We’re well in the holiday party season, and whether you’re still looking for gifts for fellow productivity nerds or looking forward to some time off, here’s a tongue-in-cheek list of how I Done This can help cut down on holiday stress by keeping you organized from our chief-iest of chief happiness officers, Ginni.
We’re super excited to welcome Tony Doran to the iDoneThis team! Tony learned about us by landing on one of our popular guest blog posts on the science of motivation, discussing the significant impact emotion has on us at work and how managers misunderstand what motivates employees. The post resonated with Tony because he was … Read more
Any.DO is an elegant task management application available for Android, iPhone, and the Chrome browser. While the app has received praise for its simplicity and ability to sync across platforms, the Tel Aviv-based startup found that it needed some management tools to synchronize itself, with one of its founders, Omer Perchik, relocating to San Francisco. Plus, the company, which started in 2010, saw its team nearly double to twelve people.
Any.DO turned to iDoneThis to sync its team, and as co-founder Yoni Lindenfeld explains, to solve one of the challenges of fast growth — how to get all the newbies up to speed. “It’s a good tool to get new people coming on board to understand what other people are doing and to show other people what they’re doing.”
Communication and coordination are priorities for Any.DO, achieved through transparency regarding the inner workings of the company. “It’s really important for us for everyone to be involved and aware,” declares Yoni, as part of Any.DO’s tight-knit “family-style environment” work culture. These objectives led the Any.DO team to implement iDoneThis with a plan to be more specific in their daily entries. Yoni elaborates, “Before we started using it, we talked to everyone about how we would profit most from using it. It’s going great because people are writing more details about what they’re doing and other people,” —including new hires — “know more details. It’s a great tool.”
Here’s the weekly round-up of the best of the blog & links we’ve shared on the interwebs!
We have a guest blog post over at Buffer on the science behind what motivates us to work hard.
How we help Reddit get stuff done.
Mike Sun wrote about security and Google/OpenID Integrations.
We wrote about how we need more quiet and slower web to create better, transcend, and find joy in our work.
The struggle to help your employees find larger meaning.
Talent isn’t enough.
How the President gets stuff done.
How iDoneThis aspires to build a product that fulfills a maker’s schedule while meeting the manager’s needs. However you walk the talk is what builds your company culture. And so are your values. How do you give difficult feedback to a team leader? A team-building scavenger hunt that worked. Our glimpse into how PagerDuty uses … Read more
Systems down? Who you gonna call? PagerDuty is on it! The service dispatches alerts collected from system monitoring tools through email, SMS, phone, and mobile and provides no-fuss on-call management.
PagerDuty is all about intelligent messaging, integrating with tools you already have to notify the right person to deal with the problem, based on schedule and situation.
We’re fans of how PagerDuty promotes efficient, effective communication. The company carries over this value to its inner workings as well, implementing iDoneThis in place of its old daily stand-up meetings. “Instead of adding more meetings, I can see what everyone is up to by simply checking my email,” saysPagerDuty co-founder and CTO, Andrew Miklas. ”The iDoneThis digests are the first thing I read every morning. I glance through them on my phone before I even get out of bed.”
It’s hard to build great technology products without a muser. The muser not only adds emotional motivation to the developer’s work ethic; she serves a cognitive function of focusing his mind on the one thing that truly matters: what using the thing is like. Without her, projects disintegrate into scattered bundles of individual features, appealing to the intellect but not the heart.
– Jakob Lodwick, Elepath.
Hands down the most inspired we’ve felt as a company has been our excursions to visit our musers, see first-hand how they get down with iDoneThis, and chat about the vision and direction of the company.
It started serendipitously. In February, we’d started corresponding with a guy named Tobi at Shopify about a support matter who turned out to be the CEO. The more we talked to Tobi and read about Shopify, the more enamored we grew with them — they do things their own way and on their own terms, and they’ve been wildly successful.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. – Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980).
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
The slow web started as a vague idea framed as a joke.
When we put our site out into the world on January 2, 2011, we only processed incoming emails once per day. At the bottom of every email, we wrote:
iDoneThis is a part of the slow web movement. After you email us, your calendar is not updated instantaneously. But rest up, and you’ll find an updated calendar when you wake.
Part of the idea was to put a positive frame on one of our most glaring shortcomings. But the reason why we believed that an MVP didn’t have to include real-time processing is that we wanted to build a site whose value-added was independent from the number of times that a user interacted with the site. With something as quick and simple as one email a day, a person could build up a whole record of her accomplishments.
As we’ve worked on iDoneThis, that vague idea of the slow web and unfunny joke has coalesced into a mantra. At iDoneThis, we believe in taking it slow.
We’re thrilled to introduce that Michael Sun, engineer and hacker extraordinaire, has joined the iDoneThis team. In January and February, Michael worked with us on a contract basis to help us scale our infrastructure to support the influx of new users we were getting, and he did a fantastic job. When we had the opportunity … Read more
We’re now in the Google Chrome Store! Add iDoneThis to Chrome, and Dundee will live on your Chrome home screen. His mere presence will encourage you in everything you’re getting done.
From there, you can launch iDoneThis with one click. If you haven’t made iDoneThis your home page yet (tsk tsk!), this is the next best thing.
We bet that you’ll get more done when you see Dundee on your Chrome home screen every time you open up a new tab!
Our email reminders make it easy to remember to write down what you get done every day, so that you don’t have to do the work in remembering. With our iPhone App, people have told us that having Dundee sit on their phones is a constant helpful reminder to use iDoneThis to jot down their day.
We hope to be helpful in the same way every time you open a new tab in Chrome. From there, it’s dead simple to launch iDoneThis and use the web to write down your accomplishments of the day.