I Done This Blog

Ameliorating the Human Condition with iDoneThis Memory

December 22, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

A few months ago, we started to occasionally send your old daily dones to you as a reminder of just how much progress you’d made. Some of you told us that you loved it. For you, we made iDoneThis Memory.

Every morning, we’ll email you and remind you what you did on that day either 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year ago. To turn it on, just go your Email Settings and check the box which reads, “Send me memories”.

In the words of the 20th century Italian poet Cesare Pavese — “The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.” Thanks to modern technology, we can shrug off some of the human condition’s more unfortunate features. iDoneThis Memory brings life’s evanescence into your inbox every morning, turning email into an affirmation of immanent existence.

You should turn it on here.

Get Some Stuff Done!

December 21, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Get Some Stuff

YAY!

A Stupid Idea, One Year Later

December 20, 2011 by I Done This Support 2 Comments

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.

Effective Management: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

December 19, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Say it with us now — autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Management means creating that environment, and then getting out of the way.

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

Start With Why

December 18, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Your “why” should drive all of your work.

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

iDoneThis: Not Just for Science Fair Winners

December 17, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

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.

Manage Your Energy

December 16, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

To maximize performance, manage your energy.

(Source: http://vimeo.com/)

Better Together: Team Dynamics

December 15, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Better Together

How do YOU create teams in the workplace?

via SOCIALCAST

Search Your Dones

December 14, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

iDoneThis: You do not yet realize your importance. You’ve only begun to discover your power! Join me, and I will complete your training! With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict, and bring order to the galaxy.
You: I’ll never join you!
iDoneThis: If only you knew the power of the Daily Done. Dundee never told you what happened to your father.
You: He told me enough! He told me you killed him!
iDoneThis: No, I am your father.
You: No. No! That’s not true! That’s impossible!
iDoneThis: Search your dones, you know it to be true!
You: Oh, huh, I didn’t know I could do that.
iDoneThis: Yeah, we just added that feature a few weeks ago. Just login and go to your calendar — there’s a search box up top.
You: Cool.
iDoneThis: Cool.

How We Got Our First 10,000 Users

December 13, 2011 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Passing 10,000 users felt awesome and we did it with three dead simple techniques that anyone can execute.

1. Custom narratives for influential communities. I wrote in April how we made it to 5,000 users by constructing custom narratives for Hacker News, Reddit, and Lifehacker. We described iDoneThis to a community as both (a) a solution to the problems specific to that community with (b) an emotional hook that the community could relate to while (c) giving signals that reflect that we’re members of the community.