拖延症患者注意：这个APP可以帮你克服“懒癌”

    人类把很多时间都浪费在了无谓的事情上。拿我写这篇文章的过程为例：我先是写下几个句子，然后收收电子邮件，泡杯咖啡，再写两句，喝口咖啡，然后上上Facebook，再做一个毫无意义的个性测试（只是为了确认一些我已经知道的事实），然后我告诉自己不能再拖延了，然后再一鼓作气写下两段，然后再收收邮件，回一两条无关紧要的消息，最后起身再泡一杯咖啡。不管你信不信，我最后居然还是写完了这篇文章。

    我对自己糟糕的时间管理能力感到非常羞愧。杜克大学（Duke University）教授、知名行为经济学家丹•艾瑞里曾经把人类浪费时间的倾向称为“边缘抑郁症”，恐怕我就是患者之一。

    艾瑞里在上周的一次采访中对我说：“我们不妨思考一下，人类有多少创意，有多少干正经事的能力，有多少进步的空间，再看看人们最后都在做什么。他们把大量的时间花在各种糟糕的事情上，而没有去追求自己的幸福，没有去做任何有用的事。人类的愚蠢的确让我很苦恼。它就像某种抑郁症——边缘抑郁症。”

    艾瑞里研究人类不靠谱的行为已经很多年了（难怪这哥们儿有点郁闷）。他的第一本书《怪诞行为学》（Predictably Irrational）揭示了我们在做最佳财务决策方面是多么的无能（并且该书还找到了供需理论的漏洞）。他的研究给治愈“拖延症”带来了一丝小小的希望。他与斯坦福大学（Stanford University）计算机科学教授约阿夫•肖汉姆和斯坦福大学博士研究生雅各布•班克一道，创办了一家公司，旨在让人们更好地利用他们最宝贵的资源——时间。

    这家公司的总部位于加州的山景城，它的第一款产品是一个名叫Timeful的应用，可以在iOS平台上下载。第一眼看过去，Timeful有点像一个加强版的日历应用：它可以自动与你的现有日历同步，而且界面也和普通日历应用差不多。不过这款应用会要求用户列出一张与健康或幸福有关的任务清单，比如跑步、用牙线清洁牙齿、给父母打电话等等，此外也有与工作或生活有关的日常任务清单。此外它还包含了睡眠模式，并且你还可以指定一天的某个时间段为最有效率的时间。整合了以上所有信息之后，这款应用便会提供一份日程建议表，将一天的每件事安排得井井有条。艾瑞里表示：“要确定怎样合理安排你的时间，的确是个非常复杂的计算问题。”

    让我颇感安慰的是，艾瑞里指出，人们在决定何时做什么事时，很少会把所有因素都考虑进去。人们一想到前头还有千头万绪的大事小情等着自己，往往就开始头痛。再加上我们经常搞不清干完某件事需要多长时间，也不知道自己在一天的几点到几点干事最专心，因此我们往往会先做手头上最简单的任务——再看一遍还没回复的电子邮件，或是更新一下Facebook。

    换句话说：我们都是严重的拖延症患者。

    有些事情我们通常放在工作以外的时间做，但忽视了它们也有在工作时间做的可能，比如给父母打电话、跑步甚至是清洁牙齿。但是如今的大多数电子日历，并没有先进到能够见缝插针地替我们把这些事安排到工作时间里。换句话说，现有的电子日历应用依然不够智能，无法通盘考虑如何利用一整天的时间，无法把我们需要做的事情（比如写材料）和我们应该想要做的事情（比如利用午休时间跑步）结合起来。

    Human beings waste an awful lot of time. Consider my process for writing this article: Begin writing, check email, make coffee, write some more, drink coffee, peruse Facebook, take a meaningless personality quiz (only to confirm what I already knew), tell myself I shouldn’t procrastinate, write more, check email again, respond to a non-pressing message, and finally, get up to make more coffee. Believe it or not, at some point I actually finished writing the thing.

    I have plenty of guilt about my shameful time management skills, but I’m afraid that I may have also contributed to what Dan Ariely, the DukeUniversity professor and renowned behavioral economist, describes as his “marginal depression” about humans’ wasted potential.

    “You think about the amount of human creativity and human ability to do good and the amount of progress we can make and you see what people end up doing,” Ariely told me in an interview last week. “They’re just kind of squandering their time in all sorts of terrible ways and not fulfilling their own happiness, not doing anything useful. The human stupidity really weighs on me. It’s like a depression—a marginal depression.”

    Ariely, whose first book Predictably Irrational highlighted how painfully incompetent we are at making optimal financial decisions (and poked holes in the theory of supply and demand), has been researching human fallibility for years. (No wonder the guy is a little despondent.) But there is reason for a small, newfound source of hope. Along with Stanford University computer science professor Yoav Shoham and Jacob Bank, a Stanford doctoral candidate, Ariely has co-founded a company that aims to help people make better use of their most precious resource—time.

    The trio’s first product is an application called Timeful, a name that their Mountain View, Calif-based company shares. At first glance, the iOS app seems like a slightly souped-up calendar tool: it automatically synchronizes with existing calendars and has a familiar interface. But the app also instructs users to pick from a list of health- and happiness-minded tasks—running, flossing, calling Mom or Dad—in addition to the usual personal or work-related to-do list. It then incorporates all of that data, which can include sleep patterns and designated productive times of the day, to suggest time slots for everything. “Figuring out what to do with your time is a really complex computational problem,” Ariely says.

    Much to my relief, Ariely posits that we are pretty much all unable to take all factors into account when deciding what to do, and when. Faced with myriad big tasks and smaller to-do list items, plus the difficulty of estimating how long it will take us to complete something and which time of day we’re best able to focus, we often turn to the easiest task at hand: re-reading unanswered emails or updating one’s Facebook status.

    Translation: We procrastinate. A lot.

    Making matters worse is the fact that most of today’s digital calendars aren’t well-equipped to remind us of the kinds of things we typically do outside of work but could possibly do during work—like calling Mom and Dad, running, or even flossing. In other words, today’s calendar apps seem to lack the smarts or focus in providing a more holistic view of our day, incorporating both what we need to do (like writing an article) and what we should aspire to do (like go for a lunchtime run).