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How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

blog.beeminder.com

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Re: How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

#31

Post by agumonkey »

lambdaloop wrote: post #16

I've tried beeminder and other self-binding contracts, but after some time something in my life (moving, breakup, etc) pops up and I just can't fulfill the goal for 1-2 weeks. After I let it slip for a bit, I find it harder to come back and it feels that the contract loses some meaning. For any system I've tried, it consistently falls after 3-4 months of use (this is beeminder, spreadsheets, text files, among others)…

work

I kid you not, there's no better mechanism than that.

In a job you suddenly are part of a whole, the motivation is regular and smooth (somehow).

On your own, unless you have everything in check (rare I assume since we're all here to talk about our struggles), it will be a long uphill battle.

Re: How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

#32

Post by plutonorm »

agumonkey wrote: post #31
lambdaloop wrote: post #16

I've tried beeminder and other self-binding contracts, but after some time something in my life (moving, breakup, etc) pops up and I just can't fulfill the goal for 1-2 weeks. After I let it slip for a bit, I find it harder to come back and it feels that the contract loses some meaning. For any system I've tried, it consistently falls after 3-4 months of use (this is beeminder, spreadsheets, text files, among others)…

work I kid you not, there's no better mechanism than that. In a job you suddenly are part of a whole, the motivation is regular and smooth (somehow). On your own, unless you have everything in check (rare I assume since we're all here to talk about our struggles), it will be a long uphill battle.

Work has never "worked" for me like that. I don't want to be part of a whole that exists purely to make money. I also don't like someone being my boss, who the fuck do they think they are to tell me what to do? Unless I respect them and their opinions - but in 20 years of work that's happened 0 times.

Re: How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

#33

Post by agumonkey »

plutonorm wrote: post #32
agumonkey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

work I kid you not, there's no better mechanism than that. In a job you suddenly are part of a whole, the motivation is regular and smooth (somehow). On your own, unless you have everything in check (rare I assume since we're all here to talk about our struggles), it will be a long uphill battle.

Work has never "worked" for me like that. I don't want to be part of a whole that exists purely to make money. I also don't like someone being my boss, who the fuck do they think they are to tell me what to do? Unless I respect them and their opinions - but in 20 years of work that's happened 0 times.

I can understand. Quite a lot.

But in my experience, going lone wolf has been twice harder and had very nasty health consequences.

I should have been more precise, a job that is 'good enough' (good spirit, good goals, good management). Otherwise yeah it's another form of hell.

Re: How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

#34

Post by RobertoG »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #15
reagle wrote: post #8

I wrote about this here https://hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/94tu3rlx/release/2

* Regarding "life-hacking": "In an effort to keep up with a world of too much, life hackers sometimes risk going too far" [1] * Regarding "meditation": "The Varieties of Contemplative Experience Study catalogued 59 different types of meditation-related experiences that can be distressing or associated with impairment in functioning." ... " As many as 1 in 4 meditators reports negative or unwanted effects from meditat…

>"There are "significantly higher mortality rate among people who regularly sit for prolonged periods" and "long term complications of prolonged standing" [3]. What's left for us? Floating? :-)"

Walking. We are made for walking.

Re: How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

#35

Post by _huayra_ »

lambdaloop wrote: post #16

I've tried beeminder and other self-binding contracts, but after some time something in my life (moving, breakup, etc) pops up and I just can't fulfill the goal for 1-2 weeks. After I let it slip for a bit, I find it harder to come back and it feels that the contract loses some meaning. For any system I've tried, it consistently falls after 3-4 months of use (this is beeminder, spreadsheets, text files, among others)…

This is not a systems problem, but an emotional pattern.

To break down that "setback" feeling: it often feels like one must "make up for" that setback, i.e. to get back where one "should" be. This causes one to move the goal posts further and further in order to save one's ego.

