Uncontrollable Outcomes and Immediate Gratification

I continue to lie on the couch while reading about motivation, self control, and activity. The latest batch of things I've been reading about have been on how to use social and immediate behavioral reinforcement to be more successful at long term goals. Apparently there is always something going on in us called "hyperbolic discounting". This is a very fancy math-based term for how we always prefer the immediate gratification versus the long term goal. An oft cited piece of research is ordering groceries on-line: when ordered for delivery that day, the order is loaded with cookies and snacks. When the same person orders for delivery next week, fruits and vegetables and healthy food dominates. This reflects our future good intentions. There is a constant dialog inside each of us between present me and future me, but present me controls all the actions we take.

This is tied to our difficulty in tying current actions to future outcomes. Today's doughnut will not necessarily affect tomorrow's weight exactly, and just this one has very little impact on our goal weight six months from now. Plus, there is ultimately a very uncertain relationship between eating, activity, and weight- we are not precisely controlled physics experiments. We are learning more and more about how so many more things impact how we take in and use energy and how it translates into fat, muscle and body weight. There is ultimately a long term and imprecise relationship between energy in, energy out, and weight.

But there are many things we can control much more precisely, things which logically will lead to the weight loss outcome. I'm trying to focus on those things I can control in my day-to-day life, and looking for those techniques which make the rewards and consequences of today's choices more immediate and stark.

The 5K run was definitely an epic win. It was a New Year's resolution, and seemed very far off when I signed up for it. If I hadn't been so public about doing it, I certainly would have trained less, especially once the first month or so of enthusiasm and rapid progress had worn off. I probably would have bailed entirely when I got frustrated. But fear of public humiliation is a powerful tool. Still, there were plenty of times when I elected to sit on the couch rather than get down to running. I had plenty of opportunities to make up the time later.

I love technology, and The Internet is filled with plenty of tracking, todo, and goal achievement websites. A recurring theme is to "gamify" the process- make it social, and make it fun, but adopting elements of successful computer games. There is plenty of advice about tying long term goals to short term actions by breaking down big tasks into little ones, and how to apply rewards and penalties. I've just stumbled across a website that has a slightly different take on this: Beeminder. Their plan is to set a long term quantified goal, and then (this is the different part) they plot a course to get there. You then report progress along the way (daily if appropriate), and if you fall off the path along the way-if you defer too much- you have failed and the penalty comes right then. There is clearly a band of variation along a strict path, and you get warning before you fail, but they have some good math behind their ranges and if you fall too far, they have a point where you simply can't get to the end in time.

Their business model is you pledge money for the goal, and you pay them if you fail. They do let you start for free, however, and so I'm playing around with this. Their number one use, of course, is weight loss, but I'm not setting a pounds goal. I'm focussing on things I can do today that I believe will eventually impact that. So, in a very meta use of the tools, I'm starting out to track in Beeminder [link when I'm at a real computer] how successful I am at tracking in WW. This is simply counting how often I track not whether I stay within points. This is very very easy and entirely within my control. But clearly I see a relationship between the tracking and what I eat.

I'll let you know how it goes.