Done List

The done list is where you write down everything that you've accomplished. It's the absolutely vital complement to the to-do list that productive people like Marc Andreessen use.

When you reflect on your day's accomplishments, you'll often realize that you got more done than you'd otherwise give yourself credit for. It'll set you up to make improvements and feel great about tackling the next day.

Start here with our done list guide.

How to Master the Art of To-Do Lists by Understanding Why They Fail

January 25, 2021 by Janet Choi 36 Comments

A watch and a phone on a desk. The phone shows a "To Do" list.

The to-do list is an inescapable, age-old productivity tool. It is our very human attempt to create order in our disorderly lives and an expression of our ability to impose self-control. Most of us, including to-do list haters, keep one, and the fact is, they can work when you find the to-do method that works for you.

I don’t love to-do lists but found it odd that I still continue to use them. I sometimes worry they’re just a form of self-flagellation. Is my list-making just a futile exercise in productivity-flavored self-torture? Is the to-do list just a blunt instrument to wield in the quest for personal productivity and getting stuff done?

Am I actually achieving more in a given day because of my list? We went to the data from our users to find out.

5 Checklists Applied to User Onboarding

August 8, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

If you’re a product person, you’ve probably spent a lot of time obsessing over the minute details of your app. You’ve spent hours tweaking the wireframes in Sketch, and even more hours working with engineering to make sure that everything’s absolutely perfect. But even once you’re satisfied, none of that hard work actually matters unless you can get people to use your product. Your users won’t always care about gutter sizing or great typography, especially when they’ve just signed up for a new product. They just want something that they can use and that can work. The good news is that you’ve already sold them on your product’s value proposition. They’ve downloaded or installed your app and, in doing so, given you a clear signal that they’re interested in what it has to offer. All you have to do is roll out the welcome mat and show them how it works. But demonstrating the value of your app and the way it works is the key to engaging users who will actually stick around. A simple checklist is often one of the best tools for that. As productivity guru Atul Gawande writes in The Checklist Manifesto, “Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success.” Checklists break a complicated system into small steps that are easy to accomplish. They hook into psychological principles, creating motivation for new users to actually complete onboarding tasks. From scheduling a social media post to creating a channel in a chat app, breaking these desired actions into small, simple steps is the key to actually getting people to do them. In this article, we’ll look at five different examples of how products use checklists to drive success in user onboarding. Continue Reading

How to Make Your Company Email Totally Transparent

February 16, 2017 by I Done This Support 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.

What Have I Done This Year?

December 13, 2016 by Willa Rubin Leave a Comment

Inching towards the new year means it’s time to reflect on what went well, and what could be improved—especially if you’re thinking about performance reviews. But December means we need to juggle that with immediately pressing projects that must be finished before the holidays. Once we enter tunnel-vision mode to complete those projects, it can be hard to disengage, look up, and think critically about what we’ve accomplished.

Source

At I Done This, we’re all about celebrating small wins and learning from every step of the process. Here are some of our favorite tools that remind us of our professional growth, and prompt us to think about improvement next year.

How to Make Sound Decisions About Your Product Design’s Future

October 26, 2016 by Willa Rubin 2 Comments

Product design is all about tradeoffs—and when we designed I Done This 2.0, we had a lot to consider. We added new functionality, like blockers. But we also noticed a few patterns in our user behavior data that we weren’t quite sure what to do with.

We find, for example, that a higher volume of short entries helps people feel great about their work, and it’s more interesting for their co-workers to read. Does that mean we should encourage this behavior, and cap entries after a certain number of characters?

Ultimately, we set our default in I Done This 2.0 to shorter entries, but we added an optional button to allow longer entries. We don’t want to fall down the rabbit-hole of offering too many configuration options—but we also don’t want to lose customers who find our product useful. When it comes to exact entry length, we’re passing the baton to those who know their team’s needs best—team leaders.

I Done This: Short Post, Best Post?

October 18, 2016 by Kathryn Vandervalk Leave a Comment

The more you write on your “Done List,” the less likely your co-workers are to read what you write. 81% of educated people don’t even read what they see—they skim.

I Done This 2.0 automatically sets the default length of a Done List post at about 12 words. We’ll never limit the amount of words you post, but the default setting encourages you to fit your post on one line, like this:

idonethis1
Continue Reading

How Envoy Inspires Team Motivation with I Done This

October 11, 2016 by Sasha Rezvina Leave a Comment

What do some of the most well-known companies today (Pinterest, Yelp, Box, POPSUGAR, Asana, MailChimp) have in common? They all care immensely about their brand experience. What else do they have in common? They all use a service called Envoy to extend that brand experience to their front desk, creating a warm, delightful and quick check-in process for visitors.

Envoy is a visitor registration platform that’s been a game-changer for how guests are greeted in workplaces around the world. As part of the sign-in process, they automate badge-printing, host notifications and signing of NDAs and other legal agreements. Founded in 2013, Envoy now serves 6 million visitors in over 50 different countries.

As we learned recently, the small team of 37 people was able to inspire team motivation through high morale and fast growth, thanks, in part, to their favorite productivity tool. Here’s how they use I Done This.

Zapier Brings a Chrome Extension to I Done This

October 6, 2016 by Sasha Rezvina Leave a Comment

Most SaaS companies use upwards of 20 productivity tools on a daily basis, some hitting as many as 50. We have so many tools that productivity boosters—such as Trello, Slack, email— ironically become productivity blockers. There’s only one tool that can fix that.

Zapier is a tool that lets you automate interactions between your favorite apps.You can auto-create spreadsheets, based on Salesforce data, or have Google calendar meetings automatically appear as “dones” on I Done This. You can even use it as a product management tool.

Now they’ve launched Push, a new Chrome extension that lets you access your favorite apps, without having to logging into the dashboard. You can now add “dones,” “goals,” and “blockers” to your done list without ever leaving your browser window. Here’s how.
Continue Reading

3 Hidden Productivity Killers You Can Beat With I Done This 2.0

August 16, 2016 by David Zha 1 Comment

Your startup is on the rise. You’ve added four great developers, six customers have signed on, and you’ve reached a revenue milestone of $2.4 million ARR. But just as things are getting peachy, you notice the company isn’t shipping as much code as before.

What makes productivity problems so hard to deal with is that they’re hard to detect. They’re often so entrenched in culture and old systems that they seem invisible. At $2.4 million ARR, you are now far removed from the day-to-day routine of team members, making it difficult to spot inefficiencies on the ground.

productivity boos
We built I Done This 2.0 to help teams bring lurking productivity killers to light. We want to help our customers spot the most common production killers out there. I Done This empowers you to find out what’s going wrong with productivity and address the problem at its source. Here’s how your startup can track down invisible productivity killers and solve them with I Done This 2.0.

How to Finally Make Peace With Your To-Do List

September 23, 2014 by Janet Choi 3 Comments

The person who’s going to complete all the tasks on your list is not you. It’s some superhuman version of you, who gets all the things done without breaking a sweat. Perhaps the biggest problem and allure of the to-do list is how aspirational it is.

In the early days of iDoneThis, there used to be a to-do task feature. While we decided to focus on helping people harness the benefits of keeping and sharing a done list, we gained some fascinating insight into what really happens when it comes to your to-do list along the way.

Two of the most interesting discoveries we made were how 41% of to-do items were never finished, while a whopping 85% of dones were unplanned tasks that never started out as to-do’s.

There’s a huge gap between what we hope to get done and what we actually accomplish — and that might just be part of the human condition. The problem is when we let our to-do lists dishearten and demoralize us because we feel we’ve somehow failed. The way to conquer those negative feelings is to look backwards.