We need fewer things to work on. Starting now.
Notion encourages busy-work and I’m tired of it
Why has everything become so needlessly complicated?
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
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
Less stress, more productivity: why working fewer hours is better for you and your employer
There’s always too much work to be done on software projects, too many features to implement, too many bugs to fix. Some days you’re just not going through the backlog fast enough, you’re not producing enough code, and it’s taking too long to fix a seemingly-impossible bug. And to make things worse you’re wasting time in pointless meetings instead of getting work done. Once it gets bad enough you can find yourself always scrambling, working overtime just to keep up. Pretty soon it’s just expected, and you need to be available to answer emails at all hours even when there are no emergencies. You’re tired and burnt out and there’s still just as much work as before. The real solution is not working even harder or even longer, but rather the complete opposite: working fewer hours.
My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file
The biggest transition for me when I started college was learning to get organized. There was a point when I couldn't just remember everything in my head. And having to constantly keep track of things was distracting me from whatever task I was doing at the moment.
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.
Productivity
I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets...
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consistently intensify it: In the study, employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. That may sound like a win, but it’s not quite so simple. These changes can be unsustainable, leading to workload creep, cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems. To correct for this, companies need to adopt an “AI practice,” or a set of norms and standards around AI use that can include intentional pauses, sequencing work, and adding more human grounding.
The Rise of the Decentralized Startup
I think we’re seeing a very big shift right now in how startups are created and operate. But before we dig into that, I want to spend some time talking about work. For centuries, work has bee…
Why time management is ruining our lives | Oliver Burkeman
The Long Read: All of our efforts to be more productive backfire – and only make us feel even busier and more stressed
Work Smarter: The Cocktail of Simplicity, Manageable Adversity, and Muntzing
Sometimes deliberate roadblocks can be a good thing to get more efficient and effective products and workflow. Here's how.
We should be more tired than the model
Adding deliberate friction back into development
What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade
We are headed toward a world of productivity without prosperity, execution without verification and capacity without constraint. But this outcome is not inevitable.
What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade
We are headed toward a world of productivity without prosperity, execution without verification and capacity without constraint. But this outcome is not inevitable.