Jan 5, 2016 | Cardsmith, Productivity, Project management, Strategy, Thinking tools
Do you use a list when you shop for groceries? If so, you are already a project manager. There’s a reason countless productivity, task, and to-do applications highlight grocery lists among their use cases. As simplistic as it may seem, shopping for food has all the... 
Dec 29, 2015 | Cardsmith, Creativity, Party Planning, Play, Things we love
“Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365 page book. Write a good one.” –Brad Paisley I love New Year’s. What I don’t love, however, are the loud, crowded bars, clubs, and restaurants where I’m getting gouged on food and drinks. Nor do I love the fact that, if I’m... 
Dec 22, 2015 | Cardsmith, Creativity, Design, Productivity, Products, Project management, Strategy, Thinking tools, Uncategorized, Work
In the first part of this series, I explored using agile project milestones for creative endeavors. In this case, we’re using that term to broadly describe projects that need to be planned and tracked, but perhaps aren’t as concrete or knowable as projects that... 
Dec 15, 2015 | Cardsmith, Productivity, Project management, Strategy, Thinking tools, Uncategorized, Work
At Cardsmith, we spend a lot of time thinking about project management. I’m not just referring to making project management faster, more responsive, and more rewarding. We also reflect on what it means to “manage” a project and, beyond that, how we define and... 
Dec 2, 2015 | Cardsmith, Productivity, Project management, Strategy, Work
Have you ever worked hard to design the ideal work process and then been disappointed when your team just doesn’t see things the way that you do? Perhaps they pretend to follow along when you describe how the process should work, but then you realize a few weeks later... 
Nov 24, 2015 | Cardsmith, Creativity, Portland, Productivity, Project management, Strategy, Thinking tools, Uncategorized, Work
The other day, I had lunch with a friend of mine, Kevin. Kevin had some bad news and some not-so-bad news to share. His tale demonstrates the value of visual tools — and yet another example of how sticky notes make people productivity rockstars. The bad news was...