I have been playing around with life hacking ideas inspired by hyperbolic discounting.
One idea that seems to have worked reasonably well is was the idea that I could get to bed on time better if my computer simply switched itself off at a certain time, with absolutely no way (that I am capable of executing!) to make it work until the morning. I found and paid for a piece of software that does this - isurveillance shutdown timer. Unfortnately, this seems to have just shifted my late night computer use to my android mobile device, though gaming sessions that last till 5am are a thing of the past.
So, I'd like an android app that shuts down your (rooted) android phone if it is ever detected on within a prespecified time window on a particular day - e.g. between 11pm and 6am, with no way for the user to circumvent the shutdown. If the user restarts the phone, it should shut down again immediately when it finds out that the time is not within the specified window.
I have looked for something like this on Google Play, however most offerings will shut down the phone *once*, but it will stay on if you switch it on again.
LW being a community of tech-savvy people, I was wondering whether anyone was interested in building such an app? It probably isn't hard to do if you are already an android developer, and I think it would really improve my life, and possibly the lives of other people. You could even make it a paid app - I'd pay. In fact I will commit to paying $50 for the app if someone develops this app and it works as described. If the community finds it useful, I'd expect there'd be some karma in it too. Alternatively if anyone can *find* such an app, I'd be extremely grateful.
A more advanced version of this would be to lock the phone into "emergency calls only" mode within a specific time window. I don't know how hard that would be to pull off.
This idea might even be good enough to turn into a business - millions of people around the world have the same problem. The requirement to root the device obviously puts something of a dampener on the viability of a business, there may be legal issues with rooting devices as part of a business.
Tasker is an Android app that lets you specify "contexts" (specific states of the phone), and carry out actions depending on these contexts. An example use-case might be something like "when I am connected to my home WiFi network, disable my screen lock".
One of the actions available under Tasker is "Run Shell", which lets you issue shell commands to the underlying operating system. To achieve your desired effect, you could:
This does seem quite hazardous, though. If an emergency happened at 3am, I'm pretty sure I'd want my phone easily available and usable.
ETA: I just Googled to see if there was an existing recipe for this. It turns out Android doesn't have a conventional shutdown terminal command, but does have the "reboot" command, with the switch -p for powering down. Tasker also has a "reboot" under System->Misc, with a power-down option on rooted phones. This can absolutely do what you want it to do. Just don't go having any emergencies between 11 and 6.
Thanks! This will be useful for me as well, it definitely seems better than my current solution: leaving my cell phone locked in my office(EDIT: at work).