I Done This Support - Author Articles

Changing Your Mind Should Be a Process, Not a Reflex

March 23, 2021 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Changing your mind doesn’t have to be impulsive or accidental; you can purposefully choose to put your beliefs to the test too.

First, decide what your most fiercely held beliefs are. Then, throw your very best arguments against them until you believe something else. Going out of your way to change your mind in this way is the key to growth.

As physicist Richard Feynman explained: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

He also said, “We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong.”

The more you challenge your beliefs, the more accurate they will be, leading you to make better choices. This is the larger benefit changing your mind offers, but there are many more.

3 Ways Productivity Increases When You Take Control of Your Health

December 18, 2020 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Productivity increases when you realize that “productivity” isn’t a goal; it’s a side effect of being a healthy and happy person.

That means the root of the problem isn’t laziness or lack of motivation, but the certainty that we’re human beings and we run out of energy. Our bodies shut down when they’re not treated properly—as do our minds, our motivation, and our productivity.

We’re going to offer a few tips on how to prioritize your health, boost your workplace productivity—and do it all without going completely bonkers.

Unlock Intrinsic Motivation to Inspire Your Salespeople

October 30, 2020 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

If your best tried-and-true motivational techniques don’t seem to be working on the otherwise talented members of your sales team, you might want to try appealing to their intrinsic motivations.

According to a recent survey, 95% of managers think money is the most motivating factor for employees. In fact, an adjacent survey of 12,000 employees found that emotional rewards led to greater performance.

Not every salesperson is motivated by promotions and money, and using the same old motivations may unexpectedly fail. That doesn’t mean it’s time to look for a new hire — it means you’ll have to break out a different tool from your managerial toolbox.

Writing is Power: Supercharge Your Writing Process

August 31, 2020 by I Done This Support 3 Comments

We’re writing more than ever these days. Every day, you’re texting, emailing, and chatting. As many of us sit at our computers at work all day and our phones everywhere else in between, we’re writing.

Successful leaders believe writing is a crucial ingredient of great work. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, for example, insists that writing replace other forms of communication to make the most of meetings. Instead of jumping straight into a conversation, or snoozing through bullet-pointed sentence fragments in a slideshow presentation, he requires his senior executives to write six-page narrative memos.

He explains in a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose, “When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences and complete paragraphs, it forces a deeper clarity of thinking.” In this age of knowledge work, we’re hiring people to think and communicate those thoughts — which means people who can write have a leg up.

Like most things worth doing, writing can be a chore. But the more fluent and practiced you become at the writing process, the more you’ll be able to own your success.

Remote Work is Here to Stay

July 23, 2020 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Remote work is increasing across the globe, in every industry that can manage it—and it isn’t just the pandemic that’s making it happen. Sure, the pandemic forced an increase in speed and breadth of adoption, but this snowball has been rolling down the hill for years. Employees expect more flexibility; employers need to prepare for a massive change in the average worker’s schedule, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Industrial Revolution. Whether you’re a team leader, an investor, or a business owner, you have to understand this: Remote work is here to stay. And it can be very effective, too—especially with the use of tools to help you and your workers maximize their morale and production, no matter where they’re logging on from. Continue Reading

Entrepreneurs Share the Only Thing that Matters

April 14, 2020 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

The journey of the entrepreneur is to figure out what matters. We know that starting a company requires extreme focus and prioritization. We know that a focused culture can make an unbeatable team. We know that humility creates adaptability.

But figuring that “one thing that matters” is no easy task. We have to navigate a jumble of possibilities and complexities of running a business, on top of the cottage industry of abundant, contradictory, and just plain bad business advice.

These pieces are the thoughtful reflection of industry leaders on what matters, above all else, in building a successful company from scratch.

So You’re New to Remote Work

March 24, 2020 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

COVID-19 quarantines and self-isolation have put millions of workers at home for the first time, trying to get remote work done while managing home life.

It’s easy to struggle with communication and productivity when you’re trying to work from home. If you don’t have a dedicated office space in your home, you’re either being interrupted by roommates/family or getting distracted by all your toys and media.

Plus, we tend to associate rooms with certain activities: the living room for leisure, the bedroom for sleeping, the dining room for eating and entertaining. When you start bringing work into those spaces, you can disrupt your usual patterns and make it difficult to “get in the zone.”

We have a huge list of remote work tools and guides that can help you be productive, collaborate with colleagues, and even manage an entire remote team located anywhere in the world.

Bad Managers Talk, Good Managers Write

March 9, 2020 by I Done This Support 13 Comments

The exemplary manager is often shown as the outgoing guy that gives his team pep talks and high fives. In truth, though, that stereotype couldn’t be farther from the truth. To four highly effective, seasoned, and successful executives, being a good talker isn’t just overvalued, it can actually be detrimental. Rather, there’s a subtle, often-overlooked ability that’s one of the most vital skills you can have as a manager — the ability to write.

Writing creates a permanent knowledge-base

“Written communication to engineering is superior [to verbal communication] because it is more consistent across an entire product team, it is more lasting, it raises accountability.” —Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz

When managers write, you create work product — white papers, product requirement documents, FAQs, presentations — that lasts and is accessible to everyone in the organization. From marketing to sales to QA to engineering, everyone has a single document off which they can work and consult. The upshot is that the manager also takes public responsibility for what happens when the rest of the team executes on the point of view taken by the documents. That ratchets up accountability through the organization. To Horowitz, author of Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager, the distinction between written and verbal communication is stark and, in fact, it’s what separates the wheat from the chaff. Good managers want to be held accountable and aren’t looking for ways to weasel out of responsibility. And so, good managers write, while “[b]ad product managers voice their opinion verbally and lament … the ‘powers that be’.” Continue Reading

The Ultimate Remote Tool Stack For 2020

March 3, 2020 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

This is a guest post from Lisa Banks, an expert in workplace communication and writer at content marketing agency Animalz.

Choosing the right tools for your remote team is second only to hiring the right people.

Remote tools offer structure, streamline operations, and hold your company together as it grows. And you need a lot of them. You need remote tools for team communication, tools for talking to people outside your organization like customers and vendors, tools for managing the business, tools for hiring and development, and so on.

But picking the right tools for a distributed company is not easy with so many to choose from. I’ve whittled through every remote tool in the most common categories to pull together a list. All the following tools are ones my team uses or have come highly recommended by other remote teams.

If you’re setting up a distributed team this year, these are the remote work tools you need.

The Shit Sandwich and Other Terrible Ways to Give Feedback

January 23, 2020 by I Done This Support 5 Comments

Contrary to common misconception, giving feedback—insightful, useful feedback—is surprisingly difficult. Why? Because, as legendary venture capitalist Ben Horowitz once observed, it’s completely, utterly unnatural.

“If your buddy tells you a funny story, it would feel quite weird to evaluate her performance. It would be totally unnatural to say: ‘Gee, I thought that story really sucked. It had potential, but you were underwhelming on the build up then you totally flubbed the punch line. I suggest that you go back, rework it and present it to me again tomorrow.’ Doing so would be quite bizarre, but evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what a CEO must do.”

Sometimes it’s tempting to feed our employees a shit sandwich—more on this momentarily—and give vital feedback in other completely awful ways, but it’s crucial to your career as a manager that you resist the urge to do so. As a cautionary tale, here are three uniquely terrible ways that inexperienced managers often give feedback and how you can avoid doing this yourself.