Stop Trying to Be Productive (Alexandra Issue #022)
A bi-weekly newsletter dedicated to bringing you the best content related to design, technology, and entrepreneurship.
Featured Article
BusinessTown: What Value-Creating Winners Do All Day — welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com
“An ongoing project attempting to explain our highly intangible, deeply disruptive, data-driven, venture-backed, gluten-free economic meritocracy to the uninitiated. With apologies to Richard Scarry.”
More Amazing Reads
Emotional Agility: How to Build Resilience in Times of Crisis
““Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility.” This quote by Dr Susan David perfectly encapsulates the importance of emotional agility. We love and we lose, we are healthy and ill, we complain about someone, then we miss them when they’re gone. The complex interplay between beauty and fragility is at the core of life.”
Stop Trying to Be Productive
“This urge to overachieve, even in times of global crisis, is reflective of America’s always-on work culture. In a recent article for The New Republic, the journalist Nick Martin writes that “this mind-set is the natural endpoint of America’s hustle culture — the idea that every nanosecond of our lives must be commodified and pointed toward profit and self-improvement.”
Basecamp’s Jason Fried on the Learning Curve of Remote Work
“This is a break in momentum, which is the healthy side of what’s happening. Momentum can be powerful: doing today what I did yesterday because it worked. A lot of companies are on autopilot, without taking time to reconsider how they do things. When something knocks you off course — this is as off-course as we could imagine — it gives people a moment to look around and see what needs to change. We don’t need to do everything as we did in the office. What happens if we don’t?”
IDEO Designers Share the Best Creative Advice They’ve Ever Received
“Creativity often isn’t the work of a single, solitary genius. In fact, it’s usually when a set of diverse perspectives come together that we’re able to see new possibilities for solving problems. That’s why creative collaboration is crucial — and it’s also why creative mentorship is so important. This got us thinking: What else could we learn about creativity from the people we work with every day? What have they learned from their mentors?”
Priority Guides: A Content-First Alternative to Wireframes
“Simply put, a priority guide contains content and elements for a mobile screen, sorted by hierarchy from top to bottom and without layout specifications. The hierarchy is based on relevance to users, with the content most critical to satisfying user needs and supporting user (and company) goals higher up. A priority guide is automatically content-first, with a strong focus on providing best value for users.”
How to Create a Remote Usability Test for Fast, Actionable Insights
“Remote usability testing is a quick way to get actionable insights from users — while avoiding the hassle that comes with arranging tests in-person. With the right approach and a modern remote usability testing tool like Maze, unmoderated tests can give you deep, data-driven results that’ll guide your product design process.”
