Stuck. Frustrated. Banging your head on the table. We’ve all been there.

Getting unstuck is often a matter of getting perspective.

We’ve all heard that setbacks are opportunities.

Think of setbacks as learning opportunities is a useful trope, albeit a tired one.

But there’s little good advice about how to recover quickly from a setback.

Here are a few tactics that work for me:

Even the best leaders often overestimate how many projects their teams can tackle.

Frequently, this happens because work output doesn’t scale at the same rate as team size. Adding new team members always comes with its own coordination, education, and communication costs.

It’s strange how we’ve repositioned vacation as a career necessity.

What used to be about personal wellbeing morphed into another way to optimize your work. Vacations, the argument goes, help you refocus, increase productivity, and even cause a measurable boost to your long-term salary prospects.

These are all fair points. But after taking a week-long vacation to Mexico, I’m convinced those aren’t the really important benefits.

Imagine what organizations would be like if they were only filled with people with practical skills.

How much do we waste by hiring analysts who can’t implement and managers who can’t do?

If I only knew then what I know now.

When you’re learning a new skill, it can be tempting to dive right in. It’s always more fun to play with the new tool than read about it how others are using it.

The team over at Mixpanel wrote a wonderful article on measuring user adoption.

In the article, Mixpanel defines adoption as the process by which new users become acclimated to a product or service and decide to keep using it.

They suggest that user adoption conforms to this formula:

Adoption = Value / Effort

I think this is a solid start. If users see value in your product, they’re likely to use it as long as the effort of doing so isn’t too high. Too much time, too high a price, or too much confusion will sour the experience and decrease adoption.

But I’d like to suggest a few more nuanced measurements that build on this idea.

Too many companies view experience design as a tool for tricking users into doing things they wouldn’t do otherwise.

All of us know deep in our guts that because I said so, I’m the CEO, and respect the office are all horrible reasons to do something.

Yet some leaders still insist on using authority like a hammer, pounding followers into submission.