Setting one’s clock ahead by 15 minutes is a useful trick for procrastinators. I do this myself with my alarm clock, not that it ever does me any good, in the hopes of being a little bit earlier out of bed. This comment by “Vadi” in Academic Procrastination gave me pause:
If this advancing clock can be done for dates it will be great. Perhaps you have a Calendar that is a day in advance? But somehow that idea still looks far fetched. Any good suggestions?
That does seem far fetched, but I got to thinking about why the “set your clock ahead” trick works. I think it presumes the following:
- You have a terrible sense of time, or are obsessed by last-minute details, either of which cause you to be late.
- You actually do care being on time, but your friends have started keeping a separate timetable just for you thanks to your legendary unreliability.
- Enough awful things have happened because of lateness that you’ve resorted to pre-emptively tricking yourself by advancing the time on all your watches and clocks.
Now, the problem is that you know that I know you know you’ve already set your clock ahead, so you cleverly take this into account and end up being even later. It’s a vicious circle. What we need is a way to channel fear and anxiety positively, while keeping you from getting too comfortable with your clock.
Enter the Procrastinator’s Clock. It’s guaranteed to be up to 15 minutes fast. However, it also speeds up and slows down in an unpredictable manner so you can’t be sure how fast it really is. Furthermore, the clock is guaranteed to not be slow, assuming your computer clock is sync’d with NTP; many computers running Windows and Mac OS X with persistent Internet connections already are.
So why go through all this trouble to make a clock that’s sometimes fast and sometimes not? FEAR, UNCERTAINTY and DOUBT, my friends! If you use this clock to keep appointments and deadlines, and you really care about being on time, you have to assume that the clock might actually be telling the correct time though it’s likely to actually be up to 15 minutes fast. Yikes! All that anxiety should give you a good kick in the pants to get moving, because you can’t really trust the clock to be anything but on time, even though it probably is fast.
Get all that? Click here to try it out. It will open up into a small window.
I offer this clock in the spirit of Chindogu, the Japanese art of creating almost useless objects. Technically, the clock maintains a “time buffer” of “fastness” measured in milliseconds. This buffer is modified every second by a certain amount, either adding or subtracting a number of milliseconds. Every once in a while, the delta value changes and the rate of change may increase or decrease. The time buffer is added to the actual time before the display calculations are made. The whole point of all this is to keep ya guessing as to what the real time is. The clock should be, on average, about 7 minutes fast, but betting on the law of averages in the short term is a good way to screw yourself. So just assume the clock might be on time, but accept it’s probably fast. Since you don’t know if it’s fast by just a few seconds or several minutes, it’s safer to assume the clock really is telling the right time, which is just what you should be thinking :-)
Incidentally, there’s a Procrastinator’s Watch that weights the minutes instead, which is genius. However, it’s far too reliable and therefore relatively easy to “game” by clever procrastinators. To be useful, we really do need a clock that’s reliably unreliable and predictably unpredictable to keep them guessing—and motivated—in the right way.
There are now three versions:
- Web Version (opens in a new popup window)
- PC Executable (ProcrastinatorsClockPC.zip)
- Mac Executable (ProcrastinatorsClockMac.zip)
Enjoy! ;-)
If you liked this, you might find Regift Receipts, Chain Letter Breaking Certificates, Social Yardsticks and Gauntlets of Productivity interesting too. For more serious tools, check out the Printable CEO Series.
UPDATE: For those of you asking for physical versions, I’ve been made aware of a patent already covering the same idea.
Hvatum 
Jesus Presley 
spaggio 
Gnoupi 
I’ve been doing that since I was a kid, and I’m 50. And I learned it from my dad and I don’t know where he picked it up. However the web version is pretty neat – for an old trick.
Great Idea!!!!!
fantastic idea – does it work as a screensaver?
yOU SHOULD make an integrated version into the colck for windows
Is it just me or has the online version of this clock been ahead no less than 14 or 15 minutes for the last 5 days? I haven’t seen it be less than 10 minutes ahead for ages… :-S.
