I’ve got two machines on me.

One’s strapped to my left wrist. The other lives in my pocket.

The one on my wrist can tell me the time (precisely in 12 hour format, roughly in 24), the day of the week, the month of the year, which year of the leap year cycle we’re in, and the current moon phase. But that’s its limit. There’s no software, only hardware. It’s programmed in springs and gears and levers and jewels.

The one in my pocket can tell me anything and do just about everything. It knows my voice, it responds to my touch, and it even instantly recognizes my fingerprint out of fourteen billion fingers. This machine even knows the angle, velocity, and distance it travels when I swing it around. And it always knows exactly where it is anywhere on the planet.

But sometimes I wonder which one is more modern.

The one in my pocket can do more, but only for a limited time. And then it can’t do anything. It dies unless it can drink electrons from a wall through a cable straw for some hours every day. And in a few years it’ll be outdated. In ten years it might as well be 100 years old. Is something that ages so fast ever actually modern?

And then there’s the machine on my wrist. It’s powered entirely by human movement. No batteries, no cables, no daily dependency on the outside world. As long as I’m running, it’s running. And as long as one person checks it out once a decade, it’ll be working as well in 100 years as it works today. It’s better than modern. It’s timeless – yet it keeps time.

As time goes by, my pocket will meet many machines. My wrist might too. But when I look down at the machine on my wrist today, and know that in 50 years my son will be able to look down at his wrist at the same machine ticking away the same way it ticks today. That’s a special kind of modern reserved for a special kind of machine: the wonderful mechanical wristwatch.

Last year I shared some extra drawings I made for the Basecamp marketing site that for a variety of reasons never went live or were seen by anyone outside of Basecamp. There have also been many drawings for The Distance that have never seen the light of day until now.

For just over a year, The Distance was dedicated to longform articles about long standing businesses. Under the editorship of Wailin and the art direction of Mig, I made a header illustration for each article and a building drawing that served as the footer. In recent months, The Distance has morphed into a podcast. I still illustrate the cover for each issue, but the header illustration is no longer needed. I like to tell people that I illustrate a podcast, and then I wait to see their reaction. There were a few issues that were both a podcast and a longform article. Here are some of the extra drawings made for those articles and then a link to each corresponding podcast. I’m also hoping to show some of the collaborative process and how we use Basecamp together as a team.

World’s Largest Laundromat

The finished header looked like this. I got a creative brief from Mig with some of the concepts of the story that he wanted to see in the header, and he also shared some visual inspiration, including some anthropomorphic washers and an animated gif of spiraling bubbles. The theme that I latched onto was that this is the world’s largest laundromat, so I knew I wanted to draw a big washing machine. The first image I drew was of a washer amidst a field of bubbles, but that didn’t read well and it didn’t really say anything.

I tried another one with a washing machine looming large on a street with residential buildings. Drawing buildings is my jam so I was playing to my strengths here, and I thought it worked conceptually. I shared it on Basecamp and…

I was ecstatic that they liked the drawing, and that the header came together so quickly. As you will see, it doesn’t always happen that way. I colored in the drawing and that became the final image. I had some time and I was still thinking about washing machine people, so I made the additional drawing of a washer with a top hat!

Ideal Box Company

The final header looks like this.

This article is about a box company that makes a lot of point of purchase displays. I kicked off the to-do with a drawing.

Wailin shared a copy of the story then and she broke down some of the key points and themes. She also shared a few ideas for me to try. I did this drawing but I knew that it didn’t hit on many of the themes (even though I initially tried to champion it).

Mig then chipped in with a winning idea followed by some other points, but I latched on to his origami concept.

Even though I’m relatively inexperienced in editorial illustration, that doesn’t always stop me from being overly opinionated about their purpose. I ranted about that on the thread a little bit. Artists are the worst. In the end Mig is usually right.

Victory Auto Wreckers

The final header looks like this.

I got a copy of the story and some thematic ideas from Wailin: the afterlife of a car; use every part of the animal; from junkyard to recycling center; and new commercial. That gave me enough to sketch out some ideas.

Mig liked that idea but he wanted to see it more dense with car parts.

