Tagged: productivity

Jordan Lord:

These are the 3 constraints that I use before I start building anything. I'm a believer in constraints as an enabler for creativity. Constraints help us collapse the search space, and figure out innovative solutions to problems.

I've been a builder for 10 years, and I've built products that went nowhere because they were either too complex or had no identity. These are the constraints that I landed on after making those mistakes.

I tend to agree with the author — constraints breed creativity and all that jazz.

I find the second constraint fascinating in particular: “The core tech must be separable from the product.” I’ve been thinking about this in the context of product ideas I’m constantly exploring.

For example, Pi, my favourite coding agent and daily driver has this: the pi-ai package which is similar to Vercel’s AI SDK (abstract access to various models & providers) and pi-agent-core (built on top of pi-ai and provides common constructs to build an agent). OpenClaw is built on the latter, and that played a big role in making Pi popular.

Arnav Gupta:

But the truth is that these layoffs, even if they they are not because AI is replacing you, and even if they are some form of AI-washing. These layoffs are still because of AI. And these layoffs will continue till we learn to use AI. Till we learn to convert AI-tokens into outcomes and not just input. Till we learn to re-align the speed of "alignment" with the new speed of coding. And till we figure out, beyond our 2 good and 8 stupid ideas, 10 more ideas that we can chase with our increased productivity.

This is a very refreshing take on the layoffs in large tech companies. It’s the best take I’ve read on this.

Murat Demirbas:

I remember the early 2010s as the golden age of productivity hacking. Lifehacker, 37signals, and their ilk were everywhere, and it felt like everyone was working on jury-rigging color-coded Moleskine task-trackers and web apps into the perfect Getting Things Done system.

So recently I found myself wondering: what happened to all that excitement? Did I just outgrow the productivity movement, or did the movement itself lose stream?

I was very much in the audience for the productivity theatre. I still am to an extent, even if the stage has lost most of its oomph. A good, short read.

James Somers:

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more.

The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and you're sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, you're probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it'll feel too expensive.

What's worse, because you blog slowly, you're liable to continue blogging slowly—simply because the only way to learn to do something fast is by doing it lots of times.

This is true of any to-do list that gets worked off too slowly. A malaise creeps into it. You keep adding items that you never cross off. If that happens enough, you might one day stop putting stuff onto the list.

That hit hard. Read the whole post, it’s well worth the time.