Last time, I told you about a simple script I made to collect data about my laptop activity, talked about why collecting data about yourself is a moral imperative, and shared the upgraded script with you alongside my plans for it. Today, I will show you a problem I’ve been tackling, with help of this script and the data it gives, and I also would love to hear your advice on a particular high-level problem I’m facing.
Today’s problem is as old as time – I often can’t focus on tasks I badly need done, even ones I want done for myself. This has been a consistent problem in my life, closing off opportunities, getting me to inadvertently betray my friends and family, hurting my health and well-being, reinforcing a certain sort of learned helplessness, and likely reinforcing itself as it goes, too.
It’s deeply disturbing to sit down fully intending to work on a project, then notice no progress on it hours later, and come to a gut-wrenching realization you’ve had hundreds of such days before – I think this screws with you, on a fundamental level. Over the years, I’ve been squeezing out lessons from this failure mode, making observations, trying out all sorts of advice, in search of a solution.
Join me today in non-invasive brain augmentation and reprogramming, as I continue trying to turn my life around – this time, with help of my laptop, a computer that I already spend a ton of time interfacing with. Ever notice that starting work on a task is often the hardest part of it? It’s the same for me, and I decided to hack away at it.
Staying On Track
As you might recall from the last article, I wrote a program that produces a stream of “currently open window” data – which is a good proxy for “what I’m doing right now”. That looks like a good start for figuring out when I’m planning to do a specific task and end up doing something else entirely!
Starting small, what kind of specific problem could I solve here? Let’s see. There’s a difficulty jump when I’m starting certain kinds of tasks (like writing articles!), but the difficulty lowers a fair bit once I’ve been typing for a few minutes. In that crucial time, it’s way too easy for me to Alt-Tab and get distracted, and not just then – I also become more distractable when I stumble upon a hard-to-write block of text. As you might imagine, Alt-Tabbing when things are hard is the undesirable kind of habit to develop, and I’m concerned that this habit is priming me to give up early when I’m struggling. It’s definitely not the kind of brain wiring I ever wanted to have!
I don’t even notice when I Alt-Tab away from a task I’m not yet focused on. It’s not a conscious reaction – instead, it’s more like a split-second reflex. This concerns me – Alt-Tabbing from a hard task is not something I genuinely think I should do, it’s more of a coping mechanism, and an effective one at that.
The idea to fix this problem was simple – making noises into my headphones when I Alt-Tab into something I’m not supposed to Alt-Tab into, and stopping the noises once I’m back on track, very rudimentary negative feedback. I already rely on headphones to listen to music and videos as I write, so that’s the actuator sorted out.
As for classification, I could classify the windows as I went about it, using hotkeys – unknown windows resulting in a noise by default, requiring me to whitelist windows manually. Whitelisting makes the most sense – there’s an infinite amount of possible distractions, and a limited amount of windows I want to be focused into. An important project was upcoming, and I couldn’t afford to fail it, so I switched into “I must have this ready today” mode and finished it in an evening’s time.
A lot of required building blocks, were things I already had developed by then – for instance, it’s best for me to monitor hotkeys using direct evdev input, instead of DE-provided mechanisms, which are limited, and I had enough code for it written already. As for audio, the usual import pygame trick everyone uses to play short audio clips from Python, was nowhere near quick enough, and didn’t even really let me control audio playback. Instead, I wrote a small proof-of-concept library using gstreamer to play audio files on a whim. I pilfered an online sound effect library a little, arming myself with files like Siren.wav, Martian Scanner.wav and Alarm Alert Effect.wav, then glued the building blocks together, added a simple task tracking system on top, and got a working prototype.
