Principles of Construction

I set out to build a productivity app, to solve a little problem I was dealing with— that work sucked and I wasn’t making progress on anything I cared about. Along the way, I learned something, and everything changed.

My idea was an app to track small, daily wins. An agile / retrospective tool for the Self and all of one’s myriad projects & interests. My thesis: we can learn how to become more productive, by first tracking and measuring our actual daily progress.

Last fall, I (re)learned how to code, built an alpha version, tested and improved it, then launched a private beta to test this idea with a bunch more people.

I learned that I wasn’t building a productivity app after all.

Building an app from scratch forced me to be productive. I learned by doing. Like the ceramics teacher who assigned half her class to make one perfect piece over the course of the semester, and the other half to make a new piece every day…

Productivity is not the goal. Learning and growing, ie. knowledge, is the goal. But to learn, we need to do the work and be productive. I had it backwards.

I was building a knowledge app.

And so, I rebuilt Bicycl with this as my first principle:

1. Productivity for the sake of learning

a. Not the other way around. We are productive so that we can learn and grow as humans. It’s how we find meaning. Bicycl’s mission is to empower people on the path of knowledge.

a. Learning begins with mindfulness. This is the science of small wins — when you notice and observe what happens each day, you’re gathering real data you can learn from, and training your mind’s neural pathways to ‘see’ in a new way.

2. Respect each other’s attention

a. We are creators, not users. Dividing the world into users and non-users of a product, while a small semantic hiccup, is demeaning. No one’s ever sincerely defined themself as User.

b. Optimizing for engagement / usage of a product results in shallow reward loops. Instead, optimize in service to a person’s purpose. In Bicycl, this is as Albert Wegner calls it, the knowledge loop — learning, creating, and sharing.

3. Stories = containers of meaning

a. Stories are the basic unit for how we create, organize, and distribute the meaning or value of everything we humans do.

b. How we communicate progress and knowledge, ie. the stories we tell — both to ourselves and the world around us — shape our reality. A question I’m asking with Bicycl is, how can learn to tell better stories?

4. Every object has an origin

a. Anything can become the beginning of a new story or thread. In programming terms, any child can become a parent.

b. In classical folder structures, we have to plan our organizational hierarchy ahead of time. While an effective execution system, it leaves no room for innovation. As soon as we learn something new, that system changes or becomes irrelevant. This is where most productivity systems fail. In Bicycl, any micronote can become the start of another thread.

5. Live in the present — time is an abstraction

a. We cannot change the past, only learn from it. The more accurate data we have about what actually happened, the more we can learn. Being mindful is all about paying attention to what happens, gathering that data.

b. We can’t set the future either. No matter how tightly we plan our schedules, things change. We can prepare for it, by practicing now what we want to become, and by believing in our ability to learn and grow, while helping others do the same.

6. Growth in cycles

a. We are not automatons with a single setting: productivity. We work, grow, live, learn, rest, and play in cycles. Every day, month, year, every project, relationship, and activity has its own ‘time’, as they say. And it’s own beginning, middle, and end.

b. Understanding where we’re at in these cycles — in the context of where we’re we’ve been and where we’re going — helps us more efficiently apply our resources, adjust our attention, and act accordingly.

7. Finding purpose

a. Having a purpose, knowing why you do something, gives you a north star, something you can make meaningful progress towards every day.

b. Knowing why is not the end, though. If life is a process of evolving our desires, our purpose, then it is the ongoing search for meaning, the journey that matters. We choose a purpose, live it, and learn and grow through what we experience daily.

This is the path of knowledge.

And finally, because it defies ordering in a list:

Embrace the unknown

a. It is the territory into which all quests for knowledge must venture —from science, travel, business, and art, to each personal search for meaning.

b. Structure, purpose, and preparation provide the vehicle for such exploration. But still, we must traverse wild and chaotic landscapes, listening, learning, and adapting to the unknown.

These principles are my hypotheses of life, based on evidence gathered so far. I’m using them to build a tool for the future I believe is coming — a new knowledge economy. We are just at the beginning.

// Bicycl is in beta. You can experiment at bicycl.com. I’d love to learn about your experience.

// email - now@bicycl.com, twitter - @bicyclhq