I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
simonberens.me
simonberens.me
This guy seriously paid people to sit behind him and didn't even think about them stealing his $1000 monitors until after the fact?
He didn't try blocking any non productive sites? No productivity software? No pomadoro technique-esq focus methods?
This guy should have paid $88/hour for therapy if we are being honest here
I did actually use my own custom built productivity tools to block websites[0], and I used ActivityWatch[1] to track my time.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webblock/jeahkphmd...
Or based on the ones custom you described aforementioned, which features or tools do you wish you had on top of it?
Just curious, and I respect the setup thus far.
ActivityWatch is great for single device tracking, but I wish there was a tool for multi-device tracking and also away-from-device tracking (tracking gym, sleep, etc...) that integrated all of the data into one place and made it easily accessible. My use case is pretty niche though :/
I'm not sure if that's a joke, or not. But if you sincerely mean it - I put it away for years and now I feel like an idiot for wasting a lot of my time fighting rather than actually addressing my issues. This would've been the most productive time investment I could've done a decade earlier.
That's great that therapy worked so well for you, but don't make it out to be a panacea for everyone.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5788928/#:~:tex...
Which books do you recommend?
> In the morning session, I did yoga, went to the gym, started two blog posts, and did some work for my job.
If it's the 5th you mention, it's just not that important?
I mainly wanted to get a lot of side projects/hobbies done.
It's a cheap and simple solution to the problem of people spending half their work hours puttering around on Twitter etc.
What a horrible thing to do.
- It's business devices, so there should be no private stuff in any of the screenshots. - It's screenshots, so it's just a point-in-time. There's no way to determine how long a sequence was. For both sides. - The rule seems to be that it should just set boundaries. There's no proactive monitoring. They only seem to look at the screenshots if productivity does not raise.
Obviously, lower intervalls may be problematic. If there are maybe 15-30 screenshots a day, I don't see any issue (for me).
That's when we use it. Some people need to have discipline imposed from an external source, if they don't have it, they will fail.
If they turn their performance around they can ask to have it removed and we usually grant the ask. I don't have anyone senior on my team who has to use this system, because part of becoming senior is developing the discipline to not need this.
We give freedom to those who perform and explicit, direct, unambiguous corrective guidance to those who don't.
It's frankly a great system at the right time and place. I thought the OP's post was very interesting because being watched improves output for many people. Managers like having people in the office for this reason, too. But the OP's way of having himself watched was very expensive. You can do it for 15 bucks a month with a SaaS. The most interesting part is that performance usually improves even if no one is looking at the screenshot. This is an awful lot more relaxing than having someone hover over your shoulder all day, whether they're a manager or a person you hired.
Thanks for making the effort to judge us with zero context and six words though.
1 hr a week for most people. Give up 1 of your 100 unproductive hours instead lol.
Meaning, I am pretty sure, your effective productivity would have declined after the month, with assistants, or not. And that you got Covid, might be a clear sign of that.
Some of you need to touch grass.
You mean aside from the fact that people are insulting this guy for trying something that doesn't hurt anybody or affect anybody else? You just called him insane. For what exactly? And why do you think that's okay for you to do?
Touch grass, bro.
Also, he has gone so far as to create his own productivity tool, so it seems like he has invested some time and effort into trying to reach his productivity goals prior to this experiment.
That's worked for thousands of years, or millions if you count all the species where males "dance" or flaunt their physical appearance to attract a female partner.
I have a hard time to see how something that we have done for millions of years can be bullshit. Seems to me rejecting it is more bullshit.
That said, from your comment I don't understand if you are pro or against the "Date me" form. What I'm saying is the DJ saying "hey babe, check out my records" or the guy dressing well for a date is exactly how Nature intended it to work, not by sending someone a questionnaire.
[edit: More precisely what I mean is that the rituals performed with just feathers and money look stupid to me; more complicated rituals have taken their place and are usually intended to show survival traits that apply to more modern circumstances.]
[edit 2; by feathers I mean everything from clothes to Botox to Ferraris.]
My basic point was that the questionnaire is just one more recent iteration of the same thing. If nature intended DJs and record collections, there's no reason nature couldn't intend questionnaires.
Wait, what?
I see a lot of this on TikTok nowadays; and, if my YouTube feed were less curated, I'd probably see it there, too. It's the food videos where someone makes an absolutely terrible meal out of 8 whole fast-food burgers, covered in fries, then honey, then mashed potatoes; or the videos where someone makes a mess with spaghetti and sauce in their hands and then puts it in the oven.
