I recently realized that the web services I love and use the most are all run by indie developers or small companies. While I ponder what that means, I thought I’d do my little part to tell you about them in case you’re in the market for one of these things.

These are all services I’ve used for a while and have no intention of leaving. Unless they shut down. PLEASE SUPPORT THEM SO THEY DON’T SHUT DOWN.

• I use Feedbin as my back-end for RSS reading. It’s solid. It always updates fast, it never goes down, and it works with a pretty much any RSS reader you can think of. I tried Feedly, but it’s not for me. Too many gimmicks I don’t need.
• Speaking of which, I use Reeder as my front end for RSS reading. Beautiful UI, great integration with services.
• Anyone who’s paying attention knows that Feedburner is on its way out. So a while ago I moved my site’s RSS feed hosting to Feedblitz. It’s not worth linking to them — it was a terrible mistake. Shady “growth hacking” marketing techniques, impossible to work with on support issues, etc. Don’t do it. I have since switched to FeedPress and I’m really happy with it. I do think there’s still a gap in the market for a really good Feedburner replacement, but Feedpress does an admirable job for now.
• Pinboard is still the backbone of everything I do online. It’s basically my external memory. I don’t know how I would internet without it.
• Instapaper is not a one-person band any more, but it’s still my “read later” service of choice. I dabbled in Pocket for a while, but I keep coming back to Instapaper for the no-nonsense UI and focus on typography.
• When it comes to writing, my favorite tools remain MarsEdit (blog writing and editing), nvALT (text editor), and Marked 2 (Markdown viewer).

I really hope these developers continue to make enough money to focus on these fantastic projects. I also hope they know how many people they’re helping every day with the things they dream up. Thank you, to all of you.

The Economist tries to answer the question Why is everyone so busy? and it doesn’t tell a pretty story about ourselves. It starts with the economics of it:

When people are paid more to work, they tend to work longer hours, because working becomes a more profitable use of time. So the rising value of work time puts pressure on all time. Leisure time starts to seem more stressful, as people feel compelled to use it wisely or not at all.

This part makes us sound like terrible human beings, but it’s hard to disagree with:

The explosion of available goods has only made time feel more crunched, as the struggle to choose what to buy or watch or eat or do raises the opportunity cost of leisure (ie, choosing one thing comes at the expense of choosing another) and contributes to feelings of stress. The endless possibilities afforded by a simple internet connection boggle the mind. When there are so many ways to fill one’s time, it is only natural to crave more of it. And pleasures always feel fleeting.

And of course we tell ourselves that one day it will be different:

Writing in the first century, Seneca was startled by how little people seemed to value their lives as they were living them—how busy, terribly busy, everyone seemed to be, mortal in their fears, immortal in their desires and wasteful of their time. He noticed how even wealthy people hustled their lives along, ruing their fortune, anticipating a time in the future when they would rest. “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy,” he observed in “On the Shortness of Life”, perhaps the very first time-management self-help book.

This is a long article and I know you’re busy, but try to make time for it…

Sticking with the theme of remote work, Steven Sinofsky wrote a great post called Why Remote Engineering Is So Difficult!? There’s a lot of food for thought, but here’s the main issue:

The core challenge with remote work is not how it is defined right here and now. In fact that is often very easy. It usually only takes a single in person meeting to define how things should be split up. Then the collaboration tools can help to nurture the work and project. It is often the case that this work is very successful for the initial run of the project. The challenge is not the short term, but what happens next. […]

If I had to sum up all of these in one challenge, it is that however you find you can divide the work across geography at a point in time, it simply isn’t sustainable. The very model you use to keep work geographically efficient are globally sub-optimal for the evolution of your code. It is a constraint that creates unnecessary tradeoffs.

Projects often start off ok, but then start to unravel as every small miscommunication and missed messages add up to a much bigger problem. I find this stuff fascinating not just because I work at Jive (where we don’t use email at all), but because we’re seeing such an explosion of remote work everywhere as our tools keep getting better and better.

Steph Yiu’s post Still figuring it out: communicating remotely with lots of people is another good one to read, since she walks through all the tools they use to get their work done. Our setup at Jive is very similar, except that we use our own tool where they use P2 (their Wordpress intranet theme).

I really enjoyed Eddie Smith’s The ascent of failure, a post on the many ways our technology can fail us. He starts off with a parenting story that’s infinitely relatable, and goes on to make some good points about how fiddly we’ve become with our technology:

With Yosemite and iOS 8, we have even more interdependence through features like Handoff. Now, a MacBook, iPhone, and iPad are no longer three things but a system of things—an ecosystem with an even higher chance of failure by virtue of sitting atop an ever-rising house of cards.

I think it’s worth pondering the time we spend fixing our tools and toys versus the time we spend solving problems and actually getting to play.

I’m not convinced that having complex tools is a necessary condition for achieving remarkable results.

Maybe this non-complexity is another reason why vinyl is seeing such a revival. Or why paper notebooks are making a strong comeback, spurred on by brands like Field Notes, Moleskine, and the one I personally use (and love): Baron Fig.

There are lots of great points in Chris Hardie’s Distributed vs. In-Person Teams, an article on the challenges and opportunities of remote work. But this part, in particular, stood out because I’ve experienced it myself:

Having some remote workers is harder than being fully local or fully distributed. […] This dual approach is probably a recipe for disaster when it comes to building shared vision and common culture in an organization. If there are team members who have a daily experience of being in the same space together and sharing all of the quirks and benefits of that, remote workers will almost always feel excluded in some way, culturally, logistically or both. When only part of the team is forced to consider the implications of having a distributed group, an unfair burden falls to the remote worker to keep their needs in front of everyone else. At best it adds a weird kind of tension to team relationships, and without incredible discipline and initiative, it probably won’t work in the long run.

