Books: Your Way Out of the Filter Bubble (#18)

The driver for writing this post, on the value of books, came from becoming the book club chair at my company.  This topic has been done to death, so I’m going to take some different angles and write this with young professionals in mind.

Case #1: Are newsfeeds your primary touchpoints to the outside world?  Then you, my friend, are in a filter bubble. The benefits of constant access to tailored content are easy to see but the drawbacks of personalization are more subtle. Your network of Twitter/Instagram/LinkedIn friends can create a shield of similar religious, political, and cultural views.  Your 4 conservative friends will be filtered out by Facebook’s algorithm when you don’t like their “Obamacare isn’t working” posts, and soon it’s as though they won’t exist.  As psychologist Meg Jay writes in The Defining Decade, our "Urban Tribe" of close friends is unlikely to challenge us, and instead likely to reinforce our worldview.  Non-social news sites and even Google have begun internalizing your preferences whether or not you are signed in.  In 2014, you’ll rarely be exposed to the whole scoop on the internet.

Books offer an alternative: to expose you to different worlds, topics and views.  The power of a book is its lack of connectivity, because a hard-bound work cannot personalize your experience.  An ardent capitalist can buy The Essential Works of Socialism and get the thorough, unvarnished view from the other side.  As marvelous at technology is, we are all aware that omnipresent distractions are not a great environment for learning.  When you open a pdf of a research report, it is so easy to fire up Chrome or stuff the report in a folder for later – the computer enables collecting and organizing, but not doing. With a book all you’ve got in your hands is words.  IKEA captures many of the drawbacks of digital news sources perfectly with its amusing “BookBook” ad.  

Case #2: There’s a “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” factor that make a 250-page book superior to its short-form internet rivals.  I spent a lot of time under the perception that reading 10 articles from 5 websites could be better than 30 pages from a book.  But do you remember anything from the articles you read this morning or last night? On the chance you remember one new factoid, will you now feel well versed on the topic and be able to contribute to a conversation?  If the value of most articles is basically zero, you aren’t better off multiplying that by 10. When you’ve read a book relating to the topic at hand, your contributions can be both substantive and well-reasoned.  How often have you fallen down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia and Google searches, with ten tabs you eventually close in shame when you don’t have the energy to get through them all?  With a book on a topic, the author has organized the information for you and given you history, multiple angles and time to ponder when the book was closed.  Those who make themselves start and finish something are usually happy they did, and will want to keep going.

Case #3: Books represent the crucial midpoint between fun and productive.  A lot of young professionals want to feel “on track” and that we’re working toward something besides what we’re doing from 9 to 5.  Yet, if they only way to be on track is sit through online lectures on how to use the SQL Server or what Linux is, I would be the first to end up back on Facebook (or even worse, Buzzfeed).  I firmly believe there’s a happy medium between textbooks and fun novels where the writing is both well-written and relevant, easy to read and enlightening.  Switch by the Heath Brothers exists at this midpoint.  The book, subtitled “How to Change When Change is Hard”, offers data-driven advice that is equally applicable to work and life.  I keep going back to advice like “tweak the environment – make the right behaviors a little easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder” and “spend more time scaling successes and less time dealing with problems” and the stories that accompany this advice.  It brought me to new worlds (it was amazing how researchers led poor Vietnamese communities to healthier and cheaper eating habits, or how they grew a culture of safety in hospitals), gave me complete and convincing arguments, and made me (someone who is really distraction-prone) happy with learning on the bus ride into school.  Let's scale that success.

New App Idea: "Running Early" (#15)

Pitch:

People are often late.  Even very bright individuals have a voice in their head that says, "we'll be fine, we can wait…" and don't leave enough time to get where they need to be  Some employ tricks, like buying Clocky, the alarm made at MIT that runs across the room.  Others turn the time forward in their cars to fool themselves into getting more places early.

But after a while, we know our clocks are two or four minutes early, and the benefit is gone.  How can we reignite that fire many people need to be on time?

