How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)
blog.beeminder.com
blog.beeminder.com
For any system I've tried, it consistently falls after 3-4 months of use (this is beeminder, spreadsheets, text files, among others).
Does anyone have suggestions for how to keep going after a setback?
I did use beeminder for 3-4 months at a time, with great benefit! But looking back at every goal I set, it starts slipping past the 3-4 month mark. I got similar results with other systems (like the Lights spreadsheet from ultraworking or keeping a journal in text files), although without the nice beeminder charts..
I'm not sure, do other people see these patterns with their goals? Are there any tricks for fighting this late slippage?
Analytics-wise it seems that if you stick around for 9 months to a year you become markedly more likely to stick around indefinitely.
Another possible source of tips: http://blog.beeminder.com/burnout -- about not getting overzealous about beeminding all-the-things right off the bat.
https://www.beeminder.com/lambdaloop/mustdo - doing 1 admin task per day (slowed down after 3 months, stopped after 6 months)
https://www.beeminder.com/lambdaloop/anki - reviewing some number of anki cards each day (lapsed after ~2 months, recovered but lapsed after 2 months again and stopped)
(goal was private when archived, but yah similar trajectory) - doing weekly reviews (lapsed after ~5 months)
I would probably die of boredom and give up too after a while if it was "Some seemingly pointless small task repeated daily with no larger goal to work towards as a means to measure when I had done enough or keep me motivated and clear why I should continue to do this."
It's hard to answer about overarching purpose. The habits I highlighted each help towards some purpose (organizing my life, learning languages), but only form some portion of that goal.
1. A milestone that marks when you have done "enough" and can quit without feeling like you failed.
2. A metric that reinforces the idea that "I need to keep doing this to avoid bad things or to get good things. When I stop, things I don't desire happen instead."
Without one of those, you will tend to have some internal, subconscious thing go either "Yup, I've gotten what I needed and can't be bothered with this anymore." or "This is pointless drivel and doing nothing and wasting my time, and I can't be bothered with this anymore."
I kid you not, there's no better mechanism than that.
In a job you suddenly are part of a whole, the motivation is regular and smooth (somehow).
On your own, unless you have everything in check (rare I assume since we're all here to talk about our struggles), it will be a long uphill battle.
But in my experience, going lone wolf has been twice harder and had very nasty health consequences.
I should have been more precise, a job that is 'good enough' (good spirit, good goals, good management). Otherwise yeah it's another form of hell.
To break down that "setback" feeling: it often feels like one must "make up for" that setback, i.e. to get back where one "should" be. This causes one to move the goal posts further and further in order to save one's ego.
Inevitably, the goals to "save" one's ego become more outlandish and impossible, further setting one up for feelings of failure. These failure feelings often cause one to retreat to the passive, short-term pleasurable / long-term destructive habits (e.g. procrastination, substances, video games, etc).
That stuck feeling happens because it feels really hard to let go of that narrative, which causes these Emotional Phugoids [0] that ultimately lead to further inaction.
There are various things that have worked for me, but most of it is around acceptance and recognition of this pattern. Meditation helps too, to recognize that voice that says "in order to make up for pissing away 2 days tweaking your Emacs config when you need to write that unit test, you must finish the project by the end of the week!".
In addition to meditation, practicing boredom has been enormously helpful. If you can step away from that feeling of always needing to use every second of your time to the max (e.g. catching up on twitter while using the bathroom), it can help close those mental open loops. When one frantically is trying to listen to podcasts at 2x speed while reading a tech blog post while getting jostled around on Caltrain (at least when we used to do that...), your brain just lobs these open problems at you and it's easy to get overwhelmed.
I find these self-binding contracts to be a smaller portion of the equation for making progress in life. I know people who have one note on their phone with their TODOs that are successful and people who have email auto-responders, a bunch of accountability buddies / apps, and a mindmap / Zettelkasten / Roam / Notion account that looks like the graph of sites on the internet, yet they accomplish nothing.
Relying on a system of any sort without changing your brain through emotional work is attempting to build a house without the foundation.
Would be great if someone figured some roadmap for self-help on that, because the standard advice of "go see a therapist" is not actionable for many, for various reasons, ranging from contextual (e.g. you live in a small city, no relevant therapist anywhere in range that you could make work with your schedule) to personal (for some problems, if you could just go and see a therapist, you wouldn't need one in the first place!).
> To break down that "setback" feeling: it often feels like one must "make up for" that setback, i.e. to get back where one "should" be. This causes one to move the goal posts further and further in order to save one's ego.
Not sure why, but it made me think of windup in feedback control[0]. In controllers it usually involves overshooting the target, but you can imagine physical limits preventing you from closing to your target in the first place[1]. Stress levels about tasks seem to work similarly - they seem to integrate your distance from "done". So if you're not making progress, you can get so wound up that stress response dominates all your thinking about the task, which can prevent you from reaching it and/or force you to abort it entirely.
The analogy isn't in any way perfect, but going with it, I wish you could apply the same mitigation strategies to your stress levels that are applied to PID controllers to prevent windup.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_windup - Basically, the Integral part of a PID controller tracks the integral of the error. If you stray too far from target and for too long, that integral of error will grow so large as to dominate the output of the controller. It's usually a problem in terms of overshooting - a wound up controller will shoot you past your target and keep pushing you away, until the error integral "unwinds" and the Proportional and Derivative parts of the controller will regain their influence.
[1] - Perhaps the windup grows faster than the controlled device can act; e.g. a valve cannot be more than 100% open, no matter how strongly the controller is asking.
