One of the best things I’ve done in the past year, is get a good to-do list that I can really count on. That is different than alleviating stress by sitting down and making yet another list. A good list helps me let go of the to-do and know that I’ll see it later.

I have been using Hiveminder, which lets me tag to-dos with keywords so I can group all my like tasks. That way, I can let go of everything else, just for awhile, so I can focus only on what is important. And no matter where I am, if I think of something new, I can add it from any phone and then move on, let go.

The idea of letting go is a major topic in Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy:

“When bits are infinite, the only way to thrive is to pick up the eraser. This is letting the bits go: always looking for reasons to delete, defer, or filter bits that come our way. Anything else allows the bits to pile up. Success comes when we get the square empty. Thus another way to describing bit literacy is the constant attempt, in a world of infinite bits, to achieve emptiness.”

If you’re ready to achieve emptiness, start with your inbox. Email is the nerve center of my life and probably yours, too. The key to email, as well as everything (to-dos, photos, news, blogs, and more) covered in Bit Literacy, is letting go. It’s the only productivity tip you need.

Think like a user. That’s the basis of any good approach to usability.

The trouble is that it has become meaningless. It is easy to say I am considering user experience, but how do I hold myself to the standard?

I actively try not to think like a technician. I try to remove from my brain the knowledge of how web sites and applications are made. When I jump too quickly from problem to technical solution, I am grasping at what is easiest to implement, not what would be best for the user. Sometimes I have to ask, simpler for whom?

Technical knowledge can be a burden. It can cause one to see a problem from the wrong direction. Having a non-technician plan user experience is sometimes a perfect fix. If he doesn’t know the guts of how hard a perfect solution is, he isn’t tempted to tweak the user experience in the name of easy coding.

On the other hand, the non-technician might hand a web developer something unnecessarily difficult or impossible. It’s not his fault, because he doesn’t know a database or Javascript or whatever works that way. I think that is a pretty good trade-off.

Like the incrementalist and completionist, the non-technician and technician can work together to make something great. And if you’re patient and focused, you can even play both roles.

I’ll start out by saying I’m an incrementalist. It’s at the heart of my simple-loving nature. Michael Lopp writes about the two personalities for problem solving.

“Incrementalists

…are realists. They have a pretty good idea of what is achievable given a problem to solve, a product to ship.”

If you have a problem today, find the easiest (but hopefully still elegant) fix. Avoid over-engineering the solution. Step by step, you’ll get to something good without making yourself crazy aiming for perfection.

Or, so says the incrementalist.

“Completionists

…are dreamers. They have a very good idea of how to solve a given problem and that answer is SOLVE IT RIGHT.”

Take that same problem today, and realize that if you don’t solve every aspect of it, you’ll be fixing it over and over again. The Completionist wants to fix it once.

As an Incrementalist, I probably will be frustrated with the time-wasting Completionists most of the time. But as Lopp identifies, we need both personalities, and the two aren’t that far off in their intentions.

“The co-worker identified (correctly) the original problem. Why in the world don’t they see the value of my solution? The reason is, this is a Incrementalist doing battle with a Completionist. This isn’t the battle of wrong versus right, it’s the battle of right versus right. Bizarre.”

Read the whole essay to find out more. Which type are you?

via Joel Spolsky

Innovation is good, but what is it? Not technology, according to Niklas Zennstrom. The Skype co-founder shares his thoughts on innovation with BBC News:

Innovation “tends to originate from a simple idea that can be easily explained to anyone who isn’t interested in how you make the technology work but more importantly, interested in what it does.

“If I was to single out where the next big idea is going to come from… it will be driven by what consumers want… Those that have been the most successful are the ones which are fun and easy to use.”

It’s one thing to make something simple. But you also have to make something that people want. It must improve my life. If you take away too many layers, you’ve made something simplistic that nobody can use.

Innovation isn’t technology. Innovation is finding new ways to be useful.

via Good Experience.