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’m more interested in using the technique than enhancing it or spreading it. Writing special software, making it a product or even evangelizing feels icky because I don’t want to become a self-help guru like pjeby (who used to be a well-known programmer in the Python world), I just want to achieve my own goals. It’s strange and mysterious to me why many other people don’t instinctively avoid roads that are “bad for the karma”.
I was also going to mention pjeby here, in the sense that your experiment is not focused on understanding or curing your procrastination, but a way to punish yourself with shame until anticipating the shame of procrastination-by-internet feels so bad that you avoid procrastination-by-internet.
Which might work, but my other question here was wondering if it merely pushed your procrastination elsewhere—after all you haven’t improved the pressure to work, or removed the pressure to procrastinate, you have only made the computer unavailable for procrastination.
Whereas pjeby’s approach is in removing the mystery of why you are procrastinating, and then fixing it directly.
I’m more interested in using the technique than enhancing it or spreading it.
You did author this post, included “We want this post to actually help people”, and commented with contact details to help spread it to others. That shows some nontrivial interest in spreading it.
[Edited for less aggressive wording, last paragraph].
your experiment is . . . a way to punish yourself with shame until anticipating the shame of procrastination-by-internet feels so bad that you avoid procrastination-by-internet.
Shame is not an essential ingredient in the method. To see this, suppose the monitor has a button which freezes all the applications on the remote machine except for the application for communication between the parties.
I do not know about Vladimir, but the only reason I have not been doing it that way is to avoid the cost (in buying or developing software) of implementation of the button.
Before the internet, the average office contained no distractions more potent than Minesweeper, Solitaire, annoying office mates and gossip with coworkers.
I think of the method as a way to create a place with internet access as free of distractions as a pre-internet office.
your experiment is not focused on understanding or curing your procrastination
There are thousands of software developers, web designers, film directors and other very bright people around the world constantly dreaming up more potent ways of using the internet to grab and keep our attention. Probably nothing in human cultural or genetic evolution prepared us to resist that kind of temptation. Certainly, being able to override an instinctual or habitual response was important in human evolution, but the sort of constant temptation represented by on-demand video sites like Hulu is probably unprecedented.
Consequently, I am disinclined to believe pjeby or any other self-help or productivity expert if they claim that my procrastination stems from a pathology that can be (your word) “cured” and am inclined to believe that procrastination is what you get when you give a normal pathology-free person access to the modern internet.
I am disinclined to believe pjeby or any other self-help or productivity expert if they claim that my procrastination stems from a pathology that can be (your word) “cured”.
s’ok; I did claim it at one point, even sold a product called The Procrastination Cure. (I do not sell it any more, though: despite being 6 CDs in length, it covered only a relatively narrow part of the procrastination spectrum that I’ve discovered since.)
To be clear, though, this is really a language problem. You cannot cure “procrastination”, but you can cure an instance of procrastination, such as an ugh field, an unclear goal, etc.
The monitoring method in the article will work well for some sources/instances, and not for others. It appears to me to be a digitized version of the ADD “body double” tactic, where having another person in the same room (even if not in any way observing or interacting with you) can improve your focus. So, if you have that type of problem with maintaining focus, one would guess that this technique would work well for it.
Despite the increasing forms of addictive distraction on the internet, I have personally observed that when I have some goal that actually interests me, I can go for days without visiting my usual addictive haunts. So, I therefore choose to interpret my desire to visit, say, LW, as an indication that I need to step back and either notice what I’m avoiding, or find a more engaging goal.
See any downsides to the ADD “body double” tactic besides the cost retaining the body double?
If it doesn’t work (because your procrastination has different or additional causes), shame could create an additional ugh field or magnify the one you already have.
(But that risk is common to most anti-akrasia tactics, and the antidote is the same: realize that until this procrastination instance is fixed, you don’t (and can’t) really know what’s causing it.)
Shame is not an essential ingredient in the method. To see this, suppose the monitor has a button which freezes all the applications on the remote machine except for the application for communication between the parties.
