Sorting and choosing

Sorting puts our options into two piles. One pile is the don’t-like, not-good-enough or wrong stack. These are the flavors we don’t enjoy, the paths that are dead ends and the people we simply don’t want to hang out with.

The other pile meets spec. The other pile is good enough.

Choosing among the good pile makes a small difference, but getting the piles right is the hard part. All the time we’re agonizing about our choices, we’re avoiding the hard work of really considering how we sorted things in the first place.

This works in design too.

Years ago a product manager taught me the trick of building out a project board with everything I could imagine. Notes, inspiration, screenshots, design iterations, sketches. Lay it all out on the canvas.

Then, little by little, start to sort.

For me, that means moving ideas from an active area to the archive. I’ll actually name the areas on the canvas and sort as needed.

Sometimes if an artifact isn’t ready to be moved I’ll draw a big red line across it diagonally. That tells me I can disregard it now, but if I need to check it for reference it’s still around.

This is a fantastic way to build out a design project. Throw things into the active and archive piles, move between them if you’re wrong, and remove decision paralysis.

Via Seth Godin.