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I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

simonberens.me

11–20 of 346 posts

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#11

How do you think this compares to coworking?

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.

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#13
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:

https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://simonberens.me/blog...

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#14

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 tend to do the dishes and laundry on those kinds of calls.

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#16

This reminds me of "This Guy Hired Someone To Slap Him In The Face Every Time He Got On Facebook" https://www.businessinsider.com/this-guy-hired-someone-to-sl...

This comment reminds me of reddit, where people feel like reading a headline warrants a comment without actually reading the article

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#17
post #13

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: https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://simonberens.me/blog...

That’s a fantastic summary.

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#18
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.

Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month

#20
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.

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