At Dwell, we use Hill Charts, a project management tool developed by the folks at Basecamp and built into Basecamp 3.

What are Hill Charts?

The basic premise is this:

To-do lists are imprecise (what does it mean for a project to be “42% done?”), so we need a visual representation of progress. A Hill Chart is a subjective visualization of progress in which each to-do is a dot positioned on a hill. The left side of the hill is for figuring out the unknowns of a project; the right side is for implementing the knowns.

The left/uphill side is for problem-solving, consideration, and figuring out uncertainty. The right side is for execution, implementation, and confidently taking care of the knowns.

Note: For more about Hill Charts beyond my oversimplified explanation, you can read Basecamp’s article, or watch this video from Ryan Singer (also embedded at the end of this post).

What’s Good About Hill Charts

I’ve found it helpful to have a visual representation of where we stand with different tasks, even (especially) if that representation is subjective. Hill Charts maintain a history, so you can scroll back and see the progress that’s been made in different places.

I haven’t done this, but I suspect that if I looked at the history of all of my tasks and projects, I’d see overconfidence at the beginning tapering off into realism as the dots get closer and closer to the end. Lots of progress in the “figuring things out” phase, followed by the realities of implementation bringing me back to earth.

What’s Bad About Hill Charts

Okay, now the part that was promised in the post title. There are some things I don’t like at all about Hill Charts, and while I don’t have a proposed solution, I thought I’d list them here in case somebody has some ideas:

Equal horizontal movement ≠ equal work. Moving a dot 50px on the left side of the chart doesn’t necessarily equal moving a dot 50px on the right side of the chart. It’s possible to go up the entire left side of the hill in a day, but take weeks to go down the right side. The time it takes to figure out the implementation of a task isn’t necessarily the same as the time it takes to actually implement it.

A downward slope implies ease. The “Figuring Things Out” side of the chart moves uphill, making it look like a slog. The “Making it Happen” side goes downhill, making it look easy. “It’s all downhill from here.”

The difficulty slope of each project is different. Sometimes, the figuring-out process is more difficult than the implementation; other times, the implementation is harder than the figuring-out process. There’s no way to express this on a Hill Chart, since the slope is identical for every project.

Progress gets more granular as time goes on. I’ve noticed this in my own usage of Hill Charts, so it could be just me. At the beginning of a task I tend to be overzealous in moving the dot from left to right. I’m pretty confident during the “figuring things out” process, but then once the implementation starts I move the dot smaller and smaller distances. The last portion of a task usually has a bunch of moves of a few pixels each. Maybe I’m just using Hill Charts wrong, or not breaking my work into tasks that are granular enough, but I suspect Hill Charts unintentionally incentivize this kind of usage.

Hill Charts are deliberately subjective, so perhaps this critique isn’t entirely fair. But since they’re specifically paired with to-do lists, I think they should be a more accurate reflection of the actual work it will take to move through a task.

How to Fix Hill Charts

We need a visual representation of progress through a task list. Hill Charts are a start, but I think we need a solution that incorporates some additional attributes:

Variable difficulty slopes. The user should be able to set the slope of the hill. Some projects might have a lengthy, shallow Figuring it Out segment; others might a steep, quick left side but a shallow, lengthy implementation side. Let the user decide.

Flexible difficulty slopes, with history. The initial slopes might be inaccurate, so users should be able to change it on-the-fly. These changes should be rolled into the Hill Chart history, so we could visualize how it’s changed over time.

I don’t know exactly what this solution would look like, but I’m hoping someone on the internet (or maybe Future Me) can help flesh this out into something real.

More About Hill Charts

Basecamp’s excellent Getting Real channel has two videos on Hill Charts as part of a larger series on how they work. Here’s the quick primer:

And here’s a more in-depth explanation with examples:

A Note About Ryan Singer, Product Genius

Hill Charts were pioneered by Ryan Singer, who leads Product Strategy at Basecamp. If you’re interested at all in product work, you should follow his writing and videos — I’ve learned more from reading him than almost any other single product person. His work gives me the same feeling as Ben Thompson’s or Patrick “patio11” McKenzie; it’s like they’re seeing in four dimensions what the rest of us only perceive in three.

Ryan Singer is @rjs on Twitter, and his website is feltpresence.com.

TL;DR — I’m building an iPhone app called Interlude, using the knowledge of Swift I’ve gained by working at Dwell. It’s a small project that will give me the chance to build something start-to-finish, rather than just editing an existing codebase, so I’ll learn more about the overall native development ecosystem.

Just a reminder that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote a rap about The West Wing for the excellent podcast The West Wing Weekly and it’s well worth your time.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Blaise Pascal, likely before compulsively checking Twitter

For knowledge workers — designers, programmers, writers, analysts, and desk jockeys of all kinds — our minds are our greatest asset. We get paid for our ability to turn our brains towards a problem, ruminate on an answer, and produce a solution. It’s how we create value.

Our attention is our most valuable resource, yet it’s the one we treat most casually.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but tell me if this sounds familiar:

I think long and hard before spending money. I hate to waste food or drink. I cringe at the thought of leaving a light on unused. And yet I’ll sink an hour into browsing TechCrunch or Hacker News and barely realize it.

Media Diets & Mental Junk Food

When it comes to our bodies, we understand intuitively that diet is important. “You are what you eat,” after all. Fruits and veggies in, your body gets stronger. Twizzlers and Twinkies, not so much.

