Find your true fans

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11 years ago, Google did something amazingly creative to help find people to test their brand new Chromebooks. They offered some “spiffy Chrome stickers” to see which of their Facebook followers were really big Chrome fans.

The idea was that you would have to take a quiz and then provide your mailing information — just to get a few free stickers. You’d have to be a pretty big Chrome fan to do that.

Of course, it was a just a ruse and Google actually sent everyone a test version of their first Chromebook device, which I talked about a bit here.

Google wanted to find out who their true fans were (not just people who would want to sign up for a free laptop), and this was an excellent way to do it.

Finding ways to track down your true fans can lead to amazing results too.

Going beyond accessibility to reduce motion

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Building websites that are accessible to all users is something that continues to be a problem on much of the web, but it’s continuing to improve over time. For most sites, some simple steps will get you going in the right direction and put you ahead of most other sites in helping users with disabilities consume your content.

However, there is more that can be done. If you have a site with heavy animation on it, you can do things to help users that have problems with motion on sites, whether it leads to sickness or even seizures. The relatively new “Media Queries Level 5” specifications that came out last year have a solution specifically for this called ‘prefers-reduced-motion’.

The code for it is pretty simple, as it only has two options:

  • ‘reduce’
  • ‘no-preference’

If the user has no-preference, the website will load normally. However, if their computer is sending the ‘reduce’ directive to your site, you can choose to change how motion behaves. Digging into that code is beyond the scope of this post, but Michelle Barker at Smashing Magazine has an excellent post that digs into some simple examples.

Users

With that out of the way, it’s worth looking at the other side. If you’re a user, how do you specify that you want websites to hear your request for ‘prefers-reduced-motion’? When digging into this, I suspected it would be a setting that you adjust in your web browser, but it turns out that it’s setting you change in your operating system.

  • In Windows 10: Settings > Ease of Access > Display > Show animations in Windows.
  • In macOS: System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Reduce motion.

I don’t suspect many websites will support this for a while, and many others (like this one) don’t have a need to at all. Still, if you’re building a site with a lot of interactive pieces on it, I recommend you check this out and make some small changes to help out those users that specifically request fewer animations.

My favorite Supernatural workouts

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I mentioned back in May that I was really enjoying the Supernatural VR app for workouts, and I haven’t slowed down. Since that time I’ve done 270 separate workouts, with each one lasting around 15-20 minutes. They have roughly 800 workouts available right now, with more added every day, but I tend to gravitate back to some of them more than others.

If you’re not familiar with it, here’s a quick promo video they put out:

While I generally lean toward workouts where I already know the songs pretty well, and I certainly enjoy those, my favorites somehow end up being ones with less-familiar songs.

The last few weeks have been more Holiday focused (they have a great one with six songs from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and another with a eight selections from The Nutcracker), but these are two of my typical favorites.

Y2K Babyyy “Take Up Space” – 25:16

  • Daft Punk Is Playing At My House (Warmup) – LCD Soundsystem
  • Praise You – Fatboy Slim
  • 19-2000 (Soulchild Remix) – Gorillaz
  • I Like The Way – Bodyrockers
  • Go (Radio Edit) – The Chemical Brothers
  • The Rockafeller Skank – Fatboy Slim

Just Dance “It’s Going Down” – 22:44

  • Good Time (feat. Pitbull) (Warmup) – Inna
  • GDFR (feat. Sage the Gemini & Lookas) – Flo Rida
  • Thrift Shop – Macklemore
  • Hot-n-Fun – N.E.R.D.
  • Hangover (feat. Flo Rida) – Taio Cruz
  • Scream & Shout (feat. Britney Spears) – will.i.am

Both start with pretty tough songs (Praise You is quite long, and GDFR has some very tough mapping) and make for some sore muscles!

While Supernatural doesn’t give you a good way to look at the song selections unless you have a VR heatset or use their mobile app, you can find the full list of all 1400 songs and 800 workouts in this great Airtable document that was created by Kam Kuo and Janene Pappas-Mccrillis.

Within, the company behind Supernatural, is also much larger than I expected. They’ve raised over $50M so far, and were recently acquired by Meta for an undisclosed amount. That surprised me, but it explains how they’ve been able to license so much music and produce this huge number of workouts. I love it.

