Keeping your remote team happy, motivated, and productive takes an ongoing commitment to communication and inclusiveness. But engaging people in far-flung locales and isolated time zones? That’s a who
Let's talk deployment Whenever you make a change to your codebase, there's always going to be a risk that you're about to break something. No one likes downtime, no one likes cranky users, and no one
The last few weeks, or so it seems, I’ve had an incredibly difficult time waking up in the morning. I’ve found myself sleeping until 10am, 11am or sometimes noon. This morning I set my alarm for 8:45a
In the first part of this article , we discussed the basic principles of conversational interfaces, and why you should consider building one for your own product. Here, we’ll dive a little deeper into
Caroline Crampton isn’t lacking for an audience. A longtime political journalist, she’s been a web editor for the New Statesman , the 103-year-old British political and cultural magazine, since 2012.
The village of Fredvang in Lofoten, Norway. ( Sveter/Wikimedia Commons ) This post originally appeared at TomDispatch and in print in slightly shortened form at The Nation . Some years ago, I faced up
A bout two years ago my wife and I decided to officially commit to the process of becoming licensed foster parents. That wasn't the first time we considered it. Prior to our second child being born we began the process but were pleasantly surprised by the news that we were expecting, so we put…
A working mother I know recently told me that toggling between parenting a toddler and the demands of managing a department and a staff of three is a tightrope walk. Some days, everything worked smoot
The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it? Hossein Derakhshan Jul 14, 2015 · 16 min read By Hossein Derakhshan Illustratio
Carlo Allegri / Reuters One of the greatest challenges of the sleepy morning: making coffee without first having coffee to kickstart the neurons necessary to make coffee in the first place. This desperation drives design trends toward equipment that allows easy preparation, the most typical example…
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I t’s been a while since I was hiring at a startup, and recruiting at a startup is very different from hiring at a big company. At Yahoo! Search, it seemed like we were constantly hiring. I did an ave
In his book, Deep Work , Cal Newport states that as our information economy grows, there is an ever-increasing advantage for knowledge workers who are able to focus. His Deep Work Hypothesis is this:
Twitter is contemplating an increase from the heretofore gospel of 140 characters. As has already been capably reported pretty much everywhere, the mechanism for this increase would likely work similarly to the existing Twitter card feature, where a user can click to expand a tweet and see more—a…
One of my goals in 2016 was to work less while, somewhat paradoxically, accomplishing more. I knew I could squeak more out of my day if I just put some better systems in place. As part of that process
Discover how you can introduce or improve customer service automation, without hefty investments in AI and machine learning… while still staying human. “Do things that don’t scale.” (Or, so goes popul
Our headquarters in Chicago. I’m often asked about the benefits we offer at Basecamp . Potential employees are obviously curious, but most of the questions I get are from fellow business owners and en
Mikael Cho Jan 3, 2016 · 18 min read We’re happiest on Saturdays at 7:26pm .While the exact time of 7:26pm is strange, there have been multiple studies to back up that people are generally happier on
In his latest and typically vituperative talk , Maciej Cegłowski drops this little nugget at the end: Let’s preserve the web as the hypertext medium it is, the only thing of its kind in the world, and
From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. You could call my four years of devout screen‑reading an experiment. I felt a duty – not to anyone or anything specificall
Resolve to Live a Deep Life December 31st, 2015 · 47 comments A Deep Omission In preparation for the upcoming release of my new book , I’m doing a lot of interviews about deep work . This process of t
A knowledge base can be a customer’s best friend during the “help me help myself” phase of exploring your product. But as Kathy Sierra shares in Making Users Awesome , companies often drop the ball wi
As noted in Cory's review , Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora makes an undeniable case for ecological stewardship through a rigorous, gripping technological speculation about climate science, biology, spa
It is difficult to deny that these three terms are becoming increasingly visible in the language of business: Customer Service Customer Experience Customer Centricity I say that they are becoming incr
When you’re revising any piece of writing — a novel, a news article, a blog post, marketing copy, etc. — there are certain words you should delete to make the text stronger and cut your word count. Wh
In my conversations with support managers over the years, I've often heard people ask each other questions like "How many tickets do you expect your team members to solve each day?" or "What are your employee ticket KPIs?" And while I'm mentally responding with "We don't have ticket KPIs," that…
Reader notice: This is the summary of my talk at UXLS and WordCamp Zurich , Switzerland. Thanks again to the organizers for having me and all their effort. W hen I read Kenya Hara’s book, “white” (白)
Last December I wrote an article entitled The State of Consumer Technology at the End of 2014 . That article was more than a year-in-review though: in it I both defined the different epochs of computi
Monday, December 14, 2015 Vancouver’s Great Creative Exodus A brief word before you get into this post. I recognize that I’m writing about a subject that impacts many. Some will read it and share my o
Personal Love Thy Neighbor December 7, 2015 | Today’s Monday Words are a little different that the norm. We wanted to share a personal story of inspiration with you today. The story is unique to us, b
I write a weekly newsletter called the Sunday Dispatches where I share articles about working and living online with 35k subscribers: Here’s a small sampling of newsletter articles: Black Lives Matter
I loathe web ads as much as anyone. I gave a talk in 2013 where I suggested that the dominant economic model of the web—advertising—was inhibiting design excellence. Why? Because web adve
The Internet—it’s branded as the electronic equivalent of the marketplace of ideas, but the best homes online, the places you wind up spending your time, they never feel like a bazaar. They’re not even a café—that’s too public. Coffee shops get noisy, your favorite barista moves away, and sometimes…
Deep Habits: WorkingMemory.txt (The Most Important Productivity Tool You’ve Never Heard Of) October 27th, 2015 · 33 comments Productivity Problems Here’s a typical scenario. Looking at your daily sche
Spend More Time Managing Your Time November 3rd, 2015 · 48 comments Making Time for Time Something organized people don’t often talk about is how much time they spend organizing their time . I think t
Knowledge Workers are Bad at Working (and Here’s What to Do About It…) November 21st, 2012 · 209 comments An Inconvenient Observation Knowledge workers are bad at working. I say this because unlike ev
View more from the November 2015 Issue Explore the Archive Executive Summary As digital technology has enabled shoppers to easily research and buy products online, sellers have been scrambling after t
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