CEO of Medium but I used to be called Coach Tony and so I'm trying to square the two.

I'm serious about helping people achieve their goals. That's the one theme that I work on but there are many projects that relate to it.

I see Medium that way. You come here, you are entertained, hopefully you find something that makes you smarter or deepens your understanding of the world. But my favorite situations go a bit deeper. You come here to learn a profession or to get better at your profession or to get healthier or to grow a business or to somehow level yourself up. We serve all readers, but I'm happiest when we serve readers with big goals.

My work history does start with publishing. I used to run the online side of O'Reilly Media and even wrote a small book for them.

More recently, i.e. before Medium, I've been involved in self-improvement products.

I helped start the first positive reinforcement habit tracker for the iPhone. Almost all the habit tracking apps available now borrow from our design. But of course, we also had borrowed our design from other places: game designers and behavior researchers. My only regret is that we called it a habit tracker and not a habit builder.

Now that "habit builder" is a feature within a coaching platform, Coach.me. We pioneered coaching over text messaging, invented habit coaching, teach an excellent habit coach certification, connect clients to coaches, and help coaches grow their businesses.

Here on Medium, I am the founder of three publications focused on leveling you up. Better Humans covers personal growth and Better Marketing covers growing the impact of your work and Better Programming covers improving as a professional software engineer. Better Marketing is still running, but I've put Better Humans and Better Programming on hiatus.

I also write occasionally. I'm best known for this post on optimizing your iPhone. It's now well over 2 million page views. People seemed to find the length and absurd detail helpful. But I also want people to see the post as a warning about how far technology has diverged from being productivity tools. That's why it took such a long post to explain how to optimize something as simple as your phone.

My next most influential post is about a technique I invented for bringing extreme mindfulness to your work, Interstitial Journaling. It's been covered by NBC and is popular with the networked note taking crowd (i.e. Roam Research, Obsidian).