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Navigating the jotter pad

As someone who works on the web, I rarely see criticisms of physical objects (Design of Everyday Things doors excepted) that this paragraph from James Ward’s Adventures in Stationery delighted me:

I find jotter pads confusing. The spiral binding across the top makes it easy to take notes, flipping each page over at a feverish rate as words are quickly scribbled down, but I gradually lose sense of what is ‘forwards’ and what is ‘backwards’ within the notebook. I get lost by the middle of the pad. Normally, when trying to find a particular note or idea I hurriedly wrote down, I can at least remember if it is on the left or right page of the notebook or pad and then try to find it that way. The jotter pad offers only vague locative information. That crucial scribble could be anywhere. Notebooks need a ‘search’ function.

Yes, exactly, the sense of environment and direction of a physical left-right page book or notebook is critically important. I can find content in my physical copy of CSS Pocket Reference at ten times the speed I can find it in the Kindle version, and not just because I wrote notes in every margin. There’s both physical and visual memory associated with one’s place in a physical book; the weight of the pages on one side or the other, the look of the way the pages curl, the depth perception of the edge, all contribute to remembering one’s place just as much as the content.

The fact that this happens in jotter pads should have given us a bit of a warning that it was also going to happen on tablets and smartphones. But, humans, meh, what can you do?

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Now on The Pastry Box: Wasted Time

This month I ran into three or four occurrences of people feeling like they were wasting time at work — not because they were surfing Facebook or anything that dramatic, but because projects were canceled, people were moved around, and things they’d worked hard on were clearly not going to come to fruition the way they’d expected.

That’s not wasted time. Wasted time is when you don’t add value — to yourself, to your family, to your clients or employer, to whoever matters to you.

I provided one example in this month’s post, but there are dozens of others. You’ve probably had a few yourself.

Plus, hopefully I’ve planted this delicious ear worm.

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Now on The Pastry Box: Can’t

This month’s post on The Pastry Box is about using the word “Can’t”. When we use can’t, we frequently mean “won’t” or “haven’t considered” or “don’t want to”. My argument is that we should try to reserve “can’t” for times that you actually are not able to do a thing — for example, when you can’t talk to a satellite any faster than the speed of light.

Grace Hopper illustrates what it means when you can’t do something, at 4:23 in this video. (The rest of the video is worth watching too.)

I hope the next time we say we can’t do a thing, we mean we can’t do a thing — and if we won’t or haven’t considered or do want to do it, we’ll say that instead.

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Now on The Pastry Box: The damned annoying truth about sucking at things

The truth about sucking at things is that you do it at the beginning, and suck less until you master a thing.

The damned annoying truth about sucking at things is that if they don’t have defined limits to what “mastery” looks like, you’re always going to be able to see progress. And that means, well, you’re going to suck.

Read the damned annoying truth about sucking at things on The Pastry Box.