Igloo is now free to use with up to ten people, making it easier to work with your whole team, your customers or your partners.

Your Igloo is built around apps you already know and love: blogs, calendars, file sharing, forums, microblog and wikis.

Start building your Igloo instantly (no credit card required), or check out their awesome Sandwich Videos.

* * *

My thanks to Igloo for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Jared Sinclair:

I’ve been wrestling with some hard design challenges for my next app. Every day this week, I worked late into the evening, pushing the design to a point that seemed like the right solution, only to wake up the next day and see that yesterday’s solution wasn’t right yet.

It’s taxing to work like this, but rewarding.

Remember last week when I said Matt Gemmell was on fire lately? Well, the flame burns on. This time he’s writing about digital distractions and ruthlessly doing what we can to avoid them in order to crank out our best creative work.

This fits inline with the aforelinked piece about ego depletion.

Consider: You’re sitting at your desk, trying to accomplish a creative task. Meanwhile your phone is buzzing about once every 3 or 4 minutes, your Twitter stream is flowing in the background, and your email inbox is dinging each time a new email comes in.

In that scenario, you’re fighting against more than just distractions. Even if you can simply dismiss each notification out of your mind in a split-second, that is still a choice you’ve made — am I going to pay attention or not — and thus it has drawn on those cognitive resources you need to complete the creative task at hand.

Heck, so long as we’re on the subject… this is also why working within constraints so often breeds creativity. When you have a wide open canvas with unlimited time and resources, you’ve got too many decisions to make. If you’re dealing with time, budget, and canvas constraints then many of the project’s decisions have already been made for you, thus freeing up your cognitive resources to focus on how to best creatively solve the problem at hand.

Fantastic essay by Kathy Sierra about how apps with gamification and poor user experiences deplete our cognitive resources. (Via Marco.)

This is a subject which has fascinated me endlessly since I first learned about it a couple of years ago. Making smaller, inconsequential decisions impacts our ability to make bigger decisions, do hard work, and solve difficult problems later in the day. (Commonly referred to as Ego Depletion.)

It’s why the brain works best in sprints with breaks in-between, so we can have time to refuel our cog resources in between stretches of “knowledge work”.

I also love hearing about what sorts of patters and habits people set up for themselves. For example, did you know President Obama only wears gray or blue suits? Because it’s one less thing to think about, thus leaving him with more mental energy to run the country.

If you feel decision fatigue on a regular basis, consider automating some of your daily, inconsequential decisions. Such as when you get up each morning, what you wear, and what you eat for breakfast and lunch.