Jack Cheng

Maxing out your Triangle

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:40:00 +0000

I find that most people take on new jobs, projects and hobbies for three reasons:

To learn something new
To pay the bills
Because they love doing it

These three things fulfill some of our very basic needs—they give us stability, excitement, ways to contribute and opportunities to grow. If you’re with me so far, then allow me to present exhibit A, the love-growth-cash triangle:

Here’s where some common activities could fall on our chart:

Some people might ascribe to the philosophy that it’s okay to be at a well-paid-yet-crappy day job and use the remaining time and money enjoying your hobbies. I disagree. Here’s why—if you combine the two triangles, you get the following:

In other words, you end up missing out on pieces of the bigger (triangular) pie. There’s a certain joy that comes from doing what you love, getting compensated for it and constantly learning new things in the process. Your goal should be to maximize each experience and try to cover as many new areas of the bigger triangle as possible.

If you have a shit job, come up with new ways to learn something out of it. If you have a hobby you’re super-excited about, try to turn it into a business. If you’re just starting a new gig, instill it with something you’re passionate about.

Do it.

Re-evaluate everything you’re working on. Grab a pen right now and draw a triangle for every job, project and hobby. Take a good hard look at each one. What can you do to get more out of that experience? If it’s not helping you max out the bigger triangle, drop it and find something else to spend your time on.

Passion Projects

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:35:00 +0000

Thank you. For all the supportive comments and emails. It’s been 3 weeks since I took the leap and I’ve already sat down a ton of interesting people for lunch and tea. A surprise for me so far is the number of new projects I’ve had to turn down or pull myself away from. I’m going to tell you about one of these projects.

Meet Will

My friend Will has been bitten by the travel bug (though it’s probably more of a full-on infection). If he could have any superpower, it’d be to teleport to new places on a whim. Will’s also a web developer who’s worked at companies like Google. He approached me at the beginning of the year for some help on a travel planning site he was building. There was no budget, but it seemed like an interesting challenge, so I jumped on as a partner.

We quickly realized there were too many travel planning sites out there already. Most of them tried to be a “one-stop stop all for your travel needs” and many had an overly-tidy view of how travel planning worked. These sites expected you to know what your travel dates were and tried to confine you to a very linear, step-by-step kind of travel planning.

But real-world travel planning looks more like this:

Photo via Philosopher Queen

It’s chaotic. You have a million different websites open, hear recommendations from co-workers, clip articles from the travel section of the Times and bookmark pages in your Lonely Planet guide. All the while, there are emails going back and forth constantly between you and your friends. Most people just end up copying and pasting stuff into a Word document or printing everything out and shoving it into a manila folder.

Our approach

We wanted to be a little more forgiving of all the chaos. No matter what kind of trip you’re planning, where it is or when you’re going to take it, you’re essentially just collecting ideas for things to do, based around a certain location.

We’re calling it Duffel. Here’s what it looks like:

Duffel’s now at a stage where we’re not totally embarrassed to show it friends of friends (some companies call this the private beta). If you’d like to play around with it, leave a comment here or email me directly and I’ll get you in [update: for a limited time, here’s a direct link]. Since I don’t have any trips lined up in the near future, I use it to keep track of things I’ve been meaning to check out in New York.

“I think we need a break.”

When you don’t have a steady job, your time suddenly becomes a lot more precious. If you’re doing something and it’s not paying the rent or offering you some kind of unique learning experience, you start asking yourself why you’re not spending the time on your own obsessions.

A few days ago, I told Will I needed to step away from Duffel for the time being. It had turned into a passion project that wouldn’t really help pay my rent (at least not immediately). And while I have no problem working on passion projects, in the end it’s Will’s passion—not mine. He’s the one that obsesses over travel. He’s the one who’ll enthusiastically read every piece of feedback you send in.

We all have our own personal Duffel. Some us need to find it and some already know what it is—we just need to start giving ourselves a little more attention.

On Permanence

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:28:00 +0000

How many times has this happened to you:

You summon all your brilliance to put together a killer design, email, presentation or blog entry.
Time whizzes by and you’ve read, re-read, tweaked and re-tweaked everything for the five hundredth time.
The instant you look at the sent message, printed slides or published blog entry, you notice typos, redundant phrases and other things that make absolutely no sense.

