Michaeleen Doucleff: “To make cognitively demanding tasks a habit, try to do them every day at the same time and in the same place. Add a ritual before you start, such as turning off your phone and launching an app to block distracting websites. “You’ll teach yourself that mental exertion pays off under these certain conditions,” Botvinick says. After a few weeks, concentrating deeply won’t just feel easier; it will actually be easier.”
FT: “Mike Brearley, once at the helm of a very successful England cricket side, is now a psychoanalyst. He argues we each have a team of internal players, who we need to coach so we can use all their skills for tip-top performance — and find balance between them for a happy existence. “We all have an indulgent side, a playful side, a serious side, a work ethic, a superego or a harsh conscience,” he said in a recent interview with Cambridge university’s alumni magazine…Instead of falling out with ourselves and indulging in the equivalent of locker room fisticuffs, his advice, in a book published last year, was that “captaining ourselves, like captaining a team, requires a willingness to allow thoughts and feelings their space”. He suggests “nudging rather than forcing” these parts of ourselves into being more effective.”
Arnold Kling: “In profit-seeking businesses, a company that gets too heavily bureaucratic will eventually lose money and have to cut back or go bankrupt. That provides a check on bureaucracy. But government interferes with this process by creating compliance requirements. These requirements force businesses to expand bureaucracy, and they provide a barrier to entry preventing new firms from coming in and competing on the basis of lower overhead. You cannot execute a lean startup in an industry that is heavily regulated.”
WSJ: “[Cal] Newport, 41, says we can accomplish more by shedding the overload. He calls his solution “slow productivity”—and has a book by the same name—a way for high achievers to say yes to fewer things, do them better and even slack off in strategic doses. Top-notch quality is the goal, and frenetic activity the enemy. This, he told me, is the thing that can save our jobs from AI and layoffs, and even make shareholders happy…One mistake we make, Newport says, is taking on too many projects, then getting bogged down in the administrative overload—talking about the work, coordinating with others—that each requires. Work becomes a string of planning meetings, waiting on someone from another department to give us a go-ahead. Newport recommends giving priority to a couple projects, then bumping the others to a waiting list in order of importance. Make that list public, say, in a Google doc you share with bosses and colleagues. “
Dev Ittycheria: “The real sophisticated [AI] apps will be using real-time data, being able to make real-time decisions on real-time events. Maybe something’s happening in the stock market, maybe it’s time to buy or sell, or it’s time to hedge. I think that’s where we will start seeing much more sophisticated apps, where you can embed real-time data along with all the reasoning.”
