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.
