In many parts of the world, May 1st is known as May Day. And this year, I find myself reflecting on the origins of my previous startup, the product we were building, and the significance behind our name, Mayday.

Dating back to the late 19th century, workers in the U.S. and other industrialized countries were subjected to exhausting, prolonged workdays. But the Haymarket Affair of 1886, which involved a series of strikes and protests advocating for an 8-hour workday as the standard for all workers, marked a turning point.

May 1st, or “May Day” was ultimately designated as International Workers’ Day, commemorating the accomplishments of the labour movement and promoting workers’ rights, including fair working hours and improved working conditions. The word “mayday” is also rooted in the internationally recognized distress signal for help. Established as a universal call for assistance in the wake of WWI, it was derived from the French phrase “m’aider,” which translates to “help me.”

The concepts of work/life balance and providing help were central how we approached building software that helped people manage time across multiple time horizons. The name also playfully incorporated elements of time, with “May” signifying months, “Day” indicating days, and our URL, mayday.am, representing hours (as in AM/PM).

With its historical significance and origins as a distress signal, “Mayday” was clearly a fitting name that encapsulated the essence of what we’re building, the value we strive to deliver, and acknowledges the ongoing pursuit of a healthier balance between work and life.

Long before the name Mayday was even a consideration, the idea behind it was formed during my tenure at a health and fitness company called Precision Nutrition. PN offered a year-long coaching program, and we noticed that when participants failed to complete it, it wasn’t for lack of motivation or dedication; it was often because life simply got in the way. Unexpected events, such as travel, illness, or pressing work commitments, threw their schedules off course, and the technology that supported the program wasn’t designed to adapt to these changes.

Years later, I found myself working at Facebook in Menlo Park. As I observed my team, I recognized a familiar pattern: we were all drowning in meetings, struggling to carve out time for actual work, and often needing to put in extra hours after work to get things done. Burnout wasn’t uncommon, and it seemed like everyone was juggling an impossible load, desperately trying to make time for what truly mattered each week.

That’s when it became clear that there had to be a better way, and I was certain that a smarter calendar was the way to solve this problem. And so, Mayday was born.

Originally published on Medium, but republished here as I consolidate my writing on a self-hosted platform.

One of the byproducts of building a software company focused on productivity is that we spend a lot of time thinking about better ways to optimize our time. This is especially important for us because, as a remote-first startup that also runs a 4-day work week, we greatly appreciate the value of time.  If we’re going to be successful, we have to be intentional about what we choose to spend our time on… and what we choose not to.

As we've been building Mayday, we’ve explored many ways to help people take control of their schedules. And with those learnings, we’ve oriented our product around four areas that help our team be more effective every week.

Schedule Everything

If you intend to spend time on something, schedule it. Personal stuff, work stuff, meetings or tasks; If you think it’s a priority and requires your time, it needs to go into your calendar. All of it. 

Scheduling everything in your calendar gives you a better sense of your true availability and forces you to think about what’s important. If something isn’t a priority, ask yourself if it needs to happen at all. If it requires other people, ask yourself if it can be done asynchronously instead of as a meeting. If someone asks for your time, determine if the request is truly important. If it's not, it's okay to say no because you've likely already underestimated the time required to complete everything else that needs your attention.

The goal is to make time for urgent and important things while deferring (or eliminating) everything else. We call this Schedule/Priority Fit. Whatever your priorities are, you can only accomplish them if you invest time into them. So your schedule needs to reflect that.

Some people argue that success is when your calendar is empty. Nonsense. Retirement is when your calendar is empty. In the meantime, your calendar needs to be filled with your priorities. So plan accordingly.

Context-Switching Destroys Days

Context-switching is a term that originally comes from computer science — it’s when a CPU changes from one process to another. The state of the first process needs to be restored and resumed at some later point, resulting in a loss of efficiency in execution.

Our brains work in the same way. There’s a cognitive cost to alternating between tasks, and the ways we work—tracking multiple threads, notifications, tabs—all serve to increase the amount of context-switching we experience on a daily basis. And a poorly organized schedule can be just as damaging.

You can lose up to 50% of your productivity as a result of context-switching because it takes time for your brain to regain focus once interrupted. And frequent context-switching leads to additional cognitive fatigue, which further reduces productivity. I'm particularly susceptible to this myself and can easily lose hours as a result of a single errant distraction if I’m not diligent.

One of the best methods of reducing context-switching is to batch similar things together. Organize your time around themes (e.g. focus time, writing, email, coding, designing, team sync, etc.), and aim to carve out meaningful spans of time to focus on the task in front of you, followed by a brief break. By one assessment, the ideal work-to-break ratio is 52 minutes of focus, followed by 17 minutes of rest.

I often find switching between meetings to be less disruptive than tasks, so cluster your meetings together to preserve longer stretches of uninterrupted focus time. If possible, go a step further and try to organize specific days around a particular theme or focus (eg. “Meeting Mondays,” “Team Tuesdays,” “Focus Fridays,” etc).

Protect Your Time

The key to taking control of your schedule is prioritizing your tasks in advance and then blocking time in your day so you can complete them. “Time blocking” involves dividing your day into distinct blocks of time, with each block dedicated to completing an individual or group of tasks.

This is beneficial because it allows you to focus on specific tasks by setting aside time for them instead of just having an open-ended to-do list. It's also the most effective way of ensuring your schedule reflects your priorities.

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, dedicates upwards of 20 minutes every evening blocking time for the following work day:

Sometimes people ask why I bother with such a detailed level of planning. My answer is simple: it generates a massive amount of productivity. A 40 hour time-blocked work week, I estimate, produces the same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.

This technique is simple but impactful because it helps you enter a focused state of (you guessed it) “deep work,” which Newport describes as “a state of peak concentration where you can learn difficult things and create high-quality work quickly.”

It also helps you be more intentional with your time and prevents your coworkers from taking too much as well. Because that's what is going to happen if you don't take that time for yourself. Someone else is going to take it from you.

However, therein lays the challenge of time blocking in a typical workplace. If you block your entire schedule for all your priorities, you’ll never be available to meet with others. But if you keep yourself open for potential meetings, you’ll inevitably end up overbooked without enough time to get stuff done.

The biggest misconception with time blocking is that you have to rigidly stick to the schedule no matter what. According to Newport, it's important to be flexible and adjust your time blocks as your priorities evolve. No matter what happens during the day, “the goal is to make sure you always have an intentional plan for the time that remains in the workday.”

With shifting priorities, opportunities, and unforeseen changes, it's inevitable that something will affect your original plans. We all need to be comfortable with our schedules changing to remain agile and effective. Or as Mike Tyson said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Start with a plan but expect to be punched.

Automate It

If everything above sounds daunting, it's because it is. Most people struggle to implement these techniques into their daily lives because they require a lot of effort to set up and maintain.

Regularly achieving Schedule/Priority Fit can be challenging when you work alone, but it becomes exponentially more difficult when you need to collaborate with others. What works for you may not work for others, and the more your team has time-blocked their week, the less time there is available for everyone to meet. So everyone understandably prioritizes their own needs and schedules things in whatever way works best for them. And that’s how your team ends up with overbooked and fragmented weeks that inhibit deep work.

The typical solution is to hire an executive assistant. One that can evaluate everyone’s individual schedule and priorities and then make an informed decision about what is most important and what can be moved to accommodate the group.

Most people don’t have this luxury.

Originally published on mayday.am, but republished here as I consolidate my writing on a self-hosted platform.

We are excited to announce that Mayday has raised a USD $3 million seed round led by 8VC with additional participation by Shasta Ventures, ff Venture Capital, Colle Capital, and others to grow our team and accelerate development towards achieving our mission of coordinating the world’s time.

The Future of Work Needs Prioritization

The shift to remote & hybrid workplaces has dramatically changed how we spend our time. The idea of “work hours” has become blurry, with personal and work tasks demanding our attention throughout the day.

Our daily lives have become a balancing act between what’s supposed to be important and what actually is, clashing with the reality that we can’t do it all. Too many meetings. Too many distractions. Not enough time to get things done.

We need a new kind of calendar that helps us and the people we work with achieve Schedule / Priority Fit.

An Engine For Achieving Schedule/Priority Fit

Modern calendars weren’t designed for the modern workplace. As a result, we waste a lot of time context-shifting, planning, and managing our time.

Mayday is building the world’s first truly smart calendar that learns what’s essential and plans your schedule accordingly. To accomplish this, we created the first “Priority Engine” that analyzes your calendar patterns to determine what’s important, enabling it to effectively allocate available time to support your priorities.

And when it’s time to meet with coworkers, Mayday automatically determines the ideal time that works for everyone by considering hundreds of signals from everyone’s calendar and work preferences.

Native Apps For All Your devices

As our suite of APIs progresses, Mayday will be able to make more informed scheduling decisions about your entire teams’ calendar. However, as we use our calendars daily, having a fast and easy-to-use user interface is just as important.

That is why we’ve built beautiful native apps available on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS (with Android and Windows versions on the way) that are both fast and easy to use.

Our native apps also include intelligent scheduling links, which utilize Mayday’s advanced understanding of your schedule and priorities. So you may make yourself available to meet with others without sharing your entire schedule or overcommitting yourself.

Coordinating The World’s Time

Success at work, the strength of our relationships, and our health are tremendously affected by how we choose to spend our time every day. And we’ve completely lost our ability to manage it.

Time is our most valuable asset, but it’s been too easily lost, stolen, and misspent for too long.

To truly align people and their time, we need a smarter calendar that helps you live the life you want to live. That’s why we built Mayday — At Mayday, our mission is to coordinate the world’s time, so we can all achieve Schedule / Priority Fit.

Investors in this round include Alex Kolicich and Jack Moshkovich from 8VC. Nitin Chopra, Jacob Mullins, and Joe Cashion from Shasta Ventures. John Frankel and Eric Shu from ffVC. Victoria Grace and Doug Benowitzfrom Colle Capital. Alex Norman from N49P. Prashant Matta from Panache Ventures. Adam McNamara from Ramen Ventures. Christopher Golda and Bradford Cross from Rogue Capital. Brice Scheschuk from Globalive. Plus, angel investors Adam Flynn, Rahul Kulkarni, John Maier, Haroon Mirza,John Laban, and Luke Vigeant.

Originally published on Medium, but republished here as I consolidate my writing on a self-hosted platform.

The single most important tool we use to manage our time is the calendar. Nearly every device you own has one, and it’s likely something that you use multiple times a day, every day. We spend an excessive amount of energy monitoring, planning, and managing our time. But modern calendars were never built for the modern workplace.

Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook are the current workplace standard, and their approach to collaboration is transparency — they make it possible for you to see your coworkers’ calendars. Beyond the obvious privacy implications, what they present is a mirage.

When viewing someone’s calendar, we’re led to believe that emptiness means availability. But what we see is an incomplete picture because we rarely record everything in our calendars. From personal events to undocumented to-dos, our calendars are not a comprehensive record of how we will be spending our time.

The scheduling back-and-forth we do over email is us struggling to reconcile this tension. Calendly, X.ai, Vimcal, Calendso, Doodle, and countless other scheduling tools were all created to address these shortcomings. But none of them are actually solving the problem.

They present an illusion of someone’s true availability and force you to make a scheduling decision without understanding the contextual priorities of any pre-existing event. The information asymmetry means our only option is to slot meetings between what’s already scheduled.

As a result, we manage our time on a first-come-first-served basis. Our schedules are shaped by the order in which events were added and not by the priority of the events themselves.

These challenges compound because as our calendars fill, the scheduling options decrease. Finding a time that works for all parties becomes increasingly complex, and that complexity grows exponentially with each additional attendee.

None of the current solutions truly help us become more productive, calm, or happy because they all rely on a paradigm that dates back to when we used paper calendars. We don’t need faster or prettier versions of the same old thing. What we need is a new kind of calendar that help us, and the people we’re working with, achieve Schedule / Priority Fit.

Schedule / Priority Fit

On the surface, Schedule / Priority Fit is a straightforward concept — determine what matters most to you, then add it to your calendar in the order of priority. But it’s really an optimization of supply and demand — the most efficient allocation of your available time put towards the most important demands for your attention.

We like to believe our calendars are a reflection of our true priorities, but they’re really an incomplete list of what we intend to spend time on. While some people do schedule every hour of every day, it’s incredibly uncommon.

Based on our data, the average person only has only 20% of their time accounted for in their calendar. Of that scheduled time, 26% goes towards solo meetings, to-dos, or reminders. Recurring meetings automatically take 67%. And because it’s so easy for coworkers to book time in your schedule, 54% is booked by someone else.

