Cyborg Motivation
Recently I've been making my way through the reams of posts from Inkhaven, the daily blogging residency/challenge/convention that took place last month. Participating blogger Lucie Phillipon has written some good posts on the tools you can use to align your commitments to your goals, which given my recent Beeminder obsession I have been thinking about quite a bit.
One big question is: is it better to align your short-term actions and long term goals using external commitments and incentive systems or try to align yourself internally by shifting your thoughts? Or to put it differently, should you be a Cyborg or a Mentat? As you can probably predict as someone with a strict (but effective!) blogging commitment, I'm on largely on team Cyborg.
A lot of the power of these systems is just making the goal legible. For a well-designed incentive system, the cost of maintaining it and the reduced flexibility of locking yourself in is worth it for the clear marker it sets in your mind of what to do and when to do it.
One way a Cyborg system can fail is by premature optimisation. You can try to design a maximally efficient system that accounts for all the edge cases and weird exceptions you can throw at it, but if you haven't built up the basic actions that are required for the system to do anything, it will just fall over. You shouldn't spend hours researching complex note taking systems and buying fancy notebooks when you haven't yet built up a habit of just writing things down.
A reason I think Beeminder has been working so well for me is that you can set it up to track anything you can put a numerical value at a specific point in time. If misused, this level of flexibility can cause issues: you can set a goal for an obviously bad and unsustainable goal like dropping your weight through a crash diet. But for me this means you can set up experiments, see what works, and drop things (with a one week buffer) that aren't working or don't seem to be taking you towards your long term goals. And you can iterate on these experiments, gradually approaching a reflective equilibrium between your actions and your goals.
But maybe I've been playing on easy mode this whole time? Most of my present goals are about getting off my butt and setting habits to do things that work towards my long term goals, but many people's most pressing goal is ceasing to do something harmful: kicking an addiction, modifying a harmful habit like going to bed late and losing sleep etc. A Cyborg system can certainly help with that, but it seems a lot more fragile when it's serving as a defence for something your rational brain wants to stop doing rather than as scaffolding for something you want to accomplish. You need to account for when you slip up and lapse back into your bad habit, and just tracking a 'streak' of not doing the thing each day falls apart if that streak ever gets broken. I have no great advice on this, except that recognising and thinking about your problems in an organised way is a necessary (but certainly not sufficient) first step towards fixing them.