The nervous Blog

nervous To-do: Why I built it.

I’ve tried every productivity app. The ones with beautiful interfaces. The ones that gamify your tasks. The ones that promise to finally make “GTD” click. They all work great except that they all have the same fatal flaw: they require me to open another app.

Here’s the thing about another app: I won’t open it. Or I’ll open it, see my tasks, feel a brief moment of clarity, and then get distracted by something else before I actually do anything. The app becomes another tab I close, another icon I scroll past, another source of guilt collecting dust on my home screen. How many tabs do you have open that you haven’t looked at in a week or longer?

To-Do: A Discord-based task manager

As Discord has grown in popularity, so too have the ways that people use it. And for years now, nervous has used Discord for everything: we build, moderate, and manage servers for clients; we use it for all of our internal organizing and communications, and we use it to manage our various side projects. We are all-in on Discord and have been for years now. So we’ve decided to start building out the tools we’ve always wanted to use for ourselves and make them available to everyone. The first of these tools is To-Do.

Three Steps to Building a Successful Brand Community

Everyone knows that building a community is hard work. There is no secret sauce to make a community coalesce around a product or company. Anyone who says there is? They’re lying. Building an online community is one of the trickiest things that a brand can do.

A lot of brand Discord servers are started with the assumption that customers will be happy to come and hang out in a brand server and that the brand will be able to leverage those community members to their advantage. Unfortunately people are smarter than that and are able to recognize when a community is just another way to sell them stuff. So how do you build a community for your brand in a way that is meaningful not just to the brand but also to the members of your community? Here are three steps we’ve found helpful in building a successful community: