Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about two ideas: dogfooding and abstraction.
Dogfooding is simple: start by solving your own problem.
The best opportunities usually come from work that keeps repeating, takes too much time, or feels more manual than it should.
One example for me was presentation creation. I was spending too much time trying to make presentations look good, so I built a cowork skill to help with that. It saved me hours and made the output much better.
That kind of reflection is valuable on its own:
what do I keep doing again and again?
what is taking too much time?
what part of my workflow should be easier by now?That’s usually where personal efficiency starts.
The second idea is abstraction.
Once you’ve built something that works for you, the next step is figuring out how to make it useful for other people as well.
That means identifying what is specific to your situation and what can be made reusable.
If you’re a developer, it’s the difference between hard-coded values and configurable parameters. The same principle applies to tools, prompts, workflows, and templates.
In my case, the first version of the presentation skill was built for me. Later, I refactored it so it could generate presentations for other people based on their own description and branding.
That’s the shift from a personal shortcut to a reusable asset.
A simple pattern:
Notice the friction
Solve it for yourself
Generalize it so others can use it tooA lot of good tools start there.
If you’ve done something similar, reply to this email and tell me about it. I’d love to hear what problem you solved for yourself and how you turned it into something reusable.
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