Searching for change
Of productivity, information architecture and intentionally shaping habits
Hi! Unfortunately this post will be public a bit late, I got some flu and I couldn’t help myself but give up and delay the writing to a moment where I felt better. I think it is respectful for myself, caring about my health, and also fo everyone who reads me, to do my best when producing content where you invest some of your time.
I also wanted to share that last week post went very well and it is one of the most viewed at the moment. It is the longest I’ve ever written, and I’m very scared of being too verbose. As you know I like to experiment with the newsletter and I’m trying out a new writing structure that could lead to some longer content. Feedback is always welcome. Let me know any thought you have, I hope to keep doing better by learning things through these experiments.
Let’s start.
Takeaways (TL:DR)
Productivity is quite a hot topic, especially if we focus on the professional part of our lives. Theres’s so much attention and literature about the topic and even if the productivity mania is well fed from the capitalism propaganda to optimise the rat race of daily workers, I believe it also rooted somehow in our nature and evolution as a species to optimise our tools and delegate processes in order to do more with our lives. It is very important, and I think also very stimulating, to think about the impact that tools and solutions have on our way of thinking and relating with the world. Our actions, communication and thinking processes are interconnected, and being deliberate about the habits and the way of working we choose and design for ourselves can a have a great impact on changing ourselves and the way we think.
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Weekly retrospective
In the last couple of months I’ve been working more side by side with my colleague, developing the design system and the redesign of our client’s application. So we daily come to each other desks to see and discuss things, and we look each other interact with our computer and softwares, sometimes even using each other workstation. We sort of started a silly dispute on keyboard shortcuts (my side) vs graphical interface controls of the software (his side). There’s no winner of course, everyone is confident with his way of interact whit the software, and while I sometimes do things so fast without him even noticing, I also sometimes trigger his mockery as I struggle to remember a particular shortcut missing several attempts.
These discussion broke some sort of “habit blindness” and actually gave me a lot of awareness about the way I use devices, and the fact that even if as a designer I’m forced to use a cursor and a mouse to interact with the space of drawing softwares, I still try to use the keyboard as much as I can and I know that using the keyboard to avoid continuous movements to grab and release the mouse can be a great productivity boost, also training your muscle memory to write faster. But why do we care so much about the efficiency of our processes and our productivity?
What is productivity about?
I’m a productivity maniac, I watch so much content on youtube about productivity, self-improvement, habits. I’m a super curious person and I like to learn and grow and be a better version of my self, so this kind of content really hooks me up. I asked myself why is productivity so important today that the world is full of content creators talking about ways to be more productive, the internet is full of productivity tools. And why there’s also a huge amount of public interested in such content and products. I believe there are three levels, at least these apply to myself.
Capitalism and the rat race
If we think more of the word itself, productivity is about producing more, and this is so deeply linked to the capitalist culture. We want to be more productive in order to do more in our jobs, to spare more time to achieve more by going the extra mile, get that promotion, earn more money to buy more stuff and things like that. The cult that is building up over productivity habits, tools and features is surely fed and intricately interconnected to capitalism in the way it built our society and influence our goals in life. It is a hard truth, but this is what it is.
Transhumanism and the evolution of humans
The second reason I believe is found in pride. We like to be productive because is often measured in some way or in the context of precise goals and we feel to be better than ourselves and others when we are able to achieve more. It triggers our self-esteem, it feels like we can be super humans, and is somewhat deeply rooted to our very nature as species because we were able to thrive with our fragilities also thanks to our ability to use and exploit tools in order to make things that evolution could achieve to provide to our own biology at the same speed. Every hack, every optimisation feels like a little step of personal evolution. I’m convinced that the component of being able to express always more potential is probably the strongest.
Design thinking and problem solving
The third reason is a bit of a personal one. Productivity is also a matter of optimisation, removing obstacles, finding patterns to automate, and similar problems. Finding solutions to this problem spaces is very satisfying in terms of problem solving for the sake of itself. We know we like enigmas and solving puzzles, and I believe that productivity related solutions tickle also this part of our brain. Be able to adapt things to ourselves, design and build processes to optimise structures and entire systems, or just refine a single task to spare energy and time can be of great satisfaction.
