Instant delivery; Spotify's dilemma; Internet censorship
💡Think
This week, a colleague of mine described a concern that their entire job was becoming "notification bashing". This really hit home because personally I spend over an hour a day reading Slack messages or emails.
As you can imagine, this compounds. If all of your teammates are spending this amount of time consuming rather than doing, how much "doing" are you missing out on?
It's important to catch these inefficiencies and scale accordingly. What can you be doing to ease the burden of "important" notifications, and ensure people know just enough to be effective?
📷 Look
📖 Read
❶ The empty promise of instant delivery
Depending on where you live, you may have noticed an incredible increase in the amount of companies offering 15 minute grocery (or anything) deliveries. There's a warehouse on my street where you can see moped drivers zipping in and out. Dubbed the "Amazonification" of retail, this trend is causing our retail spaces to become even more ghostly than they were during the first struggle with our shift to online. I'd personally prefer to walk to the supermarket to get my loaf of bread; Netflix can wait.
❷ Spotify isn't just about the music anymore
Bad news for fans of Neil Young – his music is no longer available on Spotify. This is because of a protest move against Spotify's lasting support of Joe Rogan's podcast, in which conspiracy theories thrive. It then boils down to business, ultimately. Spotify needs to keep selling, in order to pay investors back and drive profits, and unfortunately that means prioritising reaction over cool, soothing, classic rock tunes.
❸ When Kazakhstan turned off the internet
This is pretty scary. Imagine having no internet for half an hour, let alone many days. That was the reality for those in Kazakhstan recently as part of a media crackdown, and it's wild to think that it's possible for that to even happen. This article is part of a free speech series, and looks in detail at just what happened there and why.
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Bonus round
Dieter Ram's 10 principles of design
I hosted a livestream with the Wix.com design systems lead, available to watch on YouTube
🎧 Listen
Sweet Bobby – A real life catfishing story
Admittedly, this isn't the normal type of podcast I share here, but it's about tech and is fascinating in its own right. It's a series about a decade-long catfishing story...seriously. It's about someone who was led into the (virtual) arms of someone who didn't exist, as well as dozens of other characters who didn't either. It's great, I promise.
Listen to this podcast series