Step 1: Notice I’m procrastinating
- I know I should do a task
Step 2: Guess which unattacked part of the equation is causing me the most trouble.
- Low Expectancy: am I likely to succeed? Is the task within my capabilities? Will I actually get the reward?
- Low Value: am I bored and distracted? Uncomfortable, onerous, or painful? Am I nervous or afraid of the outcome? Do I care about the task?
- Delay: how much reward is delayed, and for how long?
- Impulsiveness: am I impatient? Distracted?
- Should I drop/delegate this task?
Step 3: Try several methods for attacking the specific problems.
- Low Expectancy
- Success Spirals: Give yourself a series of meaningful, challenging goals, and achieve them! Set yourself up for success by giving yourself goals you know you can accomplish and do them again and again.
- Vicarious Victory: Get in a positive, achieving mindset by surrounding yourself with positive people, watching/reading inspirational material, listening to motivational speakers.
- Mental Contrasting: Strongly visualize where you want to go, then compare it where you are now (second part is key!). This way, you see your current situation as an obstacle to your goals that motivates you to take action.
- Plan for the worst, expect the best
- Low Value
- Reward because humans are animals, use rewards to reinforce good behavior.
- Focus on what you love, wherever possible.
- Flow: if the task is boring, try to make it more difficult up to the point of creating flow
- Meaning: remember the chain of meaning that makes a specific task relevant to your over-arching goals, e.g. this homework gets me PhD which gets me writing job which gets me ability to help people
- Energy: do things to increase your mental energy.
- Delay
- decrease delay
- chunk the task to get more rewards.
- Impulsiveness
- use precommitment
- Set specific and meaningful goals and subgoals
- Measure your behavior
- Build useful habits.
- Low Expectancy
References
- This article by lukeprog on the LessWrong forum