It’s a pain in the ass to pull a phone out of your pocket when you’re sitting down -especially in jeans.

I pull my phone out of my pocket 30 times/day just to interact with it for 5 seconds: when I get into my car and the kids want to listen to the Disney Pandora station; when I get a phone call to see who it’s from; when I need to see where my next meeting is; when I need to perform two-factor authentication to login; etc.

This is the first world problem that I was hoping the Apple Watch would solve.  My Apple Watch arrived last night and I’ve now had it for 24 hrs, and so far I’m happy.

Pros:

• The Modular watch face comes configured to show the current or next item from your calendar.  It displays the meeting title, time and location.  My work week is 80% scheduled these days – so I’m frequently trying to figure out where I should be going next.  Having this available as a flick of the wrist is super handy.
• Two factor auth works!  Duo Mobile works flawlessly.  I can login to my work VPN by providing my password and asking it to push the request to my watch.  The authentication notification comes to my watch and I can just press approve.  I don’t have to take my hands away from the keyboard.  For services that don’t support push – like GMail – the Duo Mobile watch app can generate passcodes with a few presses (open app, select the account).  This takes away some of the friction from two-factor auth.
• Starting up a Pandora radio station works.  After buckling up, while my phone (in my pocket) is establishing the bluetooth connection to the car radio, I can open the Pandora app and click the “Do You Want to Build a Snowman” station, so my daughters and I can play name-that-tune and sing along on the ride to school.

Cons:

• There’s a whole bunch of apps installed on the watch that I’ll never use and I cannot delete – e.g. stocks, weather.  They’re just taking up space and making it harder to find the few apps I want to use.
• By default the Activity app is everywhere: in the glances, sending you updates every couple of hours, sending reminders to stand up, etc.  I had to go into the settings and turn off 6 different notifications to get it to shut up.  And I still can’t remove the app from my watch app screen.
• By default all app notifications start out enabled on the Apple Watch.  And to make it even worse, audible notification is turned on.  So there I am in my first meeting of the day and Ping Ping goes my watch.  I suppose that if they defaulted these to off few people would enable them.  So instead this forces everyone who gets an Apple Watch to go through the full list of apps on their phone and disable notification mirroring on most of them.
• I can’t help but wonder if this will open up a whole new channel for distracted driving.  Incoming texts, Tweets, Facebook notifications – all distractingly in your field of vision.  I wonder if they could add a driving mode that suppresses notifications while in-motion?

I bought the lower-priced Apple Watch Sport, which – at $400 – still makes it by far the most expensive watch I’ve ever purchased (also: the 3rd watch I’ve ever purchased).  Fortunately I can afford a $400 experiment with new technology.  For many this is still an unaffordable luxury.

What will be extremely interesting to see is what the replacement cycle looks like.  People hold onto their luxury watches for many years.  Will the Apple Watch be like an iPhone (replaced every year or two) or more like the iPad (replaced every 4 or 5 years)?

Only time will tell.

I have always been attracted to the Buddhism.  Although I don’t necessarily believe that we are part of a cycle of rebirth, I do believe that attachment leads to suffering, and I believe that the Noble Eightfold Path (chose carefully your words, your actions, your livelihood, etc) is a pretty good and worthwhile approach to living.

But I have never been comfortable with the Buddhist ideal that involves detachment from the world; that the most dedicated adherent (the monastic) doesn’t marry, raise children, or participate in civic or commercial life; that what we seek is liberation or nirvana – literally “blown out”, as in a candle – from our attachments.

I have also long been attracted to Stoicism, after reading The Art of Living by Sharon Lebell in college.  I think Stoicism gets a bad rap.  Probably because the word stoic – enduring pain and hardship without showing one’s feelings or complaining – looks at a Stoicism from the outside and assumes that people who practice it are long-suffering.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.  Lebell’s small book taught me that there are things under my control (my thoughts and actions), and things not under my control (the thoughts and actions of others, my health, my reputation), and that I have the power to alter my perspective on things not under my control.  If I practise this, I will experience less pain and hardship – not supress them.

I never realize what a significant impact that book had on my life until I recently picked up A Guide to the Good Life, by William B. Irvine.  Dr Irvine presents a brief history of Stoicism and explains the various Stoic psychological practices – and I identified with almost all of them.

For example, Negative Visualization is the practice of regularly stopping and reflecting upon the potential loss of things you value; imagining that you have lost your job, or your health, or your child.  Not worrying about these things, but imagining that these could happen in ways beyond your control, and that ultimately you would be okay.

I do this regularly.  Not usually about large things like the loss of a child – but about many things in small ways.  I regularly imagine not being able to afford a car, and having to bike or take public transit.  It would be a hinderance – I’d have less time with my kids before they have to go to bed, for instance – but we’d survive.  Or I imagine losing my ability to type – I wouldn’t be able to program, but I’d probably still find some way to be of value to my employer (maybe as a full-time tech interviewer, or a technology trainer).  This practise helped me recently when I  broke my middle finger quite badly by jamming it.  I looked at my crooked finger and imagined the worst – amputation – and realized I could be ok with it.  Lots of people used to lose fingers in accidents.  I’d be ok with 90% of my fingers, and this is not under my control.  This allowed me to view any outcome as ok, and approach the whole thing lightly.  It turned out I needed surgery, two pins, months of unpleasant therapy to get my working finger back.  But it didn’t take an ounce of joy away from my life.

