Verstreuen [ver-ˈstrɔɪ̯-ən]

verb (German)

1. to scatter; to spread widely.

2. (versehentlich) to spill, often by accident.

Verstreuen is my weekly ritual of revisiting notes to find the ideas worth carrying into the next week.

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🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 37 new additions to the Zettelkasten - here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 The information you ignore might be the most valuable signal you have.

🟦 You’re probably getting faster at things that don’t actually matter.

🟥 Why good design isn’t created. It’s revealed through context.

I grew up being told gossip was rude. A distraction. The kind of thing serious people filter out.

But after watching a youtube video on markets I now see the true role gossip plays in society.

Markets don’t run on clean, official information. They run on flow - messy, uneven, constantly updating not always based on reality.

Prices emerge from fragments of information: what people notice, suspect, overhear, and act on before it’s confirmed.

Information moves through proximity. In the time before the internet and centralized exchanges traders gathered in coffee houses not just to transact, but to listen.

Who seemed worried.
Which ships were late.
What deals were rumored.

None of it was complete or fully reliable. It didn’t need to be.

As those fragments spread, and people acted, prices adjusted.
Behavior became the signal.

In most organizations, the “official” conversation is polished and structured yet incomplete in side conversations, someone always shares a piece of context they wouldn’t say to the group.

And suddenly, things make more sense.

Not because gossip is more accurate, but because it carries what formal channels filter out: Hesitation, Incentives, Social risk, The early sense that something is off.

Ignore or avoid the gossip layer and you miss how information actually moves.

📎 Takeaway:
Don’t treat informal signals as noise. Treat them as early data - imperfect, biased, but often closer to what’s really happening.

—🗃️—

Lately, I’ve felt burnt out at work - busy and productive, but not entirely sure why.

My inbox is clear. My calendar is full. My task list is checked off.
Everything is moving. Its just that not much is changing.

We’re making progress, but it’s not meaningful work. And speed has a way of hiding that. When you’re constantly in motion, you stop questioning direction - you just move faster.

I caught myself doing this recently. I’ve been designing a few apps, but instead of taking time to think through the problem each app is trying to solve, I’ve been rushed to put something, anything, on the page.

not being able to connect to the larger problem has left these apps feeling disconnected from their purpose, which actually matters.

The solution isn’t better app features. It’s deciding what actually matters before the design begins.

That’s why I built DoneOS. At work, I don’t have this structure - and I feel the difference. But in my personal projects, I do: built-in weekly, monthly, and quarterly reflection cycles that force one simple question:

Is what I’m doing actually moving things forward?

The system that supports everything else.
Get DoneOS →
one-time purchase - no subscription.

📎 Takeaway: If you don't choose what matters first, your time defaults to whatever's easiest to finish.

—🗃️—

I’ve always thought of design from a more industrial designer perspective thinking about the product itself divorced from its surrounding context

but reading thoughts from Christopher Alexander on what the definition of design is its expanded the solution space for design for me.

Instead of designing just the object, designing the space around it can be just as, if not more important.

most of the time, the problem isn’t the thing - it’s the fit.

A workflow that doesn’t match how people actually work.
A design that ignores its constraints.
A solution aimed at the wrong need.

When you only focus on the output, you end up over-optimizing something that was misaligned to begin with.

But when you understand the context, the work changes.

You’re no longer asking “How do I improve this?”
You’re asking “What does this need to fit into?”

And once that’s clear, the answer tends to collapse into something obvious.

Not because it’s simple - but because it’s aligned.

📎 Takeaway:
Good design isn’t about perfecting the thing. It’s about shaping the context so the right version becomes obvious.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

I think we over-index on efficiency.

I’ve done it myself - trying to move faster, streamline everything, cut out anything that looks like noise.

But a lot of that “noise” is actually where the useful information lives.

The informal stuff. The things people don’t say directly. The context around the problem.

So lately, I’ve been trying to pay more attention before I try to improve anything.

Because once I really understand what’s going on,
the answer usually becomes pretty obvious.

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Until next week
-GH

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