You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly round-up of hand-picked articles and resources for people who make software products: designers, engineers, product managers, and organizational leaders. Brought to you by the team at Steady.
By the Numbers
- $1.4 trillion — A report sponsored by Dropbox in 2023 revealed an economic impact of $1.4 trillion due to lost focus in the workplace. The loss highlights the importance for businesses to rethink work models promoting focus and productivity.
- 42% — In the same report, it was found that 42% of the surveyed knowledge workers rarely spend more than an hour on productive work without being interrupted, demonstrating the challenge of maintaining focus in the modern work environment.
- 553 hours — Knowledge workers reportedly lose 553 hours of productive time annually, primarily due to ineffective meetings and administrative tasks.
- $21,000 — The cost of lost focus is significant, averaging $21,000 per year for employees. For managers, this impact is even higher at $37,000 annually.
- 90-95 minutes — Workers are typically able to focus for 90-95 minutes without distraction, regardless of their work model. Despite different work environments, the average productive work hours remain the same, between 5.5 to 6 hours a day.
— Dropbox Blog, 15m, #productivity, #workplace-focus, #remote-work
Leadership > Measureship
The modern economy is in the grips of “measureship”, a managerial approach where data measurement takes precedence over genuine leadership, and the consequences are not pretty. The trend is driven by several factors including efficiency-focused economics, the rise of technology and digitization which expands what can be measured, and the removal of middle management which traditionally trained leaders. The result is businesses optimizing for their own benefit at consumers’ expense. The symptoms of this philosophy include an anti-human approach, lack of direction due to the overwhelming amount of data, a decrease in innovation, and a tendency towards value extraction rather than creation. To beat this system, it’s crucial to prioritize quality over quantity, focus on long-term growth over short-term efficiency, and remember that leadership is not just about hitting targets, but about creating more value for customers.
— Off Kilter, 10m, #leadership, #management, #business-strategy
The Coordination Tax
In the world of IT and product organizations, only 20-30% of information is documented and accessible. This “hard data” is generally used to coordinate tasks, whereas the remaining 70-80% is “soft data,” consisting of intentions, risks, challenges, judgments, and domain expertise. This soft data is stored in people’s minds and is crucial for proactive management and leadership. The assembly of these two types of data for hybrid, remote, and distributed teams is a challenging and productivity-draining task. This “coordination tax” consumes 60% of the average tech worker’s time and is currently a $100B+ problem. While AI toolkits promise to solve this issue, most only operate on hard data and ignore human input and behavior patterns. Steady is developing a solution that collects soft data and uses AI to synthesize it, directly eliminating the coordination tax and enhancing productivity.
— Steady, 6m, #teamwork, #productivity, #coordination-tax
Programmer, Interrupted
The main productivity killer for developers? Context-switching. According to Dr. Milanović, every time you ping a developer with a “quick” Slack message, it costs them 23 minutes of productive work. Why? Because our brains aren’t like computers that can load a new program instantly. We need to clear one set of thoughts and then load another, a process that creates mental overhead and can kill momentum and foster errors. This problem is amplified by the fact that our tools, like apps and notifications, are designed to grab our attention and our work culture rewards immediate responses. Research indicates that frequent interruptions not only lead to more bugs and increased technical debt, but also correlate with lower code maintainability and mental fatigue among developers.
— Techworld With Milan, 9m, #productivity, #context-switching, #software-development
Programming Precisely
AI development tools are taking a wrong turn by treating programming like a casual conversation. In reality, programming is more akin to drafting legal documents - meticulous, clear, and comprehensive. While AI has promised a human-friendly interface where plain English could serve as a code, the current tools are failing to live up to the hype, producing sub-par software. The issue isn’t about smarter AI models, but about precision. Real software needs exact commands, not guesses. The chat-like user interface simplifies things too much, reducing programming to a game of memory and hope. Daniel De Laney argues that the future of AI development tools should be rooted in document-style programming, allowing for improved clarity, trackability, and collaborative work.
— Daniel De Laney, 4m, #ai-development, #programming, #software-tools
Autonomous Team Coordination
The average knowledge worker loses 23 hours weekly to coordination overhead. Fix that with Steady today.
Steady is an agentic AI coordination layer that runs in the background, distilling plans and progress from tools, teams, & people into forward-looking tailored summaries, giving everyone the clarity they need to build outstanding products together. Teams using Steady typically see 10X speed-to-impact increases in the first 30 days.
Learn more at steady.space.
