Win back your time, then put it where you chose.

At 32, I hit my goal: 100,000 euros in revenue.

I can tell you exactly what it feels like. 100K doesn't make you happier than 70K. The trouble is, you have to hit 100K to find out.

That's the problem this manifesto goes after. We've spent fifteen years learning to go faster. Nobody ever asked us where.

Open any productivity app. It can count your completed tasks, your focus sessions, your unbroken streak of days. It has never once asked you why.

I see the same thing in my own trade. All my clients are buying the same thing from me: saved time. It's the worst metric I know. A freed hour is worth nothing until it gets reallocated. Nobody measures the second half.

Productivity is saving time. Time is the only resource nobody can make one more unit of, because we all end up in the same place. So the only question that matters isn't how much of it you save. It's where you put it back.

A vague goal doesn't get fixed by discipline. Discipline makes it worse.

I know the price. In 2024 I wrote down, in black and white, that financial insecurity was the root of my troubles. Hitting the number didn't dissolve it. It just picked a new target. Along the way: sleepless nights, anxiety, a body that sends the bill on a date you never planned for.

An HR client showed me his reports after six months of AI. Dense, clean, perfectly empty. He had saved a considerable amount of time. He could no longer tell me what he thought.

And there's the long version, the one Tolstoy wrote in The Death of Ivan Ilyich: a man who did everything he was supposed to do, exactly the way he was supposed to do it, and who understands at the very end that he lived the wrong life. The book is nearly 140 years old. It describes my generation with unpleasant precision.

I'm not against anyone. I'm against three ideas.

Saved time as the measure of progress. It's the most common metric and the most misleading one. What will separate people over the next ten years isn't intelligence, it's their relationship to mental effort. Some will use their tools to think more. The rest will use them to think less. Saved time tells you nothing about which side you're on.

Top speed mistaken for ambition. Waking up at 5 a.m., grinding through 80-hour weeks, sleeping less. That isn't ambition, it's a loan. Before founding my company, I put my conditions in writing: no work after 6 p.m., no weekends, 10 weeks of rest scheduled in advance. Freedom isn't something you claim afterward. You negotiate it up front.

"Find your calling." There is no meaning waiting to be found in a life. There's introspective work, and a constant effort to create some. Ordering a 22-year-old to discover their vocation is asking them for an answer that doesn't exist yet. Existentialist before 40, essentialist after. Pile up experiences first. Only then, prune.

Intentional productivity is saving time to reallocate it to what you chose. Two moves, in that order. Never the reverse.

First move: make the goal less vague.

It took me years to figure out where I found my answers. One summer I walked across the Alps on the GR5, the long trail that comes down out of the mountains to end in Nice, on the Mediterranean. Somewhere on that crossing I noticed I was deeply happy, and I went looking for the reason. I found five things, and all five were there that day:

1. A goal. Reaching Nice.
2. Wonder. The mountains, the sunrises and the sunsets.
3. Encounters. Brotherhood, love.
4. Physical effort. The reminder that I was once a hunter-gatherer.
5. Disconnection. Which is what makes connection possible.

I had everything. And that full tank of energy is what made the rest possible: launching the company, writing online, writing books. It wasn't a break from the work. It was the fuel for it.

Let me be precise about one point, because I got it wrong for years. The third ingredient isn't decorative. I spent part of my life losing myself, trying to build a business alone in front of my PC. What I found again out there is that real connection isn't what's left over once the work is done. It's what makes the work possible. Intentional productivity is not a solitary discipline.

Second move: go at the speed you can hold.

The same crossing taught me this one. I walked those 600 kilometers with a wrecked meniscus. My rule at the time was simple: stopping is cheating. I eventually gave in, saw a physio, and finished the 600 kilometers. What I learned there wasn't how to grit my teeth. It was how to silence my ego.

If you arrive burned out, you didn't optimize your route, you sabotaged it. Know your limits, accept them, set your level of ambition against them. That takes infrastructure: sleep, exercise, food, therapy when it's called for. It isn't comfort. It's the precondition for everything else.

