Modern Wisdom - #248 - Tim Campos - Doubling Facebook's Workforce Productivity & Fixing Your Calendar

Episode Date: November 21, 2020

Tim Campos is the CEO of Woven and Ex-CIO of Facebook. We live in a world with a surplus of information. How we cut through that noise and arrive at a place where we can make effective decisions quickly is the job of productivity systems. As someone who doubled the productivity of Facebook's workforce, Tim knows the limitations of high pressure, high growth, high information environments. Sponsor: Get a 21 Day Free Trial to a supercharged calendar at http://bit.ly/wovenwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Woven for free - http://bit.ly/wovenwisdom Follow Tim on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothycampos/  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, my friends in podcast land, welcome back. My guest today is Tim Campos, CEO of woven and ex-CIO of Facebook. We live in a world with a surplus of information, how we cut through that noise and arrive at a place where we can make effective decisions quickly is the job of productivity systems. And yet, so many of us are struggling massively and drowning in overload. As someone who doubled the productivity of Facebook's workforce, Tim knows the limitations of high pressure, high growth, high information environments. And today we get to learn his best tips on how you can improve your productivity.

In other news, my tan's pretty good. I am enjoying Dubai. I have to say, getting some winter sun has been a very rare enjoyable change. I'm going to have to be back in the UK at some point soon, and December is probably the busiest month I've ever had for recording, so we have some absolutely insane guests coming up soon. Keep your eyes peeled. But for now, it's time for the Hey, hey, welcome back. I'm joined by Tim Campos. Tim, welcome to the show. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Budget, have you on, man? So start us off. What got you interested in productivity to begin with? I've been in productivity for maybe almost two decades now. I was a CIO for Facebook for almost seven years and my job there was a productivity of the workforce. Prior to that, I was a CIO for another company and my job there was a productivity of the business. When I go back even to the beginning of my career, a big part of what made me an effective

software engineer and engineering leader is I was very jealous of my own and my team's productivity. How much can we get done in the amount of time that we have? And that led me to focus a lot on automation and streamlining things. It's really been a big part of my life, even though it's really been the last four years that I have really coined ownership of this is the thing I'm focused on right now. It's been a big part of my life for a long time. What are the changes you've seen over 20 years?

Well, we have a lot more technology than we did before. So when I don't want to date myself too much, but coming into the workforce, when I did, technology was relatively new. So you had a lot of office automation that was basically looking at things like, okay, we used to manage things on paper and here's how we're going to manage it in the digital world. So whether you take the concept of a document or a file and you basically represent that

in a computer, fast forward in other 20 years, we've started to throw that stuff out the window. We don't think about files as much as we think about just links to things. Even the technology is like email. What is email? Email is the electronic memorandum. That is basically its history. Memorandum are cool when you can only communicate on paper, but when you're in the digital universe They are completely like way too much overhead and that's why people have moved to

Slack and Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and text messaging and all those other things. They're far more efficient ways to to communicate and So I think we're in this wave now where we're starting to throw away the history of the technologies that we utilize, even things like slides, like PowerPoint slides. Why are they even called slides? Because they used to be cellophane slides that you would put in a slide projector to present your ideas out there.

And just imagine how much friction went into producing those slides. So you didn't really care about how they were authored or whether they were dynamic, but in today's universe, they're all digital, right? Who wants a static slide with just a couple bullets? You need animation, video, and other stuff. So we're starting to throw away all that stuff and evolve into a pure digital universe where we're not constrained by how things have evolved in the past, but we're really thinking towards the future, especially with mobile

devices and ubiquitous connectivity that things can be really dynamic and rich to facilitate that productivity. I've got Buddy, my industry is nightlife, and one of my friends Ray Chan, the owner and CEO of CandyPants, he was pitching for his first event in Vegas. So he's going in and he's thinking, well, all of us are very competent at what we do, but we're just small time British events creators. Why should some like huge time club owner of like,

Arya or excess of wherever he was in Vegas, listen to him and they were brainstorming around how can we really sort of make an impact with this. So what they decided to do was get a specialist 360 videography crew and film at all of their other events in Dubai, in Marbeja, in the UK, elsewhere, on the yacht at the Abu Dhabi F1, everything. And they rock up to this meeting and it's in the 75th floor of some beautiful hotel in Vegas or whatever. The guys come in and say, okay, Ray, like let's crack on, Manjurana, show us your presentation. And he pulls out a bunch of Oculus Go's and puts them on top of all of the guys' heads. And then he starts talking through as they experience, they're looking around,

they're on the yacht in Abu Dhabi, then they change and they're in the middle of a pool party in Marbeye and then it changes again and they're in a nightclub in the UK. And yeah, when he told me that story is like holy shit, this is really getting stepped up a notch isn't it for presentations? Yeah, I mean, it's a perfect example of how in today's world there are so many other options for how to convey and present ideas and collaborate on them that are extremely efficient for us. And if anything, the running into limits of how much we can cognitively process as human beings, we suffer from information overload and need better tools to help streamline what it is that we actually have to consume and make decisions on. But in terms of what

the technology can do, it's amazing. it's amazing. It's just absolutely incredible. And that's a great story. That's a really fascinating point that you just made there that we've gone from information scarcity to information surplus in probably 30 years. Like 30 years ago, I would have wanted to be able to access the entire history of the earth

in a device in my pocket. And then probably, probably about the time that Instagram launched. No, maybe a little bit later, maybe like 2012. 2012 was like maybe the sweet spot or 2010, and then it's just been like wildly overshot now. And you're right, a lot of what people's time is spent doing is not getting more information.

