Do you know how to lead a team well?

If people working for you don’t like your management style, they are probably looking for a new job.

A study by Gallup says that half of the workers leave their jobs because of their boss.

If your business keeps losing workers, you must learn better team leadership skills.

Here are six easy tips to be a good team leader this year:

1. Focus On Big Picture

Good leaders bring their team together with one main goal. Don’t get too caught up in small, daily tasks. This can make things messy and slow down work.

Once you know your primary goal, tell your team clearly. Keep checking your goals every month, every three months, and every year.

Don’t get distracted by anything that doesn’t get you closer to your goals.

Avoid the temptation to grow your team unless it’s essential.

You can do big things with a small team with the right project management systems.

2. Have Clear Communication

Communicating well is vital to leading a team. Make sure what you think and what you say are the same. This way, everyone knows what the team is trying to do.

You should be able to talk about:

• Most valuable tasks
• Long-term plans
• Team mission values
• How to do the plans

Everyone communicates differently, so try to understand that and talk (and listen!) in a way that works for everyone.

If talking isn’t your strong point, write down what you want to say before meetings.

3. Keep The Team Organized

Staying organized is a big part of being a good leader.

It’s not just about keeping your desk clean; it’s about managing your work so that everything gets done on time. Here’s how you can do it:

• Use Tools: There are lots of productivity apps and software that can help you keep track of what needs to be done. They can remind you of deadlines and help you plan your day.
• Make Lists: Write down what you need to do. This can be a to-do list for the day or a bigger plan for the whole week or month. And don’t forget to make a done list!
• Set Priorities: Know what’s most important and what can wait. This helps you focus on the things that need to be done first.
• Keep Track of Time: Be aware of how long tasks take. This helps you plan better and not overcommit.

3. Solve Problems Well

Even the best leaders face problems. It could be about money or missing a deadline.

A good team leader can find solutions to problems and make them work.

Here’s what you can do:

• Stay Calm: When a problem comes up, stay calm. This helps you think more clearly.
• Look at Different Angles: Sometimes, the best solution isn’t the first one you think of. Look at the problem from different sides.
• Ask for Ideas: Don’t hesitate to ask your team for suggestions. They might have great ideas.
• Make a Plan: Once you find a solution, make a step-by-step plan to fix the problem.
• Learn from Mistakes: Every problem is a chance to learn. Figure out what went wrong and how you can avoid it next time.

4. Show Confidence

Being confident is great, and you can learn it.

Know what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at. Use your strengths and work on your weaknesses.

Taking tests like Myers-Briggs can help you understand your strengths and weaknesses better.

5. Be Fair And Friendly

Being fair is very important in leading a team. Don’t play favorites.

This can make people unhappy and hurt the team.

Even if you like some team members more, don’t show it.

Make sure everyone is included in team activities and meetings.

Handle problems at work reasonably, especially if you like one person more than another.

TL;DR

Effective team management involves leading with a clear vision, communicating effectively, staying organized, being adept at problem-solving, exuding confidence, and treating all team members fairly. These skills are crucial for maintaining team cohesion, productivity, and a positive work environment. A team leader should focus on clear and adaptable communication, use tools to stay organized, solve problems calmly and creatively, and ensure fairness in all interactions to build a strong, effective team.

Managing A Team?

You might be wondering how you can be a better team leader. Here are answers to frequent questions.

Glossary

Here’s a glossary of the key terms related to effective team management.

Team Management: Leading and organizing a group of people to work well together.

Turnover: How often employees leave a company and new ones come.

Vision: A plan or idea for the future.

Productivity: How much work someone can do in a certain amount of time.

Communication: Talking and sharing information with others.

Priorities: The most important tasks that need to be done first.

Gratitude: Being thankful and showing appreciation.

Organization: Keeping things in order and well-planned.

Problem-Solving: Finding ways to fix difficult situations or challenges.

Confidence: Believing in your own abilities and feeling sure about doing things.

Fairness: Treating everyone equally and without favoritism.

Gallup: A company that does surveys and research, often about work and employees.

Have you ever felt that traditional to-do lists don’t work for you?

If you’re running your own business, leading a team, or just trying to get through your day, seeing a bunch of un-done tasks first thing in the morning can make it feel like you’re starting the day already falling behind.

But what if you started each morning by reviewing what you accomplished the previous day?

That’s the idea behind a done list.

What Is A Done List?

It allows you to see how much you get done each day and can make a big difference in how you feel about your work.

Keeping a done list changes how you see your productivity. Writing down your dones shifts your focus from what you didn’t get done, to what you actually did get done.

Each evening, take a moment to jot down what you’ve accomplished.

Keep a Done List

No victory is too small. This simple act shifts your focus from what’s pending to what’s completed, offering a more balanced view of your productivity.

Tracking accomplishments shifts your focus from unfinished tasks to completed ones for a more balanced perspective.

Done lists help you celebrate small wins.

Celebrate Small Wins

Small wins over time become big wins. And adding accomplishments to your daily list fuels a sense of momentum on the path toward bigger goals.

Recognizing and celebrating these small wins helps you stay motivated.

It’s a reminder that you are making progress, even when the ultimate goal seems distant.

This motivation keeps you engaged and eager to work towards the bigger goal.

Done lists help you see everything you got done, even if it wasn’t on your original plan.

5 Steps for Doing a Done List

Here are five simple steps to effectively create a “done list” to celebrate your daily achievements, stay motivated, and set yourself up for ongoing success.

1. Start Simple: Set aside a few minutes daily to create your “done list.” It doesn’t need to be elaborate or time-consuming.
2. List Your Accomplishments: Jot down everything you’ve accomplished during the day, whether planned tasks or unexpected achievements. Keep it brief and to the point.
3. Celebrate Small Wins: Take a moment to celebrate each accomplishment, no matter how small. This is your chance to acknowledge your efforts and successes.
4. Reflect on Patterns: Review your “done lists” weekly and monthly to identify patterns in your accomplishments. Notice which tasks you excel at and which ones require more effort.
5. Stay Motivated and Set New Goals: Use your “done lists” to boost your motivation when feeling low. Recognize how you’ve kept your commitments to yourself and others.

Following these five simple steps, you can effectively create and utilize a “done list” to celebrate your daily achievements, stay motivated, and set yourself up for ongoing success.

Join The iDoneThis Movement

Ready to transform the way you track your daily accomplishments and stay motivated?

Give iDoneThis a try today!

Start celebrating your small wins, acknowledging your daily achievements, and fueling your progress toward your bigger goals.

Join iDoneThis and take control of your lists in a way that works for you.

TL;DR

Embrace the transformative power of a “done list” to shift your focus from uncompleted tasks to accomplished ones, fostering a more positive outlook on your productivity.

By writing down daily achievements, no matter how small, you celebrate small wins and build momentum towards larger goals. This simple yet effective tool not only keeps you motivated but also offers a balanced perspective on your progress.

Follow our five easy steps to start your own done list, join the iDoneThis, and revolutionize how you perceive and track your daily accomplishments.

Popular Questions

Here are some questions along with answers you may have about using done lists.

Glossary

Here’s a glossary of key terms mentioned in this article, with their definitions:

1. Done List: A productivity tool where completed tasks are recorded, focusing on achievements rather than pending tasks. It serves as a positive reflection of daily accomplishments.
2. To-Do List: A traditional list of tasks that are yet to be completed. It often includes both short-term and long-term goals and everyday responsibilities.
3. Small Wins: Minor achievements or tasks completed in the course of a day. Recognizing these helps in building momentum and maintaining motivation towards larger goals.
4. Productivity: The effectiveness of one’s efforts, often measured in terms of the output produced within a given time frame.
5. Motivation: The drive or willingness to complete tasks and pursue goals. It’s an essential factor in maintaining productivity and achieving success.
6. iDoneThis: A platform or community mentioned in the article where individuals can track their accomplishments and progress using the done list method.
7. Momentum: The sense of forward progress or motivation that is maintained by regularly completing tasks and achieving goals.
8. Reflect on Patterns: The process of reviewing completed tasks to identify trends or habits in one’s productivity and work efficiency.
9. Celebrate: Acknowledging and appreciating achievements, no matter how small, to foster a positive mindset and encourage continued progress.
10. Goal Setting: Identifying specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives to work towards.

Please note that without explicit markers for subheadings in the text, such as font size or bold text formatting, this list is created based on the context and structure of the provided content.

The famous management thinker Socrates once said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

As 2024 approaches, everyone is making resolutions. Most people do this without data, hypotheses, or any idea of what they will do differently. It’s usually a combination of regrets over bets that didn’t pan out, thoughts about what they should improve, and inspiration from others. And they wonder why nothing really changes.

Intention without information is powerless. To misquote great management thinker Albert Einstein, doing the same thing and hoping for a different result is the definition of inefficiency.

This is where the personal time and motion study can help.

Time and Motion Study Basics

In summary, a time and motion study goes like this:

1. Look closely at what you’re doing.
2. Spot opportunities to be more efficient.
3. Make a change to the way you work to do it.
4. See if it produces the expected results.
5. Rinse and repeat.

(Note: a traditional Taylorist time and motion study separates thinking about work versus actually doing it. You can tell who’s thinking because they’re wearing a suit and an expensive watch. That approach, though still common, is somewhat discredited and is not what we’re discussing here.)

Small Changes, Enormous Benefits

Small savings quickly mount up. At the same time, we spend a lot of time doing stuff that is not very useful. For example, every day, most people spend two or more hours on social media.

Reducing useless tasks or doing them more efficiently can free up vast time for what’s important.

Here’s a table to help you work out how much time you could save with modest gains repeatedly and regularly:

[Image Source]

Is it worth the time?

It’s a question worth asking yourself for whatever you do — even if you intend to be more efficient and productive.

Pay Attention

In the Atlantic, Megan Garber describes MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle’s working method as “the kind of low-grade spying that in academia is known as ‘ethnography,’ that in journalism is known as ‘reporting,’ and that everywhere else is known as ‘paying attention.'”

This is what you aim for pay attention to what you do and how you do it.

Start by thinking, in broad terms, about how you spend your time over a typical working week. Time trackers like Clockify (a timesheet app that successful teams like Atlassian and Siemens use) and Toggl (an online timer that you can run across your devices and generate reports from) may give you more objective data about how you spend your time.

Features and apps are popping up daily to help you organize your day — but you could also simply try writing things down.

With I Done This, you complete a five-minute survey every day. These check-ins become more extensive progress reports that help you ensure you’re moving forward at the right pace.

You don’t need to measure your activity down to the second. That would be Taylorism — you are both the subject and the observer, the thinker and the doer. Examine and report on your life in a helpful way.

If you can’t pay attention to the tasks, you must at least know how to make time go slower to maximize your time and take advantage of that.

Opportunities For Improvement

Group your time into categories using a classic Boston Box with the time spent and value on the two axes.

You already have data about the amount of time spent on your observations. Here are some criteria for judging how valuable an activity is to your job:

• Does it create value for the business?
• Is it in my job description?
• Is it an investment in personal growth?
• Do I get a bonus for doing it really well?

There are some things, like going to meetings or writing emails, that are part of your job, but they’re not valuable. Once you’ve classified your tasks this way, you can see where you need to spend time and what you need to adjust.

Create A Hypothesis

Common ways to be less efficient are good places to start looking for improvements. Do you do any of these things?

• Spend too much time on email. Email takes up over 30 percent of the average desk worker’s day. That’s a day and a half a week.
• Interrupt yourself. Each day, a typical office employee checks email over 80 times and uses instant messaging 94 times. It’s hard to concentrate if you’re doing this.
• Multi-tasking. Productivity drops by as much as 40 percent when subjects try to do two or more things at once.

From your own observations, come up with a question or hypothesis that addresses these common behaviors, such as “Can I cut the amount of time I spend doing my email by 25 percent?” and what you discover about how you spend your time, such as “can I find a way to replace or reduce some kinds of meetings?”

Make A Change

Once you’ve got a hypothesis, make a change in the way you work and run an experiment to see if it helps. Here are some tools and techniques for doing less and doing better:

• Change the venue where you work. For example, try shared workspaces or working on the Underground.
• Go to fewer meetings or just email a report instead of attending.
• Use an online tool, such as Tricider, to build consensus rather than spending an hour in a meeting.
• Switch off your email notifications and other interruptions. Put your phone into airplane mode and use a distraction-free editor.
• Consider using the Pomodoro technique to improve concentration.
• Listen to white noise or classical music in the background.
• For your email, set up some rules for routine messages, such as using some autoresponders and some canned responses.

There are so many tweaks you can make. This is just a starting point.

Consider Automated Solutions

[Image Source: Pexels]

There are lots of automated solutions cropping up for simple tasks like data entry, bookkeeping and tax preparation that can free employees to focus on more creative, higher-value tasks. Far from leading you into an AI winter where robots overwhelm your work environment, these are small fixes that make a big difference in productivity.

Simple, mundane work takes up so much of employees’ time. After conducting the time and motion study, determine what low-value work is the most time-consuming and consider investing in tools that can take this off your plate.

Evaluate Results

Try your experiment for a week. Perform the same observations as before using the same tools. Is there an improvement? Great. If not, try something else. Rinse and repeat.

A few minutes every day and an hour or so every week working with time and motion study experiments can produce a dramatic change in your productivity.

