Author Maneesh Sethi started paying a woman $8 an hour to knock some sense into him after realising that he wastes 30 hours a week on Facebook and other sites, it has been revealed.
According to him, the unusual motivation technique helped his productivity skyrocket from 38 per cent to 98 per cent.
The blogger, who lives in New York, decided to let a stranger take the matter into her own hands when he realised that he was wasting about 30 hours a week looking at Facebook and other forms of social media.
“I found that I had been having a lot of trouble getting focused. There was just an incredible amount of things that were distracting my attention,” TheNew York Daily News quoted Mr. Sethi as saying.
He also revealed that his experiment was inspired by the “slap bets” seen on the U.S. sitcom ‘How I Met Your Mother’.
Mr. Sethi was able to measure his productivity through an app called RescueTime, which records the amount of time you spend on different websites. “When I have a boss or someone of authority watching me, I always get my work done,” Mr. Sethi wrote on his blog.
Recalling his thought process “How can I simulate the authority figure?” Mr. Sethi turned to Craiglist where he posted an ad titled “Slap me if I get off task”, which got more than 20 responses in the hour after it went up.
“I’m looking for someone who can work next to me at a defined location [my house or a café] and will make sure to watch what is happening on my screen,” the ad said. “When I am wasting time, you’ll have to yell at me or if need be, slap me,” it said.
He sifted through the responses and found Kara, who can be seen striking Mr. Sethi on the face in a video that has since gone viral on YouTube.
“It gave me a non-conventional reminder of what I was supposed to be doing — and it ended up being something I didn’t want to happen again”, Mr. Sethi wrote on his blog.
