iDoneThis blog
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2012-05-25
Source: come-feed-the-rain
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2012-05-24
Photo: Katie Weilbacher
Over at The 99%, Tony Schwartz offers some excellent advice on how to accomplish more by doing less.
It’s not just the number of hours we sit at a desk that determines the value we generate. It’s the energy we bring to the hours we work … . Maintaining a steady reservoir of energy – physically, mentally, emotionally and even spiritually – requires refueling it intermittently.
Schwartz’s insistence that real productivity requires real rest, recharge, and renewal is in tune with Ken Robinson’s focus on energy. Robinson suggests that having passion for your work is a built-in energy renewal system. Schwartz’s point on sustaining personal energy levels is even more basic, whatever your passion (or lack of passion) is for your work — simply take more meaningful breaks.
Get outside, move around more, and please, stop eating lunch at your desk.
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2012-05-23
The Minor Miracle of Third-Party App Development Without a Real API
I’ve never had a kid, but I imagine that it can’t be too different from giving birth to a web app. It’s amazing that the thing exists at all, much less that it walks and talks, and it’s a minor miracle when it thinks on its own and creates something new of its own volition.
A few weeks ago, I received a bunch of errors in my inbox, and a week after that, a Dutch company named Springest wrote a blog post, Alfred App + iDoneThis for logging your todo’s, GTD style.
The Springest guys were the ones who had been spamming my inbox with errors! They had been testing their iDoneThis extension to Alfred (an awesome Mac app launcher).
It was super simple, it worked, and ok, I thought it was incredible. Wouter at Springest, a company halfway around the world that I’d never talked to, without asking for permission or needing to ask for permission, lacking a real API, used our email interface to connect Alfred to iDoneThis.
Just punch your done into Alfred, and it will shoot out an email to us and in it goes into your done list. Not only did the extension rule, it also became the main way that I entered my dones!
A week later, more errors hit my inbox and I noticed what seemed to be an error with the Alfred extension. ”Uh oh,” I thought. Either we’ll have to support the extension or we’ll be left with buggy software built by a third-party that diminishes the user experience.
I reached out to the user to see what was up and if there was anything I could do to help. It turned out that Rudy was attempting to use the Alfred extension for his personal iDoneThis, whereas the Wouter built the extension only for teams because that’s how they use it at Springest.
I didn’t feel comfortable with reaching out to Wouter to request a fix, and I wasn’t sure that we had the bandwidth to basically begin the process of supporting a third-party extension. I sent the kind of useless placating email that I hate sending.
Oh, I think I realize the problem.
The Alfred integration was created by Springest, and they use iDoneThis in a team only, but you’re trying to use iDoneThis for personal use.
So by default, the email address that the email gets sent to is <team name>@team.idonethis.com, which for you, is personal@team.idonethis.com. But the email address for personal emails isn’t the same scheme — it’s today@idonethis.com.
So basically, the Alfred integration won’t work for personal users right now.
I’m cc’ing my co-founder Rodrigo on this email and I’ll make a ticket for this. We’ve wanted to add personal@team.idonethis.com as the primary address we send and receive from for personal emails.
Rudy’s response was short and simple but it made me stop and marvel at the world we live in. ”I’ll fork the extension and submit a pull request.”
A few days later, Dennis, Wouter’s pal at Springest, merged the pull request and we had an Alfred extension to iDoneThis that supported personal and team users made by people who just get stuff done, for people who get stuff done.
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2012-05-22
I’ve learned that if I’m thinking about my productivity tools, I don’t have enough enthusiasm for my projects.
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— C.J. Chilvers, Rethinking Productivity for Creatives.Fabian Kruse writes about “the loop“ inherent to getting anything done, and the idea that periods of procrastination, having doubts, and losing momentum are just part of that natural productivity cycle. So, while productivity systems and techniques are valuable, they don’t necessarily prevent the slower parts of “the loop” from happening again. In fact, they become a part of the loop.
The reason why I hate productivity systems is because they easily become a dominant part of “the loop”. And once they become a dominant part of the loop, they become a problem. A problem that keeps creatives from focusing on what matters – and from doing what they want to do because their muse is calling.
