Everyone seems to be writing list-based articles about the Top (insert number) things people can do to produce a single result. We humans must like to read them. So, with hypocrisy at its finest, I guess I’ll be like everyone else. The top 3 things you can do to improve productivity and sanity while you’re at work:

Tip #1 to Improve Productivity: Be yourself

Are you a Project Manager? Entrepreneur? Developer? Designer? CEO? Sorry, but these are titles—not identities. If you identify your title with who you are, then this article is for you, and we all can’t wait for you to get back to being Bob or Jane or whatever your name is. Your occupation is just that: something you do. Not who you are. There is a difference, you see.

How does being yourself improve productivity? Greatly. Think about musicians. Why is it that the first and second albums a band produces so often end up being the only good ones? Why is the earlier work of so many artists the only output worth whatever fame they have and are trying to hold onto? I would argue that these works were made when they were people, and the crap that followed was made by musicians. Initially, they were humans with thoughts, feelings and the talent to express them. After everyone (themselves included) realized how well they did what they did, they slowly morphed into musicians, artists, singers, rock stars, etc. Instead of people making music, they became musicians making music, and their creativity became inbred. There’s a funny process that happens when a person discovers that they’re good at something:

Stage 1. They attempt to grow in their gift. It’s a humble and true endeavor, and they get better at it.

Stage 2. They bliss themselves out with the euphoria of their skill in sharpening action and begin to identify with it.

Stage 3. The tragedy of triumph: they stop being who they are to become what they do.

What does it prosper to gain the world and lose your soul? Many would make the trade in a heartbeat, but what if it actually made you worse at what you do?

Tip #2 to Improve Productivity: Be yourself

Stop being Clark Kent. We’ve all heard the phrase, “Believe it or not, so and so is actually a pretty cool person. You just have to get to know him outside of work.” Who wants to hang with someone outside of work to find out that he’s a nice guy if he’s a jerk at work? If he actually is a nice guy, then who the hell is this impostor that you have to deal with everyday?

Study after study reveals a link between state of mind, motivation and productivity. You want to improve productivity for yourself? You want to improve productivity for the people who work for you? It all starts with a state of mind. If you really are a nice chap, then, for heaven’s sake, BE ONE AT WORK! If you really are a jerk, then be one at the company Christmas party too.

Tip #3 to Improve Productivity: Be yourself

Being yourself liberates others to do the same. It’s clear that our thought and speech excels when we’re with other people who make us feel comfortable. When I’m at Thanksgiving dinner with my family, I’m a smooth operator. I’m witty, funny, sharp and sometimes even pleasant. As soon as I’m around a person who doesn’t know me and I don’t know them—especially someone I want to impress—I can be like a nervous kid on a date, tongue-tied, inarticulate and unintellectual. Improving productivity is about getting all cylinders firing and that takes a warm current of comfort flowing from person to person.

So, whether it’s a man or a woman with your name laying your head down at night and waking up in the morning, or if it’s a CEO living in your body, think about it: Your productivity is pointless unless you are the one being productive. Keep it real, yo.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

When you’re lying on your deathbed, you’re probably not going to be thinking, “I’m so glad I had that social productivity app for my professional and personal life to constantly distract me when I went on my honeymoon, played with my kids and hiked up half dome.

It seems like everyone has a productivity app these days, but do they make our lives better? Let’s start with what is the “better” life. I would define it as actually having one. That would mean that when you leave work, you do just that; leave it for tomorrow because you’ve done your job for today with the help of a productivity app. Then you’d go enjoy your life with friends, family, a hot date or a good novel.

So let’s assume (or at least hope) that you have a life. You killed it at work today, enjoyed a well-earned beer with your friends, and now you’re sitting down to read The Hunger Games trilogy before hitting the sack. But wait…you decided to get that new killer productivity app that you can use to manage your entire life, from checking off tasks at work to buying flowers for your honey, and getting social with it all. Obviously, you’re extremely important and everyone wants to see what you’re up to. With the help of your new social productivity app, you’ve shared your new project with fifteen friends on Facebook and now you have seven new comments awaiting your reply. And you need to get on that so you don’t look like a douche. You are one. Your productivity app owns you. So you reply and try to get back to your book. “Beep, beep…” you just got another reminder from your new swiss army life application: GET A LIFE!

Hey, who doesn’t love a good productivity app? We built one, and we do see the value in social collaboration at work…for work. Facebook rocks the social life already, so why do we feel the need to blur the lines between work and play? If you’re an American, it’s probably because you were bred to be a workaholic, and you may not even know it. Maybe now is a good time to reconsider mixing your professional and personal productivity so you don’t regret the few short years you have on this planet to enjoy yourself with your loved ones who want to enjoy you. One thing is for sure: when you are looking at your iPhone every 10 minutes, getting pinged with reminders and updates, no one is enjoying you or themselves.