What helps you to be more efficient? What tools do you use to measure your effectiveness? What holds you back? Share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.

Popular Questions

Here are some popular questions about a Time and Motion Study.

• What is a Time and Motion Study?

  A Time and Motion Study involves observing and analyzing your work habits to spot efficiency opportunities, implementing changes, and reviewing the results to create a more productive workflow. This method helps identify time wasted on non-essential tasks and suggests ways to improve the usage of time.

• How can I be more efficient in my daily tasks?

  To improve efficiency, you can start by paying close attention to how you spend your time, use time tracking tools like Clockify or Toggl, categorize tasks by value, and minimize inefficient habits such as excessive emailing, frequent interruptions, and multitasking.

• What are some common ways to be less efficient at work?

  Common inefficiencies include spending too much time on email, interrupting yourself with constant checks on communication platforms, and attempting to multitask, which can reduce productivity by up to 40%.

• What tools can help me do a Time and Motion Study?

  Tools such as Clockify, Toggl, or simple note-taking can provide data on how you spend your time. Techniques like the Pomodoro method or listening to white noise can improve concentration and efficiency.

• Can making small changes really improve my productivity?

  Yes, small savings in time can quickly add up. By eliminating or improving how you handle low-value tasks, you can free up significant time for more important work.

• What should I do if my initial changes don’t yield improvements?

  If your initial experiment doesn’t show improvement, reassess your approach, adjust your hypothesis, and try different strategies. It’s a continuous improvement cycle – observe, change, and review.

Glossary

Here are the key terms mentioned in this atticle, each followed by its definition:

Time and Motion Study: A business efficiency technique combining the Time Study work of Frederick Winslow Taylor with the Motion Study work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. It is a major part of scientific management (Taylorism). It involves the analysis of workflow to improve efficiency in the workplace.

Taylorism: A theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflows with the objective of improving labor productivity. Named after Frederick Winslow Taylor, it is often associated with treating workers as machines and breaking down work into very simple, repeatable tasks.

Boston Box: Also known as the BCG Matrix, developed by the Boston Consulting Group. It is a planning tool that uses graphical representations of a company’s products acompany’ses in an effort to help the company decide what it should keep, sell, or invest more in.

Pomodoro Technique: A time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The technique uses a timer to break work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.

Ethnography: The systematic study of people and cultures from the subject’s viewpoint, usually through participant observation, where the ethnographer immerses themselves in the culture as an active participant.

Automation: The use of largely automatic equipment in a system of operation, such as manufacturing or data processing. Automation often refers to using robots or computer software to perform tasks that were once completed by humans.

AI Winter: A period of time during which there is a lack of interest and funding in artificial intelligence research. The term was coined as an analogy to the idea of a nuclear winter.

Email Autoresponders: Email systems that automatically reply to incoming messages. They are often used for out-of-office notifications or marketing purposes.

Canned Responses: Pre-written responses to common questions or situations, allowing for quick and consistent communication.

Distraction-Free Editor: A writing or coding software tool designed to minimize distractions by offering a very simple, clean interface.

White Noise: A constant background sound that masks other sounds. It is often used to drown out distracting noises or to promote relaxation and concentration.

Productivity Podcasts: Podcasts that focus on enhancing productivity, often featuring tips, strategies, and interviews with experts in time management and personal development.

Pop Quiz

Here’s a pop quiz based on the Time and Motion concepts mentioned in the article.

1. According to the article, what is the first step in conducting a time and motion study?
   A) Making a change to your work routine.
   B) Spotting opportunities to be more efficient.
   C) Closely looking at what you’re doing.
   D) Evaluating the results of changes made.
2. What is a traditional Taylorist time and motion study known to separate?
   A) Work from personal time.
   B) Thinking about work from actually doing it.
   C) Efficient tasks from inefficient ones.
   D) Important tasks from non-important tasks.
3. The article suggests that multitasking can reduce productivity by up to what percentage?
   A) 10%
   B) 25%
   C) 40%
   D) 50%
4. Which of the following is NOT listed as a common way to be less efficient at work?
   A) Spending too much time on email.
   B) Checking email frequently throughout the day.
   C) Using a timesheet app to track work.
   D) Trying to multitask.
5. What is the suggested way to determine if a task is valuable?
   A) If it is in your job description.
   B) If it takes less than an hour to complete.
   C) If it is a task you enjoy doing.
   D) If it requires a meeting.

Answer Key

1. C) Closely looking at what you’re doing.
2. B) Thinking about work from actually doing it.
3. C) 40%
4. C) Using a timesheet app to track work.
5. A) If it is in your job description.

I don’t love to-do lists but found it odd that I still continue to use them. I sometimes worry they’re just a form of self-flagellation. Is my list-making just a futile exercise in productivity-flavored self-torture? Is the to-do list just a blunt instrument to wield in the quest for personal productivity and getting stuff done?

Am I actually achieving more in a given day because of my list? We went to the data from our users to find out.

Analyzing the efficacy of our users’ to-do lists

At I Done This, we used to have a to-do task feature, and we discovered some interesting numbers demonstrating the common struggle to conquer our to-do lists:

• 41% of to­-do items are never completed.
• 50% of completed to-­do items are done within a day.
• 18% of completed to­-do items are done within an hour.
• 10% of completed to­-do items are done within a minute.
• 15% of “dones” started as to-do items.

In other words:

• People aren’t that great at completing their to-do tasks.
• Tasks that do get completed are done quickly.
• Tasks that are reported as done don’t correlate with planned to-do tasks.
• Most to-do lists are too long.

The popular to-do list, then, appears to be rather ineffective, and it’s this paradox that may explain the spiky love/hate relationship that people have with to-do lists. Or does the weakness lie deeper in ourselves in our human struggle to impose order and control?

It seemed too facile to chalk up the poor figures to the simple failure of to-do lists and/or humankind, so we wanted to take a closer look at why people aren’t good at completing their to-do lists.

Problem 1: We have too many to-dos on our list

First of all, most of us put way too much stuff on our lists.

Social psychologist Roy Baumeister and journalist John Tierney, authors of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, report in their book that one person typically has at least 150 different tasks at a time. They also say that a typical executive’s to-do list for a single Monday could take more than a week to finish.

Sounds like a setup for failure if there ever was one.

Overstuffing our lists causes a continuous thrum of worry in our head. This constant disquiet has negative effects in tackling the very tasks that are so worrying. As described in Willpower, psychologists Robert Emmons and Laura King discovered that the worry that results from having too many conflicting goals causes our productivity and our physical and mental health to suffer. Which, of course, leads to our health tanking, which makes our productivity get worse. It’s a vicious cycle.

So the to-do list gives and takes. We have so much to tackle, and a to-do list helps us remember everything. At the same time, it’s a nagging tool that can induce unhealthy and disarming anxiety.

Do the cons of a to-do list outweigh the pros if we’re not ultimately getting everything done?

Problem 2: Think of the to-do list as a starting place for planning

Zooming into the true purpose of the to-do list, we discover that a significant problem is that we’re just not good at constructing our to-do lists.

It’s not as simple as it looks. The to-do list is an external memory aid, or a reminder outside of your head, which nudges you about all the stuff you mean to do. Right—you knew that. What’s surprising about the research recounted in Willpower is that the to-do list’s badgering isn’t for you to actually get stuff done.

That intrusive pestering from uncompleted tasks and unmet goals hanging around in your mind is known as the Zeigarnik effect.

The logical response to “cure” the Zeigarnik effect would be to finish the tasks and meet the goals. However, studies by Baumeister and E.J. Masicampo found that the Zeigarnik effect was the unconscious asking the conscious mind to make a plan, as opposed to asking the conscious mind to get off its butt to complete some tasks.

In one of Baumeister and Masicampo’s studies, a group of students was instructed to think about an important final exam, while another group was told to make a specific study plan with details of what they would do, where, and when. Nobody actually studied during the experiment, they were just made to “think” about or “plan” their studying. When given word fragments to complete, the students who had been told merely to think about the upcoming test filled in exam-related words, while the study-plan group did not.

Even though the planners had, in effect, spent more time thinking about their task, with no progress made on the task itself, as Baumeister and Tierney explain in Willpower, “their minds had apparently been cleared by the act of writing down a plan.”

It turns out that to-do lists aren’t as useful when you conceive of them as just a string tied around your finger. Many of us aren’t any good at formulating the tasks on the list, failing to think through steps and plans, so when we’re faced with too many tasks and too few suggestions on how to proceed, we don’t complete tasks.

Remember that the to-do list string around your finger is for you to make better plans using the list.

Problem 3: We give ourselves too much time

It makes sense, then, that our stats show that when people did complete tasks, they were done quickly. When goals are broken out into actionable steps, it takes less effort, energy, and time to cross those smaller tasks off the list.

Add to our lack of planning a tendency to be lenient about deadlines, and up goes the chances that we’ll never finish a task. As many fellow procrastinators know, the more time you give yourself to finish something, the less likely it is that you will finish in that time frame.

For example, behavioral economist Dan Ariely found that students who had longer to finish three papers performed worse than those who had externally imposed or self-imposed deadlines that were evenly spaced and earlier.

Problem 4: The list doesn’t account for real life

Only 15% of our members’ dones started out as to-dos. That’s a staggeringly small correlation.

Dones don’t match up with to-do tasks when we’re not great at formulating to-do list tasks to begin with. If, as discussed above, we don’t take the time to plan out specific actions for general goals or tasks, but we do take some forward steps, those steps won’t correlate with the original task. You can’t check off a task as “sort of” done.

Plus, we can’t predict the many interruptions that happen in our day.

The most common reason for failure to get through a to-do list is usually unplanned tasks such as unscheduled calls, emails, and meetings. Surprises pop up in our lives in and out of the office, creating little and big fires to be put out. Maybe the kids had to be taken to school when they missed the bus; the deal fell through; this coworker is never going to stop talking; the same coworker screwed up the budget, and now I have to fix it; this internet is so much more interesting than tasks A through Z right now.

Sometimes, the to-do list just can’t handle the changes that crop up, because we can’t tell the future.

Why we got rid of our to-do feature

We tried to incorporate a to-do feature because people told us they wanted to plan their day. We let the feature go because the main focus of our service at I Done This is “dones.” As in, tasks you’ve already completed. And, of course, how motivating, revealing, and useful it is to record those dones.

But we still believe that to-do lists are helpful, and that dones help balance out the to-do list’s problems and shortcomings. To-dos and dones are two sides of the same productivity coin.

How to improve to-do lists

Make more specific, actionable plans. Make it easier to get to done by spending some time thinking about what that journey will look like. If I am reminded by my list to do some general task, like “write blog post,” instead of something specific, like “research and brainstorm some ideas for a blog post about to-do lists,” I’ll be much less likely to reach the intended goal.

At the same time, don’t micromanage your tasks, or you’ll feel locked in and unable to make adjustments and respond to things that come up. Use your dones as a reference to make better, more responsive plans.

Use implementation intentions during planning

An implementation intention is a planning strategy that helps automate a desired action. You plan out an if-then process, where you use a certain situation to lead to the desired response. Setting out in advance some specifics of when and where forms the “if” component of the implementation intention, and the specifics of how forms the “then” component.

In effect, you’re the director in the play of your life, giving the cue to act a certain way.

Give yourself earlier deadlines

In his study, Dan Ariely found that even when earlier deadlines were self-imposed, students performed better than those who had later deadlines. Which makes sense, of course. Distant deadlines create no sense of urgency and, in fact, can be forgotten entirely.

An earlier deadline stays at the forefront of your mind and pushes you to get it done.

Even if your project is huge, it should consist of multiple smaller deadlines instead of one mega deadline a year from now.

Prioritize the tasks that matter

Think of this step as task triage. Sure, we all have a theoretically endless to-do list, but most of the things on that gargantuan list can wait.

Look at those 150 tasks you have to do, and pick the most important, pressing or interesting ones to work on, big and small.

It’s easier to focus on five things (and get them out of the way) than to just stare helplessly at a mountain of tasks with no starting point.

Forgive yourself and count your wins

Since our minds can get overloaded to the point of distraction, forgive yourself for not getting to 150 tasks. Be realistic about what you can do in a day.

Remember that interruptions will pop up, and accomplishments don’t always start out as to-dos. You are probably getting a lot of stuff done that you’re not giving yourself credit for. So record and celebrate your dones, and let that motivation push you to tackle the next day’s or week’s tasks.

In fact, there is strong evidence that empathizing with your “future self” could lead to less procrastination and a more effective workflow. The idea is, you imagine talking to the version of you from tomorrow, next week, next year, etc. Think about how doing your tasks for today could improve that version’s life. How grateful that version of you might be if you get your work done today.

Embrace the idea of the “done” list

Instead of worrying about what’s left to do and busying yourself with more and more tasks, spend your time wisely on what’s important, with the motivation and insight gained from your “done list.”

A “done” list is like a to-do list in reverse. Instead of assigning yourself a bunch of tasks (many of which you might not get to), you write down the things you’ve done after you do them. So instead of ending the day with a list of things you haven’t accomplished, you end with a big list of wins.

Download our Busy Person’s Guide to the Done List ebook now, and fill up your “done list” today.

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If your startup needs a dynamic communication system, daily standups might sound like a great idea. So you pitch it to your team and get everyone on board with the daily 9:30 a.m. meeting where everybody stands and gets straight to the point.

