Against to do lists; Poor feedback; System design

Milk, No Sugar #255

💡Think

Hey everyone,

With the holiday season approaching, I’ve been thinking about plastic quite a lot. Not because I want a bag of plastic underneath my tree, but because of the wastage.

Whether it’s through the packaging on our gifts, or our Christmas trees, the amount of plastic we’re throwing around is obscene. This becomes more acute when we think about the shockingly low levels of recycling that actually happens once we send off our green bins.

According to the National Geographic, 91% of plastic doesn’t actually get recycled. Let that one soak in for a little bit.

Although it’s from 2018, I also found that only 49% of UK households recycle as well, which means that the incredible amounts of plastic that we use and throw away is becoming unmanageable.

As December approaches, let’s try and be conscious of our plastic purchasing.

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📷 Look

Gunnersbury, London – from my Instagram

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📖 Read

❶ The case against to do lists

I drown in mental to dos. A lot of the time, I’ll actually wake up thinking about the specific things I need to do. As you can imagine, this isn’t great. I’m starting to fall in love with the idea of themes or schedules rather than very specific “I’ll do this” tasks. It has been popularised by Ryan Singer, and this article riffs on a similar approach. Let’s get productive.

Read this article

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❷ Stop asking for feedback

Businesses strive to create transparent cultures of feedback, where people are encouraged to share positives and negatives about colleagues. In practice, this sounds logical, but studies have shown that feedback for the most part is quite useless, particularly when it’s a woman who’s receiving it. Weirdly, men tend to give women less constructive feedback compared to when giving it to another man. That really sucks.

Read this article

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❸ The six principles of system design

I don’t know about you, but when I start something new I want to jump straight into producing it rather than planning properly. This isn’t the best approach when you start to think at scale; which requires a system. System design sits at the start of everything we do, whether it’s writing, product design, or engineering, and building good habits is a sure-fire way to ensure long term success.

Read this article

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Bonus round

• I don’t know why they have done it, but it’s great. This person takes photos of the Mumbai taxi ceilings and they are beautiful

• I interviewed Cape Town based designer Aqeela Valley this week, her desk setup is drool worthy

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🎧 Listen

Automated Fact Checking

Have you ever been watching a press conference, talk, or the news and just known that what they were talking about was incorrect?

We’ve seen Twitter and Facebook introduce measures to stop the spread of false information on their platforms, but is it possible to have this done…live? There’s a team working on it, and it’s fascinating.

Listen to this podcast (22 minutes)

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🙌 Share

Enjoying Milk, No Sugar? I’d really appreciate it if you would share my tweet, or forward this to a friend.

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🙏 Thanks

Have a great week,
Luis Ouriach
@disco_lu