iDoneThis blog

Any.DO is an elegant task management application available for Android, iPhone, and the Chrome browser. While the app has received praise for its simplicity and ability to sync across platforms, the Tel Aviv-based startup found that it needed some management tools to synchronize itself, with one of its founders, Omer Perchik, relocating to San Francisco. Plus, the company, which started in 2010, saw its team nearly double to twelve people. 

Any.DO turned to iDoneThis to sync its team, and as co-founder Yoni Lindenfeld explains, to solve one of the challenges of fast growth — how to get all the newbies up to speed. “It’s a good tool to get new people coming on board to understand what other people are doing and to show other people what they’re doing.”

Communication and coordination are priorities for Any.DO, achieved through transparency regarding the inner workings of the company. “It’s really important for us for everyone to be involved and aware,” declares Yoni, as part of Any.DO’s tight-knit “family-style environment” work culture. These objectives led the Any.DO team to implement iDoneThis with a plan to be more specific in their daily entries. Yoni elaborates, “Before we started using it, we talked to everyone about how we would profit most from using it. It’s going great because people are writing more details about what they’re doing and other people,” —including new hires — “know more details. It’s a great tool.”

Everyone at Any.DO uses their own creation to manage personal and work-related tasks, but according to Yoni, iDoneThis plays a different role. “When you put a task in your to-do list, it’s more of a personal thing. Actually that’s something we’ve learned from researching a lot about how users manage their tasks. Tasks are usually much more personal and you don’t elaborate a lot because it’s just something that will remind you about what you want to do.” Meanwhile, a tool like iDoneThis functions more broadly and publicly. Members find value both in personally focusing on accomplishments and in sharing that attention with others.

We’re delighted that a company that made a task management app uses iDoneThis to help get them from to-do task to Done!

The availability of seed-stage funding today means that there are a ton of first-time entrepreneurs out there assembling teams and building companies without any experience running a team or managing people.  Building a team in this environment is especially difficult because funded companies typically grow teams prior to sustainability or product-market fit. It’s hard to steer the team in the right direction when you yourself don’t quite know what to build.

Naval Ravikant at AngelList has blogged about “Building a team that ships”, describing his assembled team as “self-managing people who ship code.” Naval calls this peer management: one person per project (with help from others as needed), no middle managers, and individual choice on what to work on using accountability is the rudder. In his words: “Promise what you’ll do in the coming week on internal Yammer. Deliver – or publicly break your promise – next week.”

At iDoneThis, we’ve seen peer management as an effective approach to take for the young startup CEO.  We’ve worked closely with many first­-time entrepreneurs like Danny Wen at Harvest and Tobi Lutke at Shopify who have succeeded in building unique, quirky, and profitable companies by empowering individuals at their companies to manage themselves and each other to build out great products exceeding a high standard of excellence. Here are some keys to effective peer management that we’re seeing.

Systemized Accountability

Skillshare uses a system called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to systemize accountability. Every individual is responsible for company objectives, which are broken into measurable bites in the form of key results, resulting in alignment within and accountability throughout the team. At the end of every week, month, and quarter, individuals measure themselves against their OKRs to evaluate performance.

OKRs have a rich history in building great tech companies, going back to Andy Grove at Intel in the 1980s and what he called “Management by Objective.” Drawing a fundamental distinction between output and activity, Grove’s use of the word “objective” involves dual meanings.  Output is both the objective and something that’s objectively measurable, while activity is a black box. An engineer at heart, management by objective was Grove’s way of bringing scientific and engineering principles to management.

OKRs have since been embraced by tech giants like Google and Zynga and spread throughout the Valley and to the broader tech world. At Salesforce, they do V2MOMs (vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measurement); at Yammer, they do MORPHs (mission, objectives, results, people, and how did you do); others use KPIs (key performance indicators). While the acronyms may vary, the general principles hold true.

To Mark Pincus, OKRs are the solution to the basic problem that’s at the heart of many a founder’s anxious and sleepless night: how “to keep everybody going in productive directions when you’re not in the room.” Every individual has one objective, and they are the CEO of that objective, entrusted with authority and accountability for their objective and the key results necessary to get there.

Individual Data Tracking

“Do things, tell people.  These are the only things you need to do to be successful.”  When individuals are CEOs of objectives, goals, and projects, they need a way of measuring the intermediate progress and activity of themselves and their peers. As with the quantified self movement, tracking progress — writing it down — leads to reflection, knowledge, and betterment.