The algorithm currently is simple and effective. Press a hotkey to start a new task or resume a previous one – a task contains a list of “good” windows, and optionally a list of “bad” windows. There’s a global whitelist of known-good windows, containing mostly window titles like New Window - Firefox and Save As. When I open a new window, the system starts beeping at me within half a second – giving me immediate feedback that my Alt-Tab was perhaps uncalled for. As it’s beeping, I have the option to either whitelist a window for this specific task, or blacklist it – the whitelisting stops the beeping immediately, and the latter raises the beeping noise intensity next time I switch to the window again. As I’m working Alt-Tabbing between windows I need, the workplace is, and whenever I switch to a blacklisted window, I instantly get a notification that this particular window switch is not something I want myself to be doing.
Hotkey input, audio output – the system ties into the “flow” state pretty damn well, as long as I am wearing headphones – they are required for this specific augment program. And thankfully, I wear my headphones 24/7 already. Of course, I had to make the algorithm less obtrusive – make the relationship between “current window” and “what I’m doing right now” into a more direct one.
There’s a few heuristics I’ve added, that “normalize” the window name – for instance, Notepad++ adds an * in front of the title if you haven’t yet saved the document, which makes the window title change every time you save your text file, Discord, Gmail and YouTube append unread notification numbers in front of the tab (each in their own way), and GIMP puts the currently open image resolution in the title, which results in plenty of beeps as I’m resizing article images for Hackaday articles. Also, I ended up adding a few of my closest friends’ nicknames into the global whitelist – people I want to make sure I always pay attention to.
Does it Work?
Exceptionally well – I just used this system to write the very words you’re reading, this entire article, and many articles you might’ve read before. The audio files seem to lose their effectiveness over time, but I’ll soon be trying out swapping the files to a different sound – it’s not like there’s a shortage of siren sounds online. As you might noticed, in the end, I’ve built something like Windows Recall, except my program is a thousand times simpler, to its benefit. It is also consensual, open-source, and it actually does something directly useful for me, not to mention that it does not capture any passwords or private messages by accident.
I’ve been using this script for the past few months’ time, and my life is notably better nowadays because of it. Sometimes it’s finishing an article where the conclusion can’t quite seem to come into words, sometimes it’s pushing myself through writing a tricky email I must send out, and sometimes it’s staying in a chatroom with a friend helping them as they’re dealing with some emotional turmoil. Alt-Tabbing away from these situations never helps me or anyone else, somehow, it’s a reflex I ended up with, and I’m hell bent on rooting it out. Slowly, over time, it helps me re-align my life in the way I always wished it to be.
One thing I’ve noticed over time – this project focuses mainly on negative reinforcement. I don’t want to lean into negative reinforcement – it has notable negative consequences. For me, I often don’t want to switch into “task” mode when I’m supposed to work on something. This means that I have to look for various ways to add positive reinforcement sources to my life, and, I’m coming up short. I’ve also noticed that I rarely ever blacklist windows – instead, leaving the even distracting ones in the “beeping” state; associating a distraction window with a more-intense beep is not something I can quite teach myself to do automatically, somehow, even though I adore everything else about the system. There absolutely are methods of positive reinforcement that can work, so not tapping into that feels like a major waste.
I want to ask you all about positive reinforcement – it’s something I am a little baffled about. I strongly suspect that a cultural layer is missing here, because it feels so much easier to think of methods for negative reinforcement than positive reinforcement. Is it that my culture doesn’t treat positive reinforcement with the respect it deserves, or did I get trapped in a self-reinforcing loop because I only knew to put points in a specific skill tree? Maybe a mix of these two, maybe something else, the outcome here is the same – I struggle to come up with positive reinforcement methods, and today’s augment reflects it.
Positive Reinforcement: Gamification?
We have quite a few shining examples of positive reinforcement done right, like videogames – they rely a ton on it, at their core, tapping into fundamental human drives I didn’t even know I had. Some do it a little too well, usually, when money gets involved.
