Notebook: Homepage Evolution

Today, some semi-intelligible notes:

Time for a new homepage design for logged-in users. The current design has the following faults. The Top 6 is a nice reminder about the contest, but the Top 6 don't change often enough for it to be interesting. Second, the content tabs (Video / News / etc) are lost behind the contest tab, and they are a little boring to look at.

The new homepage will feature content a little more, and will probably feature some of our experimentation with recommending links to people. Top 6 will still be present, but pushed down.

The new design will probably push down the Spank News (news feed) off the screen. Trying to keep the Spank News on the screen was part of what inspired the current design. And some people will disagree with this. I think it's a case of thinking inside the box, since the news feed is so prominent on facebook. But what Linkspank offers is primo content, and connections with friends through the content. We'll be integrating all that into the top box.

Win 30 Points, Be on Linkspank TV

Do you like sports commentary? Do you like Linkspank? Do you want 30 points for that Hawaii contest?

Join us at Linkspank TV for the Sports Corner (or something) to discuss the Hawaii Contest. We'll draw some X's and O's, talk about who's winning and who's going to win, and try to make as little sense as John Madden.

let's do this

Any spanker is welcome to participate. Just contact us to state your interest - first to respond can reserve the spot. We'll record Sports Corner today, tomorrow, or Friday, at some hour.

We'll conduct the interview online (probably over Skype) and rip the sound (we'll add visuals to it afterwards).

So sign up.

Six Ways of Managing To-Do Lists (Entrepreneurial Lifehacking)

Two cliches of entrepreneurship are managing yourself and wearing many hats. At the heart of all this is To-Do List Management. A boring subject, but one which holds the key to our productivity and happiness.

Six Ways of Managing To-Do's:

1. Noting them in a daily work journal (a document)
2. Listing, scoring, tracking them in a spreadsheet
3. Storing them in folders in my email
4. Keeping them in online "sticky note" applications
5. Using Jott to send them to myself via phone.
6. Writing lists on pieces of paper

I have experimented with these for a long time (except Jott, that is recent).

My findings: -- summarized from lots of testing :-)

Since I have a very high volume of items (feature requests, little notes, micro-bugs) the spreadsheet method is required. I need a method that is simple enough that I'll use it, but which can organize and prioritize hundreds of to-do items.

Email, Jott, and paper lists are all useful ways of recording items to make sure they get into the spreadsheet. If the to-do item is very small then it might be dealt with before it makes it to the spreadsheet.

Paper is good also to take items out of the spreadsheet as the Daily To-Do List.

Smaller notes:

I tried the email method during a campaign to keep my emai inbox clean. That campaign worked and I rarely have more than 20 messages in my inbox now. But the email folder method wasn't working for me because I was wasting time by sending myself emails and it was difficult to get myself to visit the folders.

I think the folder method works for less pressing items, and maybe for lists that are only 20 or 30 items usually.

Jott is pretty cool. I think it's more cool as an on-the-fly communication system. But it's good for a quick reminder of a micro-feature that you can send to email and copy into a spreadsheet later. If you could jot to a spreadsheet that would be cool, but the internal mechanism for managing your Jotts is primitive.

I think paper is a really really good method... but it's easy to lose paper and hard to organize it. Sometimes I write notes and they end up useless in a pile. I think written notes have an expiration of 24-72 hours. I think paper is good for copying a list of what to do and then thinking out on paper exactly how you are going to do those things that day.

Journaling your work is important I believe. But it's a big jumble. The journal has two purposes. One is like writing on paper - temporary thinking and quick access - but it's tied to the clipboard on your computer. The other is the emergency haystack - if you're looking for something and you don't know where it is, you can always dive into the haystack.

Many people comment on the soothing aspect of creating lists. Write a list and you feel control over your life. I think it's even more true for a spreadsheet. You have to put some work into the spreadsheet. I have a dorky model where I rate todo items on how important they are to the business. It takes a lot of time to do that... but hey, how can you march without a strategy? Plus having a strategy is much more comforting :-).

four lessons from our facebook experiment

Here are Four Lessons from our facebook app experiment:

1. Lots of facebook users are willing to install apps... but many of them will hide the profile box and all the other stuff.

2. Lots of facebook users have never installed an app. (I believe this segment is largely college students actually.)

3. People often install an app and that's it - they don't know what to do or what it does.

4. People want to be able to spank their facebook friends. They don't care much about the features of our baby app (sharing recent spanks on your facebook profile, or promoting your spankathon pledge).

I'm glad we did this test. More to come...

Entrepreneurial Lifehacking

I've been meaning to post for a while on "Entrepreneurial Lifehacking" - tricks and strategies for being organized, happy, productive as an entrepreneur.

Today I'll just warm up by listing some of the topics I've been thinking about and working on:

+ Daily routines
+ Which to-do's to delete entirely and avoid
+ How to organize and prioritize to-do's
+ Use of phone, email, and meetings
+ How to digest maximum news in minimum time
+ Experiments with Jott.com
+ Phone gadgetry, including the N95 and the Jawbone

Hmn... that sounds like a pretty boring list now that I write it out. But doesn't everyone like to be more productive? :-)

Our Toolbar = Excalibur.

Our Linkspank toolbar is turning out to be the greatest and baddest weapon since King Arthur's Excalibur. It's going to be completely nasty. Get ready. Prepare for your life to be changed. Coming soon for testing in FF during November, with IE to follow in December.