Once I got this perspective on a lot of video content, I could see it basically everywhere.
I think he could've saved a great deal of money by just going into a collaborative workspace environment.
And the guy literally links to a website-blocker he develops.
I guess his being weird doesn’t particularly bother me. I liked that the post was frank and (seemingly) honest. Doing that sort of experiment and writing about it seems basically fine to me. Maybe he’ll be able to contrast it with other things, like maybe having one extra hour of productive work is worse than using the same amount of hours more productively by eg avoiding blunders.
In the first paragraph he did mention tools for focusing, saying he went as far as making his own.
But were those people the same? Usually have have one type of person for each purpose, one psychologist/therapist to help you figure out why you can't focus and then one cleaner that helps you keep a tidy house.
If you ramble on long enough and your maid starts to answer and ask questions, are they a makeshift therapist?
If all you think a therapist does is just answering and asking questions, you should maybe see a therapist and experience it for yourself ;)
Joking aside, the struggle of loneliness can probably be helped by having just somebody to talk to, though not in a professional setting.
But if you're constantly having trouble focusing, it could be a sign that something is amiss. Personally, sometimes I get affected by things in my social environment without really noticing it, just that things gets less interesting and that I'm being less productive than usual. A therapist can help you realize those things, while friends will usually be more supportive rather than trying to actively combat your "inside problem", as they have their own.
Could also be that some sort of medication can be helpful for you. I have some friends who didn't realize that suffered from ADHD until they were 30-40 years old, and having access to medication and therapy helped them a lot. A therapist can again help you realize if you need/don't need this.
Imagine your arms barely work. Or even more accurately, sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, and you really can’t predict it. This is greatly interfering with your home and work life. Sometimes you can do laundry, sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you can type, sometimes you can’t.
You go to a doctor. You take meds. You see a physical therapist twice a week. Maybe this is slowly helping. But consider during all that time in the doctor’s office, the PT’s office, the pharmacy, your laundry still isn’t getting done.
So, you need something that helps now. Some people will call this a quick fix, but that’s what you need. You know, that oxygen mask isn’t really a solution. You can’t fly like that all the time. You should figure out the root cause of your airplane’s depressurization. Or, you know, just focus on staying alive first and talk to the mechanic at your weekly session.
So you hire someone to be your arms for eight hours a day. What do you need help with? Everything. When? All of the time and none of the time. 50/50 at any given moment. So you basically need someone with you a lot of time. While your arms are working and you’re paying them, you might want them to do something else for you. And a normal assistant won’t cut it because this can apply to stuff that you specifically have to do, or requires some skills that other people are unlikely to have.
The porn thing was most likely a generic "mind your own business" non-response. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBE4262nxkE
They would be doing him a favour I think, considering the complete crime against ergonomics that monitor setup is.
The fact that the author seems to take it as genuine adds to the bizarre nature of this blog post though!
"No! No! It was porn I swear!"
I think you're too certain about that. She has no responsibilities other than some occasional chores and keeping an eye on what he's doing. Maybe she thought looking at porn surreptitiously would be OK, on that basis. And I'm going to anticipate the "but women don't watch porn!" objection and counter with - no, some do. E.g. some bisexual women, some trans women...
With her comment about "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" it's also possible she was trying to seduce him at the start and was sexually frustrated when he didn't pick up on that...
Why does he feel the need to be 'productive' for 16 hours a day?
Why did he think the best way to deal with this was to hire a group of babysitters?
Why was he being so weird to his assistants?
It just doesn't add up. The whole thing is so damn strange.
Maybe this is an experiment on the readers of his article, to see how we will react to something on the borders of credibility.
Yeah after reading the post I’m like this guy must be a founder to value productivity so highly… NOPE, just works at Meta!
EDIT: Oh wait, he DID also start a company, during the experiment in fact, but of course it’s in stealth mode!
Can’t make this stuff up…
Also doesn’t Meta own everything you create when you work there? I know other companies of that size do. And if so, then creating a company is breach and technically the IP of that company now belongs to Meta too.
I've heard stories like this but I can't imagine this would be enforceable unless the "IP" was very obviously related to his work at Meta. What other companies are you thinking of, and do you have any stories of this happening to someone?
Many top companies do have these clauses, I’ve signed them and seen others. How enforceable they are, I’m not sure, but billionaires with armies of bored lawyers, don’t make for great opponents in legal battles.
