I used to work on a large corporate campus, with a big maze-like central building that was the amalgamation of various additions and renovations, surrounded by a vast sprawl of parking lots. The landscaping was always well maintained, but for the first 10 years or so that I worked there, one little corner of the front lawn was consistently stomped into dirt by foot traffic. This kind of thing is known as a desire path, an improvised path created by the consistent trampling of foot traffic.
You can probably come up with examples of desire paths that you have seen or walked. If you are a landscaper trying to maintain even grass, I’m sure this is a deeply frustrating phenomenon. But if you are a pedestrian, then you know exactly why these paths form – because the sidewalk or road or trail is laid out in a silly fashion, one that’s not useful for where you want to go or that causes you to go unnecessarily out of your way.
There are two ways to fix a desire path. One is to fill in the area where pedestrians have been trampling through with a more impassable obstacle, like a fence or a hedge. This was the solution that my old company finally implemented for the much-trampled bit of grass at the edge of the front parking lot: they replaced it with a flower bed, with close-planted flowers that you’d have to be a real jerk to stomp through. And that wasn’t a terrible solution – the flowers looked nice.
The other way to fix a desire path is to pave it – to make it an acknowledged through-way. In general, I think this is the most obvious and sensible solution. There are reasons you might not want to do this, but allow me to suggest that “because people aren’t supposed to be walking there” is not a good one.
This concept of desire paths is one that extends very easily to the world of usability and design. UX designers who spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to herd their users into particular types of product engagement are very busy building fences and flower beds. They might come up with a design that looks very pretty. But if you’ve ever found yourself cursing an interface that requires you to click through multiple levels of navigation or dismiss multiple forms of pop-up in order to accomplish a simple thing, then you know that pretty fences and flower beds can be an absolute pain in the butt.
Lately I’ve been thinking about this concept of the desire path as I’ve been looking at how I spend my time. I left my old job a year ago, and while I’ve worked on an assortment of interesting projects over the last year, very few of them have looked anything like what I expected to be working on. Recently it has occurred to me that I should probably think about what that means, and that maybe I should take a look at how I’m organizing my time and the spaces that I’m working in, and consider where my feet are trying to take me and what obstacles I may be putting in my own way.
Over the summer, I had fallen out of the habit of walking regularly. A few weeks ago I got a new fitness tracker, an Oura ring, and it has been a great motivator to consistently get my steps in. And in doing so, I found myself with this strong desire to walk to somewhere, with a notebook or my tablet – wanting to create a “walk to the coffee shop and write” type of experience, even though I was struggling to find a destination that really felt right. And only today, I finally finally stumbled on what I was looking for, in the form of the bizarrely hard-to-find coffee shop at the the local technical college, adjacent to a spacious atrium with plentiful tables and chairs.
I’m writing to you from a table in that atrium, and it’s hard to articulate the pleasure and the weird sense of victory I feel. It’s like I spent all that time poking around the hedges and fences and flowerbeds of modern suburbia until I finally found the little cut-through that got me here.
The first thing I did after ordering my coffee was to pull up Google Maps and submit an updated entry for the campus coffee shop, with a precise location and current hours. It’s as close as I can get to putting paving stones down on the desire path I’d been following. If you ever want to meet me here for coffee, now you can find it too.
Professional Life
This week I am intending to power through the last edits to a Power BI project that has gone neglected. Wish me luck. I had the same goal for myself last week, so I’m not batting a thousand here. But I did finally accomplish breaking down the remaining work into something more resembling a plan of action, as opposed to just the monolithic “do the thing.”
Last week I did a mini skills course through Sean McCormick’s Executive Functioning Coaching Academy which contained a good overview of some practical tactics for managing overwhelm and getting a project on track. One of my favorite go-to tips is to break things down into more manageable tasks. I often put this as “the next smallest step” – what is the next smallest step you can take toward getting this part of the project done. A connection that this course made was to link that with the Pomodoro technique, which is a method where you set a timer to focus on work for 25 minutes and then take a 5 minute break. Sean suggested that as you break your to-do list into manageable tasks, think about what you might be able to accomplish in a 20-30 minute chunk. I think that’s a great recommendation. Things don’t always take as much time as we expect, but something that seems like you could finish it in 20 minutes is a good place to start.
Writing & Culture
I’m currently reading The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd and enjoying it. Probably this is another thing that has me thinking about desire paths, as sort of the secret third thing alongside what Paul defines as the “default path” of a conventional career and the “pathless path” of the person defining their own ideas of success.
Physical Existence
I mentioned that I’ve gotten back into the habit of walking a lot. It feels really good!
I have not followed through on my proposed dietary experiment to try cutting out potatoes and tomatoes and avocado (as someone who likely has a latex allergy, those being foods that have a higher likelihood of cross-reactivity). I still think this would be an interesting self-experiment to try, but the holiday season is approaching like an oncoming train, and this just maybe isn’t the time to stress about it.
Odds & Ends
I still have not gotten any new art projects off the ground, but I did make this list for myself. I’m looking at it for inspiration, and maybe you might find it helpful too:
Ideas for breaking through creative barriers:
Use up the “good” art supplies on silly projects.
Do art in weird places – at a breakfast joint before your order comes, in your car while you’re waiting to pick someone up, at the park on a nice day, whatever.
Make something goofy and useless. Bonus: put googly eyes on it.
Share your creation with a friend or a family member or on social media, joyfully and unapologetically – even if (especially if!) it’s kinda janky or didn’t turn out quite like you’d hoped.
Hmm, now there’s a solid piece of advice to take into the end of the year: Share joyfully. Wherever you are, whatever you’ve got. We are made to share this life with one another. Let’s do it joyfully.