87 stories tagged productivity, newest first.
501 points by the-mitr | 557 comments
Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok's Daily Spark note with charts arguing AI has shown no revenue, margin, or productivity payoff outside the Mag 7 tech firms.
55 points by zaevlad | 6 comments
Anthropic announcement introducing Claude Duet, a proactive agent app in research preview via waitlist for US Pro and Max subscribers.
68 points by ilamont | 172 comments
NBER working paper by David Deming and coauthors presenting large-scale economic evidence on workplace meetings from a survey of over 9,000 workers.
42 points by dmayle | 36 comments
Try page for 3 & Done, a task app that takes voice or text input and emails you three prioritized tasks each day with reasons.
3 points by speckx | 1 comments
A blog post explaining how to use substring search on shell command history in bash and zsh to recall long commands faster than with the up arrow.
641 points by donohoe | 178 comments
Tiny Little Office is a web-based collection of small office tools including a word processor, outliner, presentation builder, spreadsheet, calculator, drawing and diagram tools.
18 points by surprisetalk | 16 comments
A Substack essay by Justis Mills arguing that habitually asking AI like Claude to solve problems is a surprisingly rare and valuable skill.
37 points by hxii | 31 comments
A personal blog essay arguing against the corporate pursuit of constant growth and happiness, advocating for doing less at work to avoid burnout.
5 points by vscarpenter | 2 comments
GitHub repository for GSD Task Manager, an offline Eisenhower-matrix to-do app with an MCP server that lets AI agents manage a task list.
11 points by shmilia | 7 comments
Blog post by Ilia Parunashvili introducing Nagare, a simple to-do app for iPhone and Mac that can also be used by AI agents.
953 points by splintersio | 265 comments
Fleeting is a web app that plays plausible fake meeting audio, such as standups or sales calls, so users can pretend to be busy in a meeting.
31 points by edris0077 | 7 comments
GitHub repository for Edi Life OS, a self-hosted PHP life dashboard for habits, goals, Kanban, finance and focus with an MCP server for AI assistants.
38 points by speckx | 39 comments
A blog post on baty.net about the author's attempt to move his notes out of Emacs due to "Emacs Fatigue" and why he ended up returning.
77 points by luu | 25 comments
A personal blog post describing a couple's music-based accountability system where completing a daily task earns sending the other a song, contrasted with accountability bets.
15 points by zdw | 4 comments
A blog post proposing a draft protocol for a focused "hardcore coworking" meetup group in Portland, with calls to join a poll and mailing list.
26 points by surprisetalk | 1 comments
A Substack post by an amateur physicist describing a new strategy for doing home experiments after reorganizing a messy lab to fit limited free evenings.
31 points by grigy | 36 comments
Google blog post announcing CC, an experimental Google Labs AI agent designed to help families and households manage logistics.
675 points by peykar | 381 comments
A personal blog post by Glyphack reflecting on increasing difficulty focusing and getting only about an hour of focused time a day.
325 points by Tiberium | 163 comments
OpenAI announcement page about ChatGPT for ambitious work, captured behind a Cloudflare verification challenge.
338 points by signa11 | 120 comments
Blog post, third in a series, highlighting useful but lesser-known built-in features of Emacs.
334 points by Sukram21 | 116 comments
Blog post by Sean Goedecke arguing engineers should work fewer hours at ~80% utilization because tech company performance is dominated by outlier, high-impact events.
569 points by riddley | 230 comments
Landing page for Mouseless, a cross-platform app for controlling the mouse pointer with the keyboard, offering a 14-day trial and lifetime or subscription licenses.
326 points by James72689 | 200 comments
Fatih Arslan's blog post describing how he split one long desk into a digital work side and an analog side for reading, writing, and LEGO with his kids.
621 points by TheEdonian | 418 comments
Blog post by Frederick Vanbrabant arguing that AI is unlikely to make business processes faster.
331 points by cratermoon | 99 comments
James Shore blog post arguing that AI coding agents must cut software maintenance costs proportionally to how much they speed up code writing.
1490 points by diebillionaires | 601 comments
An essay on the No One's Happy blog about how workers use AI and large language models to appear productive at work, framed around Parkinson's Law.
662 points by aselimov3 | 305 comments
Personal blog post by Alex Selimov about staring at walls as a practice to improve focus and productivity.
614 points by PaulHoule | 295 comments
Blog post describing a native method to disable the macOS space-switching animation for instant space switching, after surveying existing solutions.
601 points by ppew | 402 comments
A blog post by geohot arguing that social media fear about falling behind on AI agents is nonsense and urging people to focus on creating value for others.
