Thinking long term is one of the thing that makes you take decisions that don’t suck for society and the world in general. But it’s kind of hard to remember to do it.

For that, Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and one of the creators of Wordpress (1) has a tip: add decades in your dashboards and performance tools.

For example in one of the dashboards that the company uses, it shows what’s happening within the company in the last 24 hours, the last year and… the last decade!

As Matt said it “every time someone [looks] at one of these stats pages (…) they [are] reminded that we’re building for the long term”.

Action question

Where in your tools and HR processes could you add a long term view as a way to measure the impact and work done? What time-frame would be relevant for you: a decade, more?

Footnote

(1) You know, the tool that runs most of the websites on the internet.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.