Accountability

Today was an up and down day in terms of productivity. At work, I managed to force myself to work on task after task despite not having anything extremely pressing/easy to do. I was proud of that fact because I definitely pushed myself successfully today in that regard. However, I became really tired after that (probably also lack of sleep), and I just got too tired to work after that.

Once I got home, I also ended up playing league for most of the night, but I did manage to do my habits right now.

Also, my neck hurts so badly because I have no good chair to sit in and working in bed hurts my neck so badly. I really need to figure out a way to fix this.

Productive Thinking

I’ve been using the app Habitica rather liberally the past two days. I don’t know if it’s just the initial spurt of motivation that comes with starting something new or if I’ve actually stumbled onto something that actually works for me. At work today, I would randomly think of a task that I needed to do (but wasn’t absolutely necessary), write it down in the app, and then force myself to complete the task for my in game points. It somehow worked, and finish each task was oddly satisfying.

Even in middle school, I used to love making to-do lists and checking them off. Today made me realize that the same thing holds true even now–the reason why I like doing psets in one setting is because I enjoy the satisfaction of finishing something and I hate just working without a definite thing to check off. I liked using productivity apps because it felt like the habits I did had an immediate benefit. And with this app, checking off these minor, 5 minute tasks, are really satisfying. This exemplifies how humans instrinsically love direct, tangible effects of their actions–without a direct, perceivable effect, completing the very same action just feels much worse. Logically, it shouldn’t make a difference, so why does this happen?

It is no secret that the vast majority of humans will default to short term benefits over being smart and seeing the long term benefits of a different course of actions. I am no exception to this–I often jokingly describe my approach to life as a “greedy algorithm.” I tend to just take the most pressing task at each available moment–makes me great at improvising and handling new situations in stride, but when too many things queue up for the distant future, I get absolutely screwed. Moments like that make me realize the importance of planning ahead.

I always admire those who are able to see the long term consequences of their actions–yet, despite knowing the benefits of planning long term rather than reaping short term benefits, it can be extremely difficult to live one’s life that way.

The reason why I believe productivity apps work is because it offers some short term benefit for an otherwise abstract, long-term effect. For me, I plan to continue feeding myself these little victories until hopefully these habits become ingrained into me. Already, I’m getting better at holding these habits–hopefully, I won’t have to resort to cheap tricks like this in order to get what I want. But, the advantage of the fact that humans have illogical, irrational behavior is that sometimes you can utilize it to make yourself go against your own human nature. It’s just another step towards becoming superhuman…one day (fingers crossed)!