think people who finished school and have diploma's are chumps who fell for paper-to-prove skills game in a system that is easily gamable and as a result doesn't actually show anything about your skill.

Test: imagine finishing school, and see if your spontaneous reaction is thinking you're a chump. If not, you're just speculating rather than actually observing your beliefs.

What i've been stumped on for years though, is how to respect being a graduate.

Stop disapproving of graduates. I.e., refrain from withholding your approval of them. Imagine a person who's a graduate, notice your disapproval (really, the muscle tensions that go with it), and then physically begin releasing them. You may also wish to ask yourself if there is any benefit to you from continuing to disapprove, or whether anything bad will happen if you begin approving of them.

If you have difficulty just letting go of it, I suggest this book, even though it is annoyingly repetitive and simple-minded. The repetition and simple-mindedness are actually a feature, not a bug, though it may not seem that way at first. If you aren't willing to endure a little boring repetition and simple-mindedness, though, you probably don't want your goal that much. ;-)

Still another method: if you can state your disapproval in the form of a "should" or "shouldn't" statement, you can rephrase to a statement of preference instead of one of judgment. e.g., "I would prefer not having to graduate" instead of "I shouldn't have to graduate."

Do you know of a better strategy?

Find out what is objectionable to you about being the kind of person who would enjoyably and successfully achieve the outcome you're intending to intend to have, and stop objecting to it.

For example, if your overt intention were to make a lot of money, but you noticed that your actual actions mysteriously kept interfering with that goal, then perhaps you apply the label "greedy" to people who actually make money, and would thus object to actually succeeding at that goal, because you yourself would become "greedy" by your own rules. The solution would be to stop disapproving of "greedy" people or change your rules for what constitutes being "greedy".

Of course, it's rarely that simple: you might actually avoid making money because it involves being "a suit" or "a sellout" or a "drudge" or any number of a bazillion labels you could attach to people on the basis of actions like yours.

The trick is to pay attention not only to what labels you'd apply to yourself if you achieved your ultimate goal (which itself is above the level of your overt goal), but also to what labels you'd apply if you were staying on task for more than a few days every few weeks. If you persisted, for example, would that make you a nerd or a bookworm, or be perceived as such by people in your life?

On the ultimate goal level, if you actually succeeded in improving your job marketability, would that make you be seen as an overambitious wannabe or "thinks he's better than us" by significant people in your life (e.g. family or co-workers)?

I don't claim that finding and fixing this is easy or even a "better" strategy, since (at least from your brain's point of view), your continual trying and failing may actually be an optimal compromise. ;-)

(Consider that, if you succeed, you very well may lose some of your existing friends and allies.)

Procrastination is worst for me on tasks where effort is only ambiguously related to goals. ... If effort and goal completion become strongly linked I seem to have no trouble.

Upvoted. This seems like an incredibly insightful observation, which has not been addressed much in the procrastination or self-discipline literature much, if at all.

This observation certainly would explain why "writer's block" is a thing. ;-)

More formally, such a correlation predicts that writer's block would 1) exist, and 2) be worse for some sorts of writing than others. It would also predict difficulties achieving such outcomes such as losing weight or developing some degree of fitness, where the causal links between inputs and outcomes are tenuous or unclear.

ISTM that one way to harness this observation would be to shift one's goals to refer to things that are fully under one's control. This is already part of standard self-help advice, but it's usually justified on the grounds that it's discouraging to work as hard as you can but still not get your desired outcome.

I figured something out, I need to find a pet project or work project that the class is relevant for and then follow the class as a way to get that project done/improved.

My guess is that will only help to the extent that it doesn't get you any closer to actually succeeding in school (in the big picture), but admittedly that guess is based on very little information. However, my general observation that such tricks work on the small scale but not the larger scale is a very well-established pattern, so I will be quite surprised and curious should your trick actually work.

"I am doing X because Y." "Y does not motivate me to do X."

That's a flat-out contradiction. It means you've either mis-stated something or one of the statements is wrong.

In this case, it's the first statement that's inaccurate. First, you're not "doing school to improve your chances on the market"... because, as stated, you're not actually doing it, except for a few days out of most weeks.

So what you probably mean is, "I intend to do school to improve my chances on the market". But this statement is still false, unless it is also true that "I intend to improve my chances on the market". Do you, in actual fact, intend to improve your chances on the market?

