Making Impulsivity Work For Me

Recently, I have noticed that I have been less responsive to my usual techniques to "get things done / act in accordance with my longer-term desires." For example, historically successful approaches have included making an appointment for myself for slightly in the future to do something I have been avoiding and planning out every detail of my meals, snacks, and exercise in advance. But lately, I often can't seem to take the first step of imposing the schedule, and when I do, I later don't take the plan seriously enough to follow it. It's no wonder I've been pondering whether a person can experience psychological reactance - a response to the feeling that one's behavioral freedoms are being threatened that often results in the person adopting an attitude or engaging in behavior opposite to that being advocated - to behavioral limitations one has placed on oneself.

I have also been somewhat more impulsive than usual. (Of course, given my baseline level of impulsivity is pretty low, this still leaves me in the category of Ridiculously Scheduled and Over-Considering, but I am moving toward Sane Level of Planning.) Although this has its obvious downsides, such as idle thinking along the lines of "three slices of bacon would make this salad much more delicious" resulting in almost immediately cooking and eating bacon (an act made extremely easy when one possesses a package of pre-cooked bacon that only needs 1 minute in the microwave to be crunchy and perfect), it's also meant that I find myself acting immediately on conscious thoughts like "I should write my psychology paper" and "I need to pay my bills" as well as acting almost before thinking on impulses like (the event that partly inspired this post) suddenly deciding to make the beef stew this morning, something I have been intended to do for a couple of days, while I happened to be up to wash my face. I'm also finding it generally more common to abruptly stop doing some leisure (time-waster) activity - I will often shut down my web broswer after a short period of time or stop reading a novel in mid-sentence and not really realize until afterwards that I wasn't enjoying the experience a whole lot.

Socially, I wonder if this lowered emphasis on following through on commitments to myself will make me more likely to be the kind of person who is willing to blow off the kind of agreements that I used to find binding, like saying "Yes, I will see you at X's party." Given that my impulsivity toward making social contact is arguably not significantly different from zero, this might make me even more of an introvert than I have been. On the other hand, I have been having conversations with random people more frequently (which is easy to do in the university environment), so maybe it's a wash.

Anyway, after noticing these changes, today I read this well-timed blog post on overcoming procrastination, which I suffer from to an average, to somewhat below average, degree, but that is still arguably a kind of bad thing in any quantity.

I have used the "set aside time to do things" approach in the past for Robert and me to clean the apartment, but it has fallen to the wayside with the increase in Robert's dissertation hours on the weekend (where he is totally rocking this very technique on something much more important than vacuuming). I am now operating on the "do it at whatever random time I think of it" principle and this has definitely resulted in less cleaning, though I do occasionally surprise myself with a sudden decision to thoroughly clean the kitchen and I do a much better job than when cleaning on schedule. We (read: Robert the Laundry and Dishwashing Elf) have stuck to the Sunday morning laundry time, so we are not running out of clean socks and such. My daily treadmill session is absolutely set in stone, but I have reached the point where even if I don't want to get started, I know that I want to be doing it / have done it (since it does wonders for the random pain and aching I experience basically every day), so it's not usually very tricky to get myself to do it; I only skip on the rare occasions I am very sick (as in, so sick I cannot actually stand up / stay awake for more than a few minutes) or my fucked up knees are acting up badly enough that I fear instigating another major injury.

"If it comes to mind, then do it" is something I'm doing more and more of. So far, it seems to be the second or third time I think of it, not the very first, so I appear to be setting the stage to act on this impulse through previous decision-making. But last week, this resulted in my sending my grandmother a get well card on the same day that I first thought to do it, rather than waiting several days and then rationalizing that it was stupid to send a card at this late date, and basically being a bum. I got to feel good about making a kind gesture (which, you know, is not exactly something I do a lot of) and using up one of the approximately 849 free cards sent to me by environmental organizations trying to guilt me, through the application of the reciprocity norm, to send them money in return.

To make this technique effective (and not a way to increase the amount of popcorn that I eat and other counter-productive actions), I need to think about what I can do to diminish the amount of effort necessary to move me from "not doing the desirable activity" to "doing the desirable activity" while continuing to maintain barriers/inertia against those other behaviors. I've been successful with this in small things like keeping a full array of cleaning supplies in both bathrooms and the kitchen so that the need to walk 20 feet to get the Windex is never an issue; having stashes of plastic trash can liners in all rooms, so I can take out a full bag of trash and replace the liner easily right when I notice it; keeping my checkbook on the top of my desk at all times so I can write bills; having a post-it note with my library card number next to my computer so I can renew my books easily. I have also made a point of making certain things more difficult by not keeping the most crave-worthy snacks in the apartment, not keeping my credit card number anywhere near my computer so I have to make a special trip to the other end of the apartment (and dig into a pocket of my backpack that has an annoying zipper) if I want to buy something online, and keeping my list of Internet bookmarks to a minimum so I don't fall into the habit of checking 17 blogs every day. No doubt there are many other things I could do to influence the likelihood of following through on sudden thoughts for the better.

"Use a timer to get back to reality" is a funny one for me, just given my insane borderline super-power ability to judge the passage of time, but it's a good idea for normal humans.

"Do not multi-task" - amen. I basically do not even believe in multi-tasking, which is a method of doing 3 things in a one-quarter-ass way, taking twice as long, all at the same time.

I'm not sure what I could do to "modify [my] environment to eliminate distractions" at this point. I definitely don't keep my email browser open on my computer - even now, when I am goofing off, though with a goal in mind - and am lucky that I no longer have a job that requires me to be ready at any moment to deal with someone else's emergency phone call.

I have not thought of "comparing my actions to my personal values" as a technique to fight procrastination, and it's not that unconsidered action is a value of mine. I suppose this is intended as a way to force oneself to confront the contradictions and motivate change through a cognitive dissonance or self-perception mechanism. But it seems to me that I am putting a lot of effort right now into the things that are most important to me.

The "Take Back Your Brain" site is rather interesting and has a series of posts on Robert Cialdini's excellent book on persuasion. I do not feel particularly jazzed to put the effort into creating an advertising campaign to make myself do the things I am putting off, partly because it seems easier for me personally to just do the things than create this campaign (I might feel differently if I were more into playing around with Photoshop or artistic endeavors) and I don't think I have any big goals that I am not already spending a perhaps crazy amount of time and effort and mental energy working on. If I were to implement this approach, the most likely goal would be to reduce the amount of anxiety and generally mental futzing that I am doing around the whole grad school thing. But given my current state of psychological reactance, and my general sense of things as famously summed up with my outraged statement "How can you say that when you know it isn't true!" and the fact that I think that it is entirely rational to be concerned about how my plans will turn out, it's hard to believe that some advertising campaign around the idea of "Relax, it'll be fine" is likely to be effective; I anticipate a reaction more along the lines of "Fuck you, you patronizing, lying asshole." Anyway, I am too busy (and enjoying too much) channeling my fear of ultimate failure and creative energy into thinking of scenarios for Ally to face in the book I am not writing about a terminal masters program at an obscure school taking a turn for the very strange indeed.

And now it's time for lunch. I'm going to have an omelette, just as I planned, and a little something else, which I will choose when the time comes.