Sure, task management is helpful with both our work and personal lives. But when a GTD or productivity app crosses over into both, is that really productive? You’re at work using your productivity app for task management and there, in your face all day long, is your personal to-do list waiting for you when you get off work. Distracted? Well maybe you’ll just surf the web in the middle of work to go look for that birthday present for you mom. If you can just take care of that, you’ll be right back to work…until you see the next thing on your list of endless things to do.

Now let’s add the social aspect on top of that, because Facebook is so productive. Hello, McFly, your shoe is untied. Think, McFly. Think! Facebook is a social network. What about that sounds like saving time and money at work? Facebook is supposed to be a social diversion; one of which people who have friends (i.e., a life) can enjoy to spend their free time to connect, catch up and post inappropriate pictures of their weekend debaucheries. Unless you’re trying to expand your market reach with social media optimization, then sharing project and task management on Facebook and Twitter is not what I would classify as a productive way to get things done.

So here’s some advice when looking for a productivity app: start with your pain points as an individual or team. Who cares about the mob and the latest innovation in universal connectivity? They’ll be onto the next big thing next week. Just find a productivity app that solves your problem and isn’t just out to use you to distribute their product through your personal social networks so they can get a series A investment. Think about what will actually help you to Rule your work so you can enjoy your life. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” – Jack

1. It would shoot the requested feature to the top of our mental priorities, since here it was in realtime right before us: a real customer asking for a real feature.
2. We would feel bummed that we didn’t yet have the feature.

Our immediate reaction dictated our response: Reaction: “Well competitor x and competitor y both have this feature. We need it too!” Response: “We hope to have this feature soon! Thanks for your feedback and patience.” Then one day, some customer was asking for some random feature, and we were going about our standard routine (adding it and haphazardly prioritizing it in our overwhelming list of features we needed to have) when one of our team members made the divine suggestion, “Why don’t you ask WHY they need this?” The results not only changed the way we develop our product roadmap, sharpening our knowledge of WHY we should add certain features and functionality and leave others out, but it completely changed the dynamic of our customer interactions. It engaged our customers to think rather than wait. So, now when a customer asks for something, this is our response: “WHY do you want this feature? WHAT does this look like within our software? HOW does this help you to become more productive?” It is always one of three results that occur:

1. The customer does not respond to our questions. Hmmmm….. apparently they’re tongue-tied.
2. Their response is a self-declaring answer arguing against the importance of their own request. They convince us (and themselves) that what they’re asking for is a want (at best) and definitely not a need. They actually talk themselves out of their own request and make it quite clear that this has no business being on our product roadmap.
3. They articulate exactly WHY they need this feature, WHAT it would look like being implemented into Rule, and HOW it will truly make them more productive. Bingo! “Now, add that to our wish list too.”

When it comes to developing software, it’s not about the kitchen sink—it’s about value. Which leads us to the customer’s dilemma: a desire for a solution with only a vague understanding of the problem. “I have to manage my team which includes customer relationships and project management. I have this software that we use to manage customers and projects, and we also depend on email, but our team is still not on the same page. We have work activity for projects with discussions all over the place—from email to the software. We have the same thing for customers and I can’t see how everything relates.” This is the reason why Rule exists and why we do what we do. Customers are helping to identify the problem that cloud collaboration & project management software is trying to solve. Like a rock laced with gold, raw feedback needs to be refined. We don’t want to appease demanding customers…we want to figure them out. There’s pain in work. We all have some symptoms. We all have some points. True customer service is a two-way road: discovering the problem together and working on a solution together. We’ll never be in the business of telling customers what they need without listening to what they want. Nor will we return to the mindless nod of, “Yeah we’ll have that…eventually.” We ask WHY.

The Rule CRM is a simple and powerful way to manage deal flow, grow your business, stay on task and make sure that everyone on your team—from sales to production—is winning together. Rule on.

Now, here’s a project that actually manages itself. Artist Matty Davis is doodleifying and coolifying the west wall of the Rule warehouse. When he’s done we’ll be converting it into an office where dozy designers and crazy coders can look at something a little more in tune with their palate than a motivational poster of a mountain climber. We’ve had the pleasure of beholding the unfolding of this…thing.

Everyday around noon, the team has been resorting here to have sandwiches and beverages (along with a jar of pickled chilis that make certain people scream), let the sun shine in and the wind roll in, and watch Matty do his…thing. Even when he’s not here painting, you can look at something that was a random doodle a day earlier, and is now connected and interacting with the other once-random doodles.

There’s a large, long-legged slave with a baby fisherman sitting on his bald head while getting his wheel cranked by an impostor from the sky as good ol’ Longbeard looks to be finding his zen in a blissful swirl while TV’s are shipwrecked from a living, wrinkling trimene and a squid rises up from the spinning whirpool of tiny bat-infested water being blown into a tsunami from a little boy in the corner (who’s looking pretty sharp). What does it all mean? It’s obvious, but we like to hear you say it. Pray tell.

Check out the evolution of our favorite mural ever!

Here are three really cool features to help you save time, stay focused and get things done. We use these everyday here at Rule, and we hope they’re as helpful for you as they are for us!

Also check out the new Rule Projects video!

With all the great updates we’ve recently made, it was time to make a new video to show you how fun and easy it is to collaborate around projects with your team.

When it comes to project management, especially with a small team, producing results that pack a punch in a short period of time is non-negotiable. The stakes and stress levels are higher, and team morale plays a vital role in crossing the finish line. In our world, there is no difference between running a good race and running a good project— warmup, sprint, cool down.

I’m not talking about the revolutionary 4 hour work week, 8 minute abs or 8 minute buns (unless you’ve figured out how to do it in 7). If you’ve tried those by now, you’ve probably figured out that you still have 36 more hours left of work, abs that you hide behind your oversize shirt and a butt that says, “You sit on me for at least 40 hours a week.”There is no getting away from having to do the necessary work to get what you want. We’ve been experimenting with project management techniques, and the process we’re stumbling upon seems to be keeping the team motivated, our customers happy and our production output in the 90th percentile. I have to ask myself, “What’s with this 3 day sprint thing?” and “Can this help other teams as well?”

5 things we’ve learned about project management:

1. Better project management planning leads to more creative solutions, packing a punch and delivering on time.
2. Working with the finish line in sight keeps the team pumped and focused as we run towards a common goal with a lower margin of error.
3. Testing and/or reviewing work when it’s still fresh is actually fun, so we stay in love with what we do and make our customers happy.
4. Marking a project and/or milestone as complete is gratifying. The more we mark things off, the better the team feels.
5. Taking 5 to debrief, celebrate, discuss the project highlights and pin a medal on a team member provides some closure and helps reset the team for the next event.

The 3 Day Sprint: How it all breaks down

The Warmup (Monday)- Just like needing a good stretch before a race, there has to be a good plan before taking on a project. We dedicate Monday (the entire team for the entire day) to coming up with a sprint that will produce the best results. As a team there are usually a few constants that every project will include and those things should always be in focus when deciding on what the sprint will entail. As a startup project management and team collaboration software company, those constants may include the product, our customers, sales. The goal: solve customer pain points with the product, positively impact our current and/or future customers, maintain/increase sales. Once there is a plan, the tasking begins. We task out the team and gather all related work items needed to execute the plan. When it comes to big projects we use the old-school milestone method to prep for sprints, which really just means that the overall project is a container for weekly milestone discussions and activity (tasks, documents, wiki to-do lists, notes, people etc.). After that, it’s time to run.

The Sprint (Tuesday – Thursday): – Get ready for some Gilly moments (check out SNL if you don’t get it). Longer timelines can make it easier to get sidetracked, but just because the timeline is shorter, it doesn’t mean that mayhem won’t come knocking. The trick is maintaining focus on the finish line. It’s difficult, but no matter what, we try not to deviate from the plan for 3 days straight. To keep the focus, we use project management software in order to organize our discussions that go together with the work activity that goes together. We make sure that everything needed to accomplish a task, a milestone or a project is directly connected to those items so everyone has what they need to do their job along the way. While we do most of our project management collaboration in the cloud, we keep things human with morning check-ins (about 15 min) and also on breaks throughout each day. We rarely use email. It’s distracting. Even with all of the wonderful technology available for managing a sprint, there is no substitute for the occasional, impulsive outburst when we feel like screaming across the office.

The Cool Down (Friday): Assuming we survive Gilly’s antics, the team is usually gasping for breath after 3 days of picking up speed, but we don’t quit there. Sometimes we  actually see a trail of fire behind us, kind of like the DeLorean in “Back to the Future” (OK, now I’m really dating myself). Equal to the warmup (project planning) is the cool down (testing, reviewing and refining of work) after a good project management sprint. We take the time to go over everything while it’s fresh, which just makes sense. We debrief, talk about how we kicked Gilly in the teeth and learned from our mistakes. What’s really gratifying is when we step back from an intense time of collaboration and mayhem, maybe have some pizza and beer, and celebrate the wins that happened. Giving credit where credit is due is key (we give the office shake weight to whoever’s killing it—don’t ask), then we clear the slate, rest and get ready for the next event.

Excessively long project management timelines tend to result in plans lacking details, due dates getting pushed back and the team losing their drive. 3 day sprints may provide the focus your team needs to keep the wins rolling back to back each week. Hey, it’s worth a shot. And If you think your team has what it takes to go for a 3 day sprint, give a shout out and tell us know how it goes.

Leave a comment and let us know what project management methods work best for you. We’re all in this boat together, and the faster we share together, the faster we Rule work together.

When you click the “My Tasks” icon in the bottom right from wherever you are in Rule, this handy little gadget makes it easy to scroll through your task timeline to see what’s due today, this week, overdue etc.  Add, edit and check off personal, project and CRM tasks as you go.

Tasks with a priority (high, medium, low) are conveniently color coded so you know what’s important. Edit a task and change the status to let others involved know what stage you’re at in the process of getting things done in Rule. Clicking a task or the related project from “My Tasks” redirects you to the details where you can share it, connect it and collaborate on it.

So stay on top of your game and go Rule your tasks today.

Share and Connect

Do you want to share something with another user or group? Click the share button.

Do you want to connect a document to a project? A wiki checklist to a task? A contact to a deal? Click the connect button.

Whatever item your viewing, you can share and connect without breaking a sweat, and you can also see everything that has been shared or connected in the same place. Click a button… Now that was easy.

Collaborate from Anywhere

Even the smallest work item has a proper place and its own space to collaborate and view all activity related to it. Item specific streams: That’s where you’ll land for every item in Rule now. In one view you can see all data, discussions and activity for that item, and collaborate right from there. If you collaborate around a task, your discussions will flow from the task’s stream to its milestone’s stream to its project’s stream…and all the way up into the main stream. You never have to dig through an inbox again. Rule organizes your work for you while you go.

Every Item Now Has Its Own Action Menu

Edit, delete, comment, etc. Before this update, the Universal Actions Menu was required to do a lot of these things and we realized that this just didn’t make sense. Now, anything you can do with a work item can be done in a very creative way: click a button right next to it. You can always use the Universal Actions Menu to create anything in Rule without leaving where you are.

We hope you enjoy the update! We’ll be working hard to make work easy.

The top 3 features that you have requested are now here.

Project Templates

Project Templates are easy and useful. You can now choose one of your Rule projects from a list and you’ll be able to create a new project with the same tasks, milestones and a timeline matched up with your new project’s due date. Project templates save time, money and manual labor.

Deal Flow

Now you can easily manage the flow from Contacts to Leads, Leads to Customer and Customer to Projects. So go makes some connections and collaborate with your team in Rule to track and win some deals. Then when that customer flows into a Rule Project and you collaborate with your team and customer to deliver the goods, you’ll get that repeat business and you’ll be Ruling.

Help Center

Now you can learn everything you need to Rule @ help.rule.fm You can also access the Help Center from within Rule by clicking the “?” in the upper-right corner of the application.

Thank you all for your requests. Now we’re off to work on the rest.

1. It’s alive! New stream activity now shows when you’re viewing the main-stream or an item specific stream and a new activity or discussion arrives.
2. Inline Stream Post commenting. Keep the conversation where it belongs.
3. New inline views of all Stream post attachements – Images and now also PDF’s!
4. Now when you post, your parent user group is chosen by default so everyone gets notified in your primary team. But you can still choose whoever and whatever group you want to notify.
5. View the discussions and activity happening right now without breaking a sweat. User posts and system activity is different and now looks different (ie: XX user has marked XX task as complete).
6. We simplified the Stream navigation in the left column and brought item specific filters to the stream header next to the date range selector for better control of Stream filters.
7. And, as always, when you notify your group or any user of your posts, your conversation will be tracked and in tact in Rule where it belongs in Rule and in their email client of choice.

This is Team Rule signing out…more to come.

Matty's first piece of work sold

Back in the day we opened shop in the garage behind my house. After we decked it out, the first piece of art on the wall was from a local artist, Matty Davis, who honored me by allowing me to purchase his fist work (above). It’s fair to say that this painting was the crowing piece of our young work culture.

To be honest the garage days will go down in history, but we haven’t abandon our roots, we just got a bigger garage. There is no better way that I can think of than to kick off a new season of creative code collaboration than with some Matty inspiration. We still have his first piece proudly hung where we gather at the table to stretch our team brain, but today is Day 1 of something much bigger… Matty is turning the West wall of the Rule warehouse into his canvas. Here’s a sneak peak at where his genius is headed.

