Newbie - Idea/Proposal: peer-to-peer "productivity pal" for writers, (dissertation/senior) students & freelancers

Hi you guys out there suffering from chronic procrastination!

I´m new to this group. I´ve been struggling with procrastination all my life. Over the last months, I´ve been trying to finish my thesis and I´ve already missed all thinkable deadlines.

I´ve got an idea and I would like to know if anyone is interested in it (if so, please keep reading)...  <!--break-->

Over the last years I´ve read several books on procrastination and spent zillions of hours reading procrastination stuff on the internet, which means that study techniques, establishing long- and short-term goals and developing action plans are not a (big) problem for me. I also think I understand the underlying problems of my procrastination, such as fear of failure, task aversiveness and low motivation to achieve, but I agree 100% with pro when he says that knowing why you´re a procrastinator can help but it´s not the solution and that procrastinators have an additive personality and a problem with compulsive avoidance (http://www.procrastinators-anonymous.org/node/8).

So, in my case, the problem I can´t deal with is to make myself accountable to my daily goals because I´m alone and nobody supervises how much time I spend on my work. I´m sure many of you have the same problem as I do! ;-)

I´ve been thinking about hiring a professional coach, but most of them just seem to focus on your underlying problems and won´t actually see how much time you actually spend on your projects every day (I don´t know if would spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a dissertation coach, either :-) ). Check-in postings seem to be helpful for small tasks but I´m pretty sure that I would just end up doing nothing and stopping posting new check-ins.

So, my idea is to build very small groups (two or three procrastinators) who mutually CONTROL the progress of their own work by communicating to each other their working plans in advance and, more importantly, by ACTUALLY SENDING THE RESULT of their work to each other, personally (for example by email) on a daily/weekly basis and getting feedback and support from each other. That is, we could actually send the due assignments, paragraphs, chapters, presentations, etc. to our "productivity pal", and vice-versa. Of course, we could support this activity by frequent emails, by chatting on this site or posting the results here in order to foster the sense of accountability and the sense of having someone who actually supervises your work and supports you. If confidentiality and exclusivity of our work is an issue, we could also avoid sending the editable files (such as Word, HTML or Powerpoint files) by sending to each other only non-editable PDF files of our work or just screenshots of it, and by hiding names and personal references in the files.

Of course, this wouldn´t work for things like doing the dishes, writing christmas cards or cleaning up the room, since they can´t be controlled over the internet, but it could work for students who have to hand in assignments, senior or grad students who have to finish their thesis or dissertation (like me! ;-) ) and writers or freelancers who have to hand in the result of their work on a regular basis.

I think this could work, since no other person can understand us better than another person suffering from the same self-destroying habit.

I really think this deserves a try!!

Anyone interested???

Any comments would be appreciated!
 
Thanks a lot,
searcher