It happens to all of us (at least from my unscientific survey of a few friends these couple days). The question is why? Why does it seem like we’re better at picking up mistakes only after the fact? Why do we notice different details when we print something out and read it over versus trying to review it on-screen? As I brought the subject up over lunch, Johanna mentioned that she had written about almost the exact same thing two weeks ago. Her entry deals with the act of organizing thoughts in physical space and there are some wonderful ideas in the comments too.

Review vs. Do

My personal take is that for any given task, our minds constantly shift between two modes: review and do. Review-mode give us perspective on the big picture and keeps us on track toward reaching our destination. Do-mode is focused on implementation—building, typing, moving pixels and making changes.

The problem is that when we’re in front of that blinking cursor, everything is so easily editable that we get caught up in do-mode. When we try to review things, we think, “oh, that’s an easy fix, so I’ll do it right now,” and instantly return to do-mode. We keep bouncing back and forth between the two without maintaining the proper altitude to see the bigger picture. To use the forest-from-the-trees analogy, it looks something like this:

On the other hand, paper isn’t so immediately malleable. Sure we can make marks on it, but we don’t actually implement the changes until later. When we print something out, read it through and then go back to make the revisions, our path looks more like this:

The permanence of printed ink on paper forces us to stay in both review-mode and do-mode for longer spans of time. The end result is we fly a smoother path, save time and energy and reduce the risk of crashing and burning along the way. I think we all realize that on some fundamental level, paper offers us greater clarity of mind. It just feels better.

Putting it into Practice

We can force ourselves to stay in each mode for longer periods of time by applying permanence in some of the following ways:

Print it out. Grab a pen, move away from the computer, and go through it.
If you don’t like wasting trees, save it as a PDF and review it that way. Jot notes down on a scrap of paper as you flip through and then go back to make the changes.
If you’re writing a blog entry, use the ‘preview’ mode so you can see what it will look like on your blog before you publish.
Set up a text-to-speech shortcut, highlight what you’re working on and have your Mac read it back to you.

By creating constraints on our ability to instantly manipulate what’s in front of us, we can carve out a smoother, more effective path to getting things done and getting them done well.

Presidential Teas

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:22:00 +0000

Funny thing that Twitter. First this:

Then this:

Along with this:

And a few emails, IMs and many cups of tea later, we have Obama Tea and McCain Tea! I created the photo-illustrations on those sites and the tea itself is blended and packaged by the wonderful Elise at Pearl Fine Teas, you can order them from the Pearl Fine Teas website up until election day.

Because of obvious timing and logistical details, the orders will start shipping inauguration week in January. Part of the proceeds will be donated to the Washington Humane Society. I love it when a plan comes together.

Be sure to check out the TeaLove Blog for further developments on the presidential blends.

I am my own boss (and so can you!)

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:08:00 +0000

This is my last week at ss+k. I’ve had a wonderful two years at the agency and have nothing but nice things to say about the people there.

The last major risk I took was coming to New York without a job three years ago. Look what it got me: colleagues I’ve learned a shitload from, amazingly supportive friends, fascinating conversations over tea and a city I consider home. In fact, if I go back and recall every time I’ve pushed myself outside my comfort zone, I’m always glad I did it.

And lately I’ve been too comfortable. I’ve talked the talk and now it’s time to get off my ass. I see myself running my own businesses in the near future. I see myself building ridiculously awesome things that make the world a more interesting place. In the past I’ve spent time planning, trying to find the right ideas. But one thing I’ve learned is that nothing ever goes according to plan. And you can spend forever planning. That’s what most people do. They keep waiting and waiting until they have enough saved up, find the right idea or until they’re in a position with more responsibility.

But conditions are never perfect. And when we’re so focused on our plans, we lose sight of the openings in front of us. Instead of plans we need habits. Habits of taking risks. Habits of keeping our eyes open for new opportunities. Habits of putting ourselves in situations that force us to grow and change. We can all introduce a little chaos into our lives.

What’s next? I’m working on a few projects that I’ll post in the coming weeks. Aside from that, I’m keeping an open mind and figuring out other ways to pay the rent without working a full-time job. I’m sure you have some ideas too. Let’s talk.

How many gallons?

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:20:00 +0000

^{Disclosure: the agency I work at (SS+K) does work for the Obama campaign. That said, I personally don’t work on that account and launched this site completely independently of anything the agency or campaign is doing.}

Here’s a quickie: howmanygallons.com. Go to the site, type in your hourly wage, and then you’ll see how many gallons of gas it’s worth. The site pulls in weekly gas prices from Energy Information Administration and it’s inspired by the voter registration ads the Obama campaign’s running in battleground states.

