I hope this changes someday, but historical Meta decisions make me believe this won't happen. So instead, I created a userscript and userstyle to limit Threads to just a Following feed in your browser.

How To Use Userscripts

For Chromium-based browers, you can use the extension User Javascript and CSS. An alternative extension to look at would be Tampermonkey.

The Userscript

This script looks for the "For You" section of the page, and removes it if it's the first of two divs. The goal here is to have a focused Threads experiences, and thus the limitation here is that you cannot use it with multiple columns.

// ==UserScript==
// @name     Remove "For You" Section from Threads.net
// @namespace  
// @version    1.0
// @description  Removes the "For You" section if it's the first of two divs and shows main content
// @match    https://www.threads.net/*
// @grant    none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
  'use strict';

  function showMainContent() {
    const mainDiv = document.querySelector('body > div[id^="mount_"]');
    if (mainDiv) {
      mainDiv.classList.add('content-loaded');
    }
  }

  function removeForYouSection() {
    const forYouLink = document.querySelector('a[href="/for_you"][role="link"][tabindex="0"]');
    if (forYouLink) {
      let elementToRemove = forYouLink;
      
      // Go up 5 levels of parents
      for (let i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
        if (elementToRemove.parentElement) {
          elementToRemove = elementToRemove.parentElement;
        } else {
          break; // Stop if we can't go up further
        }
      }
      
      // Check if the element to remove is a div and is the first of two divs
      if (elementToRemove.tagName === 'DIV' && 
        elementToRemove.parentElement && 
        elementToRemove.parentElement.children.length === 2 &&
        elementToRemove.parentElement.firstElementChild === elementToRemove) {
        
        // Remove the element
        elementToRemove.remove();
      }
    }

    // Make the main content visible
    showMainContent();
  }

  // Run the function immediately
  removeForYouSection();

  // If the site uses dynamic loading, you might need to run the function periodically
  setInterval(removeForYouSection, 100);
})();

The Userstyles

This is the related CSS to add to optimize the experience. By using CSS, this runs earlier than the script.

// ==UserStyles==

body > div[id^="mount_"] {
  visibility: hidden !important;
  background: #000 !important;
}

body > div[id^="mount_"].content-loaded {
  visibility: visible !important;
}

I hope this allows you for a more focused, enjoyable experience on Threads. If you have any questions, or want to talk more about this, please reach out. And if you remix this, I’d love to see what you come up with!

Today, I'm delighted to share a set of presets for Darkroom that I use the most. I call them: Loomono Profil.

But first, a little context. If you are not aware of Darkroom, it's a pretty fantastic photo editor that started on iOS, and has since become available for iPad and Mac. This week, Darkroom launched the ability to share presets.

I have been using Darkroom ever since its inception and I have been wanting to share my presets ever since I started creating some reasonably good ones. Enter: my first set of B/W presets that I've used for years.

But before I get to them, an important note. Every photograph is different, and should get the love and care it deserves. I use these presets as a starting point and often still mess with Exposure, Whites and Shadows to dial it in on a per photo basis. They include a little bit of grain, but intentionally do not have any Fade or Vignette applied.

There are three variants: 200, 400 and 800. I will go through them in chronological order of when they were designed.

Profil 400

Loomono Profil 400 was the first filter in the set. It was designed for well lit, or slightly overexposed situations — portraits or otherwise — to which you want to give a bit of a contrasty black-and-white punch to.

Here is a sample, featuring my very handsome friend Chris Michel.

Profil 800

Profil 800 was designed for not-so-great, dimly lit situations, especially ones that would lead to a lot of orange tones without any computational colorization applied.

As a bonus, it also works well for high-key portraits.

(Note: I still often crank up Exposure on these for dark situations, so am dabbling with a 1600 of this as well. Stay tuned!)

Profil 200

Finally, Profil 200 was designed for dramatic, contrasty cityscapes, silhouettes etc. I often also use this for a high-contrast, darker portrait.

You can find the links to these presets below. They should open in Darkroom automatically.

• Loomono Profil 200
• Loomono Profil 400
• Loomono Profil 800

I hope you enjoy them. If you have any questions, or want to talk more about them, please give me a shout. And if you remix them, I’d love to see what you come up with!

You rarely get fortunate to encounter a situation in which it sits front of you after a few minutes. The React logo was one of those lucky cases.

