In his book “Creativity,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi advises readers who want to find flow to take charge of their own schedules.

It is also possible the schedule you are following is not the best for your purposes. The best time for using your creative energies could be early in the morning or late at night. Can you carve out some time for yourself when your energy is most efficient? Can you fit sleep to your purpose, instead of the other way around?

The times when most people eat may not be the best for you. You might get hungry earlier than lunchtime and lose concentration because you feel jittery; or to perform at the top of your potential it may be best to skip lunch and have a midafternoon snack instead. There are probably best times to shop, to visit, to work, to relax for each one of us; the more we do things at the most suitable times, the more creative energy we can free up.

Most of us have never had the chance to discover which parts of the day or night are most suited to our rhythms. To regain this knowledge we have to pay attention to how well the schedule we follow fits our inner states—when we feel best eating, sleeping, working, and so forth. Once we have identified the ideal patterns, we can begin the task of changing things around so that we can do things when it is most suitable…Time is more flexible than most of us think.

Another advantage to flex scheduling: It lets you get away from the nonstop communication flow that occurs during “mainstream” hours. It’s a lot easier to get things done when you’re not constantly being pinged by others.

Zappos
Alex Labbett writes: “I just placed my 5th order over 4 months at Zappos.com and decided to read through their ‘Shipping Notification’ email. Attached you will find what they had to say, and I believe it follows some of the principles shown on SvN.

I placed my order close to 2:30PM and it has already shipped (the day I ordered it) for me to receive by tomorrow. Also, the overnight shipping is free.

Specifically, this paraphraph is what sets them apart:

While most companies spend a lot of money on marketing in order to grow their business, our philosophy at Zappos.com is a little different. Instead of spending a lot of money on marketing, we would rather work on improving the customer experience (running our warehouse around the clock, super-fast free shipping, free return shipping, 24/7 customer support, etc.), and rely on repeat customers and word of mouth to grow our business instead.

I’ve recommended Zappos to all my friends before, but this follow-up email just further solidifies my opinion that they’re the best online shoe store. Period.”

Chocolove
Kathy Sierra used to rave about Chocolove for their smart packaging (which includes poetry inside the wrapper). History of Chocolove is from the company’s site and tells a story that sets the company apart from the Snickers of the world.

Chocolove started as the classic entrepreneur story – a dream, a garage, extended credit card debt and loans from friends and family. With its visionary chocolatier, and a solid concept, Chocolove became, and continues to be, a pioneer in the chocolate industry.

Timothy Moley is the founder, owner and chocolatier at Chocolove. A tall and slightly eccentric man, he reminds you a little of Willy Wonka. His laid-back attitude, wry grin, and lanky physique would never lead you to believe he is a man who lives and breathes chocolate, and has been consuming two chocolate bars, every day, for the past ten years. Seriously.

It all began in a cocoa field in Indonesia… Timothy was chewing on some cocoa beans doing volunteer work for USAID, a government program that promotes agricultural and technical education in developing countries. He had been living abroad on and off for two years, visiting over 28 countries, developing his palate with spices, teas and wines. And, like most of us, he had always dreamed of being his own boss, dedicated to something he loved. The idea of a career in chocolate inspired him and an idea began to form -  to create a premium chocolate bar, paired with the romance of love.

Click for larger version.

Richard Kostelanetz calls the image above, from László Moholy-Nagy’s “Vision in Motion,” “a masterpiece of graphic literary criticism.”

Not only did he understand Joyce’s extraordinary work better than anyone else writing at that time, but Moholy also provided a chart that, as it uses his favorite visual forms of the rectangular grid and circles, remains to this day the most succinct (and inspired) presentation of the Joycean technique of multiple references.

More on Moholy-Nagy: A few photos of his “Vision in Motion” book at Flickr. “The fiery stimulator” is a Guardian profile of Moholy-Nagy which calls him “the most inventive and engaging of all the Bauhaus artists.”

How many companies would let one of their own openly attack and criticize its actions in public?

That’s the job of The NY Times’ Public Editor, a “readers’ representative” who investigates the actions of his own paper. His job is to follow up on reader complaints and make sure everything at the paper is on the up and up. He’s like the journalistic version of an internal affairs cop.

He’s given a wide berth to call it like he sees it too. For example, he recently took issue with the paper’s decision to run a discounted ad from Moveon.org criticizing Gen. David Petraeus.

The ad violated The Times’s own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to…

For me, two values collided here: the right of free speech — even if it’s abusive speech — and a strong personal revulsion toward the name-calling and personal attacks that now pass for political dialogue, obscuring rather than illuminating important policy issues. For The Times, there is another value: the protection of its brand as a newspaper that sets a high standard for civility…I’d have demanded changes to eliminate ‘Betray Us,’ a particularly low blow when aimed at a soldier.

I won’t get into the politics of this specific issue, but I do think it’s refreshing to see this level of transparency from a big media company. After all, a newspaper’s job is to serve as a watchdog that tracks the hypocrisies and abuses of power taking place in big government and big business. So it better be able to take a long, hard look at itself too. What’s good for the goose…

There’s a lesson here for non-media businesses too. The age of secrets is dying. It’s all going to be out there. If you report on yourself and tell the truth about both your successes and failures, you get ahead of the curve. Sure, sometimes that might mean taking a short-term PR hit. But in the long run, you make it back in spades by earning long-term credibility.

