Akrasia Tactics Review 2: The Akrasia Strikes Back

21 polutropon 16 July 2013 02:17AM

About three and a half years ago, orthonormal ran an akrasia tactics review: an open-ended survey asking Less Wrong posters to give numerical scores to productivity techniques that they'd tried, with the goal of getting a more objective picture of how well different techniques work (for the sort of people who post here). Since it's been years since the original and Less Wrong has grown significantly while retaining akrasia as a major topic, I thought it'd be useful to have a new one!

A modified version of the instructions from the previous post:

  1. Note what technique you've tried. Techniques can be anything from productivity systems (Getting Things Done) to social incentives (precommitting in front of friends) to websites or computer programs (Beeminder, Leechblock) to chemical aids (Modafinil). If it's something that you can easily link to information about, please provide a link and I'll add it when I list the technique; if you don't have a link, describe it in your comment and I'll link that.
  2. Give your experience with it a score from -10 to +10 (0 if it didn't change the status quo, 10 if it ended your akrasia problems forever with no side effects, negative scores if it actually made your life worse, -10 if it nearly killed you). For simplicity's sake, I'll only include reviews that give numerical scores.
  3. Describe your experience with it, including any significant side effects. Please also say approximately how long you've been using it, or if you don't use it anymore how long you used it before giving up.

Every so often, I'll combine all the data back into the main post, listing every technique that's been reviewed at least twice with the number of reviews, average score, standard deviation and common effects, as well as links to the relevant reviews <edit: mostly canceling the last two parts part because I think it'd be too much work for me for too little benefit for the reader>. I'll do my best to combine similar techniques appropriately, but it'd be appreciated if you could try to organize it a bit by replying to people doing similar things and/or saying if you feel your technique is (dis)similar to another.

I'm not going to provide an initial list due to the massive number of possible techniques and fear of prejudicing answers, but you can look back on the list in the last post if you want. If you have any suggestions for how to organize this (that wouldn't require huge amounts of extra effort on my part), I'm open to hearing them.

Thanks for your data!

——

Updated through 7/23/13. Organizing these turned out to be a lot harder than I expected and involved a lot of subjective categorization, so consult the primary sources.

——

6 reviews:

Beeminder: +5.3 (SD 1.8). Details of how it's used vary a lot.

Getting Things Done (GTD): +2.8 (SD 4.0). A very broad and modular system, with opinions differing on different parts.

4 reviews:

Remember The Milk:+5.5 (SD 3.0). Frequently mentioned in conjunction with GTD.

Pomodoros: +4.5 (SD 2.5).

3 reviews:

Scheduling: +4.7 (SD 3.7)

Leechblock: +3.0 (SD 0.8)

Social precommitment: +0.7 (SD 2.6)

Unaided self-reinforcement: +0.7 (SD 0.9)

2 reviews:

Trello: +5.0 (SD 3.0)

HabitRPG: +4.5 (SD 0.5)

LW Study Hall: +4 (SD 3.0)

Comment author: letter7 01 July 2013 08:54:06PM 14 points [-]

There's something that happens to me with an alarming frequency, something that I almost never (or don't remember) see being referenced (and thus I don't know the proper name). I'm talking about that effect when I'm reading a text (any kind of text, textbook, blog, forum text) and suddenly I discover that two minutes passed and I advanced six lines in the text, but I just have no idea of what I read. It's like a time blackhole, and now I have to re-read it.

Sometimes it also happens in a less alarming way, but still bad: for instance, when I'm reading something that is deliberately teaching me an important piece of knowledge (as in, I already know whathever is in this text IS important) I happen to go through it without questioning anything, just "accepting" it and a few moments later it suddenly comes down on me when I'm ahead: "Wait... what, did he just say 2 pages ago that thermal radiation does NOT need matter to propagate?" and I have again to go back and check that I was not crazy.

While I don't know the name of this effect, I have asked some acquantainces of mine about that, while some agreed that they have it others didn't. I would like very much to eliminate this flaw, anybody knows what I could do to train myself not to do it or at least the correct name so I can research more about it?

Comment author: polutropon 06 July 2013 10:01:20PM 5 points [-]

Are you sleep deprived? This kind of attention lapse sounds like the calling card of a microsleep.

Comment author: polutropon 06 July 2013 08:11:53PM 3 points [-]

Hello again, Less Wrong! I'm not entirely new — I've been lurking since at least 2010 and I had an account for a while, but since that I've let that one lie fallow for almost two years now I thought I'd start afresh.

I'm a college senior, studying cognitive psychology with a focus on irrationality / heuristics and biases. In a couple of months I'll be starting my year-long senior thesis, which I'm currently looking for a specific topic for. I'm also a novice Python programmer and a dabbler in nootropics.

I'll be trying to avoid spending too unproductive time on LW ("insight porn" really is a great description, and I've learned to be wary of being excessively cerebral), but here I am again.

Comment author: polutropon 06 July 2013 07:21:10PM 16 points [-]

This seems to me to be a permutation of the sunk cost fallacy. If you retrace your steps, you feel as though you're wasting the effort you took to get there in the first place, even though it's already spent and now it makes sense to go back again.

I share the intuition, by the way.