iDoneThis Blog

Like most things, choosing where to host your company blog is a strategic choice that can't be boiled down to a categorical. tumblr has a really amazing community. tumblr's downtime is a fact. The question is, does the community outweigh the downtime? I think you make this decision based on the demographics of the tumblr community vis-a-vis your users / customers. And tumblr isn't just 14 year old girls -- there's a bunch of tech people on it (although that may be more NYC tech). In the comments, people have mentioned the simple fact that you can have both a self-hosted company blog and a company tumblr, much like most companies have a company blog and a company twitter. I agree, although simply feeding content from the blog into the tumblr of course doesn't make best use of tumblr as a platform. My startup's blog is on tumblr (http://blog.idonethis.com) and we get about 1/5 of the referral traffic of twitter and facebook from tumblr. (We have nearly 1k followers on tumblr versus 1.6k twitter followers and 2k facebook likes.) In other words, it's our 3rd largest source of referral traffic from social media.

I found a great article by Walter Chen yesterday about how to he brought his business to $1000 recurring revenue yesterday. http://blog.idonethis.com/how-we-got-to-1-000-in-recurring-revenue/ Im working on a similar service using SMS.

Great job! I started writing down my daily "wins" after reading about Marc Andreeessen and his anti-todo list. http://blog.idonethis.com/marc-andreessen-productivity-trick/

Wow! Thank you. This is really awesome feedback. I really did drop the ball on that, this is the second person to bring that up. I intended to record a video for the launch explaining it (Premortems in 60 seconds) but couldn't find a mic. I think my favorite post explaining Premortems is on the iDoneThis blog: http://blog.idonethis.com/post/43078049631/the-perks-of-considering-yo… Again, thank you so much for your great feedback. I really appreciate the time you spent writing it up. I only spent 3 days on the app so far, it's a weekend project for me, so I'll be making these changes soon (hopefully this coming weekend)

Productivity went up sharply in the pandemic, for starters: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB It's axiomatic that people can work more efficiently when they have fewer interruptions and more power over their schedules. There are many studies on this. One by Gloria Mark et al. found that it took around 25 minutes for individuals to regain their focus after an interruption or context switch. http://blog.idonethis.com/distractions-at-work

GitLab is a company I've always felt hasn't quite found product market fit. However, its "open source internal practices" model is the gold plated standard for a 21st Business. If you're any kind of manager of anything, do this. See: http://blog.idonethis.com/managers-write/ for more.

For those who are interested in the „two-pizza-rule“: Bezos believes that no matter how large your company gets, individual teams shouldn’t be larger than what two pizzas can feed. http://blog.idonethis.com/two-pizza-team/

See also the "shit sandwich" approach. http://blog.idonethis.com/sandwich-feedback-performance-management/

Seems better than Slack, i.e. more focused around work vs casual discussion. Not sure if it's better than Quip. One thing I'd like to see (though I'm not sure there's a big market for it) is software like this enforcing extreme focus like http://blog.idonethis.com/manager-focus-peter-thiel-paypal/

> How long to write a long email? How long to speak to someone? A better question is how long to say something that is well thought out and matters vs. how long to write something that is well thought out and matters. I have found that talking leads to lots of talking with little real substance unless it is meant to be a brainstorm session. And even then, writing ideas down before hand help to quickly get to the sticking points rather than bike shedding over something trivial and wasting everyones time. Writing out a page long email forces the writer to think through and address their idea more seriously up front. This is why Bezos famously requires a written memo for a new idea before the meeting [0]. [0] http://blog.idonethis.com/jeff-bezos-self-discipline-writing/

working URL: http://blog.idonethis.com/how-we-got-to-1-000-in-recurring-revenue/ "By that point, iDoneThis for personal, self-tracking use had grown to some 40,000 members" Step 1: get 40,000 free members. Step 2: get 333 (0.8%) to sign-up at $3/person/month.

What I have done in the past is have a slack channel that everyone puts their status in once a day. No third party system required, and no need to setup chron! I think automatic information distributio is the right idea. idonethis has an API so you can have a ticket completion automatically show up: http://blog.idonethis.com/connect-apps-to-idonethis-with-zapier/ You could think of the manual information entry as forcing people to write things down that they are doing which they are not writing down in the ticketing/workflow system.

Some companies seem to be like a VC in disguise: I would think of Supercell(http://blog.idonethis.com/post/48277151394/least-powerful-ceo) and Google when it had 20% free time. I liked the 20% free time model, people have some freedom to pursue their goals without worrying so much about money. It probably leads to more innovation being done as it takes money out of people's concerns. I don't know how it's done now on Google.

A later HN story suggests this culture is changing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5727576 > http://blog.idonethis.com/post/50579439215/the-most-innovative-employe… But a comment from someone "familiar with the current engineering hiring practices at Google" argues the opposite, along the lines of my concerns above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5727620

Previously, The Sprawling Guide to Content Marketing that Made Us $10,000: http://blog.idonethis.com/post/36065976015/the-sprawling-guide-to-cont… http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4805655

Link to the much longer blog post swombat refers to, which includes a nice case study on the point - http://blog.idonethis.com/post/4961556178/copywriting-as-scalable-cust… In my opinion, if you have to explain the same thing to customers more than twice (ie, more than two customers), then you need to find a scalable solution. Sometimes this is code - automating a process step etc - but often it is related to human error or misunderstanding, in which case it needs to be explained better. And one of the first rules of business - communication requires two parties, but when it goes wrong you are 100% responsible for fixing it.

It has to start at the very top. Managers get bullied into creating multi-tasking cultures because they aren't allowed to staff projects sequentially. Every stake holder cares that their project is started, at the expense of when all projects will finish. Early Paypal had singular focus, although I've only heard the stories told through the mythologizing of the founders: http://blog.idonethis.com/manager-focus-peter-thiel-paypal/ I think there's a way to manage remote teams that promotes single tasking. Because communication is harder with remote teams you have to make a choice: have more of it or have less of it. I always choose to have less communication by trying to simplify work, eliminate coordination (especially parallel projects), actually push decision making out to the edges. I don't know exactly how well the people who work with me enjoy it, but I know I only have one meeting on my calendar this week, and so I'm pretty free to single task at least.

Cynicism not necessary. It depends on the culture of internal communications and the purpose of the memo. Are these weekly update memos on activities to be discussed at the staff meeting? Is it asking for permission on something? Is it just informational? Receiving dozens of these a day can be daunting, and forcing limits on length force articulation of what's new and a clear question being asked. Sounds very basic, but lots of memos are poorly written. Google and other companies are known for very brief updates (may be called memos in your organization), as short as a single line, sent per week. No need to send multiple pages of details: http://blog.idonethis.com/post/16736314554/silicon-valleys-productivit… These memos are different from the author's post, which is really not about memos, but rather an alternative means of presenting all of the information required to get to the key discussion in a meeting. I don't think is anyone is suggesting that 6 pg emails should be the memos, and something is wrong if the 6pg emails are replacing decks that are being sent around via email.