Maybe I’m too cynical but it just seems performative. It seems like any number of YouTube videos where some financially well off influencer spends their money doing something awkward to attract views. And it worked. Here we are gawking at the latest stunt. Like and subscribe. Don’t forget to smash that bell. Check out my patreon for access to my Discord.
Yeah, I had the same impression after reading the blog post, it very much felt like a performance art piece rather than a practical experiment with any quantifiably measurable takeaway since there's no way this would be very financially sustainable as an actual applicable solution to the problem.
I think he could've saved a great deal of money by just going into a collaborative workspace environment.
I feel like this perspective is missing the point. A lot of what we see on the internet nowadays is pornography. It has no point at all except to be a spectacle and to generate conversation and views and to keep the person watching - thereby getting ads, thereby getting money.
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.
Yeah, I think the moralism or existentialism or whatever of “what is real and what is a performance or simulation?” aside, something that is taught as part of an exaggerated performance inherently makes it less objective. It’s fine as entertainment, but questionable as education.
He's got a 'Date Me' button on his website which takes you to a Google Form where you can apply to be his girlfriend. I can't decide if this makes the blog post more or less believable. Could it be that he's just a satirical character and doesn't really exist?
This is in line with the content of the blog post and make me believe it is real. Author may have certain degrees of narcissistic personality, but I am no doctor or psychiatrist.
The "apply to date me" form is something I've seen done in the past by female influencers (or whatever it's called when the line between influencer and sugarbaby is blurred). Everyone's hustling these days. The money flow seems to still go in the same old direction where man flaunts wealth and woman flaunts beauty (not saying this to be sexist; I wish it weren't so, but here we are). It's crude and distasteful and transparent and makes you think about all the animal display bullshit that still goes into the propagation of our species, but not really any more or less so than a DJ saying "hey babe, come over and check out my record collection".
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.
I agree with everything you're saying up to the final sentence. I find these displays distasteful because I think humans are worth more than feathers or muscles or money. But that's only to say that the rituals have become more sophisticated with language.
[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'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.
On the other hand, I've seen a handful of therapists, three of them for longer than six months and really, they've done zilch for me. A waste of money in hindsight. Reading helpful books and really applying the good ones (for me) has helped me more while costing way less, aka bibliotherapy [1]
That's great that therapy worked so well for you, but don't make it out to be a panacea for everyone.
isn't the complaint that people are not willing or able to delineate who or what it's actually useful for? it seems like it could save some people a lot of time and disappointment.
My desire to increase my productivity was not solely (or largely) driven by doing better at my job; I find it's relatively easy to be productive if you go into the office.
I mainly wanted to get a lot of side projects/hobbies done.
I'll just leave this here - when remote/junior contractors have a focus issue we simply require them to use software which screenshots their desktop at random intervals during work hours. This usually revolves the issue, if it doesn't, we start actually looking at the screenshots from time to time and providing feedback.
It's a cheap and simple solution to the problem of people spending half their work hours puttering around on Twitter etc.
No. It's completely justified, humane and good when you have a contractor or employee who's dicking around, failing to meet expectations and the alternative is termination.
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.
I'm all against employee surveillance but I actually would take part in that for several reasons:
- 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).
While working out your data, have you considered, that you were basically doing a long sprint?
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.
Yeah I built that chrome extension I linked (WebBlock).
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 :/
The article strikes me as an amount of weirdness within the normal range for ‘rationalism’ people.
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.
I doubt this 0%. I’ve hired people just to help me focus and also to help with chores. To me, this is someone with the same job in the same city as me just taking what I’ve done two steps further. Literally nothing in that post is unbelievable to me, including the behavior of the people he hired.
In the first paragraph he did mention tools for focusing, saying he went as far as making his own.
> I’ve hired people just to help me focus and also to help with chores
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.
Psychologist/therapist helping you figure out why you can’t focus is a different approach to the problem, one that you can do at the same time. But it’s really on a different timeline and sometimes it just doesn’t work. Sometimes you need help now.
