Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
Hundreds of point solutions across dozens of Gartner quadrants solve subsets of these problems, but these narrowly-focused products cannot solve administrative challenges across systems. It’s not surprising that total factor productivity has stagnated, despite an explosion of productivity software tools promising the opposite. Not only do point solutions fail to accelerate productivity, their sprawl is actually slowing things down:
She likes Slack, but she sees how it can get to be too much. “Sometimes I felt that I needed to mute every single channel in order to get stuff done.
My Friday ritual is to do a cool down to prep for the week before the Daniel Craig Weekend meme hits. I'll change the scenery to focus on, such as a walk, moving to another room in the house, or going to a cafe outdoors. The purpose is to put all the weekly reflections and subsequent week planning down on paper. This might be a checklist of what you need to do or start planning the week out. We should be entering the weekend like Roman Soldiers marching back through the Arch of Triumph; cleansing ourselves before re-entering the haven that is the weekend—leaving the baggage on the battlefield of the workweek.
Most business models require companies to sell more products consistently. At best, this forces businesses to constantly develop and market new products to new customers — rather than making the experience for existing customers the best it can be. Pharmaceutical companies are great examples of this: They need to keep selling more stuff to stay above water, so they have no incentive to focus on long-term value for those who have already made a purchase.
Good ideas are easy to write, bad ideas are hard. Difficulty is a quality signal, and writer’s block usually indicates more about your ideas than your writing.
According to Brook’s law, the number of communication paths grows at a faster rate than the number of people you add to the group. As a result, what worked for a small team of 10 won’t work for a team of 40. Actively designing and tending to the tools & process is essential.
Sherlock Holmes, in BBC’s rendition, builds a fabled mind palace, an imaginary castle in which to stash his clues and concepts for later recall. Mere mortals with our average powers of recollection turn instead to notes and bookmarking apps, with their promises to be our “second brain” and help us “remember everything.”
While many politicians earnestly believed their Covid policies necessary and good, it is impossible not to notice these policies also afforded our political leaders sweeping new power over the lives of ostensibly free people. Beyond the world of elected power, on questions related to the nature of the pandemic from which these new political powers draw legitimacy, media companies policed our information landscape for dissent, and social media companies erased that dissent from the internet. All of this was managed unofficially in tandem, and with ruthless efficiency. Tensions flared. Flaring tensions were further repressed. Backlash was inevitable, and in Ontario that backlash manifested on the road.
Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought.
This metagame ends up giving players the habit of looking at every situation by asking: what's the best way to automate this, and what dependencies of other automations are threatened if I do? This is, for developers and for the many, many people whose jobs will involve more software development over time, a very good habit indeed. I tried to crank through some emails right after playing Factorio one time, and realized—I urgently need to write some email snippets. This just can't be allowed to exist in an un-automated state! But if I'm going to use a lot of email snippets, I need a consistent way to manage them lest I end up with five different iterations on "Yes, let's talk about that; here's my Calendly."