I work better at night. At around midnight, I’m more prone to entering a state of relaxed focus, my mind making more lateral connections when reading or coming up with ideas that will likely have great positive impact on my personal life and work. This happens after a hard workout too, or after having a stimulating discussion with a trusted, unbiased, and driven friend. The conflict comes every day I wake up in the morning, and it’s as if the open tabs of useful thoughts in my mind have closed, refreshed, but with no Command+Shift+Tab to reopen them exactly the way they were. I feel different in the morning; without the vision and subjective "charged" state I felt the night before, my mind doesn’t give me a clear path to execute on the useful thoughts from yesterday. I don’t have full access to that action-taking state. It’s logical that the subjective impact of thought and motivation changes from day-to-day. I wouldn’t want to remember and feel the embarrassment from a social faux pas I made last week, every day. I just want to be able to capture and feel more of the good stuff from the day or week before. To feel the same emotional impact as when I first came across particular insights, so that I’ll follow through on that with fervor and persistence. Is there a way of hacking the brain to get the upside, without incurring the downside? It’s almost as if I existed in two states: one which thinks that it has done enough and deserves surface pleasures and rest—akrasia, and its opposite, non-akrasia—buzzing with quiet energy, working towards fulfillment, constantly alert to ideas that I can implement. I know that being in a state of non-akrasia for sustained periods of time is possible. There are the Elon Musks of the world, those who work 80 hour work weeks towards their very specific cause of choice. I choose to believe that they were not so much genetically predisposed to do so, as they had something to protect as well as systems that ruthlessly reduced friction and distraction and ritualized the state of Flow. The importance of colonizing mars and reversing climate change are likely kept as open tabs at the forefront of Musk’s mind, thoughts with deep significance to him, that has guided every business or engineering decision he has made. Given the limitations of working memory, how do I keep my useful thoughts as open tabs after a night’s sleep, or at least be able to access the full "History" and restore them? I’d imagine that if I was able to hack my brain to access the long-term-thinking, fulfilment-driven mode of non-akrasian thoughts, there will be exponential gains in the areas of my life that matter—no more instinctive checking, mindless scrolling of social media as distraction to fulfilling work, no more superstimuli foods to damage physical and mental health. The cost of giving into temptation will be greater than the short-term benefits precisely because the open tabs show me that I’m forgoing a much greater physique or career impact if I take the easy path. More importantly, it will give me the confidence to follow through on all of those thoughts in the exact way I intended to. Being able to remember the full rationale and potential impact of these thoughts, I will be able to execute them without second-guessing myself. Finding a system or trigger to access these thoughts from my subconscious, in order to act with conviction and consistency with my long-term goals—that is my priority at this point of time.
I’ve done a bit of work on this. I’ll try to map out my understanding, and you’ll have to figure out which parts apply to your situation. First, you’ve got to ask yourself, why do you have the oscillating motivation in the first place? What’s going on there? One answer, on a macro level, is that you’re oscillating between being driven by your vision/mission/purpose, and being driven by your resistance—the thing that fears for your safety, or wants you to get rest, or whatever. Macro Motivation OscillationsTo stop these oscillations, the first thing to do is recognize what your resistance values, and incorporate that into your motivation system. Sustainable Macro-MotivationOn a micro-level, it may be that you’ve learned to motivate yourself through shame/guilt and other negative emotions. So the longer you go without doing your task, the bigger your shame/guilt gets, until it finally causes you to act… then your shame and guilt goes away. Again, this creates oscillations: Micro Motivation OscillationsTo deal with this, you have to again deal with both sides of the equation. First, you have to learn how to process and remove all the negative emotions you have about a task. Then, you have to learn how to motivate yourself using positive rather than negative emotions Sustainable Micro-MotivationOnce you’ve switched to a sustainable motivation system, the question becomes: How to connect with that motivation. There are two parts to this:
How do you get motivation and resolve for your tasks?
