Complexity of Simplicity

In the life cycle of innovation adoption, I have never been an Innovator. The displaced pieces of hardware strewn throughout the house and storage suggests I have experience as an unsuccessful Early Adopter. Contrary to my nature, I forced myself to wait until the second generation of iPads. I no longer immediately jump at any fanciful software that makes claims of organizing my life or making me smarter, faster, or more insightful. For more than a year I have been reading about the amazing, simple yet powerful capabilities of ifttt.com - IF This Then That. After yet again reading about it in another "best tools" article, I finally signed up. Now I have an account and have exactly no idea of how to make it do what it claims it so easily can do.

So far I have written multiple "recipes", all of which I have deleted, except for one. The single remaining "recipe" is to have my Blogger posts be saved on Evernote. It seems simple, but I had to watch multiple YouTube videos to try to figure it out. Each of the videos should have said there are young, technically savvy people in this world, and there is everyone else. I recognize I do not fit in the category of young anymore, but I hoped and considered myself technically savvy. Until now. What should be so hard about having e-mails from a given address be automatically sent to a folder in Evernote? I suspect for that group of people of whom I am not one, there is nothing hard about it. I will continue to plod along trying to simplify, even though it is incredibly complex for me and hopefully this post will show up in my Evernote account in the right folder.

Carry-on v. Checked Luggage and Incentives

Velocity is the key to making money for the airlines. An airplane on the ground does not make money. Turn the airplane around as quickly as possible to make the most amount of money. Yet, by charging for checked bags, airlines have taken away the incentive for checking bags. Thus, many travelers use a carry-on bag, slowing boarding, slowing velocity.

Spirit Airlines now charges for carry-on bags. The charge though, is less than for a checked bag. Passengers on Spirit, then, still do not have an incentive to put up with the inconvenience of checking their bags, walking to baggage claim, waiting, and hoping their bag is not lost.

American Airlines is experimenting with letting passengers without carry-on luggage to board the airplane before those who do. Not having to stand in the aisle as people in front of you try to put their carry-ons in the overhead bins is not much of a benefit, but it is a start.

Reference

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2013/04/american-airlines