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I Done This Support

Stop Worrying, Start Living

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I’ve gotten better at the drudgery of real life, but I still suffer from bad habits. I put off difficult tasks, and then I feel guilty about putting off these tasks, and I blow that guilt out of proportion, and then I rub all these bad feelings around my insides like broken glass. I become a worry machine. It is not an overstatement to say that the despair of these tiny, accumulated failures keeps me from truly living, because it creates in me a need to hide from the world. I needed to figure out a way to get right with the world—not because I was going to die soon, but because I probably wasn’t.

Sarah Hepola, on the weight of to-do lists.

Tricks for Productivity! The Best of the Internet

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I have no idea

I have no idea

Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of the internets that we’ve shared this week! 

How startups are killing off bosses.

Our Senior Engineer Mike Sun wrote about learning to scale an e-mail based app.

What’s Marc Andreessen’s trick to feeling marvelously productive?

Human Rescue Time!

How VHX uses iDoneThis and leads the video self-distribution revolution.

Advice on how to Network Your Face Off.

What leads to the beaten path?

How VHX is Leading the Self-Distribution Revolution

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VHX is bringing digital video distribution up to speed with this internet-fueled modern age, delivering DRM-free video, such as Aziz Ansari’s Dangerously Delicious and Indie Game: The Movie, directly to fans. Having launched as a social video community — a way to discover, share, and queue video for later — VHX could soon be seeing their distribution platform and consumption community interact in interesting ways down the road.

We talked with co-founder, Jamie Wilkinson, who describes how the timing felt right for VHX’s push to help small filmmakers and artists self-distribute their work: “It really helps leverage all the growth we’ve seen in social media for people to actually financially support themselves outside of the old studio distribution model. For filmmakers, it’s really great because we don’t take any rights restrictions or exclusivity, so we push things to market super fast and work in a way where every project is individualized and has a bespoke solution.”

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Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient

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I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon among productive people: they often overlook their own productivity.  The more productive you are, the more likely you are to get down on yourself and think at the end of the day, “I wasn’t very productive today.”

Because ambitious people measure themselves by their progress towards achieving audacious goals, they often can’t appreciate a single day’s worth of tiny, incremental advancements that they’ve made.  Plus, the fuller your day is with activity, the harder it seems to pinpoint what exactly it is that you did at all.

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Between starting Netscape, Opsware, Ning, and Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen has done monumental work in his career and seems particularly at risk to fall into this trap.  To arm himself against the daunting imperative of making meaningful progress toward his big objectives, Marc came up with a system: the Anti-Todo List.  It’s his way to stop and recognize his own accomplishments, measured not by a project’s impressive success, but in increments, to fuel his motivation for getting stuff done day after day.

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Find Meaning in your Work: The Best of the Internet

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Cake Leap

Get ready for the week ahead by catching up with the best of the stuff we’ve shared this past week!

Gregory Ciotti’s fascinating guest post about the science behind energy management and how it improves your work!

How Wistia uses iDoneThis to get stuff done, the Wista way! Word.

How to deal with psychological fatigue and create more energy and positive momentum.

Finding meaning in your work isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Overcome the blech of unpleasant tasks by checking out these tips.

Dealing With Office Anger

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Not Cranky

Don’t get all inner-Angrybot at work. Eilene Zimmerman wrote recently in the NYT about how to deal with office anger. Tips on how to deal include writing it down:

It might help to vent by writing down your feelings and thoughts, says Deborah Grayson Riegel, founder of Elevated Training in Hewlett, N.Y. The writing process may help you resolve your feelings — and you may want to share what you’ve written with friend, a spouse or someone at work you trust. “That person can read it and tell you if they see something in the situation you aren’t seeing,” Ms. Riegel says.

Don’t suppress strong emotions; this gets in the way of creativity, thinking clearly, and good judgment. Head over to Buffer to read our post about how emotion affects work and motivation!

Start Your Own Business

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Trust yourself. If you are passionate about your idea you can do more than you ever imagined. There is no secret to success; you simply start with a vision and then it is about problem solving, breaking everything down into smaller pieces, getting it done, and remaining tenacious even when the uphill pursuit becomes steeper. Nothing is more rewarding!

Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp, co-founders of Birchbox, giving the scoop at goop about starting your own business.

How Wistia Builds Its Competitive Advantage

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Wistia provides super easy, distinctive video hosting, management, and marketing for businesses. We wanted to find out from co-founder and CEO, Chris Savage, how Wistia uses iDoneThis and why they love it.

In the past year, Wistia has gone through a growth spurt, doubling to a total of fifteen people. Chris wrote a great blog post about the challenges of staying productive during such rapid growth, pointing out how Wistia’s “internal communication mechanisms have had to evolve so that they are less disruptive, more relevant, and more helpful.”

Wistia logo

Allotted ample ownership and authority, people at Wistia have a great deal of freedom over what they do. As a result, as Chris explains, “it’s hard to know what everyone else is doing, which I think is really important.” So, the Wistia team uses iDoneThis to “facilitate what would often be those random connections that would happen if you were sitting next to somebody, if you were walking by somebody working on something.”

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