长东的笔记
长东的笔记
最近几年，我发现我的拖延症非常严重。这个词也有其它的说法，比如执行力低下。
我曾刷到过一些视频，说将困难的任务，拆分成数量众多的trivial tasks（微不足道的小任务），那么在完成这个任务的时候就会像打游戏那样上瘾——就像你每天登录游戏完成日常任务一样，完成一个任务就获得一次奖励（正反馈），那么你就会无脑地一个一个任务地完成。其实这个游戏本质上就是把最终的大目标帮你拆分成了日常的小任务，引导着你去一步一步完成困难的大目标。
除去这个基本的原则，还有两件事情也逐渐植入我的脑海中：
但是，即便知道这些，我也仍然寸步难行。在真正执行这些方法的时候，仍然出现了一个问题：
怎么拆分任务？
我感觉这是一个类似悖论的东西：如果你知道怎么拆分任务，那代表你知道完成任务的每个步骤是什么，如果你知道每个步骤是什么，那么其实你就知道整个任务该怎么完成，如果你知道怎么完成整个任务，那其实你也就不应该有什么拖延症——之所以拖延，是因为任务很难，大脑发现完成这件事需要付出很多努力，同时，完成的结果不确定，大脑无法判断完成后收益一定大于付出的努力，那么大脑就会替你回避做这件事情。
更麻烦的是，日常中的每件事情都不一样，需要的步骤也大不相同，如果在完成任务之前总是需要为每件事去了解怎么拆分它们，那么这个“拆分”的步骤，也会成为一个让我的大脑回避执行的事情（至少对于目前的我来说是这样）。
文章到这里戛然而止了，我确实也没什么更深的思考。
我把我的想法跟deepseek说了，他说我的说法没大毛病，甚至拆分需要的成本巨大这是个被几乎所有人忽略的严重问题。但他说"知道怎么做"和"能够启动去做"是两件不同的事情，即便不知道一件事该怎么做，也可以通过极小的启动成本让人愿意去开始做，而“探索怎么做”这样的步骤，在启动之后，总是可以作为下一个小步骤来完成。
也就是说，完成任务并不需要拆分到底，不必事先知道怎么做，而是在启动之后，再一步一步探索方法。
也许这是对的吧，但这个方法，我听起来还是觉得很overwhelming（让人窒息）。
下午在油管看到了一个教人“拆解任务”的视频，于是有了这篇博客，最后附上视频的链接和视频转录。
【YouTube - Olga Loiek】HOW TO BECOME ADDICTED TO DOING HARD THINGS (with neuroscience)
You know exactly what you should be doing. You know you should learn that skill, you should work on that project, you should study for that exam, but you still do not do it. But believe me, there is nothing wrong with you, because your brain is literally designed to resist effort. And in this video, I'll explain how it works and the three ways to fix it.
My name is Olga. I study computation and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania. And in this video, I'll break down how you can finally stop fighting your brain so you can easily do the hard tasks that life throws at you.
There's a key distinction that separates people who easily do hard tasks from those who struggle. So people who struggle with hard tasks, they feel a lot of resistance towards the task. And those who do it easily, they feel way less resistance. And they figured out that the solution is to not push yourself harder and use up all of your willpower. The solution is to design your task in a way that your brain actually wants to do it, that your brain doesn't feel intimidated by the task. But how is that even possible? Well, first we have to understand how your brain handles hard tasks in the first place.
And there are two systems for handling tasks. The first one is your basal ganglia. And it basically handles all of the automatic behaviors, such as brushing your teeth, because you stand up, you brush your teeth, and you don't actually think about the angle of the brush. You don't think about how much pressure to apply, where to start. It's basically an automatic behavior for you that doesn't require any conscious decision-making. For example, if you were to drive a car, if you drove a car for a while, you're going to find it very easy and automatic. But if you just started learning how to drive a car, that would require a lot of conscious decision-making.
And that brings me to my second system, and it's the prefrontal cortex, which is located right behind your forehead. And essentially your prefrontal cortex is responsible for all the actions that require conscious decision-making and conscious effort. For example, when you're writing an essay or learning a new skill or you're working on a project that you've never done before, these tasks require a lot of conscious effort. And your brain doesn't really want to use the prefrontal cortex too much because if you use it a lot, if you work for a very long time on something very difficult, it causes mental exhaustion.
So when you think about actually doing the task, your brain runs a cost-to-benefit calculation. It essentially analyzes whether the reward that I'm going to get from doing this task is worth the effort that I'm going to put into it. And there's a model that shows exactly how this works, which is called the Fogg behavioral model, which was developed at Stanford. So you have two axes, and on one side you see how much effort the task requires. But on the other side, you see how much reward your brain expects right now. And there's a threshold line between them, which is the action line. So if the reward exceeds the effort for a specific task, your brain says yes and you do it easily. But if the effort exceeds the reward, your brain says no and you feel that resistance. This is why scrolling TikTok is so easy, because it's almost zero effort and you get immediate reward. But if you were to read a textbook, for example, that would require a lot of effort and distant reward, because you're not going to immediately feel the benefit of reading a textbook. But the thing is, you cannot actually control how much immediate reward a task is going to give you. But you can easily control how much effort it requires by intelligently designing your tasks.
