Azeem Azhar

Another one of my favorites is

that I use it to prioritize my to-do lists set against the plans that I have.

I mean, those who work with me know that I'm always pushing, putting pedal to the metal.

I've got way too much on.

And so prioritization becomes quite important.

The amount of time I spend has declined significantly, but the quality of that has improved dramatically.

But perhaps my favorite new use is building software that works.

So I've been writing programs for a long time, since the early 80s.

Over my shoulder, you can see my first computer just over there from 1981.

But I didn't keep my skills up to date.

And I remember about 15 years ago, my CTO at my last company saying, please stop trying to write software.

You've got a development team working for you and they can do it.

He was, I think, pleading with me because the quality wasn't particularly good.

But what I can now do is build software that works.

I might not be able to sell it.

I might not be able to get it into the app store, but it works reliably.

And I have made, I kid you not, dozens of software tools, many of which I use daily or weekly or run constantly in the background.

These might be complex workflows or they might be things that I've built through a combination of Replit and Cursor.

They include a content management system that helps me make sense of the hundreds of things that the research team reads every month.

This is something that is designed for the way I want to work.