There’s a wealth of material on just how much focus you can extract from someone – the video above is a good introduction. Modern-day mobile games are a well-known offender, to the point where smartphone gaming companies hire behavioural psychology researchers, who then get paid to figure out ways of capturing our attention and converting it into money, hijacking the brains of people most susceptible. The consequences of the mobile game microtransaction-backed reinforcement loops are pretty daunting, and have a close parallel with gambling – from people pushed to recklessly spend their money, to increased suicidality and depression, and most often, significantly reduced ability to achieve tasks in day-to-day life. Remember the perils of external data collection? Once again, large entities wield significant power over us, in ways we barely discuss, and we get none of the benefits – even though we could benefit tremendously if we started to use the same methods.
Videogame-tailored methods sure work well on me, in particular – I’ve spent dozens upon dozens of hours in videogames, feeling pretty fulfilled in life as I go through a list of in-game tasks, or perfect a level time after time. It’s not an unpopular topic, either – you’ll find quite a few open-source solutions trying to tap into it. Where’s my own quest menu, and why can’t I have a quest progression system for my real-life tasks? Why is this system of positive reinforcement reserved to virtual stories that I will forget in a year’s time?
I’ve only started learning about all the yet-unexplored ways of positive reinforcement harnessing, and there’s a ton of them that could work pretty well, and I keep discovering new options – just that they’re harder to think of. Audio feedback works for me well when it comes to noticing unwanted Alt-Tab presses – what about figuring out when I’m doing well, and giving me audio feedback on it too? Tracking time spent in whitelisted windows, together with monitoring typing speed, the system could put pleasant sounds in my headphones as long as I’m focused, reminding me that I’m on the right track, or maybe provide a summary right after. Could this help, or would it be distracting? Can’t know until I finally try them out, one by one.
What about keeping a running-tally summary of what I hack on, and perhaps creating some sort of “streak” or “levelling” system? Maybe, each morning, giving me an overview on how my days went? I’ve written a “productivity calendar” program before, a generator of printable PDFs for each month. Every day, I’d try and write in my day-to-day tasks with a ballpoint pen.
It largely failed to uphold itself – the A4 sheet of paper and a pen were easy to lose track of, given how I move from place to place all the time. It would be pretty simple to repurpose this script, however, putting task summaries into the empty boxes and regenerate it every hour. Say, I have this summary generate & open automatically each morning, right after I wake up – could it help? What about adding messages from the past into the mix? I’m probably jumping ahead a bit too much here – this one’s a whole self-hacking topic of its own.
Once again, sadly, I have committed the sin of not collecting enough data over time – this program, too, needs to grow an API. The bringup of my software stack has been pretty recursive, in a bad way, aimed at solving exactly the problems preventing me from working on it – an uphill climb with no peak in sight. Seems like I really ought to forgive myself for this journey taking years. Exploring new ground, with what feels like barely enough language to describe it, is not a pleasant process, but today’s Alt-Tab Annihilator program has helped me gain a strong foothold that felt long overdue, and it helped me spot a fundamental weakness in the way I learn, too.
Thankfully, I know that I can ask advice from your all. What’s your experiences, ideas, and opinions on positive reinforcement methods? What kind of positive reinforcement methods do you use for yourself, or wish that someone explored?
Fundamentally, doing stuff on computers means that positive reinforcement is hard. If I dig a ditch, the ditch is real, and does a thing. I can go look at it later. There are things one can do on a computer to provide positive reinforcement, but it’s hard because it’s abstract, and it’s REALLY hard to compete with the huge industries that do positive reinforcement on computers (games, social media, etc). My suggestion would be to intentionally do more tangible things.
“Tangible” is an interesting thing – helping others is a pretty tangible goal for me, even if it’s something that happens purely online, and, somehow, leveling up in videogames feels like a pretty tangible thing for me, too. Plus, at this point, I don’t get to pick the “type of things I do” as much – I have a life direction I’m pretty happy with, which does require a list of pretty tangible things from me, yet, those things might not always feel tangible from where I am at different points in time. So, gotta work with what I currently have =D
When I use the word tangible, I’m being literal :) It’s not whether or not it “feels” real or not – the problem you’re having is literally that your feelings aren’t doing what you want them to – so doing some actual real things, not mediated by your computer, seems like good training for your feelings. Helping people is good, whether or not you do it via the computer. But helping them in person or producing physical (tangible!) output, will show the difference between those things, and video game levels.