I will make Running Early (working title).  It will periodically and randomly adjust the time on your mobile devices (and ideally, your smart car) so that they are between 0 and 10 minutes fast.  My bet is that you may not give yourself a bigger buffer if you know your clock is 5 minutes fast, but you will compensate if your clock is either 2, or 5, or 8 minutes ahead.  Running Early will sync across devices but stay out of the way, subtly encouraging you to get out the door and to your meeting a few minutes early.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't need Running Early.  We should have plenty of responsibility and self-control.  But according to everything ever written by behavioral economics, we just don't.  We know people like being a few minutes early, to be able to walk instead of run before an appointment, to sit and check their email or just enjoy the day.  And yet they don't get this enough.  Running Early removes cognitive dissonance from your life, giving you a handful of minutes you didn't know you had, and resulting in a happier and more prompt you.

Logistics:

The app's first screen would have a big green button that activates the time randomization, with no sign-in required.  On Android I would have a 1x1 widget, similar to the "Data ON-OFF" app.  One can always drag up from the bottom to peek at the correct time (I would have it like this because knowing the true time ruins the power of Running Early, so consumers should look at it quickly and rarely).

Monetization strategy #1 is to patent the time randomization and license or sell it to OEMs (if you have a friend or relative in intellectual property, please send me their contact info!).  If I can't do this, monetization strategy #2 is to expand the feature set so that either Running Early builds a brand and user base, or so people will be willing to pay for a premium version.  Additional features could include a check-in button on the Android notification tray, which would, if synced from the user's calendar app, generate a report showing how early they were, how their on-time rate varied by randomization settings, weather, and other items data geeks might enjoy.  Integration with Foursquare would allow the user to log when they check in.

A patent would be ideal.  But if I had to build a brand, I would connect Running Early to blogs about procrastinations, behavioral economics, building good habits, etc.  The app would be linked to a lifestyle, a choice that says, "I'm not perfect, but I'm resourceful and smart enough to work on my lateness".

What do you think?  Would this app add value / improve punctuality?  Would people beyond me and those I've spoken to actually download this app?  Thank you for your suggestions!

Apps: The Time-Saving Paradox (#4)

I have Evernote, SMemo, Any.do, Stickynotes, Calender, and Smart Voice Recorder on the first two screens on my phone.  And I still didn’t get much work done when I came home last night.  Actually, let me clarify.  I sent off some emails, put the rest in archived folders, and deleting extraneous downloads and setup files on my computer.  On the way home, I put deep thought into which apps I use most to move to the front page (Flipboard or Snapchat? Definitely Flipboard), and, within that page, moved Facebook and Music Player (the top picks, of course) to the place where my thumb most naturally hovers.  So, I did no real work after work yesterday.

That day was a bit extreme, but not so unusual that I failed to realize a trap I fall into, that I think much of the young professional world is drifting toward.  We are obsessed with saving time to the point that we don’t care if we’re taking seconds to shave off milliseconds. We feel like we have no spare time…so we use it poorly, as a reflex.  This extends from our myriad task management strategies (I’ve seen friends write on themselves, carry around a whiteboard in their bags, put sticky notes everywhere, and worse).  Seriously, the hundreds of hours spent designing and integrating weather widgets is probably greater than the time people save vs. touching the app (…or sticking their heads out the window).  I believed I've reached the limit of time-saving apps.

What I mean is, apps are great.  So is the internet.  So is device syncing and streaming from the cloud and SD cards that can store a million articles for you to read later.  But none of these save as much time as goal-setting and focus.  If I had just closed every other window last night, I would have gotten through those stat software tutorials.  I don’t need the Self Control App, I just need self control.

I made a rough list to set priorities, to constrain my options as the tech world insists on giving me more every year.  I won’t tell you how to live your life, but I do better when I follow rules like these:

1. Do not let yourself call organizing work.  That’s a copout.

2. Unplug at some point every day, not because cell phones are giving you cancer or carpal tunnel, but because you’re human, and it’s alright that you can’t resist your devices.

3.  Don’t allow more than ~5 tasks to accumulate on a note app each day (put the low priority ones somewhere else), and aim to complete just over half of them.  You don’t need the stress of clearing a self-memo, or an inbox, every single day.  In fact, just delete that one that will take a month right now.

Keep it reasonable, organize it once, and Nike.