Want to get more productive?  Hire someone to slap you when you slack off. And where would you find someone to do that? Why craigslist, of course!

Maneesh Sethi is a programmer in San Francisco.  Last month, he started tracking his productivity using an app called RescueTime.  It monitors how long you spend doing different tasks, and visiting websites unrelated to work.

And he was HORRIFIED to find he was spending 62% of his time on the computer slacking off.  He was only operating at 38%productivity, which means he was wasting 19 HOURS a week.  So he came up with a solution.

He put an ad on Craigslist looking for someone who’d SLAP HIM if he started slacking.  He offered them $8-an-hour, and they could do work on their own computer the entire time.  They just had to pay enough attention to slap him when he slacked.

Maneesh got 20 emails immediately, and hired a woman named Kara.  And he found that when she was there, ready to slap him, his productivity almost TRIPLED to 98%.  He was only slacking off 2% of the time.

Maneesh says it wasn’t just the FEAR OF THE SLAP that made him more productive.  Just having someone else there made him more productive because it added accountability and gave him someone to bounce ideas off of.

Hack the System