The Procrastinator's Clock

Filed under: Business, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

The Procrastinator's Clock

by Jason Clarke Jan 21st 2007

~~Legendary web designer Dave Shea~~ Dave Seah has a recent post where he releases what he calls the Procrastinator's Clock, which is implemented in a simple pop-up window in your browser. Although he considers it silly, I think this thing is pure genius.

The idea here is that many people (like me, unfortunately) set their clocks ahead in the hopes of being on time more often. The problem here is that if you yourself set the clocks ahead, you already know how much extra time you have. If you get clever and let someone else do it for you, it won't take long to figure out what your time buffer is. So, David postulates, what we really need is a clock that is sometimes fast, but not necessarily.

The Procrastinator's Clock has the potential to be up to 15 minutes fast, but it just as easily could be exactly accurate, assuming your computer's time is accurate. This means that you basically have to assume that it is correct, and you will likely show up for meetings or appointments with some small amount of time to spare, rather than walking in 5 minutes late and having to apologize profusely.

Now I just wish someone would implement a version that manipulates my system time on my computer in the same way.

Tags: David Seah, DavidSeah, lateness, on time, OnTime, Procrastination, Procrastinator's Clock, Procrastinator'sClock, productivity

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Dave Seah said 2:18PM on 1-21-2007

Just want to make sure you're not confusing me with with actual legendary designer Dave Shea, since I'm not a web designer. Similar spelling, different person. Thanks for the writeup, glad you liked it!

Jason Hodulik said 8:41PM on 1-21-2007

This is actually extremely clever. I'd love to see a feature like this implemented into an actual tabletop clock. My laptop just isn't up often enough to be reliable for this. Good work, Dave :)

Adam Chamness said 12:18AM on 1-22-2007

Reering to your final statement about the system clock being set up in a similar way as the program...I believe it should be possible with Samurize and the System Clock Launcher. Currently I've setup a fuzzy clock to replace my windows system tray clock. Samurize runs on visual basic scripts, so i imagine programming sometihng with identical functionality would be very do-able. Maybe Mr. Seah himself can download Samurize and the clock launcher plugin and give it a whirl!

Adam Chamness said 2:56AM on 1-22-2007

Re: the last sentence about making the system clocok have this functionality.

It's most likely possible with Serious Samurize and it's system tray launcher plugin. Right now I have a fuzzy clock replacing my normal system tray clock. Samurize uses visual basic script for its "widgets", so programming something like this to repalce your system clock should be do-able. Perhaps Dave could port his code over to a Samurize plugin.

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