Why You Should Try Making Pacts
Over the last several years I’ve found that the absolute best way to ensure that I actually do something, no matter how big or small, is to make a “pact” that I will accomplish what I set out to. This one weird trick was the catalyst for my receiving a large grant to organize a conference, set me on the path to help develop a new type of vaccine against COVID, and has countless times helped me wake up, stay in shape, and work tirelessly for hours on end. Every single post I’ve ever made on this substack was, I believe, the product of a pact.
A pact has a few key components:
The task. The action that you have to have completed. This is the pact’s “resolution criteria”. It helps to be very precise. You don’t want ambiguity in how the pact resolves. As soon as you agree to a pact, you mind find that you slip into a mindset of trying to find loopholes in the pact’s definition. This is natural, and it’s why specifying the pact well is so important
The deadline. The time by which the pact either expires, and you are no longer bound by it, or the time by which you have to accomplish the task. Pacts that are recurring may both have dates/times as part of the recurring resolution criteria, and have dates on which they expire.
The penalty. The difficult, expensive, or embarrassing thing that you have to do if you fail the pact. For instance: do an arbitrary and difficult chore (like take the SAT). Most often for me, this is sending someone money via Venmo. Often, the penalty involves another individual who is keeping you accountable, or who receives
For example, on March 1st I might write: “I must be out of bed, and have checked off the current date on the calendar in the kitchen with a marker by 9:05am every weekday, or else I have to venmo my friend Alfred $25. This pact lasts until May 1st of this year.”
You can also have pacts that bar you from doing something. For instance, if I’m taking a break during work to watch YouTube, I’ll set a timer and make a quick pact that says “I’m setting a 30 minute timer. When the timer goes off, I have to close YouTube and go back to work by the time the 60 second long timer sound ends, or else I have to venmo my friend Alfred $10”
Surprising Dark Art of Pact-Craft: You don’t even have to tell your pact partner about the pact!
One thing that makes pacts annoying to set up constantly and use repeatedly each day is that you can feel like you’re bugging your pact partner. If you want to be using this mechanism many times a day, this friction can cause you to give up on pacts as a source of externalized willpower altogether.
To solve this, I’ve found it’s possible to make pacts with a pact buddy without even telling them about the pact you’ve made with them. That is, you can quickly specify to yourself, “If I don’t accomplish X by time Y, I have to send my friend Z much money, and if I don’t, that will simply undermine the entire pact edifice I’ve built up, and make me much less accountable to myself going forward.” However, this takes some serious self-discpline built around personal precedent and ritual, which is a muscle that must be built up over time and can wither quickly.
Recursive Pacting Under Duress
Some pacts, especially ones to e.g. complete a project over multiple months, can require a lot of careful thought about resolution criteria, and require detailed specification of the conditions under which the terms of the pact would be accomplished or failed. The “ugh” field associated with spending this time specifying the parameters of a project and its pact can itself become a source of avoidant energy.
I’ve found that the solution to logjammed pacts is just more pacts. When you find yourself in this situation, simply make a pact to have drafted the formal terms of a larger pact by a specific date, and send that interim pact to your accountability buddy instead! This works especially well if you feel genuinely accountable to your buddy, and can compensate for the abstractness of a pact-to-have-a-pact by giving your buddy broad authority over whether or not the pact has resolved. For instance: My parents wanted to embark upon a long, multi-month project to clean out the basement of their house. Specifying the resolution criteria for the pact itself would require lots of inspecting the state of the basement, what all was currently stored in it, and some initial thinking about home re-designing and new storage options. When drafting the terms of the pact itself became an obstacle, I recommended simply making a meta-pact with me that formal terms of the pact would be established within a week, and that if they weren’t they would have to pay me $15 (much smaller than the planned penalty for the larger, complete pact).
I hope this makes you interest in trying making pacts yourself, and I’d be interested in sharing more insights/techniques I’ve learned in designing good goal as a result of thinking about pact-making a lot.