December 30, 2021
The Insinuation of Stasis
Screen shot of my yearly templates
Well… 2021 is ending and it’s been a really tough year for me. The lack of momentum from 2020 and the glimmer of hope before resurgence all lead to a year of… stasis. I’d go so far to say that the Stasis full replaced my original yearly theme of “reinvigoration” such that, were I the sort to grade my efforts toward a year theme (I’m not, they aren’t pass/fail things) I’m pretty sure I’d flunk it.
Like.. I didn’t even read a full book? The pandemic lockdown mindset insinuated itself into everything in 2021 and became an excuse to just… not. Very little writing, art, exercise, house & home build, and pretty much anything. I don’t think I even got much large work stuff done where I feel I had considerable more focus.
But these themes are about direction setting, not specific goal accomplishment. So I may have been more stasis-minded than reinvigoration-minded, but that’s ultimately ok and nothing I can change now. There’s only setting myself up for the next year.
Pictured above is the template I use for yearly planning. The idea is to set directions in increasing levels of specificity to help guide where I go in the year. I’ve included the template text below the line for folks that are interested.
This is how I use it.
The Sky
The sky is the largest, biggest thin that matters in your life. Vocation. The thing that generates your energy, that rallies you, and the thing that insinuates everything that you do. For me, this wasn’t something I really figured out until I’d been doing these yearly preps and review things for a number of years.
So, if you have no idea what you’d say is The One Big Thing that matters to you, don’t stress it. And really, it’ll refine or change over time. It should. You grow. What matters to you should grow and change with you.
Flight plan
Each level increases in specificity to help refine what you want your year to resemble. I start with a single word to define the year. Incidentally, these become the titles for my yearly printed journals. 2020: The year of Community (lol)
My theme journals going back to 2012
- 2019: The year of Cultivation
- 2018: Refinement
- 2017: Self-improvement
- 2016: Loss
- 2015: Virtue
- 2014: Self-discovery
- 2013: Order
- 2012: Metamorphosis
Honestly, the more vague, the better. I think there’s actual value in having to think about what the word means when you review things. The word may take a whole new meaning. Cultivation was going to be about building relationships. It turned into a year of permaculture gardening and nature.
I answer some questions about the theme trying to help put some historical perspective and motivation but, again, don’t stress the content here. I don’t want the word to take too specific a meaning.
I trying to organize the things I want to focus on into broad areas. But I’ll tell you a secret… I occasionally do this last and group the projects or other ideas into areas at the end.
Scandalous….
Cruising altitude
This is the scaffolding for progress. What projects, focus, skills, or thing to do you want to do in a year. They should be bigger than “clean the garage.” But cleaning the garage could be part of a larger “get my physical space better organized.”
These are probably the most concrete thing to come from this thinking process and can be the Stuff What I Work Towards in the year.
In my case this is the Virtue and Project tracking work I do day-to-day. I have found, through the 2015 virtue project, that they become a really helpful engine for all the other things I want to do in a given year, month, or week.
I also try to start linking these things to the areas defined above. This is more about seeing where I’m spending my time. Maybe I only have one regular thing going for “increase overall health” and too many things in “organize spaces” and want to adjust the quantity of things you’re doing for an area.
Concrete things you want to do, like cleaning the garage (20,00ft), the steps to accomplish (10,000) and the related stuff from above. You may or may not have a lot here yet. It’s fine if you don’t. Just start.
Bringing it together
I ultimately build check-ins and reviews of each level in a time frame that makes sense for each. I review my projects weekly, partly because this includes stuff at work and I need to stay atop those of I want to HAVE a job, but also because the projects and tasks are the most dynamic.
The areas and cruising tools are every month or so. Probably not less than quarterly. Right now, the structure for the review is pretty free-form except for the daily task stuff I do at work. I kinda want to build better strategies for this review to be better about progress so that’s probably something I”lL try to do in the next few days while I work on the rest of the template stuff.
Like sticking the discrete stuff into a set of text files and can I manipulate with iOS Shortcuts to step me through the more concrete review parts - like run a shortcut for the quarterly that grabs all the stuff defined at the higher levels and asks me questions about them?
The End
IDK, something like that… Maybe gather the individual projects and tasks that work towards that out of my task manager? That would probably require some extra stuff logged in my daily procedures so I can dig that out quickly.
Something something over-engineering….
But any way you slice it, the last two years have been less than ideal and I’d like to change that. But “like to change” is very different than “actual change.” The latter needs active effort.
We start here.
The Sky
A Vocation
Ideally, this stays similar or refines over the years.
Last Year’s sky
Flight plan
The single word or idea to guide the year
The Year Of….
SUMMARY IMAGE?
Related quote
In summary….
A very short summary statement
Why this?
What brought this on?
What is it about this thing that you trying to accomplish?
Why now?
Did something trigger this?
The areas of focus for the year Like life, health, creativity, or whatever
Area 1 - brief definition
Area 2 - brief definition
Virtues where you should spend most of the time {Virtue list}
Specific projects to accomplish for the year
Project - virtue - area
Project - virtue - area
Actions, Items, low-level concepts to work
- Item - project - due
- Item - project - due
Where am I starting?
