
How I Hired Someone On Craigslist And Quadrupled My Productivity - sethbannon
http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i-hired-a-girl-on-craigslist-to-slap-me-in-the-face-and-why-it-quadrupled-my-productivity/
======
pg
Henry Moore used to live over his studio. Whenever the noise of his chisel
stopped, his wife would call down and ask why he had stopped working.

~~~
jc4p
Economically speaking, I'm fairly certain finding a wife is more expensive
than a $8/hr freelancer though.

~~~
nuje
I don't know if you're a rich guy planning to marry down in the social
hierarchy, living in a culture where where women don't work or just a
misogynist but this is generally false in the west. Dual incomes with a single
household is very economical compared to life as a single.

See eg. <http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dinks.asp> "A household in which
there are two incomes and no children (either both partners are working or one
has two incomes). DINKS are often the target of marketing efforts for luxury
items such as expensive cars and vacations."

~~~
Retric
Except this if the wife can hear you working then it's probably not a dual
income home.

Edit: Prior probabilities yada yada.

------
tjic
As a productivity system, this is idiotic.

As a blog post that serves as link-bait, it is GENIUS.

...which is to say, I think it excelled at the REAL goal. ;-)

~~~
Neepy
It still irks me that people can tout off success as though it's guaranteed
for small experiments such as this without even considering elements such as
the Hawthorne effect - 'changed behaviour during the course of a study may be
related to the special social situation and social treatment they received'

~~~
mey
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect>

~~~
michaelkscott
Thank you!

------
ashray
The most important thing I got out of this article isn't the productivity
'hack' but the fact that there's a program called RescueTime that lets you
find out exactly how much time you spent on your computer doing what.. o_O I
didn't know about that!

I have long suspected that I have an HN addiction. Time to quantify it!

For others: <https://www.rescuetime.com/>

EDIT: Haha, while setting it up I found that the rescuetime folks think that
adult funsies are quite important :P

 _Ignore adult content. Data for sites we recognize as adult-themed will be
rejected at our servers and no time will be logged._

~~~
GFischer
I use a similar program that is called ManicTime:

<http://www.manictime.com/>

I can't recall what I didn't like about RescueTime, but the free version of
ManicTime gives me a very good breakdown for my purposes.

FWIW, I spend on average close to 2 hours a day (of 10 hours in my office)
browsing the web, and only 2/3 hours of real productivity (I hate my job).

~~~
Apocryphon
What's with the rest of the 10 hours? Daily scrums?

------
robterrell
"Social working" -- I always thought this was the most important takeaways
from XP and agile methodologies, that the highest quality work gets done when
we tell each other what we're going to do ahead of time (agile/scrum), and
then collaborate in the most literal sense by sharing one screen (pair
programming) to see that the work gets done in the best possible way. Granted
there are surely lots of other takeaways, but those are two things I did take,
and I only do one of them.

------
motoford
This is an interesting and funny experiment, but I believe it's success lies
in the fact that the author lucked out and found someone who could actually
help with his work for $8 an hour.

I didn't watch the videos, but from the text it sounds like the lady was more
like a good coworker, certainly better than your average minimum wage slapper.

~~~
graeme
I'm work alongside someone for $8 an hour, depending how distractable they
are. I have some tasks that don't require that much focus and it's nice to do
socially.

I expect I'd get a spinoff effect of being more productive myself. Wouldn't
want to be on Facebook when I'm trying to keep someone else off it.

------
ken
I've been looking for something vaguely like this -- i.e., accountability --
for my own work. I'd rather work on my own projects, solo, but the one thing
that is missing from a more formal work environment (or even a startup that's
just "2 people with laptops in a cafe", which I did for a while) is
accountability.

I've suggested to my friends with startups that they should host "hack nights"
where random people can bring their laptop and work in a shared space for a
while. I think it'd also be a good recruiting tool for the company. They've
already got a cool office, so why not invite people there to see for
themselves, plus become known as that place where people go to hack on
interesting things?

I think this is one thing that academia really got right (having worked there
for a few years once): put a bunch of smart people together in close
proximity, each working on their own thing, but loosely sharing with each
other. Big companies, small companies, startups, coworking spaces, and cafés
all get one piece of this but miss a crucial piece.

Maybe I need to start a meta-startup.

~~~
luke_s
I'm just curious what you think coworking spaces get wrong? Having looked at a
few (but I must note, never worked in one!) it sounds like they come the
closest to what you describe.

~~~
ken
I started writing a response but it started getting rather long, so it really
deserves to be its own blog post. In the meantime, I'll pick just one thing
that seems most relevant:

There's a kind of implicit tactical (minute-to-minute) accountability in
coworking, because you're all there to work, but not any larger strategic
accountability. I don't think anybody would hold your feet to the fire if you
didn't produce anything for a week, or month.

------
neilk
Slap startup people hanging out all day in Mission cafés? Hell, I'd do that
job for free!

~~~
Evbn
They say you should do what you love, so you are never "working" at your job.

