Use It or Lose It

Here’s a photo I took this morning while waiting in line at Target.

You’re probably wondering where all the stuff is. The Target I went to growing up in Nashville would close out of shame if it looked this way.

But this is not the Nashville Target. This is one of Target’s biggest stores in the country, and the only Target in the New York area. This is Brooklyn Target. And I will admit that on weekends, it can be a zoo.

So much a zoo that the company doesn’t know how to handle it. When I first visited this store eight months ago, I thought they were undergoing a reorganization, because so many shelves were completely bare, and sometimes entire aisles were empty. The merchandise was frequently laid out on the floor of the shelving system. But I kept going back, and nothing changed. And it’s the same today. This place just gets pummeled every single weekend, and by Sunday night it is utterly ravaged. Sure, the prices are pretty good, so I can see how popular it is. And a big part of Target’s image is the price—while not on Wal-Mart’s level, it’s definitely cheaper than the corner bodega or convenience store.

But Target has failed to adapt to New York City. They clearly built this store without planning to cover the volume of business they’re seeing. It feels like a test run for them. They’re dipping their toes in the water. I’m sure they knew, going into this, that Brooklyn is not Nashville. But whatever they did to compensate for the New York market, they didn’t do enough of it.

The funny thing is, the shoppers seem unfazed—their carts are full, they seem content. It’s as though they haven’t had the experience of other Targets. They’re just happy to be here, happy to have the option to save some cash. And after all, who needs AA batteries? Or anything else that is extremely popular and always completely sold out?

I’m starting to get used to it myself. But I know it’s possible to run a retail store in New York and keep things in stock, so I’m tempted to raise my expectations. I really am. Yes, there’s a lot more people here. Yes, things get really dirty quickly. But look at the New York-area chains: Duane Reade, Fairway, Key Food, and so on. These companies were built upon the mechanics of the New York market. They’ve learned how to protect themselves from being ransacked every weekend. National chains that come to New York have to learn some lessons from these folks.

I love to play Scrabble. One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten better at it is that many new Scrabble players start out with a broken model about how to win. People start out wanting to make long words, because naturally long words are good. It is assumed that if you’re a grammarian or amanuensis, you’ll naturally be good at Scrabble. But Scrabble is not about making long words, it’s about strategically placed, usually mundane words. In Scrabble, a well-placed two-letter word can score points in the upper 30s, while a beautiful looking 6- or 7-letter word may only score 10 or 15 points. Furthermore, Scrabble draws from a very specific grammar that Scrabble players memorize and that’s really pretty useless in everyday life. Unless you’re a civil engineer in the Middle East, you probably don’t talk about qanats very often. But if you’re a Scrabble player, this is a word you should know, because it may provide a brilliant play one day when you have a Q and no U. Who cares what it means.

Similarly, in Pac-Man, many people start out with the idea that success means gobbling up all those dots so you can reach another level in the game. It is so natural to want to do this. It doesn’t matter where you live or what language you speak—the first time you sit down at Pac-Man, you’ll probably be unable to suppress your desire to eat all the dots. But Pac-Mac is not about dots or levels, it’s about points! The levels are a trick. The real goal of Pac-Mac is to creatively lure the ghosts into one of the corners where you can eat them all up quickly after using a power pellet and score lots of points. If your focus is on this goal, the dots will take care of themselves. And if you can eat all sixteen ghosts on each level, then you’re on your way to a high score.

Not that Pac-Man and Scrabble are the only examples. Every skill has its broken initial models that lay waiting for the unsuspecting beginner. As people gain experience, they continually build, test, and rebuild mental models. I think this is why people who are very good at something will know it, because they have insight into their past incompetence.

An ad phrase that caught me ear the other day on the New York Times was, “Since when is an airline’s schedule more important than yours?” It was for “The New Delta” and I had to laugh, because it’s a really odd way of saying, “Things have been screwed up lately, but we’re trying to fix them.” They have a lot more to coordinate than I do–with their airplanes, luggage, pilots, crew, fuel, and little pillows and bags of nuts all having to arrive at the same place in the middle of a long day. If they are to continue functioning at all, their schedule must be more important than mine. But something about that notion is way too socialist. People really don’t want to hear it.

The funny thing is, even if their point is simply that the two schedules, mine and the airline’s, are ideally of equal importance, they still leave room for the hyper-individualistic interpretation that my schedule is way more important than theirs. I’m sure there are many who see it that way, and that’s why we are going to hell in millions of individual handbaskets, with little pillows provided through a partnership with Delta.

