Left to their own devices, tons of people struggle to formally study topics they’d like to learn. What’s the standard solution? A classroom environment, where a teacher/professor gives assignments and there are (perceived) consequences for failing to do them.
Left to their own devices, tons of people would struggle to complete the non-fun parts of their job. What’s the go-to standard solution? A boss.
Back when I was a student, it certainly helped me study much more than I would have managed on my own, but I wouldn’t say it was a solution for akrasia. I still had pretty massive amounts of it. Likely the bit about consequences also made things worse. I might notice that I was falling behind in how many courses I had completed, so I would do things like taking on an excessive course load in an attempt to catch up and then be forced to drop most of them partway through the semester, after it proved impossible to do all of them. Then I did worse than if I’d just have focused on a more realistic amount of courses from the beginning, and fell behind even more.
Many of my past jobs have been similar in that yes, I have certainly gotten more done at the job than I would have gotten done otherwise, but that’s involved a very large degree of suffering and fighting akrasia and the amount of things I’ve accomplished has been nowhere as much as I’d have wanted to.
My levels of akrasia have been more serious than the average person’s, but I don’t think that I’m unusual in finding that school/work is nowhere near a solution to akrasia. In fact, I think that “procrastinating on your school assignments until it’s just barely before the deadline and then doing them at the last moment with a lot of discomfort” is maybe one of the most common forms of akrasia there is.
Back when I was a student, it certainly helped me study much more than I would have managed on my own, but I wouldn’t say it was a solution for akrasia. I still had pretty massive amounts of it. Likely the bit about consequences also made things worse. I might notice that I was falling behind in how many courses I had completed, so I would do things like taking on an excessive course load in an attempt to catch up and then be forced to drop most of them partway through the semester, after it proved impossible to do all of them. Then I did worse than if I’d just have focused on a more realistic amount of courses from the beginning, and fell behind even more.
Many of my past jobs have been similar in that yes, I have certainly gotten more done at the job than I would have gotten done otherwise, but that’s involved a very large degree of suffering and fighting akrasia and the amount of things I’ve accomplished has been nowhere as much as I’d have wanted to.
My levels of akrasia have been more serious than the average person’s, but I don’t think that I’m unusual in finding that school/work is nowhere near a solution to akrasia. In fact, I think that “procrastinating on your school assignments until it’s just barely before the deadline and then doing them at the last moment with a lot of discomfort” is maybe one of the most common forms of akrasia there is.