Bodydouble / Thinking Assistant matchmaking
I keep meaning to write up a more substantive followup to the Hire (or Become) a Thinking Assistant post. But, I think this still basically the biggest productivity effect size I know of, and more people should be doing it, and seemed worth writing the simple version of the post.
I tried out 4 assistants who messaged me after the previous post, and ultimately settled into a rhythm of using one who had availability that matched my needs best. I think all of them were net helpful.
So far they’ve all been remote contractors that I share my screen with on zoom. Previously I had worked with one in person which also went well although was a bit harder to schedule with.
Most of what I do is just have them check in on me every 10 minutes and make sure I haven’t gotten off track. Sometimes, I talk out loud about a problem with them.
They varied in how much chemistry I felt I had with them, and in how good they were at more active metacognitive assistance.
The way I basically related to it in most cases was “I’m in charge of figuring out my metacognitive trigger-actions, and I direct them to ping me if it seems like I’m in a situation where my explicitly-written TAPs suggest I should do X.”
(It’s a delicate operation to actually let people be more actively involved with helping my thought process. I think roughly 1.5 of the 5 people I’ve worked with had the right chemistry/skills to help more proactively than that right out of the gate)
Some people had foreign accents that made it harder to talk-through-things with. They were still pretty good for the basic “check in every 10 minutes” process, and a strategy that worked decently was communicating with them more in writing (i.e. have them observe failure modes I seemed to be falling into and writing them down).
Negotiating Upwards
I do think chemistry here matters a lot, and I’d recommend starting off with 1-2 sessions that are largely for getting a feel for whether a given person is working out, and to try out a few of them before settling into a longer-term working relationship.
I found it somewhat awkward when I sometimes needed to say “okay, this isn’t working out enough for it to be worth the amount I was previously paying”. There is a skill of being able to push through that awkwardness. Meanwhile I expect it to work best for most people to start off with lower expectations and payment-rate and then raise it if it’s going well.
One system I found good was paying different rates for “just checking in every 10 minutes” style work and “active thinking assistance.” Where by default someone is mostly working on their own stuff, but periodically can upgrade to “okay for this problem it’s worth paying more for more active attention.”
Someone should still build the Uber-for-FocusMate app
Ideally, I’d still like someone to build an app that gets enough critical mass to easily be able to find a thinking-buddy on-a-whim. I thought about building that myself but I just have too much else going on. I think it does require someone’s full-time entrepreneurial spirit to really get going.
Apps normally have a bit of an awkward thing with rating-systems, where in practice people feel bad about leaving less than a 5-star review, and it’s hard to leave nuanced feedback. I expect it to be even more awkward here where the problems will tend to be minor personality frictions. If I were building the app I think figuring out how to extract good information would probably one of the main difficulties.
I think displaying publicly some info about how many different people had hired a person more than 3 times or something to maybe be the main way to convey a contractor’s quality.
Meanwhile, matchingmaking thread
If you are interested in either finding or being a body-double / thinking-assistant, I recommend posting about it here, with what sort of availability you’re looking for or can provide.
I’ve also been doing a lot of this (10-15 hrs per week) and found it very helpful (thanks Ray for connecting me with the person).
The standard routine is that every ~5 mins they ask me what I’m doing and if I endorse it. And if I’m doing something I don’t endorse, or I’m taking too long on something, then I ask them to give me 1 or 2 min timers to wrap up the unendorsed thing.
Added: I’ve also just started trying out having wake-up phone calls instead of morning alarms, I kind of like it.
If anyone wants to help with germline engineering stuff, I could probably use a few people who’d be up for very sporadic (I mean, unpredictable times, short notice) chatting about random bio stuff. Given my very small budget I can’t pay much, but volunteering is welcome.
In this case are you hoping more for someone who has, like, some background in bio, or is at least capable of quickly orienting on whatever you’re talking about, or would someone more rubber-duck shaped work?
Rubber duck is what I want to try.
ime the handful of times I’ve done body doubling, it has been incredibly helpful and greatly increased my productivity, but I always crash fairly badly after finishing the thing (or sometimes even just the session). There’s something about forcing focus that drains my “ability to do things” in general, and I’m not sure how to fix it. I would love having sustained 2-4x productivity, would appreciate ppl’s ideas
My experience has varied with this over time – sometimes, body doubling is just free extra focused work time, and sometimes, it mostly seems to concentrate my focused work time into the beginning of the day and then I crash, but usually that is still preferable because concentration-of-focus lets me do tasks with more things-I-need-to-keep-track of and serial steps.
Related: https://x.com/nopranablem/status/1938762088018526424
I’d be interested in trying thinking assistants to help me with my work. The main time window where I’d want that would probably be 10:30am-2:30pm CEST (with 1h break in the middle) but I’m slightly flexible. (Feel free to PM me about this even if you read this in a year or so from me now posting this.)
I’m working on a long-term non-ML alignment agenda (and also on leveling up my rationality) for which I’m currently doing introspection and concrete analyses of how I solve problems.
I wonder, this seems like a superficial enough job (at least in some cases) that AI could be a good fit for it. But then again, OnlyFans seems about as superficial and hasn’t been completely captured by AI yet, so maybe there’s still some time this remains viable.
I think body-doubling is a job where being human is actually pretty important. (I agree you can make an AI that does a pretty good job of the basic task, and that may work for people who aren’t too distracted and just need a bit of a reminder. And it’s probably hard-but-doable to make a talks-out-loud chatbot who gives okay-ish cognitive advice. But, I think for many people, there being a real live human they can disappoint is loadbearing)