Another book to avoid

I’m usually a fan of Cal Newport’s books & articles, but his latest one is awful. The concept is fine — do less, slow down, and focus on quality. But the anecdotes and examples to support those claims seemed weak, strained & boring. Definitely one to skip.

R&D productivity booster?

Apparently someone has discovered a sure fire way to increase the ever elusive way to boost R&D productivity!

Company accidentally increased dev productivity 3x by laying off 20% of middle management

Yes, it’s satire, but there’s a bunch of truth in that no?

Wasted time at work

For those that know me, know that I’m a big fan of productivity hacks at work. e.g. shortcuts to get things done faster, keyboard usage vs. mouse, apps to help you switch faster etc.

So it was with great pleasure that I saw an article in the Economist about how much time we actually waste on non-value adding things. e.g.

• We waste ~180 days in a typical career correcting typos
• ~145 days wasted in logging into things
• Deleting emails takes up ~6 weeks
• Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” in the time that an average office worker spend changing font sizes in their career

The solution is to have a bag of tricks to go faster. (If you have any of your favorites, I would love to hear about them).

Not your typical productivity book

For those that know me, know that I’m somewhat of a productivity geek. I try to use tools where I can to accelerate, I’m careful where I spend my time and am generally always looking for the “next boost”. Fortunately, this book is nothing like your typical productivity book. In fact, it deliberately takes the macro view that we only have ~4000 weeks (80 years x ~50 weeks), and so people who are trying to optimize every minute better step back and take the big picture view. It’s hard to summarize, but there’s one quote that stuck with me:

When it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less

Good reminder to step back and see what we are all working so hard for. Definitely worth a read!

GPT powered email?

This new product (Flowrite) looks like just the thing to help people write less, but get more done. Essentially it seems to learn from your emails, chats and then using GPT (what else!) to construct emails, messages etc.

Seems to be just browser based. It would cooler if it were just baked into Outlook say. Can’t wait to try it out. You can try it out here.

Personal CRM

I’ve always longed for a personal CRM that allows one to keep better in touch with people. I came across Clay — looks pretty interesting / well done.

Has anyone tried it? There’s a sneak peak at SuperOrganizers.

Elegant app launcher

For all those people that are easily distracted by smartphone apps / notifications, enter Blloc Ratio, an elegant app launcher (and more). It essentially allows you to focus the “home screen” to just the apps that you care about, it reminds you of the time you waste per app, has the ability to “go monochrome” per app and more. To get the full picture, I would recommend a short video.

Unfortunately, it just seems to be for certain Android phones currently. It seems like the future of the interface for smartphone isn’t locked in stone after all.

Time management tricks from Marc Andreessen

Nice short interview on productivity / time management with Marc Andreessen. Two things that caught my eye: One, he blocks his time. Second, does he really use a text file to manage his projects? Shows the developer roots. Interesting.

Worth a read.

Inbox ninja moves

I love this kind of stuff. Productivity tips on email management from the technorati. Worth a read. It also has a bunch of tools (mostly for gmail) that may be helpful. Top tips:

• If you can’t delete an email without flinching or responding, you won’t scale
• Subject lines are everything
• Turn off all email notifications
• Check and answer emails once per day
• …

You get the idea.

Becoming indistractable

There’s been a lot of hand wringing about how tech is making us into zombies that have no self control and are constantly being distracted. However, there’s isn’t a lot of systematic advice on what one can do to be more focused.

So it was with eagerness that I wanted to pick up and read a new book that purports to help us all be more “indistracable”. It does not disappoint. At least the first 2/3rds or so of the book are pretty practical — I found myself putting the book down and trying to implement the hacks. Essentially he asks everyone to schedule everything, turn off distractions, use tools (SaneBox for email, DF to avoid the YouTube rabbit hole,  Newsfeed burner for LinkedIn etc.) to avoid being sucked into the internet and so on.

Some tidbits:

• Only 1/3 of Americans keep a daily schedule
• About 83% of working professionals check their email after work. 2/3rds take their work related devices with them on vacations and about 50% have sent work related emails during meals with family / friends
• 70% of US office space is arranged as open floor plans
• The average office professional receives ~100 emails a day

Worth a quick read.