This gets even worse when the remote workers are in different time zones. The remote workers are almost always the ones who have to give up their evenings to do Skype calls.

As is often the case with these things, I just noticed two articles that make very similar points about the quantified self movement. In Quantify Thyself LM Sacasas makes the point that we don’t know what we don’t measure:

Not only do we tend to pay more attention to what we can measure, we begin to care more about what can measure. Perhaps that is because measurement affords us a degree of ostensible control over whatever it is that we are able to measure. It makes self-improvement tangible and manageable, but it does so, in part, by a reduction of the self to those dimensions that register on whatever tool or device we happen to be using to take our measure.

In a similar vein, Anne Helen Petersen has a great piece on Buzzfeed called Big Mother Is Watching You: The Track-Everything Revolution Is Here Whether You Want It Or Not. Here’s the kicker:

But there’s something to be said for the allure and beauty of the mysteries not only of our confusing, previously unknowable bodies, but the intricacies of life. For the daily banalities of tuning the thermostat, or of knowing you had a good night’s sleep because you feel good, not because an app indicated as much. For the pleasure of running without knowing how fast or how long or how many calories but simply because your body could and did move, and that even without a digital trace, a GPS footprint, or way to leverage evidence thereof against friends and co-workers — it nonetheless felt something like being alive.

I just finished Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better and really enjoyed it. So much of what we read about technology these days is doom and gloom that I wanted to spend time on something a little more positive. And turns out, there’s much to be positive about.

There are many stand-out moments in the book. One is the exploration of ambient awareness — how social media often makes our in-person connections stronger because we know so much about each other’s minutia that we can skip the small talk and jump straight to the important stuff when we see each other. But the part I want to elaborate on a little bit here is what historical events tell us about the important criteria to meet for collective thinking to be successful.

Clive points out four important aspects of successful online collaboration:

1. Collective thinking requires a focused problem to solve. One disastrous story Clive tells is when the LA Times create a wiki page on the Iraq War and encouraged people to edit it. No focused outcome = a rapid decline into the bottom half of the internet. But give people a common problem to solve — like “Which tent hospitals in Cairo need help, and what do they need?”, and people start to shine together.
2. Collective problem solving requires a mix of contributors. Specifically, it needs to have really big central contributors, and then a lot of people making small contributions to push the solution forward. As Clive puts it, “these hard-core and lightweight contributors form a symbiotic whole,” coming up with the best solution in the fastest possible way.
3. Collective thinking requires a culture of “good faith collaboration”. Contributors need to struggle constantly to remain polite to each other. And it is a struggle, but a necessary one. As Anil Dash once said, if your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault.
4. To be really smart an online group can’t have too much contact with each other. This sounds counterintuitive, but the evidence supporting the point is pretty overwhelming. Clive goes over a few examples that shows that “traditional brainstorming simply doesn’t work as well as thinking alone, then pooling results.” This also explains why Design Studio is such an effective way to solve design problems. So one of the secrets of online collaboration is that it “inherently fits the model of people working together intimately but remotely,” as Clive puts it.

There’s much more to say about the book, but I think I’ll stop here and just encourage you again to read it. You’ll agree with a lot of it, disagree with some of it, and think about all of it for days after finishing it. That’s all we could ever ask of a book.

In Avoiding product management whiplash Hemal Kuntawala describes the constant context-switching that PMs need to do as they move from strategy to execution and back:

Each phase of product development requires a different perspective, almost a different mindset. At one end of the scale you have a big-picture view of the world, like looking at the market you’re in and hypothesising new value propositions. At the other end you have nitty-gritty details like the pixels and font-sizes of your UI.

I like the gentle slopes of the sine wave he uses as illustration, although I think in reality the back-and-forth is a lot less gentle…

The biggest problem that many Mac users struggle with is that we work for organizations that use Exchange for email and calendar management. This means that, in most cases, we have to use Outlook for Mac if we want the majority of basic tasks to work. It’s an application that is so ugly and bug-ridden that most people look like this every time they open it:

The problem is that traditionally it’s been pretty difficult to make OS X’s Mail.app play well enough with Exchange to be a viable replacement. For my personal use case there were a few things that always held me back:

• The default view settings are not conducive to effectively manage a lot of email.
• No keyboard shortcuts to move messages into folders.
• All other email programs display the default system font when it receives an email generated in Mail.app — in Office for Windows this is Times New Roman.

I think I’ve finally addressed these issues enough to make Mail.app my primary mail application and ditch the horrors of Outlook. But you’ll need a few settings and plugins to get that done.

View options

I like the simple, friendly list view that these options give me. Try it out:

Shortcuts for moving messages

Mail Act-On 3 is an essential extension. It does a bunch of different things, but for the best feature is that you can map a key to moving messages to a different folder (I use “v” to match Gmail’s shortcuts), and then use type-ahead to pick the right folder:

Changing the default font

Universal Mailer is another powerful plugin that just makes Mail.app work better, but its best features is that you can set a system font that is respected by other email programs:

Unexpected bonus features

Switching to mail brings a bunch of great things with it that you don’t get in Outlook:

• Smart folders that can bring a bunch of different emails together based on specific criteria you set.
• Great integration with iOS, since it takes advantage of handoff.
• Fast email that’s not ugly.

All I’m saying is, give it a try. Your eyes will thank you.

My latest column for A List Apart is called How to Do What You Love, the Right Way, and it’s out today. It’s a response to that mantra we hear so often, and loosely based on a rant by Merlin Mann on one of his Back to Work podcasts. Here’s the gist:

Doing what you love doesn’t necessarily mean quitting your job and starting a coffee shop. Most often, it means building your own platform, and crafting your own work, one step at a time.