I understand where he is coming from. I desperately wish I had back the dozens of weekends I spent customizing tools like Notion (or Obsidian or Roam or Omnifocus or Things or...). At one point, I convinced myself, "I can do this better" and spent a few months hacking together my own tools that were infinitely worse than the worst of the commercially available software.
Then there are the rabid communities, YouTube channels, and cohort-based courses that make you spend hundreds of hours learning how to "be productive" in these tools.
I call this "fidgety work":
"fidgety work (n): 1. spending inordinate amounts of time researching, designing, and tweaking tools & systems with the expectation that time spent on 'productivity hacking' is an investment in future better and faster work; 2. procrastination
Real Work > fidgety work"
That said, there is probably an 80/20 argument here -- there are probably a handful of tips and optimizations that get you virtuosic with a given app. After that, it's all diminishing returns.
I like it and have been recommending it too, but it desperately needs a better data export (i.e. _any_ data export). Concerned that so few quantified self apps actually let you have your data (I'm looking at you fitbit)!
believe me, we don't want ownership over any of the ideas. we're also aware that "no-strings-attached" often is not, so I'll grant you that this may all seem rather suspicious. Honestly, I hope people get fabulously happy and can quit the day job off of the $1000 we're handing over. Doing that for somebody is my ROI. But even if all it does is lower the activation energy required for somebody to get off his/her ass and do something awesome or encourage already awesome people to keep going, I think we all win. We could use a little more unfettered joy around us, don't you think?
Then there are the rabid communities, YouTube channels, and cohort-based courses that make you spend hundreds of hours learning how to "be productive" in these tools.
I call this "fidgety work":
"fidgety work (n): 1. spending inordinate amounts of time researching, designing, and tweaking tools & systems with the expectation that time spent on 'productivity hacking' is an investment in future better and faster work; 2. procrastination
Real Work > fidgety work"
That said, there is probably an 80/20 argument here -- there are probably a handful of tips and optimizations that get you virtuosic with a given app. After that, it's all diminishing returns.
Someone should sell an ebook on this.