ChoreHat Blog

ChoreHat provides a powerful set of APIs that enable developers to monetize their to-do apps and help users get things done. Integration is easy. We are currently in beta, but shoot us an email and will keep you updated.

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Founders’ Stories: Listing it!

For our newest interview in our Founders’ Stories series, we are excited to go back to Europe to introduce Ciske Boekelo. Ciske is an Android developer and the mastermind behind Listing it!, an Android checklist app that offers nested lists and a lot of other cool features. 

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself.  What got you interested in productivity? What methods / tips / tricks do you use to stay focused and productive?

I got interested in productivity out of an obvious need to get organized. When I don't make an effort to do that, I'll forget to do things, miss appointments, make plans to do two incompatible things at the same time, etc. It gets a little messy.

Tips to stay focused and productive: 

Eliminate all distractions (by turning off notifications, for example).

Prioritize. Do one thing at a time and do it well. 

Take regular short breaks. 

The obvious things, really :-)

2. What’s the story behind the app? Where did the idea for Listing it! come from?  And how did you go about building and launching Listing it!?

First, let me just say that I love that you're including Listing it!’s exclamation mark in your question, it makes it seem as though you're shouting the question. :-D

I guess I just missed being able to easily nest lists in other checklist apps that I've tried. So after a long and futile search for a good app, I decided to build my own. I had plenty of experience with Java, but was new to Android. I liked it though, and after a while I decided to make a living as a freelance Android Developer. Listing it! has remained a hobby project, though I'd love it if it became popular enough to financially justify increasing the hours spent improving and maintaining it.

3. What makes Listing It! different from other task management apps? Why do your users use Listing It! instead of some of the other solutions out there?

The primary unique selling point is easy sub-listing (lists within lists within lists). But that can't be the only thing I've done right because some people tell me they've tried a dozen list apps before they found Listing it! and now they're so happy they found this perfect app. 

It's not perfect of course, but I guess people like the simplicity of the app, even though it is still quite a powerful tool. 

Things that my users mention as working well are: easy ordering, moving around, batch checking and unchecking, export and import, sharing and prioritizing.

4. What are the unique challenges and joys of developing an app that is used by people all over the world?

I haven't really run into challenges yet that have to do with developing for every nationality and culture. That might be because currently the app is in English only. But maybe that will change in the future. I love getting feedback from people over the world!

5. How do you split your time between developing new features and managing existing ones? What changes will users see over the next few months?

I'm mostly spending my time adding new features, but that may change as the app becomes more complex. 

Over the coming months I hope to add some settings that will allow more customization. If I could add cloud sync too, that would be really great.

6. What other productivity apps do you use? What do you see as the future of task management?  What are the challenges and where are the opportunities?

Besides Listing it!, I use Google Keep, mostly for things that have pictures or things I am sharing with other people. I use COL reminder for my reminders. And Google Clock to set an alarm if I really mustn't forget something at a specific time.  

I think the future of task management is an AI that can listen to you and respond intelligently, just like a human personal assistant can. You would be able to plan your day together, just by having a conversation. It would be great if your personal AI would send reminders when you need them without even having to ask for them. And of course, it would be awesome if it would do stuff for you that you don't want or need to do yourself. But that sort of stuff is still a long way away, I think.

Ciske, thanks for taking the time to talk about Listing it! with us! Anyone interested in learning more should check it out in the Google Play store.

If you are, or know of someone we should interview, please get in touch, we’re always looking highlight people building cool stuff that makes the rest of us more productive.

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Capturing Everything

Since being in beta, one of the things that has jumped out at us from the data is the massive variance in how people talk about their tasks (stay tuned for a blog post on the subject). That’s to be expected, given how personal a task list is and the incredible complexity of language.

But what is also striking is how many people use their task lists to literally capture everything, even the most routine and mundane things. Specifically, it is amazing how many people record things that they do every single day as “tasks.” From waking up, to showering, getting dressed, eating, and going to sleep, a certain subset of users rigorously records everything they do. They’ve taken the GTD step of Capture to an extreme. 

As we’ve written about before, GTD is a great productivity framework. It can be a hugely powerful tool. On its surface, it's simple: 

Capture 

Clarify 

Organize 

Reflect 

Engage

I’m sure some people to do a brain dump of literally everything they do in order to focus on those things that are truly important. But it can be problematic when GTD becomes an end in of itself, rather than the means to the end. In other words, some people focus more on the system rather than on what that system is designed to output: greater productivity. I think that’s why many of us that love the idea of GTD, tend to follow a modified version of the framework.

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Founders’ Stories: Checkli

For our newest interview in our Founders’ Stories series, we are pleased to introduce Marvin Russell. Marvin has done a ton of interesting things, ranging from founding and then selling The Ocean Agency, a digital agency for SMBs, to creating MySiteAuditor, a leading SEO audit tool. 

