Earlier this week a friend asked if I knew any 5-10 person start-ups that were doing interesting work in the productivity space. I knew a couple, but the always-full-of-opinion Twitter seemed like a good place to learn more, so I asked. The following is a selection of the surprisingly large number of start-ups that responded.… more
Earlier this year, I ran a survey to get ideas about how leaders could mobilize. 1311 of you filled out the survey which mean I’m certain the results are full of good ideas and inspiration. It also means I have to mine them. An obvious mobilization tactic was a mailing list. Sure, it’s old school,… more
The final count of respondents to the Rands Leadership Survey was 1274. Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey. I’ve called in volunteers to help scrub and normalize the survey data and will have a detailed report published here. It will also be sent to the inboxes of those who requested a copy.
Here’s the breakdown of answers to the question: “Where would you be willing to invest your time?”
Four of the top five answers involve us getting together in some fashion and discussing the craft and/or bitching. This resonates, so in what might be a horrible mistake, I’ve created a public Slack channel where we can do just that thing. I was originally thinking a mailing list would be the move here, but email is a blight and you don’t need more email.
This Slack channel is a low risk and low commitment experiment and is not the only consequence of this survey – simply the first. If you’d like to productively join the conversation, please click here and read all this things.
I’ve been mostly ignoring the hubbub about companies reading my email. I’ve always assumed that part of not paying for a service means that I’m indirectly paying for it in other ways, but the closing line of this CNN piece somehow put me over the edge.
In a move that might be deemed ironic, Microsoft will now add its own internal searches to its biannual transparency reports on government surveillance.
Marco has been pushing for FastMail for a long time – might be time.
At some point in the last year there was too much email. I’ve considered myself a competent manager of email and to-dos for much of my career, but the quantity of email that needed my attention exceeded a heretofore unknown ceiling and I began to understand how the smallest parts of my inbox policy could… more
Brief productivity update. As I noted at the end the year, I moved from Things to Asana. After the initial excitement and eager eager that accompanies any new bright and shiny product, my Asana usage tanked. The issue? First, I was using it like I used Things and, second, I didn’t know Asana.
As I’ve written about before, my personal workflows are bereft of complexity because each sliver of complexity creates mental friction and aggregate excess mental friction is why I abandon tools. My initial Asana workflow was an exact mirror of Things – the reason, I didn’t want to reinvent my flow. After a week, it was clear from increasing that with Asana that I was forcing my square-peg workflow into a round product.
After several weeks of watching Asana slowly gather digital dust, I rebooted. First, I watched every single Asana video available. Oh, it all revolves around the inbox. Ok. Second, I became the master of all Asana keyboard shortcuts. This might well be a nerd thing, but part of the reason I knew Asana is built for me is they’re big on keyboard shortcuts and, for the nerd, the single biggest killer of mental friction is memorized keyboard shortcuts. Lastly, and as you’ll read in an accompanying forthcoming article, I reinvented and rebuilt my workflow in both my email client and Asana. Accompanied with a better understand of Asana’s features, this blank slate approach allowed me to build around Asana’s feature set. Two weeks later and this revamped workflow feels familiar and productive.
My workflow is a work in progress. I’m still experimenting, but, then again, so is Asana. This week they released a Calendar feature. I haven’t extensively used the feature, but I sleep better at night knowing my tools are actively thinking about how to grow and evolve with me.
For me, the amount of email that arrives is inversely proportionate to my amount of free time. This means the less time I have to read mail, the more mail that arrives. Greater minds than mine have attempted to tackle this unfortunate time management situation, so I’m going to keep it simple. You and I… more
I am told that the manner by which others understand that I am busy is when my writing coherence suffers. This primarily occurs in email when whole words are dropped, sentences become jumbled, and logic falls on the floor. Rands, I literally did not understand what you were asking in that email. Poorly written emails… more
On my short list of professional competitive differentiators, I would list my inbox strategy. I have a zero tolerance policy for unread mails. Zero. Any mail, however big or small, which lands in my inbox, is instantly read. There is an industrial strength set of mail filters that move mailing list noise out of the… more
In starting a significant project, an engineer knows the first three big design decisions you make are vastly more important than the second three. The nature of these decisions varies from project to project. They may be choices about look and feel, rules about architecture, or trade offs regarding feature set. Whatever these decisions are,… more
