Hey Reddit!My name is Nik and like all of you, I’ve been struggling with accountability and self-discipline for years. I’ve tried lots of things but found that group accountability works the best: you can’t fail on your commitments in front of people you respect

But many times, my friends were busy, and when it happened, I got back into a “procrastination hole” because I couldn’t keep myself accountable.

My first attempts with trying AI chatbots

To solve that, I’ve tried Chatgpt to motivate me by describing how I feel and what I’m currently doing. For example, once I said "I feel like I don’t want to do anything and so I’m watching youtube"And I got a super helpful response “If you don’t want to do anything, try actually to NOT DO anything by staring at the wall for 10 minutes.” - I tried it and it worked really well.

It worked so well, that now whenever I’m procrastinating or spending by scrolling stupid apps, I stop doing that and just stare at the wall for 10+ minutes. My dopamine cycle calms down and then I easily get back to work.

Trying Personalized Chatbot coaches

In some cases, AI was so helpful for me that I decided to create my own personalized “coaches” for myself based on people I respect. For example, I deeply respect Paul Graham (founder of top-1 startup accelerator Ycombinator) and I built my own “coach” Paul Graham who motivated me.

Even more, you can make your coach “integrated” into your life. For that, you can add a “listening” feature and just have it listen to your surroundings. You can build it yourself or use a publicly available chatGPT bot (not sending the link here because of rules, so let me know in the comments and I can DM)

I’ve been talking to my coach whenever I felt “down” or “demotivated” and it worked really well, but then my brain “figured that out”, and I started to procrastinate even on opening my “coach chatbot”

I got into a “procrastination hole” once again for some time until I decided to try creating a “proactive” coach that would send me proactive notifications even when I am too lazy to “motivate myself”.

Proactive AI Coach

So I built a very simple iOS app that would listen to whatever is happening around me and then send me a proactive relevant feedback like

  • “hey I noticed you talked to much, how about we do some work”
  • “It seems you are procrastinating again and watching something irrelevant, let’s pause that for a minute and get some fresh air”
  • “Yesterday you mentioned that you want to accomplish {X} today. How about we start the day with that?”

I gave it many specific prompts with a “mentor/coach personality” and uploaded motivational content. Also, I made this coach “educate itself” based on the things I say. The more I use the app, the more useful it becomes => After few days of use, some of the feedback was really good - I have been using it non-stop.

To summarize, here is a step-by-step plan I’d suggest if you want to try my method:

  1. Choose a person you deeply respect and are fascinated by. It can be someone like Usain Bolt if you are in sports or Steve Jobs if you are in business
  2. Play with “AI chatbot apps” that allow you to create your own customized chatbots and create your own coach! Or use one that already exists.
  3. You can personalize your AI coach by uploading quotes of the person you choose. Simply Google “{person name} motivational quotes” and put them into the Prompt of your chatbot
  4. If you want to go beyond like I did, try to make a proactive AI coach that would send you notifications. You can send them either via messages or any messenger you use. You can start with “scheduled notifications” and then make it understand when to send notifications by itself
  5. Even more beyound, you can make your coach “integrated” into your life. For that, you can add a “listening” feature and just have it listen your surroundings
  6. Finally, you can buy a wearable hardware like a microphone or similar, connect it to your app and have it always with you => that would be a peak performance

I’d love to hear about your experience with AI coaches! And also greatly appreciate any feedback to my method and how to improve it. Thank you for any insights you can provide!