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The Trickle List

There’s a gaping hole in The Taste of the Day. Yes, it’s a handy task management system, but it’s incomplete. It describes a process for constant scrubbing of a task list, as well as a handy place to keep distractions out of your way via the Parking Lot, but at the end of the day, what exactly is it helping you do?

Here are three tasks from my current list:

• Headcount Asks
• David Lunch
• Move EU Trip

These are tasks for today. They are well-defined, measurable, tactical, and they need to be done today. While it’s professionally terrific that I’m actively making sure that nothing is falling through the cracks, these are still just tasks. What am I accomplishing when I complete them? I’m getting things done.

Is that what you want to do all day? Things? Stuff?

No.

You’re a Sr. Development Engineer or an Engineering Manager or a Project Manager, and while things and stuff are part of the gig, if it’s all you’re doing, you’re productive, but you’re vigorously running in place. You’re tactical, but not strategic. Tasks are an incomplete picture of what you do and what you need to do.

The curse of any effective task management system is that you get really good at capturing, prioritizing, and executing tasks. To the point that you start to believe that merely completing a task is helping your career. After a solid decade of rampant task management, I realized I needed to augment tasks with a system that would strategically guide and remind me that my job was not to do things, but to remember the interesting words in my title: manager, engineering, and products. That’s what I do.

What I needed was a guiding force behind these tasks, a way to remind me that I was pushing towards a goal and defining and refining a strategy.

I call it a Trickle List and it looks like this:

Trickle Creation

My first excursion into the word trickle was a productivity article called Trickle Theory. The argument was simple. You can do more than you think with small, consistent investments of your time.

To understand the Trickle List, you need to first look at the headers at the top of the list. These are the heart of the list and how you define them is how you define what you want to do.

A good place to start is figuring out what your current job is. If you need a reminder, go scrub that task list again. The question I want to start the Trickle List with is: “What should your job be?”

Ok, got it? You want to be a manager. Good, we can work with that. What simple, regular tasks are going to point you in a managerial direction? Do you need to network? Do you need to file more bugs? Write more specs? Strategically, I don’t know who you work for or where you’re headed or what your company values, but here’s the good news with the Trickle List: you don’t have to be perfect. In fact, imperfection is a great place to start.

Here’s my current list:

• People — Have a random chat with someone in the hallway
• Rands — Doing something Rands related
• V — Take a vitamin
• Biz — Learn a part of the business
• Book — Reading something in a book

“Rands, these are simply recurring tasks.”

No. They’re not. You’re doing more than stuff and things with your trickles; you’re designing moments of high potential. I’ll explain.

Having a random hallway chat usually isn’t going to be a career changer. 9 out of 10 of those conversations are lightweight, but those are 9 conversations I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Plus, it’s hallway visibility, and in a gig where 90% of the days are spent holed up in meetings, that’s time well spent. And there’s the 10th conversation where I learn something huge:

Wait, the project is HOW FAR behind?

Hold it, you’re thinking about QUITTING?

By choosing to create a moment where I leave my structured day to have a random conversation, I’m creating informational opportunity, and while these moments may appear to have low initial return on time investment, you’re playing a numbers game. You’re counting on the fact that, over time, over many moments, you’re creating unexpected potential.

The items on your Trickle List don’t need to be huge, in fact, as we’ll learn in the moment, the bigger they are, the less likely you’ll do them. What they need to be is aligned with where you’re headed. However small, they need to be a daily reminder that you’re headed somewhere. The size and the impact of the trickles will come from repetition. Here’s three months:

That’s not just 90 vitamins I remember to take, it’s 47 random hallway conversations that not only increased my hallway visibility, but also resulted in the discovery of some sweet gossip, gave me a chance to deliver some quiet career advice, allowed me to unearth an impending, avoidable disaster, and, oddly, taught me a lot about high definition TVs.

The Trickle Process

With a couple of defined trickles, let’s talk about how to work them into the day. Remember the Taste of the Day process. The Morning Scrub, the creation of the Parking Lot, and finishing the day with an Evening Scrub. The Trickle List integrates with all of it.

