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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

I feel like individual productivity is a pretty much solved problem and comes down to picking your tools. Whether it's one out of a million 3rd party Todo/Note taking apps, or just whatever is available in your OS, is a matter of taste. If you want to be productive you will find your way and most importantly, just don't get too obsessed about not being at maximum productivity.

Group productivity and collaboration, however, is a problem with square root complexity (if not worse) of the number of collaborators. It is not a solved problem at all. I hate all the existing ways and tools for sharing, working on something together, planning, scheduling, all the Asanas, Trellos and Jiras of the world. They all feel somehow wrong and counter-productive for any more or less non-trivial collaboration.

I think we all know there's a golden opportunity here, just not clear yet what a better collab tool should be like for 2021 and onward.

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I feel like individual productivity is a pretty much solved problem and comes down to sitting on your ass and doing the actual work (yes, I sometimes have trouble doing that, but in the end 'just sit down and start doing it' is the best advice to listen to).

For me the harder problem with productivity is often picking the right work to do, and balancing that with analysis paralysis.

The GTD method got me past this problem. Don't get overly complicated with it -- just do the basics, and add/subtract as you see fit. Changed my life.

Depends on what you mean by "solved"

If by "solved" you mean we have a theory, then perhaps.

But truly solved would include how to get yourself to do it.

Productivity was something I struggled with for many years. At times I was the best employee, and others the worst. Have a tricky problem to solve? Or a complicated architecture. I was the right guy for the job. Need to build 200 variations of the same feature. I was horrible.

Chief problem being that anything boring was physically painful to me.

Pair programming helped a lot, but those gigs are hard to find.

Eventually diagnosed with ADHD. Completely shocking to experience “normal” with medication. I no longer take any medication (BP), but I can somewhat deal with boring stuff now, where before I could not.

Feels like I learned how to focus. The physical pain part is gone.

Would you say that with the help of medication you learned to focus?

Yes.

It’s still hard without it. If I could tolerate the side effects I would continue to take medication. But I at least now know what it feels like to stay on task.

I think there isn't a one-size-fits all because group dynamics differ across groups. A group collaboration strategy has requires experimentation and evolution.

Trello boards (Kanban boards in general) work great for certain types of people like designers, but they've never worked great for engineers I've worked with.

Jira is often just way too complicated.

Slack is great for asynchronous team meetings but if you're not checking in reguarly, you might find yourself scrolling way up to figure out what people are discussing.

A Github pull request + code review workflow is great for collaborating in code, but for documentation writing, some writers don't get it (and struggle with version control -- to them, track changes makes more sense). Google Docs makes more sense.

Almost all group collaboration solutions are at best local minima for the group you have right now and for the types of stuff you need to accomplish. Add or remove people from the group, and the dynamic changes.

That said, I have found my own local minima in Google Docs, and Markdown design docs + Mermaid diagrams in Azure Devops wikis (Github wikis are similar). But I also live in a word-centric culture. These things might not work so well in visual cultures.

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