The toolkit didn't survive the speed
The cult of productivity has reached a new level of insanity.
The norm slid to an hour
A year ago "I'll have it by tomorrow morning" was a perfectly normal answer. It counted as fast. Today the same sentence reads as "get lost, I'm going for tea." The norm has slid to an hour — and an hour is generous, because somewhere around minute forty you'll get a "so, any updates?"
The part I'd rather not admit: I became a source of exactly that insanity. I catch myself pinging people after an hour and getting sincerely annoyed that there's no answer yet. I know it's unreasonable, and I still expect it. The speed of the market sets the inputs, so the madness becomes an internal standard.
The tools broke, not the people
The real problem is that at this speed the toolkit everyone spent years learning simply fell apart. Half of us never learned to use it properly anyway: quarterly plans, roadmaps, demos, retros, two-week sprints, the sacred "let's groom it next week." Those are methods from a world that no longer exists. While you're aligning a quarterly plan, the market changes its shoes three times. Half a quarter in, I've already corrected OKRs in several directions.
How I rebuilt the way I work
- A hard MVP for every task. Not "I'll do it well and then show it," but "I'll do the bare minimum and show it today." Eighty percent of the polishing gets thrown away after first contact with reality anyway — you just find out two weeks later.
- The shortest possible iterations. Half the time an iteration is one day.
- A definition of done for everything. Otherwise a task spreads like dough and eats exactly as much time as you gave it — and by instinct you gave it plenty.
- Batching by context. Jumping between analytics, hiring and calls costs more than the tasks themselves; switching eats more than the work.
- All the dumb routine handed to AI. These machines don't get to think for me, but unloading my hands is mandatory — that's what marketing automation is actually good for.
Where it shows most: hypotheses
Around ten a week go through my R&D. Each one used to wait for a full justification before anyone would even pick it up. Now a hypothesis goes into the field with a minimal slice of data — and we either see quickly that it's dead, or we fix it on the move. That's only possible because the research runs in hours, not weeks.
Bottom line
For the clever commenters, up front: none of this is a victory over the environment, and it isn't me standing in white claiming everyone else is doing it wrong. It's just how you survive in this environment, stay sane and stay competitive. Nobody is dialling the speed back, and the world isn't going to regress.