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.
> 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.
I clicked on the "About" page and learned that the author is 21. For a minute that made the experiment make more sense. Then it stopped making sense again.
I'm more confused by these comments. Like, he's 21. This is an interesting experience and a great story to tell. Sounds like money well-spent and I'm glad he's experimenting in unusual ways. That's what makes life interesting and worth living. Some of my most memorable and valuable memories stem from bad decisions or experimenting with different ideas that might be dumb.
There's a difference between "Alice thinks it's odd" and the degree of disparaging criticism I'm seeing here. I'm really disappointed by the quality of discussion on this post.
This man is insane. He'd rather oppress himself at great expense than spend any time at all actually thinking about where his problems come from (and why its so important to him to "all work and no play"). Perhaps there's a reason "touch grass" is on the tip of your tongue.
He doesn't sound like was oppressed. If I introspect my thoughts about this experiment, I feel like if I did it, I would feel oppressed - but on the other hand I don't feel oppressed by being around my manager and knowing he could look over my shoulder at any point in time. That's just a normal part of working in an office, and it's kind of cringe and naive to view that as oppression. It just isn't. And this kind of arrangement would be even less bad than that, because I would be ultimately their boss and able to fire them, so they wouldn't be able to impose any kind of restrictions on me that I didn't choose for myself, unlike my actual boss.
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.
> Perhaps there's a reason "touch grass" is on the tip of your tongue.
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?
I’m certain she wasn’t actually watching porn. It’s a pretty common joke answer to say “porn” when someone asks what you’re browsing and you don’t want to share.
The fact that the author seems to take it as genuine adds to the bizarre nature of this blog post though!
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 idea seems decently self-aware to me. All the systems and techniques in the world can't compensate for poor discipline, and social accountability is a strong pull.
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.
>Also doesn’t Meta own everything you create when you work there?
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?
I’ve heard examples of it happening, but can not point to any. I know my cousin was sued for changing employers, they tried to block her taking a job at a competitor(broad use of the term, but I guess fang’s think everyone is a competitor), but lost in Delaware court. So I do know they will attempt to enforce these contracts if they want to.
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.
they don't, because stuff like this does not exist. Unless you are outright stealing like that convicted uber/google guy, or building a direct competitor, nobody cares what you do, at least in the location of the TFA.
Not necessarily. It depends how much your employer cares about confidentiality. If you work at a bank like I do, then 100% yes. But if you work at some social networking site like Facebook, as this guy apparently does... realistically is some rando woman off Craigslist going to try to steal code? No. Not gonna happen.
//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?
Achieving a lot per time spent working seems unrelated to achieving a lot of time spent working per day. Are you sure your comments are written by a human rather than a LLM?
This and things like FocusMate seem symptomatic of much larger, more serious latent problems. It reminds of the younger generations having to put YouTube on to eat a meal. I can't quite put my finger on the connection, but paying a person sit behind you and ask how you're doing, and make you a smoothie... it feels like you're hiring someone to be your mother. This entire experiment left me feeling unclean.
The loss of "public life" in NA is a fairly well documented phenomenon. Putnam's Bowling Alone was a famous warning shot that we never quite reacted to. For a whole host of reasons, many people nowadays, and especially many young people, are lonely in a way and scale that is hard to imagine 50 or 60 years ago.
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.
> ADHD body doubling is a productivity strategy used by individuals with ADHD to finish possibly annoying jobs while having another person beside them. This person is the body double. The body double's duty is to keep the individual with ADHD focused on the task at hand to reduce potential distractions.
My thought as well. People with ADHD will appreciate the experiment. Productivity tools may help some people, but there’s something about having people in the room that greatly amplifies productivity for me.
