Most executives are reaching for ways to become an AI-first organisation, but many of them are missing the productivity power up that’s hidden in plain sight – asynchronous collaboration. Not only does asynchronous collaboration free up unproductive time for workers, it helps create the digital exhaust of knowledge that LLMs can feed on.

We often derive satisfaction from difficult activities, even if they aren’t pleasurable. Does this effort paradox hold any learning for us all?

It takes a special discipline to push back against novelty and embrace routine, boring solutions. That discipline, however, can lead to surprising efficiency.

It’s OK to say “No” to incoming work if you deliver high-quality outputs, communicate proactively, and meet your deadlines. The bargain is as simple as that.

Too often, we say an instinctive “Yes” to every new idea and every new request for our time. To be productive, I argue that our default response must instead be a strategic “No”.

If you set them up right, internal open-source projects can help your company gain extra development capacity and a sense of community. In this post, I discuss four key practices that help you run a successful, internal open-source project.

Efficient work rituals lead to predictable, high-quality results. As part of my depth rituals, I setup a clean workbench before I begin any work. The inspiration? Elite sport and master chefs!

Volunteerism at work can do more harm than good. I believe that employees should steer clear of it, when possible.

There’s always more to do than I’ll ever have time for. I’m sure you face similar choices in life and at work. I take a detour today, to explain why I’m doing less than I possibly can with this website and my professional presence on the web.

Tech proliferates into our lives with the promise of improving communication and giving us access to information. But it’s also left us more disconnected and busier than ever. In this post, I reflect on my years growing up and whether a subtractive approach to using tech, may lead to a more enriching outcomes in life and at work.

Our time is a zero-sum game. We don’t want shallow work commitments to steal our deep work time. Shallow work is unavoidable, but we can control it. In this article I explain four ways to do so.

Cal Newport’s “slow productivity” philosophy advocates for multi-scale planning at the quarterly, weekly and daily levels. While Cal recommends his excellent time-block planner, I’ve found my humble calendar to be an effective tool for this way of working.

The “whiteboard effect” refers to a deep work phenomenon that occurs when two or more people problem solve together in spells of intense focus. The presence of this effect doesn’t mean, however, that we must always be in whiteboard mode.

We pay too much attention to the idea of skill and talent. Often, time on task, trumps talent. Could this be the secret to doing excellent work, having a resilient career and building excellent teams? We explore that question in this article.

If you adopt asynchronous work, everyone should be able to work on a schedule that’s convenient to them. But that may not be the case from day one. You must first build your deep-work muscle.

Organisations can benefit from volunteerism in the workplace by harnessing their people's spare capacity. But how do you get it right? Allow me to explain.

It’s tempting to extract the last bit of productivity from our work schedules. However, busyness isn’t the same thing as productiivity. Let me explain why cutting yourself some slack, is a better idea.

Unpredictable days are shapeless days. This represents the classic maker-manager paradox. Makers need contiguous blocks of time to achieve meaningful outcomes. A calendar driven schedule is amongst the worst blows to a maker’s productivity. We can’t be proud of this way of working.

To move away from the office mindset, then we’ll need to unlearn a few unhealthy habits we’ve picked up over the years. In this post, I want to share four of these habits. Benign as they may seem, they are pernicious obstacles in your path to being an async-first team or organisation. Let’s explore each of them and the problems they create. As we do so, I’ll outline a few alternatives to these behaviour

Chat is an essential part of your toolset. The trouble is in the “instant” of “instant messaging”. To be “instant”, you need to monitor chat all day. Not only does that build interruptions into your way of working, it can be mentally exhausting to keep up with all the channels your team and company have created. So in today’s post I want to share a few ways you and your team can use this set of communication tools effectively and support a more productive, async-first way of working.