When you want to achieve something, the obvious first tool you reach for is discipline—whether you have an actually-available surplus of trained habitual discipline and/or natural willpower….or not.
But discipline is a limited resource, or maybe it’s not, I heard that the ego depletion studies failed to replicate. So judge for yourself, I guess, whether or not it is true of you that you have a daily discipline bar, such that you want to use the least amount of discipline possible for each task, so that you can accomplish more overall. It’s basically true for me. There are ways of making the discipline bar bigger to start with, but still, you want to spend that discipline wisely.
Discipline is definitely vulnerable to goodharting: your target as expressed is unavoidably going to be a proxy for your actual goal. Like, if you set a target of reading fifty books a year, you’ll be tempted to read shorter books, easier books. You’ll be less willing to stop reading books you’ve invested some time in, sunk cost fallacy (and giving up is very very good, we’ll discuss later). You might find yourself rereading less because “rereading doesn’t count” (and also because rereading tends to be more partial and flip-aroundy & harder to list as an accomplishment). But you didn’t set that goal because there’s something fundamentally good about reading fifty books a year. You set it because reading books creates a deeper experience than just reading tweets all the time, helps you learn, etc etc, whyever you read books. And the goal got in the way of that.
Also, this is a little harder to express, but there’s often a tradeoff between the work of discipline and the actual work itself. Like it’s very easy to end up spending time and effort recording, optimizing, etc etc instead of doing. I think the hardest thing sometimes is the easiest thing is just quitting when something isn’t working for you, like shame you didn’t finish a book. Ask what are you doing this for , and is this gonna get you closer to your goal?