Productivity

Labor productivity growth — output per hour of work — as the engine of national economic power, and the puzzle of its recent slowdown. The McKinsey Global Institute report frames it as the central macro lever: productivity growth has powered US economic strength since WWII, adding 2.2% annually, but over the last 15 years it has averaged just 1.4% — a paradoxical deceleration during a boom in digital technology. Regaining historical rates would add $10 trillion to US GDP (GDP). The report’s structural finding is a split between “frontier firms” — which invest 2.6x more in technology and intangibles, attract more skilled Talent, and “free their top thinkers” to outsize returns — and laggards that persist by serving different customers, workers, or geographies rather than being competed away. Geography and density matter: Seattle went from 16% more productive than other cities in 2007 to 38% by 2019, tying productivity to City Building.

The Build-Nothing Country (Noah Smith) supplies the build-side complement: the constraint on raising real output isn’t capital but the ability to build. “Money is not physical stuff… just because you earmark $5 billion for a subway in some Excel spreadsheet doesn’t mean a physical train has been created.” Broken permitting, land use, and NIMBY incentives (homeowners restricting local supply as a “costless subsidy”) choke the housing, transit, and energy buildout that productivity gains depend on. Read together, the two pieces frame productivity as both a firm-level investment problem (Capital Allocation) and a national capacity-to-build problem.

Where this appears

• Rekindling US Productivity for a New Era — quantifies the slowdown (2.2% → 1.4%), the $10T GDP stake, and the frontier-vs-laggard firm split.
• The Build-Nothing Country — diagnoses the build-side bottleneck (permitting, land use, NIMBYism) that caps real output growth.
• How To Take Smart Notes — Tiago Forte Interviews Sönke Ahrens · Roam Research: Why I Love It and How I Use It (Nat Eliason) — tagged #Productivity on March 19th, 2020.

Saved from Roam

• productivity-1.png — “How To Be Productive” infographic by Anna Vital (Funders and Founders) — roughly 35 tactics mapped across Tech, Clothes, Hacks, Body, Schedule, Food and Mind: notice the 80/20, decide the outcome before starting, define a fashion uniform, do a bad first draft, no meetings unless decisive, keep an ‘Idea Dump’ book.

From “Things To Internet”

• The Great Suspender — a Chrome extension that suspended idle tabs to save memory (2M+ installs). After it was sold to an unknown new owner in 2020, Google pulled it from the Chrome Web Store and disabled it on users’ machines in February 2021 for containing malware (9to5Google). Saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet” (c. 2015–2016).
• Fantastical 2 — Flexibits’ natural-language calendar app; saved as a “desktop calendar app”, i.e. the Mac version. Saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet” (c. 2015–2016).
• Diigo — a social bookmarking and web-annotation service (highlight and annotate pages, save to a library). Saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet” (c. 2015).
• OmniGraffle Pro — The Omni Group’s diagramming and mapping app (omnigroup.com); saved as “GrafflePro mapping”. Saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet” (c. 2015).
• mymorningroutine.com — My Morning Routine, an online magazine by Benjamin Spall and Michael Xander that published a new morning routine from a successful person every Wednesday, December 2012 – July 2019, and became the 2018 book My Morning Routine. Saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet” (c. 2015).
• Hoover’s — saved as “Hoover’s Academic”: the Hoover’s company-information database that university libraries license, bought by Dun & Bradstreet in 2003 and now D&B Hoovers. Saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet” (c. 2015).
• powerocks.com — Powerocks, a maker of portable power banks and backup phone batteries, per a January 2014 Wayback capture of the site. Saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet” (c. 2012–2013).