Month: June 2020

Categories
Wellness when Always-On

Slicing good hours into time confetti

I finally got around to reading a blog post a close friend had recommended in Feb 2019. It references a book by the academic and productivity blogger Cal Newport:

Last year Cal Newport convinced 1600 people to completely change their lives. He asked them to take a 30-day break from the optional technologies in their lives. Unless not using it would get you fired, divorced, or cause the people you love to spontaneously burst into flame, it was out. Say goodbye to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for a month. 

People’s lives improved, they were happier and ended up spending more quality time with family and friends. You’ve read similar results in a few other places before, I’m sure.

It’s what the writer then describes that struck me:

The real problem is “reverse FOMO”. You’re not missing out on anything online. But by always being online you’re missing out on life. 

and even more so this:

The ability to lift your phone at any moment is slicing good hours into time confetti. It’s preventing us from accomplishing big things and focusing…

I’ve known this for a long time and have never taken action on it. I spend a lot of time on Twitter and Reddit: acording to iOS’ Screen Time tracking feature, over the last week I have used my Reddit app an average of 100 minutes a day, and my Twitter apps an average of 65 minutes a day. 

Now I derive great joy from these sites. I have been ruthless on both about cutting out negativity, blocking people and keywords aggressively.

But it’s still over two hours. And it’s fragmented. And I’ve often struggled to find time to read my RSS feeds and newsletters, my backlog of saved articles in Instapaper and Pocket, and write and build up this website according to plans that have been in the works forever.

So I’m going to give Cal Newport’s 30-day challenge a shot: 20 June to the beginning of 20 July 2020. It’s not as much a challenge for me as a test to see if this leads to a clearer mind, more focused time and progress towards my plans.

I will continue reading, both online and books, but deliberately and in pre-carved chunks of time. I will continue writing on this site. And occasionally reflect on what, if any, difference the Twitter and Reddit isolation has made.

Here’s wishing me luck.

Categories
Data Custody The Next Computer

Email and Workflows – Part 2

(Part 1)

The most consequential change I had made was to change the default folder from my Inbox to one I called Desk (if I remember correctly).

The Manually Sort Folders extension made this possible:

The thinking was that we copied the idea of the inbox and outbox for email, but not how we actually work with it on our (paper-based) desks. The inbox was just a tray on one corner of your desk. it was not the centrepiece. the centrepiece was where you sorted, read, thought, composed.

I had set up a whole set of filters so that email from a whitelist would go directly into the Desk folder. This was my company management, my Product Management team, and key people from projects and partners I worked with at that time. Automated alerts, newsletters had their own folders. And finally, email from people I did not know would stay in my inbox.

A few times I day I would scan my inbox and rapidly triage email: I had a keyboard shortcut that would move email into Desk, and the Gmail shortcuts extension had one-key shortcuts to archive or delete email.

That meant I was free to spend most of my day in Desk, a folder with email that I knew was important, and into which no new email would flow unless I explicitly moved it there or it was from someone I had allowed in. Email could pile up in my actual Thunderbird Inbox or other folders, and I would not care. This most closely corresponds to the ‘Read Together’ feature of Hey, and meant that I could achieve flow several times a day.

Endnote:

By and large, open standards, open formats and open source software is tremendously more flexible and customizable. You can build a highly individualised experience that makes you highly productive over time. And/or you can build an experience that compensates for your unique weaknesses or disabilities in ways commercials software can’t or won’t.

The tradeoff is that because few open source projects have dedicated marketing and branding teams, the packaging will often be rather unsexy. Because the developer optimises heavily for the steady-state experience, setup will often be wizard-less (although this is a plus if it’s part of package managers like HomeBrew) and “hard”. The out-of-the-box interface will be optimised for functionality over looks, though it’ll be easy enough to tweak that with themes (and you can tweak those themes).

But if you understand that open-source software front-loads most of the work for increasingly less marginal work later, you’ll be able to look past superficial shortcomings. You’ll invest the time and effort it takes to set up your tool the way you want it. And you’ll be set for years – you won’t be hostage to software being sunsetted (Google Wave), business models changing (Dropbox, 1Password), the developer being bought by a larger company and either taking a different path or being shut down (Whatsapp, Tweetie, Dark Sky).

(ends)

Categories
Data Custody The Next Computer

Email and Workflows – Part 1

“HEY is not about workarounds. it’s about workflows,”

– Jason Fried, in the demo video for his new email service/client HEY

It’s a brave take on email. The last time anyone took on email with real vigour was eleven years ago. It was Google, with Google Wave. Tim O’Reilly termed it “email if it were invented today” instead of back in the 1970s. Google itself described it as bridging the “divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents” which really was even more ambitious.

Wave lasted a little over a year. Since then there’s been a lot of innovation in the design of email clients – desktop and mobile, especially after iOS’ popularity, but not in the basics of how you handle email. Even Google’s own Inbox, shut down but with many features merged with the mainstream Gmail, was tame compared to the audacity of Wave.

HEY is the first take I have seen that is in the vein of Wave.

But – as one comment online said – it’s an opinionated take on what email should be. Specifically, the opinion of Jason and DHH who have built it. Their workflows.

Contrast this with an open-platform email client like Thunderbird, which can be modified, via extensions, to suit essentially any workflow, any layout, any shortcuts. It’s a shame it’s not as popular as it ought to be.

During a phase in 2012-13 whenI dealt with many external parties at work and therefore several different individuals across different team, I used the outrageous SEEK extension that displayed my primary Thunderbird interface like this (screenshot from the SEEK homepage):

It resembled the iTunes Column Browser mode and was invaluable in quickly toggling between different ways of filtering my email. I was/am a fan of Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, so I used an extension to add those very shortcuts to my Thunderbird. There used to be a whole clutch of Thunderbird extensions I would use to create an experience that was uniquely mine.

Now you could make the case that these are workarounds to the fundamental problem of email, not workflows – the very thing that HEY avoids. But I’d argue that the sum of these customisations resulted in a Thunderbird experience that matched my communications workflow then.

(Part 2: The single change I made to Thunderbird to create a whole new workflow)

Categories
Discovery and Curation Making Money Online The Dark Forest of the Internet

Discovery of independent publishers online – Part 2

(Part 1: RSS, Google Reader, Friendfeed, WordPress)

Medium, created by one of Twitter’s founders in 2012 “initially… as a way to publish writings and documents longer than Twitter’s 140-character[s]“, is built around both discovery and publishing. In its early days it appealed to both sides:

In 2014

But having now establised itself as an attractive destination for writers, its home page focuses entirely on discovery. Each of the tags points to a Medium collective blog:

As an aside, Medium’s monetization model is somewhat contrived, based on a metric named Member Reading Time, 

As a user reads, we measure their scrolls and take care to differentiate between short pauses (like lingering over a particularly great passage) and longer breaks (like stepping away to grab a cup of coffee). Reading time incorporates signal from your readers without hurdles. You don’t need to ask your readers to remember to clap, or click, or do anything other than read.

It is a bold take, but does not inspire confidence.

This is in contrast to Substack, which allows its publishers to set their own prices and takes a 10% cut plus Stripe’s card processing fees.

Which brings us full circle to Substack’s discovery. Unlike WordPress, Substack’s incentives are in fact aligned with its publishers build a paying audience. But so far it’s followed a WordPress-like publisher-centric positioning. As with most marketplaces, it’s starting with building supply.

This will likely change over time if and when Substack feels confident it has cemented its position as the dominant independent publishing platform.

The big unsolved problem and opportunity is yet a neutral discovery destination of great writing for your specific niche interests, whether that writing is on Substack or Medium or a WordPress hosted or self-hosted blog, or a Threader-collated Twitter thread.

(ends)

Categories
Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

Discovery of independent publishers online – Part 1

Substack, the newsletter platform, is going to need a discovery engine. As it becomes increasingly popular as a publishing service, discovery becomes both a problem and an opportunity.

