I Done This Blog

The Hidden Form of Procrastination That Is Killing Your Productivity

March 1, 2017 by Jonathan Figliolino 1 Comment

You’re being interrupted every three minutes to handle something urgent. You have a report that’s due at the end of the day. But your coworker just called you into a meeting that will “just be a minute.” When you get back, you just have to send a quick email. After you start on that email, another coworker asks you to jump on a client call.

You don’t think you’re procrastinating because you’re busy every moment. But just because you’re super busy doesn’t mean you’re being productive. You’re actually guilty of a subtle form of procrastination known as priority dilution. This means you are distracted from focusing on your most important work. But it’s not your fault that you’re getting consumed with all these small disruptions. Your brain is actually hardwired to handle them. Here’s the science behind managing the small disruptions so you can be more productive.

Use I Done This to become more productive when you know how to manage distractions, which are the hidden form of procrastination that kills productivity.

Take a closer look at where procrastination originates in your brain, and you’re on your way to vanquishing the hidden form of procrastination that’s killing your productivity.

The 15 Best Productivity Podcasts of 2016

February 27, 2017 by Paige Picard 2 Comments

The average commute time in the United States is 25.4 minutes. Every hour of the day is precious when it comes to getting things done, which is why having to sit through a commute can be insufferable.

Rather than tuning out to the same playlist you hear every day, tune into a podcast — specifically about productivity. This list of productivity podcasts will inspire you and give you the tools to start forming better daily habits, so you get more done.

Make the most out of your commute by checking out some of the best productivity podcasts of 2016.

Do Business Globally and Manage Remote Teams Locally

February 24, 2017 by Jackie Cohen Leave a Comment

RingCaptcha makes it look easy to secure the world

The Internet makes it a no-brainer to run a global business with a tiny staff, but for most ventures that means a direct mail operation out of a single office. Imagine setting up physical infrastructure in 195 countries with a lean team — if that sounds impossible, you might not have heard of RingCaptcha yet.

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 5 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.

The 27 Best Productivity Software of 2016

February 9, 2017 by Sasha Rezvina 21 Comments

With productivity apps popping up left, right and center, it often feels like you waste more time looking for the perfect software than actually working efficiently. At I Done This, we’ve worked to improve our done lists and integrations to eliminate the need for meetings — but we realize that there are many more ways that you and your team can get more done in less time.

The 27 Best Productivity Software of 2016

How To Avoid the Traps Of Communication With a Remote Team

February 7, 2017 by Alexa Lemzy Leave a Comment

If you run a location-independent business, you will run into a number of remote team communication challenges. When they arise, you might question whether or not the benefits of remote work actually outweigh the stress of unclear communication.

If you only knew how to avoid common communication pitfalls, you would be on the fast track to distance collaboration success. Here, that is exactly what you are going to learn.

19 Beautiful Tools For Managing Time Zone Differences

February 2, 2017 by Blake Thorne 7 Comments

Screenshot 2017-02-01 16.43.52

If you work on a remote team, there’s a good chance you’ve struggled with managing time zones.

With coworkers and subscribers spread all over the world, it can be hard to keep track of what time it is where your colleagues are. Even if you’re not working remote, it’s easier than ever to end up doing business with someone in a different time zone. As our world becomes more connected, our differences in time zones become even more important to manage and understand.

Here at I Done This, we face this challenge daily. We’re a small team dispersed across 3 different continents. The work day is finishing up for some of us just as it’s getting started for others, which is why asynchronous communication is so important. There’s only a short window of time for us to communicate in real time and that window is critical to our productivity.

Here’s a look at some of our favorite tools for managing time zone differences.

The Science of Motivation: Your Brain on Dopamine

January 24, 2017 by Kevan Lee 43 Comments

Editor’s Note: This refreshed post was originally written by Kevan Lee in December of 2013, but has been completely revamped and updated for currency and comprehensiveness by Willa Rubin.

Screenshot 2017-01-18 11.37.59

I spent an hour on this opening paragraph.

The hour wasn’t time well spent, mind you. Sure, I was working — writing, deleting, tinkering with words here and there — but my one-paragraph-per-hour pace wasn’t out of indecisiveness as much as a lack of motivation.

I spent five minutes on email, ten minutes on Twitter, and fifteen minutes doing who-knows-what on Tumblr. (Just kidding, I know exactly what I was doing: watching cat videos.)

Sound familiar?

Motivation is a tricky thing to corral. Tricky, but not impossible.

How A Team of 3 Needed I Done This to Stay In Sync and Prioritize Work

January 17, 2017 by Evan Leave a Comment

The Brief

Productivity is everything at startups. And, with all the chaos that happens at startups (growth, hiring, legal – you name it), it’s easy to lose sight on tracking your productivity.

That’s where Markitors found themselves last year.

Markitors is a growing digital marketing agency in Scottsdale, Arizona with 3 full time employees and 15 small business clients. If you Google “digital marketing company”, Markitors usually appears on the first page of the search engine results. As a result, you’ll find a lot of the chaos at Markitors that you’d find in a typical startup. Onboarding new employees. Finding new office space. Delivering results for clients. Making sure deliverables are met. And, ensuring that the company is operating at max productivity to bring on employee #4.

The Hidden Form of Procrastination That Is Killing Your Productivity

The 15 Best Productivity Podcasts of 2016

Do Business Globally and Manage Remote Teams Locally

RingCaptcha makes it look easy to secure the world

How to Make Your Company Email Totally Transparent

Jeff Bezos’s Peculiar Management Tool for Self-Discipline

The 27 Best Productivity Software of 2016

How To Avoid the Traps Of Communication With a Remote Team

19 Beautiful Tools For Managing Time Zone Differences

The Science of Motivation: Your Brain on Dopamine

How A Team of 3 Needed I Done This to Stay In Sync and Prioritize Work

The Brief

What you don’t know about productivity and happiness, delivered to your inbox daily

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