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Some of the most rewarding features to add to products are ones that don’t increase surface area, but increase depth. This is how you continue to make a product a whole lot better without it feeling like it got a whole lot bigger. Basecamp’s new References feature is a great example of this. Video + write-up: https://updates.37signals....


 
 
 
 
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An unusually simple spin-off story.It was 2014, and we decided to spin one of our products off into its own company. The product was Know Your Company and knew the perfect person to run it. Her name was @clairejlew.There are a million ways to spin-off a company. And most of… pic.twitter.com/ahgRlT8Ixs— Jason Fried (@jasonfried) April 11, 2024

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Having a style collapses hundreds of future decisions into one, and gives you focus.

If you want to progress faster, write concise explanations. Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, rewor...

And in the midst of living, take a photo.

When someone just gets it

With news that OpenAI's ChatGPT Voice feature is now available to all free users, you can ditch Siri as your main voice assistant on your iPhone -- well,

What can you remove? What can you neglect?

One of the things that makes Obsidian unique is the ability to extend its capabilities with third-party plugins. In this post, we share a bunch of our favorite Obsidian plugins to help you take your personal knowledge management game to the next level.

A riff on what it’s been like to be a solo studio / service business over the last four years.

One of my favourite things to do in my free time is to tinker with this website. Indeed, this website is the culmination of years of tinkering. I have added features like coffee shop maps that I can share with friends, a way for me to share my bio in two languages, a sitemap.xml file to help search engines find pages on my website, and more.

I wrote the article below about working in a single text file back in July 2006. I stuck with this way of taking notes until the end of my employment with Nortel in 2009. By then, the text file I was...

It's a perfect companion to my discbound paper notebook

Building a product is like running a marathon with a backpack.Adding features adds weight to your backpack.Some product features will add a lot of weight to your backpack. They make you go slower by a small percentage for the rest of your run. They make it harder to change…— Marc Köhlbrugge (@marckohlbrugge) February 21, 2024

I think, I think I've found a music workflow I'm happy with for 2024 and it looks like this.

George Saunders shared with us his notes for a speech he gave at Syracuse University, in which he shares how one of his biggest regrets sprang from something very small.

Creator Cabins seem to be a growing business – thanks in part to the increase in remote work. Who doesn’t aspire to have a place of their own for uninterrupted creative work? Within that genre resides the more-within-the-grasp-of-an-actual-human cabins for backyards and “gardens.” This seems to be bigger in the

Photographer Thomas Hawk shares why he believes Flickr is still the best online photo sharing service nearly 20 years into its existence.

You can use Cloudflare to customize your Mastodon username domain without needing to host your own Mastodon.

My podcast producer recently turned me onto a show called Acquired, which features its co-hosts, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, diving deep into the backstories ... Read more

Schedule Shut Down, Complete Here’s what happens, without exception, at the end of my normal work day. First, I make sure my master task lists ... Read more

Why you need a shutdown ritual to maintain work-life balance and maximize productivity

Wallpapers have always been a reflection of my often chaotic energy. I can sometimes spend months, or even years, without ever changing my wallpaper, and I can spend that same amount of time just frenetically changing it every day until I’m completely satisfied. A lot of that decision process is completely irrational, but I do

Chickens and pigs is a metaphor for who's got skin in the game. Or to leave metaphors behind, who's involved in a project vs who is fully committed. Also known as the bacon and eggs principle, it's from the old joke (sometimes told as a short story), "In a bacon and eggs breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed." Many people may be interested in and share their opinions on a project or decision. But only some will be responsible for delivering the project and directly accountable for its success. Everyone may be interested in a bet, but only some players have money to lose. The chickens and pigs metaphor used to be part of the scrum guide for developing software but was removed. While it memorably distinguishes accountability in a project, there's a danger that it alienates or diminishes valuable input that might make a project successful. For a more conventional grouping of stakeholders in a project, see RACI