Let me start by saying: logo design is the furthest away from something that I believe I can do at a quality bar that I deem excellent (see: Ira Glass’ The Gap). However, sometimes life has its magical way, and you find yourself in a situation where you have to get uncomfortable.

In the spring of 2013 — while Pete Hunt and I were refactoring large parts of instagram.com to React — it became clear that Facebook wanted to start heavily investing in open-source. And React was going to be one of the first frameworks we would make available publicly. As with any launch, we needed a bunch of documentation and collateral designed if we wanted to stand out from the plethora of other frameworks.

Cue a couple of sketches, lazily drawing some curves to look like a simple version of an atom and magically having that “FedEx logo feeling” from the moment they came together.

If you aren’t familiar: the FedEx logo is widely regarded as one of the most successful logos amongst designers. Whereas the logo looks pretty bland from the outset, the arrow elegantly hidden in the negative space between the E and the x is a crucial example of “once you see it, you can’t unsee it”. There’s something extraordinary in the way your brain stores that pattern recognition deep in its depths, which is another illustration that everything is a remix.

For the React logo, it meant that after drawing three ovals, of which two were rotated incrementally by sixty degrees, a cog appeared. Et voila: a technological framework — a tool, if you will — that has a name that correlates with chemistry, represented by a cog living in the negative space of a simplified atom.

Anyway, I won’t make this too long. It was an honor to engage in creative work that serendipitously stood on the shoulders of giants, only to become a part of technology history that has caused a paradigm shift in the way we engineer for the web.

Thanks for reading; this was a fun one to reminisce on.

To effectively lead a team of highly motivated and skilled employees, these employees need to know they're operating in a realm of trust and empowerment. A very effective way to do this is to lead with questions.

Leading a team full of highly ambitious people in a creative or knowledge field—like design, product management, or software engineering—is even more complex. This complexity only grows with the size and momentum at which the team performs.

A Shift in Information

The computer and the network have democratized access to information, driving a significant shift in working style away from top-down leadership. Where in the past authority came from information asymmetry through layers of leadership, you are now more likely to see organizations where most information (internal communication, data, etc.) is available to all.

The leverage of the open availability of this information can dramatically positively affect the trajectory of a company. It has allowed many, still relatively young, technology companies to scale at a blistering pace. But the availability of this information also brings a different way of working.

Where in the past hierarchy would dictate and control the information flow to teams and individuals, now leaders need to gain the trust of their teams in an open forum. In an environment of open information, you need a level of rigor to internal communication, decision making, and leadership. To perform at the highest level and scale this performance, leadership needs to focus on trust and empowerment.

Trust and Empowerment

Many people who’ve worked with me will have heard me say: “there is a time when you hire people for their hands, and there is a time when you hire people for their brains.”

When you tell someone specifically what to do, and even worse how to do it, you ask an individual—who you hired for their skills, knowledge, traits, and behavior—to be a set of extra hands for you.

If you’re looking to build a successful team, grow your impact, or scale a business in any field of knowledge work, everything should be biased towards trust and empowerment. So how do you empower your teams? How do you empower individuals? How do you ensure that they get the things done that need to be done?

Before we get to that, let’s start with some questions:

• How sure are you about the work that needs to get done? Do you know what success looks like?
• Do you have absolute, 100% confidence and conviction in your direction and guidance? If not, how confident are you?
• What information are you missing? Do you know what information you are missing, or do you not know what you may not know?

Or, said differently: do you need your teams to go out and understand the problems in front of you, identify what success could look like, and come up with a plan to get there?

In an environment with high trust and empowerment, you won’t have to lead through traditional means. Instead, progress gets made through collaboration up and down the leadership chain. More importantly, trust and empowerment work both ways. If you trust your teams and empower them to do great work, they will allow you to scale your operation. This will enable you to focus more on long-term strategy, and creates more trust upwards to your leaders.

Creating the Environment

How do you create an empowered environment built on trust? Trust works in a reciprocal manner. To create a climate of trust, you have to show people your faith in them by empowering them with an ambiguous task with clear expectations.

Here’s an oversimplified e-commerce example: you have a hunch that you are leaving money on the table because conversion isn’t optimized. The wrong way to lead would be to say: can you make the PDP (Product Detail Page) convert better? The even worse way would be to say: can you make the “Add to Cart” button bigger?

