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

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 #woven #facebook #productivity - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 like how much we can cognitively process as human beings. We suffer from information overload and we 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 just, it's amazing. It's just absolutely incredible.

• 0:32Chris Williamson?

  Start us off. What got you interested in productivity to begin with?

• 0:39Speaker 00

  You know, I've been in productivity for maybe almost two decades now. I was a, 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, you know, focus a lot on automation and streamlining things.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  And so it's really been a big part of my life, even though it's really been the last four years that I have, you know, really claimed ownership of like this is the thing I'm focused on right now. So, but yeah, it's, it's been a big part of my life for a long time.

• 1:38Chris Williamson?

  What are the changes you've seen over 20 years?

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Well, we have a lot more technology now than we did before. So when I, I don't want to date myself too much, but you know, coming into the workforce.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  You know, when, when I did, uh, technology was relatively new. So you had a lot of office automation. That was basically looking at things like, okay, we, we used to manage things on paper and here's how we're going to manage it in the digital world. So whether you, you know, take the concept of a document, uh, or a file, um, and you basically represent that in a, in a computer. You know, fast forward another 20 years, we've started to throw that stuff out the window. We don't think about, um, files as much as we think about just links to things. Even, uh, you know, the technologies like, uh, email, what is email? Email is the electronic memorandum.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  That is basically its history. Um, 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, uh, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and text messaging and all those other things. They're far, uh, more efficient ways to, uh, to communicate. And, uh, 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, um, 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

• 3:16Speaker 00

  to present your ideas, uh, 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 of 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, um, you know, thinking towards the future and especially with mobile devices and ubiquitous connectivity, um, that, you know, things can be, uh, you know, really dynamic and rich, uh, to facilitate that productivity.

• 3:57Chris Williamson?

  I've got a buddy, uh, my industry is nightlife and one of my friends, Ray Chan, the owner and CEO of Candy Pants. He was pitching for his first event in Vegas. So he's going in and he's thinking, we're, 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 Aria or XS or 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

• 4:36Chris Williamson?

  other events in Dubai, in Marbella, 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, you know, 75th floor of some beautiful hotel in Vegas or whatever. And the guys come in, they say, okay, Ray, like, let's crack on, man, do you want to show us your, show us your presentation? And he pulls out a bunch of Oculus goes 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 in, they're on the yacht in Abu Dhabi, then they change and they're, they're in the middle of a pool party in Marbella, then it changes again and they're in a nightclub in the UK. And yeah, when he told me that story, I was like, holy shit, this is really getting stepped

• 5:21Chris Williamson?

  up a notch, isn't it, for presentations?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's, 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, the running into limits of like how much we can cognitively process as, as human beings, we, we suffer from information overload and need better tools to help streamline, you know, what it is that we actually have to consume and make decisions on. But, you know, in terms of the, what the technology can do, it's just, it's, it's amazing. It's just absolutely incredible. And that's a great story.

• 6:02Chris Williamson?

  That's a, 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?

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:11Chris Williamson?

  Like 30 years ago, I would have wanted to be able to access the entire history of the earth in a, on 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.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  My, my, the bane of my existence these days, and there'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 email, all you need is an address in order to, to send a message to somebody. And it, 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.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  It's not always obvious which ones are the important ones and which ones aren't. So it's very hard to use a traditional algorithm to just filter them all out. But it's just the wrong, you know, mechanism. You take Facebook as an example, not that, you know, Facebook is, is perfect on any front, but the news feed 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 news feed stories that it chose not to share with me. I'm only going to get the ones that the, the algorithm chose to, to provide.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Now, in that case, that, you know, has some obvious consequences, but generally speaking, it's been extremely successful for, for Facebook. Imagine, you know, if we're able to do that in, you know, in, 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 gotta 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 the problem that there's Slack overload, but at least Slack has more of a recency bias where

• 8:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:33Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 9:46Speaker 00

  I don't think it'll die, but I think email is going to 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 information is not conveyed via email. It's conveyed via, you know, their own proprietary platforms and Instagram and WhatsApp and Tik Tok and other things.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  These are not email based systems. In the professional environment, you've got Slack and Teams and now Zoom, 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, you know, 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, you know, because you want to be contacted by the recruiter

• 10:52Speaker 00

  or you want to be contacted by, you know, 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, that's still a detriment. So until that problem is solved, I think email will continue to exist, but it'll 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 is, you know, had been a great way for people to communicate with each other.

• 11:30Chris Williamson?