After I’ve done the Morning Scrub and after I create my fresh, new, legal-sized Parking Lot, I pull out the Trickle List for a look at the previous day. Anything that didn’t get checked off yesterday day gets brief consideration. Any clue why it didn’t get checked? Offsite all day? That makes sense.

This is not a guilt-inducing list. I’m not beating myself up when I’m looking at unchecked items. I’m looking for data. Didn’t check anything? So I was buried, right? Haven’t checked off one item for a week? Is this a trickle I should be trying to do? Yes? Okay, why isn’t it happening? What larger thing do I need to change?

If your Trickle List becomes a Must Do List, you’re going to stop looking at it. The weight of Must Do will slowly transform into “I didn’t do it, so I suck, and I don’t want to suck, so I’m going to move my Trickle List out of my line of sight, like, say, to the trash.”

The last step of the morning is adding a fresh new line to the list, starting with today’s date, and then I put the list somewhere where I’m going to visually stumble on it during the course of the day. We’re off.

Hopefully, during brief moments of calm, I glance at the list and it gives me a motivational shove. “Now is the time to learn something about the business and I’ve got the bookmark right here.”

The Evening Scrub shenanigans, like the morning’s, involve assessment. It’s the end of the day and what’d I get done? “Hey, I haven’t done this trickle in a week? Why?” Again, the point is not guilt, it’s assessment. I want you to add and delete from your Trickle List with glee. In fact, if you’re not regularly adding new trickles to the list and removing others, I’d argue that you aren’t really using the list. What you need to do as part of your evolving career is, well, evolve. Perhaps you no longer need to focus on the hallway chats and that’s why you haven’t checked it off in a week. Fine. Remove it. Move on.

Maybe your trickles are too meaty. I keep trickles deliberately simple because tasks that take more than a few minutes to complete don’t get checked. You need trickles that you can easily do. I design trickles more for likelihood of completion, rather than perceived impact. Again, impact is going to come from repetition.

Lastly, as you can see from my Trickle List, I often use letters and glyphs as my column headers. My thought is that by giving them less definition, I make more room for me to be creative about how I complete them.

Structured Improvisation

My constant struggle with productivity and task tracking systems is a struggle with structure. My natural tendency is to build systems that track everything, and that’s a silly goal. There’s no way I’m going to keep track of and complete everything. I can look at my calendar and tell you what I think I’m going to be doing tomorrow, but the fact is, I won’t actually know what I’m going to be doing until I’m doing it.

This is why I’m particularly choosey about the structure I use in task tracking. I need just enough structure to not lose important tasks, but never structure that collapses when the sky randomly falls.

Because the sky always falls. There’s always a crisis. If two days pass and I don’t feel blind-sided, I start to worry that I’m not paying enough attention. This is my other requirement for my productivity system: it needs to encourage improvisation.

There’s a reason I’m scrubbing my task list twice a day. There’s a reason I’ve got the Trickle List taped to my white board. I want both lists front of mind all the time not only because I want to constantly seek opportunities to complete a task or tackle a trickle, but also because I want to be aware of the larger themes present in both my lists. This 360 degree awareness is going to improve my ability to improvise, and that’s where I’m really going to kick ass.

Your job is not to check off one thing on your list. It’s to cross three things off — at once. It’s to have an epiphany so big that you add a column to your Trickle List in the middle of the day — I MUST DO THAT — A LOT. The only way you’re going to come to massive strategic realizations is to have a sense of your entire task list and Trickle List in your head. I’m not talking about memorization, I’m talking about a complete feel of things you need to do and the ability to improvise odd strategic conclusions.

It’s the moment in a meeting where I see a hint of opportunity in that thing Phil said. I see the opportunity because I know I’ve got 12 Phil-related tasks and 2 trickles that, in a way I can never describe but only feel, intersect with that thing Phil just said.

Strategic holy shits only come from well-informed chaos, and you can take a stab at building a productively ephemeral perspective with the tactical information you gain from a structured task list combined with hopeful strategy provided by a slippery, healthy Trickle List.

