In the office you could look busy.

Walking to meetings, sitting at a desk, being visibly present. None of it meant anything was getting done but it felt like work and managers felt comfortable.

Remote removed that. Suddenly the only thing that mattered was actual output.

Some people thrived. Some people were exposed.

I think that's why the return to office push is louder from management than from employees. It's not about collaboration. It's about visibility. And visibility was never the point.

What's your read on why RTO is really happening?

I don’t mean AI paying bills or moving money. I mean using it before a weekly finance check to boost productivity, so you’re not starting from a blank dashboard every time

Something that flags late invoices, changed vendor charges, missing receipts, subscription renewals or payments that need approval. You still open the source and approve anything important yourself ofc. For other business owners, would that actually save time or would you still double check everything from scratch anyway?

I work as a project manager. One person on our team is working with another client, someone else has recently been fired. I’m used to a higher workload but I feel like I just can’t function or get anything significantly done, And the tasks continue to pile. I’m not burnt out I don’t think and I understand how we got into this position. But lack of organization for this amount of work is crushing me.

How do you organize your workload and tasks? Especially if you have multiple things, projects, deadlines? What are some structures or mindsets that help you get things done even when your workload goes up unexpectedly. How do you keep yourself from stopping because there are just so many things to do.

Side note: my wife wants me to test for ADHD. As far as I know I don’t have a family history. Apparently I’m showing many of the signs and she thinks that might be why my productivity is struggling so much. I’ve never thought of there being an additional issue, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with people that do struggle with it. I criticize myself pretty harshly, I’m not discouraged, I just feel like I can do better. I just really don’t know how and I’m trying to figure out the best solution for me.

Hey everyone! I'm about to enter into a crazy busy season of my life. I'm starting grad school in the fall and I do a lot of travel & presenting for work. I also have pretty strong ADHD and struggle with executive function pretty heavily. I'm skating by at work, but barely, and I'm reducing my hours and travel schedule come August.

Once I start, I'll need to figure out how to manage multiple calendars. My work is Microsoft-based, my school is Google-based, and my personal calendar... I mostly run on vibes, which doesn't work very well. I like the UI of Google but I haven't used it in a long time. Planners I use for three weeks and forget they exist. Wall calendars can be very helpful for me for a lot of things, so that might be the move.

Do you guys have recs on how to manage multiple calendars? Any systems that work for you, reminders, calendars that sync well?

I always find it hard to not use my phone before bed. I have the brick app/device but I find myself always just unlocking everything then scrolling till I pass out

Instead, I optimize things I do every single day. Like finding notes, saving files or deciding what to work on next. Saving five seconds on something you do 100 times is usually worth more than saving ten minutes on something you do once. What's the smallest improvement you've made that keeps paying off?

I'm trying to figure out which learning method is better for my situation.

I live in a very noisy house, and I rarely get uninterrupted time to study. I don't have a fixed study schedule because I have to study whenever I can find a quiet moment.

I also tend to overthink and get lost in my own thoughts. While watching video courses, I sometimes realize I've been mentally somewhere else for several minutes and have to keep rewinding. If someone interrupts me or the noise gets too loud, it completely breaks my focus.

Because of this, I'm wondering if books or written documentation would be a better fit than video courses.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? If you had a noisy home, no consistent study time, and a mind that wandered easily, which learning method worked better for you and why?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who learned programming or other technical skills under similar conditions .

My goal is to build enough skills to get better opportunities in the future, but currently I have to learn from home with limited resources."

Over the last year, I’ve realized something about myself.

Every day I save articles, yt videos, GitHub projects, Reddit posts… all with the same thought:
“I’ll get back to this later.”

But “later” almost never comes.
Instead, my bookmarks, read-later list, and saved posts just keep growing.
Ironically, finding great content has never been easier. The internet—and now AI—helps me discover more valuable information than ever before.

But my ability to actually consume and retain that information hasn’t changed.
I’m starting to wonder if the problem isn’t time management anymore.
Maybe it’s knowledge management.

I’m curious:
How many things do you currently have saved “for later”?
Do you have a system that actually turns saved content into something you’ve learned?
Or is everyone else quietly building a huge backlog too?
I’d genuinely love to hear what has worked for you.

