Productivity

You’ve got about 110 days left

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Roughly a Quarter Roughly a quarter left. Aim it at your Work. | Image generated by AI, prompted by me Labour Day weekend just passed. That long weekend sits on a clear hinge in the year, the turn from more relaxed summer energy into a season that usually gets busier. Projects stack. Calendars fill. The light changes, and so does the pace. Between now and the end of the year, you’ve got about 110 days left, roughly a quarter, give or take. That stretch can be an ideal design window if you…

Would it bother you if everyone knew?

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Faint unintended mark left across a blank page

Use AI Like Everyone Will Know A mark you leave without meaning to. | AI-generated image, prompted by me Anthropic caused a bit of a firestorm this week. The company behind Claude announced it is now adding invisible, machine-readable watermarks to AI-generated text, along with provenance metadata for generated files. You can read the details here. My social media feeds filled up with people celebrating the prospect of catching AI users, alongside people horrified that they might be caught….

You were never paid for your effort

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Open exit doorway framed as the point of the path, not a failure

Markets Don’t Reward Hard Work — They Reward Value Turns out the exit was the point. For 27 years, I thought I was being paid for my effort. I stayed late. I took on the ugly projects that many steered clear of. When something caught fire, I was the one they called, and I enjoyed being the one they called. I was wrong. The reward was real. The effort got me better performance ratings, bigger files, a name for being the guy that got shit done. Now that I’m on my way out the door, I’m seeing…

The most polished, useless thing I’ve ever made.

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Stack of drafts covered in red edits, with a red pen on top

Perfectionism Got You Promoted. Now It’s Keeping You Stuck. Perfected into oblivion. I once spent so long perfecting a briefing that it died on the way up. It was headed to the CIO, then the deputy minister. Lots of visibility, and my name was on it. That made it high stakes to me. So I revised it. Then I revised the revision. Tightened the language, reworked the framing, chased one more data point, softened one more sentence so nobody upstream could poke a hole in it. By the time it reached…

You’d get fired for running a project this way

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Brass compass resting on architectural plans in a dark office

The Most Important Project You Keep Ignoring A heading, not a prophecy. You’ll invest heavily in planning a major project at work without blinking. Then leave your own life to chance. I’ve run complex programs for the government for years. Scope documents. Milestones. Risk registers. Budgets tracked to the dollar. When something threatened to go sideways, I usually saw it early enough to do something about it. It took me into my mid-40s to notice I’d never once pointed any of those skills at…

The week I disappeared.

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Wilted plant on a cluttered desk beside an open laptop

The Week You Can’t Remember You kill your dreams the same way you kill houseplants — neglect. My journalling app threw a question at me that stopped me cold. “What’s a moment from this week that felt meaningful to you?” That was it. The bar was so low! One moment, just one, that meant something. It didn’t have to be a career milestone or a life-altering epiphany. Just something that meant something to me, something to remind me how glorious life can be. Nothing came to me. I sat there with…

Hero Mode Put Me in the Hospital

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Person curled up on a dark floor in a strip of light

Hero Mode Put Me in the Hospital This is where Hero mode got me. I was telling myself I just needed to go harder. Lean in. Push through. Dig deeper. The project was slipping, the people around me weren’t moving fast enough, and somewhere in my head I had decided that if I just willed it hard enough, I could drag the whole thing across the finish line by myself. Then one night I found myself on the floor. Curled up in a ball. In tears. A couple of days later I was in the hospital. And lying…

Performative AI is killing your reputation

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Smiling man sliding a blank page across a meeting table

Your Name Is On It And so is your reputation. The document is blank. The smile isn’t. And his name is on it. Jensen Huang — CEO of NVIDIA, the company that makes the chips powering the AI revolution — has a message for his engineers. If you’re earning $500,000 a year and you’re not consuming at least $250,000 in AI tokens, he’s going to be, in his words, “deeply alarmed.” He’s spending $2 billion a year on tokens for his engineering team. And he wants more. The signal is clear: organizations…

The LinkedIn CEO is only half right.

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Silhouette facing a mirror that shows a different person in the light

AI Isn’t Coming For Your Job. It’s Shining a Light On Your Excuses. The LinkedIn CEO wants you to upskill. I want you to ask a harder question. The mirror doesn’t show you what you are. It shows you what you’ve been avoiding. The CEO of LinkedIn, Ryan Roslansky, wants you to adopt a “skills-first mindset.” He argues that jobs are just collections of tasks. Some AI will do, some it will assist with, and some will remain “uniquely human.” His advice? Break your job down, automate the boring…

Stop being so damn good at your job.

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Man in headphones at a laptop while papers swirl around him

The Art of Strategic Ignorance Why your competence is a trap (and how to escape it). Ignore the noise. Protect the mission. You are exhausted. But not because you are failing. You are exhausted because you are succeeding at the wrong things. There is a dirty secret in the corporate world that nobody says out loud: The reward for being efficient is more work. If you are the person who always fixes the slide deck, you will always be the person fixing the slide deck. If you are the one who knows…

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