Each person shares a few key updates about what they’re working on and what’s blocking them from completing important tasks. Everything is going great, and the company is growing.

But as you keep hiring, the daily standup becomes a chore. The more people who have to speak, the longer the meeting lasts, and the less productive it feels. Then one day you forget to do something that Jill from product management asked during a standup because nobody was taking notes. It was your idea that nobody should take notes! You read about it on a “How To” startup blog.

Daily standups are supposed to be an efficient way for teams to stay updated, but all of a sudden yours has turned on you. The barrage of information doesn’t seem as useful, and the meeting itself is a time-sink. It requires everyone to drop what they’re working on every day just to gather round and hear updates. It’s time-consuming and disruptive.

Email Standups Are the Solution

Email standups offer a quick and convenient solution to the daily standup problem. They’re easier than a face-to-face standup, and they accomplish the same thing. You get all the important information without the hassle of a meeting.

Switching to email standups will help your team circulate useful information in a fast and fluid way. Email standups send the highlights of what you need to know directly to your inbox while sidestepping the fanfare of a meeting. It’s called asynchronous communication. There are several advantages.

Sync Up at Your Convenience

With email standups, you can report your updates and look at everyone else’s updates at your own convenience. This is great because managers and engineers often have conflicting schedules. Engineers, like most creative workers, need large chunks of time for concentrated progress on work, while managers spend more time in meetings.

Remote teams who have to loop in on video calls for face-to-face standups especially benefit from switching to email. Video chat can be unreliable, and the difference in time zones can be problematic.

Distractions like unnecessary meetings waste more time than you might realize. It interrupts people from what they were working on. People can’t just transition back into other tasks as soon as the disruption is over. Asynchronous communication lets everyone stay informed without disruption.

Avoid the Stress of Meetings

Email standups are easy. No interruption, no timer, no video chat, and no pressure to be on point when you recite your updates out loud. This is especially beneficial to people who are pressed for time.

In the heyday of face-to-face daily standups, some enthusiasts claimed you should use a stopwatch to prevent people from talking too long. In practice, this means that one unlucky team member has to do the un-fun job of enforcing the time limit. For people who don’t like public speaking, this can be a source of daily, sweat-inducing anxiety—you have to get everything out before the timer goes off!

For people who like public speaking, the temptation to ignore the stopwatch can be all too strong. So avoid the posturing and bravado, eliminate unnecessary stress, and switch to email standups. Introverts might not remember to say everything in a meeting, but in an email, they will.

Keep a Record of your Progress

Emails provide a written record that’s automatically archived and searchable by date, project, or team members. Unlike your daily standup meeting, where people are discouraged from taking notes because it takes too long, email standups log a very thorough record of your progress.

You can refer to these whenever you need, as well as share them with others. Written records of progress are especially helpful to show the higher ups, bosses and management. They also come in handy during performance reviews and 1:1 meetings, where referring to specific achievements and obstacles is crucial.

In addition, relevant links to documents, videos and code in Github can be included directly in the email. Instead of telling your team that they can see your work somewhere, simply embed the link in your daily email standup. Your team members will be able to see your work at the click of a button.

Save the Banter for the Break Room

Email standups avoid the kinds of chit chat and other digressions that happen naturally when people get together. While everybody enjoys a moment to banter with their colleagues, standup meetings are not the time or place.

This happens all the time when new companies start out with in-person standups: at first, everybody is gung ho about the discipline and efficiency of the idea. Nobody anticipates that the meetings will relax over time. Your daily standup will slowly devolve into social hour.

It’s better to let lunch be social time, or let face-to-face interactions happen organically throughout the day. If your daily standup is your only time for your team to have informal conversations, you should consider establishing another outlet for casual communication. Using email for standups sets boundaries and eliminates temptation.

Note: the daily standup is also not the time to discuss strategy or hash out problems—that’s what weekly “sit-down” meetings are for. Keeping your tools and allotted schedules distinct for different communication goals will prevent muddling the channels. Email standups make your sit-down meetings more clearly valuable because your face-to-face time has an explicit purpose.

A survey by Wolf Management found that most professionals today attend an average of 61.8 meetings per month. That’s 31 hours per month (rouphly four work days) lost to meetings that aren’t always productive. Switching to email standups are a great way to trim the fat.

Case Study: Reddit Uses Email Standups for Remote Teams

Since its launch in 2005, Reddit has quickly risen to become the go-to social content bulletin board for savvy Internauts. Their team is scattered between San Francisco and New York, with a handful of remote workers in between. The Reddit team definitely knows the challenges of staying synced on a day-to-day basis. That’s why they use email standups.

For Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin, email standups serve multiple purposes. First, they function as a personal record. Second, when shared transparently with the rest of the team, they become an informative point of reference.

“We all wear a lot of hats. We’re only about twenty people. All of us do a bunch of different things, so it’s hard for us to jump around,” Erik explains. “It’s nice to be able to track how that’s going. Maybe not what we’re spending time on as much but what we accomplish on any given day.”

Standups Enable Good Teamwork

People are always astonished by how small Reddit’s team is. How can such a massive online forum function with so few administrators? The secret is that Reddit communicates very well internally. At the same time, they value autonomy and ownership of projects. Standups help with this.

Erik’s team members use email standups as a simple way to keep track of what they’ve done. It’s a tool that enables collaboration, where team members feel good to share what they’re working on and what they’re struggling with. The ability to keep an automatic record of progress is especially valuable.

“It’s nice to see what you’ve accomplished, especially when a lot of the work we do is vague. It’s not like building something with your hands where you see the progress,” Erik says. “It’s nice to look back and see what you’ve done and what other people have been working on.”

The Reddit team gradually stepped up from using simple email threads for sharing updates to using a tool that automates the mundane parts of the process, called iDoneThis. Basic email threads can get convoluted, but with a more organized system, each week’s progress stays neatly saved.

How to Run an Email Standup

So how do you run an email standup? You have a few options. The first is to do it by hand. This involves drafting and sending out emails to your team every day. All you have to do is remind them to reply with their updates, then collect and compile their updates into a record.

A step above that is Google Groups, a free service that lets you start discussion threads for your team. Google Group’s archives are a little bit clearer to navigate than basic email.

A step above that would be a system like iDoneThis that lets you automate the sending and collecting of responses. An automated system can be good because it enforces regularity without you having to think about it.

Remember that it’s important to establish good practices with your team from the beginning of adopting a new tool. Otherwise people won’t use it. When setting up your email standup system, keep in mind that the emails are supposed to be minimally invasive, easy to fill out, and easy to read.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to using Google Groups to manage your email standup. Google Groups is pretty basic, but it’s nice because it’s free.

1. Create a Google Group for your team

Google Groups is a service from Google that lets you create discussion groups for your team. Once you’ve created the group, invite all of your team members to join.

2. Go to “settings” in Gmail to enable sending to the entire group

Most of the default settings in Google Groups will already be tailored to your purposes, but for email standups, you want to make sure everybody’s responses are being shared with everyone. This is why you enable sending to the entire group.

3. Create a “New Topic” with the date in the title

Create a new thread every time you ask for a round of updates from your team. Make sure to include the date of the standup in the title. That way, the emails will be neatly archived.

4. Send out a daily reminder

Send out daily reminders to your team asking them to share their updates. Ask them about the three key points of productivity, as outlined in the screenshot above. This format will encourage people to keep their responses short and to the point.

5. Watch the responses roll in

Read everybody’s responses and see what themes emerge. Every time you get a new response, it adds to your global understanding of how the day/week/month is going. Once everyone has responded, write a roundup featuring highlights and feedback. Say congratulations to people who deserve it, and offer words of guidance. It’s great to identify problems that can be easily solved.

6. Extract highlights and send feedback

Of course, this system isn’t perfect. There are services specifically designed for email standups that make the whole process easier. Some companies develop internal tools that are tailored to their team. Other companies pay for productivity tools and services like iDoneThis.

Avoid These 5 Potential Pitfalls

Sometimes you’ll hear people say that email standups don’t work, but the truth is you can avoid potential pitfalls if you plan smart and instill good habits in your team.

For example, you might hear CEOs complain that it’s a hassle to have to remember to send these emails every day. What if you forget? What if you’re inconsistent? One solution is to ask a programmer to set up an automated system for you, or to pay for a productivity service that makes the process more streamlined.

Another thing that people might complain about is that every time somebody replies to the thread, you get an alert. This can be annoying! But again, you can bypass this minor issue by upgrading your email system to something slightly more sophisticated and more suitable.

Pitfall #1: Email Threads Are Confusing

Ryan Carson, founder and CEO of Treehouse—an interactive education platform—started using email standups in 2013. His biggest complaint was that the “reply all” situation in email threads could get way too out of hand.

When a lot of people were in a thread, it became confusing and difficult to keep track of what everyone was saying. Sometimes people were reporting their updates, but other times they were commenting on each other. That’s why Ryan developed an internal productivity tool for Treehouse. It looked almost like a Reddit thread.

“Long email threads quickly break down into reply-hell where it’s difficult to tell who said what and who they’re talking to,” says Carson. “Why not use a sort of internal Reddit clone to post daily status updates?”

The new tool made it much easier for Ryan’s team to read and make sense of each other’s updates. Tools like this are especially helpful when people miss meetings, or need to go back to notes from previous weeks. The information is easy to search and navigate.

Pitfall #2: They Blow Up Your Inbox

Shruti Gandhi, entrepreneur and former engineer at Samsung Ventures, hates getting too many notifications. That’s why she advocates for customizing our software and devices to accumulate alerts before notifying us—when it’s convenient for us.

“To combat alert overload, I want my OS or some great app to control everything that gets delivered, and personalize what gets delivered and when,” she argues. Shruti is imagining a tool that could automate the mundane task of collecting and assembling information from a long email thread. Sounds pretty nice!

In the world of email standups, there are productivity tools already on the market that do exactly that.

Pitfall #3: Email Isn’t Transparent

At WooThemes, co-founder Mark Forrester didn’t like that his email threads were only transparent for the people in the conversation. Not everybody in the office needed to be cc’ed on every single specific email, but he wanted people to be able to see what other teams were working on.

So Mark started using iDoneThis to improve his team’s transparency. This enabled people to archive their daily email standups in a way that’s immediately available to everyone else on the team to search through when they need to. Before, only the manager had access to all the company’s standup records. Now, everybody has access.

“It’s best if people leave that sort of cookie trail for us to see how effective they have been,” says Mark. “Seeing it’s so easy to submit your daily reports by email, people do it every day. Even though it’s not a requirement, they realize the benefit to them.”

So even though your designers don’t need to always be in the loop about what your sales team is doing, transparency tools let them casually be in the loop. And when those two teams do need to collaborate, they’ll already be up to speed.

Pitfall #4: They’re Difficult to Automate

At LivingSocial, Ruby developer Tony Pitale got on board with email standups in 2013. But he hated having to manually pull the trigger on the initial email reminder every day. So he hacked a way to automate this chore.

Here are 30 easy lines of code Tony developed to automate his email standup. This requires Ruby Script and the mail gem:

That’s a piece of cake for any savvy Ruby programmer. Automating your email standups will make sure they get sent out consistently. It’s the best way to breed good habits with your team.

Pitfall #5: Writing Takes Too Much Time

Russell Uresti, a web developer, complains that writing isn’t faster than talking. But the truth is most computer programmers can type almost as fast as they talk. So what’s the hold up?

Your email standups don’t need to be super polished. In fact, they’re best when they’re three sentences or less. But the real time-saving benefit of email standups is that it’s way faster to read an email than go to a meeting and listen to everyone talk.

On top of that, writing your ideas down is an exercise in seeing if your ideas make sense. It requires you to be more clear, thorough and precise. Getting into the habit of writing your daily updates and daily challenges will have the benefit of solidifying your ideas in your head.

Email Standups Scale As Your Business Grows

Blogger Tommy Morgan warns that when choosing the best standup method for your company, one factor you have to consider is growth. How big is your company? A team smaller than 10 or 12 can still function with relatively unstructured communication. But as your office grows, the dynamic will change.

An office of more than 50 people definitely needs a structured communication system. The in-between period is where you might experience some awkwardness or growing pains, but don’t worry. By starting now, you’re getting a head start. When you do get up to 50 people in your office, you’ll already have your best daily standup practice in place.

According to a new Clarizen/Harris survey, 40 percent of employees think status update meetings waste valuable time, and 67 percent say they’re spending up to four hours per week getting ready for their next status update meeting. That’s not necessary!

Email standups can revolutionize the way your team communicates and works together. By saving time and reducing the stress of meetings, people will be more productive. By creating digital archives of your progress and promoting transparency, you’re enabling everyone on your team, whether in-office or remote, to see the bigger picture of your company and its future.

P.S. If you liked this article, you should subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll email you a daily blog post with actionable and unconventional advice on how to work better.

The Definitive Guide to Google Snippets

I knew nothing about Google Snippets before I moved to Silicon Valley. But when I was out there, I kept hearing that successful company after company — like Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Buzzfeed and more — used the snippets system to power a flat and decentralized management structure, enabling autonomy, transparency, and happiness in the company.

This guide tells everything you need to know about Google snippets, from its inception at Google to how it’s used at top tech companies today. You’ll learn why snippets is so useful and how to get snippets going in your own company.