Whether you’re an Obama supporter or not, you can use the Vote for Change site to register to vote, check to see if you’re already registered or find your polling location. Get to it!

Stuff I love: Muji Chronotebook

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:31:00 +0000

Start with the simplest thing imaginable: a blank sheet of paper. Add a rows of lines and it becomes a notebook. Add a grid instead and it becomes an drawing pad for architects. Add a few tiny boxes and it turns into a to-do list. Put in dates and you’ve got a calendar.

But as they teach you in your high-school econ class, everything has a cost. For each function or feature you add, you lose a purpose. A blank sheet that could’ve been used in a million different ways can now only be used for a few. Artists aren’t going to buy a calendar if they’re looking for something to sketch on. Writers aren’t going to pick up to-do lists to use as a journal. This isn’t a bad thing per se—by narrowing down on a purpose, a blank sheet of paper can become more useful and relevant to certain people.

The Status Quo

But there is such a thing as too narrow. Take the typical day planner. You have a day and date printed at the top, timestamped lines for each hour, a section of little boxes for your to-dos and more lines underneath for notes. In theory it’s everything you need to go about your day. In reality, the various functions have whittled the audience for these planners down to people who have 8 to-dos, a full calendar every day, need exactly 6 square inches of space to take notes and who like buying a planner at the beginning of each year.

You get one of these things and you realize that you always write outside the boxes. There’s never enough space and every day needs a different allocation of it. Feature-creep, as it turns out, happens to paper too.

Enter the Chronotebook

The chronotebook was a judges’ prize winner in last year’s Muji Award International Design Competition and is available in Muji stores across the globe. The notebook chucks out the gridularity of the typical day planner and puts an analog clock in the middle of the page.

It’s the simplest manifestation of what a day planner is all about: time on paper. The clocks occupy a small amount of space on the page and rest is completely flexible. You can write in your own dates at the top of each page, and you can treat the rest of the space like a blank page. Here’s are some words from the designer, Wong Kok Kiong:

Because of the numerous hours in a day (and various other constraints), the lines in a diary are typically very narrow. They are also usually equally distributed (somewhat). But our information is a hierarchy. Some are more important to us. Some we feel happier about. We want to highlight stuff that’s important to us. We want to write things that are more important in BIGGER sizes. Our lives cannot be so easily and clearly divided into equal parcels.

I use the clocks in my chronotebook to keep track of appointments, how much time I spend working on things, and when I wake and sleep each day. The free space is great for daily to-dos and interesting quotes or ideas I come across. It’s small enough to fit in my back pocket and it’s the first day planner I’ve consistently used for over a week (going on 2 months now).

The chronotebook teaches us that multifunction is not the same as multipurpose. That there’s a logical, hypothetical way to do something and a simple, flexible way to do the same. When given the choice, I choose the latter. I absolutely swear by my chronotebook and recommend it without reservation (I’ve already bought three more of them).

—

Update 10/15: hello kottke.org readers! For those of you wondering how you can get it outside New York, commenter ‘jamaica’ says below that you can call Muji Times Square (212)382-2300 and they’ll ship it to you. The notebook itself costs $4.95.

Idea: Judge books by their cover

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:20:00 +0000

Here’s another small project I’ve been working on. It’s called judgeby and it does exactly what it sounds like. You go on and get shown a random¹ book cover from Amazon. Your job is to guess how good you think the book is. After you click, you see what Amazon reviewers actually rated it (and can head to the book’s Amazon.com to find out more). Rinse. Repeat.

^{1 Not totally random since Amazon doesn’t let you just grab a random book from its catalog, but there are ways to fake it ;)}

Risk-inverse

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:25:00 +0000

We’re in a recession. Lawmakers are scrambling. Businesses are in a hiring freeze and suddenly we all own a little piece of AIG. Everyone is hunkering down and preparing for the worst. The phrase “especially in this economy” is the new black.

Translation:

Great ideas and opportunities are being left on the table. Few people want to take chances right now. And when everybody plays it safe, the ones that go dancing in the rain will come out ahead when the storm clears.

Example:

During the dot-com bust, instead of cutting back and laying people off, Apple did the opposite. They kept their existing talent and upped their R&D budget. In Steve Jobs’s words:

What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place—the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.

There’s no better time than now to make shit happen. Zag.

How to remember stuff

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:11:00 +0000

My short-term memory has been getting worse. A friend kindly suggested that I’m just getting old, which I guess is in some ways true. But I don’t blame aging brain cells. I blame the Internet.

