My roommate and I had a no-internet day last week. It worked surprisingly well. One of the key reasons I didn't crumble and turn our router back on was that I wanted my roommate to be productive. It's easy for me to play off my own need to be productive, but I'm less cavalier with the productivity of someone else.
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Facebook status update, Sunday Sept. 26.
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
My soul doesn't always have my best interests at heart.
This guy has a lot of stupid beliefs. It's too bad we have to hear about them because he made one good call.
I know some christians have used similar practices for years to avoid Internet porn.
There's probably more low hanging fruit there, if you can stand the forest.
(Edit: "Accountability Partner" is the phrase they use.
Thanks to rhollerith_dot_com)
This is like pair programming except you don't have to cut your productivity nearly in half.
To clarify: I've always believed that most of the benefit from the practice comes from the fact that work is actually being done for an increased portion of the time in front of the monitor, and that the costs and benefits of discussion roughly balance.
Anecdotal, but my experience of pair programming is that it's incredibly useful for picking up bugs as they are laid down rather than having to dig them up later. Not to say that being monitored working doesn't help, but finding and removing bugs is by far the hardest and most expensive part of programming.
In the spirit of my memento-mori.sh, I've written a script to sleep randomly 0-10 minutes and take a screenshot & webcam shot. Obviously many of the values are specific to my own computer (such as the names in /proc, where in ~/ the pictures are sent to, and the use of ImageMagick, jpegoptim, and OptiPNG), but it should be easy to adapt to your own computer:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
if grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID?/state > /dev/null
then
CURRENT=`date +%s`;
SLEEP=$(( $CURRENT % 10 ))
TIMEOUT="m"
sleep $SLEEP$TIMEOUT
impI'm not sure how ironic I should find it that my procrastination site is now actively discussing anti-procrastination methods. -rela
You get several "clean" hours every day, where you either do work or stay away from the computer - no willpower required. Magic.
How do you feel about working now compared to before? Are you more enthusiastic, or more reluctant? Are you staying away from the computer as a form of procrastination instead of going to it but not working?
A cute idea but no info on whether it'll work more than a month or so: http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i-hired-a-girl-on-craigslist-to-slap-me-in-the-face-and-why-it-quadrupled-my-
I read this and it immediately shouted at me:
"Chatroullette clone"
I'm not entirely sure how this might work. Maybe something along the lines of :
Every 15 minutes a screenshot of your work is sent to a complete stranger. If they think you're procrastinating, they can hit a "horn" button which causes a loud noise to occur on your computer, and broadcasts 5 seconds worth of your reaction.
This would need some impressive anti-troll precautions. Or at least a way to temporarily disable the horn, so nobody can blast it when you're in the middle of a video chat with a client, but then that'd be a source of temptation.
It seems like it'd be obviously worth investing a couple hundred dollars in a second monitor for anyone who wants to do this.
In fact, it seems like it might be worth investing in 2 or 3 monitors anyway... screen space is cheap and might make you more productive? I find myself switching between windows a lot because even minimized windows can take up a lot of screen space.
Enhancement suggestion: time-shifting. Make periodic screenshots and deposit them on the server. Of course this will not work with IM, but the shame factor might just be enough. Plus you can occasionally use "privacy privileges" and delete x% of the screenshots, in case of the obvious.
I could actually see this as a product.
Solo, I've had pretty good results with aggressive leechblock settings. My habitual timesinks are only accessible for a half-hour block each day.
Very cool idea!
Also, don't underestimate the power of working in a library to cut distractions and add a tiny but perceptible social incentive to not slack off.
Sharing a list of running processes and DNS lookups would be more privacy-sensitive. (I have no idea how to implement the latter, but the former could at least be done on Linux, and possibly Windows, using ksysguard) You might not want to share your screen with a random stranger, but would you share process names and DNS lookups? How about open sockets?
I should mention that I've been trying a vaguely similar experiment. I've been using Google Wave to document how I've been spending all my time, and I've given access to these waves to a few friends. Google Wave lets them see these logs as I type them, and add their own comments, in realtime. I was expecting this experiment to have a similar effect as the screen monitoring experiment. I was expecting that if I knew that all the time I've been wasting was documented, and that people could see this, then that would motivate me to waste less time. But it...
This sounds really cool! I would definitely like to do this with someone the next time I am in an entrepreneurial setting and/or working from home.
I should add that both Vladimir and I understand that most people do not want to participate in remote monitoring because of the loss of privacy. Also, if I ever do write software to make remote monitoring more efficient, I will take great pains so that the software is not used to monitor people without their consent. That would probably mean assigning copyright in the software to an individual or a group with a reputation for humaneness and not releasing it under and open-source license.
Your anti-akrasia system is driven by shame? In designing an ideal solution, this wouldn't be one of the must-have features I would add into it.
Any questions are welcome.