From the Co-founder and CEO of productivity tool Rule, Patrick Carmitchel…

My biggest discovery in 2011 was the rediscovery of why we set out to build a productivity tool. We just wanted to be able to collaborate from anywhere, with anyone about everything in work that matters. Now I can say with confidence, “The more we drink our own kool aid, the better it tastes.” We didn’t just create Rule, we use it every day to get things done with our team.

I realize we have not been a very chatty crew up until now. It’s not because we don’t like to share, debate and encourage the trolls to come out and play, it’s because we had work to do (a lot of which included listening to the thousands of companies each month that signed up to Rule in 2011). There will always be more work, but now that the dust has settled since our official release of our productivity tool, it’s time to start sharing some of what we’ve learned about getting productive.

Conversation around work is more efficient than talking about it.

Once we made the choice to collaborate on work only through Rule (our own software), we were met with some resistance. Yes, even the creators of a productivity tool have an addiction to the email beast. Maybe, like us, you should reconsider just how much time is wasted at work trashing, reading and sorting email that has nothing to do with your job. We decided to develop email integration so users can post to the Rule Stream from email and also send email notifications from the Stream to track conversations simultaneously inside Rule and through any email client. We also added a handy feature to the stream so you could reference any item in Rule and have that conversation copied to the item specific stream. This took the edge off long enough to realize it was far more efficient to have a conversation around work related things (ie: projects, documents, customers etc.) inside the application where all of our work activity was being tracked in the first place, than talk about it using email.

Embrace that saucy minx called accountability.

No one wants a “Big Brother” looking over their shoulder. At the same time managers need to be able to see the who, what, when, where, why and how in order to make important decisions in the now, and make strategic ones for the future. Our team started to embrace the productivity stream when it became their friend; an objective reporter on all of the great work and conversation surrounding getting things done. On the flip side, when you filter a date range in the activity Stream it’s clear who’s been slacking off. Here’s the “Rule Big 10″ that have helped our team get the most out of our product.

1. Check your task list first thing.
2. Post a stream status when you begin to work, summarizing what you plan on doing for the day.
3. Mark things as complete immediately when done.
4. If you spend more than 30 min working on something that is not on your task list, add it to your task list so it’s tracked.
5. If you are working on something that takes more than one day to complete, quote and track actual hours worked and use the task status feature when it makes sense (ie: awaiting approval).
6. Post a status update when you leave and return from breaks and/or lunch.
7. Post/notify when you have a question for any/all team members.
8. Post a status update when you run into a wall that may cause you to deviate from your planned work load for the day.
9. Post/notify when you need to manage expectations of team members due to any unforeseen change.
10. Post a stream status at the end of the day summarizing what you actually did and/or learned.

It’s not exactly rocket science, but doing these basic things makes it possible to see exactly how efficient a team really is. However, you could always keep sending emails, managing spreadsheets and sharing random files, so that you can go dig through piles of email crap when you want to know the who, what, when…. of how stuff is actually getting done with your team.

Thing 1 and Thing 2

Dr. Susse paints a picture of Thing 1 and Thing 2 terrorizing the house, but there is another side to the story. It’s easy to chase after the wind with a bottomless pit of things to do. When I saw this happening at work it occurred to me that, without a way to define if the day was a success, work becomes overbearing even if “things” are getting done. In order to chisel away at the behemoth that is called work, here are 5 things to ask yourself in order to experience a win every day and keep your head above water:

1. What is on my task list today?
2. What is my THING 1? The thing (or group of smaller things) that I know I have to complete in order to know the day was a success?
3. What is my THING 2?  The thing that is almost as important as 1, but guaranteed to be completable if you know Thing 1 cannot be completed mid day, so you have a daily win.
4. What are the 2 or 3 micro tasks or things I can do if/when I complete Thing 1 & Thing 2?
5. Am I waisting time on email and arbitrary tasks instead of focusing on completing Thing 1 & Thing 2?

A productivity tool won’t solve your team dynamics issues.

This last year we became fixed on using our own software for just about everything. Sure, we found that the more we used it, the more we accomplished in a shorter period of time and there was less confusion about who did what, when and how, but what we realized in the end was even more valuable… there is no substitute for the “Daily 15″. No matter what we were getting done, we needed to have time in the morning to connect, share ideas, cry like fools and get our heads in the game to kick some ass. We suggest timing it and not placing any boundaries on what is said, so there is total freedom to build the relationships necessary to survive that crazy thing called work as a unified team. For those who survive working with us we give thanks, and for those who do not, we wish for them to be reborn into an environment that will help them reach their full potential.

