Meet Joseph Zimmerman.

You may not know who he is by name but, what he invented changed the very fundamentals we hold at the center of our modern communications. He likely did not understand the gravity of his invention at the time. He likely saw it as the first successful implementation in a long series of attempts by many others before him to create a device that would be a boon to businesses everywhere, help their customers, and perhaps save them some money. Little did he know that at the heart of what he invented was a ground breaking paradigm shift. Something that would shift responsibilities and expectations we hold for others in basic ways. So, what was this device?

The answering machine.

That right. Humble on it’s simple mission, yet so very subversive. You see, before Mr. Zimmerman’s device, when someone called you on a telephone, and you were not available, the responsibility was on the caller to try again, not you, the receiver. There was no way to know if you missed a call. To businesses, lost calls meant lost customers. Therefore, operators and secretaries were often hired to take these calls, take down a message, and deliver it to the right person. To an individual, a missed call was simply that and no one but the caller held any responsibility for action.

The answering machine was welcomed by businesses and, by the time I was in my early teens, existed in many homes. If we called and left a message, we expected a return call. It alleviated much of our own responsibility for further action and replaced it with expectations we then placed on the recipient. For instance, expectations of a timely followup that are not agreed upon, are largely based upon what the person leaving the message feels is such, yet can only be the responsibility of those on the receiving end.

Of course, such responsibility shifts have multiplied further with the advent of email, voicemail, mobile phones, etc. Now, not only do we expect a response but we, more often than not, expect it in a time frame we have wrongly set for others. Without negotiation. Without agreement. A time that is generally and largely based upon our own response time and the expectations we place on ourselves. We, in general, mistakenly assume that everyone else is just like us. Therefore, if one is the sort of person who is always connected and reads and responds to email in minutes, we wrongly expect that everyone else is, or should be, doing the same.

But how do we counter this expectation? One way is to negotiate and set reasonable expectations for others. For example, in my last job, I let all of my coworkers know that I only looked at and responded to email twice a day for 1 hour. Once in the morning at 9am and then again at 4pm. Also, I set the email to manual checking so that, what I retrieved at those times was all I was going to see for an hour. If someone sent me an email at 4:15pm, I would not see it until 9am the next morning. It was the sort of job that took me away from my desk and the ability to check email easily so this agreement met with little resistance. It took a short time but, eventually, my coworkers learned that if it was something that required my immediate attention, the last thing they should do is send me an email. They called me on my mobile phone for urgent matters and questions instead and I, in turn, had less email to deal with and therefore could handle it in the allotted time frame.

While this may sound reasonable enough to do in a work environment, where one can address many people at once, in order for this to really work for everyone we communicate with is to have dozens of these little negotiations and agreements about how we handle all of our communications. Frankly, that is somewhat unreasonable. Must we help others with adjusting expectations on a near case by case basis? I mean, seriously, how does that scale?

Perhaps, instead, we should simply and collectively adjust our expectations of others. Perhaps we should all accept the responsibility that we are so easily and readily inclined to shirk upon others. And, maybe, just maybe, we should realize how valuable time itself is. How little of it we all have. Conversely, take the time to communicate to those important to you what they should reasonably expect. Maybe put it in your voicemail greeting or email signature. Replacing expectation and responsibility with compassion and understanding on all sides will reduce the stress of not knowing.

I don’t claim to have the answers to these questions. I simply have observations and the same struggles keeping up with the great expectations increasingly placed upon us all.

Part of my self defined job, as curator of Minimal Mac, is to monitor a wealth of information via RSS feeds in the hope of finding relevant content to post. My job often means that I am away from my feed reader (Google Reader in my case) for long enough that I return to hundreds and sometimes thousands of items waiting to be read. Obviously, there are only so many hours in a day and catching up would be impossible. That is why I have developed the following system to allow me to process everything I need to when this happens.

I have divided my feeds into the following folders:

• a-list – These are everything I consider a “must see”. This is also my shortest list of feeds. To make it to the list you have to have a long history of providing top value content. Not just occasionally, but with almost every post. Daring Fireball is here, Kottke is too. I look at everything that shows up in this list no matter the count. It’s worth it.

• b-list – These are feeds that deliver value but not near the regularity of the ones in the a-list. This is an especially good place for the true weblogs where interesting links with short commentary rule the day over long form posts, and not everything is a must read.

• friends – These are people I know personally and feel compelled to read them not only to keep up with their lives and what interests them but also so that when they bring up these things in conversation I have background (“Hey, did you see my post on…?”). That said, my friends also very often are first source for interesting content. I hang out with the right people I guess.

