procrastination

I’ve been reading David Seah’s blog for a while now - it’s a fascinating mix of organizational tools, productivity ideas, and the ramblings of a mind that remind me a lot of my own thought processes. (He should be afraid. Very afraid)

During today’s browsing, I ran across a fun bit of software he’s made available: The Procrastinator’s Clock

It’s based on the old “set your clock 15 minutes ahead” trick to keep procrastinators from being late. That never works, of course, because really dedicated procrastinators (like yours truly) know that their clock is fast, and automatically allow for the extra time.

David’s clock neatly solves that problem. It runs up to 15 minutes fast, but you never know *how* fast, because it’s designed to be unpredictable. It may be fifteen minutes fast. It may be only one minute fast. Since it may actually display the accurate time, you must assume it is always right, in order to not be late. Got it?
I downloaded the standalone PC version, and started it up… and immediately felt anxious and hurried. That was curious, since I have absolutely nowhere to be.

But even more interesting to me than the clock is the Japanese concept that David released it under… Chindōgu. According to Wikipedia, Chindōgu is the art of creating ingenious every day objects which seem like an ideal solution to a problem, but which in fact creates so many new problems that it’s simply not worth it. They are “unuseless” — they aren’t useful, but they aren’t exactly useless, either.

There’s a reverse mind-tweak joke in here, somewhere, but I haven’t got time to figure it out.. I’m 15 minutes late! oops.. only 2 minutes…. oh, wait.. its 10… I’d better hurry up!