A thought about productivity systems/workflow optimization:
One principle of good design is “make the thing you want people to do, the easy thing to do”. However, this idea is susceptible to the following form of Goodhart: often a lot of the value in some desirable action comes from the things that make it difficult.
For instance, sometimes I decide to migrate some notes from one note-taking system to another.
This is usually extremely useful, because it forces me to review the notes and think about how they relate to each other and to the new system. If I make this easier for myself by writing a script to do the work (as I have sometimes done), this important value is lost.
Or think about spaced repetition cards: You can save a ton of time by reusing cards made by other people covering the same material—but the mental work of breaking the material down into chunks that can go into the spaced-repetition system, which is usually very important, is lost.
A thought about productivity systems/workflow optimization:
One principle of good design is “make the thing you want people to do, the easy thing to do”. However, this idea is susceptible to the following form of Goodhart: often a lot of the value in some desirable action comes from the things that make it difficult.
For instance, sometimes I decide to migrate some notes from one note-taking system to another. This is usually extremely useful, because it forces me to review the notes and think about how they relate to each other and to the new system. If I make this easier for myself by writing a script to do the work (as I have sometimes done), this important value is lost.
Or think about spaced repetition cards: You can save a ton of time by reusing cards made by other people covering the same material—but the mental work of breaking the material down into chunks that can go into the spaced-repetition system, which is usually very important, is lost.