On knowing when you're finished.

I wrote a post for the UC blog this week about something that I've been mulling over for a while. Fenske told us once in grad school that knowing when our work was done was as valuable a skill as the specialized crafts we were learning over those sixty weeks. This wisdom popped into my head a few months ago, when I was up late working on my first proposal and was plagued by self doubt. Instead of continuing to stay up all night, tweaking and re-reading and comparing it to past proposals written by the peers that I look up to so much, I made a decision that it was ready to send in its current form, and went to sleep. So here it is on the site, and cross-posted below.

I recently co-ran workshops at a couple of graduate schools in Stockholm. At the end of one of the sessions, a series of questions from the students evolved into one of the themes of the day: Knowing when your work is finished is one of the most valuable skills.

This was very helpful wisdom to hear as a student several years ago, and it’s important for everyone in the strategy world to take to heart. Because intellectual labor is intangible and expansive – and strategy is about making things without a defined “right answer” – we can get trapped in a cycle of perfectionism and hesitancy. Knowing and deciding when your work is ready is a powerful way to avoid being paralyzed by ideas staying in our heads for too long.

Opbeat’s much-shared F**k It, Ship It image encourages the same behavior – stop worrying about failure and learn to love the Launch button – but comes from a different place. Deciding and trusting when something is ready, rather than resigning yourself to the fact that there are dozens of additional things you could add to your work, is a powerful choice that requires skill, understanding of your own mastery of the subject matter, and an ability to pull yourself out of the storm of self-doubt that can prevent you from seeing the work from a higher, objective level. Deciding when your work is done isn’t easy, so here are four ways to help frame things.

1. Know your skill level, and tweak your judgment accordingly.
I wrote my first ever strategy document in 2004. I rewrote it 15 times before it was finished. There is a starting point in any craft in which you’re learning, and it’s sometimes necessary to do things many times to grok the craft and learn how you do your best work. The more mastery you have over the thing you’re making, the easier it is to pull yourself out of the weeds and realize when you’ve got it. But even if you don’t have the sufficient hours behind you, you can use your understanding of the context, time constraints (more on this next), and audience to make decisions within the parameters you are given.

2. Use your time wisely.
However much time you have to do something, it will take that much time. Because project scopes vary greatly and you don’t always get to choose how long you spend on certain things, you have to let your skills in the subject matter inform the intensity you put into the work, based on how much time you actually have. Let’s use the example of audience research. Over the past year, we have worked on projects with three-week research work streams (the most fun), and ones with three-day research work streams. With only three days to learn about a group of people on the Internet, you don’t have the luxury of getting lost down a bunch of rabbit holes. So, you force yourself to see behavioral patterns, motivations, and archetypes more quickly, and decide when you have an intuitive grasp of that group online – supplemented with all of your existing knowledge, of course. The result will be something that is appropriate for that project.

3. Resist the paint war.
A high school art teacher once described a dangerous tipping point in paint mixing. When you keep adding more and more of each color to get the perfect shade, eventually you end up with a muddy brown-gray mess – and you’ve wasted a whole lot of paint. When you stay up all night pushing pixels around until 4AM, or trying to cram every interesting link and quote you found in your research into a deck, you can get into a never-ending cycle that increasingly binds you to the work itself rather than your mastery of the material. When you have sufficient comfort with your process and your craft, eventually you recognize the point at which you’re good to go – you have made yourself a miniature expert in that one area and can riff on it freely. Conan O’Brien put this advice perfectly in his Guide To Creativity in Fast Company last year:

My formula has always been I’m big on preparing. Prepare like crazy. But then just as you’re heading out, half an hour beforehand, forget all of it. It’s there. It’s in your reptile brain. Go out but feel loose enough to grab opportunities as they come up.

4. Remind yourself that the Internet is never finished.
Like a city, the Internet is a dynamic and ever-evolving place that is forever being built upon and modified – there will always be things you can do to improve something. The Internet as a whole has gotten more keen on this reality, which is why we don’t use “Under Construction” banners on our sites anymore. Similarly, with strategy we don’t ever want our work to be the last thing, but rather a contributing factor along the way – a starting point rather than end point, to frame and begin conversations. Keeping this in mind will make it easier to put a stake in the ground about what the end of this project looks like, and in turn where to start the next iteration.

On tangibility and engineering inspiration

Every now and then, I think about how few of my blogger friends from ~2006 write consistently anymore. I have always blamed it on the fact that as we've become responsible for a lot more over the years, we have had less time to ruminate and get our thoughts down. I have noticed for a while that the more overwhelmed I am, the less frequently I feel inspired enough to start diving down rabbit holes.

A little over three years ago, I saw Zach Klein and Casey Pugh talk about physical computing and Arduino at a Creative Mornings. It was fascinating, and I thought about it all the time over the years.

My Daft Punk helmet from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Cue to a few months ago. My friend Jim and I led a project at work to make a small GE fridge smarter (you can read Jim's awesome blog post about it here), and hired a phsyical computer to build it. The entire time, my head was spinning as I watched him solder things together, move wires around, and type endless strings of code. I was simultaneously furious and jealous about the fact that I didn't understand what he was doing.

