On Twitter and on the past couple episodes of Shawn Today I’ve been talking a lot about the importance of fun when it comes to doing our best creative work. Not only are we more whimsical and daring when we’re having fun, but playfulness and fun also serve as indicators letting us know we’re in a setting where we are capable of doing great creative work.

Along those lines, here’s an excerpt from a speech that Calvin and Hobbes creator, Bill Watterson gave in 1990 for the graduating class at Kenyon College:

If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

Justin Williams:

People may write off ADN as a failed experiment and maybe it technically is, but it was always a risky proposition. They always were going against the grain and seemed like a longshot to succeed. We need more people to take risks like that.

Some sad news from Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg:

The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees. After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders. Dalton and Bryan will continue to be responsible for the operation of App.net, but no longer as employees. Additionally, as part of our efforts to ensure App.net is generating positive cash flow, we are winding down the Developer Incentive Program. We will be reaching out to developers currently enrolled in the program with more information.

Like many of you reading this probably, I was one of the original backers of ADN and I used it quite a bit in the early days. In fact, I even moved Tweetbot out of my Dock and replaced it with Riposte. ADN is so much more than “Twitter without the ads”, but Alpha (the Twitter-like part of ADN) was my biggest reason for using and paying for the service. Over time, most of the people I followed on ADN began simply dual-posting between ADN and Twitter. And I only know of two people who actually quit Twitter to use only ADN. So that’s why it just wasn’t worth it to me to renew my annual subscription. And clearly I wasn’t the only one.

Dalton and Bryan and the whole ADN team truly did build something amazing. Congratulations to them for doing the work and shipping something great.

Some excellent advice here. I’ve been working from home for a little more than 3 years now and I concur with all of Matt’s tips. The one that I would add: define your daily goals.

Even with a schedule, it can be easy to meander through the day and to go to bed at night feeling like you didn’t actually accomplish anything (even when you did). Because so much of the work we do these days is “ongoing”, there isn’t always a strong sense of accomplishment. Not to mention that when you work from home you don’t have coworkers in the office with you to celebrate the small milestones of victory. So I will identify 3 big things each day that I want to accomplish. If I can at least tackle 2 of the 3 then when I call it quits for the day I have a quantifiable metric for feeling succesful.

VSCO, which has been profitable since day one and now has 43 employees, has just raised $40,000,000:

Joel Flory, the chief executive and a founder of VSCO, said in a recent interview that although the company had been operating profitably, the team decided it wanted to expand and add to product offerings in international markets, as well as work on other creative ventures, like awarding grants to artists.

I’m interested and excited to see what they do with the funds. Pretty much every photograph I make finds its way through a VSCO filter of some sort. I use VSCO Cam on my iPhone and the VSCO Film presets in Lightroom for all the shots I take with my Olympus.

Matt Mullenweg:

Things were and are going well, but there was an opportunity cost to how we were managing the company toward break-even, and we realized we could invest more into WordPress and our products to grow faster. Also our cash position wasn’t going to be terribly strong especially after a number of infrastructure and product investments this and last year.

This week’s sweet setup interview is with my long-time internet pal, Aaron Mahnke. Aaron is a Sweet Setup alumnus from the original series of interviews I did here. His office looks the same as it did back in October 2010, but his hardware has all been upgraded and his software in use is quite a bit different now, as well.

However, I bet one thing that hasn’t changed is his answer to the question about how his setup helps him to do his best creative work:

I’ve tried my best to surround myself with tools that help me get the job done faster. I take notes in Notational Velocity, which is connected with SimpleNote, so that I never have to save, rename, or move the files again. I keep inspiration logged in Yojimbo and Littlesnapper, both of which sync across my computers. And I try my best to master hot keys to save time and effort.

Creativity is all about reducing the distance from inspiration to retention. I might not be able to react to a moment of inspiration right away, but if I can capture it properly (via screenshot, dragging into Yojimbo, or typing the idea out) I can come back to it when I’m ready. This isn’t multitasking, though. This is all about knowing your tools and having a solid system.

Workflow Mastery is an ebook that will teach you how to work and play with a clear mind.

• Learn to avoid procrastination and form your work into paths of mastery.

• Build strong decisive systems by starting with the most basic building blocks.

• Nurture calm confident elegance throughout your workflows.

Written by the author of Creating Flow with OmniFocus, Workflow Mastery: Building from the Basics helps you to build solid workflows so you can work and play with a clear mind.

Winner of a Quality in Excellence and Design Award and a Bronze eLit Award in Education (First edition — Workflow: Beyond Productivity).

Now available at MasteryInWorkflow.com and UsingOmniFocus.com.

* * *

My thanks to Workflow Mastery for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I follow up with last week’s episode, Regret and Focus, to talk about the need for having a focused schedule, why it’s especially important for creative people, and a step-by-step walk through for how to get started.

Sponsored by:

• Scratch: Capture your ideas with the best quick-input notepad for iPhone.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Sylvia Poggioli (via Kyle Steed) tells the story for NPR about coffee shops all over Europe that offer caffè sospeso, or suspended coffee. Suspended coffee is when a customer comes in for a cup of coffee and they pay for two so that someone else can have a drink for free.

The barista would keep a log, and when someone popped his head in the doorway of the cafe and asked, “Is there anything suspended?” the barista would nod and serve him a cup of coffee … for free.

It’s an elegant way to show generosity: an act of charity in which donors and recipients never meet each other, the donor doesn’t show off and the recipient doesn’t have to show gratitude.

There is a Coffee Sharing website with a list of all the shops that do Suspended Coffee. And then there’s a coffee shop in Kentucky that offers a similar model, but with a twist. At A Cup of Common Wealth customers can buy a specific drink for a specific person or type of person. Such as “a medium coffee for a a middle school teacher” or “an iced latte for an Alaskan traveler”.

The Cramped is a brand new site from my internet pal, Patrick Rhone, that is all about “the unique pleasures of analog writing”. In other words: pen and paper nerdery with a focus on actually writing. Love it.