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'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."

Looking for an AI productivity coach and wondered if there were AI ones I could see and talk with to get me to do my work lol not sure if this is a thing that's even available.

Earlier, I could complete tasks almost within the time I expected. I could even watch study lectures at 2× speed and still understand everything clearly. My calculations were faster, and I learned new concepts quickly.

Since the past year, due to some personal circumstances (which are now resolved), I've noticed a significant drop in my efficiency. Now, I sometimes struggle to grasp concepts even at normal playback speed, my calculations feel slower, and it takes me much longer to learn and process information.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? If so, what helped you regain your previous learning speed and efficiency? Any practical advice would be greatly appreciated.

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 had one of those days where I just stared at my screen and accomplished absolutely nothing. I tried to start multiple tasks but could not focus on a single one. Now I am feeling extremely guilty and worried about falling behind on my workload. Do you just accept it as a rest day and move on, or do you try to catch up the next day? I would love to hear how you guys reset your mindset after a completely wasted day.

I recently learnt to write in cursive from scratch (it took me around 1 week to become proficient and 2 weeks to completely finish learning it)

I enjoyed the process and I think it was quite a productive use of my time, but I dont know what to learn next.

I want something similar to learning cursive in the sense that it's fairly easy and something you can fully learn and then just know. (So please don't suggest more abstract things such as budgeting or time management)

Do you have any suggestions?

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’ve noticed that my energy often drops in the afternoon. Usually sometime after lunch, my focus gets worse, simple tasks feel heavier, and it becomes harder to get started again. It’s not that I’m completely exhausted, just that my brain feels slower and less sharp.

I’m curious how other people deal with this. Do you change what you eat, take a short walk, use caffeine differently, switch to easier tasks, or just accept that your energy naturally dips at that time? What actually helps you avoid or handle that low-energy afternoon state?

Hello, does anyone know of a desktop timer that logs the minutes it's been paused but doesn't reset it?

Pretty much almost everything that a normal human being does takes me like 5 times longer than average for example

Eating lunch/dinner sometimes takes me up to like 2 hours, showering takes at minimum 1 hour, brushing my teeth takes like 30 minutes and even tho its kinda disgusting i stopped brushing my teeth in the morning because its too much effort to go into the bathroom and wash myself, changing my clothes takes idk how long because im not counting that but it takes a while, doing my school work takes me until i have to go to sleep which is like 10/11pm and i get home from school at like 2/3pm even tho the teachers barely give us any work to do

And the school work thing just leaves me stun locked the whole day, because i feel like i cant do anything till im done with it but it always takes the whole day

Which then leads to when i do have free time during weekends or school breaks I feel like i have to be extra productive on my personal projects because otherwise its just a waste of time

But its like for my personal projects if i do the smallest thing then my brain "ok were done here since we did the bare minimum" but i dont want the bare minimum because then its going to take 500 years to finish and most humans dont even live past 100

And the fact that its summer break right now only makes these issues worse because i feel like i should be doing productive stuff right now but im not doing jack shit

Like i draw sometimes and i see artists online saying like "oh this took me 2 hours to draw, that super long for me" and not only does it look better than anything ive ever made but for my drawing 2 hours doesnt even make the sketch look good yet

Or when im coding something for some shitty game i want to make, it also takes forever because my brain is scared of technical debt

Or one time i was collabing with a bunch of people on a passion project and it took me 14 times longer to do what they did, which i think is super embarrassing, and they also had more work

Ever since ive had the ability to remember, ive always been doing something but its always something useless because in the grands scheme of things i could be doing something that would make my future easier, and i feel like ive never been relaxed a single day in my life

Like the only time i dont feel bad about doing "useless things" is when im supposed to be sleeping, which has now resulted in my sleep schedule being fucking terrible

But also trying to fall asleep is just a gerenal pain in the ass

And since im relatively young and probably know more than the people my age i feel like i should be using that, because if i dont then ill fall behind and ill be a fucking failure, but not even that is enough to get me to do something

Anyways im going to sleep