Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

This idea resonates with me quite a bit. Recently, as I’ve been going on job interviews and meeting with potential clients, I’ve found myself feeling pressured to sell myself as a “team player” who thrives in a collaborative environment. And it’s true. I love collaborating and working on teams, and I’ve done great collaborative work.

But if I’m being perfectly honest, I really do my best work when I’m alone.

At Code Academy, we did pair programing, meaning we had two people per computer (and two keyboards and mice) working on the same project. The basic idea is that two heads are better than one, and the collaborative process yields better code than either individual could write themselves. It is a skill in itself and takes some getting used to, but when it works, it really works.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really take to it that well. I found myself just letting the other person take the driver’s seat while I followed along, contributing here and there, but mostly just observing. The reason, I think, is my thinking style.

I think slowly. I don’t mean that I’m unintelligent. What I’m talking about is not so much sharp-vs-dull, more microwave-vs-crock-pot. Two equally useful ways to cook, but different. I’m a crock-pot.

I see this more as a strength than a weakness. Sometimes the solution to a problem is not immediately apparent, and taking a step back to mull it over and consider the big picture is actually more productive than taking immediate action. Insights require patience. When you’re putting a puzzle together, you have to hold on to all the pieces even when you do not yet know where to put them. You have to tolerate confusion and uncertainty. If you just try to jam the pieces together as fast as you can or you throw away the ones that you don’t know what to do with, it will actually make the situation worse.

As the article mentions, collaboration works best when it happens spontaneously, and when the option to work alone is available. In other words, effective teams know when to collaborate and when to delegate, and can jump between the two as needed.

More specifically, I want to write about the following sentence, which I heard from a Zen practitioner several years ago and has stuck with me ever since:

Meditation is about learning the state of boredom.

When I first heard it, it puzzled me. Boredom? Really? Not inner-peace or enlightenment or something else like that? But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

Our minds crave novelty and stimulation the way our bodies crave food. When you meditate, you intentionally deprive your mind of external stimulation and focus on something dull and repetitive, like breathing. And then you just sit there. It’s boring. But it makes you happier for the same reason that being hungry makes food taste better.

A helpful way to think about it is like an addict going through withdrawal. One of the cruel effects of addiction is a numbed pleasure response, meaning that it takes more and more of whatever you’re addicted to just to get to the same level of pleasure you used to get with only a small dose, until it gets so bad that you need the object of your addiction just to feel normal. Going through withdrawal is not pleasant, but once it’s over, you feel normal again and your pleasure response is restored. Meditation works in a similar way. It restores your general sense of well-being by depriving you of that which you feel dependent on (novelty/stimulation) long enough for that feeling to fade away.

When you learn to feel content being completely and utterly bored, everything else becomes awe inspiring simply because it’s not boring. And as a result, you feel happier.

The way I meditate is by drawing circles in a graph paper journal. For every breath cycle (inhale & exhale) I draw a circle inside a square on the grid, then move to the next square and repeat. I started meditating this way because I was struggling with just sitting. I needed something a little more tangible to return to whenever I notice myself getting caught up in my thoughts. Otherwise I get distracted too easily. Also, looking back on the circles I’ve drawn in the past helps put me back into that state of mind.

Click on the card to see it flip.

The gist of this post can be summed up in the following three lines:

Abrupt change is inherently disorienting.

Reorientation requires mental effort.

Motion (i.e. animation) explains change.

Let’s unpack those three lines.

You’re probably familiar with this quote from Steve Jobs,

“Computers are bicycles for our minds.”

Bicycles are useful because they allow you to travel greater distances in less time and with less effort than walking or running. In other words: small effort, big results. This is common to all tools, including your app. Tools allow you to accomplish more with less. We can express that in an equation:

utility = increase in results – effort required

The effort required to use a bicycle is mostly physical effort, but computers and apps require mental effort. So how do you decrease the mental effort required to use your app? This is where animation comes in. (Actually, this is where design in general comes in, but I’ll just focus on animation since that is my area of expertise).

First, let’s look at what happens when an app does not have animation. Whenever something changes, the change is abrupt. The user clicks on something, and *boom* it’s different. It happens suddenly and without any visible transition. And whenever there is abrupt change, the user becomes momentarily disoriented, and will ask the question,

“What just happened?”

Answering that question requires mental effort. Usually, the user is able to figure it out within a fraction of a second without ever becoming conscious of the small uptick in mental effort. But the uptick is there, and over time, those upticks add up. Returning to our equation, utility = increase in results – effort required, every uptick in mental effort is a downtick in the utility of your app.

Animation, when used properly, prevents the user from ever asking, “What just happened?” because they can see what just happened. It’s obvious what happened, and no (or very little) mental effort is required. They click on something, and a new menu comes in from the left while the original page fades into the background, or whatever it happens to be. The change is explained visually and spatially, within a fraction of a second, so that your users don’t have to spend that fraction of a second figuring it out for themselves.

(If you want to delve deeper into these concepts, I recommend the book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug.)

The general idea is to help the user not only budget their money, but also to conceptualize of it as if it were physical cash. Using cash gives us a much more immediate sense of how much money we’re dealing with, which leads to wiser spending decisions. But plastic is way more convenient and safer to carry around. So this app will attempt to make the best of both worlds.

It’s organized into three separate modules/stages: Budget, Pocket, and Change.

From a practical point of view, this part of the app is completely unnecessary. Why not just deduct straight from the budget whenever you make a transaction? Because the purpose of the Pocket is psychological, not practical. This is what helps you conceptualize of your money as if it were physical cash. When making purchasing decisions, there’s a big difference between thinking “Oh, I’ve got plenty of money in my checking account” and “I’ve only got $12 in my pocket right now”. Plus, putting money in your Pocket before spending it forces you to plan ahead and avoid impulsive purchases.

The idea for this app came to me when I was considering using the Envelope System for my own budget. The problem with the Envelope System is that it only works if you’re using cash for everything. That got me thinking about the psychological benefits of using cash versus the obviously superior convenience and security of using plastic, and feeling frustrated with having to choose between the two. Why not have both?

Please chime in in the comments if you would use this app. It’s still in the very early early stages of development, so I’m trying to get as much feedback on the idea as possible.

Click the button to make a dot!

Update: I figured out how to embed this in the blog post itself, so you don’t have to click a link anymore.