For his most recent project, Marvin built Checkli, a super simple and beautifully designed checklist app. While Checkli has gained a strong and incredibly active following thanks to its great web app, Marvin and his team just released a mobile app for iOS. If simplicity and beautiful, minimal design are your thing, then read on, because that, and boosting your productivity, is what Checkli is all about. 

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What got you interested in productivity? What methods / tips tricks do you use to stay focused and productive? 

Checkli is my fourth startup in 10 years, so I think the best phrase to describe me is Serial Entrepreneur. I’d say three important events, that I can remember, got me interested in productivity. 

The first one is simply being an entrepreneur. At any given time, I have a million ideas floating around inside my head, and I can’t keep track of all those things. 

The second thing that led to my obsession with productivity is my severe ADHD. Ever since I was a child I had a hard time focusing on one thing. Checklists are a great substitute for ritalin and adderal. 

The third thing was reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gwande. It changed my entire way of thinking. It taught me that almost every single industry on the planet uses checklists for everything they do. It also taught me that humans, unless you’re a savant, aren’t meant to remember so many things. We need checklists to function. 

2. What’s the story behind the app? Where did the idea for Checkli come from? How big is your team and how many users do you have? And how did you go about building and launching Checkli? 

Checkli, pronounced “check-lee”, is just an abbreviated version of checklist. 

When I first launched a checklist making tool, the name was actually ChecklistPal. Then I did some research and bought the domain Checkli.com for $2.99. 

The idea really came after reading The Checklist Manifesto. If making checklists were critical to all of Boeing’s processes, then it was good enough for me. 

The team was just me until March of 2016. I built the app across seas using UpWork, formerly elance. Now I have a full-time partner, a developer who owns part of the company. He’s cleaning up all the cheap crap I did across seas. 

3. What makes Checkli different from other task management apps? Why do your users use Checkli instead of some of the other solutions out there? 

One word, simplicity. I want our app to be the easiest Checklist app to use. End of story. That’s what I do, and that’s what I focus on. 

Some other cool features are the ability to share and brand checklists. 

4. What are the unique challenges and joys of developing an app that is used by people all over the world? 

The joy is knowing that Checkli is a solution to real problem that all humans share. Our brains are not meant to remember everything we need to do in our lives. 

The challenge is not adding every feature that’s requested from our users. I personally think fewer features make any app much better. But there’s always a balance. 

5. How do you split your time between developing new features and managing existing ones? What changes will users see when you roll out your new app? 

It’s a very delicate thing. More features isn’t always a good thing. We’d rather perfect the features we have than add more new features that only 5% of our users may use. 

We constantly run surveys on our site to get feedback from our users. That’s so important. One feature we’re adding in the near future was not even in our minds, until a high percent of our users asked for it. 

6. What other productivity apps to you use? What do you see as the future of task management? What are the challenges and where are the opportunities? 

I really like IFTTT for killing two birds with one stone. I also like Basecamp for bigger, team-oriented project management. 

The future of task management is getting back to the basics of using checklists. So many apps are way too complicated. People want simplicity. That’s all we focus on at Checkli.

Marvin, thanks for taking the time to share a little bit about Checkli with us! Anyone interested in learning more should check out @checkli on Twitter and in the iOS app store.

If you are, or know of someone we should interview, please get in touch, we’re always looking highlight people building cool stuff that makes the rest of us more productive.

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Founders’ Stories: Tasks & Notes for MS Exchange

In our newest interview, we are pleased to introduce Jakub Klos, founder of Uniqtec and Icewarp, and maker of Tasks & Notes for MS Exchange, a feature-rich, and easy to use GTD app, that’s great for Microsoft Exchange users interested in keeping their data synced with their Android device.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself.  What got you interested in productivity? What methods / tips / tricks do you use to stay focused and productive?

I have been involved in IT since I was 10.  When I was 15, I got my first paid job in tech. And back in 1999, when I was 22, I released the first version of what is now my flagship product, IceWarp server, an integrated collaboration and communication platform (formerly known as Merak Mail Server). IceWarp has been my biggest achievement so far, and I devote most of my professional time to it. Currently, we have over 30 branches all over the world and employ more than 100 people.

But I have always been creative and I tend to think a lot about things. When ideas come to me they sometimes result in new projects. Building cool and useful applications is both a hobby and my job at the same, which is great. 

A few years back, I started UniqTec just for fun. I love new technologies and got psyched about Android (as opposed to iOS). I went on to develop a few apps here and there. Most of the apps, projects, and work I do is because I have a problem and have to find a solution. So in a lot of ways, you could say I like to solve my own problems!

2. What’s the story behind the app? Where did the idea for Tasks & Notes come from?  And how did you go about building and launching Tasks & Notes?

At the time, our main product, IceWarp Server, provided Exchange ActiveSync functionality, but lacked any reasonable “Notes” application. So just for my personal use, I developed a simple notes app. There wasn’t any sync feature at the time. In fact, the way it originally worked was by accessing calendar items in the Android calendar storage and displaying them as notes.

