I love simple little utilities that help you change your behaviour for the better—Pomodoro; all those apps that remind you to drink water; and, now, good ol’ “Do Not Touch Your Face” dot com.
For those who are terrified of the Coronavirus, or just want to practice better habits as it relates to any infectious diseases, I recommend keeping “Do Not Touch Your Face” as a pinned browser tab for the time being. Or, better yet, get it working on your kid’s computer so they stop touching their face with their gross, unwashed hands.
Here’s how it works: Pull up the site, and it’ll ask you to take a quick video recording of your face. Easy.
It’ll then ask you to place your (clean) hands on your face and take a second video. Double-easy, since it takes less time than the original video. Now, whenever you raise your filthy hands to your face to give it a quick pat or caress, you’ll get a very obvious warning—and, if you enabled them, a desktop notification.
The warnings persist as long as your tab remains in your browser’s background (assuming you haven’t suspended it).
I love the concept, but this site has two quirks worth mentioning. First, since all of this face-training happens directly in your browser, not on a server somewhere, you’ll have to go through the process of taking a video of your normal face and your hand-covered face each time you restart your browser. Annoying? Yes, but it sure beats someone having recordings of thousands of peoples’ faces on some server somewhere.
Second, it’s imperfect. Sometimes, I’d get the horrible warning when my hands were nowhere near my face. I blame my somewhat-crappy webcam and lighting. If you can, make sure you’re in a well-lit area when you’re going through the teaching process, lest your computer freak out for no reason.
While I can’t see many people using this forever, it’s still a fun little way to untrain yourself of a bad habit. Do as I say, not what I do, right?
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