Category: magic dots

More About Magic Dots

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Govind M., the Stanford grad student who recommended brown noise, has good things to say about magic dots:

I have been using magic dots for about two months now and they work. I have no idea why they work — maybe it’s the reinforcement — but they do. I enjoy making them and for me, I have to finish them. I use 9 min/mark for 90 min intervals, which also provides a very easy way to track time. A four box day is enormously productive, though the fourth box typically gets torpedoed by a meeting or something.

One of the advantages of magic dots is that instead of setting down an intimidating 90-minute chunk of time, my mental horizon is shortened to the next 9 minutes. After that, the box takes over. So in situations in which (1) it is difficult to get started and (2) I want to add structure to the day, I use magic dots.

I asked, “When you are using the magic dots, do you work for longer periods of time before taking a break?” Govind said:

Yes. However, it is possible that goal gets shifted from “be focused and attentive and not goofing off on facebook” to “work long enough make 10 marks on a piece of paper.” It makes it easier to start and to continue on working.

I too find that magic dots make it easier to start work. I think this happens because the task in front of me (getting work done) seems more doable.

More Magic Dots

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A New Jersey patent attorney named Jim D writes:

I’ve been using the magic dots as you described, marking a dot or line every six minutes. I use an online timer with an audible tone every six minutes. A portion of my work requires focus, as I have to review, compare and contrast technical documents. I’ve historically had limited ability to focus for extended periods of time. I’ve used an online bar graph countdown timer, but even with the visual feedback of the bar graph counting down, the longest I could go without a short break was 20 minutes. I’ve also tried online Pomodoro timers, with alternating work and break periods, but again, the longest I could go without a break was 20 minutes.

In contrast, by using the magic dots method, I can easily focus for 60 minutes. I’ve been working for 60 minutes until the box is completed, and then taking a short break before starting another 60 minute box. After a few more weeks, I will see if I can extend the focus length for a longer period of time. (As an aside, I wonder if completing an entire “box” is psychologically important, and, if so, would a 90 minute “box” shape work better than continuing with consecutive 60 minute boxes?).

I don’t think finishing a box matters. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. A friend used a much different counting system; it also worked. After years of using six-minute intervals I have started to use five-minute intervals; they don’t interfere too much and shorter intervals are likely to be more powerful. I would like to compare different interval lengths but it is a difficult experiment to do.

Why Do Magic Dots Work?

Seth Roberts10 Comments

2013-06-24 counting method

I’ve posted several times about the use of what I call “magic dots” to get things done. You make a dot or line every six minutes of work. I use the counting method shown above. The effect was first seen in pigeons. A similar effect was discovered (by accident) in rats.

It works amazingly well. “The magic dots have been magic,” said a user named Joan. It would be nice to know why — maybe the effect can be made even stronger. Joan commented in an email:

I have been thinking about why this has worked for me – I think it’s that there is an almost immediate “reward”, so I get started right away. Since the reward does not have any associations, there’s no inner conflict sabotaging it. For instance, I might feel guilty if I ate a jelly bean every 6 minutes, or I might just eat them anyway. I’m not “deprived” if I don’t get to add more dots and lines, and I know I can just get back to work and start writing dots again.

Certainly the dots – or the act of making a dot — act as a reward. But why? If I’m writing something, why do the dots have an effect when I can already see my progress by looking at what I’ve written? I’m already making marks.

The consistency of the marks — the same mark, again and again — may make a difference. Presumably the brain needs to notice a correlation: Writing (or whatever the difficult task is) produces both marks and progress (= a sense of satisfaction). Other activities produce neither. The more identical the marks, the easier to see the correlation. When I write, there is not one consistent mark of progress.

Maybe other people have independently discovered this, without knowing about the pigeon results. Their methods might shed light on what you need to do to get the effect. I don’t know of any independent discoveries. The closest thing I can think of is most computer games provide markers of your progress throughout the game, such as level advancement.

Magic Dots: User Experience (Person 4)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Previous posts about the magic dots method of getting work done are here. Recently, Patrick Dwyer, a solo-practitioner lawyer in Chicago, started using them. He explained how they help:

When I use the magic dots for brief writing it helps me in a few ways. First, it is much less intimidating to set a goal to write for 15 minutes than for 50 hours. Second, it also does not seem so bad to work for just a few more minutes when I am bored or out of ideas rather than wait for that elusive “flow.” Third, it gives me an ability to keep a precise account of my time and what I was doing so that I can show the client a specific task when I send the bill. Fourth, after I have made several boxes at the end of a day, it gives me a sense of accomplishment. All these things help me not to procrastinate. There is also something pleasing about drawing the boxes which seems to be more satisfying than merely writing non-graphic sentences or notes about my time.