The question is, how good is his actual work and would it be bad or good PR for Meta to keep him around.
//Why does he feel the need to be 'productive' for 16 hours a day
When you are shooting for an outcome, you want to make sure you are working on it. Productivity is the means not the end.
// Why did he think the best way to deal with this...
I can relate. I am reasonably successful/ productive, but I am exponentially more successful and productive when focused. But focus is hard. If hiring someone to focus me was practical, why not?
Dude wanted to hit the front page of HN so he wrote the most unhinged productivity porn he could muster.
I do not believe these events actually transpired.
— add.org google extract
Sounds like a legitimate strategy.
Btw this doesn't just include young people. People needing youtube on to eat is just another variation on needing the TV on. I know and have read about some elderly people that keep the weather channel or 24hr news on all day out of sheer loneliness. Across the board people are just lonely in numbers that lead it could be called an epidemic by many health and mental health organizations.
This experiment left me feeling unclean for a different reason: this person essentially just hired a retinue of servants.
I really enjoyed the post and found it useful.
I'm enthusiastic about the topic and appreciated TFA, and I felt like most the people ripping on it here were just a couple steps away from turning their (IMO) unconstructive criticisms to constructive ones.
And yes, as it has been pointed out: a lot of the parameters had him practically crossing over into hiring servants, and I felt like it deeply undermined some aspects of the experiment, although I guess the main goal was just to strictly see increased work output as a fun experiment.
I would have found the experiment more interesting if the warm bodies were hired a little more strictly for accountability purposes in helping the author stay on task not only for work but also with tending to the basic Maslow tasks, especially in the area of home-cooked meals (or just sticking with ordering out/delivery if that is what they usually do). I've only recently acquired the space and wherewithal to be able to do this for myself, and it is a HUGE timesink.
Regardless, I think most people are rather reading between the lines, since there's some weirdness to hiring (from Craigslist) a "productivity manager" who watches you, does house chores and cooks for you. This is basically a servant with another title, and not acknowledging it makes it seem like the author is missing some common wisdom. There's other details like his assistant being caught watching porn, to which the author reacts in an.. even more awkward way than expected? It reads a lot like satire.
that's kind of a royal luxury because the things that need to get done today don't care about that.
For me personally I found that the longer i live on this planet, the more I'm drowning in a million stupid bureaucratic things like startup taxes, dealing with tenants, dmv, financial paperwork, etc etc. Maybe good problems to have, but whatever, all this still requires lots of diligent work. Taxes don't care if you are in the mood to do them, you just need to get the hell up and do them on time, correctly, otherwise you don't even qualify as a functioning human. So if there is some person there who gently nudges me to stay on track with all the inevitable, snowballing stupid daily crap, I'd count that as a win and I don't care if they mock it as a "proxy mom" if it's actually productive.
This isn't micromanagement, except to the extent that they are preventing him from visiting time-sink websites (unclear to me why his website blocking tech didn't work for that). They aren't actually directing his work activities in any way, so not only are they not micromanaging him, they're not managing him at all - in fact, he is managing them. All they are doing is making sure he's "on the clock".
I weep for the future of a world where zoomers have entered the workforce during covid lockdowns and think that remote work is normal and working in an office, with a boss sitting behind you or whatever, is what "micromanagement" means. Newsflash - it ain't.
One assistant expressed interest in the experiment and honestly I’d have been open to helping a friend do this for science
Recently I've seen the claim that a meetup organiser shouldn't flirt with meetup attendees, because reasons... power differentials I guess? The idea that a fully-grown woman should be capable of noticing a power differential and making her own decision as to whether to enter into a relationship, with that in mind, didn't seem to have occurred to the poster.
But this really takes the cake. Someone is paid to sit at a desk with their laptop and do virtually nothing for >= 5 hours and cook at a basic level for <= 3, and that's problematic according to you? Dude that's like the easiest job in the world, if you can cook (I can't, but that's besides the point). And she can use her laptop so it's not even like she's going to be bored to death (and if she is, she should quit, simple, problem solved).
If he was the one "watching porn" then yeah, but it was one of his assistants! Or maybe she was joking.
I also note that there was not even a hint of flirting or "problematic" sexual/romantic behaviour from him in this account, so any problems in that arena would mostly likely originate from your own imagination.
The benefits for me are two-fold:
1) It keeps me accountable while working and
2) I can rewatch my work sessions and recall my thought process from a future me perspective.
