Vague Discomfort, Values > Metrics, and Approved?!?

Approved or Approved Approved?

Go back to high school for a sec. Do you like them? Or like them like them? Do you really like them? Is it really approved? Because I have gotten a clear final approval, collected the files, sent the files, only to get a change hours or days later. One reason this happens is the endless layers of people who need to approve something. But the other reason is attention. I get it, everyone is pulled in a million directions. But here's what happens: someone looks at something quickly, says "yeah, great," and moves onto something else. A couple hours later they decide to go back and really take a look. Now they see an issue. It wastes time on both ends to have to loop back around in the process.

Think of it this way, you get to trade in six emails over the course of several hours in exchange for spending a focused ten minutes on a thing.

On Creativity

A colleague loaned me his copy of John Cleese's Creativity, which is as it says, a "short and cheerful guide." And it reminded me of this post about managing your creative time. There's a great part in the book that talks about how creative people are that way because they 1) have not forgotten how to play. And 2) that they are OK with the vague sense of discomfort when we leave something unresolved "...because they know that an answer will eventually present itself."

I asked an instructor once if he ever had an occasion where he just couldn't solve the problem. And his answer was that he could always solve the problem "in some way." And I find that to be true.

The book also reaffirmed this quote that the best free labor is your subconscious:

This is a very useful thing to know about the mind, because it means you can steer your subconscious towards the particular problems you want it to work on. By priming yourself with important problems before doing the dishes or going for walks or sleeping, you make sure your mental resources are used on what matters for you, instead of, for example, the open loops in a Netflix series you watched before bed. It is free labor. – Henrik Karlsson

How Metrics Make Us Miserable

In the middle of listening to this podcast about why we are both addicted to metrics, and yet they make us miserable. This is the best explanation I've heard so far. The good – metrics compress information. They make complex information easier to understand and use. Or should at least. The bad – metrics compress information. And making decisions while leaving out important things that cannot be quantified isn't good.

This is why brand sometimes suffers in an age of performance marketing. As in the Creativity book above, play is hugely beneficial, yet not very quantifiable. And we should not allow metrics to supersede values.