High Output Management (1995) by Andrew S. Grove

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NOTE: Bewarned, these notes are un-edited, un-revised, and un-styled. I plan on cleaning them up eventually, but until then, I apologize.

My boss at Noom told me to read this book. He said the Noom’s management style was based on Google’s management style, which in turn was based on Intel’s management style. And frankly, having a company other than Toyota being noted as a model of successful management philosophy intrigued me.

Andrew Grove was the president of Intel.

 Part One: The Breakfast Factory

1. The Basics of Production: Delivering a Breakfast (or a College Graduate, or a Compiler, or a Convicted Criminal…)

Basic requirements of production: build and deliver products in response to the demands of the customer

• at a scheduled delivery time
• at an acceptable quality level
• at the lowest possible cost

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster (2013) by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz

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NOTE: Bewarned, these notes are un-edited, un-revised, and un-styled. I plan on cleaning them up eventually, but until then, I apologize.

This book gets right down to the nitty gritty. So I don’t think I’m going to take notes on everything. For the stuff that relates to specific business models, I’ll just note that it exists, BUT IT’S ALL REALLY GOOD STUFF so I should remember that it exists for when I need it.

Part 1: Stop Lying to Yourself

1. We’re All Liars

“In a startup, the purpose of analytics is to find your way to the right product and market before the money runs out.”

2. How to Keep Score

What makes a good metric?

• a good metric is comparative
• a good metric is understandable
• a good metric is a ratio or a rate
  • ratios are easier to act on
  • ratios...

Don’t is a companion product to Do. While Do focuses on those things that people want to, well, do, Don’t focuses on those things that people want to not do. These types of “tasks” don’t fit well into Do, because they’re quantified differently. Specifically, tasks in Do are quantified by doing them, but tasks in Don’t are quantified by not doing them.

Don’t provides a similar UX to Do, but instead of entering tasks that you want to do, you enter tasks that you want to not do. Don’t remembers everything you input, but forces you to choose one task to focus on. Every hour, Don’t asks you (via a notification) whether you’ve done the task that you’re trying to not do. Don’t tracks these responses, and displays them back to you in a line graph.

In this way, Don’t establishes a baseline for the activity that you wish to inhibit. The line graph also acts as feedback, which is a form of...

I should definitely be keeping a better record of my experience. That being said, I also hate taking notes. Ideally, it would be nice to embed the analytics data that I want into the application itself. Which, on second thought, most of it is. So the problem is really pulling the analytics data out, and displaying it in some way. Mainly what I’d like to be able to see is interactions per day. If I was to turn this into a startup, then I’d validate the problem/solution by measuring stickiness of this MVP.

On another note, after using the product for another week, I have additional thoughts. My main complaint is that the app doesn’t show me the things that I need to see when I need to see them. It also doesn’t take into account that some tasks are more difficult than others.

For example, my homework tasks each take about 10 hours. I pretty much always have at least 3 homework tasks...

Being able to complete tasks was a success. Kind of. It didn’t clear out as many tasks as I was hoping. And it would be nice if the UX was more rewarding. But mainly I’m just annoyed by the sheer abundance of tasks that I have to do. Looking at my todo list feels overwhelming instead of inspiring. So version 3 is going to be about thinning out the task list.

Ideally when I open the app I’d like to see two things:

1. Some way for me to add tasks
2. The five (or so) most important tasks for me to see right now

In order to restrict all of the todos to only the five most important, I would like to introduce the following features:

Snoozing todos

Snoozing todos is a way of saying “I acknowledge this todo exists, and I will deal with later.” Snoozing a todo removes it from the visible list for a duration of time. A new todo will rise to fill its place. An open question is the duration of...

Despite my better judgement, I started building the todo list described in part 1. I’m calling the product Do, mostly because it’s short and easy to type. Since the mental model behind this product is so confusing I thought it would be best to build it up slowly with testing. So v1 just had the ability to add a new todo and see the list of previously added todos. And data persistence. After using the app for a couple days I think I’m ready to start adding more complexity. Let’s start by analyzing the data:

In three days I added 16 todos, three of which I completed. None were above 70 characters long. I also instinctively started using hashtags on occasion to draw attention to certain types of todos. The hashtags I used were blog and idea. I’ll try to create a loose classification of the todos that I’ve added thus far:

Complete-ability

1. Todos that can be “completed”
   • “laundry”
   • ...

If you could go back to one place and time in history, where would you go? We’ve all been asked this question before, probably several times before. I think it was on Stanford’s 2011 university application. I’m going to ask it again, but give it a wrinkle this time.

You can go back in time, but only to a spot on your own timeline. Furthermore, you won’t have any memory of the events that transpired after that moment in time, except for what you can write on a single notecard. You can write as small as you want. The question comes in two parts:

1. When do you go back to?
2. What do you write on the notecard?

I don’t know if I can answer this question for myself, but I can provide some thoughts to act as a starting point. In Voltaire’s Candide, Pangloss expresses his metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology: “In this best of all possible worlds, everything is for the best.” So Pangloss, and...

I’ve experimented with a bunch of blogging solutions:

• Blogger
• Medium
• Ghost
• Self created static website
• Svbtle

None of them are terrible, but none of them does exactly what I want. So what do I want?

Separate content from presentation

This is by far the most critical requirement. My pain point isn’t with presenting my ideas; there are a million ways to share things on the internet. My problem is with managing the content. I don’t want my blogging platform to tether me to a single system (like Blogger, Medium, and Svbtle) but I do want the additional features that an integrated content creation ecosystem can provide. I’d like to model this content creation system off of Google Docs. In particular, Google Docs supports:

• offline editing
• multiple device synchronization
• collaborative editing
• commenting

Manage metadata

There’s a standard set of metadata that I care about each blog...

I want to make a to do list app. Yes, I recognize this has been done before. Yes, I recognize that it’s been done quite well. Yes, I even recognize that even the idea of making a to do list app is cliched; the default app for learning a Javascript web framework is a todo app. But I don’t care. I’ve tried using many of them - Asana, Wunderlist, Notepad, Google calendar, little scraps of paper, writing on my hand - and none of them have stuck. Even when using a todo app I still find myself often feeling overwhelmed by day to day tasks. Something this simple shouldn’t be that complicated.

So what do I want?

As a user, I want to be able to open my phone, click on the todo app, click once, type anything, and add what I typed as a new task. The entire process should take at most ten seconds.

As a user, I want to be able to see at a glance what are the tasks that are most applicable to me...

The Design of Everyday Things (2002) by Donald A. Norman

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NOTE: Bewarned, these notes are un-edited, un-revised, and un-styled. I plan on cleaning them up eventually, but until then, I apologize.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Things

Discoverability: What actions are possible?

Understanding: How is the product supposed to be used?

Industrial design - professional service of creating and developing concepts and specifications that optimize the functional, value and appearance of products and systems for the mutual benefit of both the user and manufacturer

Interaction design - focuses on how people interact with technology

Experience design - practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality and enjoyment of the total experience

Interaction between people and machines is interesting:

• people are...