You have to extend trust to your team by asking questions: how can we improve conversion? Can you put together a list of opportunities you see? The low-hanging fruit may be entirely elsewhere, and focusing on the two PDP directives could be a complete waste of time.

What happens in this interaction?

1. You show the team that you value them for their brain(s).
2. You teach them the question you are asking yourself, which lives behind the directive you would have given them otherwise.
3. You allow them to surprise you and tell you about the things you may not have known.

After the work is done, you will want to review it either asynchronously or in a meeting. (While I try to reduce meetings as much as possible, they are ideal for creating an environment of trust as they have more tone and context than written words.)

When reviewing the options, you have the perfect opportunity to show your team your thought process and how (a) you would prioritize this, or (b) what new questions this brings up for you. Likely what will happen is that you get to make decisions on part of the proposals or the direction while opening up space for more exploration.

Notice how this creates a safe space, as there is no judgment in this environment, only learning. You are directing them, but you are not telling them what to do. The level of empowerment and trust increases, and over time you can safely ask more complex questions or have more challenging conversations without hurting the team's ability to lead themselves.

Direction, Not Directives

A crucial aspect of leading a team through any discussion or review process is to see yourself mainly as the moderator, not the judge. You are part of the process; you are not above the process.

There is a straightforward approach to moderating the conversation that optimizes for empowerment but hedge against inertia. At its core, there are two essential tactics: (1) asking questions and (2) paraphrasing. Both optimize for trust and empowerment. Never, ever, start by asking a leading question.

The steps in any professional discussion are:

1. Ask an open question (e.g., a question with an answer that goes beyond yes or no),
2. ask a closed question (e.g., a question that has a yes or no answer),
3. paraphrase and make a suggestion, and
4. paraphrase and make a recommendation.

This also works in managing up, or in any direction for that matter. Not only does it scale as the organization scales, relationships based on trust compound over time and can help navigate through the most challenging moments.

What’s more, professional relationships based on this foundation can transcend a single organization and allow for long-lasting partnerships throughout roles within—or outside of—a company.

Start Small

As with all advice, things are often easier said than done. It is doubtful that you will start a behavior like this for a few weeks, and immediately it propagates throughout your whole team, organization, and business. There is even a high likelihood that only parts of the organization will be run in this way—I’ve seen this first hand.

Start small. Start with a place you have the most confidence in or an area with the least external dependencies. Some examples of my recent past have been empowering design systems at Glossier and the mobile team at Brex. Once you successfully show that you can create an environment of high trust and empowerment, you increase your own confidence, and you have examples to refer to that others can see as well.

Leading based on trust and empowerment and leading with questions can be a game-changer. It won’t happen overnight. But once the environment shifts, it will create a tailwind for everyone.

A massive thanks to Amy Snook for her editorial feedback on this.

At the time of writing this, I have about 18 years worth of photos to look back on. In the past two decades we have gone from the first digital SLRs to small mirrorless cameras with amazing low-light and video performance, and at the same time, we have seen the rise of a completely new class of camera — phone cameras — with impressive computational performance.

And as cameras have gotten better, smaller, and more ever-present, the volume of photos we take per year has dramatically increased. Most of us shoot more photos on their phone in a month than they do on a dedicated camera in year.

The sheer volume of photographs brings with it some very interesting problems. There are commodity problems — like storage and backups/recovery. There are communication problems — where images have become a primary way of communicating. But the thing that I am really interested in is the value that lives inside of these images.

While we relegate them down to bits and bytes stored on devices and in clouds, their meaning is much more than that; many of these images are triggers for our mind. At minimum, they are a picture of us smiling in front of a point of interest, that open up our memories of a trip we took. Often, they are a set of photos that remind you of who was there with you, who you were back then, and why you were there. These photographs are a rich source of memories and emotions.

Most of these memories are private ones, and we have plenty of ways to share them with our friends — mostly through different messaging services. There are even some dedicated products for this, like Cocoon.

However, in many cases, these images and these memories can also convey stories; ones that we want to make available to the public realm. And in today’s environment, most ‘publicly’ shared photos live within the walled gardens of the service they were posted on. Instagram has become one of the worst offenders here, where even on a completely public account they throw up a dialog that forces you to log in to keep consuming. So what about our favorite photos in a public space?

