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Productivity porn and yak shaving
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Posted by 22111
Feb 25, 2022 at 02:18 PM
“Worth reading” might apply to people who have free (e.g. university) access to those paid press articles, all the more so since most of those are not written by specialists.
As for their click bait, “porn” probably implies a) Addiction, and b) “make-Belief”, whilst its proven that the right instruments are able to enhance your productivity, or even your thought quality, more or less that is, according to the thought put into the tool by the respective software developer.
Thus, yes, even a software subscription might be ok, but just for high-quality tools, and on condition that its in continuous development; unfortunately, once they charge by the month or the year, developers’ motivation to assure that last requirement goes down, invariably, understandably and logically.
As implied by me before, the user can do their own development, from the outside, by macro tools then, and, according to the characteristics of the software they apply those macros on, this user strategy may become more or less possible, and thus more or less fruitful, always considering the ideal, and thus virtual, situation the user in question being able to push the limits of what the software in question allows for, re user interaction by external automation, be it the direct user interaction with the program, or then interplay with other software, mainly the user’s respective browser, i.e. all sorts of “input” into the software, but also “data maintenance”, i.e. data which already is within the software, but not yet in the right form or in the right place(s); then again, there’s the (double) “retrieval problem”, which is obviously linked to the previous one, and is double since we might want to just look up data, or then, also, process it in other, “final target” applications, our software in question just acting as a data repository, intermediate between data sources (direct user input by keyboard or dictation, or then (intra-)web (re)sources of all sorts, selected database output, etc.).
Thus, like any software project, we, the users this time, have to do our development in some iterative way, since, almost every day, we discover new “problems” for which we might write, and apply, an external “solution”, and on the other hand, we also might have better ideas how (perhaps even much better than before) to solve problems than we will have been treating them before; it goes without saying that any work input going into (new or amended) user-side solutions have to be judged by their effectiveness in the end, not only by their respective efficiency, except in cases of scripting-for-fun, so thinking about your current solutions, and re-thinking them, ideally, is far from being futile whenever your new solution will facilitate your work greatly.
To give an example: If you produce a high 2-digit or even low 3-digit number of new “items” every day, you will have to put them into their (single or even multiple) contexts, without losing too much time for this, and this also applies to users who try to rely on “search” for information instead of “ordering” it beforehand when there is no real AI to (yet) help them doing without any sort of pre-sorting (e.g. by some additional “keywords”, “tags”), for getting more reliable search results (and not speaking of the fact here that in the “just or mainly search” alternative, i.e. search instead of (in part 3-dimensional) taxonomy, the order quality of even any search result is far inferior to the same, coming from same previously ordered data set).
Thus, if you don’t want to get all your information out of just a 6-digit, unordered “inbox”, you would think that those applications we’re referring to here, tried to facilitate the “filing” of new items, but we all know this is not the case, all to the contrary, and thus, if you try, by external means, but which might get quite elaborate then, to optimize your filing procedure(s), and even if such optimization takes some effort, in thinking, and in writing the necessary code, you’re certainly not losing your time, or, as that press title might imply, “jerking off”.
On the other hand, those journalists are not completely wrong, since, I - not being willing to pay for an “Economist” subscription, I can’t but - suppose, they don’t write about scripting onto some bought / rented software, but switching from one such software to the next, in an endless search of enhancing productivity i.e. effectiveness of your work, buy those acts alone, and that’s more or less false hopes indeed; more or less I say since clearly, there is software even more inept to help you within your work than other, and/or there are applications where you can circumvent their inherent limitations (or more precisely, those among them which are counter-crucial for you, and which will thus hamper your productivity quite seriously) with some scripting which might be within your reach (or within the reach of an “ideally trained, scripting-wise” user then), whilst with other such software, even that “ideal user” will not be able to do much; it goes without saying that none of such applications currently come with an API, which would enormously enhance possibilities - cf. “Mind Manager” though, but which for other reasons is not an alternative for most.
And as for switching from one such application to the next, you better learn some AutoHotkey or some other, since in almost every circonstance, even the data import into your “new” software will not be without fault, and that’s why, btw, so many users have their info data spread over more than one application, and not for some real “workflow” reasons; I’m not speaking of the, totally logical indeed, setup “source material (browser, data base, etc. ) > data repository (for storage and maintenance) > output application (for output to third-parties)”, obviously.
Journalists, btw., get their “redaction systems”, which their desk management rents for them, and which, functionality-wise, are mostly inferior to their counterparts in the Eighties… but that’s firmly paralleled in today’s press output quality, incl. most subscription papers like the “Economist” (to which I once was subscribed, so when I sometimes browse a current issue, the difference appears to be blatant to me).