Do you question yourself?

The easiest thing in the world to be is a critic. Being a good critic? Now that’s hard.

As the Web has shown, especially blogs, most of us are critics. We’ve got a lot of beefs and the Web allows us to air them, though not always to a huge audience. (It is potentially huge – in reality, not so much, though some do have big audiences.)

I was thinking about our need to critique when I saw a reference to business rules of thumb. I’ve come up with a number of my own over the years. Rules of thumb are kind of like templates. They act as a kind of shorthand … No, I take that back. Not a shorthand, bit a shortcut. They allow us to do things quickly without really having to waste time actually thinking.

Seriously, thinking can eat up time and every so often a shortcut really does help in getting something done quickly. But it’s a dangerous thing. Efficiency is nice but when the processes that make us efficient impedes effectiveness, trouble is soon to follow. And while efficiency is often one of the key elements of effectiveness, it is not the same thing. The words are not synonyms.

(Example: You may have the most efficient approach to making hot dogs. However, if your market has changed and everyone wants hamburgers, no matter how efficient you are at making hot dogs you’re not going to run an effective business. You’re customers are going to go across the street to the guy who is making hamburgers, even if he does it inefficiently.)

And this brings me to my point: do you question yourself? While we often critique others, questioning what they do, how often do we reassess ourselves?

It’s definitely not a practical thing to do if you do it too often. But I like to question my approach, methods, thinking and so on every now and again. It’s not unusual to find I’ve been doing something that was effective a year or so ago, for very good reasons, but is no longer the best way to go.

Over the years, loads of rules of thumb have evolved about the Internet and Web sites and user behavior and on and on. Do they still hold true? (“People don’t read – they scan text online. Write accordingly.”)

Most of them probably do hold true but you can’t really be sure if you don’t question and reassess and … well, think about it. Take that bracketed one above about scanning versus reading.

Online, people don’t read – they scan. This is still true. Sort of. Sometimes. A lot depends on what the content is and who the user is. That rule, I believe, comes out of a business context, one characterized by a male mindset. So the problem with the “people don’t read” rule is that it really means men don’t read marketing material online – they scan. Women are more inclined to read, as opposed to scan. And everyone is more inclined to read if it’s something they are really interested in, if it is well written, if it is complemented by good layout and … well, it goes on.

The point here is not whether the “scan vs read” rule is valid or not. The point is that if you don’t think, if you don’t question, you may be following methods or set thinking that simply is not true, or only true in certain contexts.

I believe in questioning everything. I don’t, however, think it should be done every day, all day long. Sometimes you just have to switch to autopilot in order to get work done.

But be careful. Fly on auto too often and you may find yourself crash landing.