The app generated some user interest and I got a lot of feature requests, one of the most common of which was to add task management functionality. I realized at the time there were no native apps for tasks and saw some market potential. After a few days, I had the first working app. It was only then that I decided to implement the ActiveSync protocol for full sync capability. I changed the name to Tasks & Notes, released the app, and made it available for free for a long time.

I love hearing from users and I make sure to reply to all e-mail inquiries. I really take into consideration the feature requests that users ask for. I think this is one of the main reasons why the app has become what it is today.

3. What makes Tasks & Notes different from other task management apps? Why do your users use Tasks & Notes instead of some of the other solutions out there?

A few years ago, there wasn’t much competition. Besides, I was just doing it for fun. But I’ve always kept an eye on competitive products, particularly those that provide ActiveSync functionality. For example, I am a happy user of Nine by 9Folders. It is pretty good, but it was missing support for tasks. But then one day I learned that they had added support for tasks to their product roadmap with the goal of getting it to market in 2 months. That was a signal that I needed to switch Tasks & Notes from free to paid.

I simply had to do it, even though I initially had no intention of doing that. Nine is probably our biggest, and in many ways, only competitor. It also provides email, contacts and notes functionality. But we have tried our best to stay ahead in terms of the functionality and flexibility we offer our users and I think we are successful.

I could go on and talk about the app and list all the extra features you will not find anywhere else. The major ones are custom filters and views, notification services (display upcoming tasks in the Android notification bar), calendar integration (display tasks in any calendar app), HTML support (other apps provide only HTML for emails, for example), drag & drop, check-lists (manage check-lists within an actual note or task that can be edited back in Outlook too), SMS support (send sms message from Outlook using Activesync), export/import, special search syntax, and many more. In short, the people who use Tasks are sophisticated users who want more. They know what they need and no other app offers what we offer. Additionally, they know that I listen when they request new functionality.

4. What are the unique challenges and joys of developing an app that is used by people all over the world?

The biggest challenge is that I just don’t have enough time to do everything I want to do.  I work on IceWarp and UniqTec: one job pays me reasonably and the other one is fun to do. But the best part of doing this is that it is nice to be on the front lines again and listen to feedback directly, to know what users like and appreciate, but also learn where the problems are. I used to do that with IceWarp, but that’s the main job of our support team now.

In terms of other challenges, localization is a tough one. If it’s not done right, it can ruin the app. All our translators are fans and do it because they love the app. But there are still a few untranslated labels here and there. Sometimes that can cause the app to crash and sometimes it causes other issues. I had to write a tool to make some revisions and warnings for those translated xml files. I mean who does that?

Another issue is ActiveSync itself. Microsoft has done a bad job with it. The general idea is great, but it lacks in so many areas. First of all, there are 3rd party implementations which do not work properly and users complain as a result. Then there are different versions of the protocol, which do things differently. Lastly, Microsoft does not support extra functionality and probably never will. For example, users ask for attachments support for Tasks or they want extra fields in Outlook. But that isn’t possible because the ActiveSync protocol doesn’t provide for it.

5. How do you split your time between developing new features and managing existing ones? What changes will users see over the next few months?

In addition to work, I also have 3 kids. So I don’t have a ton of free time! But as I mentioned before, our users lead the development. If they request a feature and there’s enough support for it by the community, I will add it.

I am currently working on the Pure Calendar widget integration. So many users have requested that so we are adding it. In addition, I would love to add the attachment support I mentioned above, but I unfortunately can’t.  Even in Exchange 2016, Microsoft only added attachment support for Calendars! Who would do that? Why not add it for any Exchange object?

6. What other productivity apps do you use? What do you see as the future of task management?  What are the challenges and where are the opportunities?

I used to be a Windows user, but when they released Windows 10, I’d had it. So I switched to Linux, which I love. Most of the tools are free, many of which I have written myself.

On Android, I use Nine and Tasks. On the desktop, I use the IceWarp WebClient which provides all the functionality for tasks, notes, emails, calendars and contacts. Since I can control the development of IceWarp, I’m also planning on making it a great solution for people who love GTD too. We are still thinking about iOS, as we get a lot of requests about releasing an iOS app. The world is moving and the market changes. On one hand, we have Google Apps and Office 365, and on the other hand we have Slack and similar applications. I’m not sure when Google and Microsoft will put some work into their web apps to make them both more user friendly and full-featured enough. Slack, on the other hand might be the future for team productivity, although I don’t use it because we are currently working on our own solution called IceWarp TeamChat. That is definitely a priority for me, so stay tuned!  :-)

Thanks for taking the time to share a little bit about Tasks & Notes for MS Exchange with us! Good luck and thanks for all your hard work in helping people become more productive. Anyone interested in learning more should follow Jakub and @icewarp on Twitter.

If you are, or know of someone we should interview, please get in touch, we’re always looking highlight people building cool stuff t make the rest of us more productive.

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Task Length: iOS vs. Android

It's amazing how much you learn once you go into beta. And we are learning a ton. One of the most interesting things we've learned so far is that there are distinct differences between Android users and iOS users when it comes to the length of the tasks they input. And that makes a big difference, particularly when it comes down to discerning intent and linking tasks to products, deals, and services that can help users actually complete their tasks.