The downside of sitting in front of a computer all day and having another one in your pocket is that after some time, you let the ‘cloud’ take over. And like any other muscle, the less we use those parts of our brains, the weaker they get.

Wait a sec…

Isn’t that the whole idea? We let the computers handle the lower-level stuff so we can spend our time philosophizing about more important things. Like Alaskan vice presidential candidates, LOLcats and social media.

Theoretically, yes. Technology is supposed to make things easier. Its purpose is to give us more time, clarity and control over our lives and the world around us. And it has. But in a lot of cases, it’s done quite the opposite too. When we let technology take over too much of our biological memory, we put ourselves in a constant state of reaction. We end up with less time and less clarity because we become increasingly vulnerable to the push and pull of trivial outside forces. Like a zombie army whose commands are issued in the form of bouncing email icons, chiming calendar alerts and vibrating hunks of metal and plastic.

I could go all day about the merits of moderation in digital stuff, but let’s talk about ways to clear out some of the cobwebs. Memories are the strongest when they are anchored to something; when we associate them with some specific act or trigger. And the more we rehearse those associations, the deeper they’re ingrained on a subconscious level. We’ve all been beaten over the head with inspirational sports movies preaching “practice makes perfect,” yet the problem is that some acts, like remembering directions to a particular address, aren’t easily practiced. The best way to learn those is to go again and again, which takes significant time, effort and gasoline.

Science to the rescue!

Here’s the interesting thing: a recent study mentioned in the New York Times highlighted strong biological evidence to support a popular theory about memory—that when we recall something from our past, a lot of the same neurons fire as when we’re actually experiencing it.

In other words, when Tom Brady sits on the couch to study his playbook and he visualizes how a play unfolds, his brain behaves (for the most part) like he’s actually on the field running the play. Of course, it’s never as good as the real thing, but it’s pretty close. We can use this insight to our advantage.

What you can do right now:

Say for instance, you want to remember to take out the trash before you leave for work in the morning. Imagine yourself going about your AM routine. Close your eyes and focus on one specific thing. Something you know you’ll do for sure, like putting your shoes on before you head out the door. Got it? Now think about every little action you’d need to take to put on your shoes: kneeling down, slipping your foot in, adjusting the heel and tying the laces. Relive that memory—the more specific, the better.

Now comes the fun part. Imagine yourself standing back up, but instead of walking out the door, you walk over to the kitchen, open the garbage can, and lift the bag out. Go back to the beginning and repeat the process a couple more times. The goal is to mash up two memories and create an association between the act putting on your shoes (the trigger) and the act of taking out the garbage (the action). It’s mental rehearsal for something that hasn’t happened yet!

And it works (for me at least). Try it. Let me know if it works for you too.

Idea: So easy, mom can do it.

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:11:00 +0000

I love digging into the details when something new catches my eye, but I’d argue that less than 1% of the time do you actually need to understand how everything works to be able to perform a certain task. It helps to know the basics, but you don’t have to grasp the full science behind electricity to be able to flip on a light switch. You have better things to do with your time.

I’m interested in that other 99%. I was at a cafe a couple weekends ago thinking about how I could make my life easier. With the video of John Mayer giving tech support to his dad fresh in my mind, I started thinking about the common questions I get from parents and friends regarding things like starting a blog or setting up a router. And thus, soeasymomcandoit.com was born.

The first tutorial is How to start a blog with your own .com name. I like to think of it as a mini-project for now, and I hope to launch many more mini-projects in the weeks to come. As always, I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions.

Working Life

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 03:04:00 +0000

Picture an average American who decides to stop working at the age of 65. Got it? Now guess how many years he’ll have to enjoy his post-retirement before he passes away.

I’ve asked this to a bunch of friends and coworkers over the last two weeks. I’ve heard answers like “15-20 years” or at the very least, 10 years. But none of those is even close.

The actual answer? 18 months.

18 months! A year and a half! In a 2002 study on Boeing retirees, researchers found that those who worked til the age of 65 faced significant health problems as a result of putting their bodies under work-related stress for that long (basically forcing them into retirement). Not surprisingly, these workers passed away shortly after due to their health complications. According to the numbers, for every year a person worked past the age of 55, he/she died two years earlier.

