Nir and Far

Let me tell you an anecdote about my personal experience. Let me know if any of this sounds familiar. As the years went by, I began to realize that a lot of the managers/mentors I had worked for and looked up to when I was younger simply did not know what they were talking about. You're too easily distracted -- focus, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, they would say! But they would never talk about how the left hand of the organization and the right hand of the organization didn't agree. And I began to wonder if they were making things up in order to deflect blame away from the leadership structure which included themselves.

Of course, that sinking suspicion turned out to be generally true. When I worked at hypergrowth companies with great leaders (rare to find and whom I must say I somewhat took for granted), guess how often I found it hard to focus? Very rarely. Now, what about all the other places with organizational dysfunction? Oh, it was VERY hard for me to focus. Borderline impossible, really.

It turns out that my to-do lists, my "productivity hacks" my treasured knowledge bases -- all of them were a very specific kind of procrastination I was doing to maintain some semblance of control trying to get work done in an organization that made questionable decisions over my head. I was trying to avoid having the hard conversations with the people who made those decisions because they were stressful and risky and if they went the wrong way I would have to leave. Which…

Lots of people will come in here with technological solutions. Adding limiting software and blockers may help with some aspects of a phone distraction habit, but they're unlikely to solve the problem long term.

The first step is to notice why you're using the phone. Since this habit is likely very strongly engrained it will be difficult to notice.

Here's an example from my life:

I'm working on problem -> I don't understand what to do next -> I feel confused and anxious -> This feeling is unpleasant and I want to avoid it -> I pick up my phone to browse something meaningless to take my mind off of the unpleasant feeling.

Your exact triggers and feelings might be very different. Finding the pattern of your thoughts is the important thing. With this in mind, you can start to understand why getting rid of the phone probably won't help. You will just replace it with another activity.

I tried switching to a dumb phone and cutting the internet off to my house for 6 months. It didn't help that much. Instead I would deal with the unpleasant feelings by watching TV or picking up a book.

Your habit was built over months and years. You won't change it in a day. The first step is just noticing your feelings (harder than it sounds!).

I recommend the book Indistractable [1]. It gives a lot more detail about how these internal distractions are the root cause of a lot of procrastination habits. Just reading the book will not fix your problem in the same way as reading a book on…

"Slavery" is a powerful word, understood universally, with high chances of proving the point and making an impact when used.

Your censorship of it's usage may have been done on good intentions but the results are nefarious.

Does it seem to you that we are living in some Nirvana / restored Heaven Of Humanity? Take a look at this, wage slavery makes 25% of work classification: https://www.nirandfar.com/wage-slaves/

Confining the word "slave" to some well-in-the-past primitive dawn of humanity and punishing us for using it to depict the deplorable state of humanity today does nothing for improving said state and makes you in the best case one of the "useful idiots" of the establishment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot ).

How do you define a "slave"? Think of this definition: "a slave is any person that trades their time in exchange for the right to live". Does it seem to you that Elon Musk is a slave? How bout someone working on a computer 1,000,000 times more powerful than 30 years ago and going through even more drudgery with less stability and guarantee of making a living out of the productivity increase?

Is it really the best that civilization can throw at the versatility and capability of the human mind? Fixing bugs in the 100'th million line of crap framework code and the perspective of being replaced by a statistical model? That's your glorious "non slavery" world you censor from using?

I spent way too much time in the calendaring space.

> Makes scheduling collaborative instead of a nuisance.

This is not a strong opinion (sorry Derrick, I love you)

Every calendar/scheduler thinks they do this. Most are just variations of calendly (which no one loves, but does it's job).

Calendars (imo) need to stop getting enamored with scheduling and more enamored with helping people use their time wisely.

Stronger opinion: scheduling sucks - do less of it.

Stronger opinion: you should schedule your calendar exactly this way (https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/)

Stronger opinion: a full calendar doesn't make you productive. Making sure you've scheduled the things that matter to you first before you let any other events is, is the only thing that matter.

Tying the way someone calendars to a specific workflow is what matters. You saw Superhuman do this with "inbox zero." They convinced you that inbox zero means you're productive. It's the wrong metric IMO, but that's how they built out their fan base.

If someone is trying to get a calendar off the ground, they should just hire Nir as an advisor, make his workflow the default calendaring experience and start from there. That would do worlds of work for differentiating in this space where everyone largely does the same minor improvements in different colorways.

You're clearly wrong: if using TLDR didn't deliver some sort of value, nobody would do it. Your argument is similar to how my parents argue about texting - you just don't get it, and because of a cultural mismatch, you probably never will. But as an entrepreneur, you need to be able to notice when you don't understand something, and you need to be above disregarding trends because you don't understand them - you should be trying to understand rather than just giving up and saying "this is stupid".

Separately, there are several reasons why people read tons of news articles they don't really care about. In general, they fall within rewards of the self (desire for mastery, completion, etc). For more info, check out http://www.nirandfar.com/ and pay attention to his explanations of the different types of random rewards that drive behavior.

Journalists and writers on Substack and similar platforms are entrepreneurs. They have to work hard to build a brand and ensure retention through superior coverage. If they are journalists they have maintain integrity with their audience.
It is like the difference between Zoom as a point solution and Microsoft Teams as part of the Microsoft 365 suite bundle.

Lazy and sloppy ITs will subscribe to Microsoft suite offerings. Those who want to step up their game will buy best of breed point solutions.

-

This is a good piece on the dark patterns NY Times employs and their signature hypocrisy:

https://www.nirandfar.com/cancel-new-york-times/

HN discussion on NY Times hypocrisy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27338157