Anti-akrasia remote monitoring experiment

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.

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)

It's about time someone made an antidote to TV Tropes.

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.

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
    import -quality 100 -window root png:$HOME/photos/webcam/xwd-$CURRENT.png
    fswebcam --resolution 1280x1024 -S 2 -F 3 ~/photos/webcam/$CURRENT.jpg
    optipng -o9 -fix `ls -t ~/photos/webcam/*.png | head -1`
    jpegoptim -m50 `ls -t ~/photos/webcam/*.jpg | head -1`
fi

This would be called from one's crontab like so:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * ~/bin/bin/sousveillance.sh

My original script ran every hour on the hour, but I discovered that this was so predictable that I was beginning to work-around it by switching to a more kosher good-looking application, and wasn't frequent enough anyway. Hopefully the randomized version will work better.

I'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.

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.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476/

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 ended up not having any noticeable effect on how much time I wasted. There was usually at least one person reading the day's log, but noone ever commented about the wasted time, or made any suggestions about how to waste less time. Even when I wrote "I am wasting time now. Someone please tell me to stop wasting time." Maybe that's why this experiment was a failure.

Yes, I know that Google Wave will be discontinued soon. And so I'll be moving this experiment to Google Documents instead.

I'm still continuing to write these logs, even though they have been less helpful than I had hoped.

Oh, and I am interested in trying that screen monitoring experiment, if anyone else is interested in trying it with me. Though I'll only be available on evenings and weekends, Central Time.

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. """

This mutuwell isn't helping you move to understand or resolve the problem, it's only helping you patch the problem while you try to carry on ignoring it.

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.

Peter Cochrance, former head of research at BT, describes a related system in his book 101 Tips for Time Travellers, where he experimented with putting a webcam in his office so anyone could see what he was doing at any time. Not quite mutual, but similarly based on the idea of being watched by someone other than an immediate supervisor as an alternate way of working.

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. """

This mutuwell isn't helping you move to understand or resolve the problem, it's only helping you patch the problem while you try to carry on ignoring it.

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.

Peter Cochrance, former head of research at BT, describes a related system in his book 101 Tips for Time Travellers, where he experimented with putting a webcam in his office so anyone could see what he was doing at any time. Not quite mutual, but similarly based on the idea of being watched by someone other than an immediate supervisor as an alternate way of working.

Ignore this.

(Test of the RSS feed of this post.)