site banner

Wellness Wednesday for October 30, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So, how to defeat akrasia? How does one lengthen their time horizons and truly spend time better?

I think for many people, this is the one clear advantage the structured environment of university/community college has: it takes the long-time-horizon task of "get a degree" and breaks it down into many medium-time-horizon tasks ("this semester, I need to pass those two courses") and short-time-horizon tasks ("this week, I need to hand in these exercises"), and it introduces an element of accountability that these tasks get done within a certain time frame (failing a class).

So if "living up to your potential" means getting a more impressive job and a college degree, start by finding a degree that interests you and find out what its course requirements are. Then work towards getting an associate's degree that shares many of those classes. You can probably do the first few classes online, at night, and not pay much money for them. If that works out, you transfer the credits to a 4 year college and get a bachelor's.

If you're in an industry that works around certifications, you can also start getting a couple of those. Basically same principle, but you might get your company to pay for them and find it easier to work it in around your job.

That's a good point about college which I hadn't considered.

I work in programming so certifications are definitely a thing, might be a good idea to take a day and turn my long-term goal of becoming a cracked programmer into a series of medium-term goals.