maurog.earth

Last week I wrote about an idea for a little app/tool to track my reading habits.

I'm in the middle of an intense jobhunt (the market feels weird) so I'm trying to market my product engineering skills. That has me thinking a lot about why we build things, what needs are we trying to satisfy and can those be met in simpler ways or with existing technology.

It's very easy to fall into the trap of using your main professional skill as the hammer that sees all problems as a nail. If you think your main professional skill is writing code, you are going to tend to solve all problems by writing little apps and tools. On the other hand, if you see your main professional skill as solving problems, suddenly you have a wider range of tools to solve them.

What problem do I want to solve? I want to know how many pages I have to read of a book to stay on pace to finish it in a certain time.

Why? Because I want to read more books and finishing books often motivates me to read more.

But why do I want to read more books? Because I want to be exposed to more different human experiences, learn from them and enjoy the process.

Enjoy the process, that's interesting. Are there processes that I don't enjoy? Yes, getting bombarded with information by my phone and computer is slowly driving mad or dumb or both. I can't read an article on a screen because I get distracted by notifications or the infinite possibilities Just One More Browser Tab could bring.[1]

Now we're cooking. The need I'm really trying to satisfy is not to keep track of arbitrary numbers on a table. The need I'm trying to satisfy is to move away from screens and digital distraction. This immediately makes a digital solution a bad fit. Asking my phone for how long I should be away from it is stupid. It's solving the problem with the same mindset that caused it. The definition of madness, someone said once. Einstein, Twain or Luther King, one of them.

It says a lot, mostly about me, but allow me to say also modern society, that it took so much thinking (and 2 blog posts) to come up with such a simple and obvious solution. Just put a post-it note on the first page of the book, calculate the pages by hand (don't use your phone's calculator, divide a 3-digit number like a Homo Sapiens) and look at it every time you sit down to read. That's it. Need satisfied. Development cost: 0. Extra bonus pen and paper affords: the satisfaction of crossing off a checkbox.

[1]: All this internal dialog reminds me a lot of the game Disco Elysium. Go play it, you are welcome.