Productivity

• mapping huge spaces onto small screens seems to be one of fundamental problems in "UI"
• somehow free panning in x/y makes me feel like looking through a loupe - I don't get that feeling when scrolling only vertically though
• I'm curious how many and what kinds of projectors would I need to have a wall for doing/thinking

...

• another thing to keep in mind is the "data-ink ratio" idea from Tufte - for power users the best UIs allow for making a lot of information visible at once, with the least amount "UI cruft" possible
• another idea to gain pixel space is to filter out what's irrelevant
• maybe the problem is not so much about the size of the display, but about the DPI? (for reference: reMarkable 2 has 226 DPI, Apple iMac Retina 5k has 218 DPI, so only ~18% of what's possible on paper)

I’ve led infrastructure at a startup for the past 4 years that has had to scale quickly. From the beginning I made some core decisions that the company has had to stick to, for better or worse, these past four years. This post will list some of the major decisions made and if I endorse them for your startup, or if I regret them and advise you to pick something else.

[Atkinson] was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

It’s not that I advocate for no note-taking. I just strongly believe in keeping it as elementary as possible, such that the note-taking itself doesn’t become the thrust of the endeavor. Leonardo da Vinci kept all of his notes in one big book. If he liked something he put it down. This is known as a commonplace book, and it is about how detailed your note-taking system should be unless you plan on thinking more elaborately than Leonardo da Vinci. Taping a bunch of cryptic phrases to the walls is also acceptable, or keeping a shoebox full of striking phrases on a jumble of papers, as Eminem did.

One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't matter.

Individuals matter.

PARA is based on a simple observation: that there are only four categories that encompass all the information in your life.

• You have projects you’re actively working on – short-term efforts (in your work or personal life) that you take on with a certain goal in mind.
• You have areas of responsibility – important parts of your work and life that require ongoing attention.
• Then you have resources on a range of topics you’re interested in and learning about.
• Finally, you have archives, which include anything from the previous three categories that is no longer active, but you might want to save for future reference.

Build software faster in an IDE designed for pair-programming with AI.

In 2024, I must admit I am having a bit of a personal crisis regarding continuous improvement. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about "high performing" companies and teams, or companies seeking to transform how they work—there is very little talk of continuous improvement.

The language around layoffs in tech is rife with talk of operational efficiency gains, achieving profitability targets, rightsizing, and high-interest rates. There is very little sense that employees were allowed to be part of the solution or path forward (e.g., by recommending areas of cost savings, quality circles, taking pay cuts, etc., similar to Harley-Davidson in the early 1980s, Southwest Airlines in 2001 or 2008, or countless companies mid-pandemic).

...Meanwhile, among companies less impacted by the ups and downs (real or imagined) in tech and deep in their respective transformations, we see the same old copy-paste approaches, outdated practices, and "changing but not really changing." On some fundamental level, when it comes to continuous improvement, there is no real difference between the two: in both cases, you have change imposed on teams and a lack of engagement to co-design the way forward. In both cases, existing power structures remain entrenched.

Great software starts on the command line. Warp is the terminal reimagined with AI and collaborative tools for better productivity.

I work with my Remarkable template right next to my laptop screen every day. It functions a lot like a second screen - except getting things onto my tablet is a slightly slow process. What if there was a “second screen mode” that could be a combination of live-data and note taking?

I opt to proceed by redoing the entire database. It takes a while. Then we rework the Angular app (also very painful) to work with the new (correct) data model. The decision to just do the right thing here instead of limping on forever gave us huge speed benefits later on, and I think it's one of my proudest professional accomplishments even though it sounds simple. It was boring, painful, and no one other than my friend would ever appreciate it. I knew that going in, and I still did it.

Incidentally, I was allowed to do so only because management had been so negligent in allowing things to get to this state that they also didn't notice I was getting them out of this state, and thus couldn't insert their asinine opinions on how good practice is actually too slow. We've got to ship.

Our current definition of “productivity” is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are these really our only choices?

