• 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. I realize again that this thing is going to cause me stress. I go do something else instead. And then maybe something else. I go back to the thing I have to do. I stare at it for a few minutes, hoping maybe it’ll do itself. When that doesn’t happen, I think how great it will feel to get this thing over with. Suddenly, it becomes a challenge. Then it becomes many small parts as I break it down and conquer part 1 of this thing. It’s manageable now, and as I finish parts 1, 2 and 3, I realize I’m groovin’ right along. This thing isn’t so tough after all. I’ll show this thing!

And so on…

The point of it all is that you have to make the conscious decision to get out of your slump. After that, take your pick of advice articles to follow. Breaking stuff down works for me, but I know it’s not for everyone.

Once you’re back in your positive state of mind, it’s go time. Here are some other questions to ask yourself while you’re riding the productivity train:

• Are you on top of your imaginary deadlines?

• Are you ambitious enough?

• Have you pinned down the purpose of whatever it is you’re doing?

• What are your guiding principles?

Power to ya, friends.

Sites like Dribbble, and FFFound are part of a new class of websites on the internet. The difference is subtle, but important. They have a user base that is a very limited subset of the internet at large.

Lots of sites control their growth through beta codes, invites etc. We do this with every app we launch. it helps us scale slowly, test things, and to be honest it’s a great way to build buzz.

But Dribbble and FFFound don’t work this way. They’re out of beta at least in the way we typically perceive it (not like the Google ever-lasting beta) but they still offer limited access.

Everyone can look, but only a few can create the content. The idea is that this leads to a curated experience where spam, and bad quality is less likely to exist. There are a fair share of self aggrandizing posts that border on spam, and an equal share of sub-par posts, but to a great degree the theory works.

Getting access.

Access for both sites is based on “who you know.” It’s tough to get in. I’ve posted to Twitter twice on 2 different accounts to get a Dribbble invite. We were even an advertiser once, and still didn’t get access. I’ve asked around a bit for a FFFound invite with no luck as well. Admittedly I haven’t worked all my connections, begged, pleaded, or prostrated myself to get in. But as a casually interested person, I’ve had no luck.

I’ve seen blog posts and tweets that offer invitations. Usually there is some sort of contest, or “show me your work so I can judge it” type string attached. I’ve never responded to have my work be evaluated in this way.

Other examples.

Sites like Twitter and Digg operate quite differently. Anyone can participate, but high profile members still get a larger share of the voice due to their status in the app’s community. For example you can follow @simplebits on Twitter and feel like you are participating in a conversation with a high profile designer. Or you can use the same tool to keep up with people nobody has ever heard of. You curate your own experience by choosing who to keep up with.

Both Digg, and Twitter recommend accounts to “follow”, offer a calculated feed of what they consider to be the “best” posts, and allow these recommendations to be ignored.

Wrapping Up.

So the scoop is this. I don’t like elitism. I’m a simple, hard working designer. I don’t give speeches, write books, or do much social networking, so invitations for sites like this don’t automatically land in my lap. I hope Dribbble, FFFoound and any sites like them in the works choose to be more open. I hope access isn’t greedily hoarded, or held up like some trophy only for the chosen.

What I love about the internet is that everyone can participate. It’s what makes it so strong, and useful. Whether you’re a lowly designer in the midwest (like me!) or a college student half way around the world you can stand on equal footing. Sites like Digg show that it is possible to have a curated experience while still allowing everyone to participate. “Open” is a beautiful system, and I think sites who don’t embrace openness do so at their own peril*.

*I do love both FFFound, and Dribbble, and look often.

QUESTION: (referring to the boss)”...The time entry feature will be great for us, but he will want to know if can it be integrated into his billing process. Basically, does it have the ability to go beyond project communication and management to reporting and billing?”

ANSWER:
I think a lot of this answer depends on your particular workflow, and tools. Here are a few random thoughts that might help:

Staction has a robust API just dying to be integrated with some quick code into the billing app of your choice.

Even if you go for a manual approach, the reporting in Staction is great. -But you have to customize it for your needs.

-Since you can create “saved views” in Staction, you can grab any info you need quickly over the day. Like “all time entries for Paul this week on Projects X,Y, and Z.”

