Even the most organized people only have so much time, which makes prioritizing work all the more important. But how do you prioritize which tasks or product features to focus on when you’re faced with dozens of potential opportunities and a small army of stakeholders? Matrices are simple organizational tools that can help you and … Read more
First-time entrepreneurs often think building a product is the same as building a company, but experienced entrepreneurs know better.
To 3 seasoned entrepreneurs, building product is just the first step in a long journey, and it’s not even the hard part. Building product is hard, but building the machine that builds the product is even harder.
—Dennis Crowley, Co-Founder/CEO of Foursquare
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.
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.
Over half of all managers in the US are concerned about their team’s time management skills, according to an Institute for Corporate Productivity study.
As your employees’ heads are tucked behind computer screens and they’re clacking away on the keyboard, it seems near impossible to know how they’re spending their time. Are they in a private Slack channel chatting away about the new hire, or are they working? Should the project you assigned Linda take as long as it has? And if you don’t know what your local employees are up to, you can forget about getting insight into your remote employees time management habits.
In the internet-driven workplace, transparency feels like a pipe-dream. Not only do you have no way of telling whether your employees are slacking off, but you can’t even tell if hard-working employees are being tripped up by obstacles outside their control. The natural response to this issue is to micromanage and hover over their shoulder, but you want to empower your employees in their project team roles, not control them.
I Done This gives your whole team transparency without any of the negative side-effects. Here’s how.
Khalil Fuller is the CEO of Learn Fresh, which makes NBA Math Hoops, a basketball board game and mobile app that uses math problems and real-world NBA and WNBA statistics to improve students’ math literacy and engagement. He’s also a college senior, studying education and social entrepreneurship at Brown University.
Growing up L.A., Khalil saw his friends become increasingly disengaged from school, especially math class. “I started tutoring kids and realized there was nothing fun to make math really relevant to them, so they didn’t make the connection between math class and the rest of the world. And they didn’t want to do their homework — they wanted to go outside and play basketball.”
At Brown, Khalil met Bill Daugherty, an entrepreneur and former NBA executive who’d teamed up with Tim Scheidt, veteran math educator and inventor of a prototype math board game. “For the earliest versions, it wasn’t Kobe and LeBron,” Khalil recounts, “it was Johnny SlamDunk and Andrew ThreePointer. Bill and I said, ‘if this is somewhat fun and the kids like it, it could be much more powerful if it had real NBA players.’”
When it was clear that the kids did like it through some early testing and incubation with Big Picture Learning, they brought the game to the NBA to see about those real-life players. “The NBA really liked the fact that we had a purely social mission,” Khalil reports. “They actually gave us a royalty-free license for the first time in their history.”
When we launched a paid version of iDoneThis, we held our breath — we didn’t know if a single person would sign up.
The waiting, the sweat, the nerves.
Finally, the whoosh of a collective sigh of relief. One trailblazer of a person signed up for iDoneThis and put their credit card down.
Amidst all that “will they pay?” jitters though, we figured that if just one person signed up, there had to be at least 1,000 more people out there who hadn’t yet heard of us that would be willing to do the same. And that first month, we got $1,000 recurring revenue signups for our service.
Note: we have disabled the integration described below. It is to be replaced with an improved version.
Hellooo Octocat! We’re so excited to announce our new integration with GitHub that makes it a cinch to gain motivation and momentum from seeing your progress and sharing those steps forward with your whole team.
(Ready to go? Start by setting up the integration.)
When you’re coding all day, it’s easy to forget to take stock of the great work you and your team are getting done. We use GitHub here at iDonethis and realized that our commits are a rich exhibit of our work that often goes unrecognized. So even if you get a ton of stuff done every day, you can’t fully appreciate all your progress and accomplishments.
The content of commit messages provide pretty accurate reflections of what you get done during the workday — and it’s annoying to have to re-enter that information into iDoneThis. What happens when you don’t record those dones, though, is that you miss out on acknowledging and getting that higher level view of all your awesome work. When you fail to celebrate your amazing coding progress, you’re not fully using your potential motivation and planning power.
Plus, developer communication with other team members is a perpetual challenge and always seems to require a disruptive step out of your existing workflow. This integration streamlines that process. Now your coworkers not only get a better idea of what you’re up to, they’ll stop interrupting you with the inevitable “What are you working on?” and you can work in peace. Everyone wins!
We’ve joined forces with Draft to make it incredibly easy to track your writing progress and share it with your team. When you’ve written up an awesome piece in Draft, record your accomplishment as a done in iDoneThis with a single click inside of Draft.
We do a lot of writing here at iDoneThis for our content marketing efforts, so we’re always in search of better writing tools.
We used to use Google Docs for collaborating on writing pieces, but it’s not great at dealing with versions and merging individual edits. I used to use WriteRoom for distraction-free writing, but it’s designed for single-player writing, not for collaboration.
We found the solution in Draft, distraction-free version control for writing.
We use it every day at iDoneThis, and we found that we were always sharing our drafts in our company iDoneThis. We found that it was an awesome way to keep the whole team in the loop on the marketing and messaging efforts that were happening, especially for team members not part of the direct draft-edit workflow. Also, it was a great way for the content marketing folks to show, not just tell, what they were getting done.
One of the biggest pain points we’ve heard from our customers is that the vital information on what’s getting done in the company is fragmented across different systems. Changes to the code happen in Github, meetings happen in Google Calendar, and tasks are marked as done in Trello. There’s no one place to see, talk about, and get excited about everything that’s happening in the company.
I Done This is meant to be that place, but we’ve heard that one of the biggest pain points is that you have to enter dones again into I Done This, what you might’ve already entered into another system. And that means that I Done This is just more work to do.
That’s why we teamed up with Zapier, an awesome tool that automates tasks between two apps with “zaps”, to make it even easier to record and share what you’re getting done in all the tools you use — without any change to your current behavior, to empower you to use the tools you love. We’re excited to share some of the most popular app integrations with I Done This using Zapier.
Zapier’s zapping magic takes small but accumulating tasks that you do every day off your plate. By automating the recording of dones, now you don’t have to enter duplicate information into I Done This and you can spend more time on the things that matter.