• other – These are everything that do not fit into the above. Things that are nice to know but not need to know and that I can easily ignore without missing anything. In general, if it is important, I know that someone in the above three lists will cover or link to it. This is also a place for the sites that generate the most posts (Gizmodo, Lifehacker, etc.). The noisier the feed the more likely it is to go here. This is, by far, my largest list of feeds and always contains the bulk of the items in any given day.

• probation – Pretty much everything new I add goes here first. Only after a couple of weeks, do I then decide where it belongs in the lists above or, more likely, delete it entirely. A blog has to earn it’s way out of here fairly quickly in order to be a keeper.

Now, how that works in practice is this. If I have a lot of feeds to go through, more than I have the time scan or read, I know I can read the a-list and friends and safely declare bankruptcy and “mark all as read” on the rest. I do this more often than not and have never regretted it.

This is a true story.

A couple of weeks ago I had just tucked myself into bed, had turned off the light, and was beginning to let my mind wander down the long path to sleep. The road to sleep for me is usually a long one. It is just about that time of the day that my manic brain starts to swirl with thoughts. It usually takes me at least a half hour after I close my eyes for my brain to shut down enough to actually turn off. Sometimes it takes much longer than this. What goes through it is usually thoughts of items to do the next day and new ideas which, if I have not captured them, I must get up and do so, thus starting the process again. It was in this swirl of commitments, responsibility and desire that the following two words came to me:

Minimal Mac

Now, I don’t know what most of you do when intriguing words and phrases pass in that fleeting space that lies between the ears. My first thought is always, “I wonder if that domain is available”. You would be surprised at the domain names I own because of this habit. I pick up domains like most people retrieve squandered heads-up pennies on the street and largely for the same reasons. So of course I had to get out of bed, wander over to my Macbook, and check to see if serendipity might allow me to own this one. As luck would have it, it was available. I registered it.

Of course, this was a big mistake. Why? Well, I just guaranteed that I would not get to sleep for several hours as my head swam with ideas of what I could possibly use such a thing for. I mean, my head was exploding with possibilities. Yet, in the midst of the chaos, one thing came floating by that made me pause. One memory that I have had bubble to the surface of my brain since I was a much younger man. One idea, that I recount in this post from my new project, quoted here in it’s entirety:

Many years ago, I saw a picture in a magazine. I can’t even remember which magazine but it was in a feature article about creative office setups. One of the examples was essentially a large square low table, probably a coffee table, with large floor cushion for seating and a single Powerbook on the desk and nothing else. That image burned a hole in my brain like no other for some reason. I remember it just as clear as if I was looking at it now. I think it was just the idea of being able to have something so simple as your “office” was inspiring to me. No chair, no desk in the traditional sense, no filling cabinets – just a laptop and a cushion and a surface. There was something so raw, simple, yet complete about it. I’ve been dreaming of achieving the same ever since.

It was really then that Minimal Mac was truly born and I was able to get some sleep for the night.

The next morning, after waking up, dealing with helping get Beatrix off to “charm school”, having coffee, etc. I continued to run through my head possibilities of what the site should really be. I knew the goal was to challenge myself, as much as my readers, to get to an equally ideal and complete state as that image in my head. But there is so much more about the back end stuff that needs to be decided before lauching a blog…

What blogging platform? Wordpress? MT? No, Tumblr. Tumblr is easy to post stuff to. OK, gotta find a theme. Has to be a minimalist one (obviously). Let’s look at whats out there. OK, hate that. Hate that too. Oh, this one is OK. Need to customize it a bit though. Hate that font size. How’s the CSS? Not to poorly formatted. I can figure this out. OK, let’s do this… Wait! I haven’t even thought of the content. What about the content? Screw the content for now. Let’s build this thing. OK, it’s built. Font size still not right globally but I’ll do that later. Need to think about content. Let’s see, I got all of these links and quotes and photos and links and stuff about minimalism and simplicity saved up in my Evernote. I can front load this thing with a bunch of stuff and just throw it out there. See how people respond.

… and here we are today. To say the response has been tremendous is an under statement. Without going into details on the numbers let’s suffice to say that it has far exceeded any other project I have ever launched and naturally my wildest dreams. The feedback I continue to receive, the submissions from my readers, the people emailing to let me know it has helped them come to terms with what is “enough” for them – humbling does not even touch it. Every time I think it has reached a new highlight I discover there is another just around the bend.

Not bad for an idea that was conceived and executed in 24 hours.