Bad idea.
Going to class is actually pretty useful. At the very least it forces you to add more structure to your day. Structure is good.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
On Stagnation
Stagation.
The third state. The one we fall into without a thought, trapped in our railroads and empty routines. The worst state, where where growth is stunted and our fire goes out. Stagnation is what kills us in the end. We may try to improve ourselves to death, but that blaze is never in reach. We stop improving, we stagnate, and then we die.
I used to think that stagnation was an anomalous state, an aberration caused by... something. I don't know. Trying to write it out just emphasizes how pervasive it is. Nothing causes stagnation. After we've grown enough it simply happens. It's the normal state, I think. Only serious external events really knock us out of complacency and back into growth. Otherwise we're stuck. We can temporarily force ourselves to fight, but not for long. We grow tired and our will fails us.
As you can tell, I want to improve. So stagnation is a biiiiiiit of a problem.
Solving it is essential. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do this. It seems almost impossible. The entire point of stagnation is that if you aren't doing your damnest every single day to avoid it, you succumb to it. And it's really hard to do your damnest.
Case in point: last night I got badly drenched by the storm. Really badly, "shoes are soaked completely through" badly. There was no way for me to get to campus today, so I stayed home. My plan was to get ahead on all of my work. Over the past ten hours I have... done my reading for one class, read five pages for my research job, and did the dishes. I spent the rest of it vegging out in front of the computer and playing with the rabbit. Hell, I just managed to force myself to do my laundry. The place isn't cleaned, I haven't made tomorrow's lunch, I haven't graded a single homework... you get the idea. Writing this post is taking a huge amount of effort. Today I stagnated.
So stagnation is something we have to use every ounce of will to beat, for a short time, and without much gain. To stop stagnating we have to gain infinite willpower or be physically addicted to improvement or something. It's a shadow under which we live with our whole lives. It has always has the upper hand, and the rules say it always wins.
But what if we cheat?
Is there a way to beat stagnation without inhuman willpower? Maybe. Could we set things up so there's always external events kicking us out of the rut? I have no idea. But it's an idea worth pursuing.
The most important part in self improvement is also the hardest to do. How do we beat stagnation? I've been trying to figure this out for years and have gotten nowhere. But maybe this is the year. If not, next year. If not, the year after that...
The third state. The one we fall into without a thought, trapped in our railroads and empty routines. The worst state, where where growth is stunted and our fire goes out. Stagnation is what kills us in the end. We may try to improve ourselves to death, but that blaze is never in reach. We stop improving, we stagnate, and then we die.
I used to think that stagnation was an anomalous state, an aberration caused by... something. I don't know. Trying to write it out just emphasizes how pervasive it is. Nothing causes stagnation. After we've grown enough it simply happens. It's the normal state, I think. Only serious external events really knock us out of complacency and back into growth. Otherwise we're stuck. We can temporarily force ourselves to fight, but not for long. We grow tired and our will fails us.
As you can tell, I want to improve. So stagnation is a biiiiiiit of a problem.
Solving it is essential. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do this. It seems almost impossible. The entire point of stagnation is that if you aren't doing your damnest every single day to avoid it, you succumb to it. And it's really hard to do your damnest.
Case in point: last night I got badly drenched by the storm. Really badly, "shoes are soaked completely through" badly. There was no way for me to get to campus today, so I stayed home. My plan was to get ahead on all of my work. Over the past ten hours I have... done my reading for one class, read five pages for my research job, and did the dishes. I spent the rest of it vegging out in front of the computer and playing with the rabbit. Hell, I just managed to force myself to do my laundry. The place isn't cleaned, I haven't made tomorrow's lunch, I haven't graded a single homework... you get the idea. Writing this post is taking a huge amount of effort. Today I stagnated.
So stagnation is something we have to use every ounce of will to beat, for a short time, and without much gain. To stop stagnating we have to gain infinite willpower or be physically addicted to improvement or something. It's a shadow under which we live with our whole lives. It has always has the upper hand, and the rules say it always wins.
But what if we cheat?
Is there a way to beat stagnation without inhuman willpower? Maybe. Could we set things up so there's always external events kicking us out of the rut? I have no idea. But it's an idea worth pursuing.
The most important part in self improvement is also the hardest to do. How do we beat stagnation? I've been trying to figure this out for years and have gotten nowhere. But maybe this is the year. If not, next year. If not, the year after that...