Listen, I think your service is great and all, but I’m finished with it. I found a better alternative. I found some other phone company, some other bank, some other to-do list management service. They are cheaper and better, and their web site looks nice. So, I guess if I’m all done, I will just sign on to your web site and close my account.
Now, if I can just find the button that says “close my account.” Let see–”add a fax line” — “add calendaring” — “upgrade rate plan”– “open a brokerage account” — hmmmm. I know it’s here somewhere. Right? No?
Why not? I’ve never understood this frustrating barrier. It’s not just a cost for me, the customer. It’s a cost for the company, who is paying upwards of $3 to answer my call and demand that I explain in person why I’m leaving. Don’t you hate these calls? They hem and haw, they make you wait, they ask lots of questions. Suddenly all of our information age advances fade away. You could apply for a Turkmenistani passport in less time than it takes to quit some of these services. But as services inevitably become more “self-service”, this has to change. The quality of the service has to be the thing that keeps people around, not an exit barrier.
It’s funny though. Part of the logic for companies is, “Maybe they’ll stick around longer if they have to call.” Has anyone measured this? How many people actually stay with a service for a longer time just because they couldn’t find the “close my account” button?
And if they do, does it outweigh the cost of the phone call? There’s also the cost of the bad will. That is, by not providing a feature they should clearly have, the company is sending a message they might not even be aware they’re sending: “If the customer doesn’t value the relationship anymore, neither will we.” But the fact is, people quit services for a lot of reasons and often return later. Maybe they are moving away for a year. Maybe they’ll tell their friends about it. In other words, it ain’t over ’till the customer is dead. And even then it might not be over.

Why is this sign needed? Were people going to try some third option? Yet it was obviously written by hand and attached to both sides the door for a reason, presumably to prevent some common problem. I am puzzled.

I’m terribly unresponsive to e-mail. It’s not on purpose, of course. I just let days go by sometimes, and then I look down at the bottom of my inbox and there’s something I should have replied to that is now two weeks old. I’ve improved the situation recently by storing only items that need my attention in my inbox, and moving everything else to the trash or some archive folder. This is the Getting Things Done approach, sort of.
At work we’ve been doing a lot of recent work with the Kaizen method of process improvement—redesigning our processes to be more efficient, where efficiency is measured very closely on a few different axes. The Kaizen method makes the outliers of any process very very clear, and everything else just flows through. Some of our processes are managed with simple translucent bins posted on the wall. Every bin represents a different state in the process, and all of the bins have a time limit. Time is money after all. If a piece of paper (representing a task) sits for too long in one bin, it gets moved into an “urgent” bin where it must be dealt with that day. For example, if the bin represents an external part of the process, handled by someone outside of the company, with a four day time limit, this might simply mean that after four days of inaction, we have to send a ping: “How’s it going?” The followup is important to keep people from getting upset, and to keep things moving along, so it represents an action and when it’s done, the paper can move back into the regular bin to wait another four days.
I’d like to see this with my e-mail. If I haven’t replied to something in four days, I want it to come back to show up in an urgent folder and turn red. I need to at least say “Look, I’m not ignoring you, but this is taking me a little longer.”
You would think this possible with Apple Mail, but it’s not. You can’t set up a smart mailbox to do it, either. “Unreplied to” and “Unforwarded” are not filtering options. And I don’t want to flag messages in need of reply, because that takes too much time and I have to unflag them later.
So for now I’m keeping unreplied messages in my inbox. It’s simple and sometimes it works. When is e-mail going to get a much-needed overhaul?

I’m fascinated by the working style of successful teams and individuals, specifically in the creative realm. I think that’s what’s been drawing me to diaries and biographies lately. I’m not expecting to find some key to unlocking creativity, but I have been collecting guidelines that I can cling to in the limitless expanse. One of the guidelines is the Buddhist principle about learning to let go, so I should probably throw my whole list into the river right now. But let me indulge myself for a moment instead. The problem is, I’m sick of feeling both overbooked and underlimited, so I’m looking for ways to either accomplish more with less, or more with the same, or simply less. Less means stabbing my ambition and letting it bleed a little, and I’m not ready to stick the knife in yet.
So I’m stuck hunting for design principles and working styles that can help me make sense of my work. I’m attracted to them because they’re about understanding the medium—any medium. They are solely about process, but they are not Life’s Little Instruction Book entries about having a solid handshake. So in a way they are constrained: they contain no subject and no emotion, no social etiquette. They’re not supposed to make you happy in life; they’re simply there to boost creatively productivity. They aren’t too general; they’re just general enough to be useful. We all find inspiration but apply it differently.