Why now, and why it holds up:

• This is the moment. Our tools have never been better at saving us time, and never worse at telling us what to do with it. The gap has never been this wide.
• It's doable. The entry point is a single question, asked before you start working. Nothing to install, no method to learn.
• It's useful. One hour invested in a direction you chose is worth ten hours in a direction you endure. You can check that within a week.
• It's fair. A method that requires destroying yourself to work isn't a method, it's a filter. This one starts from your limits instead of denying them.

You're entitled to ask who I am to be telling you this.

Jean-Baptiste Berthoux, 33, married, father of a little girl, living on the shore of Lake Geneva, between the water and the mountains. That address isn't decorative. It's part of the setup.

I co-run an AI company in Geneva. I've written 4 books. Two newsletters, more than 200 issues between them. I've posted on LinkedIn almost every day since June 2022. I run or swim at least 3 times a week. I work 40 hours a week on average.

The last line is the one that matters. Everything else fits inside those 40 hours.

Before that: 33 ideas launched since I was 18, 33 that failed. An application for RSA, the French welfare benefit, in 2022. On November 30 of that same year, the technology I now make my living from wiped out three years of my writing work, and I thought it was over.

I'm not someone who found a shortcut. I'm someone who took ten years and finally figured out where the leak was.

And I checked every one of my boxes. I wanted a family, I have a family. I wanted a company, I have a company. I wanted to write books, I wrote books. Which is exactly why I can tell you that checking boxes was never the point.

I didn't work any of this out alone.

Gustave, an Afrikaner cabinetmaker in Franschhoek. He could have served me the comfortable version, the one where you inherit without owing anything. Instead he told me: heal your traumas so you don't pass them on. I had just crossed a continent to avoid thinking about mine. He reminded me that you work on yourself for other people's sake.

My site foreman, 2013. One morning we showed up late and he told us to get off our asses. He could have let it slide, we were only interns. It became my test: when I fail, I ask myself whether I really gave enough. The answer is usually no.

The physio on the GR5. He could have told me to stop, that was the reasonable call. He got me back on my feet and let me finish. He taught me that accepting a limit and giving up are two different things.

Leonardo da Vinci. He could have picked one trade and excelled at it. He chose art, science, architecture and anatomy, at the cost of a reputation for never finishing anything. He showed that you can scatter yourself for a long time before converging, and that the convergence is better for it.

One more thing I need to be clear about, because I sell what I'm talking about.

I don't build apps for you. I build the ones I need, because I love making them, and I open them up to you. The one I'm writing with right now existed before the idea of selling it. That's the only order I care about: a tool proves itself on its author before it gets offered to anyone else.

For a long time I assumed no screen could help you find your goal. Except part of mine came out of one. The Self Authoring Program sat me down and made me write, question after question, until what I wanted stopped being vague. So I build apps for that work too: apps that help you find your goal, not just keep it in sight.

And I will still, every time, push you to go outside as well. Nature is where I feel most alive, and my own deepest answers came on a trail, not at a desk. A notebook, a walk, someone sitting across from you: no screen replaces that, mine included.

Where a tool earns its place every day is the second move: recalling your intention before you start, protecting your attention while you work, and measuring the second half, the one nobody measures.

I sell my apps for two reasons I stand behind. Because it pays for me to keep making them. And because sharing what I know is the part of the work I like best, the part I did for free long before I knew how to invoice it.

That's not the end goal. The end goal fits in the question below, and it's free.

Before your next work session, before you open anything, answer two questions out loud:

What am I trying to accomplish? And why?

Thirty seconds. Do it five days in a row. You'll see soon enough how many of your sessions had no answer.

That's all I'm asking of you, and it costs nothing.

If after five days you miss the question on the days you forget it, then my apps have something to offer you: they're built to make it hard to avoid, and to help you answer it. If you don't miss it, you already have what matters, and you owe me nothing.

Even when I do nothing, I already exist. Creating isn't proof that I exist, it's a game I offer to life.

The long game is finding a speed you can sustain. A speed that honors your ambition and your humanity.