In Part 2, I described the sublime and powerful experience of flow, which could be considered the “holy grail” of productivity. I argued that there is theoretically no minimum amount of time necessary to get into flow, contrary to popular belief. But in reality, as always, it’s a bit more complicated. Let’s look at what this looks like in a typical working session of a couple hours.
Just-In-Time PM #8: Divergence and Convergence - Forte Labs
In Part 7, I argued for the importance of interacting with information, instead of just passively consuming it. Interaction results in better learning at the same time as it creates valuable deliverables. But incorporating all these new ideas about how work is completed – flow cycles and intermediate packets, downscoping and evolving deliverables, interaction over consumption – can be a little overwhelming.
Just-In-Time PM #12: Just-In-Case to Just-In-Time - Forte Labs
In Part 11, I introduced the concept of a “critical path” of tasks in a project, and the rationale for pushing tasks as late as possible on the timeline. The late starts approach inspires a tremendous amount of resistance, especially from creative knowledge workers. It sounds an awful lot like taking control from individual employees, centralizing it in a central decision maker, and forcing people to finish everything at breakneck speed at the last minute.
Just-In-Time PM #13: Component Thinking - Forte Labs
In Part 12, I described the shift from a just-in-case to a just-in-time philosophy of work, using late starts as an example of the benefits it offers. But if nearly everything can be done later, and there are major benefits to doing so, one question comes to the forefront: what in the world should I do now?
Just-In-Time PM #9: Placeholders - Forte Labs
In Part 8, we looked at divergence and convergence as the two fundamental modes of all creative work. Now let’s see what this looks like in our day to day schedules. The main feature of the modern workday, you may have noticed, is fragmentation.
Finding Flow: Escaping Digital Distractions Through Deep Work and Slow Living
Learn how to achieve flow state and defeat digital distractions through environment design, mindful breaks, and deep work practices for a more focused life.
Just-In-Time PM #10: Structure, Features, and Purpose - Forte Labs
In Part 9, I explained why it is so important to create placeholders for your work-in-process: to allow you to pursue multiple projects across different spans of time without losing your progress. What we are converging towards is a set of core principles for how Digital Knowledge Work is fundamentally different from previous kinds of work.
Just-In-Time PM #5: The Iron Triangle - Forte Labs
In Part 4, I introduced the idea of “intermediate packets.” Instead of delivering value in a big project that spans huge amounts of time, we want to deliver it in smaller chunks at more frequent intervals. This follows a basic principle that has revolutionized many industries: small batch sizes.
Just-in-Time PM #21: Workflow Strategies - Forte Labs
Now it’s time to look at the JIT Project Manager’s toolkit. How do we put these ideas into practice in our day to day work? Through Workflow Strategies, a set of practical techniques for executing modern projects. Here is the full list, according to whether they work better for small or large-scale projects, and what kind of situation they are best suited for.
Just-In-Time PM #15: Multithreading - Forte Labs
In Part 14, we looked at the potential for massively increasing our bandwidth by creating “personal productivity networks.” These networks are made up of packets of work that move between “nodes” where some kind of intelligence is applied, whether human or software-based. But what does it look like to operate such a network in our day to day work?
Fast Flow Conf UK 2026
What a fantastic day at Fast Flow Conf 2024! ⭐ We fully support their commitment to promoting greater DEI at tech events, and this event was thoughtfully organised bringing together a diverse group of practitioners, experts, and enthusiastic newcomers to share knowledge, ideas, and grow the
PhilipK Devblog
In my experience, you can speed up your workflow in UI and Game development, by writing tests for the edge/hard-to-reproduce cases.
Just-In-Time PM #11: Late Starts on the Critical Path - Forte Labs
In Part 10, I argued that digital knowledge work was fundamentally different than other kinds of work, because its structure, features, and purpose could be added or changed after it was built. Principle #4 of Digital Knowledge Work is therefore to “Start everything as late as possible.”
Why embracing complexity is the real challenge in software today
In the midst of industry discussions about productivity and automation, it’s all too easy to overlook the importance of properly reckoning with complexity.
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.
AI research speeds up. Monitoring gets harder. - Sensemaker
OpenAI says coding agents now run 3.1 days for every human research day, while its chief scientist warns the lab’s main monitoring method is weakening.
What We Learned from Letting AI Posttrain AI
We built a posttraining task that runs for 20 hours with the Tinker API. The core bottleneck is research intuition.
