I like coffee
In fact, I like it too much. I find it easy to slip into the habit of having several cups of coffee a day.
This leaves me irritated and restless, it stops me from sleeping properly and it leaves me ‘needing’ a coffee to fully wake up!
That’s why, a while back I decided to cut down on my coffee consumption, particularly at work.
One approach would be to limit myself to one coffee a day. That would solve the restlessness and sleep issues (providing I don’t have it too late!) but I also wanted to avoid ‘needing’ a coffee.
As a result I decided that during the work week (Monday - Friday), I would have coffees only on 3 days. (And of course no more than 1 on those days.)
Furthermore, I decided to randomly pick which days I could have coffee.
Why random?
I could have just picked 3 specific days (e.g. Mon, Wed & Fri), but I wanted to avoid ‘getting used to’ having coffee at a specific time or on a specific day.
This is more of a mental thing (for example: to avoid putting things off until Wednesday, when I know I’m having coffee) than physiological (I assume my body doesn’t have a ‘week clock’).
So I decided that every weekday morning, I’d hit the ‘random’ button on the calculator on my phone (who knew they had random buttons?!) and if it was less than 0.6, I could have a coffee!
(This means that some weeks I would have more than 3, some weeks fewer. But that is great for me as it again avoids a schedule!)
But there was a bigger benefit of trusting the random number. Once I decided that there were no exceptions, it was easy to beat the urge to break the rules and have forbidden coffees.
It’s like having a coach. Elite athletes benefit from coaches because they spot and correct tiny problems in their technique. The rest of us benefit because they shout at us and stop us from doing the wrong thing.
With a coach to make the decision for us, we don’t need to expend as much effort maintaining the discipline. In this case, the random number was the coach. Anything above 0.6 meant no coffee, and it was pointless even thinking about it.
This only works if you trust it completely. There can be no exceptions. Didn’t get much sleep last night? Doesn’t matter. Big meeting later? Doesn’t matter. If you decide that you can, on occasion, overrule “Coach Random” then the spell breaks.
Did it work?
Yes! I managed to cut down coffee a lot. I slept better, I didn’t get restless but most importantly
- I didn’t crave coffee
- I stopped relying on coffee (i.e. I could get through days without having coffee).
So much so that I’m going to try it in other areas.
But I decided to write a script to help me. I did this because:
- I wanted more complex choices (e.g. 3 options instead of two)
- I didn’t want to have to add up the probabilities myself
- I switched to an Android phone and the calculator app doesn’t have a random button
Trust the dice
So I wrote a Python script https://github.com/sujaymansingh/trustthedice.
I called it trustthedice because that sounds catchier than trusttherng.
You can then give it outcomes with individual probabilities, and let it do the arithmetic and picking.
$ trustthedice random --outcome 'Coffee: 3 in 5' --outcome 'No coffee: 2 in 5'
Coffee
$ trustthedice random --outcome 'Coffee: 3 in 5' --outcome 'No coffee: 2 in 5'
Coffee
$ trustthedice random --outcome 'Coffee: 3 in 5' --outcome 'No coffee: 2 in 5'
No coffee
You don’t have to specify all possible outcomes. You can specify one, and then let everything else fall into an ‘otherwise’ category. (Useful because then you don’t need to ensure everything adds up to 1)
$ trustthedice random --outcome 'Coffee: 3 in 5' --otherwise 'No coffee'
Coffee
(I.e. trustthedice knows that the ‘otherwise’ option is whatever probability
is ‘left over’ from the main outcome.)
You can use it to specify more fine-grained options. E.g. you want a 1 in 10 chance of walking all the way to work, a 1 in 3 chance of walking half the way and the other times you take the train:
$ trustthedice random --outcome 'Walk all the way: 1 in 10' --outcome 'Walk half the way: 1 in 3' --otherwise 'Take the train'
Walk half the way
Of course typing these out each time is tedious, so you can save them. (Just
init a project first: this creates a directory called .trustthedice.)
$ trustthedice init
$ trustthedice events save 'weekday-coffee' --outcome 'Coffee: 3 in 5' --otherwise 'No coffee'
$ trustthedice random --from-saved 'weekday-coffee'
Coffee
What next?
I want to start adding this approach to other areas. E.g. going to the gym, what I eat, forcing myself to set aside time for crucial but tedious tasks etc.
I also want to add the ability in the script to log what was generated. (Partly for stats, but also so that there is a concrete record of what the coach decided so that it can’t be disputed :) )