I, for sure, spend equal if not time writing the data flywheel code compared to architectural changes.

This has been bugging me for awhile, but I haven’t had time to sit down and write about it until now. In my mind there are three things that makes coming up with a good take about this (and also implementing it) hard:

1. This may be a problem that’s solved in much of the frontier labs (I would argue more because of workflow optimizations that sidestep the problem, see below)
2. The “solution” to the problem also seem extremely person-dependent, so it seems hard to make an overall suggestion.
3. Many people write it off as “necessary engineering”

I don’t purport to have a solution to the pipes problem here, but I want to spend a little time now to reflect about what I have been thinking about while spending days at the office writing pipes.

Why are Todo Lists (a.k.a. personal productivity systems) so hard to build well?

I’m genuinely curious. I was listening to the last episode of Cortex, and one of the hosts (CGP Grey) brought up a similar point regarding personal productivity platforms. OmniFocus, the reigning champion of the industry for professionals looking for a deeply customized system, has been staggering in their ability to ship the next version of their application. Much of the market consists of various different packagings of the same offering. Grey’s thesis of these platforms essentially boils down to this: