Ask HN: Productivity tools that need to exist? The landscape of productivity tools is littered with dead bodies. But what else needs to exist? Where are the biggest inefficiencies in your day? Or what would you have a personal assistant do, if you had one? |
Basecamp is Asana is Evernote is Trello. You have tasks, you assign them to people, and I think 99% of the time the reason people go with a certain tool is the look and feel.
I've found the main driver for productivity (and I know this sounds flippant) is to actually make an effort to be productive. If you aren't making an effort (or your team members aren't making an effort) the tool won't change their behaviour.
I need a natural language robot that can attend meetings for me and produce minutes and an artificial intelligence that can write an executive summary of those minutes, calling out anything should care about.
Alternately, I need a robot attached to the back of my task chair that smacks me upside the head every time my brain segfaults and crashes to reddit.
Alternately, I need a supervisor who doesn't need daily written status updated because we use a task management tool that is worth a shit.
As for the NLP of meetings - yes please !!!
I think productivity is partly good people, good open systems and partly leaving folks to get on and find the biggest pain points whilst not stuffing architecture up.
I think this works for non devs too and has next to nothing to do with productivity tools. I could have been using notepad and a shell and would have done as much useful work.