Inevitably, the goals to "save" one's ego become more outlandish and impossible, further setting one up for feelings of failure. These failure feelings often cause one to retreat to the passive, short-term pleasurable / long-term destructive habits (e.g. procrastination, substances, video games, etc).

That stuck feeling happens because it feels really hard to let go of that narrative, which causes these Emotional Phugoids [0] that ultimately lead to further inaction.

There are various things that have worked for me, but most of it is around acceptance and recognition of this pattern. Meditation helps too, to recognize that voice that says "in order to make up for pissing away 2 days tweaking your Emacs config when you need to write that unit test, you must finish the project by the end of the week!".

In addition to meditation, practicing boredom has been enormously helpful. If you can step away from that feeling of always needing to use every second of your time to the max (e.g. catching up on twitter while using the bathroom), it can help close those mental open loops. When one frantically is trying to listen to podcasts at 2x speed while reading a tech blog post while getting jostled around on Caltrain (at least when we used to do that...), your brain just lobs these open problems at you and it's easy to get overwhelmed.

I find these self-binding contracts to be a smaller portion of the equation for making progress in life. I know people who have one note on their phone with their TODOs that are successful and people who have email auto-responders, a bunch of accountability buddies / apps, and a mindmap / Zettelkasten / Roam / Notion account that looks like the graph of sites on the internet, yet they accomplish nothing.

Relying on a system of any sort without changing your brain through emotional work is attempting to build a house without the foundation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phugoid

Re: How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

#36

Post by TeMPOraL »

_huayra_ wrote: post #35
lambdaloop wrote: post #16

I've tried beeminder and other self-binding contracts, but after some time something in my life (moving, breakup, etc) pops up and I just can't fulfill the goal for 1-2 weeks. After I let it slip for a bit, I find it harder to come back and it feels that the contract loses some meaning. For any system I've tried, it consistently falls after 3-4 months of use (this is beeminder, spreadsheets, text files, among others)…

This is not a systems problem, but an emotional pattern. To break down that "setback" feeling: it often feels like one must "make up for" that setback, i.e. to get back where one "should" be. This causes one to move the goal posts further and further in order to save one's ego. Inevitably, the goals to "save" one's ego become more outlandish and impossible, further setting one up for feelings of failure. These failur…

> Relying on a system of any sort without changing your brain through emotional work is attempting to build a house without the foundation.

Would be great if someone figured some roadmap for self-help on that, because the standard advice of "go see a therapist" is not actionable for many, for various reasons, ranging from contextual (e.g. you live in a small city, no relevant therapist anywhere in range that you could make work with your schedule) to personal (for some problems, if you could just go and see a therapist, you wouldn't need one in the first place!).

> To break down that "setback" feeling: it often feels like one must "make up for" that setback, i.e. to get back where one "should" be. This causes one to move the goal posts further and further in order to save one's ego.

Not sure why, but it made me think of windup in feedback control[0]. In controllers it usually involves overshooting the target, but you can imagine physical limits preventing you from closing to your target in the first place[1]. Stress levels about tasks seem to work similarly - they seem to integrate your distance from "done". So if you're not making progress, you can get so wound up that stress response dominates all your thinking about the task, which can prevent you from reaching it and/or force you to abort it entirely.

The analogy isn't in any way perfect, but going with it, I wish you could apply the same mitigation strategies to your stress levels that are applied to PID controllers to prevent windup.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_windup - Basically, the Integral part of a PID controller tracks the integral of the error. If you stray too far from target and for too long, that integral of error will grow so large as to dominate the output of the controller. It's usually a problem in terms of overshooting - a wound up controller will shoot you past your target and keep pushing you away, until the error integral "unwinds" and the Proportional and Derivative parts of the controller will regain their influence.

[1] - Perhaps the windup grows faster than the controlled device can act; e.g. a valve cannot be more than 100% open, no matter how strongly the controller is asking.

