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.