A few months ago I decided to make a conscious effort to spend five minutes every day cleaning my room. I’ve found that this actually works remarkably well, to the point that my room is almost always in a clean or nearly clean state. This is partly because my room is small, but it’s also because five minutes of “straightening up” — e.g., making your bed, recycling old papers, putting books back on shelves, putting dirty laundry in a hamper — is actually quite a lot. I still haven’t finished my theoretical framework of orderliness, but my room sure is a lot cleaner.

Visible checklists are the only ones that matter. If you want to get yourself to do something, make it hard to ignore and even harder to forget. This is one of the many things I use my whiteboard for: My notes/goals/lists live as large letters on my wall, visible from my bed. A note on my computer or phone will quickly be forgotten or lost; a note on my wall will greet me when I wake. (Note that this doesn’t mean every habit you put on a readily visible checklist will automatically be picked up. This worked great for making sure to floss every day without fail, but my results were less impressive for making sure to exercise — perhaps my new taekwondo class will change things?!)

One (or two) habits at a time. When I come up with six or seven new habits to acquire, I’m likely to fail at most or even all of them. If you’re serious about making changes, concentrate on one or two things; if after a week or two those are going well, add a third or fourth.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. For those of us who spend way too much time in our heads, it’s easy to forget just how powerful real-world experimentation is, or even that things can, like, be empirically verified. If you find yourself daydreaming about what the “ideal” method for doing xyz is, try to come up with something that you can try that might be part of that ideal system or which is simply good enough. If it succeeds, great. If it fails, you’ve an idea for your next hypothesis to test — or at least more data to daydream about.

All of which is to say, I’m in general agreement with Megan Hustad:

The office phone call, properly overheard, is really the cheapest, easiest way to transmit institutional knowledge.

Which is why, these days, I try to make sure my younger collegues can overhear my most important conversations. They’ll learn more from that than almost anything I can teach them directly.

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

Guilty.

Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”

And your nerd says, “Cool”.

Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”

You can be rightfully pissed off by this behavior — it’s simply rude — but seriously, I’m trying to help here. Your nerd’s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.

No comment, other than to say my preferred response is “OK” rather than “cool.”

[T]here are many, many areas of life where routinization is imposed in order to lower cost and raise overall quality — and it often has a detrimental effect on the job satisfaction of the people performing the work.

Some examples: airlines moving from hub-and-spoke to shuttle models, so their flight crews now spend all day every day flying back and forth from Indianapolis to Chicago; hospitals insisting that one physician perform all of a certain type of procedure, in response to AMA findings linking quality to volumes; programmers forced to use frameworks and purchased third-party tools instead of writing everything from scratch.

Does all this stuff save money and improve the quality of outcomes? Absolutely. And it also takes even the most skilled individuals down a path of stultifying boredom and repetition.

(That’s jen in comments at 11D)

And of course, it’s not just people at the top of their professions — doing the same thing all the time is tiring for flight attendents and operating-room assistants, too.

I have not traditionally put much thought into designing my living space. Sure, I set up my room nicely (both functionally and to a lesser extent aesthetically), but prior to the last year, I had never thought about how much my environment impacts my productivity and happiness.

For example, last fall, a suitemate and I came up with the idea of purchasing a whiteboard for our suite’s common area. We thought it would be a fun and useful way to collaborate on our many problem sets.^[1] The idea percolated in our minds until one day we broke down, went to Staples, and purchased a whiteboard and the necessary accoutrements.

To say that the board was a success would be an understatement. It worked out so well, in fact, that we shortly thereafter purchased a second board, and then a third.^[2]

What did we use the boards for?

First and foremost, they performed even better than expected at helping us with our original goal of collaborating on problem sets. The boards enabled us to offload our thinking into a shared space — a commons — which meant quite literally that multiple people could work on a given problem simultaneously. It also meant problems could be put on the board, ignored (or at least not actively worked on) for a bit, and then resumed.

Compare this to doing problem sets alone, on a piece of graph paper. With graph paper, when you’re not working on your problem set, the problems are not in view — they’re in your backpack, desk drawer or, most likely, on your floor. In any case, you’re unlikely to glance at them when you’re eating or chatting with friends. But if the problem exists on a whiteboard just next to your breakfast/lunch/dinner table, in the room where you and your friends spend 75% of your time at home, you’re bound to gaze upon it from time to time. Chances are also that at some point you — or one of your friends — will have a breakthrough. And when you do, there will be no delay before you can start working again.

That last point is key: Whiteboards operate in realtime and thus have no “startup time” — i.e., there’s no pause between when you want to start working and when you can actually start working. The few things that might actually slow you down, like not being able to find a marker, can be eliminated with a little thoughtful design.^[3]

The boards didn’t just give us a way to do our homework together, though. They actually helped us learn the material more thoroughly, by keeping our work visually in front of us, and by facilitating the social connections that helped cement our new knowledge. They also served as a mechanism for my friends and me to share information that was not directly related to our course work: My friend Spencer taught me some of the basic mathematics behind Western music, and the boards have been used more than once to parse Arabic and Latin sentences.

But the boards’ usefulness did not end there. Over the past months, they have, among other things, served as an oversized message board (I’m at the library. Want to grab dinner at 7:30?); an ad hoc grocery list; and aided in the development of a theory of how best to pick up strangers.

As the above examples suggest, the dry-erase boards became wholly integrated into our daily lives.^[4] Here’s why I think they worked so well — and were adopted so quickly.

First, as I hope I have illustrated above, the boards were genuinely useful. This may seem painfully obvious but I still think it’s worth stating: Things that are useful will get used.

Second, they were right there, so we didn’t have to go out of our way to use them. How many times have you found a new website or downloaded a cool new program, only to find that a week later you’ve forgotten that it even exists?

I think there are two primary lessons to be learned here.

The first lesson is that our environments facilitate our thinking much more than we tend to think they do.^[5]

The second lesson I will sum up in the form of a new law:

Nicholas’s law of technological adoption:

The rate of adoption of a new technology is directly related to its utility and inversely related to how much effort it takes to incorporate it into your established workflow.^[6]

I’m curious to hear what people think of all this.

1. Keep in mind that I am, along with all of the people with whom I live, presently in engineering school. We don’t write response papers or essays; we do problem sets. For better or worse, we live and breathe problem sets. I should also note that for the majority of our classes, collaboration is not only permitted but actively encouraged by our professors.↩
2. In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that the acquisition of the third board was driven as much out of my near obsessive desire for symmetry as it was out of actual need.↩
3. Early this semester, with the purchase of the third whiteboard, I got an extra set of markers that were magnetized. A friend noticed that they stuck rather well to our rooms’ metal doorframes. Ever since, I have kept a marker or two on my doorframe. Now, when I have a thought in my room and want to work it out on the dry-erase board, I mindlessly grab a marker on my way out to the lounge and I’m ready to go.↩
4. This has become something of a problem. I now frequently find myself looking for the nearest whiteboard (or reaching into my pocket for an erasable marker) when I want to explain something to someone. The problem is that this happens even when I’m places that rarely have publicly accessible whiteboards, like a restaurant or train station.↩
5. Variations on this theme have been studied for some time. The American psychologist J. J. Gibson wrote about the importance of environmental factors in shaping our thinking decades ago. I guess I’m more than a little late to the party.↩
6. As an example of this on a large scale, think about how quickly Facebook went from being non-existent to utterly pervasive. In a matter of months, it became part of the daily routine of millions of people and the sixth-most-visited site in the US. Imagine the possibilities if we could build a grassroots activist network with the same rapidity.↩