Our original training set was iOS-based. The average character length of a task was around 95 characters, shorter than a lot of tweets. And a lot of tasks were even shorter than that, frequently just one or two words. But when we went into beta with our first partner, an Android task app, we experienced something much different.  Namely, the average character length jumped significantly: up to 125 characters.

At first we thought this might be due to the fact that users were copying and pasting tasks / lists from other applications into the app. I wouldn’t be surprised about this if our beta partner were a web service, but they are mobile only. We don’t have enough data right now to be able to determine if this is an anomaly or not, but as we add additional partners over the next few weeks and months, it will be interesting to see if this pattern holds.

If you have any thoughts or ideas as to why there might be a difference between iOS and Android, I’d love to hear it!

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Founders’ Stories: Taskler

To continue our new interview series with the people behind awesome productivity apps, we are pleased to introduce Alexander Deplov, co-founder of Pleeq Software and the creative force behind Taskler, a cool iOs to-do app out of Russia that has just been updated.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What got you interested in productivity? What methods / tips / tricks do you use to stay focused and productive?

I live in the south of Russia. When I first started out, I worked as a graphic designer. Later, I learned HTML and CSS. For the last few years, my brother and I have been focusing on web projects, some of which are pretty popular, some of which aren’t :-). More recently, I switched to iOS programming with Swift, which I love.

Let’s say you’d like to build a house. You can’t succeed without a good blueprint. You have to have a plan: a strong idea of the steps that you need to follow to get to your goal. It’s the same thing in any other area of life or business: you need a plan. And that’s how I stay productive. I have a plan that’s made up of long-term objectives and the tasks that help me reach those goals.

In terms of staying productive, my own trick is pretty simple: before I go to bed, I write down the most important tasks for the following day. The next day, I check off each item that I was able to finish. Before I go to bed, I check my list again to see how productive I was. This simple approach allows me to use literally anything as to-do list, from a notepad to an app. Of course, my favorite tool is Taskler!

2. What’s the story behind the app? Where did the idea for Taskler come from? How big is your team and how many users do you have? And how did you go about building and launching Taskler?

After reading Getting Things Done, my brother and I wanted to make our own to-do app. Our main goal was to make an app so simple to use that literally everybody could start using it straight away. It also had to be beautiful. Then I stumbled across some old paper business notebooks that had colorful badges/tags, which reminded me of how some people highlight important tasks. Together, these images formed the basis of the Taskler interface, where every task is a colorful bubble. By default, every bubble has a different color because every task is also different.

Right now, we’re a two-person team: two brothers, both of whom graduated from art school and also love to code. But we each play to our individual strengths. Dmitry writes more of the complex code, while I focus a lot on the visual concepts. In addition to programming and art, we also like to skateboard, listen to music, and read books about business and technology.

We’ve spent about a year on Taskler. It wasn’t simple, because of the interface. And at the beginning, we also had some bugs to iron out, all of which should be taken care of with the latest update. Currently, Taskler has been downloaded more than 40,000 times, mostly by users in the US and Asia. But this is still a very young app and we are really excited to see it where it goes. And we’re working as hard as we can to make it better.

3. What makes Taskler different from other task management apps? Why do your users use Taskler instead of some of the other solutions out there?

Task managers differ depending on the objectives that developers are trying to achieve. Our goal was simplicity, so that even a family member who’s not technologically sophisticated could start using it as soon as they installed it. Taskler has another important part: the ability to enter sub-tasks. If you have a complex goal and you split it into small and simple steps it will be much easier to achieve.

4. What are the unique challenges and joys of developing an app that is used by people all over the world?

We live in amazing times. It used to be that it took a lot of time and effort to invent, improve, or change something. Now the most amazing tools are in everyone’s pocket or on their wrist. And we can create really cool and helpful products fast, improve them with almost no cost, and ship them all over the world in no time. Even a small team can have an amazing impact on the lives of a large number of people. That’s amazing!

Of course, we are still taking the first steps in this direction. In the future, apps will became even smarter and users will do even less work (for example, check out this presentation by Aaron Shapiro, CEO of Huge Inc.). So, it’s interesting to see and be part of the future.

5. How do you split your time between developing new features and managing existing ones? What changes will users see over the next few months?

For our point of view, new features should be added only when current features are polished and work well. I think adding “new features” should not be a goal in and of itself for an app. If you take such rock stars like Instagram, they implement new features very slowly. But the app itself constantly gets better because of the amount of work that is being put into it. In other words, you have to focus on whatever the main goal of the app is.

For Taskler, we collect user feedback and prioritize our development by focusing on those features that most users want and which help advance the long-term goals of the application itself. For example, we’re working on features like sync, widgets, apple watch support, and repeating tasks. We’re want to improve the existing feature set, keeping in mind simplicity and easy of use.

6. What other productivity apps do you use? What do you see as the future of task management? What are the challenges and where are the opportunities?