Mig wasn’t sure about the car in 3D space, so he wanted me to try one flat but with more parts.

I drew up this, and it evolved into the final image.

Continued…

Every working day for the last month or so I’ve posted a single “chart of the day” to our Basecamp account. They’re posted internally without much commentary—just enough to explain what the chart is about. The topics are wide ranging: in the last month, we’ve covered browser uptake, search terms, The Distance, database performance, phone support, Nagios alert trends, demographics, classes, timezones, and even home energy usage and BMW torque curves.

The charts don’t fit into a big picture narrative, and there’s no agenda behind them: I simply take one chart from something I’m currently working on, have worked on recently, or someone has been curious about. Most are literally pulled from an open workbook or browser tab, so it’s not a big time investment. The chart of the day takes about a minute to post when it’s pulled from something I’m already working on, or up to fifteen minutes on the rare occasions that I create something completely from scratch for one. Sometimes they’re great visualizations; sometimes they’re not the most stunning displays of data. The key thing is that there’s a new one every day.

Why am I doing this? In part for fun and as a personal challenge: it takes a certain amount of thought and a different approach to making a chart that can tell a story on its own.

The bigger and more strategic reason for posting a chart a day is that I want to make data easier for people to digest and make a part of their daily work. I’m guilty of occasionally dropping 5,000 word reports with a couple dozen figures included into a Basecamp project when writing up a topic. I’ve gradually moved more and more content into appendices, methodological supplements, or self-service Tableau workbooks, but a full in-depth analysis of a topic is still long. I understand that it’s a real commitment of time and attention to read something of that length and digest it fully.

One chart a day, on the other hand, is easy — it’s not a big commitment to look at one chart and a couple sentences of context on a different topic each day. I don’t track readership of either longer reports or charts-of-the-day religiously, but based on general feedback, I think it’s fair to say more people are reading – and benefiting from – the daily charts.

I’ve talked to people in other organizations who do similar things, whether it’s a weekly internal blog post or data show-and-tell at a meeting, and the reaction has been uniformly positive: more people engaging with more data and having a bigger impact on organizations. If you do something like this, I’d love to hear about what you do and the impact that it has. If you don’t, maybe it’s time to give it a try.

The cattle has to be round up. Complaining about the weather or going without sleep for 16 hours isn’t going to do it. So clench your teeth and get the work done. That’s the grit needed to be a cowboy.

But I’m a lot less sure that grit is such a positive trait in other professions, particularly creative endeavors like programming, design, or writing.

If I had more grit, I would probably just have clenched my teeth and dug into that J2EE architectural hole with greater perseverance, rather than giving up and building Ruby on Rails. I would probably have spent more time finishing my math classes as a senior in high school, rather than just plagiarizing my friend, and spending the time running gaming websites in the late ‘90s.

Grit is a convenient trait for enticing others to comply with the uncomfortable or the uninteresting. It elevates the perseverance of such adversity to a virtue in and of itself. Just dangle that long-term goal in front of them, accuse them of lack of grit, and compliance will oft follow.

But far more important than to be capable of suffering for your cause is to ask “what cause”? Am I the beneficiary here, or is someone else? Being high on grit may well mean sticking with a faulty cause for far longer.

Grit is an optimization for local maxima. If you’re able to change the function, drop the grit.

I want to create something out of nothing but nothing isn’t a great place to draw from.

Mitch Hedberg

On February 21, 2006 a guy launches a video blog. The results, even by 2006 standards, were far less than perfect. The lighting is terrible. The camera unsteady. There’s a use of zoom and text effects that remind me of my mom’s VHS videos of my sister and I figure skating in 1990.

Later episodes have funny text effects where the title of the blog swims into view like a novice PowerPoint presentation. There’s a glass picture frame behind him reflecting whatever light fixture is in the room, and that’s all your eyes want to look at.

The first episode has 14 comments made in its entire first year. This definitely didn’t take off like a rocket ship.