That hasn’t helped me see it. It still seems as though, if you didn’t care one bit about someone seeing you timewasting, then the method wouldn’t work, and no amount of screen locking buttons would change that bit. Even if I consider it a friendly cajoling instead of a remote monitoring, it still wouldn’t work if you felt no qualms about ignoring the viewer’s cajoling and carrying on timewasting.
but the sort of constant temptation represented by on-demand video sites like Hulu is probably unprecedented. [..] am inclined to believe that regular procrastination what you get when you give a normal pathology-free person access to the modern internet.
The unprecedented temptation is a nice idea. I want the difference between me and people who can easily ignore it to be a learned behaviour, so I could potentially learn it, but I have no solid support for suggesting that it is. Maybe it isn’t and we are being trapped by addictive superstimulus.
[Edit: I see that I am procrastinating now, but I am not on Hulu, iPlayer or any other attention trap site (as I sometimes do), instead I am alternately reading Less Wrong and pacing up and down the room. This is anecdotal support that it is not the attractiveness of certain carefully designed attention hooks which is causing my (current) procrastination, but instead a repulsion away from what I should be doing.]
Shame is not an essential ingredient in the method. To see this, suppose the monitor has a button which freezes all the applications on the remote machine except for the application for communication between the parties.
That hasn’t helped me see it. It still seems as though, if you didn’t care one bit about someone seeing you timewasting, then the method wouldn’t work, and no amount of screen locking buttons would change that bit.
“The monitor has a button” was a poor choice of words, so I will rephrase.
Suppose the person monitoring me has a way to freeze my computer so that none of my keystrokes or mouse gestures have any effect.
Do you agree that that would give the person monitoring me a way to stop me from using my computer to procrastinate that does not rely on shame?
(It would work better if he had a way to freeze all the apps on my computer except for the app he is using to communicate with me because then he can give me pep talks or negotiate with me while my machine is in the (mostly) frozen state.)
Do you agree that that would give the person monitoring me a way to stop me from using my computer to procrastinate that does not rely on shame?
I do agree. That sounds like a slightly different experiment to the one described in the original post, though—such a system could not fail to work.
I wonder if cousin_it percieves the experiment differently to you—do you agree with his description “”“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.””” ?
(If you wish to try that in your experiment, Dameware Mini Remote Control (dameware.com) has a “lock remote keyboard and mouse” feature, and a 30 day free trial).
Do you want me to tell you how I think the arrangement Vladimir and I have been using produces the effects it does produce?
The short answer is, I do not know. And I doubt I will ever know because why I procrastinate and why this arrangement stops it are probably extremely complicated.
If I had sent you a short explanation the day before the start of the experiment of why I expected the experiment between Vladimir and I to succeed, the explanation would definitely not have contained the word “shame”.
I never felt nearly as ashamed while being watched by V as I felt the last time I procrastinated by watching a show on Hulu in the middle of the day. I have never procrastinated while being watched by V except for “sham procrastination” to verify that V is actually watching.
V and I were still getting to know each other when he started watching me, so of course I wanted to make a good impression on him like I would with any other person who was investing time and effort in getting to know me. My desire to make a good impression definitely affected my choices of what to work on and definitely caused me to try to work at a faster pace while he was watching. (I want to stop trying to work faster because I have read things that make me believe it does not actually make one work faster.)
I am not entirely sure what I want to know either, but how it does produce the effects it does produce are part of it.
Previously the idea of remote monitoring gave me a negative Orwellian feeling. When I first read the book which I quoted in email to you, I was surprised that the author could be comfortable with such a situation, which may be why I remembered it easily. You two doing something similar stood out and I am interested in why you both chose to do it, how well it works and what the cost of reduced procrastination is to you—learned negative feelings about using a computer at all would be a high cost, learned positive feelings about having company while working could be an unintended benefit and pretty much no cost, for instance.
It turned out to be more interesting as you are both two halves of the same experiment and getting similar results out of it, but apparently both doing so via different reasons, and might be considering the experimental purpose differently.
I don’t really have any reason to dig further—thank you for elaborating on it.
I wasn’t suggesting you build the product, it was just an idea. Building a screenshot timer wouldn’t make you a self-help guru anyway, no fear.
I used to read some PJEby python stuff, surprised and personally glad he turned up here, I think he contributes pretty good content while trying to subliminally advertise his product.
It’s strange and mysterious to me why many other people don’t instinctively avoid roads that are “bad for the karma”.
