Month: July 2025

In late 2023, the founder of a new productivity app contacted me. I tried it and was stoked: Finally a tool that combined all the usual tactics and habits into one coherent solution!

It had Pomodoro timers, a to-do list, music, breathing exercises during breaks, even some gamification and rewards after each session, like a score leaderboard and inspirational quotes. It also came with a group chat and an AI coach who would encourage you to stay focused and remind you to get back on track when you went on distracting websites. Plus, the standalone desktop app allowed you to keep everything hovering on your interface in one convenient bar as you moved around various browser windows to do your work.

In other words, it was everything you could ever need to be productive. From the moment I signed up, I used it every day. But over the next 1.5 years, the founder and his small team kept making changes. The desktop app was no longer supported, and it all went into the browser, making it harder to separate the tool from everything else. The variety of the AI coach’s messages was toned down significantly. Meanwhile, the founder kept us they were working on version 2.0. It’d all be much better once we got there.

After around 1.5 years of me using the app daily, we finally reached that milestone—and it was a disaster. Instead of a wide, spacious interface, all the widgets were scrunched together in the middle of one browser tab. Our task lists had been jumbled and previous time estimates butchered completely. Everyone’s points had been reset, and the new leaderboard wasn’t working. The AI was now a chatbot interface, not that anyone needed one more of those, but the chat, scrolling through playlists, it was all so tiny, you had to click and move and navigate forever to locate anything. Needless to say, that was a tough week. When people rely on your software to do their work, you might want to give them a proper heads up and, perhaps more importantly, not launch a half-assed version.

The founder told everyone they really wanted to “build in public,” and that they felt they had to launch because at this point, they’d been building by themselves for months. It instantly reminded of a talk from Noah Kagan I heard over a decade ago: “I call it an engineering disease. If you’re an engineer, you guys are smart. What you do is you love to build really cool shit, right? It’s really great to build something—and then you go out with it, and you’re like: ‘Anybody want this? Anybody?'”

My app never had a feature problem. It had a marketing problem. They were charging too little and promoting to too few people. They could have reworked their positioning, gone out to more target customers, and really given it a year of diehard promotion to see if their approach was resonating. Instead, they chose the easy route. They rebuilt the thing from the ground up in their dark garage—without actually changing much at all and, in fact, destroying some of the features they had already figured out more than well enough. A classic case of engineer’s disease.

It’s hard to bring a new product to market. But if you believe in what you’ve made, you need to tell the world about it and give that an honest try. It takes a long time for the world to catch up, even for great new ideas. Of course it’s easier to keep tweaking! But that doesn’t change that, with the right product in hand, marketing is your moral obligation.

I’m not sure I’ll keep using the app. Right now, I definitely wouldn’t recommend it. There are some things even engineers can’t fix—and when it’s time to start talking, more tinkering just won’t do.

Work is infinite. That much is clear. But how does facing infinite feel? That’s where the difference lies.

I really enjoy my job. But I also know I could work 24 hours a day and still never be done. The work demands more, and that demand will never go away. But a job is just a job, and so when I look at this endless demand, I flinch a little. I realize I have to be careful. If it could, the work emerging from our company would swallow me whole.

My writing and personal projects are also infinite. There’s more of them than I could ever complete. But when I look at this vastness, I feel a little different. There’s more curiosity than skepticism. I see potential. And even though I know I’ll also never be done, the thought of spending as much time as I can with them does not seem overwhelming. After all, I’m having so much fun, I’d do it for free—and, in fact, often am. Of course, individual projects also become daunting at times. And while I was forced to make money from my own projects, some of the same dynamics that now apply to my job held true.

But there does seem to be a balance. Even if I was willing to work every waking hour at my job, I would produce little more that’s better than what I’m doing now. After a certain amount of hours each week, I’d just start resenting the work and avoiding it. As an employer, you want your employees to still have time to feed their own dreams. If they’re good, and they don’t, they’ll just leave sooner rather than later.

Similarly, barring a lottery win, it’s good that I have to go back from my dreams to reality on a regular basis. It brings a sense of pragmatism to any particular dream. It reminds me time is finite, and that progress is what counts. If I was never forced to look at life’s constraints, I could dabble forever and might never ship anything.

