Recently I scored a practically mint condition Olivetti Lettera 22 from Post 27 here in Chicago. I can’t stop myself from inspecting it in awe daily.

Created to be the quintessential portable typewriter, it’s made of sturdy but lightweight steel, designed minimally and simply. There’s nothing under the keys besides air, no added weight or metal. Even the case it comes in wastes absolutely no space – the bottom piece is flat and flush with the bottom of the typewriter, the top part zipping over in perfect proportion to the machine.

It makes me think of the electronic typewriter my grandmother had in the 80’s, this huge bulky machine that took up half her desk and felt like it weighed a ton. Sure, it probably did a lot more – it even had a WhiteOut laced backspace key! – but how much of that was necessary? Bells and whistles and electronic WhiteOut do a lot to blow the mind, but nothing will ever compare to the most simple, elegant solution.

Talk to someone who runs a successful business and ask them, “When was the last time you looked at your business plan?” Chances are they don’t even know where to find it.

“Three Start-Ups, a Year Later” [NY Times] gives some examples of how little the original plan for a business matters once you’re actually doing something.

Tina Ericson recently shut down her online T-shirt store, Mamaisms Gear, in Wilmington, N.C., overwhelmed by the strains it was putting on her corporate job. “It seems like it was only yesterday that we were discussing our plans to make $100,000 in revenue the first year,” Ms. Ericson said. “We made some very expensive mistakes.”…

She predicted sales in 2008 of $100,000 at Mamaisms Gear, which intended to offer a broad line of T-shirts and other products with “Mama Says” slogans like “Quit Whining.” She also talked about creating a Web site for women and starting a consulting company for the financial services industry…

But by June, with economic growth slowing, all three business owners were scaling back their ambitions. Ms. Ericson had abandoned her plans to create an Internet community for women and to start a consulting firm to concentrate on marketing her T-shirts to boutiques.

The other two business profiled are still alive but have also completely rethought their original plans. They’ve changed focus, services, salaries, partnership arrangements, etc.

Sure, you can blame the economy. But this type of thing is par for the course even when things are going fine. Businesses, like armies, always have to adjust to the facts on the ground. If these companies’ one year projections were so far off, imagine how worthless those year three (or five) projections turned out to be.

It begs the question: What’s the point of a business plan if it’s obviously a fantasy that has nothing to do with reality? If these projections are just numbers pulled out of thin air, why pay any attention to them? Wishful thinking doesn’t really benefit you in any way.

It seems like most people write business plans just because they think they’re supposed to. They’ve been told a business plan is what a “real” business needs so they go ahead and start making shit up. Then reality happens and the whole thing goes out the window.

Sure, thinking about the future can help. But writing it down and thinking it’s any sort of plan is foolish. The truth is you’re not going to know what to do until you’re actually doing it.

Last weekend we released two updates to Backpack to help your team share and collaborate on pages.

Set sharing options up-front

Before this update, every page you created was shared with everyone in your account by default (unless you were the only person on your account). This meant that if you wanted to share with only certain people, or if you wanted to make a private page, you couldn’t do it without first saving a page shared with everybody and then changing the sharing settings after the fact. The result was that your private page title could be exposed to people in your account in that brief period between when the page was first created and when you clicked to change the sharing settings.

We’ve fixed that situation with a new “Make a new page” form. Now you can set the page title and sharing options together in the same step, before the page is ever created.

Page notifications

Another new feature allows you to notify people in your account that you created or updated a page. Now when you create a new page, you’ll see a yellow button at the bottom that says “Tell the others I created this page.”

You can click the button to reveal a notification form. Check the people you want to notify and type an optional personal message and then Backpack will send those people an email with a link to your new page.

That last checkbox is for administrators only. Admins can check “Add this page to each person’s sidebar” and the page will automatically be added to each person’s list of links in their sidebar. Now when you want people to check up on an important page you can be sure they have easy access to it whenever they log in to Backpack.

Page creators aren’t the only ones who can send notifications. Anybody who is sharing a page inside a Backpack account will see a button to “Tell the others I’ve updated this page” at the bottom of the page. Clicking that button displays the same form as the one above.

We hope these new features make it easier for you to share Backpack pages with your team!

Bill Moriarty, record producer and Highrise customer (case study), offers some interesting advice to other producers at his blog: Mix Records on Crap Speakers.

“It’s the very naive producer who works only on optimum systems.” -Brian Eno

It’s unlikely whoever is buying your records has anything better than an average hi-fi, boombox, car stereo, or ipod. I’d bet they don’t have studio monitors.

Recording & mixing solely on studio monitors is foolish. All that low end in the guitar? It’s useless in the small speakers. It’s just taking up frequencies the bass or drums or organs or tenor instruments can occupy. You have to be ruthless in cutting away useless frequencies so the record is loud & jumps out of all speakers. Make the record sound outstanding on little crap speakers since that’s where most people will hear it. I’ve found when I do this it still sounds great on the fancy speakers.

Love this. It’s not about the gear. In fact, gear can distract you from the essence of what you’re working on. Strip what you’re doing down to its bare essentials and evaluate that. If that comes off great, then it will work as it gets louder, starts to grow, or whatever. (And web designers can definitely apply the same idea to bandwidth speed, screen size, etc.)

I visited with a neighbor this weekend. He’s my parents’ age (which is to say, middle-aged), and is the undisputed king of the tangential story. Given any question, he’ll manage to turn it into a 5-10 minute yarn. This would be annoying, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s got some awesome stories.

This weekend I asked him for the correct pronunciation of his last name, which is rather unique. In one sentence, he answered my question, and then proceeded to relate the following story.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
How INTO uses Basecamp as a content management system and wireframing tool
“Upon browsing 37signals we saw three letters on the footer, “API,” we did a quick search for a way to connect to the backdoor of our favorite web application. After seeing the available data and the need for a simple server-side CMS that worked like Basecamp, we figured why not just use Basecamp as a CMS. We’re a transparent company, so if it works — use it. We did, and we’re happy to say it works great.”

A script checks Basecamp, sees what new news posts are available, then writes a new content file and refreshes it for the next visit.

Periscope Gadget: “Basecamp control on iGoogle & in GMail too”
“I really needed (and wanted) a simple way to punch-in to a project I was busy on; work; then punch-out and write a quick description of what I did. It’s really important to me to charge my clients by the minute: who wants to be charged 1hr of my time for a small copy change that really only took me 4 minutes to do? Enter Periscope.”

Highrise
Author uses Highrise to manage contacts (and integrates it with HelpSpot too)
“I’m using it with my assistants to manage the contacts for the marketing of my new best selling book Blog Blazers. Not only does it allow us to manage who’s who, we also use it to manage who’s been sent books to review, who to follow-up with, and when to follow-up with them. Basically it’s a great tool to keep track of our marketing efforts for the book. I can’t imagine being without it! What’s also very exciting for us is that we use HelpSpot to manage internal emails, and they’ve created an integration plugin for Highrise right into their products. So as we email people, we can do what’s called a ‘Live Lookup’ right into the software and get the benefits of Highrise with our email client.”

Multiple products
[Case study] BootStudio uses 37signals tools to build websites for large organizations in Central America
“We’ve found that the most value can be obtained from these collaboration apps when everyone can easily find the information they need, when they need it. In order to achieve this, all team members need to be clear on where different items should be posted. Consistency is the name of the game, and over time our team has developed naming schemes that make it easier for us to know where to look for things later. Thinking carefully about the information architecture of the things we can customize in these tools — category names, project labeling schemes, message titles, etc. — has made a big difference in how usable (and useful) they are to us and to our clients.”

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