Can you unpack this? I assume you’re still talking about PJ?
I used to read some PJEby python stuff, surprised and personally glad he turned up here, I think he contributes pretty good content while trying to subliminally advertise his product.
That (subliminally advertising our product) is what we all do… PJEby is just someone who happens to be monetising the product too. :)
PJEby is just someone who happens to be monetising the product too.
I would brag about being more-instrumental-than-thou, except that I generally spend more time obsessing over getting things right than I have spent on actually making money.
LessWrong is actually a bit of a mixed bag for my business—participation here has challenged me in lots of interesting ways, and I do end up with the odd customer or two (no pun intended), but for a long time it also had some very nasty negative effects on my ability to communicate confidently or effectively outside LW… not to mention being an attractive place to waste time.
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 someone to act/believe), don’t confuse them with the whole truth.
I think this is the right way for you to operate if you want only to increase the amount of satisfied customers you have (I presume they’ll be satisfied as long as they can feel that you’re making them feel/think/act differently than they would have had you not sold them on new practices).
But you then make it harder for those who are truth-hygienic to listen to you. Of course, you haven’t confessed to anything that wasn’t already apparent in your attempts to help and/or convince people here (while sometimes, like all of us, protecting your feeling of being clever and wise, sometimes in an unwise way).
pjeby (who used to be a well-known programmer in the Python world)
Whaddya mean, “used to be”? ;-) I’m still well-known for far greater evils in the Python world (cough, setuptools, cough) than being a self-help guru, thank you very much.
www.rescuetime.com does something similar—it tracks program names and window titles, and which have the focus, and you can group them into different categories and assign desirability weightings to each category. You can use it personally, or as a group and then see reports on how productive you are day by day against your own productivity measures.
Because it logs everything i do on the computer, at the end of the day i can always check my progress and how much and where my time goes.
I have set goals: 6h of work, 1h of learning a day. And all the activities basically go into 3 large groups: work, fun, learn. It works very very well. At the end of the week it feels nice to check out how much work you have or haven’t done.
I’ve also been experimenting with Rescuetime, with mixed results.
Pros: It makes me more aware of the amount of time I spend procrastinating, and the popup it throws at me after 5 minuates of inactivity can get me back on task if my procrastination takes the form of non-computer stuff.
Cons: I don’t feel like I’m procrastinating less, and my efficiency graphs definitely confirm that impression.
This would be fairly trivial to implement in many different programming languages.
In fact, to lessen bandwidth requirements, you could expand this idea.
Set up your software to take the screenshot and automatically upload it somewhere and share the link via instant message with your watching buddy every X minutes.
I’d vary the amount of time some random amount so that you didn’t start gaming your own system.
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.
I’m more interested in using the technique than enhancing it or spreading it. Writing special software, making it a product or even evangelizing feels icky because I don’t want to become a self-help guru like pjeby (who used to be a well-known programmer in the Python world), I just want to achieve my own goals. It’s strange and mysterious to me why many other people don’t instinctively avoid roads that are “bad for the karma”.
I was also going to mention pjeby here, in the sense that your experiment is not focused on understanding or curing your procrastination, but a way to punish yourself with shame until anticipating the shame of procrastination-by-internet feels so bad that you avoid procrastination-by-internet.
Which might work, but my other question here was wondering if it merely pushed your procrastination elsewhere—after all you haven’t improved the pressure to work, or removed the pressure to procrastinate, you have only made the computer unavailable for procrastination.
Whereas pjeby’s approach is in removing the mystery of why you are procrastinating, and then fixing it directly.
You did author this post, included “We want this post to actually help people”, and commented with contact details to help spread it to others. That shows some nontrivial interest in spreading it.
[Edited for less aggressive wording, last paragraph].
Shame is not an essential ingredient in the method. To see this, suppose the monitor has a button which freezes all the applications on the remote machine except for the application for communication between the parties.
I do not know about Vladimir, but the only reason I have not been doing it that way is to avoid the cost (in buying or developing software) of implementation of the button.
Before the internet, the average office contained no distractions more potent than Minesweeper, Solitaire, annoying office mates and gossip with coworkers.
I think of the method as a way to create a place with internet access as free of distractions as a pre-internet office.
