Productivity

October 8, 2024

Less News is Good News

Stepping into the General Store is like taking a step back in time. Glass jars full of Tootsie Rolls and Swedish Fish greet you at the front door. The cracked walls are lined with photos showing the Deli as the town’s original grocery store. There’s a framed copy of the local newspaper, and the headline reads, “Men Walk on the Moon.”

My interest in the news used to be like most — casual. Since 2020, though, I’ve spent an abnormal amount of time obsessing over it. A lot happened that year, if you recall. One article per topic used to suffice. Now, the News app on my iPhone follows any article I click with a delightful notification about another. The algorithm picks up my interests quickly. However, it seems as if the perspectives and opinions of each article I read get more polarizing, controversial, and perhaps even darker.¹ Another News notification? Click.

With the 2024 election on the horizon, I decided to give up the News app. But, with the satisfying vibration of each breaking story, I knew I couldn’t do this alone. I researched multiple screen time-saving apps, and decided on Opal — it promised 5 years of my life back, free from distractions. I created an account and decided which apps were the most detrimental to my focus. That was Monday night.

Breaking: The Urge is Real

Tuesday morning, I immediately reached for my phone. The apps I habitually open were blocked but, instead of checking other apps, I rolled out of bed and started my day. Throughout the week, I continued to click my phone’s notifications, only to be denied access to them by Opal. After each blocked attempt, I simply moved on to the things that needed to be accomplished. On Wednesday, I headed to the office 15 minutes earlier than usual. On Thursday, I arrived 25 minutes early! Opal awarded me with a new gemstone and let me know that I had saved enough time to watch 17 episodes of Friends. How nice, I thought.

This Just In: Data Doesn’t Lie

The Opal app was instrumental in preventing the urge to read the News, but does not provide free data. Luckily, Apple’s Screen Time app provides loads of interesting factoids. I learned that from Monday evening through Saturday, I picked up my phone 383 times! (91 pickups for Text Messages alone.) The number of notifications received during that time is also revealing — almost 150 from each of my email accounts. The biggest culprit? 263 text message notifications over 5 days. That’s much higher than I would have expected, and easily the largest source of my daily distractions.

News to Me

I didn’t look at the News app once, but I was able to ignore 173 notifications from it. I received almost as many notifications from News as I did from both my personal and professional email accounts combined. No wonder I’ve become so obsessed with the news. But the best news? Even though the number of notifications received went up each day, my daily screen time went down through Thursday. Just being more mindful about our time, I’ve concluded, seems to enable us to focus on more important things.²

It's Sunday, and I’m back at the General Store with my family. My wife and I are splitting the veggie wrap, my son Owen is enjoying his everything bagel — toasted with cream cheese — and Samantha, my daughter, is sipping her orange juice. I can focus on these little details, because I'm not staring at my screen. I also happen to notice the stack of newspapers by the coffee, and pick up a copy. I catch up on a week’s worth of news after 20 minutes, and haven't looked at the News app once. That’s one small step for man, I think to myself, one giant step for mankind.

October 1, 2024

To Solve, or to Shrug

Give a Creative Director a creative brief and make yourself a bucket of popcorn. Sit back and watch as he or she questions the objectives, pushes back against the target audience, and argues over the communication points and product benefits. The brief is all wrong, the Creative Director will explain. It needs to be reworked. The Strategist will have to dig deeper to find a more insightful approach.

Give that same creative brief to a Designer and expect ten solutions by morning. It’s the inquisitive nature of designers that drive them to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Like an artist, they just want to make creative stuff. Like an engineer, they want to do it in a way that solves real-world challenges. Yet, they’re rarely given the credit they deserve.

In Stolen Focus, author Johann Hari discusses the infinite scroll, an internet browser feature that automatically loads more content when a user reaches the bottom of the page. It was designed by Aza Raskin, the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, who admits that the feature likely contributed to smartphone addiction. (Hari, 2024, p. 120) We spend more hours on the internet when we aren’t given the time to pause, reflect, and make a conscious decision about continuing to scroll. But I can’t help but imagine the creative brief that led Raskin to his solution: create more engagement. To that extent, didn’t Raskin solve the problem brilliantly?

Raskin’s Center for Humane Technology offers a course that’s focused on shifting the “foundational paradigms underlying technology creation.” It’s a fantastic course, filled with astonishing data about the harms of persuasive technology. My favorite diagram is inspired by Donella Meadows’ “12 Leverage Points to Intervene in a System.” There are seven forces to balance the attention degradation cause my social media, in ascending order. At the bottom of the list? Design Changes. The course calls out that design “changes may be small, but they start the conversation.” Um, thanks for the recognition? Significant changes can’t happen until the design issues are solved, for crying out loud! This is a perfect opportunity to praise and celebrate the work that designers do. Once again, they are relegated to the bottom of the ladder.

In Ayn Rand’s seminal 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, she imagined an American dystopia where businesses are overrun by government rules and regulation. Instead of continuing to fight and argue with politicians, the self-made leaders of the world — Atlas, as Rand envisioned them — simply retreat to a secret resort. They strike. It’s a wonderful analogy for today’s designers. Without them, who would solve all the problems with persuasive technology? Who’s going to figure out the solution to the infinite scroll? It will be a designer, of course. At least until they all decide to shrug.

September 8, 2024

Talk Designer to Me

Designers and project managers are like oil in vinegar — they don’t mix. Project managers focus on budgets, objectives, deadlines, and the process of getting from point A to point B. That’s foreign language to designers. We’re concerned with colors, patterns, fonts, and the way things look. Creativity doesn’t always spark according to a detailed timeline.

Of course, if graphic design is going to behave like a business, clients need to pay for our services. That means, for small to mid-size creative studios without project managers, creative leaders must manage our own projects. Enter, the modern project management system. For a project management system to help designers get from problem to solution, it would be helpful if we spoke the same dialect. Perhaps a creative brief will help us find the right solution.

Creative Brief

Objective: Find a project management system that speaks the same language as the creative team.

Mandatories: User interface must be intuitive, the system should be easy to learn, and the software needs to be free, forever.

Timeline: Monday, research project management systems. Tuesday, narrow selections down to three options. Wednesday, test final options. Thursday, make final decision. Friday, go to happy hour. Saturday, write blog post.

The Candidates

The team reviewed four options: Podio, Asana, Trello, and Miro. Podio was the first option to be nixed from the list. Users need to request a demo of their app, and that initial time investment was too big to overcome. While we appreciated the introductory video on Asana’s website, it became quite clear that their primary audience is corporate businesses, and not boutique creative studios. Trello has a modern user interface, custom illustrations that help guide their process, and plenty of features. Trello was a finalist, however, we wanted something more intuitive.

The Winner

Turns out, we already owned the project management system we had been looking for all along. With Miro, we can easily sign in through our Google account, and there are plenty of visual templates to get started with. We can choose from any of the traditional project management frameworks — from Agile to Kanban — and they are only a click away.

Conclusion

The best solutions are often right in front of your eyes. While we researched multiple project management platforms, Miro was included with our paid Google Business account. Not exactly free, but we incurred no additional costs. We tested the software on a new project, and there was virtually no learning curve. Everybody spoke designer, including our client. Problem solved.