You might also like Aaron Schwartz’s notes on productivity:
Assigned problems
Assigned problems are problems you’re told to work on. Numerous psychology experiments have found that when you try to “incentivize” people to do something, they’re less likely to do it and do a worse job. External incentives, like rewards and punishments, kills what psychologists call your “intrinsic motivation” — your natural interest in the problem. (This is one of the most thoroughly replicated findings of social psychology — over 70 studies have found that rewards undermine interest in the task.)5 People’s heads seem to have a deep avoidance of being told what to do.6
[LZ Sidenote: I think I’d want to actually read the studies or at least a meta-analysis of recent replications first before being sure of this]
The weird thing is that this phenomenon isn’t just limited to other people — it even happens when you try to tell yourself what to do! If you say to yourself, “I should really work on X, that’s the most important thing to do right now” then all of the sudden X becomes the toughest thing in the world to make yourself work on. But as soon as Y becomes the most important thing, the exact same X becomes much easier.
Create a false assignment
This presents a rather obvious solution: if you want to work on X, tell yourself to do Y. Unfortunately, it’s sort of difficult to trick yourself intentionally, because you know you’re doing it.7 So you’ve got to be sneaky about it.
One way is to get someone else to assign something to you. The most famous instance of this is grad students who are required to write a dissertation, a monumentally difficult task that they need to do to graduate. And so, to avoid doing this, grad students end up doing all sorts of other hard stuff.
The task has to both seem important (you have to do this to graduate!) and big (hundreds of pages of your best work!) but not actually be so important that putting it off is going to be a disaster.
Oooo love these thoughts from Aaron Swartz! I actually hadn’t read this bit from him before, yet reading it felt so familiar in that “oh snap, duh, he just put to words that kind of unspoken wisdom we’ve always been dancing around for probably generations” kind of way.
Thank you for sharing this! I’ve added some of those tips to the list here.
You might also like Aaron Schwartz’s notes on productivity:
Oooo love these thoughts from Aaron Swartz! I actually hadn’t read this bit from him before, yet reading it felt so familiar in that “oh snap, duh, he just put to words that kind of unspoken wisdom we’ve always been dancing around for probably generations” kind of way.
Thank you for sharing this! I’ve added some of those tips to the list here.