iDoneThis blog

One of our awesome users, Nate Graves, basically performed the web equivalent of taking the time to return some cash he found on the ground to whoever dropped it.

He landed on idonethistoday.com by mistake, realized it wasn’t registered, bought the domain name, and passed it onto us.

Here’s the email we got back in the beginning of this year:

So, today I got my daily reminder from you guys. I saw it pop up on my phone with the from address showing “IDoneThis Today.” Without really thinking I typed idonethistoday.com into my browser and off I went to…nothing. I realized and righted my mistake pretty quickly. But, later I checked the whois on idonethistoday.com and saw it wasn’t registered. It is now and is pointing to your site. I’ll be happy to hand it off to you if you’d like (free of charge of course). Just figured you might have some folks out there like me who wound up in the wrong part of town, and I didn’t want them to miss out on your great service.

By day, Nate is a product manager at Meetup.com and by not-day, he has a handful of other projects. One of those projects is Grammarize, which crowdsources copy-editing through a javascript widget, allowing people to correct mistakes on webpages inline and pushing those corrections to the website owner to accept.

With Meetup’s sense of community and a natural bent for crowdsourcing ideas, maybe it makes sense that Nate is such a good web Samaritan. Still, we were quite thankful for his gesture! We chatted briefly with Nate about his act of kindness and ideas for our shiny new domain name gift.

When many people would have input a web address to nowhere, shrugged, and carried on, what made you decide to actually act after landing on a dead end?

There have been times where I’ve registered a domain for a side project and hadn’t realized there was something I was overlooking that might have confused people, like whether it’s singular versus plural, or just how to spell it. There’ve been domain names that I’ve wanted that have been registered already and people are asking for just crazy amounts of money for not amazing domain names.

I thought if I were in this situation and there was a chance that I was losing some traffic because of a fairly simple thing, then I’d love to have that extra domain.

Have any ideas about how we could use idonethistoday.com?

It could be used for something like codeyear.com. Codeacademy launched it at the beginning of the year and said, if you’ve always wanted to learn how to code, here’s how you get started. Maybe idonethistoday could be something along those lines - a targeted landing page to get people to start using idonethis.

Great idea! And though we’re still sending out emails with the “from” field of IDoneThis today, how do you use the service?

I use it as a reminder to be working on something everyday, trying to push myself to be developing something. I started one also for Grammarize ‘cause there’s a friend of mine who lives in Oakland who’s been helping out. I can certainly watch his commits but rather than having to dig through messages or the actual code that he changed, it’s nice to have a summary. 

It’s great that it’s so simple and that it lends itself to so many different uses. I’ll be interested to see what you do in the future and how you build out the product so that it continues to be useful but has more to offer.

There you go. Nate Graves, good web Samaritan and awesome iDoneThis user. Do you have ideas on how to use idonethistoday.com? Show us in the comments!

Start off your week with some cans!

Get some productivity ideas from some famous artists, writers, and musicians. Our particular funny favorite, Henrik Ibsen. Nothing like those mortal enemies to get the motors running!

Source: Lapham’s Quarterly via TNW

“If you don’t give a damn about anything, no one will give a damn about you.” 

— Jessica Hagy offers great advice and brilliant illustrations over at Forbes on How to Be More Interesting (In 10 Simple Steps). Her points are also spot on for how to get awesome stuff done. Our other favorites? Embrace your inner weirdness and ignore the scolds!

Check out Hagy’s other relational doodles at This is Indexed. 

Just a reminder that happiness and health is just as important as working hard in getting more awesome stuff done! Happy Friday!

The key to success is not just focusing on what’s important but knowing what to ignore, to say “No” to. The decision to achieve something requires decisions not to achieve other things.

HBR’s Peter Bregman recommends looking at Focus and Ignore lists every morning to direct your day to success:

List 1: Your Focus List (the road ahead)

What are you trying to achieve? What makes you happy? What’s important to you? Design your time around those things. Because time is your one limited resource and no matter how hard you try you can’t work 25/8.

List 2: Your Ignore List (the distractions)

To succeed in using your time wisely, you have to ask the equally important but often avoided complementary questions: what are you willing not to achieve? What doesn’t make you happy? What’s not important to you? What gets in the way?

What makes your Ignore List?

This 1932 quote from FDR may be about the U.S., but it stands as pretty good personal advice too!

The country needs, and unless I mistake its temper, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

(Image from Note to Self)

Ever sage advice from the unflappable, stylish Tim Gunn. Garbage can be made into couture? Whatever you’re doing, you can make it work!