So I signed up for an Arduino class at 3rd Ward. With so little time on my hands, I needed some kind of structure if I was to ever learn.

I have thought about so much stuff over the past few weeks I've been taking the class. I have made little LEDs turn on, seen how tweaks in code could fade them in and out at different speeds, and can now understand the tiniest bit about currents, resistors, actuators, and pulse wave modulation (any Arduino expert is probably laughing at how beginner-level I sound). And now I can't stop thinking of all the things I want to connect an Arduino to.

Now to my point. Two things I realized as a result of taking this class --

1. It's ok to make inspiration come to you.

I can't afford to let my mind wander all day long anymore, waiting for interesting thoughts to come together and form an idea. Putting structure around activities that I know I will find interesting has done wonders for my extracurricular thoughts – I've been thinking about all sorts of things since pointedly seeking something like this out.

2. Tangibility is important for strategists.

For the past six years, I have worked at strategy-only companies – ones in which we only do strategy, and outsource production to partners. I love this for many reasons, but one byproduct of it is that you're removed from the tinkering energy that working at a full-service shop can expose you to. We are "making things" more and more at Undercurrent (mostly in the name of curiosity and experimentation), but I am still a few degrees of separation away from stuff like hardware laying around, photography studios, and prototypes. As a strategist, you spend a lot of time in your head, and being at a strategy-only company only intensifies that.

That's why Arduino has been so great. As I mentioned in my Hackers post, I have a pure love of technology and the Internet, and I'm just plain interested in it. Learning how to use this platform not only has me buried in code again, but I'm also physically touching wires and turning knobs - it brings a delightful balance and feeling of I-made-a-thing-that-does-a-thing to my days.

I'm planning to take more circuitry classes at 3rd Ward to keep the inspiration and tangibility up (like Intro to Circuits and Electronics). I'll be writing a lot more about 3rd Ward in general and these classes too, so stay tuned for that. I guess this was just a little kick start into what feels like hanging out with an old friend again. :)

Dropbox as carrier pigeon

Several months ago, I shared a song with my friend Mike via Dropbox.

Days later, I was doing some hard drive housecleaning, and noticed a new file in my Dropbox folder called hi hi.txt. Inside was a line of text:

hello toky toky! -MLE, 1/17/2010

So, I responded.

oh my goodness, hello! -Johanna, 1/26/2011

Over time, another text file appeared.



And another.



We never talked about this, but kept adding to hi hi.txt little by little over time. This is what it looks like now (please excuse my too many exclamation points):



I love how we got used to and felt the medium out by mirroring each other's writing styles – first with writing our name and date after each message, and later evolving to just including the date.

To me it feels a little like long-distance, long-term message exchanges, like playing a game of chess with someone else via mailed letters.* Mike brought up how crazy it was that we were communicating by physically making changes to each other's hard drives over time. So sci-fi (especially since we live across the country from each other). Usually people who opt for slower communication do it in a way that purposefully ignores new technologies – the thought of slower communication existing within the very channels that its participants strive to distance themselves from had never occurred to me.

* How much would you scream if chess-by-mailed-letter became the next "thing?" I would never stop laughing.

Google Street View documenting humanity

I just read the most fascinating and beautiful post on Art Fag City about how Google Street View is an objective, impartial snapshot of humanity today. I had no idea such gems could be found there! It reminded me of this post about digital serendipity; you never know what you'll find as you're poking around the world from your desk.



Jon Rafman – the artist & guest blogger of the post – brings up about a million good points, but some of my favorites were about how Street View records the world: as it exists, at that very moment, in whatever state it is.

The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project.

It definitely different from photographers who spend hours taking 500 shots, only to pick one that is perfect, no?


The last part of that quote – about the vastness of the project – is brought up again later: If Google chooses, their systematic storing of panoramic views serves photography’s historic role of cultural preservation. This could be a different version or perspective on things like the LIFE archives, maybe?

Rafman also brings up how technological phenomena like Street View are ongoing symbols of our world & how we interact with it evolves all the time. This very way of recording our world, this tension between an automated camera and a human who seeks meaning, reflects our modern experience. Beautiful, a little wistfully sad, and squeakily delightful all in one.

Dunkin' Donuts gets more* of my love.

Those who don't live in NYC may be unfamiliar with HopStop. It's a web site that tells you how to get from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible via walking or public transportation (bus and/or subway). It takes all soooorts of things into account when figuring out the best route to take, like time of day, transfers and construction work. I could sing its praises for hours and hours and pages and pages (and so could nearly everyone else I know), but what really blew my mind this week was something I noticed Dunkin' Donuts do on the site.


At first glance, pretty standard display ads, right? I like the placement, though, since there are tons of Dunkin' Donuts locations all over New York, and this is a site about getting all over the place in New York.


Now let's scroll down a little...


Here's a closeup:

Normally, I would be pretty annoyed to see an ad in the middle of content I'm trying to read; but look at what they did! They saw where I was starting my trip and told me where I could get coffee for the ride just two blocks away. Let's scroll some more...


