My issue is that with productivity theres a big factor of "good data in good data out". If a system is too overdesigned it often gets underutilized. I used to have complicated setups for my "productivity" but honestly I've paired it down to one google sheets time tracker with a few fancy features like time predicting on projects but not much.. and google calendar. It wasn't until I reduced my tools that my productivity increases.
I worry that overanalyzing productivity will innevitably lead people to forget the 1 rule of "do less".
Hey CEO2, I totally understand where you're coming from. There are a whole bunch of "productivity tools" out there. Many people try to stitch together multiple productivity apps in an attempt to improve their productivity. Floutwork is trying to solve that problem by bringing it all together into a single "work system" that helps you focus on your work, rather than the tools. It's designed to help you be productive by default, and you really need to go out of your way to be distracted. We would love for you to try it out and let us know what you think."
Hey Daniel, hope all is well. I completely understand and I'm sure I'll check it out at some point. I'm just saying in my experience I've yet to find a tool that justifies adding yet another tool in this space.
I'll have to check it out, haven't seen any of his work! I based my current system off of Cal Newports work. I basically intentionally designed and overly comprehensive and overly complicated system and paired it back until I had a good balance of inputs and outputs!
@CEO2 - I loved Deep Work from Cal Newport! That books changed my whole mindset regarding productivity and was partly the inspiration for the app. I did build the methodologies from Deep Work into the app. Here are some of those:
- Plan your day ahead of time and know exactly what you are working on next. In Floutwork, you can give time estimates for your tasks and it will suggest best times to work on those tasks on your calendar. It won't show those suggested times "as busy" on your calendar but you will know exactly what task to work on in between meetings etc..
- Focus for longer periods of time without interruptions. In our regular desktop setup, we constatly get inturrupted by chat notifications and email notifications. In Floutwork, you can mute them all in one shot and it is totally configurable.
- When you are doing deep work and you remember you have to do something else, most people will drop what they are doing and go do that other thing because they don't want to forget about it. Now they just switched contexts completely and it would take them about 23 mins to regain focus on their original task. In Floutwork, you can pull up the command bar any time by pressing CMD+1 and quickly enter your task like "Get with Mike tomorrow at 4pm" and then continue doing your work without losing focus.
- Cal Newport says measuring focus is hard. So I added a way to track how much time you spend on each app you use and also have a focus timer built in to measure your focus.
These are just a few examples. I can go on but I just want to say I loved the book so much I wanted to implement practical features that will help people incorporate those concepts in their work environment.
I second this! Couldn't agree more. In all honesty, some of the best parts of jazz lie in its history. For example listening to Clifford Brown might make you think "huh this is neat". But understanding his relationship to gillespie, early death, etc, puts his career in a unique and fascinating frame.
What aways amazes me about Brown is how much he accomplished in so little. I play trumpet, in high school was in California All State Jazz and Classical. I'm by no means a prodigy, I merely brought that up to say I know a lot of musicians.
When you ask any trumpet player to name their top 5 go-to artists if they want to sit down and listen, I'd say that 95% plus would have Brown somewhere in that list. This would be true of people ranging from myself to pro studio musicians. Heck I don't know anyone who's dedicated to the instrument that cant hum along perfectly to Jordu or Joy Spring including his solos.
In only 26 years of life, he has become one of the most iconic names in hard bop, a genre containing the likes of Freddie Hubbard and Horace Silver.
To think he did that in 26 years, one can only imagine what he'd have done if he made it to 60+!
I understand the concern about this being rather useless fluff with no real differentiation beyond a cute and UX. However, as someone who grew up playing music, I truly believe that listening to "difficult" music exercises the brain in a way similar to reading a good book. Because of that, I am all for any lipstick on a pig that might bring the general public deeper into classical music.
I think this is illustrative of a broader theme which is how enduring and baked in a lot of our climate degradation is. As much as the chlorine compounds will decay, but not exactly anytime soon. To think we won’t have an issue with this again before they’re decayed would be ridiculous.
It’s the same thing with the broader topic of global warming. Absolutely we should seek to minimize greenhouse gas emissions, that’s a no brainer. But at our current stage in developement, especially with some countries not exactly being team players in this fight, a lot of the increase and future increase in temperature is baked in (pardon the pun). As much as I’m all for mitigation, much like the wildfires themselves, we will already have plenty of consequences to come. That’s why I’m so excited to see focus shifting more towards mitigation and resilience. We need to be prepared for the inevitable we’ve caused.
