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Not Mutually Exclusive: Small, Secure and Productive

Don't let security worries interfere with your productivity use RingCaptcha

Time is in short supply at every startup. Everyone wears at least four different hats, and you need every second you can get to make sure things get done.

You have to be as productive as possible—which is why it’s tempting for your business to neglect security concerns, or make them an afterthought. But at the same time, all your hard work can go away in an instant if you let yourself be vulnerable to a cyber threat.

This is the phenomenon known as the security paradox: you need time to create work worth protecting, but you also need time to protect that work. But in the growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) economy, security and productivity don’t have to be a tradeoff. You don’t need to hire an IT team or develop complicated code to keep your data safe—external services can do it for you.

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How to Focus on the Magic Even When Scaling Up

Onfleet Product Design and Strategy Director Ivan Tolmachev (right) discusses a prototype with Vice President of Sales Andrew Travis.

Teams of all sizes struggle with their processes at some point in their lifetime. If you’re a startup, one of the your advantages is how quickly you can move in a space where the big boys take a while. But what happens when your team is in transition mode and needs to keep scaling up as quickly as it did in the beginning? And how do you this in a design capacity?

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The State of Human Resources (Before I Done This)

Human resources needs a swift kick in the butt. I say this based on experience — I’ve done a lot of back-office work while running TypeFrag, Carbonmade and other companies. I’ve set up and managed payroll, benefits, and on-boarding of employees more often than I care to remember. It’s always a painful process that you put off to the last minute because you just don’t want to deal with it.

Remote employees feel closer when you can offer them perks.

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How to Make Your Company Email Totally Transparent

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team-email

This is a guest post by Mathilde Collin from Front. Be sure to check out the Front Blog for more tips on managing team emails.

Transparency helps you move fast. Information isn’t siloed — it’s all readily available for the taking. You don’t need to ask questions, forward information about a customer, or attend a meeting to know what’s going on. Instead, anyone can get access to the information they need without having to jump through hoops to get it.

However, extending this transparency to email is tricky. It was initially designed for 1:1 conversation but has been adapted to team use over time. You can loop in the people you need on a single email with BCC or CC, but it’s hard to make email efficiently accessible to an entire team. At the same time, within every inbox is a goldmine of customer interactions, company history, and internal discussions — so not sharing that is depriving your team of valuable information.

Thanks to new tools, automation, and a bit of organization, you can turn your outdated email inbox into a fully transparent platform that will serve as a resource for your entire team. Here’s how to do that in three steps.

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I Done This: Short Post, Best Post?

The more you write on your “Done List,” the less likely your co-workers are to read what you write. 81% of educated people don’t even read what they see—they skim.

I Done This 2.0 automatically sets the default length of a Done List post at about 12 words. We’ll never limit the amount of words you post, but the default setting encourages you to fit your post on one line, like this:

idonethis1

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How to Use an Amazon Echo for Your Startup Office

This week’s post is a guest article by Vinay Patankar, CEO and co-founder of Process Street.

If you’re running a startup, you can use every little bit of help you can get.

But to justify an administrative assistant or office manager, you’ll probably need to have raised a big seed round of over $1 million or have bootstrapped your company past 10 employees. Otherwise, that extra help getting stuff done is just a luxury you can’t quite afford yet.

Enter Alexa via the Amazon Echo. In the same way Alexa can help you and your family out around the home, it can also make your office and your startup just that little bit easier to manage, so that you can keep your sanity and focus on what’s important.

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To get the most out of Alexa, you’ll need to set her up specifically for the office. Here’s how.

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Your Accomplishments, Now with Emojis

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We’re excited to present to you: the launch of emojis for iDoneThis! It’s a fun way to record your accomplishments and share with your team how you’re feeling.

To give it a try, just type a colon and then start typing a word, like :pizza: pizza.  If an autocomplete menu shows up, then we have it. Bread-and-butter emojis like smileys of different kinds work as well. smiley

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@Team and the All New Autocomplete

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We heard your complaints about the old autocomplete.

  • You had to know the username of the teammate that you wanted to mention. That was all fine and good when your teammate’s username was @janesmith, but not when it was @l33thax0r.
  • You had to know the exact tag that you wanted to use. It was too easy to create multiple tags for the same purpose, because it was way too hard to figure out what other tags were out there.
  • Autocomplete was case sensitive.
  • There wasn’t any way to mention the whole team, so you had to mention people one by one.

We fixed all of those problems in the latest revamp of autocomplete! Now it’s just plain easier to use.

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Integrate Everything—Introducing iDoneThis for Zapier

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We’re super excited to announce that we’ve integrated iDoneThis with Zapier.

Zapier, makes it easy to connect two apps together. Have you ever wanted your Google Calendar meetings to show up automatically in iDoneThis? Zapier makes it super simple.

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This means that the 400+ tools that Zapier integrates with are now available to you to integrate with iDoneThis, tools like Trello, Google Calendar, Dropbox, Evernote and more.

To get you started, we’ve created a few zap templates for you to use:

Note: to use this zaps, you’ll need to create a Zapier account.

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