Sep 6, 2017 | Party Planning, Play, Portland, Productivity, Project management, Startups, Things we love
I never thought I’d get my partner Joe to use Cardsmith. He has been nothing but supportive of me and the Cardsmith team. He MC’d our launch party, he’s the voice behind the getting started tutorial videos on our website, and he has done QA work for Cardsmith. And... 
Jan 12, 2016 | Portland, Startups, Strategy, Uncategorized, Work
A couple of weeks ago, I discussed using the concept of project milestones in unpredictable creative project like starting a business. This post is a quick follow-up and shout-out to our mentors at TenX in Portland, who have cleverly built a whole program that helps... 
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... 
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... 
Nov 16, 2015 | Cardsmith, Creativity, Design, Portland, Productivity, Project management, Startups, Strategy, Thinking tools, Work
How are people using Cardsmith? We sat down with one particular user this week to find out her story. Ann Sanderson is a planning machine. As a small business owner and political activist, she needs to be able to keep all her projects organized and track their... 
Sep 21, 2015 | Cardsmith, Portland, Productivity, Project management, Startups, Strategy, Thinking tools, Uncategorized, Work
I’m a fan of a weekly meeting when working with a small team on a creative project that goes for many weeks or months. In a well-functioning team, a well-executed collaborative meeting of no more than one hour sets a kind of cadence that energizes and aligns the...