In five words, the general idea behind ProcrasDonate is

Incentivize something we can measure.

Let me first say that I love the procrastination-donation duo that we’re starting with. The ProcrasDonate name is dynamite, the explanation is simple—donate to charity for every hour procrastinated—and the user response is energetic.

Nonetheless, it’s fun to think of other applications for the general idea. We’ve received so many ideas that I can’t help wanting to make sense of them all. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

The chart presents two orthogonal dimensions: behavior and incentive. A good behavior is a virtue, a bad behavior is a vice. A positive incentive is a reward, a negative incentive is a punishment.

Ideas are broken down into behaviors and incentives, which are partitioned into each dimension’s end-points. Taking a cross-product of each behavior against each incentive shows us all the applications we could build.

In this simplistic abstraction I’ve evaluated each idea in binary. In truth, the “goodness” or “badness” of each end-point is relative to the individual. So it goes.

Vices (if harmful)

• Online procrastination (facebook, chat, blogs, feeds, games, TV, movies, videos
• Missing a deadline
• Addictions (smoking, drinking, gambling)
• Physical laziness
• Staying up or waking up late
• Sending too much email
• Unhealthy eating
• Being mean
• Greed

Virtues (if empowering)

• Productive
• Meet deadline
• Learning
• Making
• Fighting addiction (not smoking, not drinking, etc)
• Exercising
• Early to bed, early to rise
• Taking pills
• Good grades
• Healthy eating
• Being nice
• Enabling

Punishments

• Lose money
• Lose time (signed up to tutor or be tutored, community service)
• Volunteer for non-profit or open source project
• Shame (publicize results to friends)
• Annoying warnings, alarms
• Prevent behavior (eg, block procrastination sites)

Rewards

• Receive money (savings account, from parents, wager with friends, coupons)
• Gain time (virtues are good in themselves??)
• Accolades
• Enable behavior (desserts after meal)
• Affirmation (support, coaching)
• Specific goal (eg, plan a trip)

ProcrasDonate

Where would you put ProcrasDonate on the chart?

I’d put ProcrasDonate in quadrants II and III. Donations play a dual role of reward—support good causes—and punishment—lose money. This twist piques many people’s interest, especially mine.

Bets

One kind of app that isn’t clear from the above model is how a group of friends might reward and incentivize each other.

Social dynamics draw on shame, affirmation, competition, and resource re-distribution. For example, each week the friends bet money on their own success. The winners receive either money, decision-making power or a random act of kindness as prizes. The losers give up those things.

This strikes me as a particularly fun and effective behavior-changing strategy, if sufficiently coupled with graphs, of course .

The more ideas the merrier, so keep ‘em coming.

Proudly ProcrasDonating,
Lucy.