WorkHack.com

Few days ago I started my day as usual; I turned on my computer, washed my face, made tea and attempted to check my email, then I screamed noooooooooooooooooooooooooo. I did not have internet, I did not have internet for the whole day. At first it was weird; I did not know what to do. I couldn’t check my emails, my stats, my IM, my blog, nothing. Then I started working on my projects, and wow, I was so productive, I wrote so much high quality code, brainstormed and came up with great ideas, and made lots of phone calls that I was putting off.

By not having internet I saved so much time by not:
-checking emails
-checking and analyzing stats
-IM-ing people
-checking my blog
-checking my sites
-checking others blogs
-checking digg
And the list goes on.

Today I read about Parkinson’s Law, which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson’s_law).

From now on, I will not obsess about checking my email, IM, blogs and stats. I will only spend one hour a day on that stuff. I will use my time for productive and healthy activities, like working on my projects, going to the gym, cooking healthy food, and reading a book.

Here is a test for you, before you go to bed tonight, disconnect your router and hide it in the closet. Spend tomorrow without internet and see if it makes any difference, I bet it will.

Cheers,
Rami

RSS feeds are now cached for 30 seconds to minimize the loads on the server. I should’ve done this long time ago. Yesterday I got a new tattoo to remember caching RSS feeds on my new startup.

Ref

I am a big fan of paper and whiteboard to-do lists, because they are functional and fast to use. As for web based to-do list, there are many on the market but none of them worked for me. It always took longer to set up and organize the tasks than it took on a paper to-do list. I needed a custom solution, so I developed WorkHack.

I believe in simplicity, and one of the better books on simplicity is by John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity. The book describes Maeda’s 10 laws of simplicity, which can be found here.

During the design of WorkHack, I followed the following laws of simplicity:

Law 1 - Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
Law 2 - Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
Law 3 - Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.
Law 10 - The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

I reduced WorkHack to the bare minimum; I did not add tags, due dates, or task assignment. I added a feature to visualize tasks by color and size to give it the whiteboard feel. I added a pop-up version called miniWorkHack, so that I could put my list in the corner of my screen (this feature was added based on user feedback).

Barry Schwartz concluded in his book “The Paradox of Choice” that the many choices (features) we have make us miserable. I don’t want to be miserable! [I recommend watching Barry Schwartz’s TED talk]

David Allen’s 2 minutes rule states that “If it would take less than 2 minutes to do something, just do it right away”. Adding 2 minutes tasks to WorkHack is worthwhile, because I designed WorkHack so that I could add a task in less than 5 seconds.

I received a lot of feedback on WorkHack, asking for anything from custom font size and color for each priority, to complex tasks grouping, start and end dates and assignment to users. My response was always, WorkHack is unique because it is simple.

My Pitch: Try WorkHack, try simplicity, you can always go back if you’re not satisfied. Try making small to-do lists on a daily basis. Don’t spend 4 hours adding 100 tasks on another complicated to-do list app. Spend 1 minute adding 5-10 tasks, finish them, and then add another 5-10 tasks.

Liberate yourself from the stress of to-do lists. Concentrate your energy on finishing your tasks rather than organizing them. Try WorkHack.

Cheers,

Rami

If you have a group project, use WorkHack to manage the project’s todo list. Create a todo list on WorkHack and email the url to everyone on the team. Everyone could track the project’s progress and update the todo list. This is especially useful on short term projects.

How do you use WorkHack? Send us feedback and we’ll feature it on the blog.

Cheers,
Rami

As of today, WorkHack has been accessed from 107 countries. This is huge and unexpected given that the target countries were users in Canada and the United States.

Thanks for everyone that is using WorkHack and here are the top 15 countries:

1. United States
2. Japan
3. United Kingdom
4. Canada
5. Australia
6. Germany
7. India
8. Sweden
9. Spain
10. Singapore
11. France
12. Italy
13. Austria
14. Netherlands
15. Belgium

The most popular WorkHack feature is miniWorkHack. It is a pop-up/smaller version of WorkHack.

Launch miniWorkHack and put it in the corner of your screen; now you can work and see your to-do list. Keep your eye on the prize, the prize of having an empty to do list.

Here are two screenshots of miniWorkHack with the visualize-by-size feature on and off:

I just wanted to share with you that the number of to-do lists at WorkHack has reached 8,000 today. Very exciting, don’t you think?

Since the launch; WorkHack got “a lot” of feedback; with thanks, congrats, suggestions and feature requests.

Some feature requests were super great and useful, it was very hard to resist but to implement them immediately and they are live now; they include:

miniWorkHack a pop-up/smaller version of WorkHack,

save tasks order, and

an RSS feed to the tasks list.

What makes WorkHack unique is its simplicity and functionality; thus not every feature request will be implemented.

Thanks for all the feedback and keep them coming.