I know half of my time is well-spent, I just wish I knew which half.

Eric Gordon and David Bogen, Designing Choreographies for the “New Economy of Attention”; noting the work of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in developing the concept of “choice architecture”:

People will be more inclined to actively engage with the world, they argue, if they are given small choices to make within discrete attentional frameworks. … Choice architecture is … about supplying focused choices in situ for people who are otherwise aimless and wandering. Most of us never change the default settings on our operating system, or go through the trouble of actually mailing in rebates (that is precisely why companies offer them). But if significant choices that require little energy … are designed into our environments, we are more likely to make use of them.

The notion of how defaults frame and ground judgments and actions is hardly new, but consider how “cheap, ubiquitous interactions” in our “hyperconnected” world are creating opportunities for us to make more decisions using less energy; consider how we can capture, aggregate, benchmark, access and publish online and offline personal data in realtime throughout our networks and communities. How?

Jonathan Mendez, API Battle Plans: Fighting for Next, outlining the layers of the API stack into content, utility, development and analytics; well worth a read to consider how we are creating tools to aggregate, restructure, understand and use distributed data.
(link via David Sanger)

Bijan Sabet, Beware of the complicated deal:

There is an old saying: “don’t let a great deal get in the way of a good deal”. There is much wisdom in that one. You can interpret it in several ways but I take it to mean – keep it simple, give yourself some flexibility and go execute.

Yes, this incentive structure appears complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Contracts structured with more flexibility and less “defaults” result in less negotiation, more decisions and more execution; instead of attempting to allocate value, time, effort and passion is spent creating value.

Robert Hotz in WSJ, A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight:

“We often assume that if we don’t notice our thoughts they don’t exist,” says Dr. Christoff in Vancouver, “When we don’t notice them is when we may be thinking most creatively.”