If you’re interested in using iDoneThis for snippets, just go to idonethis.com. We’d love to hear what you think about snippets and our guide at @idonethis.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret
2. How Snippets Enables Flat Management
   1. The Art of Getting Stuff Done Without Bossing Around
   2. Case Study: How Shopify Crowdsources Its Company Bonuses
   3. Case Study: Non-Hierarchical Feedback at Foursquare
3. Do Away with Meetings and Standups by Working Asynchronously
   1. Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Software
   2. Case Study: SourceNinja
   3. Case Study: Crashlytics
   4. Case Study: BuzzFeed
   5. Case Study: Remote teams, WooThemes
4. The Power of Tracking Your Progress
   1. The Progress Principle — How Recognizing Small Wins Drives Growth
   2. Case Study: Reddit
5. Why You Should Build a Transparent Company
   1. Case Study: Qualtrics
   2. Case Study: How Transparency Drives Buffer’s Remote Team

1. Introduction: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

The wonder of Silicon Valley has been its rich history of producing incredibly capital efficient companies operating at massive scale. No doubt part of that achievement lies in the capital efficiency of software engineering itself, where technology gives incredible leverage to create and disrupt established industries. Nevertheless, as a company scales, individual engineers need to work together in concert, which results in the industry-agnostic problem of people management.

Unique from other industries, Silicon Valley’s natural inclination isn’t simply to find an individual solution to people management but to create a scalable management model. Of course, technology is the natural place to turn.

During Google’s growth stage, Larry Schwimmer, an early software engineer, stumbled upon a solution that was deceptively simple, but it’s one that persists to this day at Google and has spread throughout the Valley. In his system called Google Snippets, employees receive a weekly email asking them to write down what they did last week and what they plan to do in the upcoming week. Replies get compiled in a public space and distributed automatically the following day by email.

A number of the top Silicon Valley startups have similar processes. At Facebook, they have a system called Colbert where weekly check-ins are logged. Square employees send their weekly snippets directly to the COO Keith Rabois.  The elite engineering shop Palantir requires a weekly email to managers detailing what got done last week and what’s planned for the upcoming week.

The Google Snippets process at any scale is a compelling productivity solution, and companies of all sizes have adopted it — and some, like SV Angel, rich in Google DNA, do daily snippets. The process forces employees to reflect and to jot out a forward-looking plan for getting stuff done, all while requiring a minimal disruption in the employee’s actual work.

Setting aside time on a daily or weekly basis to reflect on the day is a powerful productivity hack.  In The Progress Principle, Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer showed the counterintuitive conclusion that progress toward a meaningful goal is the #1 motivator for employees at work, not financial motivation or downward pressure. Professor Amabile prescribes 5 minutes per day of reflection, religiously protected by bosses, centered around the progress and the setbacks of the day. Simply put, employees connected to their work and its progress are happier and more productive.

On the flip side, Google Snippets works because it’s minimally disruptive to employee flow, working asynchronously and without facetime. This allows for a maker schedule — large blocks of time dedicated to concentrated progress on work — rather than breaking up an engineer’s day into a manager’s schedule to suit a manager’s needs. At Palantir, they do email snippets because they have a very strong culture against meetings. In addition, email as an interface avoids the issues with, for instance, CRMs, where employees spend valuable time logging into a system and entering highly structured information or they don’t use it at all.

Google turned periodic email updates as a process into a scalable management solution, leveraging technology, through automation, data storage and data retrieval. An individual’s Snippets are transparent across the organization and are linked to an individual’s internal resume in its MOMA system which connects individual employees to the work of team members and others within the company. It can kill political squabbles, the core problem of people management, by providing a record of what’s been done.

Put differently, Google Snippets is a management process that scales because transparency means that individual engineers can manage themselves and individual engineers can manage each other without having to go through a middleman. It’s the disruptive power of peer-to-peer management centered around atomic units of work.

Silicon Valley’s focus of work around the work itself is still an ongoing competitive advantage. Being work-centric means focusing manically on how to formulate process to eliminate all the cruft. Most engineers at Google, Zynga, Palantir, Square, etc. do often end up finding the process of Google Snippets and OKRs (objectives and key results)  to be annoying and unnecessary. At the same time, many of them admit that they were their most productive when they closely tracked their Snippets and OKRs and that much of the autonomy and freedom that’s characteristic of top software engineering shops in the Valley could be attributed to Google Snippets doing its work of people management, in silence.

2. How Snippets Enables Flat Management

Flat management is a massive trend in Silicon Valley. It gives autonomy to employees to do the work, and that’s a powerful driver of productivity and happiness at work.

Snippets is an important part of a set of practices that help make flat management and self-organized teams work in companies. In this chapter, we take a look at how top tech companies empower individuals to manage themselves and get stuff done.

2.1. The Art of Getting Stuff Done Without Bossing People Around

The availability of seed-stage funding today means that there are a ton of first-time entrepreneurs out there assembling teams and building companies without any experience running a team or managing people.  Building a team in this environment is especially difficult because funded companies typically grow teams prior to sustainability or product-market fit. It’s hard to steer the team in the right direction when you yourself don’t quite know what to build.

Naval Ravikant at AngelList has blogged about “Building a team that creates value while you sleep,” describing his assembled team as “self-managing people who ship code.” Naval calls this peer management: one person per project (with help from others as needed), no middle managers, and individual choice on what to work on using accountability is the rudder. In his words: “Promise what you’ll do in the coming week on internal Yammer. Deliver – or publicly break your promise – next week.”

As work gets automated and outsourced, self-directed, creative work is required in ever-increasing degree.  Peer management not only makes us more efficient, but it builds a workplace that enables — as Dan Pink describes — autonomy, mastery, and purpose that makes work fulfilling and joyful.

At iDoneThis, we’ve seen peer management as an effective approach to take for the young startup CEO. We’ve worked closely with many first­-time entrepreneurs like Danny Wen at Harvest and Tobi Lütke at Shopify who have succeeded in building unique, quirky, and profitable companies by empowering individuals at their companies to manage themselves and each other to build out great products exceeding a high standard of excellence. Here is how snippets enables effective peer management and other keys to building a flat management culture in your company.

Individual Data Tracking with Snippets

“If you don’t communicate with someone you shouldn’t assume you know what they are thinking.*” When individuals are CEOs of objectives, goals, and projects, they need a way of measuring the intermediate progress and activity of themselves and their peers. As with the quantified self movement, tracking progress — writing it down — leads to reflection, knowledge, and betterment.

In old-school, hierarchical companies, information that passed down to employees or up to executives had to travel through middle managers and that created a single-point of failure anti-pattern. You had to rely on your manager to get information and also to market your accomplishments upward to upper management and the executive team.

Where individuals manage themselves and each other in a peer management environment, it’s vitally important that everyone gets the requisite information flow they need to do their jobs and that they have channels to market their own accomplishments and results.

Google snippets is an example not of Big Brother monitoring, but of empowering individuals to see everything that’s happening in the company so that they can find their niche in the company and contribute. The power of snippets is in gathering data to demystify the black box of the notoriously fuzzy production process — in which raw material turns into output with the application of labor — and makes progress possible to measure, analyze, and recognize. It makes sense then that peer management environments tend towards transparency, meritocracy, and individual professional fulfillment.

Systemized Accountability with OKRs

Skillshare uses a system called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to systemize accountability. Every individual is responsible for company objectives, which are broken into measurable bites in the form of key results, resulting in alignment within and accountability throughout the team. At the end of every week, month, and quarter, individuals measure themselves against their OKRs to evaluate performance.

OKRs have a rich history in building great tech companies, going back to Andy Grove at Intel in the 1980s and what he called “Management by Objective.” Drawing a fundamental distinction between output and activity, Grove’s use of the word “objective” involves dual meanings. Output is both the objective and something that’s objectively measurable, while activity is a black box. An engineer at heart, management by objective was Grove’s way of bringing scientific and engineering principles to management.

OKRs have since been embraced by tech giants like Google and Zynga and spread throughout the Valley and to the broader tech world. At Salesforce, they do V2MOMs (vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measurement); at Yammer, they do MORPHs (mission, objectives, results, people, and how did you do); others use KPIs (key performance indicators). While the acronyms may vary, the general principles hold true.

Ex-Googlers have even offered examples of the OKRs written at Google. These easy-to-use templates show that OKRs can be written simply and still be just as effective: you just need to define an objective and three key results. Most tasks can be broken down this way, even the most complex.

Every individual has one objective, and they are the CEO of that objective, entrusted with authority and accountability for their objective and the key results necessary to get there.

Fit as a Deal Breaker in Hiring

In company cultures of extremely high personal autonomy, fit is paramount because it reduces friction in every interaction.

While fit can be tested by hiring a candidate first as a contractor, fit often amounts to guesswork based on intuition and impression during interviews.

Collaboration between the hiring manager and the recruiting team can alleviate some of these problems. Netflix, Apple, and Facebook all have a strong tradition of collaboration and debate between those doing the hiring and those who have to work with the new recruit, and they believe it helps reduce turnover and improve fit.

Fit is about an ever­-solidifying sense of self as much as it is about bringing on like­-minded people, and that sense spawns canonical stories and processes. Carwoo is a company that’s a little weird, so they ask every interviewee how weird she thinks she is on a scale of 1 to 5. There is a right answer. 3­-4 is the sweet spot ­­a weird person who is self-­aware.

Wistia is a company that highly values its culture and the unique identity it has built. Co-founder and CEO Chris Savage finds that combination of autonomy, culture, and fit becomes “a competitive advantage.” As Wistia hires more people, “the culture of the company should get stronger because we’re hiring for values that the company believes in, and people with those values should make it stronger.”

He also went on to say that “the force with the greatest impact on company culture is hiring.”

And remember, too, that the onboarding process is just as important as the initial hiring process. This where the rubber hits the road, where the company and the employee finally begin to understand each other. Communication during the onboarding process is just as important, if not more important, than the initial hiring process.

2.2. Case Study: Non-Hierarchical Feedback at Foursquare

Most corporate reporting systems force underlings to report up to management and executives. That made sense in the command-and-control management framework, but it’s totally out of date in the flat, decentralized way nimble tech startups are organized.

Because snippets asks everyone to account for what they’re working on, it’s a system that’s unique in that it flips the way company reporting is typically organized. Instead of employees only reporting to managers, managers report to employees as well. When Dennis Crowley, co-founder and CEO of Foursquare sends out his snippets, he’s reporting to the team as any other member of the team would:

When I send out mine, the first heading is, “Things I’m Psyched About,” and the next is, “Things That I’m Not So Psyched About” or “Things I’m Stressed About.” The next thing is usually a quote of the week — something I heard from one of our investors or maybe overheard from an employee — and then I have my snippets below that.

In response to his snippets, employees will send him feedback on how he can improve, which inverts the typical reporting-into-feedback power dynamic. “I get a lot of feedback from employees,” Crowley says. “It only takes them a minute or two to read, and it’s like a bird’s-eye view of what I think is going well at the company and areas where I think we could improve.”

2.3. Case Study: How Shopify Crowdsources Its Company Bonuses

I’m sure we’ve all worked at companies where the loudest guy gets the biggest bonus. In most companies, compensation is determined by a cabal of execs — people you may never have met — evaluating work that happened up to a whole year ago. Bonus compensation ends up being a function of politics, not performance.

Only 14% of employees feel that the performance reviews upon which bonus compensation is based actually help them improve, according to Gallup. When you add in that only 45% of HR leaders think annual performance reviews are an accurate appraisal of an employee’s performance, and 63% of employees feel they don’t get enough praise, we find that no one in any part of the performance review pipeline is getting the results they want.

Incredibly, despite widespread recognition of its failure, a recent Wall Street Journal article found that 99% of companies still go through the process of ritualized demotivation.

At Shopify, an e-commerce software startup,  they’ve reinvented the process and turned bonus compensation on its head. They distribute bonuses every month — not once a year — and that compensation is determined by peers, not by the management team on high.

Shopify crowdsources their company bonuses.

We spent a week with Shopify at their headquarters in Ottawa, Canada, after the company began using snippets via iDoneThis. We learned that their use of iDoneThis was a small part of a bigger philosophy — to put power in the hands of employees, the ones closest to the ground, to make consequential decisions, crowdsource business intelligence, and build their own unique company culture.

To crowdsource company bonuses, the Shopify team built their own internal system called Unicorn.  Here’s how it works.

When Serena does something awesome, Daniel gives her thanks by going into Unicorn, logging her accomplishment, and giving her one, two or three unicorns.  Everyone in the company sees Serena’s plaudits and can pile on more unicorns if they agree that she did an awesome job.

At the end of month, every employee in Shopify gets allocated a proportion of the company’s profits that are set aside for Unicorn bonuses. Daniel’s allocation goes to Serena and anyone else to whom he’s given unicorns over the course of the month. In other words, Serena’s bonus is determined by the gratitude of her peers for a job well done.

Whereas traditional bonus compensation schemes assume that management knows employee performance better than employees themselves, Shopify’s system seeks the wisdom of the crowd to determine who the top performers are.  The upshot is that Unicorn isn’t merely an administrative tool that doles out bonuses, it’s a business intelligence platform for employee performance.

It’s the difference between management hindsight on the one hand and data and genuine insight on the other. CEO Tobi Lütke told me that Unicorn discovered top performers among employees who might otherwise have been overshadowed by more charismatic colleagues.

