Pat Dryburgh
Unlike us, our ancestors were calorie-restricted. Just like cats, pandas, and almost all large animals, humans have evolved a strong natural drive to be lazy. In the wild, laziness is smart business – seeking comfort and reserving energy for the hunt is a winning strategy in a harsh world. Millions…
Like most athletes who would rather be outdoors running, riding, swimming, or hiking, I don’t set aside much time for the gym. Yet I fully realize the importance of building general strength and mobility—not just to support my outdoor activities, but also for everyday health and fitness. I’d like to…
I shot this video on the island Paradise of Mauritius on a topic that seems to fascinate people: The 5 am Club. In it, I walk you through the best ways to get up early so you 20x your productivity and quality of life. Enjoy it! Do you want to reach higher and do more than 95% of the population does?…
Apple Watch Series 3 Review Preamble Apple Watch Series 3 is my first smartwatch and first Apple Watch. As I have no previous Apple Watch to use as a comparison, this review will speak to my experience with the current generation of the product. Last week I went into an Apple Store and purchased a…
I see it all the time. A big-name author or rock star enjoys the adulation of millions of fans, but takes home a fraction of the income of a C-level executive or investor. Both envy each other, but I don't know anyone who would honestly take fame over money. In fact, the truly wealthy pay more to…
The Old Guard is a set of humans who inhabit the early days of a start-up. As I’ve written about before , they define the culture in both obvious and non-obvious ways. Simply: the way they act and how they treat each other disproportionately affects the values of the company. The Old Guard gets to…
Being a generalist is great fun. There is much joy to be had in jumping between programmer and artist, project manager and product designer, bug finder and bug maker. You can also be a musician and athlete, parent and world traveller, superfan, superstar, and whatever else strikes your fancy if you…
Don’t Promise We’ve all been there. A customer’s upset. They make a demand. Maybe it’s reasonable, quick, easy, and no big deal. Fine. But sometimes it’s unreasonable given the context and situation. And we give in. Promises to placate rarely end up well. Sometimes you’ll do anything to avoid the…
I woke up this past Saturday morning to a headline in the London Times , " World Powers Prepare for Attack On Iran ." Given the climate following the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iranian nuclear capability, and the ensuing ransacking of the British embassy, the news is…
For the majority of the life of this site, I’ve been a staunch OmniFocus user. Detailed and meticulously maintained systems for doing . I didn’t have, nor did I want, a list — I wanted platform from which I launched my projects. That’s a fancy way of saying I scheduled time — I made tasks — for…
Earlier today while doing research into how best to improve my CSS workflow, I came across BEM . BEM – Block Element Modifier is a methodology that helps to create reusable components and code sharing in front development. What this actually means is that it provides a new methodology to reduce the…
Ryan Holiday Instagram A weird, and somewhat morbid thought occurs to me from time to time. When I am on a plane and the turbulence hits, when a car veers out into traffic, when I hear about someone I know who died suddenly: I don’t get scared. I just think, “If this is it, alright. ” At first I…
It’s human nature: I over-value where I have influence. Since I am a designer, this frequently means placing too much emphasis on how things look and work rather than the direction they are pointed. But reflecting on the other side of the issue is also interesting: I find that the more input I have…
He knew how to work up a sweat for developers, I’ll give him that. But… This is why we have working managers at Basecamp (and why Microsoft and Apple stumbled when they lost their tech CEOs) Harvard Business Review studied what makes 35,000 employees from the US and Britain tick and found: The…
Demoing TrackApp to a prospective user I very well remember my first day as a TrackApp Ambassador in downtown Kampala interacting with quite a number of small business entrepreneurs. To my surprise, I realized that the majority of them kept incomplete financial records, or no records at all. The…
I’m an anxious person. It started when I was a teenager and got worse through college. Those days, it was mostly limited to the stress of school, making money, trying to figure out what to do with my life. Things took a pretty sharp turn on September 11, 2001, when I spent that morning across the…
Most writers struggle with getting their writing done for one surprising reason. They think writing is a one-step process, when in fact, it’s a three-step process.
