Buckets of Time

I'm going to spend 30 minutes or 40 minutes answering 70 emails, which means that I'm actually only spending two minutes an email

Just become a person who's not just automatically saying yes to everything, no matter how unreasonable the demand is

If you actually set some boundaries, you appear more valuable

Try letting that one thing slide a little bit longer than you normally would and you, you'll find out the sky's not falling and the world doesn't end

You actually have probably have a lot more control over this than you think you do

You can be doing a bunch of stuff and not getting anywhere. That's what happens when priorities keep changing and points of view or, or responsibilities keep changing

You confuse enthusiasm with priority. The thing you were so excited about three weeks ago, you're not actually that excited about when you have to to do it

This notion of why we try to have... the discipline to only change our mind or make determinations on the big projects we're pursuing every six weeks is to enable that

While you have 24 hours a day, you don't have 24 hours of attention a day

Time and attention are very different things and attention is far more limited than, than time

If you interrupt someone for just 10 minutes, how long does it take for them to ramp back up into productive mode? And for some people to take as much as 45 minutes

If half of your mental energy or a quarter or whatever is, is always drawn to the right side of your screen, the left side of the screen... you can't do one thing at a time

I use a single laptop. I have one computer, so it's single laptop, it's a 13 inch laptop. I don't have an external monitor, I don't have a second computer

I try to always have like one or two things to do in a given day, um, and not nine things

The key here is to figure out what's not worth doing, um, right now

Not about eeking out more hours, about collecting all these tasks that come in that are not urgent, that are not ASAP, which is 99% of everything, and dealing with them in bulk

My favorite days are the ones where I set up these buckets that collect all the rainwater that's falling down in terms of interruptions

The way I found to be most effective is to bucket that time in ways that I'll do a certain activity

When priorities keep changing and points of view or, or responsibilities keep changing... you can be doing a bunch of stuff and not getting anywhere

We don't have any dedicated managers who just do management work. So, we don't have project managers, which should probably be surprising to many people, especially since we make project management software, but the software we make is made so people can run their own projects. So, it doesn't require project managers necessarily

It's not that these people would sit around twiddling their thumbs. In fact, a lot of the times, that's the problem. The problem is when you don't have 40 hours a week of legal work, that person who's in that role is going to find a way to conjure up 40 hours of work

I think there is something about everyone kind of being involved that we do that I think probably a lot of other companies don't do

Magnano, they write all of their own HTML and CSS and a little bit of JavaScript and some of them get in there and do some Rails work. And it just, it shocks people. And they're like, well, that's actually called a design engineer role. And it's called a designer

So in 20 years, in some ways, the skills have atrophied and people are less able to build things that they built 20 years ago. So don't give me the shit that it can't be done. Of course, it can be done. It has been done in very recent memory

Our standard team size for building new features in any of our applications new or existing is two people. One designer, one programmer, that's it. That team of just two people can take an idea all the way from pitch to reshipping it

There's just an inherent alienation from the work when you're doing this little sub part. This was the problem with mass production back in the day where we were replacing artisans who someone would put together a whole saddle and they would do the sewing and they'd do the line

It's even the same thing for Jason and I. So we don't have an in-house lawyer anymore, which means that a lot of the things that, at least if they're contentious in the legal department, they flow to Jason and I. And do you know how much easier it is for us to say, fuck it. Let's not do anything about it

We made progress in about six total hours of work that probably would have taken another team a few more days because they'd have to go back and forth and the feedback loop just gets slower and slower and slower and slower

It wasn't like, we cannot ship this product and we're stuck and like we desperately need someone to come finish this. It was more of a speculative situation, but one that wasn't imaginary. Like we had work lined up for you guys, you know, to do and we wanted you to do certain kinds of work

I'm surprised when people can't do all of that. I'm like, what are you doing that you don't have some time to get back to people?

Jason and I are the face of the company to a lot of people. And that's not sort of a burden. That's a blessing. That's a wonderful thing that we can have that direct connection

Someone, we're not just someone, seven people that day writes Jason about this one annoying thing. I guarantee you, by the end of that day, that problem was fixed if it was fixable in the day because Jason was sick and fucking tired of answering the same damn thing for the seventh time

We often talk about how we set product direction and company direction on a gut feeling. Well, that gut needs something to work with. And that's what the feedback is. That's what that continuous stream of interaction with customers, potential customers, haters, fans, all of it goes into that gut machine

We weren't interested in racing a bunch of series of venture capital funding or other forms of investment. We didn't really need the sophisticated structure for that

If you start out too complicated, it's quite hard to go backwards. That's the other reason a one-way door. So if you stick with the LLC structure for now, you can decide to convert it later

I would tell him just to not think about any of that shit right now. Make one thing, make it work. Make sure you're even around in three years to make your next product or two years or whatever it is. Don't worry about that stuff

The key is, of course, keep it as simple as you can initially. That gives you all the flexibility and optionality you need down the road. That's what I would suggest