This is my first post here. I've attempted writing grand, argumentative manifestos, but it's hard. So here's a topic that is easy to write, simple, actionable, and hopefully works for someone.
Epistemic status: I write from personal experience, which is the most powerful source of truth, especially for those who are already well versed in rationality. I have read enough posts about instrumental rationality to know that the bottleneck of us LWers is not more information, but action.
tldr: Sharing the process behind my personal productivity successes, as it's a topic of interest on here. It's hard to know what productivity advice actually works; as someone who used to overconsume it, I've picked out what's working for me. I hope this helps those struggling with akrasia begin building better systems from the ground up through their own personal experience, which is what I'm advocating far more than following the exact steps I took. Written with beginners & people who've repeatedly failed to improve in mind. Similar to this, but with more info on my failure modes & early successes (and seeing different perspectives is always helpful).
Top value from each section:
Trial and error as a necessary aspect of self improvement.
Learn to ignore feelings/thoughts and just do the actions.
Start with a short-term project with clear milestones.
How this all ties into my (and LW's) greater goals.
1. Habit tracking: The first kind of productivity app that worked for me.
(Note: Not an ad lmao. Find an app that works for you. This is just the most actionable thing that had a real impact)
Things that I value but haven't reached consistency with:
Doing work
Regular exercise
Sleeping & waking early
5mins daily meditation
Weekly stretching & cleaning room
I heard that you should track habits you want to be consistent with (track inputs, not outputs, to gain motivation & confidence). So (after briefly attempting to make a chart on paper and recalling that I've never once consistently used a paper planner) I googled habit tracker apps and downloaded Loop Habits off a reddit recommendation. It works. You can color code things, change desired frequency, and use a "yes/no" or "# of times" recording system.
I started with the habits "get up immediately (instead of scrolling in bed), wash face immediately (instead of going to sit on my chair and scrolling), exercise (record # of times, goal being 3x), started work at 11am, focused for an hour, meditate, in bed before 12." I added more habits as time went on, and put everything in rough chronological order for each day.
I found that the confetti animation, and wanting to get the feeling of having checked off everything, is actually adequate motivation to do my habits. Before that, I'd do them if I felt like it/remembered to. Now, I use the app daily and record everything even to mark X instead of Check.
I found that if I exercise 1x and enter 1, I feel satisfied enough and don't feel the desire to do it more than once, so I separated it into 3 habits--exercise before breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's been effective (though it's still rare for me to hit all 3 times). Sometimes I'm about to check X, then I'm like, I don't want to become the type of person who would just decide to not do the habit when I have the choice. And I do the exercise.[1]
I noticed when I procrastinate throughout the day, and when I feel like doing work or end up being productive even if it wasn't explicitly planned. Following the 11am session, these natural start times for me have been around 2-3pm and then 9pm (if I'm lucky) or 11pm-1am (usually motivated by the guilt of having done too little that day) so I added an afternoon & evening work session habit for a total of 3 sessions in the day being the goal. I make a point to separate the habit items of "sitting down to start the work around x time" and "actually focusing during the work session for a reasonable amt of time." I also added a "started work at all" item. You should reward yourself for each thing you do and start small.
Especially with the exercise, but with the other habits too, it is great to have a list of things you want to do every day, so that when a lull occurs, you don't end up procrastinating, but you do one of the habits. I started out by doing habits just to feel that I did anything at all that day. Some days I do good work but skimp on exercise, some days I can't be productive but make myself at least turn my brain off and exercise. Playing music helps with motivation for both.
There is this problem that sometimes occurs: the time that I normally do a habit approaches, I don't feel like it, so I start thinking about something else and conveniently forget that I'm supposed to do the habit soon, then I go back and mark that I didn't do it after I remember again. An emotionally successful failure mode--it feels less bad than deciding not to do it in the moment. But the goal is not perfection, so I'm ok with not having solved this yet.
I describe all this because I want to demonstrate the process of learning through action/experimentation, and iterating mistakes/inefficiencies as you go. This is how the journey should go for you also. You can use this as a guide, but what is important is developing the skill of finding what works for you.
It will not be perfect, if you need to hear this. (I'm a perfectionist who used to think 10x more than I take action on anything. I am on the journey of solving this.) Consistency over perfection.
