Noise from the Basement

As we continue to work on Goal Buddy I’ve been reading books and research papers about goal setting and its cousin productivity.  Productivity is just a fancy word for saying “get stuff done”.

Some interesting articles/podcasts about productivity I recently read/listened to are:

Freaknomics: How to be More Productive

Joshua Kennon: The Secrets of Highly Productive People

However, these articles don’t hold a candle to this best article about productivity.  Be warned that reading this article will shake you to your core.  You will re-think how you approach work and view your co-workers in a different light.  Make sure you are sitting down.

Support can make or break a goal. When we circulated a survey several months ago, asking the general public how (and if) they would use an app to help them achieve a goal, a large number of respondents indicated that lack of support was a primary reason that they had not met goals in the past. Support often comes from an external source - another human being close to you, typically - but powerful support also exists in electronic guises like social media platforms, forums, online discussion groups, and in apps.

[caption id=“attachment_1141” align=“alignleft” width=“169”] The very first Splash Screen. That sun can see dead people.[/caption]

I spent the better part of last Sunday doodling on an ancient version of Photoshop (ver. 5.5, but I’m dating myself), working on the welcome screen for our Goal Buddy App. I laboured over rolling green hills (going to town with the ‘gradient’ tool), soaring mountains (gradient!) and ethereal blue sky (gradient!). It’s the first serious version of the splash screen yet, and I wouldn’t argue that the previous version was a strange three-way mix of scary, hilarious and creepy.

We have been in the “goals” mindset at SMP for a quite a few months now, as you’ve doubtless noticed. We (and by “we” I mean “Chris”) spend most of our time on the programming end of things, but also continue to learn about the psychology of goal-setting. We ponder: why do we achieve some goals but not others? Support? Determination? How realistic is the goal?

We set goals for ourselves and discuss them weekly. Mine have all been fairly pedestrian and, hence, very achievable. I felt a huge sense of satisfaction when I cleaned and organized the storage room, but knew that action was unlikely to alter the course of my existence. I practice the bass guitar three times per week. It feels great to rock out, but my downstairs neighbour just doesn’t share my appreciation of Billy Idol or Def Leppard (I can’t turn the volume above “2” or he thumps on the ceiling). It took me nearly two months to put the Christmas decorations back in the storage locker, and it felt good to finally get those cursed tote boxes out of my office.

I vividly remember my stats professor, back when I took my undergrad degree. He had a nearly unintelligible Croatian accent, barely spoke above a whisper, and liked to write on the overhead with squiggly scribbles as he spoke/whispered. In short, I could hardly understand him, hear him, or read what he was writing, but he instilled in me that statistics are among the most misused metrics out there.

I’ll explain why. It’s easy to say that “a majority of people believe in aliens.” Or that “the average weight of hamsters in Slovenia is 200 grams.” Or “90% of survey respondents agreed that a Provincial Task Force on Walking While Texting” is a good idea. What do these numbers really mean? What constitutes a “majority?” How many hamsters were weighed in Slovenia? Did the researchers take into accounts things like breed, age and sex of the hamsters? Of this “90%” did the researchers consider things like: how many people did you ask? What was the survey return rate? Are the responses liked to other influencing factors? It’s just to easy to use words like “average” or “majority” and not give the context of sample size. It makes a pretty big difference if you asked 10 people in a survey versus 1000. How would you know if those 10 people were representative of the general population?