I just got back from a trip to Denver and I’ve been having coffee every day for the last week, to deal with jet lag. Longtime readers will know this is not normal for me, that I am usually much more careful/weird with my coffee intake. So I’m going to talk about how I ended up this way. That is, the different rules I’ve tried for gameifying and randomising coffee as well as why I care enough to do this at all, instead of having coffee every day like a normal person.
Pre jet lag me had a really good routine going with coffee and life in general. On my walk to work I would ask Siri to roll a die, if the die was a six then I’d be allowed to buy coffee but if it was anything else, then no coffee. The core reason to do this is just that the more you have coffee the less it does for you and the more you need it to reach what feels like a comfortable baseline for working in the day. If I have coffee about once a week, I find that it increases my energy, makes me extremely optimisitic about stuff and just generally brings good vibes to my day. If I have it every day though, these benefits slowly disappear into the background and suddenly I’m not energetic or optimistic, and coffee becomes something that does nothing for me but taste really good. This is all if I keep having it every day and says nothing of what happens if I decided to suddenly stop having it after a long period of having it every day. I’d feel tired, a little grumpy and almost unable to work. So I end up at minimum needing one coffee a day to keep me feeling normal and this starts a cycle that’s really hard to break out of.
Before using dice I wrote about using coin flips to decide whether or not I could get coffee, I did this for a while too and it definitely worked better than just plain getting coffee every day, however, I’d end up getting heads sometimes multiple days in a row and started feeling a bit like I really needed coffee on the fourth day of heads. Just like in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
I got the idea of using a dice from a friend when he mentioned it to me as a possibility while I lamented coins turning up heads too often. A dice immediately made sense to me and I quickly thought about the probability of a dice roll and figured I’d start by only allowing myself to get a coffe at 1 in 6 odds, but you could pick any odds you wanted. At 1 in 6 I figured it’d be a coffee roughly once a week or more. That is if I rolled the dice each day. However, I’d soon find out that this is not (exactly) how probability works when I went through my second week of no coffee.
I have also over time built in a few exceptions, like the fact that if I’m with someone else I can get coffee if I want to. And more recently the if i have jet lag then I can get coffee if i want to. The most important thing for me is just that on a normal day, which is most of them, I am not getting coffee just because I want to.
I did this dicing routine pretty consistently for a few months and it worked great! It would be so exciting on the morning’s I did happen to roll a six. I would get a flat white from Pauline’s on the way to work. And I feel like I got some extra brain juice from just seeing the screen show six, before I even got the coffee. There were times I got multiple coffees in a row which feels so lucky. Plus rolling a six would also mean I had a mandate from heaven to work extra hard on whatever I was supposed to do that day.
I also briefly experimented with tying the dice roll to my run in the morning. Meaning that I would have to run for a length multiplied by the die roll, such that if I got a six it meant I not only had to run far but would also get a coffee. Why do all this? I think I just really like the game mechanincs of random rewards, as you can imagine I love Slay the Spire, but for whatever reason tying the run to the die didn’t really stick.
Using a die for deciding whether or not to get coffee is not only great for varying your caffeine dosage, it also taught me a lot about probability. Or at least feeling probability more intuitively. That is, If you can only roll a die once a day, getting a 6 is kind of hard. Yet if you had asked me before how hard it would be to roll a 6, I would have thought, not very. Monopoly and Backgammon being my core references for how hard rolling a six is. These games disguise how hard it actually is to roll a 1 in 6 because in both Monopoloy and Backgammon you’re rolling the dice so often that getting a single 6 feels downright common.
When doing this for my coffee routine though, it was not common. So I felt like I got a much better understanding of what 1 in 6 actually means, psychologically. There is indeed a psychological component to this which is that if I went multiple days without getting a six I’d eventually believe it’s so unlikely that I’m going to get a six that I might as well not try at all. Of course the odds don’t change because you go through a dry spell of sixes but it’s hard to convince yourself that they don’t. Or even worse if I did roll a six yesterday, then really what was the point of trying today. These weird thoughts I had about the probability of getting a coffee ended up being biggest enemy of not getting a six. That is me not rolling the dice, either because I forget or because it feels so unlikely as to be a waste of time.