It's actually filtering out information that they don't need and trying to permit themselves to focus on the essential few rather than the trivial many. The ban on my existence these days, and it's really been two systems, one, the calendar which I'm sure we'll get into, but the second is email. I cannot stand that platform. It is incredibly inefficient. And it goes back to its roots, right? You know, with an email, you need it as an address in order to send a message to somebody. And it basically follows a moniker that every message is going to be read and processed and filed. And I get now 300 messages a day easy. And which

means if I don't spend an hour managing my email, then tomorrow I'm going to have 600 messages a day. It is incredibly inefficient because about 80% of these things are not things that are that important to me. It's not always obvious which ones are the important ones and which ones aren't. It's very hard to use traditional algorithm to just filter them all out. But it's just the wrong mechanism. You take Facebook as an example, not that Facebook is perfect on any front. But the newsfeed basically recognizes that there's only so much time that I have to process

information in a day with Facebook. So it's going to rank the information that I see to be the information that is most relevant to me. And I'm not even going to be aware of all of the newsfeed stories that it chose not to share with me. I'm only going to get the ones that the algorithm chose to provide. Now, in that case, that has some obvious consequences, but generally speaking, it's been extremely successful for Fishbook. Imagine if we're able to do that in a business context or a work context, how much more efficient we will be.

I think tools like Slack somewhat get there. I don't have a lot of spam in Slack for one, because you can't just use my Slack address to communicate with me. You've got to be in my Slack group. You have to be in the channels that I actually monitor. And so that means that there's higher signal for me. You still have a problem that there's Slack overload, but at least Slack has more of a recency bias where that tool is basically designed for synchronous

communication. If I miss a message that's really important, it's probably going to come back to me. So I'll just get another ping and I don't need to go back and view every single Slack message that I didn't see in the three hours between I was last in the tool. So this gets to like what how

productivity software needs to be built for the future. It needs to be really designed to fit a more efficient use of and sharing of information, which many tools I think really struggle with. Are we going to see email start to fade away? I mean, is there even really a realistic alternative to the behemoth that is email at the moment? I don't think it'll die But I think email is gonna be it already is less relevant. It's a lower signal mechanism you see this You know in the consumer space with things like social media that that information is not conveyed via email

It's conveyed via their own proprietary platforms and Instagram and WhatsApp and TikTok and other things. These are not email-based systems. In the professional environment, you've got Slack and Teams and now I'll zoom in with Zoom chat, which I think are getting, they're bypassing the communication flow that is email. Email does provide one thing that nobody has solved yet, which is the global directory. If I have your email address, I can send you a message, and most of these other systems don't operate that way.

Paradoxically, that's why they are effective because they don't allow someone who is disconnected from me to communicate with me. But you still need that mechanism, because you want to be contacted by the recruiter, or you want to be contacted by that business partner that you're going to have that is trying to get in contact with you to do something with your company. And if you don't have something like email to facilitate that, I think it's

you know that's still a detriment. So until that problem is solved, I think email will continue to exist. But it will become less and less relevant the more it's used. I mean that's the paradox with it is you know as people start thinking this is a great way to talk about our products. They're destroying the platform that has been a great way for people to communicate with each other. You're right. The ratio of noise to signal just continues to get worse and worse and worse and anyone who's got a public facing email knows as well. That one, it's just trash. It's a cesspool in there. Like this stuff, like I get randomly signed

up to mailing lists. Someone's obviously seen that the footer note on a website that's 15 years old still got like some email. You know what I mean? It's a nightmare. So, my daughter is 16 years old, she's a high school senior. She has problems with email. So, she hates the mechanism. It's very formal for her, she doesn't really understand how to use it. She grew up in text messaging, Snapchat. So, email is like this weird thing. But, I mean, she's had trouble just filtering through the noise even on her school email.

And there's no spam. There are at least spam as we would call it from advertisers. Nobody's contacting her via her school. Addressed to tell her to go buy, you know, Louis lemons or whatever. But she still gets way too much email from all of the distribution lists and all the communications from the school lists and all the communications from the school. So the important stuff gets lost.

The signal is lost and that's the problem with email is it doesn't provide a good ranking mechanism. Yeah, this is something that I wanted to get on to later, but I'm actually going to talk about it now, which is the relationship between your productivity system and everybody else's productivity system, that there is an upper bound or there's a boundary on the domain of productivity that you can take your own system to as long as you have to interact with other people.