Re: How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

#37

Post by TeMPOraL »

dreeves wrote: post #7
rektide wrote: post #3

> Industry. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.[1] One of the projects I've long procrastinated on is building a Benjamin Franklin 13 Virtues trackers, to help log/quantify myself regularly, & hopefully see/spot procrastination/low-points, & apply myself better. The commitment device of having a window in to the past. [1] http://www.thirteenvirtues.com/

Sounds highly beemindable! Likely relevant: Gitminder, our GitHub integration for committing to pushing more commits or closing more issues. beeminder.com/gitminder (I'm worried that I'm turning the comments into Beeminder Evangelism Hour here but I can't seem to help myself. I guess Hacker News of all places will be forgiving of that...)

You've been a part of the landscape for so long now that we can excuse the evangelism ;).

Myself, I've been using Beeminder many years ago for a while. It significantly contributed to my stress and misery back then, as I lost money to it in a crucial time where I didn't have much of it, and my goals were very much related to improving my financial situation :). But that's not counter-evangelism! To this day, I consider Beeminder valuable and I recommend it to people - just with a bit of hard-won caution: double-check your mental state before you engage such a strong commitment device. Derailing needs to hurt, but if you're on a verge of spinning down into a dark place, it may tip you over.

Also: I love the "yellow brick road" chart, it's clean and junk free. A commendable example of good dataviz.

Re: How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

#39

Post by dreeves »

lambdaloop wrote: post #18
dreeves wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First question: did you know that with Beeminder you can schedule arbitrary breaks in your commitment/graph? They do have to be scheduled with a week of lead time. (Of course you can also take the hit and get, by default, a week of respite after derailing. Our most hardcore users find that worthwhile sometimes and explains how Beeminder makes money even (especially) from our most successful users. I know that seems i…

Yes, when I was using beeminder, I both set scheduled breaks and also got hit and got a break. I'd say the issue would be 50/50 planned/unplanned, but I didn't always plan appropriately so I got hit more often than scheduled. I did use beeminder for 3-4 months at a time, with great benefit! But looking back at every goal I set, it starts slipping past the 3-4 month mark. I got similar results with other systems (like…

I think there are a million tricks and my top meta-trick would be to ask that question in the Beeminder forum. Just asking it will get you engaged with the community there and serve as additional motivation to stay on the wagon.

Analytics-wise it seems that if you stick around for 9 months to a year you become markedly more likely to stick around indefinitely.

Another possible source of tips: http://blog.beeminder.com/burnout -- about not getting overzealous about beeminding all-the-things right off the bat.

Re: How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

#40

Post by savanaly »

lambdaloop wrote: post #16

I've tried beeminder and other self-binding contracts, but after some time something in my life (moving, breakup, etc) pops up and I just can't fulfill the goal for 1-2 weeks. After I let it slip for a bit, I find it harder to come back and it feels that the contract loses some meaning. For any system I've tried, it consistently falls after 3-4 months of use (this is beeminder, spreadsheets, text files, among others)…

What someone told me that was very helpful was to not become convinced that just because I had fallen into this pattern over and over I would continue to do so. Recognizing the pattern is the first step to breaking it, but there's no magic bullet to break it. It's honestly sort of a leap of faith but the key is to just try again and try harder not to fall into the same pattern. Then when you fail try again. And again. And again.

In my twenties I went through the pattern of starting a side project and abandoning it because of akrasia over and over. Now in my late twenties I find the pattern continues to happen but taking an honest account of the whole decade there has been marked improvement. In the last six months I've brought two projects to a degree of semi-completion that I wouldn't have thought possible six years ago.

I don't want to be overly sunny: tons of people do go their whole lives repeating the negative patterns of akrasia and never get done what they want to get done. I feel for them it's an unfortunate combination of the tendencies manifesting stronger in them, giving up on trying to break the pattern, and inability to recognize the patterns. For you at least I have a lot of hope because in this comment you show you recognize the patterns.

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