I’ve found simply having a video call where they see me at my desk already helps to keep me accountable, and the researcher I do this with has also said it helps her a lot. Is also strangely helpful for anxiety-inducing tasks, as you feel less alone. And like I said above, we combine it with telling each other what we intend to do today, why we are doing that and not something else, and how we will start, which is inherently helpful. Personally, someone actually seeing my screen would stress me out and give me writer’s block and make me feel insecure when calculating, I think.
Even if you do want to share screen, I do not think you would need to share the whole huge screen, depending on what you are working on. If there is a core program you should be using a lot, and in which you should be making visible progress, sharing that might suffice to make it transparent that you are stalling. Or just a particular monitor? When I work with multiple virtual monitors, I often have one that is basically an overview, where I have e.g. my todo app, in which I track what I am working on, and notes on how to break it down into substeps, so seeing that would give a birdseye view of whether I have gotten further, and let them see what I should be working on and whether I have officially task switched when I said I was not going to. And one monitor that essentially has the result on it, e.g. a particular writing project, with other monitors for materials and background search. If you shared the background search monitor, that is plausibly the only one where you are likely to get sucked into online crap.
I’ve found simply having a video call where they see me at my desk already helps to keep me accountable, and the researcher I do this with has also said it helps her a lot. Is also strangely helpful for anxiety-inducing tasks, as you feel less alone. And like I said above, we combine it with telling each other what we intend to do today, why we are doing that and not something else, and how we will start, which is inherently helpful. Personally, someone actually seeing my screen would stress me out and give me writer’s block and make me feel insecure when calculating, I think.
Even if you do want to share screen, I do not think you would need to share the whole huge screen, depending on what you are working on. If there is a core program you should be using a lot, and in which you should be making visible progress, sharing that might suffice to make it transparent that you are stalling. Or just a particular monitor? When I work with multiple virtual monitors, I often have one that is basically an overview, where I have e.g. my todo app, in which I track what I am working on, and notes on how to break it down into substeps, so seeing that would give a birdseye view of whether I have gotten further, and let them see what I should be working on and whether I have officially task switched when I said I was not going to. And one monitor that essentially has the result on it, e.g. a particular writing project, with other monitors for materials and background search. If you shared the background search monitor, that is plausibly the only one where you are likely to get sucked into online crap.