Clicking unsubscribe is a critical way that your customers use to communicate with you. When a customer clicks unsubscribe, she is telling you in no uncertain terms that you are wasting her time.

At Harvest our goal is to never waste people’s time (just to track it). That means we look to only send email that will be valuable to our customers. Two of our core principles are to Be Useful and to Keep Improving. The conversation served as a reminder for me not to take anyone’s time for granted. That’s why we decided to give our unsubscribe message some attention.

We are replacing:

This message was sent because you have a registered Harvest Account. Unsubscribe

With this:

We promise to only send helpful emails. If we’re not living up to that promise, simply unsubscribe.

We intend to live by this promise. I hope that sharing this conversation inspires you to be mindful of the things you do in your communications as well.

One of the big advantages to a high level of trust amongst co-workers is the ability to work productively while also working remotely. I live in Alberta, while Jon lives in British Columbia. Barry is in Minnesota; Doug is in Montana; Warwick is in Pennsylvania. Dee is in Hungary. Our head office is in New York City. And Patrick is trying a different-location-a-month for a while, starting with Texas, and now in Illinois. (All pictures taken today.)

To stay in touch, we all use Co-op to post what we’re all working on, to have some hilarious banter, and to share some informative tidbits during the week. Here are some of this week’s highlights:

• Patrick is trying to get us to gamble on some strange American tradition called the “Superbowl”. I thought it was a trendy NYC noodle shop.
• This week we made a playlist dedicated to speed.
• TJ taught us more about the dangers of fracking.
• Karen had us all consider the trustworthiness of beards.
• Barry got nostalgic about what we did last summer. (But it was before my time with Harvest, so it probably wasn’t much fun anyway.)
• And Christopher came up with a first draft of our new marketing campaign.

Have a good weekend, y’all!

Sure enough, the game did not move quickly. I was new, and others were rusty. After about an hour and a half, everyone was getting fidgety, so I took out my phone and convinced everyone to play as a timed game. Everyone got 1 minute for their turn, no more. The game was more fun and no one’s strategy suffered due to lack of time.

Since joining Harvest I’ve gotten a bit fanatical about measuring time and keeping myself to time limits. I’ve found that I have become more efficient. For me, timers create a sense of urgency that I need to help me focus.

In this age of constant distraction, what tools do you use to help you focus?

It seems that flu season has arrived. Harvesters and their children are dropping like flies. So far among our team of 19 the virus has been spotted in NY, MN, PA and Canada. But even though the nasty bugs have been on attack we’ve still managed to get some work done and share some utterly ridiculous videos and animated gifs on Co-op.

The biggest product news this week is that we pushed out a new update to the Harvest App in the Android marketplace. We also deployed another 14 changes behind the scenes to make our beloved Harvest run even more smoothly. We ran a Time Savings Tuesday Contest and got some awesome Keystroke Protips from our Twitter community. And Samara came out of the closet as an introvert by writing this blog post on collaborative work spaces. Take that flu!

Next week Warwick, Jon and Christopher will be hitting the road. If you happen to be in Cape Town next week join our awesome Systems Guy, Warwick, for a drink. Once you’re done drinking him under the table, jet over to Seattle for a happy hour with 2/3 of our support team on Friday night.

And now a brief look into the wacky world of Co-op:

• Lettini found this explanation to the age old question ‘What are the Developers really doing all day?”
• Not really sure why Doug decided to share this picture with us, but now I’m sharing it with you.
• Barry apparently gets tired often and needs a place to sit.  He found this solution - chair pants!
• And, at lunch today we decided to end the week with a Friday evening game of Settlers of Catan.

Hope you all have a great weekend!

Ms. Sarah Haas joined the team this week as our Account Manager. Welcome Sarah! We pushed out our 2011 retrospective looking at all that happened in 2011. We published a pair of blog posts with time saving tips for your commute and for meetings. We did some software upgrades to help with performance and security. We posted about an excellent new Harvest integration, Harvest4Clients that was posted to GitHub. And finally, we sent out invitations for our Harvest Happy Hour (Seattle) event at the end of the month. If you’re in the area, join us!

