Ep.460 ~ Former Facebook CIO Talks Productivity  ~ Tim Campos

Facebook has undoubtedly become the world's number one social media platform. But have you ever wondered how it got even bigger and more productive? The answer—effective time management. Time is your most valuable asset, and knowing how to optimize it will lead to positive results for your business.

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In today's episode, Tim Campos, the former Chief Information Officer of Facebook, discusses the strategies and tools he designed to boost the company's productivity. Tim was responsible for the productivity of the entire Facebook workforce from 2010 - 2016.

 

Two weeks after Tim started as CIO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg summoned him to his office for an urgent meeting. Once there, he met with Zuckerberg’s executive assistant, who lambasted the company’s internal calendar app and urged Tim to fix it. From that moment, Tim set to work designing creative tools that would help Facebook employees easily find optimal times and places to meet. It was so successful that it helped Tim double Facebook’s productivity from $900,000 to $1.8 million per employee making it the most productive company in the world — five times more than most tech companies.

 

Make sure to tune in to this episode if you want to discover the best business strategies and tools in scaling your company more effectively.

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Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

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1. Understand the significance of time management and creativity.

2. Discover how you could combat creative burnout.

3. What leadership lessons did Tim learn while working at Facebook?

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Resources

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• Woven

• Slack

• Zoom

• Rescue Time

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Episode Highlights:

 

Doubling Facebook's Productivity Per Employee

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• Facebook's productivity begins with its culture. The company is mission-driven and focused on impact.

• Every employee is aware of the company's mission and how their role aligns with it. Facebook also instilled to them the significance of not wasting time and encouraged and empowered them not to attend meetings they do not need to be in.

• Thinking differently and being creative in solving problems helped with Facebook's growth. The employees were good at identifying possible issues and developing custom software to address them.

• Listen to the full episode to learn more about how Facebook scaled its productivity!

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Thinking Differently

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• Facebook's mission-driven culture allowed people to align their objectives with one another.

• Everyone also believed in their leaders’ strengths and vision for the company. Because of this, there were fewer arguments, and they were able to quickly identify where they needed to focus.

• Facebook was able to attract the best talents in the whole world.

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Tim’s Early Facebook Beginnings

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• Tim got connected to Facebook through a recruiter.

• He didn't want to become Chief Information Officer because he wanted to start his own company. Nonetheless, Tim submitted his resume to Facebook's HR department.

• What made him love Facebook was his freedom to build whatever he wanted.

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Building Facebook’s Internal Calendar

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• If you want to increase your revenue per employee, you must know what drives them to be more productive.

• Facebook's number one resource is engineering. It has the best engineers who know how to take care of their productivity.

• Its next most significant resource function is sales and marketing, which accounts for almost 40% of Facebook. An effective sales and marketing team resulted in higher revenue.

• Facebook has an excellent data strategy that allows the company to understand its customers and develop tools to address their issues.

• Productivity entails having the right information at the right time to make the right decisions.

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Leadership Lessons From Mark Zuckerberg

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• Mark Zuckerberg is an extremely well-read and learned leader. He will research and understand things before making a decision.

• He also does an excellent job of identifying what he wants to and is capable of doing. For tasks that are not in his expertise, he then finds the best people in the world to run those things.

• Because of his strategy, he established a diverse team with different skills that complemented each other and aligned around his vision.

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Zuckerberg's Traits

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• Most of Mark Zuckerberg's traits came from his family values and experiences when he was growing up.

• He was a brilliant and curious individual, and he does not walk around believing that he knows everything.

• Zuckerberg has more control over his emotions. He does not allow them to meddle with his work.

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Managing Creative Burnout

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• Productivity is less about maximizing your time and more about optimizing it.

• Tim gets more exhausted doing meetings over the computer than interacting with his employees in real life. He figured out his threshold and realized that he could only do five hours of Zoom a day.

• Tim tries to put variation in his work to prevent repetitive tasks and focuses most of his time making product-related decisions and how to market them effectively.

• He tracks his work religiously and makes necessary adjustments to where he allocates his time.

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About Woven

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• Woven allows you to schedule meetings with other people more easily. Through Woven, people can spend more time on what matters most to them.

• It can describe your activities for the day and remind you of your upcoming tasks and your time allocation.

• Tim believes in “No Meeting Wednesdays” to give his employees uninterrupted time to be productive and do their jobs.

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The Best Time to Be Creative

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• The best time to be creative depends on your personality.

• People usually meet in the evening, between six to eight o'clock. Working in the morning would guarantee you uninterrupted time.

• Getting good quality sleep is essential because of its healing aspects.

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Tracking Your Tasks

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• Communication is essential in completing your tasks. Choose the best platforms like Slack and Zoom.

• Time allocation software programs like Woven and Rescue Time also help you understand where you are putting your time. These can also remind you when to take a break.

• You need to learn how to set boundaries between your work and personal life.

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5 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

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“Impact is a function of how much you get done in the amount of time that you have. Your productivity is essential to driving your impact.  And so every employee in the company knows that they have a responsibility to manage and optimize their own productivity.”

 

“You can make the least productive company on the planet successful or more productive by doing what everybody else does… But if you're trying to become more productive than everybody else, you got to think differently.”

 

“Productivity isn't just about maximizing something; it's not maximizing the amount of time that you spend on your business. It's optimizing it because there's such a thing as too much.”

 

“This is life; we need variety. And so you can do too much of a good thing. Optimizing it is about spending the right amount of time enough to make the difference, but not so much that you over-allocate yourself, exhaust yourself, or over-consume something. And I think that's a key way to address burnout.”

 

“Spend time on what matters most, you know, there are only 24 hours in a day, and it's the one thing that we all have the same amount of, which is time in a day. The thing that really differentiates us as human beings is how we choose to spend and allocate time.”

 

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About Tim

 

Tim Campos was the Chief Information Officer of Facebook, the world's current leading social media platform, from 2010 to 2016. During his stay in the company, he developed and enhanced Facebook’s internal calendar software that doubled the productivity of every employee from $900,000 to $1.8 million.

 

In 2016, he left Facebook and co-founded Woven, an intelligent calendar that allows professionals to maximize and optimize their time effectively. Learn more about Woven by checking their website. You may connect with Tim on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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