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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.