productivity
9 free lessons tagged productivity across History, Business, Programming, AI. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
The Productivity Paradox: What Changed, and How Slowly
Revised estimates put British growth during the classic Industrial Revolution far lower than the name implies, and real wages barely moved for half a century while output per worker rose sharply. This lesson works through the numbers, explains why a transformative technology can take decades to show up in the statistics, and separates what is measured from what is inferred.
Inbox, Travel, and Documents: The Daily Machine
The concrete workflows: triaging an inbox that is not yours, building briefing packs, handling travel and what happens when it breaks, and producing documents. What each needs as input, where each fails, and what has to stay with a person.
What an Assistant Actually Does, and Why It Is Not Scheduling
Executive assistance looks like a set of logistical tasks and is mostly judgement about priority, access and relationships. This lesson separates the mechanical work from the discretionary work, and explains why the parts that automate cleanly are not the parts the role is valued for.
One Person, Every Function: What Actually Constrains a Small Business
A solo owner is not a small version of a company, they are one person switching between every function. This lesson identifies the real constraints, attention and the absence of anyone to check the work, and shows why that changes which AI uses pay off and which quietly create problems.
Where AI Fits in Project Management, and Where It Does Not
Project management is largely communication and judgement under uncertainty, which splits cleanly into work AI does well and work it cannot touch. This lesson separates the two, covers the administrative load that is the genuine target, and explains why estimation is the seductive case that mostly does not work.
GitHub Copilot: Niche Power Features You Probably Aren't Using
You already let Copilot autocomplete your code. This lesson dives into the underused power features: chat participants, slash commands, Copilot Edits, agent mode, custom instructions, prompt files, the model picker, MCP servers, and Copilot Spaces.
Coding Agents: Productivity Studies, Benchmarks, and the METR Slowdown
Hard evidence on AI coding assistants: the Microsoft Research RCTs, METR's surprising 2025 slowdown finding, SWE-bench Verified, and why benchmark scores keep outrunning real-world value.
Customer Service AI Agents: What the Data Actually Shows
An evidence-led look at AI agents in customer support: the Brynjolfsson NBER RCT, Klarna's 2024 victory lap and 2025 walk-back, and what generalises beyond a single firm.
AI-aided software development: working with Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code
What modern AI dev tools actually do, where they sit on a spectrum from inline completion to autonomous agents, and the workflow habits that separate developers who 2x their output from developers who ship subtly broken code.