Tag: productivity
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Humans are the bottleneck
Human attention is the binding constraint. About 80% of interactive agent session time is spent idle, waiting for a person. Reading all of the output from interactive sessions would take more than half the work week even for non-technical staff. One engineer compared it to babysitting, with every agent demanding attention at the same urgency.…
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If you don’t know how to use AI at work, it doesn’t work well
You need to train people how to use AI, otherwise the results are not great: Because the real problem here is that to judge something – both during and after production – you have to master the topic you want to judge. And to master a topic you need to practice it for 10,000 hours…
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Procrastinating by being productive.
In fact, excessive activity can protect us from the harder work of deciding what actually matters. When everything is important, prioritization disappears. When every request earns a meeting, the calendar begins determining the strategy rather than serving it. The deeper discipline of leadership may therefore be subtraction. 🔗 Busyness Can Be a Form of Avoidance
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AI is valuable to the individual, less so to the organization
Ask an individual if AI made them more productive and about four in five say yes. Ask an organization if it moved EBIT and it’s fewer than two in five, and one in sixteen for anything you’d call real. A chart pulling three August surveys together, plus why the goal should be getting better at…
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The Epictetus method for task management
Epictetus’s productivity method starts with a filter: Is this mine? Original: Epictetus Ran a Better Productivity System Than Any App You’ve Bought by JA Westenberg. List extracted by AI. Separate what you control from what you don’t. Your judgments, choices, desires, and actions are yours. Other people’s decisions, opinions, deadlines, mistakes, markets, algorithms, and outcomes…
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AI remove’s labor’s toil, capital doesn’t know what to do with AI – Elusive Enterprise ROI
Another way to say that is, AI has opened the door to humans spending more time making things instead of being crushed by meetings and process and bureaucracy. Also, from the same: Another way to say that is, AI has opened the door to humans spending more time making things instead of being crushed by…
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AI makes people more productive, not organizations – Elusive Enterprise AI ROI
For enterprises to get the most out of their AI investments, they should think about going deep with their AI deployments, not wide, Ashraf said. Instead of applying AI across every process in an organization, find the few instances where automating workflows with an agentic system could make the most impact. And: While 78% of…
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Relative to your interests, Wednesday
After reading many of the below and other links in elusive enterprise AI ROI, I wrote this theory on how to be successful with enterprise AI projects. It’s the usual “culture” cliché, but hopefully a little more practical than usual. Are PMs becoming irrelevant? – Once you remove the need for a bunch of “paperwork,”…
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the cost of fitful night of sleep
One night of sleep loss [costs] close to €200 [£173],” she said. .. Imagine a street where there are 100 people living, everybody sleeps terribly for three nights because of a heatwave and the next day they’re unproductive. That’s your investment in trees for the whole year. 🔗 From mobile jungles to shadow art: how…
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🤖 AI Productivity Gains Stall at Firm Level: The Three Stages of ROI
Original: Why AI isn’t showing up on your bottom line by Azeem Azhar. Summarized by AI on June 1, 2026. AI tools have made individual workers faster and more productive, with engineers producing more code and teams feeling tangible time savings. Yet firms see little proportional ROI, echoing Robert Solow’s paradox of computers appearing everywhere…
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If speeding up coding was never the problem…then why are we spending money on speeding it up?
When it comes to measuring developer productivity driven by AI, we’ll probably land on the same conclusion as always: counting lines of code isn’t as useful as measuring the full cycle time from idea to code to delivery to a person actually using the app – lead time, concept to cash, whatever you want to…
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Appearing Productive in The Workplace
A growing body of work calls this output-competence decoupling [5]. In any previous era, the quality of a piece of work was a more or less reliable signal of the competence of the person who produced it. A novice essay read like a novice essay; novice code crashed in novice ways. AI has severed that…
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Elusive Enterprise AI ROI: No scaling, it’s not legible, lack of skills/need for training
Despite everything, reports are still that enterprise AI ROI is elusive. At the same time, for enterprise buyers, the bill is finally coming due for the past year of AI amazement. It’s not cheap. What’s up with this elusive enterprise AI? Gartner has some survey-driven theories for finance departments. One theory is that there actually…
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Enterprise AI Slop
People are using AI to generate too much work because they think they know what they’re doing: A growing body of work calls this output-competence decoupling. In any previous era, the quality of a piece of work was a more or less reliable signal of the competence of the person who produced it. A novice…
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Usually life hacks and productivity tips are the same old things, these are fresher
Stop brainstorming. There’s a mountain of research showing that team brainstorming doesn’t work. There are several reasons why, some having to do with unconscious conformity, others with fear of being judged, and still others with unclear norms. (For example, people are often told to say whatever comes to mind, but also not to criticize.) Some…
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trying your best properly rated
widely accepted reading of the-west-wing, as such, is that of a liberal Fantasia, not because it depicts the Bartlet administration as being liberal, but because it depicts a world in which the best possible thing you can do is to try very hard to do the right thing — and the liberals, or really the…
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Never start deep work if you know you’ll be interrupted soon.
I wake up at six every morning to have coffee, read The Economist briefing, and read my “RSS feeds.” Everyone else is asleep, and it is quiet and dark. This is when I find things to bookmark and share, or just read and inform myself. Sometimes I start projects. Recently, getting all my janky AI…
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de-weirding enterprise AI
Ethan Mollick: The de-weirding impulse produces a second, deeper failure: it leads companies to default towards automation rather than augmentation. When leaders see studies showing productivity gains of 30% from AI, their instinct is to cut 30% of the workforce. That arithmetic is simple. What is hard, and requires genuine imagination, is asking a different…
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Enterprise ROI: Banking edition
Maybe no new banking businesses from AI yet: “It is a long, expensive and risk-constrained transformation,” Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo wrote in a note to investors last week. “Indeed, we can’t find one extremely noteworthy new product or service from AI in these very early days (it’s been a little boring from a product…