Modern WisdomDoubling Facebook's Workforce Productivity & Fixing Your Calendar - Tim Campos | Modern Wisdom 248
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Ex-Facebook CIO on taming calendars, email, and information overload
- Former Facebook CIO Tim Campos explains how he doubled Facebook’s workforce productivity by obsessively removing friction from employees’ daily workflows, from door badge readers to interview scheduling systems.
- He argues we’ve shifted from information scarcity to information surplus, making filtering, prioritization, and smarter tools (calendars, communication platforms, automation) more critical than simply accessing more data.
- Central to his philosophy is rigorous time management: defining long‑term life goals, planning weeks proactively, time blocking, and balancing “maker” (proactive) vs. “manager” (reactive) time.
- Campos describes how his company Woven aims to fix the broken calendar by integrating analytics, task-like events, and interoperability so people can actually spend time on what matters most.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasDesign systems to reduce friction in every recurrent workflow, even tiny ones.
Campos describes optimizing everything from badge-reader placement to IT vending machines at Facebook; small time savings compounded across thousands of employees result in massive productivity gains.
Treat time as your most finite asset and plan it deliberately.
He recommends defining long-term life goals, mapping them down to quarterly, weekly, and daily plans, and then using your calendar to intentionally allocate time to those priorities rather than letting urgency dictate your schedule.
Use time blocking to protect “maker time” from constant reactivity.
Campos pre-blocks strategic planning time, clusters planning early in the week, and enforces no‑meeting days so deep, proactive work doesn’t get crowded out by meetings, email, and other people’s urgencies.
Regular reflection on how you spent your day counteracts the pull of the urgent.
He keeps a daily journal of what was accomplished and what wasn’t; reviewing this exposes where urgent, low‑value tasks displaced important work and reinforces better choices for the next day.
Optimize communication tools for signal, not just access.
Email assumes every message must be read, leading to overload and poor prioritization; systems like Slack, newsfeeds, and future work tools should rank, filter, and constrain access so the most relevant information surfaces first.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesTime is the most valuable asset that we have.
— Tim Campos
We’ve gone from information scarcity to information surplus in probably 30 years.
— Chris Williamson
My job [at Facebook] was the productivity of the workforce.
— Tim Campos
The best engineers are the lazy ones. They don’t like to do repetitive work so they come up with mechanisms to avoid it.
— Tim Campos
Most people don’t fill their time until three days before the event occurs.
— Tim Campos
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
Get more out of YouTube videos.
High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.
Add to Chrome