Grad Hacker

Here at Grad Hacker, we feel that simply being productive is not enough. What good is your inner, clandestine productivity, if your bosses, colleagues, and you yourself don’t really know the extent of just how unbelievably productive, busy, stressed, in a rush, and important you really are? For these, reasons, we will periodically provide you with a tip on how to act productive.

In the age of the interweb, your online presence is your life. If you’re still commuting to work, working in an office with other humans, and physically handing-in paper reports to your boss, you clearly didn’t get the memo. We have home offices now, and we communicate online. But that’s cool, if you still go to school to “do experiments” or “TA a class”, or go to the office to “sit in your cubicle”, don’t worry, this advice will still apply, because I’m sure you’ve learned by now to have your computer with you always to check email often, and while you’re checking email I can bet a chat service is up and running in the background.

Now, here’s what separates the women from the girls: does your chat status look green or say “available”? “Yes,” you say, “I want to talk to my friends, that’s why I’m online.” What an amateur response. You need to ask yourself what kind of message this sends to the world, especially the chat world, which consists of your close friends and colleagues. How often are you online? (if you answered “not often” please re-read the first paragraph). How often are you broadcasting to the world that you are “available”? Do you know what this means? “Available” directly translates to “I have nothing to do. I have no active projects on my plate right now. I am accomplishing nothing in my life. I do not contribute to society. I am worthless as a human being.” Is this really the kind of message you want to send to the world?

Fret not, however, because your problems are easily solved with a simple click of the mouse. Wave goodbye to that little green dot next to your name and turn it red. Simply change your status to busy. Ideally you should type something that emphasizes how stressed out you are because of how many things you’re doing at the same time. Try to be more creative than what I’ve shown in the picture above, but otherwise the redness of your status will suffice. Notice how the image at the top of the post makes you want to talk to me a lot more than the green image below it: “What are they doing?! Why are they so busy?!” It also inspires you: “I better get to work too. I don’t want to be seen as worthless!” Inspiring others is important, it makes your stock go up.

Lastly notice how I didn’t ask you to sign off. True, you may actually get more work done if you sign off altogether, but that simply doesn’t allow you to inspire others with your displayed productivity.

So take a second right now to look at your chat status and ask yourself how you want to be perceived: worthless, or productive?

Find the full list of How to Act Productive posts here.