Currently we have a side project that we’re working on called DoitQUICKLY. It’s another way to manage your tasks. A separate card is created for each task. Every card has a timeline so you can visually see how much time has passed. The idea behind DoitQUICKLY was to push you to do more in a short period of time. It is an attempt to push people to act more and actually get things done.

I think we’re the current model is based on an app-for-everything approach. There’s an app for this and an app for that. But this model is going to change, as voice assistants like Siri or Amazon Echo understand us better and perform more tasks. When that happens, it’s going to create new ways to manage our tasks. It’s hard to predict now what exactly that’s going to look like, but we need to start thinking about that. New technologies will bring new opportunities, and, as developers, we should make our apps smart enough so that there aren’t unnecessary interactions with other apps. I think there’s going to be a shift in which digital assistants make the leap from being a digital notepad to becoming something that is smart enough to help us think, plan, and accomplish our tasks.

Thanks for taking the time to share a little bit about Taskler with us! Good luck and thanks for all your hard work in helping people become more productive. Anyone interested in learning more should follow Alex and Taskler on Twitter.

If you are, or know of someone we should interview, please get in touch, we’re always looking to highlight people building cool stuff that make the rest of us more productive.

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Founders’ Stories: FacileThings

Today, we are excited to bring you the first in our new interview series with the people behind some awesome productivity apps. Our goal is to highlight the work that they do in helping us become more productive and hopefully introduce you to cool new apps in the process.

For our first interview, we are pleased to introduce Francisco Sáez, founder and CEO of FacileThings, a GTD app out of Alicante, Spain that has just been re-launched with a cool new look & feel.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What got you interested in productivity? What methods / tips / tricks do you use to stay focused and productive?

I am a Spanish computer engineer and founded FacileThings four years ago. As a software developer, I have always been interested in obtaining the best possible results with the available resources. And this is what productivity consists of: doing more with less.

Six years ago, I worked as a project manager for a software development company. It was insane. I used to work on 15 or 20 projects at the same time, which meant I hardly had a personal life. Then I found the book Getting Things Done by David Allen, and started to see the light.

Basically, I use GTD in my daily life in order to keep focused on what I have to do. In addition, I use the Pomodoro Technique to carry out certain tasks and Kanban in order to manage some collaborative projects.

2. What’s the story behind the app? Where did the idea for FacileThings come from? How big is your team and how many users do you have? And how did you go about building and launching FacileThings?

As I kept on reading the GTD book, I started to visualise the web application I would like to use to implement this methodology. I looked for a similar application, but I couldn't find one so I decided to create it. In addition, after two years as a project manager, I missed programming, so creating FacileThings turned out to be the perfect excuse to start using the keyboard again.

After more than a year of work, I contacted a start-up incubator and they helped me launch the application in beta. It turned out that there was product-market fit. We currently have several thousand active users and are growing rapidly. We’re particularly excited about this because we are a paid app - there are no free accounts. In other words, our users see the value that FacileThings provides.

In terms of our team: there are five people working on FacileThings, although no one else except me works on it full-time right now.

3. What makes FacileThings different from other task management apps? Why do your users use FacileThings instead of some of the other solutions out there?

FacileThings is “GTD on rails”. It provides a convenient structure to practice GTD without “thinking” in GTD and helps the user to establish the necessary habits to be more productive and therefore decrease his or her stress.

Moreover, FacileThings has an educational function: it guides the users so that they make use of best practices, and explains the reason behind every aspect of the GTD methodology, something that is often counterintuitive for those who are not familiar with GTD.

4. What are the unique challenges and joys of developing an app that is used by people all over the world?

Getting Things Done has been translated into 32 languages and 1.6 million copies have been sold in more than 40 different countries. This, and the fact that GTD is a logical collection of good habits, is the reason why differences in culture are not an important aspect to take into account when implementing the methodology.

However, in order to help people use GTD to increase their productivity, you need to speak their language. For now, FacileThings is available in Spanish and English, since they are the most spoken languages in the world if you don't take Chinese into account.

Another challenge is to get the pricing right. We’re a paid app, but since an American, Greek, and Peruvian are bound to have different perceptions about the same amount of money, establishing the right price for everyone is both important and challenging. In addition, taxes in internet transactions are becoming an important aspect to take into consideration, since governments from a lot of countries want taxes collected on the purchases their citizens make. This is pretty hard to handle, especially for a small company.

5. How do you split your time between developing new features and managing existing ones? What big changes will users see when you roll out the new version of FacileThings?

We define the development priorities - from creating new features to improving the existing ones - based on the feedback we get from our users, as well as on our own vision of what FacileThings should be.

At this point, we’ve done a lot of development on FacileThings and the application has a lot of features. So we now spend more time improving what already exists rather than introducing lots of new things. But when we do introduce new features, we try and introduce them gradually so that the user’s experience is not threatened.

6. What other productivity apps to you use? What do you see as the future of task management? What are the challenges and where are the opportunities?