-If you hop into the “projects” tab up top, you can see detailed time reports for every project you have going. You can also click the little
icon to get a summary of hours by person, recent entries, and todo status.

-If you hop over to the “people” tab up top you can pull date range reports of hours logged for each person on your team.

-Don’t forget tags! Staction has it’s pwn built in tagging system, but we encourage people to take it further… Using #hashtags in your entries is a great way to track job status… Try tagging posts with #done #revisions #jobcost to get even more out of your posts. If you do, then you can pull cool reports like: “all jobs with a post that has the keyword “#done” in it that have time entries logged this month”

To be honest, Staction’s flexibility, and complete lack of rules is what we’re so incredibly proud of about the app. But also to be honest, it’s what keeps a lot of people from adapting it into their flow. It’s a blank slate… You can do almost anything you want with it, -but you will have to get creative.

Thanks for getting in touch. It means a lot to us when our customers take the time to write. Please send us an email any time you like.

Thanks for using Staction!
-Joe
-Paste

Complex apps “do more.” But they do it at the expense of crashes, and a manual in seven languages. Users use them, they hate them. They’re trapped by some function that no other app has, but that they need.

Take Photoshop for example (please take it!). No other app does RGB/CMYK, and compositing as elegantly. It’s amazing with it’s bezier curve handling and it’s simple yet incredibly powerful layer management. But on awkwardly grafted on top of that are functions like 3D compositing, check-in/check-out, and “share my screen” which nobody uses. These three examples are some of the more egregious, but they’re nowhere near the totality of the list. The whole app is a cruft of duplicative menus, bad help systems, and wanderingly bad UI.

But I still use it. Why? Because those features I need very badly to be good at my job are found nowhere else within a single app. If they were, I would pay not only the (freaking) $700 I normally pay for a license, but I swear on my design career I would pay double. Double.

I would pay double for an app that did the things I need in Photoshop, but did not crash, and did not suck. I want prettiness in a UI. I want logic, and elegance. Like most designers, I love surrounding myself with well-built things. I find joy in interacting with a laptop hinge that slides into place just-so, or a touch screen that actually reacts to my touch.

There are apps like http://www.pixelmator.com/ that I’m dying to use. Gorgeous, well planned, and humanist. But it doesn’t do the things that I absolutely have to have to make the switch. The pain of switching would mean I have to run multiple apps, or keep a copy of CrashyShop on hand for use many times a week. It’s not worth the pain. No matter how much I love beautifully designed things, I have to make a living with my tools, and if anything slows me down even slightly, I’m not going to use it.

So. We have about a million blog articles online today expounding the excellence, and instant success of “simple.” You can even look at our blog to see how we’re devotees of “less.” But I’ll be honest- our most profitable app is our most complex. People pay for functionality if it is done well. People use simple if it is free…

So as developers we’re left with a problem. Feature-rich applications lead to crufty interfaces. It’s not unavoidable, but it’s nearly inevitable. If you’re ever going to launch your app you must (MUST) limit its feature set. But if you’re ever going to make money off your app, you have to keep adding to it.

Gradually, like the ocean tides, you wear down the apprehension of your audience. Keep beating the drum. Keep enticing people who have tried it once before to try once again. Eventually the feature that kept them from sticking before will be the one you just added. But the game is to do it well. To do it smartly. To add features without adding complexity.

We are not experts on the subject, but we’re cracking every book, blog, and beer we can to try to get to the bottom of it. Every new feature brings the chance to add new users, and alienate old ones… It’s the way you add it that makes the difference between winning or losing users.

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.

My husband snorts at me every time we’re in the car and I turn my purse inside out looking for my notebook. I’m usually in a panic to jot down the idea I just had- but that’s me; if I don’t get it down in a hurry, who knows if I’ll remember it later. (I quite possibly have memory issues…)

My ideas aren’t always directly tied to work- in fact, most of the time, they’re not. (I’m one of those who has to really step away from the monitor a few hours a day.) But if I try, I can steer them in that direction eventually. Last night, for example, I thought of a way to load our bikes in my truck for our upcoming trip to Colorado. It was perfect: didn’t require a rack, and still left room for all our luggage. But the thought came to me so quickly (mid-stride of my run, actually) and I was afraid it would leave just as fast. Like that damn roadrunner. One second he’s there, and the next second all you have is a trail of dust. Beep Beep. So I hopped off the treadmill and zoomed right on over to (you guessed it) my purse, which held my notebook. Took less than a minute. Back to my run, which was blissfully thoughtless.

