The Secret To Success At Maximizing Productivity
Hint: It’s not off-the-shelf productivity tools
There’s a reason why it seems like there’s a new tech productivity tool popping up every week. And there’s a reason why they all collectively suck.
One thing I constantly hammer home to the companies I advise — from high-growth startups to big stuck dinosaur companies: Success — and I’m talking about goals and dollars and units success, not “I’m so happy at my job I could fart rainbows” success — isn’t like those paint-by-numbers books. Success isn’t about connecting dots. There is no money-back-guarantee-12-step program you can buy to be successful at what you want to do.
Because what you want to do is unique. Unique to you and what you’re in charge of. So you can learn from success. Sure. But you can never copy success.
That’s just a trap waiting to be sprung on you — with productivity tools.
Look, this scenario has played out for me relentlessly over decades. The minute I see any project or product or program meticulously planned out and mapped out ahead of time, I know the thing is going to crash and burn.
And one thing I’ve never understood in all the years I’ve been building products and the companies around them, is that if we’re going to have to “think on the fly” and “keep our head on a swivel” and “adapt or die,” then why are we still plugging our journey into someone else’s concept of a blank roadmap?
It’s 2025. There’s a better way.
The Future of Productivity
The check-the-boxes version of “getting stuff done” is a lot like those scammy simple-secret-to-easy-money programs that come in eBooks and seminars. I know this because I use the same pushback for both: If those things really worked, then we’d all be rich.
But those tools exist because checking checkboxes feels sooooo good.
I once knew a project manager who mapped out her own workday, week, and month in MS Project. Yes, that is as depressing as it sounds. It’s the ultimate example of checkbox planning. And, forgive me for calling her out, she was great at her job, but that kind of micro-rigid planning was terrible for the company. There’s a place for that kind of rigidity. Just not in tech. Not cutting-edge tech anyway.
So, back to 2025. We have all this fancy AI and a bevy of these no-code and low-code tools now. Where we once had a few dozen expensive software options for work management, we now have thousands, and they’re all up there in the cloud, easy to start using and accessible to everyone all across the world.
Like I said, there’s a reason these tools keep proliferating. And here’s the secret I promised:
In 2025, anyone can build them.
Here’s my indecent proposal: Companies should be using AI, no-code, and low-code to be building their own productivity tools, project management apps, and product development methodologies — lightweight, flexible, and totally custom. From the ground up. And project and product managers shouldn’t be following checkbox manifestos. AI can do that. They need to be building and managing custom get-shit-done platforms that make the company better at what it does.
Then project and product managers don’t have to be productivity software jockeys any more. Instead, they can be vision protectors and resource enablers. You know, a revenue center instead of a cost center.
Decentralize and Automate
Those two words define what technology does best. But tech companies are still planning by central committee and manually tracking the daily progress of some developer we never talk to in a spreadsheet that’s been modified to work like a swiss army knife — it does the same job for a construction company, an accounting firm, or a high-tech cutting edge tech startup.
Come on.
I wrote two previous posts leading up to this. One on why traditional technical project management hasn’t worked well in forever, and another on distributing the responsibility for productivity and product and project management throughout the team building the thing. You don’t have to read those now because I feel like if you clicked on the title to read this post, you’re probably already two-thirds of the way to enlightenment.
Now, I’m not going to give you a money-back-guarantee-12-step-post telling you which tools to build and connect together in which ways. It would defeat the entire purpose of this column: You are unique. You do you.
But I will tell you this,
Success is not about entering tasks into a spreadsheet and checking boxes off a checklist. It’s about data, measurement, and betterment. And none of those tools — whether it’s a workout app, personal financial planning software, or a project management platform — are good at collecting your data. If anything, the first two examples are far better than the last, but even then, they don’t automate the tracking of results against goals, just input and measurement.
That feels like progress toward the goal, but it’s just the uncorrelated data.
So you’re going to have to do the hard part manually anyway. Why not own it and automate it?
Not Everything Is a Transaction
When you think of something like Agile or Scrum or Jira, the process was supposed to emulate sticky notes on a whiteboard, a whiteboard that sat in the same room as everyone working on the project or product or goal.
That’s romantic.
Today’s productivity tools exist because the projects got so broad that the team needed thousands of sticky notes, and the whiteboard for them grew too big to fit into the room, which is now a room where no one is sitting anyway because that team is completely decentralized now, even if they’re all working in the same building.
Adapt or die.
But where tech productivity got off track was under the misguided notion from above that everything is a transaction. Those tools just take that project, break it down into chunks like LLMs, package those chunks like JSON, split them into packets and send them over the network.
I just offended so many technical people with that sentence! But I love the imagery, so don’t “well actually” me. I know it’s wrong.
Did you know that the reason why AI and no-code and low-code exists was to enable the building of successful products? In 2025, we’re selling AI and productivity tools to people so they can be more productive and automated while building more productivity and AI tools to sell to more people.
It’s a crazy infinite loop, so fix the glitch. Stop being someone else’s revenue center and build your own instead.
I’ve written a lot about productivity lately and I’m done with it, but I will indeed keep tilting at the windmills of tech. Please join my email list and ride with me.
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