Observer-Expectancy Effect
I actually made great progress in October on medium-term income pursuits; hoping to blog a summary soon. Here's an email explaining one part of how that happened:
My name is Liisa - I am the person at the other end of Toggl support, the one reading and replying to your messages when you get in touch with us. Feel free to write to me with questions, suggestions, or just general feedback at any time. I am here for you :)
For now, I just wanted to check in and ask how your Toggl experience has been so far?
Thanks for auto-asking, Liisa's robot. :-)
I've been quite impressed with Toggl. I've now logged 23+ hours
of work in the six days that I've been using it, so a bit under four
hours per day. Less than my goal (of six), but still a very healthy
number. (I recently dropped my day-job to 20hr/wk in order to
focus more on building my own business.)
One of the challenges of self-employment is that, while there is
always a ton of work that needs to be done, there's no one that's
demanding details of what was actually accomplished, and it's too
easy to get diverted to nonproductive pursuits. ("Oooo; shiny!")
Toggl is letting me "report" back to myself what I'm doing, with
brutal honesty. Thanks to the privacy, I'm not filtering my words
with a public PR smile. Just the very act of self-observation is
"forcing" me to focus far more time on exactly what I should be
doing on a minute-by-minute basis, (the observer-expectancy
effect).
The only thing that's been confusing is: Where is the advertising
on the free version? :-)
Thanks again, and best!
Tangentially related from the world of quantum physics:
Another minor area in life where I'm incorporating this effect is in driving. Not that I was a poor driver to begin with, but there's always room for improvement for everyone. Since I sold my CRX, Cat Lady and I have been sharing her car. She got a device from her insurance company that voluntarily tracks driving habits (in exchange for the opportunity to reduce premiums). Of the four factors that are being measured, there's not much that can be done about time-of-day and distance for the vast majority of my trips (seeing as I use the car to commute to work). Keeping speed under 80mph is pretty easy, so the only other factor that can be behaviorally adjusted is deceleration rate. Thus, I find myself pretty much focusing on just that as I drive. :-)
My name is Liisa - I am the person at the other end of Toggl support, the one reading and replying to your messages when you get in touch with us. Feel free to write to me with questions, suggestions, or just general feedback at any time. I am here for you :)
For now, I just wanted to check in and ask how your Toggl experience has been so far?
Thanks for auto-asking, Liisa's robot. :-)
I've been quite impressed with Toggl. I've now logged 23+ hours
of work in the six days that I've been using it, so a bit under four
hours per day. Less than my goal (of six), but still a very healthy
number. (I recently dropped my day-job to 20hr/wk in order to
focus more on building my own business.)
One of the challenges of self-employment is that, while there is
always a ton of work that needs to be done, there's no one that's
demanding details of what was actually accomplished, and it's too
easy to get diverted to nonproductive pursuits. ("Oooo; shiny!")
Toggl is letting me "report" back to myself what I'm doing, with
brutal honesty. Thanks to the privacy, I'm not filtering my words
with a public PR smile. Just the very act of self-observation is
"forcing" me to focus far more time on exactly what I should be
doing on a minute-by-minute basis, (the observer-expectancy
effect).
The only thing that's been confusing is: Where is the advertising
on the free version? :-)
Thanks again, and best!
Tangentially related from the world of quantum physics:
Click to viewAnother minor area in life where I'm incorporating this effect is in driving. Not that I was a poor driver to begin with, but there's always room for improvement for everyone. Since I sold my CRX, Cat Lady and I have been sharing her car. She got a device from her insurance company that voluntarily tracks driving habits (in exchange for the opportunity to reduce premiums). Of the four factors that are being measured, there's not much that can be done about time-of-day and distance for the vast majority of my trips (seeing as I use the car to commute to work). Keeping speed under 80mph is pretty easy, so the only other factor that can be behaviorally adjusted is deceleration rate. Thus, I find myself pretty much focusing on just that as I drive. :-)