Kairos: visualizing consequence and nurturing confidence

Kairos is a desktop application and web service that facilitates interaction between counselors and university students suffering from procrastination. The application employs a goal and feedback structure to help graduate students overcome procrastination. It encourages students to become more effective workers by visualizing the consequences of their actions, and through building confidence through a series of achievements. For counselors, Kairos provides management tools for multiple students’ schedules, and gives timely feedback to each student about their achievements. Kairos was developed through research on behavioral and educational psychology, and through user interviews with self-identified procrastinators. BJ Fogg’s behavior model (Fogg, 2009) serves as a theoretical framework for resolving the procrastination problems that the project addresses.

Through the research and synthesis phase, two types of procrastination and the core reasons — the fear of failure for decisional procrastination and avoidance as passive defiance for behavioral procrastination — were identified and because I found that these reasons are rooted in the social realm of one’s identity, the suggested solution was focused on facilitating one’s social interaction with other people. Two keywords—consequence and confidence — were selected as symbolic terms for current and future sources of motivation that will help people avoid procrastination.