DEV Community: b.j.

Productivity Trends Report: One-on-One Meetings Statistics

b.j. — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 13:45:37 +0000

One-on-one meetings are one of the best ways to collaborate within a busy organization. Taking advantage of the opportunity to connect directly to share thoughts, experiences, and guidance for or from another person is a great way to ensure your team is making productive progress towards your company's goals. And while one-on-ones are so crucial for successful teams of any size, they're not always prioritized in a busy work schedule.

This meeting trends report of surveyed and anonymized aggregated data comparing workweeks between February 2020 and October 2021 across over 15,000 busy professionals reveals the phenomenon of longer work days since before the COVID-19 pandemic started, and the impact of scheduling and rescheduling one-on-one meetings. We found that more than 40% of one-on-one meetings are rescheduled weekly, taking on average over 10 minutes each to coordinate new meeting times. And while meetings across the board have increased almost 70%, the fact that over 85% are organized as remote vs. in-person suggests this meeting growth may be making up for the organic conversations that used to happen naturally in an office environment.

The pandemic is redefining how professionals view the future of work and are prioritizing freedom in the modern workplace. This includes the ability to continue to work remotely and have full control and flexibility over their schedule. In order to do so, the need for tools to help adapt to the new ways of working will be critical -- including an automated calendar assistant that can help schedule, reschedule, and coordinate meetings so professionals can focus on getting back their time.

Workplace meeting trends

Meetings are an essential part of a healthy and productive team, but many people have felt the strain of managing a heavy meeting load while trying to balance their own work and priorities since the global shift to a more distributed, remote workforce. Let's take a look at how meetings are impacting the calendars of busy professionals:

Professionals average 25.6 meetings a week, or 5.1 per day.
Meetings have increased 69.7% since February 2020 where the average was only 15.1 meetings per week.
Professionals with 15 or more meetings a week average 39.3 meetings, a 37.9% increase since the 28.5 weekly meeting average in February 2020.
The average meeting length is 50.6 minutes long.
Meeting length average has decreased 10.9% since February 2020, previously 56.8 minutes long.
Professionals average 21.5 hours in meetings a week, over half of the "standard 40-hour workweek".
People spend 7.3 hours more in meetings since February 2020, where previously averaged just 14.2 hours in weekly meetings.
Professionals with 15 or more meetings a week average 32.9 hours in meetings, 11.4 additional meeting hours every week, up 25.3% since the 26.3 hour average in February 2020.

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In just 20 short months, the amount of meetings have increased nearly 70%, where workers are forced to create an additional 7 hours in their schedules each week just to accommodate these meeting demands. While organizations are adopting more asynchronous communication tools to support remote workers, the necessity for meetings have only intensified. Workplaces are going remote for the first time, but they don't know how to do it without increasing meetings to stay connected. Meetings for the sake of meetings take away valuable working hours from the team, where adopting strategies like weekly status reports allow team members to share regular updates in a fraction of the time.

State of one-on-one meetings

To kick off, let's define what one-on-one meetings are: a regular check-in between two people to learn about the progress of work, share feedback and answer questions. One-on-ones are often scheduled between a manager and their direct reports, but they're also used for cross-functional discussions between team members and skip-level meetings between senior management and employees further down the org chart.

Here are some one-on-one meeting statistics around time spent in meetings and frequency of scheduling:

The average professional has 5.6 one-on-one meetings a week.
One-on-one meetings have increased over 500% since before the pandemic, where professionals used to average just 0.9 per week.
Professionals with 15 or more meetings a week average 8.6 one-on-one weekly meetings, a 329% increase from 2.0 per week in February 2020.
The average person has 1.12 one-on-one meetings per day, where before the pandemic, they averaged less than one per week.
The average duration of a one-on-one meeting is 42.9 minutes.
The average worker spends 8.9% of their week in one-on-one meetings alone.
Professionals average 278 one-on-one meetings a year, compared to just 45 as of February 2020.
Professionals who average 15 or more meetings a week have 430 one-on-ones a year, over four times more than the pre-pandemic average of 100 annually.
40.4% of one-on-one meetings recur weekly, while 25% occur every other week and 18.4% are scheduled monthly.

One-on-one meetings were found to be the largest increase in the overall rise in the total number of meetings on the calendar, accounting for 79.6% of new meetings. Professionals are averaging an additional 5.9 weekly meetings since the pandemic, with 4.7 more one-on-ones scheduled on their calendars. Where coworkers could once catch up in the break room, or just through the act of passing by a team member's desk, those "water cooler meetings" are no longer happening. To have a synchronous discussion, it requires you to make time on the calendar.

How often are one-on-one meetings rescheduled?

Now that we've covered the frequency, duration and percent of time people spend in one-on-one meetings, let's take a look at how frequently they are rescheduled.

On average, 42.4% of one-on-one meetings are rescheduled every week.
118.7 one-on-one meetings are rescheduled per person each year.
Professionals with 15 or more meetings every week reschedule 182.3 one-on-one meetings a year, or 3.6 one-on-one meetings rescheduled every week.
Those professionals with 15 or more weekly meetings have to reschedule 53.6% more often than the average worker.

Rescheduling one-on-one meetings, or any meeting in general, isn't always a bad thing. In order to be productive and collaborative, professionals need to be flexible in their schedules to accommodate priority changes. There are also normal work and life conflicts that arise around less frequent or one-time meeting requests, and personal time off that impacts their regular schedule.

The problem is when rescheduling becomes the norm. If a manager is responsible for providing guidance, feedback and coaching to a team, it's important that they prioritize the time they need with their direct reports so they can be successful in their jobs. When rescheduling begins to impact a team's progress, it's time to take a look at defending these meeting times a little more aggressively in the calendar.

Rescheduling often goes wrong even with the best intentions. If a manager needs to reschedule at the last minute to jump into something else, it's likely they don't have the time to reschedule at that moment. And by the time the end of the week rolls around, they've simply run out of time to fit the meeting in because they waited too long to sit down and try to find it. So they either cancel their conflict, which creates strain in that world, or they cancel their 1:1, which erodes trust with their direct report. This is where many busy teams are adopting scheduling automation tools so their important meetings are rescheduled ahead of the deluge on busy calendars.

On the contrary, if a manager is finding that their meetings are continually rescheduled because their direct report needs more time to work through their tasks before connecting on their progress, then they may want to reevaluate the frequency of their meetings so both people are able to better plan their workweeks. A best practice for both attendees to adopt is constructing a rolling agenda so everyone puts in the time to think through the meeting's purpose, priorities to discuss, blockers, and the outcome they want to see. A rolling agenda is a simple and powerful way to not only prepare for high-quality 1:1s, but to do occasional "lookbacks" on previous goals and actions from prior meetings.

How often are one-on-ones cancelled?

With over 40% of one-on-one meetings rescheduled every week, there's not always a guarantee you can find a good time, or have a good enough reason, to connect across busy schedules. Let's take a look at the cancellation trends for one-on-one meetings.

On average, 29.6% of one-on-one meetings are cancelled.
The average professional cancels 82.9 one-on-one meetings a year.
Professionals with 15 or more meetings every week cancel meetings over 50% more often than the average person, at 127.3 cancelled meetings a year, or 2.5 cancellations a week.
59.2 hours of one-on-one meetings are cancelled every year for the average professional, and 71 minutes lost due to cancellations each week.
The average worker spends over 24.4 minutes a week cancelling and rescheduling one-on-one meetings on their calendars.
It takes the average professional over 10 minutes to reschedule a meeting.

Busy professionals with 15 or more meetings each week have a higher cancellation rate than the average worker, which could be assumed due to the fact that they likely have busier schedules of meetings presenting more conflicts for finding a time to connect. There is also the internal hierarchy dynamic to consider, as direct reports may be more hesitant to insist on rescheduling if a manager asks to cancel for a week. This anti-pattern is easy to fall into, and may go unnoticed on the manager's part. But by improving communications with direct reports, and keeping up on one-on-one meetings, managers will develop a stronger understanding of the high priority work and potential blockers that a direct report may need assistance on.

There are also productive reasons for cancelling a one-on-one meeting, if both attendees feel they do not have any beneficial items to discuss. In these cases, a simple status update on progress is a productive alternative to a meeting so both people can have that time back for productive work.

Working hours

With over a 27% increase in time spent in meetings, is this additional time coming out of professionals' solo working time, or personal time?

The workday has increased 1.4 hours, or 18.6% since February 2020, from 7.5 hours to 8.9 hours in October 2021 averaging a 44.6 hour workweek.
Busy professionals with 15 or more meetings average a 10.13 hour workday, or 50.7 hour workweek, increasing 13.2% from 9.0 hours in February 2020.
The average workday starts at 9:10 AM, 63 minutes earlier than the pre-pandemic start time of 10:13 AM.
The average workday ends at 5:02 PM, 52 minutes later than the 4:10 PM workday end pre-pandemic.
Professionals with 15 or more meetings average an 8:25 AM start time, 45 minutes earlier than the 9:10 AM pre-pandemic.
Professionals with 15 or more meetings average a 5:43 PM end time, 39 minutes later than the 5:04 PM end pre-pandemic.

With the additional 7.0 hours worked every week as of October 2021 compared to February 2020, that almost exactly lines up with the 7.3 extra hours spent in meetings every week, indicating that it's not heads-down working time that's being sacrificed for these professionals, it's their personal time. As we can see above, people with more meetings on their calendars are also working an additional 74 minutes a day just to accommodate the 13.8 additional meetings on their calendars every week.

Remote vs. in-person meetings

Lastly, with the future of work trends pushing towards remote and hybrid work environments, let's take a look at whether meetings are held more frequently in-person or remotely in 2021:

On average, 85.2% of one-on-one meetings are remote.
0% of people attend all of their one-on-one meetings in-person.
Only 2.3% of people attend up to 30% of their meetings in person, and less than 10% of people attend up to 70% of their meetings in-person.

Even if you do work full-time in an office, organizations with a remote workforce have had to learn how to accommodate sick leave, or remote leave, as employees have faced quarantine to care for themselves or a loved one and were unable to connect in-person.

As we try to accommodate both collaboration and productivity in our busy schedules, it's important to remember that our calendars are truly unrecognizable to what they were just 20 short months ago before the global shift to a remote workforce. Incredible technologies have both emerged and matured to support communication and scheduling across distributed teams, and we need to lean into these advancements to navigate our complex work environments.

At Reclaim, we're focused on helping people create as much time as possible in their busy schedules for the things that matter most, and are kicking off a series of Meeting Trends Reports to help people understand the shifting changes in the modern workplace. Subscribe below to stay up to date on the latest future of work trends.

Smarter 1:1 Meetings: How to Prepare & Schedule

b.j. — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 17:09:14 +0000

A one on one meeting, or 1:1 meeting, is a recurring meeting where two team members schedule a time to check in and share updates on a regular basis. As a manager, these meetings are awesome opportunities for you to connect with your team on an individual level, develop positive and productive relationships, and provide real-time feedback on high priority projects and goals. 1:1 meetings can also be a powerful coaching method between managers and direct reports, as you can walk through different situations your team are encountering, and share direct guidance on how to address a problem or opportunity.

The big question around 1:1 meetings is usually this: are you using them effectively? In order for 1:1 meetings to be productive and ultimately successful, it's important for both the manager and direct report to come prepared, for the meetings to be scheduled at an optimal frequency, and for the discussions to be truly aligned to your team's priorities.

In this article, you'll find everything you need to know about 1:1 meetings, including the different types of 1:1 meetings, how to make the best use of 1:1 time, how to prepare and schedule 1:1s -- and a smarter way to manage your 1:1 meetings automatically so you can focus on making them as productive as possible.

Types of 1:1 meetings

In general, there are only a few types of 1:1 meetings, but there are a lot of different styles, frequencies, and caveats around how they operate. Here are the three most common types of 1:1 meetings and how they're used.

1. Direct report 1:1s

The most common type of 1:1 meeting is scheduled between a manager and their direct reports. Typically recurring on a weekly basis for anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, these are most critical to the success of the team as it ensures alignment and direction on the team's key priorities. Importantly, this is also the most vital 1:1 to stick to: it's generally considered pretty bad etiquette for a manager to cancel their 1:1s with direct reports, especially at the last minute.

2. Cross-functional 1:1s

The next most common 1:1 meeting is cross-functional: essentially, a 1:1 between two colleagues in different roles working on shared objectives. Cross-functional 1:1s are usually less critical, as they are more oriented towards sharing perspectives and knowledge around a project or goal. They also tend to be scheduled less frequently -- usually on a biweekly or monthly basis -- and it's typically okay to cancel or move them (within reason).