2. My most important mindset shift, and the first action I actually started with.
I was under the great delusion that whether or not I be productive is allowed to depend on how I feel.
I did not do things I did not feel like doing in the moment. So I tried to optimize for making myself feel like doing things. For example, I didn't get up in the morning right when I woke up because it felt uncomfortable/painful (especially on a bad sleep schedule), and I was worried about how to make it feel less bad... instead of just committing to braving the feeling.
I've timed how long it takes for the bad feeling to grow tolerable in the morning. It's about 7 minutes.
As Leila Hormozi (from the youtube videos I linked) says, fuck your mood, follow the plan. We must not be held back by our feelings anymore. We must realize how powerful we can become through living by this principle. I am only a beginner, and it's already made my life better.
On this note, I'd like to add: fuck your thoughts. The left brain lies. As in, the part of your brain responsible for language and interpretation will always come up with excuses, rationalizations, and justifications for your behavior internally, even if they aren't accurate. Ignore these lies and observe the actual results/what you actually end up doing and start to notice patterns.
I caught myself doing this. I was analyzing why I did or didn't do something over the course of multiple days, making elaborate justifications like "I didn't feel like X that day because Y happened the day before," and then I realized that my behavior was nearly 100% dependent on and predictable by the presence of a specific external trigger. This was a redpill moment. I broke out of the matrix. Delete the delusion of consciousness and build external systems/triggers like alarms and accountability partners that force you to do things.
It is not weakness to rely on external structure. Everyone starts there. Trust me, I've spent plenty of time having the entire day to myself to do whatever I want, and I realized I can't be productive that way. External structure, constraints, and scheduled time blocks to work on something (anything, even if it isn't what you would ideally be working on), actually give you more freedom than having the entire day free and 0 structure.
I say this because I spent a significant amount of time living in the should-universe about my own productivity. "But I should be able to do something simple like making myself start work or get out of bed in the morning, solely by my own willpower! What do you mean my behavior is dependent on external forces/the environment?!" Followed by expecting myself to start acting productive eventually thanks to my awareness of the concept of my own willpower & desire to be productive. Which of course, failed every time.
"But I should-" Shut the fuck up. We are mere sheep in the hands of physics, and we cannot escape a certain level of physiological and environmental determinism. I hope you do not repeat my mistakes.
With all that said, my very first commitment before I started any of my other habits was sitting down to start work at exactly 11am (or 11:30am if I woke up later that day--the point is deciding on a time that you're forced to drop everything and start). How I felt when the time arrived didn't matter; I had one job.
I had to develop the skills of stopping in the middle of engaging with distractions and temporarily ignoring/being assertive with people who wanted my attention. When I succeeded, I felt proud of myself, which reinforced my behavior, which marked the beginning of my consistent progress. If you're not sure where to start, I recommend starting with this habit. Decide a specific time in the day when you want to work on something specific for 1 hour, and learn to drop everything and start on the dot regardless of how you feel.
Note that if you don't even HAVE a plan, you can't fuck your mood. The rational part of you needs to know exactly what it is you should be doing and have a strong argument for doing it, like a commitment you made to yourself. If you're rationally uncertain, the emotional part of you[2] will take over and run everything. (If you're like me, that means overconsuming content on platforms like Lesswrong, Substack, and Youtube instead of acting on the immense amount of information you learned.)
3. Miscellaneous experiences & lessons
Hacks for taking the first step
The only two things I've discovered so far that successfully directly caused me to lock in and led to a session of productive behavior:
Cold shower (I normally shower warm)
Intense exercise relative to how much you normally exercise. (Ex. Multiple planks when I normally only do one, running at a faster speed and for slightly longer than I usually do on the treadmill[3])
The general pattern is to feel discomfort/pain that you are not used to. (The cold showers stopped working when I did them multiple days in a row.)
After my first cold shower in a while, I threw my excuses in the trash and worked on my task of the day from 9pm-12am and finished it despite not feeling like it at multiple points along the way. I didn't go "well my only habit for now is working in the morning, and it's already night so might as well start tomorrow" which is something I definitely could have done.
