Category: Psychological and Principles of Productivity

What to do with should/flinches: TDT-stable internal incentives

~ elityre ~ 5 Comments

[epistemic status: current hypothesis, backed by some simple theory, and virtually no empirical evidence yet]

{Part of the thinking going into my Psychology and Phenomenology of Productivity sequence}

The situation

I’ve been having an anxious and unproductive week. There’s a project that I intend to be working on, but I’ve been watching myself procrastinate (fairly rare for me these days), and work inefficiently.

More specifically this situation occurs:

I’m sitting down to start working. Or I am working, and I encounter a point of ambiguity, and my attention flinches away. Or I’m taking a break and am intended to start working again.

At that moment, I feel the pressure of the “should”, the knowing that I’m supposed to/I reflectively want to be making progress, and also feel the inclination to flinch away, to distract myself with something, to flick to LessWrong (it used to be youtube, or SMBC, but I blocked those) or to get something to eat. This comes along with a clench in my belly.

The Opportunity and Obligation

This is a moment of awareness. At that moment, I am conscious of my state, I’m conscious of my desire to make progress on the project. If I do flick to LessWrong, or otherwise distract myself, I will loose that conscious awareness. I’ll still feel bad, still have the clench in my belly, but I won’t be consciously aware of the thing I’m avoiding (at least until the next moment like this one). At that moment, I’m at choice about what to do (or at least more at choice). In the next moment, if the default trajectory is followed, I won’t be.

Realizing this put’s a different flavor on procrastination. Typically, if I’m procrastinating, I have a vague “just one more” justification. It’s ok to watch just one more youtube clip, I can quit after that one. I can stay in bed for another five minutes, and then get up. But if my level of consciousness of my situation fluctuates, that justification is flatly not true.

I have the opportunity right now, to choose something different. I, in actual fact, will not have that opportunity in five minutes.

That me, right then, in that timeslice, has a specific obligation to the world. [I should maybe write a post about how my morality cashes out to different timeslices having different highly-specific obligations to serve the Good.] In that moment, I, the me that is conscious of the should, have the obligation to seize the opportunity of that increased consciousness and use it to put myself on a trajectory such that the next timeslice can effectively pursue a project that will be a tick of the world iterating to a good, safe, future.

The problem

The naive way to seize on that opportunity is to force myself do the task.

There’s a problem with that solution, aside even from the fact that it doesn’t seem like it will work (it’s typically a red flag when one’s plan is “I’ll just use will power”). Even if I could reliably seize on my moment of awareness to force myself to overcome the aversion of my flinch response, doing so would disincentivize me from noticing in the first place.

Doing that would be to install a TAP: whenever I notice myself with a should/flinch, I’ll immediately grit my teeth and preform an effortful and painful mental action. This is conditioning my brain to NOT notice such experiences.

Which is to say, the “just do it” policy is not stable. If I successfully implemented it, I would end up strictly worse off, because I’d still be procrastinating, but I would be much less likely to notice my procrastination.

A guess at a solution

After having noticed this dynamic this week, this is the approach that I’m trying: when I notice the experience of an entangled “should” and the flinch away from it, I orient to hold both of them. More specifically, I move into facilitation mode, where my goal is to make sure that the concerns of both parts are heard and taken into account. Not to force any action, but to mediate between the two conflicting threads.

(Taking advantage of fleeting moments of increased consciousness to hold the concerns of two inchoate and conflicting things at once, is a bit tricky, but I bet I’ll aquire skill with practice.)

If I were to generalize this goal it is something like: when I have a moment of unusual awareness of a conflict, I move to in the direction of increased awareness.

I’ve only been doing this for a few days, so my n is super small, and full of confounds, but this seems to have lead to more time spent dialoguing parts, and days this week have been increasingly focused and productive.

 

Some varieties of feeling “out of it”

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

[Epistemic status: phenomenology. I don’t know if this is true for anyone other than me. Some of my “responses” are wrong, but I don’t know which ones yet.

Part of some post on the phenomenology and psychology of productivity. There are a lot of stubs, places for me to write more.

This is badly organized. A draft.]

One important skill of maintaining productivity through phenomenology is distinguishing between the different kinds of low energy states. I think that people typically conflate a large number of mental states under the label of “tired” or that of “don’t feel like working.” The problem with this is, that the phenomenology of these different states points to different underlying mechanisms, and each one should be responded to differently.

If you can distinguish between these flavors of experience, then each one can be the trigger for a TAP, to bring you back to a more optimal state.

I don’t think I’ve learned to make all relevant state-distinctions here, but these are some that I can recognize.

Sleep deprivation: Feels like like a kind of buzzy feeling in my head that goes with “low energy”.

The best response is a nap. If that doesn’t work, then maybe try a stimulant. You can also just wait: after a while your circadian system will be strongly countering your sleep pressure, and you’ll feel more alert.

Fuzzy-headed: Often from overeating, or not having gotten enough physical activity in the past few days.

The best response is exercise. (Maybe sufficiently intense exercise, that you have an endorphin response?)

Hungry: You probably know what this is. I think maybe the best response is to ignore it?

Running out of thinking-steam due to need to eat: This feels distinctly different from the one above. Sort of like my thoughts running out, due to something like an empty head?

Usually, eating entails some drop in energy level, but if you time it right, both not eating and eating can be energizing. Though I’ve never done this for long periods and I don’t know if it sustainable.

Cognitive exhaustion: This is the one I understand the least. I don’t know what it is. Maybe needing to process, or consolidate info, or do subconscious processing? I don’t know if emotional exhaustion is the meaningfully different (my guess is no?).

The default thing to do here is to take a break, but I’m not sure if that’s the best thing to do. I think maybe you can just switch tasks and get the same effect?

Aversions

I’ll write about aversions more sometime, because they are the ones that are most critical to productivity. Aversions come in two different types: Anxiety/Fear/Stress aversions and “glancing off” aversions.

Anxiety/Fear/Stress/Belief Aversion: This sort of aversion is almost always accompanied by a tension-feeling in the gut and stems from some flavor-of-fear about the thing I’m averse to. A common template for the fear is “I’ve already failed / I’ve already fucked up.” Another is a fear of being judged.

The response to this one is to use Focusing to bring the concern that your body is holding on to into conscious attention, and to figure out a way to handle it.

“Glancing off” Aversions: This is closer to the feeling of slipping off a task, or “just not feeling like doing it”, or finding your attention going elsewhere. This is often due to a task that is aversive not do to it’s goal relevant qualities, but due to it’s ambiguity, or it being to big to hold in mind.

The response, as I’ll write about later, is to chunk out the smallest concrete next action and to visualize doing it.

Ego deletion: Feels sort of like my brain is tired? This feels kind of like cognitive exhaustion, and they might be the same thing. I think this is due to other subsystems in me wanting something other than work.

The correct response, I think, is to take a break and do whatever I feel like doing in that moment, though I don’t have a good understanding of mental energy, and it maybe that I’m supposed to do something that has clear and satisfying reward signals? (I don’t think that’s right, though. Feels a bit too mechanical.)

Urgy-ness: Also have to write more about this another time. This is a feeling compulsion for short term gratification, often of several verities in sequence, without satisfaction. This is often a second order response to an anxiety or fear aversions, and can also be about some goal that’s un handled or an unmet need. See also: the reactiveness scaler (which I also haven’t written about yet.)

Response: exercise, then Focusing

I wrote this fast. Questions are welcome.