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People who’ve been fans of my blog and the writing I’ve done on places like SvN have messaged me that they’ve missed my writing. I haven’t done as much lately. Why? The answer is pretty simple. As Jason Fried might say, I just don’t have the attention. It’s easy for me to spend an entire day writing and researching an article. But, running Highrise is a big job. There’s so much to do. Building a brand new team, managing the current product and its support, and reinvigorating product development on an old product, takes all of my attention.

And there’s a hesitation now in publishing my work.

Success breeds hesitation. Even the modicum of success I’ve had writing has created a hesitation to publish something that isn’t perfect. I want each article to be even better than the last one. But that just makes it impossible to publish thoughts and ideas and observations when I don’t have the attention to make them perfect.

Hesitation becomes this empty void where we stop producing good ideas, because we no longer have that bucket of just fair ideas to draw from.

How do I fix it?

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That video blogger kept at it. In episode 1000 the intro graphics are now this fancy professional animation that reminds me of the quality of the Mad Men intro. And he’s definitely found an audience.

Today you know him as Gary Vaynerchuk and this was his Wine Library TV video blog. Today, with over a million Twitter followers, he hosts another video podcast called the #AskGaryVee show. The production quality is light years past that first episode of Wine Library TV. There’s perfect lighting, multiple cameras, fancy editing and effects that all come off as interesting and professional. And there’s thousands and thousands of people watching. He’s clearly made something many of us aspire to after publishing and publishing and publishing stuff that was less than perfect.

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One thing that’s helped recently reinvigorate my writing was to give myself channels where I don’t feel the pressure for perfect. Comments on forums are great for this. Most people have very low expectations of the quality of “comments” online.

I use Reddit to practice. I’ll find someone asking something I think I could riff on, and I’ll just go. I’ll try to work in some personal anecdotes or something I’ve observed and see if I can make it interesting. If I like the result I might polish it a little and put it in more places. Here’s an example of a question on Reddit that I answered.. Seemed like it got some folks interested, so I polished it some, and posted a different version to this blog which sparked a great conversation.

If I didn’t have that first mediocre attempt at an answer, I wouldn’t have ever gotten to publishing the better one. I needed a far less than perfect place to start.

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A few weeks ago Jason Fried pinged me with:

We got together to hammer out a few details of what it would look like. Soon after, we filmed a pilot episode that we recorded but didn’t tell anyone about. We wanted to see if it had any kinks. It had kinks.

It took us 15 minutes just to figure out places with good internet connectivity and lighting – so you could actually see my face. After that, we finally got to chatting. The results were still terrible. We had a fun time talking, but it was unlistenable. There’s an echo of my voice in the video. We later figured out from chatting with people who’ve already done this a ton like Chase Clemons and Shaun Hildner, it’s probably from Jason’s laptop mic picking up the audio from his speakers – problem would be resolved if we both used headsets.

Ok, let’s do another. So we discuss, how often can we sustain doing this? What’s the name? Do we need better cameras and mics? What about lighting? Maybe we can get Shaun to help us? Should we use Hangouts or a different app or technology. So many unanswered questions and so much room to keep making low quality attempts at this podcast.

This Monday came and we didn’t have answers to any of our outstanding questions. I debated if we should do another “off air” episode, just so we can practice more. I hesitated. Jason’s reply? “Let’s do it live”

And so we did. Our second “pilot” episode went live yesterday, August 24 at 3pm. And it was as you’d expect, less than perfect. I somehow accidentally turned off the voice detection Google Hangouts uses to automatically decide which face to show in the video, so you see Jason’s face throughout the beginning until Shaun comes in and tries to fix our setup. Then you can see I’m distracted by the monitor and manually switching who is seen in the video.

People still enjoyed it.

So awesome: @jasonfried and @natekontny talk product design — https://t.co/oZmyVqndX3

— Eric Trinh (@eric_trinh) August 25, 2015

This is how life works. This is how most things we enjoy and call successful start. They aren’t as good as we want them. They need a ton of practice. And even when we get something to the place where it is good, now we have a new challenge: our hesitation at being bad again.

Just keep publishing. Keep putting out the stuff that’s not perfect. When you find yourself in a spot where the expectations are too high, just find another spot. We need that place to draw from.