We’re just getting warmed up here at Team Rule, but we hope this helps you start off on the right track in 2012, so you can Rule work and enjoy your life.

Now it’s your turn to let us know how you Rule work…

There’s a lot of places and ways you can talk these days: Facebook, Twitter, Skype, email, Rule… some even use the dinner table. In Twitter, if you can’t get to you’re point quickly, then you won’t have one.

We’d like to say thanks (of the warm and fuzzy kind) to these noble Rulers for their recent gifts wrapped in 140 characters or less:

*****WARNING***** Using Rule has been shown to dramatically increase your chances of becoming almost too productive.

Work, like life, is symbiotic. Everything depends on something else. Your projects are no different. Find out how easy it is to collaborate and be productive when your projects are connected to the people, parts and discussions that make them happen.

Now your company users can post to the stream right from any email client, and all company users will automatically receive email notifications of the post. Team members can reply to these right from their email as well, and conversations will appear in the stream tracked and in tact— as if everyone had been posting and commenting from Rule all along.

To get your drop email address go to settings, and it will be right there on the first page. Make sure to keep this private as it posts to the stream in your name.

Enjoy

It’s tough to keep everyone motivated and collaborating on your team every hour of every day. Here’s Rule’s list of 7 essential rules (pardon the pun) to help you along the way. If you have other creative ways to increase collaboration, feel free to share them in the comments.

Communicate Effectively
If you’re not communicating with your team, then you’re not collaborating. Open and continuous discussion between team members can open the door to new ideas and concepts that would otherwise be left unturned. Communication is not limited to long emails or meetings— instant messaging and group messaging services are a great way to keep communication constant and passive.

Encourage Ideas
Are your team members or clients encouraged to share their ideas? Sometimes your team or customers are not sure if their ideas will be deemed productive — let anyone working with you know their ideas are always welcome and collaboration is one of your founding principles in your company. A good exercise is to encourage ideas at different stages in a project, to make sure it’s ways headed in the right direction.

Value Opinions
If you have opened up the door to ideas from your team, clients, or customers, be sure to value that opinion. Not all ideas are going to be gems, but by showing that you value other people’s opinions, you’re allowing a constant stream of collaboration within your organization that will be worth it in the end. A simple ‘thank you for your ideas’ is sufficient and allows flexibility when it comes down to making an important decision.

Group Decisions
It’s hard making a big decision on your own. It’s normal to rely on someone else to help you make a decision, but it is even easier to make those decisions in a group. Even though it’s not possible to make every decision in your company as a group, by allowing some minor decisions or details to made as a group, you’re showing your team members that you value their opinion and you may increase collaboration as a result.

Magic Number
Try collaborating with yourself — it’s not going to happen; try collaborating with 100 people — it’s not going to be easy. Not every topic or issue needs to be shared with your entire team, but it’s also great to get other departments involved, so how do you find the magic number? The magic number has enough people to develop great ideas, but not so many that it’s hard to keep up with all those ideas. If you find the magic number, you’ll introduce a whole new level of collaboration within your team.

Young & Experienced
Remember to try and open up collaboration to as many different age groups as you can. Your team members in their 20s aren’t smarter than your team members in their 30s, and vice versa. Every age group has a different level of knowledge and experience, so don’t pick one group over the other when communicating or collaborating.

The Boss
If you’re a project manager or ‘the boss’ you may consider sitting out a few conversations and watch from the sidelines. By keeping your voice out of the start of a conversation, your team members may feel free to continue exploring their ideas without feeling the wrath of your power. If you get involved in the conversation too early, you may stump the growth of great ideas; by letting the seeds grow on their own, you’re able to jump in at harvest time and reap the rewards (or destroy the crop if need be).

This article is from Rule by Fusion Monarch, which makes simple web-based software to increase cloud collaboration in the workplace. To learn more about what we do, visit us at https://www.rule.fm and signup for free.

Improve your productivity with multi-content creativity— using Rule wikis for team strategy, brainstorming, planning, creating to-do lists and more.

See how you can collect & connect the parts of work so you can collaborate from anywhere, with anyone about everything that matters in 3 minutes.

At last, simplicity and productivity meet in the cloud with RULE: one application to make your business simply productive. People, CRM, Projects, Documents and more- all interacting and coexisting with total transparency online in an activity stream — so you can finally manage your business under one rule. Go to ‪https://www.rule.fm‬ for more info.