With the majority of our schedules booked by others, our perception of what’s essential is distorted, as our calendars become a hybrid of our priorities mixed with the priorities of many other people.

Back-to-back meetings without a break. Fragmented days that disrupt deep work. Frequent context-shifting. Working in the evening because you were in meetings all day — These are all examples of how other people have imposed their priorities on your schedule.

Solving this problem requires us to rethink how we put things into our calendars and our methods for moving them to accommodate changes in priorities.

Adaptive Scheduling

When we schedule something in our current calendars, what we’re doing is defining several static rules that govern when it will happen. It’s very specific; This event is happening on this day, at this time, in this location, with these people. But given the pace of change within the modern workplace, this specificity becomes a problem because our schedules quickly become filled with static entries.

Recurring meetings are particularly problematic because they reproduce, often indefinitely, without any consideration for our future priorities.

When something is scheduled, its relative importance is usually high. But as time passes, priorities often evolve — new things come up, undocumented things get remembered, demands for your time change to reflect the moment.

When this happens, we struggle to adapt our schedules to these changing priorities because it’s too complicated, if not impossible, to reschedule things on short notice. So we end up in back-to-back-to-back meetings, with a lack of focus time, working late, and increasingly stressed because we don’t have enough time to get everything done.

Adaptive Scheduling is a new technology that we’re developing at Mayday that approaches this problem differently.

Instead of setting a set of static rules for each calendar entry, you define a series of parameters. For instance, you can schedule a meeting for “this week” or “anytime after lunch.” You can book recurring events “once a month” or “three times a quarter.”

Mayday will then schedule the event at a time that works best within the supplied parameters, while also considering your working hours, routines, and the software’s understanding of how you want to spend your time.

If you’ve invited other guests, Mayday will also consider their respective priorities, picking a time that achieves Schedule / Priority Fit for everyone involved. And should you need to reschedule a meeting, the software will select another time that fits within the original parameters instead of forcing you to renegotiate for another time that works for everyone.

—

Success at work, the strength of our relationships, and our health are tremendously affected by how we choose to spend our time every day. And we’ve completely lost our ability to manage it.

We’ve reached a point where the demands on our time have become increasingly demanding. And the more interconnected we’ve become, the more the needs from other people compete with our own individual goals and aspirations.

At Mayday, our mission is to coordinate the world’s time by reimagining the calendar as a helpful assistant. We’re building empathetic productivity software, so we can all achieve Schedule / Priority Fit.

Time is our most valuable asset, but it’s been too easily lost, stolen, and misspent for too long.

Our goal is to fix that.

Originally published on Medium, but republished here as I consolidate my writing on a self-hosted platform.

I’ve been here for almost a year now, but I haven’t really spoken about what I’ve been working on at Connected Lab. And if you take a look at our site, I’m sure you’ll still have a bunch of questions.

We have a number of really exciting projects on the horizon, and I really really wish I could speak more openly about our clients and the projects we’re working on. But for a number of reasons, we can only speak openly after NDAs have been signed (and even then, it’s a bit problematic). That said, I’ll do my best to dance around the specifics so you’ll get a better idea of what we’re doing over here.

• We’re collaborating very closely with a major product company in Silicon Valley (whose apps are likely on your home screen) on an entirely new product. It’s the kind of career-defining product that we’ll all look back on and say “shit, can you believe we helped create that?”
• We just secured a multi-year partnership with a large audio electronics company to help build their next generation of products (everything from in-home products to in-car). You likely have one of their products in your home already.
• We’re in the early stages of a research & design project with a large, well-known camera company. We’re helping them understand their customers better while envisioning new products.
• We’re doing a number of voice-based projects for a variety of clients. We’re even working on our own voice product (which Amazon described as “absolutely phenomenal”).

And those are just some of the projects we’re working on right now. We’ve also got opportunities to work on new AR/VR products, a huge multi-year automotive project, and an exciting opportunity with one of the world’s best tech companies.

But we can’t start any of these because we simply can’t hire fast enough.

We’re already over 100 people, and at the moment we need to hire at least another 11 designers and 20 engineers, not to mention Product Managers, a QA Manager, and a bunch of other roles.

So if any of this sounds interesting, give me a shout. Visit our website, apply for a job, and come work with us. And then we can really talk about what we’re doing over here.

