This looks like a pretty interesting article; although I got bored about halfway through, I did manage to finish.
If they really want to reach people like me, they need to put the top three tips to self control in the lede, instead of at the end:
- For important tasks, leverage peer pressure and your social goals to overcome ego depletion
- Plan out ahead of time not to succumb to specific predictable temptations
- Avoid hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), for example by making a point to not skip meals
A more complicated question is whether to seek out difficult dilemmas to strengthen your medium-term self-control skills, or whether to avoid them to prevent short-term ego depletion. The obvious partial answer to this will be the subject of tomorrow’s post. In the meantime, the lolcats can wait until you’ve fixed that bug.
Tags: Self control