Snippets makes all of this possible, because it’s the place where employees learn what their fellow employees are getting done in the company. They put those dones into Unicorn, which is the starting point for sharing recognition and crowdsourcing bonuses.

Perhaps the most amazing fact of Unicorn is that Shopify has transformed the process of workplace feedback, performance evaluation, and compensation from a source of fear and dread into a fun way to recognize a colleague’s good work. The power of crowdsourcing is that it can take a back office function like traditional HR and put it into the hands of every person in the company. The result is that Shopify’s culture of performance, gratitude, and quirkiness is baked into everyday life at the company.

3. Do Away with Meetings and Standups by Working Asynchronously

To Zach Holman, early employee at GitHub, one of the best parts of working at GitHub and a reason for its massive success is that they work asynchronously. The reason why working asynchronously is so effective, is because it empowers people to get stuff done, not have to address distractions and requests for time from managers and colleagues.

It turns out that working asynchronously and ruthlessly cutting out synchronous meetings is a hallmark of top tech companies, and here’s why.

3.1. Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Software

Business software’s increasing focus on real-time collaboration, activity streams and consumerization threatens what Paul Graham called the “maker’s schedule” in the workplace. Makers need long blocks of uninterrupted time to concentrate on ambitious, creative work. The result of always-on availability, random notification, and constant information deluge is a work mode of interruption-driven multitasking that’s antithetical to a maker’s needs.

Digital connectivity empowers managers to collaborate with makers in creating, but without regard to when. Because modern collaboration tools flow so neatly within their kind of schedule, managers often don’t realize the costs to the maker. At iDoneThis, we use a bunch of awesome collaborative tools including Asana, Github, Hipchat, Hackpad, Google Hangouts, and Trello, and we’ve observed how those tools can disrupt a maker’s schedule.

For instance, in Github, we noticed that creating a bug ticket and assigning it to someone will often result in that person switching tasks to kill the bug, regardless of its urgency or assigned priority level — all because the ticket assignment triggers an email notification. We decided to avoid assigning tickets during work hours unless the ticket needs to be resolved immediately. Similarly, Asana’s comment threads are a great way to discuss projects and action items, but we try to batch these toward the end of the day. Otherwise, email notifications of comments get triggered and they disrupt and add to the multitasking that pulls your full attention away from the task at hand.

Group chat is important for our distributed team, but we saw how a scrolling chat format can be a visual distraction and group chat can devolve into one long, endless meeting. So instead, we have quiet time during the day when we work away from chat in order to focus without interruption.

In contrast, snippets offers a quieter frequency for non-urgent, unstructured communication at work. We’ve found that having such a communication channel is essential to creating a bubble that protects and enhances maker’s schedule without sacrificing open and transparent communication within a company. Pesky status updates aren’t randomly interspersed throughout your day, they occur on a rhythm that bookends the day — reflect and jot down your dones in the evening and scan your morning digest to get up to speed.

Your snippets become the place for recording the reflective thought that’s vital to evaluation and improvement but often gets ignored in the hustle and bustle. A valuable repository of nuggets of learnings, notes, emotions, appreciation, and thanks build up, bit by bit. You can record any non-urgent communication during the day, and you know that you won’t be bothering anyone with it — they’ll see it the next morning when they’re sipping a cup of coffee.

We’ve learned that this type of asynchronous, thoughtful channel for communication is extremely useful in replacing the meetings and standups that can interrupt our flow and are generally extremely inefficient.

What’s at stake in developing business collaboration software is building and reinventing the modern office into the type of place we’d all like to work in. For us, that means ensuring alone time, maker’s schedule, and the quiet time we need to do our best, most fulfilling work.

3.2. Case Study: How Sourceninja Gets an Extra 7 Hours of Productivity Every Week

Sourceninja is worry-free open source management made simple. To explain how they find snippets useful, they told us an early lesson they learned from an early investor, Thomas Korte.

What Korte impressed upon us was to maximize every minute of every meeting, because time spent in meetings has a multiplier effect. Every meeting costs the number of minutes it takes multiplied by the number of people in the meeting.

For the Sourceninja team, this used to mean 20 minute standups for their four-member team on a daily basis. 20 minutes five days a week for four people multiplies out to close to 7 hours per week spent in their daily standup.

The guys at Sourceninja have found snippets to be a huge a time-saving tool. Instead of spending time in meetings, they’re getting stuff done.  Brett, one of Sourceninja’s founders, told me that using iDoneThis for snippets is “the easiest method I’ve found to have open communication in a team.”

Brett and his co-founder Matt have been around the block. They worked together at PGP, a startup, and stayed together through PGP’s acquisition by Symantec, the largest maker of computer security software. They’ve gone through many different companies’ attempts at solving the hard problem of communication: how do you stay focused and communicate what you’re doing? Besides standups, they’ve used wikis, sat in other kinds of meetings, and written weekly email rollups.

Snippets succeeds where other methods have failed, because it gives visibility into the entire company and provides a record of everything that’s getting done, but it doesn’t force people to waste time listening to information that’s irrelevant to them. They’ve used those extra 7 man hours every week to make incredible progress.

3.3.  Case Study: How Crashlytics Doubled Its Headcount in 6 Months

The Twitter-acquired company Crashlytics provides real-time crash reporting for mobile apps, down to the exact line of code that caused the crash. Current mobile performance management options run thin due to a knowledge gap that arises after somebody downloads an app. Engineering director Rich Paret recounts, “When [our] founders talked to developers about what they were doing to manage the quality of the stuff once it hit the app store, we found out that some software companies were paying an engineer to read the reviews in the app store. Any review that was under 3 stars, they would try to reverse-engineer from the reviewer’s comment what was wrong with the app. That’s a crazy sort of situation to be in.”

With Crashlytics, developers are no longer blind to how their mobile apps are performing in the wild. It has been so successful at doing this that it powers many top apps like Yelp, OpenTable, HBO, PayPal, and Square, and is deployed on hundreds of millions of devices.

In its earlier days, the Cambridge-based startup doubled in size in six months, and with the sudden growth, the Crashlytics team wanted to avoid the problem of what Rich calls “islands of information,” where some people know certain bits while others don’t know what’s going on. So instead of daily standups which can get unwieldy, Rich thought using snippets would fit the bill for making sure that “everybody is aware of what’s going on, in a lightweight way.”

Experienced in thinking about, building, and managing great collaborative teams, Rich tells us about the challenges of having to pay coordination costs as groups scale up. “Investing in the right tools and taking advantage of things like iDoneThis allow me to pay a lower coordinating cost than I would otherwise have to at this stage.” In turn, Rich has observed “a general awareness of what’s going on, how things are going, that sometimes you don’t get at a startup that’s growing this fast.”

Rich emphasizes recruiting people who are both self-directed and collaborative and plugging in tools for them to work that way. “Then you could step back, I don’t need to be mediating every relationship, I don’t need to be scheduling a meeting to make sure everybody is talking. We use iDoneThis as a tool to encourage the behavior that I want to see and that I’ve hired for.”

Crashlytics is gung-ho about building awesome solutions for developers, who “have a lot of pain and a lot of need,” to help them spend “more time on doing things that matter, like building new features, and differentiating their product in the marketplace.” Snippets similarly provides a way for Crashlytics to spend more time on doing things that matter, serving as “a good base layer, sort of substrate for a bunch of collaboration and communication that might not otherwise happen,” Rich comments. “It makes it easy to focus on the work but also stay in sync.”

3.4. Case Study: Buzzfeed’s Kismet Engine

People often hold this ideal about how great work gets done through serendipity, as if brains to stumble upon each other like characters in a romantic comedy. More often, the spark happens when we create the conditions for it to do so. If you really want lightning to strike, you don’t just mosey along empty-handed, you go out there with a lightning rod.

Jon Steinberg, former president and COO of Buzzfeed and current CEO of Cheddar, found his lightning rod system, what he calls his “kismet engine.” That fateful engine is Snippets.

How Snippets worked at Buzzfeed is this: employees send Jon a weekly email by the end of the workday on Friday identifying what they’ve been working on and what they need help with. Everyone can also subscribe to each others’ snippets. As for Jon, he reads his compiled snippets over the weekend and then responds with feedback and questions.

He explains, this makes it possible to “connect dots and people on things I wouldn’t otherwise know about.” Voilà, facilitated kismet.

With Snippets showing Jon and the growing team at Buzzfeed where all the dots are, they get a sense of the layers of individual details and multitudes of dots that help create the big impressionistic picture. The result is that:

“Snippets … forces me to review my week and tell the whole company what my contributions and challenges were for the week. Some weeks it feels great, other weeks not so much. On the weeks it feels disappointing, it’s a great forcing function to prioritize and focus.”

Depending on what’s going on, that kind of transparency may show you something wonderful or ugly or what’s sticking out. Getting a view of the picture’s composition is revealing and full of insight. And it’s a good deal better than the alternative of merely having a random, vague sense of what’s going on, only seeing some percentage of the whole.

This kind of process is essential given how — as Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, suggests with great wisdom — “if you don’t take the time to think proactively you will increasingly find yourself reacting to your environment rather than influencing it.” Oftentimes, in the workplace, we don’t take time to think, reflect, and situate ourselves. The ironic thing is that thinking — no matter how proactive it is — looks like you’re doing nothing. And maybe this explains people’s reluctance to put reflection and review into real, meaningful practice.

Yet embracing that appearance of doing nothing and taking the time to think is integral, psychiatrist T. Byram Karasu *explains, “for previously unrelated thoughts and feelings to interact, to regroup themselves into new formations and combinations, and thus to bring harmony to the mind.” And tuning in, Dr. Karasu says, ultimately creates rather than takes away, because you build a better sense of reciprocation.

By being in touch with the internal, you establish links with the external world. Tuning in, not just on an individual but team and company level, is how you connect, sync, and plan, enable kismet instead of waiting for lightning, influence rather than react.

 3.5. Case Study: How WooThemes Makes Distributed Team Culture Succeed

The multi-million dollar company WooThemes started with a single email, as a small side project of Magnus Jepson in Stavanger, Norway, Adii Pienaar in Cape Town and Mark Forrester, then in London.

From that one email sprouted a bootstrapped company that produces a rich catalog of WordPress themes and plugins, serving over 450,000 users. And this impressive success emerges from a distributed team of only thirty people, spanning seven countries.

Making Distributed Culture Work

Sustaining the company’s remote roots was a natural but conscious decision by the founders. “We wanted to make sure that the business was built around our lifestyles, rather than dictate our lifestyles,” explains co-founder Mark Forrester.

Ten employees work in the Cape Town office but there are no location requirements. Mark appreciates the advantage of going borderless: “Being able to pick the cream of the crop from anywhere in the world is hugely beneficial.”

Indeed, WooThemes’s hiring tactics tackle the accountability challenges of remote working by giving precedence to personality and fit before ability to ensure that the cream of the crop stays at the top in its environment of trust and enthusiasm. Mark reports, “The culture is to have lots of fun with what we’re doing and to employ people passionate about WordPress and content publishing. A strong attitude and desire to share in our success is more important to us than experience and aptitude.”

An integral part of that fun, passionate culture is the annual WooTrip —  to destinations like the Austrian Alps and to WordCamp in the Netherlands — to meet, socialize, and cement a sense of cohesion. Mark comments, “Even though we’re all over the place, we like everyone to feel like they’re a part of a small team.”

Overcoming Growing Pains

Especially after the launch of WooCommerce, an e-commerce engine, eighteen months ago, WooThemes expanded rapidly. The company faced its growing pains by wielding its approach of continual improvement and streamlining. Operating in accordance with agile and lean principles, WooThemes settled on its current toolbox of WordPress theme P2 “for the chitter-chatter” and Trello to track projects.

“We place heavy emphasis on keeping the team small and trying to have our systems running as efficiently as possible,” Mark says, “which is why we’re using applications like iDoneThis. It helps us strategically in figuring out our effectiveness as a team and whether we’re making the best use of our team members’ time without micromanaging them. It also helps us get to know our staff more personally to see their work habits and their day-to-day tasks.”

In fact, WooThemes had attempted minute-by-minute tracking but quickly felt it wasn’t true to their ethos of trust. With Skype simply not working as a team-wide communication tool at this size, WooThemes turned to snippets via iDoneThis to keep abreast of exciting developments on its multiple ongoing projects. Plus, it serves as a gentle way to check in: “If someone’s out for half the day and we can’t find them on Skype, at the end of the day, we can see that they had to run out to do some errands.”

The Transparency Advantage

A company built on trust demands transparency. While WooThemes sets clear expectations that visibility into performance keeps the company running smoothly, its team embraces those values in using snippets. “It’s best if they leave that sort of cookie trail for us to see how effective they have been,” Mark explains. “Seeing it’s so easy to submit your daily reports by email, people do it every day. Even though it’s not a requirement, they realize the benefit to them.”

The street of accountability goes both ways, with the co-founders sharing what they’re doing every day as well. Encouraging open circulation of knowledge is especially essential for distributed companies. Now, according to Mark, “people are more informed of the day-to-day tasks. Previously emails had been on more of a global scale — what we’re working on as a team and not seeing what each of us is doing individually. Keeping everyone on the loop with a transparent communication tool is where we found the real benefit of iDoneThis.”