I'm not sure why there so many negative comments. I work from home for myself and I can say not having a boss to report to makes it easier to get bogged down in non productive tasks. When I used to go to an office and had a manager there was always that external pressure to get things done. I have to constantly remind myself to be productive and not spend time on time wasting websites so I can see how just knowing someone is watching would make you more productive. I remember a few years ago there was a website where you could be on a webcam with someone else while you both worked, sort of a productivity buddy type thing. Kudo's to the author for trying something new and sharing it with everyone. I think that's brave especially with all the keyboard critics in the world.
Most people would agree that having somebody keeping you accountable in the same room does tend to increase productivity in the short term. Long term, not being micromanaged has a positive mental impact.
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.
> Long term, not being micromanaged has a positive mental impact
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.
> Long term, not being micromanaged has a positive mental impact.
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.
Yes, I also find the overall cold reception unfortunate.
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.
The obliviousness to the human element and power dynamics here is shocking. It would be one thing for an eccentric billionaire to do something like this; it would feel sort of par for the course and understandable that they don't really have to answer to anyone there's no downside in letting it all hang out. But a 21-year-old Meta engineer with big ambitions? It's sort of mind-boggling.
The bar for what is considered "problematic power dynamics" among the woke and/or left seems to be getting lower and lower.
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.
You're bringing your own axe to grind to this conversation. I did not say anything was "problematic" nor do I believe anyone's agency was infringed upon here. Frankly, it's much weirder than that.
OK, so why did you bring up power dynamics at all? Are you saying that this won't work long-term because he'll realise that the power dynamics are the wrong way round? That's the only way I can think of that it would be relevant, if it's not problematic.
One thing I've done to increase my productivity after reading a comment from a Hacker News post [1] is recording my work sessions on OBS.
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.
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.
People are saying the original post is weird but honestly I think this is weirder. There is no way I could do this. You must be super-extroverted to be willing to let it all hang out publicly, warts and all.
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.
I do the same thing and if I had some more brain power and free time I may just have invented https://www.rewind.ai/ as I thought of using ocr to find stuff after the fact. Leaving handbrake overnight to crush a 20gb file to throw in google drive is the sad part of this routine.
I had to look it up too. In this case it’s Open Broadcaster Software, but they seem to treat OBS more as a name than an acronym so the usage seems appropriate. https://obsproject.com/
Because that's the name of the software. Google will return it as the first result. It is technically an acronym, Open Broadcast Software, but all the marketing material refers to it as OBS.
I often feel the same, but I think OBS is the name here: OBS may be Open Broadcasting Studio, or Broadcaster Software, but it seems to mostly go by and be referred to as OBS…
> 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
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."
I like how he concluded that $88 per extra productive hour is worth it and more people should consider it.
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.
INFO: did you make them sit on that hard wooden chair for eight hours and watch you recline in your aeron?
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.
I can see therapy working well for someone who has unprocessed trauma or depression, but I have ADHD, and my ADHD specialist has told me that the medicine part is for the symptoms, and the future therapy part of the treatment is for unlearning coping mechanisms that I may have developed to work around my ADHD symptoms, that I would no longer need due to the medicine doing its job. I'm not sure what they would be exactly, but I don't see how they would be holding back my productivity that much.
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?)
I think his employer at Meta would be furious right now for letting this guy jerk off for 4 hours every day when he was supposed to be going fast and be breaking things.
> I have an endlessly growing list of projects I want to make, books I want to read, and skills I want to learn, so productivity means a lot to me!
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.
> If it really meant a lot, it wouldn't be a challenge to actually do it.
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.
I mean no disrespect to sufferers of ADD, or for that matter anyone who finds it difficult to do anything which is 'important' to them. I too have many things that I wish I had done that I think would be very worthwhile but which, for whatever reason, I haven't.
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.
I've been diagnosed with adhd by a psychiatrist, I have a big stack of projects and activities I want to do, because I like them or they solve a problem I have. See, the thing with adhd inattentive types is that you have a dopamine intake problem, so you get random bursts of focus and motivation on things that are novel and you find intriguing,but as soon as figure out how something works, that dopamine dissappears and you can't focus on that thing even if your life depends on it. Same as the article author, I'm a lot more productive when I have someone breathing down my neck or I'm doing something out of spite, just to show them how it's done or that I can.
