It’s easy to do, and it’s easy to buy in when others do it for us.
“You deserve this.”
“You’re doing a great job.”
“It’s not your fault.”
To be clear, these may be true, but what if they’re just comfort in disguise?
Are you snowing yourself?
Daily one-pagers about AI, leadership, technology, and being human.
johnmaconline
I'm writing to think, learn, and remember in public. I'll be here everyday.
Productivity Metrics
Productivity is easy to measure in industries that make stuff. How many cars off the line? How much wheat? How many I-beams?
Productivity measurement in knowledge work is slippery.
We try. Is it hours worked? Is it emails sent? Story points? Tickets resolved? Tax forms submitted?
What if we stopped asking, “how many?” and started asking, “what value?” or, “what problem was solved?”
Busy is easy. Valuable is harder. Solutions are harder.
But that’s the work. Once you see it, you’ll never worry about losing your job to AI.
ROA (Return on Attention)
Attention is a currency.
You spend it, and others are trying to extract it.
We talk about, write about, and argue about how we spend our other resources. We made up the term ROI (return on investment) to measure it.
“What’s your ROI?”
How are you spending your attention? Are you investing it? Wasting it?
“What’s your ROA?”
Where you spend your attention shapes what you produce, how you feel, and who you become.
Attention, like time, is one currency you can’t earn back.
$1000 Meetings for $100 Problems
A friend of mine recently said that when we were commiserating about useless meetings in our businesses.
In the industrial work paradigm, you clocked in, moved parts down the line, and then clocked out. Today, we do the same thing, except the parts are useless meetings, and the line is our calendar.
We replaced the factory with the meeting room.
We gather six people with the right titles for an hour to address a $100 problem.
The repetition feels safe. Familiar. Productive-ish. The hierarchy is satisfied.
Useful work — the kind that solves $100k and $100M problems — often takes place with a collaborator or collaborators. In assertion. In tension. In collective energy. In conversation.
Wait, aren’t meetings the problem?
Meetings, yes. Conversations, no.
If you’re a leader, encourage the conversations. Give them room to exist and breathe. Give them tools and the power and responsibility to use them.
Skip the meetings.
1000 Blog Articles on The250
I’ve made it to 1000 days in a row. That’s about three years.
Here are some observations:
- It doesn’t feel like 3 years.
- It’s now a habit. I get antsy if I can’t/don’t write.
- The perfect balance of working days ahead is 3-5.
- Writing has helped clarify my thinking. I find I can have better conversations about the stuff I’ve written about.
- I no longer have to think hard about 250 words. However, I sometimes have to edit quite a bit to get there. Lessthan in the beginning.
- I get excited when I have “series” ideas. I think it’s because I can dig in across multiple days on the same basic topic.
- I occasionally read back through some for context and to look for progress. I am happy with some and hate others.
- My recent and near-future topics are mostly technology (AI), leadership, productivity, work culture, some marketing/messaging, and values and modern life. I suspect it will continue.
- ChatGPT has helped. These are still my words and thoughts, but I use ChatGPT to help edit, research, and look for patterns.
- My audience is me. I’m writing to work out the stuff in my head. These are notes to myself. You’re voyeur.
Next stop is 10000. I’ll be turning 80 at that time.
I wonder if I’ll make it?
Back At It
You’ve lost momentum.
To get back at it, you don’t have to start with inspiration, intensity, or the answer to whatever stopped you.
It’s simply motion. Not everything or even the most important thing. Start with the next thing. One foot in front of the other.
Now you’re back at it.
The Data Bludgeon
Tables and charts are just tables and charts.
Until you enter the picture. Does this table beg new questions from you? Will this chart inform your decision? Do either of these help you change your mind or bolster what you already know?
The data doesn’t talk, but when you come together with it, it may undergird your voice. Or maybe not.
Yet, smart marketers use data as part of the story they tell. It’s part of their influence campaign. It’s a bludgeon.
More data — bigger hammer.
Don’t be impressed, distracted, or confused by the data if it doesn’t help you see it better.
Data should be a flashlight, not a weapon.
A Penny Saved is a Nickel Earned
[NOTE: I commandeered/plagiarized/stole the title from The 1440.]
Penny’s cost almost four cents to make. Yet, they’re worth only one cent.
The government lost $85 million last year making pennies. $85 million. A pittance for the government, sure, but for you and me?
And what did you do with them?
You probably left them at the register, or tossed them in a tip jar, or stuffed way down in the console of the car, or even threw them out. About 6.7 million people toss their pennies in the trash. In total, we discard about $62 million in coins each year, with pennies comprising a significant portion of this amount.
And yet, we kept stamping them out. Why?
Nostalgia — The penny feels foundational, plus it’s a tie to times past.
“That’s how they get ya!” — People are concerned about businesses rounding up and having to pay more.
Infrastructure — Pennies are built into the system’s infrastructure. Changing the system is hard.
Politics — Somebody’s gonna spin this as taking away something “the people.” That somebody will tell you a story with a name and a face about how this person is suffering without the penny.
OK, fair enough.
But sometimes you gotta rip the band-aid.
Just because it used to work doesn’t mean it still does. Just because that’s the way we always did it doesn’t mean you still should. Just because one or some people may be worse off doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it anyway.
The hardest part of progress isn’t necessarily building the new. Sometimes, it’s letting go of the old.
The Disappearance of the Blank Page
The blank page used to mean something.
It sometimes meant a world of possibilities laid out before you. The start of an adventure. Other times, it mocked you. It was a giant, glistening wall topped with the sharpest razor wire ever conceived.
In either case, it was the moment right before the idea formed. Exciting or torturous. A moment of tension. Compressing the spring or over-inflating the tire.
But now?
Now, the page is never blank. ChatGPT fills it before you’ve built any tension. Before you’ve wrestled with the possibilities or the wall.
I admit it. I do it. I use ChatGPT to fill my blank page, so I don’t have to wrestle with it.
It feels productive. It feels helpful. It feels like a shortcut.
But is it serving me?
Am I — are we — skipping the part where I discover what I think, feel, and believe rather than copy what sounds good?
The blank page is the beginning. An invitation, or sometimes a command, to think from scratch.
ChatGPT is an amazing tool, but it’s not the work.
The work still starts with facing the blank page.
AI — It’s a Mirror Not a Brain
AI doesn’t think.
Not like we do. Not like our brain does.
It can spot patterns. It can synthesize. It can reframe, remix, and repackage.
These can seem like thinking, much like it seems like we can fly with an airplane. But we can’t really fly. Not like a bird.
AI doesn’t feel. It doesn’t wrestle. It doesn’t wonder. It doesn’t push back. It doesn’t get fatigued. It doesn’t stress. It doesn’t wake up one morning and decide it doesn’t want to — or that it does want to.
What it does really well is reflect.
We gave it our libraries, galleries, feeds, opinions, and search histories. And now we ask it to tell us something about that.
It’s very good at that.
But it’s a mirror, not a brain.
And mirrors can be helpful. They show us what’s already there. They’re fluent in what’s already there. That helps us remember, see, and understand.
However, let’s not confuse fluency with wisdom because we risk mistaking reflection for truth.
And we’ll stop doing the hard part. The human part.