What also motivated me was that this was my first task in a 2-week long productivity sprint that Claude AI helped me plan. I knew what the exact tasks I had to do each day were, and I didn't want to already be behind. And it was based on a real external deadline at the end of the 2 weeks.
Proof you need to have something to do
The 2-week deadline was for applying to an internship program.
I haven't heard back from them yet, but even if I don't get anything, it will have been completely worth it. From revamping my resume, researching which companies I want to apply to, and reaching out to relevant people online, to writing personalized cover letters based on the info I gathered and filling out the application, I had something to do every day and could clearly measure my progress.[4] And the fact that I reached out and scheduled meetings with people--mini deadlines before the big deadline--meant I couldn't fall too behind on things like research. I couldn't have asked for a better project to learn elementary productivity through. (More advanced projects might be completely personal, with zero external interaction/accountability/deadlines, such as writing a book.)
To contrast, I had a period of a few weeks for which I decided my singular goal would be fixing my sleep schedule and getting myself to sleep before 12am. I realized that I can't trust myself to stop using electronics at an arbitrarily decided time, so I banned all electronics after dinner. Then I found that reading a book before bed works somewhat, as long as I keep an eye on the clock. But the trial and error process was extremely slow and unsatisfying, I lost interest and fell back to old patterns after figuring out a solution, and I had little motivation for even keeping the schedule when I knew I didn't have anything productive scheduled the next day.
Maybe there's no one else who would think of trying something like this. But in case there is: here's your case study on how it didn't work. Don't hinge your success or failure on things you perceive you "should" do but that aren't tied to any other goal. Take on meaningful short-term projects that have small milestones and ideally external accountability built in. Plan out each day of the productivity sprint if you can. Expect to fall behind at some point. Learning how to bounce back after that happens, instead of immediately returning to wallowing in old patterns, is a skill that will serve you to develop.
4. Having a long-term goal: the core reason why I actually started making progress.
I've just discussed the merits of setting small goals and short-term projects, but I can't leave out the reason I went through all these developments in the first place.
Before this year, I was trying to be productive just for myself, and it didn't work. I didn't want to stay stuck in the cycle of having a terrible sleep schedule and doing things last minute, but the only reason for this desire was avoiding personal negative experiences. I'd always end up getting everything done, so I didn't face real-world consequences for my actions beyond feeling bad, and I didn't have a compelling enough reason to actually motivate me to get better every day and provide some justification for why I can't give up.
Now I have a mission that extends beyond myself. It's the big picture and the driving force that all my actions (learning & skill development) are oriented around. I want to solve the metacrisis. It's a term for all the threats humanity faces, or what happens when zero-sum games and continued resource extraction (both physical, like fossil fuels, and mental, like attention) meet exponentially accelerating technology. The most notable and immediate crisis is AI, so it makes sense to focus on it, but it's not the only problem humanity will need to solve to survive in the coming decades (of which I hope there will be many). I haven't seen this term discussed on here, and I think it is highly relevant seeing that multiple people here have written posts about "saving the world" (and not just from AI). It's also a term that will help other people understand that important existential problems they should personally care about are happening right now, as it includes things like nuclear threats, biohazards, and climate change, even if they're incapable of seeing AI discussions as anything but "hype" and "doom."[5]
I obviously don't expect to solve all the world's problems on my own, but I believe in my ability to become someone who can help impact significant change, especially after I met someone crazy enough to have made significant and unique progress on understanding human psychology with the goal of preventing mass catastrophe (long story--we've currently lost contact), and especially after seeing the kind of people on Lesswrong. There's likely to be plenty of people here who would be willing and able to take concrete steps as long as they are reasonable and clearly laid out, and that's part of what I hope to do eventually, if I can. I just need to learn to write in a way that appeals to/is accepted by this community and (more importantly) continue learning and gaining personal experience to verify my ideas.
But that's just one example of a long-term goal you can set to become productive. It's up to you to identify a cause, ideal, or possible future worth fighting for (or against[6]) that causes you to commit to self-improvement and determinedly move forward despite each slip and setback.
I hope this helps you begin on that journey.
