Slower, better, and worth the effort
For about twenty years the standard advice was: make it complicated, change it every ninety days, and never write it down. What that produced was a season, a year, and a punctuation mark on the end, incremented every quarter, written on a sticky note…
Read more →Navigation goes wrong slowly. Almost nobody takes one dramatic wrong turn. What happens is that you stop paying attention on an obvious path, the cloud comes down, and twenty minutes later you are standing somewhere that does not match anything on the map, with…
Read more →A budget usually dies quietly. Nobody sits down and decides to stop. The spreadsheet just goes unopened for a week because it was a busy week, and then opening it means catching up on three weeks of receipts, and by the time that job…
Read more →A fridge is where food goes to be forgotten. Half a bunch of cilantro liquefying in the drawer, a container of something from a week and a half ago that nobody will open, three jars of the same mustard. None of that is a…
Read more →The renewal notice arrives with a number a little higher than last year's, and a reassuring sentence explaining that you need do nothing and everything will continue as normal. That sentence is the product. The entire pricing structure behind it is built on the…
Read more →There is a whole class of products where the machine is close to a giveaway and the supplies are where the money is. Printers are the famous case, but the pattern is everywhere: the coffee machine that only takes its own pods, the vacuum…
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