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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

#321

Post by greenrd »

timthelion wrote: post #297
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…

I do this too. And post the sessions publicly when I can, which you can see here: - https://gradesta.com/blog/ - and here https://veganbuddies.org/blog/ 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…

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.

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

#322

Post by greenrd »

moconnor wrote: post #203

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…

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?)

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

#323

Post by jmcqk6 »

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

Where are you finding therapy for $88/hour?

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

#324

Post by greenrd »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #138
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.

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.

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

#325

Post by greenrd »

erenyeager wrote: post #224

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.

> I hope he has some good influences around him to keep him grounded.

That's what he paid all those assistants for.

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

#326

Post by greenrd »

scotty79 wrote: post #132

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' rac…

> 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?

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

#327

Post by iKlsR »

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…

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.

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

#328

Post by greenrd »

darcys22 wrote: post #71

I think the traditional way of doing this is just to make a team you work with. Working solo with a fake “manager” is probably less productive then hiring a team member and sitting in the same room while they work for you

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.

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

#329

Post by greenrd »

m3kw9 wrote: post #142

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.

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

#330

Post by greenrd »

praxulus wrote: post #120

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.
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