Where would I like to be at the end of the year?
Are there problems you’re trying to solve?
Permalink: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/the-insinuation-of-stasis
General
October 28, 2021
On allowing for processing
Etienne considers himself a more introverted person. Like Wortman Ploetz, he says he’s ultimately become more productive while working from home.
“I felt more in control of the management of my time,” he says. “For example, I think we’ve all been through this: you finish a meeting and you’re walking back to your desk and someone spots you and you have a conversation. And you lose the time to process the meeting you’ve just finished, and reset. That doesn’t happen anymore. Now, I can have my moment of reflection in silence, without disturbance. With things like Zoom and Teams there are even ‘do not disturb’ settings; you literally can’t message me.”
Very much this. When people are focusing so much on getting back to the office because being around people is how you innovate, that’s how extroverts work. Extroverts can create new idea connections through conversation with people. It’s the sounding board metaphor.
Introverts process ideas differently. Introverts can be more creative, more innovative, when allowed to sit and think without distraction.
The workplace was created for extroverts, by extroverts.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210713-why-introverts-excelled-at-working-from-home
And it biases contribution attention to the loudest among us.
Work
October 18, 2021
On executive awareness….
Interesting report I suggest you read.
Two out of every three executives (66%) believe they’re being “very transparent” regarding their post-pandemic remote-working policies. Less than half of workers (42%) agree.
Similarly, 81% of executives say their company’s leadership is “transparent about sharing new developments that affect the company.” Only 58% of employees concur.
I personally think that executives should be far, far more open on decisions that affect the company. Not necessarily is it “do what employees say” but talking about where you think things are going and WHY.
My recent experience has been a lot if “we are being transparent. Here’s a wiki” followed by policy change that wasn’t even in the wiki as a thing going on.
Transparency is not just announcing things at full company meetings…
Findings from the Pulse survey show marked differences between executives and employees—from return-to-office preferences to perceptions of transparency to employee experience and how workers are feeling:
• Most executives (66%) report they are designing post-pandemic workforce policies with little to no direct input from employees.
• While two-thirds of executives (66%) believe they’re being “very transparent” regarding their “post-pandemic” policies, less than half of workers (42%) agree.
Honestly, it feels like a lack of empathy. “Well, I like it this way so everyone must.”
Source: https://futureforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Future-Forum-Pulse-Report-October-2021.pdf
Work
October 14, 2021
Beautiful but usable?
New website from Jonny Ive and Marc Newsome’s new(ish) design firm - LoveFrom. It is, as we’d expect, beautiful. The many comma animations (refresh the page a few times) are delightful.
https://www.lovefrom.com
But, is the page usable? It took me a good minute to realize that you can scroll to see more text. No scroll bars. No cheeky text above the fold. Just blank space.
Affordances like that are a cue to users that there’s more. It makes a site more engaging and accessible. Otherwise, you ask the user to expend cognitive energy to engage with you. Sure, it may not be much, but it is still requiring effort on the user that should be expended by designers at the start.
They’re both titans and the aesthetic of the page is on par with the visual appeal of his work. But it’s not accessible.
I expect accessibility from Ive and Newsome. Not just love.
Accessibility
October 10, 2021
Asterisk has no meaning
The TL;DR:
Visual conventions have no inherent meaning. That meaning must be provided for users of all types explicitly.
Meaning is subjective and context driven. My favorite example of “well everyone knows what that means” is the “*” used in a web form to denote a required field. Asterisks themselves do not inherently mean “required”. Historically, according to Wikipedia, asterisks were first used to identify errors in duplicated texts (source).
Aside: I find it funny that modern usage for asterisks means “fill this out or we’ll throw an error” where the first known usage was “hey there’s an error there.” Centuries of usage and the concept stays fairly close to original use. Language is neat.
You still need to explain that in your interface even if “everyone knows that”. Probably especially because of it.
Not everyone knows
The “everyone” in the statement is “everyone that has spent significant time using computers/the internet” which is NOT the majority of people, not even the ,Anorinth of computer users, in the world. To be as inclusive as possible, assuming that users don’t know that “*” = required is the better option in case it’s an unfamiliar convention.
It’s also ableist to see the symbol and expect the cognition to understand
A couple of things…
- it may be easy to miss seeing the asterisks even if users do know what it means. Small characters on a form are easy to overlook as a user tries to enter data.
- Recalling that “*” = required requires cognition and not all people will be able to do that sort of mentation effectively due to cognitive disabilities.
Why is meaning?
Fixing this is super simple and not really what I want to focus on here. You can find it below but what I find most interesting is the creation of meaning from repeated use of an element. It’s probably happenstance that the usage of asterisks to denote “error” is some fashion since Ancient Greece. It has otherwise been used to soften swearing by hiding letters, secre passwords by hiding them, use as a wildcard to computer searches, and myriad other things.