In old school, hierarchical companies, information that passed down to employees or up to executives had to travel through middle managers and that created a single-point of failure anti-pattern.  You had to rely on your manager to get information and also to market your accomplishments upward to upper management and the executive team.  

Where individuals manage themselves and each other, it’s vitally important that everyone gets the requisite information flow they need to do their jobs and that they have channels to market their own accomplishments and results.  

The system of snippets adopted at Google is an example not of big brother monitoring, but of empowering individuals to see everything that’s happening in the company so that they can find their niche in the company and contribute.  You get a weekly email that asks what they did last week and what they plan to do in the upcoming week.  Replies get compiled in a public space and distributed automatically the following day by email.

The power of snippets is in gathering data to demystify the black box of the notoriously fuzzy production process — in which raw material turns into output with the application of labor — and makes progress possible to measure, analyze, and recognize. It makes sense then that peer management environments tend towards transparency, meritocracy, and individual professional fulfillment. Companies on the rise like Shopify and Harvest track and celebrate their daily accomplishments with a daily email from us here at iDoneThis.  

Fit as a Deal Breaker

In company cultures of extremely high personal autonomy, fit is paramount because it reduces friction in every interaction. Companies like Valve and Github tout boss­less cultures.  Stripe is building a world-­class team and every employee can veto a potential hire.

While fit can be tested by hiring a candidate first as a contractor, fit often amounts to guesswork based on intuition and impression during interviews. Peter Thiel said PayPal once rejected a top­-notch engineering candidate because he said during an interview that he liked to play “hoops,” and a PayPal engineer does not play basketball, much less “hoops.” The wisdom of that decision is unclear, but that decision process no doubt solidified a sense of self in the team.

Fit is about an ever­-solidifying sense of self as much as it is about bringing on like­-minded people, and that sense spawns canonical stories and processes. Carwoo is a company that’s a little weird, so they ask every interviewee how weird she thinks she is on a scale of 1 to 5. There is a right answer. 3­-4 is the sweet spot ­­a weird person who is self-­aware.  

Wistia is a company that highly values its culture and the unique identity it has built. Co-founder and CEO Chris Savage finds that combination of autonomy, culture, and fit becomes “a competitive advantage”, as Wistia hires more people, “the culture of the company should get stronger because we’re hiring for values that the company believes in, and people with those values should make it stronger.” 

Conclusion

As work gets automated and outsourced, self-directed, creative work is required in ever-increasing degree.  Peer management not only makes us more efficient, but it builds a workplace that enables — as Dan Pink describes — autonomy, master, and purpose that makes work fulfilling and joyful.  

Thanks to a study by Japanese scientists at Hiroshima University’s Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, titled “The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus”, you can be guilt-free when looking at photos of ridiculously cute animals at work.

Published in the journal, PLOS ONE, the study found that viewing photos of cute animals — which induces positive emotions — results in improved “subsequent performance in tasks that require behavioral carefulness, possibly by narrowing the breadth of attentional focus.”

Well then! Here are a few cuties to focus you today:

We’ve written before about the secret to happiness and motivation at work. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer wrote a whole book about it called The Progress Principle. They found that the number one driver of a positive inner work life, the key to motivated, engaged, and productive employees, is making progress on meaningful work, even if that progress is a small win.  

In a recent 99U conference talk, Professor Amabile shared the best way to achieve those small wins and leverage the progress principle in our daily lives: keeping a work diary. We’re so pleased that she suggested using iDoneThis as an online work diary tool, and we thought we could break down how iDoneThis contributes to the four benefits of keeping a work diary that she identifies:

1. Capture progress that may have been lost in a busy workday and celebrate the small wins.

Professor Amabile notes that even on frustrating, seemingly unproductive days, you can almost always find one thing on which you made progress. Note it. Celebrate it. “This is the best way to leverage the progress principle,” Professor Amabile says. Next stop: more awesomeness.

iDoneThis helps you see your workday through the lens of accomplishment because it asks, “What’d you get done today?” In taking a moment to reflect on this question, you make a habit out of focusing on the progress you made and your wins, however small. Writing and recording wins in your iDoneThis calendar is a quiet affirmation and celebration.