And for instance, you've used this example before about a finance department asking particular sales people to log all of their expenses, which took 100 times more effort for the sales people, but made it really slick for the finance department. And as anyone who's decided to venture down the productivity rabbit hole knows, your system can be as slick as you like. But if you are a doctor working for the NHS in the UK, you're on Windows 95 and facts.

If you are part of any sort of big, well-established company that is going to take time to update their systems, the likelihood is they're not going to be able to have your Alfred Auto snippet shortcut like coded, preconceived, idea macro system that you can just run. They're not. And so, yeah, the marrying between the two and the turmoil of knowing that you've got your shit sorted and that you now kind of have to slow yourself down to get to everyone else's place is something I found really funny.

This was the number one issue for Wobin because the problem that we're looking to solve with calendars, time is like the most valuable asset that we have. There's only 24 hours in a day and in the work environment, it's usually more like 10. So it's a very precious resource and the the system that we used in Managed Time is generally very disconnected from the things that we're doing. You don't actually use the calendar to like coordinate the agenda of a meeting, you'll have to use something else. You don't use the calendar, in many cases, even schedule.

You will schedule over email, over text messaging, and then when you're done, you actually send the calendar invite from the calendaring system. So we were trying to fix that, or we are trying to fix that, by addressing how the calendar is built, because the calendar is just broken in terms of how it's built. I can talk about that later if you want. But going back to your point, we can come up with the most brilliant calendaring back end. If it doesn't interoperate with how other people work

It's either gonna create a huge burden for them or they're just not going to Be able to interact with others. So the biggest technical challenge for woven has been to build a system that is still compatible for the people that you're gonna collaborate with on your events that aren't woven users It needs to synchronize with their existing systems and Degrade gracefully and you know way that will allow them to To still interact and collaborate with you and we put a lot of energy into that and it's you know I worked I think pretty effectively, but it is the hardest part. I think for productivity software some companies do what we've done where they bootstrap on top of an existing I think pretty effectively, but it is the hardest part, I think, for productivity software.

Some companies do what we've done, where they bootstrap on top of an existing technology. In the early days, you can even use email for some notification updates. Others like Slack just go and they rip the bandaid and they go straight into a completely different way of doing things. They've been successful on that, but it's hard. It's really, really hard. This whole thing, I think, is one of the tricks with productivity software is how do you interoperate so that your new system that you're using to make yourself more productive doesn't

create an undue burden on the people that you work with. At the end of the day, if it doesn't work for everybody, for a group of people, then it doesn't really even work for you. Yeah, are you agree, man? Let's go back to your time at Facebook. You doubled the productivity of the workforce at Facebook. What's the metric for that and how did that happen? We use revenue per employee, and which is not the best measure, but it's very easy to benchmark to look at other companies.

We also looked at a couple of other measures. We would look at profit per employee. Then within each business function, you could provide more specific productivity measures like how many candidates can a Sorcerer produce or can a recruiter hire in a given period of time. But at a growth level, we use revenue per employee. And that number where we talked about doubling the productivity of the company was very much based on doubling revenue per employee. Look at a different measure. We actually didn't even better. The key strategy on this was one just

an incredible focus on it. This was all my organization thought about was workforce productivity. Even things as like trite as the gates that we would have, the turnstiles that people would have to walk through to come into the building, we looked at how much time it would take for someone to badge in and walk through.

And in some cases, we had to rebuild them because it took an extra 75 milliseconds for the badge reader to read a badge because of the distance between the badge and the badge reader. So by moving the badge reader from underneath a plate of glass to on top of the plate of glass, we were able to get an improved throughput for people through those turnstiles. That's how much we cared about things. So when you got into things like how to employees me with each other, we wanted a tool that was super easy, so

they didn't have to ask an admin. How do people, you know, get accessories? We invented these vending machines that a lot of companies now have where you could just badge into a vending machine if you needed keyboard mice, batteries, screen wipes, like anything that was technical. So you didn't have to go to the help desk for that. You put these machines anywhere that employees were, even if we didn't have IT people. And you know, certainly things like how do we make a business function like sales or recruiting

more efficient through technologies. You know, with Facebook, Pires a lot of people. And that's a lot of interviews to find the right candidates. At one point, it was 37 interviews that hire one software engineer. And so if you're going to hire 10,000 of them, you can do the math in terms of how many interviews that would require.

So we would build automation to take care of the mundane for people. Let's make it so that it's really easy to schedule candidates. Let's make it really easy for people to do their performance reviews and to get feedback from other people within the company. And those were the mechanisms that we employed in order to achieve those outcomes. Over time, they really started to compound and build themselves because we built a technical asset that we could then start using and reusing to get more and more capability into these functions.