The point of your productivity system is not to keep absolute track of your tasks. The point is to keep the important information in the front of your brain where it will improve your improvisation and inform your whims. A task tracking system gives you just enough information to calculate your chaos while reminding you to create and act on random moments of high potential.

The Taste of the Day

Think of this. You have a job where, whenever you need to, you can find the absolute truth. When someone asks you, “Phil, why is this happening?” you are 100% confident that you can figure out the precise answer.

This is the idyllic situation many engineers on the planet Earth live in, and, well, it’s just a great gig.

I exaggerate. Engineers do have blind spots, but for their work, for their specific pile of bits, they are omniscient. They’re their bits and they constructed them into their specific system where they are intimately familiar with the rules because they defined them.

Outside of my career as an engineer, I’ve been a store clerk, a butcher, a video rental clerk, a lawyer’s assistant, and a bookseller, and while it’s been over 15 years since I’ve done any of these jobs, I remember the sense of naive pointlessness: “What do I build? Well, I sell stuff, cut stuff, or type stuff. I don’t really build anything, I… do stuff.”

This made the first engineering gig a revelation. “You. We are building a database application and you own this specific part. It is entirely yours. Don’t fuck it up.”

Delicious, delicious structure. Sweet, sweet definition.

These basic and essential elements of job satisfaction are at the root of why many engineers make horrible managers. They are trained and love to be control freaks.

The New Gig

Now you have a new job. You have an office and you have a door. On your desk, there’s a timer that tracks the number of seconds that it’s just you alone in your office. Whenever someone else walks into your office, the timer magically resets to zero.

Today’s record for consecutive uninterrupted seconds is 47.

This is not a world an engineer is used to, this interrupt-driven day full of people and political calculus. This is where the reputation that your manager does nothing begins. It’s your manager who thinks it. It’s the close of the day and your manager wonders, “Did I actually do anything today except contend with a constant stream of people coming into my office?”

Try as you might, the structure and definition of your quiet engineering gig is gone. Your days of digital omniscience are over.

This is the big switch between the engineer and the manager. You are leaving the comfortable world of bits for one of bafflingly configured atoms, where you need to figure out how to trust those you work with. Where you need to train folks to make decisions for themselves, but also help them understand it’s ok to escalate for help. It’s a gig where you need to keep track of everything, constantly re-prioritize, but remain strategically limber.

And to do all of this, you need a task tracking system that allows you to strategically forget.

The Taste of the Day

This is my system. It’s a mix of my ability to be a systematic thinker with the fact that there is more to do than I can ever complete. I’ve been using some variation of it for ten years now and it’s how I run my day and my week.

It all orbits around a task system. Your first question will be: “What task tracking system do you use, Rands?” The answer is a simple: “Whatever works for you”. I’ve used a homegrown Excel system, Tasks, and I’m currently using Things, but as you’ll see, the strategic key here is not identification of the task tracking system, it’s using it — all the time.

This system is designed to create a living, breathing, manageable list of things you might actually do, and it starts with…

The Morning Scrub

The first task of the day is to set my head. What kind of day am I getting myself into? A quick glance at the calendar gives me the first hint of what to expect. Is this a quiet get-things-done day? A meeting hell day? Or a sky-is-falling day? Each day has a different taste and the Morning Scrub forces me to set my head appropriately. It gives me a rough sense of my capacity, the people I’ll meet, and what they might need. More importantly, it reminds me that Priority is Relative.

Humans suffer from bright’n’shiny complex, where we’re titillated by the new. Think of it like this: have you actually done anything with that last domain you bought? No. You had the idea for it on Tuesday morning and you got all fired up, so you bought the domain the moment you got in to work. At lunch you furiously doodled your design in your notebook, fully intending to get home and get started on the HTML/CSS, and then you got home… and watched Lost.

Take the bright’n’shiny complex and apply it to your entire group, where everyone is prioritizing their day by their particular inspiration and you’ll realize it’s shocking that we ever collectively get anything done.

