Jeff Keen

Posts tagged with #work

Not a paintball guy

It’s always nice when you feel like you can really be you with the people you work with. Earlier, I got this message from the development manager at this company that I regularly work for.

Team,

Charles and I were discussing paintball this morning and it occurred to me that paintball could be a fun team event in October! Charles is an avid paintballer, so he would of course be on my team. Let me know if you have any particular reason why you think paintball is for the birds, otherwise, I’m going to see if we can reserve a field.

Trent

And in an ongoing effort to be honest and authentic, I replied:

Hard pass for me.

Don’t let that stop everyone else, but I don’t do paintball primarily for reasons of being a huge target/wuss.

The truth hurts. But a little less than getting hit with paintballs.

Dev Stuff

Daily Goals

Like millions of developers before us, we wanted a better Todo list. This is how we thought about it.

We all had tried our fair share of todo list apps, and none of them quite did the job. A friend of mine swore highly of his very low-tech system: write down the next three things he was going to accomplish, immediately followed by doing them. In a world of overly complex productivity solutions, this worked surprisingly well.

We started talking about creating a web-app that would better mimic this simple approach, called “Daily Goals”.

Common Problems With Todo Software

  1. People tend to put too much on their lists, leaving many tasks unfinished at the end of the day.
  2. Most Todo list software is either boring, overly-complex, or too open ended. We felt that with the right UI and right messaging, things could be made much better.

How Daily Goals Would Be Different

  1. Focus all messaging on what could be done today.
  2. Make our UI stand out, by not taking the typical approach to the problem.
  3. Don’t allow more than 3-5 incomplete tasks on the list at a time.
  4. Don’t automatically carry over unfinished tasks from the previous day.

Design Principles

  1. Simple things should be simple, and complex things shouldn’t be too hard.
  2. Talk to your users like they’re humans. Light, playful messaging is key.

“Boring software is broken software.”

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