Author: Matt West

My day revolves around what’s on my to-do list. It helps to keep me productive. But to-do lists have a problem. They get bloated. You end up with all sorts of stuff on there that isn’t that important.

It’s important to edit your to-do lists.

Remove the things that aren’t important.

Focus on the things that are.

You won’t have a long list of completed to-do items at the end of the day, and that’s fine. Don’t judge yourself by the amount of ‘stuff’ you get done today, but by the quality of the work you decide is most important.

Yesterday I finished reading The Last Lecture. The book is based around a talk given by Randy Pausch (The Last lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams). Randy was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2006 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and despite a number of attempts to halt the cancer’s progress, Randy passed away on July 25th 2008.

Randy’s talk inspired millions. It made people question how they were living their lives.

Something that Randy spoke about in his talk was that we should view our time as currency. This simple idea has been bouncing around my head for the past few days. It’s made me question what I’m spending my time on.

Unlike money, you can’t get more time. It doesn’t matter how hard you work, once it’s gone it’s gone.

Your time is limited, be careful how you spend it.

We don’t beat the reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well, and living fully. For the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what we will do between the time we’re born and the time he shows up, because when he shows up it’s too late to do all the things that you always [wanted] to.

Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon Graduation Speech (2008).

I think it’s sad that a lot of people view three or four years at university as the end of their education. The truth is we never stop learning. Education is a lifelong endeavour for all those that wish to live life to its fullest.

I’m not talking about the sort of broken education that exists in our schools and universities today. Education shouldn’t be about memorizing stuff from text books or sitting exams. Education should be about exploring the things that you find interesting. It should be an adventure.

Everyone is different. They have their own beliefs and their own interests. And yet our education system is stuck in a mode that tries to teach everyone the same things.

Just to be clear, I don’t think that teachers are at fault. There are some amazing teachers in our schools and universities today. When I look back to my own time at school I was lucky enough to have a few key figures who really inspired me to pursue the things I was interested in. The key difference was that these teachers colored outside the lines. They gave students the freedom to go off and explore the things that interested them.

There’s been a lot of talk about education reform over the past few years and that talk is translating into action. Companies like Udacity, Khan Academy and Treehouse have opened their virtual doors to anyone that wishes to learn. These solutions still have their own set of problems but I strongly believe that companies like these will make up the educational system of the future.

The education system of the future won’t be about learning a set curriculum consisting of things that other people think you should know. It will encourage you to explore the things that you want to know. It will inspire you to choose your own adventure.

Email has become one of the primary ways that web applications send us notifications, but email wasn’t built for this. Email was built for communication, not for sending people notifications about events.

Somewhere down the line we seem to have merged email and notifications together, but they don’t really belong that way. The whole context in which we receive, consume and act-on these things is different.

In my mind a communication is a message that is passed from one human being to another. 
A notification is generated by a machine with a single, short-lived purpose.

When we receive an email from a friend we tend to think about them. We have context with that person, and that context affects the way we interpret the content of that email. Notifications are different. Notifications are cold. They are soulless clumps of bits that have the single purpose of delivering a message about an event. We don’t have the same context with notifications.

I have emails that go back years that I still read regularly. Just as people would keep letters in times gone by, I keep emails that have had an impact on me. But amongst all of these cherished emails you won’t find any notifications. Notifications provide the information we need in the moment, but once that moment has passed their value quickly depreciates.

A lot of people complain about email. I wonder if those people would still be complaining if their inbox only contained communications from warm blooded humans. The people they know and have context with (and possibly a few they don’t). What if the notifications went elsewhere?

Many companies have come along with products that promise to get you to inbox zero. Some of these products are great, but I think they are going after the wrong problem. We need to try and reduce the amount of email we’re receiving in the first place. Attack the problem at it’s cause rather than just coming up with a better way to deal with the effect.

I think it’s time that we separated communications and notifications. In all honesty we’re already half-way there. Every operating system – be it on desktop or mobile – has the ability to handle native notifications. The remainder of the problem lies mainly with web applications. Even with the new HTML5 desktop notifications API, if your web app isn’t open, you can’t send a notification.

I propose that we need to build a whole new platform that has the sole purpose of handling notifications.

We need to build an open platform that can run anywhere, regardless of device or operating system. A platform that includes an API that developers can use to send notifications to users from any program, be it native or web. We need a client application that can handle these notifications and that can display them at the time that’s right. An app that can take into account context, and that knows that a notification that someone favourited your tweet isn’t anywhere near as important as keeping your eyes on the road whilst you’re driving.

The system we have is broken. We need to rebuild.

I say explore because true unknowables cannot always be solved. There’s not always an answer to find. Instead we explore them. We experiment in order to learn.

Unknowables are things that nobody knows. No amount of research will lead you to an answer. True unknowables are like pristine snow sheets, free from the footprints of those that have come before.

Henry Ford once famously said:

If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.

He didn’t know that customers would want to buy cars. Nobody had ever tried to sell cars to the people he was targeting before. It was an unknowable. Henry Ford pushed ahead because he believed that everyone would want to own a car one day. He explored the unknowable, and on this occasion he found an answer. They really wanted cars.

Unknowables come up a lot in business. Especially if you are at a company that is truly innovating. If you’re doing something new you’re going to come up against challenges that nobody has had to deal with before. Don’t worry about finding the ”˜right’ answer. Just explore the unknowable. You might find a solution, or you might not. It doesn’t really matter that much. The value isn’t in the end result, it’s in the journey you took to get there.