But what would Friday be without a little fun?  Submitted for your enjoyment:

• Great review of Harvest on The Stiletto Series. You’d think we paid for this, but we didn’t.
• Kids are cute when they’re learning to walk.  Unfortunately, sometimes they fall. :-(
• Warwick shared this great mashup he found by DJ Lobsterdust.
• TJ educated us on 10 things everyone should know about time.
• We wondered what some advertisers think as Barry posted this ad (we’re not clear if it’s “proposed” or actual) for North Dakota. Wind has gained acceptance (finally) in this clever one.

Hope you all have a great weekend! See you next week.

A huge part of Harvest’s successful distributed team is our use of Co-op, a free online collaboration tool built by the Harvest team. Co-op is a private status update stream that is seamlessly integrated with Harvest (naturally!). The original intent was to create a water cooler that was less invasive than group chat. However it has become absolutely vital to the operations of this business as well as to the culture.

The reason Co-op works is that it enables one-to-many communication in addition to one-to-one communication. As a marketer, I shouldn’t be surprised that communication should vary if speaking to many people versus one person. It just never occurred to me that successful distributed teams need tools that enable multiple types of communications. It’s quite obvious now.

I’ll admit, when I first got here I was a bit overwhelmed by Co-op – it just seemed like one more continuous stream of chatter that I needed to pay attention to. I have now come to love it. In addition to keeping me up to date on what everyone is working on it has helped me build relationships with my co-workers both in and out of New York. Personalities come through in Co-op in a way that they don’t on email. It has helped create and maintain the sense of culture in the office.

If you have a distributed team, or even if you don’t, I recommend you check it out here.

In 2011, we made over 800 updates to Harvest. We had countless conversations with our customers, added new features, refined old features and fixed issues. The constant evolution is a part of who we are as a cloud-based software company. A new update can be deployed to our customers in over 100 countries in an instant and we love that.

It’s About the Team

Behind the scenes, we’ve focused on growing our team. By December of 2011, we added 8 brilliant Harvesters to round out the team at 19. We’ve learned new ways to work together, whether it’s creating Delta Force teams for support, thinking through feature requests, or getting face time with our customers.

With every new team member we add to Harvest, we’re adding one more mind that’s completely focused on making the Harvest experience better for our customers. Updates are done faster, problems are solved more efficiently and our customer service gets even better (send our support team an email during business hours and you’ll hear back from us within 15 minutes).

It’s been a tremendously educational year for us as a team. If you’d like to learn with us, we’re hiring. :)

Turning 5 Years Old

2011 also marked the 5th year we’re in business as Harvest. Harvest was first created to meet the time tracking needs that Shawn and I had during our days as a design studio.

Since the beginning, we’ve taken the approach of building things one step at a time. At first, it was out of necessity of being bootstrapped, but later, it was because we wanted to keep things simple. Year after year, more and more people adopted Harvest to power their businesses. In the process, we’re honored to have picked up the best kind of funding possible for a company: paying customers. Without the distractions of fundraising, we are free to focus on just making Harvest better.

We couldn’t have done it without the support of our amazing community and customers, so when we turned 5 in April, we launched our Giving Back program. As our users tracked time, we allocated donations towards important causes addressed by Doctors Without Borders, Room to Read and charity: water.

The first 5 years was just the beginning.

A Better Harvest

Our business philosophy is simple: create a great product and tell people about it. There are no gimmicks and no shortcuts. We simply love creating something useful and we’re happiest when our customers tell us how we’ve saved them time and hassle.

Our team proudly stands behind what Harvest offers and we’ve prepared a little something to look back on the major updates last year: Harvest 2011 Year In Review.

Thank you for a great 2011. We can’t wait to share the goodness with you in 2012.

After returning from a short break, we’ve been focussed on catching up with any questions and bugs that were reported to us. Naama had an epiphany while on holidays, and put out the rallying cry to Demand Better!  The billing overhaul went very smoothly and we’ve been tweaking a few odds and ends on that front.  We discovered a minor bug with our iOS app when the New Year hit (with Expenses), and a new version has been sent to Apple for approval. We also launched a new Twitter Contest for the month of January – Time Saving Tuesdays where you can tweet your best productivity tips for a chance to win some great prizes.