I agree with all this, but would add that the method was suggested to me by pigeon research in which none of these factors could have mattered (e.g., pigeons do not bill clients). If the pigeon research and the magic dots method really involve the same mechanism — which seems to be true — then that mechanism is remarkably old. According to this, the common ancestor of birds and humans lived 300 million years ago. Maybe it is hard to notice the mechanism because it is buried so deep in our brains.

Animal learning researchers have always said that by studying animals (such as rats and pigeons) we will learn about humans. This example supports that claim. (As does the Shangri-La Diet.) The pigeon research, which had a very counter-intuitive result, led me to try the magic dots method, which seems like it can’t possibly work, but did. Yet when this actually happened it was hard to notice. I talked about the pigeon results, which I thought were astonishing, for many years before I realized they might help me.

Magic Dots: User Experience (Person 3)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Based on research by Neuringer and Chung, I started marking my work progress by making a mark (such as a dot) every six minutes of work. I did it for difficult tasks, such as writing. Neuringer and Chung found that markers of progress made pigeons peck twice as much. The dots seemed to enable me to work twice as much — e.g., twice as long.

I think a friend came up with the name magic dots. It did seem magic that such a tiny thing — making a dot on a piece of paper — could be so useful. A recent post about procrastination software led a reader named Joan to start using it. I’ve already described her experience (“the magic dots have been magic”) and someone else’s experience here.

Two more people have told me about their experience. I’ll describe what one of them said today and what the other one said tomorrow. Alex Chernavsky wrote:

I tried the Magic Dots system yesterday, and I liked it a lot. I ended up with two-and-a-half completed squares. I was more productive than usual. (By the way, have you heard of the Pomodoro technique? It’s similar.) I didn’t use a stopwatch. I download an iPhone app called Interval Timer, by Delta Works. It’s free, but it shows small, unobtrusive ads. I set it to do continuously-repeating six-minute countdowns. The end of each cycle is marked by a short vibration. The iPhone screen stays lit-up the whole time that the application is running, so you can easily check the remaining time. If I remember to glance at the screen, I will make a mark if the application shows a remaining time of less than three minutes. If I forget to check, I make a mark when I hear the vibration. I was home alone most of the day, and I was able to get a lot of work done. I didn’t use the technique when I was doing menial chores, like washing dishes. I only used it when I was working at my desk.

Alex also asked several questions:

What happens if you end up getting distracted by a non-productive, time-wasting activity, like checking Facebook? Should you reset the six-minute countdown cycle back to the beginning, or…?

I would just stop the stopwatch, not reset the timer. I would hate to lose the 2 minutes or whatever.

What’s the best way to account for unplanned, unintentional changes in focus from one productive activity (e.g., balancing your checkbook) to a different productive activity (e.g., replying to important email messages)?

I don’t change anything, as long as I am being productive I keep racking up the dots.

What happens if you need to take a bathroom break or other short break? Should you pause the timer?

No, I count anything necessary, including bathroom breaks and making tea. This is one reason I like the method: getting credit for making tea.

Magic Dots: User Experience (Person 2)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In 2012 I posted about using “magic dots” to get work done. You make a mark on a piece of paper every six minutes you work. The idea derives from the quasi-reinforcement effect of Neuringer and Chung. They found that giving pigeons markers of progress toward food, such as a blackout, doubled how much the pigeons pecked for food — that is, doubled how much they worked.

I found magic dots very helpful. The future will be different from the past was my reaction. (In the future I will get more work done.) So did a reader named Joan. Now a reader named David Johnston tells his experience:

I’m an engineer designing cryptographic digital circuits in microprocessors, which is intellectually challenging but also involves a lot of coding and debugging which requires concentration and attention to detail but is certainly not intellectually challenging. My specialization is random numbers, which even by computer science standards is a very narrow and deep field to specialize in. I don’t know of anyone else who does what I do. My work environment is saturated with sources of interruption which very much gets in the way of getting work done. If you think my employer is getting something wrong in creating an effective workplace for engineers, you would be correct. Procrastination is a big issue for me and I’ve tried various approaches to focus better without great success except for the Japanese music thing described below.

So after reading your article I gave it a try, I set up a timer on my computer (Orzeszek Timer) to beep every six minutes and filled out the dots on each beep.