My new productivity setup
Of course I have an interest in softwares and digital products. Pretty obvious considered it is my own job to build this kind of artefacts. Because of this, in the last couple of years I developed a daily habit over checking the Product Hunt feed for new product launches and find useful tools for me, or for my team collaboration, and also to look at their design, be aware of the latest capabilities of technology and this sort of things. It is part of my routine to be inspired and keep up with the progress of my industry.
And if you link this to the previous topic you’ll guess that I have a particular passion over productivity tools, things to manage whatever: tasks, time, people, teams, skills, files, infos, yatta yatta yatta. For example I’m a big fan of Notion, which I promote to any person I talk to and I use daily to manage some things including this newsletter.
A couple of weeks ago I found out in my “daily hunt” about Raycast, which is basically Apple Spotlight on steroids and open source to let the community build commands to control anything by it. Last week I ended up investing part of my weekend to change a bit the configuration of my main devices (phone and laptop) accordingly.
Raycast, “empty” dock and keyboard
For my new laptop setup, I installed raycast, downloaded from the store any extension that could be useful for my daily tasks or linked to applications I use, and began to actively focus on internalising this new interaction. So anytime I press ⌘+space on my keyboard, I have a window over anything in my computer and I’m one interaction away from anything I need. I just need to be able to express it in words and digit. I use it to navigate to an app, open them, I use it to translate words from italian into english, to make math and conversions, to position windows in the screen and also to play music, search for things or so many other things. Of course I still struggle to use it every time, my brain suffers the weight of more than 20 years of using a cursor as a main tool of interaction and we all know how reluctant to change are our brains, but I’m placing my best effort to switch to this new habit. In order to facilitate it, I also did little adjustments to put negative incentives to my usual cursor interactions, for example, I unpinned every application from the dock, so now if I have to open an application I use daily even if I have the automatism to go search it on the dock, I won’t find it if it is not open, and I’ll remember to use Raycast instead.
Single page phone and search feature
In order to match this mindset on my smartphone and train my mind over this new kind of interaction, I also removed all the organised pages of applications in my iPhone — I used to one thematic pages for utilities, multimedia, work, burocracy, and others with related apps and widgets — and kept a very simple, single page, with three stacks of widgets and only 3 apps in the dock. The largest widget at the top of the page is for main utilities (maps, calendar, mail), a second small widget gives me access to my three main Notion spaces (big fan, I promote this productivity app to anyone I talk to) and the third small widget is for multimedia (pictures, spotify, duolingo). In the dock I keep the most used applications: the phone app, whatsapp and the browser (try Arc if you don’t know it). For any other application or need, I swipe down and search. In this way I’m helping my brain to get used to search exactly what I want or need at that moment instead of roaming around and remember the position.
Information architecture, and shaping your habits and mind
Information architecture is a particular field of practices that revolve about naming, categorisation and organisation of things, knowledge and information in general. It is one of the pillars to design and develop digital products (information technologies) because we need to make information on screens understandable and findable to anyone who’s using them. But it also comes in place when you think of organising your books, music, clothes. Abby covert is the best person in the worls from which you can learn the basic concepts of this practice. So of course there is no correct information architecture, anyone organises stuff following their own criteria, based on the way they think, and at the same time the way information and knowledge is organised shapes our way of thinking and remembering stuff. Some spaces and products gives us the freedom to play, think, and bend the organisation to match us, others forces us into structures that could change your thinking habits.
As a millenial, I’m part of the last generation that learned addresses and telephone numbers by heart, and that should learn poetry by heart to train memory and stuff like that. These days, I begin to question the utility of studying things like geography when everybody has detailed maps on their phones. Day after day we need less ROM (long term memory to store information) and always more RAM (short term memory to process information) in our brains, as we delegate to devices the task to store and retrieve information, we can focus on reasoning and make sense of that information. I strongly believe that the way we interpret the world and interact with information rewire our brains and change the way we think and our habits.