3. Skip-level meetings or ad-hoc 1:1s

Skip-level meetings are much less common, as these 1:1 meetings are between senior managers or leaders who want to meet with people further down in the org chart to gather "on the ground" insights on how things are going. These 1:1 meetings tend to be ad hoc and scheduled as needed to "check in" every so often, either because of an important project (e.g., a SVP of Product checks in with a frontline product manager to get a gut check on how development of a critical feature is going) or for retention reasons (e.g., a VP of Engineering meets with a key engineer who is unhappy and considering leaving the company). Because skip-level 1:1s are ad-hoc, they're usually pretty flexible -- but given the power dynamics between the organizer and the attendee, they're usually tilted a bit in favor of the senior leader's schedule.

How to use 1:1 meetings

One of the biggest mistakes one can make when it comes to 1:1 meetings is using them as your only communication method. 1:1 meetings are meant to make time to walk through priorities and blockers with a colleague, manager, or senior leader, but questions and issues inevitably come up between 1:1 meetings. Instead of waiting for a 1:1 to happen, it's imperative that there is an open communication channel between teammates so neither is blocked on a project midway through a cycle. Another benefit of keeping these conversations flowing outside of 1:1s is that the discussions and quality of work done in 1:1 meetings tends to be much better as a result.

The second mistake to watch out for is not letting 1:1 meetings turn into a status update. 1:1 meetings are intended for in-the-weeds feedback and discussions around priorities, blockers, and decisions, and it's up to the organizer (especially if they're a manager) to establish and maintain an open environment where the team feels comfortable sharing issues they face. It's also important for managers to offer support and ask the right questions to ensure their direct report has what they need to be successful in their tasks.

How to prepare for 1:1 meetings?

There's nothing worse than getting into a 1:1 meeting and realizing that neither attendee is prepared. The best way to ensure a productive 1:1 where both parties have what they need and know what to expect is to set up and share an agenda before the meeting.

In order to make the best use of 1:1 time, here's a list of 1:1 meeting preparation tips for managers -- and direct reports -- to get the most value out of your 1:1 meetings:

Tips for managers to prepare

Always create an agenda containing 3-5 topics for discussion.
Review the team's (and direct report's) priorities for the cycle: what's in-flight that's critical, blockers and issues that have come up, as well as any context around how priorities might be shifting or changing.
Bring a list of specific asks and/or tasks that might be critical for that week
Make sure to review -- and if possible, respond -- to any questions the direct report shared since the last 1:1 meeting.

Tips for direct reports to prepare

Always create an agenda containing 3-5 topics for discussion
Review current priorities, critical tasks, and their status
Prepare a list of questions before the meeting, especially if a decision is needed as an outcome
Outline any tasks or priorities that are at risk
List blockers and distractions, especially where help or "air cover" might be needed!

While it's critical that the vast majority of 1:1s are highly productive and structured, it should be noted that even when neither party has anything significant to discuss (or just hasn't had enough time to prepare), 1:1 meetings can still be an important tether for managers and direct reports.

Sometimes a member of the team just needs to vent about something that's frustrating them, or needs encouragement when they're going through a tough period, so it's important -- especially as the manager -- to make time for 1:1s and not cancel or reschedule at the last minute, which is all too common in organizations.

How often (and long) should you have 1:1 meetings?

While most articles strongly stress to never skip your 1:1 meeting, this article is definitely going a little against the grain on the topic. As valuable as 1:1 meetings are when they're necessary, they're not time well spent if neither party has anything important to discuss!

This is of course a tricky topic, and has a lot to do with who initiates the cancellation or reschedule. Remember that like many things in a company, 1:1 meetings have power dynamics at play: if a manager says "I don't have anything this week, shall we cancel?", it may be awkward or uncomfortable for a direct report to say "Actually, I'd really like to meet." They know their manager is busy, and they feel badly asking for the time. The opposite case -- where a direct report cancels a 1:1 or requests to reschedule -- is a bit different!

Sometimes a 1:1 is just a free-flowing discussion that's more about a certain kind of "support" that's important for both parties to develop trust in one another -- but these unstructured 1:1 meetings should be the exception, not the rule.

So how often should 1:1 meetings be scheduled? Many managers choose to set up their 1:1 meetings with each team member on a weekly basis, but depending on a variety of factors, more or less frequent meetings may be required.

The ideal duration for a 1:1 meeting is typically 30-60 minutes. This should depend on the role, tasks and projects the team is working on, as well as what phase those projects are in. It's important to have enough time to provide the feedback and guidance needed for both parties to confidently leave the meeting with all the information they need, but neither person should feel pressure to use up the full time slot if the agenda gets burned through more quickly than usual. Give one another that extra time back so it can be put to the items that were just discussed!

Using "Smart 1:1 Meetings" with Reclaim

As mentioned a couple times in this article, 1:1 meetings should not be a burden, but instead something that provides a ton of value for the entire team when necessary. This is where Smart 1:1s from Reclaim come in.

Smart 1:1s automatically schedule your 1:1 meetings by finding the best time on both attendees' calendars during mutual working or meeting hours (even across multiple time zones). These 1:1s are scheduled using smart time blocking which reserves a mutually available time, but keeps the time block flexible so if something comes up, Reclaim will automatically reschedule the 1:1. Similarly, if time is running out in the workweek, Reclaim knows when to defend the event to prevent it from getting overbooked by other meetings.

The big benefit of using Smart 1:1s is that it's adaptive. There might be an ideal time for both parties to have a 1:1, but sometimes that time isn't available due to a conflicting meeting, vacation time, or a critical project that requires your attention. Reclaim automatically sniffs that out and finds the next best time to meet, freeing both attendees up to spend time doing your best work, make your 1:1s awesome, and not worry about moving events around or playing Calendar Tetris when schedules change.

Here's a closer look at how to set up your Smart 1:1s:

Sign up and connect Google Calendar to Reclaim.
Create a new Smart 1:1, or convert one of your existing 1:1s auto-detected by Reclaim.
Set your available "meeting hours".
Select a duration and frequency to meet (weekly, biweekly, monthly, or quarterly).
Set an ideal day and time.
Optionally enter a description with links to an agenda, documents, notes, or anything else that might be useful week-to-week. This is a great place to keep a rolling set of agenda items for upcoming and past 1:1s.
Auto-add a Zoom, Google Meet, or other video conferencing link.
Send off the 1:1 meeting invite!

When your invitee opens the invite, they get to set their own working hours and time preferences around the ideal day and time to connect. If they RSVP no, the Smart 1:1 auto-reschedules to another available time on both calendars. Reclaim won't move the meeting unless it gets interrupted by another meeting that either attendee accepts (or if one attendee RSVPs No again). Once Reclaim determines that it's running out of time to schedule the 1:1, it will mark the event as busy and defend it from being overbooked.

Smart 1:1s are a perfect fit for direct report and cross-functional 1:1s that occur on a weekly basis. But there's more in store for Smart 1:1s.

What's next for Smart 1:1s?

While the October 2021 Smart 1:1 launch is focused on automatic scheduling and rescheduling of 1:1s, optimized for both parties around an ideal time, Reclaim plans to support a ton more functionality for Smart 1:1s in the coming months.\
Reclaim is uniquely positioned to provide the best experience for smarter meeting scheduling, because it knows what matters to you via Tasks and Habits. That context is critical to making intelligent decisions around how and when to schedule meetings, when to cancel or reschedule them, as well as when to make tradeoffs on the calendar.

Calendar Heroes: Chris Parsons, Co-Founder & CTO at Lollipop

b.j. — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 14:24:11 +0000

In this edition of Calendar Heroes, we talk to Chris Parsons, co-founder and CTO of Lollipop, to learn about his style, tools, and methodologies for balancing priorities while leading the early stage startup that's building the fastest and most enjoyable shopping and cooking experience in the world. Follow Chris on Twitter at @chrismdp and on LinkedIn.

Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do

I'm a co-founder and CTO of Lollipop - a startup that's making the mundane task of grocery shopping magical. We're about 12 employees right now and growing rapidly, so I'm moving from a hands-on role into an oversight position. I've been on this scaling journey before - it's always an interesting and bumpy ride!

I'm also raising three kids with my wife Ellie - two teenagers and one pre-teen - which easily fills the rest of my calendar!

What does a typical work week look like for you?

I work in London two days a week, working from my home office in Winchester the rest of the time. The entire company comes to the office in London on Mondays and Wednesdays. Monday mornings is a planning morning for our squads, then we do an all-hands check-in to catch up as a company and hear the squad goals for the week.

I'm working on our next hiring round at the moment, so the rest of the week is currently taken up with reviewing and writing job descriptions and tweaking our hiring plan. I'm also the only developer that's not on a product squad right now, so I'm often working on things that make the product teams go faster such as build improvements and timely code reviews.

What techniques do you use to manage your time?

I try to have most of my 1:1 meetings face to face on my office days. Despite us all getting better at remote working during the pandemic, there's nothing that beats chatting with someone in person. I try to do all my video calls from home, as there's not a lot of space in the office and I'd prefer to take the chance to spend time with people face to face.

I currently treat my whole time in the office as "office hours" - I'm interruptible when I'm in the office for small requests. On home days, I schedule large blocks of time as deep work so I can guarantee not to be interrupted, and I try to avoid small meetings that break up the day.

What tools do you use to make you more productive?

I'm a big fan of Todoist, using due dates on tasks for things I'd like to get done by a certain time. My to-do list is semi-organised, and could do with some work to structure it more strategically by area: currently it's a little too tactical for my liking. This is partly a reflection of starting to move from a hands-on role to a more strategic one.

I use tasks with far off due dates for people that I want to catch up with every few months - rather like a personal CRM - and I use shared lists with my family for things like shopping.

I tag tasks with people's initials so I can be sure to mention something when talking to them. I've also started running a Notion page for a series of conversations for the people I collaborate with closely so I can define agendas and take shared notes. This works really well to capture the state of conversations over time.

Reclaim is great for time blocking. I use it for a lot of my big tasks that take longer than one hour, especially if meetings are starting to take up more of my time in a particular week. It's great to be able to rely on my calendar to tell me what I should work on next, as well as blocking time out from the inevitable meeting requests. I also use Reclaim's Habits for important things I want to do weekly - for example I have a "Big Picture" Habit that only schedules on days I'm not in the office. This forces me to take a step back and think about those important (but not urgent) higher level things.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Find a mentor. Everyone needs someone a little ahead of you; someone they can trust and can confide in absolutely. I've had many mentors over the years in both my professional and personal life and can't recommend it enough for boosting confidence and enabling me to be the best version of myself.

Calendar Heroes are real stories from very busy professionals across all types of roles and industries to learn more about how they manage to make time where there is none. We're highlighting these stories to help share tips and ideas for working effectively, improving your time management skills, and boosting your productivity.

If you know a Calendar Hero who has awesome productivity hacks that you'd like to recommend we interview or want to be interviewed yourself, let us know! You don't have to be a Reclaim user to be featured as a Calendar Hero: these stories are about anyone with an interesting approach to managing a complex schedule.

Calendar Heroes: Vishwesh Jirgale, VP of Engineering at Mindtickle & Angel Investor

b.j. — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 13:59:02 +0000

In this edition of Calendar Heroes, we talk to Vishwesh Jirgale, VP of Engineering at Mindtickle and Angel investor, to learn about his style, tools, and methodologies for balancing priorities while leading the engineering organization responsible for User Facing Applications and Practices for the popular sales readiness platform. Follow Vishwesh on LinkedIn, Peerlist, and on Twitter at @vishweshji.

I have been living inside the calendar for the past few years. So much so that my daily routines like exercise, eating (at home or out), reading, Pomodoro (focused working hours), personal appointments, our family medical appointments, vaccination schedules, etc. is in a calendar. What I've seen is that my professional and personal life has a lot of crossover, and that's where Reclaim.ai has helped me merge my personal, family, and professional calendars to get more control over my time and make it more visible to the people around me.

Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do

I am currently working as a VP of Engineering at Mindtickle, managing multiple engineering teams and horizontal practices. I'm also an active Angel investor and advisor to a few startups, and have been helping startups in the US expand in India by making their first hire, setting up processes, doing audits, due diligence, etc. Apart from this, I also coach and mentor a few new leaders and engineers who are transitioning into leadership roles. I'm also a student for life, so I'm always learning something new. Currently, I'm learning audience-building and technical strategy through Reforge's cohort-based learning environments online. So in short, I have a pretty busy work week, as well as a few hours booked over the weekend.