In my twenties I went through the pattern of starting a side project and abandoning it because of akrasia over and over. Now in my late twenties I find the pattern continues to happen but taking an honest account of the whole decade there has been marked improvement. In the last six months I've brought two projects to a degree of semi-completion that I wouldn't have thought possible six years ago.
I don't want to be overly sunny: tons of people do go their whole lives repeating the negative patterns of akrasia and never get done what they want to get done. I feel for them it's an unfortunate combination of the tendencies manifesting stronger in them, giving up on trying to break the pattern, and inability to recognize the patterns. For you at least I have a lot of hope because in this comment you show you recognize the patterns.
It's weird and it's not for everyone, but if it works for you then go for it. I'm not ashamed that I need to wear corrective lenses, and I'm not ashamed that I needed help to get my shit together.
As for the link, what really resonated with me was the concept of commitment vehicles. We all hit external deadlines (a form of commitment vehicle) on a regular basis, so how can we harness their power to meet OUR OWN goals? This article presents some approaches (Beeminder and otherwise). I wonder what other approaches exist!
One of the projects I've long procrastinated on is building a Benjamin Franklin 13 Virtues trackers, to help log/quantify myself regularly, & hopefully see/spot procrastination/low-points, & apply myself better. The commitment device of having a window in to the past.
(I'm worried that I'm turning the comments into Beeminder Evangelism Hour here but I can't seem to help myself. I guess Hacker News of all places will be forgiving of that...)
Myself, I've been using Beeminder many years ago for a while. It significantly contributed to my stress and misery back then, as I lost money to it in a crucial time where I didn't have much of it, and my goals were very much related to improving my financial situation :). But that's not counter-evangelism! To this day, I consider Beeminder valuable and I recommend it to people - just with a bit of hard-won caution: double-check your mental state before you engage such a strong commitment device. Derailing needs to hurt, but if you're on a verge of spinning down into a dark place, it may tip you over.
Also: I love the "yellow brick road" chart, it's clean and junk free. A commendable example of good dataviz.
* Regarding "meditation": "The Varieties of Contemplative Experience Study catalogued 59 different types of meditation-related experiences that can be distressing or associated with impairment in functioning." ... " As many as 1 in 4 meditators reports negative or unwanted effects from meditation" [2]
* There are "significantly higher mortality rate among people who regularly sit for prolonged periods" and "long term complications of prolonged standing" [3]. What's left for us? Floating? :-)
I guess my point is that for each piece of "life-improving" advice there's a counter ... I don't really have much of silver lining to offer :-/. I guess we are all different and need to find through time, enormous effort and trial and error, the sweet spot of a routine that works for us.
1: https://hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu/
2: https://www.cheetahhouse.org/faq
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_desk#Effect_on_health
I remember hearing about adverse effects of meditation in podcasts and blog posts and, perhaps some audio book? Can't remember. There are links to a few studies in all mighty wikipedia too [1], I'm sure you can find sources.
From hearing the pros and the cons I suspect many forms of meditation are healthy, and it can be unhealthy in the same way some forms of exercise can be unhealthy [2].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation#Potential_adverse_e...
2: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22exercise%20overdose%22
Alternating could be the answer :) I have a DIY treadmill desk, and I try to walk for at least an hour every work day, while working. Usually I get to 1.5 hours, in 2-3 sessions. It's been great - I sleep much better than when I don't walk, and it's easier for me to keep my weight in check. I've been doing it for 3 years now. I know this isn't possible for everyone, but it was easy to setup and, in the scheme of things, some of the best money I've spent.
Walking. We are made for walking.
I think the summary is that hyperbolic discounting is the cause of procrastination (and other forms of akrasia) and the solution is commitment devices. Beeminder takes a quantified-self approach to commitment devices which we think is especially powerful and flexible.
I really like the idea behind beeminder, as it focuses on discipline/process more than the outcome, but it looks like I could accomplish this with a spreadsheet, reminders, and a 'swear jar' of cash I actually get to keep.
Might work for some people.
(It's possible that the tracking alone will be motivating. Some people, for some goals, find that to be the case.)
I'd love to hear how it goes for anyone who sets up a DIY Beeminder!
You're very right it would depend much on the person AND the goal.
The main value I personally see here is the setup. I wouldn't have to set up reminders and tracking manually. I may even learn a new goal I hadn't considered if others share their goals. As long as it doesn't devolve into a perfectionism race to the burnout line.
I hope it results into more a tool for self improvement than yet another business preying on human flaws/needs.
Beeminder encourages you to define and refine your metric to make sure it doesn't fall prey to Goodhart's Law. Of course it's your own goal and so it's much less susceptible to Goodhart's Law. You actually care about the underlying goal!
1. It ruins the Quantified Self aspect. You don't want to falsify your data.
2. You've set up an autodata goal and there isn't any (easy) way to cheat. Your Fitbit (or Habitica or Duolingo or Project Euler or whatever) just tells Beeminder how many steps got (or whatever your metric is).
3. Your graph is public, and ideally you've pointed friends/family to it. Are you going to lie to your friends and family?
4. It's just part of your identity as a Beeminder user. If you were the type to falsify your data to weasel out of a commitment, you wouldn't have signed up for Beeminder in the first place.
5. Beeminder does a lot of valuable things (reminders, graphs, community, generally making you awesomer) so arguably has earned the money by the time you first derail.
6. Cheating on Beeminder is a devastating precedent that ruins the power that it had as a tool to motivate you.
7. Think of the children! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB62AyZ6gHk (Those kids are so much bigger now, because your derailments pretty literally put food in their mouths!)
Ok, that's all I've got. Here's the blog version: https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating/