The iDoneThis team writes about productivity, management, startup growth, and company culture, tied to its daily check-in product.
HN links it for startup growth stories, such as reaching $1,000 in recurring revenue, and for the Andreessen anti-todo list post. Commenters offer no strong opinions on it.
Like most things, choosing where to host your company blog is a strategic choice that can't be boiled down to a categorical.
tumblr has a really amazing community. tumblr's downtime is a fact. The question is, does the community outweigh the downtime?
I think you make this decision based on the demographics of the tumblr community vis-a-vis your users / customers. And tumblr isn't just 14 year old girls -- there's a bunch of tech people on it (although that may be more NYC tech).
In the comments, people have mentioned the simple fact that you can have both a self-hosted company blog and a company tumblr, much like most companies have a company blog and a company twitter. I agree, although simply feeding content from the blog into the tumblr of course doesn't make best use of tumblr as a platform.
My startup's blog is on tumblr (http://blog.idonethis.com) and we get about 1/5 of the referral traffic of twitter and facebook from tumblr. (We have nearly 1k followers on tumblr versus 1.6k twitter followers and 2k facebook likes.) In other words, it's our 3rd largest source of referral traffic from social media.
Cynicism not necessary. It depends on the culture of internal communications and the purpose of the memo. Are these weekly update memos on activities to be discussed at the staff meeting? Is it asking for permission on something? Is it just informational? Receiving dozens of these a day can be daunting, and forcing limits on length force articulation of what's new and a clear question being asked. Sounds very basic, but lots of memos are poorly written.
Google and other companies are known for very brief updates (may be called memos in your organization), as short as a single line, sent per week. No need to send multiple pages of details: http://blog.idonethis.com/post/16736314554/silicon-valleys-productivity-secret
These memos are different from the author's post, which is really not about memos, but rather an alternative means of presenting all of the information required to get to the key discussion in a meeting. I don't think is anyone is suggesting that 6 pg emails should be the memos, and something is wrong if the 6pg emails are replacing decks that are being sent around via email.
It has to start at the very top. Managers get bullied into creating multi-tasking cultures because they aren't allowed to staff projects sequentially. Every stake holder cares that their project is started, at the expense of when all projects will finish.
Early Paypal had singular focus, although I've only heard the stories told through the mythologizing of the founders:
http://blog.idonethis.com/manager-focus-peter-thiel-paypal/
I think there's a way to manage remote teams that promotes single tasking. Because communication is harder with remote teams you have to make a choice: have more of it or have less of it. I always choose to have less communication by trying to simplify work, eliminate coordination (especially parallel projects), actually push decision making out to the edges. I don't know exactly how well the people who work with me enjoy it, but I know I only have one meeting on my calendar this week, and so I'm pretty free to single task at least.
> How long to write a long email? How long to speak to someone?
A better question is how long to say something that is well thought out and matters vs. how long to write something that is well thought out and matters. I have found that talking leads to lots of talking with little real substance unless it is meant to be a brainstorm session. And even then, writing ideas down before hand help to quickly get to the sticking points rather than bike shedding over something trivial and wasting everyones time.
Writing out a page long email forces the writer to think through and address their idea more seriously up front. This is why Bezos famously requires a written memo for a new idea before the meeting [0].
[0] http://blog.idonethis.com/jeff-bezos-self-discipline-writing/
Link to the much longer blog post swombat refers to, which includes a nice case study on the point - http://blog.idonethis.com/post/4961556178/copywriting-as-scalable-customer-support
In my opinion, if you have to explain the same thing to customers more than twice (ie, more than two customers), then you need to find a scalable solution. Sometimes this is code - automating a process step etc - but often it is related to human error or misunderstanding, in which case it needs to be explained better.
And one of the first rules of business - communication requires two parties, but when it goes wrong you are 100% responsible for fixing it.
Wow! Thank you. This is really awesome feedback.
I really did drop the ball on that, this is the second person to bring that up. I intended to record a video for the launch explaining it (Premortems in 60 seconds) but couldn't find a mic.
I think my favorite post explaining Premortems is on the iDoneThis blog: http://blog.idonethis.com/post/43078049631/the-perks-of-considering-your-plan-dead
Again, thank you so much for your great feedback. I really appreciate the time you spent writing it up.
I only spent 3 days on the app so far, it's a weekend project for me, so I'll be making these changes soon (hopefully this coming weekend)