# "Buckle up bucko, and get ready for multiple hard cognitive steps."

*The second in a series of bite-sized rationality prompts*[^2dmksz04hwh]*.*

Often, if I'm bouncing off a problem, one issue is that I *intuitively expect the problem to be easy.* My brain loops through my available action space, looking for an action that'll solve the problem. Each action that I can easily see, won't work. I circle around and around the same set of thoughts, not making any progress.

I eventually say to myself "Okay, I seem to be in a hard problem. Time to do some rationality?"

And then, I realize, there's not going to be a single action that solves the problem. It is time to:

a) make a plan, with multiple steps

b) deal with the fact that *many* of those steps will be annoying

and c) notice that I'm not even sure the plan will work, so after completing the next 2-3 steps I will probably have to generate *more* steps (itself an annoying step), and do *those ones too*, over and over, until it is done.

There's a lot of messy details inside the process of "figure out that plan, and continue to adjust it on the fly." But, I find the specific move of "accept that I am in a prolonged, multi-step annoying process" to be very valuable.

Before I do that, every time I run into another annoying subproblem, not only is it object-level annoying, but it feels surprising, jarring. My brain reports "unfair", even though that doesn't really make any sense.  ("What!? Again!!! ARRR! It's not supposed to be like this!")

It's time buckle up, and get ready for a long, bumpy ride.

For me, "Buckling up" is basically a particular specialized kind of [grieving](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gs3vp3ukPbpaEie5L/deliberate-grieving-1). I had hoped I lived in the world where this problem was easy and I could get away with a short burst of effort. Alas, I do not live in that world. I need to let that hope go, and re-orient. I use the word "grieving" to acknowledge a certain weight to it. I think there is shared structure between letting go a loved one who has died, and letting go of a belief that a particular problem is easy. 

It's often kind of psychologically loadbearing to think your problems will be easy. Alas, sometimes, you have to find a different way to be psychologically load-beared.

So I shift my mental (and sometimes physical) posture to one that is ready for a prolonged marathon. I get ready to take breaks and pace myself.

I take a deep breath.

And then I get to work, thinking.

Some examples of the starting points:

*   **Debugging a mysterious problem in a codebase.** I'm flailing around making console.logs, hoping the problem will reveal itself, without making a plan.
*   **Dealing with bureaucracy.** Surely, it shouldn't be that many steps to get a doctor's appointment. Alas, not only is it more than one step to get the doctor's appointment, I maybe need to get *another* one after that.
*   **Navigating a social conflict.** I keep trying to say the one phrase that'll convince them, or smooth everything over. Alas, the social conflict is deep and gnarly and isn't going away. Dealing with it requires modeling multiple steps out.
*   **Building a complex new product.** Sometimes this on a longer scale: surely my initial weekend hackathon prototype is basically working and I can just build the obvious things and ship it and sell it. Alas, my customer's problems are more complex than I realized and I'm going to need to keep asking more questions and modeling new aspects of the situation and iterate significantly on my original idea.

What comes after the "buckle up" move depends on the situation, but often includes taking more breaks, thinking more strategically, and spending more time on "meta."

Triggers
--------

When is it a good time to buckle up? Sometimes structured-procrastination, or circling around a problem obliquely, is a more efficient approach to solving a problem (i.e. mull it over in the background, eventually realize the answer in the shower).

Moments I find particularly good to consider buckling up include:

*   When you've tried the same thing multiple times, especially with a "flailing" sort of feel.
*   When you feel surprised about something being effortful, multiple times in a row.
*   You just kinda of know in your heart that you're not going to get this thing done without buckling.
*   You've tried mulling it over / taking a way / etc, and are still stuck.
*   It's particularly important for it to get done *quickly* (even if background mulling would be more efficient)

Exercises for the Reader
------------------------

The skill here is "notice when it's time to make a difficult, prolonged effort", and then shift into "okay, I'm ready" with as little feet-dragging as you can. 

Note: while I've practiced Buckling Up, I *haven't* practiced "noticing when it's time to Buckle Up", and I'm kinda making up this exercise-for-the-reader on the fly.

My guess is that to seriously practice it would involve remembering a situation where you dragged your feet for awhile before accepting "this is actually hard", and then noticing all the little moments in between the first clue you could have noticed "maybe this is hard", and the final shift towards acceptance. 

(Essentially, the ["Think It Faster"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F9WyMPK4J3JFrxrSA/the-think-it-faster-exercise) exercise for a situation that involved the "buckle up" move, which can take like 30-60 minutes)

Right now you're probably, like, reading this blogpost on your lunch break or in the evening when you're tired. If you want to get 60 seconds of progress on becoming the sort of people who buckle up more smoothly/painlessly, I'd maybe try spending those 60 seconds:

1.  Trying to remember some moment where you bounced around for awhile, before eventually switching to buckled up "okay I'm going to persist on this task" mode
2.  Try to remember as many details about how the transition went as you can
3.  ...idk, let your brain mull it over a bit and see if anything bubbles up.

**Writing it up**

If you're comfortable with it, I'd appreciate people who share their experience of attempting this exercise. (Both so I can see how many people actually attempted it, and what range of things came up when they did?). 

Also, for bonus points: make a public [Fatebook Prediction](https://fatebook.io/) for whether this will turn out to have been a helpful blogpost for you in a year (maybe [using the browser extension](https://fatebook.io/extension) so you can paste the result directly into the comments here. See [Fluent, Cruxy Predictions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wDpXshpakpYDcTtug/fluent-cruxy-predictions-1) for some background conceptgs here)

[^2dmksz04hwh]: This wasn't my original "step 2", but it kept coming up and seemed like it was worth making it's own post.