We set out to create a productivity tool that would make it possible for us to manage our business the way we want from anywhere, anytime. Nothing has changed — at least with regard to purpose. In actuality, this means we will be upping the ante with what rule.fm will include upon initial release. You may just find yourself getting a little more turned on by productivity every time you log in.

Where’s Your Invitation?

Let’s just say they are in startup purgatory — a process of purification or temporary punishment, where delayed invitations go prior to being made ready for faithful patrons in waiting.

When do you get to RULE?

You can’t have it until our team agrees that rule.fm is what we’ve always wanted for managing our own business. FYI – we are using rule.fm to manage this startup, so believe us when we say, “We’ll know.” What we can say is that by October 2010 (for those who have requested an invite) you will finally be RULING with us.

Keep in mind that we are a garage shop and we have to make money to put food on the table — rule.fm is funded by our blood, sweat and tears. We will not disappoint.

+Team FM

Well, it could have been because of the terrible mug shot of 2 WASPS in a garage late at night.  Or people could have just figured, “hey, way to go on a 4 character domain name that is actually the name of your product sans useless other characters and includes the initials of your company!”  Or…who effen cares?

Frequency Modulation?
Federated States of Micronesia?
Fusion Monarch?

Could radio stations benefit from RULE in managing their productivity?  We hope so.  Could the Federated States of Micronesia increase profits from their gross national product because they use the RULE platform to track and stack their important data?  We hope so.  Can Fusion Monarch bring an new utility to the table that changes the way businesses look at productivity?  Everyone will find out soon enough.

That’s what this blog is all about, a place to discuss the who, what, when, where and why of business productivity, user experience, design, etc, so that one day we’ll be able to look back and say we’re all better for it. When our toughest daily decision becomes, “where should I manage business from today… a hammock, the golf course or on the back of a camel while touring the Sahara with a martini in one hand and an iPhone in the other”, then we’ll be ruling it together.

That being said, what’s the deal with productivity these days?

On one side of the productivity chasm is the over staffed, over budgeted and over paid IT world that’s filled with people that care more about keeping their job than making a difference. The primary objective: look productive at all times. Of course this doesn’t necessarily equate to actually being productive, but what the boss doesn’t know won’t hurt them…right?

On the other side is the small business that thinks productivity equals more Excel spreadsheets and still prints everything because they don’t have a personal Internet security guard protecting their precious information from the infamous “hacker”, who apparently has enough time to personally attack any and every helpless person on the Web (paranoid much are we?).

No matter where you’re at, we want managing business from the ivory tower of corporate America (even though it pains us), to the “little guy” in the trenches (if they can survive the economy) to be more efficient and dare we say: more fun.

Join us in leveling the playing field so that no one is left out of the productivity game.

This is just the beginning and it’s not about us. In fact, we’re the first to admit we don’t know much and it seems with every day that passes, we know even less. What we do know is this — when a group of people that give a damn come together over a common goal, S#!T gets done. We have our Fusion Monarch client startups and our garage shop baby, Rule.fm to prove that.

So bring us your tired, your weak and your unproductive and lets see if we can’t change the face of productivity together.

This is Team FM, the garage boys who’s ugly mugs you may have come across on the following TechCrunch articles over the last few days:

Rule Your Work Productivity With rule.fm
How To Get Our Attention, A Case Study

Just like it states, we sent an email out to TechCrunch (yeah, we spelled it right this time) in the middle of the night last Thursday and absolutely had no expectations of getting a response. Just a garage shop of yahoos that want to show the world what our blood, sweat and tears have created in the last months. What happened after that was nothing short of insane.

And so, in lieu of the current events that began to unravel over the last week, we thought it would be appropriate to shed some light on the reality of life in the FM garage…

Thursday, July 29 (the calm before the storm)

• 11:00pm – Patrick & Mark (Co-founders), send out an email to TechCrunch
• 11:30pm – The team goes to crash in Patrick’s house yet again (also known as Chez Carmitchel)
• 11:47pm – Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch responds in a way that, well…you’ll just have to see for yourself (How To Get Our Attention, A Case Study)
• 11:48pm – Mark & Patrick freak out.
• 11:50pm – We interrupt the evening ritual episode of “The Office” for this important message “Hey guys…we just found out that TechCrunch likes our story (and apparently our ugly garage shop mugs) and wants to run a piece on RULE.fm.
• 11:51 – Total silence…followed by “OMG this S#!T just got real…” followed by another freak out session.

