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In Costa Rica lurked adventure and uncomfortable chairs. Then Pittsburgh, where Chloe was in grad school, held new friends, puzzle hunts, and rock climbing. She and I spent a summer in Silicon Valley, and with all the Less Wrong rationalists[85], Quantified Self lifehackers, and Hacker Dojo[86] entrepreneurs competing for my fascination, Skritter work was stalled at the 21 hours a week needed to fix bugs, answer email, and sputter meaninglessly on the Skritter iPhone app.
To hack motivation for learning, you apply the motivation equation as with anything else: use success spirals to increase Expectancy, learn something important to you in a fun way for high Value, avoid Impulsiveness with precommitment (especially the burnt ships technique), and focus on the learning process rather than the end goal so that you can learn ten new words by tomorrow instead of being fluent in Chinese in two years. But the other critical component is to use good learning methods, so that it’s not only fun, but that you also make rapid progress.
A natural way to do this is to use short-term goals which you must always reach, but at which you can choose, in advance, to stop or re-up.
This is going to be hard, I thought. I might have to spend more than ten minutes a day. (I did not think, I might not be able to do this. Practice learning things exposes this for the absurdity that it is, whether it’s skateboarding or calculus.)
Lucid dreaming (where you realize you’re dreaming and can control your dreams) was another skill which I had always wanted to learn and which doesn’t take much time. I had known about it ever since I read about it on Wikipedia in senior year of high school and that night went on to have my first lucid dream, where I realized that if I was being whipped as a galley slave in a pirate ship, which doesn’t actually happen in real life, then I must be dreaming and could do anything I wanted. I smashed out of my chains, Supermanned up through the deck of the ship, kicked the mast in half for good
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So I read Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner, skipped the precognition and shared dream chapters, and had three lucid dreams in the first four nights involving wrestling centaurs, teleportation, morphing dream characters into other people, and asking dream figures for advice.
This is a good strategy for learning many things: 1. Get excited about a skill. 2. While you’re excited, make time and hack up motivation to practice it. 3. Learn how to practice it from reading or from a teacher. 4. Start doing it right away.
The day before I started writing, I spent three hours reading a few writers’ blog posts and hitting all of the highest-rated topic threads at writers.stackexchange.com. Then I bought four books on writing that would kick off my read-twenty-books goal and committed to spending no more time reading writing blogs until I was done with the first draft.
I enjoyed it with limitless confidence, even without hardly any of the practice that everyone recommends. I’m not saying that I wrote a great book and that I’m a good writer, just that I knew that I would finish and then I would edit and re-edit and that nothing would stop me. I couldn’t guarantee quality or readership, just excitement throughout the process.
If you want to learn facts, then you should use a spaced-repetition system (SRS). You break knowledge you want to acquire into short answers to tiny questions, and then you make digital flashcards of those in an SRS program, which will then prompt you to review them at the most efficient time for strengthening your memories: right before you were in danger of forgetting them. You learn fast, you remember almost everything, and it’s easy to turn into a daily habit that can deliver massive piles of knowledge in a few minutes a day.
If you’re wondering what SRS program to use, you should choose Anki, which is a free desktop app, web service, and Android app, with a $24.99 iPhone app. Its flashcard system is versatile enough that you can learn just about any facts with it. I’ve used it to learn many things, including Spanish, cooking, and sensual massage. (To learn skills like sensual massage, it helps to think of the question as the cue of what just happened and the answer as what to do next: “Q: Second half of chest circulation, after pressing up to the neck?” “A: Lightly press back down the sides to the abdomen.”) I’ve
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This highlights the second mistake of SRS learning: don’t spend more time encoding and studying a fact than it will save you.
There are eighteen more classic SRS mistakes which you should avoid; read about them, and how to formulate SRS prompts, on the SuperMemo site[96]. But the biggest mistake is not listed there. It has killed more SRS study habits than all the others combined, and it will kill yours, too, if you don’t hack it. It happens when you get behind on your studies and get buried under a mountain of all your overdue reviews.
