Tag: productivity
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Stop pontificating about other people losing their jobs to AI and worry about your own job – More executives need to use AI for a month straight. This will both de-hype enterprise magical thinking and help us come up with more uses that accrue value to the organization. In the meantime, most of the value…
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Incremental AI is better than civilization changing AI
Incremental AI For every AI skeptic and alarmist, there are ten AI dreamers convinced AI will change civilization. In the business world, this fuels high valuations and premature optimization through layoffs or sweeping business changes. Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, listed out all sorts of AI things Amazon is doing. To me, the list suggests AI…
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UK govt study: Copilot AI saved workers 26 minutes a day – Well, that’s one way to do the ROI dance. // “And even using the more modest projected time savings of 4.59 days per employee per year, the £19 per employee per month cost of a Microsoft Copilot Pro subscription in the UK appears…
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Google Study: 65% of Developer Time Wasted Without Platforms – Better get a platform. // ‘Intriguingly, 86% of the survey’s respondents also said they believe that “platform engineering is essential to realizing the full business value of AI. ” // “At the same time, a vast majority of companies view AI as a catalyst for…
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The luxury of saying no. – “Most people don’t get to say no. Not really. They’re not debating whether to use AI on principle. They’re trying to figure out how to keep their job without surrendering their judgment or drowning in tasks that keep multiplying while headcount shrinks. For most people, using an LLM isn’t…
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Dark Leisure – ”in many orgs, there is too little incentive to pass on these productivity gains by telling your manager: “i found this neat tool that lets me do 8h of work in 3h! give me more work!”” // Some “real workers of the world unite” vibes.
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What is “O-Ring Theory”?
One bad apple ruins the bunch. The O-Ring Theory, proposed by economist Michael Kremer in 1993, describes how small failures in complex, interdependent tasks can lead to major breakdowns. Named after the Challenger disaster, where a faulty O-ring caused the shuttle’s destruction, this model applies to production, labor markets, and economic development. In an O-ring…
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Measuring Productivity: All Models Are Wrong, But Some Are Useful – ”Measure Speed, Ease, and Quality Different facets of productivity warrant the use of different metrics. We typically think of productivity as a balance among speed, ease, and quality.”
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The Hidden Toll of Meeting Hangovers – Hell is other people: “In our survey, more than 90% of respondents said they experienced meeting hangovers at least occasionally. More than half said these hangovers negatively impacted their workflow or productivity, while 47% reported feeling less engaged with their work. These effects often resulted from rumination, or…
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Context-switching is the main productivity killer for developers – #1 way to improve developer productivity, 30+ years running: stop interrupting them while they’re coding. // ”Research from UC Irvine shows that developers need an average of 23 minutes to rebuild their focus after an interruption fully.”
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Gartner Survey Shows Supply Chain GenAI Productivity Gains at Individual Level, While Creating New Complications for Organizations – The robot summarizes what’s happening here with theory of constraints, clever! // Robot: “Alice now processes orders faster, but Bob and Charlie still work at their original pace. If Alice completes 20% more orders, but Bob can…
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Are executives prepared for employees that 30% more productive?
Now that we’ve replaced all these people with a robot, how can we climb the CAGR? I was a guest on the Cloudcast this week. I go over how I use AI and then Brian and I discuss how companies could get more use out of AI. Most of it, I think, rests on how…
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Why I use Apple Notes instead of Obsidian
Field notes from my annual note taking rumspringa I went through my annual “I should try to use Obsidian” cycle last month. As always, I went back to Apple Notes after a few weeks. Here’s my read-out of this year’s cycle.1 Notebook philosophies First, here’s an Apple Notes method to get an Obsidian/Notion feel, briefly…
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Productivity “hacks” don’t work. These do. – If you don’t have a to do list and use your calendar, start with that and ignore all other productivity improvement advice.
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How to break free from your “toxic productivity” cycle – “if you’re not able to carve out even 20 minutes for yourself, then something needs to change in your life.” // Tools that find the priorities are hard: “We hear a lot about how to optimize for productivity, but what we don’t have is the…
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Why are corporations cutting managers? – “a large share of a company’s work force does not produce widgets. Instead, they produce organizational capital.” // Also, what if employee (individual contributor) productivity meant less managers?
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Modern Work Fucking Sucks. – Attack of the SaaS productivity apps. // Maybe it’d be better to just use one suite of tools: Office 364 or Google Apps, i.e., the #defaultslifestyle. // It’s easy to fall into the habit of planning and showing progress in work instead of just doing the work.
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DORA Report 2024 – A Look at Throughput and Stability – Developer productivity is fine, but: “We thought the bottleneck was developers writing code, but in fact the bottleneck is putting good code into production.” // Maybe the current trend in DevOps/platform engineering/cloud native to to stop caring about developer productivity, rather, re-silo and let…
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Rewiring the way McKinsey works with Lilli, our generative AI platform – “30% time savings in searching and synthesizing knowledge.” // Worth reflecting on how much of this is pulling together all the stuff for monthly status updates to management, a huge time suck for office workers. Much of it is probably bullshit work, but…