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Jason and I are going to keep publishing these “imperfect” chats of ours. You should follow us on Twitter: @jasonfried and @natekontny. We’ll talk about not just the things we see other folks struggling with and asking questions about, but the things still bugging us. Life is far less than perfect for us, and we keep leaning on each other to help us through our current challenges. Hopefully recordings of us hashing them out will prove useful to others going through the same.

If there’s anything you’d like us to ever cover, please hit us up on Twitter or ask in the comments of our SvN posts. We’d love to hear from you.

Last month, we made a huge mistake.

We’d built a new feature in Know Your Company a while back. During that process, we’d accidentally written a bit of code that caused private responses to be revealed to new employees in a company.

This means that for the past six months, when new employees were added to Know Your Company, they were able to view responses that only their CEO was supposed to have access to.

Ugh.

It was a horrible mistake… and we were just finding out about it now. It affected about 80 companies, and hundreds of employees. My stomach still feels sick when I think about it.

One of our customers noticed the error, and was kind enough to tell us. Aside from that, our other customers hadn’t noticed the problem (or, at least hadn’t told us).

Now I was faced with a big decision… Should I tell our other customers about it?

One could argue that, if customers hadn’t noticed, why say anything? Why rustle feathers, especially when the damage had already been done. There wasn’t anything that our customers could do about it.

Saying something could cause our business harm. Customers might be angry. Some of them might even leave.

Or, we could come clean. I could be upfront about what happened, own up to our mistake, and say how terribly sorry we were. Sure, we risk losing business. But what about the risk of losing the trust of our customers?

Trust, after all, is everything. If you don’t have the trust of your customers, what do you have? If your customers don’t trust you, they won’t be your customers for much longer.

I also thought: If I were a customer, wouldn’t I want to know? As a CEO myself, I would want to know that those private responses had been accessible to my new employees. Even if I couldn’t do anything about those private responses going out, I would want to know that it happened in the first place.

To gut-check myself, I called up Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp. I wanted to get his two cents, and make sure I was thinking about this right. (Basecamp originally built Know Your Company, and is a co-owner and advisor to our business).

Here’s what Jason said to me: “I like moments like this. Moments like this are an opportunity to show what kind of company you are. You get to show your customers what you stand for.”

Those words were all I needed to hear.

I knew what kind of company we were. I knew what we stood for.

I decided to personally email the eighty-some CEOs affected by our mistake. In a short note, I explained what we messed up, and how sorry we were.

I offered a small credit as a token of how bad we felt, knowing of course that it wouldn’t make up for it. I gave folks my personal cell phone number and told them to call me anytime if they had questions, concerns, etc.

Then I braced myself for the reaction.

I got a flood of replies from customers. Not a single one was negative. A few folks were concerned (as they ought to be!)

But no one was angry. No one left.

In fact, the response from customers was overwhelmingly positive. People said, “Thank you for letting me know” and, “No biggie, these things happen.”

One of our Dutch customers emailed me saying, “We have a saying in Dutch: waar gewerkt wordt, worden fouten gemaakt that translates to ‘mistakes are made if you’re doing work’.”

Another person replied to me, “We all screw up from time to time. Go have a cocktail ;)”

I even had one customer who said he was so impressed with the email I’d sent, he’d forwarded it to his entire company as an example for how to handle a mistake.

Our mistake became a positive moment for our company. It solidified who we were, what we stood for, and showed our customers that too.

We proved that “putting our customers’ best interest first” isn’t just something we say – it’s something we do. We gained our customers’ trust and confidence as a result.

Mistakes are bound to happen. You’ll never entirely avoid them. So your customers aren’t going to judge you on whether or not you’ve made a mistake – they’ll judge you on how you handle it.

Do you come clean immediately? Do you say how sorry you are? Are you genuine about it?

It’s a hard thing to remember when you’re in the middle of a fire. You’re faced with the prospect that admitting a mistake could cost you customers, your reputation, and a lot of money.

When you’re in that moment, simply ask yourself: “What kind of company are you?”

You’ll know what to do.

Even this late in the game, we’re still designing, redesigning, and debating. This is healthy product development.

