Month: February 2018

Ship when it’s useful, not when it’s done

Something I have kept in front of me for the past six months or so has been this mindset:

Ship it when it’s useful, not when it’s done.

(I think it was Jason Fried who said it, but if not it sounds like something he would say.)

This metric of shipping when a thing is useful was what I kept before me when working on our Learn Ulysses course, the Plan Your Year workbook, and All the Things.

Shipping a product when it’s useful is a far more tangible metric for creating things and putting them out there.

Because — and let’s be honest — in the mind of the creator, a project is never done. There is always one more detail or element or idea that needs to be fine tuned or figured out.

So, instead of waiting until you’re done, step back and look at what you’re working on and ask yourself, Is this useful to others right now?

If the answer is yes, then ship it. If the answer is no, fix it.

Ship when it’s useful, not when it’s done

Live, Interactive Workshop with Yours Truly on Focus  →

This coming Wednesday, Feb 14, I am hosting a live, online workshop called The Fundamentals of Focus.

It’s in partnership with my good friend, Tim Stringer. Tim is hosting the event and managing all the technical aspects, and I will be doing all the teaching.

We are charging just $20 for the workshop and then donating 100% of that to Operation Broken Silence to help build an 8th grade classroom for children in the Yida refugee camp in South Sudan.

It’s going to be pretty awesome, and I hope you will join us. Here is where you can see more details and register.

Live, Interactive Workshop with Yours Truly on Focus

Monk Mode for All the Things

This week I have been in monk mode, working on the video tutorial screencasts for All the Things.

Things are coming together (no pun intended), and they’re looking awesome!

I purchased ScreenFlow 7 from the Mac App Store on Monday and have already spent a solid 50+ hours in the app. If you do any sort of screen casting, ScreenFlow is what you want.

At the beginning of the week my screen casting workflow was all sorts of weird. I’ll probably write more about it later, but let’s just say that after 3 days of very slow-going progress, I tried a different approach that literally reduced my creation and production time by 75%.

As I’ve been working my way through every nook and cranny of Things 3, the process has endeared me even more to this app. I’ve been using Things 3 since it was in beta, but this process of teaching people how to use the app has, obviously, caused me to become even more familiar with it than I already was.

That familiarity has given me an increased confidence and joy when using this app day in and day out. Plus, I myself have even learned a handful of new tricks that are pretty awesome if I do say so myself.

All that said, because I have been so heads down doing these video tutorials, I broke the chain of my daily blogging schedule. Alas.

Between November 28 and January 26 I published an item every single day. 59 days; 59 blog posts. I am bummed to have broken the streak, but I will be picking it back up again.

I have quite a few thoughts on the value and importance of writing and publishing daily. But, these past two weeks I’ve been focused on creating something that is currently more important, and so something had to give.

It has been challenging and fun to create all of this. And I love that we are seeing it all start to come together. Can’t wait to share it.

Monk Mode for All the Things