Category: The Ride

Spent this Friday afternoon combing my work inbox — taking notes and flagging important emails that I will take on at the start of 2021. Most of my work that involves team management are already churned in Figma. In other words, I don’t worry about forgetting everything behind because I’ve already managed to extract the important elements.

This is the practice that I want to embed consistently in my life — extract and carry on. It’s like the following metaphors or mental models:

• Stepping stones – using what you’ve learned as a means to an end
• Building blocks – using what you’ve learned to make a whole
• Two birds in one stone – doing something efficiently

The lack of this practice would render, in my mind, a very messy backlog of things that, as time goes by, makes it even harder to make sense of because it became a giant tidal wave of mumbo jumbo — a real counterproductive practice. Forgetting them won’t simply do because experiences are a treasure trove of lessons. So the smart thing to do is to extract and carry on.

An important aspect of extract and carry on highly depends on the frequency of doing it. Imagine a correlation between time and memory relevance and reliability.

Relevance

Our memories simply work that way — as time goes by, we tend to not remember things the same way. From a different perspective, we tend to forget. The saying, out of sight, out of mind captures its essence best.

Reliability

As memories fade away, the way we retrieve or remember them, and the way we interpret them also change — even with the aid of digital documents. It might help you see and remember literal evidence of how many balloons were there in your fifth birthday but memories are different from ephemeral experience. That’s why if it’s not in the now, it’s not wholly what you experienced but a memory of your experience.

Frequency

For how long until you will feel that your backlog is already a giant tidal wave? Don’t let it reach that point. If you could wrap up your life weekly or monthly, then that’s more manageable than wrapping it up once a year.

Looking back a year long when you’ve got a weekly or monthly chunk of the important stuff would be easier, and could actually be an enjoyable activity without the arduous stuff of remembering and extracting.

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Pushing this idea to the extreme, I ask myself if I could save only thirty-six photos of a particular month, which could these photos be? It could mean forgetting about the rest of the photos that didn’t make the cut. That could also solve the problem of digital storage, but that’s a different story.

You get the idea — extract and carry on aims for a hangup-free and richer life.

Grabe! One would exclaim in a local language (Tagalog) as exaggeration of a feeling or an event. It’s part of my daily expressions, and exaggeration is one I consider a great tool in my existential musings.

It is not unlike a thought experiment or addressing edge cases in UX.

Two persons are in danger, who will you help first?

How do we handle a very long string here?

Will you eat turd for a million dollars?

What would you do if a love one is gone tomorrow?

Yes, simple questions, albeit provocative. The scenario might less likely happen today but what if it does? What would you do? How would you react?

In talks of exaggeration, there’s a pitfall to avoid, though — when facts are misrepresented for manipulation with malice. On the other hand, thinking in extremes helps us in realigning our principles and values with how we think and who we are now. It helps us be prepared for things unforeseen.

[ntt_rl_unsplash href=”-Qcr5Y8BTro” photographer=”Angelo Abear”]

Sure, truth is subjective. We, humans, when we go out of our heads and into the world, we must share a common truth — the same things that we believe to be true — that will hold its ground for an indefinite time.

In user interface design, there’s this thing that we call “single source of truth”. It is a design artifact that everyone refers to when needed. For example, what is the single source of truth for our brand color red?

Surely, if that red’s color value exists in one designer’s safekeeping, they might have missed (whether they missed the news entirely or missed updating their own instance) that the branding department have already updated the shade of the red which they also have in their safekeeping.

Then we can surmise that the benefit of having a single source of truth for the color red boils down to efficiency. Efficiency of maintaining only one instance (works well in the digital world) and efficiency of communications because everyone trusts that the instance is aligned with everyone.

A related experience that I had with regard to the oh-so-important “mute” button: so, there was this big presentation for a big local banking client wherein I would present this white-labeled web app mock-ups to the stakeholders. And I was on mute.

However, no matter how I set the visual state of the WebEx button, I was still on mute. Tinkering on the audio settings did not save me from the awkward silence of everyone in the call.

It ended up that I asked a colleague to save the day and present the designs while I became the slide switcher.

Right after the call, I noticed that a button on my keyboard was lit. Yep, it was the mute button and it was active. WebEx failed to deactivate it. What a learning experience in the expense of users!