Substack “readership and writership has doubled there in the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic.” according to its CEO. 

This made me think about discovery of indepdendent publishers. 

RSS, the original pub-sub standard, had no discovery built in, primarily because it was the web. 

Google Reader had your social graph as a result of Gmail, and towards the end of its short life ended up with some good social discovery:

Friendfeed took that further. You could link a wide wide variety of social accounts to your own Friendfeed account, giving your friends a single destination to ‘follow’ you. People could mix and match friend feeds. In fact, you could even create a ‘shadow’ profile for people who weren’t on Friendfeed. It was a loss for both the social and the open internet when FF sold itself to Facebook.

Regardless, both Google Reader and Friendfeed were both near-social discovery services.

Today Feedly is the dominant RSS sync – and reader – service. Even today, Feedly’s discovery seems like an afterthought compared to its fairly well built subscription and reading capabilities:

And while Flipboard does support RSS – you can, as far as I know, add and follow an RSS feed into the app, it’s hardly one of the top publishing platforms for independent publishers, and its discovery is very broad, but also very shallow. 

I really want WordPress to succeed as a discovery service. They’re a great way for an independent publisher to start a blog. But I think their positioning is somewhat muddled with regard to discovery. It’s up-front-and-center in their mobile apps, which I would imagine a blog writer would use to publish on the go, not read.

But on their website it’s virtually hidden. 

Part of the reason for WordPress’ ambivalnce about pushing discovery is that its business model doesn’t involve intermediating the relationship between publishers and readers. It’s clear it views itself as a blogging platform, and its paid plans have entirely to with with added features for publishers. There are few incentives to actively increase audiences for their publishers.

(Part 2: The new generation: Medium and Substack)

Categories
Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Real-World Crypto

On the coverage of cryptocurrency in India

The Economic Times reported that “A note has been moved (by the finance ministry) for inter-ministerial consultations” regarding a legal framework for cryptocurrency. 

Other news sites (Bloomberg, MoneyControl, MoneyLife, ) have published their own articles, all citing the Economic Times. Naturally, the crypto press has picked up on the same story overseas. To the casual news reader, the ban is now inevitable.

The only piece of actual news in the ET article, though, is that a note has been drafted by the finance ministry for inter-ministerial discussions on a legal framework for cryptocurrency in India. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. Everything beyond this is speculation.

This has led to these articles being shared on social media over and over with similar speculative discussion. It’s another example of today’s media’s SOP to use sensation to drive page views, as we have seen in the series on 21st Century Media.

This could have been a chance to own a discussion, become the destination that people trust, about India’s approach to cryptocurrency. Any one of the media sites could have distinguished clearly between the news – the note – and the context: the RBI’s banning of cryptocurrency in 2018, the IAMAI petition in the Supreme Court to reverse it, the SC’s judgement earlier reversing the ban, the difference between a legal framework and the RBI mandate, what a good legal framework could look like. Coverage like this combined with the trust and brand recognition of any of these news companies could have heviuly influenced the awareness about, and therefore the debate on, cryptocurrency in India.

This is a lost opportunity.

Categories
Product Management

Panel discussion on Product Management as a career – and some reflection

A couple of weeks ago, I was on a panel discussion with other IIM Kozhikode alumni on Product Management as a career. Here is the video (90 minutes, but the YouTube page description has time-links to specific topics)

Unlike the rest of the panel, I’ve never formally run Product except for a brief period in 2013-14. I’ve always played a GM role who’s also run Product. After years of imposter syndrome, I think I’ve finally come to see this as a positive: that Product’s fallen automatically to me every time even though I was _supposed_ to be operating the overall business.

Finally, almost all of my career has been either in early stage startups or in early-stage skunkworks units within midsized companies. As someone who likes deep focused work, I’ve had to consciously shift to being comfortable with uncertainty, scarce resources and speed. I find that it still causes fatigue and occasional frustration, but having accepted these constraints, I am vastly better at dealing with it now than at the beginning.