A place for your favorite photos

For us who want to share our photos openly on the web, we deserve a spot. We deserve a place where — ten years from now — we ourselves, and others, can find these moments back. A lot of the last ten years still exists within Flickr, but some of it is now hidden after people have lapsed on their Pro accounts. On top of that, it is a pretty tough place to traverse.

I believe in the value of a lightweight way to share your photos publicly, and I am excited to put my energy in to building a place that deserves our photos. This is why I started chipping away at building a service that would allow me to share just a curated sliver of my cache of 18 years worth of photos.

It started as a static website that I generated out of a very dingy GitHub repository, and is now a prototype that allows anyone with an account to upload photos, add them to photo sets, and tag where they were taken. It is a place that is not a walled garden, and it’s a place where I am excited to (re)post anything from some great get-togethers of smart minds (at Brooklyn Beta, XOXO, Build, CreativeMornings, etc.), to trips that I took, to photo projects small and large.

If you’re interested in testing it out, you can reach me with the details below. I would love to hear from you.

I decided on this role for many reasons, but two are at its center: (1) people, (2) positively impacting small businesses.

People

A crucial constant that I have found throughout life and my career is the quality of people you get to work with. Everything is better around good people.

Want to do some super fun, creative work? It’ll be better with good people. Want to stretch yourself and focus on personal growth? You’ll enjoy it a lot more if you are around good people.

Every conversation I had while getting to know Brex was excellent. The easiest way to sum up the patterns I noticed in the people I talked to: high talent, low ego, and very honest and candid about the company’s state. (It’s in hypergrowth, this comes with challenges.)

Positively Impacting Small Businesses

We see small businesses horrifically impacted by this pandemic. I believe providing them with better tools is one of the most significant ways to affect them coming out of the pandemic in a positive way.

Working on a product that will allow someone to manage their small business on the go feels like a no-brainer, and I’m excited at the opportunity to improve their ability to control and get insight into their business.

And now the plug! We have a lot of work to do (across all screen sizes.) We’re actively growing the design team, so if you are a senior or staff-level designer (or have been doing the work of one) looking for a new opportunity, please reach out!

In most cases, a straightforward question can save you a lot of time: “Out of ten, how much do you care about this topic [your reasoning]?”

When I first heard this question, it sounded absurdly simple. And it still does. However, you would be surprised at how effective this question is.

Yes, I am aware that it completely oversimplifies the access you may have to external validation practices (like market research, customer research, or behavioral data.) Even with all of this work and these signals, you will often find yourself in a discussion where there is no clear direction. In these moments, it is much more vital for you to create focus and momentum for your team and yourself than to be right at the moment.

The real goal is to develop shared knowledge and common ground between (often very smart) people who have different frames of reference, other goals, and different ways of communicating. It can allow you to save time and increase momentum, understanding, and mutual respect.

So what are some of the results of asking how much someone cares about the topic at hand or their take on it?

1. You can completely short circuit an argument for argument’s sake. (If you find that you are unsure about your opinion and are only bringing it up for consideration, and score yourself at a 4/10, while your team member has thought this through diligently and scores themself at an 8/10, you just won your time back.)
2. You create a common language and learn what every one of your team members cares about. (You can ask follow-up questions like: “out-of-ten, how probable is it that you’re right?”)
3. You have the opportunity to calibrate the people with the loud voices (the squeaky wheels) against the quiet ones. And in turn, you can calibrate yourself. (Finding mechanisms to allow the quietest members on your team to be heard is deeply important.)
4. You can analyze your relationship with others and identify potential pressures that would build up over time because of endless discussions.
5. You can start predicting how specific arguments will unfold and guide other people on how to handle them.

This question is only one example of how to get there. In a healthy candid organizational culture, it is all about working together, leading with vulnerability, having a good escalation structure, etc. Ideally, you should genuinely be able to ask directly what someone’s angle is to get to a good resolution.

There is a more extensive set of questions that, on the surface, seem very simple but can have some very positive impact on communication within your team. Questions like:

• “Related to other things we have on our plate, is this discussion the most important one to have?”
• “How easy is it to revert the decision we make here?”
• “Is there a specific signal that will help decide this? (ie. behavioral data)”

None of this is a silver bullet for every scenario, and if your organization fundamentally rejects these types of discussions, you have bigger fish to fry. However, please try them out amongst the collaborators you trust, and see how it works for you.

