It Took Me 107 Hours to Write This Post
Why I built an app to end my procrastination.
One rain-struck afternoon on a dreary Saturday, I decided I would try my hand at writing my first Medium article.
I sat in front of my computer and wrote the first word. Then I went down a half-hour rabbit-hole on my phone. Then back to writing a sentence. Then I figured I should go work out.
You see where this is going.
By the time dinner rolled around, I was super jacked and had done a weeks worth of groceries… but was only 3 sentences into my story.
Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you have to treat yourself like a toddler? Child locks, corner bumpers, the works?
Well that’s me when I procrastinate. And that’s why I went on a 107 hour journey to finish my first Medium story (and inadvertently find a long-term solution to my procrastination).
Start the timer.
I found my roommate in the kitchen, who was stuffing his face with raw spinach straight out of the box. That was his “dinner”. He does that sometimes.
“Hey… spinach again, really?” I asked. He stared at me blankly, mouth full.
“Whatever, look — I’m going to pay you $100 if I don’t write at least 1000 words by the end of tomorrow, ok? Can you keep me accountable?”
And that’s what we did. Except something “came up” the next day, and I made a (very convincing) excuse and pushed my deadline.
Among friends, and when money isn’t tangible, accountability is weak.
Oh, and your friends have a life. They can’t monitor you and be the metaphorical “safety rail” to your toddler-like sense of productivity.
So now I’m scouring the internet, trying to find a system that would hold my money hostage, and me accountable. Let’s ignore the fact that I clearly DID NOT want to be a Medium writer if I couldn’t even sit down and write for a measly hour. This isn’t a psychological study though, ok?
I came across a few platforms, both new and old, that implemented different ways of keeping you accountable through financially punitive means.
One needed a friend to serve as a ref (gofuckingdoit.com, which kind of pioneered the idea in 2014).
Not ideal.
I wanted the scope of my procrastination to be self-contained and put into action at a moment’s notice.
Others’ were bloated apps that needed accounts set up, and had criteria that was either too vague, too narrow, or self-defined, which didn’t feel very bulletproof. Loopholes were inevitable.
I just wanted something my unmotivated, tired brain could drag itself to do on an ad-hoc basis. Something as simple as taking a shot of espresso when you’re tired.
A dose of accountability if you will, when needed.
Now, being the intellectual that I am, I figured I would build an entire app to keep me in line and motivate the creation of my story. Genius. Keep in mind that I had written nothing so far.
I needed to be able to set some criteria that I couldn’t bypass, add my card info for the consequences, and then submit my writing before a set deadline.
A few minor problems: what about cheating with AI-generated content? What about plagiarizing other people’s work? Or submitting unrelated work? This is where the backend got a little more complex.
I would need to submit a summary of what I was going to write about and a word count target. The backend would then check the word count, compare the summary to what was actually written using chatGPT (yeah, I’m an ML expert now 😎), and use a variety of other APIs I found for plagiarism and AI-generated content checks.
Wait, what about the money?
“NICK,” I yelled at him across our condo.
“Whaahht?” he shouted back with a muffled voice.
“… do you have spinach shoved down your throat again? Listen, can I have your Stripe credentials? I need to wire it up to this app I’m building.”
Great, now that was taken care of. I also told him to send a portion of what he got to charity.
I built out the entire serverless backend (API) in Go. I won’t get too technical, but… it was a backend. And ran on AWS. And was in Go. And there were like 5 endpoints.
But Antoine, if you built it, isn’t the biggest loophole of them all the fact that you control the infrastructure? I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I did think of that. For all of you engineers out there, I gave the root AWS secrets to Nick, he made me a restricted role, and that’s what I used for maintenance once the final version of the infra was up.
Aka it’s no longer a loophole I can exploit.
2 weeks of work — and about 40 hours in — the backend was built and fully operational. I finally had a tool that would help me with procrastination.
It was time to write.
Naturally, I spent the next 8 hours designing wireframe mockups — I wouldn’t want to make the app purely practical, would I? I had to make it at least a bit pretty.
Another 50 hours later, I had built out an entire ReactJs web app.
I then realized the tool could be automated for so much more than writing. I went ahead and spent about 2 days implementing some rough versions of 3more task types: programming, miscellaneous, and cleaning (your room, car, anything capture-able by picture).
Finally, I spent an hour writing this article.
Stop the timer. Mission accomplished 😏.
On a more serious note, thanks for reading! We went on to call the app ForceMeTo; after some (ok, a lot) of finishing touches, we‘ve actually shipped it and you can find it in beta at www.forcemeto.com. It really has been a saving grace for me on tougher days, and I hope you find some benefit in it too!