By taking a deep breath and considering your entire day, I’m attempting to ditch all the bright’n’shininess and gather perspective: “What is going to matter today?” With this rough priority scale in mind, I do a complete scrub of the to-do list. Yeah, the whole thing. If you can’t get through this list in 5 uninterrupted minutes, your list is either too long or you’re bad at scrubbing. Don’t worry about that yet.

The purpose of the Morning Scrub is to land each task into one of three buckets:

1. Today. This task must be completed today.
2. Later. Not today. Later.
3. Never. Yeah, I’m never going to do this task. It’s gone. This is an important essential decision that we’ll talk about in a moment.

Initially, getting through this list is tricky because, invariably, a task will be so delectable that you’ll want to jump into immediate action. Don’t. The point of this scrub is not forward momentum; it’s complete prioritization. Any deviation from the scrub decreases the chance you’ll get through the whole list.

How many Today tasks are left when you’re done with the scrub? I don’t know because I don’t know who you are or how granular your tasks are, but I usually end up with between 10 and 20.

With the Morning Scrub complete, I create the Parking Lot. This is a blank legal size piece of paper that sits directly to the left of the keyboard. New sheet. Always legal size. Every morning.

Anyone who has sat through an offsite knows exactly what this paper is for. It’s the landing spot for any idea/task/thing that is worth remembering, but, if acted upon at the moment, will derail the productivity train. Like the Morning Scrub, the art of capturing a bright’n’shiny idea and landing it in the Parking Lot is an acquired skill. You’re going to want to move on the new, and sometimes that’s the right move, but you need to honestly and quickly answer the question, “Is moving on this new thing more important than finishing what I’m doing right now?”

Practice Productivity Minimalism

As I’ve already mentioned (and written about), this is not a piece where I’ll debate the pro/cons of various productivity tools. You get to find a tool that fits your personal quirks, but whatever that tool is, I have some brief advice how to use it relative to assessing your personal Taste of the Day:

• My task list has no hierarchical organization. I’ve used systems before that allow me to lump tasks by projects or by theme and, inevitably, I end up maintaining the structure rather than getting shit done. This pisses me off.
• I do use tags within Things, but only to track who the most important person is, if anyone, for a given task. This is a handy way to run 1:1s. “Show me all Bob-related things.”
• No priorities. Really. Again, priority is relative, and while slapping a priority on a task when you create it feels right, it’s wrong because two days from now the priority will be different. Priority is a big deal — as a manager you want to get the right stuff done at the right time, but the priority that matters is the one sitting in your head right now rather than the one you dreamed up a week ago.
• No dates. I’ve got to be pissing off productivity nerds now. I don’t track due dates, either. I fully scrub my to-do list every day, which means I’m constantly making real-time calls regarding scheduling tasks.

As an engineer, your natural inclination is to build an increasingly complex system for tracking your tasks. The risk is that the more structure you put into your list, the more you need to maintain it, and the more you maintain it, the less time you’ll have to actually get work done.

The Evening

After work, after dinner, or just before I go to sleep, I complete another scrub. The process for the Evening Scrub is slightly different.

First, I scrub the Parking Lot into the Later bucket. This is the first taste I get of how the day actually went. Lots of new tasks? Ok, what kind? With the Parking Lot scrubbed, I take a moment to size up the day. How’d I do on taste? My original read was “meeting-infested nightmare” — was I right? This is another priority leveling exercise. It doesn’t matter if I made the right call on the day; the point is to again set your head appropriately.

Finally, I scrub unfinished items in the Today bucket. For each item remaining, I ask, “Ok, why didn’t I get this done?” Very often, the answer is, “Not enough time”, so the item gets thrown back into the Later bucket, but sometimes it just gets deleted.

Your question is, “How did a task that was scrubbed into the Today bucket this morning suddenly become irrelevant?”

The efficient, version control-loving information pack rat in you is going to have a problem punting a task into oblivion. Your thought is, “Sure, it might not feel important right now, but WHAT IF!?”

Stop. Delete it. We’ve already wasted 37 seconds noodling on this semi-essential but tasteless task. Nuke it. By getting this task off your list and out of your head, we’re making space. Don’t worry, if the task is actually important, it’s going to find its way back to your Parking Lot.