On top of FacileThings, I use Evernote and Google Drive as document repositories, Slack and Skype as communication tools with my collaborators, and Trello to manage some specific software development projects.

I believe that the future of personal productivity has to be the result of integrating services and applications. People do not want to have the same tasks spread across different sources and, if they do have them like this, at least they want to have the possibility of managing them in a unique place. This is why public APIs will have an increasingly important role.

Thanks for taking the time to share a little bit about FacileThings with us! Good luck and thanks for all your hard work in helping people become more productive. Anyone interested in learning more should follow Francisco and @FacileThings on Twitter.

If you are, or know of someone we should interview, please get in touch, we’re always looking highlight people building cool stuff t make the rest of us more productive.

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Founder Interviews

We're going to be rolling out a new feature in the next week. In short, we are going to showcase interviews with productivity app developers. Sites like TechCrunch or lifehacker provide awesome app reviews, but you don't always learn about the story behind the app. For example, why someone decided to develop a new productivity tool rather than using one that's already on the market, or what tricks people who build productivity apps for a living use to stay on track and focused themselves. That is the hole we are going to try and fill. So stay tuned!

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Context Switches

(Image Kyle Pearce via Flickr)

Context switches are expensive. That's true in computing. But it is also true for productivity. Switching from one process to another, or from one task to another, requires both time and energy. In computer science, a lot of time and effort is spent on optimizing systems to be able to handle context switches as efficiently as possible. But when it comes to our own productivity, very often we aren't well attuned to the costs context switches impose. Why is context switching costly for our productivity?

There are a whole bunch of reasons. But first off, people don't multi-task well. Really. Our brains just aren't wired that way, despite everything we here from people who claim to be fantastic multi-taskers. It is actually far more productive to focus on completing a single task at a time. In fact, Stanford researchers have found that multi-tasking makes you stupid. Ok, maybe not stupid. But they did find that multi-tasking negatively impacts cognition (attention, recall, focus), while other studies have shown that multi-tasking can reudce your productivity by up to 40%. Multi-tasking is akin to constantly switching contexts. If you are multi-tasking, you are forcing yourself to reorient yourself towards the new task, with all the different types of knowledge, contexts etc. that entails. People who are truly productive - the ones we should be emulating - are not multi-taskers. Rather, they focus on one task at a time, nail it, and move on to the next.

Another trigger for context switches is interruptions. Multi-tasking represents an internal context switch in that you choose to change back and forth between tasks. By contrast, interruptions are external: an external force comes between you and your task. That "thing" can be a phone call or a person stopping by your office. But like multi-tasking, interruptions force you to re-establish the mind- task connection. In other words, every time you are interrupted, you have to refocus your energy on the task you should be working on.

In short, context switches are expensive. Our brains aren't wired to multi-task (despite whatever So how do we avoid them? One strategy for success is to group tasks in contextualized lists In the same way that you go to the grocery store with a list of things to purchase rather than making multiple trips for each item, group similar tasks together. Block out a chunk of time to respond to your email rather than as one-offs. Pay all your bills at the same time. Do all your online shopping together. The more you group these activities together, the more productive you will be.

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Unhelpful GTD Software Chart

I just stumbled across this GTD Software Comparison Chart.

At first, I was really excited, particularly as the list was apparently updated just a couple of days ago. In principle, an overview like this provides a great starting point for people interested in GTD software. There is a lot of value in a central repository of information about productivity software.

But that only works if you actually update the list. And that's the problem here. There are a lot of apps listed that are no longer around. That's frustrating and a waste of time. Talk about unproductive! To be fair, they do state when the information for a given app was updated, but still, how hard is it to simply get rid of a dead app?

If you are interested in finding out which productivity app might work best for you, I'd encourage you to head over to Lifehacker or one of our other favorite productivity blogs.

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Productivity vs. Creativity

There's an interesting article over on HBR about the tension between productivity and creativity. In short, it argues that while productive people focus on making "steady and measurable progress toward their goals," creativity involves "struggling down several blind alleys before finding the right solution."

In many ways, I think this is a false choice. The people that I regard as spectacularly productive aren't automatons working mindlessly towards a goal. Rather, they are thoughtful, reflective people who set a goal and then work towards that goal in a measured way down different pathways. As a result of that exploration, the goal itself is frequently refined or changes altogether. This requires both autonomy and the courage to make mistakes, but it also results in huge breakthroughs. And that kind of innovation is priceless.

How to be both creative and productive? Set aside some time each day to think and reflect. My first manager at Yahoo! told me that way before so much was made of Google's 20% time. I thought he was crazy, but over time I realized that he was right. It's critical. It allows you to move past focusing on what is urgent and important to strategically think about what could be. As Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn stated, blocking out time to reflect and think things through "is the best investment you can make in yourself and the single most important productivity tool I use."

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Lists

(Image Chris Lott via Flickr)

Fred Wilson just wrote a post on lists. For anybody interested in startups, his blog is a must read. It's literally the first thing I read every morning.