Sunday, October 16, 2011
An Ignoble Experiment
When my computer died I thought I'd be more productive in class. This is technically true, in that I'm doing a lot of grading and writing in class. My attention to class hasn't improved in the slightest. I go to class out of a sense of duty; that as a student I should go through all of the motions of learning. For a long time I've wondered if this is impeding my actual learning. Maybe if I pushed myself those 16 hours I spend in class per week could be put to much better use.
So I'm going to try an experiment this week. I am only going to necessary classes- classes with either discussions or homework due. During the class hours I will only be able to work on class material, work on homework, do my jobs, and work towards Millennium Goals. At the end of the week I'll post a rundown of how things went. Cool? Cool.
So I'm going to try an experiment this week. I am only going to necessary classes- classes with either discussions or homework due. During the class hours I will only be able to work on class material, work on homework, do my jobs, and work towards Millennium Goals. At the end of the week I'll post a rundown of how things went. Cool? Cool.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Myth of the Ultimate Person
A few days ago some of us had a conversation on facebook about the possibility of robots outcompeting humanity. Standard science fiction stuff. The one person asked "can we create an ultimate person?" I thought this was an incredibly interesting question, given my general outlook on life. If there is an ultimate person, obviously I'd want to work towards that. So it kinda sucks that there isn't.
Let's get the obvious problem out of the way. We can trivially define the UP to be "in absolute perfect physical, mental, and spiritual condition." This already causes a bit of an issue. For one, 'absolute perfect physical condition' doesn't actually exist. Every physical ability corresponds to some physical attribute, and these attributes often clash with each other. It's not just a matter of finite time and resources. Sometimes getting better at one thing actively makes you worse at another. Become the best football player in the world? Good luck doing gymnastics. Prefer to master contortion? You won't have the strength to do well in a fight. This even holds true in subfields of physical abilities, where the best marathoners make terrible sprinters. You can be the best in the world at something, sure, but for everything else you'll have to settle for merely 'good'.
Okay, this isn't a huge deal. Instead of requiring UPs be absolutely perfect we just have them maximize competence, whatever that means. Being damn good in a bunch of things is better than being the best in one if we're trying to achieve ultimacy. In which case our problem shifts to the whole 'mental and spiritual part'. What does it mean to have a good mind? A good soul? Is being a biologist better than an economist? A NeoKantian better than a hedonist? A quiet man better than a brash and outgoing one?
Ultimately, 'the best' is incredibly sensitive to cultural assumptions. Five hundred years ago racism was perfectly okay. Heck, you don't even need go back in time. Just look at the difference between the ideas of academic success between American and Chinese universities. Any conception of the ultimate person is intrinsically tied to the cultural assumptions you use to decide what is "best". There is no absolute metric, and so no absolute "ultimate". My conception of the ultimate person can be your conception of the quintessential asshole, and we'd both be right.
So where does that leave self improvement? Why do we self improve if there's no reasonable culmination? We can't just say "we'll improve to our cultural norms." Part of self improvement is avoiding misperception, which means we have to rise above our intrinsic assumptions. But while there is no 'ultimate person', there is still a 'better person'. Someone who clearly isn't above mankind or whom maximizes his cultural value, but a person who is capable of doing a little more. The person who has a little more control over his own mind and emotions, who can choose to be a pacifist or a killer depending on what he chooses. Clearly you hit problems if this control becomes absolute, because a person who could change their personality at will isn't a human anymore. But it's a goal constructed of smaller, attainable goals.
Looking back, this entire post makes very little sense. Proof that I shouldn't try updating at three in the morning.
Let's get the obvious problem out of the way. We can trivially define the UP to be "in absolute perfect physical, mental, and spiritual condition." This already causes a bit of an issue. For one, 'absolute perfect physical condition' doesn't actually exist. Every physical ability corresponds to some physical attribute, and these attributes often clash with each other. It's not just a matter of finite time and resources. Sometimes getting better at one thing actively makes you worse at another. Become the best football player in the world? Good luck doing gymnastics. Prefer to master contortion? You won't have the strength to do well in a fight. This even holds true in subfields of physical abilities, where the best marathoners make terrible sprinters. You can be the best in the world at something, sure, but for everything else you'll have to settle for merely 'good'.
