Don't torture your future self
Your innie is a person too
H/T Hauke for “Don’t torture your innie”
I went to a lightning talk on a ‘little-known’ productivity hack that will change your life. The idea? Putting monetary bounties on things to get yourself to do them.
This seems like a reasonable thing to do, especially for high-stakes things or items with a strong ‘ugh field’ that you just put off again and again.
Tying yourself to the mast
Beeminder is this idea on steroids. You set a commitment – perhaps going to the gym three times per week – and you enter a ‘1’ datapoint each time you do. If you don’t go on time, you get a monetary penalty, which starts at $5 and increases exponentially, so it quickly becomes an amount of money which you really care about.
It’s very motivating, and it’s cool to look at all your little graphs and see them ticking up.
There are other neat features – you can’t just change your pledge to weasel; there’s a seven day cooling-off period. You can have ‘do less’ goals, but you can’t just enter no data to game them – you’ll fall off the rails if you do. It’s a very cleverly-designed system. It might also totally destroy your motivation to actually do anything, because your past self is basically torturing your future self, and this is by design.
Punishment isn’t enough
Items surrounded by an ugh field are almost certainly getting put off because they’re aversive, even though they have a high cost – if you’re not filing your taxes because you just can’t bear to do them, you’re presumably also eating the cost of late filing penalties. The punishment is already there but it isn’t enough. Adding more punishment on top just makes you feel bad.
If you aren’t going to the gym because it fucking sucks and you hate going, then punishing yourself further by having a Beeminder goal on top will just make you hate it more.
Against sledgehammering yourself in the nuts as a motivational strategy
Instead of spending the money on Beeminder fines, you could hire an accountant to do your taxes for you. Taxes fucking suck so just throw money at the problem to make them go away; it’ll be a hell of a lot cheaper than the late filing penalties.
Instead of fining yourself five bucks each time you don’t go to the gym, sign up for a gym that’s nearby and find a routine that you enjoy, or just sack off going to the gym altogether and get your exercise needs met some other way (I started doing sessions at Barry’s and found I really enjoyed them, much more than going for a run).
Sometimes negative motivation – avoiding a bad thing – is the right way to get yourself to do something. But prefer positive motivation, where you can make the task itself motivating. Stop torturing your future self. It’s better for you.