I’m as much of a sucker for the personal productivity game as any other geek enraptured by systems and organization while suffering from ADHD symptoms. In my procrastination reading, I’ve read a fair amount of pushback on complicated task management systems. I don’t think it’s indicative of a trend, just different people coming to the same set of realizations at different times. The latest for me is Seth Clifford’s “The sickness of efficency”, which makes a lot of great points about workflow tweaking.
All told, it’s harmless if all your tweaking and playing with workflows and apps doesn’t get in the way of doing stuff. After all, isn’t the whole point of this personal productivity stuff is to give us more time to do the stuff we really want to do? When personal productivity becomes a goal in itself, we miss the point. If we can get our work done in six hours, instead of eight, that’s two extra hours to live—or at least work on something else we want to do.
I’m reminded of the great John Cleese talk on creativity. (Transcript] In it, Cleese talks about “open” and “closed” modes of thinking and working—how we need to be an open mode to be creative and create new ideas, but a closed mode to implement those ideas. And also tells a bunch of terrible lightbulb jokes.
Part of the push back against systems and heavy task management is that is far too easy to put yourself in a straightjacket. We can get so caught up in the act of productivity to enter that “open mode” of thought that makes creativity possible. Something I’ve banged my head against multiple times in figuring out just how the hell to keep me on track with creative projects is how to fit them into my system. The trick for me, it seems, is to fit the time to be creative in my system, not the act.
Systems are great for putting everything in place to clear up the time for that “open mode” thinking. Though, no matter how good we get, we can still sit in our creative space and get bupkis. Or worse, get distracted. As John Cleese says, “…[A]s we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking.” And, for us geeks who get off on systems and organization, and all that jazz, we’ll probably end up thinking about our systems, and how to tweak them for optimal efficiency. So, the cycle continues.
There’s a happy medium somewhere for all of us. Some of us will use OmniFocus, some of us will write stuff on a 3×5 card, and some of us will just be able to keep all this stuff in their heads. If there was a real, one-size-fits-all solution by now, I think we’d all be using it, and there would be no more of this hand-wringing about systems. Certainly, there’d be fewer apps in the App Store with checkmark icons.
I love reading about people’s journeys to that happy medium, and sharing my discoveries. If we can avoid prescriptivist nonsense, and avoid tweaking our systems to the detriment of actual stuff we both need and want to do, we’ll be halfway there. To be honest, I think the only real solution is to find the people who don’t need lists or task managers and eat their brains to gain their powers.
I have a startup that I plan to launch soon called LiveIn that combines all the best features of TaskRabbit, Lyft, Zaarly, and AirBNB. It’s a sharing economy enabling service to end all others—we match people with empty rooms with people who can fill them. However, instead of paying money, our LiveIn Chore Monkeys pay for their space by performing chores for the space owner. The responsibilities are negotiated up front through our iOS and web apps, along with terms and length. A LiveIn Chore Monkey could cook meals, do laundry, clean house, drive people to work or school, or other “unspecified services,” and are compensated with the ability to live in some of the hippest communities in America. We’re currently in private beta in Brooklyn and the Bay Area, but planning a public launch in 2015. LiveIn also collects a small listing fee to help keep us sustainable.
Okay, this isn’t an actual startup, but it seems like live-in help is the inevitable endgame of the “sharing economy” promoted by Bay Area technologists and Venture Capital types. The premise at least makes sense on the service: you have something you can provide: a spare room in your house, the ability to mend clothes, a car with a back seat, and you offer it to anyone who is willing to pay your price. Of course, anyone can tell right away that this isn’t actually sharing. The “sharing economy” is a wonderful piece of doublethink that hides the truth that these companies are just enabling a new form of a “freelance gig economy” with more middlemen to take your share. Even the marketing for some sharing economy apps pin it as a side hustle. Lyft promises drivers that they’ll make up $35 an hour as a taxi hack.
What is the real sharing economy? It’s tool libraries, material exchanges, carpools, and food pantries. It’s New York’s shadow transit system. It’s services where people give as well as get, and where money rarely changes hands except perhaps a membership fee. Food pantries are in serious need as donations drop and need rises with cuts to government assistance. Of course, there’s no money to be made by venture capital in those spaces, which echoes a statement I’ve made before: there’s no money in solving real problems faced by real people. Once again, we have to think outside the startup to find new solutions that aren’t just adding middlemen and profit taking.
I’m not going to harp on Yo, except to point out that Yo is ambiguous enough that content and context will need to be bundled back in by its users. Otherwise, the future of Yo-style messaging looks pretty bleak. Though a joke, the previous link illustrates a big problem with The Great Unbundling, that of cognitive overload. Simplicity only works to a point. To stay with messaging, decoupling a message from its content introduces a lot of ambiguity. The closest example is the infamous Facebook “Poke.” Ostensibly designed to signal a friend that hasn’t updated their status in a while, its actual purpose was ambiguous enough that users created one: to solicit sex. If Yo is the first in a wave of content and context-free “messaging,” others will follow suit. Imagine a world where if you send a “Sup” instead of a “Yo” to an acquaintance or co-worker, it ends up misconstrued as a come-on, or something illicit. You’ll be begging to bundle content again.