Okay, this isn't a huge deal. Instead of requiring UPs be absolutely perfect we just have them maximize competence, whatever that means. Being damn good in a bunch of things is better than being the best in one if we're trying to achieve ultimacy. In which case our problem shifts to the whole 'mental and spiritual part'. What does it mean to have a good mind? A good soul? Is being a biologist better than an economist? A NeoKantian better than a hedonist? A quiet man better than a brash and outgoing one?
Ultimately, 'the best' is incredibly sensitive to cultural assumptions. Five hundred years ago racism was perfectly okay. Heck, you don't even need go back in time. Just look at the difference between the ideas of academic success between American and Chinese universities. Any conception of the ultimate person is intrinsically tied to the cultural assumptions you use to decide what is "best". There is no absolute metric, and so no absolute "ultimate". My conception of the ultimate person can be your conception of the quintessential asshole, and we'd both be right.
So where does that leave self improvement? Why do we self improve if there's no reasonable culmination? We can't just say "we'll improve to our cultural norms." Part of self improvement is avoiding misperception, which means we have to rise above our intrinsic assumptions. But while there is no 'ultimate person', there is still a 'better person'. Someone who clearly isn't above mankind or whom maximizes his cultural value, but a person who is capable of doing a little more. The person who has a little more control over his own mind and emotions, who can choose to be a pacifist or a killer depending on what he chooses. Clearly you hit problems if this control becomes absolute, because a person who could change their personality at will isn't a human anymore. But it's a goal constructed of smaller, attainable goals.
Looking back, this entire post makes very little sense. Proof that I shouldn't try updating at three in the morning.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
On Misperception
All of the improvement I've talked about so far are action improvements. They're about things like optimizing free time and messing with risk reward. All of the millennium goals, save one, are about doing something, or doing something better. Even the patience one is about gaining the ability to sit still, not the mind to do it. There's only one millennium goal directly related to how I think, the one about emotional hypersensitivity. I think this is a huge shame. It's generally much easier to improve ourselves physically and professionally than mentally. But mental improvement is the absolute core of self growth. Without the ability to change our perceptions, we can't truly say we've become better people.
We're human. That has a lot of meaning behind it, but there's only one I'm concerned with right now: flawed. To be human means to be imperfect in countless numbers of ways, from our failing bodies to our holes in our knowledge. But by far the worst flaws are the ones where we see the world in a wrong way. A few ways immediately leap to mind: racism, homeopathism, theism/atheism to atheists/theists, etcetera. More subtle are the ones that don't define a mode of thought but hide in the cracks of our interactions. If I miss a day of training I've failed. Only a genius can write a program. I don't have the time to learn this thing. I'm spineless. I am set in my ways.
What makes these so terrible is how hard they are to fix. First of all, you have to notice them. Finding a flaw in your perception is like needing to fix a car that you don't know is broken. The flaw is just another part of how you deal with the world. Unless something huge happens to you or you spend a lot of time introspecting, you'll never realize you have it. Writing that short list was incredibly difficult for that reason. I just couldn't think of possible flaws in perception. They were there, certainly in me and certainly in others, but they're almost invisible.
Then you have to realize it's a flaw. It was only recently that I learned to "loosen up" with my training regimen. I used to think that if I didn't run for a day, I failed at exercising. That would lead to me just giving up and abandoning my work. I didn't think this was a problem, though. I was holding myself to a high standard, where the price of failure was so great that I should never even consider missing a day. But now I think that part of working hard at something is to be adaptable. I am not defined by what I do or don't do. I can be a runner without running, a writer who doesn't write, even a physicist without physics. Rather it's a mode of thought and focus, not the act of doing those things but the will and desire to do them. I am not a runner because I run. I run because I'm a runner. And this means that even if I don't run for a day, I'm still a runner. My former perception of "fail once fail forever" was invalid, to be replaced with "a miss is a blip on the radar."
((Incidentally, I'm staying up late to write this, so instead of exercising in the early morning I'll just jog and lift after my class today. Adaptability means keeping the ritual while allowing yourself to break free of the routine.))
Finally, and perhaps worst of all, you have to know that you can change a perception. This may very well be the hardest part. A lot of them are self inhibiting. Say you think you lack willpower or patience. Will you have the willpower to build patience and the patience to build willpower? Not until you stop thinking you lack them. Catch twenty-two. We never change, and so we live our forlorn lives. We stay angry and hurt and petty and down, never once truly believing that we can make ourselves better.