I expect not. Rather, I expect that your motivation is to appear to be the sort of person who you think you would be if you were ambitiously attempting to improve your chances on the market... which is not really motivating enough to actually DO the work. However, by persistently trying to do so, and presenting yourself with enough suffering at your failure to do it, you get to feel as if you are that sort of person without having to actually do the work. This is actually a pretty optimal solution to the problem, if you think about it. (Or rather, if you DON'T think about it!)

In other words, your real conflicts here quite likely have almost nothing to do with your overtly stated goals and problems.

[Edit to add: properly expanded, your real intention statement is probably something more like, "I am having (an intention to do school to improve on the market) in order to be consistent with characteristic X of my desired ideal self-image"]

I am doing school to improve my chances on the market. ... But all that still does not motivate me to do it.

There are your two conflicting beliefs, right there. ;-)

My biggest problem is doing school. I have been procrastinating on it for years and i can only bring my self to do brief bursts of work for a few days followed by weeks of doing nothing. I have tackled several conflicting beliefs but this one won't budge.

This may sound a bit flippant, but most likely the problem here is that you don't really want to do it. You want some other outcome that you think the school will get you -- not a real-world outcome but a relational outcome like your parents' approval. When the work doesn't result in you feeling like it's getting you any closer to your (covert subconscious) goal, it becomes discouraging and you give up.

Does that sound about right?

If so, it's not going to go anywhere as long as you're futzing around with beliefs that relate directly to your overt, school-related goals.

In my experience it can take anywhere from 1 to dozens of belief changes to fix chronic procrastination on a single task. I have noticed some bleeding out effect though, some of the other tasks i used to procrastinate on have become easier to do, but they clearly still have conflicting beliefs of their own.

Just a guess, but if you're gettting "dozens", I would ask: were you actually successful on the ones with "dozens" or are you still working on them?

If the latter, I'd guess that you're working on the problem at too low a level.

The most important thing i learned from less wrong is "Cause and Effect".

Since i filled out the poll i would like to say something.

What i think the poll did not take into account is that procrastination seems to be caused by conflicting beliefs. I can completely cure myself from procrastination on one specific subject if i manage to find and correct all the conflicting beliefs. It also helps to allign them with a goal you have, this turns a once procastination inducing task to something you get OCD about doing whenever it pops up.

But thats also a downside, you have to learn the habits of tracking down the conflicting beliefs, and you are likely to procrastinate at learning these new habits (as do I). It's also a bit depressing to realise you have so many conflicting beliefs,but that effect is outweighed by knowing you CAN fix them some day.

In my experience it can take anywhere from 1 to dozens of belief changes to fix chronic procrastination on a single task. I have noticed some bleeding out effect though, some of the other tasks i used to procrastinate on have become easier to do, but they clearly still have conflicting beliefs of their own.

My point is: Generally you need to attack each individual thing you procrastinate on one by one, so progress is VERY slow. But i would never have gotten to step one without lesswrong and particularly PJ Eby's http://thinkingthingsdone.com/

That exercise works to some extent is clear... However i do not see a lot of evidence based work on exercises that find a good balance between health and body damage.

Are you talking about a specific type of high-performance exercise, or exercise in general? If the former, maybe you're right, but I still kinda doubt it. If the latter...yeah, maybe a 40-year-old bodybuilder doesn't look or feel as healthy as a 20-year-old bodybuilder. But I would bet you a lot of money that they are healthier than a 40-year-old who spent those 20 years not exercising.

In general, I think, the direct health benefits of exercise (lower risk of heart disease, lower risk of osteoporosis) happen even with half an hour a day of fairly gentle aerobic exercise. Beyond that, you get what you train for. By that I mean: if you want to be able to run a marathon, you have to practice running long distances fast. If you want to be able to lift 400 pounds, you have to practice lifting heavy weights. The human body adapts to the load expected of it; that's the whole point of exercise.

There are always tradeoffs, of course. Lifting weights is hard on your joints. Running can be too. But I've known plenty of people who are in their 40s, are very fit, and have managed to avoid injuries. (Granted, they were people who had done swimming, cross-country skiing, martial arts, that kind of thing. Not bodybuilding, which might be a bit more 'unbalanced.' Older people do have to be careful to avoid injuries and do take longer to recover than younger people.)