One of the co-hosts of the show, Johnny, he was a big four-accountancy firm a few years ago and he decided he'd gone through this long process, deciding he was going to leave and start his own business and become an entrepreneur and it was his dream and blah, blah, blah. He talks about the process that he went through to leave and he went to the terminal, the console that he had on his computer, went to R for resign, pressed the resign button, are you sure? Yes, are you absolutely sure? Yes, and that was it. I'm like, that was so good. You also said about people automating stuff. So I've got a story here. A programmer wrote scripts

to secretly automate his job. So from this comes out the back end of GitHub, a guy called Narcos on GitHub, when he left his job, his former co-workers, started looking through and realized that he'd automated all sorts of stuff. So this guy wrote one script that sends a text message later at work to his wife and automatically picks reasons from a preset list of them if his login activity was ever on the computer servers after 9pm. He wrote another script relating to a customer that he didn't like. It scans his inbox for an email from the customer and uses words like

help, trouble, and sorry and automatically rolls the guys' database to the last backup. Then sends a reply, no worries mate, be careful next time. With another script, you automatically fired off an email excuse, like not feeling well working from home, if he wasn't at work logged in on the servers by 845, he called it the hangover script, and the best one, he wrote a script that waits exactly 17 seconds, then hacks into the coffee machine through the telephone terminal and orders it to start brewing a latte. The script tells the machine to wait another 24 seconds before pouring the latte into a cup. The exact time it takes to walk from the guy's desk to the coffee machine and his co-workers

didn't even know the coffee machine on the network was hackable. That's the sort of shit that you need. That's the company you want. That's a good engineer. I think the best engineers are the lazy ones. They don't like to do repetitive work, so they come up with mechanisms to avoid it, whether that's through architecture or through automation, like you just described. This is one of the things that made me successful when I was an intern at Syvey's, my very first job was I thought the job was boring as hell and so I just automated it and I took what used

to take other people eight hours a day, I could get my job done in about two. So I had six hours to go screw around and do other things and so they just kept giving me more work that I would just keep automating. But you know, this is the trick, I think, with productivity. You sit and you find the repetitive things that do not add value to your life that you must do and you automate them. That can be done through delegation to a subordinate or an assistant that can be done through actually not doing them at all.

I guess, which is the most beautiful part of your life when you realize the thing that you've been doing, no one's actually probably going to know it, so it doesn't add so little value that you basically don't need to do it, or as you say, right, it's script. So, time management, what are the basic principles before we get into tools, what are the basic principles people should understand around time management? One of the unique things about time is how limited it is. I don't think people fully appreciate this. We use phrases like waste time or not having time. The reality is we do have time.

We all have the same amount of time. Because time is so finite, you really have to be very diligent about how you choose to spend it. And this is where a calendar, I think, can be extremely valuable for people. Because what a calendar typically represents is how you want to spend your time, how you're planning to spend your time. And if you sit down, you think about it. If you have presentations to write or code to build or you need to get through your email, if you don't allocate the time for that,

those activities, if you don't plan for it, then either it's not going to get done or it's going to get the done at the expense of something else that you may have that's even more important because you're not being diligent about it. So a time management I think starts with respecting the fact that there's only so much time in a day. Then the next key thing is to be very clear about what it is that you want to accomplish, what are your goals. And one of the greatest gifts in my life was being introduced to a life coach early on in my career who helped me write this stuff down. What were my big strategic goals in life? When did I want to have kids and when did I want,

what kind of house did I want to live in? And when did I want to retire? Well, and basically, you go from big to small. You start defining these things, and then you can map that down into, what do I need to do next week, next month, next year? In fact, I still have, one of the things that this guide had me do. I hope you

can see this. It's filled out this card. And it's basically, this is your life is what the title of the card is and it starts with like my birth year and then I had to write out 100 numbers until like the age of 100. And then I had to circle where I was in my life at that time. And then I had to circle where I was in my life at that time. He also had me circle when it is that I wanted to retire. And then it helped me see how little time I had left. And it created urgency to make tough decisions on things that I wanted to spend time on. One of those things was I didn't want to be in the semiconductor industry. So I ended up resigning my job.

I had a very lofty executive position. But I chose to leave that role because I didn't want to retire from the semiconductor industry. I wanted to start my own company. And I wasn't going to do that working at this place. But a number of other decisions came out of that. So once you have those goals defined, and then you narrow that down to, how do I want to spend my time over the next quarter, you can start building a normative schedule for yourself.

I, for example, I put, you know, Mondays are my favorite days of the week. I'm fresh. I've relaxed from the week weekend, but it's very important for me to not immediately jump into collaborating with other people, but to have some strategic planning time. So the first two hours of my week are strategic planning time that I save for myself, and I almost never give that time up

for somebody else. I organize my week so that all the planning things are done Monday and Tuesday so that means the rest of the week is mostly about execution. My team has a commitment to each other that we're not going to spend time meeting on Wednesdays that allows us all focus time. It's time to just get stuff done and so on and so forth. So I've got a normative schedule that is pretty well defined. And that helps me to like meet my goals and time blocking and pre-allocating that time on the calendar is a very

effective strategy to ensuring that you get done the things that are really important to you. Time blocking being just deciding in advance what you're going to spend our X to our Y doing. That's right. That's right. And it could be on a recurring basis, as I just described, I want to spend the first two hours a week like getting ready for the week, or it could be on a, you know, an as needed basis, meeting with an investor on Thursday, and I need to prepare the deck. I'm meeting with an investor on Thursday, and I need to prepare the deck that I'm going to share with them. So I'm going to put an hour of time on Wednesday to finalize that.

