Why Fining Yourself for Snoozing Usually Fails: A Constructed Q&A

The following is a constructed dialogue, not a transcript of a specific real interview — it works through a few standard behavioral-economics concepts in Q&A form, using a composite “the economist” voice rather than any single named person.

Q: I tried fining myself five dollars every time I snoozed. It worked for four days, then I just stopped doing it. Why?

Because the entity responsible for collecting the fine was the same entity who benefited from not paying it. That’s not a discipline failure — it’s what the system was always going to do. You built an enforcement setup with no separation between the judge and the defendant, and gave both roles to the one person with every incentive to rule in their own favor.

Q: Isn’t that just willpower again, though? Am I not paying myself to have more willpower?

No, and this is the part worth being precise about. You weren’t testing willpower. You were testing present bias — the well-documented tendency, formalized by economists Ted O’Donoghue and Matthew Rabin in a series of papers in the late 1990s, for people to weight immediate costs and rewards more heavily than identical future ones. At 11pm, “pay five dollars if I snooze” feels like an abstract future rule. At 6am, half-asleep, the five dollars is suddenly a very concrete, very avoidable cost, and the person weighing it isn’t the same clear-headed person who set the rule the night before.

Q: So the fine amount was the problem?

Usually not the amount — the enforcement path. A fine only functions as a commitment device if backing out of it costs more than complying, and self-enforcement rarely clears that bar, because you can always just… not enforce it. Nobody’s watching. There’s a reasonably well-known 2012 study by Roland Fryer and colleagues on teacher incentive structures that found loss-framed bonuses outperformed equivalent gain-framed ones — teachers given money upfront that they’d lose if targets weren’t met performed better than teachers promised a bonus for hitting the same targets. The loss framing worked. But it worked because a school administration, not the teachers themselves, controlled whether the money actually got clawed back. Remove that external enforcement and you’d expect the effect to shrink toward zero.

Q: What would actually make a self-imposed fine work, then?

Separate the two roles. Give the enforcement to someone or something that doesn’t share your incentive to look away. That could be an app that automatically donates a pre-loaded amount, since automation doesn’t get tired or feel sympathetic to your excuse. Or it could be a person — a friend who actually collects the five dollars, awkward as that is, precisely because the awkwardness is what makes the enforcement real. Functionally, the money is beside the point, and it’s often the weakest lever anyway — how money penalties stack up against non-monetary ones shows flat fees are the easiest cost to normalize over time. What does the actual work is removing your own ability to be the one who decides, in the moment, whether the rule still applies.

Q: Is there a cheaper version that doesn’t involve money?

Yes, and it works on the same principle. Instead of a financial loss, use a witnessed loss — a visible marker of “I didn’t do the thing,” reported to someone who’d notice, on the same day it happens. It’s a lower-stakes version of the same enforcement-separation idea: what matters isn’t the size of the cost, it’s whether the person recording it has any reason to let it slide. DontSnooze is one version of automating that reporting step, though the same principle works with a much lower-tech setup — a shared spreadsheet, a group chat, anything where the record isn’t something you control alone.

Q: Does this framework explain everything about why people snooze, or is there a gap in it?

There’s a real gap, worth naming rather than glossing over: weak enforcement explains why a specific commitment attempt fails, but it doesn’t fully explain why someone builds a rule they don’t want enforced in the first place. Present bias is a well-established finding, but it’s a description of a decision pattern, not a complete account of motivation — it doesn’t tell you why the 11pm version of a person wants something the 6am version doesn’t. That gap is closer to psychology than economics, and this framework, on its own, doesn’t close it. It just explains why the enforcement people usually reach for is built to fail regardless of what’s underneath it.

Q: Last one — what’s the actual takeaway here?

That “I have no willpower” is usually the wrong diagnosis for a failed self-fine. The more accurate one is closer to a systems problem: you built a rule and gave enforcement authority to the one party guaranteed to have a conflict of interest. Fix the enforcement path, not the resolve.

For the mechanics of the broader category this fits into, the research on commitment devices covers the theory this dialogue only sketches, and the case against relying on willpower to begin with makes a related argument from a different angle entirely.