We keep looking for that phrase—”dream job.” But what if the dream and the job are just a happy couple? Two well-oiled halves of one perfectly functioning whole? Whichever cards you hold in this life, don’t play them against one another. Go for a combo breaker. Throw in everything you’ve got, and see if the total is not worth more than the sum of its parts.

The older I get, the more I like old stuff. I think this is normal. It’s part aging, part nostalgia for childhood, and part fatigue with new stuff flooding our lives all the time.

I don’t care all that much about AI. I find it more annoying than useful on most occasions. There are few new TV shows I’m genuinely excited about. Most of the books I’m eager to read are over 50 years old. Whenever I have to update one of my apps, I grumble at them ruining a user interface that was perfectly usable before.

I don’t know if I’m an outlier in this regard. If “new” exhausts me more than the average person or not. But I do know we—perhaps now more than ever—live in a world that has made it a habit to move for movement’s sake alone.

So many people and companies are cranking out AI-generated social media content at lightning speed. Website designs, fashion outfits, news headlines—it seems we’re now changing these things every week just to change them, not because change is necessary. There’s so much momentum, yet so few of us seem to actually try going anywhere.

It feels as if we’ve collectively agreed to run the fastest time we possibly can—each in our own little hamster wheel that’ll never stop spinning. Meanwhile, the stuff that’s interesting, the art I want to make, the places I want to be, they’re mostly offline and hold little interaction. It’s almost as if real progress, joy, and meaning happen on the inside or in small circles, not on the big, loud town square where strangers and groupies alike yell while trying to grab a piece of you.

Technologists love to tell us we must adapt or be left behind. In reality, you can ignore 99% of what’s going on, and your life will run its course just fine—because what technologists conveniently leave out is how fragile new developments actually are. But books? Writing on paper? Sitting down in person with some coffee and cake? Those have proven durable for centuries. It’s likely they’ll last another and, in any case, long enough for you and I.

Old souls die hard. Here’s to the ones who refuse to get swept away by the tides of time.

For years, Luthen Rael and Kleya Marki only ever showed up to deals they knew would go their way. One of many unlikely father-daughter pairs in the vast Star Wars universe, the two partnered to get out of a war zone—one a soldier of the oppressor’s troops, the other a child refugee.

The good thing about losing your original identity, however, is you can now adopt new ones at will—and that Luthen and Kleya gladly do. They slowly trade their way up from trinkets at the far edge of the galaxy to a brimming, high-class art gallery in Coruscant, the city-planet and capital of the universe.

Not only has their careful approach served them well financially, it also makes Luthen and Kleya perfect undercover agents for the Rebellion opposing the evil Galactic Empire they escaped from. Time and again, they turn enemy spies to their cause, catch critical information via their many listening devices, and coordinate identities, gear, and passage for Rebellion spies conducting dangerous missions—all without ever being uncovered.

One day, however, all secrecy must end. So when the Rebel Alliance finally shows its true colors in the open, Luthen and Kleya must act quickly—and preferably get out of Coruscant. Still, there is one last meeting with an informant to be held, in broad daylight, no less. Luthen volunteers for the job, and he and Kleya plan to escape together afterwards.

The two agree on a meeting point. Luthen puts on his flashy art dealer costume. But something feels off, and so Kleya reminds her surrogate father of their usual mantra: “Just promise me if it doesn’t look perfect, you won’t engage.” Alas, as good fathers tend to be, Luthen is still one step ahead. He knows the time has come, and the only thing left to do is put all chips on the table. “I think we used up all the perfect,” he tells Kleya and sends her on her way.

Caution only gets you so far in life. When the cause is right, it will ask you to jump. Sooner or later, you’ll use up all your perfect, and that’s how it’s meant to be. The steps to a better future are always wobbly. Ascend safely as far as you can, but have the courage to start running once you must.

This week, I hosted an AI reading training with a friend. It was great, and I learned a lot. From “asking” the book questions directly to exploring an author’s larger body of work to finding out which other ideas are relevant that connect to it, AI can broaden your perspective on reading a lot.