Compelling theory! So, “activities where I am physically present”. Well, thing is, I get those, and while there are differences, they don’t seem to be meaningful in our context. Plus, sadly, such things are a limited part of the “things happening in my life” range, and I don’t have much control over how much of those I get. If I’m ever going to get a decent increase of such activities, though, would be fun to try and compare, look for any notable differences!
I like to make very tiny tasks in post-it note style tracking software. If the tasks are small enough every 5-10 minutes I can move something to the done column and look back at all I’ve done that day.
Back in the day (ok, not that long ago), when I was still able to work, I found it quite satisfying to log my hours into a project tracking app on my tablet. At the time I was a field tech, and needed to justify the entirety of the day to one or more projects (even if it was just to the shop). Sometimes I filled it in real-time (start a project, come back at the end and stop it, start the next), and sometimes I filled it all in at the end of the day with estimates based on memory, notes, and my phone’s location history.
But something about getting it all into the app, and then filling out the tickets for it at the end of the day was satisfying most days. No idea if that’s because it was my system (we were pretty well left to our own devices, just make sure tickets were done so customers got billed), or if my brain really liked it because I could see what I did in one spot, instead of cryptic notes scattered around a messy notebook and a location track meandering over three counties.
I have made my fair share of tech to help with “productivity”. A phone widget which would show hours left until I hit 80 years of age (meant to scare me into working). Another simple but cool device was the device in the link below, an ESP8266 which would connect to my home server and keep track of how long I worked that day (I had to set it manually, but it worked well enough).
https://imgur.com/a/epOgzOL
Nothing ever worked for me, except
Actually WANTING to finish the job
Minimising distractions
These days I just put my headphones on, listen to some synthwave music on low volume and get the job done. Of course, for that you have to deal with the hardest problem – wanting to do it and not just procrastinate ad infinitum.
oh yeah I remember your comment from the first article!
I don’t believe that “actually wanting” is real. In my experience, it’s an amorphous blob of a concept somewhere alongside “lazy” – it’s never helped me understand how executive function actually works or what actions t taoe. “want” IME is a pretty vague direction modulated by a myriad of factors: current ability of focus, tiredness levels, having the mental context ready, perceived difficulty of the task, emotions associated with the task, and so on. wherever I see “actually want”, it’s usually used to dumb down this complex interplay into a single variable, and I don’t believe that to be useful. Instead, I highly recommend learning what lies underneath.
as for music – absolutely! music can modulate focus pretty wonderfully; I’ve been thinking about hotkey’ing some playlists for a proof-of-concept “focus helper”!
I read (I forget where) that a great deal of willpower or in this case persevering to complete a task is actually dopamine regulation (which is used as a shorthand for attention of concentration in this case I think).
IF I can get interested in an aspect of the task, IF I can reframe or find a way for it to be ‘tasty’ for my brain, then I’ll do it with glee at the determent of other maintenance tasks like eating or drinking (hyperfocus), else, it just fades into the collective beige of the rest of life.
I have yet to find a middle ground.
I often alt-tab away from a task when I have to wait for it to finish (conf. xkcd #303). Because most of such tasks i run in a shell, I made the prompt contain “\a” which makes xterm (and other terminals too) set an urgent hint on its window, which in turn depending on WM makes the window blink or do something else to draw my attention back. Currently I use liquid-prompt which can be configured to print “\a” if a command takes longer than a threshold to complete.
Maybe it’s not a carrot, but it isn’t a stick either.
oh that’s lovely! yeah I’m looking to write my own
beepreplacement; the typical one doesn’t seem to work on new systems. I have surprisingly few “runs for a long time” tasks in my own projects – a lot of my stuff is writing, PCB design, figuring out things together with friends, and so on. However, for such tasks – have you seen xnotify? it’s pretty wonderful, I use it for “get a red warning box in the center of the screen” kind of notifications, and it’s easily scriptable.Does this have an ADHD tag yet?
=D I have gripes with the “ADHD” label, but if it helps, I can tag these articles with ADHD! they have the “ADHD experience” vibe woven throughout, so, hopefully that can help, to think of it
I’ve struggled with the same/similar issues for decades. My kid got an ADD diagnosis a few years ago and medication has helped him a lot. Recently I realized that I was likely dealing with it too, and being on the low dose I’m now on doesn’t fix it every day, but it has improved my focus and average productivity and reduced the un-productive alt-tabbing.
Yeah meds are typically very nice for those who can get them ^~^ I’m not in that category yet, and neither are a fair few of my friends – medical gatekeeping is, sadly, a big problem, and so is stigmatization. On the other hand, computers could surely help =D
Having ADHD and getting things done has been a lifelong struggle. I constantly find myself drawn to more interesting, but lower priority projects at work, than tedious, high priority projects. One pitfall I’ve come to discover for me is when I’m waiting 30 s or more for something to compile, I’ll shift to something else so I’m not “wasting time”, which usually ends up taking 10 min or more to come back. I’m now trying to just sit and wait for 30-60 s compilations to complete, rather than get derailed for many minutes. On the other hand, occasionally I’m able to hyper focus on the project that I should be working on, and I get huge amounts of work done in a relatively short amount of time. That’s pretty rare though.
yeahhhhh this is a big problem, I call it “iteration intervals”, reducing those as much as possible is seriously fruitful. I ended up avoiding such long-winded tasks as much as possible in the kinds of things I do, and making sure my hardware is fast enough that routine tasks don’t take too long of a time. Still, this is a problem for writing and maintaining code tests in a large project I’m hacking on – the iteration interval for running the entire test suite is long enough, I invariably get distracted from the task in the meantime. Next time I get back to it, though, I’m going to try and put a
xnotifycall into an alias and run it like./test.sh; beep– gives me floats-above-all bright red notification bubbles that are pretty hard to miss or accidentally close!“I’m now trying to just sit and wait for 30-60 s compilations to complete”
My colleagues at work used to ask me to monitor some process on SCADA while they adjust some things. I just couldn’t stand and watch water tank level changes so was doing pushups with hands on control panel (you can do a lot of them).
If pushups with hands on your desk would make you stand and get distracted, you can hang fitness expanders behind backrest of your armchair and train sitting every time you wait. You will stay at position, not get distracted too much, time will pass faster and will not be lost (that much) ;-)
I like this! reminds me of the Russian programmer who would do pushups every time code didn’t compile. and, exercise does tend to seriously help with things like ADHD symptoms!
If anyone is interested, I’ve been studying psychology for the past decade or so and have put together a project, on Hackaday.io, to improve motivation.
It presents some of the information we know about motivation and gives it to the reader, and also asks the reader to do exercises that are known to increase motivation. It also uses some psychological tricks to increase motivation, such as priming.
https://hackaday.io/project/180726-motivation
Ironically, I didn’t actually finish that project. Not because I lost interest, but because there was no external interest from others. I know a fair bit about motivation now, I sometimes use the project on myself, but making an entire project that no one else is interested in is a bit of a stretch.
This led me to examine my inner feelings of exactly why I put projects up on .IO in the first place, and has led me to stop documenting my projects on .IO. Some of which are interesting and would probably be written up in the blog, but again if there’s no value for others then there’s little reason for doing so.
(Right now I’m refurbishing a harpsichord, and could easily document my progress and what I’ve found out, how to make the keys smooth and how to voice the jacks and all… but again, why bother?)
Everything is a project, and everything takes time. Writing things up for .IO makes everything two projects, and takes twice as much time.
“Writing things up for .IO makes everything two projects, and takes twice as much time.”
And that’s why documentation of Open Source Software sucks!