The other practices he mentions are:

• Don’t concern yourself with things that are out of your control.
• Don’t reflect on the past and ask ‘what if’.
• Practise self-denial.  (I’m not particularly experienced with this one)
• Reflect upon the way you are living and behaving.

Dr Irvine also covers Stoic advice on how to handle various life situations such as social relations, insults, grief, fame, luxury, illness and death.  I particularly liked that he attempted to bring Stoicism into a modern context and how he shared examples from his own life and practice.

I was particularly delighted that Dr Irvine connected stoicism with Buddhism.  I have always thought there were important parallels.   Buddhism and Stoicism both focus on the impermanence of everything, and the reality of the present moment.  They both draw attention to the internal causes of our discomfort (our attachments) and both work to insert a gap between a stimulus (such as an illness or insult) and our response.  Both are extremely empowering and should lead to more tranquility.

At various points in my life I have thought that I am a failing, inadequate Buddhist.  Now I realize I am probably more of a failing, inadequate Stoic.

We’re crossing a new threshold. Individuals can make real hardware products and bring them to market.

Thanks to open and accessible hardware platforms like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and even ARM processors, Frankenstein prototypes can be hacked together in short time on short budgets. What used to take more than 60 engineering months can now take less than two.

Add the ability to apply lean product/market fit testing via crowdfunding and we’ve got a hardware innovation explosion on our hands.

What crowdfunding does is enable product-market-fit experimentation in a category that has historically been deprived of it. Two engineers in a dorm room who build a prototype on a low-cost development platform can quickly see if anyone wants what they’ve built by setting up a crowdfunding campaign. If the campaign goes well, not only does the team have verification that there is a market for their product, they also have capital to fund manufacturing; if it doesn’t, they just spared themselves the pain of spending time and money on a project that may not be met with success

Great post by Matt Witheiler at VentureBeat : The hardware revolution will be crowdfunded
http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/20/the-hardware-revolution-will-be-crowdfunded/

I’m always amazed by all the lean startup events and activity that I have yet to discover.  Yesterday I learned about Lean Day West – a 3 day conference that took place in Sept 2013 and dealt with Lean Startup and Lean UX in the Enterprise.   Lucky for us the talks have been recorded and they are awesome.  If you are at all interested in how to apply lean startup in a non-startup, check them out!  Some of my favorites:

Lean Engineering: Key Principles For Transforming Engineering Into A Full Lean UX Partner

Bill Scott · @billwscott · Senior Director of User Interface Engineering, PayPal

How do you take a gigantic organization like PayPal and begin to transform the experiences? Engineering is often the key blocker in being able to achieve a high rate of innovation. In this talk, Bill Scott will give specific examples on implemented Lean UX in a 13,000 person company, re-factored the technology stack and changed the way engineers work with design & product partners. In addition, Bill will provide additional examples that go back to his early days writing one of the first Macintosh games to his more recent work at Netflix and the power of treating the user interface layer as the experimentation layer.  (Slides)

Building With Lean: A Cross-Functional Pairing Approach

Ben Burton · @bjburton · Software Engineer
Jono Mallanyk · @jonomallanyk · UX Specialist / Senior Designer

Part of the inspiration for lean is to eliminate as much unnecessary work as possible to arrive at a valuable end-product. Methodologies such as Lean UX aim to design the best customer experience in the shortest cycle possible, but how do these approaches apply when it comes to executing and shipping a functional Minimum Viable Product? In this talk, designer Jono Mallanyk and software engineer Ben Burton delve into the hands-on approach they’ve taken to cross-functional pairing to design and build products quickly and effectively. In this talk, they’ll detail how and when to involve execution in the lean process, tools and techniques they’ve found useful for developers and designers working together, and do some live cross-functional pairing to demonstrate their process. At Neo Innovation Labs, Jono and Ben have spent the past 6 months pairing as designer and developer, learning from each other, and honing their cross-functional process to arrive at a truly lean approach to software creation.  (Slides)

Iterative Innovation – Small, Focused Changes Can Lead To Big Successes

Emily Holmes · @uxemily · Director of K12 User Experience, Hobsons

At any large company, it can be difficult for a UX team to be innovative: the roadmap is pre-determined, quick fixes are the objective, revenue and new features are often prioritized over fixing what’s broken. Combine that with an aging infrastructure, and true innovation seems like an impossible goal. This session will examine how the K12 UX team at Hobsons found very small ways to innovate within existing constraints, and gradually built on those successes to move toward the forefront of the company’s product development process. By focusing first on tiny innovations, it is possible to iterate toward big changes within your organization.  (Slides)

Research Rebooted – Why Most Market Research Is Broken, And How Lean Can Help Fix It

Farrah Bostic · @farrahbostic · Founder, The Difference Engine

Based on 10 years designing, managing and conducting market research, Farrah had the opportunity to start with a blank slate on a recent project. In the interests of limited time and tight budgets, she started to experiment with lean techniques for doing research better, and discovered that a lot of what we take for granted about the research process, from study design, to recruitment, to the way we actually talk to customers, is broken. Based on what she learned on that first project, and each project since, Farrah has started to develop some lighter-weight, less expensive and time-consuming, and ultimately more useful ways to conduct research that helps brand and product managers make decisions, and grow business. (Slides)