Laura Mae Martin Martin is a big proponent of the settings menu. As Google’s executive productivity advisor, she spends a lot of her time working with other Googlers to improve their productivity and communication systems, and one of the things she often recommends is taking a few minutes to look at the options. “With phone, email, Slack, all these things, the features are there, but we don’t take the time to dig into them,” she says. She even thinks we might need to look at the settings before we can use the app. “You can’t get into the app unless you spend 10 minutes figuring out what it can do.”
In This episode of The Vergecast, In part one of our three-part miniseries on productivity and work, we spoke to Martin about how he sees things changing. Four years after the pandemic forced us all to work from home, are we finally getting the hang of remote and hybrid work? Are managers realizing that teamwork isn’t (and maybe never was) a good metric for productivity? And is the era of hustle and bustle finally giving way to a healthier, more holistic way of thinking about productivity? Martin sees all of these things from many perspectives and has plenty of insights on everything from communication styles to energy flows.
We also talk about the rise of digital productivity tools like Notion and Slack and why email is still so important (and so terrible). One of Martin’s jobs at Google is advising the teams that build Workspace apps like Docs and Gmail, and he has a lot of ideas about how those products work and how they could be improved. We also talk about whether ai can change the way we do things and whether it will help us get more done or just give us more to do.
Along the way, Martin offers us plenty of practical advice on how to better manage our digital lives. Charging your phone outside the bedroom, tech-free Tuesdays, and a couple of prettier email labels can go a long way. And if you have too many notes in too many places, it's time to create a master list.
If you want to know more about everything we talked about in this episode, here are some links to get you started:
