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.

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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.

Dan Benjamin asked me to be a guest on his Podcast That Is Trying to Find a Name but Is Still Currently Called Quit. We talked about a whole slew of things related to starting your own business, delegating, investing, hiring, firing, and the like.

“3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.”

Ben Bajarin:

Specifically, the iPad is the most general purpose computing device I’ve ever studied. It can be so many things to so many people and do a wide variety of things well. It can be a DJ’s mixing board, an art easel, a portable DVD player, a music recording studio, an e-reader, a web browser, a gaming console, and so much more. I believe this range of supported use cases is what made the iPad Apple’s fastest growing product and one of the most quickly adopted devices in consumer electronics history. […]

The iPad’s curse may be it can do many things well but does it do anything better? That is a key question.

Frank Chimero:

Increasingly, I feel like a lot of my tools are dressing-up as tools, because they don’t offer any savings in time or effort, just slightly different methods to mindlessly shift information from one bucket to the next. And if one bucket has a hole in it, you get another, smaller bucket to catch anything coming out of the hole in the first bucket. This goes on and on with more holes and buckets, and before you know it, you have an intricate network of buckets whose reason for existance is to catch the information you can’t manage in the first place. You are stuck in bucket recursion, adding tools to patch the shortcomings of other tools. Those patches are how you know you have dress-up tools.

Matt Gemmell on the small screen of the 11-inch MacBook Air:

There’s no substitute for motivation, self-moderation and focus, but there’s also nothing inherently limiting about small screens. You absolutely can have the best of both worlds: your entire office in an envelope, without feeling that you’re being held back.

Great piece; hitting on both the philosophical and the practical.