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I Now Have No Patience

The problem with ultra-productivity

Andy Taylor
3 min readAug 19, 2022
Photo by Steve Johnson: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-panel-door-near-roll-up-gate-845242/

Being productive is great. You get stuff done, that is for sure. And the more stuff you get done, the quicker you progress.

But. There is a cost. Your patience disappears.

Like that old line about get-up-and-go (“My get-up-and-go just got up and went”)… there’s a moment when being ultra-productive actually starts eating itself and everything stops.

The moment when the tech can’t move as quickly as you can.

These days, it doesn’t happen often. Usually, you as the human are the stumbling block.

It reminds of the time I worked in a huge media organisation and the IT folk that used to come and fix our computers used to say this funny word under their breath:

“Pwune.”

You’d hear them muttering it to themselves with a smirk. It puzzled me what it was all about.

So one day I asked.

“Why do you guys keep saying ‘Prune’?”

“It’s not ‘Prune’, it’s ‘Pwune’ — P-W-U-N-E… Problem With User, Not Equipment.”

Ah. I got the joke. And so often it was true. Us imperfect humans had entered the wrong command, or not waited long enough for the new thing to install. The thing that it had been…

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Andy Taylor
Andy Taylor

Written by Andy Taylor

I want to learn. I try to grow. I’d love to help.

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