On Permanence

How many times has this happened to you:

• You summon all your brilliance to put together a killer design, email, presentation or blog entry.
• Time whizzes by and you’ve read, re-read, tweaked and re-tweaked everything for the five hundredth time.
• The instant you look at the sent message, printed slides or published blog entry, you notice typos, redundant phrases and other things that make absolutely no sense.

It happens to all of us (at least from my unscientific survey of a few friends these couple days). The question is why? Why does it seem like we’re better at picking up mistakes only after the fact? Why do we notice different details when we print something out and read it over versus trying to review it on-screen? As I brought the subject up over lunch, Johanna mentioned that she had written about almost the exact same thing two weeks ago. Her entry deals with the act of organizing thoughts in physical space and there are some wonderful ideas in the comments too.

Review vs. Do

My personal take is that for any given task, our minds constantly shift between two modes: review and do. Review-mode give us perspective on the big picture and keeps us on track toward reaching our destination. Do-mode is focused on implementation — building, typing, moving pixels and making changes.

The problem is that when we’re in front of that blinking cursor, everything is so easily editable that we get caught up in do-mode. When we try to review things, we think, “oh, that’s an easy fix, so I’ll do it right now,” and instantly return to do-mode. We keep bouncing back and forth between the two without maintaining the proper altitude to see the bigger picture. To use the forest-from-the-trees analogy, it looks something like this:

On the other hand, paper isn’t so immediately malleable. Sure we can make marks on it, but we don’t actually implement the changes until later. When we print something out, read it through and then go back to make the revisions, our path looks more like this:

The permanence of printed ink on paper forces us to stay in both review-mode and do-mode for longer spans of time. The end result is we fly a smoother path, save time and energy and reduce the risk of crashing and burning along the way. I think we all realize that on some fundamental level, paper offers us greater clarity of mind. It just feels better.

Putting it into Practice

We can force ourselves to stay in each mode for longer periods of time by applying permanence in some of the following ways:

• Print it out. Grab a pen, move away from the computer, and go through it.
• If you don’t like wasting trees, save it as a PDF and review it that way. Jot notes down on a scrap of paper as you flip through and then go back to make the changes.
• If you’re writing a blog entry, use the ‘preview’ mode so you can see what it will look like on your blog before you publish.
• Set up a text-to-speech shortcut, highlight what you’re working on and have your Mac read it back to you.

By creating constraints on our ability to instantly manipulate what’s in front of us, we can carve out a smoother, more effective path to getting things done and getting them done well.