While Kruse focuses on the lives of “creative” people, his post applies to pretty much everyone as a reminder that productivity systems are tools and managers, not creations. At the end of the day, there’s no point in having “make a to-do list” on your to-do list.
C.J. Chilvers also writes about the paradox of productivity apps and the struggle that remains in getting important things done. The solution, for him, has been that “the easier a system is, the more will get done.”
We hope iDoneThis is a super-easy system, helping you record more daily dones that matter!
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2012-05-21
Picasso’s take on that easily forgotten motto that genius is 99% perspiration!
Source: notetoself.typepad.com
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2012-05-18
How Agiliq Creates Bespoke Webapps by Focusing Within
Agiliq is a 12-person web design and development studio based in Hyderabad, India that builds web applications which provide that “just-right” fit for its clients. The key to crafting bespoke webapps relies not only on the ingredients of technology and design but on understanding your client and your client’s issues.
But in order to do that, it’s important to understand the inner workings of your own team members and their work. Agiliq director and developer Shabda Raaj finds that using iDoneThis is integral to getting to the nuts and bolts of Agiliq’s operations. The results: a greatly streamlined workflow and improved capacity to focus on what matters, solving clients’ issues and getting more app-making done.
Before implementing iDoneThis, Shabda’s team members used to send him a daily report. At the same time, he did not send anything out to his team members, since he wasn’t obligated to report “down” to anyone and felt that doing so would be too much like spam. Using iDoneThis was a neat workflow solution, a non-spammy way for team members, including Shabda, to send and receive daily reports, providing better transparency within the organization and better plan-making.
Improving workflow regarding daily reports is one thing, but Shabda and the Agiliq team appreciate iDoneThis’s ability to work in concert with other project management tools such as Assembla. Since Agiliq is a heavy user of Assembla for tasks such as source control and ticketing, they set up a script that emails Raaj a summary of commits that he edits and sends on to iDoneThis. “It allows us to summarize the progress without a lot of duplication.”
While Shabda may have expected the productivity benefits of time-saving and progress-tracking, he has been surprised to find that the quality of team members’ daily reports have markedly improved. “People obviously care about what the team is reading about them.”
We’re happy that iDoneThis is a just-right fit for Agiliq, and we’re excited to see their improved inner workings translate into some awesome new webapps. -
2012-05-17
Ken Robinson’s School of Life talk teaches us to think about our lives in terms of energy and passions. So often, productivity in work and personal corners is tied to the concept of time and efficiency, which is a rather narrow view of the world.
“If you’re in your element doing whatever it is that you love to do, then at the end of the day or the end of the week, you can be physically exhausted by it but spiritually uplifted. But if you’re doing things you don’t care for, at the end of the day, you can feel physically fine but down and needing to lift yourself up again. And in the end, it’s about energy, that’s all life is, isn’t it? It’s about energy, it’s what stirs your energy, what encourages it, what fuels it, and what takes it from you. And I find, that if you’re doing things that you love to do, if you’re in your element, if you’re following a passion of some sort, that you get energy from it. Some activities take it from you.”
Click here for the full 50 minute talk, where Robinson talks about charting our own course and the indirect ways that we can grow into our element. -
2012-05-16
A perfectly sensible lifelong routine for starting your Wednesdays out right!Source: foundmagazine.com
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2012-05-15
Productivity is not about how efficient you are at work. Instead, your productivity is really about how well you are able to make an impact in what matters most to you.
— Scott Belsky, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, talking about creative productivity.
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2012-05-14
Here’s a quick rundown of these tips to beat a case of the Mondays:
- Studies say happiness is contagious. Go catch some happy from cheerful, morning people.
- Or if you’re the “Hell is other people at breakfast” type, go catch some happy from some of your favorite music uppers or Hulu/Youtube vids.
- Exercise! Have sexy time! Unleash the endorphins!
- Treat yo self: have a fancy coffee drink or your favorite comfort breakfast foods. Make this your once a week treat!