How do you get into a creative, playful state that allows you to get into flow and work well on your tasks? Again, we can split these into macro and micro. On a macro level, we connect with our motivation and resolve by creating "creative tension" for our vision using a tool called Vision Contrasting. By letting ourselves see the tension between our vision and current state, it gives us resolve to achieve our vision. I recommend doing this every morning. Vision ContrastingOn a micro-level, we get into the proper state by asking ourselves "What’s the nearest state to what I’m feeling right now that would allow me to feel meaning?," Then, "What value could I focus on to most quickly get into that state." This is called the "Meaning Maker." Meaning MakerOn a Micro-Level, we can do a similar thing as vision contrasting, but instead contrast the end state of our task to the state of our task as it is now. This is called Motivational Contrasting. Motivational ContrastingThen, we need to figure out how we can get into that playful, creative flow. To do that, we have to ask ourselves "What’s the nearest state to the one I’m feeling right now that would allow me to enjoy the task?", then "What single aspect of the task could I focus on or change to get me to that state?" This is called the Play Maker. Play MakerSo, at this point: You’ve stopped your vision and motivation from oscillating. You’ve learned how to reconnect with motivation in the morning. You’ve learned how to reconnect with the creative state that allows you to work best on your task. Obviously, there’s a bunch here I left out, but hopefully this helps a bit. I do teach this stuff for a living, so feel free to reach out if you want to take any of this further.
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That looks like an extremely well-thought out model, and I’m curious as to how it can be adapted from person to person? I have had experience working with NLP and sports psychology techniques to set goals and change states. These techniques involve mental shifts similar to the system listed above. While I had bursts of insight and behavioral changes at first, these changes were more often than not short-lived, and I find that introspective techniques tend to have diminishing benefits, because there are no ‘tangible’ results I can point to mark progress.
Of course, I did all of the above without external guidance or feedback, so it might very well be that I was missing out steps.
Because of the above reasons, I have shifted more towards outward, non-introspective activity to directly impact my state through biochemistry, activities such as intense exercise or meditation or ingesting strong doses of coffee. However, I found that these have their own trade-offs as well. My current model for effective next steps is to change my neural circuits/habits entirely using a combination of physical activities and introspection. The idea is to make the automatic cue-response pattern more effective and goal-striving, such that I’ll be able to unconsciously make the right actions even when my state is unideal/do not have useful thoughts as open tabs. I will be grateful for any feedback on the plausibility of this idea and how to make it happen.
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That, sir, might just have saved me ~10 years of work. Let me try to understand this better.
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Standard NLP resource work seems to me more about artifically adding state changes then mr-hire’s model. "What value I can focus on to make this meaningful" is a qualitatively different way to change state then to fire off an anchor that’s loaded with the feeling of meaning from another experience.
I think some productivity methods try to address this. For example, I’ve used GTD (Getting Things Done) in the past and feel like it helped a lot to deal with "open tabs" (GTD calls them "open loops") and re-establishing context.
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I’ve been using GTD for some times now, and the injunction to put every thought about something to be done into a collection device (I have a page on Roam and a file on my note taking app on my phone) is really powerful. I never noticed how much more focus and clearity were possible when everything I want to do is written somewhere, and thus I don’t need to keep mental tab on it. To go back to the metaphor of this post, forcing myself to close every tab that is not directly in use is one of the best productivity hack I learned.
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I think the collection part of GTD addresses exactly this problem. There’s two part:
You want to free your brain by writing what you want to do
You want to stop feeling like you forgot writing something down The way proposed by GTD is to collect EVERYTHING. The goal is really to not have any commitment or desire stored internally, but collect everything outside of your brain. This solves the first problem if you give enough details, and the second problem when your brain learns that it can always find what it needs from your notes. Anecdotically, it works for me.
One thing I tried was keeping open tabs infinitely, and I would just close them when I had finished the work on them. Sometimes I have 40 tabs opened, and I feel the pressure to "stop opening new tabs and finish those that are already open". And then, I click on them one by one, sometimes realizing that I already did what should be done and closing them. Sometimes, I keep postponing. After a new check, I think there are tabs that don’t add too much and I close them.
When you keep your tabs on mind, but not on the browser (e.g. chromium) you’ll eventually lose the state of mind that you had. So I would say to you write the thought, even if it is just a summary, so you can’t lose what you were thinking. Write it down, and check it later.
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-gtd-etc.html I would like to recommend the emacs’ org mode and some discussion about its relationship with GTD technique.