ABM
Happily Married In Music City, USA!
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http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i...e-face-and-why-it-quadrupled-my-productivity/
San Francisco: the city of weirdos. It’s got such a collection of nerds, hipsters, millionaires, crack addicts, etc. that no one even notices when a random blogger gets repeatedly slapped in the face.
In San Francisco, everything is done with Craigslist. Need an apartment? Craigslist’s got you covered. Want a bicycle, but you’d rather not buy stolen bikes from the corner of Market and 7th? To Craigslist we go.
It was the perfect location for an experiment on doubling productivity. How could I leverage Craigslist to improve my efficiency?
To me, the answer was obvious: I hired a girl on Craigslist to slap me in the face everytime I used Facebook.
The Craigslist Slapper Experiment
When are you most productive? Depending on your personality, you might not need alone time—you might need a team.
Humans are social animals—we aren’t designed to live and work alone. Now that the average worker’s job is to sit in front of a computer,—often with no supervision—it’s no surprise that we are only productive a three days each week. Having worked mostly alone, on my computer, I found that the majority of my time is spent unproductively.
So I measured my productivity, using a nifty little app called RescueTime (aff link). RescueTime sits in the background of your computer and measures the amount of time you spend on your computer and on each Website. It lets you see exactly how much time you spent hard at work on your Excel spreadsheet—and exactly how much time you wasted watching episodes of [The League] (holy shit go watch The League).
Nothing makes me more embarassed than seeing the amount of hours I spend wasted on Reddit and Facebook chat.
38% productive. That means that almost 19 hours of my time last week were wasted—disappeared, never to be seen again.
I figured, “This is stupid, why am I wasting this time doing nothing? When I have a boss, or someone of authority watching me, I always get my work done. How can I simulate the authority figure?”
Naturally, I believe that an authority figure should have real authority. And I am a big fan of Slap Bets. Put those together — and I realized I needed someone to make me work, with permission to slap me in the whenever I cheated.
So I went on Craigslist, put up an advertisement, and waited to see if anyone would bite.
Title
domestic gigs) Slap me if I get off task…Hey!
I’m looking for someone who can work next to me at a defined location (my house or a mission cafe) and will make sure to watch what is happening on my screen. When I am wasting time, you’ll have to yell at me or if need be, slap me.
You can do your own work at the same time. Looking for help asap, in mission, near 16th mission BART.
Compensation: $8 / hour, and you can do your own work from your computer at the same time.
Within minutes, my inbox began blowing up. I received 20 emails in less than an hour from people who loved the idea. I read through them, found one that stood out, and hired her to meet me at a cafe the day after.
The next day, at 9am, I found Kara sitting and waiting for me. Pulling up a seat, I gave her the basic instructions—she would monitor me for the next few hours, and make sure that I was staying on task. I gave her a list of action items that I needed to accomplish, and made her promise to force me to stay on task.
Yep—a few times, she definitely had to slap me. See the video below.
[video=youtube;OHGt0_t7Heo]
The results were astounding. Below, you’ll see my graph of average productivity during the experiment.
My average productivity runs around 35-40% on most days. When Kara sat next to me, my productivity skyrocketed to 98%
98%!!!
But not only did my productivity skyrocket—the quality of the work I did skyrocketed as well. Kara forced me to complete my first guest post, The Sex Scandal Technique. She also helped me push through an application for a secret project that I applied to—an application that won, out of hundreds of applicants.
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