2.  Plan next steps, think things through, and overcome setbacks.

Professor Amabile also suggests using a work diary to consider the causes of setbacks you experience and create a plan of action if a similar problem rears its head again. The Progress Principle encourages learning from negative experiences and counts those valuable lessons toward your overall progress, turning negatives into net positives.

iDoneThis contributes to such positive growth, because it keeps a record of all your daily doings. You can go back into your log and see what decisions, actions and efforts led to the setback. In short, you can pinpoint where things started to go wrong. This record gives you the information to form a plan of action to resolve similar setbacks. Down the road, your iDoneThis becomes a map to which you can refer back and see how you overcame obstacles.   

3. Nurture your own personal growth and work through difficult events.

In her talk, Professor Amabile provides an example of one engineer struggling through the experience of massive layoffs at her company. While grappling with the stress of watching her team members being laid off and her own uncertainty about the future, the engineer turned to her work diary to center her thoughts. She recognized that because she had no control over her position at the company, instead she would focus on the one thing that she did have control over — her work.

iDoneThis is about you, you the captain of your work. It’s not a task-specific or project-oriented tool in that it isn’t interested in micromanaging questions like: “How far did you get on Project X today?” or “What did you do for Team Y?”  No, it asks, “What’d you get done today?”

This is a question that matters when the going gets tough. Your progress is what matters, not that of a particular endeavor. If you need to center yourself and regain control of a situation by focusing on work, iDoneThis allows you to see evidence of your control and progress. If you need to focus on your emotional and cognitive processes, iDoneThis provides an outlet for that as well.   

4. Spot patterns in your reactions and behaviors. Identify your greatest strengths and weaknesses.

In The Progress Principle, Professor Amabile recommends asking yourself at the end of each month, “Do I notice trends over time in this journal?  What are the implications?” She also describes how research participants would change their behavior based on recognizing unwarranted and unconstructive behavior patterns.

Patterns of behavior and trends are easy to spot with tools like iDoneThis.  Because iDoneThis records all your entries in an easy-to-read monthly calendar, you can see at a glance the ebb and flow of your inner work life, day to day, week to week, month to month.

iDoneThis also provides a Word Cloud, a fun way to spot trends in your entries. The Word Cloud is populated with the most commonly used words in your entries. At the moment, my most commonly used words seem to be “worked”, “idonethis”, and “gym.”  Sounds about right.  

5. Find patience.

Professor Amabile adds a bonus benefit to her list of four, noting that keeping a work diary “can help to cultivate patience.“ Why? Because you can always look back and see how you persevered and survived much worse days.

It’s especially true if you’ve kept your work diary with iDoneThis. Every day that you make an entry, you’ll see a blue check mark appear over each calendar day.  Over time, you’ll see from the number of blue checkmarks in your iDoneThis calendar that there are no unproductive days.  Even on the worst days, you achieved accomplishments worthy of note. Don’t believe it? Click on that day and see for yourself. There’s always something in each of your past days to be proud of that contributed to the successes that came later on.

It’s an honor for us to have Professor Amabile’s recommendation. It’s always been our goal to create a tool that helps people find happiness, meaning, and motivation at work through celebrating their daily progress, however incremental.

Here’s the weekly round-up of the best of the blog & links we’ve shared on the interwebs!  Happy Friday!

How Mozilla uses iDoneThis to communicate and create.

The key to building an awesome team? Make employees feel like superheroes.

Stillpower, not willpower, is the key to flow and getting in the zone.

In case you need to read an article to remind you to please, take a real lunch break, like, regularly.

Some tips on how to get past creativity block.

The Mozilla Foundation has a super software team working on projects that range from Popcorn (a video remixing application) to Thimble (an easy-to-use web page maker) to Open Badges (a digital badges system that support learning and achievement).

Developer Jon Buckley talked with us about the struggle to align three teams when Mozilla wanted to integrate Badges into both Popcorn and Thimble. Combining multiple product worlds could very well collide into chaos and confusing communication, but Mozilla is seeing smooth sailing.

Status update discussion used to fall to a weekly call, which was time-consuming, while a shared mailing list was only used periodically for such purposes. The Mozilla teams soon turned to iDoneThis to coordinate communication for people spread across time zones and for cutting across teams.  “You don’t have to worry about being in the same room at the same time. That asynchronous nature of updating people is very helpful.”