It's amazing how much you forget about a day, but by watching the recordings after the fact, you recall the micro lessons you learned during your work sessions and you have the opportunity to encode these lessons into your long-term memory.
Released in 2012, pretty popular software.
For folks with AMD GPU. AMD Adrenalin software comes with it baked in.
My video resolution is 1792 × 1120 and I record at 10fps.
- and here https://veganbuddies.org/blog/
Kind of funny when I record 2 hours of getting nothing at all done and screaming in frustration, but there we are. Call it radical honesty if you will.
I find it absolutely exhausting though. I max out at 5 hours a day if I talk the entire time.
I find adding a blog post for each screencast to be even better for productivity. I often find myself going back to them to reference something.
https://hobbs.cz/wearable-computing/adventures.html
Obviously it's important to make sure you aren't bothering other people in a way they cannot easily ignore. You shouldn't make too much noise, especially at night, or create too much smoke or other bad smells. But being weird hurts no one. Why should I limit my own freedom out of fear of being weird? If it seemed to have a negative effect on my job prospects I might be less weird, but I find the opposite is true. Being weird has probably had a negative effect on my dating life. Then again, I don't want to date someone who is going to restrict my creative freedom by hating my weirdness anyways. Being a coward is far worse when it comes to finding dates than being weird, and being weird in public can help you learn not to be a coward.
I also see letting it all hang out publicly, warts and all as being a sort of protest. If the only ones publishing coding streams were the [Jon Gjengsets](https://www.youtube.com/c/jongjengset) of the world, people like me might simply give up. Surely I'm not the only imperfect coder. Surely I'm not the only one in the world who has spent 10 hours bashing my head against the wall because of a silly typo. I'm here to shout from the hilltops, that it's OK to play amateur football. We don't all have to bend it like Beckham to have fun!
I guess the main thing though is, that I don't really believe anyone will watch all my videos, so I don't feel self conscious doing them.
They'd have a field day with this.
But honestly, his last updates stopped being fun. It became just too repetitive.
> Tuesday morning—under Sophia’s supervision—I unironically decided to start a company (it’s in stealth, sorry!), wrote a random blog post, and did more work for my job. In the evening session with Hannah I picked up where I left off for my job and then went breakdancing. When I came back to my apartment, the internet was out so I read two chapters of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them until the internet came back on, after which I completed a lesson in the UI/UX course I’d enrolled in.
if so i applaud the author on achieving heights of tech satire not seen since HBO's Silicon Valley
My thoughts exactly.
I read this part using Patrick Bateman's voice in my head:
>"The rest of the experiment continued in a similar fashion (albeit less hectic), with me doing yoga and working out in the morning, working my job, working on my company, reading books, doing my UI/UX course, writing blog posts, working on some side projects, all interspersed with ping pong and breakdancing classes."
Here’s other ways you could introduce productivity: 1. Hire house cleaners @400/month for a large house to come in twice a month. 2. Get a grammarly or similar subscription @60/month to write documents faster 3. Personal trainer 2 days a week for $60/session 4. A dietitian for weekly sessions @100/session (you could also do virtual sessions with people abroad for a lot cheaper if you want) 5. $200/session for a monthly career coach
The list goes on and any of these would help you more than just the additional productivity. Interesting experiment though.
Can't wait to leave Palo Alto where a personal trainer is way closer to $200 than $60 per hour. $120 a week for a PT is great.
But seriously: are your graphs showing 21 productive hours a week? That’s like four a day? What _are_ you doing the rest of the time?
As someone else said: therapy would be an incredible productivity investment. Sharpen the saw. Babysitters are a hack for the symptoms, it’s long term more efficient to attack the cause.
Answering questions in slack, checking emails, going to meetings, waiting for ci/cd: all chew up your productive time.
P.S. most people don't have unprocessed trauma or depression to a clinically significant extent. If you think they do, you are living in a bubble (of melodramatic people perhaps? of therapists?)
If it really meant a lot, it wouldn't be a challenge to actually do it. It sounds like the real problem is a lack of interest in the particular books, skills, etc.
But I still struggle with this for sure. I could always use more advice myself.
Dear god I wish this were true. You have no idea. Hell, I would pay good money right this second to make it true for myself.
One of the major struggles of ADD is having things you actually care about being challenging to do. Doesn't matter how important, your brain just says "nope".
I struggle with this constantly. Things I truly care about, or which are exceedingly important are a huge uphill battle just to put any effort at all towards them.
