Productivity

Some tools are not exciting. They are just useful in a way that quietly becomes hard to live without. Zara Zhang recently recommended a Mac utility called Amphetamine. Its job is simple: keep your Mac awake when the lid is closed, while a file is downloading, while an app is running, or during a long task. That sounds almost too small to write about. But I think it points to a very real shift in personal workflows: our laptops are starting to behave less like devices we actively sit in front of, and more like small personal servers. ...

I have seen too many versions of the same meeting recently. Someone says the company needs to “go all in on AI.” A vendor shows a polished agent demo. A manager imagines every employee suddenly having three tireless digital coworkers. The deck looks great. The numbers look even better. Then the work hits reality. The data is messy. The process was never clearly defined. Permissions are vague. Nobody knows who verifies the output. The agent produces something plausible, someone trusts it too early, and now the team is spending more time cleaning up after AI than doing the work itself. ...