Today [October 19th, 2020] marks one year of taking time off. I deeply realize I have been very fortunate to have this incredible privilege, but I must say that I genuinely didn't feel its importance until about 3-4 months ago.

Making The Decision

Whenever I've talked with people about taking time off, the immediate question is: "How did you decide to take time off?"

The story this brings to mind is that I decided against it twice. First, I almost left FB at the start of 2017 because my team and I had just finished a big project, and I was tired. And (2) I had no plan to join a company immediately after my time at Facebook. In both cases, my attention and focus were wavering, but I could do these focused sprints that were so productive it seemed I was perfectly fine... until I wasn't.

Facebook gave me the freedom to work on efforts that hadn't had a lot of design attention before. This allowed me to be out of the line-of-sight of a release cycle. I got to do some super nerdy fun work and build teams that worked on internal tooling and privacy. However, my engine was sputtering, and I wouldn't stop.

In one instance, I was able to design work far enough ahead that I could take six weeks off (a company perk they called recharge) without much operational impact at all. When I came back to work, I had a bit of renewed energy, but it waned fast. Work was unfocused, and my life was unfocused. Yet, I couldn't at the time see my attention, my relationships, and my optimism slipping away. But I kept going, even though I couldn't get a good mental picture about what I was doing and why anymore.

Cue the departure from Facebook and a fantastic opportunity in New York at Glossier. I continued to follow a path I had laid out: aim to do great work, with a heavy focus on design, team, and company fundamentals (solving problems in predictable, systematic ways, consistent communication, career tracks, performance management, transparency etc.)

Lo and behold, my lack of energy caught up to me. (Lesson learned: even with all the optimism and excitement, I can do about 9-10 months of this) Again, my focus and the consistency of my output were waning. It became clear that I should have taken time off, but "I signed up for this, and I'll be damned if I don't deliver." So I focused on hiring some of the smartest people I could find and delegated the work away that led to me having to context switch constantly.

Whenever you find a way to increase your efficacy dramatically or delegate large parts of your work (also known as "hiring yourself out of a job"), there is often this great Y-split that you create.

You can either:

1. define a new role and break open new scope, or
2. make a lateral move, or walk away.

I'd done both at different levels of scale but never truly walked away entirely before. So there came this moment where I had the title, I had the seat, and grown my team, and delegated my role enough that either I could decide to double down and define a new scope or take myself out of the picture. And I did not have the energy to double down.

Taking Time

A year ago, on this day, I had my first proper day off in 15 years. A day without a company I ran or a job I was responsible for—even if only in the back of my head. Immediately I started doing a ton of traveling to see friends all across the world. This was an absolute blessing and also the best distraction. It wasn't until I got back home in January that I forced myself to sit in quiet and open up Pandora's box of how deeply I had affected my energy and brain. I didn't want to get out of bed, I had absolutely no feelings of inspiration or creativity, and I generally disengaged from everything.

Two months later, the pandemic hit. I should have taken as a hint to embrace doing little to nothing. Yet, every day, with the smallest bit of energy, I had my 'productivity' brain fighting my 'you-need-a-break' brain. Every day, it was "You should do something!" vs. "I don't want to do anything." This ended up lasting months.

I had to allow myself to do nothing, and trust to come out the other side with a clear mind. Which... is a stupendously hard thing to tell yourself.

To make sure I wasn't jumping off the deep end without any tools, I had my weekly therapy check-ins, kept up on calls with friends, ran on the West Side Highway (yay, those little mask cups that allows you to run with a mask), and implemented some basic structure to keep my sanity alive. But that was about as much as I could muster in a day.

A few months into the pandemic, it became clear I had to leave the concrete jungle and find some sunlight on the coast I had moved from. San Francisco would offer me more daylight, and I could take my car anywhere to feel a sense of movement and see the beauty around me.

On The Upswing

Slowly but surely, even with a city in lockdown, my regular conversations with friends, not asking too much of myself, and keeping somewhat of a structured day, gave me the desire to want to make things again.

A great opportunity came along, so—of course—I immediately jumped on it and started doing work. After a few weeks, it became clear this was too early, and it wasn't the right fit. However, this was the first time I felt my optimism, focus, and productivity come back.

This optimism was what made me finally accept that it was okay for me not to work for a bit. As soon as that became clear, my mood shifted. I focused on my personal life, which in turn (patently obvious, by the way) started tickling my creative and technical brain again. We're now at 12 months and a day, and while I don't feel that I need to work on something immediately, I have not felt this sharp and energized in about 3-4 years.