Start a slapping startup!

------
olalonde
I'm actually working on a startup that solves this exact problem but with a
twist: we outsource the slapping to India and use a shock-inducing necklace
that can be remotely activated through Wifi. This will enable us to bring down
costs and bring this service to the masses. So far, our virtual slappers have
done an amazing job and the self reported productivity of our beta customers
has gone through the roof.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Shocking over Wi-Fi? Just wait until 4chan hears about it...

------
anandkulkarni
This is essentially pair-programming, and seems to be the reason he got more
done -- a great idea to improve productivity.

~~~
cpeterso
That would definitely be extreme programming. And when your tests fail,
someone from QA can slap you, too.

------
TamDenholm
Ignoring the moronic link bait about slapping, essentially what he did was
apply pair programming to writing. It would make far more economic sense to do
this as well, since the level of entry to get a person to pair with to write
is far lower than for a programmer, so kudos.

------
jamesmcn
This is such an obtuse way to meet girls that it might actually work!

~~~
eru
It's actually not that hard to meet girls, even for nerds. But you need some
practice.

~~~
jamesmcn
This is very true. But this stunt seems to be better for meeting people than
getting work done.

~~~
eru
Yeah, it sounds like fun.

------
utunga
It's not quite the same but the woman who comes around every couple of weeks
and does my accounts, we both acknowledge is about 80% 'slap based'
productivity and 20% her specialized knowledge at this point.

When she comes around I usually 'drive' the computer the whole time, and it's
great to have her advice on things like withholding tax rates, but mostly it
just makes certain that particular things get done on time where if they
didn't happen they would have a tendency to snowball into accounting
catastrophe.

------
fennecfoxen
The $0/hour is to redirect your most popular slack sites in (e.g. Facebook)
using /etc/hosts. You can redirect them to localhost, or to something you
personally find annoying. :P

~~~
milesokeefe
It's easier to convince yourself to disable that than to face the pressure of
others.

~~~
contravert
This is incredibly true for me. I blocked time sink websites (like HN
ironically) in /etc/hosts for about a day, and then I constantly went back and
reverted my changes. Then, I wrote a daemon that constantly checks the host
file and puts the blocks back if I changed it. I tried making the installation
and operation as obscure as possible and try to forget the metaphoric key.
However, I eventually ended up spending a bunch of time to rediscover what I
did, so I ended up disabling this script as well...

------
mangler
... and may be you don't call her a slapper in your blog posts or she may slap
you for real. I would. She should...

~~~
andrewcooke
that may be an english english expression? i wonder if the (american?) author
is aware? [i guess so, it would be a rather lucky joke if not...]

~~~
TruthElixirX
Must be english. What does it mean?

~~~
andrewcooke
a woman of loose morals, more or less. it's moderately old-fashioned, and
probably originally local to east london, so it's got comic overtones.

[http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-
of/slapp...](http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/slapper)

------
technology
I think this is explained by Dan Ariely in his paper - "Procrastination,
Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment"

<http://pss.sagepub.com/content/13/3/219.short>

Procrastination is all too familiar to most people. People delay writing up
their research (so we hear!), repeatedly declare they will start their diets
tomorrow, or postpone until next week doing odd jobs around the house. Yet
people also sometimes attempt to control their procrastination by setting
deadlines for themselves. In this article, we pose three questions: (a) Are
people willing to self-impose meaningful (i.e., costly) deadlines to overcome
procrastination? (b) Are self-imposed deadlines effective in improving task
performance? (c) When self-imposing deadlines, do people set them optimally,
for maximum performance enhancement? A set of studies examined these issues
experimentally, showing that the answer is “yes” to the first two questions,
and “nO'’ to the third. People have self-control problems, they recognize
them, and they try to control them by self-imposing costly deadlines. _These
deadlines help people control procrastination, but they are not as effective
as some externally imposed deadlines in improving task performance._

------
hkmurakami
_> Want a bicycle, but you’d rather not buy stolen bikes from the corner of
Market and 7th? To Craigslist we go._

Ironic, since Craigslist is infested with stolen bike listings :(.

~~~
dclusin
It's been my experience that it is a lot easier to ask for a paper trail on
craigslist from prospective sellers than it is on the street from some boiler-
room type operation.

------
joshmlewis
I like this concept, I laughed.

However, don't put a popup in my face while I'm reading your stuff to join
whatever site it is. And don't bloat the side of the page with "share" stuff.
If I like the content, I will share and/or signup, or at least bug me once I
reach the end but not while I'm in the middle of reading and on a mobile
device this is even worse. /rant

------
ekianjo
The problem with these kind of articles is that they focus only on the "one-
time off" and then never talk about how sustainable the productivity increase
really is. If this is to be a social experiment, it needs to be done on a
longer term like a month or something. Anything less that is just anecdotal.

