Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #74. Snap Yourself to Attention

Change your behavior by rewarding your hard work and punishing your slacking off.

As a self-aware animal, you can motivate yourself with the techniques of animal training. You can increase the number of your accomplishments by defining measurable units of achievement, breaking down your project into those units, and then giving yourself either a fixed reward per accomplishment or a fixed negative punishment for each lapse—or both, if you prefer.

First, a word about definitions. Behaviorist and animal trainer Karen Pryor has a concise, classic definition of a behavioral reinforcer:¹

A reinforcer is anything that, occurring in conjunction with an act, tends to increase the probability that the act will occur again.

Technically, punishment is not a reinforcer, since it decreases the likelihood an action will occur. (Of course, sometimes that's what you want.) We won't go into the intricacies of the behaviorist definitions of positive and negative reinforcement, which probably don't mean what you think they do.² There is even debate among behaviorists whether self-administered reinforcement, as in this hack, is a coherent concept or is better defined as something like "self-monitoring."³ For the purposes of this hack, we'll just stick with the commonsense definitions of reward and punishment most people already have.

In Action

Break down your task into accomplishment units. If you're a Getting Things Done ⁴ fan, you can define these units as being the ...