Make your decisions once

I’ve been meaning to expose myself online for a while. Maybe even for years. It takes time and effort, it’s embarrassing to start and it’s not nice when you suck at something publicly.

The alternative is much easier: just not doing it. It’s much more difficult to see what didn’t happen as a result of not growing an online presence: the relationships that didn’t form and the opportunities I didn’t have.

And still, I know I should.

Even if you don’t know what akrasia is, I’m sure you’ve experienced it. It means knowing what you should do but still doing something else and it most likely accompanies you on most days.

I’m not perfect at it, but I’ve noticed that the best way to reduce the number of bad decisions is to just reduce the number of all decisions. You only have to decide on your daily actions once, and that once happens before you have to act.

Make it convenient to do the right thing

I’ve covered most of this one in detail in my writing about shaping your environment to achieve your goals. If it’s inconvenient to do the wrong thing and convenient to do the right one, that might just tilt the odds in your favor.

I tend to spend a lot of time mindlessly scrolling social media. It only took one moment of inspiration to turn off all my notifications and remove recommended apps from my menu. I keep getting rewarded for my one-time action every day: the urge to enter them mostly went away. Instead, I now remain focused on the task that I’m working on.

To replace the constant notification impulses, my home screen now contains a big TickTick widget with my daily tasks and habits. One of the tasks is that I need to write at least a few words every day. Sometimes the few words catch on and I spend my next hour writing. It’s still early days but checking my phone and being reminded of what I should do makes me feel like I’m going against myself if I ignore the reminder.

Implement trigger action plans

I took this phrase straight out of this LessWrong article.

Trigger-Action Plans are an approach to programming yourself where you pick a goal you want to achieve, figure out which small action helps you towards this goal, then create a habit of doing that action every time a trigger happens.

They’ve made my mornings automatic. From the moment I wake up to the moment I sit in my car, the only decision that’s left for me to automate is what I’ll make my girlfriend for breakfast.

You can follow the link above for how to implement them, but I’ll give you a recap of how I chain them.

• Trigger: I wake up. Action: I get out of bed and go to the bathroom.
• Trigger: I get to the bathroom. Action: I start brushing my teeth.
• Trigger: I finish brushing my teeth. Action: Wash my face.
• insert 5 more steps of my bathroom habit stack
• Trigger: I come into the kitchen. Action: I take my creatine.

It continues similarly until I drive away. It saves me time and energy that I would’ve spent on deciding whether to do things I don’t particularly like to do, such as brushing my cat’s teeth. And it makes me do what I need to do in the morning with great consistency.

If I ever feel the need to add another step to my morning routine, all I have to do is plan where it fits, imagine the trigger for it, and learn to act on it.

Name akrasia when it appears

This tactic is not the most reliable and it’s definitely not the easiest. But I found that knowing the phenomenon exists and keeping it in my mind goes a long way towards noticing not just when it’s happening, but also in the moments before.

It might only work for me because I’m genuinely interested in how my mind works and why it does the things it does. Whenever I notice that I really don’t want to do something I believe I should, I now catch myself thinking: “Oh, this is akrasia. Better think about this more clearly.” That allows me to gain a moment of separation between feeling the temptation and acting on it. I then see that I’m only seeing the short-term incentives instead of considering what’s good for me overall, which is often enough to guide me back on the right track.

The drawback of saying “when you don’t want to do something, just do it” is mostly that it makes me sound like a complete asshole, but also that you don’t always notice it in the moment.

Have a feedback loop

To try and make every one of the tactics I listed actually successful, it’s important to track how you’re doing. It can be just a simple weekly question of “how did I do this week”, but if you look at what you’ve tried, what worked, what didn’t and why it didn’t, you can make small corrections along the way instead of just giving up when the first week didn’t magically solve all your problems.

Having deliberate sessions of assessing your success lets you make tweaks to your habits in advance. This again means that execution time is nothing else than that, without any need to think at all.

I should really expose myself on the internet. And I am, you’re reading the result.