Productivity and offices

Discover why traditional offices boost productivity and remain essential despite the rise of remote work. Uncover the truth behind workplace effectiveness.

“Unfortunately for the believers, new research mostly runs counter to this, showing that offices, for all their flaws, remain essential."—The working-from-home illusion fades

Featured writing

Nobody takes you aside anymore

Print taught a generation when to stop. What we lose when the machines absorb the constraints that used to form us.

Your AI agents need a water cooler

Coordination is a property of the room, not the org chart. What that means when your coworkers are agents.

On the death of the author and the birth of the detector

Why worrying about AI authorship is lazier, and more prejudiced, than it looks.

Books

The work of being available now

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The practice of work in progress

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Recent writing

Did the state change? A simple test for whether work actually happened

Either something exists now that did not exist before, or it does not. A simple test for whether work actually happened, and what changes when you build your systems so they can't record anything else.

How to manage content for multiple clients without flattening their voices

How to manage content for multiple clients without their voices blurring into one house style: a workspace and a voice profile per client, batchable stages, and approval buffers.

Why does AI writing sound generic? It has nothing to work with

Why does AI writing sound generic? Because the model has none of your perspective, examples, constraints, or stakes to work with. The fix is interview-first, not better adjectives.

View all writing →

Related thinking