Prior Work
I looked at a lot of prior work in the study of procrastination. While my research question is about creating an interface to curb procrastination, I thought it might be important to research the psychology behind procrastination so that's what I did.
"Psychological antecedents of student procrastination," 1988, Beswick et al - This paper found positive correlations between low self-esteem and time spent/frequency of procrastination. The study also uncovered a negative correlation between self-reported procrastination and final course grade (gasp!). I don't think the paper was too helpful in the sense that I'm going for, i.e. addressing the moment of choosing to procrastinate, but it was still a good insight into the things that motivate procrastination on a larger scale.
- "The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure," 2007, Steel. Another paper which addresses macro psychological causes of long-term procrastination but never gets the resolution of what goes through the mind of what drives procrastination in a given instance, the kind of which almost everyone engages in.
- "Choice and Procrastination," 2006, O'Donoghue and Rabin. This one presents an economic model which was pretty interesting, which is about modeling how a person chooses to procrastinate over other possibilities. One of their key insights was that offering too much choice in the number of things one can do at a given time can induce procrastination (i.e. if I have only one homework assignment, I am less likely to procrastinate than if I have ten things to do). Also, more difficult and important tasks are more likely to induce procrastination.
The tl;dr of all these procrastination studies is that procrastination as a long-term and debilitating activity can be tied to a myriad of psychological factors, including depression and low self-esteem. Also, procrastination can be worsened by factors such as too many or too difficult tasks to do, which makes it very easy to just put it off and ignore it in favor of a bit more time spent internet-ing.
- "Speed Matters for Google Web Search," 2009, Brutlag. This one is more immediately relevant to my research topic. Increasing search latency from 100ms to even just 400ms causes a statistically significant drop in the number of searches a user performs. That difference is small enough that no one would really notice it or even really register consciously that Google seems to be going a bit slower than usual, yet still at some level this subtly discourages people from performing more web searches.
Hypothesis: Increasing the latency to access procrastination websites, such as Facebook and Youtube, will lower the amount of times they are accessed by users and ultimately decrease procrastination.
The only factor I will test for is latency; some suggestions were to have a "guilt" factor as well, such as a popup that asks "are you sure you shouldn't be working right now?" every time they try to access a certain site. However, I decided against this because while it is an interesting question I don't want to have too many test conditions and I'm really more interested in whether a subtle effect like latency can have a noticeable impact on behavior.
Experimental Method
I will be writing a simple chrome extension which forces users to wait 2 extra seconds before accessing certain greenlisted sites (they are "greenlisted" and not "blacklisted" because blacklisted implies that the sites are inaccessible or blocked, which they are not. They are just hard to access, just like if there was a thing you wanted on the other side of a swamp it would be hard to access, and swamps are green, so greenlisted). However, my experimental method will be somewhat different than described before. While initially I wanted to conduct a within-subjects test that changed the condition from one week to the next, I realized through class discussion that there might be too many confounding variables for this to be feasible. Too much changes from week to week, and any observations I make might be due to different things entirely (maybe it's closer to finals week, so people procrastinate less, or something).
Instead I will conduct the experiment as follows. I will build the chrome extension so that it will induce latency randomly half the time. So going to a website sometimes leads to an extra 2 second wait, and sometimes goes through like normal. I'll conduct the experiment over hopefully at least 2 weeks, which should be enough to have hundreds to thousands of visits to these types of websites per user and be a large enough sample size. The greenlist of websites will be the same for each user and will be determined by a user survey beforehand to find the most common sites. The browser extension will record each visit to one of these sites, whether or not the delay was induced, and whether or not the user closed the tab or went elsewhere before it loaded. It will also record the length of the visit. This is still a within-subjects design, just different than the one initially proposed.
After collecting data, I will compare the rates of premature quitting on normal page loads versus delayed page loads. Also, I will compare total time spent procrastinating in both modes, to see if there is an appreciable difference here.
Some Anticipated Questions
Why a user survey to determine the greenlist? This is indeed susceptible to gamemanship (i.e. not listing a site they don't want affected), but I think it is preferable to asking for permission to peruse browser history.
Why a 2 second wait? It's kind of arbitrary right now but I wanted it long enough to be perceptible, but not so long that the user might game the system by closing the tab and reopening it again hoping that the delay won't happen. 2 seconds is probably shorter than or of similar length to the expected value of going through all that, whereas 3 seconds might not be. It's mostly a guess for now. Perhaps a pilot study is needed to determine a better value here. It would even be simple for me to code this up and use it myself and get a "feel" for it.
The Future
The experiment I'm doing is very small of course but there is a much larger opportunity here. There are companies such a RescueTime and others whose sole mission is time-related productivity. The reason some of these haven't gained mass adoption is because they require a conscious change in behavior. However if things like latency can induce a change in behavior without any conscious effort on the user's part, that is a big win and could see much wider appeal. Given more time, I'd like to determine the latency "sweet spot" not just from a time perspective but from the other possible roadblocks one could put in towards procrastination: disabling autofill for certain sites, rearranging the order of your windows in the browser to obscure certain sites, de-prioritizing certain applications in alt-tab, etc. I'd like to spend time designing interfaces where certain activities are subtly prioritized over others, but not in a way that really annoys or frustrates.
