The End of Productivity

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

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.

Imagine trying to shoehorn the elevator mirror solution into a Linear project. The software would prompt you to move through a neatly organized set of issues: “Research elevator speeds,” “Calculate upgrade costs,” “Implement faster motors.” There’s no task for “Stare at the wall and ponder human psychology,” but sometimes that’s exactly what we hav... See more

We live in a culture that venerates productivity above all else.

shift to a new paradigm

Tools like 3D CAD are excellent for creating designs, but not particularly useful for deciding what to design in the first place. Project management tools such as Asana, Linear, and Trello can help us manage workflows by creating and organizing lists of tasks. But it’s impossible to build the right workflow if you don’t know what outcome you’re wor... See more

most productivity tools are built for convergence, the part of creativity that involves narrowing down and refining ideas. They aren’t built for divergence, which involves opening ourselves up to new ideas and possibilities.

When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular, I’ll remember everything better; everything w

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Our interfaces should facilitate prose-sculpting, meaning-architecting, memory-augmenting, and inspiration-harvesting—all grounded in sources we love and trust.