What does a typical workweek look like for you?

My typical workweek is full of meetings with my teams, peers, product teams, leadership, etc. As a leader, I typically work in "interrupt mode" for my teams, where they have open access to my time to discuss anything that may be blocking them. This means I need to have flexible hours for my personal stuff so that my team gets first priority on scheduling my time. Reclaim has enabled me to have flexible personal time for lunch, Pomodoro, reading, etc., which my team can always override, and Reclaim just automatically adjusts my calendar.

What techniques do you use to manage your time?

As mentioned earlier, I started putting everything in the calendar and reserving desired time slots for everything. Things that are time-sensitive have non-flexible hours, and others are flexible Habit hours.

What tools do you use to make you more productive?

I have been living inside Slack for my work, learning, and investment world. So Slack is my go-to tool for everything. Of late, I've also started using Discord for a few cohorts, but I have scheduled time to check Discord (and kept everything in it on mute).

So Slack + Discord + Calendar (Fantastical + Reclaim + Calendly) is my productivity stack you could say.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

I start my week on Sunday, and plan ahead. That's the best habit I got into as of late, and it's been proving very productive.

Reclaim also told me in one of my calendar productivity reports that I need to start declining a few meetings as I'm losing a lot of my Pomodoro time, not having lunch on time, etc. So, I started declining meetings that were not well-planned, un-important, where I would be underprepared, or meetings with no agenda. Believe me, it has also improved my team's habit of setting meaningful meetings.

Another great habit is scheduling decompression time after back-to-back meetings. That has helped me slow down, correct my notes, and prepare well for the rest of the day.

My calendar is always shared with everyone around me so they can find the right slot to schedule, and now they know which ones are flexible, and which ones are not. This enables me to operate in interrupt mode, without getting interrupted for unimportant things.

What is Focus Time? How to Prioritize Productivity

b.j. — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 17:04:38 +0000

Another busy week gone by, and somehow your to-do list was neglected once again! Your tasks are adding up way faster than you can check them off, and as much as you need a quiet week to catch up, there isn't one on the horizon.

And while you and your team are super busy, it doesn't always translate to being productive. The problem with busy work culture is that it's all too easy to get caught up in other people's priorities. Suddenly your calendar is slammed with all types of meetings - group updates, brainstorming meetings, and information sharing sessions, which leaves you little to no time for your actual work! What's worse, each distraction just eats further away at your productivity.

It takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back on track after being interrupted from a task according to Gloria Mark, Professor at the University of California, Irvine. That's almost 5% of your entire workday! You can see how just a few interruptions can quickly eat away at your productivity. So if you're interrupted three times, 15% of your day quickly becomes getting back on task, but on a bad day, you might be interrupted a dozen or more times, and suddenly over half of your time is gone. That is, until you reclaim some of that focus time back.

In this post, learn how to create focus time in your busy schedule to make real progress on your priorities and improve your overall productivity every week.

What is focus time?

Focus time is a dedicated block of time that you set aside for productive work on a task or project, without interruption. This time management strategy allows you to prioritize the important work that requires your undivided attention so you can actually produce high quality results. Regardless of whether you're a manager or maker, or need to spend time writing, coding, designing, or researching, making time on your calendar for heads-down work will not only help you get it done, but done faster with less room for interruptions.

Why is it important?

Focus time is important because it allows you to dedicate your full attention to the task at hand without the added distraction of meetings or interruptions. Oftentimes, you find yourself splitting your focus on two or more tasks at once, or multitasking, and that can come at the expense of missing details, deadlines, or a critical task altogether. By adopting a focus time routine, you're able to increase your efficiency and quality of work with a single-tasking approach towards your to-do list.

As you well know, one of the biggest challenges of navigating a busy workweek is actually finding the time to enter a productive state of deep work. After all, it's hard when your attention is constantly being fought over by the many workday distractions, or low-value tasks that can pile up and quickly overwhelm an afternoon. By giving yourself time to actually get into your groove, you enter a flow state where everything is clicking and you're able to make significant progress on your work.

Top work distractions

Focus time is used to combat distractions throughout your workday - here are the top work distractions that most professionals are working around:

Scattered meetings: The average middle manager spends 35% of their time in meetings, and up to 50% for upper management.
Slack interruptions: The average Slack user spends 90 minutes per working day reading, writing, commenting and searching in Slack.
Social media & news sites: The average employee spends 12% of their work day using unproductive sites, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Email: The average employee spends 28% of their work day on email, and checks their email 11 times per hour.
Multitasking rabbit holes: The average employee receives up to 200 notifications a day, causing task-switching and disengagement from their core work.

Focus time benefits

So how does focus time help you combat the constant flood of workday interruptions? By giving you the permission you need to disengage from distractions and focus on the work you need to get done.

Give your brain the opportunity to settle into a task, entering a productive state of flow for deep work, so you can be up to 500% more productive on your project.
Prevent interruptions that cause you to context switch, our tendency to jump between one unrelated project to another, so you can avoid catching up after you've been pulled away from a task.
Work faster by focusing on one thing at a time, or single tasking, so you don't slow your brain down by trying to multitask through complex problems and projects.
Prioritizing your important work during your actual working hours so you can eliminate the need to work overtime, helping to prevent yourself from experiencing workplace burnout.

When your calendar is filled with meetings every other hour, and Slack and email catch up in-between, you're forced to constantly context switch, which can prevent you from even opening up your to-do list on any given day. With the average middle manager spending 35% of their time in meetings, another 5% getting back on track after each, and then 28% catching up on email, you're not left with a lot of time for productive work. These distractions are some of the key reasons why focus time matters.

How does it work?

So, how should you structure your focus time? A good way to think about it is by the types of tasks you need to get done, and their level of difficulty. Cal Newport, productivity expert and author of Deep Work, pioneered a new way of focusing your work sessions:

Shallow Work: This is your non-cognitively demanding logistical work like email, slack, and quick tasks that can be performed while distracted, and usually done in short working sessions.
Deep Work: These sessions consist of your cognitively demanding work dedicated to your true priorities, requiring deep thinking without distraction so you can push your brainpower to its limits, usually performed in longer working sessions.

So how much time should you spend on each? This very much depends on your role, but most importantly, it's about doing them right. Bundle all of your shallow work together so it's not slowing or blocking anything during your deep work sessions. And try to set yourself up for as much deep work as you can! Realistically, the brain can't do more than 4 hours of deep work per day, so if you have the time in your role, set that as the "most aggressive" goal for cognitively demanding work on your calendar.

There are also many different time blocking methods you can try to optimize your focus time, like the Pomodoro technique which works by setting a series of timers to give yourself frequent breaks during a focus time session. You work for 25 minutes, give yourself a 5-minute break, and repeat 4 times for a 30-minute reward break after 2 hours. Or, if you have a few big projects or responsibilities on your plate, you could try day-theming to target a focus for each day of the week. Task batching is another useful process which groups similar, quick low-value tasks together for your shallow work so you can cruise through your deep work focus sessions without those distractions.

Look, there are a lot of methods, but don't let that distract you from just making time for it any way you can.

Focus time best practices

As we mentioned above, the most important way to get focus time is to actually schedule it on your calendar -- but is it really that easy in practice? Unfortunately not. Here are some of the major why people aren't blocking time for focus time on their calendars regularly:

Time blocks are inflexible and static. Something changes, and you now have more work to do in rescheduling your focus time.
Time blocks make you unavailable for meetings, which in many roles and organizations, is just not realistic. This often creates more work because people have to ping you to find time. Bleh!
Time blocks aren't intentional enough. You block time, then you struggle with what to do with it, and ultimately end up getting lost in your to-do list and start multitasking.
Interruptions still happen. If your Slack is going off every 5 seconds and your phone is buzzing with social media notifications, your time block ain't gonna help you.

However, there are steps to make this process way simpler to approach and easy implement into your regular work routine:

Plan your time

The first step is of course finding the time, but it will quickly go to waste if you don't have a solid action plan for how you're going to focus on and prioritize your work. Without a plan, it's all too easy to get caught up clearing your email, checking updates, or just poking around your task list without knowing what to focus on!

Focus time needs to be intentional! If your time blocks aren't intentional, then prioritizing them is really hard. While some tools like Clockwise will help you block fixed slots without meetings, these time blocks don't help you determine what to do with this time. Reclaim on the other hand, blocks out time that is specific to the tasks you need to accomplish, giving you a clearer view of what's on your plate and how long you need to get through your most important to-dos. These assigned blocks of time will also help you stay on task, and prevent you from bouncing aimlessly from one thing to another.

Prevent interruptions

Slack is a great tool, but it's also one of the worst offenders for interruption. On average, employees at large companies are each sending more than 200 Slack messages per week! One tool that people use to prevent interruptions in Slack is setting their status, and specifically setting do not disturb / DND. The challenge? Keeping your status up-to-date is another thing you have to remember to do, and you don't want to necessarily be uninterruptible all of the time.

But, you can use tools like Reclaim to automatically sync your Slack status to your calendar, customize your status by event type, and auto-set DND for events you really can't be interrupted in. There are other integrations like Google Calendar for Slack that works similarly, but the only status it will sync is "In a meeting", and doesn't sync shared calendar events, or allow you to automate DND. So, if you're working through an important focus time session and need to harvest 100% of your brainpower to meet a deadline, DND is what you need to block the non-stop flood of Slack messages so you're not pulled out of deep work.

So while interruptions can be difficult to prevent, you can defend yourself by anticipating them ahead of time. First being to communicate context around what you are working on. While a basic "focus time" block on your calendar may just be construed as time not spent in meetings (and totally interruptible), your colleagues will think twice before they try to steal your time during a "Write important strategy plan" or "Troubleshoot critical bug" time block on your calendar. By the simple act of communicating through an event title, you are sharing your priorities with your team, defending your focus time, and increasing the weight of their decision on imposing their own priorities to interrupt yours. And, if you sync your Slack status with your schedule, you're doubling the communication power of that calendar context.

Stay flexible

Another important part of focus time is staying flexible within your schedule. You might have every intention of working on that slide deck you've been putting off, but if an emergency customer meeting comes up that requires your attention, you need to have enough flexibility in your schedule that you can adapt without having to stress. It's far too common for all the hard work you put into your scheduling to go down the drain when a new urgent priority drops and it's all hands on deck. Now you're faced with completely rearranging your schedule once again.

Not only is staying flexible important for you, but it is also important for your team! Priorities change, new opportunities arise, and you need to be able to adapt and accommodate. Rigid schedules and time blocks make this very difficult, and can make you inaccessible and unavailable for collaboration.

This is where you might benefit with a smart time blocking tool like Reclaim. You're able to block time for your tasks and regular routines throughout your week, but these time blocks stay flexible to accommodate new meeting requests and priorities. As your schedule fills up, Reclaim will shift your time blocks from "free" time, or bookable time, to "busy" to maximize your availability while defending your focus time. Having a balance of availability and focus is key to actually executing on focus time as a methodology!

Estimate your needs

In order to really maximize the productivity of your focus time, it's important to estimate your needs! If you have an entire afternoon blocked for focus time, how much can actually get through on your to-do list? By incorporating time estimates, due dates and priority levels into your focus time planning, you can clearly see what you have time to get done in a week so you can better forecast your time and prioritize your workload.

With Reclaim's Planner, you can see what your week really looks like. You not only get a full picture of all your meetings, tasks and regular routines, but you have a priority list on the side to visualize what's most urgent, scheduled, completed, and most importantly, unscheduled. Time does not lie, and if you don't have time to get through everything, you're going to have to kick some stuff out to next week. Reclaim forces you to think about budgeting your time, without actually forcing you to "overthink" it. Just declare what you need, how long you think it will take, and Reclaim tells you what the reality is through your calendar. So whether you need to trim back on meetings this week, or push out some lower priority projects, it's imperative you understand how much focus time you actually have time for, and what you can feasibly do with it.

Focus Time examples

So how much focus time do you need? This entirely depends on your role and responsibilities! If you're a manager, you probably need to spend a majority of your week collaborating and leading your team, but if you're an engineer, you likely need to allocate most of your workweek towards your heads-down work. Every person has a different schedule and work demands, so your focus time will be completely unique to your role and personal style of work. Here are a couple focus time examples to help you get started:

Engineer needs to preserve at least 30 hours of focus time/week
Salesperson wants 1 hour/day and 3 hours on Friday for follow-ups and CRM notes
Product manager needs 2 hours, 2 times/week for priority planning
VP needs 2 hours every Tuesday to review status reports
Content writer needs 10 hours/week to develop a new blog post

How to add focus time to your calendar

Let's walk through adding focus time to your calendar using Good, Better and Best approaches so you can make time for your important work sessions every week.

Create "Focus Time" blocks without a plan - Good 🙂

Create a new Habit in Reclaim for "Focus Time"
Customize the time window, duration, and frequency of your focus time Habit
Save and auto-schedule your focus time every week!

This is a good way to make sure you have time for productive work every week, and leverage smart time blocking to maximize your calendar availability, but it lacks intentionality and context as your focus time blocks are unplanned and without purpose. Make sure to have a plan in place before your focus time sessions so you don't waste it wondering how to spend your time!

Create "Focus Time" blocks on a set schedule - Better 😎

Create a "Focus Time" event in Google Calendar (one-time or recurring)
Change the event availability from "Free" to "Busy"
Add #reclaim_free to the event description
Save & defend your focus time!

While creating a focus time block on a set schedule guarantees you time for solo work, the problem is that it locks you in, leaving you inaccessible for new meetings and collaboration opportunities. Rigid, fixed time blocks on Google Calendar aren't able to adjust to maximize the availability of your schedule like the smart time blocking options in the Good and Best options, which are increasingly important as many companies shift to a global workforce collaborating across time zones.

However, the advantage here is that Reclaim Tasks and Habits are auto-scheduled within these time blocks when you use #reclaim_free, allowing you to prioritize your most important work in your focus time sessions. This is also a great approach to blocking an entire day for productive work via no-meeting days so you can reduce distractions, increase productivity, and boost morale across your entire team.

Create "Focus Time" by time blocking your Habits and Tasks - Best 🤩

Set up all of your Habits in Reclaim
Set up your weekly Task list in Reclaim (new Tasks integrations coming soon)
Prioritize your Task list via the Planner as things change
Auto-schedule your focus time by priority every day!

This is the best way to set up and optimize your focus time because you're keeping your schedule flexible and oriented around your priorities. If you're just getting started, think through your routines. What do you need to do often? What do you end up doing in the late hours or weekends? Then create Habits for the maximum time range you could envision those routines taking so you can start reigning them back into your core working hours. Next, take your top 3-5 Tasks, especially those that you know are going to take more than an hour or two to complete, and add them to Reclaim. As your week progresses, you can reprioritize and push stuff off as needed using the Planner, and at the end of the week, you'll get to see just how much more you accomplished through your calendar productivity stats and weekly report.

It may seem like a little more effort on your part, but you're basically just integrating your existing to-dos with your calendar so your workday is aligned around what you actially have to get done. You will get that time back tenfold by putting the effort into strategically planning which tasks are the highest priority, and how long you need to get them done.

Focus time is an amazing method for productivity. It not only allows you to get more done in far less time, it also helps you eliminate overtime from your schedule to help you improve your work-life balance. While there are many ways to approach your focus time, the most important thing is just getting it on the calendar so you can start dedicating a healthy portion of your workweek towards productive progress on your priorities. Just remember, the more you put into efficiently using your focus time, the more you will get back! If you have any focus time tips you want to share with us, tweet us @reclaimai.

Calendar Heroes: Philippe Mesritz, VP Customer Experience & Customer Operations at Khoros

b.j. — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 17:10:03 +0000

In this edition of Calendar Heroes, we talk to Philippe Mesritz, VP of Customer Experience & Customer Operations at Khoros, to learn about his style, tools, and methodologies for balancing priorities while leading the "big picture" focus and strategy around customer retention, enablement, analytics and more for the digital-first customer engagement software. Follow Philippe on Twitter at @pmesritz and on LinkedIn.

Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do

For the past 2+ decades, I've been neck deep in customer-focused roles ranging the gamut from technical support, customer success, operations, professional services and now customer experience. I've had the opportunity to work at small companies (7 employees) to massive companies (88k+ employees), but really thrive the most on the lower end (100-2k).

My current role was designed to help our company deliver high value improvements for our customers through understanding their needs via high-touch interviews and en-mass surveys. My team works across the globe to deliver at-scale digital solutions and technologies while we manage the higher touch complex projects to increase the customer experience.

What does a typical workweek look like for you?

Well, according to Reclaim.ai, I'm in meetings between 24 and 29 hours a week! Each day varies, but my wife simply says that my job is to talk to people. I'd say that's not far from accuracy - whether my meetings are internally to move forward programs and strategy, with employees to help ensure their success or external with customers to understand their pain points, the typical workweek lets me spend a lot of time digging into a variety of problems and solving complex scenarios.

On Monday's, my team's leadership meets to talk about blockers for the week and I also meet with my peers to discuss the same across the entire customer organization. Tuesday's I typically have a few strategic program meetings. Going into Wednesday, it's sales deal reviews and the customer organization strategic discussions. On Thursdays, I'm the chair for our social responsibility program for a standing meeting, and then on Fridays, my team has a bi-weekly strategic planning and review session. Throughout all that, I've got 1-1s, two leadership mentees in different departments, a variety of project status discussions, and random customer conversations depending on the week

What techniques do you use to manage your time?

I'm a heavy color-coder of my calendar. It lets me skim through the next week to see where there's conflicts I need to solve with different priorities, understand where I'm spending my time, and try to prioritize accordingly. Often, I use purple as priorities, red as customer or customer-related calls, and green for team meetings (different shades for group meetings vs 1-1s).

I leverage AI, and I'm sure you can figure out which AI based on where this blog is posted :), to help block my calendar to have reviews of data forecasting, metric reviews, and personal strategic program reviews. I'd say that without Reclaim, I'd probably never eat lunch either! In addition to that, I spend about 10m towards the end of every week looking at the next week's schedule to confirm, move or decline before spending 5 minutes looking up to a month out to minimize my conflicts when I can. Recently, I've started using "Tasks" tied into Reclaim to see how I can make my task management a little more ... manageable.

What tools do you use to make you more productive?

Many people talk about email management - Inbox Zero, Inbox Triage, etc -- Definitely not something I've ever been able to master, but I do leverage Gmail's importance algorithm to help me focus on the emails that I need to respond to as best as possible. I'll also clear out email about once a quarter to simply "reset".

I'll leverage Slack reminders, Gmail "snooze", and other mechanisms to bring things to the forefront of my attention. This lets me handle asynchronous conversations by marking them for action during blocks that are available, or prescheduled, rather than always being distracted. Honestly speaking, though, it doesn't always work, so I've never really solved the "problem".

The other thing that I've found really helpful on productivity is super simple -- using collaborative brainstorming and discussions. Slides, docs, and sheets in Google all let me come up with information, send it over to other people for input and then know that I don't have to be "there" to talk through a meeting so I can work on a number of projects at the same time in the background while I'm meeting on other topics where a real time discussion is actually needed.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

I've passed this advice on many times in the past because it's been so powerful in my career -- "Prewire your audience". An old manager of mine gave me this advice years ago. Effectively, what this means is to ensure that you go into a meeting knowing that the majority of your audience is already on board. Spend the time talking with your audience one-on-one before the meeting. It's a lot of extra work up front, but the time spent to answer questions makes the group discussion so much smoother. When your audience is made up of people that can help guide the conversation in the direction you want, it gives you a much greater likelihood of "closing" on your ask.

Calendar Heroes: Megan Killion, Founder & CEO at MK Consulting

b.j. — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 13:00:12 +0000

In this edition of Calendar Heroes, we talk to Megan Killion, CEO and founder of Megan Killion Consulting, founder of Coven Cloud, property rental owner, and full-time mom to learn about her style, tools, and methodologies for balancing priorities and staying organized while running three companies as a working mom. Follow Megan on LinkedIn.

Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do
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I'm Megan Killion, the CEO and founder of Megan Killion Consulting, and I actually run three companies. Megan Killion Consulting is a sales and marketing agency where we do pretty much everything that falls under sales and marketing such as job hunting, placement, and sales training on the sales side. I'm personally really focused on top-of-funnel when it comes to sales, and although I have full lifecycle sales experience, I know that my strength is at the top of the funnel. And then we do everything marketing-related too, including SEO, lead generation, digital marketing, paper, print, absolutely everything. My number one product is outsourcing marketing packages. Think of me as your CMO, and my team as a fully fleshed out marketing team where you don't have to hire or take on the costs of an internal team.

We typically work with early-stage tech startups with smaller headcounts that are still entrepreneurial in nature, and don't have a marketing department of their own. I usually exit either when they grow naturally or organically, or when they have finished their fundraising and are looking to hire an in-house marketing team. I'll then work with the team to help hire those people.

I also run a real estate business that is short-term and long-term rentals. I kind of fell into this because I inherited a house up north, and then quickly learned that real estate investment is a great way for long-term stable income.

And then the newest, and most exciting company from my perspective, is a startup called Coven Cloud, which is a social media platform built by spiritualists for spiritualists. Our tagline is spiritual nomads wander no longer - you found a home. Coven Cloud's leadership team is mostly pagan and witchy, people who kind of didn't find a spiritual home in the good old fashioned brick-and-mortar type of religious institution. I felt like I've never found a community that was right for me when it came to my spiritual growth, and they wanted to create it. And as soon as I did, every single line in my life just kind of came together and started making sense.

So as the CEO of three different companies, time management is absolutely crucial to my functioning in any capacity.

What does a typical workweek look like for you

My rental business, which is located on Cape Cod, is in the off-season. I have two rentals. One is long-term, one is short term, and this time of year it's slow. It's a cheaper vacation in the off-season, and I only get a couple of guests that come to the Cape in the winter. But during the summertime, it's insane, and I have to find a lot more time for it than I do now. But I have a good crew of people and it pretty much runs itself! I have a tenant that lives up there that helps with property management, a Jack of all trades handyman, and then a staff of housekeepers that do turnovers between guests. I usually only spend one or two hours a week checking up to make sure everything is running okay. I've outsourced the marketing to my marketing people, which usually just requires one post a week, and we've automated the signup process for new reservations.

Megan Killion Consulting is what I consider to be my day job, and the time for that is very variable. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday are my long days where I work 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM, take a short break for dinner and bedtime with my family, and then I'm back to work by 8:30 PM working on Coven Cloud. I occasionally set aside time for Coven Cloud during the day when I need to, but I normally just check up on it during business working hours, and it isn't the focus of my daytime work. Megan Killion Consulting is where I really have to block time for specific tasks, and I use Reclaim.ai for a lot of that. Reclaim helps me balance my personal life and my work life.

I also have four kids, so we have a whole chart system to stay organized as a family. I have whiteboards everywhere - a calendar whiteboard in my office that tells me what I'm doing every day, my agenda planner, another goals whiteboard for progress toward revenue goals, and then a manifestation board for the things that I'm hoping for my company, for myself, for my family, and for my friends. And then a family whiteboard color-coordinated for everybody's chores and tasks. Everybody has the same chores every week, and we divvied them up fairly after determining which things were the most draining for which people (we all agree dishes and laundry are terrible).

I take on the vacuuming and the batch cooking, but my husband takes on the prepping for the meals Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday when I'm not around as much. Thursday night I'll cook again, and then Friday night we go out on date night. Ultimately, I schedule pretty much every second of every day and hold myself really accountable to where my time goes.

When I was first figuring it out, I got out a pad of paper to keep with me at all times, and I wrote down everything that I did. I looked for the pattern of where was my time going, when was it going, and what was most productive? And this had two purposes for me, one was to put together a calendar that actually reflects where my time is going and how I can block time to be more productive instead of just chaotically doing things. And the second was figuring out which things give me energy, and which things steal my energy. For me, it's not just about where my time goes, it's about how that time impacts you. So really leaning into my own unique ability, focusing on the things that I'm good at, that fill me with energy, and that I'm constantly improving at, then outsourcing the stuff that isn't. That really made my time more productive.

Also, coming to terms with the fact that we all have this predisposition to believe that other people are like us. Those tasks that we hate, everybody hates. For me, this is processes and documentation. I hate that stuff. I would 1000x rather record a walkthrough video then write down a process. But not everybody's like that. There are people who love processes and documentation and operations. It took me a long time to get to the point where I realized just because I hate something, doesn't mean that giving it to someone else is a burden. So I focused on finding the right people, what it is they're passionate about, and finding the best place for them in the organization. Getting that flowing really well allowed me to have better control of my time.

When I made my time list, I put a red X next to the things I needed to get rid of, and I found that a lot of Xs showed up on things that were operational. So now I'm prioritizing my next big hire, a Sales and Marketing Operations Specialist, to take the stuff I hate doing. And then bring on a personal assistant to take care of the small stuff I don't enjoy like checking email and managing my calendar. And in the beginning, Reclaim really filled a lot of those gaps - like having a PA without having a PA. But now I need somebody to work alongside Reclaim to organize my time and take the little stuff.

I'm also really, really strict about my blocks of time, and I didn't use to be. I used to say, well, the time's blocked for this, but I want to do this, so I'm going to do that. And now, I really ask myself, why don't I want to do that other thing? Is it a cop out? Am I trying to avoid something I don't want to do? Am I procrastinating? Or is this really a higher priority than that? And if it is, we need to make a change to the calendar because this isn't really a priority. But I give myself a little slap on the wrist anytime I hit that delete button in Slack on a Reclaim Task, because I'm like, "Hey, I didn't do what I was supposed to do. Why did I not do that?" Because it wasn't a priority and never should have been on the calendar, it should have been further out, or it really should have been a task in Basecamp that I'll get to you when I get to.

For me, prioritizing has been the biggest challenge, but also the thing that gets the best results. If I sit down and spend two hours of my week filtering things by priority, I will get that time back tenfold. It's like the do-not-do list is as important as the to-do list. I will not do these things because they're not a priority right now. And giving myself permission to take things off my plate and say "no", that has made all the difference in the world.

What techniques do you use to manage your time?

I actually created a Google account out of my Outlook just so I could have access to Google Calendar to use Reclaim.ai, because that's how dependent I became in the time that I was using it. Especially because there's the ability to do the integration with Google Tasks and I can zap that over to Basecamp. I have specific lists in Basecamp that are connected to my Google Tasks, which connect to Reclaim, so if I add it in Reclaim, it shows up in Basecamp, and if I add it in Basecamp, it shows up in Reclaim. That's been huge for me too, because I really need the ability to organize things across tools or I get wicked tool fatigue.

My setup is definitely multifunctional in that I can go into Reclaim to manage and build my to-do lists, but I don't actually have to go into Reclaim if I don't want to. Once I set up my system, I could manage everything from Slack and Basecamp all day, and even email to an extent - but I'm really trying to move away from letting my email manage me. My email used to act like my to-do list, but that did not scale. So, to move away from that, I had to do a little bit of work to get Reclaim and Basecamp running together, but the Slack integration is super easy and the out-of-the-box settings are perfect. I tested it a couple of times to make sure that it's pulling information from the right places, and now I really don't have to go into Reclaim at all, it just works. And that's the best thing you can ever say about software, is it just works.

I really, really highly recommend my system to entrepreneurs, even if you're not an entrepreneur but you're working at an entrepreneurial organization where it's chaotic and you have to make sense of the chaos. Especially with the career revolution that's happening right now - you have to be more capable of doing that yourself than you ever have before. We can't expect organizations to give us the blueprint anymore, we have to create our own.

Writing down where your time is going is also a really good negotiation tactic. If you're looking to get a raise, a better title, or anything like that, you can actually show this is where my time went, and I'm only being paid for this 30% of it. So either I can stop doing these 70% other tasks, or, you can pay me more, give me a better title, or whatever it is that you're trying to position for.

It's also just being aware of where your time goes. I was really, really surprised the first time I did that activity with how much of my time I wasn't aware where it was going. This is going to go on a tangent for a second, but when you do the math on the little pieces of time, and you add it up over your lifetime, it can be a slap in the face. Especially as women, because we've been sort of brainwashed by society to care about things that don't matter, like our hair, our makeup, even shaving our legs. And when you add up that time over your lifetime, and you think about what that really means for you, all of a sudden, you're like, cool. I'm never shaving my legs again.

So by looking closely at my time, I saw that a lot of my time was going towards something that wasn't productive, and that wasn't making my life better or my kids' lives better. And for me, I basically take a formulaic approach to how I spend my time, which is essentially - if you want my time, you're taking it from my kids. So, I don't know, ask them how much my time's worth. That's been the best mindset for me.

My kids are a little bit older now, my twins are three and they're now in preschool. So there are times of the day where you're not taking time from my kids, you're taking time from work, which I'm way more relaxed about giving work time away. Which is why during the middle of the day, I'm like, sure, let's do a video interview. And that is different, because for me, that's just a money equation. Although I'm very money-motivated, there are things in life that matter to me more. When it's my kids' time, I'm very cognizant of how you're taking it.

Though Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are my long days, I actually try to take Thursdays and Fridays off every week. Which, if you would have asked me three or four years ago if that was even humanly possible, I'd say no way. But I almost always take my Fridays off, and Thursdays usually end up being a light day. Things come up, my team needs me, but it's not a client-facing day. So you can't book time with me as my client on a Thursday, unless you're going to pay me an astronomical amount of money and you're a priority client. But, if my team is like "Megan, I need you, things are on fire!" Sure, I'll pop in to help. So on Thursdays, Slack and Basecamp are on and I'm checking my notifications, but I'm usually off doing something with my kids or my husband or catching up on errands.

On Fridays, I adventure with my middle child who is homeschooled, but he goes to a co-op Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. So on Fridays, we adventure-school, which means we go on a field trip every single Friday. It could be the Science Center, or Big Tree Park nearby, which is amazing and home to the oldest tree in the world. That's my favorite day of the week, every single week, is Friday. We also have Disney passes which is just 30 minutes away, so we work hard, play hard for sure.

My other big time management technique is to outsource. You might think you can't afford it. But I promise, pretty much everyone, that if you outsource the things that drain your energy, you will make that money back doing the things that don't. I have an immune disorder, so when COVID started, I didn't go out in public for 6-12 months. So, I started ordering groceries online, and now we're never giving it up - we will order groceries online forever. I will pay somebody else to get my groceries, tip well, and support a person who is making their living delivering people's groceries. And when I did the math for that time, I realized that's almost six hours a week I'm getting back. Now, the only grocery shopping I do is the farmer's market on Saturday morning. And when I looked at what six hours of my time meant for me when I charge my clients $250 - $300 an hour, that's a lot more money than I saved shopping for groceries myself.

And that's really getting honest with yourself about the value of your time. However you do it, it's relating it to what you spend your time on, by default. For me, that's time with my kids. If I have free time, it's spent with my family. So that's the quotient for me, but it can be money, taking your dog for a walk, playing video games. Whatever it is that you do, think of that as a trade value, and trade out the things that aren't worth it.

A little while back, my friend Angela told me that there is no moral high ground for doing things yourself. Basically, outsourcing is morally neutral. This is probably one of the most powerful things I ever heard in my entire life. Because before that, I really felt like it made me a better person to do it myself, to work on it, to put the labor in. But it's not true. Paying somebody to clean your house is not morally inferior to cleaning your house yourself.

As a mom, it is my responsibility to make sure that my kids get nutritionally whole food. That is a moral obligation of mine. I brought them into this world, it's my job to feed them food that does not hurt their bodies. I don't have to cook it, and I don't have to shop for it, but I do the cooking most of the time because I enjoy making meals for my family. And I used to be very judgmental about those things. Of course you have to clean the house, cook meals, do all of these things. No you don't! You have to put a roof over your kid's head, make sure they have a safe place to exist, that they're getting nutritionally whole food, and provide education for them. How you do those things. There's no moral value to it. Send them to public school, private school, homeschool them, just make sure they get an education.

What tools do you use to make you more productive?

Basecamp, Slack and Reclaim are my power trio. They get used the most and are what I live in, but there are other ones I use more specifically for specific things. Grammarly has been life-changing for copywriting, I would say it cuts my writing time down 30%. It prevents me from maniacally staring and worrying if it feels right or the grammar is right, I'm just writing like I would talk and allow Grammarly to edit it.

I also use Anyword, and this one's a little bit of a cheat, but it's essentially an AI writer for little writing assignments. So if I need to come up with an editorial, or a promo for a blog post, I'll use Anyword to quickly generate it. Zoom is my chosen video tool, mostly because I understand it and I don't want to learn a new tool! Trello used to be in my power house, but now I use a plugin called Tracked for Basecamp, and it does basically the same thing and I'm keeping it all in one place. But depending on what you do and what your team uses, Trello and Basecamp do the same thing, and one is not better than the other. Same thing with Atlassian and JIRA. It just depends on what your org is focused on, but those three are, in my opinion, the powerhouses of project management, time management, and scheduling.

I use Loomly for social media. I don't hate or love it. Their mobile app isn't amazing, but I can use the mobile app to post. I used to use Hootsuite, but their pricing just got really ridiculous, but I think they have the best mobile app, especially for creating drafts on the fly. I actually really, really liked Albert, which I tried for a little while, but their mobile app was terrible which was a deal breaker. I couldn't create and draft a post from mobile, which for me, inspiration strikes when it strikes. I'm very big on habitually writing every single day, but sometimes, you're driving, and you think of something you need to say, and need to get it out. You have to have a place to put it, to save it for later. And Albert didn't work for that.

I use HubSpot as my CRM, again, neither love nor hate. I think their pricing is insane. I have their starter package and we are already outgrowing it in two out of three organizations. I'm definitely on the precipice of having to pick a new CRM. I will not use Salesforce ever again in my life. So if somebody's watching this and has a great CRM to recommend, message me on LinkedIn! Let me know what you got. I've used Active Campaign in the past. I didn't hate it, but I didn't find their user interface intuitive. The thing that I like about HubSpot is that I find it very intuitive and they have great documentation and good support. But even with those things, I don't think they're worth what they charge. Sorry HubSpot, but you need to create some type of mid-tier for startups that doesn't require going through an incubator. There's just so many small businesses and startups out there like me that can't afford your pricing and would love to work with you if you had a system for scaling.

Which is one thing I love about Reclaim - it's free. And I know it's going to a paid model eventually, but it will always keep some type of free tier so you can scale up with companies. It's really hard to sell into a successful organization. Selling to a startup, especially if you offer it for free, is easy, and you're hedging your bets. If a startup is successful, they can pay you a whole bunch of money later. And if they're not, you threw away whatever your cost on your software is, no big deal. You were already paying most of it anyway. Creating those kinds of buckets so people can grow with you, that's hugely important for any productivity softwares, because very few people go from a small business with no income to a mega-million dollar company overnight. Real unusual. And that's how some pricing plans are packaged. You can either be on free, or you've got to pay a thousand dollars a month, and you wonder, who did your pricing strategy?

I also use Linktree a lot for social, and Canva for graphics. I used to spend hours of my day in Photoshop and Figma. But now, my graphic design team creates all the elements in Figma and Photoshop, and then when I need to create something on the fly, I can do it in Canva in two minutes. I can not say enough about Canva, it's the best graphic design tool out there, even over professional graphic design tools. If you're at a place where you have to choose between Canva and Photoshop, choose Canva. For one, it's free, and the paid plan is only $120 a year and you get five seats. Unbeatable pricing, super easy to use. They even now have a social scheduler so you can schedule social posts right from Canva.

Last but not least, LastPass is my login and password manager. Admittedly, I used to be a security nightmare. My password for everything was the same, sorry every IT person I've ever worked with! LastPass was life-changing for me. I generate passwords that are really hard to hack, and then I have one master password that gets me into everything, which is not something you could guess. I can also share those logins with my teammates. We have a lot of collaboration that happens, especially on social media, and I can just send somebody the login to get in.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

This one's just top of mind right now, I don't know if it's the best I ever received, but a couple of years ago, a mentor told me that I had the power to do incredible things, but that I had to stop taking care of adults like they were children in order to do that. And that I could never realize my potential while I was carrying everyone on my back. That was the best advice for me personally at that time, because as soon as I put it into action, my life changed. I'm a "yes" person, if you message me and you tell me that you need help, I cannot tell you "no". I'm not capable of leaving someone hurting. But I had to stop feeling accountable for other adults. It's not my job to be everybody's mom.

And I can make a bigger difference and a deeper impact by doing things like Coven Cloud, and making money and spending it philanthropically, than I can by carrying people who are capable of being self-sufficient through life. You know you see those signs at the parks, don't feed the wildlife, it's that way with people too. Which is not me telling you not to help people, because you should, if you can help somebody, you always should, every single time. What you give comes back to you tenfold, and I believe that wholeheartedly.

But you can not make yourself accountable for other people's pain. It's not yours. And I have a bad habit of carrying other people's pain around with me, in my body. And I had to learn that lesson, and at the time, no one in my life was willing to call me out on it. This was the first person, three to four years ago, that said your friends are not your responsibility. You're almost 30 years old. And now I'm 33 and I can proudly say that I am not paying anyone else's mortgage. So that, for me, was the best advice.

