Tech Productivity Issue #366 (The Greatest Focus Hack)

Issue #366 (The Greatest Focus Hack) 02/16/26

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I can't argue with this excellent bit of advice from author Dan Koe on how to have better focus and ultimately more success in getting stuff done:

Ask yourself: In situations where you never got around to finishing something, were you able to answer all the questions he mentions? Even if one of those things is missing, it's like a productivity recipe without one of its central ingredients.

Something to consider for those who often get stuck on tasks and side projects. Turning them around might be a matter of fleshing out all the parts, as Dan implies in his post.

Now on to this week's productivity links!

Tools & Apps

convly — A Slack plugin that enables chat between Slack and Microsoft Teams, allowing direct messages, channel messages, rich text, @mentions, images, files, and lots more.

MindNote — A smart, simple, and customizable AI note-taking app, to help keep your notes organized and accessible, ideal for research, study, work, and personal use.

A New Place to Read Your Newsletters — We’re trying out a free app for reading newsletters called Khaki. The interface is clean, distraction-free, and only shows the newsletters you're subscribed to, no noise of everything else in your usual inbox. sponsor

Invoist — An all-in-one tool for invoicing, client proposals, contract signing, time tracking, AI-powered expense tracking, client feedback, and more.

Surgify — A neat little exercise and training app that allows you to use AI to generate music that syncs to your workout intensity, pace, and preferences so your entire workout feels more personal and timed.

BlurData — A Mac app that enables you to protect sensitive information in your images and PDF documents by redacting, or blurring, the sensitive data.

Locally AI — A privacy-friendly app that allows you to run AI models locally on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with Siri integration, with support for popular open-source models that run locally on your device.

Articles & Resources

AI Can Write Your Code. It Can’t Do Your Job. — "The companies building AI, the ones who supposedly know exactly what it can and can’t do, are spending billions to acquire engineering talent. Not fire them, acquire them."

Listen to Understand — Some much-needed encouragement to not be so focused on ourselves and not be so quick to just give superficial advice – but instead to seek to understand another person's situation better.

Why More Companies Are Recognizing the Benefits of Keeping Older Employees — This article cites multiple studies done that show the increased value and productivity of having older staff, thus avoiding being age-based towards younger candidates.

“I’m Worried About Layoffs” — A reminder we don't hear often, which is to make sure we're still working hard, making progress, and learning during less stressful work periods where everything seems comfortable.

See How AvaTax Automates 900,000 Tax Rules in One Short Tour — More than 900,000 tax rules and 82,000 rates update constantly. AvaTax helps businesses stay current and reduce risk. This self-guided product demo shows how Avalara automates rate calculation, maps products to the right codes, and prepares you for audits. There is no call and no slides. Just the product in action. See how it works today. sponsor

Things I’ve Learned in My 10 Years as an Engineering Manager — The author shares eleven non-obvious tips on succeeding as an engineering manager, based on work across six different companies.

How to Learn Anything with the Feynman Technique — A learning technique that you may have heard of at least in concept, but this is a breakdown of the specific technique itself and how you can benefit from it.

Suggestions?

Have a suggestion for a productivity-related tool, article, or other resource? Send me a direct message via X or chat via Bluesky and I’ll consider including it in a future issue.

Stay productive!

Louis
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