Willpower

“There has been the record before me, and a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.”
    A blister to my eye. You won’t find anything in the psychological literature summarizing so vividly the impact of monitoring. Trollope was a social scientist ahead of his time. But this revelation about his working technique, which was published posthumously in his autobiography, ruined his literary reputation for a good while. Critics and fellow writers—particularly the ones who couldn’t meet deadlines—were appalled at his system. How could an artist work by the clock? How could inspiration be precisely scheduled and monitored? But Trollope had anticipated their criticisms in his autobiography.
    “I have been told that such appliances are beneath the notice of a man of genius,” he wrote. “I have never fancied myself to be a man of genius, but had I been so I think I might well have subjected myself to these trammels. Nothing surely is so potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone. A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Trollope was an anomaly—few people can turn out 1,000 good words an hour—and he himself could have been benefited from slowing down occasionally (and cutting some of those 250-word digressions). But he managed to produce masterpieces like Barchester Towers and The Way We Live Now while living a very good life. While other novelists were worrying about money and struggling to turn in chapters overdue at their publishers, Trollope was prospering and remaining ahead of schedule. While one of his novels was being serialized, he usually had at least one other completed novel, often two or three, awaiting publication.
    “I have not once, through all my literary career, felt myself even in danger of being late with my task,” he wrote. “I have known no anxiety as to ‘copy.’ The needed pages far ahead—very far ahead—have almost always been in the drawer beside me. And that little diary, with its dates and ruled spaces, its record that must be seen, its daily, weekly demand upon my industry, has done all that for me.”
    Trollope’s watch and diary were state-of-the-art tools for the nineteenth century, and they were effective enough for his purposes. But suppose, instead of putting pen to paper, he had worked on a computer. Suppose that on a typical day he had to use sixteen different programs in addition to his word-processing program, and that over the course of the day he visited forty different Web sites. And suppose that throughout the day he was interrupted every 5.2 minutes by an instant message. How much good would his watch do him? How could his diary keep track of all his work?
    He would need a new tool, something like RescueTime, a program that follows customers’ every second of computer usage. Users get reports that track exactly how they spent their time—often a depressing discovery. The computer-use statistics provided in the paragraph above were compiled by RescueTime by averaging the behavior of its hundreds of thousands of users. The founder of RescueTime, Tony Wright, was surprised to see that nearly a third of his day was spent on what he calls “the long tail of information porn”—visits to Web sites unrelated to his chief work. The typical visit was only a couple of minutes, but together they consumed two and a half hours a day.
    This sort of tracking sounds Orwellian to some people, but it’s part of one of the fastest-growing industries in Silicon Valley. The popularity of smartphones and other devices means that people are spending more and more time connected, and increasingly they’re using connectivity to track their behavior: what they eat, how far they walk, how long they run, how many calories they burn, how their pulses vary, how efficiently they sleep, how quickly their brains operate, how their moods change, how often they have sex, what affects their spending, how often they call their parents, how long they procrastinate.
    In 2008, Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf created a Web site called Quantified Self, or QS, catering to users of self-regulation technology. The QS movement is still small and heavily geeky, but already it has spread far from Silicon Valley, and devotees in cities around the world are convening—in person—to talk gadgets,