Is there an easy way to change perception? I wish there was. The question is pretty much the same as: is there a fast track to becoming a better person? The past 4000 years of theology say 'no'. And I'm not gonna argue with the Buddha. We have to try, though. If we want to really improve as people and not just pick up new skills and tricks, we have to change our perceptions. It's a slow and agonizing process, one from which I've often strayed away. But I keep coming back. There's no other way.
My past few posts have been small ramblings on the metagame, so I figure it's time to talk about where I currently am. Two of the millennium goals are completed, and I'm working on five more. The photography and Spanish ones have unfortunately fallen by the wayside, and I'm not putting as much time into anaerobics as I should. But still, they're coming along! I'm confident that I'll have at least five more of the short term ones done by winter. That's only two terrible movies I have to watch. I'm gonna restart the Spanish effort this week, maybe reserve the photography one for a winter-break reading marathon. It's one of the goals that can be completed in a very short intense time, unlike the steady pace ones I'm currently doing.
I think I've hit my limit. What are your thoughts on misperception? Can you think of any powerful ones people don't notice? How do you work on changing them?
We're human. That has a lot of meaning behind it, but there's only one I'm concerned with right now: flawed. To be human means to be imperfect in countless numbers of ways, from our failing bodies to our holes in our knowledge. But by far the worst flaws are the ones where we see the world in a wrong way. A few ways immediately leap to mind: racism, homeopathism, theism/atheism to atheists/theists, etcetera. More subtle are the ones that don't define a mode of thought but hide in the cracks of our interactions. If I miss a day of training I've failed. Only a genius can write a program. I don't have the time to learn this thing. I'm spineless. I am set in my ways.
What makes these so terrible is how hard they are to fix. First of all, you have to notice them. Finding a flaw in your perception is like needing to fix a car that you don't know is broken. The flaw is just another part of how you deal with the world. Unless something huge happens to you or you spend a lot of time introspecting, you'll never realize you have it. Writing that short list was incredibly difficult for that reason. I just couldn't think of possible flaws in perception. They were there, certainly in me and certainly in others, but they're almost invisible.
Then you have to realize it's a flaw. It was only recently that I learned to "loosen up" with my training regimen. I used to think that if I didn't run for a day, I failed at exercising. That would lead to me just giving up and abandoning my work. I didn't think this was a problem, though. I was holding myself to a high standard, where the price of failure was so great that I should never even consider missing a day. But now I think that part of working hard at something is to be adaptable. I am not defined by what I do or don't do. I can be a runner without running, a writer who doesn't write, even a physicist without physics. Rather it's a mode of thought and focus, not the act of doing those things but the will and desire to do them. I am not a runner because I run. I run because I'm a runner. And this means that even if I don't run for a day, I'm still a runner. My former perception of "fail once fail forever" was invalid, to be replaced with "a miss is a blip on the radar."
((Incidentally, I'm staying up late to write this, so instead of exercising in the early morning I'll just jog and lift after my class today. Adaptability means keeping the ritual while allowing yourself to break free of the routine.))
Finally, and perhaps worst of all, you have to know that you can change a perception. This may very well be the hardest part. A lot of them are self inhibiting. Say you think you lack willpower or patience. Will you have the willpower to build patience and the patience to build willpower? Not until you stop thinking you lack them. Catch twenty-two. We never change, and so we live our forlorn lives. We stay angry and hurt and petty and down, never once truly believing that we can make ourselves better.
Is there an easy way to change perception? I wish there was. The question is pretty much the same as: is there a fast track to becoming a better person? The past 4000 years of theology say 'no'. And I'm not gonna argue with the Buddha. We have to try, though. If we want to really improve as people and not just pick up new skills and tricks, we have to change our perceptions. It's a slow and agonizing process, one from which I've often strayed away. But I keep coming back. There's no other way.
My past few posts have been small ramblings on the metagame, so I figure it's time to talk about where I currently am. Two of the millennium goals are completed, and I'm working on five more. The photography and Spanish ones have unfortunately fallen by the wayside, and I'm not putting as much time into anaerobics as I should. But still, they're coming along! I'm confident that I'll have at least five more of the short term ones done by winter. That's only two terrible movies I have to watch. I'm gonna restart the Spanish effort this week, maybe reserve the photography one for a winter-break reading marathon. It's one of the goals that can be completed in a very short intense time, unlike the steady pace ones I'm currently doing.
I think I've hit my limit. What are your thoughts on misperception? Can you think of any powerful ones people don't notice? How do you work on changing them?