This deletion is advanced management kung-fu and it’s based on insight I don’t like to give to new managers because it’s a total productivity buzz kill. The insight is: “You will never complete everything you should.”

“Rands, I can do anything!”

Of course you can.

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”

I’m not. What I’m telling you is that management is the art of choosing what not to do, which means you need to be ready and willing to look at the task at the end of a day and ask, “Ok, I made this urgent this morning. A day has passed and I had time, but never got to it. Does it matter?”

Priority is relative. What felt so important last Wednesday loses importance five days later when the larger context of your week, your month, and your career shows up. You need to develop a practice of strategic information shedding where you are constantly and intelligently jettisoning ideas and work.

A well maintained to-do list gives you a daily sense of professional well-being. It constructs the pleasant illusion that you have a degree of control in a world where you have no idea how tomorrow will taste. The system I’ve constructed to maintain this list is lightweight, built using the practical use of constraints, designed to sift through an endless crapload of information that passes me during the day, but it’s a system that is incomplete.

A glance at my current Parking Lot demonstrates this incompleteness. It’s a list of things I need to do. It’s a list of tactics that I need to do to keep the management engine running, but dutifully following these to-do’s isn’t management; it’s task execution. You need another list, one that represents the strategy for your team, your career, and your values.

And that one is called the Trickle List.

The Quirkbook

It all started with a tweet:

“Making a list of superstitions / foolish consistencies / lightweight OCD behaviors e.g. I always put my RIGHT shoe on first. You?”

This right shoe behavior started during ice hockey. The team was bad… like 0-10 bad. Last game of the season against the best team in the league who slaughtered us in a previous match-up. As I sat in the locker room considering a perfect beat-down of a season, I decided to become zen about situation… deliberate. Rather than stressing about the size of the beating, I considered the small parts of manageable reality sitting immediately in front of me.

“In what order shall I put my gear on? What is practical? What feels right? You know, I like putting my right skate on first. I can’t tell you why, but the order feels important. Right skate, then left.”

We killed them. 9-3. Sure, they started by playing half their game because they were already in the playoffs, but after I scored that hat trick in the first period, they woke up. We slapped them around for another two periods. It was glorious.

I credit the skates. No, I credit the skate application process.

It’s that story that goes through my head each morning as I stare down. I remember deciding to care about how I put things on my feet. It’s a silly superstitious quirk transformed into an unavoidable daily routine and that’s why I twittered it. I wanted to know who else was saddled with these foolish consistencies.

Steven Frank took the time to write me a lengthy mail on my tweet. He mentioned, “For a while I used to semi-believe that if I could tap out a certain rhythm on my desk while the modem was dialing, I’d get through to the BBS instead of a busy signal. Never actually worked in reality.”

I did that, too.

Steven continued, “Anxiety, OCD behaviors, and depression almost always come as a package deal. I’m sure that anyone who reports one has the others. And for some reason, they always seem to affect a lot of folks in tech. I’m not sure which way ‘round the causality is, though.”

There’s a risk with giving a clever name to neuro-behaviorial developmental disorders. I wrote the original NADD (“Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder”) article expecting the inevitable comment, “You, sir, are making fun of people with legitimate disabilities. Jerk.”

Mostly those comments never arrived. Readers understood the meaning of NADD was not to belittle those with a disability, but rather to see the clever ways we’ve adapted our perceived deficiencies into distinct abilities.

It is with this thought that I present the following responses to my original tweet. I find them informative, sometimes hilarious, but mostly comforting.