P.S. My username is not from Atomic Habits--I actually haven't read it (though it probably has similar principles like starting small). I just thought the word atomic is super cool
P.P.S. Apologies if the last part felt abrupt; I tried to write a post on the metacrisis first but this was easier to finish and I felt leaving out my greater goals wouldn't give the full picture. But yeah, discussing what we can do to help humanity make it out of this decade alive is why I'm here. And increasing the productivity of smart people with similar goals is absolutely one way we can make progress!
If you want exercise recs: I'm doing bits and pieces of Mei Monte's 22 inch waist workout until I can build up to her full routine. It's 4x25 of toe taps, leg raises, plank up & downs, and squats + 1min plank and 1min reverse plank. I had to google toe taps proper form bc it felt too easy. Leg raises felt super hard the first time, they've gotten significantly easier. Plank u&ds are still hard. I'm skipping reverse plank for now bc I feel like I'm doing the form wrong, doing 2 min plank instead.
I chose this because it came on my insta feed, the main physique improvement I desire is a flatter stomach, and it's easy to do in your room with just a yoga mat.
I plan to start going to the gym in a couple months. I'll probably start with this workout and aim towards the fuckarounditis article's standards for women.
A specific example is 7.0 mph for 2 minutes at the end of an 8 minute walk (I normally run for 1 at 6.5). We're not talking 15-20 minutes. Brief and intense.
You may have noticed--I'm clarifying everything because I've observed my own tendencies. If something sounds too hard or unattractive, I probably won't do it. I suspect others may share this quirk of human psychology, so I hope it helps to break everything down to be as easy and bite sized as possible.
This was the only thing that worked for me after all, after 5+ years of caring about productivity yet continually repeating the pattern of procrastinating until the deadline, demonstrating heroic work ethic in the last few hours, and sleeping at 5am. Taking baby steps. Don't expect immediate perfection or sudden extreme improvements. (The sudden breakthroughs do happen, but they are rare and are almost entirely dependent on luck.)
Clarity has been the determining factor of whether I procrastinate my work or not when everything else is in place. It's much easier to procrastinate a vague instruction than a clear-cut task.
Dan Koe, who wrote the article I linked about the metacrisis, emphasizes the importance of creating an anti-vision: before you know exactly what you want, you can identify what you don't want, and thinking about where your life is headed if you don't change can be a strong initial motivator before you start discovering the goals you want to move towards.
This is my first post here. I've attempted writing grand, argumentative manifestos, but it's hard. So here's a topic that is easy to write, simple, actionable, and hopefully works for someone.
Epistemic status: I write from personal experience, which is the most powerful source of truth, especially for those who are already well versed in rationality. I have read enough posts about instrumental rationality to know that the bottleneck of us LWers is not more information, but action.
tldr: Sharing the process behind my personal productivity successes, as it's a topic of interest on here. It's hard to know what productivity advice actually works; as someone who used to overconsume it, I've picked out what's working for me. I hope this helps those struggling with akrasia begin building better systems from the ground up through their own personal experience, which is what I'm advocating far more than following the exact steps I took. Written with beginners & people who've repeatedly failed to improve in mind. Similar to this, but with more info on my failure modes & early successes (and seeing different perspectives is always helpful).
Top value from each section:
1. Habit tracking: The first kind of productivity app that worked for me.
(Note: Not an ad lmao. Find an app that works for you. This is just the most actionable thing that had a real impact)
Things that I value but haven't reached consistency with:
I heard that you should track habits you want to be consistent with (track inputs, not outputs, to gain motivation & confidence). So (after briefly attempting to make a chart on paper and recalling that I've never once consistently used a paper planner) I googled habit tracker apps and downloaded Loop Habits off a reddit recommendation. It works. You can color code things, change desired frequency, and use a "yes/no" or "# of times" recording system.
I started with the habits "get up immediately (instead of scrolling in bed), wash face immediately (instead of going to sit on my chair and scrolling), exercise (record # of times, goal being 3x), started work at 11am, focused for an hour, meditate, in bed before 12." I added more habits as time went on, and put everything in rough chronological order for each day.
I found that the confetti animation, and wanting to get the feeling of having checked off everything, is actually adequate motivation to do my habits. Before that, I'd do them if I felt like it/remembered to. Now, I use the app daily and record everything even to mark X instead of Check.