In general in the replies here there are a lot of people who aren't aware that other people might experience life differently from them.
> Things I truly care about, or which are exceedingly important are a huge uphill battle just to put any effort at all towards them.
This is the sentence that hit the hardest for me. I’ve been struggling with this since before I can remember and it frustrates me to no end. The worst part to me isn’t even being less productive than I want to be, it’s my brain sometimes not even letting me do things that bring me joy, like spending time with my family or indulging in hobbies. Anything but what I want to be doing is what my brain wants to do.
What I have observed repeatedly is that the best way to tell what is actually important to a person (myself very much included!) is to ignore what they say and look at what they actually do and don't do. That's where my comment was coming from--not a glib dismissal, but an invitation for frank introspection.
Often the things we want to be important to us are different from the things that are actually important, and it can be difficult to even be aware of that difference.
It's not about apps, techniques, habits, tricks or what have you, most of those things don't work for adhd peeps. What works is having a job be variable enough to keep you interested for a long long time or have adhd meds (Adderall, Concerta etc.)
Did you productivity improve? I think I have ADHD but not diagnosed yet and I am facing the same annoyance of not being able to do what I actually need to.
I'm pretty positive a lot of the folks around me in a late-night Starbucks in the Before Times (always packed but now closed, no drive-through) were doing exactly the same thing. There were a bunch of regulars working on side projects, they all knew each other, and if someone was screwing around they'd probably get a question "How's the project going?"
Second, you could probably do this for less by arranging a "study buddies" setup with college, grad or medical students but you'd also have to commit to keeping them productive as well.
Now I wonder if I should get an assistant too: come in at 11AM for 2 hours: make lunch, do some cleaning and perhaps some tedious phone calls every day. And maybe a mini stand up.
This one!
Asking for a friend ;)
Probably can't do that right now as my toddler wakes a few times every night so the whole family is barely dragging. I'll probably wait until he reaches 5/6 and more independent.
Btw ... Is 'ghetto' racist? What would be a better word insted?
It is not a word we use in this context in the UK, I think, because ghetto for us doesn't mean what it means in the US, it means Jewish ghetto in WW2, i.e. it's a word we only come across in history classes.
But what does it mean? What are you trying to convey by using that word?
Ah, the feeling! Nothing like it.
> Saturday morning Hannah texted me she couldn’t make it, so I slept in and skipped the gym. When I woke up, I put the finishing touches on a blog post I had started earlier in the week and published it. It hit the #1 spot on Hacker News; I couldn’t stop myself from constantly refreshing the post as it got more upvotes while chuckling at the classic Hacker News hate comments.
And it works.
You obviously don’t have to go crazy like the author, but it has a real effect.
Just sitting at the library as a student was way more effective than sitting at home.
That he’s 21, earning so much money, doing all these things, is interesting but also I hope he has some good influences around him to keep him grounded.
That's what he paid all those assistants for.
Is it that he is essentially valuing their time less than his and therefore not viewing them as equals? could someone who feels more strongly try to put their finger on whats so off-putting?
The author appears to do very little work, while he pays someone to sit there and be his surrogate mother, so that he can be a bit more productive.
It seems somewhat attention-seeking (I personally believe it's honest, though it does invoke Poe's Law). That's fine too, people seek attention on HN, but they usually offer something insightful in return.
This is more the equivalent of the Tiktok user who posted her "day in the life of an employee at (Meta? Airbnb?)" that involved very little work.
Also fine, work isn't the point of life. But when you're showing off a flamboyantly eccentric "productivity hack" that got you to work 80 hours in a month instead of 25, so you could spend more time starting blog posts, breakdancing, doing yoga, going to the gym, "unironically starting a company (it's in stealth, sorry!)", doing online courses (at least this is at least somewhat related to the job they are presumably actually paid to do)... many people reading are going to be amused at the very least.
It seems like they have time management issues that make this "experiment" only potentially useful to people who also struggles to get anything actually done due to battling severe ADHD while balancing working at a very casual pace, and shooting off in 10 different directions at once all the time.
They would very likely benefit from some combination of a reality check, therapy, counselling, or medication.
This blog post is remarkable because it demonstrates a hyper-exaggerated jumbalaya of first-world-problems, out of touch, unchecked privilege, and the "hacker" mentality, with a side of attention-seeking.
