Forced Entry

In thinking about rituals, specifically in an electronic context, my mind tends to jump to the rituals we do almost unconsciously, ones that may or may not even be desirable. I have a lot of questions, and a lot of problems, with these, but we all do it. We check our phones unconsciously and log on to a website three minutes after we’ve checked it. We look at the same bad twitter accounts that are giving us a collective nervous breakdown.

Driving Questions

Why do I automatically go to facebook or twitter when I open a new tab, without even thinking about it?

How have these platforms wormed their way so snugly into my brain that this action is practically instinctual?

Most importantly, how do I combat this? How do I fix something in myself that’s been deeply broken by the internet?

Leaving the platforms, at least for now, is out for various reasons. So I started trying to think about how I could take advantage of these subconscious rituals, of my platform addiction, and turn it into a ritual that I find positive or desirable.

What and Why?

Something I’ve done for a long time, although with wildly varying degrees of dedication, is keep a personal journal. I’ve suffered from anxiety since I was 20 years old. One of the first things I started doing when they began happening was journaling to keep track of my feelings, check in with myself, and be more aware of my own emotional state and the things that trigger anxiety within me.

I was good about this for a long time, but as I came to exert better control over my own anxieties I stopped doing it regularly, and now I’m lucky if I journal once a month. This, along with meditation, is a ritual that’s deeply important to me, but one I have trouble enforcing. These two poles of ritual are very personal to me, as one of the primary manifestations of my anxiety has long been checking rituals: repeatedly checking if I’ve turned off the stove, locked the door, responded to my emails, so on and so forth. The constant need to check social media seems to be a platform-induced negative ritual of the same type, and one that alarms me deeply.

So what if I took advantage of these unconscious rituals — found a way to force myself to journal every time I engage in one of them? Could I successfully simultaneously break myself of a bad habit while encouraging a good one?

That’s the idea behind Forced Entry: a chrome extension that forces you to write a journal entry before letting you enter websites of your choice.

How?

I started by writing a simple hello world extension using chrome’s Getting Started guide . The results were… unimpressive.

After that, I started getting into the nitty gritty. It took me a very long time to figure out the quirks of writing JavaScript in chrome: since all injected scripts exist in an enclosed environment, getting it to interact with the browser in the ways I wanted was very annoying. I also set a personal goal not to use any external libraries for this — I’ve been trying to break myself of the habit of including jQuery when I don’t want to deal with vanilla JS. After plenty of hours of mucking about, I had a functional prototype.

You can find all the code here, but basically: this extension injects a script into blacklisted sites (currently hardcoded as Facebook and Twitter, although Twitter is having CORS issues). It uses HTML to hide the body of the sites, and forces you to answer three questions:

How Are You Feeling?

This seemed like the logical starting point. The primary driving value behind journaling, at least for me, has been forcing myself to communicate what I’m feeling with the written word. Usually, this leads to me being able to articulate why I feel the way I do much more clearly.

Why Are You Visiting This Website?

It seems to me that, especially in the context of this version of journaling, it’s important to track your rationale for the behaviors you’re trying to discourage. Are you reaching out to an old friend? Responding to a party invite? Or are you just bored and doing this automatically?

Is that a good reason? Why or why not?

After making them describe their reasons for this choice, it seems logical to make them explain them. By being mindful of your reasons for doing so, maybe you can slowly learn to eliminate the unconscious element of “logging on.”

Results/Reflections

After trying it a few times myself I think it meets my goals for a prototype, although there’s plenty more I’d like to do with it. I found it immensely frustrating (largely because I kept forgetting I had it on and trying to check facebook), but when I accepted its being there and forced myself to reflect on my actions, I think it had the desired effect. I had to, in the moment, reflect on what had brought me there. This wasn’t exactly a pleasant thought process, but it did make me close the window.

I was able to get a couple user tests in before the due date, and received some interesting suggestions.

• Adding a timer instead of a character limit
• Forcing users to revisit previous entries (this is how you felt yesterday, etc.)
• Repeating questions after a break to meditate/breathe
• Asking different or more open-ended questions (it seems like the last two questions end up being redundant for some users)

There was also some discussion about making it more complex or aesthetically pleasing (adding more complex CSS, visible character counts/visible timer, interfacing with calendars/apps/etc.) I was going for a UX Brutalist form and function, and I’m hesitant to overcomplicate things when I believe it should be a simple thing that accomplishes a simple task, but it’s certainly worth considering whether other wrinkles are worth adding.

I think my favorite response was that it was “like a cool down: waiting 24 hours before you have to buy a gun”, but for checking your ex’s facebook or performing some other ill-advised act.

I’d like to test and incorporate some of these suggestions and eventually submit it to the app store.