Log: Intentionality Experiments

October 31, 2024

This document is intended to be a live log of my experiments with increasing my intentionality. I find that often I waste a lot of time doing things out of avoidance or procrastination, and am generally not very in touch with my preferences. I’d like to change that. The problem seems to have multiple parts. First, some setup:

Terminology

Until I think of a better word, I’m going to use “actions” to refer to tasks. I like it because actions are either happening or they’re not. Tasks are something that can exist in a backlog, actions are not, at least not in the same sense. They don’t want to be there. Action also implies intentionality. It doesn’t feel like you’re performing an action when you waste 3 hours playing video games, but it does feel like an action when you sit down to play a video game with the intent of playing for 3 hours.

Now that we have that squared away, let’s look at the problem at hand. I see the lack of intentionality as being composed of a few inter-related issues:

Physiology

This includes everything upstream of thought and movement, so: strength, flexibility, chemical “imbalances” in the brain (ADHD, depression, etc). I think the most potent ways of tackling this look like:

1. Strength: light exercise
2. Flexibility: light exercise and stretching
3. ADHD: meditation, diet, sunlight
4. Depression, anxiety: all of the above + sleep

This is all the same boring advice everyone hears and gives, because it works, and because it’s really hard to act on, so there’s always a market for giving it.

Ease of Logistical Access

Working out should be as easy as physically possible. An example of this for “light exercise” would look like:

• There is a kettlebell in my room
• There is a clear space to use (swing, squat with, do turkish getups with,e tc) the kettlebell in my room
• There is a printed or written document on the wall near the kettlebell that explains the exercise routine (whiteboard works, but paper seems like it would work better)
• Workout clothes are stored in the same area and visible
• There is a bottle of water nearby

For “sunlight”, maybe it looks like:

• I know where I’m going to go when I want to get some sunlight (the roof of my building)
• I have something to do while I’m up there (read a book)
• I have a way to get from my current state to a “go outside” state (slippers, pajamas, jacket if it’s cold)
• The items I need are colocated somewhere easy to access (by my bedroom door)

The other side of “ease of logistical access” is making it harder to access things that aren’t good for you. Crucially, I think it’s bad to try to restrict yourself from them altogether. You should just sort of make them higher effort to engage with. This optimizes for intentionality, not making good decisions, which is an important distinction in this mission and this log. Good decisions come separately, once you can be making decisions at all, in the same way that a contractor might charge low rates until their calendar fills up, and then they can charge higher and higher rates.

So how do I decrease ease of access to things that harm me? There are passive and active ways. Say I’m trying to spend less time gaming. This might look like:

• Unplugging my windows computer when it’s not in use (and optionally stowing it away).
• Keeping my macbook, which I use for work, as the primary connection to my keyboard, monitor, and mouse, so I’d have to replug everything to play games. This works doubly well, as it changes the dominant association with my desk from gaming to work/administrative tasks, and introduces another physical obstacle to playing games.
• Keep my speakers (not headphones) plugged in by default to reduce immersion.

One challenge I anticipate with some of these changes is that they require consistent upkeep (for instance, setting my macbook back up every time I stop playing a game). So The first changes I should implement are the most passive ones or ones that only take a half-second to implement (unplugging computer between uses and using my speakers by default.

Topics for later

• Meaning-making: how do I justify any of my actions at all?
• Ease of Emotional Access: how do I make this emotionally salient?

Takeaways, and beginning experiments

1. Choose a book that I read on the roof every morning, get some slippers and pajama pants, put them by my door
2. Make an easy, obvious routine (using the above bulletpoints) for a daily kettlebell workout
3. Unplug computer when not in use
4. Stow my headphones when not playing games with others

I’ll report back (ideally in a ~week) with updates.