Don't compare your back-of-house with others' front-of-house.

Usually, we only see others' front-of-house, and because we know all about our own house it's easy to find ourselves comparing how we're doing in the back with how others are doing in the front. Often a recipe for unhappiness.

I remember wondering how a friend was so calm before their first child. They said, "I'm like a duck, calm on the surface, but underneath my legs are kicking like crazy."

The truth is we don't know how others are doing so best not be comparing at all.

This idea is inspired by an exercise about the hidden parts of parenting from The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Philippa Perry, though I'm pretty sure as a metaphor it can be quite widely applied.

Front of house, back of house

Phubbing: snubbing people for your phone.

We've probably all experienced it — heck, we've probably all done it at one point or another — or at least it's likely to be familiar. Someone in a restaurant waiting for their friends to put their phones down. A family gathering where people are no longer talking to each other. A teacher without the attention of their students. A child failing to get the attention of an adult who's trying to process some messages on their phone.

Research on phubbing, mostly since the word was coined, says it largely has the effects you'd think it would. The effects vary with who's being phubbed and who's doing the phubbing: bosses and employees, family members, parents and kids, or partners. Whoever's phubbing who, snubbing is a suitable root word for it — it's not so nice to feel snubbed.

I learned about phubbing from the Mind over Tech community — they also have a newsletter on forming better digital habits.

The word phubbing has the unusual distinction of being created for an advertising campaign to sell a dictionary.

Phubbing, you may have spotted, is a portemanteau. For more phone annoyance see halfalogue.

See, for example, Knausenberger, J. et al. (2022). Feeling Ostracized by Others’ Smartphone Use: The Effect of Phubbing on Fundamental Needs, Mood, and Trust. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.883901

Phubbing

'Plan ahead' is also a nice example of a pleonasm.

And I've lost count of how many times I've found this technique useful to draw a bike.

This idea was shared with me from this Instagram account.