The World’s Most Satisfying Checkbox is a checkbox you’ve just checked off

For all that I'm not particularly excited by the story of The World's Most Satisfying Checkbox,1 I'm glad that stories are being written illustrating the latest swing of the pendulum away from the trend for flat design.2

I'm making a note of this here on my decidedly old school tech blog. We have so much to learn from their brave and daring experiment.


  1. For the last few months I've found myself tracking as much of my daily grind as possible via simple, portable Markdown files, including using task list items I can check off as I go. I no longer feel the need to have all my daily tasks try to grab my attention via notifications and alarms, which is a huge win. The sensory overload if I ever install a plugin that retrofits Obsidian or Drafts with a variant of what the Not Boring team are doing to checkboxes might just finish me (or at least my iPad Mini) off. 

  2. At work, where we have to use severely locked-down Windows 10 machines it's very different. I can type all the Markdown text I like, but I can't access a half-decent Markdown editor without breaking all our rules about not storing work content on an unapproved cloud service so as I very much do not want to mix work and my private computing I am OK with that. There's an increasing focus on a) stamping out stuff created by teams using tool we had access to like, well, Microsoft Access, and b) shoehorning as much as possible of what we do into one corner or another of Microsoft Teams, even when it's duplicating stuff we already do via email and the intranet anyway. I commented to a colleague yesterday that it's reminiscent of a few years ago when we went through a period of Trello being the new hotness. That phase faded after the managers who had been Trello enthusiasts moved on and the focus shifted to tools that our organisation was officially signed up for (and which, to be fair, were hooked into our existing systems in a way that free-accounts-only Trello users could not be) but I don't think we'll be escaping the grip of Microsoft Teams (which is to say, Microsoft Teams-plus-whatever-other-functionality-can-shoehorn-in-so-procurement-checklists-can-be-satisfied) quite so easily.