Anika Begay
Laura Mae Martin is a big believer in the settings menu. As an executive productivity consultant at Google, Martin spends a lot of her time working with other Google employees to improve their productivity and communication systems, and one of the things she often recommends is taking a few minutes to poke around in the options. “With your phone, with your email, with your Slack, all of these things, the features are there, but we don’t take the time to dig into them,” she says. She even thinks you might have to look at the settings before you can use the app. “Like, you can’t get into the app unless you spend 10 minutes figuring out what it can do.”
In this episode of The Vergecast, the first of our three-part miniseries on all things productivity and work, we talk to Martin about how he sees things changing. Four years after the pandemic forced us all to work from home, are we finally understanding remote and hybrid work? Are managers realizing that sitting still isn’t (and maybe never was) a good metric for productivity? And is the age of hard work finally giving way to a healthier, more holistic way of thinking about productivity? Martin sees all this from so many perspectives and has a lot of thoughts 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 still so terrible. One of Martin’s jobs at Google is to consult with teams building 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 will 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 a lot of practical advice on how to manage our digital lives a little better. Charging your phone outside of your bedroom, tech-free Tuesdays, and a couple of prettier email labels could actually 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 learn more about everything we’ll be talking about in this episode, here are some links to get you started:
