I Done This Blog

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.

How Distractions At Work Take Up More Time Than You Think

February 13, 2020 by Blake Thorne 2 Comments

Make an estimate on how many times are you are distracted during an average work day. Now take that number and multiply it by 25. That’s how many minutes of concentration you’re losing. It takes an average of about 25 minutes (23 minutes and 15 seconds, to be exact) to return to the original task after an interruption, according to Gloria Mark, who studies digital distraction at the University of California, Irvine. Multiple studies confirm this. Distractions don’t just eat up time during the distraction, they derail your mental progress for up to a half hour afterward (that’s assuming another distraction doesn’t show up in that half hour). In other words, that “30 seconds to check Twitter” isn’t just 30 seconds down the drain. It’s 25 minutes and 30 seconds. Continue Reading

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.

Google Snippets

January 17, 2020 by I Done This Support 1 Comment

The Definitive Guide to Google Snippets

I knew nothing about Google Snippets before I moved to Silicon Valley. But when I was out there, I kept hearing that successful company after company — like Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Buzzfeed and more — used the snippets system to power a flat and decentralized management structure, enabling autonomy, transparency, and happiness in the company.

This guide tells everything you need to know about Google snippets, from its inception at Google to how it’s used at top tech companies today. You’ll learn why snippets is so useful and how to get snippets going in your own company.

If you’re interested in using iDoneThis for snippets, just go to idonethis.com. We’d love to hear what you think about snippets and our guide at @idonethis.

How to Keep Calm and Carry On When You Feel Ignored

January 6, 2020 by Elizabeth Grace Saunders Leave a Comment

(This is the last part of the 3-part “Manager’s Series” by our friend, productivity expert and CEO of Real Life E time-coaching company Elizabeth Grace Saunders.)

Feeling ignored is one of the most infuriating situations you can be in — but it’s your job to control how you react to it.

When you’ve tried so hard to address team members’ emotional hurdles to accepting change and walked them through how to apply the change to their work situation, your blood can start boiling when you still don’t see the desired results. You feel ignored. Have you ever caught yourself thinking “How could they be disrespectful?” or “Do they notice? Do they even care?”

Before you stomp over to people to tell them exactly how you feel about their impertinence (or, send them that fiery Slack or email), step back and take a deep breath . . . and one more, just in case. Count to four, inhale. Count to four, exhale.Continue Reading

How To Solve The 8 Causes Of Workplace Conflict

December 20, 2019 by Blake Thorne Leave a Comment

The workplace is for work. You’re here to get things done, grow the business, improve the world and get better at whatever it is that you do.

It’s not a place for squabbling with coworkers, managers and subordinates. But that’s what seems to happen. Workplace conflict is everywhere, eating up productivity and taking precious time away from the things that really matter.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The causes of workplace conflict are recognizable. In separate articles on workplace conflict, psychologists Art Bell and Brett Hart identified eight common causes of conflict in the workplace. Think about the conflicts you’ve had in the workplace. You’d be hard-pressed to find on you can’t trace back to one of these root causes.
It’s important to see workplace conflict this way, as a symptom of a great structural problem.

That argument with the boss over coming in on Saturday isn’t really about coming in on Saturday. It’s about the misaligned expectations, structural problems, and poor communication that led you to have to come in on Saturday. In other words, the problem is bigger than the problem.

At best, it’s a symptom of a greater failure.

Thankfully, smart and innovative companies are changing the way we work — and eradicating the causes of workplace conflict at the source. Here’s a look at the eight causes and what great companies are doing about them.

Written Communication Channels at Work – Where Your Intranet Fits

December 19, 2019 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.

Good communication is vital to a productive, healthy workplace. But where that communication takes place — the channel or medium used to convey the message — can make a big difference in how successful it is.

Written communication channels have risen to the forefront in recent years. Many people now prefer written communication over phone calls and would rather read an email than have a meeting. And thanks to technology, there are more tools available now than ever before that let you tap out a message to your co-worker without having to get together in person or on the phone.

But the plethora of tools have also complicated the choices we must make when choosing the right communication channel. With teams moving to instant messaging, social intranets, and even texting as a way to communicate, the written communication channel alone brings a multitude of decisions: Should I text Sharon about this? Should I try her on Slack first? Do I need to also follow up with email? What happened to that document where we discussed this same topic last week…?

It’s as important as ever to match the message to the medium. So, how does your team know which written channel to use when they have something to say? And how does your intranet fit into the mix?