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.
They did. I've been on meds (Concerta) for 10 months now, i'm able to focus on almost anything. I'm attentive, focused and do a lot of work, instead of being distracted, watching youtube for no reason and doing chores a lot more easily.
> 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.
Talk to a psychologist or psychiatrist, to get you tested for adhd. It might not be that, as depression can also present itself as adhd symptoms, but either way, you will find out why it's like that and fix it. It helped me a lot when I found out what I'm battling with.
Thank you for the advice. I’ve been seeing a therapist for about a year and a half now and I’m in the process of seeing a psychiatrist in the very near future. I wish us both luck in overcoming our struggles.
I think there’s something to that. It could be that there’s no immediate interest, i.e. everything is tantalizing but roughly equally so, so they cancel each other out and all simply exist as vague desires rather than actual goals.
TikTok will always release more dopamine than doing basically anything else I can do. That doesn't mean I'm uninterested in doing other things, it just means tiktok has succeeded in optimizing content that immediately releases dopamine.
The good thing about my type of ADHD is I get addicted to things and then lose interest in them. TikTok is no longer exciting for me now, now that I am just using it for live DJs and checking out the videos my best friend shares with me and not much else. Got addicted to Reddit and then Twitter for years but now my Twitter addiction has largely been replaced with Manifold Markets. The key is to find balance, or to impose a rule on yourself that you only go to the problematic site a little bit unless you have spare time, or to find something else more exciting.
I somewhat identify with this. I have dozens of things I want to do and if I get started on something, I can happily work on it until 2-3 in the morning, even though I usually go to bed at 11. It’s the getting started on something that takes so much effort.
I have the same problem. For me what helps is having a schedule, you do your thing at a certain time automatically every day, which seems to lower the activation energy. For one-off tasks it helps to set myself a reminder that I intend to do whatever it is at a certain time.
But I still struggle with this for sure. I could always use more advice myself.
Agreed, it reminds me of when people say "I've always wanted to learn <Insert foreign language here>". If you really wanted to learn Spanish, you'd learn Spanish.
there is nothing wrong with saying that. With all the things that must be done in adult life, learning a language is a luxury akin to getting a rare delicate plant or something. Maybe the person saying this will actually follow through when they retire, you never know.
So hiring someone to be around you and enforce productivity - kind of like hiring a personal trainer and working out while they watch.
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.
I really enjoyed this article because it was funny. The critical comments make it even funnier. Thanks for writing, sberens!
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.
The not-completely-bonkers version of this is called "body doubling". Especially for people with ADHD and other executive function disorders, just being in someone else's presence can be hugely beneficial for productivity. There are several body doubling apps out there that virtually pair you with people while you're working.
Working Discord channels have worked well for me. When you share your screen and you are in a room with other people working it adds some level of motivation.
Is there a saas/browser plugin where you enter a name and then it alerts you if this name shows up in any hiring emails/slack conversation/twitter browsing?
This is very interesting, but this doesn't seem like a good thing to me. We don't need to be productive all the time. As he mentions, he had little time to introspect; I much prefer having downtime where I can stop and think for a while or run into something new and interesting within highly curated social media. If this truly made him happy, then good for him, but I would put more effort into being comfortable with being "unproductive" as long as my needs are being sufficiently met.
The bit about Rachel is truly the classic Craigslist experience. Anyone who's dealt with strangers through Craigslist would find this a very familiar type of strangeness.
Fun fact: in his detailed descriptions of how was the day he mentions his job ("software engineer at Meta", according to About section) only twice. It seems like a tiny fraction compared to writing blog and working on own company. Is it normal practice in SF tech companies?
I think this has already won the annual prize for weirdest post ever. There's even a "Date Me" form on the site. Claims effective altruism while spending close to $10k to be productive at blogging/yoga.
