Lifehacks

Here's how to hack your happiness and productivity to get more done and enjoy it.

4 Nourishing Routines for Your Success and Happiness

October 21, 2013 by Janet Choi Leave a Comment

Whether it’s a nice cup of tea or coffee or reviewing your diary, regular routines and rituals help forge the discipline, energy, and mental space to consistently make progress.

We reached out to some productivity superstars to ask:

What is one routine or ritual that contributes to your happiness and success?

Everyone’s response focused on nourishment, nurturing health, relationships, and mind.

Routines and rituals are inherently very personal — what works for you won’t necessarily work for somebody else — but the main takeaway here is that they’re also about prioritizing aspects of your life to create balance.

Here are four of those balancing routines:

Attain a Flexible Mind: The Best of the Internet

August 23, 2013 by Walter Chen Leave a Comment

Yo ho ho and onto the best of what we shared on the interwebs this week!

GitHub + I Done This: Bring in your commits!

We also teamed up with Draft to make it super simple to track your writing progress and share it with your team.

Why does Jeff Bezos give a hiring anti-pitch?

Self-promotion is part of your job.

You have to stretch, little by little, to attain a flexible mind.

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Better Than Optimal

August 15, 2013 by James Chin Leave a Comment

Guest columnist James Chin is a professional poker player who has previously written about flow, having the courage to change, and the importance of self-awareness. In today’s post, he examines the often overlooked components of success.

When people talk about success they often focus on the qualities of persistence and resilience. As Woody Allen would say, 90% of success is just showing up.

But to be successful at anything requires four personal qualities, not two: persistence, resilience, reality-testing, and adaptability. These roughly correspond to 4 components of the evolutionary process: repetition, survivability of failures, variation, and selection — which is to say, showing up isn’t the whole story.

It’s those last two qualities of reality-testing and adaptability that are necessary for finding the most robust strategies for success. Basically, don’t just work hard; also work smart.

So how do you work smart? By continuing to test assumptions even — and especially — if you already have robust strategies, so that you recognize where the gaps in your knowledge are.

The Benefits of a Power Nap: The Best of the Internet

August 2, 2013 by Walter Chen Leave a Comment

Friday link love! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week:

Why Does Your Work Matter?

The Science Behind Why Small Teams Work More Productively.

Why You Shouldn’t Scale Your Startup

Technology: “For everything we gain, we lose something in return.”

Microaggression & Mismanagement

Naps are amazing. ‘nuff said.

Dundee’s Tip of the Week: We’re working on the start of an I Done This newsletter. Interested in being that super special person who will give us helpful feedback and suggestions?

Loneliness at Work: The Best of the Internet

July 27, 2013 by Walter Chen Leave a Comment

Weekend edition of link love! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!

Sending this one email to your boss can change your career.

Loneliness at work is everyone’s problem.

Vanquish procrastination. Seriously.

Face your weakness. Boost your confidence.

The API of You.

Dundee’s Tip of the Week: We’re working on the start of an I Done This newsletter. Interested in being that super special person who will give us helpful feedback and suggestions? Sign up for some test runs until we learn how to fly here.

Making Happiness a Habit: The Best of the Internet

July 19, 2013 by Walter Chen Leave a Comment

Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!

Why you should stop keeping score at work.

You have to fight to make your distributed team a competitive advantage. And your right to party.

How to attack the dark heart of mismanagement and chronic stress.

Don’t be a Productivity Pinocchio.

Make happiness a habit.

Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Display a list of entries over a span of time by clicking and dragging over the days you want to show on your iDoneThis calendar. Your chain of progress will show up on the right! You go, you!

Boost Your Productivity! The Best of the Internet

July 12, 2013 by Walter Chen Leave a Comment

Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!

Priorities that come in threes are the magical productivity boost. Triorities!

How WooThemes makes distributed culture succeed.

70% of organizational change efforts fail.

The 3 basic elements of productivity and happiness.

4 Lies to stop telling yourself about productivity.

Quality is not a tradeoff.

Priorities in Threes to Spur Your Productivity

July 11, 2013 by Stacy-Marie Ishmael Leave a Comment

Named by Business Insider as one of the 30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech, Stacy-Marie Ishmael is one of the most productive people we know. Currently VP of Communities at The Financial Times and creator of the #awesomewomen newsletter, Stacy-Marie offers one of her most effective productivity tips.

Top Three Priorities

I think a lot about lists (a side effect of an ongoing and enduring fascination with GTD) and I make quite a few of them. One of the most valuable lists I make is my top three priorities for the day.

I’ve long been an advocate of taking a moment every morning — after coffee, before email — to set my top three priorities down on paper or in pixels. This simple process that takes no more than ten minutes has had a consistently profound and positive effect on my productivity.

Why after coffee? Because part of my morning ritual is brewing coffee or steeping tea before I get down to the business of the day. This ritual is one of the highlights of my day, and it makes waking up at unreasonable hours that much easier.

And why before email? Because once you get into your inbox, you’ve handed over control of your schedule to other people, and priorities are about what you want on your agenda.