Steve Jobs said:
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.”
This is what I’m often thinking about. But my past mistake has been focusing on the solution to the problem. It doesn’t sound like a mistake, but it is because I wasn’t designing for the final feeling the user would have—even when the user was me! It was always more calculated, thinking primarily about function. Not that form took a backseat, but without the focus on the feeling, the form materialised as something else than what it could have been.
I used to get laughs when I’d say I don’t multitask, I inter-task.
Whenever I hear people say they’re multitasking, invariably what they’re actually doing is working briefly on one task, pausing that work, and then hopping onto another task. The so-called “multitasking” is actually a series of hops back and forth between two or more tasks. They feel productive doing that.
In some cases it makes sense, too; perhaps one of the tasks you’re working on has a blocker that temporarily prevents continuation. This is seldom the scenario people are describing, though. It tends to be just run-of-the-mill task-hopping, with no good reason for doing so other than to feel productive. The problem is they conflate multitasking we having multiple things in progress. They convince themselves that this allows them to get more done in less time. I’d argue that this isn’t the case.
I was thinking about fear today. Anxiety in particular, which is driven by fear. I guess it’s always about fear, isn’t it?
It’s funny—I used to immediately think “I’m anxious” when I felt those butterflies in my stomach; that kind of tingling sensation; that energy in the belly, chest, or wherever one might feel it. If there was anything coming up that was even remotely scary or uncertain, I’d have that feeling.
Throughout my creative life I’ve battled with sharing my work with others. Various fears held me back, the most prominent of which were fear of failure, fear of ridicule, and even, at some points, fear of success. In a song, I once wrote:
Not sure which is greater, my fear of failure, or fear of success; they render me helpless; out of control.
I was acutely aware of the massive hindrance they presented, but could never figure out how to overcome them.