Make an appointment with your saner self

byMalcolmOcean 6mo8th Feb 2019No comments


Most people have had the experience of being able to articulate advice that they themselves do not follow, even though it applies to their situation as well. Usually this implies that there's some sort of internal conflict present—a competing commitment that gets in the way of doing the thing that the person might consider reasonable. I have written much on transcending and untangling internal conflict (see these posts) and I will write much more.

But transcending internal conflict can be a lengthy, complex, and non-monotonic process, and in the meantime you're still sitting around with a bunch of great advice you're not taking. A bunch of untapped potential.

There's a really straightforward technique that can help with this:

make an appointment with your saner self.

Put an event on your calendar, and treat it with the respect you'd give any other appointment. Which is to say: show up. Or, if for some reason it turns out you can't, then reschedule for the nearest appropriate time.

Then, when the time comes, take your own advice. You can do this literally—consider what advice you'd give a friend in your situation, then do that—or you can just do the obvious thing. You can do this with specific object-level situations, eg "I need to get around to submitting that application" or with more abstract things like "I really should take more time to reflect on my life."

Or perhaps you've got a technique that you know really helps you, whenever you do it, but you never seem to do it. "If I actually used the CFAR techniques, my life would be way better," said almost every CFAR alumnus ever. Well, make an appointment with your saner self (the one who does the techniques) and then show up and do them.

Ways this can fail (and some suggestions)

Make sure you're clear on what the appointment is. It's okay to leave it open-ended when you make the appointment, but once the appointment starts, don't take more than 5 minutes to figure out how you're going to spend it. Or decide "I'm going to spend it prioritizing". The key is not to let the time slip by while you wonder what the best way to spend it would be. Which of course you probably know on some level. The point of this technique is to tap into what you already know about how you can have a better life.

If you don't have enough self-trust to show up for an appointment if there isn't someone else who'll be left stood-up, then make an appointment with someone else. Feel free to arrange this in the comments below. I've done this with strangers and also old friends I hadn't talked to in years (which was cool!). I recommend just trying a half-hour skype call, with a minute or two of "Hi, this is what I'm going to work on," then a 25-minute focused work period (aka "pomodoro") then a minute or two of "Here's how it went." Then if both of you want, you can continue for more pomodoros, but you're not committing up front to doing it for hours.

Even better, you can make a calendar where people can schedule such calls with you, using Calendly or, share it with your friends, and then little sanity blocks will just automatically appear on your calendar. I did this for awhile and it was great. Each time a call occurred, I just asked "oh, what's some thing I've been putting off?" and I would get started on it.

If you don't have enough self-trust to show up for an appointment if there isn't someone else who'll be left stood-up, but you can't/won't schedule with someone else, then you could also try making a self-trust bet on this. Make sure to set a reminder so the thing doesn't just slip by forgotten.

If you don't have a calendar or any other system that you can rely on at all... get one? Assuming you have a smartphone, you can get it to bug you at a time. You then just need to (a) pick a time that you're likely to be interruptible, and (b) when the timer goes off, actually shift into doing whatever it was you set out to do.

Let's go meta: maybe you already knew about this sort of technique. Maybe you've done it before, or maybe you've suggested it to other people. Do you use it as much as you imagine would be optimal? If not, apply it to itself! Make an appointment right now with your saner self, and use the time to try to set up a regular event, or a like I described above.

If the thing feels burdensome, then... this may not be the technique for you. You want to find a way of thinking about it so that you feel excited to spend time with (i.e. as) your saner self. If you can't find a way to feel excited or at least engaged about it, then it's not worth yelling at yourself about it. That defeats the point. Go read my post on self-referential motivation instead, and see if that helps.

Conceptual scaffolds and logistical scaffolds

The past few years, I've been part of a team hosting an event called the Goal-Crafting Intensive. It was a five-hour online workshop on setting your goals for the year. Ostensibly, the main value of the workshop was the instruction: presentations I made about goal-setting & planning, an 50+ page handbook, and chat-based coaching. Certainly, few people would have paid money for such an event if all three of those aspects had been absent.

And yet... I have a suspicion that the main value of the event was the fact that each participant carved out five hours from their schedule and then actually spent it focused on setting goals for the year.

Which is to say, if I imagine two people...

  • Allie buys the presentation videos and the handbook plus the ability to get some chat-based coaching.
  • Barry buys a ticket to "Open Goal Setting Afternoon" which is just a 5-hour solo-work context of some sort.

Who would have a more goal-directed year?

My money is on Barry.

Why? Our goal-setting content is actually quite good, but Allie would probably never actually open the handbook at all, let alone watch the videos. And even if she did, she would be likely to read it partway and then say, "Hmm yeah I really should do these exercises" ...but still not actually do them.

Whereas Barry, who only has his own advice to take, is at least taking the time to do the best he knows how to do.

And that's what counts. That's why even though the Goal-Crafting Intensive is 5 hours long, only about 10-15 minutes of each hour is presentations. Then I mute my microphone, to give each participant the rest of the hour to focus on whatever seems most important to them—which could be the technique I just described, or it could be something totally different!

We're running the Goal-Crafting Intensive again this year. So if you think your year could be improved by taking 5 hours to set some goals and design some systems, then come join us on Feb 23rd or 24th, and we'll give you both good advice and time to take it.

And I'd love to hear below more techniques for tapping into ones' more rational self.

(Crossposted from