Friday, July 30 (the wee hours of the morning)

• 12:08am – Michael Arrington follows up with, “I think the exchange is probably well worth publishing as an example of how to get our attention.”
• 12:09am – Patrick & Mark freak out… again
• 12:15am – We interrupt “The Office” for another important update.
• 12:16am – More silence…followed by “I think we need some fresh air.”
• 1:00am – TechCrunch notifies us that they want to coordinate their article with the release of the RULE.fm product tour.
• 1:15am – We interrupt “The Office” (again) for another important update
• 1:30am – Team consensus – Ok this is getting ridiculous…lets get back to work
• 1:35am – Team FM is back in the garage doing cleanup and scaling to handle the potential response…so bad ass.
• 7:30 am – Team goes to sleep while Patrick & Mark wait for the article to post to TechCrunch.
• 8:00 am – Mark takes a nap while Patrick drops off his son at school.
• 8:45 am – Mark gets a call from TechCrunch and somehow manages to get up, answer and cover the details prior to the article being posted — looks like 45 minutes of shuteye is all that’s in the cards.
• 9:00am – 4:00pm – We almost admit ourselves to a psych ward going crazy waiting for this thing to go down, questioning whether or not we’d be passed over all together.
• 4:30pm – It happens…RULE.fm got made.
• 4:31pm – We freak out again — ya, ya, ya you get it
• 4:15pm – All of our feeble marketing attempts to trickle out the coming launch of RULE.fm are shattered by TechCrunch’s market reach.

Saturday, July 31 (the wee hours of the morning)

• 1:30 am – Yeah — 42 hours of madness and then…sweet dreams.

Once the word was out, the amount of invite requests spiked and the game changed (see “An Update from Fusion Monarch & rule.fm” below).

We’re back to business as usual, scaling, tweaking and testing our infrastructure so we can send out bulk invites to all you cool people that just can’t wait to let your work flow with the RULE.fm productivity tool.

A wise woman once said something about RULE.fm, “making the productivity software industry just a little bit more badass” – Alexia Tsotsis (TechCrunch) So just relax, sit back and think of the days ahead when you’ll be ruling your business the way you want, and we’ll keep on being who we’ve always been — a group of guys couped up in a garage somewhere in SoCal who just want to make the productivity world a better place.

By now the majority of you have seen the articles on TechCrunch (links below) about our product, rule.fm, and have requested an invite (how we got your email).

Rule Your Work Productivity with rule.fm @ TechCrunch
How to Get Our Attention, a Case Study @ TechCrunch

The good news is, more invites will be sent out in the near future. Due to the overwhelming interest, however, our game has changed. Here are the facts…

Yes, we are in a garage in so-cal — as you can see in the picture in the second article (yes, we normally look like what you see in our CrunchBase profiles). We have a team of 6 guys, and honestly, all of us have been focused completely on the product from day one — not publicity or PR. Our launch and marketing strategy did not include even getting noticed by TechCrunch or any other big name source. We wrote an email to them after coming off of a week straight of work and a 16 hour work day. We also did not believe we would even get featured in the event that we did actually get someones attention.

At the end of the email we wrote to TechCrunch, you may have noticed in the section “What’s on tap” that we mentioned that after our tour went live on Friday, we wanted to launch on August 3rd “unless someone give us a better idea.” Well, after all of the publicity, we were given a better idea by a few thousand more people being interested in our service than we ever considered would be interested at launch.

What does that mean? It means that instead of rolling out a small amount of invites (a few hundred) at a time over a very long period of time (months), we would rather release invites to larger groups (hundreds and thousands) over a shorter period of time (weeks). Thus, in short order, everyone will get to see what RULE is made of for free. During the free period we will release plans and pricing details to prepare for the product going completely public.

What should I do until I get my invite? Spread the word. As you know from the articles, we have no funding backing our game — just the desire to bring something new to the industry. We also invite you to interact with us on facebook, Twitter, and our new blog called under one rule (see below for links).

When will you get your invites? Plan on looking for them in your inbox on August 17th. We are not a team that misses deadlines. In this case, we were given a good reason by thousands of people to be ready. RULE is supposed to help your work productivity, and we want to make sure it can do that for everyone, from our infrastructure perspective, from the day you come on board.

Follow us on our blog here at underonerule.com

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Fusion Monarch @ Twitter
rule.fm @ Twitter

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Fusion Monarch @ facebook
rule.fm @ facebook

Check Us Out…
http://fusionmonarch.com/
http://rule.fm/

Cheers,

+Team FM
–
Mark Nielsen and Patrick Carmitchel
Managing Directors

Paul Redfern
Money Superman

Dalton Woods
Director of UX

Trevis Rouse
Sultan of Code

Randy Jones
Director of Compilation