Self Discipline

• Remove Activation Barriers
  • Starting a task is by far the most unpleasant aspect of it.
  • "Just do 5 minutes of work".
  • Keep a record of every time you break yourself out of a procrastination death spiral. Literally, something as simple as a tally mark on an index card.
• Precommitment
  • Take advantage of hyperbolic discounting by making good choices in the future, then preventing yourself from defecting as the moment of action draws near. Everyone knows what would be best for them to do—tomorrow.
• Accountability
  • Is a special case of precommitment that harnesses the monkey brain's reputation machinery.
  • There may be no particular reason to think that your plans will go better if you discuss them with others. But they probably will, and that is a data point.
• Limit extraneous choices and decision fatigue
  • Routines
  • You do not to have a choice about whether to get up on time.
  • Recognize vulnerabilities to decision fatigue / ego depletion and route around them. For example, one might come back from the gym (a highly ego-depleting setting) and spend an hour in a low-willpower haze. Schedule low-effort tasks during these periods.
• Ritual
  • Sufficiently advanced routine is indistinguishable from ritual
  • Consider prayer as an entrainment mechanism for overcoming activation barriers
  • Viz., a prayer for strength to complete a task is a coordination mechanism for "the society of mind", as well as a low-effort undertaking which primes the initiation of a high-effort undertaking. A "ramp up" to execution.
  • An opportunity to reflect on your ancestors and what they've done to get you this far. Will you strive as they did, or will you spend the night in with netflix? When you enter the celestial hall of your all-seeing forefathers, will you take your rightful place among them or will you say "oh fuck"? ~~Nydwracu.
• Quantify and measure
  • can only control what you can measure
  • placebo effect of monitoring
  • Make measurement low/zero cost-- how?
    • Github commits
    • Activity monitors for browsers
    • &c.
• procrastination is actually unpleasant
  • Work well done yields a deep satisfaction that procrastination can never provide.
  • "People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it" -- M.A.
• Weaponized Schizophrenia
  • Support in the literature:
    "O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as ithers see us!" -- Burns
    "But if I could talk to myself
    like I was someone else,
    well then maybe I could take your advice,
    and I wouldn't act like such an asshole all the time." -- Bright Eyes (lol)
    
  • The solutions to everyone's problems are obvious to everyone else.
  • Corollary: to solve a problem, recommend a solution to a hypothetical friend with the same problem. By symmetry, you then ought to immediately act on that advice.
  • You are not so special: Special pleading to individual circumstances is almost always incorrect. A policy of ignoring special pleading will get you much further than a policy of always heeding it.
  • divide yourself into a principal and an agent. The agent does the unpleasant stuff that the principal is too embarrassed/above-it-all/far-mode to do, like logistics and especially self-promotion.
• Define clear, objective and readily fulfillable criteria for success
  Not "write a good paper", but "write 500 words".
• Exploration vs. Exploitation
  • Messy vs. Tidy
  • Alcohol vs. Caffeine
  • Beginnings vs. endings
  • there seems like there should be a moral here [?]
• Eliminate distractions
  • Random reward levers are powerful. They are one of the most effective psychological mechanisms ever discovered. assume that you are, at best, probably not much more immune to their effects than average. In fact let's just assume you're worse. Don't rely on personal virtue and judgment to resist them-- quarantine them from your work.
  • Cope with the psychological effects of random reward levers by dealing with them at the same time each day.
  • Conversely, could you build a random reward lever to build positive habits? No one ever had to exert conscious discipline in order to train themselves to refresh tumblr a hundred times a day.
• Set and setting
  • Establish a physical location for doing work that is comfortable but not distracting, one that encourages relaxed alertness.
  • Work breaks are necessary but should not consist of mind-crack, by which is meant internet random-reward levers. During breaks, get up and take a lap around the building. Go get a drink of water.
    Talk briefly to a colleague and share the successes of the past hour. Anyone who took a work break to do actual crack in the bathroom would be rightly regarded as deeply troubled.
• Fundamentals
  • sleep
    • at the same time each night.
  • diet
  • social integration
    • Think of the early zookeepers whose charges kept dying/adopting pathological behaviors/failing to thrive because they were kept in isolation. You are probably not so special, either. You are basically a complicated marmot. Reasoning with marmots about why isolation is really nbd is unlikely to work. So too with you.
  • exercise
    • Effect size of exercising in particular is eye-poppingly large and kicks in almost immediately upon leaving the gym.
  • mindfulness meditation [?]
• Declaring discipline bankruptcy
  • social anxiety death spirals
    • broken commitments lead to
    • avoidance which leads to
    • further broken commitments
  • in general, people probably think much less about you in general than you assume, including negative thoughts. The true benefits of avoidance are smaller than you think.
  • any communication probably better than no communication
  • At any point, the best time to break a death spiral is the present, requiring a short bolus of effort to re-establish contact.
  • This contact will probably be welcomed by the receiving party, especially compared to the alternative.
  • See weaponized schizophrenia, prinicipal-agent distinction
• Metagoals
  • Getting on track and accomplishing healthy, disciplined living is simply one goal among many
  • But is more like capital investment rather than consumption.
  • Positive changes enable further changes and allow existing disciplines to be maintained with lower effort.
  • The goal is to find a stable equilibrium of order.
  • Should not expect 100% compliance, but should expect positive derivative.
  • Plans should be robust to individual lapses without condoning them.
  • Remember that the result of all of this is eudaimonia. It is not what we're aiming for in itself, but the emotional consequence of well-lived life.

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