Don’t Give Your Users Shit Work

The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do.

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One of my favorite posts is Merlin Mann’s Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities. His main point is that adding an assortment of labels, tags, and priorities to your email inbox only serves to give you the illusion of getting work done. Either something is important, or it isn’t. You don’t need five levels of priorities to decide that, and spending time categorizing isn’t real work.

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Today, Facebook can anticipate most of what you want to do:

I get to decide whether to send this status out to close friends, my work network, my school, whoever I want. And I don’t need to set those groups up.

Do: smart, automatic configurations Don’t: build out lots of manual config tools for your users.

Posted on April 21, 2020