ritalin is cheaper and more effective
I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
51–60 of 346 posts
Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
#52I 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.
Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
#53I 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'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)
Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
#54I 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
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Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
#55This 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.
Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
#56Universal 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...
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.
Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
#57> 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.
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Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
#58This is incredibly bizarre, to the point where I wonder if this isn't just a creative writing exercise. 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…
I hope that it is a parody of what the modern western manboy ™ has become, otherwise it is a bitter window to the state of affairs of the west.
I’d say it’s also the perfect marriage between the gig economy and techbro hyper-optimized productivity.
Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
#59I 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
Therapy would take away productive time :) 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/
> Therapy would take away productive time :)
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.
Re: I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
#60In 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.