Richard Shepherd

Nope, never ever feel guilty for 'me time'. For side projects, assign the time you are able to give to that project (Thursday nights for example), maybe it's between 6am and 8am before work? But never ever compromise on 'you time'. Seen it happen, for your mental and physical health look after it.

Dear Product Hunters, We are Peter and Richard, makers of Memo. Email is too formal and texting + instant message is getting distracting. It's hard to have deep and meaningful conversations online with the people we care about. Memo brings modern features to long-form messaging to achieve this. We are massively inspired by Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism and wanted to solve this problem...

What Cotter are doing for authentication is marvelous. An accessible tool for developers to easily add password-less auth to their websites is definitely needed and it's best that it's a focused product like this instead of always trying to do 'checkout' as well.

Use a tool like Memo that respects your focus and does not notify you or use the evil red dot to spike your attention. https://sendmemo.app/mission I am hell bent on getting back notification control, it ruined me a while back. I'd love to talk to you more about this.

Is frustration allowed? frustration with existing solutions not serving our needs well and so we made something that does but to make it viable we need to find other people that feel the same way. Is that an acceptable answer to why?

So, maybe. I absolutely hate voice mail on my phone. People leave poorly worded, slow messages full of ums and arhs. If you want to reference something you have to now listen to the whole thing again rather than being able to focus on the sentence you need like in a text message. Actually no I've decided they don't work at all. Much better to write it down. Particularly when you have smart...

No I do not think it is complicated but I think it benefits the productivity economy to make out that it is complicated. My approach has three steps. 1. Review what needs to be done. 2. Write down, prioritise and commit. 3. Remove distractions, choose the top item and do it. Someone mentioned eating the frog. Some days it feels like all I do is eat frogs but hey, in France they are deliscious!

@radiumLaw Hey Dominic, this post intrigued me because I wanted to ask you about focus. What do you consider to be producitive time? Do you measure or track true deep work like uninterruptable, sacrid focus time at all?

Hey Helene. We are building our company mission first. It is absolutey critical to what we are doing, indeed it is the reason we are doing it at all. I worry that missions and visions can sometimes seem a little contrived but ours comes from genuine pain and we live the mission every day. Here's the copy we use. It's from https://sendmemo.app Memo's mission is to 'reclaim focus in a...

Find GA overkill for most purposes. We use Plausible Analytics, know the founder and get great service for very little cost. Also, GA uses cookies but Plausible does not so now we don't have to display that awful cookie notice that everyone hates on our website.

Keeping to some kind of acceptable schedule. Does the day start at 6am when I get up or 10am after a long breakfast? Do I stop at 5pm or work til 6 or 8 or do I take a 4 hour lunch break. I just don't know. How many tea breaks is too many? This is actually quite a problem for me.

We have had a fun time using Gather, we have a virtual pub called the Magpie Arms and on a Saturday we just hang out there and chat to whoever turns up. https://gather.town/ Last week we tried one of those interactive game sessions using Jack Box, that was fun. The other tool we use mostly for work is Whereby. Far superior to Zoom, much much easier to use, we love the personal room...

For me it has to be Poolside FM. The best thing to hit the beach since my sunburned torso.

Yes, I completely agree. Notifications are worst thing about phones. I want to choose when to engage with something, not when it suits the app. My attention span is not for sale thank you very much! I feel very strongly about this and am trying to build our communication tool with the Centre for Humane Technology's principles in mind. https://www.humanetech.com/technologists

At Disney they call these accountabillibuddies. Best. Word. Ever. Pioneer is kinda good at this.

That users fall into four categories, tech enthusiast, visionary, early majority, late majority. I have done user interviews with users from all four and now I know which ones are which. The learning is to focus on one type at a time. What's your learning Daniela?

Quite often I ask someone else to text me. Or we ask Siri to create a reminder if we're out and need to remember to do something. Or I write it down in Notion but I don't think I've ever texted myself. Didn't know you could to be honest.

Hey Rajan. The design is lovely, it feels rather pushy though. Actually, it's very pushy. The timer thing is horrible, it's creating pressure and I do not want to trust the website. The value of the product sounds really good. Hope this helps.