Not a mentoring relationship, but a short plan that should help you avoid most trouble:
Write a check to your roommate for $100. Do not sign it, and leave it pinned on the back of your door, above a calendar. Write all your assignments on that calendar, moved up as far as is reasonable. (For example, if you would do the weekly homework assigned Thursday and due Thursday on Wednesday, i.e. one day before, then write it as due on Friday, i.e. one day after it’s assigned). If your homework is not done* by the date on the calendar, you sign the check, your roommate cashes it, and you replace it with a new one.
As Scott Adams puts it, losers have goals and winners have systems. Focus on setting up the incentives you want for yourself. (The importance of this when choosing friends cannot be stressed enough.)
* Perhaps you work on a problem for an hour and you can’t break through, and you need to ask a friend or professor for help. You may find that a first draft is all you can produce after one day. That’s fine, and this system is more beneficial if that’s the case, as it brings those things out into the open early.
It allows for wider selection of confidants. A roommate might be a trusted friend who’ve you known for a while, it might be a bland personality from craigslist. Further, an offline analog one is subject to conjoleing, conflicts of interests, and lawyering that an online digital system is not subject to. When failure is automatic if you don’t report progress and the money goes to a third party these relational complexities are removed with a scalpel rather than having to be dealt with like a bad itch. By having a person keep taps on you through typing in a URL rather than having to go through to trouble of getting a picture or text everyday you lower the barrier of entry and the amount of work it takes for the system to remain stable.
Not a mentoring relationship, but a short plan that should help you avoid most trouble:
Write a check to your roommate for $100. Do not sign it, and leave it pinned on the back of your door, above a calendar. Write all your assignments on that calendar, moved up as far as is reasonable. (For example, if you would do the weekly homework assigned Thursday and due Thursday on Wednesday, i.e. one day before, then write it as due on Friday, i.e. one day after it’s assigned). If your homework is not done* by the date on the calendar, you sign the check, your roommate cashes it, and you replace it with a new one.
As Scott Adams puts it, losers have goals and winners have systems. Focus on setting up the incentives you want for yourself. (The importance of this when choosing friends cannot be stressed enough.)
* Perhaps you work on a problem for an hour and you can’t break through, and you need to ask a friend or professor for help. You may find that a first draft is all you can produce after one day. That’s fine, and this system is more beneficial if that’s the case, as it brings those things out into the open early.
The disadvantage to this is that it gives your roommate an incentive to distract you.
Yep. But having a compliance officer is helpful more often than not.
It’d be easier to make a beeminder account and just give someone the link to watch your graphs.
Easier, perhaps, but better? I don’t find the incentives from websites to be nearly as strong as the ones from people who live with me.
It allows for wider selection of confidants. A roommate might be a trusted friend who’ve you known for a while, it might be a bland personality from craigslist. Further, an offline analog one is subject to conjoleing, conflicts of interests, and lawyering that an online digital system is not subject to. When failure is automatic if you don’t report progress and the money goes to a third party these relational complexities are removed with a scalpel rather than having to be dealt with like a bad itch. By having a person keep taps on you through typing in a URL rather than having to go through to trouble of getting a picture or text everyday you lower the barrier of entry and the amount of work it takes for the system to remain stable.