Jeremy is VP of Design at Connected Lab, and previously a Partner at Teehan+Lax. If you like written content like this, but a lot shorter (and honestly, usually just retweets at this point), you can find him on Twitter.

Originally published on Medium, but republished here as I consolidate my writing on a self-hosted platform.

I hate to say it, but Wattage Inc. is no more. We were unable to secure the additional investment we needed, so we’ve decided to close up shop and call it a day. That said, we did manage to secure a deal that allows us to return our investors’ money. So while we didn’t exactly birth a unicorn, at least it wasn’t a total loss.

There are a number of reasons why we failed, and I felt there might be some value in sharing what we learned through this experience. I suppose the first thing we should talk about is our pitch deck.

“Now That’s A Beautiful Pitch Deck”

The one piece of consistent feedback we received throughout this entire process was how nice our pitch deck looked. We often joked that no matter what happened with Wattage, I could at least take a job building decks for others. Obviously its contents didn’t do much to help build a successful business, but I figured it might be worth sharing nonetheless. It didn’t exactly follow the standard pitch deck format, and it was also described as “nowhere near as crisp and focused as required.” But at least it looks nice, right? Sigh.

It went through upwards of 6o revisions I think, and you can download the last version here.

The vision for Wattage was a future where anyone could manipulate matter. Where we needn’t settle for the generic, mass-produced things that currently line store shelves. A future where we can easily upgrade our old devices instead of throwing them away. Or reprogramming them to do entirely new and useful things.

We wanted to make it so creating and selling hardware was as easy as writing and publishing a blog post. You shouldn’t need to be an electrical engineer or an industrial designer to create electronic devices. Nor should you have to worry about supply chain or distribution if you wanted to sell them. We believed it was possible to eliminate all of that complexity, so the average person could easily create highly customized hardware without any electronics know-how, all within their browser.

Of course, things didn’t exactly play out that way. But why?

An Absence Of Traction

I suppose our failure can be summed up quite easily: An inability to show traction. We were attempting to create an entirely new market for mass-customized electronics, which we originally viewed as something positive (as we felt we could create and own this new market). But from a fundraising standpoint, it was the opposite. Why would investors put large sums of money into a company going after an unproven market? (Hint: they don’t.)

Being a hardware company, we focused on building prototypes to validate that our vision was technically feasible. In retrospect, this was a mistake. Instead, we should have released something far more lightweight, and as quickly as possible. Our efforts should have been focused on validating interest in our product and generating traction. We didrealize this, and we were moving to launch a beta as a means of validating interest. The problem is we realized too late, and ultimately didn’t want to launch a beta that we couldn’t afford to support.

Not Enough Focus

We had grand plans for the platform and we were only working on a small subset of features. But we should have been working on even fewer. We had decided to build the initial platform around just hardware creation. We wouldn’t offer the marketplace, or anyway to program devices, and customers would need to assemble their creations themselves. But that was still too broad a focus. Instead of trying to build a platform for hardware creation, we should have focused on selling a single but highly-customizable product. Doing so would have allowed us to prove that we could actually ship product to paying customers.

Poorly Playing The VC Game

While there are obviously a number of options for raising money, we chose the venture capital route. I knew this would be a difficult endeavour, but reading things like Venture Deals or all of Paul Graham’s essays do little to actually prepare you for how challenging it really is.

Having previously raised $250,000 from friends & family, we had set out to raise a $2M seed round. I spent the better part of 6 months meeting with VCs in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, New York, and Toronto. In the Valley, I was told we were raising too little. In Canada, we were raising too much. In retrospect, it looks like we attempted to raise too much, too soon. Instead of raising a large pre-launch seed round, we should have raised a smaller amount from angel investors. Raise a smaller amount, and release a smaller product. If we started generating traction, we could have then raised more.

To that end, I wish I would have taken better advantage of AngelList. There’s so much potential there. We created a profile and regularly updated it, but we never successfully used it as a fundraising platform.

What About Crowdfunding?

We got very close to launching a crowdfunding campaign, but ultimately decided against it because I felt it was premature for us. We didn’t have enough confidence in our product costs, so even if the campaign was successful, there was a good chance that we’d ultimately lose money on each sale. We’d always planned on crowdfunding, but I felt we needed to be further along before doing so.

How Does This Scale?