There’s also the problem of proliferation. My iPhone home screen only holds 20 apps, while each page in Android’s app drawer holds about the same, depending on implementation. A user has to search, scroll, and remember which new app does the one thing that they used to do in the other app that doesn’t. Ordinary users learn how to use technology with a task-based mindset. Change one thing: add a step, move an icon, and they have to relearn the task all over again. One advantage of smart phone and tablet UIs is that they lend themselves well to fast task-based learning. It will still mess someone up to drop a change like splitting app functionality. Aaron Walter of MailChimp makes a point in a great essay on app unbundling:
People will, of course, muddle through as they always do. But, if unbundling doesn’t benefit the end-user, who does it benefit? App makers benefit from new downloads, and new avenues to collect data and serve ads. It’s good for juicing stagnant numbers, too. No wonder Mark Andreessen is a fan. Unbundling works best for people when it offers a net benefit to the user. Andreessen talks about how Google unbundled search, but in doing so it provided a better search. Facebook unbundled finding people from Google, but still provided a compelling place for people to go to. The new unbundled apps can offer an easier way to do the same old thing, but not all do. This is why the emphasis on unbundling makes me skeptical. I figure one day the novelty will wear off, the numbers will be juiced as much as possible, and the Swarms and Yos of The Great Unbundling will looked on as a failed experiment. If I’m proven wrong, I’ll be chagrinned, but the world will keep spinning.
The new, discounted iMac has the RAM soldered to the logic board.The Surface 3 is nigh-unrepairable.. We’re increasingly being locked out of the inside of our computer hardware, and there’s precious little we can do about it. These are symptoms of the appliance-ificiation of technology, which is itself a symptom of mass-adoption of technology by ordinary people instead of hobbyists. A personal computer is more akin to a refrigerator, or a washing machine to many users. They want something that works, something that’s in their price range, and they don’t want to have to open it up to fix it when it breaks.
Considering that so many technology people like myself came up in an era where owning a computer was both a mark of the sort of person we were and required learning the ins-and-outs of computer maintenance, this shift has unmoored more than a few. Witness the gnashing of teeth from the iFixIt team with each, increasingly unfixable revision of Apple hardware, or Andy Ihnatko’s frustration about the retina MacBook Pro’s omitting the Ethernet port. [1] I’ve been bitten by the unfixable nature of Apple hardware twice in recent months. My iPhone 5S was completely replaced twice. One due to a broken screen, which on the 5S can no longer be swapped out. Second, due to a fault with the vibrator motor in my replacement.
The truth is, annoying as it may be, people like us are increasingly the minority. Most people want their tech to be small, light, and cheap like kitchen appliances. Most people don’t care about upgradability and repairability. How many people fix their own cars—or even change their own oil? Even in the enterprise world, it’s easier and faster for IT departments to swap out broken hardware than fix it. And if “BYOD” becomes common, the onus will be on the end user who will just replace it. Laziness will win, at least as long as typical consumer priorities remain the same.
It’s something that Phonebloks and Google’s Project Ara miss, even beyond the technical issues of speed and power consumption. If the priorities of users are cost and size, it can become more expensive to work in expandability and repairability over a closed system. At the very least, it’s more parts that could break. The priorities of hackers, tech hobbyists, and others who bemoan the appliance-ificiation of technology are different than the priorities of the growing mass market. Either their priorities will have to change, or we will. My money isn’t on the former.
In fairness to Andy, he considered Ethernet to be a “Professional” feature, and the rMBP has “Pro” in the name. He doesn’t make the same complaint about the Air, which is the mass-market Apple laptop. ↩
Today, dollar vans and other unofficial shuttles make up a thriving shadow transportation system that operates where subways and buses don’t—mostly in peripheral, low-income neighborhoods that contain large immigrant communities and lack robust public transit. The informal transportation networks fill that void with frequent departures and dependable schedules, but they lack service maps, posted timetables, and official stations or stops. There is no Web site or kiosk to help you navigate them. Instead, riders come to know these networks through conversations with friends and neighbors, or from happening upon the vans in the street. — The New Yorker – “New York’s Shadow Transit”
Reading about the underground transportation in this city—happing right under my nose, walking distance from my apartment—had me thinking. People may harp on about how revolutionary the “sharing economy” is, or how Uber and Lyft are going to disrupt the taxi industry. As long as they’re priced for Silicon Valley incomes, contemporary ridesharing services aren’t going to help working class, ordinary people get to work any time soon. Part of what makes the shadow shuttles of New York so effective and essential is that they’re often tied to a community: immigrant, non-English speaking, or just plain poor. They go not only where the subway doesn’t, but also where no well-paid Uber or Lyft driver will go. It’s also proof that you don’t need smartphones, cloud hosting, VC funding, or other high tech crap to create something that actually improves people’s lives.