I recently realized that if I’m too busy to take something on, I shouldn’t say “I don’t have the time”. In fact, I often do have the time. It’s not that hard to squeeze in some extra time for someone.

What I don’t have – and what I can’t squeeze in – is more attention. Attention is a far more limited resource than time. So what I should say is “I don’t have the attention”. I may have 8 hours a day for work, but I probably have 4 hours a day for attention.

This summer a guy wrote me out of the blue asking if he could intern for me this summer. His email was great – clear, thoughtful, kind, inviting, confident but not pushy, and not too long (but long enough to say what he had to say without leaving anything out). He was studying at Harvard Business School and was going to be back in Chicago this summer.

He asked if he could swing by and say hi. His email made it easy for me to say yes. So he did, and we had a great session. We spent maybe an hour or so together. I learned about his background, what kind of stuff he was interested in, what he wanted to learn, what he could teach us, etc. Then we riffed on a few ideas. It was natural, flowing, effortless. Really promising.

Then I told him I’d think a few things over and get back to him soon. He checked in a few weeks later, and I said I’d get back to him soon again. And I didn’t.

A month or so after that I wrote him and told him I was really sorry. I’d mislead him – and myself – thinking I had enough time to take on a intern that summer. I wanted to, I really liked him, I thought he’d be great, but I just didn’t have as much time as I thought I had to even consider it more and line up work and spend time with him, etc.

But really, as I thought about it, I realized I had the time. Every day is the same 24 hour cycle. Every workday around 8 hours. Surely I could have found even 20 minutes a day to work with him. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find the time. I couldn’t find the attention.

My mind fills up with a few key projects and that’s it. I’m absorbed by those. That’s where my attention is. Had I made 20 minutes here and there for him, I’m be physically present in that moment, but mentally I’d be elsewhere. And that’s not fair to either of us.

Time and attention aren’t the same thing. They aren’t even related.

We’ve since talked a few more times, and we caught up again last week. I think I’ll have more attention next year. We’re going to keep in touch, check in from time to time as he finished up school, and then try again.

Many of us know how much a partner can help with creating a great business. Apple had Jobs and Woz. Google has Larry and Sergey. Basecamp has Jason and David. And for years, I’ve had the help of a really awesome partner: my wife, Lynette. We’ve been together for over 16 years. She’s been there for tons of hard decisions about work or life in general.

One easy to point out example is Draft. A project I’ve been blessed to receive an incredible amount of praise about. But, I had a secret weapon, Lynette.

She was the biggest reason I created Draft to begin with. I needed her help editing my writing and blog posts. She’s the best editor I’ve ever met, and I was sick of passing Word documents back and forth with her. Of course, then she was the first person to tell me when something was wrong or confusing. She helped me prioritize. She had great ideas how to improve the product. I could get her help with anything. But we’ve had a setback in our work relationship. This little one, Addison, entered our lives. :)

Addison is everything to us. But as most parents understand, she comes with complications. Everything has become harder. Leaving to go outside? That takes planning and unforeseen obstacles. You thought you were ready to go? Here, take a dirty diaper. Now are we ready? Nope, needs to nurse. Now are we ready? Damn, now it’s nap time. Maybe we’ll try to go somewhere tomorrow.

Another complication is that it’s been harder to get Lynette’s help with anything related to my work on things like Highrise. Lynette’s swamped with her own job and being an awesome mom. And we’re too busy to deal with work when we’re together. We have filled any free time with new, incredibly rewarding things: teaching Addison to talk and read and share and everything.

But it does impact the quality of what I’m able to accomplish at work. We’ve gained an incredible amount, but in the process I’ve lost my work partner. It’s frustrating, but you know what? I have the resources to change this….

I’d like to introduce to you the new Chief Operating Officer of Highrise, Lynette Kontny.

We’ve debated this for awhile, making sure it was the right move for us and Highrise. Given our ability to collaborate over the years though, and the attention Highrise needs, this was a pretty easy decision.

