Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

It's not really about productivity, it's not about time management. It's really just about, look, at any given day, we're lucky if we can have one great moment where we have our peak attention and we use it well.

Things can sometimes be a mess outside of that, and you still feel really good about your days. You still feel really good about the way you're spending your energy.

The very beginning of your project, we recommend this kind of crazy idea that you clear your calendar. So the core team come together for 10 hours roughly and go through a sequence of activities so that we can make all of the key decisions together.

We would have a conversation with founders, you're saying like, 'Gosh, I'm almost embarrassed to ask this question, but who exactly is your target customer?' And three co-founders have three different answers.

Instead of trying to come up with the perfect plan, the perfect PRD, the perfect pitch to executives we're like, 'Let's just build a prototype and put it in front of our colleagues and get them using it.'

When you are making a new product, people want to ignore it. People want to not pay attention to it, and if they do have to pay attention to it, if it gets in their face, they want to not try it because we just are all bombarded by so many things.

If this is an important problem, your customer's probably already solving it somehow. It may be a workaround, it may be an alternative, it may not be a direct competitor, but if it's worth solving, they probably have some way of dealing with it today.

If you respond to emails really fast, you respond to messages really fast, people respond back to you and then there's more to respond to. And if you slow down that little hamster wheel, it slows down.

While you're outsourcing that prototyping work, you don't outsource the thinking. You don't kind of skip over the part where you think about, 'Well, what is the actual copy on the website? How do I actually describe what the product is, how it's differentiated?'

When you generate something using an LLM, using an AI tool, it looks pretty real. It looks believable. I think there's a temptation to say, 'Okay, this is good to go. It looks close enough that I'm just going to show that to customers.'

What we believe is you have a better... this just increases your odds. This is a chance to get more clear on, is this a good opportunity? To get more clear on, will the thing I build click with customers?

One phenomenon we've seen when teams are building things really quickly with AI is that the more AI-generated or assisted they are, the more generic they tend to turn out. Going fast can actually slow you down in the long run.

The faster you can find out if you're on the right track, the more quickly you can learn and you can course correct and ultimately you can get to a better place faster than if you spent months working on that prototype.

Willpower is never going to win, and there's great research on this, but for now just trust me, you're not going to white-knuckle your way through not looking at Twitter when you're trying to work.

I stay logged out of those sites on my computer, except for when I want to use them for some specific purpose.

Really, really good stuff, or really important stuff, will find us. The good stuff, it'll come to you. People will share it with you or you'll hear about it.

The idea that we're responsible for staying up to date with the most important news in the world... we don't actually play a role in what happens, and so the idea that we're responsible for being on it all the time, that's a job that we can quit.

Most of the stress comes internally, from our feeling that if we don't get back to people right away, we're not enough, we're not measuring up.

Most productivity advice focuses on getting better and faster about doing the things that are already in front of you. Our perspective is basically that those are the defaults.

I've had 50 conversations over the past month, but I learned so much more from even the first conversation when I had a hypothesis and I had a prototype, or a couple prototypes, to show them. It's like night and day.