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

simonberens.me

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

#251

Post by throwaway675309 »

tacotacotaco wrote: post #130
12345hn6789 wrote: post #29

I honestly cannot believe this. The porn part, the make me a smoothie request, dating dinners. 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

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.

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

#252

Post by noduerme »

Aaronmacaron wrote: post #124
12345hn6789 wrote: post #29

I honestly cannot believe this. The porn part, the make me a smoothie request, dating dinners. 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

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?

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".

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

#253

Post by mikiem »

I'm a little surprised at the response here.

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.

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

#254

Post by throwaway675309 »

usefulcat wrote: post #33

> 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.

Agreed, it reminds me of when people say "I've always wanted to learn ". If you really wanted to learn Spanish, you'd learn Spanish.

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

#256

Post by barry-cotter »

rogers12 wrote: post #215
da39a3ee wrote: post #19

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.

I see a few comments responding with sputtering outrage. Could you explain why you experience such a reaction?

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.

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

#257

Post by mattfrommars »

Kibae wrote: post #177

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 m…

Smart idea. I will give this a try.

For folks with AMD GPU. AMD Adrenalin software comes with it baked in.

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

#258

Post by Kibae »

mattfrommars wrote: post #257
Kibae wrote: post #177

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 m…

Smart idea. I will give this a try. For folks with AMD GPU. AMD Adrenalin software comes with it baked in.

One thing to keep in mind is that it uses a lot of memory on the default settings. I've configured mine to use ~200MB/hour.

My video resolution is 1792 × 1120 and I record at 10fps.

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