Swipe File #28: Lessons from the Amish

Hey All,

Hope you enjoy this week's articles and if you feel inspired, pass it on.

The Amish Hour via @nevmed

An ode to time away from technology.

Having a well-rested, playful, and focused brain helps massively when it comes to creativity.

Most of the best performing pieces of copy I’ve put out start their life as a thought in my brain that says….“Wouldn’t it be cool if I……..?”

Those kinds of moments don’t come from a scatterbrain.

The Not-To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now via @tferriss

This post is nearly eight years old — notice the Crackberry reference — but it's still applicable to our 'modern' lives.

5. Do not check e-mail constantly — “batch” and check at set times only

I belabor this point enough. Get off the cocaine pellet dispenser and focus on execution of your top to-do’s instead of responding to manufactured emergencies. Set up a strategic autoresponder and check twice or thrice daily.

Evernote’s Simple But Useful Onboarding Emails via @jimmy_daly

My latest on the Vero blog. I did a quick case study on Evernote's onboarding emails. They take a simple but really effective approach to their marketing.

You might expect that a large company like Evernote has a sophisticated onboarding process, tons of behavioral triggers and a braintrust to manage the operation. In fact, just the opposite is true. Evernote sends some of the most basic (and useful) onboarding emails I’ve ever seen.

A loose rant on maximization via @jasonfried

Another interesting "less is more" idea from Basecamp founder Jason Fried.

I’m not interested in squeezing something so tight that I get every last drop. I don’t want, need, or care about every last drop. Those last drops usually don’t taste as good anyway. My thirst is usually well quenched far before that final drop.

I built, launched, and got paying customers for my side project in 3 hours via @MarcEglon

I've been fascinated with the idea of micro-businesses recently. Here's a great example of that from Letterlist founder Marc Eglon.

I’m still not sure why (it just felt right) but I was compelled to drop everything for the morning and turn this into a thing. I wanted to get it out quickly because I couldn’t afford to let it interfere with my bread-and-butter work.

And I wanted to strike while the iron was still tepid.

One more little thing this week — check out TripAdvisor's robots.txt page for a little surprise.

Have a great week!

Jimmy

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