It’s 9am. You’ve just made your coffee. You’re ready to be productive. Then your calendar reminds you that you have standup in five minutes. You sigh, open the video call, and wait for everyone to trickle in over the next seven minutes while Dave figures out why his microphone isn’t working again.
Finally, the ritual begins. Sarah goes first. “Yesterday I worked on the API stuff, today I’m continuing with the API stuff, no blockers.” Fantastic. Groundbreaking information. Absolutely could not have been a single line of text.
At 25 I could code until 3am, sleep four hours, and do it again the next night. I had endless energy. I also had no idea what to do with it. I would start projects and abandon them. Chase every shiny new framework. Rewrite working code because I read a blog post that made me feel bad about my architecture. The engine was running hot but the steering was all over the place.
We used to build things. Software that did something. Products that solved problems. Tools that people used.
Now we build apps to talk about building things. Project management tools for managing projects that produce nothing. Communication platforms for communicating about communication. Productivity apps that consume more time than they save.
The industry has become meta. We are so busy building tools for building that we forgot to build anything.
Look at a modern developer’s setup. They have tools for task management. Tools for note-taking. Tools for documentation. Tools for communication. Tools for code review. Tools for deployment. Tools for monitoring. Tools for managing the other tools. Each tool promises productivity. Together they consume productivity. The time spent configuring, maintaining, and switching between tools is time not spent on actual work. The tools became the work.
I used to get bored. Properly bored. The kind of bored where your brain, desperate for stimulation, starts making things up. Connecting random thoughts. Playing with ideas. Inventing problems to solve.
This was where my best ideas came from. Not from brainstorming sessions. Not from productivity systems. From staring at walls and letting my mind wander with nothing else to do.
I cannot remember the last time I was properly bored. I have a phone. The phone has infinite content. Whenever boredom threatens, I pull out the phone and the boredom disappears. Problem solved.
I’ve been in thousands of meetings over my career. Most of them could have been an email. Some of them could have been a Slack message. A disturbing number of them could have been absolutely nothing at all.
The modern workplace has a meeting addiction. Got a problem? Schedule a meeting. Need to make a decision? Meeting. Want to share an update that affects three people? Better book a room for twelve and block out an hour. It’s reflexive at this point, like reaching for your phone when you’re bored.
Every few years someone publishes a “how I work” post and I read it thinking yeah, that’s nice, but do you actually do all of that or did you just describe the idealised version of yourself? The version that wakes up at 5am, journals, meditates, drinks a green smoothie, and has inbox zero by 9am.
I’m not that person. I never have been. Here’s what actually happens.
I wake up sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 because my kids have decided that’s when the day starts regardless of what I think about it. There’s no alarm clock. There hasn’t been one in years. Children are the most reliable and least snooze-able alarm system ever invented. I make coffee. Strong, black, no sugar. This is not a personality trait. It’s a dependency.
You have a meeting on your calendar. It is thirty minutes long. There are six people invited. The topic is something that could be summarised in two sentences. By the time everyone joins, exchanges pleasantries, gets distracted, and finally discusses the actual subject, you have burned three person-hours of collective time.
That meeting should have been an email.
But wait. You sent an email. It was three paragraphs explaining a decision. Nobody needed to respond. Nobody needed to discuss. You just needed people to know something. Now six people have another email in their inbox, another thing to read, another context switch in their day.
Notion is not a productivity tool. Notion is a tool for feeling productive while accomplishing nothing. It is a creativity sink disguised as a workspace. It is where work goes to become content about work.
I have watched people spend more time building their Notion setup than actually doing the tasks the setup was meant to track. I have done it myself. This is not productivity. This is procrastination with better aesthetics.
Every struggling project in history has had some executive look at the timeline, panic, and say the same thing: “Let’s throw more people at it.” It’s such a comforting idea. More hands, faster work. More brains, better solutions. It makes intuitive sense, which is exactly why it’s wrong.
Fred Brooks figured this out in 1975 when he wrote The Mythical Man-Month. His observation was brutally simple: adding people to a late software project makes it later. Not a little later. Meaningfully, measurably later. And yet here we are, 50 years on, and companies are still making the same mistake. They see a deadline slipping and reach for the hiring button like it’s a panic switch.
It is not a secret anymore. Most developers use AI tools now. If you are not using something like GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or even just pasting problems into ChatGPT, you are probably in the minority. The stigma has evaporated. Nobody is pretending they wrote every line by hand anymore.
Using AI to write code is just what we do now, like using Stack Overflow was ten years ago except the answers are usually better and you do not have to scroll past three people arguing about whether the question is a duplicate.