WooTheme’s commitment to transparency carries through from its inner workings to its relationship with its customers. “We’ve learned to be completely transparent with our customers. So we use our blog extensively to communicate with our users on what we’re doing, where we’re failing, and how we can improve.” Mark says. With that openness to customer feedback and conversation, WooThemes is making strides as a company that lets its customers into its process, decision-making, and product.

4. The Power of Tracking Your Progress

You can’t improve what you don’t track. Many companies often don’t have a culture of writing things down and tracking them, and they pay the price in lost information, the inability to analyze the data and come up with a plan to improve, and failed team communication.

4.1. The Progress Principle — How Recognizing Small Wins Drives Growth

Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer wrote a whole book about the secret to happiness and motivation at work called The Progress Principle.

They found that a massive 95% of managers are wrong about what the most powerful motivator for employees at work. It’s not financial incentive or stress. The number one driver of a positive inner work life, the key to motivated, engaged, and productive employees, is making progress on meaningful work, even if that progress is a small win.

In a classic 99U conference talk, Professor Amabile shared the best way to achieve those small wins and leverage the progress principle in our daily lives: keeping a work diary — which is essentially what snippets is. We’re so pleased that she suggested using iDoneThis as an online work diary tool, basically Google snippets but for each individual, and we thought we’d break down how snippets contributes to the four benefits of keeping a work diary she identifies:

1. Capture progress that may have been lost in a busy workday and celebrate the small wins.

Professor Amabile notes that even on frustrating, seemingly unproductive days, you can almost always find one thing on which you made progress. Note it. Celebrate it. “This is the best way to leverage the progress principle,” Professor Amabile says. Next stop: more awesomeness.

Snippets via iDoneThis helps you see your workday through the lens of accomplishment because it asks, “What’d you get done today?” In taking a moment to reflect on this question, you make a habit out of focusing on the progress you made and your wins, however small. Writing and recording wins in your snippets is a quiet affirmation and celebration.

2.  Plan next steps, think things through, and overcome setbacks.

Professor Amabile also suggests using a work diary to consider the causes of setbacks you experience and create a plan of action if a similar problem rears its head again. The Progress Principle encourages learning from negative experiences and counts those valuable lessons toward your overall progress, turning negatives into net positives.

Snippets contributes to such positive growth, because it keeps a record of all your daily doings. You can go back into your log and see what decisions, actions, and efforts led to the setback. In short, you can pinpoint where things started to go wrong. This record gives you the information to form a plan of action to resolve similar setbacks. Down the road, your snippets becomes a map to which you can refer back and see how you overcame obstacles.

3. Nurture your own personal growth and work through difficult events.

In her talk, Professor Amabile provides an example of one engineer struggling through the experience of massive layoffs at her company. While grappling with the stress of watching her team members being laid off and her own uncertainty about the future, the engineer turned to her work diary to center her thoughts. She recognized that because she had no control over her position at the company, instead she would focus on the one thing that she did have control over — her work.

Snippets with iDoneThis is about you, you the captain of your work. It’s not a task-specific or project-oriented tool in that it isn’t interested in micromanaging questions like: “How far did you get on Project X today?” or “What did you do for Team Y?”  No, it asks, “What’d you get done today?”

This is a question that matters when the going gets tough. Your progress is what matters, not that of a particular endeavor. If you need to center yourself and regain control of a situation by focusing on work, iDoneThis allows you to see evidence of your control and progress. If you need to focus on your emotional and cognitive processes, iDoneThis provides an outlet for that as well.

4. Spot patterns in your reactions and behaviors. Identify your greatest strengths and weaknesses.

In The Progress Principle, Professor Amabile recommends asking yourself at the end of each month, “Do I notice trends over time in this journal?  What are the implications?” She also describes how research participants would change their behavior based on recognizing unwarranted and unconstructive behavior patterns.

Patterns of behavior and trends are easy to spot with tools like snippets.  Because snippets records all your entries in an easy-to-read monthly calendar, you can see at a glance the ebb and flow of your inner work life, day to day, week to week, month to month.

5. Find patience.

Professor Amabile adds a bonus benefit to her list of four, noting that keeping a work diary “can help to cultivate patience.“ Why? Because you can always look back and see how you persevered and survived much worse days.

It’s especially true if you’ve kept your work diary with iDoneThis. Every day that you make an entry, you’ll see a blue check mark appear over each calendar day.  Over time, you’ll see from the number of blue checkmarks in your iDoneThis calendar that there are no unproductive days.  Even on the worst days, you achieved accomplishments worthy of note. Don’t believe it? Click on that day and see for yourself. There’s always something in each of your past days to be proud of that contributed to the successes that came later on.

3.2. Case Study: Reddit

Reddit, the popular social content site and community, hands power to the people to decide what’s important and what’s not. Snippets likewise hands the reins to Reddit’s team to use how they see fit.

With the Reddit team scattered, from San Francisco to New York and in between, the challenge may be to get a remote team on the same page. Yet, the main use of snippets for the Reddit team is as a personal record, and then by extension, as a reference for the team.

Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin explains, “We all wear a lot of hats. We’re only about twenty people. All of us do a bunch of different things, so it’s hard for us to jump around. It’s nice to be able to track how that’s going, maybe not what we’re spending time on as much but what we accomplish on any given day.”

So Erik’s team members use snippets as a simple way to keep track of what they have done and what hat they wore that day. It’s not used to check in on people in an oppressive way nor is submitting entries absolutely mandatory. “I don’t want people to wake up and go, oh, I forgot to do my thing, that’s not the point. I don’t want it to be a chore.” The team’s individual spirit extends to the various ways people interact with iDoneThis, whether it’s on the web, e-mail, or phone. “I like how lightweight it is. It’s simple and flexible,” comments Erik who uses the web interface so that he can toggle between his team and personal calendar.

What’s especially useful for the Reddit team is the ability to see real progress. “It’s nice to see what you’ve accomplished especially when a lot of the work we do is vague. It’s not like building something with your hands where you see the progress, so it’s nice to look back and see what you’ve done and what other people have been working on.”

Erik’s team used to have a weekly email thread to keep an eye on people’s progress but it’s difficult to remember that much for that long. Most of us know that five days in a workweek can go by like Dali’s melty clock — that’s pretty hard to capture. Snippets takes care of keeping a record for Erik and his team.

5. Why You Should Build a Transparent Company

To be a leader, trust is paramount, but it’s also the biggest hurdle to overcome. One of the best ways to build trust is through transparency.

Effective peer management relies on individuals having accountability and autonomy, and none of that can happen without trust. People stuck thinking of the traditional hierarchical structure as the gold standard, or even a necessary evil, once a business has aged sufficiently enough to be “established” are buying into a system of a lack of trust, which drives the need to control. Instead, peer management works by entrusting and empowering individuals to control themselves and that can only happen with transparency.

The result is the autonomy, information, and agility to carry out initiatives, and because of that freedom, those initiatives are very often creative and help mold the stand-out success of a company. And it turns out that one of the easiest and most fundamental ways to have transparency in your company is with Google snippets. It shows everyone, from top to bottom, what everyone is getting done in the company.

5.1. Case Study: Qualtrics

In many companies, your manager will know the team’s and company’s objectives, but you won’t. He may keep crucial information from you so that he can consolidate decision-making power.

Not so at Qualtrics, the extraordinary Provo, Utah-based company that did $50M in revenue, raised $70M from elite venture capital firms Sequoia and Accel, turned down a $500M acquisition offer, and grew its headcount to nearly 300 employees in 2012.  At Qualtrics, transparency is perhaps the company’s most important value for one simple and obvious reason—”Nowadays, you’re hiring individuals to think.”

For employees to think for themselves, they need information — and that comes from transparency. At Qualtrics, not only can every employee see the company’s objectives and every employee’s objectives, every employee can also see what every employee has gotten done recently, performance reviews and ratings for all employees, meeting notes from all meetings that have taken place, and even the office’s security camera footage.

We took our best product guy and some of our best engineers and built a system internally to help scale our organization by knowing everyone’s objectives in the company. We have five objectives annually for our company, and everyone goes into the system each quarter to put in their objectives that play into those broader goals.

…

We have another system that sends everyone an e-mail on Monday that says: “What are you going to get done this week? And what did you get done last week that you said you were going to do?” Then that rolls up into one e-mail that the entire organization gets. So if someone’s got a question, they can look at that for an explanation. We share other information, too — every time we have a meeting, we release meeting notes to the organization. When we have a board meeting, we write a letter about it afterward and send it to the organization.

When everyone’s rowing together toward the same objective, it’s extremely powerful. We’re trying to execute at a very high level, and we need to make sure everyone knows where we’re going.

Qualtrics is taking to an extreme what many tech companies have done to eliminate the manager-as-a-single-point-of-failure antipattern of corporate organization.  Transparency gives the power of self-determination to every employee in the organization.

5.2. Case Study: How Transparency Drives Buffer’s Remote Team

Buffer stands out among startups not just for its success in building a great social media sharing tool but in fashioning a company culture focused on making work fulfilling, impactful, and enjoyable. What’s fascinating is that they do this as a completely distributed team, spread across multiple countries and time-zones, powered by radical transparency on everything that’s happening in the company.

Treat People in the Best Way

Co-founders Joel Gasciogne and Leo Widrich set the foundation for Buffer’s culture according to the tenets of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Carolyn Kopprasch, Buffer’s Chief Happiness Officer translates what that means for Buffer’s modus operandi: “We want to treat people in the absolute best way we can, and that includes co-workers, vendors, and customers.”

It also includes how the Buffer employees treat themselves. With a unique self-improvement program, they share their progress on anything from time management to healthy eating with their teammates, spurring conversations about different lifehacks and routines.

Co-workers become a collective accountability partner for future plans like blogging or exercising, and more importantly, they become an incredible support system. Instead of looking askance when you’re doing work to do something to take care of yourself, you receive encouragement. “If you’re trying to work on your health or your fitness or your happiness level, that affects work a lot too,” Carolyn explains.

Work Smarter, Not Harder at Buffer

It’s not surprising then, that one of the company’s mantras is to work smarter, not harder — taking time to review what’s working and how to improve operations. As a remote team, Buffer needed a better way to stay on the same page. Previously, everyone would get on a daily group Skype call in which each person would take three minutes to talk about what they did, how their co-workers could help, and their improvements. With the team growing larger and the standup process proving unwieldy over email, Buffer turned to snippets and iDoneThis.

Leo remarks, “It allows us to track performance, which easily gets lost in a chat room or an in-person standup. If new people come on board, they can look through and see what has been worked on. And of course, it’s amazing to keep in sync with everyone, working as a remote team. iDoneThis is invaluable to us and has changed our productivity for the better.”

Where iDoneThis shines, for Carolyn, is the ability to comment and have chronicled conversations about her teammates’ work and improvement practices. “I think that’s one of the biggest things. It’s not just reporting what we’ve done. It’s asking, ‘oh tell me more about that.’”

Snippets is a natural fit for Buffer’s culture, but Carolyn points out that snippets has helped them to work even smarter. Holding more traditional standups over video chat meant that “if you jump in and talk about something that somebody just said, you’re basically interrupting their three minutes. So what we would actually do is not ask that many questions.” Now the team can communicate asynchronously — asking, commenting, interacting — without feeling like they’re butting in.

Transparency Fosters Tight-Knit Teams

The extreme transparency that Buffer practices in terms of sharing information from sleep habits to how much salary and equity everyone gets is not without feelings of vulnerability. But what they gain is an incredible feeling of connection. In the Buffer universe, where the personal flows right into work and vice versa, it’s their collective care, attention, and support that binds and strengthens the company.

“When somebody will say to me, ‘you didn’t really get very much deep sleep yesterday. Maybe you can try taking a bath before dinner,’ and you’re like, ‘where am I? Am I at work?’” Carolyn laughs. “It’s unique. It takes a certain type of person to really like that, but having a team that’s really interested in keeping you accountable to your own self-improvement is kind of a wild thing. It’s awesome and a little bit crazy sometimes.”

Check out our eBook to learn more about how to track small wins.

Google photo: Carlos Luna

Below is a list of the 15 best productivity podcasts to listen to in 2023

Without further ado, here is our list of the best productivity podcasts that will teach you the tips and tools needed to better manage your time so you can get more done each day.

1. The Tim Ferriss Show

The Tim Ferriss Show has over 600,000,000 downloads making it one of the best productivity podcasts out there. Tim Ferriss is a self-experimenter and entrepreneur, who could probably be dubbed King Productivity himself. His podcast takes an analytical approach to productivity.

Each episode is an interview with a professional in their field. Past interviewees include Jamie Foxx, Marc Andreessen, Malcom Gladwell, and Amanda Palmer. Tim hears their story and then deconstructs what they have to say to give the listener actionable productivity tips in areas like setting routines, time management, and getting more exercise. Recent topics include taming your inner critic, tips for building a morning routine, and the art of setting goals.

Here is where to subscribe:  Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS feed, Overcast, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode:  Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer

2. Optimal Living Daily

Optimal Living Daily  has over 250 million podcast downloads and focuses on personal development and minimalism through productivity. Incorporating productive tactics in your day happens one step at a time, which is what this podcast aims to help you with.

Recent topics on their show include moments when we are stuck in ruts, growing your health support system, tips to curb spending, and digital minimalism, which focuses on the knowledge economy and how you can cultivate your own ability to be distraction free and engage in deep work.

Here is where to subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Recommended by Oprah Daily as one of the Best Motivational Podcasts.

