Tuesday at 2PM

I was listening to the most recent episode of the Decoder podcast (link) with the creator of the Arc Browser, Josh Miller.

Arc is a web browser, so naturally he was asked something like "why compete with Google's Chrome browser?", and he said something that resonated:

What we’re focused on is the individual and the person at the other end… the focus on publishers as Google describes them, has left the individual on a Tuesday at 2PM lacking a lot of powerful tools to make them better and faster [emphasis my own]… in fact, we think that what was missing was looking at my wife using her laptop on Tuesday at 2PM [and realizing], “Wait, that’s what she’s doing? We can do better. Computers can do more than that.”

I think the "computers can do more than that" line rubs me the wrong way, perhaps because it reminds me of Notion's line about wanting to fulfil the vision of computing from the mid-late twentieth century. Approximately one billion percent more people use (and love) Notion than have ever used (or loved) a piece of software I have written.

Notion, you are a subscription-based, enterprise-grade, user-generated intranet tool.

Stay with me on this, I'm going to try and land the plane of this metaphor, I promise.

Documentation, a rant

Notion, you are very successful, and a lot of people love using your tools. But, I think people reach for those tools before thinking about the foundational questions of coordinating the direction(s) of travel, and the knowledge of institutions.

If you would like proof of this, and you work somewhere with a Notion subscription - go and look at the shared "knowledge hub" areas of your company's Notion. Everywhere I have worked since 2018 (it is 2024) has had a warren of onboarding, process, and company documentation that was true once then never updated.

This doesn't happen because Notion is bad or people are unthinking. I have worked almost entirely with companies full of thoughtful, caring, very intelligent people. (Before you think I am being saccharin: I also once had a company I contracted for suddenly refuse to acknowledge my invoices or pay me for several months, actions I would dub neither "thoughtful" or "caring" (or legal)).

It happens because the beauty of the software you use to write documentation and create Kanban boards probably isn't the limiting step in the process of building something good.

I think the infinite canvas of Notion's surface makes both breadth and depth equally available (and tempting) for people to fill out. Sure, this page is mostly done, but I better sign-post these sibling pages because they're related, and create a couple of sub-pages here, because it's getting quite long.

I think it's possible to mistake work that is pleasingly weighty, and placed within a solid document structure as important. I think it's possible — easy, even — because it looks important.

Be curious, want to help

Conflating correlation with causation isn't a new problem. Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations will correlate two things convincingly: google searches for "tummy ache" against and university degrees awarded; or baseball and divorce

Let's take a straw man example, and really torture it: you want to think more clearly, so you go be near books.

If I blindfolded you and measured the quality of your thinking (somehow, idk) - I don't think that your proximity to books would correlate with better/worse thinking.

But I actually seriously believe that some of the world's finest thinking happening today is being done in, or around, libraries and studies.

To correlate proximity to printed word, and quality of output would be possible, arguably interesting, but I think more important it would be easy.

In practice, I think we can be better served by wanting two things: to be curious, and to help.

Imagine I tell you two things about me: i) I care obsessively about helping people make their best work by helping them think more clearly, and ii) I founded a company that will insulate your wall cavities with used books, to increase your proximity to printed word.

Would you think that I actually care about helping people do their best work? Or would you think I'm working backwards to a business because I have access to a lot of cheap books?

Perhaps less flippantly: you cannot simply build a hospital near an inhabited area, and expect mortality to decrease. You cannot deliver food and water to a natural disaster site and expect famine to dissipate equally.

To do these things you must be curious, and you must care.

Landing the plane

To come back to Josh Miller's quote about building a browser to compete with Google's Chrome: you do not need to understand all the ways in which Chrome is a browser built for Google, not for you the individual, to understand that your lived experience is bad in some way, and could be better in some way.

It is Tuesday at 2PM, you are using a web browser designed by (and in service of) the company that makes twenty bazillion dollars a year by serving you advertisements that get more valuable the more the company knows about you (where you live, how often and where you exercise, etc.).

In this moment, I would take a viable alternative made by someone who feels this is important, over one made by someone who wants to improve five specific metrics about my experience.

How do you measure "creeped out" on a five-point emoji scale?

This reminds me somewhat of vibe-driven development: that the effort to gather and understand high quality data-driven insights is high, and if you care about (and use) the thing you're building, you can probably just… make it better.

An anecdote

To close with an anecdote: I used to work in the sustainable fashion space, at a time when there was a lot of excitement about the rental market. People renting their clothes for days-to-months, and other people making bank by owning but never wearing those garments. It worked for real estate, famously.

I met, first- and second-hand, a lot of start-ups wanting to get in on this. I met people with a history in finance, logistics, project management, whatever. I remember sitting in an intro call with a (now defunct) company, that was going very well out of the pandemic. I remember the founders proudly saying that they knew nothing about fashion or clothes, but that they ran the numbers and the luxury fashion space had the highest possible yield to them.

These people never thought about the Tuesday at 2PM of the people who wanted to rent a dress for a wedding, a coat for a date night, or daily outfits for their newborn.

They thought about the metrics they could optimise. I suspect that's how they see their customers, that is how they will see their employees and their partners.