Walter Chen - Author Articles

About Walter Chen

Walter Chen is the co-founder and CEO of iDoneThis, the easiest way to run your daily standup. He's a software engineer and ex-lawyer based in New York, New York. Email him at walter at idonethis dot com to chat.

How to Make Your Company Email Totally Transparent

February 16, 2017 by Walter Chen Leave a Comment

team-email

This is a guest post by Mathilde Collin from Front. Be sure to check out the Front Blog for more tips on managing team emails.

Transparency helps you move fast. Information isn’t siloed — it’s all readily available for the taking. You don’t need to ask questions, forward information about a customer, or attend a meeting to know what’s going on. Instead, anyone can get access to the information they need without having to jump through hoops to get it.

However, extending this transparency to email is tricky. It was initially designed for 1:1 conversation but has been adapted to team use over time. You can loop in the people you need on a single email with BCC or CC, but it’s hard to make email efficiently accessible to an entire team. At the same time, within every inbox is a goldmine of customer interactions, company history, and internal discussions — so not sharing that is depriving your team of valuable information.

Thanks to new tools, automation, and a bit of organization, you can turn your outdated email inbox into a fully transparent platform that will serve as a resource for your entire team. Here’s how to do that in three steps.

Jeff Bezos’s Peculiar Management Tool for Self-Discipline

February 14, 2017 by Walter Chen 4 Comments

The modern workplace’s vogue is informal information exchange. We sit in open floor plan offices so that we can spontaneously collide, chat, and collaborate. An office setup for generating ideas can be fizzy and energizing, though when sparks aren’t flying, the colliding can be noisy and distracting.

Jeff Bezos takes a totally different approach to management, far from that madding crowd. He has a contrarian management technique that’s peculiarly old school — write it down.

jeff bezos
In senior executive Amazon meetings, before any conversation or discussion begins, everyone sits for 30 minutes in total silence, carefully reading six-page printed memos. Reading together in the meeting guarantees everyone’s undivided attention to the issues at hand, but the real magic happens before the meeting ever starts. It happens when the author is writing the memo.

How to Use an Amazon Echo for Your Startup Office

July 26, 2016 by Walter Chen Leave a Comment

This week’s post is a guest article by Vinay Patankar, CEO and co-founder of Process Street.

If you’re running a startup, you can use every little bit of help you can get.

But to justify an administrative assistant or office manager, you’ll probably need to have raised a big seed round of over $1 million or have bootstrapped your company past 10 employees. Otherwise, that extra help getting stuff done is just a luxury you can’t quite afford yet.

Enter Alexa via the Amazon Echo. In the same way Alexa can help you and your family out around the home, it can also make your office and your startup just that little bit easier to manage, so that you can keep your sanity and focus on what’s important.

To get the most out of Alexa, you’ll need to set her up specifically for the office. Here’s how.

Your Accomplishments, Now with Emojis

April 20, 2015 by Walter Chen Leave a Comment

We’re excited to present to you: the launch of emojis for iDoneThis! It’s a fun way to record your accomplishments and share with your team how you’re feeling.

To give it a try, just type a colon and then start typing a word, like :pizza: . If an autocomplete menu shows up, then we have it. Bread-and-butter emojis like smileys of different kinds work as well.

@Team and the All New Autocomplete

March 16, 2015 by Walter Chen Leave a Comment

We heard your complaints about the old autocomplete.

You had to know the username of the teammate that you wanted to mention. That was all fine and good when your teammate’s username was @janesmith, but not when it was @l33thax0r.
You had to know the exact tag that you wanted to use. It was too easy to create multiple tags for the same purpose, because it was way too hard to figure out what other tags were out there.
Autocomplete was case sensitive.
There wasn’t any way to mention the whole team, so you had to mention people one by one.

We fixed all of those problems in the latest revamp of autocomplete! Now it’s just plain easier to use.

Integrate Everything—Introducing iDoneThis for Zapier

February 26, 2015 by Walter Chen 5 Comments

We’re super excited to announce that we’ve integrated iDoneThis with Zapier.

Zapier, makes it easy to connect two apps together. Have you ever wanted your Google Calendar meetings to show up automatically in iDoneThis? Zapier makes it super simple.

This means that the 400+ tools that Zapier integrates with are now available to you to integrate with iDoneThis, tools like Trello, Google Calendar, Dropbox, Evernote and more.

To get you started, we’ve created a few zap templates for you to use:

Note: to use this zaps, you’ll need to create a Zapier account.

iDoneThis for Mobile

February 3, 2015 by Walter Chen Leave a Comment

Before on left, and after on right

We’re excited to announce that we’ve made iDoneThis better for your phone and tablet. When you pull up idonethis.com on your phone’s web browser, you’ll now get an iDoneThis that’s specifically tailored for your screen size.

Now it’s much easier to read what your team is getting done and enter your dones on the go, from your phone.

To have the app-like experience of launching iDoneThis from your home screen with a single tap, just add iDoneThis to your home screen. It won’t take more than 30 seconds to set up—just choose the directions for your device below.

Add to Home Screen for iPhone / iPad

Add to Home Screen for Android

Company Culture for Startups

January 26, 2015 by Walter Chen 3 Comments

The Practical Guide to Company Culture for Startups

Company culture can be an enigmatic idea to a first-time startup founder, but it’s an absolutely vital resource that can buoy your company in tough times, that’s like jet fuel when times are good, and that can mean the difference between survival and giving up.

In this guide, we want to make company culture a concrete concept to you that you can make real in your company today. We use practical examples from leading companies and entrepreneurs that are on the bleeding edge of innovating company culture into a competitive advantage.

Let us know on Twitter at @idonethis what you think about this guide and share with us how your company is developing and cultivating its culture.

Transparency for Startups—A Practical Guide

January 19, 2015 by Walter Chen 4 Comments

A Practical Guide to Transparency for Startups

Join the movement that’s changing how companies are grown and run

By law, a public company can’t be transparent about how it operates, but a startup can. The ability to be transparent is an advantage unique to startups and, done right, it can drive company culture, employee happiness & retention, marketing, community building, and all other aspects of your business.

Moreover, transparency is an essential movement that’s changing the way that companies are built because it has the potential to make work more human and fulfilling.

In this guide, we cover why transparency is so valuable and important, and we give you concrete advice on how to make transparency real in your company using examples from how the best startups are doing it today. After you get a chance to read our guide, we’d love to hear what you think on Twitter at @idonethis.

Introducing Goals for iDoneThis

November 17, 2014 by Walter Chen 28 Comments

We’re excited to announce that we’ve built Goals for iDoneThis. It’s a simple way to plan your day.

To take it for a spin, just start your done with open and closed brackets–”[]“–and we’ll turn that into a goal with a checkbox that you can check off. Try this goal for today:

[] take the goals feature for a spin!

It works on the web, over email, and with any of our integrations.

Goals iDoneThis demo

How to Make Your Company Email Totally Transparent

Jeff Bezos’s Peculiar Management Tool for Self-Discipline

How to Use an Amazon Echo for Your Startup Office

Your Accomplishments, Now with Emojis

@Team and the All New Autocomplete

Integrate Everything—Introducing iDoneThis for Zapier

iDoneThis for Mobile

Company Culture for Startups

The Practical Guide to Company Culture for Startups

Transparency for Startups—A Practical Guide

A Practical Guide to Transparency for Startups

Join the movement that’s changing how companies are grown and run

Introducing Goals for iDoneThis

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