The Productivity Mirage(frantic.im)
287 points by msephton 13 hours ago | 127 comments
tl;dr: The author, once obsessed with elaborate developer tooling, recalls sitting next to "Bob," a prolific Facebook engineer who won hackathons using vanilla Sublime Text and printf debugging. The lesson: product taste and picking the right problems matter far more than optimizing your workflow or chasing the latest productivity trends.
HN Discussion:
  • ~Tools matter but should serve the work, not become the work itself
  • Agrees that obsessing over setup distracts from the real work of thinking and problem-solving
  • Productivity obsession is an escape from harder ambiguous product/domain problems
  • Best productivity comes from stepping away from the computer entirely
  • Tinkering with tools is just fun and doesn't need justification