I found that if I exercise 1x and enter 1, I feel satisfied enough and don't feel the desire to do it more than once, so I separated it into 3 habits--exercise before breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's been effective (though it's still rare for me to hit all 3 times). Sometimes I'm about to check X, then I'm like, I don't want to become the type of person who would just decide to not do the habit when I have the choice. And I do the exercise.[1]
I noticed when I procrastinate throughout the day, and when I feel like doing work or end up being productive even if it wasn't explicitly planned. Following the 11am session, these natural start times for me have been around 2-3pm and then 9pm (if I'm lucky) or 11pm-1am (usually motivated by the guilt of having done too little that day) so I added an afternoon & evening work session habit for a total of 3 sessions in the day being the goal. I make a point to separate the habit items of "sitting down to start the work around x time" and "actually focusing during the work session for a reasonable amt of time." I also added a "started work at all" item. You should reward yourself for each thing you do and start small.
Especially with the exercise, but with the other habits too, it is great to have a list of things you want to do every day, so that when a lull occurs, you don't end up procrastinating, but you do one of the habits. I started out by doing habits just to feel that I did anything at all that day. Some days I do good work but skimp on exercise, some days I can't be productive but make myself at least turn my brain off and exercise. Playing music helps with motivation for both.
There is this problem that sometimes occurs: the time that I normally do a habit approaches, I don't feel like it, so I start thinking about something else and conveniently forget that I'm supposed to do the habit soon, then I go back and mark that I didn't do it after I remember again. An emotionally successful failure mode--it feels less bad than deciding not to do it in the moment. But the goal is not perfection, so I'm ok with not having solved this yet.
I describe all this because I want to demonstrate the process of learning through action/experimentation, and iterating mistakes/inefficiencies as you go. This is how the journey should go for you also. You can use this as a guide, but what is important is developing the skill of finding what works for you.
It will not be perfect, if you need to hear this. (I'm a perfectionist who used to think 10x more than I take action on anything. I am on the journey of solving this.) Consistency over perfection.
2. My most important mindset shift, and the first action I actually started with.
I was under the great delusion that whether or not I be productive is allowed to depend on how I feel.
I did not do things I did not feel like doing in the moment. So I tried to optimize for making myself feel like doing things. For example, I didn't get up in the morning right when I woke up because it felt uncomfortable/painful (especially on a bad sleep schedule), and I was worried about how to make it feel less bad... instead of just committing to braving the feeling.
I've timed how long it takes for the bad feeling to grow tolerable in the morning. It's about 7 minutes.
As Leila Hormozi (from the youtube videos I linked) says, fuck your mood, follow the plan. We must not be held back by our feelings anymore. We must realize how powerful we can become through living by this principle. I am only a beginner, and it's already made my life better.
On this note, I'd like to add: fuck your thoughts. The left brain lies. As in, the part of your brain responsible for language and interpretation will always come up with excuses, rationalizations, and justifications for your behavior internally, even if they aren't accurate. Ignore these lies and observe the actual results/what you actually end up doing and start to notice patterns.
I caught myself doing this. I was analyzing why I did or didn't do something over the course of multiple days, making elaborate justifications like "I didn't feel like X that day because Y happened the day before," and then I realized that my behavior was nearly 100% dependent on and predictable by the presence of a specific external trigger. This was a redpill moment. I broke out of the matrix. Delete the delusion of consciousness and build external systems/triggers like alarms and accountability partners that force you to do things.
It is not weakness to rely on external structure. Everyone starts there. Trust me, I've spent plenty of time having the entire day to myself to do whatever I want, and I realized I can't be productive that way. External structure, constraints, and scheduled time blocks to work on something (anything, even if it isn't what you would ideally be working on), actually give you more freedom than having the entire day free and 0 structure.
I say this because I spent a significant amount of time living in the should-universe about my own productivity. "But I should be able to do something simple like making myself start work or get out of bed in the morning, solely by my own willpower! What do you mean my behavior is dependent on external forces/the environment?!" Followed by expecting myself to start acting productive eventually thanks to my awareness of the concept of my own willpower & desire to be productive. Which of course, failed every time.
"But I should-" Shut the fuck up. We are mere sheep in the hands of physics, and we cannot escape a certain level of physiological and environmental determinism. I hope you do not repeat my mistakes.