Also, my last boss, Matt Levine over at CacheFly, told me to make small bets and double down on what works. And I think, from a business perspective, that's one of the best pieces of advice that I've gotten. It was really powerful, and you can tell, I don't have all my eggs in one basket!

Top 7 Time Management Tools (for Busy People)

b.j. — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 15:54:14 +0000

Time management is hard - especially when you're juggling multiple projects, dozens of tasks, fluctuating deadlines, not to mention that personal life you've been meaning to invest some hours into. Who has time to adopt a new process amid the chaos?

The Development Academy found that 82% of people do not have a time management system, but just use a list, their email inbox, or nothing at all. And, only 17% of people track their time according to TechJury, which is one of the most critical components to a successful time management strategy - how can you plan your time if you don't know how you're spending it?

Fortunately, there are easy-to-use time management apps that can help you plan when and where to invest your time, and how to spend it most efficiently to maximize your productivity. The problem is there are hundreds of time management tools to choose from! And while there isn't one that will suit all of your needs, there are clear leaders to help you step up your time management game.

In this article, you'll find the top 7 time management tools for busy folks such as yourself to help you manage everything from calendars to your notes.

1. Reclaim.ai - best calendar app

Reclaim.ai is a calendar management app that optimizes your busy schedule through smart time blocking. Supported on Google Calendar, Reclaim automatically helps you find the best time for your meetings, to-do list, and regular routines while still keeping your schedule flexible for new meeting requests and priority changes. It allows your schedule to stay adaptable while you have availability, and defends your smart time blocks around your most important priorities as your calendar fills up.

Auto-schedule time for your Tasks and Habits (recurring routines) on your calendar.
Sync multiple calendars and merge your actual availability so you're never overbooked across clients or personal events again.
Analyze calendar productivity stats on where your time goes every week.
Auto-schedule breaks between meetings with Buffer Time.
Reprioritize your entire calendar in one click with advanced priority controls.
Sync your Slack status with your calendar and Zoom meetings to minimize interruptions during focus work and calls.

The reason why Reclaim is the number one tool is that it actually forces you to make realistic time management and planning decisions. By integrating your task list (and personal time commitments) with your work schedule, your calendar becomes a true reflection and plan for where your time goes. Instead of setting blind goals based on what you want to do, Reclaim allows you to visualize exactly what's in your capacity by blocking the time you need for each task, and allowing you to prioritize which ones to tackle first.

Pricing: Free forever, paid plans start at $9/month (free through 2021)

2. Toggl track - best time tracking app

Toggl Track is a time tracking software that allows you to track and measure the time you spend on tasks and projects, in apps, and offline activity so you can see exactly how you're managing your time. The app integrates with dozens of project management systems so you can automatically measure your productivity across your favorite platforms and stay focused on your important work.

Start and stop time tracking across the web, mobile, desktop app or browser extension with one-click timers.
Auto-track time spent across every app or website for more than 10 seconds with Background Tracking
Get reminders when you've opened up a new app, but forgot to start your timer with Autotracker.
Create reports by time ranges, clients, and projects to analyze your productivity, progress, and profitability across your team.
Track your team's schedule and capacity to optimize their time.
Keep everyone on track with email reminders and required fields to ensure accurate reporting.

Toggl Track is the best time tracking app for managing your time because it's simple set up, navigation, and functionalities makes time tracking easy and approachable. You can see where your time goes every day, and get a clear understanding of how you can better optimize your time to become more efficient. The app can be used by single freelancers or small teams, up to large corporate teams who need to track and estimate time and tasks across many moving parts.

Pricing: Starts at $9/month

3. Linear - best issue tracking app

Linear is an issue tracking tool that allows you to streamline software projects, sprints, tasks, and bug tracking progress and development across product team workflows. It's intuitive navigation and keyboard-first design lets you move fast and effortlessly through your issues, and quickly manage and optimize your time around key priorities. Linear integrates with your favorite development and design tools, has hundreds of additional Zapier connections, and supports custom workflows through it's API so everyone is aligned and able to collaborate across roles through this one tool.

Synchronizes data in real-time so you can move fast without waiting for pages to load.
Keep your team focused on high-level milestones and goals with Roadmap.
Create and manage all of your issues by project and cycle with due dates, time and complexity estimates, statuses, and priority levels.
Collaborate with your team across projects, issues and sub-issues, and set enablers and blockers to see what's preventing a project from moving forward.
Create cycles that run on an automated schedule so you can focus on your work and not on creating tasks.

Linear's issue tracking app was designed for high-performance software teams, but also functions as a great project management tool for any agile team. It's true value is saving you time by simplifying complex challenges into simple issues that are optimized around priorities and resolution, without the heavy over-complications many traditional issue trackers force on you. Linear works great for remote teams of any size, and scales efficiently without adding unnecessary layers of processes that slow your team down as you grow. With so many organizations transforming into software companies, Linear is a great fit to help you streamline your development efforts across engineers, designers and peers.

Pricing: Free forever, paid plans start at $12/month

4. Asana - best project app

Asana is a project management tool that simplifies team-based work management and organizes everything from small projects to big-picture ideas. This project management tool doubles as a time management tool by streamlining team collaboration through priority planning, task management, deadlines and timeline tracking. Asana condenses the number of tools needed to manage people and projects into one sleek user-friendly platform, with over 200 integrations to tie in all aspects of your work.

Organize and assign tasks across your team with priorities and deadlines.
Manage and view your projects in timeline, kanban, calendar, and lists formats.
Analyze reports to set goals and track progress on where your time is going and progress across your team.
Create custom workflows to automate management across teams from start to finish, with custom rules, check-in forms and approvals.
Over 50 project templates available to jumpstart your projects and fine tune for your project needs.

When it comes to time management for your team projects, Asana is your best bet. Asana is one of the most comprehensive project management platforms on the market, yet super easy to use, which allows you to truly align your time with your workload to reach your team goals. You can see exactly where you're at in any stage of a project, see where you're going next, and automate common processes to optimize any repeatable efforts across your team.

Pricing: Free forever, paid plans start at $11/month

5. RescueTime - best time audit app

RescueTime is a time auditing tool that helps you eliminate distractions and focus on improving your productivity. The app integrates seamlessly into the task bar of your PC or Mac so it can analyze exactly where you're allocating your time throughout the day across all websites and applications. RescueTime also offers a mobile app to analyze your time spent on your phone in addition to desktop for a full picture of your time online.

Set and personalize daily Focus Work goals that support your work style and meeting schedule, and get alerted when you reach your goal.
Automated smart coaching shares insights throughout the day, nudges you to stay on track, and provides daily summaries of your work.
Block the websites that negatively impact your work time during Focus Sessions.
Analyze reports on your time spent across each app and number of sessions to understand how that time either supported or pulled from your productivity.
Compare your Focus Work sessions to your average time to see how different approaches improve your productivity.

RescueTime is one of the most popular time management tools on the market due to it's in-depth analytics on how you're actually allocating your time. The app automatically categorizes your time across apps by their function so you can see where you're sinking your time and if you spend enough time in the tools that actually support your priorities. Outside of just analyzing, RescueTime is truly a motivator and can serve as a hard reality check to the time you allow yourself to waste across unproductive sites and apps.

Pricing: Starts at $9/month

6. 1Password - best password app

1Password is a password manager that provides a safe place for you to store passwords, software licenses, credit card information, and more across both work and life. Instead of having to create dozens of complex, hard to remember passwords, 1Password just needs a single password to access them all and keep your accounts safe. This encrypted database takes the guesswork out of your day and saves you time by having everything in one place, not to mention, seriously steps up your password security!

Automatically generate suggested passwords that are highly complex and difficult for hackers to guess.
Record and store all of your usernames and passwords when you sign into an app or website so you never waste time searching or guessing a password again.
Improves your password hygiene by checking for password breaches and other security problems so you don't have to monitor yourself.
Automatically fill in forms, sign-ins, credit card information and more with a single click, look or touch.
Share vaults with your secure passwords across your work team or family, and manage all passwords from a single account.
Access your passwords from any device, at any time, to make signing in and paying for things easier and more secure.

Remembering passwords for all of your accounts isn't just difficult, it's a major time sink. Instead of wasting time resetting another forgotten password every week, or spending 20 minutes hunting down that stray post-it note for that password you need, you can use 1Password to get into any account in seconds. This tool is safe, easy to use, and can work across both personal and work accounts alike. You can manage, update and share all of your passwords through their simple interface, and control access for your team when responsibilities change.

Pricing: Starts at $3/month

7. Notion - best notes app

Notion is an all-in-one workspace that allows you to write, plan and organize everything you need for your whole team. Designed for any role, function and team, Notion allows you to create notes, tasks, wikis and databases so you can visualize everything from a product roadmap, to your sales CRM, over to a company wiki for all HR and onboarding processes. Notion streamlines content and sharing across any busy team with an easy-to-use interface and highly customizable workspace, with over 500 integrations to embed your favorite tools.

Develop team wikis to centralize all of your collective knowledge and make it easy to find answers.
Create, manage and organize all of your notes and documents, and share or tag a team member to collaborate in real time and asynchronously.
Access hundreds of Notion templates to kick off your workspace, and find thousands more through their active and collaborative community.
Create and manage projects and tasks through kanban boards, tables, lists and more.
Organize your documents through tags so you can easily filter and sort your notes however you choose.
Use Notions API to build custom workflows tieing in your favorite tools.

Notion is exploding in popularity across both professional and personal use alike, as it allows you to keep track of anything important in your life. The app gives you and your team the tools you need to plan, organize and update all of your projects, and limits the number of apps you have to have open, saving you a ton of time throughout your day. Notion has so many in-depth features to explore, and an extremely active global community and social fan base, that you can find a template or inspiration to help you quickly and efficiently create a solution to any problem.

Pricing: Free forever, paid plans start at $8/month\
Time management can be tricky for everyone, especially busy people with more plans than time, but it sure has its benefits when you find the right tool. If you happen to come across any awesome apps that have seriously improved your time management, shoot us a tweet at @reclaimai and we would love to share it!

Job Burnout: How to Fix at Your Workplace

b.j. — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 15:22:34 +0000

Have you noticed a shift in the workplace? Are employees starting to look physically and emotionally drained? Should you have capped that meeting last Thursday at 5:30pm instead of letting it run until 6:45pm? Your team might be experiencing job burnout, and it's not stemming from any one incident: burnout is a reaction to prolonged job stress. A Gallup study found that 23% of people in the workforce experience burnout very often or always, and an additional 44% feel burnt out sometimes. This means that two thirds of employees have felt job burnout somewhat recently, which is a dangerous balance for the health of any team.

With burnout so prevalent in the workplace, it is essential that management is able to spot and help correct burnout at its very early signs. If you have overlooked or are simply unsure of the symptoms of workplace burnout, we have crafted a guide for managers and leadership to detect burnout, understand the causes, and learn how to prevent it in your employees.

Burnout signs & symptoms

HR experts report that burnout is responsible for over 50% of annual employee turnover, and it can cost more than 200% of a trained employee's salary to replace them. With the high impact of burnout on the workplace, it is important to take notice of the signs and symptoms before they impact your employees' future at the organization.

Here are some key symptoms to look out for:

Workplace detachment: Has a team member seemed distant during meetings, and not as willing to participate in discussions?
Exhaustion: While everyone has an occasional week lacking in sleep, is someone consistently showing up to work visibly tired?
Angry outburst: Is someone on the team starting to display anger and short patience with other members of the team?
Unexpected absences: Is a team member starting to have more frequent absences unexpectedly?
Losing passion for their work: Is a team member performing their job duties without a lot of care, or appear to be losing enthusiasm around their work?
Work-life balance: Have you noticed or heard that work is starting to negatively impact a team member's personal life?

While the expression of workplace burnout signs vary for each employee, it is important to be on the lookout for any resemblance to these key symptoms. By being more observant and developing a professional relationship with your team, you'll be more familiar with your team's patterns and mannerisms in the workplace which will allow you to catch any red flags before a team member decides to make a career change.

What causes workplace burnout?

A lot of the time, people think of burnout as a state where you're just working long hours. Certainly, long hours can be a sign of burnout, but here's a different perspective you probably haven't heard before: burnout doesn't just come from long hours. It comes from long hours working on stuff that just isn't going anywhere fast. If employees are spending 7 hours a day in meetings and catching up on email, that's not particularly exciting or invigorating. It's just busy work, and it's the equivalent of banging your head against the wall. Similarly, if the company imposes way too much bureaucracy and process around getting stuff done (e.g., shipping a new feature takes several dozen approvals and hours upon hours of meetings) that can also be the kind of work that burns people out.

