Fooling Yourself

I find the most effective tactic is to occasionally unplug the clocks you look at around the house (alarm clock, microwave, etc.) when you’re vaguely aware of the time–say, +/-10 minutes–and reset them to the time you think it is plus 20 minutes. That’s always been pretty effective, at least with the alarm clock due to the grogginess factor. It always takes until the second snooze to remember that I’m not as late as I thought.

There are already some clocks like this called the Probabilistic Clock (http://davidseah.com/blog/a-chindogu-clock-for-procrastinators/) and the Random Watch (http://www.emergenttechcorp.com/randomwatch-description.php). The clock is usually running fast, but how fast changes randomly. Also, the clock will sometimes run slow so that it is harder to mentally adjust to a fast clock.

I read a game theory paper on using this scheme in sports. As teams approach the end of a game they get cagey resulting in a less fun sports game. If instead the length of a game was random they could not afford to start acting in a very cagey way and games would be more entertaining.

The suggestion was for soccer to be 80 minutes + rand[20] known only to the ref to stop defenders kicking the ball to each other for the last minute of the game. I will try find the reference.

Randomly a bit fast or a bit slow would work for me — I would have to assume that it was slow and so I would gain those few minutes; however 95% correct time and 5% ahead would not work for me because I would just think “well, maybe this is one of the times that its ahead,” and so I would actually end up being late more often, not less.

I used to do the something similar before I switched to the iphone as my alarm. I got around the compensation problem by turn my head when I added minutes and just hitting the button randomly, then just walking away. I’d redo the process every few weeks.

I did this back when I was in high school. I would hand my watch to a friend and ask them to set it between 0 and 7 minutes fast, and would use all the self control I had not to look at it until I didn’t know what time it was. I usually assumed it was 0-2 minutes fast, and ended up on time everywhere until I noticed exactly how fast it actually was, when it would be time to have a friend reset it again.

It came back to bite me in college when I stopped wearing a watch and started using a cell phone for a clock that automatically set itself to the correct time. I was conditioned to arriving 2 minutes late for everything, so I’d waltz in to class on time enough to not miss anything but late enough to be awkward.

The randomized watch won’t help much if you have any non-randomized clocks in your home.