Rob Weychert
Rob Weychert is a Brooklyn-based designer, evolving in the worlds of both pixels and paper. A former Creative Director at Happy Cog, Rob now hangs out with the Studiomates crew. Besides being a talented web developer, Rob has an alter-ego named Windhammer, which is a three-time US Air Guitar national finalist. He admittedly doesn’t like to shave.
You can read Rob’s writing on his personal website, and follow his tweets @robweychert.
More thoughts by Rob Weychert:
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The whole of communication technology is merely an extension of pigment on surface, the fundamental technique of indirect language transmission. Radio and television and computers do more work for us, sure. They parse ideas into shapes and colors and sounds. But there is nothing they can do that can’t be recreated with a lump of mud and a fertile imagination, a method as viable today as it was five thousand years ago.
The only thing more amazing and beautiful than how far we’ve come is that we haven’t come very far at all.
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Inspired by Daniel Markovitz’s Harvard Business Review article “To-Do Lists Don’t Work”, I have been “living in my calendar” for a few weeks now. While I’m still a long way from becoming as productive as I’d like to be, I’m definitely getting more done, and I’m also getting a clearer sense of my capabilities (read: my ideal productive self may as well have been born on Krypton).
In a nutshell, my (evolving) process works like this. At the beginning of each week, I assign upcoming tasks to days (breaking up bigger tasks into pieces that get spread over multiple days), and at the beginning of each day, I assign its tasks to specific timeframes. I leave some breathing room here and there for responding to e-mail and other little things that might pop up and need immediate attention.
So far, I have yet to accomplish a day’s tasks according to my schedule, and that failure is very valuable. On one hand, it lets me see precisely how far off my time estimates are for various sorts of tasks, and on the other, the pressure applied by the specific timeframe constraints (which Markovitz calls a “commitment device”) makes me more aware of the inefficiencies inherent in my work habits. The goal is to meet in the middle, where tasks are budgeted a bit more time (I don’t expect myself to be Superman) and my efficiency increases (I try to be a little bit more like Superman).
As I said before, my process is evolving and I’ve still got a long way to go, but, unlike my experiences with other time management methodologies, this time I actually feel like I’m on my way.
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Personal statistics fascinate me, and in the information age, I’m collecting a ton of them. Last.fm keeps track of what music I listen to and when I listen to it. Letterboxd does the same for movies, and the tagging system I’m using within it tells me how the movies were formatted, where I watched them, and more. Goodreads and Instapaper keep tabs on my reading, Foursquare and Tripit chronicle the details of my travels, and DICE’s Battlefield series knows exactly how many bullets I’ve fired in virtual combat, which weapons they came from, how good my aim is, and much, much more.
A smart person might be able to put together a decent psychological profile with this stuff. But if the subject has access to his own data in real time, is that profile reliable? I pore over my personal statistics somewhat religiously, and in many cases, it affects my behavior. I’ll be careful to space out an album’s repeat listens, even if it’s something I adore. I’ll go out of my way to rotate my reading between fiction and non-fiction. Ostensibly, I do this to make my experiences more well-rounded, or at least to give the appearance of well-roundedness to whomever might be looking.
But am I really doing myself any favors by paying attention to the play-by-play? Does such a calculated approach to these experiences rob them of their potential for serendipity? Does it needlessly impede the whims of natural curiosity?
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In an article for Smithsonian magazine, renowned magician Teller (of the duo Penn & Teller) offers a handful of guiding principles for altering an audience’s perceptions. This one is my favorite:
Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.
This is the stuff great design is made of: lavishing a totally unreasonable amount of attention on even the most seemingly insignificant details.
Here are the dates of Rob Weychert's future thoughts:
- Sunday, 27 May
- Friday, 22 June
- Monday, 9 July
- Friday, 24 August
- Wednesday, 19 September
- Friday, 19 October
- Thursday, 22 November
- Monday, 24 December