The End of Productivity

In a world where we can outsource productivity to technology, the people who reap the biggest rewards aren’t those who work the fastest.

They’re the people who make things that are wonderful, original, weird, emotionally resonant, and authentic. As our feeds become flooded with instant, AI-generated content, the most dangerous thing you can do is pl... See more

Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of the Ogilvy advertising agency, famously told a story about an office building where people complained that an elevator took too long to arrive. Instead of spending $1 million to make the elevators 5 percent faster, they solved the problem by spending around $100 to add mirrors so people could look at themselves whi... See more

Information that is worth saving usually falls into two buckets:

• Administrative information: The daily minutiae of our lives (e.g., grocery lists, meeting notes, to-do lists)


• Creative information: Information that fuels our projects and ideas (e.g., that perfect quote for a presentation, the scientific study that inspires your next big essay, the

... See more

When we gear our society around efficiency, we produce more and more of the measurable, while the immeasurable, the qualitative, and the things we don’t think to measure drain away. Bedazzled by quantitative abundance, we might not be able to see what is lost, but we can definitely feel its absence.

There are two modes of information discovery: foraging and hunting. Foraging is passive. You don’t have a clear goal; you just wander and scroll until something catches your interest. Hunting is active and purposeful. You know what you’re looking for and are consciously searching for it. A good information diet needs both: Foraging helps us decide ... See more

To do our best creative thinking, we need tools that seamlessly support both modes. We should be able to capture ideas effortlessly in the moment, then organize them with purpose when the time is right. This balance between seamless capture and intentionality is essential for supporting creativity.

A tool built for creativity should feel like a sunlit artist’s studio—spacious and inspiring, with windows you can open to allow the unexpected in.

the creative process typically involves three steps:

1. Collecting: Gathering interesting ideas


2. Connecting: Drawing connections and organizing materials


3. Creating: Producing something new