For the team at Saent, productivity isn't about working more; it's about increasing the quality of your work. And with a distributed group working from homes and coffee shops across three continents, it's super important for them to stay focused and not let distractions bog them down.
Saent is building a first-of-its-kind hardware/software solution for productivity -- a device to block out distractions and keep you focused, and software to help you better understand how you work. They'll be crowdfunding the production of the gadget in late spring 2015.
Here's what founder Tim Metz had to say when we talked about building a remote team and working smarter.
(Full disclosure: I have a consulting agreement with Saent.)
Describe Saent and what you do there.
We strive to make productivity as easy and fun as possible by using technology. Ironically, too much technology (always connected, email overload, etc.) has made many people distracted and unproductive, but we believe we’ve reached a point where we can use technology to reverse that trend. “Fight fire with fire,” if you will.
As to my role: to avoid terms like CEO or Managing Director, I’m currently calling myself “Chief Saent,” but am still looking for a better label (suggestions welcome). Currently, my role involves building the team and being involved in the marketing for our upcoming crowdfunding campaign. But as Ben Horowitz described in “The Hard Thing About Hard Things,” my job description changes at least every six months, which is exactly why I like doing this so much (I get bored easily).
Your working life has been rather nomadic, taking you all over Europe, Africa and Asia. What initially drew you to remote work?
Originally, an urge to travel and see the world. I figured the best way of doing that would be to find a job that I could combine with traveling (which turned out to be filming). But it also evolved quite naturally, because of the simple fact that technology allowed me to do so.
I think it’s easy to take for granted we can work this way, but had I been born ten or twenty years earlier, this lifestyle wouldn’t have been possible at all.
How many people are now working at Saent and how distributed are you as a company?
It depends a bit on how you count, as currently everyone is working more or less on a freelance-basis, though everyone involved is committed to stay involved in Saent for the long term.
If I count by people with an @saent.com email address (which is one measure), we’re currently at five (though I expect to be at seven next week). If I count by people who are making an important contribution and will continue do so on a regular basis, we’re now at 11 people.
Whichever way you count, we’re very distributed, both in terms of geographic location as well as nationalities. Russell Haines, who heads up Product Design, guards the brand and is my cofounder, is in Beijing, where I’m also based. Besides that we have people in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Netherlands, Israel, the USA and by the time this interview comes out I expect we’ll also have someone in the UK. We just need to add someone from South America and someone from Africa and then we’ll have every populated continent covered. ;)
How do you keep everyone feeling connected?
At the moment, mainly by making sure ideas, plans and general values and vision are written out in detail on Google Docs. We’re big on transparency (not very original, I know), so everything there is automatically accessible to all. I always encourage everyone to put any thoughts and comments in there as opposed to email, so we have a central conversation going on and anyone can comment on anything, even if it’s out of their direct field of expertise.
I think it’s easy to take for granted we can work this way, but had I been born ten or twenty years earlier, this lifestyle wouldn’t have been possible at all.
I have to say, though, that by late January of this year, Saent was just Russell and me, so we’re growing relatively fast. How to keep everyone connected only became relevant in the past two months or so. I’ve therefore just sent out our first bi-weekly team mail, which is like an internal email newsletter, so that everyone stays up to date on what everyone is up to.
Besides that, we’ve implemented Evernote Business to make sure knowledge is sort of automatically distributed and unlocked and I’m sure we’ll soon add Slack for work chat.
What are the biggest challenges you face working remotely and how do you overcome them?
Individually, I think there are a few key challenges:
- Making sure you don’t go insane from spending all your time in your house (if you work from home).
- Making sure you don’t die of loneliness.
- Making sure you stay focused and productive (hint: use Saent ;)).
- When you’re in China, Internet speed can be a challenge.
To counter these, I usually work at least one “work block” of 90 minutes each day from a coffee shop, which solves challenge #1 (and #4 usually as well). #2 I can handle quite well, but I make sure to see my friends and go to random events using Meetup.com to meet new people.