I'm actually seriously thinking about a similar service: Basically I pick an online course (say Berkely 61B 18spring) and a deadline (say 90 days), and I need to hire someone to make me study. It is not that I do not have the intellect to complete them, the thing is once I get bored I give up. Maybe I'm not that interested but I still need to complete it.
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.
This is fascinating, bravo for trying different things and sharing about it! Now I'm wondering if there can be a human or AI that can sit on calls for me so I can be working during the meetings where I'm just there in case higher ups have a question.
I'm quite surpised how many people here are strongly shocked by what for me looks just like self-organized ghetto co-working plus a bit of domestic service. There's also obsession with productivity but I think many of us have been there at some point. I don't think there's anything wrong with that guy, the whole thing is framed as an experiment and I don't think it brought any harm to anybody.
Btw ... Is 'ghetto' racist? What would be a better word insted?
> 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?
I believe the author could achieve the same result by working out of one of Meta's office. Plenty of coworkers around to mimic the effect of screen watching.
> 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. I only escaped the Skinner box when Sophia came in and I explicitly told her I wasn’t to be allowed on Hacker News.
> 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.
So interesting and off putting at the same time, I’m wondering if there is a good word to describe this feeling.
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.
Can someone directly explain the understanding he is lacking of what is wrong with this / what makes it off-putting, such as not understanding "the human element", "power dynamics" or "people or human dignity"
Obviously many people in these comments sections don't seem to understand whats wrong with this, and there is such a thing as aspergers and the like. Maybe discussion can help people come to an understanding.
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?
Sure. There are people like the author, who respect the autonomy of other people and believe that if there are two people who come to a mutually agreeable arrangement on the exchange of goods and services that’s ok. Then there are some other people who have an aesthetic revulsion for people who violate social scripts. So if you hire a maid, secretary, therapist or other kind of service staff that’s ok, but if you do something that doesn’t follow a standard script these people feel a sense of revulsion.
I don't think that's what people are "objecting" to about this (well, not even objecting in many cases, just... flabbergasted).
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.
This isn't really helpful. I have ADHD and it's been a major limiting factor in my life. I have things I want or need to do and I'll easily spend 3-4x as long as the tasks actually end up taking just trying to do them.
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.
I think in a lot of cases manual labor is extremely ironed out because the workflow is defined before the work is done.
- Pick up shovel
- Move dirt from pile A to pile B
There's not much else to think about, you do it and you know you're doing the right thing so there's no opportunities to second guess yourself into not doing it.
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.
Before I clicked I had expected a satirical humor piece about helicopter management and interruption work culture. What a sad realization as I read through it... that it was both serious, and somehow worse than what I expected this to lampoon at the same time.
My wife is my productivity assistant. It works great.
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.
You have to want this though. Otherwise you're just going to be saying "you're not my boss" and "stop nagging me" repeatedly, and that's not going to be good for your relationship. I've been there.
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.
This reads like a Mike Judge pitch. And some of the comments in here read like this guys burner accounts trying to make it sound like any part of this made sense. I really hope it’s all real because it makes the comedy of it all so much better.
In my ~20 years of mashing buttons, I've found the primary driver of 'productivity' has been my interest in the problem/project/task.
The skinner box comment gave me a hearty chuckle.
No, that doesn't work. It has to be a person whose job is specifically to watch you. A coworker or a subordinate - that's not their job. And frankly that would be inappropriate for them to do that, especially if they were a subordinate.
The amount of negativity on this post is bizarre. If you don’t like something informative that someone has tried and written about, why bother complaining about it?
In contrast, I enjoyed the post and found it useful.
As I saw his schedule with girls names I knew this will be a fun shii.
I can imagine not mentioned interviews part, some guy shows up, sorry we're not a good fit, yeah right hahaha.
Interesting read! Crazy that it was basically 3x increase/decrease in productive hours. Wouldn't try this myself, but found it interesting nonetheless @sberens.
not a bad idea, or you could try to figure it out why you are procrastinating and try to do that. That’d give lasting results but you may or may not find out and use weeks and months as you also procrastinate on finding out why.