And, you know, whatever it is, you get what you focus on. So yeah, it can be on big things, on recurring things where it can be on tactical objectives that you define, but the key point is you get what you focus on and time blocking allows you to be very deliberate about how you are going to focus your time. Yeah, there's a few doorways to hell that I've got open in my mind. One of them being Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time given for it. And I've been thinking recently about what happens when you scale Parkinson's law

in an information surplus world out across a lifetime. Like essentially what Parkinson's law does is probably push a lot of the important out of the way in place of the urgent. And you will just continue to kind of put out fires and put out fires and put out fires and never really get round to that. And that can be irritating over the micro slash immediate.

It can be kind of worrisome over the medium term, but it's existential over the long term, right? Like it wouldn't surprise me if we get to the stage where in 20 years, 30 years time, people's biggest deathbed worries or regrets. So stuff like I spent too much time on email. I spent too much time on my phone. You know, we haven't encountered that.

There's a lot of good articles. If you Google biggest regrets on deathbed, there's some really enlightening and sort of beautiful insights that nurses have got from that. But we haven't seen what the outcome is of this information overload world. And I bet a significant amount of money that stuff like social media and YouTube and email and digital work is absolutely going to make its way up that top chart higher up there. But is there a regret?

There's another framework to think about time, which is that you have, I've heard some people use the words make or time and manage or time, make or time being the time where you're doing something. You're coding or you're authoring. Manager time being, you're responding to the needs of others. You're taking care of the things that require collaboration. There's yet another way to look at that, which is your proactive time and your reactive time. You can't have none of the reactive time. Because the world is going to move on without you. And as much as we may want to have control over 100% of what we do, things change and you need to

spend time absorbing that and reacting to that. You need to read the email. You need to go to the newsfeed, but it's got to be boxed if it's too much of your time. Then that's where those regrets are going to come about. The flip side of it is make or time. I would assert that most people aren't deliberate about their make or time. They don't think about where they are most productive.

And there is definitely a Pareto here where it's usually not even that much time, but 20% of our time produces 80% of our value. And when you're able to be disciplined and focused on that, you can maybe increase that a bit. So it's not just 20% of your time, and improve your overall output. And this is what I think people like Mark Zuckerberg have been very effective at, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, all of these people are very, very good at managing their time.

They're not flippant about it. Then, yes, some others like you on Musk who just don't sleep, so they maximize their time in other ways. But still, same outcome. They're able to maximize their output from these things, and they're very jealous about the time that they need to think and be proactive about things. And it's more that we can keep that in balance with the reactive time, I think, in the more effective we are as individuals.

Absolutely. The send versus receive paradox that you've got going on there is super important. I can't remember the, I think it was another Jack Butcherism from Twitter where he said People spend their time like they can refund it and hold their money like they could never get more And we really do need to kind of flip that narrative on its head and yeah People being jealous to the point of paranoia about how they spend their time probably brings us more in line with where we all should be, I guess. Where do you see most people going wrong? They say they think, I'm going to start optimizing my time. I'm really going to, that Tim guy sounds all right.

He had some good stuff. Yeah, I don't want to die with regrets and unfulfilled dreams. What do some of the common errors people make? I think for one, not thinking far enough out into the future. dreams, what do some of the common errors people make? I think for one, not thinking far enough out into the future. We can actually see this with calendar data. So what Wolven's got about 190 million events in it. And one of the interesting things about that data set

is that highlights, most people don't fill their time until they don't schedule events until three days before the event occurs or less. So that basically gives you a horizon for how far out in the future somebody is thinking. And you know, it basically highlights how reactive that we are. So I think that is a key area where we go wrong is that we don't plan far enough out in the future. We have a very strong bias towards the here and now and not towards the long term. You see this with things like, you know, the best exercise advice isn't that, you know, okay, go start working out at the gym for 10 hours, it's, you know, work out at the gym every day for at least 20 minutes.

If you did that, you're going to be far better off in the long-term because you're going to start to institute the habit, you're going to start coming back, or you're going to allow your body to adapt and evolve. So we do too much of this cramming and not enough about thinking about the long-term implications of the decisions that we make. And if we were to plan more our futures, I think that we would be far more likely to accomplish but especially big things. Nothing worth doing is easy and therefore you're going to have to spend time on it but not

just today like overtime. You really need to think about, what am but not just today, like, overtime. You really need to think about, what am I doing next week, next month, next quarter? One of the addictions that I think a lot of people myself included have is this presumption that time spent planning could be spent working. So you have, I'm going to sit, I'm gonna put my plans together, I'm gonna, you know, the next 90 day sprint or the next year or whatever it might be. And you start doing a bit of planning and an easy-to-do task appears during the planning process.

