When you’re facing a particularly challenging task, it can be helpful to incorporate a forcing function into your routine.

A forcing function is any task, activity or event that forces you to take action and produce a result.

Need to stay productive at a meeting? Make everybody stand. Want to cut online time wasting? Leave your charger at home. Having trouble writing enough? The Most Dangerous Writing App forces you to keep typing until the timer ends, or you lose all your work.

When designing the most important steps of your app—or your life—think about ways  to incorporate behavior-shaping constraints.

I’ve lost count of the number of groans I’ve heard when the subject of user research comes up.

Most UX designers hate talking to users, and most non-design executives consider research a navel-gazing exercise.

Here’s the thing though: users don’t care about your product.

They don’t care that your product has better specs. They don’t care that it’s newer. They don’t care that it’s technically or aesthetically superior.

User only care about their problems. They care about the nitty gritty details that make something that should be easy difficult and something that should be fun frustrating. So you’d better understand those details like you understand every frustrating moment of your morning commute. And you’d better have a detailed plan for addressing those issues that you’ve vetted with actual users.

User research isn’t about asking users to evaluate their problems. They may not know what they are. It’s not about asking users to design a solution. If it’s a real problem, they’ve already pieced together the best solution they can.

User research is about giving the entire team enough information to make informed decisions about a solution as if they were solving the problem for themselves.

Unless you can honestly say that everybody in your organization is already empowered with that information, your product needs more research.

Content discovery is broken.

Android’s news feed shows the same 5 stories. There’s an entire industry dedicated to helping you find new content on Netflix. Medium only recommends more of the same content you’re already reading.

This is partly because most content is crap. It’s derivative, verbose, and designed more for search engines and recommendation algorithms than actual people.

But there’s also a bigger discovery issue at play.

Today’s AI is bad at navigating the line between novelty and your current interests. While a person might understand that their friend likes Game of Thrones not for its fantasy setting but for its political thriller overtones, most of today’s algorithms default to the lowest common denominator: “people like you.”

Collective sorting was a useful stepping stone. But it’s time for something better.

GoDaddy has horrible UX and predatory pricing.

Yet GoDaddy, and companies like it, maintained virtual strangleholds on the domain registrar market since the 1990s. Domain registry was a commodity, and companies like GoDaddy the utilities that provided it.

Pundits said the registrar world wasn’t going to change any time soon because registrars needed to mark up Top Level Domain prices because navigating the deluge of TLDs, and ICANN’s stringent rules, was so complicated.

But every industry is disruptible.

In September, Cloudflare announced that it would offer registrar services with zero markup. It would include WHOIS privacy for free. And the experience of using Cloudflare would be nothing like the bloated, complicated process of working with other registrars.

When Cloudflare decided to give away free SSL certs in 2014, they doubled the size of the encrypted web. If Cloudflare’s entry into the world of domain registry goes anything like that, the space will look markedly different by this time next year.

The same thing could happen in virtually any industry. What would happen if a company like Slack decided to make a free learning platform that undercut Skillshare and Udemy? All utilities—power, communication, education, you name it—are ripe for this type of disruption. All it takes is a company willing to treat commodities like commodities in service of a different business model.

Nick Offerman’s Netflix comedy special, American Ham, is fantastic.

In it, Offerman organizes his act around what he calls 10 Tips for a Prosperous Life. While the act is hilarious, it’s also insightful. Each of Offerman’s “tips” clearly bring him joy and fulfillment.

I think everybody should have guidelines like this for their own lives. This got me thinking about what mine should be. Here’s my first crack at a list:

1. Have a Growth Mindset – It’s important to have high self-esteem. But that doesn’t mean you can’t improve. Try to get better every single day.
2. Master a Craft, and Practice it Regularly – Find a challenging, meaningful activity that fulfills you and do it regularly, whether at work or in your free time.
3. Nurture Close Friendships – Close friends are there for you when things go wrong. Casual friends? Not so much. Take the time and effort to develop close friendships. And no, your spouse or significant other doesn’t count.
4. Strengthen Your Willpower – Willpower, self-discipline, grit. Whatever you call it, the ability to do things that are hard, even when you don’t want to, is critical. The good news is that willpower is a muscle. You can strengthen it by practicing. Do so.
5. Focus on Habits – Unconscious habits drive about 40% of what we do every day. Some of those habits are positive—you don’t think about brushing your teeth before bed, you just do it—but some are negative. More importantly, if you have to actively think about doing things that are good for you or avoiding things that are bad for you, it’s far more likely you’ll make the wrong decision (see #4). Learn how to build the habits you want and eliminate those you don’t.
6. Be Direct, but Kind – Say what you think. Speak truth to power. Be candid. But learn how to do it with kindness. Aggressive and passive-aggressive are extremes that both get you into trouble.
7. Admit When You’re Wrong – If you’re like me, this happens frequently. Admit it, apologize, and move on.
8. Don’t Tolerate Abusive Behavior – Abuse can come in many different forms. Whether it’s verbal abuse from a family member, a boss intimidating a coworker, or something worse, you shouldn’t put up with it.  Stand up for yourself and for others.
9. Get out of Dodge – Nearly every country in the world takes more time off than we do, and many of them are far more productive. Take frequent vacations. They’re good for you.
10. Have Fun – Laugh. Drink a cocktail. Crank up the music. Make time every day for having fun.

Regardless of what you’re working on, knowing what’s good enough is critical.

If you’re a busy parent cooking dinner for your 2 kids after a grueling day of meetings, healthy, palatable, and quick is probably good enough. If you’re a chef at new restaurant on opening night and you want to stay in business more than a month, then the food better be delicious. If you own a Michelin Star restaurant and command top-tier prices, then everything—the food, the service, the decor—had better be perfect.

Most projects fall near the middle category, but most people manage them towards one of the extremes.

Know your good enough and strive to hit it.

It’s far easier to lose weight by eating better than by exercising.

Even if you run five miles a day, you’re going to get fat if you subsist solely on cheeseburgers, candy, and soda. Bad inputs undermine hard work.

The same is true when designing products.

Good designers look at popular designs as sources of inspiration for their designs. To a designer, the entire web is one big pattern library.

Indeed, most “formal” pattern libraries include examples from popular sites. What they rarely include, however, is any data analyzing those patterns. Some patterns actively help users, but some are barely usable. This is probably because designers have been confusing pattern libraries with style guides and design systems for at least as long as they’ve existed.

We need more data-driven pattern libraries. The folks at GoodUI have made some great strides in this direction. The web needs more projects like that.

Most user stories are total shit.

As a user I want to create an account so I can access the application.

No real user has ever said something like this, because no real user has ever wanted something like this. Nobody actually wants to create an account or access an application.

People want more time or more money. They want to feel more in control or more connected. They want fulfillment or food in their bellies. They want to solve the real problems they face every day. They want concrete, significant improvements in their lives.

If you’re writing user stories like that, stop fucking around. Identify who people are and what they really want. Real user stories sound like this:

As a Boston professional, I want a casual, work-appropriate shoe I can wear when it rains heavily so I can look good without getting my feet wet or sacrificing comfort.

As designers and developers, we shouldn’t accept user stories that look like the first example. They lead to crap software and horrible experiences for users.

Every tech pundit with half a brain “knows”.

Technology was supposed to bring us closer together, but it’s actually driving us further apart. Phones used to be tools for connecting, but they’ve become crutches that distract and separate us instead. AI was supposed to automate and streamline our lives, relieving us of mundane chores and freeing us to spend more time on things that matter. Instead, it’s removed and trivialized the little personal interactions that make us human.

They “know” it. You “know” it.

But few pundits have suggested any realistic solutions. Fewer still have bothered to to reflect on the ways technology brings us together.

So as 2019 starts, here are a few ways tech has helped me actually connect:

Group chat – An ongoing group chat with some of my best friends has kept me sane through work stress, personal challenges, and every day gripes. Never underestimate the power of a timely gif to cheer somebody up.

Work – I knew when I made the decision to stop freelancing full time and join GetHuman that the company was special. Little did I know that this group of technologists would become my second family. This year we became profitable, streamlined our product process, and united around a shared vision we’re all passionate about. My colleague Jeff Whelpley has chronicled many of these successes in detail, and his blog is well worth reading. But many of his posts boil down to this: creating technology and working with technology brought us closer together, and we can’t wait to see what this year brings.

Instagram – In 2018, it seemed like Instagram succeeded in all the ways that Facebook failed. My Facebook feed is full of so much bullshit I don’t even bother to open Facebook anymore. But photos of my closest friends living their best lives? Instagram is getting it right. Here’s hoping Facebook doesn’t run it into the ground in 2019.