So the first thing you can design is you can design the size of the task, and essentially you have to make every step of the task absurdly small so it feels very achievable. For example, when I would be dreading something or I'd be scared to do something, I would make this long checklist of things I have to do to accomplish a certain task. For example, when I was making my first ever YouTube video, it felt very big to me and it felt very scary. So I essentially made this long checklist where number one, I have to open my computer; two, open Google Document; three, write 10 possible titles; four, brainstorm for 20 minutes ideas for the video. Like, I know it sounds simplistic, but think about video games for a second. Video game designers, they understand human psychology better than any psychologist in the world. They're not going to make you fight a final boss on level one, because they're going to cut the whole game into small achievable chunks, small achievable levels. And every time you complete a level, you can move on to the next one and you feel that sense of accomplishment and you feel that sense of drive to keep going. And this is how people accomplish extreme things.
So Kelly McGonigal is a researcher and psychologist at Stanford, and she writes about ultramarathon runners, and these people are crazy. They run for hundreds of kilometers through rain, through mountains, for days. It requires a lot of grit. Every single one of them reaches a point where they cannot continue. And they all describe the same mental strategy that they use to keep going. And the strategy is to stop thinking about the finish line, to focus just on one single step at a time. And you then take that step. You feel a little bit of a sense of accomplishment. And then you can think, oh, I just did this step, so I can do another one. And that's how people run hundreds of kilometers, one step at a time.
And the second thing you can design is you can design how the task feels, whether it feels like an obligation or whether it feels like a choice. And think about the difference between these two sentences. And the first one is "I have to complete this project" versus "I choose to complete this project." Like, even though you have the same exact task that requires the same amount of effort, both of them, they feel completely different. When you feel like something is your choice, you engage more deeply with it. You persist longer and you actually end up enjoying it more. But when you feel forced to do something, your brain generates that resistance. So when you think "I have to write this essay," your brain treats it as an obligation and it pushes back against it. But when you think "I choose to write this essay right now so that I can have the rest of my evening free," this is treated like a decision that you made yourself, because your brain doesn't actually resist hard work. It resists the work that feels imposed, even if you were the one imposing it.
And the third thing you can do is you can design the commitment itself. Because we start things all the time, but the question is how do you stick with it long enough so it actually leads somewhere? Imagine you're learning a new skill for your career, like coding or design. You feel excited for the first few days, but then you skip one lesson. Then you skip another lesson. And eventually you abandon it. And now it becomes another thing on the big pile of things that you started but never finished, which makes you feel like you're a person who cannot follow through with your commitment. And it makes the next hard task even heavier for you. And there's a framework that massively helps with this. And neuroscientist Laura Kon, in her book Tiny Experiments, she talks about creating a pact with yourself. And a pact is essentially a commitment to do a certain action for a certain duration. So for example, I choose to study coding for 30 minutes a day for the next two weeks. I choose to go to the gym three times a week for one month. I choose to read for 20 minutes before bed for one week. And you should keep in mind that in these tiny experiments, you're not actually trying to succeed. You're trying to experiment with something, and you have to commit to actually completing it. A very important thing is that the commitment, the pact, has to be short and it should feel achievable. So it shouldn't be like, oh, I'm going to go exercise every day for the next year. No, that has to be a few weeks or a few months, let's say. So you create this pact with yourself, and once you're done with the pact, you feel like, oh, I actually completed what I set out to do. And every time you complete one of these experiments, your brain tells you that you're actually the person who follows through and you can actually complete hard tasks.
And actually, I'm doing this right now. So I've been wanting to learn more about how AI works. So I decided to create a pact for myself. And my pact is: study the course called How AI Works, which is a course on Brilliant, for 2 hours a week for 3 weeks. That's my pact. And what I love about Brilliant is that instead of long and passive lectures, I learn by interactively solving problems. Each lesson is small and self-contained. So I work through one concept. I get immediate feedback, and before I realize it, I understand the concept that felt intimidating to me 5 minutes ago. Brilliant helps you build real skills in math, coding, data science, AI, with courses that are designed by educators from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, for anyone from age 10 years old to 110 years old. I just love that it makes you learn concepts by actively solving problems instead of just passively giving you information. To learn for free on Brilliant for a full 30 days, go to brilliant.org/olgayic or you can also click the link in my description or scan this QR code on screen. Brilliant has also given my viewers 20% off their annual premium subscription, which gives you unlimited access to everything on Brilliant. And thank you to Brilliant for sponsoring this video.
So to recap, if you're facing a difficult task, design the task to be small enough so that your brain doesn't feel intimidated by it. Secondly, design the framing of the task so that you feel like you chose it yourself and it wasn't imposed on you. And thirdly, design the commitment itself by running these tiny experiments. Hard things do not become easy because you force yourself to do them. They become easy because you design the right conditions for your brain to cooperate.
So that's it. Thank you for watching, and subscribe if this helped. And guys, dreams come true, because I just got 100,000 subscribers and I cannot describe to you how grateful I am to be able to share my thoughts with 100,000 of you. And this video actually was inspired by a lot of comments that you wrote about video suggestions. So I take all of the suggestions very seriously. So do let me know in the comments. I keep making videos. I want to make more. And let me know what other ideas you have. Thank you.