Let Go and Haul: Thinking about habits
Week 10, 2018 – Brooklyn
Journey: where we’re at
This week we have an exciting announcement! Ela is now a full time team member as Content & Community Manager.
Also in exciting news, we got the coveted “corner” of our NYU co-working space in Dumbo. I can’t wait to have enough space for the whole team (we have been pretty much sitting on top of each other), and I really hope this reduces the number of times we all get sick. Shouts to Anton for organizing!
We did a ton of user observation this week with the app and learned a lot. Thinking quite a lot about the length of video and what kind of clips people have on their phones again. Other than that, building building!
(One of these days I need to remember to write a funny post about how to dress for NYU user testing vs. an investor meeting, like that day I had to look sharp for dinner with some a16z peeps after a whole day of chilling with 20 year olds over video clips and lattes).
Journal: what I learned
Okay, so I’m incredibly late to this one and finally reading The Power of Habit, and so naturally I’m thinking a lot about habit loops in successful features and products I’ve been a part of but also habits in my daily life. Cue, habit, reward. The author makes it all sound so simple. The most profound thing about this cue, habit, reward loop thing though, is that it is driven by a craving… a desire.
The desire part, figuring out what people’s deepest desires are and how to tap into them with products is the best part of my job when I get it right and the most annoying and frustrating part when I don’t. For years I’ve been framing statements about users (whether it’s a usecase, a goal, a problem etc.) in terms of desire not need – because in consumer tech, nobody needs anything, they (if you’re lucky) want it (and in large amounts). For a few hot minutes in my career I consulted on some slightly less typical consumer-y things like public health (this was in the UK where that actually exists), and even when I did that, I’d attack the whiteboard with desire statements (much to the surprise of colleagues). I’m convinced that that is still a helpful lens for actual needs too. It instantly questions how you are going to use design, how you are going to make something lovely – not just needed.
I realized, reading this book that I figured this habit loop thing out for sunscreen some years ago. I knew wearing sunscreen was the most important thing for skin health, and I’m ginger. A red-headed friend of my mom’s had skin cancer when I was young. I remember vividly what a skin graft looks like, so the desire to not get skin cancer was very high. However, the habit for putting on sunscreen started out low. The sunscreen of my childhood was greasy and slimy. I hated it. As an adult, I experimented until I found one that feels amazing. I love this stuff. I put a tube of it next to the rest of my morning routine and sunscreen became automatic. If I forget it, it feels as weird as forgetting deoderant.
So, now I’m tackling a bigger habit than sunscreen – I’ve been working on my morning routine now for about a year. I’m not a natural morning person. I’m a crazy heavy sleeper (once I slept all the way from Los Angeles to Sydney, in coach, in a middle seat. That’s uh, a 15h flight). My 23andMe tells me I should get up at like 8:30am (lol) and I’ve always been a night person, doing my best creative work in the evening. I love the night. Alas, the world hates night owls! The world starts at 9am. Mornings are also the only time I have to myself and that is precious. My days are busy, my evenings are usually unpredictable. I’ve got to the point where I have shifted my sleep schedule dramatically to become more morning-ish, but I’m still trying to figure out how to make the most of the time efficiently and consistently with exercise, time to myself, and time for logistics. If you have any tips or insights on how you conquered your morning, pls send!
Jams: what I’m into
Basically only listening to the new Solange record. As my roommate Katheryn put it “I feel like she is inventing a whole new genre of music”.