Hyper-efficiency and how to benefit from it
Let’s start with the definition of what Efficiency is
Efficiency is the (often measurable) ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time in doing something or in producing a desired result.
First of all, you need to realize, that it’s not a goal. The simplistic model would be, with the least amount of inputs, you want to achieve the highest amount of output, especially impacts. In the end, you will waste fewer resources on the input. Speaking of less knowledge needed, to spend on producing this article for example.
Then you have a few categories of efficiency, especially in science and technology
You can choose which you want to follow and learn about, it’s up to you. I would try to focus on productivity-improving technologies.
My personal study
I’ve learned to cut on unnecessary decisions to save willpower through the day, simple as that.
More attention and room you leave to impactful decisions on your life, more impactful improvments will happen to you — yangwao
Mind when you should do the decisions over the day. This is probably a key ingredient as depends on you as an individual, I’ve learned when I can produce the most impactful decisions during the day, mostly is before noon, right after workout and shower and the rest of my morning routines.
From here I’ve learned that’s it’s quite important to save a deep work window for the most precious and impactful things you can dispatch, make done etc. Once you learned this habit, you most probably will be relentless no matter what you do.
During the day I would recommend learning to distinguish between low-key tasks and high-impact tasks. It’s a clairvoyance skill.
Once you will be trapped in the loop for furious super productivity, you will start seeing things where you can improve your process, what can be set way better and higher, achieve the most efficiency and effectiveness in the process. Learn that it’s not the same word.
The next recommendation would say is to learn to operate even in a non-known environment, how I call it myself, being super-immutable against the environment, probably have in head to write next article on that.
Once you reach this high level, you can carry your antifragility approach over cross-industry levels. No matter you lack knowledge, you can infuse from your previous industry and then carry on and snowball what you learn best.
Efficiency in Web3 with workforce
Usual digital projects start with having developers dedicated and paid monthly or per project/tasks basis. Usual vibes in web2. In web3, we can take this approach very differently. Especially offers room to play around.
KodaDot case-study
What we did with KodaDot, we’ve leveraged Gitcoin to find our new workforce to help us achieve our vision, faster. What has started to be an experiment, turned out to be our greatest advantage in building developers moat in the long run for our project.
Thanks for Github which helps to coordinate tasks in an open and transparent way, where anyone can plug in their bits of knowledge and help out. That’s nature where open-source development added its own sauce of value-add. We just learned to surf on top of it. Later things have evolved and we’ve started putting labels with bounties, various from $-$$$$$, where we’ve started 50USD from smallest, reaching up to $3k per task. Seems things take a while to catch up the fire and spread word of mouth. It has paid off, as now we have an amazing fireplace for delivering new stuff on daily basis.
One major downside of this thing is when there will be not enough wood to put into the fireplace or at least ideas to grow and developers might lose their income. We’ve learned that going this way helped us shortcut times to delivery as we’ve received initial capital ($1M) to drive the development of our vision in capital-efficient and time-efficient. Let me expand on that
Capital-efficient
Where usual dev studio models have someone paid on a reccuring basis, not every time you need that talent. This helps create a landing zone for the gig economy. Anyone can participate whenever they want and especially if they are eager to take the bid of bounty. Simple market mechanics.
If we feel there should be issues delivered faster, we learned to put higher bounty which brings developers into flywheel faster. In long run, we’re thinking to create a rental market as KodaDot will be quite bigger than OpenSea. The major difference we want to add is community participation, where developers will be in charge of the project, adding plugins and tons of other improvements and encouraging ppl forking, funding the upstream can have fair upside in long-term who will open IP.
Time-efficient
Briefly drafted this approach in the previous section. From the perspective of onboarding new talent to a new startup, it takes time to find the right talent, which clicks with an internal team with characters traits.
Let’s be honest, after 2 months, we still did not find anyone reliable for core stuff, there was always something missing in the right candidate. So we went with this, outside the circle of gig developers developing new pull requests, till we can assembly small team to coordinate this stuff long run.
The second is deliverability. Time-from-issue-to-PR. Once we make the issue, we can bid as much we feel needs to be done under time pressure and roll out to the production. This is could not be done with standard hierarchy in most internal teams. As lack of various experience for specific tasks. Once we tap in a big enough circle of developers' attention, no matter what you put there, it could be delivered, at least v1 version and then you can iterate. I would call it like niche-rental-gig-dev market, specifically for our use case
Efficiency is doing things right, while effectiveness is doing the right things.
Thanks to what is it working?
Probably instant value transfers. Current flow works, once code is okayish for merge, we’ve sent payout and merge, tada. The next iteration could be making a GitHub bot that will be in charge of the hot wallet and once someone writes LGTM, payout and merge will happen upstream.
Major inspiration
My major inspiration was Koyaanisqatsi. You will start seeing things, that you can adopt into web3.
Continue to next, I just wanted to put this out of my head, thanks for reading, and hopefully, I’ll expand on this in the future. If you want to hear some weird insights, you can find me at Twitter yangwao
Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is getting things done.