Still, today, I ended up sitting on my terrace for three hours, flipping through a book I’d already read. Page by page, highlight by highlight I went. I took ten pages of notes by hand. I didn’t do anything else. Just read and wrote. When I got pulled into minor distractions once or twice, I soon returned to the task. It was three hours of pure absorption.

What if I had uploaded the book into an AI and spent three hours chatting with it? I don’t know. I’ll have to try that sometime. But I doubt it’d leave me as fulfilled. Inspired. Proud. And instead of the ideas of the original book sinking in, I’d probably have 50 new ones I’d first have to wrap my head around. Could the AI have suggested a practical implementation plan for the book? Probably. But that, too, was already in the book. And I didn’t need implementation. I needed impression. I wanted to impress the author’s thoughts onto my mind and soul. Chatting with a bot for three hours does not seem like an efficient, let alone attractive, way of doing that—at least to me.

With every request you send, AI keeps digging. It prompts you to prompt it back. “Would you like me to structure this more? Would you like some practical suggestions?” Every output asks for more input. AI wants to play ping-pong, but what if I want to be a sponge? When you write something down by hand, you write it into your brain. When you read AI output, you’re scanning in the same, distracted, haphazard way you’re reading anything when it first lands on your virtual desk. You look for headlines, bolded lines, and the next jumping off point. You’re both digging—ever more holes, hoping to strike gold. But digging is not how you internalize. It’s how you find. But what if you’ve already found what you were looking for? What if you’re already holding the gold in your hands?

Most sources of information are only worthy of a skim, if that. Some serve as meaningful stepping stones. But once you’ve found a treasure trove, stop digging. Start absorbing. Take the time to focus, go deeper, and impress the ideas onto your self.

There are some things AI can help us do that we never could do before. Equally, however, there are some things AI will never be able to do. Both are worth assessing and remembering.

As our head of HR ran through the results of the annual employee survey, one metric stood out: Participation rate in the survey had dropped from the high 70s to just 69%. That meant one in three people’s voice wasn’t included.

She encouraged everyone to share their opinion, even if they feel they don’t have much to say or that the survey isn’t relevant to them. And on the next slide, she perfectly underscored why. The slide showed a graphic of milestone markers, the kind you might see on a map, along with some of the improvements HR had made in the last year. She ran through some of them, and then she said: “Without your feedback, we would not have a roadmap.” That really hit me.

No matter what you’re working on, you should always talk to your customers. But even if you don’t, in marketing, product development, and strategy, you can always make up a plan out of thin air. It might not be a good one, but you can manufacture a roadmap nonetheless. In HR, an almost entirely internal function, you can’t do that—and if you try, everyone will immediately know you have no clue what you’re doing. Of course, plenty an HR department attempts so regardless. Thankfully, ours is not one of them.

There’s nothing wrong with getting new ideas from books, Youtube, or experts in your industry. But an HR department which starts with books instead of people will always miss the mark. Fill in your surveys, and keep asking that one, ever pertinent question: What—or who—is it for?

“Wow! I have not been in this store for years.” “Well, I was here…yesterday,” my friend said, laughing. He’s completing his PhD at the university in Munich, and he still lives close by. I’m a bit further out than I used to be, and I no longer go to the college study room every day.

Yesterday, before going to see Tom Cruise hang on the side of a plane one last time, we decided to meet up in the pizza joint we used to frequent daily a few years back. Afterwards, we hit the grocery store around the corner for some snacks. It’s right across from the university, so it’s always full of students.

Realizing I hadn’t been in the area in quite some time, I almost felt like an alien observing a strange but vaguely familiar planet. New shops had replaced old ones in a lot of places. Others had received upgrades. Some were very much the same. And, of course, people. People everywhere.

In Germany, the average college student is younger now than they were during my uni days. Even if they weren’t, I probably still would have felt old mingling with the crowds. I saw young girls trying to get cheap kebabs while a five-euro-deal was on. I heard people talking about their relationships, where they’d go that night, and how that one exam might be their final boss. It made me feel nostalgic.