Lynette was both excited and sad to announce she was leaving her job, as she enjoyed a ton of it it. I overheard her phone conversations with colleagues as she announced she was leaving. They were sad too, letting her know she was doing the job of 5 other people. But now, Highrise gets to benefit from having Lynette in its corner.

If you are a Highrise customer, you are lucky! Lynette started this week, and you’ll begin to see her work all over Highrise and our ability to get impactful things done quickly. Even being here two days, she’s taken a ton of important things off my plate I was having trouble getting done. If you aren’t a Highrise customer, now would be a great time. :) Things are really getting interesting.

We are thrilled to have Lynette. I can’t describe how awesome it is to get my work partner back.

P.S. There’s a lot going on at Highrise. Lynette isn’t the only new addition. We also have had some more really great people join the team, and we’ll make introductions in the near future. If you want to follow the Highrise journey, my Twitter account is a good place. You should follow me: here.

I’m not surprised that Jeff Bezos didn’t recognize the Amazon depicted by Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace, a NYT exposé on its culture. Jeff would never have heard those stories, because nobody would ever tell him. These are the stories you have to dig for, and the NYT did.

Whether the overall, pretty glum, picture painted of Amazon work culture is perfectly accurate isn’t even that interesting. It’s certainly not an adequate defense to deflect the questions raised, as one Amazon high-level but rookie manager tried to do. There are more than enough anecdotes, supposedly gathered by more than 100 interviews with current and former employees of Amazon, to raise more than a few red flags.

How you respond to a red flag is what matters. You can deny its very existence. You can argue that it’s not really red, but more of an orange pink. You can argue that the people holding the flag aren’t true Amazonians. You can argue that the people who caused the red flags to fly were rogue actors, going against the intentions of the company. Or you can simply just claim that since you hadn’t personally seen any of the incidents, the flags are illegitimate on their face.

But the bottom line is that culture is what culture does. Culture isn’t what you intend it to be. It’s not what you hope or aspire for it to be. It’s what you do. There’s no way to discredit, deflect, or diffuse that basic truth.

Here’s how that can play out: High-level manager A gives mid-level manager B a tough, maybe even impossible, goal. Maybe A ties a bonus or dangles a promotion to the fulfillment of that goal. Now set that in context of WE ARE THE SMARTEST, WE WORK THE HARDEST.

How hard do you think B is going to push subordinate C to reach the goal? To not fail BEING SMART, WORKING HARD? Do you think that some meaningful number of times, C might feel such aggregated heat from two layers of management that it could resemble some of the anecdotes from the NYT article (and then imagine 3-4-5 layers of management)? If so, do you think A is blameless, and do you think the organization that serves as context for this scenario is blameless? I don’t.

“But that’s not what I meant” is an adequate, if somewhat naive, excuse the first time you see the consequences of your actions. The second, third, or fifth time, it’s a lot less so. At some point “unintended side effects” becomes “predictable outcomes”.

The NYT did Amazon a favor. They shone a bright light on some dank corners of the organization and its work culture. Corners that had long been rumored to exist. Now it’s out in the open, and Amazon can seize the catalyst for a thorough audit of the gap between what Jeff wants the place to be and how it sometimes isn’t.

To do so, Jeff, and other senior management at Amazon, need to remember that nobody tells you anything when it comes to bubbling-up abuse from the trenches. It’s completely unrealistic to expect someone five levels deep in the bowels of the organization to reach out to the fifth-richest man in the world and trouble him with his or her toils. It doesn’t matter how many invitations to open doors, escalators, or elevators you extend, it’s just not going to happen.

The only reliable way to get this sort of information is to ask. You cannot just extend the “open door” invitation, lean back in your executive chair, and think that you’ve done all you can.

Jeff, or a team he charges with finding facts (and not protecting egos or appearances), has to follow up on the leads, examine the stories, identify root causes, and propose sanctions and remedies. And Amazon has to be willing to accept that maybe some of its systems are producing consequences it does not desire, and that they should change.

Disclaimer: Jeff Bezos personally owns a minority, non-voting stake in Basecamp acquired in 2006. That makes this case personal for me. Factor in that bias. Also, this exact problem, top-level management being the last to know, is why we created KnowYourCompany.com.