Working long hours, or even just your standard 40, in service of something that is truly exciting can actually have the opposite effect of burnout: it can be a huge motivator to stay at the company you're at. Seeing progress on something that you love working on is really why we get up in the morning, after all.

Here are the main causes of workplace burnout:

Lack of connection with mission: Every company starts with a mission, but if it is not properly communicated and upheld internally, employees can become disconnected. Your team will be more passionate, engaged, and work harder when aligned with your mission.
Too much time in meetings: Employees spend too much time in long, redundant, and unnecessary meetings, leaving them exhausted from non-stop discussions with insufficient time to complete their work.
Uninspired work: Employees are losing motivation because their work is monotonous and does not feel meaningful, so they're uninspired and leave most days without a great sense of accomplishment.
Blocked by bureaucracy: Employees may also be losing motivation because they are trying to make real progress, but are continuously blocked, redirected, and sent backwards by internal bureaucracy, which leaves them feeling defeated and inadequate in their role.
Unrealistic goals: Employees are simply burdened with a workload that is far beyond their capacity due to poor time planning internally, which makes them feel like they're stretched too thin and a failure for continuously falling short of the unrealistic goals.
Lack of direction or engagement: If employees are working towards unclear goals, have insufficient direction, feedback or training from above, or are just plain unsure of what you expect from them, it can cause great frustration at work and stress around their own job performance.

To be clear, if your team is not getting sufficient time for a personal life and aren't getting downtime to reset their brains, that can absolutely be a cause of burnout. But burnout is a much more complex issue than giving everyone a day off. It's also imperative that you can answer the question of "Are you giving employees an exciting reason to get out of bed every morning and come to work?" If not, you'll find people burning out very quickly.

How can companies prevent employee burnout?

The biggest challenge companies have in addressing burnout is misunderstanding its root cause. With only 43% of US employees thinking that employers care about their work-life balance, your company may do things like "no meeting Wednesdays" or "take Friday off for the next month", which are absolutely helpful in terms of giving people the space they need to focus on their lives, but often don't address the core issue: that people simply aren't motivated by what they're doing and are finding it too hard to just get the simple things done.

If an employee is given a day off, that's a great thing for their mental and emotional health. But if the moment they return to the office, they're met with the same old problems and lack of excitement, they'll soon return to a state of burnout. In other words, it's like plugging a gushing leak with a flimsy bandaid. It might deter it for a moment, but not much longer than that.

If you're looking to make a real change preventing burnout at your company, start at the top, with leadership. Ask questions like:

Are we focused on stuff that is truly moving the business forward, and do employees share the belief that we are?
Are we spending too much time doing busy work instead of the work that moves our strategy forward?
Are people getting distracted by meetings, emails, and other kinds of shallow work -- and is that preventing them from working on our key priorities?
Are people excited by the work they do here?

These questions will lead to very different solutions around burnout, many of which have nothing whatsoever to do with the hours people work or their work-life balance. It's about addressing company culture and direction.

What's the cost of burnout?

The effect may actually be more topline than bottom! A lot of the workplace burnout that employees may be facing is causing companies to lose money as opposed to retaining money. Not only is burnout costing in actual funds, burnout is also coming at the cost of top tier talent. If you can't attract and retain employees who are excited by your vision and your strategy, you'll end up burning out a lot of folks, and over time, you won't be able to attract great talent. 65% of employees feel they could find a better position somewhere else according to Legal Jobs, but highly engaged employees are 75% less likely to look for a new job. Yes, people need to be compensated well. Yes, they need balance between their work and life. Yes, they need to not be online 60+ hours a week.

But ultimately, working a full-time job, even with the occasional long hours, on something you find exciting -- because you want to work those hours, because you're motivated to do so -- can be rewarding. It's not a habit that your company should force or embed in your culture, and you certainly don't want employees to feel they have to work long hours to get ahead, but it's also imperative to understand that many people want to wake up every day feeling excited about what they do. And fixing that will often fix your burnout problem faster than you think.

Top 5 Work Habits to Boost Productivity

b.j. — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 17:04:49 +0000

Everyone wants to be successful, and success is (almost always) something that requires a lot of hard work. Whether you want to get to the next level of your career, or launch an entire company off the ground, there are productive work habits you can adopt to keep yourself motivated and on the right track. And while every career and course is different, there are a few role-agnostic work habits that can benefit your productivity across basically any profession.

So, how do you build new habits? A habit is an action that is repeated so often that it becomes second nature. According to NPR, habits start with a psychological pattern called a 'habit loop', which is a three-part process. You have a cue (or trigger), the routine, and then the reward. For example, if you want to have more productive meetings, make a habit of setting 15 meetings aside beforehand to read up on your team members notes (outside of the agenda) to consider how you could add more value to the team projects and priorities. The trigger is wanting to have more productive meetings, 15-minute prep becomes your routine, and you are rewarded with having better meetings and becoming a more meaningful part of the work product.

Here are the top 5 work habits you should try to boost your productivity. If you're seeking a promotion, trying to pivot your career, or just simply looking to step your game up in the workplace, this post is for you.

1. Email

Emails can be a distraction, but it is one of the best ways to communicate inside and outside of your organization. While absolutely necessary to many people's daily work, email is a non-stop channel for communication that can seriously pull from your productivity. And even though it may only take you 5 minutes to jump in and reply to an email, the real cost is context switching. Bouncing between active work tasks to check and answer completely unrelated emails prevents you from entering a state of deep work. In fact, it can take 20 minutes to get back into the flow of what you were just doing when you context switch.

Compartmentalizing your tasks, removing distractions, and finishing one thing before moving on to the next is a great approach to email. In fact, people who check email 3x a day feel less stressed than those who check it all the time, and actually respond to the same number of emails in 20% less time. So, by only checking your email during certain time blocks, you answer just as many emails, accomplish more tasks with less context switching, and improve your work-life balance by having less stress in your day that you carry home with you after work.

John Zeratsky over at Make Time says that he has a purpose for each email session. As a solo entrepreneur who receives 50-80 emails a day (each of which requires action), it's easy for email to quickly overwhelm the workday. To combat the distraction, John sets clear boundaries for scheduled email time - he handles anything time-sensitive right away, then works through clearing his inbox with the time left in that email session. Another awesome tip for anything you're not able to accomplish right away: block time for that task on your calendar so you can successfully follow up on it!.

Moral of the story? Set aside 1-3 time blocks on your calendar a day to give your full, undivided focus to your email inbox - morning email time, midday email time, and afternoon email time. By creating a routine for yourself where you set time aside for email, you can get a hold of that distraction and have a more productive day. It will absolutely feel weird at first, and you'll have a strong urge to pop in quickly to check, but fight the pull so you can stay productive with this healthy work habit!

2. Morning Routine

Another great habit to make time for every day is "morning catch up". There's nothing worse than a meeting that starts first thing in the morning when you haven't even had time to catch up on what's happened since you logged off the day before. And with many teams collaborating across states, countries and continents, there's a lot that happens outside of your working hours. Studies also show that 70% of people prefer morning meetings, so unless you defend time to catch up first thing in the morning, it's likely you can find yourself behind all day.

Not to mention getting all those pebble-size projects off your mind so you don't have them weighing on you during your important core work and meetings.

By batching all of your "microtasks'' together first-thing, you're able to get ahead of a ton of distractions that will be competing for your attention as you navigate your day. This is a single-tasking method you can use to stay focused on lengthier, strategic tasks because you've set dedicated time aside for the small stuff. It's also a great way to ease into the day as you're still waking up and may not be in your most productive or energized state. This way, you're able to save that max-energy for your important, demanding projects while still getting the sense of accomplishment for taking advantage of your low-cognitive tasks.

So how do you reclaim some morning time to catch up ahead of your day? This is an easy habit to start and keep up with! Simply block 15, 30, 45 minutes, whatever it is you need, on your calendar every morning so your team knows you're unavailable. By time blocking the early minutes of your working hours, you can use this time to check your messages, respond to project and task notes, get updated on any company announcements, and plan out your work items for the day. This will bring a new level of structure and direction to your workweek.

3. Weekly Status Reports

Another recurring routine you'll want to make time for on your calendar is weekly status reports. Writing up the summary of your week, sharing progress and problems, and what you plan to prioritize next week is a valuable habit that can help you make real progress toward your individual and team goals.

As anyone with a weekly status deadline knows, this is an easy habit to avoid until the last minute, so to do it well, you've got to make time for it! Imagine this: it's Friday afternoon and you're about to start your weekly status report when you get an email update on a new feature in development that needs your feedback. You of course take the time to respond, but that unfortunately eats up the rest of your day and you never get through your weekly report. Come Monday in your weekly one-on-one with your manager, you remember that you didn't take the time to reflect, reprioritize, and think deeply about the problems you're working on.

While you need to make time for scattered tasks and random updates, it's critical that you don't let these overrun your workweek as they can easily make you lose sight of your real priorities. Setting aside time for your weekly report will keep you prepared and confident that you're focused on the right things. And though these may feel like an obligation you have to do for your manager, it's really quite the opposite. Weekly status reports are 25% for managers, and 75% for the direct report. Your manager does want to know what's up and where you need help, but ultimately they want you to have the time to reflect and focus.

And it's not just communication, it's communicating the right things around your priorities that will make all the difference in the progress you make toward your goals. 75% of employees feel they can easily approach their manager to ask for help, but with close to 46% of team leaders saying that hitting project deadlines is their biggest problem, there's a clear disconnect between communication and priority planning.

So, in order to avoid situations like these, it becomes a matter of simply getting into the habit of building out your weekly status reports ahead of time so you're no longer scrambling five minutes before the deadline. Setting aside dedicated time to tackle this habit a day or two before it's due will always end up being more rewarding and sustainable than planning last-minute. If you make time to get the bulk of it in order the day before, your recent hours should be easy to update before you send it off.

4. Reading

Reading doesn't guarantee you'll be successful, but it's widely known that successful people read. And while over 1/3rd of Americans want to make more time for reading, it's all too easy to keep saying you'll start tomorrow. But each day you delay is a disservice to yourself! Reading is incredibly good for your brian - it can help you experience more sensations, increase your empathy, and provide much appreciated mental stimulation for your brain which can slow down progressive brain diseases like Alzheimers and Dementia.

Exercising your memory with reading can also help you remember dates, names, and key events which make you an even more productive employee as you're less likely to drop the ball on a project or opportunity. In fact, reading has many advantages that can help you become more successful across the board, like increasing your verbal intelligence, reducing stress, and even making you a better leader.

And, not all work habits need to be in service of your workplace specifically - you can read anything, even if it's not a "professional" piece of writing. But if it's a topic that's surrounding your work, it will only make you a more formidable force at your workplace. So pick your topic! What do you want to learn, where do you want to grow? Whether it's learning a new language, developing a new skill, or reading up on an adjacent job role to increase your understanding of how you can better collaborate and support your team, reading will help make a difference in your career.

Establishing reading as a habit is simple, you just have to make time for it. You can start by setting a daily (or weekly) reading goal for yourself. Once you have your number, set aside the time on your calendar! Life is busy, and something as simple as reading is an awesome addition to your calendar if you want to seriously commit. If setting aside time by yourself isn't enough, try joining a book club. This will help you hold yourself accountable and make this habit more than just a personal task - it also turns into a social habit.

5. Networking

Networking: the dreaded activity basically every introvert secretly fears. But good news -- networking no longer has to be shuffling around an awkward social function forcing conversation! You can network from basically anywhere, and find people with shared interests easier than ever before.

First, why should you make networking a habit? It's a great way to make connections, even new friends, and scale or pivot your career. Networkings isn't just for sales or marketing folks, it can help anyone seeking to expand their professional network.

The future of work has built a pretty incredible virtual or remote future for networking too. Whether you're working remotely, or just prefer to connect online, there are endless networking opportunities available. Virtual networking allows you to find people from anywhere around the world with shared interests. Here are the most popular virtual networking channels to explore:

Virtual conferences & events: Eventbrite, 10times, Meetup
Online groups & communities: LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Groups, Slack Communities
Forums: Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow
Internal company networking sessions: Donut, Remo, Sift
Social media: Twitter, LinkedIn, BumbleBizz
Interactive Podcasts: Clubhouse, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, PodSearch

Because you're no longer limited to your location, networking has really become a global opportunity to find like minded people who are passionate about the same topics and interests as you. For example, you can connect with an open source developer from the other side of the world who's working on a cool plugin, and simply send them a note to learn more about their work and opportunities to collaborate. Or, join a webinar across the country on a new topic you want to try out at your company. Networking is also now asynchronous: you don't have to have a live conversation, you can engage someone in a comment, through a message, email, tweet, (really anything!) and build relationships on a convenient schedule.

