The Productivity Manifesto

How do we ship software faster? 
How do we improve team efficiency?
How do create leaner companies?
How do we parallelize work faster?
How do we onboard people faster?
How do we generate more shareholder value faster?
… 
How do we get more done so we can spend more time with our loved ones?

Productivity is on all our minds.

For productivity purposes we try everything:

• triple monitors, mechanical keyboards & vertical mice
• all sorts of apps that promise us to do it all
• we try to sleep less or wake up super early
• we work-out hoping for more energy to put back into productivity
• we adopt agile methodologies
• we buy faster computers
• we set up intricate calendar schemes and personal tasks
• we put in place heavy processes in companies

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Is higher productivity generated this way?

In my opinion, these things help a bit… but they don’t really move the needle. It’s simple — you can’t measure productivity, but we all feel when it’s not there. It’s just the feeling of pushing big rocks uphill.

When it is there, you feel the pull. You’re making the effort to fly but you also hit a pocket of hot air that carries you even further. Things are working.

How do we achieve that? In my opinion, there are two separate views on this, one at the individual level, the other at the team level.

Individual:

• stoicism
• becoming indistractable
• intrinsic motivation
• small units of work
• ease of mind with no calendars or complicated task schemes 
  
  

Team:

• documentation AKA async communication
• knowledge management
• good writing skills
• clear goals

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On the individual side, it's up to each one of us to improve.
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On the team side, I believe we have been severely overlooking the above for the past 20 years, especially in companies that build software. 

Can a piece of software solve this? It can’t. But I believe it can help a lot — if it’s built on these underlying principles.

Now you know why we're building Archbee — the knowledge base for software people.

We want to build the knowledge documentation software that runs on the USS Discovery.

Dragos Bulugean
BDFL of Archbee.io — AiurLabs, Inc.