John Cox

Blogs · @wyome · Now · Shelf

Tagged productivity · everything

Interesting

activeCollab - open source project management and collaboration tool.

This is a marketing page for ActiveCollab, a project management and productivity platform designed for agencies, consultancies, and service businesses. The tool integrates task management, workload tracking, team communication, time tracking, invoicing, and reporting into a single workspace to help teams stay organized, meet deadlines, and manage profitability. The platform emphasizes ease of use, transparency, and scaling capabilities while maintaining quality standards, and serves over 50,000 teams daily.

Permalink

Project collaboration, management, and task software: Basecamp

This is Basecamp's marketing homepage pitch for their project management software. They're positioning Basecamp as a deliberately simple alternative to bloated project management tools, emphasizing that after 20+ years and nearly a million users worldwide, their longevity proves the product actually works for real teams across different industries. The appeal centers on ease of use, reliable customer service (with unusually long-tenured support staff), and impressive scale metrics, with an invitation to try it free or attend a live demo class.

Permalink

10 Ways to Optimize Your Normal Days

The author argues that since most of life consists of ordinary days rather than peak accomplishments, improving the quality of everyday experiences matters far more than chasing major external successes. He describes ten specific habits—early rising, exercise, meditation, audio learning, workspace design, self-employment, communication boundaries, reading, deep conversation, and journaling—that have dramatically enhanced his daily experience and kept him consciously engaged with his goals rather than drifting through life on autopilot. The core insight is that these practices work together to maintain awareness and energy, allowing someone to shape how they spend each day instead of letting external forces make those decisions for them.

Permalink

Speed Test | Home

Ookla operates two consumer-focused platforms: Speedtest, which allows users to measure their internet speed and performance metrics, and Downdetector, which aggregates user reports to identify outages and service disruptions across websites and apps. Together these tools have amassed over 60 billion speed tests and handle 25 million monthly incident reports, positioning them as dominant platforms for helping consumers understand and troubleshoot their connectivity experiences.

Permalink

10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed

# Summary This article distills lessons from 14 years of self-employment into ten common mistakes small business owners make: being selective about customers rather than pursuing everyone, finding the balance between frugal and wasteful spending, avoiding pretense about your business size or capabilities, recognizing that contracts matter less than the relationships behind them, trusting your intuition about people and deals, staying human and informal rather than overly corporate, letting your personality shine through rather than adopting a generic "businesslike" persona, and focusing on genuine value creation rather than just making sales. The final two lessons emphasize that while value creation is essential, you must also continuously optimize your processes to deliver that value cost-effectively and sustainably.

Permalink

U-L-T-R-A'S Giant Color Chart

This is a landing page for a free online countdown timer tool that supports custom durations spanning days, hours, minutes, and seconds. The tool is designed for productivity applications like Pomodoro work sessions, cooking, fitness training, event planning, and studying, with features including a visual progress bar, optional alarm sound, and pause/resume functionality. The page emphasizes that the timer runs entirely in-browser without requiring downloads or subscriptions, making it more flexible than smartphone timers or basic web tools.

Permalink

The Art of Execution

Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of Execution" offers practical guidance on moving from fundraising success to actual business execution, arguing that entrepreneurs must set specific, measurable, relevant, and "rathole-resistant" goals with clear accountability rather than vague aspirations. The piece serves as both a startup manual and a corrective for organizations that have lost focus, emphasizing that getting the money is only the beginning—the harder work of disciplined execution and goal-setting follows.

Permalink

SynchroEdit

SynchroEdit is a browser-based collaborative editing tool that allows multiple users to simultaneously edit the same document while seeing real-time synchronization of all changes, with each user's edits displayed in a distinct color and marked with their position flag. The system consists of a request server, a Java-based sync server, and browser-based client scripts that track changes through the DOM rather than traditional locking mechanisms, enabling users to safely edit different sections without interference even during network lag. The tool is designed for various collaborative scenarios including pair programming, wiki editing, conference note-taking, and classroom collaboration, and can be integrated into existing platforms like MediaWiki and WordPress.

Permalink

Wyome (Xaraya Blog)

Athenana is a personal curation and bookmarking service where users save links, notes, images, and highlights from across the web, organized through tags and search rather than folders. The platform offers flexible publishing options—from keeping items private to sharing them on a personal front page or blog with RSS feeds—and interoperates with other software through open standards rather than proprietary APIs. It's one of several carefully-made small apps built by a solo developer, currently available by invitation at athenana.com.

Permalink