As before, the tricky part with Supernatural is pricing. The app costs $19/mo, but you also need to have a $299 headset to use it. Compared to apps like Peloton and others, it’s not too bad, but coming up with $300 just for the hardware can be a tough place to start. If you have a chance, though, give it a try. I wasn’t sure that I’d still be going strong after seven months and 270 sessions, but here I am.

If you use Supernatural, what are some of your favorite workouts?

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Which is the right tool?

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I talk a good bit about various digital tools on here, like my recent post about Pipedrive. At times I probably play with tools more than I should (testing tools instead of doing work), but in a lot of cases it can really pay off.

For example, I posted 12 years ago about Gmail’s “Send & Archive” feature, which I estimated saved me around four minutes per day. If that’s accurate, it’s saved me nearly 300 hours at this point. 300 hours for a silly little email feature? Sign me up!

Seth Godin had a recent post about finding the right digital tools for your job. He summed it up with this:

There’s probably a better digital tool for the thing you’re trying to do next online. It might be worth a few cycles to ask and discover and learn.

Beyond just finding great tools to help with your work (and here is my current list), there are things you can do to pick up little bits of time here and there.

Learning to type faster is a big one that would help a lot of folks, as would the related skill of learning keyboard shortcuts. If you see someone just flying through their work (like we often see with Ashlea), it’s not because their mouse is moving quickly, but usually that their mouse isn’t being used at all.

It really ties back to knowing that you don’t know everything, and being actively open-minded to trying new tools. Chasing shiny new tools can be a time-wasting rabbit trail at times, for sure, but often can pay nice dividends.

Back to Pipedrive

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When it comes to business, having a proper CRM and pipeline is crucial. Knowing who your current leads are, what stage they’re in, and when to respond is vitally important.

Many people track that kind of info in something like an Excel spreadsheet, and that’s really not bad. Simply having a place for that data puts you ahead of those that just wing it, but there are better ways to handle it.

I used Pipedrive years ago and it was great, but just didn’t quote offer enough data for me. To solve that, I built my own solution in Notion and we’ve been using it for quite a while now. You can read about that (and grab a free copy of the template I built) here.

While that Notion setup has worked well, I’ve been feeling the need for more power. I could potentially build out even more in Notion, but I recently took another look at Pipedrive and I’m very impressed with the improvements they’ve made over the years.

The main pipeline

At its core, Pipedrive is very similar to what I built in Notion — a kanban-style board of opportunities, like this:

As leads move through your sales process, you slowly drag them toward columns to the right. Nothing too magical there.

Reporting

I can run reports that data, too, similar to what I had in Notion but with the ability to go quite a bit deeper. I have all of our current leads in Pipedrive now, but I’m slowly moving past leads (both won and lost) to help generate more data.

Leads Inbox

A relatively new feature they’ve added is a “Leads Inbox”. Previously, you had to have a column in your pipeline for “New Leads”, which could get messy. Now they have a separate place for new leads to live, and you can move them into the pipeline if things progress well.

Even better is that you can automate adding leads to this inbox. In our case, we have the contact form on our website drop them in here for us. From there, we can respond and work with them without having to manually create that record. It’s pretty handy!

Syncing

Pipedrive also now includes ways to sync your contacts, email, and calendars.

The calendar sync is my least favorite. It’s not a bad feature, and I can see some benefit to it, but it’s not one I’ll likely use.

The email sync is pretty nice. You can choose to BCC a private address to send certain emails to Pipedrive, or you can just have Pipedrive sync all of your email and pull that info into the appropriate “deal” automatically. For example, when I pull up the details for this lead, you can see the email pulled in at the bottom right:

The contact sync is also pretty nice. I keep a large and fairly tidy contact list, so having the two-way sync to Pipedrive is nice, so any info I add in there will sync to my contacts (and by extension, my phone).

Price

The price is the only downside. It’s not bad, but our approach in Notion was essentially free. Pipedrive charges a per-user fee of $18 / $33 / $59 / $119 per month. We’ll likely use the $33/mo plan, with two of us, so it’ll cost us $66/mo. That’s a very fair price, for sure, but certainly higher than $0.

If you’re not sure what to use for this piece of your business, I encourage you to check out Pipedrive. If you use and love something else, please share in the comments so that we can all check it out.

Are you in an idea cult?