• aquarium I hate to be on the left side when going somewhere
• bobthecow i check my zipper every time i walk out of a bathroom. even if i only went in to wash my hands.
• bonsai 1 cup of coffee in the morning. Always. Even when camping in the middle of nowhere.
• borkware I like light switches to be up when on, and down when off.
• brentsimmons I always sit on the right side of the plane, where it’s safe.
• ckolderup volume levels on TV/stereo/etc must be even or divisible by 5
• decafbad Toilet paper rolls go on with paper rolling OVER the roll, not under. Geez, people. ;)
• dreid I make code fit in 80 columns, I delete trailing whitespace, spaces never tabs.
• dstringf Weird quirk - I drop the last word off sentences a lot, especially if I am nervous.
• elaptics putting my hand in my pocket to check that my keys are still there - even if I have just put them in there
• epochblue M&Ms must be eaten in even numbers. You wouldn’t want one side of your mouth to get jealous while the other eats an M&M, would you?
• ergelo always click my pen open twice before writing, it certainly won’t write as well if i don’t
• gooddoug Also, whenever I get a paper coffee cup sleeve, I _HAVE_ to line up the fold with the join in the paper cup. Always.
• hmfullen I can’t resist stacking things, basically any time I’m waiting for anything.
• isaacschlueter I avoid white cars.
• janl Use the right spoon size for the food (complex); when in doubt, a fork. Shoes off or laces lose when coding or sitting comfortably.
• jaredg I always sort the jelly and jam by flavor when eating at restaurants that put the carrier on the table.
• jexner same here - right shoe first. I also try not to step onto broken parts of pavement.
• jtradke must use phone on right ear. even if right hand is needed elsewhere.
• kissane My closet door must be closed at night so nothing can eat my shoes. (We keep neither dogs nor raccoons.)
• kmcg selected eating utensil must be right weight/heft for the moment. (utensils obviously not a matched set.)
• KuraFire car stereo volume in increments of 5; aligning cutlery in restaurants; aligning stacks of things; OH GOD THE LIST GOES ON.
• lfmoliveira must untangle tire air hoses at gas stations (and phone cords anywhere).
• luomat Realized one of my oddities tonight - I will *often* NOT click on the first result in Google until I’ve checked out some of the others
• maczter I always put my pants on both legs at the same time.
• mdhughes All gadgets/tools must go in pockets in the exact right order before leaving home, come out onto desk when I get to work/back home.
• meeju I can’t sleep if not having a mouthful of water before lay down
• melle Browser tabs and task bars have to have their items in specific order, or else they’ve gotta be closed up and re-started.
• nathansmonk When parking my car, I have to have a corner spot.
• naturallygeeky Always push the walk button at crosswalks 10x. That way it knows I’m in a hurry.
• nebulous If one of my feet stumbles/stutters on the ground while walking, I try to replicate it with my other foot.
• nevenmrgan every device light - MacBook, USB hub, TV, clock - must be covered at night. Ambient light is ok, small lights are NOT
• OcelotPotPie I always set my alarm clock in odd numbers. For example, waking up at 8:00AM is an alarm set to 8:01AM. Or 8:59.
• pburleson I don’t get up unless the clock is on a multiple of 5 ( i.e. 5, 10, 15, 20 )
• popthestack I constantly clear my clipboard by copying a single space. I accidentally pasted sensitive things in IM chats one too many times…
• robertpalmer I always wet the toothbrush before putting toothpaste on it. (We started a book of these where I used to work: “The Quirkbook”)
• ryanmears firefox and textmate windows must always be in the same upper left hand corner of my screen, and be the exact same dimensions.
• rynosoft I never realized it until a friend pointed it out, but I tend to sort my fries when eating fast food.
• sandrift Even after I *know* I’ve put my keys into my bag, I must double-check that they’re there before closing car door or trunk. Total OCD.
• simplepixels Checking my pockets repeatedly to make sure nothing fell out. I once had my pocketknife fall out in a pediatrician’s office…
• spotthehall It’s that 1-2-1, 2-4-2, 1-2-1 algorithm - applied to gaps between the pavement slabs…
• ssanchez I knock on subway / Tube doors to ask them to let me on / off, but only if they are the automatic, not push button to open ones
• studlycaps Whenever I see an open cupboard or drawer, I have to close it. I can’t bring myself to leave the room with it open
• tjeremy I have to chew the same number of things on the left side of my mouth as I do on the right side. Even down to color and #, eg: M&M
• zanshin Stairs have to be counted in groups of four.
• ZooFood The join in the paper coffee cup must align with the drinking hole on the lid. Must turn lights off when leave room, close cupboards.