It hasn’t been all business around the office though, we have had some great chats on Co-op:

• Patrick has relocated to Texas for the next few weeks, despite the lack (so far) of winter weather in New York.
• Shawn made a quick trip back to New York over the holidays to welcome a new member to his family (and ours).  Welcome Nico! Even though Shawn is off spending some time with little Nico, he’s still watching over us at Harvest HQ. (thanks Lettini and PillowMob)
• Sri has suggested that maybe all of this talk of productivity is overrated. In the near future, we’ll do all of our goofing off while hidden by a time cloak.
• Warwick has been busy digging up some wonderful delicacies for us to sample at the next Harvest Summit.  I’m going to try out Casu Marzu if Warwick tries some Hákarl (I’ll report back if I survive the experience).
• It’s Doug’s birthday today!  Happy birthday Doug!

Happy New Year everyone!

Here’s a rundown of what we accomplished this past week: we completed and deployed a major billing overhaul (and Barry even made a special Rdio playlist dedicated to it), we launched an updated Android app with improved syncing, and we came up with a plan to keep you all customer supported over the holidays.

Other things on our brains, as evidenced by our link swapping in Co-op:

• It was TJ’s birthday Wednesday, and the whole Harvest crew pitched in to make him a special website to help him launch his “side business.” We knew he had discovered it when he posted the link in Co-op.
• There was some love for a Kickstarter iPhone dock and some drooling over the new Grand Central Apple store.
• The news that Microsoft will be automatically updating IE for everyone was so popular it was double posted by both Shawn and Patrick.
• Weird links of the week: Naama found some amazing pictures of real people and their avatars, Warwick shared an interview with Lou Reed, and we all marveled at some strange Obama swag.
• The Harvest Wilco fans delighted in watching Jeff Tweedy do the Chicago weather (thanks Barry).
• Harvest loves music: Shawn shared a beautiful Neko Case cover, recorded in a stairwell, Matt found a great Led Zepplin cover by Trent Reznor and Karen O, and Christopher updated our Harvest Record club.
• On our Watercooler Tumblr: some nice looking watches from Ziiiro, and wisdom from Andy Warhol.

That wraps up another productive and fun week at Harvest. See you next week!

In between bits of holiday cheer, here’s a rundown of what we accomplished this past week: launched a more flexible and powerful permissions system, prepared for a major billing overhaul this weekend, and wrapped up development on the Harvest Andriod app for release next week. We also kept it interesting on Co-op, with a few select topics:

• True story: Danny, T.J. and I saw Woz walking past us on Lafayette St. We thought it was him, but we weren’t sure. If we had done what we should’ve done, you’d see a picture of us, with Woz, for this Playback edition (he was in New York for the Gizmodo Gallery Opening Party).
• Facebook bought Gowalla and Github acquired Ordered List. Wow, maybe we’re going about our hiring the wrong way?
• Patrick is sad about Buehrle heading to Miami, Christopher elated about Pujols leaving the Cardinals, and we’re all confused about the whole CP3 mess.
• Some of our folks are starting a “Leave TextMate (for MacVim?) campaign for 2012″.
• Be prepared to waste some precious time drawing stick figures. You can blame Scott for that.
• We’re tickled (and a little frightened) by Mint’s 404 page.
• From our very own hipster, T.J.: Hipster Ipsum, “artisanal filler text”.
• Scott Weiland’s Winter Wonderland has changed Christopher’s mind about Christmas music, to which Barry responded: Bing + Bowie. Meanwhile, Samara is keeping herself happy with A Charlie Brown Christmas. What?
• “They was doing mashups before mashups even existed,” Ice Cube on the Eames. Here are the videos and interview on NY Times. Thanks, Patrick.
• You might’ve heard: fly.twitter.com and Nick Bilton’s take on the new design. We like what we see here.