402 points by spmvg | 164 comments
Blog post by Steven van Gemert arguing that starting from an empty, clean work surface ("nothing") is the key to structuring your work and avoiding chaos.
522 points by prakhar897 | 176 comments
A personal blog post by Prakhar Gupta arguing that only actually doing the work counts, and that thinking or planning about it is not the same as doing it.
1231 points by adocomplete | 528 comments
Anthropic blog post announcing Cowork, a research preview bringing Claude Code-style agentic capabilities to non-coding work tasks.
343 points by TheAlchemist | 195 comments
A 2014 blog post by Greg McKeown arguing that people should deliberately design their own careers or others will decide their priorities for them.
338 points by eatitraw | 145 comments
Cate Hall's Useful Fictions essay "Maybe you're not Actually Trying," on selective agency in capable people.
430 points by downboots | 196 comments
A short essay listing activities like preparing, scheduling, and making to-do lists that feel productive but are not actually doing the thing.
1171 points by speckx | 335 comments
Evan Hahn's blog post listing personal shell scripts from his dotfiles that he uses frequently, such as clipboard wrappers copy and pasta.
425 points by ipnon | 150 comments
John Perry's classic 1995 essay describing structured procrastination, a strategy for getting work done by putting off other, more important tasks.
400 points by jerryliu12 | 115 comments
GitHub repository for Dayflow, an MIT-licensed macOS app that builds an automatic timeline of your day by analyzing screen content with local or cloud VLMs.
409 points by amrrs | 211 comments
A personal essay by Fernando Borretti on managing ADHD, divided into high-level strategies and micro-level tactics for tricking yourself into productivity.
1249 points by al3rez | 721 comments
A personal blog post by Alireza Bashiri about trying many todo apps like Notion, Todoist, and Things before settling on a plain todo.txt file.
325 points by jjfoooo4 | 183 comments
Blog post on the Elroy site arguing AI reshapes learning curves by helping beginners reach competence faster, while mastery and large-codebase work remain hard.
652 points by alihm | 183 comments
A Substack essay by Maalvika arguing that excessive ambition and perfectionism keep creators from starting and finishing their work.
460 points by MrVandemar | 291 comments
Joan Westenberg's essay on deleting her 'second brain' of 10,000 notes and seven years of saved ideas, and why she did it.
488 points by todsacerdoti | 254 comments
A blog post by jyn describing their unconventional terminal workflow and setup, introduced with a demo video of a PowerShell session.
1127 points by laurieherault | 567 comments
Personal blog post by Laurie Hérault on using a thermal receipt printer to print to-do tasks, drawing on video game psychology to beat procrastination.
343 points by MaysonL | 182 comments
A blog essay by Joan Westenberg arguing that smart people create limits and constraints for themselves rather than chasing goals.
396 points by WaitWaitWha | 159 comments
IEEE Spectrum guest article by Taro founder Rahul Pandey on building systems to overcome procrastination and stay consistently productive.
515 points by pavel_lishin | 256 comments
A personal page collecting macOS tips and keyboard shortcuts, updated for macOS Sonoma, covering native UI conventions and app tricks.
323 points by Iuz | 127 comments
Tero Karvinen's page describing Calendar.txt, a format for keeping a calendar in a plain text file, with a downloadable template.
531 points by debone | 270 comments
Introduction page of Johnny.Decimal, a system for organising files and information by assigning unique numeric IDs to areas and categories.
682 points by thatsnotoptimal | 124 comments
Landing page for TabBoo, a Chrome extension that adds random jumpscares to websites you want to stop visiting, using aversive conditioning.
333 points by zdw | 211 comments
A Jessitron blog post discussing the tension between hitting OKRs (objectives and key results) and actually doing your job well.
563 points by smusamashah | 177 comments
GitHub repository for Nullboard, a minimalist kanban board app contained in a single HTML file, focused on compactness and readability.
513 points by rwmj | 366 comments
IMF Finance & Development magazine article by Nicholas Bloom (September 2024) arguing that working from home is boosting productivity.
609 points by emmorts | 147 comments
A personal blog essay on the ByteDrum blog about a developer's pile of unfinished side projects and the challenge of actually finishing them.
359 points by surprisetalk | 238 comments
A personal blog post explaining why people lose items at home and proposing designated 'holding pen' spots for transient items as a solution.
551 points by zdw | 154 comments
A Raptitude blog post by David Cain arguing for framing personal ambitions as open-ended quests rather than fixed goals.
