I have a handful of weird talents but – not to boast or anything – what I really excel at is procrastination. I’ve wasted a lot of my life trying to find ways to stop procrastinating. I’ve tried self-hypnosis, I’ve tried gimmicky brain pills, I’ve tried the Pomodoro Technique and every other possible time-management technique. Until recently, I thought I’d tried all the productivity tricks ever invented. And then, last week, while reading one of the many newsletters I subscribe to (reading newsletters is a great way to put off writing), I discovered the existence of Simon Berens, a man even more committed to procrastinating in the name of avoiding procrastinating than I am.
Berens is a software engineer at Meta. He is also, as you would expect from an engineer at Meta, committed to optimising every second of his time. He is constantly experimenting with productivity “hacks” and recently hired people to sit behind him for six to eight hours a day, four to five days a week, at $20 (£16) an hour, to ensure he was being productive. Weirdly, those people were all women. “I didn’t mean to only hire women; it just turned out that way,” Berens explains on his blogpost about the experiment. Uh huh.
Berens’ experiment, as he notes in his Craigslist ad for productivity assistants, was not an entirely original idea. In 2012, a guy called Maneesh Sethi hired someone to slap him in the face when he was procrastinating on Facebook. To be honest, it seems as if this experiment wasn’t just about productivity: Sethi has admitted that he has “a weird slapping thing”. Still, he asserts his slappers boosted his productivity by 98%. Berens’ non-slapping experiment also appears to have been successful: he claims it increased his productive hours by around “2.8x” and gave him an “extra [approximately] 57 hours of productive time a month”. It did cost him $5,000 (£4,100) a month, however.
I don’t have an extra $5,000 a month to replicate this experiment. However, if any budding productivity scientists in the greater Philadelphia area would like an unpaid internship, hit me up (not literally). If hiring people to sit next to me doesn’t work out, I might investigate this weird, old-fashioned concept called an “office”. Stay tuned.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