Our business model was about selling hardware. By reducing the complexity of creating hardware, our bet was that more people would create and buy. We would then wrap these creation tools in a marketplace, so creators could also sell their inventions to the masses.

In the earlier versions of our pitch deck, we focused a lot on empowerment. We were targeting software developers, as we believed we could offer them an entirely new outlet for their creative efforts. But this narrative wasn’t big enough. Investors want to hear a story about changing the world. Large ambitions, with a meaningful impact on the market, resulting in massive sales. We just didn’t tell a big enough story.

I also don’t think I properly emphasized the marketplace potential, as most investors got hung up on the number of potential creators. We looked at ourself as a diverse marketplace of mass-customized goods, but that potential (or at least as we articulate it) didn’t seem to resonate with investors.

We also heard concerns about the viability of scaling a bespoke hardware business. The manufacturing world is geared for mass-production, with profits coming from economies of scale. But we felt we could overcome this with standardized design & manufacturing tools, in distributed factories, using modular electronics. We saw huge potential in the long tail of things. But this was obviously unproven and we clearly didn’t do enough to reduce investor fear in our ability to pull this off.

We Were Too Early

1,600 people signup for our email newsletters, and each of them received a personal message from me. I gave them my email address and phone number, and invited them to chat if they had any questions. I heard from 100's of them, and many shared “the thing” they wanted to create. The problem is many of them simply weren’t feasible with the current technology. I suspect we could have eventually delivered on most of them, but not in the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, when I looked at the various prototypes we’d created, the quality simply wasn’t there yet. We were heavily using laser cutting as our means of fabrication, and while it allowed us to produce something close to our vision, it wasn’t good enough. What we really needed was a hybrid of laser cutting and 3D printing, but unfortuately 3D printing is still far too slow and expensive to be realistic. I have no doubts that 3D printing will play a huge role in the future of manufacturing, but it simply isn’t there yet.

So That’s It.

It’s been a fun ride to say the least. We’re still deciding what to do with everything we produced this past year. There’s a high likelihood Wattage will be reborn in another form sometime in the future, but we just don’t know yet.

I wanted to say thank you to those that supported us during this adventure:

Hot Pop for helping us design & create all of our physical prototypes
Cossette Lab for the office space, staff, and bagel Monday’s
Chris Tanner for the design help
Sam Dallyn for designing our logo
Jonas Naimark for creating this awesome animation
Heist for the design help
MakeWorks & Teehan+Lax for the office space in the early days

But the most thanks goes to our supporting wives, who consistently provided encouragement through all of the up’s & down’s. I wish this had turned out better than it did, but at least we’ll have actual paying jobs again! <cough>inquires welcome</cough>

So that’s it for now. If you’d like to reach us, you can find us on Twitter:

Andy MacDonald (@andymacd)
Brett Hagman (@BrettHagman)
Peter Nitsch (@peter_nitsch)
Jeremy Bell (@jeremybell)

Originally published on Medium, but republished here as I consolidate my writing on a self-hosted platform.

Wattage is a new startup. At its simplest, it’s an online store where people can buy electronic devices. But the interesting thing is that all those devices will be created using our online tools. The enclosures are locally made using laser cutters and 3D printers, and inside is a family of modular electronic components.

What we’re trying to do is lower the barrier of entry so people can express themselves through hardware, regardless of their technical sophistication.

We imagine people creating all sorts of interesting things like podcast-streaming radios, or tactile games. Home automation gadgets, and music gizmos.

But whatever they might create, they won’t need to be an electrical engineer or an industrial designer. They just need a browser and their imagination.

Think of us along the lines of NikeiD for gadgets. You create or customize your device online, we’ll then fabricate it and ship it to you.

I’ll cover various platforms features in future updates, but today I’m going to focus on the Product Builder. And to do that, I recorded a little video for your viewing pleasure.

This is obviously an early alpha, but it should give you a sense of how it works. You virtually create your device with simple drag & drop, and then we’ll ship you the physical thing.

Ok, sounds great. But why?

Manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in the world. Since the first industrial revolution, the power to make things at scale has belonged to those who own the means of production. Big companies, with big factories, building mass-market goods.

But the same was true for mass media in the 20th century, and we’ve seen what the Internet has done to that.

We believe hardware is next.

Soon, we’ll all have the power to create and distribute hardware using nothing more than a browser.

That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do with Wattage. And we hope you’ll help us make it a reality.

