tldr; I’ve found success with what I call Anticharities - commitments where you pay money if you fail to meet specific goals. I do this with my friends, but you could be more extreme.

The Problem

A central problem I often have is where I want to control the actions of my future self. This problem can be challenging for a variety of reasons. I’ve experimented with a variety of approaches:

• Trusting my future self - this is rough to get right, especially if you are depending on willpower and hoping for the motivations of your future self to align with yours at the moment
• Setting up daily goals - this works somewhat but falls short for goals like breaking habits or managing compulsive behaviors where success is more about consistent restraint than checking off a task

The Solution

A central dogma in my productivity systems (that I’ve learned from other online blog posts) is that the best productivity systems aim to allow your ideal action to be executed by default. The more willpower or ‘force’ you need to make an action happen, the worse the system is and the more likely it will fail. Combating the inadequacy of willpower, my productivity systems introduce an enormous amount of friction, ideally such that the easiest thing to do is what is best.

The simplest version of this is installing Cold Turkey Blocker so I cannot get on Instagram Reels during the day on my computer.

The better version of this is something I call Anticharities¹. It’s simple:

1. Pick a Goal
2. Pick a Price
3. If Goal not done, pay Price to Someone

This is an extremely versatile tool which has worked wonders for me. Some examples from my life:

• No accessing a specific set of social media platforms for the rest of the day for 100$
• Reading 20 pages of a specific book before I sleep for 50$
• Sending an email that I’ve been procrastinating on for 25$

Where do you give the money to? One super extreme version of an Anticharity is to give your money to a group that you actively dislike - that is where the name Anticharity comes from, where you “donate” your money to a charity you dislike. I’m not sure I recommend this. The version I do instead, and endorse, is to set up an Anticharity with a friend instead.

Why have Anticharities worked for me?

• It puts a price on a specific outcome or goal, which helps make ’not doing it’ seem costly and real in a way that procrastination overlooks
• I am motivated fairly well by loss-aversion, especially with respect to losing money for silly reasons
• It can be flexible enough to fit a wide variety of goals for which there aren’t technological solutions to introduce friction
• The social pressure from telling your friend your Anticharity works well, too
• The motions of establishing goals is also pretty useful, and Anticharities help ‘make the goal real’
• I also suspect that I’ve developed a lot of momentum with Anticharities and don’t have the expectation failing them ²

A nice consequence of Anticharities having worked for me is that I feel a lot more agency. When I trust my ability to do whatever I want, I become far more motivated to be super intentional and clear with what I want.

In some sense, I think Anticharities might be a more natural way of thinking about behavior control. Full-on ‘blocks’ are kind of unnatural - you want to have the flexibility to break a rule if you think it’s important enough! This establishes a price to do so and ensures that the only future versions of you that break it are doing so because they are willing to pay the price you set right now³. So you, via the shared care about your money, are bargaining with your future self - it’s equivalent to your current self saying “hey you in the future, if you don’t do ABC, I will give away $X OF OUR MONEY BWAHAHAHA”⁴.

It’s not perfect but it is good. I do wonder if I should focus more on developing a system that makes me want to do things ‘really, really badly’ in a way that doesn’t force me to bet on it. But for now I’ll keep doing it until I find something better.