2 "Productivity" Posts

The Meeting Diet: An Optimization Approach to Your Calendar

Every week your calendar fills with more meeting invites than you can reasonably handle. Which ones are worth the time and energy, and which should you politely decline? What if there was a way to quantify that choice?


“Your calendar is a knapsack. Every meeting takes space, but only some add enough value to justify carrying them.”


The good news: math can help. By modeling your schedule as a 0/1 knapsack problem with two constraints , you can treat meetings like items with value, time cost, and energy cost. Classic optimization techniques then help decide which meetings to attend. In this post, we’ll walk through framing the problem, prompting AI to scaffold the code, and running a simulation to visualize your optimal “meeting diet.”

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From Solow to ChatGPT: Why Total Factor Productivity Can't Keep Up With Generative AI

If ChatGPT can write code, summarize legal briefs, and help draft business strategies in seconds, why doesn’t that show up in our productivity statistics?

Economists have long relied on a metric called Total Factor Productivity (TFP) to measure technological progress. But in an era of free digital tools and generative AI, TFP looks more like a rearview mirror than a windshield. It tells us a lot about the past, but almost nothing about where the economy is headed.


You can see the computer age generative AI everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

(Adapted from Robert Solow, 1987)


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