The Power of a Word

What is today’s word? I learned from my wife to assign one word to every day. I do it in the morning as I sit with my coffee, look at my garden, and contemplate how to spend this day.

If you just look at your task list, it will contain dozens of things you could do with your day. Letting your mind wander and settle on one word will tell you what is really important today. On some days, it will be something productivity-focused like “programming” or “debugging.” On other days, it might be development-oriented like “learn” or “clarity.” If your mind comes up with “rest,” that is a strong indication that you’ve been pushing yourself too hard.

Try it out. Set one word for the day tomorrow morning, and reflect on your day tomorrow evening. If having a focus word helps you, make it a habit.

Letting a System Give Ridiculous Answers

Here is another example of a computer giving a ridiculous answer. When I book a hotel, Booking.com will automatically suggest an airport transfer. OK, but not when the airport is 200 kilometers and a long ferry ride away. Providing meaningless answers to your users is not a trivial problem that you can brush off. It undermines the confidence your users have in a system, usage drops, and shadow systems in excel proliferate. Do you have a policy to build sanity checks into your systems?