A few Christmases ago Chris Lightfoot and Etienne Pollard built a little throwaway website called HassleMe.co.uk as a one-day coding challenge. The purposes of HassleMe was to let people nag themselves into doing things that needed doing by arranging to be sent automated emails.
The genius of HassleMe lay in the timing of the responses. Instead of it mailing users exactly 5 days or 2 weeks after they subscribed, it mails people approximately when they ask. As a consequence you never know when the mail’s going to arrive, making it strangely more effective as a nag.
After Chris died the site sat running on his server for a couple of years, and mySociety didn’t have access to it. Last week Francis migrated the site to our own machines with the help of Pete Stevens from Mythic Beasts. When Francis looked at the database he saw that there were 16,000 hassles that users had agreed could be made public. However, the feature to show them was never built.
Now it has been added on this page, and makes for a fascinating, often foul mouthed insight into what it is that people need to motivate themselves to do. There are thousands of examples, each stranger than the next, so just hit refresh for more. And please do paste and favourites as comments to this post.
PS And as always, if you like any of mySociety’s services, or even just find the comments amusing, please donate – we’re a charity!
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September 17th, 2008 at 11:13am
One from Zimbabwe?
“Enjoy being a multimillionaire roughly every 7 days”
And a mighty paradox:
“USE http://WWW.HASSLEME.CO.UK roughly every 4 days”
September 25th, 2008 at 9:38am
This is great; if you haven’t already done so you should email all the HassleMe users with a link to that page.
October 4th, 2008 at 8:35pm
“Plan a date with Becky” – roughly every 14 days.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:44pm
How do oyu cancel these hassle me messages coming to me