I remembered walking around those same streets, grabbing a döner with a friend after a long study session, happy I had managed to spend less than 20 euros on food that day. It feels like a simpler time in hindsight, where I had less but also worried less, because I was focused on fewer things yet had more degrees of freedom. Of course, at the time, none of it felt easy. And in reality I probably worried just as much.

But that person, “College-Nik,” if you will, no longer exists. He’s a character I played for a few years, but at some point, without me truly noticing, he quietly exited the show. When I look back now, I can still see him. I can remember what it felt like to be him, and of course many parts of him still live in me today. But I can’t access him quite the same way I could back then. My life is different. I am different.

That’s all as it should be. It’s just a funny quirk of time. Often, you won’t know who you were until you no longer are that person. Only in hindsight can you see your past selves clearly. The trick is enjoying each character as you play them—and remembering them fondly when their season has passed.

You don’t need an upcoming vacation to get through the month—unless you tell yourself you do. But with that mindset, however long, the vacation can only be too short. A lack of holidays was never the problem. It was some deeper issue with your work or relationships, and that will likely persist after your return.

But who is ever free of the big challenges in life? Perhaps even solving those isn’t something we can pursue with relentless fervor until it’s done—because it’ll never be done. Solving problems big and small is what we’re born to do. But it’s also an endless game of whack-a-mole. So perhaps what we really need is to figure out how to enjoy existing in a world where problems are ubiquitous.

I still look forward to my vacations. To a book launch going well, a big investment paying off, and pulling my Pokémon chase card out of a booster box. But I also look forward to having 30 minutes to myself during lunch. To watching some anime, responding to reader emails, and taking a hot shower at night. Solving such tiny problems can feel just as gratifying, and it comes with the added bonus of knowing you didn’t need a new car to fall asleep happily at night.

Use your power. Work on big things. Just make sure you always have small things to look forward to along the way.

One of the great feats of my 20s was learning to enjoy life without music. I haven’t had a Spotify account since 2017.

Despite this, I probably spend at least half my waking hours listening to music. Most of the time, it’s a deliberate choice. There’s always the right song at the right time. Music is probably my biggest productivity enhancer.

Whether it’s an instrumental piece to set the tone during creative work or a hype song to get through a boring task, for me, the right level of hum in the background is rarely zero—but its volume surely matters.

When I get to a difficult paragraph in an article, I might lower the sound level from 50% down to 30% or even just 10%. Sometimes, I hit mute altogether. In writing my book, I’ve had many sessions where I’ve dialed the volume down, up, down, and up again—all within a single chapter.

Music is both amazing art and a useful tool. But in critical moments, you still need to be able to hear your own thoughts. When music feels like it’s drowning them out or trying to push them aside, lower the volume. Listening is a virtue, and while songs are some of the greatest vibrations to grace our ears, the most important sound to listen to will always be your own.

Steins;Gate 0 is one of very few shows presenting time travel in a logically coherent way. At one point, two characters travel back one year to slap some sense into the main character, Okabe Rintaro.

Unfortunately, their time machine is running out of fuel, so they can only keep going further into the past with no control over where they’ll end up. Eventually, they land in 18,000 BC, and their prospects look rather dim. Thankfully, on a different “world line,” as the many parallel versions of reality are called in the show, another Okabe has spent the next 15 years after their departure working hard to build a different time machine so he can go search for them.

It makes for a beautiful moment. A dark, barren planet with no food or hope of escape. But then, a glowing light, sparks raining from the sky. And out of the glimmer walks Okabe Rintaro, the mad scientist, with only five words for his long-lost companions: “Kept ya waiting, didn’t I?”

You, too, can travel back in time. If there’s a version of you that feels lost, that doesn’t mean it’s gone. Your time machine is always on, always working. It sits right between your ears.

Sometimes, it takes a lot of fiddling. You have to bring all the tools, align all the wires, and fix any short circuits in the system. But in the end, there it is: a past self, liberated. Free from pain, anger, or sorrow. Free to travel back to the future and contribute to your best life.

The clock is just a nuisance. It’s never too late to travel back in time and start from the beginning.