Productivity
An annotated collection of 4 books & papers on productivity, spanning 2001 to 2025. Featuring works by David Allen, Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson and 1 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Allen's book is the source of GTD — a personal productivity system built around a handful of simple disciplines: capture everything, clarify what it is, organise by context, review regularly, do the next action. Stripped…
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
The first machine age augmented physical force; the second augments cognitive capacity. Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that we are at an inflection point where digital technologies begin doing for mental work what the ste…
Generative AI at Work
Empirical study with more than 5,000 customer-support agents. AI increases productivity 15% on average, but the effect is uneven: less experienced workers improve 30% in speed and also in quality, while the most experien…
The Rise of Industrial AI in America: Microfoundations of the Productivity J-curve(s)
Firm-level empirical evidence for the productivity J-curve associated with AI adoption. Companies that adopt AI initially see no productivity gains — they can even get worse — because they need complementary investments…