In This will only take a minute the Raw Signal team shares some much-needed advice for leaders who feel like they never have time to think and reflect. This state of constant hypervigilance is not a sustainable lifestyle because:

On one level, you’re a human being. Regardless of your title or role, you are worthy of work that doesn’t wreck your health, or your happiness, or your ability to enjoy lunch away from your webcam. On another, if you’re a manager, you’re responsible for the work of a team of other human beings. If you don’t have the time to be thoughtful about your own work, the odds are very high that your team doesn’t either.

They go on to share some ideas for how to make this time to step back a priority, once you are “past the point where working a little bit more is going to clear your plate”.

I’m sure every generation writes lots of articles like Freddie deBoer’s It’s So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive. But hear me out. This is the impassioned, forceful, yet balanced Gen X take I wish I had the skill and wherewithal to write. It is a balm to the nostalgic soul in a way that somehow doesn’t feel like cringey old-person fanfic.

Here he is on the experience of visiting a record store:

When you were there you were Doing Music. Now we’re never doing anything—we’re always getting through something to get to something else to get through, using various time-saving techniques that maximize the amount of time we have to get through things while keeping our attention divided into a thousand things we then get through. When you went to a record store you were intent on music, and sometimes, you’d care enough about a particular artist that you paid for their album, real money, so that the artist got a cut that was more than the .002 cents they get per stream now.

This reminds me of the question Alan Jacobs asks: What exactly are we’re rushing towards with all our 2x listening and cliff notes skim-reading?

My question about all this is: And then? You rush through the writing, the researching, the watching, the listening, you’re done with it, you get it behind you—and what is in front of you? Well, death, for one thing. For the main thing. 

But in the more immediate future: you’re zipping through all these experiences in order to do what, exactly? Listen to another song at double-speed? Produce a bullet-point outline of another post that AI can finish for you?

Maybe the 90s have a thing or two to teach us yet.

What would happen if we look at time through the lens of attachment theory? That’s the question my friend Simon asks in Attachment Styles to Time. I definitely have an “anxious attachment style” with time:

An anxiously attached person to time will try to arrest it: to find comfort again in a space where time felt distant. A coping strategy is to try and keep things the way they were. To hold onto people and places even if you aren’t present anymore.

The framing also reminds me of the Japanese phrase Mono no aware:

Mono no aware (物の哀れ), lit. ‘the pathos of things’, and also translated as ‘an empathy toward things’, or ‘a sensitivity to ephemera’, is a Japanese idiom for the awareness of impermanence (無常, mujō), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.

That is also basically what the entire “synthwave” genre is about so if you’d like to hear what that concept sounds like as a song, just make your way over to Los Angeles by The Midnight.

• The Minimalist Photography Awards for 2022 are out.
• The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think. “Depression has often been blamed on low levels of serotonin in the brain. That answer is insufficient, but alternatives are coming into view and changing our understanding of the disease.”
• The Battle Over Bike Lanes Needs a Mindset Shift. “Installing protected routes tends to boost local shops. But many store owners remain attached to their street parking—and fight to protect it.”
• Pepper spray for the school run? The weaponised SUV set to terrify America’s streets. I’m sorry what? “While its competitors offer heated seats and optional roof-racks, this souped-up SUV boasts bulletproof glass, blinding strobe lights, electrified doorhandles, and wing mirrors that can shoot pepper spray – handy for putting those pesky cyclists in their place.”
• See also Pickup trucks have gotten bigger, higher-tech — and more dangerous.
• Forget Google Maps: Why Paper Map Sales Are Booming (WSJ paywall, here’s an archive.is link). The kids are going analog. “While a satellite can highlight unpaved paths, cartographers actually walk down them.”
• At least let the CD die with some dignity. Amen. “Nothing in music is permanent. So if it is to die, the CD at least deserves to leave with some of its dignity intact rather than being coldly sent off with a shrug. The CD was of enormous significance but its place in history is being lost.”
• In happier music news, check out radio’s comeback! Public Radio Stations KEXP, KUTX, KCMP Grow Audiences With New Music. “A handful of public radio stations dedicated to playing new music have enjoyed notable ratings bumps in recent years. During this ‘crisis’ for new music on the airwaves, these stations have excelled at finding, and holding on to, listeners excited by the prospect of discovering a track from an artist they’ve never heard of.”

