Making sense of those blue days
I have the conviction—as a person and as a psychotherapist—that there are no positive or negative emotions. I’m not the only one. Nature doesn’t know about positive or negative but the utility to survive. Emotions are natural and they help us with a basic set of reactions to situations that require an immediate response.
Not even sadness.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s take as a reference the six basic emotions proposed by Paul Ekman: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. It’s relatively easy to find the positive side of happiness, surprise, disgust, and fear. …
Goals aren’t everything
Let me guess, the first thing that comes to your mind when reading this article headline maybe, “How the heck can you have projects without goals?”.
Fair enough. Let me give you the short answer so you can skip all this article.
If all the things you do in a project are goal-oriented you are going to stop learning, having fun, and being creative.
Quick examples.
Johnny likes to cook. He loves to be in the kitchen. Some day, he finally gets a job in a restaurant. The restaurant has already a very defined menu, recipes, and processes. You always know how…
Don’t treat it like a second class citizen in design and production
Seeing content as a product can help you to improve your processes and the value of your products.
Usually, we see content just as a product companion, support, or asset to add to the final product. In other words, content is part of the marketing, instruction manuals, or another design element.
Except for books, music, movies, video games, or comics, that are not based on content or use the content as an asset: content is the product.
But any content can be viewed as a product. Particularly, any digital content can be viewed as a digital product.
If you see…
Letter to myself. Because I needed it.
We all want to come back to normal. Or maybe we want to come back to a better normal. Or we don’t care if we come back to a different normal. But the question or the problem is not that.
We are different. How much? That’s something that we’ll see. Or better, something that we’ll live.
The question is how different we are coming out of the pandemic. Reality doesn’t care about us. It can be whatever it wants. It can change and change without asking us. We already learned that. But what about us?
How different are you? I…
And I like to be open to new connections
I always loved to write. Just to give you an idea, my grandparents had a little school where they taught typewriting. I learned touch typewriting when I was very young, and I loved it.
In high school, I attended a bookbinding workshop just to learn to stitch my own binding notebooks. I love good notebooks for journaling — Moleskine-style notebooks.
When the first text editors and word processors came to personal computers, there was an attraction for their technology and novelty. But of course, at the beginning of the PC era, the user interface wasn’t exceptional.
I had my preferences…
The key to a successful remote work or distance learning system is to accomplish the autonomy of its agents.
Working and learning domains in companies and institutions have the tendency to keep control of the processes by regaining control of its agents.
Product of the industrial revolution, work and learning became apart from intrinsic motivations and goals. There is no motivation for work or learning but getting money or a job.
Management became important as an instrument to control persons, situations, processes, and outcomes.
Hierarchy, dependencies, functions and tasks diversification, compartmentalization, top-down information flows, are tools to keep control of non-autonomous agents.
A system can have agents of control (bosses, teachers), controlled agents (in-class students, in-office employers), and autonomous…
The variations of expression
O writer with what letters can you convey the entire figuration with such perfection as drawing gives us here?
—Leonardo Da Vinci, Notebooks On Anatomy
To paint the Mona Lisa you don’t just sit and paint it. That’s the problem with the myth of the artist. We can see the Mona Lisa but we can’t see all the sketches, drafts, studios, experiments, made by Leonardo Da Vinci previous to the final piece. And like any kind of oil painting, we can’t even see all the layers of little corrections behind the last iteration.
Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t paint one beautiful…
Two contrasting forms to approach a challenge
A boy who was what we can call the attention paradigm of any psychologist responded to this question in a very focused way.
“Ok, if I want to build a snowman, I start making a plan, like any superhero would do. For that I would use a picture or a draw to know how I want the snowman to look. What do I need for that? Then, I would gather the materials to build it. I may change the plan according to the materials I found, you never know. Finally, I would put everything together, one thing at a time…
Hierarchical vs territorial writing. What’s the difference between both? The first is based on structure, the second one in relations. What I want it’s more territorial writing and a less hierarchical one?
In a hierarchical writing, I’m always thinking in an institutionalized mindset. Who am I writing to, why, how much… in some way, I start thinking under a structured box of writer and reader, sender and receptor, where I serve to the other.
Digital social networks are the extreme of a dynamic that always has existed in this hierarchical writing. …
I was wrong. We all were wrong.
In this digital era, what do you think is the life expectancy of technology like paper notepads? Do you dream of a future with a simple “Alexa, take note of this”? Or you are in the search of a frictionless way of taking notes or capturing text?
What if I tell you that the expected life expectancy of paper notepads in our daily lives is longer than an iPad, not to say “Alexa”.
iPads have been around in the face of the Earth for only a little more than ten years. Alexa is just a newborn in the tech world.
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