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I Done This Support

Grit vs. Talent in Progress

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Grit vs. Talent in Progress

“Very often when we talk about the skill of ‘productivity’ what we are really talking about is ‘self-control’ — the disciplined ability to choose to do one thing at the cost of not doing another (perhaps more tempting thing).”

As the nature of work changes to more flexible design, we must learn when not to exercise our freedom.

via The 99 Percent

A Stupid Idea, One Year Later

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iDoneThis had the humblest of beginnings, and in a year’s time, we’ve gone from a stupid idea to having helped people get over 500,000 things done.  It’s been an incredible year.

On December 17, 2010, Rodrigo wrote me the following email.  The title of the email was “stupid idea”.

A daily “what did you achieve today?” email. We send the email and expect a response.

Y’know there is this:

http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret  (he gets a big calendar and marks an  X on every day that he’s written jokes, the long chains of Xs get him to write more jokes)

Based on the emails that people send, we’d have some kind of graph/calendar like Seinfeld’s.

When we don’t hear from people we send them an angry email and show them their calendar with their string of Xs broken the next day.

I can likely put some rudimentary version of this together in a couple of days.

We called it “Attain Chain”.  And then we changed it because that’s a horrible name. Here’s one of the lists we kicked around.

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iDoneThis: Not Just for Science Fair Winners

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The following guest blog post was written by Kable Jones, aka krunkster on iDoneThis.  Kable is a firefighter with a 150-day streak of getting stuff done.

Although the overachievers of the world likely fill their calendar boxes with ease, the rest of us may occasionally stare at the IDT email with an “oh no” feeling. Nonetheless, maintaining an IDT streak need not, in fact, require constant productivity.

Unlike the Silicon Valley geniuses I don’t have a project timeline oriented job, so that’s not my easy way out of this problem.  Instead, I use IDT to overcome gender roles and keep an ongoing diary.

I suppose one could turn to hip tools like Livejournal to provide this functionality, but that’s really not my style.  Beyond being rather obnoxious, blogging typically requires far too much time and verbiage to continue for an extended period.  IDT’s clever “bulletpoint” formatting puts me back into a comforting PowerPoint mode as I chronicle the day’s events.

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