Monday, October 3, 2011
On Activity
My computer died today.
It still works, technically, but it won't recharge. If I'm lucky I might be able to borrow somebody else's battery, use it to back up all of my important files. Otherwise it's dead. Looks like it's time to get a new computer.
I'm going to hold off as long as possible. This is going to be the first time in two years I'm not constantly wired to the internet. I'll only get small doses whenever I can get to a library or steal somebody's laptop. I think this will be good for me. Let me explain why.
We can roughly divide people's actions into high intensity and low intensity. High intensity is commonly seen as "productive". This is self improvement, working a job, doing homework. Low intensity is generally "relaxing". Meditation, watching television, playing video games, going for a walk. This is not to say that these boundaries are well-defined. Sports are high intensity relaxation, knitting is low intensity productive/relaxation, cooking can be high intensity or low depending on what you're doing, etc. Maximizing the value of your time is to walk the fine line between high intensity and low intensity activities. Too much of the former and you crash, too much of the latter and you don't burn.
But there's another side of this, a third thing you can do besides production and relaxation. That's stagnation. Time you don't spend burning or healing yourself. Time you spend eroding, slowly falling apart through complacency and lethargy. It's the dark side of relaxation. We relax to eventually work again. We stagnate to continue stagnating.
The problem is how thin the line is. A lot of things we do to relax can be easily turned into stagnation. Think about the difference between playing two games of Starcraft and playing twenty.* I definitely have a problem with this. I'm really afraid of relaxing, not because I'm some sort of working machine but because I know how easily it will turn into wasting. So I spend more time in high intensity, which leads to me crashing more often. Then I need to relax a crapton, which quickly turns into stagnation, which makes the next productive zone a little less productive... so yeah. My time schedule is completely out of whack. I need to cut my high time, boost my low time, and do away with my stagnation periods.
Where does the computer fit into all of this? Being jacked to the net makes stagnation incredibly easy. I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. Worse, it's often high intensity. I've somehow managed to make surfing the web physically draining. Might explain why I'm so underweight. It also means that when I finally drag myself away from the internet I'm in a worse place than when I started. Surfing the web is one thing, snorting it is another. I do the latter.
That's why I think losing it will be good for me. I'm going through a detox here. Being semi-cut off from the internet should help me learn to use my time more wisely. Of course, I can't go cold turkey. There's still work and academics to worry about. But I think this will be enough.
You might call this sour grapes. I mean, I'm trying to justify why losing my computer is a good thing. I see this as optimism. If things go right I'll walk out of this a better person than I came in. I'm taking a bad situation and trying to spin it to my advantage. Isn't that what luck is? Every setback is an opportunity. Here's hoping this one pays off.
It still works, technically, but it won't recharge. If I'm lucky I might be able to borrow somebody else's battery, use it to back up all of my important files. Otherwise it's dead. Looks like it's time to get a new computer.
I'm going to hold off as long as possible. This is going to be the first time in two years I'm not constantly wired to the internet. I'll only get small doses whenever I can get to a library or steal somebody's laptop. I think this will be good for me. Let me explain why.
We can roughly divide people's actions into high intensity and low intensity. High intensity is commonly seen as "productive". This is self improvement, working a job, doing homework. Low intensity is generally "relaxing". Meditation, watching television, playing video games, going for a walk. This is not to say that these boundaries are well-defined. Sports are high intensity relaxation, knitting is low intensity productive/relaxation, cooking can be high intensity or low depending on what you're doing, etc. Maximizing the value of your time is to walk the fine line between high intensity and low intensity activities. Too much of the former and you crash, too much of the latter and you don't burn.
But there's another side of this, a third thing you can do besides production and relaxation. That's stagnation. Time you don't spend burning or healing yourself. Time you spend eroding, slowly falling apart through complacency and lethargy. It's the dark side of relaxation. We relax to eventually work again. We stagnate to continue stagnating.
The problem is how thin the line is. A lot of things we do to relax can be easily turned into stagnation. Think about the difference between playing two games of Starcraft and playing twenty.* I definitely have a problem with this. I'm really afraid of relaxing, not because I'm some sort of working machine but because I know how easily it will turn into wasting. So I spend more time in high intensity, which leads to me crashing more often. Then I need to relax a crapton, which quickly turns into stagnation, which makes the next productive zone a little less productive... so yeah. My time schedule is completely out of whack. I need to cut my high time, boost my low time, and do away with my stagnation periods.
