Building Things

Maybe we all live in the email anti-Lake Wobegon, where we’re all “worse than average” at email, in our own minds. One problem with email is the giant guilt pile it creates — the psychological consisting of the number of emails you know are in there that you have forgotten about, ignored, or missed....

A while back, I wrote about Anti-Workflow Apps — apps that solve problems for you without forcing you to adopt a workflow that you may never fully be able to adopt.  Workflow apps (CRMs, to-do lists, project management tools) are super hard to drive adoption towards, as everyone works differently an...

I couldn’t sleep last night, and was up around 4am lurking on Twitter.  I came across an old friend, Elizabeth Green, who is an accomplished and awesome education writer — you’ve probably read some of her recent NYT mag cover stories, and it turns out she has a new book out, Building a Better Teache...

As part of my series on Regulation 2.0, which I’m putting together for the Project on Municipal Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, today I am going to employ a bit of a cop-out tactic and rather than publish my next section (which I haven’t finished yet, largely because my whole family has th...

“Workflow” apps hold so much promise.  Whether it’s a CRM, project management tool, to-do list, or some other tool, the promise in each case is to clean up our messy lives and help us be more organized and effective. The problem, though, is that getting people to adopt a workflow is really really ha...

When I first started to learn programming, about 15 years ago, I remember being surprised at how easy it was for me to get focused and stay focused.  I loved (and still love) the feeling of getting lost in a project, and could easily spend hours upon hours “in the zone”. No procrastination, no resis...

One way I have described myself is as a “professional amateur”.  I am both deeply proud and deeply ashamed of that.  Let me explain. For basically my whole career, I’ve been learning new fields and professions from the outside-in.  While I have an undergrad degree in Urban Studies, which ostensibly ...

My favorite book on product development and startups is Getting Real, published in 2006 by the folks at 37signals (now Basecamp).  If you haven’t read it (it’s freely available online), it’s essentially a precursor to The Lean Startup (2011). Back when I was leading a team and running product and Op...

There has been a lot of debate about how to protect Internet Freedom. Today, Senator Ted Cruz has an op-ed in the Washington Post on the subject, which starts out with an eloquent and spot-on assessment of what we are trying to protect: Never before has it been so easy to take an idea and… Continue ...

I got this in the mail: It’s an ad for an extended warranty, disguised as an urgent extension of existing coverage. This makes we want to throw up.  A business blatantly based on tricking people. “Immediate response to this notice required…. Our records indicate that you have not contacted us to hav...

A few weeks ago, Brian asked Brittany and me: “do you think it’s better to build your career around skills or around ideas?”. Brittany immediately said “skills” and I immediately said “ideas”.  We argued about it for a few minutes, and ultimately we both agreed that skills and ideas are both importa...

At USV, we talk a lot about how the landscape is changing, as more entrepreneurs and investors get behind the idea of building networks around problems, communities & verticals.  And that means that we are seeing more competitors in each space we look at, especially compared to what it looked like w...

Andy and I were talking yesterday about how both of us really struggle on email, especially during busy weeks when we’re really focused on something (travel, a project, etc).  I can’t tell you how many emails I start with: “I apologize for the long delay here…” I described it as being afraid of the ...

I’ve been a remote or semi-remote worker for a long time now.  Which has a boatload of pros (flexibility) as well as cons (distance from “the watercooler”). Over time, I’ve tried lots of things to help forge a stronger connection among my distributed or semi-distributed teams.  As you would expect, ...

It’s fascinating to watch the process of business models exploding. What apple did yesterday in announcing free OSX and free iWork apps is a great example of that.  MS has traded on license fees for Windows and Office forever, and for a long time, Apple has followed suit, charging reasonably high (a...

I’m here today at the Adaptive Metropolis conference at UC Berkeley, organized by ReBar.  Which, as I suspected it would be, is awesome.  The premise of the conference is how cities, and the way we plan, manage and engage with them, is changing — an in particular, how bottom-up, diy, adaptive, respo...

I’m writing this from a plane en route to Berkeley for what should be an awesome conference: Adaptive Metropolis: User Generated Urbanism.  Among the organizers is my favorite DIY city-making collective: ReBar. Back in 2005, ReBar did something amazing.  They pulled up to a San Francisco parking spa...

(cross-posted on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog, the PBS IdeaLab blog, and the Harvard Data-Smart City Solutions blog) A few years ago when I was working on the Civic Commons project with Code for America and OpenPlans, I did a presentation at Living Cities called “Cities that Work Like the Web...

Open data is a huge driver of innovation.  Traveling around NYC is better because the MTA opens up route, schedule and real-time data for people to build apps with.  Responding to natural disasters is easier when data is open and interoperable.  As we continue to collect more data about ourselves an...

At Albert’s suggestion, I’ve started reading Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile.   It really is a powerful idea to think of things that get better with stress, not worse.  And it’s really interesting to think about how to build antifragility into your life in various ways. Here’s one (tiny) example: email...