I would say, seriously, find a new job. It is demeaning to a human being to be in the position you find yourself, especially if there's no light at the end of the tunnel.

But if leaving this job is not a viable option at this time, I would say: Take advantage of your innate strength as a human being, which is to say, intuitive thinking. You're never going to match a machine when it comes to quantitative analysis of huge bodies of data.

Are you sure it’s necessary to know about competitor moves the instant they happen? I’m a salesman not a PM but I don’t feel the least bit embarrassed about hearing of a competitor feature from a customer. In fact now I have an opportunity to ask them questions about their need.

One approach I'm finding useful is to deal with discrete projects/responsibilities/topics in regular time blocks, and within each, use a limited part of the time to "adapt to changing circumstances": emails, news, changes in legal rules (I'm a lawyer), etc. That keeps my focus on building/creating, not just reacting.

Some changes must be taken into account. Some resolve themselves over time. Others don't matter.

It's also helpful to make a list of "all" possible inputs/tasks/focuses of attention — then, out of every 5, select 1. And out of those, select one of every five. That gives you (roughly) the top 4% of important things.

I also read something on HN today that resonated [1]: "you can only ever actually be doing one thing" so pick anything that "would be worthwhile to do right now, without any expectation that you know what might be 'best'", do it, and repeat.

FOMO is a b####, but virtually everything is unimportant. And with respect to important things, consider the unimaginable vastness of the universe and how trivial even the most important things are in comparison.

[1]: previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36253882

There were some popular SaaS products doing aggregation form multiple sources (email newsletters, websites, rss feeds) into a daily morning email. One had the word "brew" in the domain.

I believe founders closed their service and started a new one based on AI (some yers ago).

It wound be nice to have such tool that can sort through communication and highlight important action items, I want this, but I want this to go further: I define my goals and priorities and it acts as personal assistant with preparing weakly goals, daily action items, managing my todo lists, outsourcing some part of my todo list, etc.

The important part is I can't just hook up some random saas into all my business communication.

How much of these signals actually matter? If the only reason "accept you'll miss things" didn't work was "anxiety", you need Zoloft, not Notion.

You have lost the plot. Get off your phone for a week.

The slop is everywhere

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