What we call “writing” is actually made up of three distinct activities: coming up with ideas, turning those ideas into drafts, and then…
70ish Life and Business Lessons for Designers I teamed up with Joel Beukelman to give a talk at Creative South 2017 in Columbus, Georgia to share tips for designers on a wide variety of topics from craft and work-life balance to the business of design. Joel works with me on Design Inc. — a company…
Figma’s New Icon Figma has grown a lot since we launched to the public five months ago, and as we’ve matured we’ve continued to evolve our marketing design. Doing this from within the organization, instead of with an agency, has allowed us to iterate in a way natural to digital design. Today we’re…
Learning about customer experience, and how to leverage the service blueprint as a research tool, is essential for researchers and designers, as this will help them stay ahead in this rapidly changing world. This March, I was lucky enough to facilitate a Thinkshop with 25 designers attending the…
Lately I’ve been sharing some CSS Tricks I’ve stumbled in to while trying to solve some problems on client work. It’s been fun uncovering new little solutions. Using *:not() for Full Bleed Flexbox Grid vs. CSS Grid On both of those, some alternative solutions people proposed were using negative…
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Creek Stewart of Willow Haven Outdoor. The term ‘Bugging Out’ refers to the decision to abandon your home due to an unexpected emergency situation–whether a natural disaster or one caused by man. A ‘Bug Out Bag’ is a pre-prepared survival kit designed to…
I posted a link to an article which pokes a little fun at the bug out bag mentality, in doing so I knew I was going to get some questions — specifically whether or not I have a bug out bag. So, yes , of course I have a bug out bag — I’ve had one since 2012. Allow me to explain why I have one, why…
Hacking GV’s Design Sprint storyboarding to get results faster, with less stress. We at AJ&Smart are big fans of GV’s Design Sprint . Beginning of 2016, we committed ourselves to work in Design Sprints exclusively, and it immediately became clear that it’s the best process to get things done at a…
Jobs to be Done: From Research to Minimum Valuable Product Image courtesy of Death To Stock Does your product team know your customers’ needs? Do your designers and engineers understand your customers’ behaviors and motivations? Discovering and defining the right problems to solve is—I believe—one…
Idea in Brief What’s Wrong Innovation success rates are shockingly low worldwide, and have been for decades. What’s Needed Marketers and product developers focus too much on customer profiles and on correlations unearthed in data, and not enough on what customers are trying to achieve in a…
Many years ago, I wrote a post entitled “ Bank Woes: Does Your Bank Make You Smile ?" As you can probably infer from the post’s title, it wasn’t a result of positive banking experiences. Rather, it was inspired by negative ones at an institution I used to bank with at the time called Kenya…
A few years ago, backstage at a conference, I spotted a blind woman using her phone. The phone was speaking everything her finger touched on the screen, allowing her to tear through her apps. My jaw hit the floor. After years of practice, she had cranked the voice’s speed so high, I couldn’t…
First, what is an actionable metric? An actionable metric is one that ties specific and repeatable actions to observed results. The opposite of actionable metrics are vanity metrics (like web hits or number of downloads) which only serve to document the current state of the product but offer no…
Illustration by Kevin Cornell
So you’ve launched your own creative business, and you’re starting to grow. That’s great! But good growth won’t just happen. Just like a junior designer starts with small projects and slowly builds her skills, a new business needs time to mature, test new ideas, and…
Illustration by Andrew Kuhar
It isn’t hard to find a UX designer to nag you about testing your designs with actual users. The problem is, we’re not very good at explaining why you should do user testing (or how to find the time). We say it like it’s some accepted, self-explanatory truth that deep…
A beautiful office completely decked out for less than six thousand dollars. Some startups spend that much on one desk/chair combo. With a single Amazon.com purchase I had my entire office completely setup; from toilet paper to office desks, monitors to silverware. It cost less then five thousand…
A few years ago, I decided I wanted to learn to play the drums. I've always loved the drums. Whenever I listen to music, I hear the drums first. I can listen to a great jazz drummer like Art Blakey for hours on end. I'd give up almost anything to be as good as Glenn Kotche of Wilco. The path to…
Everyone has been gifted a unique experience but not everyone cultivates what they think about it. It’s not that you have nothing to write about, it’s that the skill of forming an opinion about your observations is undeveloped. One of the best things I’ve learned about how to write was how to…
It is early morning in the city. There is a hint of morning dew hanging in the air, as moisture evaporates from damp concrete. But mostly the commingling smells of diesel exhaust and freshly brewed coffee waft along the sidewalk. The short blast of a car horn a few blocks away ricochets off the tall…
Design is a process of divergence and convergence. We receive a project brief, a set of constraints, and set about exploring all the ways to satisfy them. Through the course of a project we diverge, we branch, we come up with options, and then we converge by using the sum of our team’s experience as…
The Fidelity Curve: How to weigh the costs and benefits of creating UI mockups Here at Basecamp we do a lot of paper sketching. Usually we jump straight to code after making a rough sketch. But it’s not a black and white rule. Sometimes we make tappable prototypes to test an interaction, or a pixel…
For outdoorsy nature lovers, Vancouver is basically heaven on Earth. It has just about everything you could possibly want: old growth rainforests, large rivers, picture-perfect lakes, steep canyons, mountain vistas and sandy beaches with logs on them. And it’s all right there on your doorstep. No…
With the warm days of summer just around the corner, this is the perfect time of year to start planning some day hikes in the Coast Mountains. I make an effort to get out and do a solid hike every week throughout the year. Even in the winter, some of the hikes mentioned below can be done with good…
Master working for yourself without crushing your soul By Paul Jarvis The finger tattoos meant I had to be a web designer, bike thief or a fancy chef… I became a freelancer by accident. I quit my job at an agency, and was looking to find another agency job. My plan the day after I quit was to go to…
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