Self-Improvement - I Done This Blog

Don’t Let Your Huge Goal Distract You from Small Wins

April 23, 2021 by Janet Choi 2 Comments

Go big or go home. Shoot for the stars. Aim high. Humans love to celebrate starting and finishing big goals but rarely take the time to savor the steps they took to get there. These grand statements could actually be holding you back because they distract you from all your small wins.

In the internet age, accomplishments seem larger than life because people rarely document the processes that got them to the finish line. We think small actions lead to small consequences, and grand motions have the most impact. But that’s not true.

We presume this “consequence-cause matching” because it helps the world seem more predictable and manageable. In return for believing this myth, we’re less happy and successful.

Doing one push-up a day, writing one line a day might seem easy and unambitious. But that’s how you build a practice and, ultimately, achieve a big goal. Celebrating small wins might seem silly, but each one is a step toward reaching big dreams.

The 38 Best Productivity Software Tools of 2019

November 26, 2019 by Sasha Rezvina 41 Comments

Productivity apps continue to pop up right, left, and center. If you’re trying to stay up-to-date, it can quickly begin to feel like you’re wasting time looking for the perfect software rather than actually working efficiently. At I Done This, we continue 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.

To spare you hours of Internet sifting, we’ve updated our collection of the 35 best productivity software tools for the New Year.

Quiz: What Productivity Personality Are You? How to Maximize Your Productivity in 2019

November 15, 2019 by Kathryn Vandervalk 1 Comment

A habit is something you’ve learned, through repetition, to do without thinking. You know your personal habits—whether you do the dishes right away, or if you throw your clothes on the floor—but you aren’t always the same person at home and at work.

productivity quiz

We put together this Productivity Quiz to help you identify what your work habits are. At the end of the quiz, you’ll see your Productivity Personality, which gives you personalized tips on how to be more productive by capitalizing on your good habits and eliminating your bad ones. Simply tally up the number of As, Bs, Cs, and Ds you answer and we’ll decipher your productivity paragon.

Whether you schedule every minute or go with the flow, you’ll leave with actionable feedback on how to make the most of your workday.

Why Your Brain Has a Negativity Bias and How to Fix It

October 15, 2019 by Blake Thorne 7 Comments

This post was originally written in 2015 and has since been updated with new research, examples, and advice.

Pretend you’re a caveman.

You’re in your cave preparing for a hunt, but something outside seems dangerous. You hear violent sounds you don’t understand.

You have two choices: Skip the hunt, spend the night hungry, but live another day; or risk death and go outside.

Hold onto that thought. We’ll be getting back to that.

Now, imagine you’re driving to work. While getting off the highway, someone cuts you off. You slam on your brakes. You know the feeling that’s coming. A tense anger rises up. Your fingers clench the steering wheel.

It’s enough to make you feel horrible all day. You might be less productive at work and distracted during meetings. You might try to counterbalance the feeling with a quick shot of endorphins from junk food, mindless web surfing, or time-wasting YouTube videos. This only compounds the problem.

This is like taking short-term unhappiness and investing it in a long-term, high-yield unhappiness investment plan, ensuring belly flab and career stagnation for years to come.

So why does this one minor thing—getting cut off—have such a powerful effect on us? Why does one negative experience ruin an otherwise great day?

The answer has to do with our friend, the Caveman. Research shows that our brains evolved to react much more strongly to negative experiences than positive ones. It kept us safe from danger. But in modern days, where physical danger is minimal, it often just gets in the way.

It’s called the negativity bias.

How to Do a Time and Motion Study to Make Real Change

December 18, 2018 by Matthew Stibbe 3 Comments

The famous management thinker Socrates once said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” As 2019 approaches, everyone is making resolutions. Most people do this without data, hypotheses or any idea of what they’re going to do differently. It’s usually a combination of regrets over bets that didn’t pan out, thoughts about what they feel they should improve, and inspiration from others. And they wonder why nothing really changes. Intention without information is powerless. To misquote great management thinker, Albert Einstein, doing the same thing and hoping for a different result is the definition of inefficiency. This is where the personal time and motion study can help. Continue Reading

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.

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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 MindMate Stays Mindful of Remote Team Success

September 13, 2016 by David Zha Leave a Comment

It takes a truly noble cause to inspire three graduate students to put dissertations on hold so they can start a company. For the founders of MindMate, that cause was helping people who suffer from dementia.

The University of Glasgow’s Patrick Renner, Rogelio Arellano, and Susanne Mitschke created an app that empowers those with dementia to live as independently as possible. MindMate comes with cognitive stimulation games, reminder tools, and a “Getting to know me” section where people can save personal information.

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.

An App Addict’s Guide to Beating the Task Management Blues

July 12, 2016 by Sasha Rezvina 1 Comment

This week’s post is a guest article by Ben Brandall, a writer for Process Street.

Last weekend I found myself in a cafe, alone and without a laptop for around 2 hours. With just my phone, I wanted to do something worthwhile so I decided to organize my tasks properly — something I hadn’t done in a while.

I realized pretty quickly that my task management system made no sense at all.

How to Handle 3 Types of Workplace Conflict

July 5, 2016 by Henry Updegrave Leave a Comment

Hollywood would have you believe that workplace conflict is awesome. Movies depict the best offices as filled with macho dudes in suits screaming at each other, throwing around insults, and somehow also getting fantastic results.

That’s entertaining, but let’s look at the facts: a 2010 study revealed that the average U.S. employee spends 2.8 hours a week dealing with disputes at work, resulting in losses of $359 Billion across the American economy. In reality, conflict pulls people away from their jobs and kills productivity.

With that in mind, your instinct might be to ruthlessly stamp it out wherever you see it. But that’s not always the best course of action. You need to recognize that not every workplace conflict is the same. It’s like criminal justice—a first degree crime is sentenced differently than a second degree crime. The context, causes, and intentions should influence how you deal with conflict in the workplace.

Here’s a rundown of three of the most common types of office workplace conflict, what they mean for your company, and how to solve them.