Recommended by Good Housekeeping as one of the best podcasts that will help you live your best life.

Check out their starter packs that are arranged by theme.   

• Mindfulness Starter Pack
• Minimalism Starter Pack
• Productivity Starter Pack
• Improve Your Self-Confidence
• Sticking to New Year’s Resolutions

Top episode:  2047: How to Be Happy – Live in the Moment with a Plan for the Future by Jay Harrington of Life And Whim

3. The Productivity Show

Asian Efficiency’s The Productivity Show, aptly named, is a podcast about time management in every aspect of your life. This podcast has over 9 million downloads and takes everyday tasks and tools and centers them around productivity.

On their blog page, episodes are organized into such categories as journaling, family/parenting, getting things done, and scheduling/calendars. Recent topics include strategies for waking up early, overcoming distractions, all about flow state and the power of focus playlists.

Here is where to subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode: CEO of Brain.fm on High Performance, Focus, Meditation, and Workflows w/ Dan Clark

4. Beyond the To-Do List

Erik Fisher is a social media examiner, who hosts Beyond the To-Do List. Each episode examines the productivity failures of other people and how they overcame their struggle. Examining failure is essential to growth because it offers the perfect platform to learn from.

You’re forced to think about what you shouldn’t do next time. In learning from failure, Fisher will help you choose the right projects, tasks, and goals both in work and in life that will help you move forward in your own journey. Recent topics include managing stress and anxiety, the positive benefits of mindfulness, and the power and skill of listening.

Here is where to subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music | Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode: James Beshara on Caffeine Alternatives for Energy and Productivity

5. TED Radio Hour

Inspiration is at the heart of TED Radio Hour by NPR. This podcast will give you solutions to old problems, and new ways to think and create, as well as cover recent astonishing inventions.

TED Talks relate to personal productivity at the smallest scale and is a great show to listen to when you need that inspiration to keep you moving. Recent topics include the power of breath, revitalize yourself when feeling exhausted and finding happiness.

Here is where to subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, NPR One or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode:  Revitalize

6. The Accidental Creative

Since 2005, The Accidental Creative podcast has had more than 10 million downloads. The podcast offers up tips and interviews from experts on how to stay productive, healthy and creative.

It is hosted by Todd Henry, author of Die Empty, Louder Than Words, and of course, The Accidental Creative.  Episodes are under 30 minutes which gives you just enough time to get some wisdom on your lunch break. Recent topics include re-thinking your rituals, tips for dealing with burnout and how to stay mentally healthy at work.

Here is where to subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode:  Making Work More Effortless (with Greg McKeown)

7. How I Built This

How I Built This is another popular NPR podcast that shares the stories of extremely successful entrepreneurs and innovators and how they arrived at where they are—how they built their product or brand. It puts stories to the brands we all know and love.

Past episodes dive into to the creation stories of Lyft, Warby Parker, Instagram, Patagonia, and Zappos. This podcast will show you exactly how billion dollar brands and the ideas behind them. It will inspire you to act on your own ideas both personally and professionally. Recent interviews are with Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, Numi Organic Tea and Casper.

Here is where to subscribe:  Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode:  Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut

8. Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod

Hal Elrod is a successful author, speaker, and entrepreneur. This podcast is all about empowering and equipping listeners with practical productivity advice. Elrod’s podcast has a more entrepreneurial tone than other general productivity podcasts.

His episodes help listeners strategize in their professional lives to find success in their careers. Recent topics include how to commit to your mission in life, living up to your full potential and how to make any day your best day.

Here is where to subscribe:  Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode:  How To Commit To Your Mission In Life

9. Eat Sleep Work Repeat

This is one of the most popular productivity podcasts.  It sits at #1 on the Apple Business Podcast Chart and has over 250,000 streams per month. 

The host, Bruce Daisley, conducts interviews with experts in psychology and neuroscience, in the hopes of understanding how everyone can improve their jobs.  Recent topics include politics in the workplace, how to better human connection and how to disagree better at work.

Here is where to subscribe:  Apple Podcasts, Acast, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode: This 12 Year Old Wrote A Novel…What’s Your Excuse?

10. The Startup Chat

The Startup Chat is hosted by B2B and SaaS gurus Hiten Shah and Steli Efti. They’ll help you cut through the noise when it comes to managing and running a startup by giving you actionable tips and insights into how you can solve common problems.

Their chats will help your company boost productivity in your processes and as new hurdles come up every week. Recent topics include how to manage remote teams, customer acquisition tips, sales hiring tips and more.

Here is where to subscribe:  Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode: Inbox Insanity? Archive All Your Emails Now!

11. The 5AM Miracle

The 5AM Miracle is a podcast dedicated entirely to dominating your morning before breakfast. I think anyone can agree that there just aren’t enough hours in the day to maintain a healthy work/life balance.

This podcast  with over 10 million downloads, will teach you life long habits and new ways to start your day early and with enthusiasm, even at 5am. Host Jeff Sanders will stock you up with sleep and health productivity tips so you can get the most hours out of your day. Recent topics include high performance communication, rediscovering joy in your life and how to rejuvenate your creativity.

Here is where to subscribe:  Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Google Podcasts, Android or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode:  Sabbaticals, Creative Rejuvenation, and New Directions

12. The Productive Woman

The Productive Woman podcast is designed specifically for busy women to help them manage their time, lives and stress better. Host Laura McClellen is a writer and lawyer who has always loved connecting with other women in managing their family and professional lives. Recent topics include simple ways to manage your to-do list, prioritizing your passions and productive living.

Here is where to subscribe:  Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode: Simple Way to Manage To-Dos

13. The Biz Chix Podcast

Biz Chix is a fun productivity podcast for women who are looking to grow in their professional lives. Their podcast contains interviews with female entrepreneurs (and some men), who share their strategies in work/life balance and their experiences as women in startup culture.

They range in having backgrounds from tech to brick and mortar, so there’s productivity advice for every kind of female entrepreneur. Recent topics include tips for stepping into a leadership role, rebranding your business and how to discuss career planning with your team.

Here is where to subscribe:  Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode: SYT 168: The Easiest Weekly Team Report EVER

14.  Productivityist

A productivity podcast favorite, Productivityist is a half hour weekly podcast led by Mike Vardy.  His company was built around the idea of how more focus can be provided to your day.   to help you with providing more focus to your day.

His company has been mentioned by Fast Company and Lifehacker for its actionable tips and useful tools. Not bad for a half hour weekly podcast.  Recent episodes include how to to rock the self employed life, how to help your brand evolve and what are the best ways to use your time.

Here is where to subscribe:  Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Best episode: Hypnosis and Being Productively Present with Erika Flint

15. Back To Work

If you are looking to improve your work habits, the Back To Work podcast is for you. Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin run this award-winning weekly podcast and they cover everything from communication to productivity.

Here is where to subscribe:  Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top episode: You’re Sad Wrong

Want to know more about the science behind productivity?  Check out this video.

If you liked this article — or any of the podcasts we just described — you just might love all of the premium features in I Done This. Click here to learn more.

We all understand that micromanaging your employees isn’t good for anyone, but when you’re used to being involved in everything, it can be hard to let go. It gets easier as you hire great people and implement sound processes—watching your company grow without your fingerprint on everything is a beautiful thing.

Perspective helps too.

“As a recovering perfectionist, I know how hard it is to hand over control,” writes Million Dollar Women author Julia Pimsleur on her blog. It feels good to know that other entrepreneurs struggle with the same challenges that I do. But something Julia said in that post really resonated with the way we run I Done This and how we hope others use I Done This in their own businesses.

“Trust, but verify.” Give people room to get things done without looking over their shoulder, but do make sure to double-check the work.

Finding that balance is hard in any environment, but doubly so for remote teams. Interestingly, a number of companies have turned to I Done This to help solve this exact problem.

TripAdvisor VP Luc Levesque is a perfect example. He manages a team that works across three offices. Instead of calling or emailing everyone for status updates, everyone provides passive status reports in their daily I Done This updates. With this simple management tool, Luc can easily trust that the work is getting done without his team feeling like someone is watching over their shoulder.

“I frankly give people more freedom in terms of not having to talk to me every day,” he says. “They can run their things and execute towards their goals. If I see there’s something that’s not being worked on, we can sync up better.”

Balancing Autonomy and Oversight

A little basic psychology explains why it’s so important for managers to give their employees the freedom to do their work. Cal Newport introduced to me to Self-Determination Theory, an idea that has been researched and validated for decades. It says that to be happy at work, people need just three things.

• • Autonomy: control over how they manage their time;
  • Competence: the opportunity to master their skill, and;
  • Relatedness: “a feeling of connection to others.”

Trust, but verify as a management tool supports the Self-Determination Theory in two key ways.

Trust = Autonomy

Allowing people the freedom to do their work makes it easier for them to complete the work and feel satisfied with it. Happy employees have ownership of their work.

Verify = Relatedness and Competence

Done well, verifying your team’s work is an opportunity for constructive feedback and growth. Everyone moves forward when managers push their employees to do great work and offer helpful feedback on their progress.

As everyone gets more comfortable with the process, job satisfaction and the quality of work increases, while the temptation to micromanage decreases.

It’s important to remember that, in this case, trust isn’t useful without verification. Complete autonomy creates an environment where people are working without context. All spokes need a hub.

Professor Claus Langfred makes this point clear in his survey of MBA students at Washington University. He discovered that when team members trusted each other too much, the quality of the work suffered.

[Langfred] found that when these team members trusted each other, they tended not to monitor one another much. As a result, they had relatively low awareness of each other’s activities, which affected performance, probably by hampering processes and coordination.

Management is both art and science. It takes practice to achieve the right balance. Here are a few suggestions from our own experience to help along the way.

How to Implement “Trust, But Verify” as a Crucial Management Tool

You’re probably already using some variation on these ideas to manage projects and team members. Hopefully these three suggestions can help crystallize a process that is working really well at a lot of companies, ours included.

Use Work Logs to Verify Passively

Imagine calling every team member at the end of their day to find out what they accomplished. This might check the “verification” box, but it’s a waste of your time. Perhaps more importantly, it would place undue stress on your employees.

We built I Done This to enable passive verification. When each employee records their work for the day, it’s extremely easy to keep tabs on it without singling anyone out.

More often than not, however, companies have the opposite problem. Islands of information form. People start to lose track of what projects are important and what needs to be done to finish them. Without a system in place to collect all this information, it’s easy to get off track.

“Everyday coordination costs have the potential to get worse and worse as the team scales up,” says Twitter Senior Director of Engineering Rich Paret. His team saves on these costs by investing in tools that enable passive, asynchronous communication. Finding information and checking in with employees is often a distraction from the real work that drives growth. Passive verification, a friction-free way of communicating proves to be an excellent management tool.

Default to Transparency

“Transparency breeds trust,” writes Buffer founder Joel Gascoigne. “And trust is the foundation of great teamwork.”

His team shares everything to ensure that the company can move at a fast pace and each employee is armed with the information and context they need to do their job.

Instead of singling out employees who aren’t doing their best work, consider asking everyone to share information on their work in a place where everyone can see it. Asking just one employee to update you on their work could make them resent you. This avoids that problem while also giving you insight into how your best employees get their work done. There’s so much to learn from both ends of the spectrum.

Michelle Sun, formerly of Buffer’s growth and analytics team, says that the transparency makes her “feel connected with the team.” That ticks the “relatedness” checkbox from the Self-Determination Theory we talked about earlier. If transparency moves people closer to autonomy and relatedness, the question becomes: why wouldn’t you share your work with the whole team?

Offer Constructive Feedback

As you verify your employees’ work, you will inevitably find that some just isn’t up to par. Giving constructive feedback is perhaps the most difficult part of making the “Trust, But Verify” model work effectively.

At the same time, this presents a great opportunity for growth. The third component of job satisfaction is competence, defined as the opportunity to master a skill. No one masters a skill alone, so the opportunity to help an employee improve their work helps them achieve satisfaction in their work.

If you discover an issue that needs to be addressed, don’t avoid it. A conflict avoidance cycle (PDF) is a dangerous and difficult environment to navigate.

Source: Lulofts, Roxanne S., and Dudley D. Cahn, Conflict: From Theory to Action, Allyn and Bacon, 2000

Collecting daily updates with a tool like I Done This is a good way to mitigate the risks of the Conflict Avoidance Cycle. Frequently updated, transparent work logs keep both successes and challenges at the top of everyone’s mind.

When it comes time to give feedback, the key is meeting your employee in the middle. An environment where they want to improve and you can help them improve is a healthy one. A presentation from the University of Southern California (PDF) offers some helpful suggestions for providing feedback. And while it’s important to nail down the delivery, it’s paramount that you create an environment where the pursuit of mastery is not only expected but facilitated.

If you trust that your employees are working towards mastery, expect that they will stumble along the way. Everyone should be comfortable failing. If your long-term visions are aligned, it will make it easy to learn from these experiences and move a step closer to mastery.

“Trust, But Verify” may be a simple management tool, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to implement. It takes practice, failure and buy-in from the whole team to work. But when it does, it creates a workplace that people are invested in.

Do you have any questions about we manage “Trust, But Verify” at I Done This? Drop a note in the comments—we’d be happy to chat more about it.

This piece was originally published in 2015. It has been updated with new data and advice for 2023.

