Willpower is for unproductive Losers

Less Willpower, less Choices, more Boredom makes you more productive.

Three years back, I put out a video titled Willpower is for Losers on my Youtube channel. Drawing on research and my own personal experience using a KitchenSafe to lock my Nintendo Switch controller away, I explain that the problem with willpower is using it. If you want to actually get yourself to do the things you want yourself to do, you need to set things up to where you don’t have to use willpower. In this post, I’ll expand upon the concepts presented in that video I’ll talk about three concepts that have made me a lot more productive:

1. Don’t use willpower.

2. Reduce choices.

3. Strengthen your boredom resilience.

1. Don’t use willpower

This one was discussed at length in my Willpower is for losers video - let me sum it up very briefly.

・I can’t play video games is very different from I won’t play video games. If your game controller is locked up in a plastic box, your mind quickly resigns itself to that fact and moves on. If the game controller is sitting there and the only thing preventing you from playing is your willpower, you’re more distracted and you’re wasting valuable mental bandwith on resisting the temptation.

・A study titled What’s so great about self control? gathered data from 159 university students and found that those exerting more self-control were not more successful in achieving their goals. The people who planned their life so they didn’t have to use self-control were the most successful.

・The point is, effective planning, not willpower is key.

-If you don’t own a Nintendo Switch you don’t have to use willpower to not play.
-If your game controller, cookies, phone, caffeine or whatever you’re trying to resist is in a timed lock box , you don’t have to use willpower to not engage with those things.
-If you uninstall Instagram you don’t have to resist the urge to doom scroll.
-If you install a website blocker (like Self Control) on your computer then you don’t have to resist the urge to watch porn.

When you delete distractions instead of resist them, you relax that mental anxious tension that makes you distracted or procrastination-prone.

2. Reduce choices with more decisions.

I talk about the negative effect of choices on our productivity and satisfaction in life in my video Why are you Uncertain, Unfocused and Anxious? What should we do about it? A key point I argue is that the feeling of uncertainty and the feeling of anxiety are one in the same. The video discusses the different brain regions and neurotransmitters involved in the feeling of uncertainty and the consequences of this uncertainty.

Why do you get distracted when you’re working on something? Probably because you haven’t established hard rules for yourself. Let’s say you’re at the cafe and it’s work time. The caffeine has put you in the zone and you’re ready to crush the day and get some real work done.

What exactly is the work you need to do?
Should you reply to emails?
Should you finish that article you’re halfway through?
Should you start a new article?
Should you tie up some loose ends on that meditation retreat you’re organizing?
What order should you do these things in?
Articles take a long time to write - should you completely finish an article before you check any emails?

Hopefully, you pick one thing at some point and get started. But even more uncertainties pop up.

How strict should you be on yourself?
Checking Twitter only takes 2 minutes, is it OK to check twitter when you feel stressed by your writing?

Here’s a breakdown of what’s going on in these situations:
・You have too many choices. A choice presenting itself is like a question and it yearns to be answered.
・With too many choices comes uncertainty.
・Uncertainty is anxiety.
・The felt sense of anxiety is accompanied by the secretion of noradrenaline.
・Noradrenaline has the effect of making you more distractable.
・If you’re not totally confident that what you’re doing is exactly what you should be doing, your brain better search for something better to do.

In a recent interview, prolific writer Neil Gaiman explained that his strategy for getting his writing done is to delete all choices except for 2. He carves out time to write, sits down, and provides himself two guilt-free choices. In fact, one of the choices doesn’t involve writing so he has a free-pass to do absolutely no work if he doesn’t feel like it. But that’s it. …Those are the choices. Write, or do nothing at all.

You can sit here and write, or you can sit here and do nothing. But you can’t sit here and do anything else.

In an interview with Tim Ferris, Neil Gaiman says that that was always and still is his biggest rule that leads to him getting his writing done.

I’m not allowed to do a crossword, read a book, phone a friend…all I’m allowed to do is absolutely nothing, or write.

But writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing after a while. You’ve been staring out the window now for about 5 minutes, and it kind of loses its charm. And you’re going ‘Well actually, might as well write something.’

As we continue, remember that the key concept I’d like to leave you with is that reducing the choices available to you will make for a more satisfying, productive life.

The solution: Constrain your world

According to the paper Psychological Entropy: A Framework for Understanding Uncertainty-Related Anxiety, more religious people have less activation in a brain region associated with anxiety. That is, religious people are less uncertain. The authors of the paper surmise that the reason for this is that "highly religious individuals are more likely to have a clear explanatory framework that constrains their interpretations of the world and are thus less likely to experience uncertainty in their lives.”

