Far too often the reason that businesses do things for the way they do is nothing more than “because that’s how it’s always been done”. It’s not just businesses either we do it at home too; we eat three meals a day, because that’s what we do; we point the sofa at the TV; we have the living rooms on the ground floor and the bedrooms on the upper floors and so on. Probably because humans are creatures of habit.
Every so often however I urge you to stop and ask “why?” then query the answer you get, especially if you’re the one providing the answer, be hard on yourself force yourself to prove that the reason why is a good valid reason and if not change what you do.
Seth Godin sums this up well in his recent blog post Alphabetical order is obsolete in which he says:
I love the alphabet and the fact that it has an order. There’s no reason for the order of the letters, but there you go.
With computers, though, alphabetical order is almost always a bad idea, even chronological order doesn’t work perfectly.
Example: When I look through my spam folder, I shouldn’t see the notes in chromo order or alphabetical by sender (with AAAA’ going first…). No, I should see the notes in order of least likely to be spam to most likely.
The spam suggestion seems so obvious now, that I’m wonder why Thunderbird doesn’t do that. The key point however is that alphabetical ordering doesn’t always make sense, yet we stick to it because “that’s how it’s always been done” and no one has asked why.
Take a few minutes later and think about your business, or think about your life (if you’re looking for a business idea) and ask why a few times, you might just find an opportunity to improve (or start) your business.
This blog is about business opportunities and ideas that I spot, think of or hear about and think are useful and interesting. It is intended to provide ideas and inspriation for you to help you find the right business idea for you to then grow it into a successful business.
I think Seth is wrong on his post. The reason is the following. While most of those “orders” he mentions could be useful, they are in fact, not orders. The main difference between the alpha and his suggestions is that alphabetic order is deterministic and therefore unique, while the other order are subject to relative metrics (the likelihood of an email of begin spam, the similarity of unlistened songs to be like the most recently played ones, etc.) and therefore not unique. This fact would lead to different sequences of items for different people using different metrics. Pretty useless from a global point of view: imagine librarian ordering books in best-selling (for that specif library) order…
I think you’ve missed his point Michele, yes the ordering of likelihood of being spam is subjective but it’d be a very useful ordering to have.
Equally the ordering of music would suit many as it’s specific to them.
[...] It’s all about making sure to: Every So Often Ask Why, as John points out. [...]
John,
I understand Seth’s point. My argument was that these “orders” would not have usefulness beyond the personal level, so in a one to one basis. You cannot use likelihood -based ordering for deterministic systems (unless you enjoy unreliable outcomes).
Seth’s orders would be useful for the single user but not as a general way to order items on systems.
But that’s precisely the point, with the power of computers we can provide each person with the ordering that is most relevant to them at that moment in time.