Building Things

I have had a hard time finding the perfect to-do list system. I am a light implementer of GTD — I haven’t read the whole book, but I get the basic idea — capture; focus; do.  Stop working from the top of your inbox.  Amen. A few years ago, I started using Things for Mac, which… Continue reading

I had the pleasure of spending the day yesterday at The Feast. I love their manifesto: Mankind is now more connected with the tools to engage millions and more potential than ever to build a brighter future. Our role is to inspire the next generation of doers. To empower more folks to ask why the… C...

Yesterday afternoon, I caught up for a coffee with Andrew Parker.  After a wide-ranging and enjoyable discussion about app ecosystems and tech policy, we talked a bit about speed.  This post (which I’ll keep short, in its own spirit) is about why speed is so important, awesome, and magical. I wrote ...

Last week, I hung out with my old friend Nate Jaffee.  We played a bit of tennis (on the hottest day I can remember in recent history), had the standard and depressing discussion about how we both peaked athletically at age 16, and then got down to the important business of having a few beers… Conti...

Yesterday, I spent the day at the Awesome Summit — the first wholesale gathering of folks involved with the Awesome Foundation. In case you don’t know, the Awesome Foundation is a “micro foundation”, where each month, a group of 10 “micro trustees” donates $1000 (total; $100 per trustee) towards a p...

Today marks the launch of the Internet Defense League, an effort led by Fight for the Future to build permanent infrastructure for defending the internet. The idea is simple: build a loose, permanent coalition of individuas, companies and websites that stand at the ready to react to threats to the i...

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of being part of an event called Hacking Society — I helped organize the event w/ the folks at Union Square Ventures, and it was a real honor to spend a day surrounded by many of my internet heroes. It’s taken us a little while, but we’ve… Continue reading

I haven’t been following the story of the Digg acquisition too closely, and have no perspective on the economics of it, but it does seem kind of awesome in a way.  In that, the acquirers of the various parts of digg seem to have each gotten something uniquely valuable (to them) and likely have the… ...

Last week, I wrote about wanting a Chrome extension for Highrise.  This week, I built a first pass: https://github.com/nickgrossman/highrise-chrome-extension Here’s a quick video demo of how it works: Continue reading

I spent part of the train ride home today working on a coding project (the Highrise bookmarklet I blogged about wanting on Monday).  It’s almost done and I’m excited to start using it. I am not a great programmer, but I like it a lot. I only took one CS course in college. I really… Continue reading

Update: I built it. I’ve used Highrise as a lightweight CRM for a few years now.  It’s fine for my needs — basically keeping track of people who I meet on email. The thing that really made Highrise start to work for me is integration with Gmail, via Rapportive.  Being able to add someone to… Continu...

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to invest lately.  I’m not just talking about investing money, in savings or stocks or whatever; I mean investing in a broader sense, in yourself and in everything you do. I am without question an urgency addict — as a general rule, I procrastinate, let t...

Last week at the Media Lab, we had the pleasure of hosting USPTO Director Dave Kappos and several members of the PTO’s senior staff, to brainstorm ways that we might use technology in creative ways to help the patent office work better, and to help the patent system work better in general.  The meet...

The Civic Works team at OpenPlans just launched another sweet micro-site: cibi.me — for NYC’s forthcoming bike share program. The site is notable for a few reasons: First, it’s beautiful and fun to use.  The OpenPlans team has been putting out a ton of these small, beautifully designed and really fu...

I’m not a hard core follower of GTD, but I do believe that working from the top of your inbox all day long is a recipe for disaster.   However, accessing email is important and necessary.  Problem is, with most email clients (I use gmail), you have to pass through the inbox (risking distraction) to…...

When the Internet erupted on January 18th to voice its discontent with SOPA and PIPA, it was a moment of loud power.  Fight for the Future has a nice infographic describing everything that happened that day: 115,00 websites blacked out, 10mm signatures gathered, 8mm calls to congress; all in one day...