A hilarious, unusual way to boost productivity 4 times!

I love finding techniques on how to stay focused. Now usually, those techniques are based on logic or mindset or simply, quick lifestyle adjustments we can make. But every so often in my pursuit on finding the best ways to stay focused and productive — I come across something brilliant like this.

Finding yourself on Facebook and other sites is a quick and easy way of becoming distracted and unproductive. Some just block the sites, others delete certain apps from their phones. But Maneesh Sethi went the extra mile and proposed to hire someone to slap him every time he went on Facebook. He claims that his productivity increased by 4 times!

This was the crazy yet attractive offer Sethi offered on Craigslist:

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.

As you can probably imagine, Sethi got loads of offers and ended up choosing the post that stood out and had ‘Kara’ sat next to him the following day with laptop and slapping hand… in hand.

Using RescueTime, an app that measures your time on various websites across the web, Sethi found that he spends 29 hours on Facebook and Reddit per week — obviously resulting in a massive decrease of potential productivity time. Having the ‘slapper’ Sethi found his productivity rate increase to 98%.

An interesting takeaway

Maneesh Sethi actually noted that ‘the fear of the slap’ wasn’t the thing that had him working at his best. In fact, it was actually the social aspect that kept him going. The key was having someone around who encouraged him to focus and also having that person available whenever he needed a brain dump and have idea sex. (That was a surprisingly horrible sounding sentence I know, this will explain).

So if you ever find you want to focus and increase productivity, maybe you don’t need a violent assistant, but simply a productivity buddy! Someone to keep an eye on your work flow and encourage you throughout the productive day.