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

... it's a perfect example of how in today's world, there are so many other options for how to convey and present ideas and collaborate on them that are extremely efficient for us. And if anything, the running into limits of, like, how much we can cognitively process as human beings, we, uh, we suffer from information overload and we need better tools to help streamline what it is that we actually have to consume and, and make decisions on. But in terms of what the technology can do, it's just, it's, uh, it's amazing. It's just absolutely incredible.

Start us off, what got you interested in productivity to begin with?

(laughs) Uh, you know, I've been in productivity for maybe almost two decades now. Um, I, uh, was a, uh, I was the CIO for, uh, Facebook for almost seven years. And my job there was the productivity of the workforce. Uh, prior to that, um, I was the CIO for another company, and my job there was the productivity of the business. (laughs) Um, when I go back even to the beginning of my career, uh, a big part of what made me an effective software engineer and engineering leader is, uh, I was, uh, very jealous of, uh, my own and my team's productivity. How much can we get done in the amount of time that we have? And, uh, that led me to, you know, focus a lot on automation and streamlining things. And, um, so it's really been a big part of, of my life even though, uh, it's really been the last, uh, four years that I have, you know, really claimed ownership of, like, "This is the thing I'm focused on right now." Um, so, eh, but yeah, it's, it's been a, a big part of my life for a long time.

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

Well, we have a lot more technology now than we, we did before. So when I, uh, I don't wanna date myself too much-

Mm-hmm.

... but, you know, coming into the, to workforce, um, you know, when, when I did, uh, technology was relatively new. So you had, had a lot of office automation that was basically looking at things like, "Okay, we, we used to manage things on paper and here's how we're gonna manage it in the digital world." Um, so whether you, you know, take the concept of a document, uh, or a file, um, and you basically represent that in a, in a computer. Uh, you know, fast-forward another 20 years, we've started to throw that stuff out the window. We don't think about, um, files as much as we think about just links to things. Um, even, uh, you know, the technologies like, uh, email. What is email? Email is the electronic memoranda. That is basically its history. Um, memoranda are cool when you can only communicate on paper, but when you're in the digital universe, they are completely, like, way too much overhead. And that's why people have moved to Slack and, uh, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and text messaging and all those other things. They're far, uh, more efficient ways to, uh, to communicate. Um, and, uh, so I think we're in this wave now where we're starting to throw away the history of the technologies that we utilize. Even things like, um, slides, like PowerPoint slides. Why are they even called slides? Because they used to be cellophane slides that you would put in a slide projector to present your ideas, uh, out there. And just imagine how much friction went into producing those slides, so you didn't really care about how they were authored or whether they were dynamic. But in today's universe, they're all digital, right? Who wants a static slide with just a couple bullets? You need animation and video and other stuff. So we're starting to throw away all that stuff and evolve into a pure digital universe where we're not constrained by how things have evolved in the past, but we're really, um, you know, thinking towards the future. And especially with mobile devices and ubiquitous connectivity, um, that, you know, things can be, uh, you know, really dynamic and rich, uh, to facilitate that productivity.