There have been days where I haven’t even diced just because in the back of my head i’m thinking it’s not going to be a 6 (because it usually isn’t). If you follow this reasoning every day though, you will never get a 6. So I guess what i’m trying to say here is 1 in 6 actually feels like a pretty low probability when you tie it to a daily ritual like I have. This makes me think of probabilities which are much lower than 1 in 6 like me asking someone on a date and them agreeing. However high the probability is, there are going to be a lot of no’s before a single yes and rolling those no’s is almost necessary.
Even if the odds were 1 in 6 that someone agrees to go on a date with me. That means I’d have to ask out quite a few people before someone is going to say yes, all else being equal. If you do it every day then you’re all but guaranteed for it to happen. But if you don’t ever roll the dice then it literally can’t happen. I think doing my daily dice routine made me more aware of how I internally feel about rejection even if it’s not coming from a person just a process. Like, the more negative results I roll on a die the less motivated to roll the die the next day I feel. And this a game where I know the exact probability. I also know the probability isn’t tied to anything personal about me and yet I still feel demotivated. The truth is though, feeling demotivated and thereby rolling the die less, is the real enemy of achieving your goal, not the probability of the game itself. Real danger lies when you convince yourself you might as well stop playing because the chances are so low of you winning. This is true for TikTok as well by the way.
I currently ask people out, I don’t know, maybe once or twice a year, if that. What my coffee routine taught me about this is that no matter what the odds actually are when I ask someone out, rolling the dice more often, ideally regularly would ensure success after some period of time. The times when I don’t get coffee are more because i’m not rolling the dice, not because the dice is coming up with a negative result. That is, a reason or unrelated to the actual probability of the game.
“Probability is the most important concept in modern science, especially as nobody has the slightest notion what it means.” Bertrand Russell (1929).
I feel this quote rings true for me after experimenting with different probabilities of getting coffee. Part of me feels like dicing every day for an outcome that you actually want is a great way of getting a good feel for one in six, intuitively, in a way that reading the words on paper or playing a game has never felt.
If you don't want any longer runs of coffee days or non-coffee days, then you don't want coffee days to be independent events - which makes sense, because the effects on your body are not independent either.
You could (for example) do something like flip a coin to determine whether you get one or two coffee days in a row, and then roll a die to determine how many non-coffee days. That way you're guaranteed to never have 3 consecutive days of coffee, and never 7 non-coffee days.
Heh, you should play around with the probabilities. Run a D3 instead and see how it feels. Or run a dice pool like 4 dice and potentially get up to 4 coffees a day (along with an ultramarathon lol). Or do 2D6 and get a coffee when they add up to 7. Or roll a D20 and get yourself a steak dinner on 20, that'll be funny when you roll three of those in a row.
I just got back from a trip to Denver and I’ve been having coffee every day for the last week, to deal with jet lag. Longtime readers will know this is not normal for me, that I am usually much more careful/weird with my coffee intake. So I’m going to talk about how I ended up this way. That is, the different rules I’ve tried for gameifying and randomising coffee as well as why I care enough to do this at all, instead of having coffee every day like a normal person.
Pre jet lag me had a really good routine going with coffee and life in general. On my walk to work I would ask Siri to roll a die, if the die was a six then I’d be allowed to buy coffee but if it was anything else, then no coffee. The core reason to do this is just that the more you have coffee the less it does for you and the more you need it to reach what feels like a comfortable baseline for working in the day. If I have coffee about once a week, I find that it increases my energy, makes me extremely optimisitic about stuff and just generally brings good vibes to my day. If I have it every day though, these benefits slowly disappear into the background and suddenly I’m not energetic or optimistic, and coffee becomes something that does nothing for me but taste really good. This is all if I keep having it every day and says nothing of what happens if I decided to suddenly stop having it after a long period of having it every day. I’d feel tired, a little grumpy and almost unable to work. So I end up at minimum needing one coffee a day to keep me feeling normal and this starts a cycle that’s really hard to break out of.
Before using dice I wrote about using coin flips to decide whether or not I could get coffee, I did this for a while too and it definitely worked better than just plain getting coffee every day, however, I’d end up getting heads sometimes multiple days in a row and started feeling a bit like I really needed coffee on the fourth day of heads. Just like in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
I got the idea of using a dice from a friend when he mentioned it to me as a possibility while I lamented coins turning up heads too often. A dice immediately made sense to me and I quickly thought about the probability of a dice roll and figured I’d start by only allowing myself to get a coffe at 1 in 6 odds, but you could pick any odds you wanted. At 1 in 6 I figured it’d be a coffee roughly once a week or more. That is if I rolled the dice each day. However, I’d soon find out that this is not (exactly) how probability works when I went through my second week of no coffee.