PARA is a way to organize your digital life in to separate buckets: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. After watching some videos, I started applying PARA to my second brain in Notion.

...The biggest paradigm shift from PARA is the idea that projects have an end date. This is hard for me; a person who tends to have a lot of open-ended, never-ending projects. I’ve logged those never-ending projects like open source, podcasting, or gaming as “Areas” for now, but that feels a bit mismatched because they do require recurring participation. That said, the process has been illuminating. I’m not making major life changes yet, but it has opened my eyes to the fact that I need more “close-ended projects” in my life.

While remote work is fine for plowing through day-to-day work, it has the potential to put a serious damper on collaboration and innovation long-term.

Short-term productivity goes up, long-term creativity goes down.

your schedule made flexible.

stop missing your routine,
adapt to your actual hours.

Tim’s score was consistently zero. Zero! Not just low, or trending downwards, but literally zero. Week after week, iteration after iteration. Zero points for Tim.

You see…Tim wasn’t delivering software; Tim was delivering a team that was delivering software. The entire team became more effective, more productive, more aligned, more idiomatic, more fun, because Tim was in the team.

I’ve tried Notion, Obsidian, Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, Jotter and endless other tools to keep me organised and sure, Notion has stuck around the most because we use it for client stuff, but for todo lists, all of the above are way too complicated.

I’ve given up this week and gone back to paper and a pencil and I feel unbelievably organised and flexible, day-to-day. It’s because it’s simple. There’s nothing fancy. No fancy pen or anything like that either. Just a notebook and a pencil.

I’m in an ultra busy period right now so for future me when you inevitably get back to this situation: just. use. fucking. paper.

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer. This idea is known as Brooks's law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping.

About once a year, I like to take a step back from the news cycle and write about a different kind of platform: the productivity tools that attempt to harness artificial intelligence and other innovations to make us better at our jobs.

A year ago this week, I wrote here about why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter. In short, it took me too long to learn, software can’t automate your thinking. But I do think it can create the conditions for improved thinking: for making new connections between ideas; for reducing the number of times during the day that your attention flits from one app to the next; and for organizing your reading and making it more useful to you in the future.

With that in mind, here are three apps I started using since I last wrote about that subject — and some free alternatives for folks seeking cheaper alternatives.

In his course Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus, Kourosh Dini emphasises the importance of taking a moment to “be with” the work every day (or however frequently you need to tackle a project). “Being with” your work is to be fully present and intentional about that activity and doing nothing else.

This idea was inspired by Dini’s piano teacher, who encouraged him to sit at his piano and touch the keys every day. Even on the days that he felt he had no time or inclination to practice. Sometimes touching the keys would lead to a good practice session, even when he didn’t feel like it would before he actually gave it a go.

Just like Dini, I find that once I give the task my full attention and be present, the actual doing of it turns out to be much easier and more enjoyable than my mind had been expecting. As usual, the resistance to getting started is far more uncomfortable than actually doing the thing.

“CEO-ification” refers to the trend of nonprofits and charities to increasingly mirror corporate and military structures. Often they will adopt similar language, hierarchies, and strategic approaches.

...In truth this stemmed from Taylorism, also known as Scientific Management. This theory was developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th century, but influenced today’s corporate language by introducing efficiency-focused terms like “time and motion studies” and “optimised workflows.”

...I spoke to Bryony Shannon about this on the Let’s Talk Ideas podcast. Bryony argues that the words we choose reflect our values and feelings, and shape how we think and act. She argues that when language focuses on processes, bureaucracy, and transactions, it can reduce people from individuals to labels – like “service user” or “case.” These words distance us from the very people we were employed to develop relationships with.

Those relationships then become mere transactions. As Rob Mitchell has said, when you’ve got a form and a process for every relationship “Love becomes relationships. Relationships become processes. Processes get processed.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor would have loved today’s world of process, customer segmentation and journey mapping. Such methodologies can approach humans lives as something that can be managed just like a car production line, or a canning factory producing baked beans.

