Hacking Motivation

Hacking Life • Hacking Life Chapter 4: Hacking Motivation Joseph Reagle Published on: Apr 03, 2019 Updated on: Apr 09, 2019 Hacking Life • Hacking Life Chapter 4: Hacking Motivation On a lovely summer day, I headed to San Francisco’s Presidio Park for a picnic unlike any other I have attended. The small gathering was for fans of the motivation app Beeminder, and Nick Winter, author of The Motivation Hacker, was the special guest. Winter is the “founder/hacker” behind Skritter, an app for learning Chinese characters, and CodeCombat, a platform that gamifies learning to code. It’s clear that despite being someone who sometimes spends many hours in front of a computer, like Ferriss and Tynan, he isn’t content with the skinny-nerd stereotype. Winter’s webpage features a picture of him doing a single-arm handstand: he’s wearing a Google T-shirt, thin-soled “five-finger” shoes—also preferred by Tynan—and a surprisingly serene expression for someone who is upside down (figure 4.1). When I met at him at the picnic, he was wearing the same nonshoes and tossing a Frisbee. 2 Hacking Life • Hacking Life Chapter 4: Hacking Motivation Nick Winter doing a handstand, 2013, http://www.nickwinter.net/. Used with permission. The Motivation Hacker is a lab report of self-experimentation and a tutorial on how to maximize motivation. Winter’s goal had been to write the book in three months “while simultaneously 3 Hacking Life • Hacking Life Chapter 4: Hacking Motivation skydiving, learn three thousand new Chinese characters, go on ten romantic dates with his girlfriend, hang out with a hundred people, run a four-hour marathon, and “increase happiness from 6.3 to 7.3 out of 10.” Most importantly, he had to finish developing Skritter.1 Winter was inspired to take on these challenges after reading a post on LessWrong, a community blog dedicated to “refining human rationality.” The LessWrong post was itself a summary of Piers Steel’s The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done.2 Steel is a professor of organizational dynamics who suggests that the extent of our motivation can be understood as an equation: That is, if you want to motivate yourself, make sure your goal is achievable and of value while minimizing distractions and the delay before receiving a reward. For example, imagine you want to motivate yourself to start work on a new chapter in your novel. Begin by writing for just twenty-five minutes, followed by a five-minute break. This is achievable, and you know from experience the hardest part is getting started for the day; you will have begun what Steel called a “success spiral.” You also want to limit distractions and see an immediate reward. So you disable your network connection and reward yourself with a small treat, like a grape, at the end of the twenty-five minutes. Upon reading the LessWrong post, Winter was “excited to see if these techniques, designed to fix low motivation, could be used to hack high motivation to absurd levels.”3 It is fitting that Winter’s inspiration happened by way of an online rationality forum. It is especially galling for the rationally minded to fail to do what is in their own best interest. But failing to do the right thing has long been frustrating. The ancients called it akrasia, the Greek word for lacking self- control. And methods to overcome akrasia are as ancient as the temptations themselves. In Homer’s epic The Odyssey, Odysseus had his sailors plug their own ears and bind him to his ship’s mast so he could hear the Sirens’ song. The sailors were to row past, unable to hear the bewitching call nor their captain's pleas to steer toward the deadly rocks. Accordingly, commitments, like burning a bridge so there is no retreat, are sometimes called “Ulysses pacts,” substituting Odysseus’s Roman name. Centuries later, in his letter to the Romans (7:14–17, New Life Version), Paul lamented: “I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate.” His solution was to make himself a servant of his God, rather than remain a slave to his own sinful nature. Thomas Schelling, a Nobel laureate in economics, was a more recent theoretician of akrasia. Schelling is most well known for his application of game theory to global conflict and cooperation. In 1978 and 1980, he published two lesser known articles about the games people play with themselves to manage internal conflicts. 4 Hacking Life • Hacking Life Chapter 4: Hacking Motivation Sometimes we put things out of reach for the moment of temptation, sometimes we promise ourselves small rewards, and sometimes we surrender authority to a trustworthy friend who will police our calories or our cigarettes. We place the alarm clock across the room so we cannot turn it off without getting out of bed. People who are chronically late set their watches a few minutes ahead to deceive themselves.4 Schelling felt that self-control was an important subject and proposed a complementary field to economics. Just as economics comes from the Greek terms for household and management, egonomics would be the art and science of self-management. There was no shortage of cases: How do we manage our counterproductive fear, anger, sloth, addictions, and other unwanted behaviors? Just as we manage our dysfunctional scratching of poison ivy by trimming our nails and wearing mittens to bed, we need similar “tricks” for the rest of life. Much like David Allen’s use of the term tricks decades later in Getting Things Done, this was life hacking in all but name. Amusingly, the most likely emblem of effective self-management is that of a tomato—though perhaps the Pavlok wrist zapper, discussed in the last chapter, will take its place. In the 1980s Francesco Cirillo created a workflow, the “Pomodoro Technique,” after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer he had in college. (Pomodoro means tomato in Italian.) The idea is to think about your task, work for an interval, typically twenty-five minutes, and take a short break when the time is up. If you are distracted by an errant thought (“I wonder if Sally returned my email?”), simply write it down for later and continue on task. After you do a few of these, you can take a longer break. Like a lot of productivity hacking, this seems to be about time management. But it’s actually a psychological tool, a self-management tool, an egonomics tool. Its users claim it improves focus, boosts motivation, improves the ability to estimate task duration, strengthens resolve in the face of complex tasks, and lessens anxiety about taking them on. I use a similar time-boxing method and find much of this to be true for me. As Stephen Covey wrote in 7 Habits, “‘Time management’ is really a misnomer—the challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.”5 At the book’s outset I observed that life hacking is a phenomenon of the digital age. We live in a culture in which the creative class is expected to be self-reliant but in a moment in which distraction is omnipresent. Motivation hacking is offered as a solution, as a means of coping or even excelling. We will see that some of its suggestions are useful but that many are oversold. More importantly, we’ll see just how much work managing the self can be and that it’s possible to still feel that it fails to suffice. The Science of Motivation Life hackers drink from the well of popular science. They read best sellers and watch TED talks about the behavioral basis of willpower and good habits. This coincides with the boom in social-science- 5 Hacking Life • Hacking Life Chapter 4: Hacking Motivation based self-help since 2010, including Steel’s The Procrastination Equation. The term egonomics never caught on, but Schelling’s questions have—in a big way. In the last chapter we met Roy Baumeister, the prominent social psychologist who suggested a connection between GTD and the Zeigarnik effect. He’s best known for his “ego depletion” theory, popularized in the book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. His theory is that we have a limited reservoir of willpower, which is linked to blood sugar: “As the body uses glucose during self-control, it starts to crave sweet things to eat—which is bad news for people hoping to use their self-control to avoid sweets.”6 Because willpower can be fickle, Baumeister and his coauthor suggest that a good way to resist temptation is to structure your life to avoid it in the first place. The motivation hacker also needs to build constructive habits. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business suggests that to create a habit, you need a cue (to trigger the brain), routine (to make it automatic), and reward (to establish those routines). Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, by the same author, suggests you make use of SMART goals (specific, measurable, assignable, relevant, and time delimited), but within the frame of a larger “stretch” goal, otherwise you might suffice with trivial goals.7 Coming up with effective goals is also a topic of Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation.8 As is common with this genre, the best seller Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance was complemented by a popular TED talk.9 All of this popular social science is further complemented by the hype of gamification, which applies game design elements, like scores, leaderboards, and achievement levels, to things like learning and fitness.

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