Making up for lost time

Missed posting last week and late posting this week due to the joys of selling our home – plus April 22 was my birthday.

My wife and I had planned to put our house on the market starting mid-April, but had a buyer put an offer in the day before. Unfortunately, that fell through, so last week was spent moving all of our boxes into the garage and cleaning everything once again.

Fortunately, I got a great birthday present: We accepted an even better offer soon after re-listing our home!

Work-wise, things have been quiet since everyone is patiently waiting to hear what projects have been reprioritized by company executives. That's led to anxiety, listlessness, and frankly boredom, among those I work closely with.

My product team said goodbye to 3 developers last week, and will soon say goodbye to the remaining 2 – one of which is transitioning to another team, while the other will soon have a new job.

Everyone on my team understands our group will soon disband, and we are trying to make progress as best we can. But motivation is tough to come by.

I recently finished Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions though it wasn't quite what I was hoping. I enjoyed the chapters on sorting, caching, and scheduling the most. They seemed to directly apply to work-related problems people encounter every day.

The early part also focuses on the Look-Then-Leap rule, which says you should start with a predetermined time period for gathering information and then be ready to commit when you come across the next best option. This also cautions that you may encounter the best option during the "look" phase, but you may not realize it yet because you haven't been able to establish an average.

The thing is, the answer to this problem has already been well vetted and established: look at the first 37% of the options, then be ready to leap at the best one when it appears.

This played out in our search for a new home. Given the hot market, we didn't have the luxury of limiting our search to a set number of days. But we could apply the 37% rule to the number of homes we chose to see. Turns out, if we thought we needed a (relatively) large sample size of 10 to understand what is available in the market, after touring 4 homes, we would have gotten a pretty good idea of what we wanted.

I think we may have seen 6 or 7 before we put our first offer in, but there were a couple beforehand that I felt good about but couldn't convince my wife.

c'est la vie

Links

• Currently reading: Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need. I'm hoping to learn how to turn UX research and concepts into memorable, persuasive stories. Just started, so more to come next week.
• Kickstart Creativity Card Deck: My wife got me this for my birthday, and I am eager to work it into my creative process and share the deck with my UX team.
• Because I am a worry wart about taxes, I learned that married couples don't pay tax on the first $500,000 of profit from the sale of their home (when they own the property for at least 2 years).
• 2-by-2 Prioritization Matrix: I learned the true name of this workshop artifact. The Kano Model came up in a UX team conversation, and someone pointed out it seemed similar to the 2-by-2 matrix, but we blanked on the actual name.