It’s done, I’m just waiting on a review
It’s complete, I just need to do some final testing
It’s ready, I just need to merge and deploy

End users do not care. Nor should they. Nor can they. To the end user, this work provides no value. It doesn’t exist.

Work in progress has zero value. Ship!

• Before a task is shipped it provides zero value.
• Any work in progress is pure cost.
• Two tasks in progress adds cost, for no value.
• Only after shipping do you create value. Always ship.
• One task shipped is infinitely better than 4 tasks “almost done”.
• Ship something of value first. Then begin something new.

Many of us have come to expect work to involve no slack time because of the negative way we perceive it. In a world of manic efficiency, slack often comes across as laziness or a lack of initiative. Without slack time, however, we know we won’t be able to get through new tasks straight away, and if someone insists we should, we have to drop whatever we were previously doing. One way or another, something gets delayed. The increase in busyness may well be futile.

The fetish for compliance over results create a circus where the main act is anything but actual productivity. It’s a rigid, change-resistant world where innovation goes to die.

You’re supposed to like your job, which is horrific. Not only do you have to work for somebody, you have to like it...And so you did it five days a week. You signed off at five and you forgot about your work and at the weekend you didn’t think about it. Now you have to go to work, and as I say, you have to wear their t-shirt, have to go on their retreats and have to smile all the time. It’s like, not only are you alienated, you have to deny that you’re alienated, which causes symptoms.

Because what is a symptom? A symptom tells the truth that you cannot tell yourself. So if you have to pretend that everything’s great, the symptom explodes. And of course we’re seeing the explosion of all these…I mean, fatigue is a very interesting modern symptom that you could say is a type of protest precisely against this weaving of everything into productivity. There’s no space for gift.

+10x engineers may be mythical, but -10x engineers exist.

To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week.

Yesterday I worked on the widget.
Today I will work on the widget.
I have no blockers.

Are you asleep yet? The developers are. You promise them an intellectually stimulating work environment and what they end up with is drudgery.

What value can be had from these meetings anyway? Using “alignment” for justification is so nebulous that it is essentially meaningless. Engineers align themselves. They talk. Especially if you hire good ones (which, you know, you’ll struggle to if you have a culture of coercing them into this kind of busywork). Where does the real discussion happen? It’s written down.

The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level. A natural fear is that by reducing the amount of work each employee tackles at any given time, it might reduce the total amount of work an organization is able to complete, making it less competitive. This fear is unfounded. As argued, when an individual’s work volume increases, so does the accompanying overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually execute the tasks and the quality of the results. If you instead enable the individual to work more sequentially, focussing on a small number of things at a time, waiting until she is done before bringing on new obligations, the rate at which she completes tasks might actually increase.

I suspect that I am a lot more productive, even in crude, capitalist, give-shareholders-a-return-on-investment terms, when I am free to idly work at a sensible pace. In fact, this is why I am a software engineer instead of doing brutal manual labour - because working on a domain where a leisurely stroll can translate into immense value is a great way to live in a system that is focused on value extraction.

...Something I spend a lot of time reiterating is that one of the key things that you pay a large class of professionals for is their judgement. You can pay for other things, such as their muscles if you're moving to a new house and want movers, but even in that case you're paying for experienced-driven judgements such as:

• Judging what orientation would be the most effective in getting that couch through this door
• Working out how many people it would take to semi-safely move this cupboard

In the case of software engineers, you're paying a lot for design intuition, and that is only partially solved by paying someone to sit in front of a screen and demand they think about a particular topic.

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

Forget 10×. With a focus on outcomes and an eye towards the border between net-positive and net-negative work, any team can push their productivity beyond their previous limits.

...If you can perform one task better than most people, you might be a 10× designer or developer or product manager (or whatever you are). But if your team can find small ways to make many of their tasks net-positive, 10× is just the start.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Slack turned ten this week and is still as central to most people’s work lives as ever. But what used to feel like fun is now anything but: it’s a distraction machine. It’s a conveyor belt of FOMO, keeping us glued to our phones at all hours. It’s a tool that lets anyone distract everyone with each new message.