We’re less attuned to the way our media diet affects our minds. We may know on some level that an hour of browsing Reddit isn’t the same as an hour spent reading a good book, but that doesn’t stop us from making the easier choice. The short bursts of Twitter are more enticing than the slow burn of literature; the driving beat and nursery-rhyme melodies of Katy Perry are more fun than the impenetrable riches of anything classical. Pull-to-refresh provides a stronger dopamine hit than ponder-and-fathom.

It’s irrational, isn’t it? If our livelihood is based on our ability to focus our attention, then we should flee from anything that weakens our attention span and flock towards anything that strengthens it. As the “knowledge economy” grows, we should see a whole army of voracious readers and dedicated meditators. Instead, we have a world of quick cuts and hot takes. It takes an addiction to make us act so irrationally against our own self-interest.

Junk food short-circuits our genetic predisposition towards sugar and fat to make us crave it more than any fruits or vegetables. Similarly, the mental foods that are bad for us short-circuit our cravings for information. We may know that John McPhee is better for us than The Bachelor, but that doesn’t mean we won’t pick The Bachelor every time.

(Maybe it isn’t The Bachelor for you; maybe it’s something else. Or maybe you have better self-control than I do and this isn’t a problem for you at all. Anyway, isn’t Demi the worst this season?)

Saving Our Attention

The mind is a clearinghouse for information. Information goes in, is processed by a set of particular filters and biases and mental models, and comes out as knowledge.

That’s what we should be preserving at all costs — our minds’ ability to focus well.

It seems like everyone in tech circles is talking about this. Daily meditation, tech sabbaths, internet detox retreats, focus-boosting apps… they’re everywhere. They feel a little like putting a Band-Aid on a broken bone. But, in the absence of a better solution (or the willpower to ditch Twitter and Reddit), they’ll have to do.

I’m admittedly terrible at following my own advice, but here are some resources I’ve found that have helped boost my attention, or at least mitigate my distractedness:

• 📙 Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day. A book by the guys who wrote Sprint about techniques they’ve found to focus better and remember more of their days.
• 📘 The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. It’s a few years old, but this book by Nicholas Carr explores how our brains rewire around the media we spend time with. The more time we spend with quick, shallow information (like Twitter and Reddit), the less capable we are of consuming deep information (like books). Scary.
• 📙 Amusing Ourselves to Death. This classic by Neil Postman was written before the era of the internet, but its discussion of the effects of television on our brains feels as timely as ever.
• ⏰ Focus. A macOS app that disables distracting websites and apps for as long as you specify, with no take-backs.
• 🔗 Liberate for iOS. Same idea as Focus, but for iOS. It blocks websites only (no apps), and unfortunately can be disabled, but still helpful.

Postscript

I like the idea of meditation, in the sense of sitting quietly and thinking deeply for a stretch of time. If we hold that deliberate practice is the single most effective way to get great at anything, than it makes sense that the best way to increase your focus and attention is to practice being focused and attentive.

I don’t like the pseudo-spirituality of apps like Headspace and Calm (yes, even the apps that claim not to have a spiritual bent seem to have a spiritual bent, whether they themselves realize it or not). I like the idea of having a meditation timer with soothing sounds and a bell to tell me when my time is up, but I’d rather have an app dedicated to that purpose than use a timer buried in a more fully-featured meditation app.

Since I haven’t been able to find anything like that yet, I’m building my own. It’s called Interlude, it’s an unguided meditation timer, and it’s my first solo iOS app. I’ve had a chance to do some work in Swift while working on Dwell, and this seems like a good way to flex my engineering muscles and create something of my own.

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Design is a form of hospitality.

Done well, design should be welcoming. It should invite users into the world it creates, making them feel at home. This is true for websites, apps, books, posters, album covers — you name it.

Most design is about reducing friction: reducing the friction to find information, to connect with friends, to share your thoughts, to consume more content. Reducing friction is a form of hospitality.

Not all design is meant to reduce friction, of course. If you’re designing an interface for a missile defense system, you probably want to increase the friction around hitting the big red button. Making people feel comfortable — giving them appropriate guardrails that reduce the fear of making mistakes — is a form of hospitality.

Making users feel like they know what they’re doing is a form of hospitality.

Giving users a pleasant place to spend their time is a form of hospitality.

Making tasks easier so users can get back to their real lives — their homes and hobbies and families — is a form of hospitality.

Creating mechanisms that deliberately addict your users is not hospitable.

Luring your users into behaviors for the sole purpose of generating data that you sell to third parties is not hospitable.

Purposely obfuscating the way your product makes money is not hospitable. Purposely obfuscating the meaning of your privacy policy is not hospitable.

Transparently providing a service and charging for it is hospitable.

This is why hotels are hospitable in a way that casinos are not.

Let’s seek to design hotels, not casinos.

The two biggest distractions I’ve found when working from home are:

1. Housework. There’s always laundry to fold, dishes to wash, tables to tidy. It’s a great way to procrastinate without feeling like you’re procrastinating.
2. The Internet. Yes, it’s distracting anywhere. But without anyone walking by or looking over your shoulder, it’s that much worse.

Here are some ways to combat distractions. Many of these have worked for me, and some come recommended from others:

• Put your phone out of site. Out of sight, out of mind.
• Use an Internet blocker. Focus is a good one. You can set a certain amount of time, and it’ll block distracting websites and apps.
• Schedule a time for housework. Give yourself a set amount of time and you’ll be shocked how quickly you can clean.
• Get a change of scenery. If one environment isn’t working for you, decamp to a coffee shop or similar.
• Get up and move around to reset. Move around a little, make some tea or coffee, and stretch your legs before coming back to work. Sometimes that’s the reset that helps.
• Turn on one song, album, or playlist on repeat. It works! Pro tip: try it with thank u, next by Ariana Grande.