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I Done This Support

The Key to Avoiding Burnout

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I have a theory that burnout is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you’re giving up that makes you resentful. I tell people: Find your rhythm. Your rhythm is what matters to you so much that when you miss it you’re resentful of your work… . So find your rhythm, understand what makes you resentful, and protect it. You can’t have everything you want, but you can have the things that really matter to you. And thinking that way empowers you to work really hard for a really long period of time.

Marissa Mayer explains that the key to avoiding burnout.

Non-Technical Founder Feature Launch in Three Weeks

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I’ve recently spoken with technical founders who’ve complained about their non-technical co-founders who refuse to do or learn anything technical, and it’s struck a nerve.  One technical founder told me, “My co-founder refuses to learn the most basic SQL so that they can pull analytics on their own.”

As the worst engineer at iDoneThis, I’m the CEO.  I haven’t coded seriously in about 7 years since I was in college, before I went to law school.  My lack of coding chops has meant that I’ve often found myself asking the engineers to create tools for me that enable me to do my job.  That behavior can get extremely distracting for the engineering team that’s trying to push the product forward, and it creates a negative dynamic in which engineering serves managers’ needs.

We began to hear from companies using iDoneThis that they wanted a place that aggregated a single employee’s activity and dones, and I thought to myself, “Simple profile pages is a feature that I could build in a few days!”  So began a three week struggle in which I nearly gave up a bunch of times, before we triumphed as a team and got the profiles launched.

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The Slow Web Movement

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The Slow Web Movement

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.  – Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980).

(Source:  https://www.youtube.com/)

The slow web started as a vague idea framed as a joke.

When we put our site out into the world on January 2, 2011, we only processed incoming emails once per day.  At the bottom of every email, we wrote:

iDoneThis is a part of the slow web movement. After you email us, your calendar is not updated instantaneously. But rest up, and you’ll find an updated calendar when you wake.

The Slow Web Movement

Part of the idea was to put a positive frame on one of our most glaring shortcomings.  But the reason why we believed that an MVP didn’t have to include real-time processing is that we wanted to build a site whose value-added was independent from the number of times that a user interacted with the site.  With something as quick and simple as one email a day, a person could build up a whole record of her accomplishments.

As we’ve worked on iDoneThis, that vague idea of the slow web and unfunny joke has coalesced into a mantra.  At iDoneThis, we believe in taking it slow.

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Welcome Mike Sun to the iDoneThis team!

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We’re thrilled to introduce that Michael Sun, engineer and hacker extraordinaire, has joined the iDoneThis team. In January and February, Michael worked with us on a contract basis to help us scale our infrastructure to support the influx of new users we were getting, and he did a fantastic job. When we had the opportunity … Read more

Get More Done with Dundee Living in Your Chrome

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We’re now in the Google Chrome Store!  Add iDoneThis to Chrome, and Dundee will live on your Chrome home screen.  His mere presence will encourage you in everything you’re getting done.

From there, you can launch iDoneThis with one click.  If you haven’t made iDoneThis your home page yet (tsk tsk!), this is the next best thing.

Why did you create a Chrome Store app?

We bet that you’ll get more done when you see Dundee on your Chrome home screen every time you open up a new tab!

Our email reminders make it easy to remember to write down what you get done every day, so that you don’t have to do the work in remembering. With our iPhone App, people have told us that having Dundee sit on their phones is a constant helpful reminder to use iDoneThis to jot down their day.

We hope to be helpful in the same way every time you open a new tab in Chrome.  From there, it’s dead simple to launch iDoneThis and use the web to write down your accomplishments of the day.

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