I'm looking for an iPhone app that can stop me from automatically opening distracting apps while I'm working.

I've looked at Opal, Jomo, ScreenZen, one sec, and a few others, but it's hard to tell which reviews are genuine. Some apps seem too easy to bypass, while others lock down so much that I suspect I'd disable them after a few days.

Ideally, I want something that can block selected apps during work hours but still let me access them when I genuinely need to. I'd also rather avoid another expensive subscription unless the app makes a noticeable difference.

Has anyone used one of these consistently for a few months? Which one did you keep, and what became annoying over time?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who tried several before settling on one.

I have thousand of to-do lists, all organized in my notebooks. I change them every couple of days because they feel unorganized or my priorities shift. i'm just moving the same unfinished work from one page to another, though it looks like work.

I feel like taking Vitamin D has become the automatic default for anyone with a desk job. I'm actively shopping around for a setup right now—looking at everything from standard D3 to D3+K2 liquid drops—but I really don't want to just guess my way through it.

For my fellow indoor crowd: how do you handle this responsibly? Are you getting regular blood panels, forcing yourself outside on lunch breaks, dialing in diet, or just rolling with a small daily maintenance dose?

So im 15 nearly 16 and im homeschooled (important in a second). I used to wake up and know what I wanted/needed to do that day and I did it. Now i get out of bed like 2+ hours after I wake up barely do anything im supposed to or need to do. I want something to do with my life, like I feel like my life is so repetitive and there's no point to it I have nothing to do, I wanted (still do a little bit) a job but I think partly that was so i had purpose you know? I think i kind want/need some things i can do to feel productive because i feel like im wastibg my life. Im not really sure what i wanted/expected to get from this post maybe guidance or somthing I have no idea.

Thanks for taking ur time to read this.

Edit: added some things

One of my biggest difficulties as a young adult is structuring my time. I find it so easy to get done the things I need to do. I just finished uni about a month ago with a top grade, so I find it easy to do things when I need to. Right now I work about 16 hours a week in my part time job to save money. I have alot of spare time now. And like, because there's nothing imperative that needs to be done, I just sort of faff the day away. I know it's a luxury to have free time like this but I am so indecisive and have 0 ides how to spend my time. Like I don't know, even when I was working my ass off during uni to get a top grade, I somehow still managed to have so much timeee ( I am 22 )

I'm looking for was to make my phone less distractive especially for the apps I need to use like Reddit, utube, Facebook for market place etc.

I have lots of things to do with my phone like reading, planing things out, learning and being connected with ppl but somehow this very well engineered piece of shite does every possible trick to steal my attention 🥲. I just open Reddit to look for something and I just fall into a rabbit hole

I am looking for an app like Motion that uses AI to plan the tasks in your day for you according to importance, urgency or deadline. Other features I would like are you can use on desktop, has an Iphone app, you can organise your life, seperate areas of your life like home, work, personal projects into seperate tasks lists, set tasks on a recurring schedule, set up checklists, keep notes

I have looked into Notion, ClickUps, Flowsavvy, Motion as well. Is there one app that can do all of this ?

I have tried writing things down, making todo list of ideas to work on. I was waiting to work on them till i finish my exams and learn a lot of new things, read books etc. But after that I have not been able to be very productive. I keep spending time doing nothing, zoning out while reading something or just playing a game for an hour. I don't scroll insta much (less than 30 mins a day) but i still feel like my attention is getting worse and worse, i tried reading a book but stop in like 20 mins after that anything i read just doesn't make any sense.

I tried writing a todo list everyday on notion and tried doing them, but i always feel like i put in things which are impossible to do in a short span of time.

I usually write out architecture of whatever coding project i am working on on a few sheets of paper and i just keep looking at them without doing any work.

I tried writing techincal blogs but was only able to write one and that too was not that great. I built some projects but they got no traction whatsoever which made my mood worse, every few days i keep someone around my age being leagues ahead of me in every way.

I would love to get some advice, everyone around me keeps saying "wake up early" or "try harder" but i genuinely am unable to, the little productivity that i feel is at night when there is no noise.