There are thousands of software developers, web designers, film directors and other very bright people around the world constantly dreaming up more potent ways of using the internet to grab and keep our attention. Probably nothing in human cultural or genetic evolution prepared us to resist that kind of temptation. Certainly, being able to override an instinctual or habitual response was important in human evolution, but the sort of constant temptation represented by on-demand video sites like Hulu is probably unprecedented.
Consequently, I am disinclined to believe pjeby or any other self-help or productivity expert if they claim that my procrastination stems from a pathology that can be (your word) “cured” and am inclined to believe that procrastination is what you get when you give a normal pathology-free person access to the modern internet.
I claim quite the opposite, actually.
Want me to delete my “pjeby or”?
s’ok; I did claim it at one point, even sold a product called The Procrastination Cure. (I do not sell it any more, though: despite being 6 CDs in length, it covered only a relatively narrow part of the procrastination spectrum that I’ve discovered since.)
To be clear, though, this is really a language problem. You cannot cure “procrastination”, but you can cure an instance of procrastination, such as an ugh field, an unclear goal, etc.
The monitoring method in the article will work well for some sources/instances, and not for others. It appears to me to be a digitized version of the ADD “body double” tactic, where having another person in the same room (even if not in any way observing or interacting with you) can improve your focus. So, if you have that type of problem with maintaining focus, one would guess that this technique would work well for it.
Despite the increasing forms of addictive distraction on the internet, I have personally observed that when I have some goal that actually interests me, I can go for days without visiting my usual addictive haunts. So, I therefore choose to interpret my desire to visit, say, LW, as an indication that I need to step back and either notice what I’m avoiding, or find a more engaging goal.
Speaking of which… gotta go. ;-)
See any downsides to the ADD “body double” tactic besides the cost of keeping the body double cooperative?
If it doesn’t work (because your procrastination has different or additional causes), shame could create an additional ugh field or magnify the one you already have.
(But that risk is common to most anti-akrasia tactics, and the antidote is the same: realize that until this procrastination instance is fixed, you don’t (and can’t) really know what’s causing it.)
That hasn’t helped me see it. It still seems as though, if you didn’t care one bit about someone seeing you timewasting, then the method wouldn’t work, and no amount of screen locking buttons would change that bit. Even if I consider it a friendly cajoling instead of a remote monitoring, it still wouldn’t work if you felt no qualms about ignoring the viewer’s cajoling and carrying on timewasting.
The unprecedented temptation is a nice idea. I want the difference between me and people who can easily ignore it to be a learned behaviour, so I could potentially learn it, but I have no solid support for suggesting that it is. Maybe it isn’t and we are being trapped by addictive superstimulus.
[Edit: I see that I am procrastinating now, but I am not on Hulu, iPlayer or any other attention trap site (as I sometimes do), instead I am alternately reading Less Wrong and pacing up and down the room. This is anecdotal support that it is not the attractiveness of certain carefully designed attention hooks which is causing my (current) procrastination, but instead a repulsion away from what I should be doing.]
“The monitor has a button” was a poor choice of words, so I will rephrase.
Suppose the person monitoring me has a way to freeze my computer so that none of my keystrokes or mouse gestures have any effect.
Do you agree that that would give the person monitoring me a way to stop me from using my computer to procrastinate that does not rely on shame?
(It would work better if he had a way to freeze all the apps on my computer except for the app he is using to communicate with me because then he can give me pep talks or negotiate with me while my machine is in the (mostly) frozen state.)
I do agree. That sounds like a slightly different experiment to the one described in the original post, though—such a system could not fail to work.
I wonder if cousin_it percieves the experiment differently to you—do you agree with his description “”“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.””” ?
(If you wish to try that in your experiment, Dameware Mini Remote Control (dameware.com) has a “lock remote keyboard and mouse” feature, and a 30 day free trial).
I am not entirely sure what you want to know.
Do you want me to tell you how I think the arrangement Vladimir and I have been using produces the effects it does produce?
The short answer is, I do not know. And I doubt I will ever know because why I procrastinate and why this arrangement stops it are probably extremely complicated.
If I had sent you a short explanation the day before the start of the experiment of why I expected the experiment between Vladimir and I to succeed, the explanation would definitely not have contained the word “shame”.