After the switch, Mozilla found that they cut down on a ton of meeting time and used their gatherings for things that required real conversation. “I still find meetings have their place,” Jon noted, “but if you don’t have to give a status at a meeting because you’re using iDoneThis, then that’s a way you can save a meeting for this particular problem that we need to tackle. Let us discuss this in person.”

Jon is one of our work-style kindred spirits in his cultivation of time away from the distraction of Things That Constantly Refresh like, IRC, Twitter, and bugmail. He prefers to turn them off and head into one of the smaller conference rooms to work without distraction.

Personally, he has found iDoneThis helpful in broadening his perspective from building software for developers to building for a general audience, because he gains insight from his UI and UX design teammates. “If they’ve been working on mockups, they can post that in their status, so we can get visibility into what they’re doing. It’s not quite obvious. On our team, we use a bug tracker really heavily, and the UI or the UX designer workflow doesn’t fit into that all that well, so it’s useful to have a way to see what they’re working on that we can comment on.”

The Mozilla Foundation’s getting stuff done and innovating for the people. We’re psyched that we’re helping Jon and his team build an open, accessible web by opening up avenues of communication and collaboration!

Happy Monday everyone, and happy building your way to LOT!

Reddit, the popular social content site and community, hands power to the people to decide what’s important and what’s not. iDoneThis likewise hands the reins to Reddit’s team to use how they see fit.

With the Reddit team scattered, from San Francisco to New York and in between, the challenge may be to get a virtual team on the same page. Yet, the main use of iDoneThis for the Reddit team is as a personal record, and then by extension, as a reference for the team.

Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin explains, “We all wear a lot of hats. We’re only about twenty people. All of us do a bunch of different things, so it’s hard for us to jump around. It’s nice to be able to track how that’s going, maybe not what we’re spending time on as much but what we accomplish on any given day.”

So Erik’s team members use iDoneThis as a simple way to keep track of what they have done and what hat they wore that day. It’s not used to check in on people in an oppressive way nor is submitting entries absolutely mandatory. “I don’t want people to wake up and go, oh, I forgot to do my thing, that’s not the point. I don’t want it to be a chore.” The team’s individual spirit extends to the various ways people interact with iDoneThis, whether it’s on the web, e-mail, or phone. “I like how lightweight it is. It’s simple and flexible,” comments Erik who uses the web interface so that he can toggle between his team and personal calendar.

What’s especially useful for the Reddit team is the ability to see real progress. “It’s nice to see what you’ve accomplished especially when a lot of the work we do is vague. It’s not like building something with your hands where you see the progress, so it’s nice to look back and see what you’ve done and what other people have been working on.”

Erik’s team used to have a weekly email thread to keep an eye on people’s progress but it’s difficult to remember that much for that long. Most of us know that five days in a workweek can go by like Dali’s melty clock — that’s pretty hard to capture. iDoneThis takes care of keeping a record for Erik and his team. We think it’s pretty awesome that we’re helping Reddit continue making the front page of the internet!

iDoneThis recently added itself to the Google Apps Marketplace and the Google Chrome Web Store, providing OpenID single-sign-on access to iDoneThis through Google accounts. It’s a great feature to have, but as we found during our implementation, one rife with security concerns.  Security advisories from both Google [2] and the OpenID foundation [3] pointed out possible vulnerabilities with various OpenID implementations related to the failure to check  for signed AX attributes.  But the failed check for signed AX attributes by certain implementations of OpenID is really a peripheral issue. A more fundamental security threat results from the incongruent use of the OpenID protocol for trust when it was meant for identification.  This article discusses how our integration of Google OpenID single-sign-on addresses the issues brought forth by the security advisories as well as the more central issue of proper OpenID usage.

Illustration from: http://openidexplained.com

App Integration with Google OpenID Single-Sign-On

Our application is built on Python/Django and as a result, we looked to django-social-auth as a framework to provide OpenID authentication with the existing Django users account framework. django-social-auth itself relies on the python-openid library to handle the actual OpenID protocol implementation. One feature that django-social-auth provides is the ability to associate existing Django user accounts with new OpenID identies if they share the same email address. This is great for our existing users that now want to be able to access their iDoneThis account via Google Apps or Chrome. But using email addresses as identities for account associating could be a security risk.

