Image via www.sarasotahistoryalive.com . People are always telling you how to maximize your mornings , but your morning routine—whatever it may be—is fine . What you really need is an afternoon routin

Design is never neutral. It feels like the apps we use every day give us all the freedom and choice in the world, but that’s never actually the case. Every option, every button, every interaction defi

I’ve been running this site as a “member” supported site since July of 2012. That’s what I call my subscription based, paywall model, a member-site. I’ve tried a lot of different methods to what I cha

“In the end time is going to kill us. The only thing that limits us is time. You can get another job or lover. But you can’t get more time,” said Jean O’Callaghan of University of Roehampton in London

Jeff Goins Aug 1, 2017 · 9 min read “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” –Mark Twain The hard part of writing a book isn’t getting it published. With more opportunities

Q: What role should metrics play for designers? How should you set metrics, and how should you use them? I’ve often heard the misconception that metrics are the domain of Product Managers and Data Sci

We began researching newsletters in 2002 . Since then, we have conducted six large-scale studies on newsletter and marketing email usability. Our most recent research involved a diary study with 9 par

The open office layout is meant to foster an egalitarian work environment that inspires creativity and spontaneous collaboration among colleagues. Nearly 60 years since their invention, an increasing

Summary: Jobs-to-be-done focus on user problems and needs, while well-executed personas include the same information and also add behavioral and attitudinal details. By Page Laubheimer Page Laubheimer

Max Bennett Jun 16, 2017 · 4 min read Product Management is the craft of building the right things. Part of this craft is about (1) discovering and (2) delivering these right things. But a third, and

Once you’ve spent the time to find, recruit, and qualify beta testers , how do you motivate beta testers to provide feedback, and what should you do to keep them engaged and interested? Hint: it invol

Here are a few tips for running a beta test of a software product intended for large audiences — what I call “ shrinkwrap “. These apply for commercial or open source projects; I don’t care whether yo

A guide for approaching the onsite whiteboard challenge for product designers I often have people reach out to me who are doing a career transition into product design. One of the first things they ask is how can they practice approaching UX design problems and get prepared for interviews.…

Tom Price Aug 2, 2017 · 8 min read Are we saving the planet in spite of ourselves? is this all you need? So here’s a provocative idea that sounds nuts, but is totally true — we appear to be reaching P

When it comes to writing and being productive, I’ve learned a few tricks over the years. And one of them has to do with relentless capture, organization, and doing the work. As I mentioned last week,

Jasu Hu O ne day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. W

“People Make Places” Craig Mod Mar 24, 2016 · 4 min read Lots of people send me books. I love this. There are few things more exciting than to receive books. They’re all wonderful in their own ways. B

In a recent blog post about our 4-day work week experiment at Wildbit , Natalie (our CEO) wrote about some things we’re doing to focus our jobs a bit better . The example she used in that post is the

Can you remember where you were seven years ago? I was in my apartment in Birmingham, UK, coding up the very first version of Buffer as a tool to schedule tweets. So much has changed since then: the B

O ur technology-rich world has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. While on the one hand we have access to information or people anywhere at any time, on the other hand we find our attention con

I gave up daily vlogging recently . On January 1, 2017, I announced I’d start uploading a video every single day. There was no end in mind. Some people have taken on this challenge and lasted days. So

The perennial "Work hard or work smart?" debate has been playing out again, and it's one with substantial implications for my coaching clients, most of whom are technology company CEOs, and my MBA stu

10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives We got up-close-and-personal with a genius for five years. Here are 12 things we learned. Jimmy Soni Jul 20, 2017 · 26 min read

An audio version of this essay is available to subscribers , provided by curio.io . The deep infiltration of digital information into our lives has created a fervor around the supposed corresponding l

Kasey Jones May 21, 2017 · 8 min read I’ve always wanted to be one of those super-productive, get-shit-done kind of women. I have never felt that way. Sure, I go through periods of passion and excitem

Here’s Fran Lebowitz talking about race in the US in a 1997 Vanity Fair interview : The way to approach it, I think, is not to ask, “What would it be like to be black?” but to seriously consider what it is like to be white. That’s something white people almost never think about. And what it is like…

If you're a programmer building software, or a SaaS (Software as a Service), this post should help you answer the question: "What would make someone buy my app?" This is the story of why I bought soft

Int J Environ Res Public Health . 2009 Mar; 6(3): 1235–1253. Published online 2009 Mar 20. PMCID: PMC2672390 PMID: 19440443 1, * and Judith Rowbotham 2 Paul Clayton 1 School of Life Sciences, Oxford B

From 17th century Kyoto to your neighborhood Starbucks Matt Reimann Follow Jun 22, 2017 · 5 min read Starbucks introduces a new line of iced coffee drinks to their customers on a hot summer day in Was

Christopher Cashdollar Jul 19, 2017 · 4 min read It’s 4:58 PM on a Tuesday. A glance at the sticky note that compiles my to-do list for the day elicits an audible sigh that feels like defeat. Too many

Or, “I Used Headspace for 400 Days and All I Got Was This Lousy Sense of Clarity and Well-Being” Jake Knapp Jul 11, 2017 · 6 min read Supposedly, meditation recharges your brain and boosts your abilit

Think back to the last time you encountered a difficult challenge at work– one of those problems that require hard, long thought and perhaps some focused drudgery to break through. The kind of hard wo

After the response to this recent LifeHacker piece , I thought I would explain the system I use to take notes, research books and keep track of anecdotes, stories and info I come across in my work. Th

Transcript Craig Mod: You’re listening to On Margins. I’m Craig Mod and this is episode 002. Something has happened in the last few years and this is going to sound really obvious when I say it, but,

Becky Hirsch Jul 13, 2017 · 3 min read Hello, world! Hello, you! My friend and mentor Paul Stairmand , celebrity judge, UX writer to the stars, told me you’d probably be wondering who I am, and who th

Photo: Tony Duffy/Getty Images The employment market is increasingly competitive, robots are taking away our jobs , and getting ahead seems to take more hustle than ever before. But grinding out more

For a long time I’ve been reading one book. It’s been five years since I started In Search of Lost Time , and I’m only two-thirds the way through. That’s fine with me. Each month as I sit down, pen in