The Challenge Dividend: Watching My Death Clock

Earlier this week I posted about the "Meeting Minder" a tool meant to challenge your team at work to make sure they are spending valuable minutes wisely. Yesterday I found a similar tool with a much bigger stakes - the Death Clock.

I found this wonderful/morbid tool by way of an article in Wired about the writers from Futurama talking about spoofing a blog post by Kevin Kelly about his creation of a death countdown tool. Kelly's experience is described here.

I decided to give it a try for myself. At first, I just looked up the life expectancy table. It computed by "Death Day" as April 20, 2047, which seemed far too early than I planned. But later in the day I mentioned the death clock concept to people in a business meeting, and my friend, Steve, pointed me to a different site, which uses some health questions to give you a more accurate estimate. So I went over to www.deathclock.com and got a new date: November 28, 1965. Within minutes I was able to add a Google Widget to my desktop that tracks the countdown by the second.

Interestingly, the day after this experiment I went to deathclock.com to re-input my info and get a graphic that I could place in this blog (above). The output was a completely different Death Day, this one in 2056. I hit the button a few more times and got a wide range of results. I have no idea why the estimates changed by the second. But I ended up updating my Death Day with one of the new results that seemed to fall in the middle of the calculation range. Fittingly, it is on my actual birthday, December 15, 2069.

My wife thinks I'm way too concerned about getting old and that I'm obsessing about it. That might be true. But my rationale for using the Death Clock is that I think I can benefit from having a daily reminder that life is short and I'd better take advantage of every day I am given. It could be an extra challenge that gets me to do everything from finishing my books in progress to spending more quality time with the kids.

Time will tell if this works or sends me into a mid-life crisis...