Design Shack
David Appleyard writes: “I noticed this at a recently re-designed CSS gallery and thought it was quite an original idea! A fresh take on navigation through designs.”

iSquint
Rosano Coutinho writes: “When most progress indicators aren’t accurate, they rarely admit it, but the one in iSquint does. Somehow, makes me feel less negative towards the software and the innacuracy.”

Brian Crabtree of Monome sent us a link to the above clip and writes:

Thought you might like this design detail. We originally had a sortof “logo” pattern flash on startup, which is abstract in reality, pretty disassociative. Now you get the satisfying sense of physically “giving” power to the device.

Related: [Fireside Chat] Brian Crabtree (Monome), David Rose (Ambient Devices), and Nathan Seidle (Spark Fun Electronics)

This profile of Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster gives a summary of his management philosophy:

• Listen to what users want. Try to make the site faster and better.
• Hire good people. “We work hard trying to get the right kind of folks.” It pays off: they hardly ever leave.
• No meetings, ever. “I find them stupefying and useless.”
• No management programmes and no MBAs. “I’ve always thought that sort of thing was baloney.”
• Forget the figures. “We are consistently in the black, so if we do better or worse in any given quarter it is absolutely irrelevant.”
• Occasionally, give people “a very gentle nudge”. This can be done over lunch or on the instant messaging boards.
• He doesn’t reply to any of his 100 daily messages, most of which beg Craigslist to do a deal. “I’m not real chatty on e-mail.”
• Put speed over perfection: “Get something out there. Do it, even if it isn’t perfect.”
• “Don’t screw it up by doing things that make people feel worse about their work.”

[via Good Experience]

Sleepers. They’re customers who have free accounts but haven’t used them in a while. They got far enough to sign up and start using your product. They just never made it over the hump.

We’ve been thinking about how to wake these sleepers. After all, it’s a lot easier to wake a sleeping customer than win a new one.

A one-time reminder email seems like a good nudge. Something that reminds these people they signed up, shows them what they’re missing, and offers a path for getting back in the saddle. And a discount or coupon never hurts.

For example, Jamis tried StumbleUpon once a while back. They recently sent him this email:

There’s also the option of offering sleepers a treat to wake up. David, who stopped using NetFlix, recently got a letter from the company saying “we miss you” and offering a 20% discount on the first few months.

The goal is to find a nice, positive way to poke inactive account holders. You could even frame it like this: “Hey, you have data with us you haven’t used. Would you like to delete your account? If not, here’s a deal…”

Of course, it’s best to keep pokes like this to a minimum (sometimes sleeping dogs just want to lie).

Also a good idea: Allow the recipient to cancel/unsubscribe. A lot of these sleepers are sleepers because they simply don’t want to use the service. It’s only fair to give them an easy to way get back to sleep.

Erling Ellingsen made a $2 multi-touch pad with a plastic bag, some dye, and a camera. Eat your heart out, MacGyver

- The main idea is that you threshold the image into three areas: background (light blue), fingers (dark blue; these are shown as an overlay on-screen) and pressure points (not blue).

- I used a bag of dye for now, since that was easy to make. It might be feasible to tape LEDs to the edges of the table, and use FTIR-like scattering; I’d like to try that later. Actually, if you have one of those cheesy engraved-perspex-plate-with-blue-LEDs-in-the-base things lying around, you might be able to use that.

- Large areas of non-blue are interpreted as fingers. There is a mouse mode, where every touch immediately moves the mouse to that point, and a multi-touch mode which sends an NSNotification with a list of points for each frame. These will of course only be understood by programs that understand this protocol—of which there currently exist only one (the rotozoomer at the end)

- The on-screen display is just a regular transparent OSX window. The background pixels are 100% transparent (alpha=0), and the hands show up as black with alpha 0.1 or so.

So cool to see this sort of innovative thinking and embrace of constraints.

We’re ramping up our emailing efforts and decided to start sending out HTML newsletters to customers. (We’ve always sent out plain-text emails but figured some minimal styling would help liven things up a bit.) So we designed a nice, simple email using clean code. The first one is this brief Basecamp Newsletter.

It took a while to get to this version though. First, we ran our simply styled email through Mailchimp Inbox Inspector (demo), a useful tool you can use to view HTML newsletters in a variety of email apps.

It came up perfect everywhere except Outlook 2007, Windows Live Mail, and Lotus Notes. Strangely, it looked fine in Outlook 2006 but busted in Outlook 2007.

The reason? As Campaign Monitor put it, Microsoft decided to take email design back 5 years.

As I type this post I still can’t believe it. I’m literally stunned. If you haven’t already heard, I’m talking about the recent news that Outlook 2007, released next month, will stop using Internet Explorer to render HTML emails and instead use the crippled Microsoft Word rendering engine.

First things first, you need to realize that Outlook enjoys a 75-80% share of the corporate email market, which is similar to Internet Explorer’s share of the browser market – they make the rules…The reality is that many of us are going to have to scale back our email templates to years past and stick with tables and inline CSS if we want consistent looking emails in Outlook and Windows Live Mail.

No background images, no float or position (tables only), really poor support for padding/margin, etc. For real!? It’s like a time warp to making web pages in 1999. But what can ya do when Outlook’s got a 75-80% share for corporate email?

So we dove into the world of bulletproof, “work anywhere” templates. You can find them at Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, or elsewhere.

But the code is real gobbledygook. Lots of this sorta thing:

Totally drops the “beautiful code” limbo bar to the floor. Bummer.

What can be done to make this situation better? Check out these posts from Campaign Monitor that seek to improve the situation: Why we need standards support in HTML email and Help us form a baseline for standards support.