Around 450,000 people in Switzerland live with an energy-limiting condition (ELC) such as Long Covid or ME/CFS. For them, a seemingly normal day — doing laundry, cooking, a short walk — can trigger Post-Exertional Malaise: days of near-total exhaustion that follow any overexertion.
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This May, GitHub featured PersonalAnalytics in their Maintainer Month spotlight: a series celebrating open-source maintainers in academia. I’m honored to be included.
PersonalAnalytics started as my master’s thesis and grew into a tool I use for my own research: a privacy-focused, locally-running app that helps knowledge workers reflect on their work habits — time spent, productivity, and well-being — without sending any data to the cloud. Over the past decade, it has been used in field studies with around 1,500 participants and contributed to more than a dozen peer-reviewed publications.
Read more →A bad metric becomes a target, the bill comes due, and we end up paying for it twice – once in dollars, once in degraded service.
At Meta, engineers reportedly burned through 60.2 trillion AI tokens in 30 days. At Anthropic API rates, that’s around $900M. The cause: an internal “Claudeonomics” leaderboard ranking engineers by token consumption, thereby encouraging them to inflate their numbers. Meta isn’t alone – similar AI usage dashboards currently run or did run at Microsoft, Salesforce, Shopify, and others. Meta has since taken the leaderboard down.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, adding fuel to such a bad metric, declared that he’d be “deeply alarmed” if a $500K engineer consumed less than $250K in tokens annually. Not without his own interest in mind – Nvidia sells the GPUs.
We have been here before.
Read more →GenAI coding tools were supposed to free up mental capacity. Offload the boilerplate, the syntax, the repetitive work, and let developers focus on what matters. This goal was only achieved partially.
The question isn’t whether AI affects cognitive load. It’s why and how.
Why nearly half of developers *actively* distrust AI tools — and what the research says actually changes that.
According to the Stack 2025 Overflow Developer Survey with over 33,000 respondents, only 3% highly trust the accuracy of AI tools, while 46% actively distrust them. This isn’t a niche concern, it’s a large part of the developer population, and it not only impacts adoption of AI tools, but how they impact productivity.
Read more →Why productivity claims from consultants and vendors are misleading your leadership. And what early data actually shows.
Developers have been using generative AI in various stages of the SDLC for a few years now, and with mixed results. Yet, claims of 30-60% developer productivity gains continue to circulate, especially in consulting narratives.
These numbers sound compelling, but they rest on shaky grounds: Despite widespread experimentation, only 26% of companies generate tangible value from AI at scale (BCG), and the considered metrics are often flawed.
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At the end of January, an online event marked the public launch of MindfulPacer, a new app focused on helping people better understand and manage their available energy in everyday life.
The event included a short introduction to the background of the project, a live demonstration of the app, and an open discussion about practical use cases. Around 65 participants joined the session and contributed questions and feedback during an interactive Q&A.
Read more →If your team is multi-tasking during meetings, it’s a sign that the meetings, not the team, needs fixing.
Developers spend 8-10 hours a week, on average, in meetings. While some are useful, many are viewed as unproductive and interrupt long periods of focused work. Good meetings are short, well-prepared, and include only the right people. Scattered or unnecessary meetings disrupt deep work and increase fatigue.
Read more →Regular deep work – or better yet, achieving flow – is one of the hardest things to maintain in hybrid teams. What are key barriers and what can we do?
At FlowLabs, we’ve seen firsthand how even small design changes to workflows can foster team focus.
Read more →This post appeared first on Substack.
I’m starting an essentialist blog to share quick productivity tips, inspiring reads, and useful tools. Today, I cover tools to finally get your tasks done and GenAI in software engineering.
I haven’t sent a newsletter in a while. Why? I kept postponing it due to other priorities and uncertainty about how to set it up. If I commit to it, I want to stick with it – while making sure it’s truly valuable to you, as value your attention.
Inspired by Tim Ferriss’ and Alan Frei’s minimalist, plaintext blog that covers short inspirational reads, tools and ideas, I am finally starting mine. And no, I won’t write the newsletter with ChatGPT, promise! Also, if you have feedback on the format, feel free to email me at andre@flowlabs.com. Thanks for being here!
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This post first appeared in Forbes on June 25, 2025 and was written by Prof. Dr. Lauren Howe, one of our research collaborators.
