In reference to Productivity, optimising for more time might be the wrong tree to focus on. While thinking of startup ideas a few months ago, we looked at productivity related use-cases extensively. There are apps trying to optimise your calendar, rearranging things, to fit more things in. I really doubt how significant of value add this could be in someone’s life. There’s an upper limit to how much you can optimise time, and for anyone who is working rather efficiently, this limit is only an hour or two more than they are already doing. If you work 8 hrs a day, you can only extract incremental productivity by working another hour. But the best engineers don’t get 20% more done than average ones. They get 100X more done. Same with product managers, designers or any knowledge worker.
Productivity (better would be progress) needs to be looked from a lens different than time. To build something in the productivity domain it’s better to index on (i) focus (improving the ability of people to do deep work) or (ii) process efficiency. For example product managers need to perform A/B testing as a regular part of their job. Building a tool which automates this pipeline of creating control/target group, rolling out the changes and collating the result will make them 10X more productive. Same for a sales or customer success representative who is maintaining the leads on an excel sheet filling information about their communication manually. A CRM tool with appropriate integrations would garner the same productivity boost for them.
Because when we optimise for time, we are fighting against a finite resource. But when we are optimising for focus or process efficiency, the possible improvement is unbounded.
The same thing gets talked about money as well. People suggesting to save more for the future. Savings is a finite game as well. Even by cutting down on all socializings, you can save say 10K more a month. You can’t avoid paying rent or bills etc. Here too it’s better to optimise for earning more rather than saving more because earning more has no upper bound.