my life would often be better if I exercised more agency. why don’t I do so more often? here is a taxonomy of reasons I’ve noticed:
energy: I’m often very fatigued, which makes it much harder for me to do anything, which includes anything new.
decision fatigue: a related thing is even for a given amount of energy, I have a limited number of decisions I can make, and a limited number of things I can focus on and think carefully about.
emotional avoidance: sometimes, exercising agency requires admitting that I’ve been doing things wrong all this time, or that part of my identity is not what I want it to be, or confronting some past trauma. sometimes I identify as being bad at X, which make it hard to improve at X.
conformism: there’s a critic inside my head that yells at me when I do or even consider things that could be considered “crazy” by others. I ignore it more than most people, but it still has nonzero say.
uncreativity: in certain domains I’ve spent so much time thinking about a specific kind of idea that it becomes genuinely hard for me to even imagine other ideas.
cowardice: sometimes the ideas are obvious but they require large irreversible actions, and/or are likely to have unpredictable consequences.
I have an instrument that helps me mitigate decision fatigue, energy lack and conformism. I created an updatable random generator with a weighted list of all the ideas and activities that cross my mind. I exercise agency at the state of “designing” the free time passage, setting probability weights and side goals. Then I can circumvent fatigue of deciding what to do next, because i can click generate and it see the option. And since clicking generator button is a short action, a habit to actually go and execute the option can be formed.
Minmaxing trap is not happening. I am only allowed to do one edit per finished session, and that edit can be just an increment by 1 or a decrement by 1 of some parameter in the generator, which takes ~15 seconds. If my priorities change, the generator will eventually converge (easy-in over couple days) through the increments to the new state. That prevents “being hyped” and placing “all in” into some new exciting project. The new project will gain weight only if it keeps looking worthy.
I may adjust at the end of a session if i feel that something should happen sooner/more often, or something was promted too often over the past week, or i felt that the session time length was inappropriate to make an unregressable progress, etc.
I put anything I want to do eventually. That includes “work on the publication”, “work on fanfic”, “make the geolocation script”, “update my transformer”, “play a match of king of the hill chess”, “calisthenics”, “solve project euler problem”, “go to the cinema and watch avatar 3″. Both fun and serious stuff.
I am only generating the activity when there is a moment no scheduled/obligation activities, this way it never interferes with life even if fun activities start randomly appearing more often.
The generator is implemented in Google Sheets, using its in-cell functions, thus accessable on both my pc and phone. At some point I have added a column of calculated expectations “how many % of time is expected to be spent on the activity if the generator did not change parameters over a long run”, but it was distracting and not exactly meaningful, since i change weights every day to reflect energy/mood/inspirations.
Do you think you could help me with something, how did you identify specific events or choices, in your recent past, where more agency was required?
I’m very confident that I also would benefit in life from my exercising more agency. However it’s a vague confidence, I can’t offer any evidence or specific examples. When I try to list situations where I could have acted with more agency, there’s not any example where it’s clear that agency would have probably made things better, or at least had a better chance of a better outcome than making things worse. I can’t think of any recent retrospective examples where the difference between what I got, and what seems like a potentially better outcome, was simply not using enough agency. (As opposed to “oh, I wish I knew that earlier”—I think there’s an important distinction to be made between hindsight that comes form knowing what you couldn’t have possibly known at the time, and not acting successfully on the information you had at the time).
One example off the top of my head—I need to buy a book for study. Correct me if I’m wrong, but acting with more agency would have been buying it straight away. But I’ve procrastinated so far, and would my life be materially any different yet? No. Not at all. If I continue to procrastinate past a certain point, it will have negative consequences. But so far, none. Next week? Eh, even then it may be fine.
That’s the first, most immediate, pressing example that comes to mind.
idk exactly how, they just pop up to my mind easily. maybe because i am very aware of the things i’m disappointed about not having done. also, i can consult my todo list, which is effectively a list of things i will never do because i don’t have enough agency. like i’m going to set a timer for 10 minutes and write as many things as i can think of:
i’ve known that exercise is really important since forever but never really getting around to doing it
i keep procrastinating scheduling meetings with people i should meet with
i often have entire months of very low productivity where it’s a slog to do anything and in the past it never occurred to me to take any of that time off even though i have way more PTO than i need
there are many instances where i finished doing a thing and then realized i should have started doing some other thing in parallel instead of waiting on it.
there will be multiple times a month where i will realize my life would be easier if i had planned ahead even a little bit. for example i will forget to book a flight until the last minute, at which point it’s harder and more expensive to get good seats, even though i knew my travel plans much earlier.
i will often do things the hard way for way too long, even after i know there could be a better way, because i’m too used to the old process and don’t want to expend the trivial amount of effort needed to check if there’s a better way. for example it took me an embarassingly long time before i learned to use a debugger, because i was used to print-statement debugging
i often procrastinate things because there is a trivial amount of inconvenience required to do it. like it took me years to get around to various medical interventions which really only required me to do some googling and then talk to a doctor twice and whatever.
hopefully these examples help you think of similar things in your life
my life would often be better if I exercised more agency. why don’t I do so more often? here is a taxonomy of reasons I’ve noticed:
energy: I’m often very fatigued, which makes it much harder for me to do anything, which includes anything new.
