Ex-ops manager. Now independent. Occasionally opinionated about productivity tools and the people who sell them.
For six years, I ran operations at a 60-person software company called Ember Labs. My job was to make things work " which meant figuring out why a smart team kept missing deadlines, where work was disappearing, and why we kept rebuilding the same processes from scratch every quarter.
By 2019, we'd gone fully remote. By 2022, I'd learned more about what makes distributed teams productive than I ever wanted to know. I also learned that most productivity advice is written by people who've never had to make a payroll or ship software to actual users.
In late 2022, I left to go independent. I took some consulting gigs, did interim ops work for a few startups, and spent way too much time thinking about why some remote workers thrive while others burn out.
The answer wasn't about finding the perfect productivity system. It was about having any system at all.
Most productivity gurus are selling you a system you don't need. What you need is to stop making the same decisions over and over again.
The highest-leverage thing most solo operators can do isn't optimize their calendar or find a better note-taking app. It's to decide once how they handle client onboarding, then template it. Decide once how they track project status, then systematize it. Decide once what tools they use for what, then stop shopping.
Everything else is just procrastination with good branding.
Since people ask:
Full transparency:
I don't do paid reviews, "sponsored content" that pretends to be editorial, or pay-to-rank lists. If I've given something a bad rating, no amount of money would have changed it.
I take on a few consulting projects each year. Usually ops strategy stuff " helping teams figure out why their processes aren't working, or why their "async-first" culture still feels chaotic.
Good fit: You're a small team (5"25 people) that's distributed, profitable, and genuinely wants to work better. You're tired of meetings about meetings and tools that create more work than they solve.
Bad fit: You want someone to implement the latest productivity framework you read about on Medium. You think the problem is your tools, not your processes. You use the word "synergy" unironically.