the boy detective surfaces

So, I succeeded in staying offline for twelve hours. When I finally logged in, less than three minutes after time was up, it felt a little bit like coming up for air.

What I did is I took my phone, my laptop, and the Internet cable for my desktop, and I locked them in the drawer of my filing cabinet. Then I took the key to the filing cabinet and stood on a chair to place it on the top of this high shelf in my office. Then I moved the chair to the opposite side of the room. I understand it would be better if I could just say to myself "Sasha*, stay off the Internet," and have that be sufficient for me stop misusing this device I must use for my work that also happens to be the most wondrous distraction device ever created in the history of man. Instead I must assemble more elaborately engineered strategies for self-restraint. Whatever, it worked.

The actual experience of being off the Internet has been quite pleasant, which may seem weird to say considering the whole problem is my compulsion to be on the Internet. The impetus for this has been a deadline for a paper I'm massively behind on, which is stressful, and yet it's also felt strangely a little like a vacation. Aside from quelling the compulsive checking itself, it also keeps my cognitive space from being colonized by any crises or other developments that can trampoline from my inbox into my brain at any moment if I'm continually monitoring e-mail.

I'm not sure what tomorrow's plan will be. Someone in the comments of the last post mentioned the problem that it's hard to work on the references part of a paper if one is not online. This is correct, and part of what I need to work on the references part. I do want to schedule in one long offline stretch though.

* Apparently Beyonce also refers to her special self as "Sasha." One more point of evidence for the theory that she and I and Sarah Vowell are soulmates.

the boy detective unplugged

I unplugged my computer from the network and went twelve consecutive hours yesterday without checking my e-mail or otherwise using the Internet, whether from that computer, my laptop, or my phone. Sure, I've gone twelve hours without checking my e-mail various times recently, but yesterday was twelve hours in which I actually spent most of the time working on a computer. Superhuman (or, at least, superjeremian) will and essentially constant supervision from Sara was involved.

I'm going to try the same thing today. I've taken care of my e-mails for today and resolved there is nothing that could arrive in my inbox that needs to be dealt with today (or, at least, nothing that has given me fair warning that it could arrive and need to be dealt with today). I feel like I'm taking a last lungful of breath before plunging myself underwater for some David-Blaine-like feat of human endurance.

As regular readers of this blog know, I am seeking more broadly to combat some of my more compulsive tendencies regarding the Internet. Plus I have to get a draft of this paper I'm working on done. So, world, root for me. I will let you know if I succeed or, if I fail, the gory details of my lapse of will.

a couple days ago i posted a good opening paragraph from an article; today, a good opening sentence

"In comparison with research on other psychological problems, research on the nature of procrastination began relatively late, in the 1980s." -- "Procrastination in Academic Settings: General Introduction", Henri C. Schouwenburg, 2004

one way of getting me to read the rest of an article is to have the first paragraph be a capsule summary of a large swath of my life

"In this lecture I shall focus on situations involving repeated decisions with time-inconsistent behavior. Although each choice may be close to maximizing and therefore result in only small losses, the cumulative effect of a series of repeated errors may be quite large. Thus, in my examples, decision makers are quite close to the intelligent, well-informed individuals usually assumed in economic analysis, but cumulatively they make seriously wrong decisions that do not occure in standard textbook economics." -- George A. Akerlof, "Procrastination and Obedience," American Economic Review, 1991.

super kiwi cloak!

Someone has created an improved version of the "Kiwi Cloak" Firefox script that Lucy and I "made" (by doing some simple modifications to someone else's script). The script is an anticrastination tool that works by shutting you out of websites you specify (e.g., GMail) except for a window you specify (e.g., the first ten minutes of the hour). As the person describes the update:

I've updated the script so that it now functions across hours (ie, you can make the window go from :55 to :05). It will also no longer have problems with midnight (for all you night owls). Finally, I cleaned up the "minutes left" errors.

You can find the updated script (as "Super Kiwi Cloak") at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8448.

kiwi cloak: a quasi-coercive anti-websurf-procrastination tool

(locked out of jfw until the top of the next hour)

Web-based procrastinators: Lucy and I modified a script by Gina Trapani that was posted on Lifehacker. That program, called Invisibility Cloak, would allow you to specify sites that your browser would not let you visit until after a certain time of day.

While a fine idea, it's not consistent with how I wanted to rein in certain irksome compulsions of my own (e.g., GMail, Blogger, Bloglines). Instead, what I wanted was a program that would only let me check GMail and other distracting sites for a short period at the beginning of each hour. That is, I wanted a software solution that would help thwart a certain tendency toward mindless alt-tabbing self-distraction. After modifying the Invisibility Cloak script to do this, we couldn't think of a good name for it, so we're calling it Kiwi Cloak, in honor of a mysterious fruit/bird/nation fondness of Lucy's.

If you already know how add-ons for Firefox with Greasemonkey works, just right-click here to install. You can customize the settings (default is a 10 minute window from 6am to 11pm) and the excluded sites within Greasemonkey after installation.

Otherwise, how to use it:

1. Use Firefox. You should be doing this anyway.

2. Install Greasemonkey for Firefox. You should do this anyway if you use Firefox, which you should be doing.

3. Download this script.

4. Modify it to set the desired length at the beginning of the hour (default = 10), the desired window during the day when the restriction is on, (default 6AM - 11PM), and whether or not you want it to work on the weekends (default = yes). You can also set the particular sites you want to be kept from impulsively surfing. You can also this file in Greasemonkey by clicking on the monkey-face icon at the bottom of Firefox, choosing "Manage User Scripts...", choosing "Kiwi Cloak", and then either hitting the Edit button or changing the Included Sites list.

5. Go to "Open File..." in Firefox, and open the file. Click the Install button.

Sure, you can disable the script or disable Greasemonkey, etc., which is why it is only quasi-coercive. However, I've been using it and have found it genuinely effective and not something I try to thwart, since I know I should be able to wait until the top of the hour to check my e-mail. More generally, I'm optimistic that it can help lessen the habit of mindlessly clicking my way into distraction.