And you're like, oh, I can send that email now. And then before you know it, you've cut the planning stage short and tumbled into the rabbit hole of doing and then it's urgent and then information comes in and then before you know it, the planning stage has been lost. And I really do, I wish that I had a better process for it,

but I am absolutely a believer, although I'm not a member of the fact that the cult that is trying to make long term, you know, what is your obituary, what you're obituary, want your obituary to say? What do you want to do in 25 years? When do you want to retire? Where do you want to be in five years time?

Where do you want to be in one years time? And then really, because that's the only way that you can ensure that the actions that you take today are contributing to the future you want tomorrow. It's the only way that it works. But again, the urgent takes over the important and it stops us from spending that time, right? Like looking at what are the steps I need to take. And you know, this is a plea from me to anyone who's listening that tends to be a duo rather than a sit back in planner, that every minute of planning I think is probably worth 10 minutes of doing. And by spending a concentrated period of time, maybe two hours at the beginning of the week, like you

said, or once every month taking an entire day off to check in with your goals to do whatever, it feels like, oh, I'm going to have 600 emails to answer tomorrow, and I'm going to have all of this other stuff to do. But in the big, big, big scheme of things, it's going to ensure that you continue pointing toward that North Star. But it's seductive, because it feels good to get something done. But there's another hack on this that will, that I've found helps greatly, which is to spend time not just planning, but also reflecting what did I get done. So in addition to my two hours a week, at the beginning of the week, planning out how I want the week to go, every day I've got what are the goals that I have for today.

And then at the end of the day, I look back, what did I get done? I write it down into my journal. And what is it that I want to get done tomorrow? And it does a couple of things. It helps me see what I plan to do that I didn't get done. Why? Maybe it wasn't important, or usually it's because I let the urgent take over the important.

So how can I get that thing done? But also, I get the satisfaction of looking at all the things that I got done. And it's usually more than I had planned to do. And so the learning is how to make sure that all the things that I planned to do got done. But also, to get myself a little bit of credit for the fact that I get a lot done, there's a lot of things that I'll do in a day. So when I just direct my abilities towards the things that I really care about, I will get both the satisfaction of getting things done, but it will be towards a master plan. All that stuff that I didn't plan to do is firefighting

or responding to somebody else's needs and usually not particularly accretive to what my longer-term goals are, sometimes it is, but usually not. And so I found that to be a very effective practice in helping to room, both alleviate the desire to just check some boxes and say, yeah, I responded to those emails, right?

Got through my email in a day and stay focused on those bigger picture items. Is that a physical product? Is there a particular system that you're following for that? It seems like an oddly low tech solution for you. Yeah, it's, because this is less about the automation and more about the emotion. So what I have found with this is it doesn't necessarily feed the systems that I have that will automatically get stuff done.

What it feeds is my feelings about myself and how I'm approaching my day. So it doesn't really matter whether it is in a note-taking app or it's on a piece of paper, I tend to be purely digital, so it's in a note-taking app. But even there, I could be in Apple Notes today and Notion tomorrow, and it really doesn't matter, because largely this is just a reminder for me of what my Key priorities are I am thinking of other ways to get this into woven because the calendar is reflected about this like what is it? What's my goal for the day? And how do we better incorporate that and one of the things we have in woven is

analytics that I do use on a weekly basis to make sure that I'm spending time on the priorities that I care about. In fact, the mission of the company is to help people spend time on what matters most. The analytics is part of how we help you do that will give you visibility into how you're spending time. Scheduling is a tool that we provide to help you spend time. So, are you spending time on what matters most at the end of the day? I can see through the analytics how that's going and all have objectives in terms of how much time

I want to spend with the products, how much time I want to spend on growth marketing, how much time I want to spend on recruiting, how much time I want to spend on investors, and they change. Based on where we are as a team, it's helpful for me to see how that time is being allocated. When I'm doing that planning at the beginning of the week, it can lead to adjustments. I don't have enough emphasis on recruiting this week.