We really want to know what you think, and I’ll happily answer any questions you have. Feel free to email me, or message me on Twitter.

Originally published on Medium, but republished here as I consolidate my writing on a self-hosted platform.

With an increasingly complex array of platforms and screen resolutions, it’s time to embrace the creative capabilities of HTML5 + CSS3 and make development part of the design process.

While I’ve spent most of my days in the creative department, I actually started my career as a developer. I was 16, and having discovered the WYSIWYG editor in Netscape Navigator Gold, I had taught myself the basics of HTML. I was inexperienced and couldn’t build much, but I did manage to make something that landed me a job building websites. I enjoyed those days working with code, but at night I found myself playing with Photoshop. Design seemed to come more naturally and I eventually moved into the creative department as a Graphic Designer.

That transition was a very binary move. If I was to be a designer, I couldn’t be a developer. There was never an option to do both. Instead, I’d spend hours designing static pages in Photoshop that would simply be handed to the developers for reproduction in HTML. There was rarely an opportunity to collaborate throughout the process. Hell, we barely spoke. Sometimes we weren’t even in the same timezone, let alone the same room.

That was 16 years ago, and not much has changed.

Throughout my entire career, every company I’ve worked at has separated designers and developers into separate departments, each focused exclusively on their discipline. And while this practice was understandable when HTML was unsophisticated and we were building static websites for 640×480, things have obviously changed. HTML5 and CSS3 displayed across a spectrum of resolutions, running on desktops and laptops and tablets and smartphones. Technology is continuously reshaping the canvas on which we design, and yet these two disciplines continue to be treated as disparate.

Methodologies like Agile and Lean, paired with tools like Pivotal and Basecamp have certainly helped close the gap between the disciplines. We’ve embraced each to varying degrees at Teehan+Lax, and last year we also reorganized the company into cross-functional teams, completely eliminating our creative and development departments. We greatly improved collaboration by making dramatic changes to our process and structure, but I don’t believe we’ve gone far enough. Our designers and developers may now be physically sitting closer together, but there is still a significant chasm between the two.

Photoshop

The problem with Photoshop is that what’s being created is actually a fiction. It somewhat resembles what the final product might look like, but it’s not real. Layout and typography decisions are made that often don’t translate accurately to HTML. We spend hours designing for a medium that’s interactive and responsive, but we start by producing mockups that are static and inflexible. If great design is not only aesthetics but also how it works, then it’s time to make development part of the creative process.

Of course Photoshop still has a role, but it’s now possible to move to working code much sooner. Instead of iterating through creative concepts in Photoshop, designers should increasingly be exploring their ideas in code. They need to be intimate with the technology they’re designing for, and they need to be comfortable working within it.

Which all sounds great, but from my experience, most designers can’t code.

Yes, some are indeed quite capable and others have at least a basic understanding of HTML & CSS, but I doubt many designers would describe themselves as being adept. We have an incredibly talented group of designers at Teehan+Lax, but if we’re going to have them manipulating code, we need to get them proficient with the technology, and we need to rethink our creative process.

Education

Starting today, all of our designers will begin a series of ongoing training courses for HTML & CSS development.

We evaluated a number of solutions (Lynda, Codecademy, etc.) but ultimately settled on Treehouse. With their group options, breadth of content and code challenges, it was the perfect fit. We’ll start with the basics and focus the presentation layer, with the goal of getting each designer as comfortable withbox-shadow as they are with Save For Web. Of course, I expect the vast majority of education will happen on-the-job, but this will at least ensure we’re starting on common ground.

Development also requires a proper toolset, so each designer will be equipped with the following:

A local development environment. We’ll keep it simple and install MAMP PRO on each of their machines.

Access to our Git repositories (and a lesson on Git itself). I’m not expecting many will be clamoring for the CLI, so everyone will get a copy of Tower instead.

An IDE of their choice (but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most will start with Coda).

A copy of CSS Hat to better utilize Photoshop in this new environment.

Process

Our current process is somewhat of a cocktail of tools and methods. Most projects begin a little like waterfall and end a little like Agile. But we always start by creating static mockups. Over the years we’ve made an effort to get to working code sooner, and today we’re going to further streamline this by having our designers & developers collaborating in a shared codebase.

