Back in the early 20th century, at Western Electric’s “Hawthorne Works” factory near Chicago, management decided to run a long term study on factors that might affect productivity. They took a bunch of people and had them work in a separate room for five years, assembling telephone relays, trying out various changes to their hours and working environment to see what worked best.

They hit on a strange, seemingly paradoxical effect. In one example of this effect, when they reduced the workers’ hours, measurable productivity went up; but when they increased the workers’ hours back to normal later, productivity went up again.

This is the Hawthorne Effect. Changes to someone’s environment tend to increase productivity, either because people develop better habits as they’re adapting or because they’re aware that these changes involve their performance being monitored more carefully. Those increases drop off over time, but they’re real.

In short: if you want to get more stuff done, routinely disrupting and improving your process isn’t going to hurt. You’ll likely get a temporary boost no matter what, and if it doesn’t stick you can always go back to what worked before, right?

I installed Procrastitracker today (as Michael Todd suggested in the talk I linked on Friday). It’s a bit of software that tracks what windows have focus while it’s running, so it can give you a readout afterwards of how much time you spent on-task and how much time you spent mucking about.

So far it’s definitely helping me keep focused when it’s running, but I’ve learned something else: I don’t really get distracted while I’m mainly working. Sure, I spent about 20% of my tracked time up there browsing, but that’s a relatively small percentage. Also, when I was starting to lose focus, it was pretty easy to stay on track.

Where I go wrong is that I spend about an hour at a time working, then – and this is when I was switching off the tracker – slack off for a solid chunk of time before starting up again. I’m probably spending about 50% of my work time in between bursts like this.

I’m going to try and use Procrastitracker to fix this habit. So far I’ve stayed focused pretty well while it’s running. If I can keep that up, I can gradually start running it more and more of the time, on a daily schedule; eventually I’ll be able to just start it up when I want to work and my brain should damn well listen. 🙂

Fingers crossed, anyway. If this doesn’t work, plan B is switching off internet access for most of the working day. Work around that, brain!

Here is my character in Skyrim.

I AM A PRETTY PRINCESS

Really, she’s my third character. My first was a noble archer/swordswoman who’d help out anyone in trouble, leave people alone if they begged for mercy, and at least thought twice about looting burial urns for money.

One high point of her early career was manipulating a dragon into fighting a giant. The giant won and turned on her, just as a Dark Brotherhood assassin leapt from the bushes. She managed to dispatch them both. Another high point was getting drunk in a tavern and waking up on the other side of the country. But anyway – she was too upstanding to join the Thieves’ Guild or Dark Brotherhood, not magey enough to really join the Mage College, and frankly that only leaves the rebellion storyline and the main one. They’re a bit dull! Too many speeches.

So she had to die.

My second character was a thief who refused to have anything to do with violence and simply ran away at the first sign of trouble. Having avoided the nearby city on the grounds of it probably being a set-up it took him three hours of sneaking along roads, running away from wolves and robbing villages blind to reach his first city with a travel cart. He likes fancy clothes, easy money and not being shouted at by men with swords. He tried doing a quest once since it sounded pretty safe. It ended with him running through a bunch of surprised pirates hoping they wouldn’t block the doorways and then dodging their arrows as he ran for the hills. He didn’t get paid. He still hasn’t figured out where he can fence any of the stuff he’s nicked, or in fact what money is good for if you stay out of fights.

The third character, the one above, I made purely to do the Mage College storyline since it seemed interesting. Firstly, the Mage College quests are awesome. Secondly, magic is awesome. I spent something like twenty hours with my first character hitting stuff with swords, and the moment I fired up this new character focusing entirely on Destruction magic, my immediate thoughts were OH MY GOD THIS IS AWESOME I WILL SET EVERYTHING ON FIRE FOREVER.

I actually freeze about 60% of stuff to death now, but the other 40%? All of the fire.

Here are some of the bugs I’ve found in Skyrim:

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I’ve pretty much taken the day off to play Forza 4:

It’s ace! It’s basically Forza 3, but more so.

Anyway, I’m pausing work on Fight Back for a month or so. I have a tiny bit of Vigilance related work to do – putting it out to other portals – which I’ll likely do over the weekend. Come Monday, I’ll be spending my time on a nifty contract project. It’s games related this time, indie games related even, and I’ll blog about it if I can. 😀

Until then!

I’m making good progress on Fight Back’s new core engine. After the jump, here’s a little tech demo of interpolated rendering (I say little, it’s several MB because it still has most of the game assets in!):

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