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You can see idea cults in big ways, such as politics or sports, but I often see it manifested in smaller ways like “iPhone vs Android”.

Using that as an example, I’ve always found it silly when people say things like “I will never switch to iPhone” or “I’ll never drive a Chevy”. You may end up being correct, but over the course of your lifetime there is a good chance you’re wrong — and your strong view may cause you to miss some benefits in the meantime.

For me personally, I’m a big fan of Android and I love it. However, a few years ago I went back to iPhone for a while because of a particular email app that they had. I eventually came back to Android, but who knows what the future holds. I think Android is superior in many ways, but I’ll switch to iPhone again (or some unknown device in the future) if that’s the best choice.

Adam Grant said it pretty clearly in his book Think Again:

If you find yourself saying ____ is always good or ____ is never bad, you may be a member of an idea cult.

Don’t be wishy-washy, and certainly support the products and services you love, but never fear changing your mind.

The new Kindle Paperwhite is worth the upgrade

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My wife and I have been Kindle readers for quite a few years now. I picked up my first Kindle in 2010, and my wife got her first one a bit before that, and then we both upgraded to the Kindle Paperwhite some years later. It was a great reader!

When the new Kindle Paperwhite was announced a few months ago, I wasn’t sure it was worth the upgrade. It had some minor improvements, but nothing major. Ours were getting a little tired anyhow, so we took the plunge, and it has been absolutely worth it. While the new one indeed only has some minor improvements, those improvements are all about quality-of-life and they’re fantastic.

First, there are a few things that are nice, but not a big deal:

  • Better battery life. Always appreciated, but never a problem before anyhow.
  • USB-C port for charging, finally, just like almost every other device we own.

It was the other improvements that I’m finding make a big difference:

  • Warmer color temperature options.
  • A larger screen (with smaller bezels)
  • An updated processor.

It’s really those last two that make the difference for me. The last few years I’ve really noticed my eyes fading a bit (needing more powerful glasses for long-range vision make reading a bit more difficult), so the larger screen is very nice.

What I really noticed, though, was that new processor. This is still an e-reader, so you can never call it “fast”, but things like navigating the menus and flipping pages are much more responsive now. When you read as much as we tend to, the quicker page turns really feel great.

At the end of the day, it’s really just some minor upgrades but they make for a pretty solid overall improvement. If you didn’t care for the Kindle before, this isn’t likely to change your mind, but if you have an older model I highly recommend you check this one out.

The difficulty of trying to moderate content is hard to comprehend

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Moderating content on social media is incredibly difficult. People love to complain about it, and it’s indeed imperfect, but it’s a tough system. I shared the story of Chole before, but I recently came across a great article from Techdirt that gives some amazing statistics.

In a recent a talk from Evelyn Douek, a Lecturer on Law & Doctoral Candidate at Harvard Law School, she helped shape the scale of what social media companies are up against. During the course of her 30 minute talk:

  • Facebook would take down 615,417 pieces of content
  • YouTube would take down 271,440 videos, channels, and comments
  • TikTok would take down 18,870 videos
  • The Facebook Oversight Board would receive 48 petitions to review a takedown decision.

Those numbers are big enough, but you need to remember two more things:

  1. Those are just for a 30 minute chunk. We’re talking about 29 million pieces of content that Facebook removes every day.
  2. This doesn’t get into the amount of content that is reviewed and allowed to stay. Moderators and algorithms undoubtedly review and allow at least that much more content.

The answer?

That said, I still don’t have a good answer. The simple thought (and often cried on Facebook) is to just “stop moderating”, but that certainly wouldn’t work. As I shared with the story of Chloe before, moderators on social platforms have to remove some truly awful content, and we’re thankful that they do. As I’ve asked before, do you see much porn on Facebook? There’s a good reason for that, and just allowing all content to stay public isn’t a good answer. Even sites like Parler, which try their best to limit moderation, are struggling mightily with it.

Algorithms will improve and things may get better at some point, but for now I urge to you show some grace to those that try to keep sites clean, and own your content if you want to speak freely without worrying about false positive flags on your content.

For more, I encourage you to watch Evelyn’s presentation, which can be seen here:

Put your digital stuff in the right places

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Just like the key to a clean house is making sure that all of your stuff has a proper place to go, the same is true for your digital life. Once you’ve trained yourself to put your various digital items in their respective places, keeping things organized becomes much easier.

