At some point in your life someone has probably asked you “what would you do if you had one day to live?” At which point you wrack your brain coming up with all of those little experiences you would want to pack into those 24 hours. You’d probably quit your job and spend as much time as possible surrounding yourself with friends and family. You’d spare no expense (and perhaps loads of debt) trying to check items off of your bucket list. We would throw our responsibilities to the wind and focus on pure fulfillment. Fulfilling small dreams, fulfilling promises, fulfilling selfish desires.

It’s an interesting cocktail discussion perhaps, but usually inconsequential. The odds of that scenario playing out are so unlikely that we toss it aside and continue on with our day, understanding that it’s not likely our last.

After reading this post by Derek Sivers and after receiving some terrible...

Here it is, the single greatest productivity hack I’ve learned while building GroupTrip.

Perform a mental backup before you stop working

Take 30 seconds in your editor of choice and write down what you would be doing for the next 15 minutes if you didn’t have to stop.

When you come back to work, you have an instruction sheet that you can immediately tackle without having to think.

If I sit down at my laptop from scratch, it often takes me about 20-30 minutes to get in the zone development-wise. I have to remember where I left off, what I was doing and load all of the pertinent info into my head before I can pick up where I left off. If I only get an hour or two at a time to work on a product, that means anywhere from 30%-50% of my time is wasted just getting to the point of being productive. Ouch!

This is kind of a micro version of Marc Andreeson’s write three tasks before you go...

I’m building a group travel platform to make the logistics of planning trips with friends as fun as the trip itself. I had a great name for it too. Grouptrip.com. Since that was taken I started building under the name GrpTrp. It has symmetry, it’s relatively easy to describe (“grouptrip, no vowels”), and hey, I’m bootstrapping a proof of concept, I can’t be spending thousands on domains.

After listening to Jason Calacanis gush over .CO on This Week in Startups, I realized, you know, maybe I can have my cake and eat it too. The name I wanted with a big ole heaping of cash I can spend on more important things. Before I went through the effort of rebranding (while easy given I haven’t launched yet, still, it’s time I could be spending finishing out the beta) I thought I’d try to get a little data first. So here we go, the story of the Clear.co vs the Contortd.com.

Trust

My first concern...