Given what we do, I could of course write a whole blog about #3 (and I do, here), but the most important tricks I use for staying productive and focused are:
- Turning my phone to Do Not Disturb for at least 50% of my day.
- Work in time blocks using a timer.
- Eating a frog every day.
- Spending the first ten minutes of my day thinking about and planning the most important things I should get done that day.
As a team, I think the key challenges are motivation and communication. People need to hear if they’re doing a great job, they need to be kept informed of what others are working on, they need to really understand what’s expected of them, and they also need to know you, as a leader, will be very straight if something is not ok.
These things are also important in a normal office environment (and even there go wrong a lot), but this gets exponentially more important in a remote setup. It’s therefore very important to take time for communication and don’t rush calls or written responses, as this will surely lead to misunderstandings, wasted time and unmotivated people. So you need more time to write things out clearly, though I consider this an advantage in disguise (it forces you to think things through and be deliberate).
What is the biggest benefit that working remotely has afforded your company?
As a team / company, besides the obvious practical reasons (the main one being we can hire talent anywhere), I strongly believe working in a remote setup ensures the highest productivity and quality of work (assuming you hire the right people).
Offices definitely have their value, but in terms of productivity, I think they’re horrible places. People distract each other, you’re forced to work between certain hours, you’re more likely to get politics, work based on other people’s work rhythms and agendas, etc.
Having autonomy on doing your work how, where and when you want is one of the most important aspects of doing great work and being productive.
From a personal, selfish perspective, it’s that I get to enjoy a flexible lifestyle and don’t have to show up in an office at 9 am every day. I can go to the gym in the middle of the day, I can work in my boxer shorts or cow suit pajama, I can take Thursday afternoon off and read a book if I want.
Do you think you lose anything by working remotely?
Definitely. Nothing beats looking someone in the eye when communicating and physically sharing experiences (whether that’s work-related or going to a party together or relaxing in nature). To me that’s the biggest disadvantage, as I’m pretty sociable and like being around people. You definitely bond quicker over a beer than over Skype.
This is also my biggest concern going forward when growing the team and keeping everyone remote, as I’m not sure this loss can be offset with a company retreat once or twice a year.
You've written about the importance of Kaizen, or the idea of continuous improvement, usually to benefit the group, to your views on productivity. How does that apply to teams that are separated by geography?
Disclaimer: I’m by no means an expert on Kaizen, though I have written about it, I admit. But to me, it means each individual has the autonomy to tinker with “the process” and try to do things differently, in order to improve the overall outcome / quality. Then if you find something that works (better), you share it with the group.
People need to hear if they’re doing a great job, they need to be kept informed of what others are working on, they need to really understand what’s expected of them, and they also need to know you, as a leader, will be very straight if something is not ok.
For our team, that means I constantly remind and encourage everyone to provide feedback, be honest and second guess whatever I or someone else is proposing. Individually, it means not getting too fixated on a certain routine or application and sometimes just try something completely different, even if it costs you a bit more time. It’s worth the try, because you might stumble upon a new insight or way of doing things.
Last but not least, it means you want to develop yourself constantly, so we try to encourage sharing knowledge (interesting articles, books, etc.), mainly through Evernote Business.
What are some of the benchmarks you use to make sure the Saent team is in a good place, both mentally and operationally?
To be honest, we don’t have clear benchmarks yet for how people are feeling and doing personally / mentally. Everyone is fresh on the team so full of energy and excited, but we’ll definitely need to start looking at how to keep it that way and make sure people also rest sufficiently in the near future.
For our operational goals: I’m a big fan of Essentialism, so ideally both the company and each individual have as little goals as possible at any one time. One goal is perfect, but definitely not more than three.
Too often, company strategies and job descriptions contain an endless list of goals and projects, which is a recipe for failure in most cases. So currently, Russell’s only goal is to deliver a killer product, Fleur’s goal is to ensure company registration and product launch are well-sorted legally and my focus for the coming month is the crowdfunding launch marketing. Where relevant, we then tie these goals to a few metrics.