331 points by npalli | 148 comments
Nicholas Carlini's personal essay describing how he uses large language models in his research and programming work, arguing they are not over-hyped.
517 points by fagnerbrack | 113 comments
Blog post on Learn How To Learn describing a method for building projects extremely quickly, such as outlining first and filling in details later.
893 points by charles_f | 256 comments
A blog post by Charles Féval, a Microsoft principal engineer, advocating keeping a work journal to recover focus faster and clarify thinking.
342 points by giuliomagnifico | 245 comments
NPR article on UK companies that trialed a four-day workweek and, more than a year later, mostly kept and still favor it.
425 points by yarapavan | 226 comments
Jeff Huang describes his 14-year productivity system of tracking todos, notes, and plans in a single never-ending text file.
561 points by junetic | 242 comments
A minimal web app with a 60-second timer that has users stare at a dot and breathe to improve mental focus before their next task.
706 points by simula67 | 467 comments
Bloomberg article reporting a San Francisco Fed study finding no evidence that remote work affects productivity, with about 30% of paid workdays remote at end of 2023.
745 points by harrisonlo | 245 comments
Landing page for Nino, a beta superapp combining docs, sheets, slides, forms, chat, meetings, sites and other modules in one workspace.
581 points by EndXA | 189 comments
An article on the Solving Procrastination site explaining how perfectionism and procrastination are connected and how to address them.
342 points by Brajeshwar | 167 comments
A personal blog post listing things people are allowed to do but may not realize, such as hiring researchers or consultants, with practical advice.
365 points by surprisetalk | 147 comments
Landing page for Ensō, a writing tool that separates writing from editing to help users enter a state of flow.
731 points by eschluntz | 296 comments
GitHub repository for a tool that analyzes a user's message history to generate keyboard text-expansion shortcuts for frequently typed phrases.
336 points by haunter | 523 comments
Six Colors column by Jason Snell explaining why he gave up on traveling with only an iPad and returned to carrying a Mac.
451 points by imadj | 230 comments
A blog essay on why engineering work at small seed-stage startups feels intoxicating and how that spark fades as companies grow larger.
356 points by TTTZ | 228 comments
Landing page for Anytype, a local-first, peer-to-peer "everything app" for notes and knowledge management positioned as a Notion alternative.
799 points by valtism | 273 comments
Patrick Collison's list of historical examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious projects, like BankAmericard, the P-80 Shooting Star, and Marinship.
872 points by razin | 370 comments
Paul Graham's July 2023 essay offering a cross-field guide to doing great work, starting with choosing work that matches aptitude and deep interest.
469 points by duck | 201 comments
A One Thing Better newsletter post by Jason Feifer on how to tackle tasks or ideas you've been avoiding, questioning whether there's a good reason to avoid them.
442 points by aarondf | 184 comments
A GitHub ReadME guide offering advice to developers on how to finish their software projects rather than abandoning them.
444 points by cal85 | 164 comments
James Somers' 2015 blog essay arguing that working quickly matters more than it seems; the page loaded as a 500 server error.
348 points by ralgozino | 171 comments
Introduction page of the Johnny.Decimal system, a numbered scheme for organising files, projects, and information into areas, categories, and IDs.
395 points by Tomte | 148 comments
Oliver Burkeman essay on a productivity technique: write down one task, do it, cross it out, and repeat, inspired by his calm in crises.
598 points by pps | 182 comments
Blog post from Reproof arguing that notes apps act as insurance for the mind, letting ideas be forgotten, and that this is a good thing.
473 points by thunderbong | 154 comments
Homepage of Kanboard, a free and open source Kanban project management application, showing a demo board screenshot.
388 points by djha-skin | 150 comments
Stack Overflow blog post arguing that focused attention is essential for modern knowledge work and that constant alerts and interruptions undermine it.
467 points by mazzystar | 271 comments
A 2023 personal blog post reflecting on how six months of intensive ChatGPT/GPT-4 use gives individuals leverage to build things.
493 points by nate | 173 comments
A Census engineering blog post by Bradley Buda suggesting leaving work in a broken state at the end of a session to ease getting back into flow.
763 points by surprisetalk | 441 comments
A satirical blog post on taylor.town listing strategies for becoming a '-10x engineer' who wastes the output of ten engineers.
344 points by rustoo | 183 comments
Harvard Business Review article by Nir Eyal urging managers to stop distracting their employees, published January 12, 2023.
352 points by pps | 170 comments
Oliver Burkeman essay arguing readers should treat their backlog of books, articles and podcasts as a flowing river to dip into rather than a bucket to empty.