``. . . anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley, in Chips off the Old Benchley, 1949
How to be more productive without forcing yourself
Imagine you could work more and be wildly productive. And you wouldn’t need to force yourself to work.
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
The full story about why procrastinators routinely ruin their own lives.
Laziness Does Not Exist
Psychological research is clear: when people procrastinate, there's usually a good reason
Every productivity thought I've ever had, as concisely as possible - …
I combed through several years of my private notes and through everything I published on productivity before and tried to summarize all of it in this post. If you’re unproductive right now Here’s what you should do if you’ve been procrastinating for an entire day: Accept that you won’t do anything today and try not to get angry at yourself Set the alarm for the time you will be preparing to go to bed today No, really. Do it. It will take 20 seconds Procrastinate for the …
Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control) (Published 2019)
If procrastination isn’t about laziness, then what is it about?
Good and Bad Procrastination
Grady Booch on Twitter / X
Let’s be very clear: there is value in automating tedious and repetitive and dangerous tasks; there is value in delegating certain work to our machines that can do the work tirelessly and much faster.But at the same time, let us remember that there is value in the activity of…— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) October 3, 2026
This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch - Twenty Sided
Last week I derided permacrunch – the policy of working an entire creative team 70 hours a week all the time – as “the policy of simpletons and sociopaths”. This led to some people asking, “Why is crunch even a thing?” Can’t management just plan the schedule so that the project is done on time using only 40 hour work weeks?
It's the 21st century – why are we working so much? | Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley: The right calls for hard work, the left for more jobs. The dream of mechanisation leading to shorter working hours seems forgotten
In 2026, I’m no longer interested in ‘working on myself’
We think of ourselves as full-time projects, but what if doing so much inner work does more harm than good?
The peril of laziness lost | The Observation Deck
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris: If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design. We’ve all fallen into the trap of using cut-and-paste when we should have defined a higher-level abstraction, if only just a loop or subroutine. To be sure, some folks have gone to the opposite extreme of defining ever-growing mounds of higher level abstractions when they should have used cut-and-paste. Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.
The solution to (nearly) everything: working less | Rutger Bregman
Excessive work and pressure are status symbols. But overtime is deadly. If we worked less we’d make fewer errors, address inequality and have a better life
Doing nothing at work
Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I have a high-pressure project going on, I spend 20% of my workday away from the computer.
How to Beat Procrastination
Part 2. Where does a procrastinator go wrong and how can you actually improve your procrastination habits?
Work in Parallel, Without Fear — Jonas Schürmann