From this point of view, my new setup has some interesting implications from a information architecture point of view, let’s see some of them.
Spatial vs Semantic navigation
Moving from a cursor navigation to a keyboard navigation means that the basic structure of how the information is organised (at least in my mind) changes from a spatial paradigm, the one of folders and boxes where to place similar things, to a semantic one based on language and the names of those same particular items.
Hierarchy vs Flat structure
The usual categorisation structure often ends up in creating more levels of organisation, nesting boxes, stacking up rules. Of course this nesting creates a hierarchy where some things are hidden more deeplyin the structure than others. A semantic search instead brings in a more flat structure, where everything is at the same distance from you at anytime, and basically you are delegating to the machine and software the effort of creating rules and structures to find things for you.
Prioritisation vs Flexibility
Of course a hierarchical and organised structure forces you to take decisions, prioritise things at the cost of others in the hierarchy and this can be optimised up to a certain point and reflect you own priorities, but it is rigid. Having a more loose structure brings flexibility to te equation, all the things are on the same level so nothing is prioritised and this can be a problem but everything is “prioritised” based on a particular context in time and space because everything you need in a particular moment is at reach.
Pros and cons of my experiment
As I was mentioning above, I believe that changing this kind of habits can have a short term drect impact on other actions and habits, while also changing entirely the way your mind works on a longer period. The following are my speculations over the pros and cons of this new setup.
Productivity and efficiency
Obviously the first advantage I hope to find in this new setup is to see an improvement in my productivity. I suppose I should become faster in tons of little insignificant actions that working 8 hours in front of a computer we do millions of times a day and should stack up into something. It should make me faster also in writing as I’m prioritising way more than before the muscle memory of typing instead of the one of using the cursor. This can easily prove a disadvantage because reprogramming a 20 years habit can be hard, it will probably have a long learning curve and can result in being less productive for a long period of time.
Decluttering and focus
I immediately noticed the advantage of declutter. Since I don’t need icons and folders everywhere to click on them, my digital spaces are now way more clean, I tend to have less windows open, and everything helps focus. The drawback of this is that at a certain point I could completely forget of the existence of something if I use it or search it more rarely.
Intentionality and serendipity
Another huge advantage I found, very connected to the previous one, is that now I always need to be intentional to use a particular application or piece of information. Because I have to search what I need, I only open up things when I really want or need them. This reduced a lot distractions, it doesn’t happen anymore that I open my phone to check my bank account and my dopamine loops ask me to open youtube instead and get caught into half an hour of videos. Or that by searching a file in my folders I get stuck looking at random things. The downside is that by removing the possibility to stumble on unexpected things, you reduce your chances for serendipity, sometimes finding something you weren’t searching for it’s a gift, and often times having organised structures increases the chances that what you find is similar and useful to what you where searching for instead.
AI, language models and language interfaces
The last advantage is a complete bet based on the trends of the last years. First came voice assistants, now large language models like ChatGPT, the future of technology seems to move towards conversational interfaces. In few decades of computing we moved from interacting with machines in a very technical way, completely bound to their complex commands, then to replicate environments and interaction from the world around us (desktop and other skeuomorphic metaphors) up to achieve interactions in the most comfortable way for us humans, the one we use to interact with each other: language. If we really go in this direction, getting into the habit of using the keyboard more and train the brain to use words to navigate and act is a good way to future proof our efficiency in interacting with computing devices and digital spaces.
What do you think? Which are you patterns of interaction with digital products and spaces? Have you ever thought about them with critical thinking and intentionally selected them based on their repercussions? Let me know in the comments or with an email or whatever.
I’m super curious to track with attention the impact of this little new habits over the next months and look out for changes in the way a think or maybe even in the way I design information architecture and interactions in my job, bringing in a different set of personal biases.
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Thanks for reading to the finish and see you next week!
Tobia
Bellissima, bellissima newsletter, Tobia. La rileggerò ancora, per riflettere con calma. Grazie.