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The One Trend Actually Worth Your Attention This Quarter
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
The honest answer to "what's the one trend worth watching" isn't a specific
named trend — anything named today risks being stale by the time you read
it, given how fast this space moves. What's actually durable is the method
for figuring it out yourself, each quarter, rather than outsourcing the
judgement to whoever posted about it most recently.
The rule: the trend worth your attention is the one that changes what you
personally do, this quarter, not the one generating the most headlines —
use a filter to find it, don't just absorb whatever's loudest.
The mechanism
- Ask what would actually change your behaviour if it turned out to be
real, not just interesting. A development that's fascinating but
changes nothing about your actual work or decisions isn't the one worth
tracking closely, however much attention it's getting.
- Check whether it's reached your actual tools yet, or whether it's
still a research result or a demo. See "The Difference Between A Real
Capability And A Demo" — most trend-chasing anxiety is about things that
haven't reached practical use yet.
- Look for the quiet, unglamorous version of the same story. The
flashy version gets headlines; the practical version — a workflow
change, a pricing shift, a feature you'll actually use — is usually the
one that matters more to you personally and gets far less attention.
- Set a fixed check-in cadence (see "The Honest Case For A Quarterly
Tool Audit") rather than continuously monitoring — this filter works
better applied deliberately once a quarter than absorbed passively every
day.
What to skip
Skip trying to track everything as it happens — see "The Honest Case For
Boredom" for the fuller case against this. Skip assuming the trend with the
most posts about it is the one most relevant to your specific work; the two
are only loosely related.
Guardrails
- This method finds what's relevant to you, not what's objectively most
important industry-wide — both are legitimate things to want to know, but
they're different questions.
- Revisit the filter itself occasionally — what "would change your
behaviour" shifts as your own work and tools change.
- Being deliberately selective about what you track isn't the same as being
uninformed — it's choosing depth on what matters over shallow coverage of
everything.
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