I never felt nearly as ashamed while being watched by V as I felt the last time I procrastinated by watching a show on Hulu in the middle of the day. I have never procrastinated while being watched by V except for “sham procrastination” to verify that V is actually watching.
V and I were still getting to know each other when he started watching me, so of course I wanted to make a good impression on him like I would with any other person who was investing time and effort in getting to know me. My desire to make a good impression definitely affected my choices of what to work on and definitely caused me to try to work at a faster pace while he was watching. (I want to stop trying to work faster because I have read things that make me believe it does not actually make one work faster.)
I am not entirely sure what I want to know either, but how it does produce the effects it does produce are part of it.
Previously the idea of remote monitoring gave me a negative Orwellian feeling. When I first read the book which I quoted in email to you, I was surprised that the author could be comfortable with such a situation, which may be why I remembered it easily. You two doing something similar stood out and I am interested in why you both chose to do it, how well it works and what the cost of reduced procrastination is to you—learned negative feelings about using a computer at all would be a high cost, learned positive feelings about having company while working could be an unintended benefit and pretty much no cost, for instance.
It turned out to be more interesting as you are both two halves of the same experiment and getting similar results out of it, but apparently both doing so via different reasons, and might be considering the experimental purpose differently.
I don’t really have any reason to dig further—thank you for elaborating on it.
I wasn’t suggesting you build the product, it was just an idea. Building a screenshot timer wouldn’t make you a self-help guru anyway, no fear.
I used to read some PJEby python stuff, surprised and personally glad he turned up here, I think he contributes pretty good content while trying to subliminally advertise his product.
Can you unpack this? I assume you’re still talking about PJ?
That (subliminally advertising our product) is what we all do… PJEby is just someone who happens to be monetising the product too. :)
I would brag about being more-instrumental-than-thou, except that I generally spend more time obsessing over getting things right than I have spent on actually making money.
LessWrong is actually a bit of a mixed bag for my business—participation here has challenged me in lots of interesting ways, and I do end up with the odd customer or two (no pun intended), but for a long time it also had some very nasty negative effects on my ability to communicate confidently or effectively outside LW… not to mention being an attractive place to waste time.
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. ;-)
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 someone to act/believe), don’t confuse them with the whole truth.
I think this is the right way for you to operate if you want only to increase the amount of satisfied customers you have (I presume they’ll be satisfied as long as they can feel that you’re making them feel/think/act differently than they would have had you not sold them on new practices).
But you then make it harder for those who are truth-hygienic to listen to you. Of course, you haven’t confessed to anything that wasn’t already apparent in your attempts to help and/or convince people here (while sometimes, like all of us, protecting your feeling of being clever and wise, sometimes in an unwise way).
Whaddya mean, “used to be”? ;-) I’m still well-known for far greater evils in the Python world (cough, setuptools, cough) than being a self-help guru, thank you very much.
Apologies. My phrasing was very poor. Being a heavy user of Python, of course I know about setuptools.
www.rescuetime.com does something similar—it tracks program names and window titles, and which have the focus, and you can group them into different categories and assign desirability weightings to each category. You can use it personally, or as a group and then see reports on how productive you are day by day against your own productivity measures.
No screenshots, though.
I’m using rescuetime as an eye of sauron.
Because it logs everything i do on the computer, at the end of the day i can always check my progress and how much and where my time goes.
I have set goals: 6h of work, 1h of learning a day. And all the activities basically go into 3 large groups: work, fun, learn. It works very very well. At the end of the week it feels nice to check out how much work you have or haven’t done.
Here is how one of the better days looks like: http://i.imgur.com/zq2dZ.png
I’ve also been experimenting with Rescuetime, with mixed results.
Pros: It makes me more aware of the amount of time I spend procrastinating, and the popup it throws at me after 5 minuates of inactivity can get me back on task if my procrastination takes the form of non-computer stuff.
Cons: I don’t feel like I’m procrastinating less, and my efficiency graphs definitely confirm that impression.
This would be fairly trivial to implement in many different programming languages.
In fact, to lessen bandwidth requirements, you could expand this idea.
Set up your software to take the screenshot and automatically upload it somewhere and share the link via instant message with your watching buddy every X minutes.
I’d vary the amount of time some random amount so that you didn’t start gaming your own system.