For the past few months I’ve been traveling every week or every other week. The travel has been primarily for public speaking events – conferences, workshops, book signings, etc. It’s been fun, but it comes at a very high cost: A chaotic schedule.

We’ve written (and spoken) at length about the pitfalls of interruption at work. Every interruption cuts your work day into a series of work moments. 45 minutes here, then a meeting. A hour there, then a conference call. 20 minutes until someone taps you on the shoulder or calls your name across the office. These events kill productivity.

Most of these interruptions are experienced at a micro level. They’re experienced during a day. But I’ve found the same thing holds true on a macro level. If you stretch your time scale out to weeks or months, a day trip here or a couple days away there has the same effect: It kills productivity. A couple days away a week is like a few meetings a day — it makes it hard to get anything meaningful done. An interruption is an interruption.

This past Monday I gave my last talk (UIE Web App Masters in Philly) until mid September when I’m at the Business Innovation Factory 6 conference. I have a few more after that for the year, but then I’m done. I’m going to retire from travel-required conference speaking for a while. It feels great.

It’s only been three days since my last talk, but knowing I have a clear schedule for many months has shifted me into a pleasantly productive mindset. I’ve gotten a ton done so far this week. There have been some projects I’ve been meaning to start for a while, but with future travel hanging over my head I couldn’t get into a groove. I’m back in a groove.

It’s a good reminder of the power of an open schedule. Just knowing you have the time helps you make the time. Time to put it to good use.

There’s been buzz in UI circles about the end of hovers since the iPad’s debut. I’ve mentioned in talks that touch tablets pose a design challenge for web apps that rely on hovering with a mouse. But the fact that hovers don’t work on touch devices doesn’t spell their doom. If we step back from hovers to the wider picture, comparing the desktop’s vocabulary with the limits of “tap, hold, and drag” can give us a handle on the gradually differentiating roles and equally bright futures of desktops and touch tablets.

As touch tablets wax in popularity, they illuminate the role and utility of desktops (including laptops, which belong on a desk anyway). Take the desktop’s arsenal of gestures. Besides click and right-click, you have shift-click, command-click, command-tab, command-space, ctrl-a, ctrl-e, command-~, command-w, and on and on and on to even include, yes, the hover.

I always felt like computers were meant to be used with at least a hand poised on the home row, because without that arsenal of verbs things just take too long. As a power user, watching someone who isn’t familiar with all the shortcuts can put your patience under observation. To some folks, everything about the desktop is a hindrance, like swimming in molasses.

But to the geeky or trained, the desktop is a fount of power and speed. Documents are side by side, text flies from here to there, IMs are answered and dismissed, mockups reloaded, batches processed, all with tiny movements of the fingers. For those of us who work all day on computers, touch interfaces are not an impending disruption.

While the future of the desktop is bright, like some maturing stars it also becomes more concentrated. If I place a bet, it’ll be that the desktop negotiates its place among tablets to settle on a role we haven’t seen in a while: the workstation. As for interface designers, we will sometimes shift out of the one-size-fits-all mindset to ask ourselves: Which device is this app really for? The workstation or the tablet?

Mark Hurst fills my email inbox each week with a lesson on customer experience. He’s been echoing the same message for over a decade. For people who have followed him that entire time, it may seem like old hat. But every day, there’s a new person out there who’s just discovering the notion of the customer experience and why it’s important and what they can do about it.

Thomas Friedman keeps has written column after column (and a book) about the need for a “Green Revolution.” Are some readers tired of it? Sure. But others are just coming to the message now.

Warren Buffett doesn’t worry about delivering shiny, new, exciting ideas in his annual letters to shareholders. He just keeps hammering away at the same themes that have guided him throughout his investment life.

Reaching the new class
In REWORK, we talk about how you need to be willing to let your customers outgrow you. There are more people who are not using your product than people who are; You need to make sure you make it easy for these people to get on board. That’s where your continued growth potential lies.

It’s the same for your marketing message. There may be .0001% who have read everything you’ve ever written and who want you to deliver something brand new. Follow their wishes and you’ll wind up with a tiny audience of experts while excluding the 99.9999% of people who have no idea who you are or what you think.

There’s a new batch of freshmen every year. Every day, there’s a new person discovering you for the first time. If your message is simple and accessible, they can become fans. If it’s geared exclusively to PhD candidates, these freshmen will never latch onto you.

A drop in the bucket
It’s also wise to keep in mind that it takes multiple mentions for an idea to really sink in. For most of those who follow you, your ideas are just a drop in the information overload bucket. That’s why you need to keep plugging away.

Marketing something is akin to being Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption chipping away at his cell wall. Like Andy, you’re not gonna dig a tunnel overnight. It’s going to take years. You need to hammer away at the same point in the wall to get anywhere. If you keep changing spots every week, you’re never going to break out.

Honing your message
Plus, you keep getting better at making your point(s). You can’t just expect to say it perfectly out of the gate and then never have to repeat it again. The first time you say something, you get to guage its impact. If you hit on something, you can start refining it. It’ll keep getting better. A blog post can lead to a conference presentation which can lead to an interview which can lead to a magazine article which can lead to a book. And each step of the way, the message will get tighter and clearer.

Your foundation is your foundation
Doubling down on a message is how you take a stand. Of course, you don’t want to sound like a broken record. You should find new angles and new ways to present those ideas. But remember it’s ok to keep plugging away at the same themes when you really believe them because, well, they’re what you really believe. The way you get to be the Buffett of your message is by sticking to it.