The motivation hacker will not let this happen. Instead, she will focus her Expectancy on the process: “spend an average of fifteen minutes per day on Anki.” She’ll structure her goal to be strict enough to keep herself on track and flexible enough to achieve while still having a life. (Beemind it.) She’ll build up her success spiral slowly so she doesn’t fall off, make sure she’s setting aside time to study, and keep an eye on what she’s learning to make sure that it actually matters to her instead of realizing too late that she’s added too many useless facts. And when she does spend six days
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If you have a Valueless task you need to do, then make a game out of it so that it challenges you. Get into flow. In The Hobbit, Bilbo’s dinner dwarves did hundreds of dishes in no time by turning dishwashing drudgery into a dish-tossing song. Face boring tasks by imagining yourself as a badass Viking samurai who is called to fight chores.
If you don’t have a system, or if your system does not work as described, then you need a new system. There are no shortage of long books and short blog posts with equivalently good suggestions, so take your pick. Here are a few, if you need them: • Getting Things Done: http://zenhabits.net/the-getting-things-done-gtd-faq/ • Zen To Done: http://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple-productivity-system/ • Final Version: http://www.markforster.net/ • Autopilot Schedule: http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/04/07/ • Four Quadrant To-Do list:
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Entrepreneurs, management gurus, and scientists all like to quote other entrepreneurs, management gurus, and scientists saying things like “You make what you measure[98],” “What gets measured, gets managed[99],” and “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it[100].”
There’s now a community called Quantified Self[101] which extends that idea to personal measurement for personal improvement. If you want to save money, you should track your spending. If you want to get stronger, it helps to track your workout performance. And if you want to improve your motivation, your focus, your happiness, or your productivity, then you should measure those things, because otherwise you won’t know what’s working.
If you want to improve, you can do it in two ways. The first is what everyone does: try something, and then decide whether it was worthwhile based on remembering-self hunches (or skipping the evaluation altogether and calling sour grapes if you failed, sweet grapes if you succeeded). Why, of course it was worthwhile to learn the guitar / compete in a triathlon / have kids / travel the world! And that unfinished movie script, well, it must not have been fulfilling or you would have finished it, right?
Whatever goals you pick, you should have some way of measuring the results. Many goals are intended to make you happier, so measure your happiness and see what is effective. If you’re trying to get stronger, then measure how much stronger you’re getting with each protocol you try so you can determine what’s working. Trying to lose weight? Decide in advance how long you’re going to try eating according to a nutritional philosophy, what the cutoff would be for much weight and body fat you would need to lose for it to be successful, do it for that long, then quit if it’s not working or continue
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The most common mistake is to fall prey to the planning fallacy[106] when setting up your success spirals. When humans estimate things like how long a task will take, their average-case and best-case predictions are almost identical, and their worst-case prediction is still more optimistic than what actually happens.
You can’t predict in advance what specific obstacles are going to batter you away from the gym, so you don’t plan for any of them. But you should plan that something will make it harder than you can expect. A good hack is to take the outside view: ask yourself, “How long did it take last time?” or “How often did I work out last time?”
I thought of the planning fallacy and cut that in half for a conservative estimate, and then performed a Hofstadter adjustment[107] and set my success spiral goal for five minutes a day.
You can even set goals like, “Do at least ten seconds of journaling six out of seven days I’m near my computer.” You’ll hope to write 750 words[108] a day, but you’ll plan for chaos, and when it happens, you won’t get discouraged and quit writing. You’ll still build a great habit.
Akrasia Zombie[109]
I’m going to hack motivation way more than I expect I’ll need to, and I’m going to do it up front when I’m feeling most excited about my goal. I’ll precommit, I’ll burn ships, I’ll create a motivation-only environment, I’ll start self-tracking to keep myself honest, I’ll find ways to make it more fun, and I’ll precommit some more.
The major motivation hacking techniques I use—success spirals, precommitment, burnt ships, and being a task samurai—are all recommended in many places, including Piers Steel’s book, The Procrastination Equation, which details the motivation equation and dozens of clever research experiments used to develop it.
