"Useful life-hacks like prayer"

* Remove Activation Barriers
  - Starting a task is by far the most unpleasant aspect of it.
  - "Just do 5 minutes of work".
  - Keep a record of every time you break yourself out of a
    procrastination death spiral.  Literally, something as simple as a
    tally mark on an index card.

* Precommitment
  Take advantage of hyperbolic discounting by making good choices in
  the future, then preventing yourself from defecting as the moment of
  action draws near.  Everyone knows what would be best for them to do
  tomorrow.

*  Accountability
    - Is a special case of precommitment that harnesses the monkey
      brain's reputation machinery.
    - There may be no particular reason to think that your plans will
      go better if you discuss them with others.  But they probably
      will, and that is a data point.

* Limit extraneous choices and decision fatigue
  - Routines
  - You do not to have a choice about whether to get up on
    time.
  - Recognize vulnerabilities to decision fatigue / ego depletion and
    route around them.  For example, one might come back from the gym
    (a highly ego-depleting setting) and spend an hour in a
    low-willpower haze.  Schedule low-effort tasks during these
    periods.

* Ritual
  - Sufficiently advanced routine is indistinguishable from ritual
  - Consider prayer as an entrainment mechanism for overcoming activation barriers
  - Viz., a prayer for strength to complete a task is a coordination
    mechanism for "the society of mind", as well as a low-effort
    undertaking which primes the initiation of a high-effort undertaking.  A
    "ramp up" to execution.
  - An opportunity to reflect on your ancestors and what they've done
    to get you this far.  Will you strive as they did, or will you spend
    the night in with netflix?  When you enter the celestial hall of
    your all-seeing forefathers, will you take your rightful place
    among them or will you say "oh fuck"?  ~~Nydwracu.

* Quantify and measure
  - can only control what you can measure
  - placebo effect of monitoring
  - Make measurement low/zero cost-- how?
    - Github commits
    - Activity monitors for browsers
    - &c.

* procrastination is actually unpleasant
  - Work well done yields a deep satisfaction that procrastination can never provide.
  - "People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it" -- M.A.

* Weaponized Schizophrenia
  - Support in the literature:
    "O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as ithers see us!" -- Burns
    "But if I could talk to myself
     like I was someone else,
     well then maybe I could take your advice,
     and I wouldn't act like such an asshole all the time." -- Bright Eyes (lol)
  - The solutions to everyone's problems are obvious to everyone else.
  - Corollary: to solve a problem, recommend a solution to a
    hypothetical friend with the same problem.  By symmetry, you then
    ought to immediately act on that advice.
  - You are not so special: Special pleading to individual
    circumstances is almost always incorrect.  A policy of ignoring
    special pleading will get you much further than a policy of always
    heeding it.
  - divide yourself into a principal and an agent.  The agent does the
    unpleasant stuff that the principal is too
    embarrassed/above-it-all/far-mode to do, like logistics and
    especially self-promotion.
  - [TW: social science] If a coin jar for an honor-system coffee
    machine has a pair of eyes painted on it, it will get higher
    compliance.  Applications to the workplace left as an exercise to
    the reader.
  - Similar study about mirrors.  The ability/requirement to literally
    look yourself in the eye may have an effect?

* Define clear, objective and readily fulfillable criteria for success
  Not "write a good paper", but "write 500 words".

* Exploration vs. Exploitation
  - Messy vs. Tidy
  - Alcohol vs. Caffeine
  - Beginnings vs. endings
  - there seems like there should be a moral here [?]

* Eliminate distractions
  - Random reward levers are powerful.  They are one of the most
  effective psychological mechanisms ever discovered. assume that you
  are, at best, probably not much more immune to their effects than
  average.  In fact let's just assume you're worse.  Don't rely on
  personal virtue and judgment to resist them-- quarantine them from
  your work.
  - Cope with the psychological effects of random reward levers by
    dealing with them at the same time each day.
  - Conversely, could you build a random reward lever to build
    positive habits?  No one ever had to exert conscious discipline in
    order to train themselves to refresh tumblr a hundred times a day.

* Set and setting
  - Establish a physical location for doing work that is comfortable
    but not distracting, one that encourages relaxed alertness.
  - Work breaks are necessary but should not consist of mind-crack, by
    which is meant internet random-reward levers.  During breaks, get
    up and take a lap around the building.  Go get a drink of water.
    Talk briefly to a colleague and share the successes of the past
    hour.  Anyone who took a work break to do actual crack in the
    bathroom would be rightly regarded as deeply troubled.

* Fundamentals
  - sleep
    - at the same time each night.
  - diet
  - social integration
    - Think of the early zookeepers whose charges kept dying/adopting
      pathological behaviors/failing to thrive because they were kept
      in isolation.  You are probably not so special, either.  You are
      basically a complicated marmot.  Reasoning with marmots about
      why isolation is really nbd is unlikely to work.  So too with
      you.
  - exercise
    - Effect size of exercising in particular is eye-poppingly large
      and kicks in almost immediately upon leaving the gym.
  - mindfulness meditation [?]

* Declaring discipline bankruptcy
  - social anxiety death spirals
    - broken commitments lead to
    - avoidance which leads to
    - further broken commitments
  - in general, people probably think much less about you in general
    than you assume, including negative thoughts.  The true benefits
    of avoidance are smaller than you think.
  - any communication probably better than no communication
  - At any point, the best time to break a death spiral is the
    present, requiring a short bolus of effort to re-establish contact.
  - This contact will probably be welcomed by the receiving party,
    especially compared to the alternative.
  - See weaponized schizophrenia, prinicipal-agent distinction

* Metagoals
  - Getting on track and accomplishing healthy, disciplined living is simply one goal among many
  - But is more like capital investment rather than consumption.
  - Positive changes enable further changes and allow existing disciplines to be
    maintained with lower effort.
  - The goal is to find a stable equilibrium of order.
  - Should not expect 100% compliance, but should expect positive derivative.
  - Plans should be robust to individual lapses without condoning them.
  - Remember that the result of all of this is eudaimonia.  It is not
    what we're aiming for in itself, but the emotional consequence of
    well-lived life.