One day, back in April, I was shaping some work for Basecamp 4 (the next version of Basecamp that we're planning to build next year). At 4:00 p.m. I got an alert from Basecamp's Automated Check-in, asking: "What have you worked on?" Normally I write a few bullet-points to summarize what I did. I felt hesitant and anxious about answerin...

A while back, I learned this technique from Bob. Sometimes I'm working on a design problem, and there are too many things to solve. They all seem tangled together, and I don't know where to start. I'm afraid that if I start on the wrong thing, I'll paint myself in a corner or go down the wrong path and have to start all over again. A t...