I need to work with my recruiter to make sure that either we're following up on candidates that we have that are ready to go or we're putting more people in the pipeline so that I'm spending time on recruiting because that's a big part of our growth. One of the things I've been impressed with a lot recently and I think woven appears to be moving in a similar sort of direction is this post information world for a lot of personal productivity systems, some thinking about the new era of wearables, stuff like whoop and aura, which actually don't, they collect an awful lot of data, but what they feed out is quite aggregated, it's kind of simplistic, it's really the minimum viable, the MVI, the minimum viable information that you need

to get the work done. And you know, the quantified self is out there who would be perfectly happy to have every millisecond of data that they can plug into their Excel spreadsheets with a V-lockup and a color coded cells and stuff. But for the vast majority of people, and it reminds me kind of the transition that we had with products from pre-iPhone to post iPhone, where when you used to get a blackberry, it would come with this telephone book of a manual

and the unboxing wouldn't actually be that. And you'd have all this stuff and you never really need it and you'd get it in all the instructions to be Chinese, French, German, Dutch. Dutch like I don't need all of that stuff And then we get to okay, what's the minimum viable information that people require? Like what is the most beautiful and smart user experience and it would appear that Transition that you're trying to get to with calendar here, you know, it sounds great I love the idea of spending time at the end of my week reviewing how I spent my time, but it's like, if it's not there in front of me, that's just another

task on my to-do list that I need to do. And as we've just identified, we have a bias toward doing things that are immediately gratifying rather than sitting, planning, and reviewing. And unless it's there, slap-bang, staring you in the face, and almost you need to like push notification out of the way, it's just not gonna get done. Does all of that kind of map into your concept? This is why we have this concept of home in woven. And so the home section of the app

both shows you the meeting that you need to go to next. But it also shows you your analytics for that particular week. And the reason we put it there is for exactly this purpose. That if it's, you know, of course, you're going to be looking there to like, what is it that I have to do next? So it will be reactive to that. You've already made those decisions. We're going to help you get into that event. But the analytics are the piece that you may not be thinking about. But when it's there, it's a constant reminder of what are your priorities and how are you performing

against those priorities? And so by integrating things together into the counter, would have made it easy for you. The alternative would be some people like they'll pay their executive assistance to go and build a report or there are some third party apps and you can plug into your account or they'll give you insights into your day. They're not real time and it's effort. If you have to spend that time on it, you're much less likely to do it. When it's right there in front of you,

then you can immediately consume that information. In fact, this is a whole principle and information management of cycle time to information. One of the ways to increase value is to give the information to people as quickly as it is collected as possible to reduce the cycle time for information. And so that's something that we have very much that is possible to reduce the cycle time for information.

And so that's something that we have very much strive to provide on this run. But there's a lot more. I mean, you also need trends. You need to know how is it, you know, it's one thing to know. I'm spending 25 hours a week in video conferencing meetings. It's another thing to know that that has been slowly ticking up. And that's the reason why I'm tired. I feel tired because, feel tired because maybe for

me, five hours a day is about as much as I can take before I start to just get exhausted staring at a computer screen all day long. And so when you have that insight, it can help then lead to actions on how you might want to remediate that issue. Or maybe the trend has been to spend less and less time on marketing and hey, that might be good for this particular company because marketing issue is under control or maybe it's not. Maybe we're not performing from a marketing perspective. And so if I put more time into it,

I will get better output on that front. In all cases, the point being that information is both, like when it's easily collected and presented that provides insight, but when you can also give you the context over time, it provides a different level of insight, and both of them are really valuable. Yeah, have you got plans to expand out to task management as well. Do you see the line between calendar, IE, sort of time management and task management being difficult? So we spoke earlier on about the interdependence

of your system with the people around you, but there's also interdependence within your existing systems, right? Yeah. Yeah, basically events are tasks. You know, we have a task right now. Let's go record a podcast. That is an event, we just both share it.

A time block is a task. So there is a very tight connection between those two things. And in many respects, woven is actually already well suited for it because we have the concept of an event that is yet to be scheduled, a draft event we call it. And if we were to just call those draft events tasks, we'd have a task management system that's actually really, really powerful because any task inside of woven could be done with other people and is collaborative and can easily

then turn into an event on the calendar and you can even do it by itself through the magic of scheduling links. So that's in our future. There are some interesting things to address, especially when you get into groups because there's a lot of other places where people put tasks. They put tasks in their note-taking apps. They put tasks in systems like Asana or Git. They may have full-on task management systems that they're using a CRM. So we have to think through how

to bridge, as we did with calendar events, this new universe where we're mapping those tasks to time and the existing universe of where people in different organizations might want to be storing and managing their tasks. And that's I think probably the more tricky part of task management. But the other parts in many respects we've already solved, we just don't push that feature of the product just yet. Yeah, I had David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done and grandfather, I guess, of the modern productivity movement on a couple of months ago. I asked him, I was like, do you use, tell me, do you use Omnifocus, or do you use things three, or if you got like a, what's your, and he was

like, I'm just using this old as hell, like some Python script thing that looks like a Casio calculator. And that kind of really reminded me that the principles are served by the tool only for as long as the tool continues to be optimal. Like if people can make a rod for their own back and actually create more work by getting a tool which is poorly aligned and doesn't necessarily do the job that it needs.