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I would argue that this is a core reason why people struggle with keeping a clean inbox; so much of what comes in there doesn’t have a proper place to live, so it just languishes. Or, people treat their inbox as a place for something else (often a to-do list), which leads to the same kind of problem.

My places

I laid out all of my systems in my Digital Efficiency Framework post from last year, but here is a quick look at where all of my “proper places” are. No matter where something comes in (often through my inbox, but it could be a phone call, a Facebook message, or just an idea that popped into my head), they all can go into one of these:

  1. Events – They just go on your calendar. For me that’s Google Calendar
  2. Useful reference sites – I currently use Raindrop.io for my bookmarks, but there are a lot of great options.
  3. Things to read/watch – These are essentially bookmarks, but for things that you specifically want to go back and read soon. For me, I use Pocket to store and process those.
  4. Things to remember to do – This is just your task list, and it should be separate from your email. I use Roam Research for that, though there are other task-focused solutions like Todoist that can really help.
  5. Things to just remember – This is for things like quotes, stats, names, etc, that you want to remember. I store that kind of info in Roam Research, and then use Anki to help memorize the ones that really matter to me.

That covers most everything, but you’ll still be left with a bucket of “other” stuff to sort out. This might be a list of the books you want to read, or the paint color of your kitchen, or a code snippet to save for later, or anything else. These items need to go in some system that is easy to search through later and can help keep them organized. I use Roam Research for those as well, but tools like Notion or Evernote can do a great job too.

It can be some work to get things set up, but it’s beautiful once it’s up and running. If I see a great article I want to read, I can just throw it in Pocket and move on with my day. On a nice Saturday afternoon, I might open Pocket to see everything I’ve added recently and start going through it. Keeping those separate, and out of your brain in the meantime, is incredibly freeing and can work well.

What are your systems?

I’ll point you again to my longer (10 minute read) Digital Efficiency Framework post, and I’d love to hear what you do differently. Did I miss something in that list? Do you have a great tool that you use? Let me know!

A brilliant “paper” calendar on a digital device

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Over the years I’ve tried various ways to handle my daily scheduling. While my official calendar lives in Google Calendar (and that’s not likely to change anytime soon), I’ve tried various ways of really processing and following my schedule throughout the day.

A few years ago I picked up the Full Focus Planner, and it was excellent. In terms of daily work, you essentially copied your digital appointments over to the paper planner, which seems kind of silly but really offers some great advantages. I touched a bit on that in a post later that same year when I was doing my manual planning in Notion instead, how making weekly previews intentionally inefficient can be a good thing.

For the past 18 months or so, I’ve essentially been using Roam Research to handle that side of things. Roam is an amazing tool (and another that’s not likely to change anytime soon), but this week I discovered a little wrinkle with another device that might change my direction again.

reMarkable

I picked up a reMarkable tablet about a year ago, and have been using it more and more lately. This week, though, I discovered something that might increase my usage of it a lot more, and it’s ultimately just a PDF.

Voja Dimitrijevic is a popular YouTuber and runs the “My Deep Guide” channel, mostly digging into products like the reMarkable. He released a product called “My Daily Organizer” that is, well, remarkable!

As I mentioned above, it’s really just a PDF, but it’s a very creative one! Each year is a separate PDF of around 1700 pages — various daily pages, weekly views, quarterly views, etc. What makes it magic is the linking between pages so you can just tap around to get exactly where you need to go in the document. A recent update to reMarkable allows it to support internal links in a PDF, and Voja has made fantastic use of that with this product. It’s kind of hard to explain, but he’s created a very in-depth video to show it off. I don’t expect you to watch the entire thing (it’s nearly 50 minutes long), but I encourage you to scrub through it a bit to see what he’s put together:

I’ve given it a good test for the past week or so, and it’s bringing me back to my Full Focus Planner days. Being able to use a device like this more often, with it’s intentional lack of apps and notifications, is a great way to focus.

This “My Deep Guide” PDF not only works on reMarkable, but works on some Boox tablets and Supernote products as well, so it’s available for most people.

Whether I use Voja’s product long-term remains to be seen, but it’s a very creative use of the old PDF and I appreciate him bringing it to market.