Katy Milkman

So we, we talked about the low level, which is, yeah, like put it on the calendar, get somebody to nag you.

All right, let's up the ante.

The most extreme form of commitment device is literally saying you're going to fine yourself, right?

So basically you need to create a contract that's like, I'm going to have to give $50 to a politician's campaign who I hate if I haven't done this by next Friday.

And now here, there's a couple ways.

One, there are literally websites, I have no affiliation with them, that will...

help you do this there's a website called stick s-t-i-c-k-k.com built by some economists um that will let you put money on the line choose a referee so someone who will hold you accountable and report to the site on whether you successfully rolled those over so someone who you know will be a truthful reporter uh who can check on you

And then, you know, they take your credit card and they have a list of charitable organizations you can say your money is going to go to if you fail.

And P.S., they actually try to choose charities on either side of hot button topics because you kind of don't want a silver lining.

So ideally, you should commit to sending your money somewhere that would really sting if you don't succeed.

That's insane.

And if you don't want to have a middle man, middle person type website involved, you can just do this yourself.

Yeah, do it with your friends, do it with your family, whatever it is.

But the idea there is what we know from research is sometimes we need...

a nanny state kind of situation to get something done.

And like, you can set that up for yourself.

Yeah, I find that sad and silly.

Like, I think it's really smart and clever if you figured out how your operating system works well enough that you can, you know, deal with all the bugs and like get stuff done.

And so I'm like, no, don't think about it that way.

We've got to retrain our minds to be proud of finding the strategies that work.