tag:blog.danieljanus.pl,2019:category:procrastination 2008-12-18T00:00:00Z Daniel Janus http://danieljanus.pl dj@danieljanus.pl tag:blog.danieljanus.pl,2008-12-18:post:fighting-procrastination 2008-12-18T00:00:00Z <div><p>Fighting procrastination has been my major concern these days. I’ve devised a number of experimental tools to help me with that. One of them is called <a href="http://bach.ipipan.waw.pl/~nathell/projects/snafu.php">snafu</a> and can generate reports of your activity throughout the whole day of work. It’s in a preliminary state, but works (at least since I’ve found and fixed a long-standing bug in it which would cause it to barf every now and then), and I already have a number of ideas for its further expansion.</p><p>Reports alone, however, do not quite muster enough motivation for work. I’m doing most of my editing/programming work in Emacs, so yesterday I grabbed the Emacs Lisp manual and came up with a couple of extra lines at the end of my <code>.emacs</code>.</p><pre><code class="hljs lisp"><span class="hljs-comment">;;; Written by Daniel Janus, 2008/12/18.</span> <span class="hljs-comment">;;; This snippet is placed into the public domain. Feel free</span> <span class="hljs-comment">;;; to use it in any way you wish. I am not responsible for</span> <span class="hljs-comment">;;; any damage resulting from its usage.</span> (<span class="hljs-name">defvar</span> store-last-modification-time <span class="hljs-literal">t</span>) (<span class="hljs-name">defvar</span> last-modification-time <span class="hljs-literal">nil</span>) (<span class="hljs-name">defun</span> mark-last-modification-time (<span class="hljs-name">beg</span> end len) (<span class="hljs-name">let</span> ((<span class="hljs-name">b1</span> (<span class="hljs-name">substring</span> (<span class="hljs-name">buffer-name</span> (<span class="hljs-name">current-buffer</span>)) <span class="hljs-number">0</span> <span class="hljs-number">1</span>))) (<span class="hljs-name">when</span> (<span class="hljs-name">and</span> store-last-modification-time (<span class="hljs-name">not</span> (<span class="hljs-name">string=</span> b1 <span class="hljs-string">&quot; &quot;</span>)) (<span class="hljs-name">not</span> (<span class="hljs-name">string=</span> b1 <span class="hljs-string">&quot;*&quot;</span>))) (<span class="hljs-name">setq</span> last-modification-time (<span class="hljs-name">current-time</span>))))) (<span class="hljs-name">add-hook</span> &#x27;after-change-functions &#x27;mark-last-modification-time) (<span class="hljs-name">defun</span> write-lmt () (<span class="hljs-name">setq</span> store-last-modification-time <span class="hljs-literal">nil</span>) (<span class="hljs-name">when</span> last-modification-time (<span class="hljs-name">with-temp-file</span> <span class="hljs-string">&quot;/tmp/emacs-lmt&quot;</span> (<span class="hljs-name">multiple-value-bind</span> (<span class="hljs-name">a</span> b c) last-modification-time (<span class="hljs-name">princ</span> a (<span class="hljs-name">current-buffer</span>)) (<span class="hljs-name">terpri</span> (<span class="hljs-name">current-buffer</span>)) (<span class="hljs-name">princ</span> b (<span class="hljs-name">current-buffer</span>))))) (<span class="hljs-name">setq</span> store-last-modification-time <span class="hljs-literal">t</span>)) (<span class="hljs-name">run-at-time</span> <span class="hljs-literal">nil</span> <span class="hljs-number">1</span> &#x27;write-lmt) </code></pre><p>Every second (to change that to every 10 seconds, change the <code>1</code> to <code>10</code> in the last line) it creates a file named <code>/tmp/emacs-lmt</code> which contains the time of last modification of any non-system buffer.</p><p>That’s all there is to it, at least on the Emacs side. The other part is a simple shell script, which uses <a href="http://www.mplayerhq.hu/">MPlayer</a> to display a nag-screen for five seconds, and then give me some time to start doing anything useful before nagging me again:</p><pre><code class="hljs bash"><span class="hljs-meta">#!/bin/bash</span> TIMEOUT=300 <span class="hljs-keyword">while</span> <span class="hljs-literal">true</span>; <span class="hljs-keyword">do</span> <span class="hljs-built_in">cat</span> /tmp/emacs-lmt | ( <span class="hljs-built_in">read</span> a; <span class="hljs-built_in">read</span> b; c=<span class="hljs-string">&quot;`date +%s`&quot;</span>; <span class="hljs-built_in">let</span> x=c-65536*a-b; <span class="hljs-keyword">if</span> <span class="hljs-built_in">test</span> <span class="hljs-variable">$x</span> -gt <span class="hljs-variable">$TIMEOUT</span>; <span class="hljs-keyword">then</span> mplayer -fs <span class="hljs-variable">$HOME</span>/p.avi; <span class="hljs-built_in">sleep</span> 15; <span class="hljs-keyword">fi</span>) <span class="hljs-built_in">sleep</span> 1 <span class="hljs-keyword">done</span> </code></pre><p>The nag-screen in my case is an animation which I’ve created using MEncoder from a single frame which looks <a href="http://bach.ipipan.waw.pl/~nathell/procrastination.png">like this</a>. Beware the expletives! (This is one of the few cases I find their usage justified, as the strong message bites the conscience more strongly.)</p><p>I’ve only been testing this setup for one day, but so far it’s working flawlessly: I got more done yesterday than for the two previous days combined, and that’s excluding the hour or so that took me to write these snippets.</p><p>If anyone else happens to give it a try, I’d love to hear any comments.</p></div>