Tanuj

In the early days of The Creative Independent, we sometimes thought of TCI’s website like a house next to a river. We considered the interviews the flowing water, as they were our house’s nutrients and source of life. We would collect and drink from the water every day. But sometimes, depending on its nutrient makeup, the water would change our... See more

We're biologically programmed to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They connect us to other people. So they're like a kind of candy that we're fed when we consume political information, when we read novels.

Every area you don’t given a damn about you probably should read at least one book in. Because the very best book in that area is superb, and you’re not going to know what it is. So if tennis is something you don’t know anything about, well, read Andre Agassi’s memoir. That’s a wonderful book. You don’t have to know about or care about tennis. And... See more

In trying to get a particularly tricky habit to stick, I tried dozens of apps and nothing worked for me. Recording an action felt like yet another chore. None could approach the most basic satisfaction of simply crossing out an item on a list. Could you design a simple action that felt as satisfying and infuse it with as much symbolism? Were we... See more

ITEs are probably a subset of notes apps, just like IDEs are a subset of text editors. Every IDE is fundamentally a text editor. Every ITE is fundamentally a notes app. That’s because—at least for now—the best way we have of working with our thoughts is to instantiate them as notes.

Most designers set requirements for f() by describing what f() should be, which is a circularity. To be useful, requirements should be defined independent of f() as tests for fitness.

Someday there's going to be a product, or two products, that are competing with each other, with similar features, and the thing that they're not going to be competing over is like how well the eraser works or how well the select tool works. They are going to be competing at that higher level — of the features that they built that are unique to... See more

It's easy to think of ourselves as separated from everything, but this is not true. We are as much the universe as a neutron star or a black hole or a nebula. Even better, actually, we are its thinking and feeling part: the centre organs of the universe.