Work today is full of interruptions. The constant influx of emails, notifications, and questions from co-workers can slow individual progress and create a sense of frustration. After all, most people want to feel productive and work toward crossing off important goals from their to-do list.
But productivity is more than a one-person show: it’s a team effort. Recognizing this can help managers to make their teams more productive.
1. Signal Team Member Availability
One solution is to let team members know when they should avoid interrupting people, so that focus time is protected. To accomplish this, a team of researchers at the University of Zurich developed the “FlowLight,” a tool that detects when a worker is focused and signals availability for interactions to others. First, the tool measures whether workers are in a state of “flow,” detecting this through computer activity like keyboard and mouse usage. Then, the tool signals via a lightbulb mounted nearby whether now is a good time for interruptions. Like a traffic light, red signals that a person should not be interrupted as they’re in the midst of deep work, while green means go ahead.
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In der dritten Folge des DSI Podcasts «Genial digital?» spreche ich mit Podcast-Host Milena Ragaz über den täglichen Gebrauch von Handys und Computern. Wie nutzen wir diese digitalen Geräte im Alltag und bei der Arbeit? Und vor allem: wie können wir sie nachhaltig nutzen, um künftig neben unserer Produktivität auch unser Wohlbefinden zu steigern?
Milena Ragaz besuchte mich in meiner Funktion als DSI Forscher in meinem Büro am Institut für Informatik der Uni Zürich. Dabei sprachen wir unter Anderem über PersonalAnalytics, RescueTime und Apple Screen Time. Das sind alles Ansätze, um unsere eigene Gerätenutzung besser zu verstehen.
Wir diskutieren Erkenntnisse diverser Studien, welche wir mit PersonalAnalytics durchgeführt haben, und ich teile konkrete Tipps, wie die digitale Selbstbeobachtung und -Reflektion nachhaltig wirken kann.
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Ein kurzer Teams-Chat hier, ein Zoom-Meeting dort – und zwischendurch noch die “ganz kurze” Frage von der Chef:in. Kein Wunder, dass Fokus oft auf der Strecke bleibt.
In der aktuellen Folge des Podcast Schampar Digital habe ich mit Frank Richter über genau dieses Thema gesprochen:
Wie wirken sich ständige Unterbrechungen auf unsere Arbeit aus – und welche Strategien helfen, um Flow statt Frust zu erleben?
🎧 Jetzt (auf Schweizerdeutsch) anhören auf Spotify, YouTube oder Apple Podcasts:
This post first appeared in German on www.mindfulpacer.com.
Hallo zusammen!
Gerne möchte ich die Gelegenenheit nutzen, um (endlich) ein Statusupdate zum MindfulPacer-Projekt zu geben. Dieses ist schon lange überfällig, aber diverse Herausforderungen haben dazu geführt, dass sich dieses mehrmals verzögert hat.
Wie einige vielleicht wissen, ist MindfulPacer Mitte 2023 aus einem Masterprojekt am Institut für Informatik entstanden und die Projektfortsetzung wurde dann Ende 2023 mit dem Postdoc Team Award ausgezeichnet, aufgrund dem interdisziplinären Charakter, welche u.A. Medizin und Informatik beinhaltet. Um die nächsten Projektschritte zu finanzieren, haben wir bei der Digitalisierungsinitiative der Zürcher Hochschule (DIZH) einen kleinen Forschungsantrag gestelt und erhalten. Das Ziel dieses Forschungsbeitrags ist, MindfulPacer zu veröffentlichen und anschliessend die Community einzubinden, um gemeinsam das Projekt voranzutreiben. Nach einem Wechsel in der Co-Projektleitung, wir haben mit Tobias Hoch einen würdigen Ersatz gefunden, und haben im Frühling 2024 mit dem Projekt starten können!
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I am thrilled to announce the acceptance of our newest FlowTeams-paper that marks a continuation of our seminal FlowLight-paper. This blogpost first appeared in the FlowLabs blog.
Multi-tasking Craziness in Hybrid Teams
A key challenge that knowledge workers in hybrid teams face nowadays revolves around finding a balance between focused work and collaborating with their team to support them. When an individual spends too much time with teamwork, individual productivity might suffer. Conversely, when focusing only on progressing one’s own work, teamwork suffers and co-workers might remain blocked with unanswered questions.
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