My (Evil) Experiment

Procrastination. It haunts us all. It's the reason I watched "Tron: Legacy" on Wednesday night and finished my CS 303 assignment on Thursday night instead of the other way around. Usually, though, for me procrastination isn't watching a movie when I should be doing work, it's telling myself "just five more minutes of goofing around on the internet before I get started" and watching those five minutes turn into five hours. It's little things that lead to procrastination; things like auto-fill of websites on my address bar make it so simple to waste time that the impulse not to procrastinate doesn't hit me until after I'm already at my destination, by which point it's too late. Even something stupid like having to wait a few extra seconds for a site to load is enough to make me rethink what I'm doing and actually start doing my work instead.

Thus my experiment this quarter will focus on designing a system specifically to cure web-based procrastination, and experimenting with how increasing the friction to accessing procrastination websites affects amount of time spent procrastinating.

Pre-experiment: I will design a simple Google Chrome extension that works as follows. It will be a configurable system that contains a blacklist of websites that are considered procrastination websites: Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, and others that users can themselves add in the subsequent experiment (described below). Depending on the mode, the extension will either do:

• nothing
• disable autofill on those websites
• force users to wait 5 extra seconds before loading
• both disabling autofill and the 5 second wait

It will also monitor how long users spend on these sites and send results to a server that I set up (or just record it in a local logfile that I can retrieve later).

Expreimental design: The experiment will be a within-subjects design. Users will install the Chrome extension on their computer, and for the first week, the "nothing" setting will be enabled, just collecting normal usage data to determine how much these users procrastinate. Then, for the next week of the study, the users will be divided into experimental groups based on the conditions listed above. The blacklist of procrastination sites for each user will be determined by looking at the previous week's results, and seeing if there are any obvious procrastination sites that take up a lot of time for a given user. We will then see how much of a difference the plugin made.

That's all for now. I'm looking forward to it!