Tech Productivity Issue #390 (Why Lionel Messi Barely Runs)

Issue #390 (Why Lionel Messi Barely Runs) 08/03/26

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As a post-FIFA bit of content, best-selling author David Epstein put out a fascinating video on Why The Best Player Alive Barely Runs (in reference to Lionel Messi). This is a powerful consideration of athletes and their almost inhuman ability to react in ways that the rest of us can't comprehend.

Although most of the 15-minute video is covering some sports-related info, the conclusion looks at how we all can use these same skills to improve how we can learn better and improve skills.

It's well worth a watch but if you prefer something written, there's a short companion article on his Substack covering roughly the same topic, but not in as much detail.

At the end of the video, he goes over the practical application of the material, so you can skip to about minute 13:00 to see that summary.

Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!

Tools & Apps

Clipy — A screen recorder tool that produces a video that can be read by AI agents as structured text, so your human team and your AI agents can see the same video content.

TabShame — A macOS menu bar app that counts your open tabs across Safari, Chrome, and Edge, then shames you with escalating notifications and sound effects, potentially to get you to complete things sooner.

The AI:ROI Conference — On September 17 from 11am - 6PM ET, join Scott Galloway and Section for the AI:ROI Conference, the bi-annual event featuring high calorie insights for the enterprise on how to get the most value out of your organization’s AI. sponsor

FileFlan — An end-to-end encrypted file transfer service that allows you to share files across devices with no login or cookies used, with up to 1GB per file.

Little Irons — A GitHub-powered job search tracker that offers a Kanban board, calendar sync, smart email processing, AI features, browser extension, and more, to help organize your current job applications.

Cozy — A local-first journaling app for Mac and Windows where your entries live on your own computer as plain text files and nothing is synced to a server or fed to an AI bot.

TimeQuorum — A clean, fast app for teams to track time across projects and clients, featuring time entries, project hierarchy, members/roles, reports, invoicing, and more.

Articles & Resources

What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Modern Job Search – and What Actually Works — The author claims that the fundamentals of a job search haven't really changed due to AI, while clearing up some common myths about who sees your resume and how modern tech affects your job search.

Stop Confusing Your Dreams with Your Goals — It's possible you've never considered that there's a difference between dreams and goals, so this might be a bit of an eye-opener for you.

The Deep View — The go-to daily newsletter for 700k+ founders, knowledge workers and professionals who want to stay up to date with AI. sponsor

Focus is Motivation — "What matters with motivation isn’t simply how much we want to do something, but how much we want to do that thing, compared to all our other alternatives."

Why Unlearning is Vital to Succeed in the AI Era — The belief here is that we should be changing our beliefs about how we measure competence, how decisions are made, and what counts as doing a good job.

Flat Hierarchy: Four Ways Companies Make It Work — I don't come across a lot of articles on organizations that use a flat hierarchy (i.e. no hierarchy), but this might be of interest for those considering it.

I’m 38 and I Can’t Support Myself Anymore — We all hope this sort of thing is an extreme outlier, but it might not be as rare an occurrence as we think. This article blew up all over the socials when it was published in June.

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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