Sometimes the internet seems to think about the same things at the same time. Last week we were all in on meetings (see here, here, here, and here), and this week we’re all talking about distractions. Here are three excellent articles about this topic that all came across my feeds this week.

First, there is a new interview with the father of deep work, Cal Newport (NYT gift article link). He talks about context switching and “slow productivity”—and it’s really good:

I’m trying to develop this notion of productivity that’s based on, at the large time scales, the production of things you’re proud of and that have high impact, but on the small time scale, there’s periods where you’re doing very little. […] So how do you actually work with your mind and create things of value? What I’ve identified is three principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, but obsessing over quality. That trio of properties better hits the sweet spot of how we’re actually wired and produces valuable meaningful work, but it’s sustainable.

Matt Reynolds has a catchy title in Wired: Easily Distracted? You Need to Think Like a Medieval Monk. It’s a fun exploration of how medieval monks were, as he calls them, “the original LinkedIn power users” who kept trying to one-up each other with how distraction-free they were living:

These kinds of stories reminded monks just how hard it was to stay focused. They weren’t expected to be concentration machines. They too would come up short every now and then. “Acknowledging that upfront is a kind of compassion,” says Kreiner. “Monks are really good at being compassionate to each other, and to how hard it was to really follow through on stuff.” Freeing ourselves from distraction is really difficult. We don’t have to feel awful about not always matching up to our lofty goals.

And finally, in a short read Mandy Brown talks about the importance of Between-time:

We live in a world full of distractions but short on breaks. The time between activities is consumed by other activities—the scrolling, swiping, tapping of managing a never-ending stream of notifications, of things coming at us that need doing. All that stuff means moments of absolutely nothing—of a gap, of an interval, of a beautiful absence—are themselves absent, missing, abolished.

If I had to find a thread through all these pieces, it would be this:

• Not every moment needs to be filled with work that produces output. Cal Newport calls this working at a natural pace: “one with more variability in intensity than the always-on pace to which we’ve become accustomed.”
• Everyone gets distracted. Have some grace for yourself, and others. And try to distinguish between “distractions” (filling time with stuff) and “between-time”—those real breaks that we all need but get so little of.

This is a wonderful essay by Vivianne Castillo that encourages designers to hold fast to the belief that things could be better for users—and for themselves. From The one thing missing from UX today? Hope:

Today, it’s clear that many designers are feeling overwhelmed, disillusioned, and even unsafe within their organizations—and design leaders are recognizing that conversations around burnout and stress aren’t quite cutting it. I’ve found a deep sense of comfort in the words of American activist, grassroots organizer, and abolitionist Mariame Kaba: “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion…Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.” 

Kaba’s quote is a reminder that the answer to feeling hopeless isn’t toxic positivity or forced optimism. The answer is to make our engagement with hope a discipline because of what’s at stake if we don’t: namely that designers will begin to believe that a better future is not possible within our lifetime.

She goes on to provide examples of how to uphold a comittment to hope in creative, human-centered ways, specifically as it relates to values of belonging, integrity, and power.

Matt LeMay’s post on how to build safety into team communication might not immediately seem that relevant to product management, but Why is Psychological Safety at Odds With the way we Work? is an excellent reminder for all of us:

Now let’s talk about the product managers who are willing to take on the individual risk that comes with creating psychological safety for their teams. These product leaders often don’t have the opportunity to step into those big “visionary” roles – not because they lack vision, but because they are so busy doing the emotional labor of cleaning up after the other product leaders who are making those big, lofty promises. These are the product leaders who earn the trust and respect of their teams by helping leadership understand the real-world trade-offs that go into actually delivering products, even when leadership doesn’t want to hear about it. And here’s the thing: over time, they actually train company leadership to be better! They sharpen their organization’s focus by saying, “You can have this OR you can have that. Which is more important given our goals and constraints?” These product leaders deliver so much value to the companies they work for, and the truth is, they don’t always get rewarded for it.

Over the years I have become more and more convinced that team safety is the most important job a product manager has.

Katy Cowan’s interview with Frank Chimero is really great from start to finish, and covers so much ground on design and technology and how to think about our work. Frank’s view on the importance of not overworking yourself is refreshing, and we’ll hopefully continue to see more of this kind of thinking:

It’s really easy to think that not working full bore is somehow failing your teammates or that withholding effort is poor work ethic and moral weakness. That thought is worth interrogating, though, and it all seems kind of ridiculous once you get it out in the open. There should be no guilt for refusing to work hysterically.