Oliver Burkeman says we can all help keep society civilized by inflicting altruistic punishment on rude people that we encounter:
The study of happiness rightly focuses on such indisputable virtues as gratitude, generosity, and forgiveness. But any honest accounting of the sources of daily pleasure – for me, anyway – must include the exquisite joys of what I’ve come to think of as Politeness Enforcement Tactics: the guerrilla moves we use to avenge boorish behaviour in public places.
After reading it, I realized that I saw this sort of thing in action last weekend. I was third in line to use a communal grill, and when the person ahead of me started removing his cooked food, someone else just walked up and threw his two pork tenderloins right in the open space that I was about to use. (Rude!) The guy who was leaving apologized to me for unintentionally skipping ahead of me in line (even though he hadn’t), just to let the guy with the pork tenderloins know that people are supposed to take turns.
I’m going to look for more of these opportunities myself.
Picking up new habits
In a post about the adoption rate for FaceTime, Marco Arment talks about the tendency of people not to use new features of devices that they already use. He explains that while people who were already using the iPhone when FaceTime was released may not get into the habit of using it, people who started using the iPhone post-FaceTime may be more likely to make regular use of it.
His post reminded me of something I think about a lot — how to get more out of the tools I already use. Most of the devices and applications we use on a day to day basis are incredibly complex. For example, I spend a lot of my day writing code in TextMate and Eclipse, and I’m certain that there are keyboard shortcuts that could make me more productive that I don’t know about, and features that would be really helpful that I never take advantage of. People often ask for features that already exist.
One resolution that I’ve made a number of times but never kept was that I’d try to build one new habit a day that will make me more productive with a tool I already use. That’s what the “tip of the day” feature that so many applications used to include was all about — giving users an opportunity to discover features that slipped past them. It’s also what Ribbon Hero, the Microsoft Office game is for. I still think this is one of the great unsolved problems in the software industry. We’re great at building powerful tools, but not so great at helping users unlock that power.