For the longest time, all the videos on my channel were created entirely by myself. I did the research, the writing, the shooting, and the video editing. My to-do list for the most part usually looked like this:

Work out
Meditate
Work on making a video

The issue with this was it was far too unconstrained. Who’s waiting for me to finish the research? No one.
Who needs me to hurry up with the shooting so they can get started on the video editing? No one.

Combine this with the fact that I enjoy rabbit holes of research and tweaking every last little thing and you’ve got a recipe for me spending way too much time on each step of the video production process. My process was a great demonstration of Parkinson’s Law which basically says things will take as long or as short as the amount of time you allot to them. If I give myself two months to do a video, it will likely take me the whole two months. If I have to get the video done in one month to meet a deadline, it will take me one month.

This is why most students who are given a month to complete an essay that would actually take two days to do will hem and haw for 29 days then pull an all nighter completing the essay right before the deadline.

One of the ways I became much more productive was by taking on more responsibilities. By having more to-dos, I was able to get a lot more done. This either sounds counter-intuitive or totally obvious.

I’m now working with two researchers, an animator and a video editor/motion graphics artist. Obviously, much more is getting done thanks to their talents and contributions, but that’s not what I’m referring to - the work I do myself is done more efficiently thanks to them. If I don’t finish my end of the research, I can’t narrow down the specific details that I need to ask my researchers to dig into. If I don’t finish writing the script and shooting the A-roll then my animator and editor will be waiting on me twiddling their thumbs. So, I’m forced to make better decisions quicker and I have to speed up my own output.

I’ve also piled on a brand new project of consistently putting out an interesting article on my Substack as well as a 5-Point Newsletter every single week. This might not sound like much to some of you, but this is a big step up for me considering I used to take a month to finish a single video script for reasons I talked about above.

The point is that all of this constrains my world.
There’s only so much time in the day, I’ve already committed to certain things, so there’s not really any room to dawdle - this makes what I should be doing very clear.

What does this look like practically?

Basically whatever you can think of that will reduce the amount of decisions you have to make make going forward will leave you with a lot more mental bandwith to be productive and less anxious.

They say behind every great man is a woman. I don’t doubt that a supportive spouse can do wonders for your motivation and productivity, but surely tons of mental bandwith is freed up when the option of chasing women is removed from a man’s mind.

From my experience, the three basic things that allowed me to further constrain my world, reduce uncertainty, and increase productivity were:

1. Having Core Goals.

The month when I was totally killing it at the gym was when I was doing my 30 eggs a day for 30 days video. Sure, I had the power of egg at my back, but I wasn’t just going to the gym and going through the motions, I had the specific goal of gaining as much muscle as possible to do the experiment justice and make an interesting video. Each workout session felt like the last chance - I only had one chance at Day 1/30 or Day 15/30. Every day counted because I needed to squeeze as much as I could out of each of those 30 days.

Several people have asked me how I keep track of so much information and honestly I have an unfair advantage. I have a channel where I can talk about so many different things, so each time I read a book or listen to a lecture it feels like it’s working towards the goal of some future video. My mind becomes very attentive when I’m learning new things - keeping note of information or logic that is worth sharing with people later and discarding things that are just trivia - not really practical or useful.

Sure, some things are just interesting in and of themselves, but I think the best way to immediately forget something you learn is to not think about how it could practically connect to some goal you have in your life.

As Jaak Panksepp says in his book The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, “pleasure indicates something is biologically useful.” Of course we should expect the reverse to be true, that doing useful things (‘useful’ as in effective in moving you towards a future state you have determined to be desirable) is pleasurable.

This concept of goal oriented behavior really deserves its own post. While it sounds cliche on the surface, I find it quite deep and interesting. Due to the nature of the dopamine system, mentally logging your behaviors into a goal-oriented framework allows you to derive much more satisfaction from life. Simply put, when you identify your actions as moving you closer to a goal, it’s satisfying and pleasurable. The more important the goal, the more satisfaction.

When you make a goal, a future outcome you strongly desire, your brain will start to efficiently identify all the behaviors that will act as the most useful dominoes leading up to that outcome. It forces your mind to organize actions in terms of what will bring you towards that goal the quickest.

Let’s say you suddenly agree to a boxing match in 6 months with someone who is not so much of a monster that there’s no way in hell you could win, but if you committed to a rigorous training routine, you could very likely avoid getting brutally concussed. Your decision making schema is going to rapidly change.

