Not the question I asked though. I’m far more interested in knowing how well everyone did exit wise, as that is a data point that would be most useful to the general public.
Reclaim.ai (https://reclaim.ai) is an intelligent operating system for the calendar, helping to automate and defend the schedules of busy product leaders, engineers, managers and their teams. Thousands of busy professionals rely on Reclaim every day to manage their calendars.
We offer full health, dental, and vision benefits to all employees as well as a competitive salary, a generous equity package, and a 401k program. Flexible hours, remote-first, awesome (and scrappy) team.
Reclaim is backed by some of the top venture firms in the US, and you’ll be on the ground floor of a fast-growing company with a big mission.
:wave: While not _exactly_ the scenario we envisioned when creating it, you might want to check out Reclaim's Calendar Sync feature.
We basically can read events from any source within Google Calendar, assuming you have access to the calendar (either because it's shared to an account you have access to in Google or because you have OAuth access to the account where the calendar originates) and then sync them over to any other calendar that you have access to. You can also assign some nice custom privacy settings to those synced events so that they show up with whatever level of visibility you want others to have when they view your calendar.
So in your GF's case, she'd sign up for Reclaim, set her primary calendar as the non-Treatwell calendar, and then set the Treatwell calendar (assuming it's a shared calendar that her Google login can access) as the source. Then events get synced and you're good to go!
Reclaim.ai | Portland, OR | Full Time | Remote - US
Reclaim is an intelligent operating system for the calendar, helping to automate and defend the schedules of busy product leaders, engineers, managers and their teams. At the heart of our mission is the idea that priorities -- not random meetings -- should guide your workweek, and your time should be oriented around the stuff that really matters.
Reclaim syncs your calendar with your priorities, automatically blocks time on your calendar, and provides analytics and workflows for the entire team that keeps everyone on track.
We offer full health, dental, and vision benefits to all employees as well as competitive salary and generous equity package. We keep flexible hours and are remote-friendly. Reclaim is backed by some of the top venture firms in the US, and you’ll be on the ground floor of a fast-growing company with a big mission.
I've read this article about 4 times in the last few hours, and there's so much to say about it -- partly because it resonates pretty deeply with the product I'm currently building (reclaimai.com, apologies for the shameless plug) but also because I think it flies in the face of some logic that has emerged over the past several years. Namely, that meetings are anathema to productive organizations and that individualized "focus time" is the only way to achieve meaningful outcomes (see: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html).
The quote that sticks out to me the most:
> Some people will assert that meetings are creativity killers, and “a camel is a horse designed by committee”. But this is absurd. We’ve all been in conversations where one idea sparks another. And while an individual can write a novel or paint a portrait, solo creativity is no way to produce nuclear fusion or a new antibiotic. In a world full of specialists, complex projects require collaboration. Meetings can and do generate ideas that no individual could have conceived alone. They do not do so automatically, however. (emphasis mine)
Managers, in particular, need to internalize this ideology: if you're responsible for leading a broad group of highly-motivated-but-disparate individuals, your fundamental role is collaboration, analysis, collation, and decisionmaking. Not every instance of collaboration needs to take the form of a meeting, but as the author indicates, "there are many situations in which there’s simply no substitute for a meeting". In other words: managers actually need meetings to push the organization's agenda forward. It's not about more or fewer meetings, it's about more high-quality meetings that drive teams to figure hard stuff out and make informed, efficient, and effective decisions.
This isn't to say that focus time is meaningless or not useful to managers, but just that a manager's job is inherently less to individually make and more to synthesize ideas from smart people. That tends to happen in interactive, real-time forums.
One thing Tim doesn't touch on here is how meetings align to priorities, both for the manager and for the company at large. Or: how does your calendar, the declarative record of where you'll likely spend your time, the oft-hedonic treadmill of your week, actually reflect what's important to you at a strategic level? There's a super interesting article that Mike Monteiro wrote in 2013 (https://medium.com/@monteiro/the-chokehold-of-calendars-f70b...) that touches on this exact topic.
His basic thesis is that if all you do is block out time for "working" or "focus time" on your calendar, that time is inherently more interruptible than the meetings. This is anecdotally pretty spot-on for most people: how many times have you been sent an invite for a meeting that overlaps with your precious working time, with the inviter stating "Well, I saw that you just had 'Working' there, so I figured you were free"? That's the interruptibility of focus time in action.
A better way, IMO, is to actually map all the time on your calendar to real priorities. Don't just put "working" time down. State what you're planning to do with that time as part of the actual calendar event, and make it known to those who would interrupt it. This does two important things for your schedule:
1) It makes you think about your time in a much more fundamentally useful and meaningful way. You'll also probably find that a ton of events just don't map to anything strategic for you or the organization.
2) It signals that that time serves a purpose, not just a catchall for reading email or Slack.