How do you build culture with your team so spread out? What aspects of your company culture are most important?
Perhaps the most important one is having a shared vision. Everyone on the team needs to believe in, understand and contribute to where we want to go. This is important in any organization (and often lacking), but especially in a team spread out. This means you have to articulate this vision often, make sure it’s accessible to everyone and also continuously receive input and feedback on that vision.
Besides that, there are other values such as being open-minded (you work with people from very different cultures and backgrounds), transparent and honest in everything you do. Also the ability to take and give criticism the right way. If you take any negative feedback as a personal attack, this becomes even more problematic in a remote setup than it is in a normal office environment (it’s harder to kiss and make up ;)).
Describe your personal work environment.
I’m currently mainly circulating between office desk, living room table and coffee shop. I’m not easily distracted by stuff, people or sounds around me, though my digital environment (my computer) is very organized.
How do you manage work/life balance when working from your home?
My main thing is working in 90-minute blocks and then taking extended breaks. So I’ll go to the gym in the middle of the day, go out for lunch with friends at least twice during the week, or read a book for half an hour when I want.
Having autonomy on doing your work how, where and when you want is one of the most important aspects of doing great work and being productive.
In addition, I strive to stop working at the latest at 7 pm, though not always succeed. Similarly, I aim to switch off my phone and Internet connections after 9 pm and before 9 am and not do anything work-related on at least one day of the week (usually Saturday).
You tweet and blog a lot about stoicism and meditation. What role does mindfulness play in keeping yourself productive? How do you measure your success in that?
For me, it plays a pretty important role, though not in a very spiritual way or anything like that. I’m by no means a meditation expert or guru, but can share my personal experience with it.
Since we do most work with our brain these days, it’s very useful to be aware of your own thinking. Things like writing off the afternoon because you didn’t have a very productive morning. Or getting caught up in busywork, while in fact you’re simply putting off that important, yet difficult task you’re dreading. But also worrying about failure or getting carried away about potential success in the future, while instead you should just do what’s in front of you today.
So meditation is a way to be more observant of those thought processes going on in your head and what you’re telling yourself, while stoicism kind of tells you to throw away self-pity, to stop with the excuses and don’t bullshit yourself and just get it over with.
I don’t really actively measure success in those areas, but it roughly would come down to something like:
- How often did I get angry or irritated this month?
- How many days did I sit down to meditate this week?
- Am I sleeping well at night?
If I got irritated zero or one time in a month, meditated at least four days of the week and am sleeping seven to eight solid hours, things usually go well and I feel very happy.
What are some of the tools you couldn't live without as a remote company?
Besides some of the usual suspects (Skype, Google Drive / Docs, etc.) I would add Evernote Business and WeChat. Evernote Business because it allows us to know what everyone else knows and make knowledge easily accessible and shareable. WeChat because of its superior voice messaging functionality, which allows you to communicate in spoken word, without having to call and interrupt the other person (and it saves a lot of typing).
I’m a big fan of Essentialism, so ideally both the company and each individual have as little goals as possible at any one time. One goal is perfect, but definitely not more than three.
What advice would you give to a company heading down the remote working path?
Make sure it fits with the personalities in your team. As a founder / CEO, if you want to have oversight and be in control of everything, a remote team will be a big challenge. You need to be comfortable with delegation and letting others take initiative.
For the individuals on the team, I think you need to be comfortable with yourself and able to withstand a certain amount of loneliness. Also, being very self-driven and motivated. Even if your team pays attention to providing encouragement and compliments where they’re due, you will have moments where you’re stuck and there will be nobody to cheer you along and get you out of that hole. You need to be able to deal with those kind of situations.
But if those boxes are ticked and you’ve always felt the office is a distracting place and felt comfortable working, perhaps with freelancers, through Skype and email, it’s definitely worth it and will unlock a lot of productivity, creativity and, most importantly, happiness for all involved.