I Done This Support [I]n many ways, time is a much more valuable resource than money. You can earn large profits and save them for use years later. However, once time is gone, it will never come back.
Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
How socially conscious startups find motivation.
Jeff Bezos’s peculiar management tool for self-discipline.
Are you happy at work? I believe you have my stapler…
A case for the workplace’s digital village.
The less-is-best approach to innovation is simpler and quieter. Ahhh.
Some helpful productivity tips from the 7th annual New York Times Small Business Summit in June 2012.
What’s the secret to happiness at work? Recent studies show that it’s not how much money you make, but how much progress.
We’ve written before about the progress principle, an idea developed by Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer, who found that the greatest indicator of happiness and motivation at work is incremental progress toward a meaningful goal.
Meaningful goals can be anything from the team’s stated objective, to a personal goal. It can be tangible and specific, like tackling the bugs in a program, or more general, like ensuring customer happiness.
We were curious about the progress principle in action, but meaningful goals are so personal and variable that we didn’t know where to begin. So we approached startups that served a social good. For these companies, their meaningful goal was collective, explicit and already built into the job description.
We asked each of these startup founders:
Your startup works towards a meaningful social good every day.
How does your goal motivate your team’s hard work and happiness daily?
Here are their responses:
‘The longer you work, the less efficient you are,’ said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity and time-management consulting firm in Norwell, Mass. He says workers are like athletes in that they are most efficient in concentrated bursts…. Working energy, like physical energy, ‘is best used in spurts where we work hard on a few focused activities and then take a brief respite,’ he says. And those respites look an awful lot like wasting time.
Lisa Belkin explores how we are both working harder and wasting more time. Whether you consider it wasting time, or productive “jell time”, she concludes that it’s the end result that matters.
Happy Weekend! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week! (And apologies for the hiccup with yesterday’s post.)
Our sprawling guide to content marketing.
How to get in the habit of writing.
We’ve written about the awkward leader. Now read about the generous leader.
The dark side of charisma.
Did you take part in Small Business Saturday? Here are some small businesses that have cracked the code of their success.
A big THANKS to our iDoneThis members and blog readers, here in the U.S. and abroad!
The noted quote by Jack London is actually, “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” Stop waiting. Play offense. Go do stuff!
We’ve experienced modest success with our content, to the point where people ask me for tips on content marketing. We went from $0 to generating $10,000 in revenue almost purely with content marketing. With what I’ve learned along the way, I’ve boiled how I think about content marketing down to one key approach.
Think distribution first.
What’s true for your product is true for content. The hardest part of starting a company most likely is acquiring your customers. The hardest part of starting a blog is acquiring your audience.
Distribution is the limiting constraint. Start there.
Thinking distribution first means framing all of my thinking with respect to content around distribution. Here’s how I think about content marketing viewed through the lens of distribution.
Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
A call to managers: “First, do no harm.”
What does bosslessness mean?
On thanking your customers.
Agree that tech makes good managers better and bad ones worse?
The zen of work — it takes practice.