This is my Hammertime Final Exam.
Pledges is a technique for setting deadlines that you actually meet.
In March (2021), my flatmate and I decided that we want to do a startup project together. We did not have much time back then and therefore pledged to have decided on an idea and pitched the idea to 3 people until the 19th of April. If we would not fulfill that pledge, we would need to go into the crowded pedestrian zone in Heidelberg with signs "We are incompetent".
We did everything the last week, but we definitely would not have done anything at all if we had not had the pledge.
We then renewed the pledge to set a date where we finish the beta version, with something even more embarrassing on the line, and it keeps us motivated.
When setting a pledge, make your goal specific and set a deadline. You might want to add sub-deadlines for sub-tasks, so you don't procrastinate everything until the deadline.
When choosing a penalty, do something that you really don't want to do. For me, embarrassing stuff works quite well, because my System 1 does not want to be embarrassed.
It is crucial that you tell other people of the pledge, to make yourself more responsible so that others can urge you to do the embarrassing action when you have not succeeded.
For other a bit smaller tasks (e.g. drawing an important decision or doing anything that you would like to procrastinate), pledging something is still powerful, though here I rather use smaller penalties. I sometimes write something like the following message to a friend:
"I pledge that I will do [*the task*] until [*the deadline*]. Otherwise, I [*will endorse the penalty I set myself*]."
For small tasks, I often use penalties like "don't watch Youtube for the next 3 days" or "don't listen to music for the next 2 days", but you can experiment and see what works best for you.
You can also try beeminder, but I think for me it may be less effective, though I must say I have not tested it yet.
To motivate yourself, even more, you can reward yourself after you have completed the task.
Activation energy is the term I use to describe that you often only need to get started with a task and then pretty much automatically continue on.
One kind of using the principle of activation energy is using TAPs, especially the kind of trigger-action-sequences where you break down a task into small and easy steps to start with (see TAPs 3: Reductionism). For example when you want to go running:
Yup pledges are one of my favorite techniques. When you want to do something, but your lazy brain does not want to do it, just start by writing a pledge to a friend that you will do the task until a specific deadline and then your lazy brain will probably not resist so much, because it also does not want to endorse the embarrassing or otherwise harmful penalty.
The concept behind activation energy is that you want to reduce the willpower needed to do a task by focusing only on the first simple step and thereby tricking your lazy brain into resisting less. When you are feeling like you want to procrastinate something, just ask: "How can I trick my lazy brain?". For example:
Sometimes you don't want to trick the "lazy" brain, but the "shy brain", the "afraid brain" or another intuitive non-rational part of yourself. The technique still works:
The technique does not make everything easy and sometimes you cannot fool the bad parts of your brain that easily, so don't just think "Well, seems like the technique does not work for me, I will just go swimming now...". Use the techniques to lower the needed activation energy, but when it is still high, just shut up and put in the willpower.
I noticed that sometimes there are some activities that don't feel so productive, but when I actually think about it they are quite productive.
There are two main examples where my intuitive perception of productivity is wrong:
So don't confuse productivity with doing hard stuff.