I'm a procrastinator. If something needs to be done by 2:00 PM, I'll often finish it at 1:59. My procrastinating tendencies sometimes make me late though. Like many people I've tried the old "set your clock ahead 15 minutes" trick, but it doesn't work -- I just find myself mentally calculating every time I look at one of my clocks.

This week Component X released an interesting little Mac utility for people that like me have a procrastination problem, inspired by Guy Kawasaki's Alltop. It's a menu bar clock replacement called Alltock that runs anywhere from right on time to fifteen minutes fast, but the trick is that you never know whether it's running fast or not. This forces you to assume that the time is accurate, and ends up more often than not making you a little bit early.

While I love the concept, the execution leaves a bit to be desired. While it's easy enough to hide your Mac's built-in menu bar clock, you can't move the Alltock clock over to the right on the menu bar. This is apparently due to the fact that Alltock was created as an application rather than as a system preferences pane, which was apparently necessary because the system's internal clock is not actually being changed. However, I find it hard to believe that it couldn't have been done as a system preferences pane -- on my system I've replaced the system clock with one from iStatMenu, which is a preference pane.

My other gripe with Alltock is the fact that there is no ability to hide the dock icon. If a user really wanted to replace their system clock, I see no reason to leave the new clock's dock icon sitting there taking up valuable screen real estate.

Complaints aside, the concept of Alltock is a winner, and hopefully a subsequent version will make it a truly viable system clock replacement.

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.