Extracted from the Team Echo room in our Campfire account:

Sam: touch nubbins are more or less done – just need to test in IE and do a final round of polish

Ryan: awesome!

Sam: famous last words

Jason:

That’s IE

Sam:
IE

Jason: lol

Ryan: hahaha

Jason:

Real IE

Sam: lol yes

We’re looking for a new person to join our support team (internally known as Team Omega), and we thought we’d let you in on what it’s like doing support for 37signals. It’s not like working behind the customer service counter at Wal-Mart. It’s not like answering calls in a phone bank, or automating responses like an email robot. It’s undoubtedly the best job I’ve ever had, and I hope it’s the last job I have.

I’ve been doing support for 37signals for almost 4 years. I didn’t want to at first; in fact when I was interviewed and eventually hired I was explicit: I will not do customer service. This left me doing back office sort of admin things and keeping myself busy, until one day I had to help Jason out on emails. Then daily I kept taking on more and more until one day I said to Jason, “Stop taking all the customer emails from me!”

They let me take over support full time, and I can’t tell you how surprising it is that I love this job. I love it so much that I’m passionate about it, I fight for it, I push back against very heavy opinions to protect it and improve how we help our customers. So what in the world made me go from never wanting to answer customer support emails to answering sometimes 200 a day by myself? Well, pretty simply, our customers are awesome!

Our customers love our products. They are loyal and fierce about them. They write us for help making sure everything works because they can’t imagine working without Basecamp or Highrise or Backpack. They want new features because they want to do more with our products. They’re funny, they are so kind and patient, they’re opinionated and friendly. 200+ emails a day of that sort? Bring it on.

We take support seriously as a way to educate and help. We use bad experiences our customers have to improve our products and processes, and turn that experience into a positive one. Our support team is a vital connection to our customers other teams don’t have, and we use that link to determine how to make our products better. We let people vent, and we understand their frustration. We stop and think to ourselves, “How can I make this person’s experience better?” Then whatever that is, we do it.

Support at 37signals was not good 5 years ago. It wasn’t and we know it. It took years of us recovering from stumbles in the beginning to be the support team we are today: Enthusiastic, fast, agile, happy to be here and eager to help. Not all of us come from customer service backgrounds, and we don’t think it’s required to do this job well.

What’s required is a will to make people’s day better, to teach them how do to things, to surprise them with speed and accuracy and become leaders in the support industry. And if you think that sounds awesome, why not come join us?

We think you’ll like it here. Plus, there’s often cookies.

This is part of our series “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” which profiles companies that 1) have $1MM+ in revenues, 2) didn’t take VC, and 3) are profitable.

Q&A with Andy Wilson of Logik

What does your business do?
Logik helps companies find, organize, process, and make searchable terabytes of digital documents for legal discovery. I always say we sell digital aspirin to attorneys experiencing discovery migraines.

How successful is your business?
Financially, we’ve been very successful considering our size relative to the competition (most have close to or well over 100 employees, we have 16). We don’t reveal internal financials now, because 1. we are private and 2. we don’t want VC’s beating down our door anymore after what happened with the 2009 Inc 500 ranking.

With that said, from 2005 to 2008 we grew revenue by 1,067% from $373,866 in 2005 to $4.4 million in 2008 with about $3 million in profit. We did that with 8 employees, a ton of servers, niche software, and 1 dog. This, minus the profit, is all public information now. We were ranked #181 overall on the 2009 Inc 500 survey and #1 for eDiscovery companies.

Getting on the Inc 500 was a great marketing tool for us, because it helped some of our more skeptical, on the fence, customers realize we were indeed legit despite our small size. Although we don’t reveal financials anymore, we have doubled our company size, moved to a new, bigger, and more open office space closer to our customers, and we are hiring for more engineers and support staff.

How did you get started?
In 2004 Sheng and I met for some quality Chinese food in Virginia to discuss what would become Logik. Prior to Logik, we were working for a small legal printing company helping to destroy rain forests. No seriously, we would print hundreds of thousands of emails to paper, so that massive legal teams could manually review each page. Very efficient ;) (odd fact: I worked on the Microsoft antitrust litigation and at one point was printing out Bill Gates’ email for a few weeks. He is very long winded.) After a few years of doing this and inhaling enough toner to paint your entire house black a few times over I decided I needed out and to find a better way to solve this problem. I mean, why would you “print” electronic documents to paper? Why not just print them to PDF or TIF? Ah-ha!

So, after letting the Chinese food settle we got to work drawing out the process flow for our document processing software. We quit our jobs, cut back on expenses, leased some servers, and got to work. I have a CS background, but Sheng is the real engineer and created the first version in just a few months. We got our first real customer 9 months after we started. This is how we got started.

Logik founders Sheng Yang and Andy Wilson.

Here’s a stool at a gate at O’Hare (Chicago) airport:

Everything below the seat was black painted metal. I’m sure it looked nice when it was painted and originally installed, but it ages quickly. So here we have a material (metal) that will last forever, but a high-contrast finish (paint) that only lasts a fraction of forever. Probably not the best idea for a high traffic area – especially when a lot of people in airports have hard-soled shoes. A bad design decision.

Here’s a stool at a gate at Hartsfield-Jackson (Atlanta) airport:

More comfy seat, but let’s look at the base. It’s either steel or aluminum. But it’s bare – no paint. It’ll hold up just as long as the metal base on the stool at O’Hare, but it’ll age more gracefully. No paint means nothing wears off. It looks new longer. Less maintenance means money saved and aesthetics maintained. Good design decision.