B^)
P.s. I’ll stop by your .io later. Though it appears I have to re-register there.
I stopped by, but hackaday.io still won’t let me login.
It doesn’t recognize my password anymore.
oh that’s looking wonderful, I must try that out! DMed you on .io
Sounds like me, both OCD and ADD.
“I prefer to call it CDO, that way the letters are in alphabetical order, as they should be!’
-saw it on a T-shirt?
Being a big fan of 2001’s Black Scorpion TV show and movies, I made a small Pomodoro python script ,so every 25 min I got Michelle Lintel dancing in a two frame gif and the soundtrack To be a hero starts pumping :) followed by the usual 5 min break and so on. Only 3 buttons: start, stop and pause/resume. It works for me and helps to achieve my daily goals both sitting in from of my computer or doing something else at home. Sometimes I joke to myself in the middle of a hard task : why I’m doing this? Oh! yeah because I want to see Michelle lintel dancing for me!
I just watched a YouTube video clip of “Black Scorpion”.
Was it a spin-off of Power Rangers?
More like a female version of Batman series , but the show is quite entertaining, 90’s style way. And both Black Scorpion and the female villains are quite …you know.
Ideas for positive reinforcement for large tasks – break the task into smaller parts, stages, or sections. For these parts (or for small tasks), having a checklist is a good tool – and possibly order the tasks by least estimated time to complete. Ticking off a few small tasks quickly will help get you feeling productive. When you feel productive, you are more likely to survive a longer or more intense task.
Add visual “rewards”:
Think a progress bar, with the major milestones/percentage points marked. As you do more of the task, the bar starts filling up.
Or perhaps have a program that starts off with a basic image, or a colour grid that has been muddled (or has obvious imperfections in it). As you do more of your task, the imperfections start fixing up (or the colours group together on the grid) – windows disk defragment grid comes to mind.
If you wanted to play around with a bit of chemistry and olfactory senses, rewards could come in the form of a whiff of a pleasant aroma. eg (type…type…type….type….get to end of paragraph, and catch a whiff of tropical island scent)
Some people in the comments have mentioned focus music. Perhaps the focus music starts out barely audible, and the more you stay on task, the closer to a comfortable listening volume the music becomes.
You could experiment with different ambient lighting, vibrating pads on your seat or footrest. You could also implement a system where you assign a physical reward for each task (ie for every task you complete, reward yourself with 10mins of youtube watching allowance – to be used at the end of the day). Complete 6 tasks in a day? Let yourself watch youtube stuff for an hour…etc
Looking forward to seeing what ideas you come up with.
When I can’t figure out how to start something, it seems overwhelming, I’ve got no motivation, health wont let me, etc (my normal, sadly), I start looking for the easiest bit of it I can accomplish right now. Doesn’t matter how useful, how far it gets me, I just need to find a piece of it that I can do in my current state. I’ll often find that if I can do just one little bit, I’ll discover quite some time later that I’m much farther into it than expected. Just keep looking for that one bit that can be done now, until the momentum gets going.
This serves me quite well on cleaning and organizing tasks, but works for pretty much anything. I really wish it’s something I had known when I was younger.
Have you looked at Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg? That gives a good analysis of motivation and how to hack it. Might help?
First of all, that was very insightful – I see similar patterns in myself but never even thought about properly analyzing them.
Second, regarding positive reinforcement, Video Games / Grocery Shops often have you collect some kind of points (experience, Dollars spent, whatever) which you collect for a bigger reward (new skills, free Cookies).
Could something similar work as motivation to get tasks done? E.g., for each minute spent in “focus mode” you get x amount of points. For y points, get a few minutes in your favorite Jump’n’Run, collecting z points gets you 20 Minutes of YouTube watching, whatever you enjoy doing.
Now I’m thinking of linking the window name and type speed to a soundtrack.
An inspiring ambient soundtrack for working windows while there’s little to no typing (thinking phases perhaps) and then epic motivational sound to keep you in a flow while typing, with the BPM linked to typing speed.