It's like Lucille Bluth's character from arrested development[1] and Bill Gates trying to guess the price of groceries[2] conceived a baby with Krazam's "Hustle culture"[3] and delivered it right into this unbelievably glorious blog post
I know, I'm being uncharitable, and I feel a little bad about it. I can even relate to the author with a lot of their struggles, interests, and activities. Best of luck to him.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw
Just do the work, or don't.
This is some bullshit.
Somehow it's more obvious that it will yield results (at all) and soon.
- Pick up shovel
- Move dirt from pile A to pile B
Compare that to a vague action of "build xyz app". There's a million things to think about and you can easily talk yourself out of it because maybe you're doing what you think is the wrong thing (note: the "what you think" is a really important phrase here).
But if you break that down to "open up code editor" and "design user registration page" that at least starts to get less vague. Eventually you get into precise actionable tasks like "create user model with an email, password and username" which you can start progressing on without much distraction.
Unless my brain happens to be "in the mood for work", the only way I can get things done is by being in a structured "you must do X now" kind of environment. Doubly so since shifting gears from something you are focused on to something new is essentially impossible.
It is shitty and stressful being forced to run 100% towards artificially imposed deadlines that I'm always just barely late for but unless I do that, I will never make progress regardless of how much I actually want to do the work. And this really hurts me for burnout as I constantly feel like a failure for not meeting deadlines that I knowingly set to be nearly impossible. So I'm stuck in a balance between not being able to do work because I'm not running against an impossible clock or feeling like a failure for not beating said impossible clock.
Even worse is the reality that if I start to recognise that the constraints I've placed are artificial or have consequences I control, any help they provide falls apart. So it's a constant struggle to find new, increasingly ratcheted constraints for myself so I can continue to do the things I enjoy or even basic day to day personal or work related tasks.
Because of this, I 100% get the author. I couldn't see myself doing what they did but the thought process makes complete sense to me. I'm practically doing the same thing but using friends, coworkers, or technology to do it, even if they aren't necessarily in the same room as me.
Since COVID started we've had our desks next to each other, and even though she's not constantly checking on me, I know she can see if I'm just wasting time. On days where she's not working, or if one of us moves to another room to take a call, my productivity falls off a cliff.
I feel like there is an element of "Body Doubling" here... a strategy used by those with ADD/ADHD. I recently looked in to this when curious about my own observation that I work longer and with better focus when working in close proximity of someone else.
Did you try Buddhism?
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard”
Working solo with a fake “manager” is probably less productive then hiring a team member and sitting in the same room while they work for you
In contrast, I enjoyed the post and found it useful.
Please go live on a farm or something and do real work.
I do wonder how much a measure of "productive time vs unproductive time" corresponds to actual outcomes though; it's very different than knowing you've spent that time on the right things.
> When I woke up, I put the finishing touches on a blog post I had started earlier in the week and published it. It hit the #1 spot on Hacker News; I couldn’t stop myself from constantly refreshing the post as it got more upvotes while chuckling at the classic Hacker News hate comments.
EDIT: I think coming from a humble background helps to proud oneself to be able to do everything yourself. I guess the line of having (modern) slaves vs employing someone is complicated and intermingled with the amount of payment. I imagine, especially the first assistant, after knowing that OP earns a magnitude more than 20/h, and then goes on a date and expects me to stay since I'm on payroll, is rather unsettling.
The goal shouldn't be to increase the number of personal productivity hours. The goal is to move a company vision forward.
The leverage you get by spending half as much money on a single full-time virtual assistant to handle tasks for you alone would easily be double the "output" as what he did here.
Hopefully, lesson learned on his end? :shrug:
Also looks like he's into standup comedy. If you ever want a spot in Taipei hit me up Simon!
I love the out of the ordinary experiment
I don’t care if the OP could be a narcissist he did a good write up and leveraged a social aspect to increase his productivity in unique way.
https://hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/npc7g21v#quadrupled...
I imagine someone could build an effective AI with face to watch over you to increase productivity/$ spent but it wouldn't have a physical presence.
- Have deadlines
- Make evening plans you can't get out of
- Ask your S.O. to cook dinner tonight so you can keep working, and expect them to notice if you're playing videogames.
So, in keeping with Simon Berens' theme of increasing productivity (or at the very least, increasing the throughput of my procrastination), here is a summary:
https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://simonberens.me/blog...
>In the evening session with Hannah I picked up where I left off for my job and then went breakdancing. When I came back to my apartment, the internet was out so I read two chapters of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them until the internet came back on, after which I completed a lesson in the UI/UX course I’d enrolled in.
What a weird, weird detail to include.