Edit: I’ve made a top-level post for sharing anti-akrasia techniques—go ahead and share your techniques as well. Let’s continue the discussion there.
A very quick outline (I’ll post a detailed version later).
Determine what is your current better judgment. This is critical—I noticed that I hesitate to trick myself into doing anything I don’t consider to be relevant to my goal.
Constant asking myself: “is the activity I’m doing at the moment advancing me toward the desired state of reality”? If the answer is “no”, know that I’m procrastinating.
80⁄20 elimination, Tim Ferris / Pareto style (I’m skeptical about the rest of Tim’s book, but the Elimination chapter is pure gold).
Parkinson’s law (work expands to fill the time allotted). Again, Tim has some advice on it—basically, it boils down to scheduling most important things (in the 80⁄20 sense) first, with aggressive deadlines.
PJ Eby’s secret meaning of “just do it”. He considers the article to be outdated, but its key paragraph worked wonders for me. Basically, “just do it” = “don’t do anything else”. In its pure form, “not doing anything else” is too macho for me, so I leave a line of retreat for myself—I permit myself to eat, think about anything (not just the task), walk, have sex, but no surfing unless it’s on-topic, no doodling on paper unless it’s on-topic, etc.
Self-priming—I try to expose myself to stimuli related to my current task, and to shield myself from irrelevant stimuli, no matter how pleasant (e.g. I run away from my toddler daughter, because prolonged exposure to cuteness tends to totally ruin my ability to work efficiently :)
Begin. For example, if you need to do some stuff in Excel, just open an empty spreadsheet and type in the table header. Just stupidly staring at this makes you better at spreadsheets and your task—your mind pulls linked concepts to the fast-access cache, without your consent, and you don’t need to do anything.
Mindless repetition of things like “I want to do/make/design/create/code the best X in the world” (X stands for a short-term todo item, not some far-off goal) -- I’ve been doing this for at least a decade, and it seems to work (don’t know how, but perhaps it’s related to Cached Selves).
Sorry if I forgot something—gotta run (will edit later.)
(Obligatory note of caution—these are tricks, they are not proven by experimental results, I’ve been using them for just about 3 months, they aren’t tested under serious stress / pressure, I have no deep theories to explain why they work, and the evidence I offer is purely anecdotal.)
Edit: I’ve made a top-level post for sharing anti-akrasia techniques—go ahead and share your techniques as well. Let’s continue the discussion there.
A very quick outline (I’ll post a detailed version later).
Determine what is your current better judgment. This is critical—I noticed that I hesitate to trick myself into doing anything I don’t consider to be relevant to my goal.
Constant asking myself: “is the activity I’m doing at the moment advancing me toward the desired state of reality”? If the answer is “no”, know that I’m procrastinating.
80⁄20 elimination, Tim Ferris / Pareto style (I’m skeptical about the rest of Tim’s book, but the Elimination chapter is pure gold).
Parkinson’s law (work expands to fill the time allotted). Again, Tim has some advice on it—basically, it boils down to scheduling most important things (in the 80⁄20 sense) first, with aggressive deadlines.
PJ Eby’s secret meaning of “just do it”. He considers the article to be outdated, but its key paragraph worked wonders for me. Basically, “just do it” = “don’t do anything else”. In its pure form, “not doing anything else” is too macho for me, so I leave a line of retreat for myself—I permit myself to eat, think about anything (not just the task), walk, have sex, but no surfing unless it’s on-topic, no doodling on paper unless it’s on-topic, etc.
Self-priming—I try to expose myself to stimuli related to my current task, and to shield myself from irrelevant stimuli, no matter how pleasant (e.g. I run away from my toddler daughter, because prolonged exposure to cuteness tends to totally ruin my ability to work efficiently :)
Begin. For example, if you need to do some stuff in Excel, just open an empty spreadsheet and type in the table header. Just stupidly staring at this makes you better at spreadsheets and your task—your mind pulls linked concepts to the fast-access cache, without your consent, and you don’t need to do anything.
Mindless repetition of things like “I want to do/make/design/create/code the best X in the world” (X stands for a short-term todo item, not some far-off goal) -- I’ve been doing this for at least a decade, and it seems to work (don’t know how, but perhaps it’s related to Cached Selves).
Sorry if I forgot something—gotta run (will edit later.)
(Obligatory note of caution—these are tricks, they are not proven by experimental results, I’ve been using them for just about 3 months, they aren’t tested under serious stress / pressure, I have no deep theories to explain why they work, and the evidence I offer is purely anecdotal.)