Lessons Learned

The biggest lesson for me among all this was—and this may sound 'woo-woo': seeing a structured day, a quiet cup of coffee, or a workout not as a task but as something to relish. There are these things in our lives that we know we 'should' do, but if we don't find a way to appreciate them truly, it will forever be a struggle to integrate them.

Be it working out, being mindful of your diet, meditating, managing your attention, and in this case—for me—it was challenging my assumptions and getting off of this career hamster wheel. Even though fear will tell you otherwise: with a little turbulence, you can always get back on.

However, I don't just want to write this without acknowledging the situation we are in right now. It's a cliché to say this, but times are crazy; there is macro-level stress, day-to-day life has been upended, and—on top of that—you're likely in too many (video) calls every day.

If you have the opportunity to protect your time by taking a long stint of time off, especially after many years of work, please consider it. Plan it out, budget it, consider the consequences, learn how much it will affect your retirement, all those things.

In all of us lies this subconscious stress that we can manage, and manage, and manage until we cannot. It's like dehydration for your energy: when you figure out that you are thirsty, it's way too late.

If you made it here, thank you for your time and attention. If you want to talk more about this: my DMs are open.

Here’s the note I wrote to my colleagues. I was originally going to circulate this to just friends, but with the positive feedback I have gotten I decided to use this venue to post more widely.

Thank You.

As hard as a decision it was to make, September 21st will be my last day at Facebook. Over the last six years, I have worked with a tremendous amount of love and energy on the opportunities this community has allowed me to be a part of.

I am grateful for the projects I have been a part of. I am grateful for every single ounce of progress we were able to make, and every launch we were able to do. I am grateful for the faith that people have put in me, the guidance that I was given, and the opportunities I have received.

Most of all, I am grateful for the bold, talented, tireless people I have had the great fortune of meeting, working with, and learning from.

As there is too much to cover about the last six years, here are some lessons I learned.

1. Figure out what you want to optimize for.

Having impact for the company is your job, but what is the purpose of this job to you? How can you look back and be proud of the time you spent? For me, I have always optimized for learning. This has put me in some uncomfortable and inefficient situations, but I can honestly look back and say I have learned from every single one.

2. Find your people.

We move fast. This is a hard job. Find your support system, both inside and outside of the company. Find people you can lean on, people that invigorate you, and people who aren’t afraid to be honest. I feel very fortunate to still have strong connections to the people I have worked with throughout my time here.

3. Be patient, yet vigilant.

It is easy to want to get things done fast. It is easy to look at the past half and feel like not enough progress was made. A lot of the roles we take on, and the work we do will only pay off in the long term. So be patient and aim for the prize. However, don’t be apathetic. If you sense that something isn’t right, and you cannot shake it, figure out how to best impact it.

4. Give feedback in the right venue.

Feedback is important. Being honest and calling out potential pitfalls even more so. Be thoughtful about how, and where, you give this feedback. Nobody wins if you call someone out on potential bad behaviour amongst a group of their peers. Find the right venue to give feedback, and it will likely be more effective.

5. Listening is Knowing.

Don’t make assumptions. Asking questions is the best way to get to know as much as you can. By asking questions, intentionally listening, and analyzing people’s position, you can figure out at what level you should have a conversation. Is this about a detail? Is this about a structural problem? Is this about strategy?

The strongest leaders I have seen move around this company have always observed and asked questions first. And if you don’t feel comfortable asking questions in a meeting, ask them over Messenger, or in a group.

6. Pace yourself.

I learned this one the hard way. There were weeks where I would get on 640AM commute in, and 10PM commute out. And I definitely had the energy for it. But these things catch up on you. So make sure to pace yourself.

Nobody wins when you’re tired, when you’re on edge, and when you’re off balance. Use your PTO wisely, find ways to reduce your commute, force yourself to have lunch away from your screen.

Thanks again for all the great moments and memories. It’s been an honor and a pleasure.

(Originally posted on Medium)

In this talk, Simon explores the challenges faced by the millennial generation. Failed parenting strategies left many feeling special, but without cause. Growing up in an echo chamber of praise led to shattered confidence.

For those same people, technology and social media have rewired how we handle stress and build relationships. Instead of turning to people, we turn to devices. The dopamine hits from phones mirror other addictive behaviors.