Wilson breaks out lists into two types: task management (where users create their own lists) and publishing (where people / companies make lists for others to consume). The challenge is how to become a network, where publishers make lists that others consume. Wilson argues that no one has really accomplished this, even though "Listmaking is the kind of thing that really lends itself to the internet architecture."

A couple of thoughts:

Task management is personal. But people likely share many common tasks (e.g. grocery shopping). Commonalities across lists can provide templates for action. In other words, the wheel doesn't need to be recreated each time. The trick is to deliver those commonalities at appropriate points in the worksflow.

Some task apps allow shared/public lists. Wunderlist, for example, used to allow you to make your list public (they are apparently working on this, which ironically underscores some of Wilson's points). Trello offers a similar feature. The problem is that users have to actively search for those lists, rather than consume them passively/receive them as suggestions. Moreover, public lists are limited and generally particular to the author, which limits their utility/applicability across contexts.

So, how do you create a list ecosystem that is robust enough that it allows for lists to be created and consumed more broadly? Wilson points out the importance of engaging with the "obsessed listmakers on your platform." But beyond that, I think task management apps have to become more pro-active themselves. It's not enough to help people organize their tasks, we also need to help people complete the things on their list.

How? One way would be to break tasks down into their component parts. For example, if I have a task like "Plan a birthday party for John," it would be amazing if a task app would break that task down into its constituent parts (possible locations, invitations, gift suggestions, etc.) and provide recommendations for each sub-task. This requires a lot of information beyond the task title itself. We would need to know, for example, how old John is, the location of the author, etc. If we did know that information, however, we could then make some great suggestions as to how to break down and accomplish that task.

To stick with the example above, if John is a kid in Chicago, we could then return a list of the top party places, gender-appropriate invitations and gift suggestions, and so on. Beyond disambiguating the task to provide actionable steps, integrating a social element would also allow users to draw on other people's tasks in the way that people draw on other's people's pins in Pinterest or Tweets in Twitter.

What are your thought on making task management more useful? Let us know!

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15 Secrets to Time Management

It seems like new productivity books come out all the time. But our focus should be on being productive rather than just reading about it. Given that, it can be tough to know which time/task management books are actually worth reading (Here's our list of current favorites).

That said, every once in a while a new book comes along that is worth a read. Kevin Kruse's 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management: The Productivity Habits of 7 Billionaires, 13 Olympic Athletes, 29 Straight-A Students, and 239 Entrepreneurs, is definitely worthwhile, especially if you are looking for a great all-in-one book.

One of the reasons that I like this book is that it draws on what works for other, really successful people. I think there is value in learning about how people struggle with and overcome many of the same challenges we all face. No, I'm not a billionaire or an Olympic Athlete. But I'm an entrepreneur. I'm also a father and a husband. In other words, there are a ton of demands on my time. Working more isn't always possible, but there are always ways to work smarter. 15 Secrets not only provides actionable steps to become more productive, it also teaches you how others manage to balance all the competing demands on their time, while simultanelously achieving their goals and leading fulfilling lives.

Aside from the anecdotes that help ground and enrich the book, 15 Secrets covers a lot of familiar ground, ranging from MITs (Most Important Task), to Inbox Zero, and how to address procrastination. One piece of advice that you don't hear all the time is to get rid of your to-do list in favor of scheduling everything on your calendar. I prefer a hybrid approach. I timebox my to-do list on my calendar to make sure that I can allocate enough time to focus on what is important (my MIT), but also to ensure that I don't forget anything. I schedule in "Other" blocks to make sure I don't forget to pick up the toothpaste etc.

In short, if you want a great overview of time management practices, one that really covers the gamut in an acccessible yet engaging way, pick up a copy of 15 Secrets.

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Hacker News - Pomodoro Technique

(Image Michael Meyer via Flickr)

One of the first things I do every day is check out out Hacker News. It's a great way to keep up on really interesting developments in the world of tech, as well as discover cool, random stuff (like this). There's generally not a lot of productivity-related articles there. Today is different. Today someone linked to a great article over at Fast Company about using the Pomodoro Technique to improve your productivity.

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management methodology developed by Francisco Crillo. It's different in it's focus than, say, GTD. It really zeroes in on how to carve out the time and focus to accomplish the things on your task list (as opposed to capturing things on your task list in the first place).

Far too often, I find myself sitting at my computer for hours at a stretch, not taking breaks. It's too easy to get off track and really hard to stay focused. Enter the Pomodoro Technique! Like so many productivity methods, it's easy on paper but hard to put into practice:

Choose 1 task

Set a timer for 25 minutes

Work on that task -- and only that task -- until the timer rings

Take a 4-minute break

Repeat steps 1-4 three more times, followed by a 15 minute break

The Fast Company article gets into the method in more detail, as well as some of the challenges. And if you want even more details, there's a ton of books, the official Pomodoro Technique website, as well as a lot of apps (Google Play / App Store) that help you put it into practice. Lastly, if you like the article, you want might to check out the author's own blog.

