The Three Phases of Work - Productivity Demystified

The productivity trap represents the most deceptive form of stagnation - you're technically working and producing outputs, but this creates false confidence while lacking real depth. You're going through the motions with surface-level activities that feel productive but hit an inevitable quality ceiling because they are not grounded in holistic and reformed understanding.

What makes this trap insidious is that it feels productive in the moment. You have something to show for your time and deadlines get met, but this false confidence prevents you from recognising that you haven't actually grappled with the substantive aspects of your work. Eventually, you reach a quality dead-end where additional effort won't meaningfully improve the result.

True productivity requires moving beyond this comfortable zone into 'grounded direction' - where you engage authentically with the work itself. Only then can you access the enlightenment phase where real understanding emerges, leading to peak resource optimisation and development of your ideas.

Screen real estate is the most important real estate. It is also the only real estate where more is always better. Portability is not worth the order of magnitude difference in productivity with more pixels.

How Emotions Drive Decisions: A Processing Framework

After much thought, I believe that emotions are the primary driver of human decision-making, operating in a sequential rather than integrated process. When faced with any decision, we tend to elicit an immediate, biological emotional response, and I broadly categorise them in four buckets- indifference, happiness, fear, or anger.

These emotions then undergo some "delayed transitory period of reflection" where these initial feelings either settle into stable drivers of action or fade away. Rather than reason and emotion being intertwined, I see them as fundamentally separate processes where emotion comes first and what we often call "rational" decision-making is actually just emotion that has had time to stabilise and mature through this reflective settling period.

Even seemingly logical decisions are ultimately rooted in emotional responses that have been processed over time, and why it is no wonder that we tend to say that ‘everything settles with time.’ The characteristics we associate with reasoning (being slow, reliable, and logical) describe emotions that have completed this settling process, while impulsive decisions stem from emotions that are still fast, unstable, and haven't had adequate time to stabilise.

The go-to web trifecta - Python, PostgreSQL, and Django are good defaults for a reason.

AI can be the critic of great work, not the creator of it.