On day one, I’m not anticipating a dramatic change to our process. We will still create high-fidelity mockups in Photoshop and our developers will still translate those mockups into HTML. But instead of providing visual feedback in the final stages of development, our designers will modify the actual CSS themselves. They will be responsible for tweaking and polishing the final product until they feel it’s perfect in Chrome. From there, the developers will still be responsible for ensuring cross-browser consistency.

Looking into the future, the gap between the groups will continue to blur. I suspect we’ll often still need to create a set of preliminary mockups, but our teams will be increasingly working through design challenges in the code itself. This will be a highly collaborative process, with the developers being primarily responsible for JavaScript and the underlying markup for content and structure, while the designers will be increasingly responsible for the presentation markup.

We believe great design fuses form & function to create things that people actually want to use, and Teehan+Lax is committed to making this philosophy a fundamental aspect of our process. It’s not going to be an easy transition, but I’m incredibly excited to see where this path takes us.

Originally published on Medium, but republished here as I consolidate my writing on a self-hosted platform.

I’m seeing a wave of people move from iOS to Android, and I’m curious to find out why.

I’ve noticed that a number of people I know have recently upgraded from an old iPhone to a new Android device. Usually moving from an iPhone 3Gs or iPhone 4, to a Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One or Nexus 4.

I’ve been incredibly curious to know why they made the switch and what they think of their new Android device… So I decided to check it out myself. I just switched from an iPhone 5 (running iOS7 b4) and will be using a Nexus 4 for the next few months.

I’m very familiar with Android and I used a Galaxy Nexus for about a month when it was originally released. This Nexus 4 is much better than that Galaxy, but overall I’m still struggling to understand why someone would buy an Android over an iPhone.

———

On the surface, the platforms are very similar now. Especially since iOS7 was announced. You might not like the icon styling or overall aesthetic, but there’s little doubt that iOS7 has borrowed a number of features from Android.

Hardware-wise, the features and specs are essentially at parity. You can debate the differences in screen sizes—and yes, the larger screens look more appealing—but I personally can’t stand the size of the Nexus 4. It’s too big and I actually find it fatiguing to use with a single hand. I find the width of the iPhone to be perfect.

From an OS standpoint, the platforms are also very similar… At least from a stock-Android standpoint. I quite like the Nexus version of Android—and am impressed how quickly it has been improved—but overall I still find it clunky.

Perhaps “clunky” isn’t the best description, but I don’t know how else to describe it. Things look like they should work well, but I continue to find something off about them.

The way you copy and paste is horrible on Android. The gmail app should be good, but it’s not quite there. Setting up and maintaining the home screens is a pain in the ass. And I find most apps to be a bit rough around the edges… Just not as polished as their iOS counterpart.

I do like that you can customize Android much more than iOS, tho I’m not sure its actually worth the tradeoff. I’ve changed the launcher and the icons and have installed widgets, but I’ve found them all to be flaky. They stall and stutter. Coincidentally, today I overheard someone complaining that Android 4.3 broke their launcher and things weren’t working correctly.

So, really, is this customization worth it? I’m not finding nearly enough value to justify it.

Yes, there are things that Android does better.

The keyboard is nice, tho I’m not sure I actually type any faster on it. I also tried the Swype keyboard, but I found myself fighting it more than enjoying it. Again, perhaps I just need to get used to it.

Yes, I like that you can install apps that can augment core OS functionality (like the I’m Sleeping app that brings Do Not Disturb functionality to the OS). You just can’t do this on iOS.

Yes, I like the idea of widgets, but I don’t actually find I use them much nor am I really finding that much value in them.

Yes, notifications are better (tho, I think iOS7 has addressed this).

Yes, I like that you can quickly disable WiFi or adjust the screen brightness (but iOS7 has addressed this as well).

I adore the idea of Google Now, but I haven’t found much use for it yet (and it’s technically available for iOS, but not nearly as integrated or convenient).

I love that Google services are so deeply integrated (email and calendar in particular because I use Google Apps for my personal and work email), but most of that is also doable in iOS now.

So, to all my Android friends. Why? What was it that made you decide to get your Android over an iPhone? Was it the screen size? The degree of control over the OS (and are you really exploiting it)? The price? Do you just hate Apple? Did you want to try something different?

I’m honestly curious.

Originally published on Medium, but republished here as I consolidate my writing on a self-hosted platform.