So then later, as I was going through my notes, I came across my bike idea. I secretly marveled at how efficient it was. The way I was going to pack my truck left the most important items near either the front or the back- easily accessible, within arms reach. The voices (or words, rather, since the conversation happened online) of my co-workers rang in my head. We have a new feature to add to Jumpchart soon, but fitting it on the interface wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be. We didn’t want to just stuff this new feature anywhere. It was like packing my truck- it had to be accessible. Someone had mentioned a dropdown menu for this new thing, and as I realized I had found the most efficient way of packing, so had we found the most efficient way of adding this new feature.

While my “idea” wasn’t exactly a work revelation, or earth shattering by any means, it landed my opinion firmly on the dropdown as a solid option. Now I had something to add to the conversation.

When you think about it in terms of “when ideas hit,” nine to five is just a formality. We’re working all the time- whether we know it or not. Even as we’re going about living our personal lives, we’re scooping up experience, having conversations, meeting people, packing for trips, and learning new things that just might be relevant to something at work. The key is finding a cool way to put it all together.

Besides the easy approach of just getting faster hardware, we also decided to dive into database tweaks – and couldn’t have been happier about the results. Or more surprised.

Like many (probably most) applications for the Web, all of our apps run on MySQL. And while we’re old schoolers at it, we never really worried much about how fast each SQL query was. When your app is small, it hardly matters if you have poorly written queries or inefficient table indexes. Once you start getting the first thousands of daily hits, bad code comes back to bite you. Hard.

The first step we took was to develop code that would tell us exactly which queries weren’t performing well. By adding some timers to our OO database handler, we easily had after the first few days a huge log of all queries that were performing poorly in our MySQL server. It’s really a great way to keep track of how database performance evolves in your app.

The next step was to actually improve things, and we started that by reading O’Reilly’s High Performance MySQL, which is the best book to get you started on all things database performance – the authors have a nice blog also. It walks you through the very basics and low-level aspects of each storage engine and the internal query parser, and then shows you multiple ways of improving performance.

Table indexes are probably the most important aspect of performance in a MySQL server, and also the easiest to actually implement. It’s nowhere near the complexity of replication or load balancing, but it can give you amazing performance improvements. Here’s a good example of a query quite common that we use in Jumpchart.

SELECT * FROM pages WHERE parent_id=428230

Running it without any use of indexes, our server takes 6 seconds to return the row we’re looking for. Given that each page load requires multiple queries to be properly built, you can imagine how unusable the app would be with performance like that.

Now’s the interesting thing. By indexing the parent_id column in the pages table, the server runs the exact same query in 0 seconds; that’s right, it doesn’t even blink to fetch the results!

This happens because an index in MySQL works just like the one from a book; it lets the database go straight to the “page” it needs to go instead of flipping through all pages until it finds what it’s looking for. The 6 seconds the initial query took was basically due to MySQL going through 400 thousand rows until it found what we asked it to find. In the second approach, MySQL just looks at the index and knows exactly where to go.

We’ve altered dozens of tables within our app this way. Not every adjustment is as dramatic as the one above, and most are more complex. Sometimes you get a few milliseconds, sometimes you win several seconds, but every little bit helps.

If you’re an app developer, you should really find some time to research the ins and outs of MySQL performance and what affects it. Besides the joy of making your app run faster, the process you’ll go through can be very fun, surprising and inspiring. Not to mention that you can save money by getting the same hardware to do more for you.

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.

Read this. Maybe print it. It might make you feel like a planet, or a rabbit, or a human. But it will make you feel something. You should probably print it.

“Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.”

http://blog.frankchimero.com/post/979706728/what-advice-would-you-give-to-a-graphic-design-student