I have also over time built in a few exceptions, like the fact that if I’m with someone else I can get coffee if I want to. And more recently the if i have jet lag then I can get coffee if i want to. The most important thing for me is just that on a normal day, which is most of them, I am not getting coffee just because I want to.
I did this dicing routine pretty consistently for a few months and it worked great! It would be so exciting on the morning’s I did happen to roll a six. I would get a flat white from Pauline’s on the way to work. And I feel like I got some extra brain juice from just seeing the screen show six, before I even got the coffee. There were times I got multiple coffees in a row which feels so lucky. Plus rolling a six would also mean I had a mandate from heaven to work extra hard on whatever I was supposed to do that day.
I also briefly experimented with tying the dice roll to my run in the morning. Meaning that I would have to run for a length multiplied by the die roll, such that if I got a six it meant I not only had to run far but would also get a coffee. Why do all this? I think I just really like the game mechanincs of random rewards, as you can imagine I love Slay the Spire, but for whatever reason tying the run to the die didn’t really stick.
Using a die for deciding whether or not to get coffee is not only great for varying your caffeine dosage, it also taught me a lot about probability. Or at least feeling probability more intuitively. That is, If you can only roll a die once a day, getting a 6 is kind of hard. Yet if you had asked me before how hard it would be to roll a 6, I would have thought, not very. Monopoly and Backgammon being my core references for how hard rolling a six is. These games disguise how hard it actually is to roll a 1 in 6 because in both Monopoloy and Backgammon you’re rolling the dice so often that getting a single 6 feels downright common.
When doing this for my coffee routine though, it was not common. So I felt like I got a much better understanding of what 1 in 6 actually means, psychologically. There is indeed a psychological component to this which is that if I went multiple days without getting a six I’d eventually believe it’s so unlikely that I’m going to get a six that I might as well not try at all. Of course the odds don’t change because you go through a dry spell of sixes but it’s hard to convince yourself that they don’t. Or even worse if I did roll a six yesterday, then really what was the point of trying today. These weird thoughts I had about the probability of getting a coffee ended up being biggest enemy of not getting a six. That is me not rolling the dice, either because I forget or because it feels so unlikely as to be a waste of time.
There have been days where I haven’t even diced just because in the back of my head i’m thinking it’s not going to be a 6 (because it usually isn’t). If you follow this reasoning every day though, you will never get a 6. So I guess what i’m trying to say here is 1 in 6 actually feels like a pretty low probability when you tie it to a daily ritual like I have. This makes me think of probabilities which are much lower than 1 in 6 like me asking someone on a date and them agreeing. However high the probability is, there are going to be a lot of no’s before a single yes and rolling those no’s is almost necessary.
Even if the odds were 1 in 6 that someone agrees to go on a date with me. That means I’d have to ask out quite a few people before someone is going to say yes, all else being equal. If you do it every day then you’re all but guaranteed for it to happen. But if you don’t ever roll the dice then it literally can’t happen. I think doing my daily dice routine made me more aware of how I internally feel about rejection even if it’s not coming from a person just a process. Like, the more negative results I roll on a die the less motivated to roll the die the next day I feel. And this a game where I know the exact probability. I also know the probability isn’t tied to anything personal about me and yet I still feel demotivated. The truth is though, feeling demotivated and thereby rolling the die less, is the real enemy of achieving your goal, not the probability of the game itself. Real danger lies when you convince yourself you might as well stop playing because the chances are so low of you winning. This is true for TikTok as well by the way.
I currently ask people out, I don’t know, maybe once or twice a year, if that. What my coffee routine taught me about this is that no matter what the odds actually are when I ask someone out, rolling the dice more often, ideally regularly would ensure success after some period of time. The times when I don’t get coffee are more because i’m not rolling the dice, not because the dice is coming up with a negative result. That is, a reason or unrelated to the actual probability of the game.
I feel this quote rings true for me after experimenting with different probabilities of getting coffee. Part of me feels like dicing every day for an outcome that you actually want is a great way of getting a good feel for one in six, intuitively, in a way that reading the words on paper or playing a game has never felt.