Personally, I wouldn’t use the term “excited”. The focus could just as easily shift towards nationalist movements trying to hoard resources and prevent refugees from warmer areas from crossing borders. There’s no guarantee that “resilience” is going to come in the form of technical innovation or human cooperation.
As much as I see the concerns, the issues that could arise from resilience are issues that can arise anywhere where human self-interest is present which is just about everything. I am excited for firms to start focusing on greener office buildings, even if their are some using it to greenwash for optics.
Though as I mentioned, I completely see your point. I guess I should rephrase to “I am excited that there is the potential for positive action in this space.
What I think is important in looking at the difference in treatment between “big tech” and telecom firms is the political expedience. Not to sound too much like a Mayhew acolyte, it can’t be denied that most legislators have their primary focus on reelection. It comes as a priority before efficacy of legislation.
To the voters, telecom companies have always been a priced in annoyance. Additionally, their services aren’t differentiated so although they’re annoying with pricing, the average voter doesn’t see them as quite so pervasive. You pay, you forget. They’re all mildly frustrating to deal with but un-noteworthy .
Big tech on the other hand is in your face. I don’t see my telecom but you can be rest assured I see Microsoft, Facebook, etc on a daily basis.
This means that a congressman fighting telecom is taking a stand against an amorphous blob that we forget about after our monthly bill. Conversely a congressman fighting big tech is a valiant warrior fighting greed and corruption.
I’m sure people here have different views due to a grasp of the nuances but the sad truth is that most of america isn’t all too aware. Big Tech just seems scarier.
Telecom wealth is also pretty evenly distributed nationally because at the end of the day all the money is tied up in the infrastructure that's installed across the nation. They gotta pay someone in Kansas to install fiber in Kansas.
Tech wealth is far more concentrated and it's concentrated among the "very wealthy" and the "coastal elites". Both of those groups are pretty unpopular outside their own bubbles right now.
That further tips the scales in favor politicians targeting tech.
Great breakdown, enjoyable read. I think it highlights why more and more tech firms are hiring employees with psychology and economics backrounds. The attention economy combined with the ever-growing presence of a razor and blades style market with in-game purchases in pay-to-win games is insane. I understand it from a profitability perspective. In addition it allows for more enduring cashflows.
From a less direct perspective I remember vividly when my mom would be shook at the idea of a $30 Pokemon game for the DS. Now we pay $60 for a game and expected to pay up to $60 in DLC's not including ingame currency purchases. Oh how times have changed.
Oh that tin!
I was so excited with my purchase--having saved up for months to get it at launch--that I missed my stop on the bus home. I had to get off about a mile away and ran to my SNES like I'd never ran before.
I think DLC is a matter of inflation. publishers don't want to raise sticker prices, but their input costs are actually increasing, so they need to increase prices directly somehow.
Also, expansion packs for AAA games have always been a thing, and it's always felt kind of painful to buy them.
Another reason to produce DLC is that it keeps market attention on your existing game (thus diverting eyeballs from your competitors) without having to devote the resources required to develop a whole new game since most of the base is provided by the previously finished game.
As someone who has been very interested in diet and health from many perspectives, be it general health and wellness when I was younger, competitive cycling and rowing, and more recently competitive bodybuilding, I have come to a tragically bland conclusion.
Every day it seems like there's a new study about a new food that will revolutionize XYZ. Meanwhile, most people don't sleep well, dont drink enough water, overindulge in alcohol, don't get enough excercise, and don't get much sunlight.
I think it should be everyone's primary focus to sleep well, drink water, get outside, get active, and eat generally decently. The huge cognitive and physical gains that would come from these basic activities far surpass any marginal benefit from optimization. I hate to say it, but if you're not eating a good amount of vegetables and fruit, decent protein, sleep, etc, no amount of mushrooms will catch up to that detriment.
Now if these fundementals are in place, findings like this are truly fascinating! I just see so many people put the cart before the horse far too often.
> Meanwhile, most people don't sleep well, dont drink enough water, overindulge in alcohol, don't get enough excercise, and don't get much sunlight.
A couple I know in their mid-60s were both diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. They were both sedentary, overweight and ate horribly. They embarked on an ambitious diet and exercise plan, have both lost a lot of weight and are both no longer diabetic. It truly is fantastic, and I'm happy for them.
One of them is convinced that people just don't know that they can beat type 2 diabetes; she wants to publish a book about what they've done. I keep trying to tell her it's not a lack of information, but a lack of will for most people, that she and her husband are very much outliers in that regard. Her publishing their method won't change things for hardly anyone.