・When picking lunch, french fries vs. roast beef and salad will not come down to “which tastes better?” but “which is going to help me get to a weight that allows me to be nimble enough to avoid having my nose broken?”

・Your other choices will change to where “Should I work out or play video games?” will quickly become “what time should I work out?”

2. Taking on more responsibilities.

This doesn’t necessarily mean do what Jim Carrey did in Yes Man and say “Yes” to any sort of opportunity or request that comes your way. Make sure you’re taking on things that are actually meaningful for you. If you’re saying yes to a ton of things that don’t actually resonate with you, that sounds like a good recipe for burnout as my friend Misha can tell you.

When you have more responsibilities, there is more pressure to neatly allocate time to what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. If I have to definitely get the A-Roll to my editor on Friday, then that forces the rest of my schedule to line up. Rather than resisting the urge to waste my time playing video games or doom scroll on twitter, I simply don’t have time for those things. If I’m recording the A-Roll next Friday, then that means the research needs to be wrapped up by next Monday and I’ll need to put in several hours of writing on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. With that one commitment, most of my week automatically gets planned out.

Of course strong goal setting ties into this as it is going to make this step so much easier. When you have very clear goals for how you want your future to look, the things that are worth saying yes to and the things that you need to say no to (even if it might hurt someone’s feelings) become very clear.

3. Set up a routine.

Mornings are always for writing. Every day, I have two coffees while I write at the cafe for about 3.5 hours. After that, it’s to the gym, then lunch, and then a short break and then more work. This a great constraint because pretty much 2/3rds of my day is already decided so there’s not much room to dilly dally.

There’s only so many hours in the day. If you’ve set things up to where you’ve established a routine that eliminates decision making for several hours of the day, then you’ve saved yourself tons of mental bandwith. As you probably already know, reducing the number of decisions he had to make was the reason Steve Jobs wore the same thing pretty much every day.

3. Strengthening boredom resilience.

Boredom is essentially when you’re craving more stimulation than you’re getting. Ever been watching a movie and you pick up your phone to scroll through Instagram? However fast-paced movies have become, the slow process of building up characters so you’re actually invested in them is more boring than Instagram’s captivating novelty-at-a-click mechanism.

This is part of why Neil Gaiman’s approach is fantastic. Writing may be boring, but it’s not as boring as doing absolutely nothing. Humans hate being bored. However, we need to learn to be able to sit with boredom because that’s when new insights and solutions arise in our minds. You’ve probably had plenty of great ideas come to you when you’re in the shower. Hence the existence of the subreddit /r/showerthoughts.

Engineer Barbara Oakley says that we have two modes of thinking that are like two different pinball machines. When you’re engaged in an activity, your mental patterns congregate around things related to that activity. Your thoughts bounce around all the bumpers that are close to each other. It’s not until we disengage from that activity that we start to think in a more relaxed mode, able to have all sorts of unconnected thoughts arise. This type of “thinking outside the box” is when new creative insights pop up in our heads.

Though, we also need to be able to deal with the mini-boredoms that pop up while we’re doing our work. We need to be able to resist the aversion to boredom while we’re focusing on each task - we need to stop multi-tasking.

Why multitasking is a waste of time

You might think: it’s not a big deal if I’m distracted. I just decide the 10 tasks I need to get done today, then if I’m working on one and my attention wanders to another task, it’s OK because it needed to get done anyhow.

However, this is where the concept of “attention residue” à la Cal Newport comes in.
Georgetown University computer-science professor Cal Newport, author of the book Deep Work, says that we need to conquer attention residue to be our most efficiently productive selves living our most satisfying lives.

Newport draws on a 2009 paper titled “Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?” where the author, Sophie Leroy, found that people are less productive when they are constantly moving from one task to another instead of focusing on one thing at a time. The paper’s abstract says:

People need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers.

Leroy calls this carryover from one task to another “attention residue.” Like waiting for your heart rate to go down after you finish sprinting to your job interview, your brain is still powering down the regions that were being called upon to work on your previous task. You’re still thinking about your previous task as you start another one.

Multi-tasking is like going to the gym three times a day. You go, workout, take a shower, get dressed, go to the office, then later your change out of your office clothes into gym clothes, workout, shower, get dressed, back to the office, then you repeat the cycle once more. It’s inefficient.

Focusing on one task and completely finishing it and then moving to the next task is much more efficient. Constantly swapping between different tasks is like warming up your arms, doing half of a leg workout and then suddenly doing half of a back workout.

