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.
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.
Catch me in gtalk and we’ll arrange it. vladimir.slepnev@gmail.com
There’s a chat room going that has had around 6 LWers on it for most of the day. I don’t know if screen share is an option, video share is.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gwo/coworking_collaboration_to_combat_akrasia/