I'm 59 years old and have been a moderate athlete my whole life; I keep my weight decent (not as low as I'd like but well under official obesity levels), eat pretty well, get enough sleep. I am having a medical procedure done tomorrow (that's completely unrelated to anything here), and the nurse who did intake for the hospital was shocked that I don't take any prescription medications. I call that a win.
I completely agree, but to add to this I also think it's an issue with information overload. Popular culture and pop science is all about quick fixes and crazy complicated "30 day transitions". It causes people to think that there are 3 types of people:
1) People who are naturally fit without effort.
2) People who have crazy gnarly diets and regiments.
3) Everyone else.
This causes them to give up as it seems like far too steep of a climb. It's incredibly sad because the basics of "eat a little less, a little cleaner, and go for a walk" would kickstart a revolutionary change in most people. If you're maintaining weight on 3500 calories, it doesn't take a ton of work to start losing a bit of weight, even if its at a slow rate. People just see the first step as insurmountable.
Not to mention the millions of fashion models and actors who take steroids then say they have a perfectly attainable physique and it was all hard work. Alas, that is a disucssion for another post.
Learned Helplessness everywhere you look. It's why, here in the US, we won't rise up like the French as our own government also looks to raose our retirement age. Not sure how you correct this across such large demographics?
I don't think it's a lack of will. It is more an environment that is overwhelming most peoples capacity of will, as well as simply just material circumstances that make all those changes even more difficult, or impossible. Inbetween working long times, low wages, unavailability of healthy food in a lot of places, car-centred culture, you will need absolutely crazy amounts of will power.
The solutions to these problems are not individual, but systemic.
It seems like that “lack of motivation” applies to many other medical conditions as well, and people like me who actually want to and have and will commit to the “hard fix” are confused about just how “incurable” something is, and whether something like surgery really is necessary.
Thoracic Outlet Syndrome for example can typically be cured with either months of exercise and stretching, and being cognizant of one’s posture throughout the day, OR a relatively simple and quick and minimally-invasive surgery. I get why most people opt for the surgery and probably even lie to themselves by saying surgery is the only pragmatic option.
I've had orthopedic's tell me I needed an epidural steroid injection without even bothering with an MRI (same guy told me to, "Take it easy on the PT." despite the fact that PT and a systematic return to exercise is what got me pain free).
So I'm personally just as likely to blame the so-called specialists here. They can't bill insurance when people start taking their health into their own hands.
I struggle so much with figuring out how to fit enough fruits and especially veggies into each day. Really fruit isn't an issue now that I think about it. It's nature's candy. Veggies, though I do love them, are harder to get enough of EVERY day.
As an athlete and lifter, do you think smoothies destroy a lot of the benefit of veggies? Say I want to make a smoothie each day that is packed with spinach and broccoli and carrots. I have to clearly pulverize the crap out of that to get it drinkable. I love the idea of that, because I can get a fair amount of veggies in a smoothie... But I've heard some say that doing this can destroy a lot of the nutrients from oxidation as you blend the veggies which is also pulling oxygen into the whirlpool created by blending. Not sure if that makes sense.
Aside from making a really veggie packed smoothie each day, I struggle with how to fit all the veggies into each days diet?
I do eat a good amount of oatmeal in general... Try to have some fruit and veg every day. Very little red meat. Any pointers you could offer in general are appreciated and I'm sure others here would appreciate the extra information as well!
I personally don’t really think it’s a problem to blend them. In general, it’s still far better than not getting enough in at all.
I think the important thing to think about is that not all vegetables are created equal. The nutrient profile of spinach versus lettuce isn’t even comparable for example. Then you have fibrous veggies like broccoli that can be great for digestion. So a diversity is amazing, making your core dark leafy greens and adding ancillary vegetables on top.
One hack is that spinach wilts down super nicely. If you’re ever behind in a day, olive oil, cup or two of spinach, and some garlic and you’ll have a very enjoyable way to cram nutrients.
The problem is that taking care of yourself to that extent is a massive undertaking that often completely exhausts your functional capacity irregardless of the benefit.
I am actually rather curious whether there's any difference between in-ear and over-ear headphones in terms of their effect on hearing. Assuming the same volume, content, etc.
As much as this may seem like merely an interesting dive into the subject of wear and tear, the broader world of bicycle geometry and design is fascinating. I used to race downhill and the tire path of the bike's design combined with how that path changes as the rig goes through its suspension travel is integral to feeling stable/planted. When you see some of the patents regarding modern bike design, especially in the world of suspension linkage, its mind boggling how much depth is put into these machines. All so I can go fast down a hill, fall on my ass, and get covered in mud.
