Lifehacks

Here's how to hack your happiness and productivity to get more done and enjoy it.

A Scientific Guide to Summoning Your Creative Juices

February 22, 2021 by Blake Thorne 4 Comments

Does this happen to you?

It’s Friday, and you’re sitting in an all-hands-on-deck staff meeting. The boss needs creative ideas for next quarter.
“Concentrate!” you’re told. “Be creative!”

You concentrate with all your might, but you’ve got nothing.

The next day, you’re outside cutting the grass. There’s the steady hum of the lawn mower and the rhythmic predictability of the mowing pattern. Your mind slows down. Wanders. Drifts off. But suddenly . . . light bulb.

Some creative idea nearly knocks you over. It’s brilliant. Where was that kind of thinking when you needed it in yesterday’s meeting?

The answer has to do with our creative juices and the science behind them. And although “creative juices” isn’t exactly a scientific term, there’s plenty of science behind what we understand to be creative juices.

3 Ways Productivity Increases When You Take Control of Your Health

December 18, 2020 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Productivity increases when you realize that “productivity” isn’t a goal; it’s a side effect of being a healthy and happy person.

That means the root of the problem isn’t laziness or lack of motivation, but the certainty that we’re human beings and we run out of energy. Our bodies shut down when they’re not treated properly—as do our minds, our motivation, and our productivity.

We’re going to offer a few tips on how to prioritize your health, boost your workplace productivity—and do it all without going completely bonkers.

200 Business Applications For Your Relationship Stack

July 16, 2019 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Our relationships with customers are more complex than ever before.

Conversations start months before a purchase and continue for months afterwards. Our interactions span dozens of channels, from phone calls to email to live chat. Increasingly, customers have no single point of contact: marketers, sellers, developers, and support reps all influence our customer relationships.

In the Relationship Era, companies can no longer rely on all-in-one sales suites, and have to provide flexible technology that teams can leverage in any department: Marketing, Sales, Success, Operations, Finance, Creative, Account Management, and more. This has forced the need for every company to build their own relationship stack: a toolkit of specialized, best-in-class applications.

To help you get started on your own relationship stack, we’re showcasing 200 of the most customer-centric sales, marketing and operations products going — each designed to create truly remarkable customer experiences.

25 Jason Fried Quotes That Will Make You More Productive

July 12, 2019 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

There’s a lot of people out there trying to sell you simple solutions to productivity, as well as their advice, usually involving their latest book, podcast, or video series. They might not be millionaires, but they’ve found the secret to making millions — order now! Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp — a company that makes project management and communication software — is different. Fried is honest about what it takes to get work done and keep your sanity while doing it. He’s the author of several books, including It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work; Rework; and Remote: Office Not Required. Fried has earned the trust of many because of his straightforward takes on productivity and the unhealthy sacrifices some people make in an attempt to get more done. If you want to work smarter, not harder, listen to Jason Fried. Here are 25 of his best quotes on productivity, focus, and decision-making.

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How to Do a Time and Motion Study to Make Real Change

December 18, 2018 by Matthew Stibbe 3 Comments

The famous management thinker Socrates once said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

As 2019 approaches, everyone is making resolutions. Most people do this without data, hypotheses or any idea of what they’re going to do differently. It’s usually a combination of regrets over bets that didn’t pan out, thoughts about what they feel they should improve, and inspiration from others. And they wonder why nothing really changes.

Intention without information is powerless. To misquote great management thinker, Albert Einstein, doing the same thing and hoping for a different result is the definition of inefficiency.

This is where the personal time and motion study can help.

7 Lessons on Survivorship Bias that Will Help You Make Better Decisions

July 24, 2018 by Walker Donohue 2 Comments

Everyone loves a survivor.

We love watching movies like Gladiator, where a muscular Russell Crowe stands tall after defeating wave after wave of enemies.

Sometimes, however, we concentrate on the fact of surviving and fixate on that, and overlook everything else. This is a well known cognitive bias that psychologists refer to as “survivorship bias.”

Put simply, survivorship bias describes our tendency to focus on the people or things that have passed some kind of selection process—whether it’s literal survival in the gladiator pits, or getting a perfect score on a standardized test—and forgetting about other important factors.

Survivorship bias explains why people often believe that cars that were made 50 years ago last longer than those made today—even though these ideas are empirically false. The problem with falling prey to survivorship data is that it clouds your judgment and distracts you from getting to the root cause of a problem within your personal life, your team, or your product. It makes it easy to pattern-match and conflate correlation with causation.

Understanding survivorship bias and how it can cloud your judgment is the key to becoming a sharper, more critical thinking. That can lead to better team-decision making, building a more cohesive product, or making data-driven decisions like a scientist. Let’s walk through some examples!

How to Sync Items from a Kanban Board to your Daily Standup

September 5, 2017 by Cody Leave a Comment

This is a guest post from Kim Kadiyala, Partnership Manager at Zapier.

A daily status update is only as helpful as it is complete. If your team struggles to log their dones, goals, and blockers, rest assured you’re not alone.

But if you’re using a project management tool like Asana, Trello, or Basecamp to take care of your team tasks and deadlines, it’s a safe bet that the tasks in your project workspace are the same tasks mentioned in your daily standups. Syncing those tasks from your project directly to your daily stand-up entry could help eliminate the manual effort needed to prep for the meeting.

Sound interesting? Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to connect your project tasks directly to your I Done This standup entry, powered by app automation platform Zapier. The best part? It takes just a few minutes to set up these automated workflows and no coding knowledge is required.

The 15 Best Productivity Podcasts of 2016

February 27, 2017 by Paige Picard 3 Comments

The average commute time in the United States is 25.4 minutes. Every hour of the day is precious when it comes to getting things done, which is why having to sit through a commute can be insufferable.

Rather than tuning out to the same playlist you hear every day, tune into a podcast — specifically about productivity. This list of productivity podcasts will inspire you and give you the tools to start forming better daily habits, so you get more done.

Make the most out of your commute by checking out some of the best productivity podcasts of 2016. Tim Ferris was one of the 15 best productivity podcasts of 2016

Stop Information Overload and Treating Your Mind Like a Filing Cabinet

June 21, 2016 by Sasha Rezvina 1 Comment

In the SaaS startup world, there’s always a push towards self-improvement. Every employee tries to learn, memorize, and have working knowledge of everything even loosely associated with their role in the company.

But unlike the tools we work with, we’re not super-computers and we often face information overload. Our brains aren’t designed to soak up, process, and store all the information that we encounter. Ironically, in order to retain more, we actually have to absorb less. You have to be selective about what you put your mind to.

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You have a limited amount of mental resources, so you have to free up some of that space by outsourcing. Here’s how.

14 Learning Apps That Keep Your Mind Sharp

May 31, 2016 by Sasha Rezvina 2 Comments

Studies have shown that the average person only retains about 10% of what they read. In the Information Age, we have so many resources at our fingertips that our brain doesn’t get the practice it needs to stay sharp and retain information.

A few years ago, UCLA Professor of Psychiatry Gary Small found that spending a lot of time online actually rewires our brain. Because of all the skimming that we are forced to do, we replace deep, careful learning with hurried, shallow thinking.

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But all hope isn’t lost. Instead of using technology as a crutch to free us of having to do calculations or remember information, we can use it to improve our thinking and our capacity for learning. There are tons of activities and exercise that can be found in mobile apps that actually improve our cognitive functions.

Here are some iOS and Android learning apps that will get those brain muscles flexing.