Lifehacker has a fantastically nerdy interview with This American Life host, Ira Glass. From tools, to schedule, to workflow, and more. As you’d expect, the thing is filled with interesting and funny tidbits.

What’s your best time-saving shortcut/life hack?

I’ve got nothing. Reading other people’s answers to this question on your website today made me realize I live my life like an ape. I eat the same breakfast and lunch everyday, both at my desk. I employ no time-saving tricks at all.

Though come to think of it, I guess my biggest life hack—and this is the very first time I’ve attempted to use the phrase “life hack” in a sentence—is that my wife and I decided to live just a few blocks from where I work. We did this because of our dog. Since I spend at least an hour every night walking the dog, I didn’t want to spend another 60 or 90 minutes a day commuting. I don’t have the time. Like lots of people, I work long hours.

And his workflow for how he organizes a big mess of interview tape into a structure and edits it down into a radio story is fascinating:

I find that the important first step to writing anything or editing anything (half of my day each day is editing) is just getting the possible building blocks of the story into your head so you can start thinking about how to manipulate it and cut it and move it.

Reminds me a lot of how Dustin Lance Black writes his screenplays.

On this week’s not-so-brief episode, I answer a several reader and listener questions related to the launch of Delight is in the Details.

Some of the questions include:

• What was the moment in which you said “this is good enough”?
• What advice would you give for preparing for a launch of a new product or service?
• And how did the launch compare to your goals and expectations?
• what factors contributed to the success of the version 2 launch?
• How many cups of coffee did you drink?
• What was your process for making the videos?
• And more…

For the past several months I’ve been head down, working on a huge update to my book and interview series, Delight is in the Details.

My original plan was simple: fix a few typos that were in the first version of the book and have all the audio interviews transcribed. But now that it’s shipped, you’ll see the update includes quite a bit more than just fixed typos.

• Two new chapters
• Two new audio interviews
• A Makers Q&A section
• All the audio has been remastered
• All the interviews have transcriptions
• The Resource Index

Over these past several months as I’ve been working on the update, I’ve been thinking more and more about what it truly means to be creative. I wrote “Fighting to Stay Creative” about two months ago as part of this whole thought process.

The ideas and principles I shared in that blog post blossomed into what has become the preeminent topic that now concludes Delight is in the Details. Which is: how to stay creative and how to build delightful products.

Something that always bugged me about the first version of the book was that it didn’t offer any how-to guides for building a delightful product. Because, really, there isn’t a checklist for that sort of stuff. But in place of a checklist, we have experience and commitment.

Delight is a choice, not a checklist.

And but so, now that we know we want to do our best creative work, what does that look like? How do we inject delight into our photography, our writing, our music, our apps?

I believe I’ve answered those questions (at least to some degree). This version of the book is what the first version should have been.

The updated version is available now.

Do me a favor and set aside 9 minutes to watch this video I put together with the help of my friend, Joel Sorge.

The video is one of three that comes with Delight is in the Details. This one is so great — and I feel the message of it is so important — that I wanted to share it in its entirety.

The first single from Weezer for their upcoming album. Dropped first on YouTube. It’ll be available on iTunes tomorrow, and they’re performing it on The Tonight Show this Wednesday.

Do you have a product, app, service, or company you’d like to promote directly to this site’s readership and visitors? Good news! This week’s sponsorship spot is available. If you’re interested, or have questions about it, email me and I’ll work you a deal.

On this week’s episode of my podcast, The Weekly Briefly, I share a lot about some of the most important ideas and values I’ve learned and written about while spending the past several months working on the update to my book, Delight is in the Details.

Sponsored by:

• TextExpander: If you’re not using TextExpander, you’re wasting time.

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

Marco Arment’s amazing new podcast playing app, Overcast, shipped on Wednesday and it’s awesome. I think it’s the best app design work Marco has done yet, and the smart speed feature is absolutely killer. Not only does it save you time without making the podcast hosts sound like the micro machines guy, but it also makes most average podcasts (like mine) sound professionally edited with tighter pacing.

Seth Godin:

What they’re actually saying is, “I don’t have any ideas that are guaranteed to work, and not only that, are guaranteed to cause no criticism or moments when I’m sure the whole thing is going to fall apart.”

The process for how Dustin Lance Black writes his screenplays is incredible. I don’t know how other movie writers do it, but Black’s process is not unlike the way I go about doing my long-form software reviews: Start with a closetful of research and other information miscellany, distill everything down, then put all the pieces together to form a narrative.

This week’s setup interview is with a new friend of mine, John Voorhees. I met John at WWDC this year, and we had some great chats about raising boys — I have two little guys; he has three older sons, one of whom has a portfolio of iOS apps.

TextExpander saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text and pictures.

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Sync snippets via Dropbox and use them on multiple devices with TextExpander touch on iOS.

Learn more about TextExpander at: smilesoftware.com/shawn

TextExpander touch for iOS is available on the App Store.

* * *

My thanks to Smile Software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. I’ve been using TextExpander since the beginning of 2011, and good gosh is it great. I use it for automating email signatures, speeding up podcast show notes, inserting affiliate tags into my links to Amazon or iTunes, fixing odd CamelCase spellings, and about a billion other things. One thing I didn’t use it for was to write this editor’s note — but I did use it in my email to Greg at Smile when I sent him the list of sponsorship assets.

Huge congrats to Maciej Cegłowski. Pinboard is awesome. If you’re not already using it, I wrote up this Beginner’s Guide a few months back. Also, if you’ve got an iPhone in your pocket and an iPad on your armchair, Pushpin is the best iOS app for Pinboard.

Yevgeny Yermakov is on track to interview 100 designers (mostly graphics folks) asking them each the same 5 questions. No surprise, I could get lost in this kind of stuff. Getting a peek into the values, habits, mistakes, and successes of other creative folks is incessantly fascinating to me. And it’s also helpful, I think. Another person’s biography can help remind us that we’re not phonies after all, and it can also give us ideas and inspiration for how better to live our own life.