Tag Archives: the cloud

Is Your Productivity App Destroying Your Personal Life?

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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

Taking the Cus Out of Customer Service: Why Ask Why?

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Customers are always asking for something. When we first launched our project management & cloud collaboration web app, Rule, every time a customer would ask for something it did a couple things:

  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.

Rule Your Projects

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Project management is this easy…

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.