Some of us procrastinate because we have ADHD. I hear there is a cure to ADHD procrastination, it's called quitting your job and becoming an enterpreneur, but that's a little extreme and may result in a huge loss in income and job security for someone who's currently working at Meta.
This is a really interesting experiment, and the author did a great job of breaking it down and quantifying it.
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.
I agree I don't know if I spent time on the best thing, but in general I think the things I classified as productive (writing, coding, fitness, etc...) are much better than the unproductive things (social media, youtube, hn, etc...).
I hope this is satire. If it is not, then the author is a disgusting narcissist with no understanding of people or of human dignity. It's very depressing that HN readers are genuinely responding with approval and encouragement.
There's a lot of negative comments here too. Funnily enough (from the article):
> 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.
I looked into some other blog posts of the author - this is not satire. Something is seriously wrong with the guy. His parents have to convince him to seek medical attention.
Misguided sure, but disgusting? Nothing he did was disgusting. There's nothing undignified about being paid $20/hr to watch someone work, people do far worse for far less everyday.
He’s violating social scripts. That’s it. You’re not going to get any arguments without obvious counter examples that these people would let pass by without comment.
I'm sorry it's depressing. I think that just makes you older and wiser (and probably indicates you have different blind spots in your life compared to these commenters)
This guy reinvented the concept of hiring a personal butler.
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.
Whenever I'm in an office I pick the computer with the most visible screens, so everyone can see what I'm doing. It has the same affect, but it's much cheaper.
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 feel it's hard to achieve consistency with coworking; I never had enough overlap with a friend's schedule to make a meaningful impact on my productivity. I actually made a tool (before the experiment) to try to coordinate coworking between a group of people, but it never took off.
Pick any WeWork in a populated city and you'll find people there 24/7 and at least a few of them as will be kooky enough to engage in this performative nonsense (I say that mostly without judgement). Or pick any office building, really, because they'll have 24/7 security who do nothing but sit and watch movies or listen to podcasts. There's an entire world of people bored out of their damn minds in boring office buildings all night, and you wouldn't need to do things like schedule.
You can't delegate software engineering to a rando off Craigslist, especially if you're an employee. (If you're a contractor and your contract allows you to do that it's just irresponsible, if not, it's a fireable offense.)
Strange to see the reaction to this. Of course hiring people to watch you is weird. Human psychology is weird and trying to motivate yourself to do certain things and not other things at the computer is weird. It's a hack.
What a great idea. I've been grappling with low productivity for 20 years, trying various solutions without success. I would love to emulate your approach, but don't have the means at present. Regardless, I'm eager to observe the outcome of your experiment, with hopes of replicating it in the future. Don't pay attention to detractors, as tackling productivity is a critical concern and worthy of pursuing with determination. Individuals who don't support or comprehend your experiment likely lack the same productivity challenges or are just mediocre.
Dude you literally called people who disagree mediocre and respond to people saying you’re a dick with an email like reply. Do you think you’re a good person?
Any plans to start dedicating more time to cooking for yourself? You seem to think that working out is productive time would you consider eating well and spending time cooking to be productive?
Absolutely. He identified a problem and figure out solution. The True Hacker among us. How can us, mere mortals, even come close to such unorthodox out of the box thinking?
Universal Summarizer was making the rounds on HN recently (https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum) and when I clicked on the link here (I hired 5 people), I decided I didn't want to read so much text.
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:
Somehow this is a decent example to highlight the weaknesses of summaries. For example, all context about the challenges, the missing assistant and how he massaged the data is excluded. It sort of says the same thing but still misses everything.
What a weird, weird man. I didn't need it anyway but this certainly confirmed the Early Life section for me:
>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.
People in general don’t do that much research on candidates or friends. OP will be fine, also you are the only one making this about romance. What are you basing this on? For being so concerned for OP you seem to want to drag them a bit more than I would anticipate.
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