an ode to receipts
i love a receipt. no, not the receipts that you get after you buy something or finish dining at a restaurant. i'm talking about the receipts that are hiding in your screenshots folder or notes app. receipts are little pieces of evidence 🕵🏻♀️.
unlike my other interests, my love for receipts didn't start at a young age. instead, it started when i was fresh out of college working my first full-time product designer job.
back then, i was so excited to be a designer. i had so many ideas! i was on a team with two other designers that were both way more experienced than me. during the project, one of my design ideas kept getting approved and was nearing the finish line. to my surprise, near the end of the project, one of the designers on my team pushed heavily for a different direction and all my designs basically went into the trash 🗑️.
it happened so fast i didn't even know what happened. i was like... wait a second? i thought we liked what i was working on.
(i promise you this will tie back to receipts soon.)
after this moment, i realized how naive i was. in order for my work to be taken seriously, i had to advocate for myself and my ideas. i shifted to a constant state of feeling the need to "prove myself" at work. (this is probably some form of imposter syndrome, but we won't be talking about it today~)
i felt the need to bolster all my statements and arguments with evidence1. what better way to prove yourself than generate a bunch of receipts? what does receipt-collection look like at work?
- posting excessively in slack to claim ownership over all the work i'm doing! any public-ish written form is a receipt because it can be searched through later.
- taking screenshots of all the slack messages whether it be negative or positive.
- documenting feedback and information i receive, so i can reference it back to someone later. often leads to a moment that's like: "we didn't discuss this on thursday because it's not in the notes (:" i know it's annoying behavior hahaha.
anyway, i was thinking about receipts today because i found a collection of receipts i have called "light rejections from job interviews." it's a collection of "we loved you but" rejections i've gotten from companies. i will not be going deeper into this collection today, but you might hear from me in a future blog post.2
you might be thinking, this doesn't sound very healthy. it's definitely not if you take it to the extreme, but it has helped me communicate with people who approach the world differently than me. as a myers-briggs N, i tend to approach the world from a higher-level vibe based view. we don't need evidence to prove stuff, you can just tell that it should work! as a myers-briggs F, stuff just feels right some times. we don't need to logic our way out of everything (:↩
i might edit this post in the future when i'm in a less salty mood 😊.↩