With all that said, my very first commitment before I started any of my other habits was sitting down to start work at exactly 11am (or 11:30am if I woke up later that day--the point is deciding on a time that you're forced to drop everything and start). How I felt when the time arrived didn't matter; I had one job.
I had to develop the skills of stopping in the middle of engaging with distractions and temporarily ignoring/being assertive with people who wanted my attention. When I succeeded, I felt proud of myself, which reinforced my behavior, which marked the beginning of my consistent progress. If you're not sure where to start, I recommend starting with this habit. Decide a specific time in the day when you want to work on something specific for 1 hour, and learn to drop everything and start on the dot regardless of how you feel.
Note that if you don't even HAVE a plan, you can't fuck your mood. The rational part of you needs to know exactly what it is you should be doing and have a strong argument for doing it, like a commitment you made to yourself. If you're rationally uncertain, the emotional part of you[2] will take over and run everything. (If you're like me, that means overconsuming content on platforms like Lesswrong, Substack, and Youtube instead of acting on the immense amount of information you learned.)
3. Miscellaneous experiences & lessons
Hacks for taking the first step
The only two things I've discovered so far that successfully directly caused me to lock in and led to a session of productive behavior:
The general pattern is to feel discomfort/pain that you are not used to. (The cold showers stopped working when I did them multiple days in a row.)
After my first cold shower in a while, I threw my excuses in the trash and worked on my task of the day from 9pm-12am and finished it despite not feeling like it at multiple points along the way. I didn't go "well my only habit for now is working in the morning, and it's already night so might as well start tomorrow" which is something I definitely could have done.
What also motivated me was that this was my first task in a 2-week long productivity sprint that Claude AI helped me plan. I knew what the exact tasks I had to do each day were, and I didn't want to already be behind. And it was based on a real external deadline at the end of the 2 weeks.
Proof you need to have something to do
The 2-week deadline was for applying to an internship program.
I haven't heard back from them yet, but even if I don't get anything, it will have been completely worth it. From revamping my resume, researching which companies I want to apply to, and reaching out to relevant people online, to writing personalized cover letters based on the info I gathered and filling out the application, I had something to do every day and could clearly measure my progress.[4] And the fact that I reached out and scheduled meetings with people--mini deadlines before the big deadline--meant I couldn't fall too behind on things like research. I couldn't have asked for a better project to learn elementary productivity through. (More advanced projects might be completely personal, with zero external interaction/accountability/deadlines, such as writing a book.)
To contrast, I had a period of a few weeks for which I decided my singular goal would be fixing my sleep schedule and getting myself to sleep before 12am. I realized that I can't trust myself to stop using electronics at an arbitrarily decided time, so I banned all electronics after dinner. Then I found that reading a book before bed works somewhat, as long as I keep an eye on the clock. But the trial and error process was extremely slow and unsatisfying, I lost interest and fell back to old patterns after figuring out a solution, and I had little motivation for even keeping the schedule when I knew I didn't have anything productive scheduled the next day.
Maybe there's no one else who would think of trying something like this. But in case there is: here's your case study on how it didn't work. Don't hinge your success or failure on things you perceive you "should" do but that aren't tied to any other goal. Take on meaningful short-term projects that have small milestones and ideally external accountability built in. Plan out each day of the productivity sprint if you can. Expect to fall behind at some point. Learning how to bounce back after that happens, instead of immediately returning to wallowing in old patterns, is a skill that will serve you to develop.
4. Having a long-term goal: the core reason why I actually started making progress.
Related: Something to Protect
I've just discussed the merits of setting small goals and short-term projects, but I can't leave out the reason I went through all these developments in the first place.
Before this year, I was trying to be productive just for myself, and it didn't work. I didn't want to stay stuck in the cycle of having a terrible sleep schedule and doing things last minute, but the only reason for this desire was avoiding personal negative experiences. I'd always end up getting everything done, so I didn't face real-world consequences for my actions beyond feeling bad, and I didn't have a compelling enough reason to actually motivate me to get better every day and provide some justification for why I can't give up.
