Everyone wants their software to be faster.

Faster onboarding, faster checkout, faster everything.

But fast and productive are two different things.

To me, the best software is the one you barely have to use. You open it, it does the thing, you close it.

That's also why "Agents" are so popular now, because they promise a world where you don't even have to open an app or tool anymore, you just chat with it.

Fast is not productive

Productivity is a weird one, to be honest. Most people try to squeeze more out of their day. Their time, their tools, all of it. Do more, faster.

But a lot of the time they just get really efficient at something they didn't need to do at all.

Peter Drucker said it best:

I recently read The Goal by Goldratt. Great book!!

It's a novel about a guy running a factory, and he's got a few months to fix it or it gets shut down. So he tightens everything up. The machines, the workers, the output. And it's still failing.

Then it clicks for him. Productivity is doing the stuff that actually moves you toward the goal. Everything else is just being busy.

Same counts for software.

Goals & Onboardings

Everyone says the same thing. Make your onboarding as easy and as fast as possible.

Sure. But that's step two.

Step one is asking what the software is actually for. What's the one thing a user came here to do? Until you know that, faster is just faster.

Take an accounting tool.

The big goal is simple: Handle your accounting, all your invoices, in one place.

So the onboarding goal becomes something small. Connect your bank. Or upload your first invoice.

Once I know that one goal, the job of a designer gets kinda easy. You strip everything else off the screen and you get the user to that one thing. No clutter, no detours.

Try out an onboarding of a competitor yourself to see how they get rid of most features in the first few steps. You'll realize how they "activate" users and what makes their users really productive.

How to really define a productive software

This is where a lot of software gets it wrong.

A lot of accounting tools made uploading an invoice super fast. Drag, drop, done. Looks productive.

But uploading invoices was never the goal. Handling your accounting is.

So the actually productive version removes the step. It scrapes your invoices in the background and you never see that upload screen again.

And the thing is, this isn't just a nice idea, the numbers back it up. Baymard found that 18% of shoppers drop a checkout because it's too long or complicated. And the average checkout has about double the form fields it actually needs. Every step you remove gets more people to the goal.

This is also why I love working with engineers. We get to push what's technically possible, and a lot of the time the most productive design is the one that deletes the task completely.

Good enough beats perfect

This works for anything. Even a calorie tracker.

The goal is not: Log food & calories.
The goal is: Lose/Gain Weight.

Yet, most trackers obsess over precision. The exact grams, the exact amounts. They made it faster and faster to add your food and count your calories.

IMO, a productive version gets it juuuust about close enough.

For me, I just snap a photo of my meal into Claude, or I tell it what I ate, and it estimates. Even if it's off by 50 or 100 calories, by the end of the day I've got a good picture and I can adjust. (I'm not weighing my chicken on a kitchen scale, sorry.)

And the data agrees. A Kaiser Permanente study of nearly 1,700 people found that the ones who kept a food diary lost twice as much weight as the ones who didn't. The researchers even noted it doesn't have to be formal, a Post-it or a quick text to yourself works fine. The tracking is what gets you there. The decimals, not so much.

Close enough, but done, beats perfect but never started.

Be productive in Life, and your Software Design

If you care about productivity in your own life, your work, your habits, whatever it is, then your software should be productive too.

And the way you get there is always the same. Understand the goal. Remove everything that isn't it. Get the user there as fast as you can.

That's about it.

PS: I just started a Substack where I share the raw stuff. My personal notes on self-improvement as a founder and investor, and how health, mindset, and spirituality feed into being a better founder and designer.
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It's called the 1% Club, and you definitely should check it out.