Keeping the Door Open Isn’t That Hard
This is not difficult. It feels difficult! When you walk through a door right in front of someone else, you need to keep that door open for them, otherwise you are rude. But if they’re a little behind you, they need to hurry up to catch up, and then (as Redditty editor Voldetitti recently pointed out) you’re really annoying. At some hazy distance, there is a phase transition from “don’t keep the door open” to “keep the door open,” and a wrong judgment will ruin your life for a full five seconds.
Initially, we were going to calculate this distance. But, of course, it definitely doesn’t exist. Even if that were the case, you would not be able to judge it every time by performing mathematical calculations. Instead, you need to plan ahead. Just a few seconds ahead.
When you are in the moment, you may feel the door delay coming too long. The next time this happens and you start to panic, you will remember this blog post and do the following:
- Slow down with one touch. Not too much or they will catch up. Trust your body.
- Turn around – carefully – and smile at the person behind you. Don’t be weird, just give them a little more attention than usual. You buy them one or two more seconds to catch up.
- Make the crucial decision: will you walk through the door first or keep it open? Be guided by your intuition. It usually comes down to which way the door opens.
- Ready. It really isn’t that difficult.
Train with a friend! Obviously you won’t because it’s funny , but it’s nice to think that someone, somewhere, will spend a few minutes opening doors with a partner because they are likely to really get better. Just train in your mind. Good enough.
This is the big thing in the Lifehacker office, where the main entrance involves opening two doors, climbing stairs, and sometimes opening a third door. Keychains are also involved in this process. Once you keep the first door open for someone, whole adventures await you together. This forces more conscientious workers to tread our stairs and come up with light conversational gambits that can be easily interrupted at the end of a three-door tango.
For a deeper understanding of the door problem, here’s a sketch from a British comedy posted by redditor l_l -l-l_l . It’s surprisingly practical!