Author: Jeff Shearer

When CD burning first became popular, I was obsessed with getting a burner of my own. How cool would it be to make my own CDs? I could have my own mixes for car rides, and give them out to my friends. That year for Christmas, my parents got me a CD burner. I hooked…

The daily vitamin/pill reminder may seem like a mundane, boring product, but it’s in fact the perfect habit forming tool. To borrow the framework set forth by James Clear in Atomic Habits, the steps to design good habits are: Make it obvious: Simply setting out your vitamin reminder on the counter you pass every morning…

A little while back I wrote about the lessons I’ve learned from remote work, and the experience of working from home full time over the last year has been a net-positive for me. In fact, I love remote work—It’d be hard for me to adjust back to an in-office life again. But there is one…

I’m typically up before the sun is, 5-5:30 AM, and this is the time when I’m most productive and creative. I’m an early bird. But I’ve been reading Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep and early on, he mentions that early birds and night owls are genetically determined—chronotypes. Some of us simply are wired differently for…

A few years ago, I read about Jerry Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break the Chain” method of productivity. Meanwhile, my wife and I were trying to build a better exercise ethic, and I decided to apply the method that Seinfeld popularized. I went to the hardware store, bought one of those big panels of blackboard material, cut…

At least once a month I find, in the mail or in my inbox, an offer: Hop on a 15 minute sales call, and get a $5 Starbucks gift card. Really? That’s the best you can do? If you knew me at all, you’d know I don’t even like Starbucks, and $5 seems like a…

I’m sure we’d all prefer the work get done if we simply ask. But somehow it rarely works out like that. Other priorities come into play. There isn’t clear alignment on what needs to get done. The fact is, you’ve always got to keep your foot on the gas if there’s important work to be…

I’ve rediscovered my love of board games recently. But trying a new game is always a risk, in ways that feel quite unique to other media. It’s because the learning process of a new game can be daunting at first. You’re at the whim of the game creator and how intuitively they designed the mechanics…

I often talk to recent marketing graduates and interns who feel somewhat lost in figuring out what they want to do with their careers. There’s so many directions you can go in the field, and students often feel like they have to choose a path now, while turning their back on the other paths. It’s…

Between my current role and my past time as a consultant, I’ve now been working 100% remote for well over a year. I had previously worked occasionally from home, but never in a fully remote setting, and the transition was more challenging than I imagined. Now I’m nicely settled into the remote life, but it…