Paraphrasing Dave Snowden: a framework is a typology (a system of dividing things into types) that allows you to look at things from different perspectives and make distinctions between those things; the purpose is so that you can think and act in different ways based on those distinctions (hopefully successfully).
I’ll illustrate with a simple “discarding things” framework from Marie Kondo, the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up:
People have trouble discarding things that they could still use (functional value), that contain helpful information (informational value), and that have sentimental ties (emotional value). When these things are hard to obtain or replace (rarity), they become even harder to part with.
In practical terms, when you have problems discarding something, making a distinction between whether the cause is because of functional value, informational value, or emotional value (and considering rarity) will let you look at it differently and come up with an appropriate solution, for example:
- If a physical object has only emotional value, storing it as a digital photo may make it easier to discard
- If it is a box full of cables with functional value but with low rarity, looking at it from a logical cost of storage versus cost of re-buying may help you make your decision.
Originally posted on Linkedin