During the OpenID authentication process, an OpenID consumer, like iDoneThis, can request and receive an OpenID user’s email address as part of the Attribute Exchange (AX) extension. Last year, based on research from Wang, Chen and Wang [1], Google and the OpenID foundation published security advisories [2][3] that pointed out that certain OpenID implementations did not check that certain information passed through AX was properly signed. The Google advisory highlights one possible exploitation of this vulnerability:

“A specific scenario identified involves a website that accepts an unsigned AX attribute for email address, and then logs the user in to a local account on that website associated with the email address. When a website asks Google’s OpenID provider (IDP) for someone’s email address, we always sign it in a way that cannot be replaced by an attacker. However, many websites do not ask for email addresses for privacy reasons among others, and so it is a perfectly legitimate response for the IDP to not include this attribute by default. An attacker could forge an OpenID request that doesn’t ask for the user’s email address, and then insert an unsigned email address into the IDPs response. If the attacker relays this response to a website that doesn’t notice that this attribute is unsigned, the website may be tricked into logging the attacker in to any local account.”

Since our implementation utilized django-social-auth’s email-based account association feature, we were potentially vulnerable to such an attack. We weren’t able to find any documentation or reports that indicated the python-openid library checked for properly signed AX attributes, so we peformed our own security audit of the code. Our audit showed that the current version of python-openid (2.2.5) does, by default, only return properly signed AX attributes. 

The crucial snippet of code comes from ax.py in the python-openid library:

def fromSuccessResponse(cls,success_response,signed=True):
    """
    @param signed: Whether non-signed args should be processsed. 
                   If True (the default), only signed arguments
                   will be processsed.
    @returns: A FetchResponse containing the data from the 
              OpenID message, or None if the SuccessResponse did 
              not contain AX extension data.
    """
    self = cls()
    ax_args = success_response.extensionResponse(self.ns_uri, 
                                                 signed)

The django-social-auth code utilizes this default behavior of python-openid, meaning we were in the clear with regard to this attack.

As we were researching this OpenID security issue, we found a number of people advising against the use of any AX attribute (including an email address) as a means of identification. One poster on the OpenID mailing list wrote:

“Actually, you should never use anything but the openid.claimed_id in the positive assertion to identify the user. This or openid.identity are the only values that could possibly be used to identify the user.

The chairman of the OpenID foundation himself, wrote on his blog [4]:

“The correct behavior is to identify the user using openid.claimed_id. Other parameters MUST NOT be used to identify the user. If RP uses any other parameter to identify the user, then it is a security hole. This is the root of problem.”

Given these emphatic warnings against using an email address AX attribute for identity related purposes, we thought long and hard about the security implications of using the email address AX attribute as a means of identification for our Google Apps Marketplace and Chrome Web Store OpenID sign-in integration.

The core issue is that the OpenID protocol was designed to provide identity and not trust between the OpenID provider and the consumer. An OpenID provider will always attest to a user’s unique identity (the openid.claimed_id or openid.identity attributes), but in general cannot be trusted to validate attribute information like a user’s email address. For example, the iDoneThis OpenID provider can properly attest my identity to be mike.idonethis.com, but could falsely advertise my email address as walter@gmail.com, even with properly signed AX attributes. This behavior could be leveraged by an attacker to gain access to accounts owned by walter@gmail.com if the consumer gives account access based on the email address provided by the untrustworthy OpenID provider.

In the specific case of Google Apps Marketplace however, the discovery URL (https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/site-xrds?hd=domain.name) and the resulting OpenID endpoint (https://www.google.com/a/domain.name/o8/ud?be=o8) will always be a Google Apps OpenID server. This means that if we trust Google’s OpenID servers to only provide email addresses that are properly owned by their respective Google Apps users, we can trust the user’s ownership of these email addresses. Based on the security architecture and policies of Google Apps, the email address associated with a Google Apps account must always be owned by the Google Apps user. Non-Google Apps email addresses can also be associated with a Google Apps user, but the user must verify ownership of those additional email addresses. Because of this unique situation and context, we trust email address AX attributes provided to us by the Google Apps OpenID providers and use them for features such as associating existing iDoneThis users with Google Apps users. The same policy restrictions hold for Google Chrome Web Store users; the Google account OpenID provider is wholly controlled by Google and requires all associated email addresses to have their ownership verified.