Kinda like Doom 2016 understood to play and blend soundtracks during and between combat encounters.
To fully gamify ones life would probably require some sort of Quest Master AI to automatically create Quests and Side-Quests from everyday life as you live it. An AI assistant would probably be a good tool for behavioral hacking in general, making sense of the harvested data in near real time, adjusting stimuli to meet the specified behavioral goals.
There is this app “SuperBetter” which aims to increase life quality by means of gamification. I watched an impressive TED talk by inventer Jane McGonigal a long time ago but never tried the app because I didn’t want to share private details with an app. However, she has also written some books. Maybe some more ideas on positive reinforcement can be found there.
oooooh that reminds me of Ultrakill’s dynamic soundtracks! here’s a decent example of those in action.
Yeah, quest-ing things feels super promising! LLMs could indeed be useful to decrease resistance here and there, whether for title generation, or for operationalizing things. As for data processing – well, hope so! It’s been a thorny road so far, there’s a good few failure modes to consider, but hopefully, with enough data collected, people can start making sense of things here and there. I think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit before anyone would even need to involve LLM’s – Apple Health is doing pretty damn good, for example, here’s an impressive usecase I saw just today!
I think some old wise guy once said; “Know Thyself”.
apology not accepted – I do have an entire article on the topic, feel free to bring more substantive criticism by engaging with it
You’re misusing terms from the psychology of learning. If an unwanted action results in something unpleasant (Alt-tabbing creates noises into your headphones) it’s not negative reinforcement, it’s punishment. Negative reinforcement is when an unwanted action results in the removal of something pleasant.
That’s a fair gripe! I don’t aim to use terms in the same way they’re used in other fields – all I felt like I needed here was a dichotomy between “methods for incentivizing a certain behaviour” and “methods for disincentivizing behaviour considered ‘opposite’ of that”. Now, that could be a mistake, of course. Do you have any thoughts on how I could benefit from drawing a distinction between “removal of something pleasant” and “addition of something unpleasant” in the context of the article?
The things we do to manage our ADHD! This one really spoke to me, thanks for sharing your ideas.
interesting article and I thought I’d send you some of my experiences. I know your problem too well.
Digital work in particular produces no visible output. When I work in my garden, I can see what I’ve done at the end. When I do something in my flat, I can see it every day and I’m happy when I use a repaired chair, for example. The book I wrote is now on my bookshelf and I’m always happy when I see it. It’s different with blog posts. They just don’t have that physical presence.
Look at all the research on the topic of ‘alienation of the worker from his work’. We digital people in particular have this because we are too often just a small cog in the machine
Distraction and procrastination usually have a reason. Even technical tricks don’t help students who can’t finish their work. You can do a lot of things, but you can’t trick yourself
If you really have huge problems, see if ADHD is an issue for you.
You’re already doing it, but it’s worth separating your work areas. For example, I have two computers, one set up for work and the other for ‘entertainment’. Then nobody chats to me in a workflow, no emails come in, no notifications, simply because that doesn’t exist on the computer.
Interesting! I’ve had this vague idea of some sort of digital dashboard that might help with motivation, but without the slightest idea of what might go on it beyond “here’s the depressing list of things you still haven’t done, you terrible and lazy person.” Having been down the task list route enough times to know that slapping myself in the face with a detailed list of everything I might never do is just going to demotivate me, I’ve been left with zero ideas.
Some sort of means to track the various things I’ve been up to digitally seems like it might be more useful. Some combination of the window tracking and … hmm. Filtered highlights from my bash history sounds like a scary idea. Ripe for problems and mischief. Yet that’s where a good chunk of my digital productivity is. There and the browser, which is just as likely to be unproductive.
Food for thought anyway. Sounds like an idea that needs to percolate a bit and see if it develops into something.
For me, positive reinforcement is when I finish something, publish or PR it, and wait for the responses.