Productivity Feeds

A robot vacuum should be a simple delegation. The floor is dirty. The robot cleans the floor. I go do literally anything else. Instead, the promise of automated cleaning comes with a surprising number of supervisory responsibilities: rescue it from a charging cable, move a sock from its path, ponder why the bathroom threshold is apparently an impassable geological formation. The floor gets cleaner. I remain involved. Enterprise AI agents are roughly in the same spot. In Zapier's 2026 AI Agent...

A car's dashboard displays vital information in an easily understandable format, assists in decision-making, and alerts the driver to potential issues. (Although the check engine light, with the specificity of a horoscope, treats a loose gas cap and a full-system meltdown with the same level of urgency.) Like a car's dashboard, an Excel KPI dashboard shows you the vital signs of your business, but without the cryptic hints and not-so-subtle threats—just cold, hard data served up in a way that's...

I can't think of many apps that inspire the kind of devotion that Notion does. Its fans organize meetups all around the world to chat about productivity systems, from Aruba to Poland to Pakistan. Heck, you can buy Notion onesies for your baby. My theory on Notion's popularity is this: because you can use it to organize pretty much anything, it's become the software equivalent of a self-help book. Whether you're struggling with school, work, or your personal life, there's a Notion template design...

A few months into our internal pilot, the Sidekick team noticed that most of what reached them was bug reports. Someone started a channel just for wins, a place where people could post what Sidekick had done for them. It filled up faster than anyone expected. We read through it, along with the pilot feedback threads and our own team channels, and picked five stories that made us stop scrolling. Everything below happened at Zapier or with a Zapier customer, and where people measured something, we...

TL;DR SEO feedback loops take weeks. We wanted something faster for agents, so we built a tool that runs the same Claude Code task against production and a preview variant of a page, with the URL held constant. The first real test surfaced three things we didn't expect: our Markdown mirrors are already in the agent's request path, WebFetch hands the page to a separate model before the calling model ever sees it, and that model has its own instructions shaping what survives. The problem One of th...

If you want to change your life—like really, seriously, no bullshit, actually change your life—do this: Step 1: Write down everything you care about. Step 2: Arrange the list from most important to least important. Step 3: Cross out everything but the top 3 things. Step 4: Re-organize everything you do around those three things. People make this mistake of setting new goals every January 1st, but forget that goals are the path, not the destination. Your real destination is your purpose. Your goals just inform that purpose. “Cool, Mark. Now WTF does that actually mean?” For example: My goals change every year. But my purpose hasn’t budged over the last decade. I want to improve the quality and resources for personal growth and development to help move humanity forward. So every year, I set new goals to further that purpose. Some years, it was writing books. Other years, it…

In 2023, my publisher offered me $5 million to write my next book. I said no. From 2016 to 2022, I was in full-blown author mode. Writing, touring, promoting. It felt like one never-ending deadline—and by the end of it, I was completely burnt out. By 2022, I felt drawn back to entrepreneurship. The creator space had changed dramatically. AI was emerging. Everything was moving fast—and writing a book all of a sudden felt like the slowest, least relevant thing I could do. The problem was, I was still on the hook for another book. A big one. With a massive payday. I had an impossible decision to make: Turn down the money and work on what I want? Or take the money and spend the next year or two cashing the checks? My agent warned me: “If you don't write this book, there’s a very good chance they’ll cancel…

On a random night last January, I sat down next to a guy at a poker table. A month later, we decided to start a company together. Little did I know, it would completely change my life. The guy’s name was Raj. We started talking between hands, and Raj asked what I was working on. “I've been trying to solve this scaling problem in personal growth,” I told him. “I was about to buy an AI company to do it, but the deal just fell through.” “That's funny,” Raj said. “I've been building AI companies for ten years. Just exited my last one. I’ve spent a year on sabbatical figuring out what's next.” I asked him what he landed on. “Whatever I build next has to be in AI and mental health. Or AI and personal growth. I want to work on something that actually helps people at scale.” I…

This year has been one of the most important, yet challenging years of my life. And as we’ll see, that might not be a coincidence. As you probably know, I’ve been calling out some of the shady dealings and worst practices of the self-help industry for my entire career. Whether it’s slimy sales tactics, unrealistic and unscientific advice, or promising results that simply aren’t possible, I’ve dedicated much of my adult life to “cleaning up” this space as much as possible. You could even say that I have come to see this as my purpose, my calling in life. About a year ago, a number of people I know started asking me about using ChatGPT as a therapist or life coach. Turns out, millions of people were doing this. I was intrigued, so I tried it out. The results were… mixed. Very mixed. On the one hand, AI has access…

What is your biggest fear? What would it mean if you could overcome that fear, once and for all? In this article, I'm going to help you do exactly that by teaching you five tactics to conquer anything you might be afraid of. Heights, spiders, small spaces, strangely-shaped clouds—whatever makes your knees turn to water and keeps you up at night. These five tactics are universal and proven. In fact, last year I used them to help two readers who were afraid of driving overcome their fear over a single weekend, then shared the results on my YouTube channel. https://youtu.be/pZXzLN2miq8?si=AZgbNR_VVyvcnCY5 Ready for those five tactics? Let's hear them. 1. Exposure Therapy The core of attacking any fear is something in psychology known as exposure therapy. Exposure therapy. (2024). In Wikipedia. Exposure therapy is exactly what it says. You take something you're afraid of and gradually expose yourself to it, first…

To say Michel de Montaigne had a run of bad luck would be a massive understatement. First his best friend dies, probably of the plague. Then his father passes away from a kidney stone. Then his younger brother is killed by a tennis ball. Then Montaigne’s firstborn dies at two months old, the first of The post How To Live A Good Life: 6 Secrets From Ancient Wisdom appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

Something happened. Maybe somebody died. Or a relationship collapsed. A friend betrayed you, or somebody vanished without explaining why. The event’s over. But your feelings, well, they’re refusing to respect the calendar. What you need, everybody will immediately explain, is “closure.” They mean well. They want you to stop hurting. So they reach for a The post How To Deal With Life’s Toughest Moments: 5 Secrets From Research appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

We’d all like to think we’re deliberately steering our lives. Yet a heck of a lot of adulthood consists of continuing whatever we were already doing because stopping would require change. You took a job because you needed money, stayed because you knew where the toilets were, and now, apparently, this is your destiny. If The post This Is How To Get What You Want In Life: 6 Secrets To High-Agency appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

You show up to the negotiation wanting to be reasonable. You’ve prepared several ways to demonstrate this, all of which involve receiving less. To make it worse, you’re dealing with the kind of person who’d happily disconnect an orphan’s ventilator to charge his phone. He asks for a concession. And another. He keeps pressing and The post How To Stop Getting Taken Advantage Of: 6 Secrets From Game Theory appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

Now and then, we all have those nights. It’s a little too late and your brain starts asking way too many questions, auditing your life at the time when it’s least generous. Until finally it lands on The Question: “Is this it?” Not that your life is bad. You got some of the good stuff. The post This Is How To Find Meaning In Life: 5 Secrets From Research appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.