Stable Externalization
Full disclaimer: the following post is poorly researched, “folk productivity” advice. It borrows terms from neuroscience without strong research into those ideas, which makes it no more than useful anecdotes of the self-help genre.
One thing that helps me get more done is being more organized. If I think of myself as a meat-computer, a self-improving algorithm, I would say that my constraints are as follows:
- I have two cognitive systems, system 1 and system 2.
- System 1 is automatic, intuitive, and emotional.
- System 2 thinks deeply, but requires sustained effort.
- System 2 responds poorly to attention fragmentation, has low bandwidth.
- System 2 can be consciously controlled.
- System 1 imputes a policy (chooses a next thought or action) where system 2 does not or cannot.
- System 2 shuts off once attentional resources are exhausted, for which blood glucose is a proxy.
Also:
- System 2 actions can be taken over by system 1 if reinforced.
- System 1 is in the driver seat most of the time, just due to the sheer cost of deploying system 2 reasoning.
The question, therefore, is how can I offload as much useful productivity to system 1 as possible? If it’s a skill, then I think the answer is deliberate practice. If it’s decision making, then I think the answer is precommitment.
You’ve done precommitment if you’ve ever rehearsed anything. System 2 sets the intention of what to do if a particular scenario occurs, and when the cue occurs, you automatically execute the rehearsed routine1. One example is telling a lie. You rehearse it in your head, and when it comes time to actually say it, you don’t hesitate, because you’ve precommitted to a particular story.
Precommitment allows you to set useful defaults. Once you’ve made a particular behaviour the default, the probability that it continues to happen is extraordinarily high, because it requires conscious effort by system 2 to override the default. If that default results in you automatically doing useful things, then you’ve solved a large part of what it takes to be productive.
Rely on system 2 to make the critical changes necessary to keep the productivity machine moving, instead of relying on system 2 to be the muscle that creates productivity out of nothing. This means self-reflection and setting implementation intentions, so that the next time you reach a critical junction you can make the right choice.
What does this have to do with organization, or as I like to put it, a stable externalization? Well, we know how much our environment affects our ability to get things done. The reason is that the environment can be understood as cues for certain behaviours2. By setting correct, consistent, and intuitive cues in our environment, we can make it easier for system 1 to automatically complete the desired behaviours.
Stability is critical because we can only (en?)train the correct response when we’ve been exposed to it repeatedly.
Therefore, create a stable environment that cues you into doing the correct thing in each scenario. This is all what I mean by organization.
If you think about it, precommitment operates on the same mechanism that skills do. They’re both automatic responses calibrated through experience and repetition. It’s just that we think of precommitment as deciding to do a particular action, not as a step in a larger routine. ↩︎
In certain RL algorithms, ALL an environment is is a collection of cues to behaviour. The neural net takes in an a raw observation from the environment, and directly scores each action depending on its expected reward. This expected reward can be thought of as the strength of the cue toward that behaviour (again, folk-intuition) ↩︎