Slack fixed so many problems with email but has now made it easy to mistake motion for progress. Ah, look how much work I am getting done! you think to yourself as you bounce uncontrollably between a dozen threads and channels of varying importance.

...Chat should be an escape hatch, a space for small ideas and quick questions. But we shouldn’t be making company announcements or sharing project updates in the same text box we use to say “good morning” to the team.

We believe that posts are the sweet spot between chat and docs, and they create a calmer, context-rich way of collaborating with people across projects and time zones.

So we’re not trying to build a new Slack at Campsite. We’re trying something different — and we might not get it right!

The biggest determinant for success in a technology company is the speed at which it operates and learns – the “clock speed” to use a CPU analogy.

...When someone says “Let’s have a follow up conversation”, what is the implicit unspoken understanding of when that should happen?

In companies I’ve been at, that has ranged from a few hours to the next day to the next week to …perhaps never. This little test usually tells me a lot about how fast your organization/company works.

“Fleming's method involved isolating himself in a mundane hotel room, in a location offering no distractions, forcing him to focus solely on his writing. This environment, devoid of alluring alternatives, left Fleming with two choices: write or do nothing.”

You could think of this as an example of end-user programming. But I’ve always found this term a bit odd, because it implies a dichotomy: either you’re a programmer, or an end-user.

To me, the more interesting distinction is the context of use. I’m a professional programmer, and there’s a whole class of problems that (a) I know I could solve by writing some code, but (b) they’re not really Serious Business™.

...To me, the distinction [between end-user programming and casual programming] is important: I’m specifically interested in ways of making the power of programming available in a much more casual, informal way.

Tools make a difference. A productive machine is capital, in the deep sense: leverage. Don’t be afraid to invest in a serious tool when the time is right.

Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth.

The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains derives from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers 19th-century-style salaries, the managers may decide to quit to get a job at an automobile factory, where salaries are higher because of high labor productivity. Thus, managers' salaries are increased not by labor productivity increases in the retail sector but by productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries.

One thing I've been enjoying about working as a technical writer is that the minute-by-minute texture of the work feels right. Something about formatting text, faffing about with SVGs, trying to rewrite a sentence more clearly... it's just enjoyable in itself, and I feel at home with it.

...Working as a programmer was very much not like that. There's something in the rough vicinity of professional dev work that I do like, which I could probably label as 'iterative hobbyist tinkering with websites'. I like working on something with a strong visual component, and I like to be inside of a fast feedback loop, and I'm mostly interested in just somehow bodging through until it works. I'm not very interested in either the computer-sciencey side of programming — data structures, algorithms — or the software-engineerey side of making things run reliably at scale in a maintainable way. So maybe it's not surprising that the minute-by-minute texture of professional programming was just... kind of bad. Occasional fun bits when I got into something, but the background experience was not fun.

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.

That's the "absent-minded professor," who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he's going while he's thinking about some interesting question. His mind is absent from the everyday world because it's hard at work in another.

Weighted Shortest Processing Time: Similar to the shortest processing time strategy, this strategy completes tasks based on how long they take to finish, but changes the ordering of the tasks based on their importance.

...Though the Weighted Shortest Processing Time strategy will take you a bit longer to organize, it also might just be the best scheduling strategy out there.

The biggest hurdle todo faces is that the emotion you generally experience when you look at your todo list is shame. This is bad because it makes you uncomfortable with the tool and makes you want to avoid it — you don’t want to look at it because engaging with it makes you feel bad, so you don’t use it, or you wait until it’s too late, you avoid it, etc. etc.

The key to fixing this is coming up with a todo system where the emotional experience is pride. This way you often want to look at your todo list, you enjoy the experience of working with it, you approach it, you seek it out, etc.

"Flow" is often a synonym for ignorance and laziness.
It's also a sign of haste, the urge to be done.