Yeah, yeah, it is. And this is, it's hard enough to build systems that are simple. I mean, you talked earlier about how it used to be by a piece of technology with a big thick book of instructions on how to use it. And that's the world today will not accept a solution like that. You have to build your technology in a way where it's easily discoverable, but simplicity is hard, right? It is difficult to build a powerful system that is simple. It takes a lot of engineering, a lot of thought. And so, you know, this is one of our current focuses is to take the power of woven and really try to simplify how people can use and discover it so they don't necessarily have it all in their face on their first day when they come

into the product, but it's still there. It's still there to provide value to them so we can automatically form an event through automatically scheduled events or whatever it is that the individual may need. And those problems are valuable problems to address, which is one of the reasons why you don't want to expand your feature set too wide, too quickly, so that you can make sure that you streamline things that you have first.

I was listening today to Lex Friedman on the Artificial Intelligence part. It's not called that anymore. It's just called the Lex Friedman podcast, but he's talking about Artificial Intelligence. And he was talking about the fact that the first company to get an effective self-driving car will get a lot of the benefits that the first AGI slash super intelligence will, because their ability to compound on the data and the

analytics is going to just exponentially skyrocket their ability to further improve their system and further improve their system and further improve their system, further improve the learning. And it really seems like you guys are kind of mining that data to look at, you know, what is it that people want? Because a lot of the time, we don't even know what we want. You say to someone, what are the sort of features that you would need in your new mobile phone

or in your new whatever. And someone would rationalize what they think they want. And then you look at their usage, and you're like, if I gave you that, you'd use it five times a year. Whereas if I managed to reduce this particular operation down by five seconds per time, it would save you 50 hours per year or more.

So yeah, it's fascinating, Man. I'm really interested to see how the analytics driven world is going to move into productivity. I think that's a really exciting area. Well, with time, we will further stitch together time events and what people are doing. This is the long-term vision of the company is to make time an asset, an information asset. And it won't be that when it's not isolated, when it's not all by itself. So when you're going into your staff meeting

and the agenda is already there and the follow-up action items are connected to the event. And as we do that more and more, then those events can be smarter. You can start to see, oh, there's going to need to be a follow-up meeting out of this. So let me help you schedule that. Or maybe this event is going to trigger the need

to cancel something that you have in the future, because you've just made the decision on something that was already planned in the future. The more that we do that, the more intelligent we can make the calendar and have it be a more proactive part of your day and your life, where it's helping you to accomplish your goals as opposed to just being this administrative burden that you have to pay somebody else to manage. Yeah, it really does feel we talked about this kind

of corner that we've turned with technology into the information surplus age. It really does feel at the moment like that's what a lot of people want. Like, the number of, there's no one listening who thinks that they have enough time in the day. Like, the day that we're recording this, the clocks went back last night. Sorry, the night before last night. And, oh my God, a day with 25 hours in it, it was like, it was so beautiful.

How's that? I, this is what, this is what it should be like. But, you know, I can't do that all the time, sadly. I get that one. Sadly, in four months, you're going to have a date. No, don't remind us about that. Do you know that there's a statistically significant increase and decrease of 25% in heart attacks and strokes on both of those days and the same increase and decrease in road traffic accidents. I'm not surprised. I've never heard that statistic, but I'm not surprised at all. Yeah, from... This was my number one challenge to my executive assistance at both KLA Tencore

and at Facebook, which they'd say, how can we help you most? I need a 36-hour day. And for whatever reason, they all failed at it. They could not. I mean, it's a simple thing. Just add 12 more hours of the day somehow. The only time one of them figured it out was, apparently, if I fly from Midway Island to Singapore, I can get that 12 hours.

But it only happens once. Only happens once, and then you go to Luzi. I had a friend who set off on a flight from Hawaii to China. No, sorry, from Hawaii to Australia and lost Christmas day. Set off on the 24th, arrived on the 26th and lost Christmas day. And they had, they had Christmas on the plane, apparently, they had like the Christmas dinner, but never actually experienced what the 25th of December felt like.

Yeah. I mean, every time I'd fly back from Asia, that was a one nice thing. You would get your time back. The travel day didn't exist on the way back. On the way there, you're screwed. You're right. Yeah. Look, Tim, thank you so much for coming on woven.com. Slash podcast slash wisdom. If you want to go and check out woven 21 day free trial, people can get the moment. Is that right? That's right. Hey, your man knows it. That's what happens when Joel sends out the script

for the pre-roll. So yeah, go and check it out. If this sounds like the sort of tool that you guys want to use, I am someone who schedules an awful lot, you know, four, five guests per week plus all of the rest of the stuff I do for running multiple businesses and everything else. So I'm looking forward to syncing my teeth into the tool. And I'm fascinated by, you know, it's a really interesting time.

The technology's finally sort of permitting you guys to be able to do the things that you need to do, hopefully, to counteract the amount of information that we're all dealing with. Chris, it's been a pleasure to be on your podcast here and really look forward to to counteract the amount of information that we're all dealing with? Well Chris, it's been a pleasure to be on your podcast here and really look forward to seeing some of your viewers come and check out Woobin and we offer in addition to the 21 trial, 21 day trial, we also do some onboarding for our new users to help them learn about the app and very, very committed to the mission of the company to help people spend time on what matters most. you