  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, I get randomly signed up to mailing lists. Someone's obviously seen the, the, the footer note on a website that's 15 years old, still got like some email, you know, I mean, like it's, it's, it's a nightmare. So.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  I mean, my, my daughter is 16 years old. She's a high school senior. She has problems with email. All right. So she, she hates the, 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, at least spam, as we would call it, from advertisers. Nobody's contacting her via her school, uh, uh, address to, to tell her to go buy, you know, Lululemons or whatever. But she still gets way too much email from all of the distribution lists and all the communications from the

• 12:41Speaker 00

  school. And so the important stuff gets lost. The signal is lost and, and, and that's the problem with email is it doesn't provide a good ranking mechanism.

• 12:51Chris Williamson?

  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 a, 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 salespeople to log all of their expenses, which took 100 times more effort for the salespeople, but made it really slick for the finance department.

• 13:32Chris Williamson?

  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 fax. 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

• 14:14Chris Williamson?

  of have to slow yourself down to get to everyone else's pace is something I found really funny.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  This was the number one issue for woven, because the problem that we're looking to solve with calendars, time is like the most valuable asset that we have. And 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 system that we use to manage 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 to even schedule. You will schedule over email, over text messaging, and then when you're done, you actually send the calendar invite from, from the calendaring

• 15:02Speaker 00

  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. And I could talk about that later if you want. But going back to your point. We can come up with the most brilliant calendaring backend. If it doesn't interoperate with how other people work, it's either going to 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 going to collaborate with on your events that aren't woven users. It needs to synchronize with their existing systems and degrade gracefully

• 15:44Speaker 00

  in a way that will allow them to still interact and collaborate with you. And we put a lot of energy into that, and it's 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 technology. Even Facebook, in the early days, would use email for some notification updates. Others like Slack just go and they rip the Band-Aid and they go straight into a completely different way of doing things. And they've been successful in that. But it's hard. It's really, really hard.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  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 work for you.

• 16:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I 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?

• 16:59Speaker 00

  We use revenue per employee, which is not the best measure, but it's very easy to benchmark, to look at other companies. And so we also looked at a couple of other measures. We would look at profit per employee. And then within each business function, you could provide more specific productivity measures, like Um, you know, how many candidates can a source or produce or can a recruiter hire uh in a, in a given period of time? But at a, at a gross level, we use revenue per employee. And that, that number where we talked about doubling the productivity of, of the company uh was very much based on doubling revenue per employee. Looked at a different measure, we actually did even better.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  Um, uh, the, uh, a key strategy on this was one, just a, an incredible focus on it. Like this was all my organization thought about was workforce productivity. Even things as like trite as the, uh, uh, the gates that we would have, uh, the turnstiles that people would have to walk through to come into the building. We looked at, you know, how much time it would take for someone to badge in and walk through. And in some cases, we had to rebuild them because, uh, it took, you know, an extra seventy-five milliseconds, uh, for the, the badge reader to read a badge because of the distance between the badge and the badge reader.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  And 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. Um, and so when you got into things like, you know, how do employees meet with each other? We wanted a tool that was super easy so they didn't have to ask an admin. Um, how do people, um, uh, you know, get, uh, accessories? We invent these, uh, vending machines that a lot of companies now have, uh, where you could just badge into a vending machine if you needed keyboard mice, uh, batteries, uh, screen wipes, like anything that was technical. So you didn't have to go to the help desk for that. We put these machines anywhere that employees were, even if we didn't have IT people.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  Um, and, uh, you know, certainly things like how do we make the business function like sales or recruiting, um, more efficient through technologies? Uh, you know, with Facebook hires a lot of people and that's a lot of interviews, um, to find the right candidates. At, at one point, it was thirty-seven interviews to 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 that would require. So the, you know, 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

• 19:54Speaker 00

  to get feedback from other people within the company. And those were the mechanisms that we employed in order to achieve those outcomes. And, you know, over time, they really started to compound and build on themselves because we built a technical asset that we could then start using and reusing to get more and more capability into these functions.

• 20:15Chris Williamson?

  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. And he talks about the process that he went through to leave. And it was, 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. That's so good. You also said about people automating stuff. So I've got

• 20:55Chris Williamson?

  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 coworkers started looking through and realized that he'd automated all sorts of stuff. So this guy wrote one script that sends a text message late 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 guy's database

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  to the last backup, then sends a reply, no worries, mate, be careful next time. With another script, he automatically fired off an email excuse like not feeling well, working from home. If he wasn't at work logged in on the service by 8:45, 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 coworkers 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.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  That's a good engineer. I think that 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 Sybase. 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. And but, you know, this is the trick, I think,

• 23:02Speaker 00

  with productivity is you sit and you find the repetitive things that do not add value to your life that you must do and you automate them.

• 23:10Chris Williamson?

  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, write a 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?

