We shape our incentive structures, and afterwards our incentive structures shape us.*
You can take weight off your short-term memory and willpower by building scaffolds that support your wellbeing, productivity, and growth. Systems like calendar reminders, to-do lists, and habit trackers can help free up your attention, so that it’s available for handling unexpected and important things that arise.
Building successful scaffolding is an iterative process. You can set something up, try it out for a period of time, see what worked and what didn’t, and make modifications for the next round. It’s important to set aside reasonable intervals for designing your systems, working with them, and reflecting on modifications. For example, if you were hiking with a compass and stopped to take your bearings every ten feet, you wouldn’t go very fast. But if you hiked all day without checking your direction, you might end up very far from where you wanted to go!
It makes sense to set aside times to check in with your progress, and reorient as necessary to keep tasks on track towards goals, and keep goals in alignment with what you need and value. This can happen at specific times, like weekly, monthly, or yearly reviews. It can also make sense to reflect after the end of a big project, or when something shifts in your life. (In the hiking metaphor, this is like climbing up to a ridgeline, where you can get a wider perspective on where you’ve been, and see where to go next.)
You may also need to take a step back to think when you encounter tension and stuckness in the moment. (Like finding yourself at the edge of a swamp – or in the middle of it!) Working with internal conflicts and various dimensions of mindset (beliefs, assumptions, frames, etc) can help you reframe and reorient towards a clearer path.
Goals and habits
Resources about goals and habits:
- Malcolm Ocean‘s blog has a variety of excellent posts on productivity and mindset, such as:
- The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg (and an interview)
- Trigger-action planning (TAPs) – Less Wrong
- “How I Am Productive” – Less Wrong
- “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters“, a poem by Portia Nelson.
(I’d replace “fault” with something more like “responsibility” or even “response-ability”, and I also really like this poem!)
Apps:
- Complice is designed to connect your daily tasks to goals you care about. There’s a built-in Pomodoro timer, and lots of customizable features
- Habitica turns your habits, daily tasks, and to-dos into a role-playing game! Some people find the gamification to be engaging, while others find it distracting.
- Fabulous is another popular choice for habit-tracking
- Workflowy is a simple, excellent way to build nested, collapsible lists
Procrastination
If you’re experiencing resistance or distraction around a particular task, that’s useful information! A few possibilities:
- The task isn’t clearly defined.
Can you break the task down into smaller steps? Do you need more information or clarification from someone else? Have you mixed in an output with an input? (For example, “Find a roommate” can’t be checked off until someone else takes an action. “Post a roommate ad” is a component of that goal which is under your control. “Take photos of room” is a smaller and more tractable sub-task.) - The task doesn’t feel connected to what you care about.
If so, try and trace the purpose of the task back to what you need and value, by asking yourself why you want to do it. If it doesn’t connect, maybe it’s not actually a priority. You can also look for different strategies to meet that underlying need. - Two or more systems are trying to pull you in different directions.
If you have your foot on the gas pedal and the brakes at the same time, that’s going to put a fair bit of strain on the system without much motion. Untangling internal conflicts is a key component of acting effectively in alignment with yourself, and noticing this kind of tension is the first step.
More resources on procrastination:
- “Eating Frogs or Playing Vicious Rock-Paper-Scissors” – Malcolm Ocean
- “I delay writing back to people and then never do it — can I fix this?” – Ask A Manager
- “Don’t Shave That Yak!” – “Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later.”
Akrasia, motivation, and self-improvement
Willpower, choice, and decision fatigue
- Posts from Minding Our Way by Nate Soares:
- Book review: Willpower – Slate Star Codex
- Developing Willpower, by Jason Shen
- Decision fatigue:
- Wikipedia
- NY Times article (although it opens with the bit about the judges, which is likely due to other factors)
- The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz (related TED talk)
* Hat tip to Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