Side Note: Reusable Credentials

One minor issue with email addresses as identification credentials is that they are potentially reusuable. mike@idonethis.com is currrently my email address, but could potentially in the future be assigned to another person.  Reuse of email addresses is not an issue that we’re concerned with as it common practice across the web to assume ownership of an email address implies ownership of the identity.  Just about every web service provides account recovery via email.

Comments to: mike@idonethis.com

[1] Rui Wang, Shuo Chen, and XiaoFeng Wang. “Signing Me onto Your Accounts through Facebook and Google: a Traffic-Guided Security Study of Commercially Deployed Single-Sign-On Web Services”. 
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=160659

[2] “Security advisory to websites using OpenID Attribute Exchange”. 
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/security-advisory-to-websites-using.html

[3] “Attribute Exchange Security Alert”. 
http://openid.net/2011/05/05/attribute-exchange-security-alert

[4] “Comments on Wang-Chen-Wang paper on OpenID Implementation Vulnerability”. 
http://nat.sakimura.org/2012/04/27/comments-on-wang-chen-wang-paper/

GetWorkDoneMusic is a webapp by Ryan Ghods that plays music to help you get your work done … fast, or faster. The mostly electronic music is randomly pulled from SoundCloud playlists, and you can replay tracks you like, or skip to the next one.

What’s on your productivity playlist?

When did work become so noisy? I don’t just mean the ambient noise, that clickity-clackity typing, strangely noticeable chewing, annoying finger tapping, and chit-chatting hubbub of an open floor plan office. I’m also talking about the information and social inundation invading our work life, the buzzes and pings, the tweets and likes, the emails and comments, the meetings and chats.

Our notion of productivity has become imbalanced toward focusing on the inbox of our thought process — input, information, inspiration. I can feel productive after scanning tweets, reading articles, even having an inspiring conversation, but if I don’t take time to think and process, if I don’t actually turn the input into something, that feeling is illusory.

Ultimately, productivity requires producing, creativity creating. It sounds so simple and obvious, but it has been easy to forget these days that we need solitude, quiet and time. We need more of what Paul Graham has identified as maker’s time versus manager’s time. Makers need uninterrupted blocks of time to create and make progress in their work, the kind of schedule that resists carving out units of time for discrete tasks. For a maker, a meeting can disrupt and derail a whole day’s work.

The difference between makers and managers is not just in type of schedule, but more basically, in the nature of their work. Makers require solitude and quiet while managers require interaction and conversation. Solitude is necessary to create, to pay attention to yourself, to tune into what psychiatrist T. Byram Karasu calls our internal rhythm. Karasu’s idea of tuning in allows “time for previously unrelated thoughts and feelings to interact, to regroup themselves into new formations and combinations.”

Similarly, the late psychologist Ester Buchholz explains:

Solitude is required for the unconscious to process and unravel problems. Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers…. The natural creativity in all of us—the sudden and slow insights, bursts and gentle bubbles of imagination—is found as a result of alonetime. Passion evolves in aloneness. Both creativity and curiosity are bred through contemplation.

Apple’s Steve Wozniak, too, champions alonetime for the sake of the creative process:

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists….And artists work best alone — best outside corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee.

Woz’s point isn’t just relevant to artists, inventors, and engineers, nor is it correct to say so broadly that the only and best way is to work alone. It highlights how privacy, solitude, and autonomy are needed to get stuff done by limiting inputs that can reach the level of buzzy noise, the committees and groupthink and interference that restricts and interrupts innovation and creativity. Without some quiet, how can you listen to what’s in your head, let your own thoughts network?

Yet many of today’s business software and apps, while intending to make getting work done easier, are often disruptive. Real-time activity feeds, like Yammer, ironically mirror the addictive features of Facebook and Twitter.  Online gatherings via text, voice and video chat work essentially as meetings without end. They demand the kind of time and attention that are antithetical to the maker’s schedule and make it difficult to hear and tune into yourself. Plugging in and collaboration is important but not as a continuous stream that burbles at the expense of actually producing and creating.

It’s not enough to point out how the noisiness of our information and work culture has created what Herbert A. Simon called a “poverty of attention,” nor does it make sense to get off the grid altogether. Instead, let’s tune into quieter channels that support the reflection and contemplation that enables us to better create. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer, for example, have found that maintaining a work diary cultivates a practice of reflection and translates into engagement, motivation, and a positive impact on creativity, productivity, and commitment.

