With work from home and kids at home, it seems like the only way to get something done is to carve out moments to focus. Over the past few years, my use of a the Tomato Timer technique has been helpful. What I’ve learned through employing it is the minimum focus time that’s needed to complete certain tasks.

Clear out email that’s lingered over a week? That’s three tomatoes worth of focus (3 x 25 minutes)

Get done a 700+ word article and proofread? That would six tomatoes.

If I can’t dedicate the focus to it, I work on other…

There was important lesson I learned from observing other Kickstarter campaigns in the lead up to our launch of the Ubi. That lesson came back to me after hearing some complaints about how long NASA was taking to share images of Perseverance’s journey.

We learned the importance of answering and addressing comments and feedback as quickly as possible. We could remain on top of our narrative when we were addressing questions before they were being answered by angry backers of the project.

We saw with other projects that a little snowflake of concern could quickly turn into an avalanche of…

A few years ago when running an e-commerce site, I obsessed about page load times. It was and remains a big gripe when pages take forever to load. Worst is when I can hear the CPU fan on my laptop kick in just to load on some bloated rendering as a result of going to a new site.

There’s analytics code, ad serving, who knows… maybe in-page bitcoin mining — but they all seem to lead to worse performance and Internet that reminds me of 15 years ago.

There is something magical if you can keep the time from pressing…

Amazon’s Built It program is interesting. It’s more of a Quirky than a Kickstarter, except that the makers are all Amazon.

The idea is that by pre-ordering items, you can get a discount on them. If not enough people buy, you don’t get charged. However, while Amazon does provide the status to have the product “funded”, it doesn’t give that as a discrete figure, so you’re left guessing if 80% fulfilled means 10 orders or 10,000.

There are three items that are currently listed: a cuckoo clock, a smart scale, and a smart printer. Of these, the cuckoo clock probably…

I learned about the swing with my second child. It was a crazy time where both my wife and I were working from the same office with a child who was only a few months old. Projects on fire, lack of sleep, and a baby who would scream if we put her in a crib or bassinet.

Then we tried the swing. Our little noise maker turned into someone having a delightful time. The change was nearly instantaneous. …