As I gaze at the dark night sky I am filled with such excitement.

Excitement for the future generations that will visit distant worlds.

The generations that will experience other lifeforms, cizilisations and technologies; 
all incomprehensible by our current minds.

For if we can just refrain from destroying ourselves, 
maybe one day we can truly learn what it is to be explorers.

We’ve spent years entering intricate details about ourselves into various places on the web and yet we still can’t get a truly great recommendation out of a machine.

Don’t get me wrong, recommendation engines have come a long way, but it still feels like a scatter-gun approach. We’re bombarded with ‘recommendations’ and left to sift through the pile until we can find the one thing we haven’t already got or are actually interested in.

• Spotify and Last.fm know pretty much every song I’ve ever listened to. 
• Amazon knows what books I read. 
• iTunes and Netflix know the films I like to watch. 
• Digg knows which articles I read, and which I skip over. (Yes, I’m a Digg Reader fan) 
• My iPhone knows the places I go and how long I’m there. 
• Facebook and Twitter know the people I like to talk to, and the ones I don’t. 

We have all this data about us out there on the web but it’s all being stored in (mostly) proprietary silos that makes it really difficult to do anything useful with.

Imagine what would happen if all of this data came together.

We could build recommendation engines that could move past the content and start to build context. In the least creepiest way possible, they could begin to understand who we are and use that information to make our lives a little better.

This is something that’s really been bugging me lately. 
We have the technology, we have the data. 
Lets do this.

No matter where we go these days our phones are always with us. They keep us in touch with the wider world.

I feel like my brain has an invisible connection to the internet. In a way the internet is just an extension of our minds. We can find out about pretty much anything that takes our interest with just a few taps on a screen.

Always being connected does have it’s downsides though. Our concentration is constantly being interrupted by notifications. You hear that characteristic buzzing sound and instinctively look at your phone. We don’t even have to think about it anymore. It’s become a reflex.

Why do we let notifications rule our lives like this?

Many people have a fear of missing out. They need to know about everything. Every blog post. Every email. Every drunken picture posted to their friends facebook page. But what if we just turned it all off? Would we really miss out on anything? What if we cut out all the noise and just made things simple again.

A few months ago I did exactly that. I was finding it hard to concentrate under the constant bombardment of notifications. A lot of which really weren’t that important. So I just turned them all off, and it feels great. I’ve got my productivity back

I think a lot of app developers add notifications without really considering what impact they will have on their users. Sure, it’s a great way of reminding someone that your app exists but is the information really so important that the user needs to know right this minute. Could it not wait until the next time the user opens the app?

Over time I’ve turned a few things back on. I get notifications for messages that hit my priority inbox in gmail now, but most other apps remain muted. I feel liberated. Finally I can focus on my work without being constantly interrupted.

If you suffer from this problem too, try turning off all the notifications on your phone for a week. You won’t be missing out on much.

Today I wanted to share with you some advice that I received when I was 17. It was given to me by Edd Smith. At the time Edd was running a company called Dreadworx that was one of the countries largest sellers of dreadlock products. He now runs a creative agency called Purple Claw.

This email changed my whole outlook on business and gave me the confidence to go out and start a company. I hope that it’s as useful for you as it has been for me.

When you get home and you think about the computer idea, ignore what your family think, ignore what your friends think, ignore what your teachers think and ignore the negative thoughts in your head telling you not to do it. If you know you can sell computer parts (and as long as you don’t get yourself into massive debt!) then you should and at the end of your time in sixth form you can think ”˜hey it was fun but I’ve had enough of that and am going to uni’ (with I might add a fantastic addition to the CV) or you might think ”˜this is going really well I could make a living from this’. All that matters is your own self belief in your ability to sell products and don’t let anything or anyone else let you wonder otherwise. Work hard, believe in your ability and you will go far.

Another entreprenuer I met said something along these lines to me once, actually he wrote it on a bit of paper after I gave a business presentation to him as part of the A-Level course – still have it on my pinboard in the kitchen at home.

“The blind belief of others in your ability is always a boost when even those closest to you don’t always see the opportunity you see” ;o).

For the past few years I have been watching the revolution that is going on in education with much excitement. A traditional college education is rapidly becoming obsolete as the standard of online courses surpasses that of the courses taught at many institutions. Of course, I am biased. I never went to college. I took the view that there was nothing I would learn at college that I couldn’t teach myself using information that is freely available on the internet. I was probably a bit naive at the time (after all, college isn’t just about the classes) but I stand by the fact that it was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Online education does however have some shortcomings. The one that I have been thinking about a lot recently is how we measure the quality of online education. The difference in quality of online courses makes it extremely difficult for employers to effectively gauge the value of online courses when reviewing applicants. Students taking a course from one organisation may get a significantly better education than a student taking a similar course from another institution. This isn’t a new problem, it existed in the traditional college model too, but I think it’s something we need to try to fix.

Each organisation offering online courses has come up with their own way of measuring a students progress. Be that using a points system, badges, certificates or something else. This works fine within that organisations ecosystem but these grading systems don’t play well with each other. What we need is a standardised system that represents both the quantity of content that a student has consumed as well as the quality of that content.

This isn’t a trivial issue and I don’t have an answer as of yet, but it’s something I’ve spent considerable time thinking about. If you have any ideas that you’d like to share please reach out on twitter or in the comments below.