Productivity
fromFast Company
19 hours agoThe productivity question AI forces us to ask
Productivity tools increase capabilities but also raise expectations, leading to a cycle of anxiety and an overwhelming pace of work.
I got a degree from Douglas College in programming and business management. I understood the business side more and was better at that than at being a coder.
With the launch of Acrobat Spaces, Adobe aims to provide students with a comprehensive tool for creating study materials, competing with existing AI solutions like Google's NotebookLM and Goodnotes.
Atlassian has been in the business, for decades, of collaboration software helping people get work done. Now, you enter agents, and agents are now doing a lot of that work, and so you want to be able to coordinate between humans and agents.
The real cost of poor observability isn't just downtime; it's lost trust, wasted engineering hours, and the strain of constant firefighting. But most teams are still working across fragmented monitoring tools, juggling endless alerts, dashboards, and escalation systems that barely talk to one another, which acts like chaos disguised as control. The result is alert storms without context, slow incident response times, and engineers burned out from reacting instead of improving.
One of the challenges teams face when working with large boards or displaying multiple fields on work item cards is limited screen space. This became even more noticeable with the rollout of the New Boards hub, which introduced additional spacing and padding for improved readability. While this enhances clarity, it can also reduce the number of cards visible at once.
Scrum has a bad reputation in some organizations. In many cases, this is because teams did something they called Scrum, it didn't work, and Scrum took the blame. To counter this, when working with organizations, we like to define a small set of rules a team must follow if they want to say they're doing Scrum. Enforcing this policy helps prevent Scrum from being blamed for Scrum-like failures.
Clockwork is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that automatically tracks your work time based on git commits. It aggregates commits into worklog entries, calculates durations, and manages projects - all through a simple CLI interface. Automatic Commit Aggregation: Automatically collects commits since your last worklog entry Smart Duration Calculation: Estimates work time based on commit timestamps Project Management: Track multiple projects with associated git repositories
They may be spending a lot of combined time at the office and commuting, or just putting in a lot of hours both at work and at home. Fixing that problem can't be done abstractly, though. If you're going to address the balance of work and life activities, you have to start getting specific about where your time is going and where you really want it to go.