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Here’s how the story usually goes. Sometime in the early 20th century, British explorer Ernest Shackleton needed to hire a crew for an upcoming expedition to the South Pole. So he placed a newspaper ad:

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in event of success.”

The copywriting — and its strong, direct language — has been printed, reprinted, and talked about for decades. It’s beautiful. Possibly the world’s greatest job ad.

Though his accomplishments went largely uncelebrated in the years after his death, Shackleton, in recent years, has become a revered leadership figure thanks to new literature on his life and career.

The Shackleton ad copy has taken on a life of its own, with hiring managers and entrepreneurs pointing to it as an example of how to lure exceptional people to your organization.

But there are two problems here. For one, the ad probably never existed. Even if it did, many people — it seems — are missing the point.

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What’s in it for me?

Let’s break down this ad, line-by-line, and see what it’s really saying.

“Men wanted for hazardous journey.”

OK, so it’s unsafe. But a journey? That’s making the reader interested. That implies a destination and a mission.

Let’s keep reading.

“Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness.”

Now we get an explanation of the hazards promised in line one. The reader gets a sense of what they’re in for.

“Safe return doubtful.”

Again, some brutal honesty about what’s possible. This is the part of the ad that weeds out people just looking for a safe day job.

“Honor and recognition in event of success.”

Bingo. Here’s the most important part. The promise of what will be offered in return. Because by this point in the ad, the reader is thinking, “OK, what’s in it for me?” Notice the ad doesn’t say “potential” or “likely” honor and recognition. It is promised.

Three parts to a great job posting

Looking at it this way, you can break the ad down into three parts.

Unfortunately, one key part of the Shackleton ad has been missing from a lot of job postings. Many, it appears, have taken the ad as license to write job postings that look like this:

“This is the hardest job you’ll ever have. You’ll work 14 hours a day and be on call all night. Your managers will be demanding and ruthless. Must be able to juggle multiple deadlines per day and handle irate clients.”

See the problem here? They skipped steps one and three.

Someone might write this ad thinking they’re weeding out the people who aren’t cut out for the job. They filtered out the weak. And they have. The problem is they’ve also filtered out the good candidates. They didn’t promise anything in return. Their posting will go unanswered for weeks, and they’ll wonder why.

Compare this to a recent job posting for Palantir, a data analytics company and one of the highest-valued startups in the United States.

At Palantir, we develop the world’s leading products for data analysis and we deploy them against problems that truly matter—uncovering human trafficking rings, containing the spread of infectious diseases, combating fraud, stopping cyber attacks, protecting privacy and civil liberties, prosecuting complex financial crimes, providing relief to victims of natural disasters, and more.

Being a member of this team means being deeply involved in Palantir’s mission to continue the evolution of its technology and services. The candidate will have the power to make her mark and to make a real difference in the lives of her colleagues and long-term success of the business.

Only after this does the ad get into the nitty-gritty of the job’s technical responsibilities, i.e., its challenges. The ad essentially rearranges the Shackleton model. It starts with what the company’s mission is, why it’s important, and immediately goes on to explain how the candidate will be rewarded by helping make the world a better place. Only in step three are the technical challenges addressed.

Like the Shackleton ad, this ad promises something heroic. It delivers on the “what’s in it for me” question.

More iterations of the Shackleton ad in 2023

Here are three more versions of the Shackleton ad — job postings that convey:

• a destination and/or mission
• day-to-day tasks and potential difficulties
• the particular reward for navigating these challenges and achieving success

Here you go.

Automattic

Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, and several other popular platforms. They believe in making the web a better place and crafted their hiring page to reflect this. Below are key portions of the page.

[Source for Image]

Like the original Shackleton offer to work in Antarctica, Automattic weaves in potential challenges new employees will face (remote work, complex tools to track project progress, and 24/7 activity) — alongside the rewards (greater latitude to work and grow and a strong global community).

Auth0

Auth0 believes in making the web a safer place. The company focuses on innovative solutions to help their customers manage user identities — from employees to third parties to customers.

In this job posting for an Account Development Representative, Auth0 stacks the company’s mission and promise (the chance to be part of a high-growth, high-tech team doing critical work) up top. Below, it doesn’t shy away from the fact that they are looking for a high-performer — someone to not only hit but to exceed goals.

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Auth0, like Shackleton, balances risks and rewards in creating a compelling job offer.

The Obama Foundation

Following the 2009-2017 presidency, Barack and Michelle Obama started The Obama Foundation to “inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world.” Here’s their job ad for a Communications Manager:

[Image Source]

It’s clear that the day-to-day for the Communications Manager will be very busy and challenging. It’s also clear that she or he has the potential to create enormous positive social impact through the work. For the right candidate, this promise is worth the obstacles.

The ad that never was

As mentioned earlier, the Shackleton ad probably never existed. Nobody has been able to locate an original copy.

Bob Headland, curator of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, announced that he’s keeping a bottle of Madeira as a reward for anyone who can find a copy of the ad.

“This is a needle-in-a-haystack situation,” Headland said. “But I’m fairly convinced this haystack doesn’t have a needle in it.”

Headland and others have said they believe the ad first appeared in the 1949 book “The 100 Greatest Advertisements” and that the copy was penned by the book’s author Julian Watkins.

Regardless of the ad’s legitimacy, Sir Ernest Shackleton did convince thousands of Americans and others to apply for his Antarctic expedition, despite constant danger, small wages, and similarly small case of success. Perhaps the tale of all those applicants inspired someone to write the sort of ad that would inspire such a response. We may never know.

What we do know: People were excited to work on Shackleton’s dangerous expedition. Thousands applied, including Endurance captain Frank Worsley, who successfully made the cut. The Scott Polar Research Institute also uncovered one letter from three British women eager to join the expedition. They wrote:

“We have been reading all books and articles that have been written on dangerous expeditions by brave men to the Polar-regions, and we do not see why men should have all the glory, and women none, especially when there are women just as brave and capable as there are men.”

See a theme here? These women saw something they wanted. They wanted glory. And they were willing to buck the gender conventions of their day and put themselves in harm’s way to get it. Regardless of whether the Shackleton ad actually existed, somehow these women knew about the expedition. They knew it was dangerous, but they also knew it promised glory.

These women were daring and brave. Thankfully, people like them are still out there today. They are willing to work long hours and do whatever it takes to make your mission a success. You just have to know how to attract them. Start by promising something in return. Promise something great.

P.S. If you liked this article, you should subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll email you a daily blog post with actionable and unconventional advice on how to work better.

Goals are the glue that holds a company together. Setting the right business goals help all the people in a company—from customer support to sales—align around making progress and moving forward to a shared vision.

They don’t just help a company’s bottom line either. Research shows that goals help increase the drive and persistence of the people who are trying to achieve them.

Goals give your company the capacity to incentivize and motivate your team toward specific action.

For a finance department, though, setting team goals can be extremely tricky. Other teams in a company often have clear goals to drive the business forward: “Decrease churn by 20%” for your product team, or “Increase user sign-ups by 4x” for marketing. Within a finance department, it isn’t always clear how specific goals connect to the growth of the business—they’re often more focused around managing cash flow or containing costs.

For goals to succeed, you have to be able to connect them to the broader trajectory of what your company’s trying to do. You have to connect the dots between the bigger strategic goal of your company, the operational goals of your team, and the individual goals of your people.

Company Goals = Team Goals + Individual Goals

“Grow Quarterly Revenue by 2x”

The goal above sounds great—who doesn’t want to double revenue for their company? It provides a clear, quantifiable goal that can be tracked and measured. It’s aggressive but possible.

Delivered on high from the CEOs desk, however, it’s just a loose statement of intent. Increasing revenue by 2x isn’t going to be achieved by the CEO or even the executive team—it’s accomplished by the engineers, salespeople, support reps, and marketers on the ground.

That means to achieve these big goals, individual teams need their own set of goals to move the ball forward.

In a finance team, this begins with the CFO:

In the diagram above the finance team has a clear and actionable goal—to structure an 18-month plan for the finance team. There are two things that make this challenging:

1. The CFO doesn’t have all the information to execute. The CFO isn’t necessarily aware of a payroll hiccup in the accounting department or the VCs that the finance department is talking to for funding. That means they have to meet with individual managers, gather information, and set realistic targets that make sense.
2. The CFO has to delegate responsibility. While the CFO is responsible for the strategic plan, it’s the rest of the department that executes. That means the finance team has to participate in putting the plan together.

The CFO’s strategic goal

Big, hairy, audacious goals always sound great—but the bigger the goal, the less actionable it is. That’s why the first thing a CFO has to do is break a big goal into smaller ones that can be achieved within discrete periods of time.

This could look something like:

• Gather feedback on a strategic plan by C-Suite executives by March 3.
• Set acquisition targets with VP of Marketing by March 10.
• Set new bookings targets with VP of Sales by March 10.
• Set hiring capacity with Director of HR by March 10.
• Get the green light on plan from CEO by March 17.

By breaking down a bigger goal into smaller, easier goals, you’re able to compartmentalize your time and work more efficiently. The more you can break your goals down into their composite parts, the easier they become to achieve. The magic thing about small wins is that they compound over time into a big one.

Setting Individual Team Goals

While the CFO might succeed in putting together a strategic plan for the department, this doesn’t actually matter unless individual team members can execute their own goals. These vary from team member to team member:

• Finance Manager: Test new pricing structures.
• Accounting Team: Process accounts payable one week prior to the end of each month.
• VP Finance: Close funding round for Series B.

As with the CFO, each team member needs to split up their big goals into smaller parts. For example, if the VP of Finance wants to close the company’s Series B round by the end of the quarter, that big goal needs to be broken down into smaller achievable goals:

• Finalize pitch deck by March 20.
• Prepare statement of company financials and business metrics by March 25.
• Prepare legal documents by March 30.
• Reach out to existing investors by April 7.
• Prepare list of initial leads by April 12.

What quickly becomes obvious when each team member begins to break individual goals into shorter steps is that these goals aren’t really “individual” or even restricted to the finance team. For accounts payable to be paid on time, the accounting team might need other teams to submit their expense reports sooner. The VP of Finance needs to enlist help from the company’s founders to close the Series B round and so on.

Breaking down big goals into smaller ones doesn’t just help keep individual team members accountable—it provides greater transparency across the company and collaboration. It makes team members assess how they can achieve their goals by working together.

A Three-Step Process for Setting and Achieving Team Goals

While breaking big goals into smaller ones is a powerful best practice for getting stuff done, it’s not enough. You have to keep your team on track and accountable to meet the goals that they’ve been set. That means not just thinking about revenue targets or sales quotas but how to augment individual team members and position them for success.

Let’s walk through a three-step process for making this happen.

1. Pick achievable goals

The first and most important step to achieving team goals is to make sure that your team actually has the capacity to achieve them. While this sounds obvious, it’s one of the biggest reasons ambitious goals fall short in practice.

In a finance department, take the long-term goals of the business as a whole as a starting point. Look at your bookings and revenue targets across the history of the company. Your long-term goals—and the overall financial health of the company— depend on your ability as a business unit to forecast revenue and determine the practical steps for getting there.

Scale Venture Partners recommends framing long-term goals like so:

What—from a business perspective, not a purely financial perspective—is the company trying to achieve? The financial plan should map to these goals and should be judged in that context.

2. Communicate your goals

Telling your goals to team members and other people at the company is the next critical component in making them happen. Managers and executives need to clarify what the goals are, why they’re important, and how they’ll be measured. For a finance team, this typically involves digging deep into the numbers.

Budgeting, key metrics, and sales targets need to be forecasted accurately to provide a framework for tracking goals and holding people accountable to them.

While it’s important to set goals, it’s also important to keep in mind that they’re often a moving target. If a bunch of new competitors enters the market in the middle of the quarter, you need to readjust your goals and communicate them to the team. Remember that goals aren’t set in stone—they’re a moving target meant to unify your team.

3. Track your goals

Measuring success around goals and holding people accountable to them is critical to making progress as a company. You need the ability to identify what’s working and what’s not.

There are a number of ways to do this across your team:

• 1:1 meetings help managers keep a finger on the pulse of the team and identify blockers to success for specific team members. They also give managers a window into the broader career goals of individual team members and how they can align team goals with individual goals.
• Presentations on a weekly or monthly basis allow your team to keep up-to-date on the progress around your goals. They also help hold team members accountable, as it’s a form of self-assessment across the whole team.
• Reports force your team to look closely and scrutinize progress and identify any roadblocks in the way. They also help keep managers up-to-date on big pushes that would otherwise feel intangible. Don’t be afraid to automate any reports you can to save time.

Finance teams are responsible for keeping the gears turning in any business—and this can create a high-pressure environment. Tracking goals and staying accountable, whether in the form of a 1:1 or in an all-hands, can help team members keep their eyes on the prize and make incremental progress toward big goals.

Goals Align Your Team

The most important thing to remember is that goals exist to help pull your team together and work as a unit. They’re the north star of where you want to go, and they guide all your different operations toward the same shared goal.

Being clear and pragmatic about the goals you set is the key to success. Your people want to feel like what they’re doing matters and will make all the difference in your company—so help them do exactly that.

This is a guest post from Teampay, a corporate credit card built for teams. Teampay gives your company control over purchases, allowing you to request, approve, and track purchases in real-time. To learn more about setting and managing financial goals for your company, check out the Teampay blog.

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