We think it’s possible to provide web services that run on these quieter frequencies (though we want to find the right balance between serving both maker and manager, roles that aren’t mutually exclusive of each other in the workplace). We’ve declared that iDoneThis is part of the slow web movement, because we want to encourage reflection and emphasize doing, to enrich our attention and help people turn toward meaningful engagement. Slow web, as Jack Cheng has so insightfully written, is:

Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information. … It’s not so much a checklist as a feeling, one of being at greater ease with the web-enabled products and services in our lives.

While fast web is more about unfiltered consumption and real-time updates, slow web gives you some space and autonomy on how and when to engage, with timely interactions that “happen as you need them to happen.”

The value of slow web can be easier to see in our personal lives. In that sphere, we risk losing time and attention for the people and pursuits we love when we crave those hits of fast web.

Still, in our work, we risk losing relevance and development of skills that we’ll need to stay competitive. The unfolding of what Dan Pink describes as the Information Age into the Conceptual Age tracks the shift in qualities that will be required more and more in our work, adding to the traditional left-brain skills of reasoning and logic that have so pervaded the professional working landscape the right-brain skills of creativity, synthesis, and meaning. “In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices,” he writes, “the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent.”

In this data-deluged, choice-choking environment, we also compromise ourselves and our capability to become lost and absorbed in our work. We mess with our flow, that “in the zone” state of being where your mental energy and attention snap into focus, and you experience joy.

Pico Iyer in his lovely piece about the joy of quiet describes the paradox of technology, how what “made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier … cannot teach us how to make the best use of them.” We can make better use of technology and information not only in our play but also our work. If we can tap into quieter channels and slower web, whatever it is that helps us really listen to ourselves, we fuel a burning flame, we build momentum, we help the maker make, we find more joy.

How iDoneThis aspires to build a product that fulfills a maker’s schedule while meeting the manager’s needs.

However you walk the talk is what builds your company culture. And so are your values.

How do you give difficult feedback to a team leader?

A team-building scavenger hunt that worked.

Our glimpse into how PagerDuty uses us!

Photo: Jackson Carson

Systems down? Who you gonna call? PagerDuty is on it! The service dispatches alerts collected from system monitoring tools through email, SMS, phone, and mobile and provides no-fuss on-call management.

PagerDuty is all about intelligent messaging, integrating with tools you already have to notify the right person to deal with the problem, based on schedule and situation.

We’re fans of how PagerDuty promotes efficient, effective communication. The company carries over this value to its inner workings as well, implementing iDoneThis in place of its old daily stand-up meetings. “Instead of adding more meetings, I can see what everyone is up to by simply checking my email,” saysPagerDuty co-founder and CTO, Andrew Miklas. ”The iDoneThis digests are the first thing I read every morning. I glance through them on my phone before I even get out of bed.”

Launched in 2009, the company has grown to seventeen employees, with three main teams, dealing with operations, product, and messaging. Going through stand-up meetings with seventeen people got old fast, because of inconsistent staff attendance, and as Andrew explains, “some people just don’t like the daily stand-ups.” 

Stand-ups can be intrusive and put people on the spot. A team leader who thought they were ineffective was the one to nudge PagerDuty to replace their meetings with iDoneThis. Now, PagerDuty’s staff are more responsive reporting in writing and can keep tabs on what’s going on by subscribing to a group.

While Andrew acknowledged the difficulty of a growing startup to find the right alignment of tools for getting stuff done, he has found that iDoneThis scales well as dev teams are added. “One of the things with iDoneThis that people really like is that it’s so unstructured.” Instead of having to make a ticket to record how you spent time interviewing people for two hours, for example, and then marking it as complete, “with iDoneThis, they can just say it.” 

We’re delighted that we can help the PagerDuty team to just say all the awesome stuff they get done in order to be ever reliable in urgent situations to sound the alarm.

Business software’s increasing focus on real-time collaboration, activity streams and consumerization threatens what Paul Graham called the “maker’s schedule” in the workplace. Makers need long blocks of uninterrupted time to concentrate on ambitious, creative work. The result of always-on availability, random notification, and constant information deluge is a work mode of interruption-driven multitasking that’s antithetical to a maker’s needs.