Where does the computer fit into all of this? Being jacked to the net makes stagnation incredibly easy. I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. Worse, it's often high intensity. I've somehow managed to make surfing the web physically draining. Might explain why I'm so underweight. It also means that when I finally drag myself away from the internet I'm in a worse place than when I started. Surfing the web is one thing, snorting it is another. I do the latter.
That's why I think losing it will be good for me. I'm going through a detox here. Being semi-cut off from the internet should help me learn to use my time more wisely. Of course, I can't go cold turkey. There's still work and academics to worry about. But I think this will be enough.
You might call this sour grapes. I mean, I'm trying to justify why losing my computer is a good thing. I see this as optimism. If things go right I'll walk out of this a better person than I came in. I'm taking a bad situation and trying to spin it to my advantage. Isn't that what luck is? Every setback is an opportunity. Here's hoping this one pays off.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
On Procrastination
I was planning on writing a post about motivation, but procrastinated it into oblivion. Then I thought "Hey, why not write a post about procrastination" and here we are.
There are a lot of things I really want to do but never get around to. Uploading my Chile pictures. Finish my fiction. Update my blog. But I don't. I trade long term satisfaction for the immediate pleasure of surfin' da web. And it really is da web that's my procrastination locus. But not the only one. In Chile I'd not brting my computer home for precisely this reason. I ended up spending all of my time sleeping and reading trashy fantasy.
We are life with a question: why short term over long term? I'd say it's two reasons. Short term satisfaction absorbs the mind, so I don't remember the long term projects. This can be beaten by having constant reminders in always-novel forms. Any sort of daily planer becomes mundane and useless for remembering, after all. My This of course assumes I remember to set this up, which runs back into the procrastination problem.
But why seek short term pleasure at all? It's addictive, of course. Amusement and satisfaction provided in blazing-fast time?! Count me in! And once you start, the inertia keeps you going. Kinda like how you put going to bed off for just five minutes, then five again... How do we beat this? Either make the addiction provide less pleasure or the virtues provide more. I think this can be accomplished by a three-tiered approach.
1) Make slacking off less enjoyable. Install locks and conditions that make it tedious and difficult to reap rewards. This is easy to implement: Only one "addiction tab" can be open at once. I'm going to start this right now.
2) Make the reward more tangible. Give victory a taste. I can do this by encouraging friends to remind me about the benefits of my goals. Then actually improving is part getting what I need and gaining prestige among my friends. This should make putting in the effort a lot more appealing.
3) Make the process of improvement more enjoyable. Turn it into an addicting game. Set and reward milestones. This one is the hardest to figure out and implement, and will have to wait for another post.
Now I'm turning the question to you all. Why do you procrastinate? How do you overcome it?
There are a lot of things I really want to do but never get around to. Uploading my Chile pictures. Finish my fiction. Update my blog. But I don't. I trade long term satisfaction for the immediate pleasure of surfin' da web. And it really is da web that's my procrastination locus. But not the only one. In Chile I'd not brting my computer home for precisely this reason. I ended up spending all of my time sleeping and reading trashy fantasy.
We are life with a question: why short term over long term? I'd say it's two reasons. Short term satisfaction absorbs the mind, so I don't remember the long term projects. This can be beaten by having constant reminders in always-novel forms. Any sort of daily planer becomes mundane and useless for remembering, after all. My This of course assumes I remember to set this up, which runs back into the procrastination problem.
But why seek short term pleasure at all? It's addictive, of course. Amusement and satisfaction provided in blazing-fast time?! Count me in! And once you start, the inertia keeps you going. Kinda like how you put going to bed off for just five minutes, then five again... How do we beat this? Either make the addiction provide less pleasure or the virtues provide more. I think this can be accomplished by a three-tiered approach.
1) Make slacking off less enjoyable. Install locks and conditions that make it tedious and difficult to reap rewards. This is easy to implement: Only one "addiction tab" can be open at once. I'm going to start this right now.
2) Make the reward more tangible. Give victory a taste. I can do this by encouraging friends to remind me about the benefits of my goals. Then actually improving is part getting what I need and gaining prestige among my friends. This should make putting in the effort a lot more appealing.
3) Make the process of improvement more enjoyable. Turn it into an addicting game. Set and reward milestones. This one is the hardest to figure out and implement, and will have to wait for another post.
Now I'm turning the question to you all. Why do you procrastinate? How do you overcome it?
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