Tag: Psychology

• Adam Savage on Lists, More Lists, and the Power of Checkboxes

  Published Jan 23, 2020

  # Adam Savage on Lists, More Lists, and the Power of Checkboxes

  In this Wired article, Adam Savage provides a pragmatic description of how he breaks down complex projects using lists.

  In my mind, a list is how I describe and understand the mass of a project, its overall size and the weight that it displaces in the world, but the checkbox can also describe the project’s momentum. And momentum is key to finishing anything.

  Momentum isn’t just physical, though. It’s mental, and for me it’s also emotional. I gain so much energy from staring at a bunch of colored-in checkboxes on the left side of a list, that I’ve been known to add things I’ve already done to a list, just to have more checkboxes that are dark than are empty. That sense of forward progress keeps me enthusiastically plugging away at rudimentary, monotonous tasks as well as huge projects that seem like they might never end.

  I love the physics metaphor here. There’s lots of other insights to be gained by thinking about how work follows physical principles. For instance, projects also have inertia, friction, and surface area:

  1. Inertia. The longer a project sits waiting for you—weighing on your mind—the harder it is to get it moving.
  2. Friction. Inertia is driven by initial friction. In parallel, of course, kinetic friction can make it hard to stop working on something. This is why multitasking doesn’t make sense with most projects.
  3. Surface area: It can be hard to attack a single, huge project idea, just like how a large ice cube melts slower than many little ones. List making is a key way of breaking up the surface of a project into smaller pieces, making it easier to handle. Increasing surface area also facilitates collaboration: it’s easier to hand off smaller pieces to others, and to put them back together again.

  To return to momentum, though, Adam makes an excellent point: breaking down the work helps keep momentum going even when you put the work down.

  That may be the greatest attribute of checkboxes and list making, in fact, because there are going to be easy projects and hard projects. With every project, there are going to be easy days and hard days. Every day, there are going to be problems that seem to solve themselves and problems that kick your ass down the stairs and take your lunch money. Progressing as a maker means always pushing yourself through those momentum-killers. A well-made list can be the wedge you need to get the ball rolling, and checkboxes are the footholds that give you the traction you need to keep pushing that ball, and to build momentum toward the finish.

  Another point in the article that’s worth emphasizing:

  [I]n a project with any amount of complexity, the early stages won’t look at all like the later stages, and [the manager] wanted to take the pressure off any members of the group who may have thought that quality was the goal in the early stages.

  I’ve heard this discussed in the context of critique, or “10% feedback”. When sharing work with others, it’s important to disclose the stage the work is at. Typos should be caught at a project that’s basically ready to publish. They shouldn’t even be discussed when a work is being conceptualized. The focus on early stages should be the concepts themselves, and how they fit within the broader context.

  Last thing. This is excellent:

  There is a famous Haitian proverb about overcoming obstacles: Beyond mountains, more mountains.

  🏔

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• Beautiful is good and good is reputable

  Published Jan 23, 2020

  # Beautiful is Good and Good is Reputable: Multiple-Attribute Charity Website Evaluation and Initial Perceptions of Reputation Under the Halo Effect

  The halo effect is essentially how positive—but irrelevant—traits influence our perception of what the thing with the halo actually says or does. These authors explored how charities manifest the halo effect on their websites, and find evidence for four varieties of halo effect.

  this study employs charity websites as a multi-attribute donation channel consisting of three attributes of information content quality (mission information, financial information, and donation information) and four attributes of system quality (navigability, download speed, visual aesthetics, and security). Based on the proposed framework, this study proposes four types of halos that are relevant to charity website evaluation —collective halo (attribute-to-attribute), aesthetics halo (attribute-to- dimension), reciprocal-quality halo (dimension-to-dimension), and quality halo (dimension-to-dimension)

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• Keeping the buzz in buzzwords

  Published Jan 23, 2020

  A thought-terminating cliché limits conversation by capturing a complex (but potentially debatable) subject within a reductive term or phrase. Merlin Mann references this idea in episode 164 of Back to Work when discussing curiosity and buzzwords.

  Thought-terminating clichés can be used to avoid discourse on a subject: by never unpacking the components of an idea that are debatable, those components go unexplored. They can also be exploited to veil ignorance or illogic—the speaker can state the complex term and allow the implication to have impact without contextualizing/explaining it while the intimidated audience shies away from critique or questioning.

  This explanation makes the phenomena seem villainous, but many of us are prone to committing these crimes—through buzzwords! Buzzwords are terms that catch on because they represent something exciting to a discourse. Then, because they’re popular, they get used frequently, by many people. Because they are somewhat novel, these different uses attach slightly different meanings to the same word. Eventually the buzzword’s overused (reducing the novelty, and therefore the impact of its meaning) and/or overloaded with meaning.

  Most of our buzzwords were real things at one point (and sometimes they still are). When buzzwords are used effectively they allow a good conversation to move faster between speakers who have the same mental models about the buzzwords.¹

  Sometimes, however, buzzwords are said to represent concepts that aren’t fully understood by everyone in the conversation. When my meaning of the word “design thinking” differs from yours, but we both refer to design thinking in conversation nonetheless, we can run into trouble.

  In these situations, buzzwords obfuscate the ideas we’re actually talking about. In my experience, we also know when we’re using buzzwords. We can guess at when others are using them, too. As a result, the conversation loses meaning, and we lose trust in the conversation.

  

  # Dealing with buzzwords

  So what can we do?

  Well, the easy thing to do is to clarify. When you use a phrase with many potential interpretations, try to clarify how you’re using the phrase. When others use words that may have multiple meanings, ask specific questions about what they actually mean. This clarification might seem like extra work, but it only needs to happen when terms are first invoked—and it’ll prevent lost time and energy due to the consequences of thought-termination later on.

  More importantly, though, we should try to avoid thought-terminating clichés altogether. Take time to break down the concepts you’re talking about in concrete terms. Explain them in ways you haven’t heard before to avoid relying on trite metaphors and anecdotes. If you can really get at what you mean, your language will be minimally re-interpretable: that is, it should be near-impossible to understand your explanations differently from how you intended.

  As a result, your communication will become more impactful. The conversations you participate in will have more novelty, too, making it more exciting to discuss the ideas you’re sharing. This may result in more buzzwords emerging, but that’s okay—use the same approach to break those down, too.

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  1. See the excellent Notes on the Role of Leadership and Language in Regenerating Organizations for more on this. ↩︎

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