Have you considered understanding why you procrastinate and then eliminating that reason?
To quote EY from another context:
"""Explanations are supposed to make you less confused. If you feel like you don't understand something, this indicates a problem - either with you, or your teacher - but at any rate a problem; and you should move to resolve the problem. ""...
Your anti-akrasia system is driven by shame? In designing an ideal solution, this wouldn't be one of the must-have features I would add into it.
Any questions are welcome.
Have you considered understanding why you procrastinate and then eliminating that reason?
To quote EY from another context:
"""Explanations are supposed to make you less confused. If you feel like you don't understand something, this indicates a problem - either with you, or your teacher - but at any rate a problem; and you should move to resolve the problem. ""...
Apologies for tempting you to spend more time here, but what difficulties have you picked up in communicating outside LW?
Mostly , a severe limitation on what I was able to contemplate saying without hearing an internal chorus of critical nitpicking, dismissive, and fully-general counterarguments.
To put it another way, participation in LW greatly strengthened my mental muscles of "defense against learning anything new"... and caused me to waste considerable amounts of time trying to devise workarounds for the defenses.
For communication outside LW, this is a waste of time, since most people's anti-learning defenses are not quite at that "more intelligence makes you stupid" level. (Also, non-LW persons are somewhat less likely to have brains that give them status reward pings for coming up with clever arguments for not learning anything new.)
Of course, for communication on LW, it's also a waste of time. The main difference is that there are plenty of ideas I don't need to communicate here: the loss if I don't say them here is LW's, not mine. Outside LW, though, it's a different story, since I need to be able to teach those ideas to my customers, even if some of them happen to also be LW participants!
So, time wasted on trying to make those communications LW-friendly is a loss for me and my customers -- and even more so if the time wasted doesn't result in any actual creative output. (Which is what usually happens when you engage self-criticism during creative output.)
LW overemphasizes epistemic rationality at the expense of instrumental rationality. But the usefulness of epistemic rationality in helping people actually change is quite limited, since the function of "truth" is only useful if it convinces someone to take effective instrumental actions. (Worse still, if only a person's logical mind is convinced of the "truth", this may not have any effect on their behavior except to increase their frustration with their own behavior!)
So, if you only need to use a technology (not invent or improve on it), then you don't need a "true" theory, just a good enough intuition pump. I've wasted time trying to find ways to demonstrate "truth", that I should've used to build better intuition pumps, instead.
The flip side, of course, is that some of my best intuition pumps in the last couple years have come about in part as a side-effect of (things learned through, or arguments spurred by) LW participation. So, like I said, it's a bit of a mixed bag. ;-)
you don't need a "true" theory, just a good enough intuition pump. I've wasted time trying to find ways to demonstrate "truth", that I should've used to build better intuition pumps, instead
Disclaimer: I am willing to play such tricks on myself in order to get results I want (e.g. - loosely related but too tired to think of a better example - allowing myself to think 'sour grapes'). I'm about to attack that part of us both. Also, I appreciate your honesty.
What you're saying seems to amount to: if you want to make a sale (convince ...
So we (Richard Hollerith and me) tried out my anti-akrasia idea. Actually we've been doing it for more than a week now. Turns out it works just like I thought it would: when you know an actual person is checking your screen at random intervals, and they will IM you whenever you start procrastinating online, and they expect the same from you... you become ashamed of procrastinating online. You get several "clean" hours every day, where you either do work or stay away from the computer - no willpower required. Magic.
Proofpic time! Once we both left our VNC windows open for a while, which resulted in this:
The idea isn't new. I first got it this winter, Alicorn and AdeleneDawner are apparently doing similar things unilaterally, and even Eliezer has been using a watcher while writing his book. I don't know anyone who tried the Orwellian mutual screen capture thing before, but I won't be surprised if a lot of people are already quietly practicing it.
Being watched for the first time didn't make me feel as vulnerable as you'd think, because, realistically, what can the other person glean from my monitor while I work? Random screenfuls of source code? Headings of emails? We don't realize how normal the little details of our lives would look to strangers. In the words of McSweeney's, "chances are, people will understand. Most people are pretty understanding." The experiment did feel weird at first, but it was the expected kind of weird - the feeling you should get when you're genuinely trying something new for the first time, rather than just rehashing. It feels normal now. In fact, I'm already ever-so-slightly worried about becoming dependent on remote monitoring for getting work done. You decide whether that's a good sign.
Passing the microphone to Richard now:
In conclusion, the technique seems to help me a lot, even though it's shifting my sleep pattern to somewhere in between Moscow and California. My current plan is to keep doing it as long as there are willing partners or until my akrasia dissolves by itself (unlikely). The offers I made to other LW users still stand. Richard is in talks with another prospective participant and would like more. We want this post to actually help people. Any questions are welcome.
UPDATE one month later: we're still doing it, and everyone's still welcome to join. Won't update again.