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iDoneThis for Mobile

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Before on left, and after on right

We’re excited to announce that we’ve made iDoneThis better for your phone and tablet. When you pull up idonethis.com on your phone’s web browser, you’ll now get an iDoneThis that’s specifically tailored for your screen size.

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Now it’s much easier to read what your team is getting done and enter your dones on the go, from your phone.

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To have the app-like experience of launching iDoneThis from your home screen with a single tap, just add iDoneThis to your home screen.  It won’t take more than 30 seconds to set up—just choose the directions for your device below.

Add to Home Screen for iPhone / iPad

Add to Home Screen for Android

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Company Culture for Startups

company culture for startups

The Practical Guide to Company Culture for Startups

Company culture can be an enigmatic idea to a first-time startup founder, but it’s an absolutely vital resource that can buoy your company in tough times, that’s like jet fuel when times are good, and that can mean the difference between survival and giving up.

In this guide, we want to make company culture a concrete concept to you that you can make real in your company today. We use practical examples from leading companies and entrepreneurs that are on the bleeding edge of innovating company culture into a competitive advantage.

Let us know on Twitter at @idonethis what you think about this guide and share with us how your company is developing and cultivating its culture.

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Transparency for Startups—A Practical Guide

Transparency for Startups

A Practical Guide to Transparency for Startups

Join the movement that’s changing how companies are grown and run

By law, a public company can’t be transparent about how it operates, but a startup can. The ability to be transparent is an advantage unique to startups and, done right, it can drive company culture, employee happiness & retention, marketing, community building, and all other aspects of your business.

Moreover, transparency is an essential movement that’s changing the way that companies are built because it has the potential to make work more human and fulfilling.

In this guide, we cover why transparency is so valuable and important, and we give you concrete advice on how to make transparency real in your company using examples from how the best startups are doing it today.  After you get a chance to read our guide, we’d love to hear what you think on Twitter at @idonethis.

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Introducing Goals for iDoneThis

Goals iDoneThis

We’re excited to announce that we’ve built Goals for iDoneThis. It’s a simple way to plan your day.

To take it for a spin, just start your done with open and closed brackets–”[]“–and we’ll turn that into a goal with a checkbox that you can check off. Try this goal for today:

[] take the goals feature for a spin!

It works on the web, over email, and with any of our integrations.

Goals iDoneThis demo

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Introducing iDoneThis for Slack

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We’re proud to announce that we’ve built iDoneThis for Slack, a super simple way to track your daily accomplishments in Slack.

iDoneThis for Slack

Send your dones in Slack simply by using the slash command /done.

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See what people are getting done without having to ask or log on to the web. Just switch over to your #dones channel on Slack.

Go here to set it up and check out other integrations on our apps page.

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How to Avoid Startup Premature Scaling

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Startups are at their sexiest when hundreds of millions of people around the world use something that a couple of guys and girls built in their garage.

But I’ve noticed how that perception lays a trap for many first-time entrepreneurs. With their sights set on serving the masses, first-time founders often conclude that they must build a product that will work for millions of customers — before they even have one.

This is such a major problem that Startup Genome identified “premature scaling” as the number one cause of startup failure. Surveying 3,200 startups in 2011, the startup-community hub Startup Genome found that a whopping 70 percent failed because they tried to scale too early — expending resources on add-ons like expensive marketing and hiring salespeople before they truly had a product to satisfy a sufficiently large market.

Here are three ways to avoid the trap of startup premature scaling and build a successful business the right way.

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How to Manage by Doing Nothing

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Mark Zuckerberg may be the poster child for entrepreneurial success as a young person, but he had to hire a CEO coach and learn how to lead.  Along his meteoric rise, he had to get an education on how to be a manager—simply being the founder and CEO of a hypergrowth company wasn’t enough.

No doubt, leadership is tough, even for the most naturally gifted business people. That’s because it feels unnatural.

You have to train yourself to overcome the innate responses that accompany regular social interaction and contend with the instinct to be liked while continually evaluating and providing feedback.  Plus, you also have to fight the inclination to always be producing.

Hard work likely got you this far, but once you take on the CEO reins, your job as a manager won’t resemble work as you know it. In fact, it may not resemble work at all, and that can be incredibly uncomfortable.

To Andy Grove, a management legend and former CEO of Intel, a manager’s fundamental job of information gathering can be one of the most unnatural and awkward. Yet dealing with that awkwardness, even inviting it, is also a fundamental part of being a good leader.

Grove tells us, that there’s an efficien —but underused because it’s uncomfortable—way to get and disseminate information: To be out in the open in your company, doing nothing.

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How to Work Quietly

Here’s an excerpt from our fresh-of-the-presses eBook, What You Don’t Know About Management: How to Take Back Your Work Day. If you like what you read, download the 50+ page eBook for free!

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While teamwork is exciting and camaraderie a wonderful source of intrinsic motivation and purpose, getting stuff done also isn’t a matter of adding more people to the tasks at hand. In fact, collaboration can be too noisy.

What with all the open offices, unwelcome chit-chatters, dreadful meetings —not to mention the digital inundation of posts and pings of a never-ending stream of information — it can be near impossible to hear yourself think.

Ultimately, productivity requires producing, creativity creating — and while interaction is a key part of these processes, it isn’t everything. If you don’t actively think and process, if you don’t actually turn input and inspiration into something, if you don’t take time to reflect and analyze, then you’re shortchanging yourself.

It sounds so simple and obvious, but it’s easy to forget these days that we need solitude, quiet and time. 

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Don’t Manage Projects or Tasks, Manage People

Here’s an excerpt from our fresh-of-the-presses eBook, What You Don’t Know About Management: How to Take Back Your Work Day. If you like what you read, download the 50+ page eBook for free!

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One of the biggest misconceptions of management is about what really drives people. In a survey of hundreds of managers by Amabile and Kramer, 95% failed to correctly identify the best motivator at work. This has huge consequences.

The most powerful motivator isn’t monetary incentives or even beneficial management techniques such as providing recognition or interpersonal support. The best motivator is simply making progress on meaningful work.

As a manager, understanding that you can have a large impact on people’s sense of progress can transform and clarify your focus on how your team gets stuff done. Your job isn’t so much to manage the tasks themselves or be “inspiring” or dictate turn-by-turn directions on what to do. Your job is to manage people and facilitate their progress by providing support, tools, resources, and feedback.

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How to Go Beyond Trust Falls to Strengthen Your Team’s Camaraderie

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Here’s an excerpt from our fresh-of-the-presses eBook, What You Don’t Know About Management: How to Take Back Your Work Day. If you like what you read, download the 50+ page eBook for free!

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For the amount of our lives that we spend working, you’d think it would be more common to spend time tending to our coworker relationships. Yet, the default is to treat the social aspects of work as a given instead of managing them in any significant way.

Team-building goes way beyond trust falls. Successful people recognize the importance of establishing and cultivating meaningful connections.

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