• It’s the middle of the week- you feel buried, without a light at the end of the tunnel.

• Those app updates you’ve been wanting to start? Still untouched.

• Your new product launch is just around the corner. Your revolutionary marketing ideas = brainfart.

Not the least bit productive, they’re not the states of mind you want when you’re trying to, well… do anything. How do you get out of your slump? I think the first step is simple, although often overlooked.

First things first

Think about it this way. When you realize your problem is just a state of mind, you’ll realize you have the power to change it. Mentally take control of your actions- and know that you’re bigger than they are. Yeah, actions speak louder than words, but actions don’t happen without your willpower leading the way.

Here’s how it goes for me. There’s an internal battle going on in my head: I think about the thing I have to do. I realize how difficult this thing is going to be. I decide to do it anyway. Keep Reading

We think preferences suck. We tend to be positive about most things, -but we really do hate preferences…

Preferences are:

• A fork in your app. You will forever have a divided user base.
• A time sink. The eat up support time, programming time, and debugging time.
• A cop-out. When you can’t decide, -add a preference. It’s how bad software gets worse.
• Confusing. They often have far reaching effects on usability that the user has no way of visualizing.
• Ugly. Those fiddly screens full of toggles and buttons are a mess. A mess to use, and a mess to design.
• A chance to fail. If you allow your users to customize your app so that it is accidentally less useful to them, -you’ve missed the point.
• Sometimes Necessary. Awful, but necessary. Things like “time zone” or “currency indicator” are unavoidable preferences.

Make sure the list is small, and deal with them gracefully as possible.

You’ve got to want to be productive. You’ve got to want to create. It will start when you see the joys of accomplishing something rather than absorbing others’ creations.

I think Adam Spooner nails it here. I’m certainly guilty of saying “Well, now that I have this productivity app, I’ll get more done” and then reading my guilty pleasure blog five minutes later.

No more. We have to stop blaming our inability to get stuff done on anyone (or anything!) other than ourselves. We have the most important tools already- we just have to dig all the way to the bottom of our toolbox (while hoisting those heavy distractions out of the way) to get to them.

I used to be a copywriter for a retail catalog. Golf, to be specific. If you’ve ever written (or read, for that matter) catalog content, you know there’s not a whole hell of a lot of creativity that goes into it. Even still, there were headlines to write, and 120 words to cram into a 25 word space- all of which had to be approved by 1.) our buyers 2.) the company… NIKE, Cobra, FootJoy, TaylorMade, or whoever. It was very unlikely that anything I ever wrote actually ended up in the catalog because it got changed somewhere down the line. But hey, they paid me, and I wasn’t complaining.

Except that I was. Every single day. Keep Reading

“All successful businesses start as an idea in the back of an insane entrepreneur’s mind. They start with a single storefront and a single product. All successful businesses start with a single customer. And no matter what — no matter the size it is aiming for nor the type of business it is looking toward — all successful companies start with something simple and quaint (even if it doesn’t appear that way).” – Dustin Curtis

It’s not fun knowing someone hates you. “Hate” is such a strong word anyway. But…

“The world is full of very average things made by people who don’t want to upset anyone, or too eager to please their peers. I believe you have to have an opinion – choose daddy or chips, I really don’t mind, just don’t say “I don’t really know”. And when you have opinions and strongly held beliefs you’ve got to be prepared to get some flack – in fact that’s part of the deal.You can’t have the nice feedback without accepting that some people are going to hate what you do.”

- Brendan Dawes

When we avoid discussing failures, we deprive both ourselves and our colleagues of the lessons we’ve learned from them.

We think it’s important to be okay with failure- and make the most of it. But once you’ve accepted it, and it actually happens, shouldn’t your (for lack of a better word) self-therapy continue? If it was your own failure and no one else’s, you need to help your teammates avoid the same mistake.

No need to get all mushy, but it helps to talk about it. Keep Reading

This is about how our internal conversation went last week:

“So you heard about the Posterous Switch Campaign, right?”

Position #1: Bold-Faced Reality. Suck it up.

Posterous believes in their product, and is willing to stick its neck out for it. They didn’t insult anyone outright- and if another company was insulted, they should step back and evaluate what can be done better. Keep Reading

We recently received the following e-mail from a curious user about how we, and other people use Paprika:

“I’ve been a staction user for a while now, and I started to “get” the flow of using staction after a few days. Keep Reading

I was intrigued by the article itself, and while I had no intentions of commenting, I did read the first of 78 responses. I was surprised at how articulate this particular commenter was (what blogs have I been reading anyway??) and couldn’t help but read a few more.

As I got further and further into the debate of whether or not management is considered a profession, I decided this is the way all comment threads should be. Keep Reading