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I Done This Support

Matthew Stibbe, Founder of Turbine & CEO of Articulate Marketing

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Matthew Stibbe is the CEO of Articulate Marketing, a marketing copywriting agency, and founder of Turbine, an online application that helps businesses take care of administrative issues, to “take the paper out of paperwork.” In what he calls his spare time, he’s learning Dutch and blogging about flying and about writing and productivity. We talked about his faith in to-do lists, the shortcomings of productivity systems, and how we are all becoming robots.

Since you’re in charge of two companies that do different things, how do you divide and maximize your time?

I am a devotee, a worshipper in the temple of lists. I love to-do lists. I’ve had this same list running in various versions of Microsoft software back almost 20 years, and it’s a very strange thought to think that the items on the list have changed, change constantly, but the list is still here. I’ve still got it, and it’s still fundamentally the same electronic thing that I had when I was running my computer games company in the nineties. It’s an interesting philosophical point — one day we will all become lists, some computer memory somewhere.

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Have the Courage to Live an Imperfect Life

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James Chin is a guest columnist and a professional poker player living in Las Vegas, Nevada.  He has a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas.  

Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get hit in the face.”

So you’ve been going through life with these plans in your head, these perfect ideas of how everything will turn out, and eventually, it comes to pass that the world isn’t like how you envisioned. What then? Do you lose your motivation?  Do you only have the courage to live a perfect life?

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Hopefully not. Hopefully, you realize that setbacks are an opportunity to learn more about how the world actually works rather than how you idealized it in your head.

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Join us for iDoneThis’s First Tweet Chat

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iDoneThis will be hosting our first #prodtalk Tweet Chat of a series on productivity, motivation, and getting more done! The topic:  Our recent post, Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secrets, has piqued a lot of interest, and we’d love to hear more about your thoughts and reactions! What do you think about scalable people management? How do you … Read more

Keys to Building a Lasting Internet Startup

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Keys to Building a Lasting Internet Startup

GOOP’s January 19th newsletter features tips from the founders of Instagram, Zagat, Refinery 29, Warby Parker, Kiwi Crate, and Stella & Dot for starting and sustaining innovative internet businesses.

These successful founders all have some great, informative tips, but some common themes emerge from the fray:

  1. Don’t confuse the product for the company. They’re two different things that require building and growing.
  2. Value passion and learning from failure rather than measuring only with experience and success. Love what you do!
  3. Understand and focus on your customer.
  4. Be ready to change and evolve!

Do you think they’re right? 

The Servant Leader and the Social Enterprise

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Dan Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author on the changing world of work, told us that the most radical change happening in enterprise organization is that “[t]oday, talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people.” The effect of that is to upend the traditional corporate hierarchy and put individual employees at the top.  As Robert Greenleaf wrote in 1970 in his influential essay, The Servant as Leader, the winners will be those companies whose “first order of business is to build a group of people who, under the influence of the institution, grow taller and become healthier, stronger, more autonomous” — in other words, those that put people first.

Greenleaf argues that the only person to lead a people-first organization is a servant, because a servant’s natural inclination is service to others — not coercion — for the purpose of others’ growth, health, wisdom, freedom, autonomy, and benefit, and for that reason, in the future, “the only truly viable institutions will be those that are predominantly servant-led.”  That makes the value proposition of the social enterprise stark and dead simple, and, no surprise here, it isn’t covered by buzzwords like “collaboration” or “social”: adapt to the social enterprise or face complete obsolescence.

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Stacy-Marie Ishmael: Founder, Editor, and Reporter

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Stacy-Marie Ishmael contains multitudes. Currently, she’s the founder and editor of Galavant Media and an adjunct at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Previously at the reins of FT Tilt, an emerging markets news service, as a co-founder and editor, she has also reported for the Financial Times and FT’s financial blog Alphaville.

We talked with Stacy-Marie about the challenges of running a news startup and how she gets the better of distractions and deals with a career transition.

Stacy-Marie Ishmael

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Da Vinci’s To-Do Lists

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Da Vinci

Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich dipped into the mind of Leonardo and his to-do list, based on Toby Lester’s book, Da Vinci’s Ghost:  Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image, which comes out today.

According to Lester, Leonardo travelled with a small notebook at the ready to take notes, sketch, jot down a to-do about getting a vitolone.

As Leonardo wrote, ”It is useful to constantly observe, note, and consider.”

(Illustration by Wendy MacNaughton for NPR)

Mark Lesek: A New/Old Prosthetic

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Here’s some Monday inspiration from the story of Mark Lesek and his project to make a better, more affordable prosthetic arm to improve the lives of amputees. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a bike or an arm or a life. If you can take it apart, if you can understand it, you can make it better.”

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)