Now I have a mission that extends beyond myself. It's the big picture and the driving force that all my actions (learning & skill development) are oriented around. I want to solve the metacrisis. It's a term for all the threats humanity faces, or what happens when zero-sum games and continued resource extraction (both physical, like fossil fuels, and mental, like attention) meet exponentially accelerating technology. The most notable and immediate crisis is AI, so it makes sense to focus on it, but it's not the only problem humanity will need to solve to survive in the coming decades (of which I hope there will be many). I haven't seen this term discussed on here, and I think it is highly relevant seeing that multiple people here have written posts about "saving the world" (and not just from AI). It's also a term that will help other people understand that important existential problems they should personally care about are happening right now, as it includes things like nuclear threats, biohazards, and climate change, even if they're incapable of seeing AI discussions as anything but "hype" and "doom."[5]
I obviously don't expect to solve all the world's problems on my own, but I believe in my ability to become someone who can help impact significant change, especially after I met someone crazy enough to have made significant and unique progress on understanding human psychology with the goal of preventing mass catastrophe (long story--we've currently lost contact), and especially after seeing the kind of people on Lesswrong. There's likely to be plenty of people here who would be willing and able to take concrete steps as long as they are reasonable and clearly laid out, and that's part of what I hope to do eventually, if I can. I just need to learn to write in a way that appeals to/is accepted by this community and (more importantly) continue learning and gaining personal experience to verify my ideas.
But that's just one example of a long-term goal you can set to become productive. It's up to you to identify a cause, ideal, or possible future worth fighting for (or against[6]) that causes you to commit to self-improvement and determinedly move forward despite each slip and setback.
I hope this helps you begin on that journey.
P.S. My username is not from Atomic Habits--I actually haven't read it (though it probably has similar principles like starting small). I just thought the word atomic is super cool
P.P.S. Apologies if the last part felt abrupt; I tried to write a post on the metacrisis first but this was easier to finish and I felt leaving out my greater goals wouldn't give the full picture. But yeah, discussing what we can do to help humanity make it out of this decade alive is why I'm here. And increasing the productivity of smart people with similar goals is absolutely one way we can make progress!
If you want exercise recs: I'm doing bits and pieces of Mei Monte's 22 inch waist workout until I can build up to her full routine. It's 4x25 of toe taps, leg raises, plank up & downs, and squats + 1min plank and 1min reverse plank. I had to google toe taps proper form bc it felt too easy. Leg raises felt super hard the first time, they've gotten significantly easier. Plank u&ds are still hard. I'm skipping reverse plank for now bc I feel like I'm doing the form wrong, doing 2 min plank instead.
I chose this because it came on my insta feed, the main physique improvement I desire is a flatter stomach, and it's easy to do in your room with just a yoga mat.
I plan to start going to the gym in a couple months. I'll probably start with this workout and aim towards the fuckarounditis article's standards for women.
If you've read Wait But Why, you could call this the Rational Decision Maker and the Instant Gratification Monkey.
A specific example is 7.0 mph for 2 minutes at the end of an 8 minute walk (I normally run for 1 at 6.5). We're not talking 15-20 minutes. Brief and intense.
You may have noticed--I'm clarifying everything because I've observed my own tendencies. If something sounds too hard or unattractive, I probably won't do it. I suspect others may share this quirk of human psychology, so I hope it helps to break everything down to be as easy and bite sized as possible.
This was the only thing that worked for me after all, after 5+ years of caring about productivity yet continually repeating the pattern of procrastinating until the deadline, demonstrating heroic work ethic in the last few hours, and sleeping at 5am. Taking baby steps. Don't expect immediate perfection or sudden extreme improvements. (The sudden breakthroughs do happen, but they are rare and are almost entirely dependent on luck.)
Clarity has been the determining factor of whether I procrastinate my work or not when everything else is in place. It's much easier to procrastinate a vague instruction than a clear-cut task.
Just a few months ago I talked to a layperson who said "it's ridiculous to think a computer can get anywhere near what a human can do"💀
Dan Koe, who wrote the article I linked about the metacrisis, emphasizes the importance of creating an anti-vision: before you know exactly what you want, you can identify what you don't want, and thinking about where your life is headed if you don't change can be a strong initial motivator before you start discovering the goals you want to move towards.