• 23:39Speaker 00

  One of the unique things about time is how limited it is. And I don't think people fully appreciate this. And we use phrases like, you know, waste time, or, you know, not having time. The reality is, we do have time. We all have the same amount of time. And 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 and you think about it, like, you know, if you're, you know, if you

• 24:22Speaker 00

  have presentations to write, or code to put to build, or, you know, you need to, you know, get through your email, if you don't allocate the time for that, those activities, if you don't, you know, plan for it, then either it's not going to get done, or it's going to get 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, 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?

• 25:04Speaker 00

  And, you know, one of the greatest gifts in my life was being introduced to a life coach early on in my career, who helped me, like, write this stuff down. Like, 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? Blah, blah. 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, next week, next, next month, next year? In fact, I still have, one of the things that this guy had me do, I hope you can see this, is fill out this card.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  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. He also had me circle when it is that I wanted to retire and then it helped me see like how little time I had left and it created urgency to make tough decisions on things that I was, 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

• 26:24Speaker 00

  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 you know, a number of other decisions came out of that. So once you have like those goals defined and then you narrow that down to how do I want to spend my time, you know, 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 relax from the weekend, but it's very important for me to not immediately jump into collaborating

• 27:06Speaker 00

  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, 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

• 27:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:57Chris Williamson?

  Time blocking being just deciding in advance what you're going to spend our X to our Y doing?

• 28:06Speaker 00

  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 of the week like getting ready for the week. Or it could be on a, you know, an as needed basis. 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. It can be on, on big things, on recurring things, or it can be on tactical objectives that you define. But the key point is you get what you, what you focus on. And time blocking allows you to be very deliberate about how you are going to focus your time.

• 28:49Chris Williamson?

  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 around 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.

• 29:34Chris Williamson?

  Right? Like it wouldn't surprise me if we get to the, the stage where in 20 years, 30 years' time, people's biggest deathbed worries or regrets are 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, there's a lot of good articles. If you Google biggest regrets on, 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'm, I'd bet a significant amount of money

• 30:14Chris Williamson?

  that stuff like social media and YouTube and email and digital work is absolutely going to make its way up that top chart hierarchy of regrets.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  There's another framework to think about time, which is that you have, I've heard some people use the words maker time and manager time. Maker time being the time where you're like 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.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  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 news feed, 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 maker time. I would assert that most people aren't deliberate about their maker time. They don't think about where they are most productive. And there is definitely, you know, a pareto here where it's usually not even that much time, but 20% of our time produces 80% of our value.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  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, you know, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, all of these people are very, very good at managing their time. They're not flippant about it. Then you have some others like Elon Musk who just don't sleep. So they've maximized their time in other ways. But still, same outcome. They're able to maximize their their output from these things. And they're very jealous about the time that they need to think and,

• 32:39Speaker 00

  you know, be proactive about things. And the more that we can keep that in balance with the reactive time, I think, then the more effective we are as individuals.

• 32:49Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. The send versus receive paradox that you've got going on there is 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 hoard 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 so they think, right, I'm going to start optimizing my time. I'm really gonna, that Tim guy sounds all right. He he had some good stuff. Yeah, I don't want to die with regrets and

• 33:34Chris Williamson?

  unfulfilled dreams. What do some of the common errors people make?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  I think for one, not thinking far enough out into the future. We can actually see this with calendar data. So what woven's got about 190 million events in it. And one of the interesting things about that data set is it 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, the the it basically highlights how reactive that we are. So I think that is a key area where

• 34:20Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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 for it over and over. You can 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

• 35:02Speaker 00

  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 over time. You really need to think about, what am I doing next week, next month, next quarter?

• 35:27Chris Williamson?

  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 down, I'm going to put my plans together, I'm going to, 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

• 36:08Chris Williamson?

  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's your 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 year's 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?

• 36:52Chris Williamson?

  And you know, it's a, this is a plea from me to anyone who's listening that tends to be a doer rather than a, a sit back and planner, that you, 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, you know, once every month, taking an entire day off to check in with your goals, to do whatever, it feels like, oh, I'm gonna have 600 emails to answer tomorrow, and I'm gonna 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.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  But it's seductive because it feels good to get something done. But there's a, there's another hack on this that will, that, 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, or at the beginning of the week, planning out what, 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 planned to do

• 38:12Speaker 00

  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 like, looking at all the other, 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, you know, to give myself a little bit of credit for the fact that I get a lot done. Like, 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, you know, I will get both the satisfaction of getting things done.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, because this is less about the automation and more about the emotion. So that 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

• 40:17Speaker 00

  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 reflective of this. Like 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 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?

• 41:01Speaker 00

  At the end of the day, I can see through the analytics how that's going and I'll 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. But it's helpful for me to see how that time is being allocated. And when I'm doing that planning at the beginning of the week, it can lead to adjustments. You know, I don't have enough emphasis on recruiting this week. I need to, you know, work with my recruiter and make sure that either we're following up on candidates

• 41:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 41:50Chris Williamson?