Meaning in interface convention is not inherent. Someone decides to use something and either it catches on and becomes convention or it doesn’t. We could just as easily place (required) after the labels in an required field and it would be MORE reliable and understandable because words have understood definitions adm can be translated. But that isn’t used for aesthetic reasons or space constrainers. “*” is considered more attractive and efficient.
What is meaning??
Meaning of symbols is cultural. It derives from usage and exposure and npot something inherent in the thing.
Take another example - the octagon 🛑. Itself, octagon is just a shape. Make it red and/or put STOP in it and you have a conventional English traffic sign.
Aside: the original stop sign was literally just black letters on a white background. It was standardized into the octagonal shape in 1924 but was black and yellow. It wasn’t made red until 1954. The octagonal shape has been adopted by numerous countries, as well as the white text on a red fieldstructure. Source: https://www.myparkingsign.com/MPS/article_history-of-stop-sign.aspx
From years of usage, humans in countries that use that convention, understand red octagons to tell a person to stop and pay attention. It’s still not perfectly reliable but decades of cultural reinforcement means it’s a relatively safe convention to use.
But, again, octagons are just octagons. Red is just red. And you still need to address the obvious sight-bias in signs anyway. We’re out saying that stop signs need an audio equivalent (though walk signs should) given the context - not many folks with zero vision may be driving cars (there are some legally blind folks who CAN drive cars [so take care of your assumptions there…]).
What is meaning????
I tell folks that I work with that we have to separate the meaning from the symbol and ensure the meaning is provided to all users. Red octagon doesn’t mean anything. STOP means a lot. You really need to have both for a symbol to matter and to ensure proper user information and behavior
The Fix For *
Addressing the issue is pretty simple though. In your interface, include “*” indicates a required field” or similar text that is of an appropriate literacy level for your audience. Short, easy words. Fewer symbols. Simple sentences.
Make the text high-enough contrast to be visible to users.
And write your HTML to spec. The HTML REQUIRED attribute is widely supported by browsers and assistive technology so that low vision users can still understand the requirement. You don’t even need to use the aria label anymore because it is so well supported.
Bit consider this anywhere you’re thinking of using something “understood” by everyone. We get far better results if we don’t assuming for previous knowledge and just… be obvious.
Tell people what they need to know, when they need to know it, and encode it into your interface.
References
Aria-required: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/ARIA_Techniques/Using_the_aria-required_attribute Asterisks: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk Blind driving: https://lowvisionmd.org/legally-blind-and-driving/ Contrast miniums: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#contrast-minimum Literacy levels: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/reading-level.html Stop signs: https://www.myparkingsign.com/MPS/article_history-of-stop-sign.aspx
September 12, 2021
Building them nodes
I have been building out my Second Brain more. First screen shot was from August 4th and he second is today.
August 4th’s graph
Today’s Graph. Such dense. Very node. Wow.
Wait what was this again?
Second Brains are ways to externalize and traverse our knowledge. I’m using Obsidian, an application that allows for easy linking between text notes. Think like Wikipedia. Note 1 links to note 2 though a note title link. Do that for lots of notes and you get a network of ideas.
What’ve I been doing?
The hardest thing has been recognizing when I should be writing something down.
Example:
Someone asks me to interpret a WCAG criterion for a bug fix. I look up the criterion, review the bug report, review the functionality, and read the design. What I HAD been doing was just answering that question over email, or design, or whatever.
NOW I write all that down as I go. I grab source links, references and text within the sources, my understanding of the question, and my final interpretation.
But write it down where?
In Obsidian, I create a daily note that holds all my calendar holds, tasks, and general note section. I start writing things there. If the information gets “big” enough, I cut it out into its own note and leave a reference link to it from my daily note.
When writing those notes, I create notes for other concepts that I want to expand because, say, I have opinions/ideas on related concept that contributes to my understanding of the thing I’m writing notes about.
I’ve also been just… brain dumping into notes occasionally to build things up or grabbing old blog posts and dropping them into notes to then go pick apart into smaller notes.
Over time, these notes expand and the links get bigger and nodes get larger where more things reference them.
Here is an example from today: http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/Example-Note
Anatomy of the note
At the top sandwiched between ’— is YAML markup. This is just metadata I add to extend functionality in Obsidian.
MOC - this is a link to my “map on concept” note. MOCs are intended to be a note that aggregates kinda my understanding of A Thing. Here, this note is contributing to my understanding of “accessibility” more broadly.
Then the body of the text. This note was about making “real” buttons in HTML instead of ’
s’ and the associated benefits plus some other history.
Everything in ‘[[]]’ is another note related to this one.
And them ending with references, ’natch.
So… what?
The long-term goal is to be able to pull insights from the linkages. So I wonder“how does Interface Design relate to screen reader DOM construction” and start with my note(s) on interface design and trace links from that into my DOM notes. The pathway there may result in some novel ideas.
Orrrr… you get blog posts like this because I find this interesting and I know many of you find this interesting too.
The graph images are really just because they’re neat to see.
Me