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Creativity Inc.: Sustainable Flow

I'm not sure why I had not read it before, given that so many people have recommended it, but last week I finally picked up Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, by Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar. After reading it, I had to write a post about it. It is, as David Slocum wrote in Forbes, "one of the half-dozen best books that have been written about creative business and creative leadership. Ever."

But it is so much more that that. It has great lessons that can be applied to productivity in general, and to time & task management in particular.

Here's why: I don't believe in productivity for productivity's sake. That is, the reason we spend so much time working on improving our productivity is because we we want to be the best we can possibly be in every aspect of our lives. And Creativity, Inc. is about how to achieve and sustain that flow that allows us to be our best.

As the head of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has had a lot of experience in creating sustainable creativity. The book contains a lot of stories about building a culture of creativity at Pixar and how that sustained innovation. Yet it goes well beyond that. Particularly the last chapter,“Starting Points: Thoughts for Managing a Creative Culture," provides 33 "starting points" for building and sustaining excellence.

One of the most important take aways is the insistence on linking ideas to behaviors. Like we've talked about in other posts, it isn't enough to come up with a framework for organization or, as with this book, creativity; it is critcal to habituate that framework and live it. Only then can you truly achieve and sustain the best that we are all striving to achieve in our lives.

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Top Productivity Blogs

(Image Sean MacEntee via Flickr)

What are the blogs that have influenced our thinking about improving productivity? What blogs do we read regularly to keep up to date on developments in this incredibly fast-changing space? This will be a running list, so please check back / let us know what we've missed.

The List:

Lifehacker is simply one of the best out there, particularly for app reviews. To be honest, it's my go to blog. It covers life hacks more broadly, not just productivity. Bonus: its founding editor, Gina Trapani, has also put together some awesome open source productivity apps of her own.

Productivityist provides a great time-management philosophy together with other content to make you more productive in diverse aspects of your life. That shouldn't be surprising, given that founder Mike Vardy used to be managing editor of Lifehack (see below).

Lifehack is similar to Lifehacker in that it encompasses way more than just productivity. While I tend to rely on Lifehacker for app developments, I love the layout and organization of Lifehack. Its section on productivity is worth visiting regularly.

Sources of Insight is my go-to source for good productivity book reviews, but it also contains a ton of other great resoruces. That shouldn't be surprising, as it's author, J.D. Meier, also wrote one of our favorite books, Getting Results the Agile Way.

43 Folders hasn't been updated in over 4 years, but it's still on this list. That's a testament to the content that's been aggretated on the site since 2004 - it's still relevant. Among my favorite posts are Getting Started with Getting Thigns Done and Building a Smarter To-Do List

Freakishly Productive isn't a site that I visit all the time, but I'm always glad when I do. The design is awesome and intuitive. And I love the content. Most of all, I love author Annie Mueller's goal of "becoming the best version of myself." That's what improving productivity is all about!

zen habits is a little different that most of the above. It isn't an aggregator / collection of diverse content. Rather, it's author, Leo Babauta, is also the author of Zen to Done, a modified version of GTD that I've found works best for me. His blog continues to rif on that and so it's one I find myself revisting regularly

Asian Efficiency is another great blog. i stumbled across it through their review of Getting Results the Agile Way, whcih was fantastic and got me to pick up a copy for myself. But beyond reviews, they provide everything from basic primers to more advanced dicusssions on becoming more efficient.

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The 4-Hour Workweek

The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss is one of the most popular productivity books of the last decade; it has sold over a million copies, has been published in over thirty countries, and had a significant tenure on the New York Times Bestseller List. So, yes, we had to do a review of it.

Ferriss's book centers around the "DEAL" approach to work and to life overall. DEAL stands for Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation. These are are the four steps to become part of the New Rich, which Ferriss defines as people who have the time, income, and mobility to live a rich life.

It's important to separate Ferriss's book into two types of content: the goals he describes and the tactics he uses to achieve his goals. His primary goals of not being tied to a specific location and of only wanting to work four hours a week may or may not appeal to you, but the long collection of tactics he describes to help make an individual more productive are helpful and cogently organized.

Ferriss brings together many common productivity concepts to create the "how" of achieving a four-hour work week, including the Pareto Principle, tips and tricks for reducing procrastination, tactics for avoiding interruption, providing effective feedback, day-to-day time management, and delegation. These concepts drive a lot of the "Elimination" section of the book.

"Automation" includes a wide variety of strategies for creating businesses that generate continuous cash flow, and gives very detailed examples of how to create these businesses while using small amounts of your time on an on-going basis. This section is amazingly detailed, with the names of many websites and services listed including instructions of how to use them to achieve various aspects of starting a business.

The section on Automation is, for me at least, the most interesting part of the book, and the biggest departure from other productivity books.

The 4-Hour Workweek is one part lifestyle manifesto, one part productivity book, and one part self-help book. A wide variety of readers will find at least some portion of this content helpful and applicable even if they are not seeking to reorganize their life along Ferriss's principles.