The Coffee Mug Affair

At my favorite local coffee shop, Lorraine gives me shit when I purchase coffee in a paper cup, “You… are not saving the world.”

She’s right. I’m not, and it’s actually worse. Each time I reach for a sip and this sad little corpse of tree flesh greets me with its pathetic weight and palpable sense of Al Gore guilt, I’m lonely.

I’m missing a key member of my creative posse.

A Box Full of Fail

The next chapter in documenting the accessorizing of my obsessions was an investigative report on paper. I’ve got 27 links regarding the history of paper queued up and ready to be read, but I don’t honestly care a lot about paper. I can’t separate the notebook from the paper.

In fact, I’m pissed at paper. Forget about the environmental guilt, cups made of paper are a sure fire way to ruin any cup of coffee because they change the taste. Coffee mugs are the only way to go and I’ve spent a lot more time fretting about mugs than paper. That’s the other thing Lorraine doesn’t know: I’ve got a box full of failed coffee mugs.

Unlike prior excursions, with coffee mugs, we can brief. There is no need for comparison tables. There are just two use cases that define a great coffee mug: Driving and Writing.

Driving

The Driving case is tactical. How do I move from point A to point B without spilling scalding liquid over me and the car? Technology has provided a bevy of James Bondian metal travel mugs guaranteed to safely transport a hot beverage, but this technology comes with a cost. After three uses, like paper, your coffee tastes like whatever material your mug is made of.

This means I’m paying two bucks for the privilege of not being scalded by a cup of coffee that tastes like old aluminum.

No.

Plastic, while less hip, suffers from the same taste degradation over time. Glass-lined or not, three uses and the taste of old coffee and angry plastic permeates every sip. This conveniently leads us to the first key construction point for the perfect mug:

It must be made of ceramic. After years of foul tasting cups of coffee, I’ve discovered a ceramic travel mug, while a hazard if dropped, is the only material that doesn’t affect the taste of the coffee. Combine this with the cleverly designed removable plastic top and you have the Pottery Barn travel mug:

Will it last? I don’t know. Can it survive a drop? Probably not. Will I lose the top? Probably. Does it deliver my coffee as intended? Yes. I have six.

Writing

The Writing use case is strategic because it’s an essential part of my writing process. Right this second, I’m editing this article and, as you might expect, there is a process. First, I sit up. Writing is serious business for which your spine must be straight. I also lean my head slightly downward, looking up at my words as I write. Occasionally I mumble what I’m typing… no clue why.

And then I stop and I take a sip of something from a ginormous coffee cup… which is when I really start writing. The sip of coffee is a pause with weight. As I described in I Don’t Multitask, these moments of silence are invaluable. They are when I step out of what I’m doing to consider what I’m going to do, and for this brief journey I need a companion, and that’s my coffee mug.

To understand this relationship, you have to consider the sip. It’s a conversation and that conversation has two elements:

It must begin with character. The appearance of the coffee cup needs to speak.

It must continue with weight. A full coffee cup is a two-handed affair. The coffee must be blistering hot and a threat sitting three inches to the left of my keyboard. Reaching for my mug is a commitment. It is a reminder that, “Hey, we’re focusing elsewhere for moment. Don’t screw this up. I’m hot.” My coffee mugs are ginormous. My sips — carefully orchestrated.

It’s a brief conversation and it has only one goal: a creative elsewhere.

The Posse

I’m only addressing half of this situation. There’s a coffee bean article to be written, but it’s time to get back to management and design, so I’ll cut to the chase: whole bean + grind at home + French press = FTW.

A great cup of coffee is not just a gorgeous caffeine administration vehicle; it’s part of your creative posse. On my desk, all within a 12 inches my hands, I have the iPhone, the Zebra Sarasa gel pen, a sweetly decaying Field Notes, and the Life is Short coffee mug. None of these items are required for me to write — they are conveniences — but they are essential to accessorizing a moment of creative, companionable silence.