Lynette Bye

Productivity coaching for effective altruists to increase their impact.

I plan to continue coaching high-impact EAs on productivity. I expect to have 600+ sessions with about 100 clients over the next year, focusing on people working in AI safety and EA orgs. I’ve worked with people at FHI, Open Phil, CEA, MIRI, CHAI, DeepMind, the Forethought Foundation, and ACE, and will probably continue to do so. Half of my current clients (and a third of all clients I’ve worked with) are people at these orgs. I aim to increase my clients’ output by improving prioritization and increasing focused work time.

I would use the funding to: offer a subsidized rate to people at EA orgs (e.g. between $10 and $50 instead of $125 per call), offer free coaching for select coachees referred by 80,000 Hours, and hire contractors to help me create materials to scale coaching.

You can view my impact evaluation (linked below) for how I’m measuring my impact so far.

(Lynette’s public self-evaluation is here.)

I generally think it's pretty hard to do "productivity coaching" as your primary activity, especially when you are young, due to a lack of work experience. This means I have a high bar for it being a good idea that someone should go full-time into the "help other people be more productive” business.

My sense is that Lynette meets that bar, but only barely (to be clear, I consider it to be a high bar). The main thing that she seems to be doing well is being very organized about everything that she is doing, in a way that makes me confident that her work has had a real impact — if not, I think she’d have noticed and moved on to something else.

However, as I say in the CFAR writeup, I have a lot of concerns with primarily optimising for legibility, and Lynette’s work shows some signs of this. She has shared around 60 testimonials on her website (linked here). Of these, not one of them mentioned anything negative, which clearly indicates that I can't straightforwardly interpret those testimonials as positive evidence (since any unbiased sampling process would have resulted in at least some negative datapoints). I much prefer what another applicant did here: they asked people to send us information anonymously, which increased the chance of our hearing opinions that weren’t selected to create a positive impression. As is, I think I actually shouldn't update much on the testimonials, in particular given that none of them go into much detail on how Lynette has helped them, and almost all of them share a similar structure.

Reflecting on the broader picture, I think that Lynette’s mindset reflects how I think many of the best operations staff I’ve seen operate: aim to be productive by using simple output metrics, and by doing things in a mindful, structured way (as opposed to, for example, trying to aim for deep transformative insights more traditionally associated with psychotherapy). There is a deep grounded-ness and practical nature to it. I have a lot of respect for that mindset, and I feel as though it's underrepresented in the current EA/rationality landscape. My inside-view models suggest that you can achieve a bunch of good things by helping people become more productive in this way.

I also think that this mindset comes with a type of pragmatism that I am more concerned about, and often gives rise to what I consider unhealthy adversarial dynamics. As I discussed above, it’s difficult to get information from Lynette’s positive testimonials. My sense is that she might have produced them by directly optimising for “getting a grant” and trying to give me lots of positive information, leading to substantial bias in the selection process. The technique of ‘just optimize for the target’ is valuable in lots of domains, but in this case was quite negative.

That said, framing her coaching as achieving a series of similar results generally moves me closer to thinking about this grant as "coaching as a commodity". Importantly, few people reported very large gains in their productivity; the testimonials instead show a solid stream of small improvements. I think that very few people have access to good coaching, and the high variance in coach quality means that experimenting is often quite expensive and time-consuming. Lynette seems to be able to consistently produce positive effects in the people she is working with, making her services a lot more valuable due to greater certainty around the outcome. (However, I also assign significant probability that the way the evaluation questions were asked reduced the rate at which clients reported either negative or highly positive experiences.)

I think that many productivity coaches fail to achieve Lynette’s level of reliability, which is one of the key things that makes me hopeful about her work here. My guess is that the value-add of coaching is often straightforwardly positive unless you impose significant costs on your clients, and Lynette seems quite good at avoiding that by primarily optimizing for professionalism and reliability.