OK maybe we need to use some willpower

Now let me contradict myself for a moment. This is where willpower comes in. You need to build your boredom resilience muscle. I can tell you not to task-switch or multitask but that doesn’t change the fact that focusing on one thing at a time can get boring, no matter how much more productive it is.

You can of course drastically reduce the amount of things you can task switch to. If your phone is locked in a box, you of course can’t switch over to posting on instagram. That’s an example of using planning instead of willpower. But nowadays, our computers, the devices we get our work done on, have so many other distractions built in.

A “dopamine detox” is basically like a boredom resilience bootcamp. While this is great to kickstart your boredom muscle, what is probably more effective long term and will get you consistent results is practicing your boredom resilience every day.

Meditation is a great practice to have. You could also do something as simple as: Don’t look at your phone when you’re in the bathroom, don’t look at your phone while you’re walking to the cafe, don’t look at it on the train, and resist the urge to whip your phone out while you’re waiting for the elevator. If you have some texts you need to respond to that’s one thing, but try and undo that default of aimlessly reaching for the phone the moment you feel the slightest twinge of boredom.

Of course, here is where we can rely less on willpower and more on planning too.

Cal Newport recommends that you:

a. Allocate certain hours of the day that you designate as ‘deep work’ time
For me, this would be those 3.5 hours at the cafe.

b. Do your deep work in an environment with Minimal distractions
Maybe the cafe with people chatting and walking around isn’t the best spot, but there’s plenty I can do to make my environment better: Put on my noise cancelling headphones with some music, turn off notifications on my phone and close all tabs and windows on my computer that are unrelated to the task at hand.

c. Make sure you have everything you need
You don’t want to have to interrupt your flow to have to go and get a ruler or that book you need for you research.

d. Write down what you want to get done each day
This is the goal setting we we’re talking about. Now you get to feel that satisfying, pleasurable feeling of logging behaviors that move you towards your goal.

Lastly, let’s look at how we want to craft our to-do list so that we can have the most undistracted minds.

OK but how can we focus when all these other tasks come to mind?

Here’s a tip you might recognize from the Getting Things Done approach. Basically, when you’re writing down your to-do list, you need to establish the conditions that will trigger each to-do.

What do I mean by this? Well,

Social Psychologist Roy Baumeister and E.J. Masicampo published a paper titled Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals that explains that when we have things we need to do or should probably do at some point floating around in our head, these unconscious incomplete to-dos distract us and eat at our mental bandwith. Unfinished goals cause intrusive thoughts that will distract you from the task at hand. The study specifically noted that people were less able maintain their focus on a reading task due to unfinished goals slipping to and fro from their unconscious to their conscious mind.

You might have your distracting phone locked away in a plastic box while you’re chugging along on coding, but then the distractions come from within your mind: “I forgot to reply to Matt,” “I need to buy that thing on Amazon…” and so on

The good news is that the people didn’t have to actually go and do that thing to get it to stop distracting them. They just needed to write down what it is that they needed to do but they also needed to write down when they would do it.

"Once a plan is made, the unconscious knows how and when to act, and so in a sense the uncertainty of the unfinished task is resolved."

So “send an email to Tom” is not enough to have on the to-do list.
You need to have something like:
“…on Monday at 2PM,”
“…after you receive an email from Bill,”
“…when you finish your taxes,”
“…when the cat’s litter box is full.”

An ineffective to-do list is one that doesn’t make the decision of when each thing will happen. To extinguish the distracting effect of unfinished goals, you need to write down the thing you need to do and when it will get done. That’s enough to have your mind stop distracting you.

To sum up

1. Don’t use willpower

Identify points in your day when you are having to exercise willpower to keep you on track towards your goals. Then, do the necessary preparation so you don’t have to use willpower:
-Lock your phone or game device away for certain amount of time
-Set up a website blocker on your computer
-Work at a cafe or library instead of your house so you don’t have access to typical distractions or temptations

2. Reduce Choices

Try and constrain your life in beneficial ways. Having your free time set up to where you could do anything you want is a recipe for anxiety and procrastination.
-Establish your core goals and craft your to-do list with when you’ll do each thing*
-Take on more meaningful responsibilities
-Set up a routine where you get in the habit of consistently working on your goals at certain times of certain days

3. Strengthen your Boredom resilience

-Stop allowing yourself to check your phone anytime anywhere
-Set your working space up to where you have two options: either get the work done or be bored.
-Don’t have a workplace that allows you to indulge in distractions
-*Make a to-do list and write down when the things need to get done so you’ll be less distracted by your own mind