decision fatigue: a related thing is even for a given amount of energy, I have a limited number of decisions I can make, and a limited number of things I can focus on and think carefully about.
emotional avoidance: sometimes, exercising agency requires admitting that I’ve been doing things wrong all this time, or that part of my identity is not what I want it to be, or confronting some past trauma. sometimes I identify as being bad at X, which make it hard to improve at X.
conformism: there’s a critic inside my head that yells at me when I do or even consider things that could be considered “crazy” by others. I ignore it more than most people, but it still has nonzero say.
uncreativity: in certain domains I’ve spent so much time thinking about a specific kind of idea that it becomes genuinely hard for me to even imagine other ideas.
cowardice: sometimes the ideas are obvious but they require large irreversible actions, and/or are likely to have unpredictable consequences.
I have an instrument that helps me mitigate decision fatigue, energy lack and conformism. I created an updatable random generator with a weighted list of all the ideas and activities that cross my mind. I exercise agency at the state of “designing” the free time passage, setting probability weights and side goals. Then I can circumvent fatigue of deciding what to do next, because i can click generate and it see the option. And since clicking generator button is a short action, a habit to actually go and execute the option can be formed.
Sounds interesting.
How often do you adjust this generator? What tasks do you put on it? Do you have any examples? Do you find yourself min maxing probabilities?
Minmaxing trap is not happening. I am only allowed to do one edit per finished session, and that edit can be just an increment by 1 or a decrement by 1 of some parameter in the generator, which takes ~15 seconds. If my priorities change, the generator will eventually converge (easy-in over couple days) through the increments to the new state. That prevents “being hyped” and placing “all in” into some new exciting project. The new project will gain weight only if it keeps looking worthy.
I may adjust at the end of a session if i feel that something should happen sooner/more often, or something was promted too often over the past week, or i felt that the session time length was inappropriate to make an unregressable progress, etc.
I put anything I want to do eventually. That includes “work on the publication”, “work on fanfic”, “make the geolocation script”, “update my transformer”, “play a match of king of the hill chess”, “calisthenics”, “solve project euler problem”, “go to the cinema and watch avatar 3″. Both fun and serious stuff.
I am only generating the activity when there is a moment no scheduled/obligation activities, this way it never interferes with life even if fun activities start randomly appearing more often.
The generator is implemented in Google Sheets, using its in-cell functions, thus accessable on both my pc and phone. At some point I have added a column of calculated expectations “how many % of time is expected to be spent on the activity if the generator did not change parameters over a long run”, but it was distracting and not exactly meaningful, since i change weights every day to reflect energy/mood/inspirations.
oh wow this is a really cool idea. i’ll give it a try
My experience is that sleep + gym ease most of these somewhat if I’m currently lacking on those dimensions.
Do you think you could help me with something, how did you identify specific events or choices, in your recent past, where more agency was required?
I’m very confident that I also would benefit in life from my exercising more agency. However it’s a vague confidence, I can’t offer any evidence or specific examples. When I try to list situations where I could have acted with more agency, there’s not any example where it’s clear that agency would have probably made things better, or at least had a better chance of a better outcome than making things worse. I can’t think of any recent retrospective examples where the difference between what I got, and what seems like a potentially better outcome, was simply not using enough agency. (As opposed to “oh, I wish I knew that earlier”—I think there’s an important distinction to be made between hindsight that comes form knowing what you couldn’t have possibly known at the time, and not acting successfully on the information you had at the time).
One example off the top of my head—I need to buy a book for study. Correct me if I’m wrong, but acting with more agency would have been buying it straight away. But I’ve procrastinated so far, and would my life be materially any different yet? No. Not at all. If I continue to procrastinate past a certain point, it will have negative consequences. But so far, none. Next week? Eh, even then it may be fine.
That’s the first, most immediate, pressing example that comes to mind.
How did you remember yours?
idk exactly how, they just pop up to my mind easily. maybe because i am very aware of the things i’m disappointed about not having done. also, i can consult my todo list, which is effectively a list of things i will never do because i don’t have enough agency. like i’m going to set a timer for 10 minutes and write as many things as i can think of:
i’ve known that exercise is really important since forever but never really getting around to doing it
i keep procrastinating scheduling meetings with people i should meet with
i often have entire months of very low productivity where it’s a slog to do anything and in the past it never occurred to me to take any of that time off even though i have way more PTO than i need
there are many instances where i finished doing a thing and then realized i should have started doing some other thing in parallel instead of waiting on it.
there will be multiple times a month where i will realize my life would be easier if i had planned ahead even a little bit. for example i will forget to book a flight until the last minute, at which point it’s harder and more expensive to get good seats, even though i knew my travel plans much earlier.
i will often do things the hard way for way too long, even after i know there could be a better way, because i’m too used to the old process and don’t want to expend the trivial amount of effort needed to check if there’s a better way. for example it took me an embarassingly long time before i learned to use a debugger, because i was used to print-statement debugging
i often procrastinate things because there is a trivial amount of inconvenience required to do it. like it took me years to get around to various medical interventions which really only required me to do some googling and then talk to a doctor twice and whatever.
hopefully these examples help you think of similar things in your life