What people say
In their words
Case study · Huw, 80,000 Hours
Huw leads the AI-safety headhunting team at 80,000 Hours. We do around five hours a week — a Monday planning call, daily morning calls to decide what the day’s deep-work blocks are actually for, a short afternoon call to hold them, and a shared map of the week so the plan lives somewhere other than his head. His org funds this as a normal contractor arrangement.
He’d been scoring his own weeks — productivity, enjoyment — since before we met, so there’s a before-and-after most engagements can’t give you. Over the first four weeks, excluding the kickoff week, his weekly averages moved: productivity 5.6 → 7.5, enjoyment of work 5.2 → 6.75. We’re still working together.
I think there is just a very clear difference in the graph of weekly wellbeing and weekly output before and after. It feels quite easy to point at causation here. This is a very longstanding pattern.
I don’t think there’s been a week where I haven’t got to the end of it and felt mostly good about the week.
The mechanism, in his words
A great way to get metacognition is borrow someone else’s.
There’s something really valuable about literally borrowing memory. Once I can get a difficult problem into someone else’s context, I can talk around it a bit — and suddenly a different route becomes possible.
Case study · Ediya
Ediya is a YouTube creator and retreat host with 400,000 subscribers. We did a two-week sprint on the brand philosophy she’d been stuck on for three years.
I’d been stuck for three years on my brand philosophy — what I actually stand for, why I’m doing what I’m doing, my mission and purpose. It started as “I guess I’m a little burnt out, I’ll give myself a break,” and snowballed into something that got bigger and bigger and more unmanageable. It gave me a reason to doubt myself.
I’d been looking for support but couldn’t find it. A lot of people were like “you should do it my way” — I couldn’t find someone who could see it from my perspective.
Working with Alex felt different. The way he takes notes, takes in everything I’m saying, tries to understand things from my perspective — it was really reassuring. I had a lot of trust I wasn’t abandoning myself in any of it. He wasn’t trying to convince me of his way.
What stands out is how quickly we got past it. I didn’t realise how close I was to it. I didn’t think it’d be that simple.
And from earlier work
I feel like I found a right-hand guy — I feel force-amplified. His way of listening (attuned, and detail-oriented) meant I could focus on what I was good at and trust the rest would be well-handled.
I feel myself relaxing thinking about the effect Alex had on the company as I write this.
You blew my mind a few times with our early collaborations… The deliberateness with which you approach life, thinking, learning — it’s special.