The Productivity Mirage: Why Tools Matter Less Than Intuition

I think it's a false dichotomy. A good craftsman cares deeply about their tools. But the tools are a means to an end, not a toy.

I have a bunch of small productivity tools I made to match my workflows: tiny shell scripts and functions, custom Emacs functions and settings, small tools to control windows placement, etc. Cumulatively I spent many days building and adjusting it.

But when I need to jump into a task, things just work. Syntax highlighting is there, code navigation is there, code analysis is there, I can rearrange things in my area of attention the way I want with a couple of keystrokes, I can drive git the way I want with a couple of letters. I don't have to tweak anything. Nothing bothers me, nothing distracts me, nothing wastes my time and breaks my concentration by requiring legwork.

(Same applies to my mechanical and electrical tools. Mostly.)

Invest in your work environment. Adjust your chair. Adjust your shell prompt. Adjust your editor settings. Comfortable? Good. Now you can forget about them all, they are just there working for you. Concentrate on the real problem you have. Godspeed!

The skill of concentrating on a problem is much harder though. Endless tweaking of your tools that eats all your time can be a sign that you are just trying to avoid that daunting and uninspiring task. But this is not the tools' problem, not that simple.

This is so important. I've seen so many fellow technologists (and I've skated this myself) obsess about their setup to the point that they're spending more time on that than the actual thing they're building.

The whole "90% of my time as a coder is spent typing, so I should optimise my ability to type fast" is so, well, wrong. 90% of our time should be spent thinking, and most of that reading.

There's a bubble where VC backed companies are not producing anything that people are really using or paying for. So to justify their valuation they instead try to show just how productive they are. Surely if they are this busy and productive they must be worth something? (This could also explain the hype around AI which is all about "productivity/how" and nothing about "what")

This article compares these kinds of companies ("nihilists") with game developers who are producing things that people pay for and use. The game developers don't pay much attention to productivity tools because they are too busy producing things.

https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/

> the perennially unprofitable venture-backed startup, for which faux productivity is connected to the generally immaterial nature of its high valuations, versus the game studio that lives and dies by the profitability of its products.

> In a sector of the economy where "it's not about how much you earn, but about how much you're worth," the labors of the companies whose workflows are built on the kinds of productivity apps that today comprise nearly 40 percent of Product Hunt's output are not actually directed at the creation of a thing, but at the appearance of the creation of a thing.

I've found that I get more done the less time I'm at the computer. My productivity also went up dramatically when I reduced from three monitors to one.

I solve most of my problems when I'm doing things like chopping vegetables or mowing the lawn. Sitting in the presence of shiny technology does not magically confer one with the ability to achieve higher quality decisions more quickly. I find the opposite to be mostly true. I can massively outperform the development team that my clients have simply because I am not a full time employee and can idle out long enough to think about their problems the slow way. The urgency to keep the status circle green in Teams (and related productivity theater) creates a lot of stupid decisions in many shops.

The OP implicitly raises the question of why does "productivity" exist. I've been giving that some thought lately, and the hypothesis I arrived at was that of diminishing suffering.

Many types of performance optimization work, including "programmer productivity" are really the engineer's getaway from having to contend with the ambiguity of the problem domain, the politics, the vagueness, the risk of failure and other kinds of suffering.

Alas, solving a problem coming from the world requires confronting the world - a couple of examples are the tedium of mentally working through a user workflow, getting somebody else to cooperate by articulating and proposing a joint strategy and more.

I do not believe in pain for pain's sake, but good delivery has an inherent quality of athleticism, and one cannot be an athlete without accepting that training for the track means proficiency at managing pain - and at the track rather than elsewhere.

I literally just closed a tab from a talk by Brandon Rhodes about Activation Energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pybtvFFRYFs

In it he talks about how making things easier to do via scripts is a good thing. He even has a system of using `,` as a prefix for all his own scripts just to make them discoverable with ,<TAB> :)

My dad uses to this day a borland compiler and IDE to compile his C++ program.

No syntax highlighting at all.

And it is a commercial product, I'm not talking about a pet project or hobby.

It amazes me, really.