How to manipulate future self into being productive?
I don’t like doing much work. I would however, like my future self to do work so that my far future self will have better opportunities.
To clarify, I want these things for each specified self:
Current self: immediate gratification
Future self: work hard
Far future self: benefit from future self’s work
The problem is, I expect that my future self will feel the same way and also want immediate gratification. What can I do now to achieve all 3 of those goals? How can I manipulate my future self into doing more work without having to do much work right now?
You’re framing the problem wrong -within these conditions, there are no good solution. There are 3 shortcuts out:
First, realize, that you’re inherently time-locked: the current self is the only one on which you have some amount of control (you might put yourself in a situation, where your only way out is to “work hard” -eg. make a bet with a friend to pass that exam, etc- but I found these to be less effective, than the other two).
Second, reframe the problem. Some sample questions you might ask:
In what ways might I get the most gratification out of this work?
In what ways might I get the most XP out of this experience?
In what ways might I learn the most of myself during this excercise?
In what ways might I use this as a way to self-improve? You get the idea -reframing is key.
Third, “working” for most classes of work, is fundamentally muscles: as you do more, and more, try different ways out, your leverage, and ability to “get stuff done” will improve. So: start with baby steps, then use the positive feedback, and gained experience to improve, and apply it to other aspects of the task.
Hope this helps.
Actually, I have managed to cause short-term changes in productivity to my future self but they tend to slowly wear off. This makes me optimistic that there are self-sustaining solutions.
What were these changes? What was the experience of them wearing off like?
I stopped procrastinating as much and kept more organized. I also spent more overall time on productive activities.
The wearing off was just a slow gradient of falling back into my usual level of productivity. I didn’t notice it immediately as it was happening, only upon reflection.
I guess I worded the question poorly. I mean, what did you change that made you more productive? I’m trying to see if there’s any obvious and fixable reason that it didn’t last. This can require precision in describing your mental state to get right.
I will attempt to do so but I have no way of knowing whether this is accurate or it is just the best rationalization my brain came up with. In addition, I know very little of psychology and my attempt at introspection is probably inadequate to give much useful information.
If I introspect while making a decision I can notice a succession of feelings in response to each other. I tried reflecting upon the experience of making a poor decision and explicitly noticing the affective factors that influenced my decision. I constructed a new feeling which I thought would promote productivity. I attempted to suppress thoughts supporting the poor decision while promoting my constructed feeling whenever I was making a decision related to productivity.
I posted something on the open thread about exactly this:
If you don’t think this will give you said “immediate gratification”, try narrowing your definition of “current”. Are you viscerally compelled to buy a pack of cookies? No, you’re just viscerally compelled to eat them. People seem to extrapolate that visceral compulsion so they feel viscerally compelled to buy the pack of cookies, and you don’t have to extrapolate like that.
I’ve also been experimenting a lot the past year with deliberate self-delusion as a way of increasing willpower and it seems to be working. I know some here have argued that deliberate self-delusion is a bad idea, but I’m entirely unconvinced. Rationality is what wins.
What you want is suboptimal. You should want different things.
Work’s results compound over time. This is most obviously true for money, but it’s also true for other things—your position in the workplace, and (most importantly) your acquired knowledge and skills.
You should want for your past selves to have worked very hard—achieving things that will compound over a great deal of time. Assuming you’re relatively young, you should want for your current self to still work pretty hard—compounding still matters—but you can spend a little more time having fun. In comparison to your past, you can enjoy an unprecedented level of goofing off, while spending only a little more time in absolute terms (and time is the ultimate currency). And so on, into the future.
What you want is going to be stamped out over and over into the future, so it should produce a desirable result. “I want immediate gratification now, and maybe I’ll work hard later” is going to result in endless goofing off, since you’re always trying to get your future self to do the work, then when you become that future self, you punt it further along. “I want to have worked hard in the past, pretty hard now, and slightly less hard in the future” is stable, with the right attitude—if you start slacking off or wasting time, you’re not sticking to the curve.
Using myself as an example: when I was younger, I worked super hard to learn C++ (it is not the easiest language in the world to learn, that’s for sure). Now I am way more powerful than before, and acquiring further power gets easier and easier (in C++ and related areas like OpenGL—it’s easier to learn new things with a solid foundation). If I had goofed off in college more than I did (and I spent a lot of time posting on forums and playing video games) instead of teaching myself the language, I wouldn’t have gotten my current job, and I’d be bored out of my skull in grad school somewhere, doing who knows what and living like a monk on an income to match. Ugh. Now, this wasn’t an explicit plan of mine (I did it because I thought it was awesome, and it was more interesting than my classes), but it’s become The Plan and I’m going to stick with it.
Here is a similar old comment of mine.
It sounds like the rule you’re following is “Do interesting awesome things now”, and all this other stuff about payoff is tacked on post facto.
Mind you, I’m not saying this is a bad thing.
I agree—as long as awesome is understood as shorthand for a more precisely defined concept.
Here’s an even better way to put it: Do interesting awesome things now, especially those that will increase my ability to do interesting awesome things in the future. When I was in elementary through high school, I thought science was awesome, so I learned a lot of it, but it never really went anywhere. (If I had intrinsic aptitude for physics/chemistry/etc. it probably would have.) I also thought programming was awesome, but I was never really effective at it (QBASIC is a monkey-man language). When I graduated from high school, I made a serious conscious attempt to learn a real language—and I found that (a) I really liked being effective at creating imaginary machines, and (b) the more I learned the more effective I was. So I’ve been riding this feedback loop ever since.
Monetary payoff is nice, but for me, the ultimate motivator is increasing my ability to precisely imagine something, write it down, and have it work perfectly on the first try.
If were to be one qualia which wasn’t a shorthand and was actually a fundamental ontological entity then I would certainly hope it was the ‘awesome’.
The issue with that line of thinking, while I think it is the optimal result, is that you have some degree of control over your future self, in setting up binding or non-binding systems for you to follow in the future. But you have no control over your past self, only your present and some control over your future. So now, you have to think of yourself as the soon to be past self, and your future self as your present self. That then goes against the authors original goal, because then you will be working forever, as the gratification is always in the future.
You could read about hyperbolic time discounting realize it makes no sense, and learn to avoid it. If you’re lucky, this process will take long enough that it will be future you doing the work.
What time scale are you looking for? When does it switch from current from future, and from future to far future?
It switches from current to future in 10-30 minutes. Future to far-future is not a hard limit. I just meant that I want my future self’s work to eventually pay off.
An order of magnitude estimate would be nice. For example, I was thinking the first cutoff was more like a week. I was way off.
I suggest you start working now. This will mean that your current self will work, but it also will mean that your future self will probably work. The benefit to your far future self may pay off the cost to your present self. It’s only a few minutes after all.
That’s a good idea. It seems to work but the thought takes a little while to convincingly construct.
Psych yourself up with Courage Wolf.