Thanks if you read so far

I’ve been trying to clean up my meeting workflow lately because a huge chunk of my workday disappears into calls, follow-ups, half-decisions, and “wait, who owns this?” moments.

Most AI meeting tools I’ve tried or looked at seem focused on what happens after the meeting: transcript, summary, action items, searchable notes, maybe a follow-up email draft. Useful, but still reactive.

I saw the halliday g2 launch video recently, and their Meeting Flow concept got me thinking about the opposite approach: AI helping during the meeting, not just afterward.

From what they showed, it’s more like smart glasses for live meeting support: captions, quick catch-up summaries, research with sources, decision confirmation, open items, and then a post-meeting summary at the end.

As someone who is always trying to squeeze more leverage out of AI tools, this is interesting to me. Not because I want more gadgets, but because the real productivity loss often happens while the meeting is still going — missed context, vague commitments, unclear decisions, next steps that never get locked down.

Or do you think the best productivity setup is still: stay present during the call, then let AI clean up the notes afterward?

I have this weird habit where I set fake deadlines for myself.

If a task is due on Friday I put it in my calendar for Wednesday.

My brain somehow falls for it every time and I rush to finish it early.

It is honestly the only way I manage my daily workload and actually get things done.

Does anyone else do this or am I just unnecessarily stressing myself out?

I tried TickTick but feel it’s a bit cumbersome. I’m looking for something that has the Eisenhower matrix view/labeling for tasks, custom lists, and some functionality for actually doing something with Q2 and Q3 tasks like mark a task as delegated or mark a task as scheduled. But the biggest thing for me is that functionality is streamlined. I haven’t tried TickTick in a while I guess but I remember thinking there were too many steps involved or things weren’t obvious/intuitive.
Is there anything that does this or am I going to be stuck doing this manually for the rest of my life lol

I've been using Tweek for the last month, and have loved it. However, the app and desktop site have a bug where they randomly don't sync with each other, with the desktop version having outdated information and the app being the most correct. I'm having to rely on only the mobile version, which I don't like for big planning sessions. I'm faster typing than two-thumbing.

Their support email has taken weeks to get back to me before with another issue and gave me incorrect/old information, so I really don't want to bother with them. I'm either looking for folks who have Tweek and have fixed this issue, or another app that's more reliable and also touts the same level of simplicity. Fixes I've tried include:

• Clearing my cookies and history
• Logging in and logging out
• Updating the mobile app
• Logging into an incognito window

Thank you for any help!

I'm going into sophmore year, but I decided it would be a great idea to get a summer job even though I knew I had a lot of summer work. I've finished my Chem work, and I'm fine on English, but this AP history work is kicking my ass. I'm genuinely scared. I have to get through 2 chapters of a college textbook, create an outline using the information with six details from each part (which there are 61 of), write 6 short answers, and complete two essays. I have one week. I don't know if I'm a complete wuss and this is actually fine but I'm kinda freaked out. I've barely started the outline. I need advice. I'm currently pulling an all nighter to get through it, which I know isn't great but I seriously need to get this done. Cheating and using AI is something I will absolutely not do. I need real advice that will keep me focused for hours and get through this. I have only completed 6 of the 61 parts. Do I have any chance???? I don't have an option other than to get this done, I just need to know HOW to do this.

Edit: I also still have to go to work, which is only about four or more hours every evening for the next two weeks before I'm done, which isn't bad at all, but does make this so much harder because I need to be able to stay focused there.

I was wondering if any of you had any solutions to decision fatigue that are actually approaching the problem as the mental health crisis it actually is and not "How can I take the basic decisions that functional adults have to make every day and reassign them to my productivity grind?"

"Always wear a green tie on Tuesdays" is not a real solution.

I feel like its necessary to stay informed of what going on in the world and your country. However, I don't know how to get into politics. When I look at news websites (NPR, CNN, etc.) it's just a mess of information, and links to articles, and I don't know how to navigate it. Do I click on the top one? The most recent? I try to listen to podcasts that offer daily briefs, but often find myself tuning out or confused about the relevance of anything that's being said.

Another issue I run into is, what am I doing with this information? Is staying informed and being politically savvy just inputting the information and saying 'ok now I know about that thing"? If none of it is interesting to you why stay informed at all?