On my first pass I lasted 2.5 hours before I had a meeting to go to and completed a detailed technical diagram of a circuit I was proposing. The next day I did 5 hours (with a lunch break in between) and was coding up the circuit. I stopped due to a meeting and could have continued. The third day I did not get a chance to focus on code or design, so I managed 0 hours. Then the weekend happened.

This is very much not normal for me. I might do 30 minutes to 1 hour before feeling the need to do something else besides concentrating, like dealing with email or getting a coffee. Getting back to it is not an efficient process since you are typically juggling multiple facts (aka the ‘working set’) pertinent to the problem and getting back in that frame of mind takes time. This is well a well documented aspect of computer programming, where there is a warm up time before the programmer becomes productive and then the productive period is fragile and easily set back to the start by interruptions.

I intend to keep trying this method and I hope it proves to be effective over longer periods because succeeding at my job is a lot less stressful than not succeeding. Obviously the vanishingly small investment required to try it is a big factor in making it easy to choose to try it.

So my initial reaction is that it works. My sense is that there is something important about mentally breaking up progress into chunks. I certainly do that on long tasks, e.g. a long drive ( I might envision it as passing the 10%, 20% etc points as we progress) or recently a game (Ingress – a game you play with a smartphone that requires you get out and walk a lot) where the space between levels doubles. To get to the final level 8 from 7 requires 600,000 points to reach 1.2 million total. Logic would suggest you should just head out and get all the points you can as fast as possible, but that is disheartening because any one day doesn’t make a big dent. By setting a goal of 10,000 per day, that gave me a mental and physical framework that was effective. I knew when to keep going (less than 10,000 points achieved) and I knew when to stop (at 10,000 points and probably 2 miles walking). Roughly 60 days later I got to the highest level.

While working on design, the beep in my ear and reaching to draw a dot or line on graph paper was not enough to knock off my concentration, but the continuing for the next six minutes felt like an achievable goal, much like 10,000 points in Ingress felt like an achievable goal each day, whereas choosing to sit and concentrate for five hours is a non starter, much as trying to battle through 600,000 points in Ingress is a non starter.

Possibly unrelated, but maybe not – I have found that I work well listening to Japanese music on headphones (e.g. Happy End or Tokyo Jihen). I haven’t a clue what the words are and so it seems to not interrupt my coding state of mind in the same way that English language music does. The cadence (3-6 minutes per song) is not that far off the quasi-reinforcement time of 6 minutes that was suggested on your website. Also it blocks out the blathering of people near me in the office. I presume it being Japanese has nothing to do with its efficacy. It is just a language that hits zero of my language processing neurons. Any language would do if the music was good.

If you find the magic dots don’t work for you, I am just as happy to hear about it.

Magic Dots User Experience (Person 1)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

One of my recent posts about anti-procrastination software led a reader named Joan to an earlier post about magic dots, which is a low-tech way of getting work done. Every six minutes of work, you make a dot or line in a certain pattern on a piece of paper. I got the idea from the quasi-reinforcement effect of Neuringer and Chung. Studying pigeons, they found that markers of progress act like rewards. What was amazing was that they got pigeons to work twice as hard (= peck twice as fast) without increasing their salary (= food reward). The dots mark progress.

In her comment, Joan said

This post led me to find the post about the magic dots, which for me [have been] magic. I have a fairly boring job and lots of annoying things I have to take care of for my family, so it’s hard to get going most days. Today I got going right away and stayed on task. I didn’t use a stop-watch, just wrote down the time I started, and created the boxes. I started this yesterday afternoon, so this is one and a half days.

I asked her for details. She replied:

I have an IT job where I am pretty much self-directed, but one week out of four have to be on-call for production support, which takes up most of the time that week, and I also have to assist the on-call person the other 3 weeks when it’s an application I own. Since I spend the on-call week pretty much just monitoring 3 mailboxes, it’s very hard to focus on the off weeks, and I find myself reading blogs way too much of the time. Also, some of the production support work is interesting -figuring out what happened and how to fix it, but a lot of it is routine and annoying, like some external server was down, so we have to rerun a job.

I have tried various tools to block the most addictive sites, but am not really supposed to install stuff on my work computer. The percentage thing looked interesting, but it looked like it would be minor project to implement. Then I saw the post about magic dots. I’m a “tactile” learner, which means I like to write stuff on paper, so I thought this would be easy to try and started right away. I was already trying to keep a list and give myself checkmark rewards, without much success.

So far this week has been great — I follow this very loosely. I make a list of activities to accomplish between production support calls, including stretching, etc. and anything that is not something to be done immediately. So things that might not be “work”, but that I have to get done that day during the day are on the list, and I fill in between support work with this stuff. I count time spent chatting with co-workers, calls to my mother, calls to the bank, even this email.