There it is again! In case I was running late and hadn't wanted to walk an avenue out of my way, here is another Dunkin' Donuts smack in the middle of the next station and my meeting. I know that the algorithm used to generate these locations wasn't thinking about it in this way, but advertising the presence of more than one location gives options, which (to a point) can be a convenient thing.


Reading up on Dunkin' Donuts early last year taught me a bit about their rebranding efforts: they de-positioned the "fancy coffee" market and played the "efficient for people on the go" card (quick in-and-out, "just give me my coffee" service vs. the "relax in a big comfy chair and pull out your laptop" culture surrounding Starbucks). To me it fits pretty perfectly with someone looking up directions to get somewhere in the most efficient way possible. As Dunkin' Donuts says in their most recent ad, "We don't work around our schedule, we work around yours."


So, yeah, this isn't the sexiest looking thing in the world:


But it's the smartest placement I've seen in a while; it just works & makes sense.


This week's NY Magazine quotes Twitter co-founder Biz Stone describing straightforward web advertising as feeling "tacked on." Definitely not so in this case, and telling someone where they can grab coffee on-the-go is pretty straightforward. Dunkin' Donuts didn't just stop at the "two brands relevant to New Yorkers" part; they went deeper to a) make sure that they were giving people something they could use; and b) made sure that it made sense for what their brand stood for. Good work, guys.

*The "more" part of this post's title references the fact that I've mentioned Dunkin' Donuts one two three four five six times on this blog so far. Yeesh, I should cut it out, shouldn't I.

[x-posted to House of Naked]

Analogue Twitter project

I took December off from Twitter.

It was a combination of being creatively bored, in the mood for a project, and feeling too digitally transparent at the time. So until the first day of 2009, I wrote down my short thoughts instead, in the notebook I carry around with me.


Now, obviously the two can't be compared. First of all, the obvious: analogue takes longer. You need to find two things in your bag (notebook and pen), and writing takes exponentially longer for me than typing. Secondly (also obvious), you don't have the instantaneous sharing with hundreds of people that you do with Twitter. Even though I knew I would eventually scan some of these and put them here, it definitely wasn't as satisfying, somehow.



Here is the most interesting thing I discovered: the mode that my brain goes into when writing thoughts in a small book (as opposed typing) is a more private one (again, even though I knew I would be showing this to people). I have been documenting my life and thoughts since I was six, and when I was a wee Toky, that meant having diaries. With locks on them. Pen and paper used to be reserved for thoughts I didn't want anybody else to read. The moment I started typing those thoughts into Angelfire when I was 16, I typed knowing that there were people on the other end.

I never realized that my subconscious had those two behaviors divided so much. I noticed it when I told Faris about my experiment a few days into it, and then panicked a little when he took the notebook to read. I think the panic was a visceral reaction, though (associated with the construct in which I place the "writing down thoughts" behavior), because there was nothing too private in there. Nothing too private: the content would have all remained the same had I not taken this digital hiatus, though sometimes phrased in a way that I wouldn't exactly want to broadcast to the world. So I guess the mindset I'm in when documenting thoughts in each medium also influences how they come out.


One of the other reasons I did this was to see if I could live without that periodic sharing throughout the day. And I was able to do it, but only because I'm stubborn. It was really hard. A lot of the thoughts I had didn't get written down at all because they were things I wanted to say right that second. My compulsive nature will never go away, and losing that immediacy gratification just sucks. So, am I glad I did it? Yes. Would I do it again? Nah. I know now that there is a time and place for everything (or, every thought).

[You can read a few more of the scanned "tweets" here]

PSFK Good Ideas Salon [Digital]

Yesterday I was on a panel with Noah, Mike and Claire Hyland in one of PSFK's Good Ideas Salons. PSFK usually puts out an annual trend report, but this time it's in the form of a book with Good Ideas to "encourage positive change in 2009." There are 8 accompanying breakfast sessions, each about a different topic. So far we've heard about Good Ideas in Mobile, Design, Collaboration and Digital (yesterday's).


We talked about all sorts of things, and I loved hearing everyone's points of view. Noah mentioned Wii and Guitar Hero as being virtual reality in today's sense of the word, sans goofy goggles and funny movements. Nintendo and Activision are taking actions and behaviors we're already familiar with, and putting them in a digital context. As Mike said, we're not becoming more and more like computers; computers are becoming more like us.

The beginning of the discussion, prompted by Jeff Squires, centered around virtual identities and creating histories digitally, like leaving breadcrumbs of your life. Noah's My First Tweet was brought up... I really like stuff like that and Photojojo's Time Capsule, because they bring some of your documented history back to you. Since these are democratized channels that are so easy to use (no matter where you are), it can sometimes turn into a mindless act of information pouring with less deliberate thought as creating something physical.

Anyway, here is a link to the Good Ideas in Digital video if you want to see/hear the rest, since my blog makes it unbearably tiny. Mike and Fast Company also wrote about it.