This isn't to say that in-person isn't a great way to network - things are definitely kicking back into gear across trade shows, conferences, local meetups, career fairs, and company-sponsored events, presenting new opportunities for face-to-face networking once again. Connecting in person gives you the chance to stand out, build a strong personal connection, and really make a great lasting impression. Even with 83% of employees working remotely, 85% of positions are still filled through networking, 49% of people prefer in-person communications, and 78% feel in-person communications allow for better discussions. And even if you're networking in person, you're going to want to follow up through some form of online communication. Make sure to grab a business card from them, or at least their name and company, so you can find them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or wherever your network connects!

So set a goal for yourself - spend 30 minutes networking twice a week online and see what interesting connections you can find! And if you're comfortable, try to set a goal for an in-person networking event once a quarter to put yourself out there and meet new people in your area.\
Forming habits are hard, but if you choose to make time for them, these goals can become your regular routine in no time. If you're wondering where and how to get started, check out Habits by Reclaim.ai. Just tell Reclaim what habit you want to make time for, how often and for how long, and automatically find the best time blocks for that routine on your calendar. Let's see how you can advance your professional career by developing some awesome work habits.

Calendar Heroes: Chris Hunt, Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Stack Overflow

b.j. — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 16:00:59 +0000

In this edition of Calendar Heroes, we talk to Chris Hunt, Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Stack Overflow, to learn about his style, tools, and methodologies for balancing priorities while collaborating on the dev tooling team for the community-led question and answer platform. Follow Chris on LinkedIn and at @LogicalDiagram with @StackOverflow on Twitter.

Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do

My name's Chris, and I'm a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Stack Overflow. I currently work on the developer tooling team where we handle anything that helps our developers create and deliver our products to customers. So, one day I might be debugging C#, and the next, building continuous deployment pipelines for Kubernetes. I've been with Stack Overflow for over three years, and have worked remotely the entire time.

What does a typical work week look like for you

As an engineer, I have the usual weekly meetings for work planning and team brainstorming. The coworkers I interact with day-to-day span about 10 different time zones, so scheduling options are pretty limited. This usually works out to me getting some heads-down time early in the morning, and again late in the afternoon. I try to carve out a couple of two-hour blocks a day to focus on project work.

What techniques do you use to manage your time?

One of the first pieces of advice my manager, Tom Limoncelli, gave me was to book a recurring event on my calendar to block off time for lunch. This sort of worked, but with the middle of my day being the best time to schedule meetings for our distributed team, meetings often ended up overlapping my lunch break anyway. Reclaim.ai made that lunch scheduling intelligent, so now if 12 PM gets booked for a team meeting, my lunch break might get shifted to 11 AM, and my calendar will remind me to take a break to eat before getting stuck in a few hours of afternoon meetings.

I also let Reclaim carve out those blocks of focus time. As an SRE, there is almost always some distraction from a person or system that wants attention. I've found it to be a valuable mind hack to have time on my calendar defined as project work, and give myself permission to ignore email and Slack for an hour or two.

What tools do you use to make you more productive?

I've been using Roam Research pretty heavily as my second brain --- I use it to take notes, draft documents, keep to-do lists, etc. Roam is very low friction for capturing and organically organizing information.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

This advice came from a psychology study in 2017, so given that it's backed by science, I think that makes it "extra good" advice. Buying things likely isn't going to make you happy. However, buying time can. I pay someone to mow the lawn because it means I get back a couple of hours a week that I can now spend with my family on the weekend.

Know what your time is worth to you and invest in it.

Durable Identity: Employee-Friendly SaaS for Life Changes

b.j. — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 16:30:16 +0000

Changing jobs is a stressful event. From continuity of healthcare benefits to wrapping up your final couple weeks, there is often an endless checklist of offboarding items you need to have in order before you leave.

One thing that often gets lost in the shuffle is ensuring you have access to the essential services and tools that you might want to continue using once you've left your job. Your stress only escalates when you realize you're locked out of a tool because you were signed up via your work email.

This problem can be even worse if your job change occurs suddenly, and you lose access to your work email without notice. All too often, this creates a headache for getting access to the services you want to continue using.

Life changes -- and job transitions -- are more frequent than ever, certainly more than you can plan around. But there's a new concept in SaaS that's making it easier for you to navigate these changes without having to start over at every turn. We call it durable identity.

In this post, learn more about what durable identity is, and what it means for the future of work.

What is "durable identity"

"Durable identity" is a concept that has been around for many years, but we might be the first people to put a name to it! As it might sound, durable identity is the idea that your accounts and identity should be able to survive a job transition or life change. Whether you're changing careers, taking a break from work, or going out on your own to launch a startup, your logins to various essential SaaS tools should be...well...durable!

Note that we're not talking about bringing company data with you when you transition to a new job. If anything, it's great to shake off the old stuff when you make a career change! Durable identity is really about your login, your personal settings and preferences, and your access to those tools when you leave a job.

Durable identity at Reclaim

The best way to put this into perspective is to walk you through how and why we do this at Reclaim. For those who are unfamiliar, Reclaim is a smart time blocking platform for Google Calendar that allows you to make time for your important priorities across both work and life. At Reclaim, you connect both your work and personal calendars to merge your availability for actual work-life balance, and create and manage both personal and professional tasks and routines through a single platform.

Oftentimes, Reclaim users will sign up for Reclaim using their work email and calendar. After all, it tends to be where most of the action is, and where they have the most challenges in blocking time for their priorities. But that also means that if their job changes, and they lose access to their work email, there's potential to lose access to Reclaim and all their personal routines and preferences with it.

This is where Reclaim's conception of durable identity comes in. In Reclaim, you can connect multiple emails and calendars to your account. If you've set your work email and calendar to be your main Reclaim account credential -- and then lose access to that work email when you change jobs -- Reclaim will simply give you the ability to "swap" that credential out for your personal one.

That means that you can continue to use Reclaim under your personal email, even after you've lost access to your work email. Once you start your new job, you can once again swap your personal email / calendar for your work email / calendar, and Reclaim will start doing its magic on your work schedule.

When you change your main account email and calendar in Reclaim, your Habits, sync policies, and Tasks come with you. It's basically a way to toggle between jobs without having to worry about losing the stuff that you use to keep your schedule on track.

Why is durable identity important?

Durable identity is important because careers are becoming more and more fluid, and life changes are as well. Job changes are also happening more frequently, with the average person changing jobs every 4.1 years. There are dramatic differences in tenure by age -- workers between 25-34 only stayed at a job for an average of 2.8 years while employees between the ages of 55-64 averaged 9.9 years. And in 2010, only 5.7% of people changed jobs, while that number jumped to 10.9% in both 2017 and 2018.

This data probably doesn't come as much of a surprise: you've probably noticed (and experienced yourself) that people are making job changes more and more often these days. In our view, this increase in career fluidity means that it's even more important for software to make it easy for users to transition from gig to gig.

From the very beginning, we saw this problem crop up often for Reclaim users. When COVID really hit home in early 2020, this issue became even more prevalent -- users would constantly have to re-create their Reclaim account from scratch if they left a job or made a life change that cut access to their work email.

We spent months improving this experience, giving users the ability to migrate their account to other emails in the process. It was good for them, but it was also good for our own analytics and account architecture. It's really difficult to do things like measure active users or engagement if you're trying to track the same user across multiple accounts!

Durable identity is good for users, certainly, but it's also good for companies. Instead of dealing with IT requests for users to transition logins to a personal email, or dealing with issues around migration or merging accounts, durable identity built into SaaS applications helps to relieve the burden on company admins. If software has a graceful way to deal with job changes, there's nothing that IT administrators need to worry about in terms of preserving access for employees that are leaving the company.

Companies that do "durable identity" well

As we mentioned earlier, Reclaim isn't the first application to implement durable identity. There are several products that have done it very well for a long time, and you've probably benefited from it without knowing it.

So who's doing durable identity well today? Some software has had to provide durable identity due to legal requirements. For example, HR software requires that employees continue to have access for many years after they leave the company so they can acquire past W2s and other financial data in the future for tax purposes.

But there are also lots of companies that have implemented durable identity for the reasons we mentioned earlier: it guarantees that someone can continue to use the software without having to worry about maintaining a separate identity for work vs. personal emails.

Here are the top 5 SaaS applications that are rocking durable identity today:

1. 1Password

1Password is a password manager, digital vault, form filler and secure digital wallet. You can see why this is something you'd leverage across both your work and personal life! This app makes it easy to store and organize your passwords across multiple accounts, with the ease of managing through a single login.

If you have a 1Password Business account, you're eligible for a free 1Password Families membership that you can use and share with up to 5 family members so everyone stays safe and secure. You can use the same login for both your work and personal vaults which makes it easy to access and manage everything you need. And while your work vault will be revoked if you leave a 1Password Business access, your 1Password Families account stays with you.

Additionally, if you're paying for your own 1Password account, and join a company that has 1Password Business, you won't get charged for 1Password anymore. When you leave the company, 1Password will automatically downgrade you back to your individual license and start invoicing you again.

2. Gusto

Gusto is an online payroll service for small businesses that makes it easy to onboard, pay, insure, and support your growing team. As an HR tool, Gusto not only supports you across work and personal accounts, it also supports you across multiple job accounts and history through Gusto!

When your employer invites you to the platform, you can work off of your work email and still set your personal email as your main account email so if you ever lose access to your work address, you can still log in and manage your personal payroll, insurance, and tax information. If you're starting at a new company that uses Gusto, you can easily switch between companies to see details for each profile or account all through your single account and login.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media platform and largest professional network in the world. With over 750 million members using the platform to build, engage, and grow in their professional careers, LinkedIn is built to withstand life changes.

Adding a secondary email is extremely simple at LinkedIn. All you have to do is visit your settings to add both your professional and personal email addresses, and choose which you want to be your primary form of communication. If you ever lose access to your main account, just log in with your backup and continue without a hitch!

4. GitHub

GitHub is an open source software development repository and community supporting over 65 million developers across the world. Home to companies, hobbyists, and amateurs alike, GitHub is leveraged as a command line interface, hosting service, GUI, and wiki down to a simple task management tool for projects.

As a developer, you probably live in GitHub for work, but it's likely your personal development hub for side projects too. GitHub also functions as a social networking site for programmers, where you really build your profile and personal brand as you develop in your career. Fortunately, it's easy to manage a personal and professional account as one on GitHub. You can easily add a backup email so you can reset your password if you lose access to your primary account.

Even in organizations that use GitHub Enterprise, it's very common to allow you to use your personal Github account for working in private GHE repositories, because the company can always revoke access to those repos in the future. GitHub also has a best practices doc to help you smoothly transition from a career change and clean up your personal and professional repositories in advance.

5. Slack

Slack is a team and group communication platform that allows you to connect by direct messages, group chats, and video. While originally designed for teams, Slack has quickly expanded into the community space allowing individuals to join different Slack workspaces and communities across the globe to share and discuss interesting topics.

Your professional network of communities is probably something you'll want to take with you to a new job! Each Slack workspace you join or create will be associated with a specific email address, but you can switch and work through multiple workspaces under the same account. While your professional Slack workspace should be under your work email, you can join any number of Slack communities under your personal email and collaborate through both without resistance. If you joined a workspace you want to take with you through your work email, you can change your email address from your settings for that workspace.

What's the risk of adding durable identity to your SaaS?

There are some instances where durable identity might not make sense for your users. As the lines between life and work become increasingly blurred and fluid, however, we believe that more and more software will have to contend with some form of durable identity so that users can continue to get value out of your service after they've changed jobs. This is where durable identity is really more of an opportunity for companies than it is a risk.

Growing a great SaaS product is all about long-term, committed, engaged and happy users. Part of that user experience means making it simple for people to stay engaged with your product even after they've made a life change or career transition. Why not make it easier on your users to bring your app with them to their new company, or use it as an individual user in between gigs?\
So what do you think? Is durable identity an opportunity for your SaaS tool? Let us know if it is, why it's not, or another great SaaS app that's doing durable identity well today! We want to hear every side and perspective - share your take with us on Twitter at @reclaimai.