He ends by telling us that life isn't a game you can win. It's an infinite journey of constant improvement. Success comes from helping others and playing the long game. The goal is progress, not victory.

With that said, I thought about approaching New Year's Resolutions as a design problem.

The problem with New Year's Resolutions

New Year's resolutions are often ineffective approaches to an end goal. New Year's resolutions are about aspiration and behavioural change. The format of a New Year's resolution is a statement that expresses a promise or a solution. It uses an arbitrary point in time, and an arbitrary length of time to do this. Most of them are also formulated in large, ambiguous ways ("I want to lose weight", "I want to stop smoking" etc.).

To me, there are three major problems with New Year's resolutions:

• A New Year's resolution is articulated as a promise or solution, and does not express the problem you actually want to solve.
• Because of this, a New Year's resolution does not express the motivation behind the resolution, or a "why".
• The time horizon is too long. New Year's resolutions don't account for unexpected changes, like jobs, travel, partners, interests etc.

Reframing New Year's Resolutions to Goals

This is why, in the last eighteen months, I've reframed it for myself. It breaks down to two elements:

1. Set clearly defined goals with an arbitrary time horizon (1 month, 3 months, 6 months, a year), and ask yourself why you want to achieve these goals.
2. Use monthly resolutions to work towards, and check in on, these goals.

Set clearly defined goals

Over the last eight years, I've been reasonably good at consistently working out and not eating too many bad things. I would have periods in which I would get really in to running, or cycling, or interval training, but all slowly faded. There were triggers that have caused these positive behavioural change, but none of them lasted.

In June of 2015 I set myself one personal goal to finish the year with: Become more fit. How? (1) Work out more, in a consistent way, and (2) be intentional about the things I eat. Why? I want to reach and extend the peak of my fitness for as long as I can. (or: I'm getting older and I'm actively going to make sure I do it the right way.)

The tool of choice? Monthly resolutions.

Time-box a step towards the goal

For the month of June 2015 this meant:

1. Work out at least 3 times a week.
2. No bread, pasta, white carbs, processed foods etc.
3. Not more than one alcoholic drink a night.

These were simple rules to follow, the one month time horizon is a small commitment, and this monthly approach allows for faster iteration and continuous success. If successful, these rules were going to roll over to July.

🚀💪🏻 → 😬😱 → 😎👌🏻

And they were successful. Yet halfway through July I had to help with a project in New York City. And while I could keep up the workout rule, the work priorities and distractions of New York got the upper hand. With monthly resolutions, July was lost, and I was able to pick it up again in August. Into September, then October. And whoops, because my birthday is in November, basically all the rules were broken again.

All time horizons are arbitrary. With New Year's resolutions, I might have had more resolve. But most likely I would have folded on them completely.

Monthly resolutions are small commitments

Fast forward, I restarted the rules in January, but with a change to 4 workouts a week. I succeeded, and switched to 5 workouts a week in February.

Nowadays, it feels off when I don't work out more than 3 times a week. Monthly resolutions have allowed me to change my behaviour in a flexible, iterative way throughout the year. Beyond the personal health and fitness changes, I've set goals for quality time spent with friends, consuming less things from the internet, travel, exploring hobbies, reading and improving my apartment.

The end result of all this is having done over 200 workouts, spending quality time with a small set of close friends, spending a couple of weeks traveling and (almost) completely disconnecting from work, picking up and getting halfway decent at tennis and tripling my reading (which is only an abysmal six books for the year, but still.)

Continuous Iteration

One of the key strengths of monthly resolutions is continuous iteration. If you don't succeed for a month, that's okay. Take a cheat day. Take a cheat week! Hell, challenge if you even should be doing some of your resolutions. Adapt.

If you are successful, consider if you've been challenging yourself enough. Maybe you easily cut the amount of time spent watching TV. Should you even be watching TV? Maybe you breezed through taking a 2 hour walk every weekend day. What about a hike every weekend? Maybe you have an extremely busy life and found a way to meditate for 10 minutes a day, what about making it 15 minutes?

If it doesn't work, it doesn't mean you failed. It means you need to reflect and consider what you should do different next time. If it does work, it doesn't mean you didn't challenge yourself hard enough. But it might be worth considering if you did.

I hope some of you try this. And if you do, please let me know how it is working for you.

(Originally posted on Medium)