Digital connectivity empowers managers to collaborate with makers in creating, but without regard to when. Because modern collaboration tools flow so neatly within their kind of schedule, managers often don’t realize the costs to the maker. At iDoneThis, we use a bunch of awesome collaborative tools including Asana, Github, Campfire, Google Docs, Skype, and Trello, and we’ve observed how those tools can disrupt maker’s time.  

For instance, in Github, we noticed that creating a bug ticket and assigning it to someone will often result in that person switching tasks to kill the bug, regardless of its urgency or assigned priority level — all because the ticket assignment triggers an email notification. We decided to avoid assigning tickets during work hours unless the ticket needs to be resolved immediately.  

We use Campfire for group chat, but we saw how a scrolling chat format can be a visual distraction and group chat can devolve into one long, endless meeting. Plus, without extended time alone, work product can end up designed by committee, a problem of too many cooks. So instead, we have quiet time during the day when we work away from chat in order to focus without interruption.  

Similarly, Asana’s comment threads are a great way to discuss projects and action items, but we try to batch these toward the end of the day. Otherwise, email notifications of comments get triggered and they disrupt and add to the multitasking that pulls your full attention away from the task at hand.  

With iDoneThis, we aim to create a quieter frequency for non-urgent, unstructured communication at work.  We’ve found that having such a communication channel is essential to creating a bubble that protects and enhances maker’s time without sacrificing open and transparent communication within a company.

The way we work is through an evening email that asks, “What’d you get done today?”  Just reply.  In the morning, everyone gets a digest that shows what the team got done—to kickstart another awesome day.  Pesky status updates aren’t randomly interspersed throughout your day, they occur on a rhythm that bookends the day — reflect and jot down your dones in the evening and scan your morning digest to get up to speed.  

iDoneThis becomes the place for recording the reflective thought that’s vital to evaluation and improvement but often gets ignored in the hustle and bustle.  A valuable repository of little nuggets of learnings, notes, emotions, appreciation, and thanks gets built up, bit by bit.  You can record any non-urgent communication during the day, and you know that you won’t be bothering anyone with it — they’ll see it the next morning when they’re sipping a cup of coffee. 

At the same time, we’ve struggled with realizing our maker’s schedule aspirations real through the product.

• Notifications: We started with no real-time notification system, and when we implemented a feedback system of “comments” and “likes”, we built them into the evening/morning rhythm to avoid disruption.  After running with that for a bit, our members told us that they expected the comments to happen in real-time.  We found that people wanted to start a conversation about what had been recorded the previous day, and the lack of real-time email notification of comments made the conversation die, resulting in a failure to surface relevant knowledge at the right moment. No doubt, real-time email notification increases engagement with the product and that’s the primary reason for its pervasiveness, but engagement itself isn’t an end.  We think we can look to the job that makers and managers alike wish to accomplish with the mechanics of iDoneThis to determine whether a notification should be turn-based or real-time rather than applying the real-time design pattern across our site without thinking. 

• Privilege: We began by treating every user as exactly the same, no one having a privilege that others didn’t, because our gut told us that it was important for building credibility. We didn’t want people to feel wary about a lack of transparency, that the tool was actually more for monitoring and control rather than for sharing progress and celebrating it. feel wary for lack of transparency that the tool was for actually for monitoring and control rather than for sharing progress and celebrating it.  Nevertheless, we’ve seen that managers have felt the most strongly about wanting their companies to adopt our product, and as a result, we’ve seen an uptick in user adoption by empowering managers with configuration options to help make iDoneThis work for the way their team operates.  While we’ve given managers admin access that other members lack, we’ve done it through the lens of helping managers better serve their team, and we think that’s a distinction that will stick.

• Adoption: Where adoption happens through management, as it does for most business applications, the managers become your customers. Managers as customers inevitably request features that will help them do their jobs better, and who can blame them?  We often receive requests for a manager’s-only view, which makes explicit who is failing to comply and provides mechanics to more strictly enforce compliance.  When managers are the ones who are paying us, they become the people we want to please, but as the product’s creators, we also have a broader view on what works across companies.  And the number one challenge for building open communication and a healthy work culture does not revolve around what the manager wants in the individual case, rather it’s getting trust and buy-in from everyone in the company.  Armed with that knowledge, we try out best to focus on what’s best for makers and managers alike.

What’s at stake in developing business collaboration software is building and reinventing the modern office into the type of place we’d all like to work in. For us, that means ensuring alone time, maker’s time, and the quiet time we need to do our best, most fulfilling work.