If it was this bad 6 years ago, how much worse is it today? People are working more hours than ever before. They’re also pushing retirement back a couple years because they want to pad their nest egg. The perception is that if we make the immediate sacrifice, we’ll be better off in the long run. The reality might turn out to be quite the opposite. Happy Monday :)

The Illness

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:11:00 +0000

Tomorrow you visit the doctor and find out you have a life-threatening illness. There’s no cure. Nobody knows how much longer you have to live. It could be a few weeks. It could be a few months. It could be a few years. Possibly longer. The only thing that’s certain is that you will die. You won’t experience any physical pain as a result of the illness. One day you’ll just go to sleep and you won’t wake up again.

If this happened to you, how would you change your life? What would you do right away? What would you do after that? The answer to those questions is what you should be doing right now.

Routines for Creativity

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:11:00 +0000

One of the biggest problems facing retirees is that they don’t know what to do with all that free time. Many end up returning to the workforce, working jobs as Walmart Greeters just because they need someone to structure their day. We’ve heard that too much freedom is paralyzing. Without a specific plan of action, we feel helpless and overwhelmed.

Routines give us structure, and this is good for creativity too. Whether it’s writing for 30 minutes every morning or meeting with friends once a week to brainstorm business ideas, these rituals tell our brains and bodies to get into a specific mode at a certain moment. It’s like your subconscious saying “okay left-brain, you turn off for a little while and let right-brain do it’s thing.” Routines get us into a rhythm and allow us to shift from thinking to doing. Routines help us make shit happen.

One of the biggest advantages of having routines is what comes out of breaking them. Think about the excitement you have when you get a new project after working on a previous one for months on end. Bursts of creativity happen when you break the cycle. When you get used to sleeping at 11 every night, staying up until 4 can lead to a new spectrum of ideas. Same goes for sleeping and waking early if you’re usually a night owl.

But having no routine is really the worst routine of all. It’s the hardest one to break. Without a rhythm, music becomes random noise. Contrast and repetition are just as important for creativity.

If you’re on the no-plan plan, the first step is being conscious of your routines. What are some rituals in your life? Which ones help you be more productive or creative? Which ones are hard to break? Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

51 ways to change your life

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:02:00 +0000

We’re obsessed with lists. Not shopping lists or top-five-robotic-villains-of-after-school-cartoons-from-my-childhood lists (Megatron, Doc Ock, Krang, Dr. Claw, Dr. Robotnik) but different kinds of lists.

When I was cleaning my desk a few weeks ago, I found a folded-up copy of Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. Flash back two years: I shrank the font down enough to print it onto one 8.5×11” sheet, which I then folded in half a few times and put in my wallet. I probably carried it for two days before I misplaced it. Finding it again years later, I still agree with most of what’s on the manifesto. It’s hard not to.

But acknowledgment is different from action. The nature of the list format stops these behavioral lists from being more valuable. 10 ideas to simplify your life. 30 ways to reduce stress in the workplace. 48 principles of good design. When things are packaged into a list, we have a habit of reading one thing, nodding and moving on. When the next bit of juicy advice is just a few lines down the page, it’s effortless to tilt our eyeballs the extra millimeter. In our quick-fix culture, lists are the Taco Bell of knowledge.

I had a habit of doing this with self-help books and business books as well. It’s too easy to turn the page and read the next insightful tip, without stopping to really think about or try what you’ve read. The creators of these lists or books aren’t are at fault—we can only blame our own hyper-indulgence of knowledge. We’re so infatuated with the idea of learning something, we don’t take the time to really learn it.

If you feel the same way I do, here’s one (and only one) piece of advice for you. It’s a simple act that’s made a universe of difference for me lately:

Learning in moderation.

When you find yourself saying “that’s a really great idea, I should try that,” stop reading. Pick one thing from that list of fifteen. Don’t worry about finishing the rest of the book. Try it. Practice it, repeat it, until it becomes routine. Remind yourself to consciously think about it on a regular basis. When you make that one item a habit, you can come back to the source and learn something else. Then, every time you practice the new thing, you’ll be reminded to keep practicing all the old ones.

Moderation is key. The more we try to learn everything, the more we learn nothing.

Starting anew

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:59:00 +0000

The past few months have been hectic, but in a good way. I’m still at ss+k, working on some pretty exciting projects. I have one or two ventures of my own that are starting to become a little more real. Lately I’ve been trying to streamline and unclutter my life, and I’ve finally gotten around to this lil’ site.

The old content is here now (though if you’re on rss, you probably won’t miss a beat). The new version will be less about general thoughts/theories and more about my projects and personal methods. All those ideas aren’t any good unless you put them into practice.

In other words, less talk. more do. Time to stop wasting time.