Category: Posts
The car remote’s button
I discovered after one year that by long pressing the car locking button on the remote I can close the car windows as well.
I had no idea about it and not being enough curious I didn’t find it out myself. It was only after a casual chat with a friend that it revealed.
The affordance of this feature is poor. There was no translation of what I know about interacting with buttons on a digital product and that physical user interface.
What can a designer do to make interfaces more discoverable? How can we make explicit the multiple functions a single button might have?
Adding Review and Revision to your Creative Process
In your deliberate practice of daily creative habit building you cannot skip the review and revision phases. Exercising your kick 10’000 times without feedback and correction would have a pale comparison against a complete feedback loop.
When you write daily only the check boxes, that’s what you risk. A stale routine of boring activities carried on just for the sake of them.
If you are serious about improving, then, reviewing your past performances becomes essential in your habit-forming practice.
Where should you start? From the beginning, take your oldest artifact and put it in your review queue. If it is old enough there will be a good chance you will look at it as something sufficiently new for you. That’s a good application of the future self approach. If you put enough time between your creative production and the review you are multiply yourself into: past, present and future selves.
Second order thinking would help in your metacognition. How are you reviewing your past creations? What can you learn from them? How will the learning affect your future creations?
Plan Ahead or Fail
When time is running out and you didn’t take advantage of it’s more than risky. You are risking more of no making it. You have already failed. You have failed in using that time smartly. You had to plan your time before its end. There is no planning and no thinking to do when time is scarce. Things are already decided. You cannot take your time when your time is taken.
Where There Is Internet There Is Home
I felt more comfortable hundreds of km away from home with a fast connection rather than at home with poor or no connection.
This is scary. Where is resiliency?
Precision of Language
What do you mean by what you say? It’s a powerful and ambiguous question that could bring you more clarity or rejection. We have evolved to who we are today thanks to our communication skills. Our ancestors, the best ones, survived because they were precise when describing food location or where predators were wandering. The precision of language allowed us to be the powerful living being we are. When food or safety is not our primary goal it’s easy for us to be superficial and approximative. It can become part of our culture to speak fast and easy without giving too much attention to the words we are using and how we are using them. That makes us lazy and sloppy. Imprecision in communication makes us prone to error, to waste and inefficiencies. Asking “what do you mean?” or “Can you elaborate that?” or “Can you provide an example?” is usually seen as being on the defense, or even annoying if not insulting. It’s the precise role of who wants to be an effective listener to ask those questions. Designers, for instance, need to understand deeply and carefully the people involved with their design. They cannot be superficial or approximative or imprecise, unless there is a specific attitude to elicit knowledge with that behavior. Asking clarifying questions is a skill, to be used carefully. It can lead to rejection, failure or making you appear weird and annoying but it’s an important tool to become an effective communicator.
Systematic, iterative, incremental experimentation as a self-growth strategy
Intentional serendipity is a powerful technique to have new ideas and to test our thinking skills. It requires not only being comfortable with uncertainty but to search for it. It’s a delicate balance between preserving ourselves and our interests while opening to the chance by creating opportunities intentionally. As human beings we have in our nature both the adventure spirit as well as the one of surviving and so avoiding exposure to dangers. That is why it requires an effort to go beyond our comfort zone while minimizing risks. Iterative incremental approaches are useful to form a habit to experiment, continuously. Nobody would self-impose pain or lethal risks, and a healthy attitude towards experimenting, evaluating, and reflecting on the outcome of our trials is an effective push to self-growth.
Small Steps Towards Increased Future-Proofing of your Writing
Hey, Max, this is your past self. I am present, yes, but as long as I write a word, it immediately becomes a thing of the past. I have finally a bit more time to reflect: I don’t like the latest trend with your daily writing practice, it has become a chore and a burden. Something emerged, though, your desire to leave a meaningful trace to be read back in the future. I wanted to highlight the nature of this pattern so you might take actual value out of it when you will read this.
You are writing for yourself but in public. You keep on saying that you should be your first reader, the primary audience of your blog posts. It seems like you are failing all types of audiences since you are bored of your own writing. Hint: if you are bored while you are writing and you are not satisfied with what you have written you cannot expect anybody else to find your words to be interesting nor valuable. Curate better your list of interests and write about them, as a starter. Visualize yourself rereading what you are about to write: how will you like it? What value will you find in it?
By being more self-empathetic you can try to understand better how to create more engaging content for others.
A few months ago I did some critical exercises in trying to post myself questions about what I want to write and what I would actually write. It would slow you down but by being more critical towards your ideas you can improve them.
Remember to separate the research, the first draft writing and the revision phases. You are too bent towards writing impulsively, because you’re lazy and bored (see above) and you tend to be undisciplined in your creative workflow. Write less and shorter but never skip the key stages of the creation process. Better one single sentence, meaningful, engaging, worth to be remembered rather than mumbling gibberish for the sake of filling a page.
See? That’s better than the previous days. I’d like to read this again.
Well done.
Technological Hedonistic Adaptation
The availability of high-speed Internet connection shouldn’t affect my will and attitude to write my daily article. Pen and paper should be enough. But when I load my favorite text editor online, and I have to wait seconds because it’s available, I am already changing my mood.
It’s an addiction. And it’s not good for creativity. My goal is to publish a memorable daily article. Something I will find valuable in the future. I am not benchmarking all connectivity services as a profession. It would be nice to be more mature about that.
But slow Internet connection is really frustrating. It’s not helping at all.
So, here is my slowly written and slowly published article for today.
That’s another non-memorable one.
Working On The Move: Far but Close.
A virtual space to meet online becomes home when you are traveling. There are a lot of limitations in remote working in virtual offices. On the other hand, having a decent connection, a screen and a keyboard, immediately makes you feel at home. You hear and feel your distant colleagues in the same way you usually do, even from your real home. But you’re not in your house, your in another place, maybe alone, maybe with friends and family. And the weird thing is that it reveals being unusual to be working in the usual conditions while being in another place. It’s confusing but also stimulating, there is continuity that keeps your team together, regardless of where they are located in the world.