End note: when asked to name two books that early Product Managers would find helpful, I suggested

  • How The Web Was Won by Paul Andrews, a 1999 book on a few technical and Product people at Microsoft in the early to mid 90s who, unknown to each other, got an entire organization to embrace the open web. Though not about Product Management per se, it’s a remarkably inspirational book about both the building of new products and about initiative.
  • Life After Google by George Gilder, a 2018 book on new disruptive areas of technology and the world they are likely to create. Again not about Product Management, but a great guide to the areas where new products will be built in the near future.

Categories
Data Custody Making Money Online

Digital Tenancy

We have discussed earlier how different generations approach media like books, movies, music. The young today are comfortable with streaming services:

 …they have never had to store anything, never had to back it up. They lament a TV show or music album no longer being available because a service chose to not renew a licenss, but they move on quickly because they know it’ll just show up sooner or later on another service. Impermanence is not a bug, it’s just part of the experience. 

But even in the cases where they do ‘buy’ a song or a book or a movie or a TV show, they never own it – it’s at best a license for an unpredictable amount of time. They are renters, digital tenants:

Unlike many other streaming services, Prime Video not only gives you access to selected content with your monthly subscription, but it also allows you to rent or buy movies. The latter is explicitly advertised as a purchase and its price reflects that… [but instead] Amazon grants you a “non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, limited license, during the applicable Viewing Period, to access and view the Digital Content in accordance with the Usage Rules, for personal, non-commercial, private use.”

In addition,

The company also states that it cannot be held liable “if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming.” In other words, you are not buying a product, you are simply “licensing” the right to view the content on Amazon’s platform and your access can be revoked at any time.

This is true of your collection on the Kindle and Apple Books stores too. It’s also true of digital games that can only be played on a particular platform and need connectivity to a vendor-run server, like Valve’s Steam. It is very like the ownership issues with connected appliances we discussed only a few days ago.

The iTunes Store may be the big exception here. It has always offered DRM-free purchases of songs. When you buy a song from the iTunes Store, you download the MP3. You can back it up to an external hard drive, you can play it in a different music player, you can sync it to a non-Apple MP3 player – no problem. It truly is yours to own. The Store is such an outlier in this space that I wonder how long it will last.

End note: At a time when the music industry had realised how big the piracy problem was, I recall Steve Jobs made the argument by saying that the time taken locating, downloading, adding ID3 metadata to and organising an album’s worth of music files versus the cost of downloading it from iTunes (USD 9.99) meant you were making less than minimum wage – that you should just pay the USD 9.99 and earn more in that time. It was so simple and powerful that it has stayed with me nearly twenty years later.

Categories
Uncategorized

Appeal to bias

From the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World:

“In a study during the run-up to the Brexit vote, a small majority of both Remainers and Brexiters were able to correctly interpret made-up statistics about the efficacy of a rash-curing skin cream, but when voters were given the same exact data presented as if it indicated that immigration either increased or decreased crime, hordes of Brits suddenly became innumerate and misinterpreted statistics that disagreed with their political beliefs. Kahan found the same phenomenon in the United States using skin cream and gun control. Kahan also documented a personality feature that fought back against that propensity: science curiosity. Not science knowledge, science curiosity.”

In an age where we are inundated by information and skim instead of digest, there is every incentive for publishers to present information selectively and in a way that appeals to our biases and reinforces them. More than ever before we must be skeptical of everything we read AND be open to new ideas. At the same time.

Categories
Uncategorized

Anachronistic but beautiful

Every now and again I break out some old hardware and software. For old times’ sake.

Well designed hardware lasts. Well designed software should too, but no software is an island, and therefore things break, often much too soon.

Well designed software, though, running on well designed standards runs years after its first release.

And just like good hardware wears well, old good software seems anachronistic but beautiful.

So. In 2020, here are Evernote, Gmail and Telegram running like new on iOS 6, released in 2012, running on an iPhone 4, released in 2010.