What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from The Design of Everyday Things
Coach Reyes designed a new practice-drill rotation for his youth swim team, printed on a laminated board by the pool with numbered lanes matching numbered drills. He'd built the numbering himself and understood it instantly, so he assumed a glance at the board would make it equally clear to everyone else. During the first session, several younger swimmers stood at the wrong lane, unsure whether the number meant drill order or lane assignment, and one swimmer, Mia, quietly swam the wrong drill for twenty minutes rather than interrupt practice. Reviewing her lap times afterward, Coach Reyes assumed she'd struggled with the drill and mentioned it as an area to work on. Mia went home believing she'd fallen behind, when the board had simply never said what its own numbers meant.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Making a drill or plan visible at a glance
A practice board, training plan, or session structure should show people exactly what to do through its layout, not depend on an explanation given once at the start that some will miss or forget. If someone has to interrupt the session to ask what a symbol or number means, the plan hasn't finished communicating itself.
A training plan uses shorthand abbreviations for exercises that only the coach who wrote them actually understands.
Show your next session plan to someone unfamiliar with it and ask them to describe what happens first, second, and third, using only what's on the page.
Giving feedback the moment someone attempts something
When someone you're coaching tries a new technique, drill, or approach, they need a clear and immediate signal about whether they're doing it correctly, before the wrong version becomes a habit. Waiting too long to respond lets an error repeat itself long enough to feel normal.
A coach saves all technique corrections for a single end-of-practice debrief, so an athlete repeats the same flawed form dozens of times before hearing about it.
For one session, give feedback within the first three attempts of any new drill, rather than waiting until the session wraps up.
Matching your methods to what people already understand
New drills and frameworks land faster when they build on structures a mentee already recognizes, rather than requiring them to learn an entirely unfamiliar system on top of a new skill. Borrowing a familiar counting pattern, hand signal, or sequence reduces how much a person has to learn before they can even begin practicing the actual skill.
A coach introduces a unique hand-signal system for pacing that resembles no signal the athletes have used before, and most swimmers miss it entirely mid-lap.
Before introducing a new coaching convention, check whether the group already has a working signal or structure for the same purpose, and build on it instead.
Treating a mentee's confusion as an instruction gap, not a talent gap
When someone you're coaching keeps missing the same step, the fair conclusion is rarely that they lack the talent or focus for it; it is that your instructions never clearly showed what to do in a way that landed. Coaches who redesign the instruction after this kind of repeated miss help a mentee improve quickly, while those who read it as a personal limitation risk discouraging someone who was only ever missing a clearer signal.
Clarity and challenge can pull against each other in coaching: over-explaining every detail can rob a mentee of the productive struggle that builds real skill, while under-explaining leaves them guessing at things that have nothing to do with the skill itself. The balance is to make the logistics of a drill fully clear, and reserve genuine struggle for the skill being taught.
Name one thing, honestly
Which drill or instruction have you been correcting as a performance issue that might actually be an unclear signal?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Before introducing a new coaching convention, check whether the group already has a working signal or structure for the same purpose, and build on it instead.