The first 2 days were pretty hard. I found myself scanning the list for the least annoying or tiresome tasks, but toward the end of the day I was actually pushing myself to stay and finish a couple of issues that would fit in my time remaining, and empty those in-boxes.

I’m not that focused on filling in the dots [= completing a set of 10] as the day goes on, but after every break I start a new one, and note the time I started.

I have no idea why this works, when nothing else seems to have helped.

I asked what else she had tried. She replied:

I had some success with LeechBlock, but had to remove unauthorized apps [LeechBlock is a Firefox addon] from my desktop and [had to stop] using it to stay off the really addictive sites such as ancestry.com. Work already blocks most social media sites. I tried using the IE site blocking, but having to enter a password didn’t seem to deter me.

To try to get motivated and get more done I have:

  • Affirmations and resolutions. Fail.
  • Tried using a “7 habits” style to do list. Fail.
  • Putting little mirrors on my desk. No help.
  • Improve another habit and hope for carryover. I tried food monitoring, and spent too much time researching diets. I am keeping up with exercise goals though.
  • Looked for support or monitoring sites. Did not find one that seemed like a good fit. Internet addiction forums are mostly about porn or gaming addictions, not ancestry.com or paleo diet blogs.
  • I followed a popular “personal productivity” blog for a while, but in the end spent too much time reading the forums. Seems like most of these gurus have always been over-achievers.

Based on statistics I have heard, I’m only a little above average in internet use at work, but some days I’m way over.

Magic Dots: Quasi-Reinforcement Helps Get Things Done

Seth Roberts17 Comments

This photo illustrates a method I have used for many years to get work done, usually writing. Every six minutes of work, I make a dot or line. One hour = 10 marks = a box (counting method from Exploratory Data Analysis). I use a stopwatch. I make a mark when I am more than halfway to the goal. If I glance at the clock and it says 4 minutes (more than halfway to 6 minutes), I make a mark. If I glance at the clock and it says 10 minutes (more than halfway to 12 minutes from 6 minutes), I make a mark. I only zero the clock when I take a break. I use one piece of paper per day.

I devised this. It is based on an effect discovered by Allen Neuringer and Shin-Ho Chung called quasi-reinforcement. Neuringer and Chung studied pigeons. They found that if you give a pigeon food every 500 times it pecks a key, it will peck the key slowly (say, 2 pecks/minute). If you give the pigeon a brief flash of light every 20 pecks — a marker that shows it is doing the right thing to get food — it will peck much faster (say, 4 pecks/minute). The flashes of light are quasi-reinforcement, said Neuringer and Chung — they have some but not all of the properties of ordinary reinforcement, such as food. By themselves, the flashes of light don’t interest the pigeon. It won’t peck a key to get them. The amazing thing about this effect is that it doubles how hard the pigeon works without raising its salary.

I noticed improvement — it was easier to write — within about 20 minutes the first time I tried this. I chose six minutes as the unit because shorter times were more distracting and longer times less effective.

I told Gary Wolf about the dots method two years ago and he’s been using it ever since. He says it is good for getting started on something he needs to write. After he gets going, he stops doing it. He uses it as an example of the value of self-tracking. I too find that after I get going on something, I need it less. If I stop, however, I drift backwards toward doing less productive stuff or nothing.

Gary asked me about this a month ago and I started doing it again (instead of percentile feedback). I noticed something I had never noticed before, which was that the system lifted my whole energy level and gave me a “can’t wait to get started” feeling in the morning. This too made it easier to get stuff done. It reminded me of some rat research I’d done. Put a rat in a Skinner box and it will explore for a while. If it doesn’t get any food, after a while (10 minutes?) it will stop exploring and curl up in the middle of the box. However, if I give the rat a pellet of food at random times (at the rate of one pellet/minute), it will keep exploring the box indefinitely. Learning psychologists have emphasized that when you reward an action, you make it more likely. The rat experiment I just described suggests a second effect: when you give reward — at least, when reward is rare — you make all actions more likely. You increase exploration, not just the rewarded response. When I was a young professor I went to a two-week neuroscience program at Dartmouth. It was all lectures. The other attendees were graduate students. I had little in common with them. There was little to do in the town, besides eat Ben & Jerry’s. The next town was 8 miles away. I couldn’t find anything I enjoyed doing. After a week, I had trouble getting out of bed, like the rat curled up in the middle of the Skinner box. A psychiatrist might have said I had major depression. I flew home and was fine.