  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, there's the quantified self is out there who would be perfectly happy to have every millisecond of data

• 42:32Chris Williamson?

  that they can plug into their Excel spreadsheets with a V lookup and a color-coded cells and stuff. But for the vast majority of people, we're in, and it reminds me kind of 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 like this telephone book of a manual and the unboxing wouldn't actually be that. And you'd have all this stuff and you'd never really need it and you'd get it in like China. All the instructions would be Chinese, French, German, 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 the transition that you're trying to get to with calendar here, you know, it sounds great.

• 43:17Chris Williamson?

  I love the idea of spending time at the end of my Reviewing how I spent my, 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 like, it's just not going to get done. Does all of that kind of map into into your conception?

• 43:48Speaker 00

  This is why we, we have this concept of home in woven. And so the, 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 do we, what is it that I have to do next? So you'll 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, you know, what are your priorities? And how are you performing against those priorities?

• 44:28Speaker 00

  And so by integrating things together into the calendar, we've made it easy for you. The alternative would be, you know, some people like they'll pay their executive assistants to go and, you know, build a report or there are some third party apps that you can plug into your calendar and they'll give you,

• 44:48Speaker 00

  you know, insights into your, your day. They're not real time and it's effort. And if you're going to 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. Like this is a whole principle in information management of cycle time to information. One of the ways to increase value is to give the information to people, you know, is as quickly as it is collected as possible to reduce the cycle time to, for, 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.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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, you know, 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, uh, the trend has been to spend less and less time on, 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, I'll get better output on, on that front.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  In all cases, the point being that, um, 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, uh, it provides a different level of insight and both of them are really valuable.

• 46:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Have you got plans to expand out to task management as well? Do you see the line between calendar, i.e. sort of time management and task management being difficult? We, we spoke earlier on about, um, the interdependence of your system with the people around you. But there's also interdependence within your existing systems, right?

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Uh, basically events are tasks. You know, we, we have a task right now. Let's go record a podcast. That is an event. We just both share it.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  A time block is a task. Uh, so there is a very tight connection between those two things. Uh, and in many respects, woven is actually already well suited for it because we have the concept of an event that has yet to be scheduled. Uh, uh, 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 it 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

• 47:55Speaker 00

  in their note-taking apps. They put tasks in systems like Asana or Git. They put, you know, they, they may have full-on task management systems if 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.

• 48:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. I, 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. And I asked him, I was like, you know, do you use, tell me, do you use OmniFocus or do you use Things 3? Or have 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, 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 you, 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.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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 buy 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, 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 simp 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, you know, on their, their first day when they come into the product.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  But it's still there. It's still there to, you know, provide value to them. So we can automatically format events or automatically schedule events or whatever it is that the individual may, may need. And, you know, those, 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.

• 50:32Chris Williamson?

  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 superintelligence 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, further improve the learning. And it really seems like you guys are kind of mining that data to look at, you know, what, what is it that people want? Because a lot of the time, we don't even know what we want. You say to someone, oh, what's the, what are the sort of features that you would need

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

  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, if I managed to reduce this particular operation down by five seconds per time, it would save you 50 hours per year or more, you know? So, yeah, it's, 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.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  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 will 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

• 52:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 52:46Chris Williamson?

  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. I was like, 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 once again.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Sadly, in four months, you're gonna have a day that's

• 53:25Chris Williamson?

  No, I know, 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?

• 53:41Speaker 00

  I'm not surprised that, I've never heard that statistic, but I'm not surprised at all.

• 53:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  This was my, my number one challenge to my executive assistants at both KLA TenCor and at Facebook was, they'd say, how can we help you most? I'm like, 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 to 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, I can get that 12 hours, but it's only happens once.

• 54:17Chris Williamson?

  Only happens once and then you're going to lose it. 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.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, every time I'd fly back from Asia, that was the one nice thing is that you would get your time back. The travel day didn't exist. On the way back, on the way there, you're screwed.

• 54:51Chris Williamson?

  You're wrecked. Yeah. Look, Tim, thank you so much for coming on woven.com/podcast/wisdom. If you want to go and check out woven 21 day free trial, people can get at the moment. Is that right?

• 55:03Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 55:03Chris Williamson?

  Hey, your man knows it. That's what happens when Joel sends out the, the script for the, 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, 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, and everything else. So I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into the tool. And I'm fascinated, man. 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.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  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 woven. 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.

• 56:04Chris Williamson?

  I love it, Tim. Thank you, man.

• 56:22Speaker 02

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• 56:26Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

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