Okay so I realised that the BioBlog hadn't seen much love lately (I've been moving house - sorry!) and thought it was time for something new - preferably one of the awesome Bodylab experiments where I try something ridiculous such as living on just supplements or working out for 12 hours straight. So I thought long and hard about how to punish my body in new ways until I realised that I actually already had only a few days prior when I attempted to work for 24 hours and maintain a constantly high output of work.
Here's what I do for a living other than running the website - I write articles. Hundreds of articles for websites - usually 7,500-10,000 words' worth in a day - and then get paid for those via PayPal on receipt. I have lots of clients and so in other words the more I write, the more I earn. If I need £10 I work for 30-40 mins and I get it. This then makes it pretty tempting to just always work so that's what I tried to do in order to become rich so I could blow it on geeky Iron Man figurines. At the same time I need the money in order to fund my holidays, because if you think about it being paid for productivity means I don't get paid on holiday or sick leave...
So for 24 hours I attempted to work solidly - typing constantly only taking work and food breaks. I've been trying to find different ways to increase my productivity lately, including having the very helpful Guarana stimulant along with my usual caffeine and writing my own 'exo cortex' programme to help make working more streamlined and in some ways fun (I added Megadrive sound effects to the typing...).
Did I make it? In a word no. What I did find out during this duration is that with a little training you can massively increase what you're capable of outputting. Today I've written about 15,000 words and I have brain energy to spare. At the same time you can really affect you ability to work like this in little ways. For example getting more sleep the night before massively improves your ability, and having just a single can of beer will drastically cause you to be able to write less. Other things that help surprisingly are light and carbs. Interestingly since working on such a high output level I've actually lost weight (in the good way don't worry). Here my training is actually paying off and by increasing focus and thinking speed and building a very transhuman-esque programme I've made myself into a 'word machine' (like War Machine but less cool) and made myself to do a job no one else could really do.
But when you try and do 24 hours it's a different ball game. My mind began to drift so badly that I actually couldn't even form coherent sentences in my own head. As in, instead of saying 'I want to go to bed' I'd think 'I want to... what? Go? I want... bed!'. It was weird and quite creapy and I felt like an animal. I continued writing but at this point I was having to write the first half of a sentence and then come back to it and I was a lot slower than normal.
It was at this point I had to give up because my quality of writing was beginning to be affected to the point where I could no longer really sell it. But I did manage 26,000 words in about 15 hours which is probably not all bad. More to the point though I realised that my brain adapated to this ordeal and could now write much more quickly as a result. Like a marathon you simply have to train for it. Maybe next time I try I will manage 40,000.
So what if corporations stopped pouring money into more and more staff, and they stopped looking into new software and programmes to do the job for them and instead started training themselves and the staff they already have to be able to do there job 40 times faster and more efficiently? They'd massively save on their over heads and they'd have a higher quality of work. Meanwhile software they do purchase should be like my exo cortex (or 'Cortez' as I call him) and designed to work with the individual worker to drastically increase their capabilities and automate the 'boring' formulaic parts of their job. Me? I'm more interested in becoming a one-man corporate machine.
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