I have 23 days left before graduation and absolutely no motivation left to study or do much of anything else. However, I committed to finishing 25 credit hours during this last term, so there are 2439802349804238902344 that have to get done in the next three weeks. So, instead of studying, new project!
I don’t have time to work on this yet, so right now all I have is a basic webpage with audio clips, using Pokemon Go sound effects as a temporary solution. The labels are pretty self-explanatory: I’m playing the background music constantly, then click the play buttons each time I finish reading/writing a sentence, paragraph, or chapter/section. Usually after a few minutes I actually start to focus and quit feeling the need to click the button every time I finish the smaller parts.
Ideally, I’d like to make this into a Chrome extension with music designed for it, auto-detection of things like the end of a sentence, paragraph, or chapter, adding/reviewing flashcards, right/wrong answers to flashcards, switching away from the tabs related to studying, etc. I think it would gamify studying in a way that’s not limited to what material is available through a particular platform.
I’d love to have an option similar to this extension so that a user could indicate that they were reading something and then play a negative sound if they looked away. And in the opposite way, if they were supposed to be reading a physical text, then stop the music if they looked at the screen (though that would be complicated with multiple devices).
And of course it could all log to Beeminder – minutes studied being positive data points, minutes distracted being negative.
Another more simple plan: make an audio track similar to the background music but with the reward chimes marking each one minute, five minute, and fifteen minute intervals to motivate while studying in general.
I think something like this would be good for coding too, or exercise, or all kinds of things really.
