Fighting Akrasia Techniques

This is a survey about akrasia, or the weakness of will people often experience where they feel a desire to do one thing and end up doing something else. For example, when you want to eat something healthy but end up eating a tasty dessert instead, that's akrasia. The purpose of this survey is to collect data on what techniques for fighting akrasia work for what people. Don't worry if you've never even tried to fight akrasia before: we need data even from people who have never had a problem with it or never tried to do anything about it. The goal is to find a way to predict what techniques will work best for what people.

Your responses are anonymous, and responses will be shared only in aggregate (i.e. as statistical summaries of responses).

Thank you for your assistance.

Sex

Male
Female

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Age

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Education

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Meyers-Briggs Personality

The next few questions are to find out your Meyers-Briggs Personality type. Since it would be unnecessary to reproduce a whole test here, take the one at http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp if you do not already know your type.

Extraversion/Introversion

E - Extraversion
I - Introversion

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Sensing/Intuition

S - Sensing
N - Intuition

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Thinking/Feeling

T - Thinking
F - Feeling

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Judging/Perceiving

J - Judging
P - Perceiving

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Akrasia Fighting Techniques

The next several questions ask you to rate how well different akrasia fighting techniques have worked for you. If you have not tried a technique, rate it as a 0. If you have tried a technique, rate its effectiveness from 1 to 5, with 1 being not very effective and 5 being very effective.

Scheduling work times

(including blocking times to work on particular things)

	0	1	2	3	4	5
							Very effective

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Using to do lists

(including next action lists, but we'll come back to GTD)

	0	1	2	3	4	5
							Very effective

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Setting financial consequences

for failure to achieve desired actions/goals

	0	1	2	3	4	5
							Very effective

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Setting social consequences

for failure to achieve desired actions/goals

	0	1	2	3	4	5
							Very effective

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Setting physical consequences

for failure to achieve desired actions/goals

	0	1	2	3	4	5
							Very effective

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Setting existential consequences

for failure to achieve desired actions/goals

	0	1	2	3	4	5
							Very effective

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Setting rewards for success

in addition to the "reward" to obtaining a desired outcome

	0	1	2	3	4	5
							Very effective

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Creating special work environments

(wearing particular clothes, working in a particular place, listening to particular music, eating particular food, etc.)

	0	1	2	3	4	5
							Very effective

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Another technique

If you've tried another technique not fitting one of the categories used above, please write in describing it and rating how effective it was at fighting akrasia. This will be used to help refine the survey to provide better/more categories of techniques.

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	1	2	3	4	5
						Very productive

	1	2	3	4	5
						Lots of akrasia