Time flies when you get older... but that's only because lives become less novel. And you control that.

As people get older, "they just have this sense, this feeling that time is going faster than they are," says Warren Meck, a psychology professor at Duke University.

This seems to be true across cultures, across time, all over the world.

No one is sure where this feeling comes from.

Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory. Think about your first kiss.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine says that since the touch of the lips, the excitement, the taste, the smell — everything about this moment is novel — you aren't embroidering a bank of previous experiences, you are starting fresh.

Have you noticed, he says, that when you recall your first kisses, early birthdays, your earliest summer vacations, they seem to be in slow motion? "I know when I look back on a childhood summer, it seems to have lasted forever," he says.

That's because when it's the "first", there are so many things to remember. The list of encoded memories is so dense, reading them back gives you a feeling that they must have taken forever. But that's an illusion. "It's a construction of the brain," says Eagleman. "The more memory you have of something, you think, 'Wow, that really took a long time!'

"Of course, you can see this in everyday life," says Eagleman, "when you drive to your new workplace for the first time and it seems to take a really long time to get there. But when you drive back and forth to your work every day after that, it takes no time at all, because you're not really writing it down anymore. There's nothing novel about it."

via wbur.org

We don't remember things that happen as a routine. If you're not remembering it, is it worth experiencing? And if that's true... then aren't routines actually sapping our lives away?

Maybe rather than take that normal drive home, drive a different way back every day for a week. Walk to work on a new route. Hell, work earlier or later or in a different order than usual.

Because life is precious and novelty makes it so, in large and small amounts.

Quick design feedback for @feedly: A beautiful way to scan feeds.

Feedly is a thing of beauty. Really, it's great. Here's what it looks like. I'm impressed that it syncs with Google Reader out of the box. The install process is a snap.

Visually it is beautiful. Here's the thing I really want it to do though: I want it to let me see lots and lots of content very fast. Google Reader does a decent job of this already with the inline post views. Just press space and keep scanning -- hundreds of post consumed in minutes. Its not pretty but it does the job.

Feedly reminds me of going to a bookstore and poking around. Everything is pretty, shiny, and new. I really appreciate the attention to information design. But on the interaction side, I don't want to give up the ability to scan fast, ideally using minimal mouse interaction. The inline modals don't feel quite natural, and for an uninitiated user can be unexpected.

EDIT: Super awesome commenter below mentions that pressing ? gives you keyboard shortcuts. This is pretty epic and satisfies my need for fast keyboard navigation. Just press j and it'll inline the next story immediately. Man, that's nice. 

The other thing I would love is more media-specific views of things. Of course, thats not the easiest thing in the world, but could certainly be powerful.  I didn't play with this enough when I first wrote this. I love the media-specific views for video, photos, etc. I find it weird that they are buried in the middle of the homepage. While I like pages that show me lots of cool stuff, I somehow expect these views to be top-level navigable, not interspersed without context.  

Been thinking a lot about how to consume feeds -- The My Subscriptions view on Posterous could use some love and I think there is a lot of amazing stuff that we can't wait to build. I can't tell you how lucky we feel to wake up in the morning and know that we can build new cool stuff that both we and our users will use.

It's very hard to design something that works incredibly well and is beautiful at once. But when you do, there can be nothing like it. Feedly, you are so beautiful, and with a little bit of tweaking, I think you can be the beautiful unique snowflake that you deserve to be. Thanks for the inspiration, too.

The myth of the overnight success: An egg doesn't magically become a chicken

Picture an egg. Day after day, it sits there. No one pays attention to it. No one notices it. Certainly no one takes a picture of it or puts it on the cover of a celebrity-focused business magazine. Then one day, the shell cracks and out jumps a chicken.

All of a sudden, the major magazines and newspapers jump on the story: “Stunning Turnaround at Egg!” and “The Chick Who Led the Breakthrough at Egg!” From the outside, the story always reads like an overnight sensation—as if the egg had suddenly and radically altered itself into a chicken.

Now picture the egg from the chicken's point of view.

While the outside world was ignoring this seemingly dormant egg, the chicken within was evolving, growing, developing—changing. From the chicken’s point of view, the moment of breakthrough, of cracking the egg, was simply one more step in a long chain of steps that had led to that moment. Granted, it was a big step—but it was hardly the radical transformation that it looked like from the outside.

via jimcollins.com