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.)
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.
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.
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.
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'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)
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 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.
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 :/
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 404 ms ] threadDid you try Buddhism?
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...
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.
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.
[1] https://platri.de/informatiker-gehalt/
Can't wait to leave Palo Alto where a personal trainer is way closer to $200 than $60 per hour. $120 a week for a PT is great.
I imagine someone could build an effective AI with face to watch over you to increase productivity/$ spent but it wouldn't have a physical presence.
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.
https://youtu.be/_o7qjN3KF8U
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056
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.
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...
[1] https://activitywatch.net/
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...
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.
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."
This one!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4661940
— add.org google extract
Sounds like a legitimate strategy.
Can you imagine a way to hire a personal assistant of the opposite sex and catch them watching porn (or claiming to) and not have it be awkward?
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.