You can’t buy back time once you’ve spent it

February 24, 2023

There's a deep and surprising sense in which money can't be "wasted" from a bird's eye perspective - only resources and people's time can be wasted. If someone "wastes" $100, someone else now has $100 extra to spend. Even burning bills deflates the currency, making other bills more valuable. But people's time genuinely can be wasted. The tragedy of someone spending hundreds of millions of dollars building a yacht is not the dollars spent but the enormous quantity of people's time and all ...

Tricks for Getting Started on a Project When You’re Stuck

April 19, 2021

If you ever have trouble starting on something that's important or find yourself procrastinating on a project, you may find it useful to notice what you feel at that moment and design your approach based on it. Here is a list of "feeling-based" strategies that may help you get started on what you have trouble getting yourself to do: If you are feeling: 1. unsure of where to start-> think of three really small, simple, actionable steps that would constitute a small amount of progress...

How Do You Increase The Productivity Of A Team You Are On Or That You Lead? A Simple Framework

July 3, 2019

We can think about "productivity" in terms of how much value a team creates (according to any particular measure of value) on average each month. With that definition in mind, there are many reasons a work team may have low productivity. To make a team more productive, I suggest first trying to pinpoint the predominant causes of inefficiency, since different failure points typically have different solutions. The key is to identify and then focus on just the 1-3 of these causes that seem to b...

The Problem with Pseudo Work

September 19, 2017

Pseudo work (PW) is a problem. Pseudo work consists of tasks that feel productive but neither contribute to your goals nor help anyone else to any meaningful degree. PW (pseudo work) is neither fun nor useful but, because it feels like work, we allow ourselves to do it and consider it work time. That means we may not even have it on our radar as something to get rid of (unlike pure procrastination time, which we know we want to reduce). Yet if we remove PW, we can free up time for either real w...