Activation Energy is a good model for a lot of things

I forget where I read it but I have not forgotten that sometimes, a task reads as a threat. like, physiologically. Stack of unhandled tickets: menacing workload, guilt for being behind, internal judgment, fear of external judgment … fight or flight. Or difficult task: all the same things.

Or, and this was my own ah-ha moment: losing valuable context on where you are currently. Exiting one activity to start another, in the fear of losing progress and momentum on something you -did- manage to activate on. Not wanting to give up the -previous- victory over inertia.

So one of the many things I can try now (none of which ALWAYS work) is naming the physiological aspect. My body is recoiling as if I’m about to fight a bear. But do I actually see a bear? No. So shake it off

(And move on to the next procrastination complex…)

I quite like the article, but I think it is missing reflection on what other common models are and why activation energy is more helpful.

In practice the model par excellence is the humble linear model - put a bit more effort in, get a bit more result out. Increase the widget budget by 10%, get 10% more widget. People seem to default to that sort of thinking quite readily.

And then obviously if someone applies linear thinking to a fire hazard they're going to get really bad results, because once enough energy has gathered to spark a flame, reducing the available energy by 10% is not going to be enough to get the situation back under control.

There are really important non-linear situations - many involving soft skills. Relationships, reputation, motivation and the like. Having a nonlinear model for them is quite important.

A thing I go back to from the book “Unf*ck Yourself” is a firm identification with things that you have set out to do early on. Rather than saying “I need to exercise.” instead “I exercise.” With that mindset adopted pretty quickly into your campaign any slacking is genuinely you no longer being yourself. A rejection of your identity is stronger activator than a spoken aspiration of a future self that does said thing. Identities are hard to shake.

This reminded me one of PG's article about how to get started when you are not really feeling it on a certain day. You just tell yourself that you will go through what you have done yesterday for 10 minutes. That trick works wonderfully in most cases for me. This small trick, to some degree, helps with that activation energy to start working on what I want to work on.

I have a trick for writing (I used to write tech books) where I allow myself to write one sentence of the current in-progress chapter instead of aiming for anything more. The activation energy for writing one sentence is so low that it's almost easier to do this than make excuses. Once you've written that first sentence... well, it wasn't unusual to sit down to write a sentence and write a couple of chapters instead.

I'm not saying I never found an excuse instead of writing ONE FEEBLE SENTENCE of the damn things, but tricking my stupid brain did work quite often.

A good person to have on a team is someone with high sensitivity and high activation energy. They’re the ones who notice it’s getting stuffy and open a window (or onboarding is a total pain and rewrite it, etc).

I have found satisfaction in thinking about activation multidimensionally (free energy surfaces). It lends the interpretation of reactants trying to escape gravity well-like local minima, crossing marginally more unstable transition states* to reach more stable global minima.

*A misconception is that transition states are local maxima. They are first order saddle points: maxima along one direction but minima along every other direction.

To drive a reaction forward, it doesn't always have to be lowering the transition state energy. Another technique is by destabilizing the resting state. In the analogy, the message would be: to not get too settled into one's comfort zone.

> Some people get disproportionately large AE from negative stuff—they’re highly motivated to avoid bad outcomes. Others find that the big boosts come from positive, “toward” energy, visualizing the things that are exciting and happy.

Oh look, it's Behavioral Activation (BA).

I like Jamie Wong's take on this too: https://jamie-wong.com/post/the-pit/

Along the same lines, tanh-like curves describe a lot of shit across many domains, especially technology. Plateaus due to some fundamental limit, rapid rise after long slow start, then marginal gains become harder.

Both also follow from very simple physical/mathematical arguments. See strogatz book or ken dill's thermo book for example. I'm partial to energy landscape perspective for most everything. Free energy and entropy - entropy balance applies to more than you'd expect if you allow some liberty in interpretation

Im surprised they couldnt find a good pair of activation energy graphs. i think theres good ones everywhere and theyre easy to draw?

This is also a fun contrast with an amazon talk about s3, where increasing checks and trying to avoid errors happening is described as trying to raise the activation energy higher and higher for getting bad data, and how theres diminishing benefits to doing so, vs building anti-entropy tools that find and fix the bugs and bad data

I've always framed that as "Newton's first".

I absolutely loathe the idea of doing the very thing I'll spend tem hours straight on once started.

The subtle difference to TFA's framing is that it's not only harder to start moving, but it also takes mental energy to stop moving.

I'm sure there is a medical condition or two being described here but I'm too lazy to find out.

One of the best things I've done for productivity is to try hard to make execution of todos as automatic as possible. I actually try to imagine myself as a CPU executing instructions with no free will.

when you want something to happen (more):

- increase energy for activation (motivation, habit, …)

- make obstacle lower (break it down, find an onramp, …)

sometimes one is easier than the other

other times working on both is what makes it happen