------
spyder
Do it with a shock therapy device:
[http://www.djspyhunter.com/teapot/2005/11/buzztrainer-usb-
sh...](http://www.djspyhunter.com/teapot/2005/11/buzztrainer-usb-shock-
therapy-gadget.html) So we could see if it's the social aspect or the
punishment that improves the productivity.

------
bennesvig
The social element works. I've experienced big productivity gains by having
someone I connected with on Hacker News call me every night at 10:00pm and ask
me 4 Yes/No questions that I wrote. The pressure to not say no provides extra
fuel to stay on track and get more done.

------
annon
This is no mystery to most of the third world, you just set up your own
personal sweatshop.

------
rickyconnolly
I would suggest reviewing the title of this position. In certain parts of the
Anglosphere, 'slapper' has an entirely different meaning, and telling people
you have hired one will spark a flurry of raised eyebrows

------
andyakb
one of my friends did something very similar [without the slapping] and had
the same results. he is a high stakes poker player and paid somebody just to
sit next to him and make sure he didnt surf the web, chat on aim, etc while
playing poker. it let the "attendant" watch a skilled player at work, and it
kept the player focused and earning more money.

is it best to will yourself to not get distracted? of course, but we all know
thats easier said than done and for people with high hourly rates, it is often
going to be worth it to just pay somebody to help ensure compliance.

------
benzor
I think it's a neat and creative idea, but I wonder about its long-term
effectiveness as they get to know one another better. It's easy to be
embarrassed when making mistakes in front of someone you don't know at all,
because there still exists that social awkwardness between the two. But get to
know someone well enough and it's much easier to shrug off. Maybe he should
just hire someone new every few weeks to keep things fresh?

~~~
ajuc
The most productive time I've had in home projects was when I pair programmed
with my friend.

I actually think when you know the person watching you and value her/his
opinion it works better.

------
klous
This reminds of of pair programming, or pair _everything_ like they do at
Menlo Innovations [1]. I took a tour there recently and it was pretty eye
opening. People are now even paying to learn the "Menlo Way"

[1] [http://www.menloinnovations.com/our-method/founding-
practice...](http://www.menloinnovations.com/our-method/founding-practices)

------
maneesh
I am the author of this piece. I used the same techniques that I talk about in
this post until today---but without the slaps. The power is in the pair,
having an accountability partner is important. One good tactic is to have two
friends plan out joint Pomodoro sessions --- sit down, set a timer for 25
minutes, and ask each other how you did.

------
dorkrawk
Guilt (or at least empathy) can work in a similar way. My girlfriend is in
grad school right now and always has a ton of work to do at night. I feel bad
spending my nights goofing off or watching TV while she's hard at work, so
I've been really good at getting real work done on my projects while she's
doing homework.

------
jv22222
I like the idea in theory, but, if I hired someone to help me stay on task
from craigslist they (probably) wouldn't undertand various programming tasks I
was working on... so most likely they would not be able to stay on task at
keeping me to stay on task ;)

------
gprasanth

      Do or do not, there is no try. - Master Yoda
    

And, this link seems very appropriate to link now:

4# @ [http://iqtell.com/2012/01/what-master-yoda-can-teach-us-
abou...](http://iqtell.com/2012/01/what-master-yoda-can-teach-us-about-goals/)

------
digitalWestie
I think this guy has a thing for slapping...
[http://hackthesystem.com/blog/how-to-get-slapped-
by-50-colom...](http://hackthesystem.com/blog/how-to-get-slapped-
by-50-colombian-women-and-do-pushups-on-a-mountain-side/)

------
digitalboss
Thanks for recommendation for RescueTime - just installed, lets see what
happens.

------
Nowyouknow
That graph/chart is REALLY throwing me off. I can't even process the post.
Where do you get that chart?? I can input numbers into a graphical chart
generator, too. How do you measure that shit and I know it's not BS?

------
qoo
Who wants to slap my face whenever I browse Hacker News?

~~~
urbangangster
___slap_ __

------
chris123
It’s called the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect>

------
kevinconroy
And this, kids, is why pair programming WORKS.

------
yumraj
Okay... maybe I should hire someone to do the same when I go on HN and post
comments like this one ;o).

------
subrat_rout
This slapapp has few advantage: a. wont need update b.No advertises

But one disadvantage a. might quit one day

------
IsaacL
"Hiring a slapper off Craigslist" has quite a different meaning in British
English...

~~~
digitalWestie
Got a good chortle out of it.

------
freeslave
i finally blocked reddit in my /etc/hosts/ file and i am wasting way less
time.

------
osmanizbat
SDD (Slap Driven Development)

------
zemanel
his Math skills didn't improve tho, 98% is hardly 4 times more than 38%

------
draggnar
This is why entrepreneurship is a collective process.

------
rontseng
Wow, I'll try one of these tactics in the future~~

------
rontseng
this is awesome interesting...

------
maxrage
thats bdsm

------
bravoyankee
I just look at the pile of overdue bills for a moment and the harsh slap of
reality gets me right back to work.

------
jlebrech
wouldn't a service where people can watch what you do on screen be as useful?

