I went through college with almost nothing outside of class work to show for it. Two years later I have a system which I used to get a job in tech without a CS degree, and grow a 1 inch stack of (unedited) writing on my desk. I had been killing my creativity with guilt and pushing myself to no effect.
Non Coercion is about negotiating with your natural desires without guilt. It’s not a magical productivity hack, it’s an emotional hack that can help you be more productive. It’s getting out of your own way, as Michael Ashcroft beautifully puts it.
The way to achieve non coercive productivity is to figure out what you want to do and then do it. This sounds easy, but it’s really hard to distinguish between “want” and “should”. The introspection needed to figure out your actual desires is tough and requires you to take your actions seriously. Read the following thread for more detail.
Working on what you want to work on is essential because otherwise it won’t be good. Learning to live with your feelings and appreciating what the other parts of your brain are telling you can make your work better. Creating while playing at the same time is excellent. On the other hand, forcing and guilting yourself into doing things your soul is opposed to won’t bring results.
“But what about the stuff that I need to do but I don’t like? We can’t all do what we want all the time?” I agree with that, but it’s more about shifting the balance towards fun. It’s about not feeling guilty for not wanting to do things you don’t want to do. Consider what you need to do, it may not be as necessary as you think.
“If I don’t force myself nothing will get done.” I understand this because while making the switch from coercive productivity to non coercive productivity I had a gap where I did almost nothing. It took me a while to begin trusting my instincts. When I realized I needed to do personal projects to get a software job, I made a point to only work on projects I actually wanted to do. This was hard, since I kept feeling the draw towards doing projects that “looked good on the resume,” but I couldn’t get done since they were soul sucking. In that gap, it does feel nerve wracking to have nothing to show for “being lazy”. If you honestly want to do it, it’ll get done. If you don’t, then guiltlessly let it go.
“The work I want to do isn’t considered productive or socially useful.” Judging the usefulness of work is an exceptionally difficult problem. Too many important discoveries have happened by accident or were underappreciated for me to believe that your judgment of your work is correct. Doing something that appeals to you is better than doing something you “should be” doing since it’s more likely to be incredible.
“I’ll just do Hedonic Activity forever.” You can do that, but you’ll get bored pretty quick I bet. At least for most people doing real things which are difficult and multifaceted are more engaging over the long run. In my experience, get the hedonism out, get sick of it, and get back to work. See below tweet.
Non coercion is a concept that’s popular on my corner of twitter, but I think in reading and talking about it a lot, I’ve come up with my own head canon on what it means. This is my interpretation of the principles of non coercion as they’ve best worked for me.
