Actions are the children of mindset and environment.
When running his document storage company, AJ Wasserstein created a travel budget. Budgets are good. Budgets are a design tool, and we are all designers.
Wasserstein’s budget wasn’t denominated in dollars, it was in days away from home
“One thing I did while working at Archives One was give myself a travel budget. I gave myself permission to travel a certain number of days a month. It wasn’t a financial budget, rather a nights-away-from-home budget. If I started to exceed that consistently, my role at the company needed to be cleaved and I had to hire someone to do part of what I was doing.” – AJ Wasserstein, Circle of Competence, June 2021
Wasserstein asked a different question. Rather than ask what was financially costly he asked what was socially costly and optimized for that. A lot of times we assume that the important is easily measured. Dollars? Yes. But other things too.
The Waiter's Pad 
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