Anyway, I love the idea, but unfortunately we live in a world with way too many clocks… There’s one on my cell phone, on my iPod, in my Instant Messaging client,… :(
Cheers,
Tijl
This is a great idea, and most of the things I was going to say have been said already.
However, as far as I can tell, no one has brought up buses. My schedule revolves around when the bus stops near my house and when it stops near my work. This could easily make me wait in the cold for up to fifteen minutes…..
Good idea though.
Fantastic idea! I’ve tried setting my clocks ahead but as you know, it doesn’t always work.
I’d love to use your program, but it just seems a little unwieldy in its current form for OS X. Could you perhaps make it run on the menu bar to replace the system clock (ideal) or make it a widget?
Cheers.
The most general way to integrate it into other programs on your computer would be to make an NTP proxy. Get the NTP server source code, and drop in the same algorithm you used to dither the time. Then, you just install the NTPPP (NTP Procrastinator’s Proxy) on your machine locally. NTPPP uses an actual-time NTP server, and then serves up a dishonest time.
On each machine you want to lie to you, go into the date and time settings, and tell it to use the NTP server on the computer with NTPPP installed—that would be 127.0.0.1 if it’s the same machine.
Now your computer thinks the dishonest time is the actual time—every clock or time display on the machine will use and display it. Caveats: this could make things like rsync that depend on file times to do synchronization. (For rsync, you’d use the—modify-window=15 flag) You should make sure that the NTPPP software never travels *back* in time (that is, it can dawdle at 10h47m05s for 1100 ms or race through it at 500ms but I wouldn’t allow it to go back to 10h47m04s, as that could cause real trouble with sessions, authentication, samba, etc.).
Great Tool! Any chance of getting it in 24h time format for us spoiled europeans?
great idea!!!
I am a huge fan of chindogu! Nonsensical fun at its finest!
we recently created a series of chindogu videos with everyones favorite actor Shaving Cream Man and posted them on YouTube. Check them out at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ShavingCreamMan
I would love to hear what you guys think. Thanks
I agree with the commenter who requests a menu bar version. I can’t have this giant clock hogging my screen (even with the window shrunk as far as it goes, it’s still way too big)… but it’s a great concept.
Also, in the PM display, the P and M are too close together, making it look like “AM”.
Hi David,
I’m trying to get to he Procrastinator’s Clock, ut at the bottom of the page it keeps saying “Error on Page”.
This clock seems like it would be very useful for me and I’d like to check it out.
Thanks!
It would be really cool if you could make this a gadget for microsoft vista! Then it would just sit and run on my gadget bar!
Here is a fastly done widget for netvibes (and eventually the base for other widgets, netvibes provides it, if someone is motivated) : http://eco.netvibes.com/widgets/295008/procrastinator-s-clock
I started with setting my clocks 10 minutes ahead, then 15, 20, 25, 30… now I have some of them set 20 minutes ahead, some of them just 15, and some of them 45 minutes ahead… I live in the future!
This is pathetic.
Please go all back to normal life.
Greetings, I see there are no comments here for awhile, but I’m working on both a Vista/Win7 sidebar gadget and a modified NTP time server. The sidebar gadget will come first. It’s far less work.
The NTP time server is worth the effort though. This will allow you to sync Windows, Linux, OSX or any other system to display “procrastinator” time. Some phones also allow NTP time synchronization (like Windows Mobile based ones). Since the clock of your computer or phone itself will be fuzzy there will be no need for platform specific gadgets or hiding the default OS clock.
You can then occasionally (every few days) set your watch to match the time displayed on your computer. All in all, if I get it done it should be a very elegant solution.
… And Jesus Presley – you sad troll. If you’ve honestly never been late to anything, then congratulations. Otherwise: Pot, meet kettle.
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