Published on November 7, 2025 8:28 AM GMT

It’s the seventh day of the week. The creator rests while the writer attempts to keep up. It’s been a rough one. Writing takes more hours than I would have imagined, given that I can type dozens of words per minute. Work is barely getting done, at the cost of neglecting sleep, nutrition, and social contacts. I’ve spent only one day doing any kind of outdoor activity, and that activity was eating sugary things. With friends, at least.

I need a break. This is consuming all slack I have. Zero texts ready to use as fillers if I don't have the time to write some day. It will happen, and I need to be prepared. I'm already fully booked for about half of the remaining time. To practice what to do about a new all-consuming habit, I'll do an analysis using Zvi's Out to Get You framework. I'm not sure how useful it is for self-imposed challenges, but I guess we'll see soon. The approaches listed in the post are:

There are four responses to Out to Get You.

You can Get Gone. Walk away. Breathe a sigh of relief.

You can Get Got. Give the thing everything it wants. Pay up, relax, enjoy the show.

You can Get Compact. Find a rule limiting what ‘everything it wants’ means in context. Then Get Got, relax and enjoy the show.

You can Get Ready. Do battle. Get what you want.

The first step is to figure out what exactly is Out to Get Me? Social pressure that I've been building so I don't give up too soon? Pride of a self-imposed challenge? Worry that I'll never amount to anything if I can't even complete one little writing challenge? Shame? The drive for self-actualization? I suppose it's some mix of these.

If your instincts say Get Gone, Get Gone. At worst it is only a small mistake.

My whole body is screaming to stop doing anything productive if it isn't fun literally all the time. Forcing it makes me feel physically sick. It would be a huge mistake to let that stop me, otherwise I'd be killing time 14 hours per day instead of the current 10. This is a desperate effort to do something, anything. I'm not yet willing to consider giving up as an option, by which I mean I've considered quite a bit. How about giving it everything it wants, instead?

What does it want? Definitely not everything. It's not actually all-consuming. One month duration means that after 24 more days, I'm done. 500 words a day, 12 000 in total. Of course some texts will be a bit longer. But I'd be somewhat satisfied even if it all was only lightly-edited stream of consciousness, terminating quickly after the minimum length has been achieved.

You cannot afford to Get Got if the price is not compact. [..] Get Compact when you find a rule you can follow that makes it Worth It to Get Got.

I feel like I'm missing something. Never Get Got, always Get Compact instead? The point of having Get Got as a category is to notice that you're making a mistake and find a limiting rule instead? Although some things already have a built-in max loss, so the thing Out to Get You is compact, so you don't have to be. This only has a rule limiting total duration. I should decide some maximum number of hours per day that I'm allowed to write. Or possibly not per day but per post. Typically I work in long intense bursts with even longer breaks in between, and deviating from this goes against my nature.

There's one more option, Get Ready. I doubt my introspective skills suffice for that. It would probably mean efficiency and fixed routines. It would feel awful. And it would probably work.

The game can be fun. The original activity can be fun. Both at once is rarely fun. Both means multi-tasking and context-switching, plus a radical shift in emotion and tone. Relaxing into cooperative experience is not compatible with battles of wits and tricks. [..] You pay for not Getting Got with time and attention. You master arcane details. Time disappears. You spend parties talking tricks instead of living life. If shower thoughts shift to such places, you are paying a high price.

Well, it's time and attention I'm trying to save anyway, so this isn't the correct way. Unless I'm optimizing for more than just this writing process during this month. There should be a lot more to win if I were to actually optimize what I do daily. But that's fortunately out of scope for today, as the word count is well over 500 already.

“That it’s always going to feel like there’s too much going on, like tomorrow will be a better time, and it never, ever is. We don’t get to live after the work is done – we have to live while we’re doing it, or otherwise we never will.”

• Randi, ASFTV, book 4