Doubling Facebook's Workforce Productivity & Fixing Your Calendar - Tim Campos - #248

**Chris Williamson** (0:02)
Hello, my friends in Podcast Land. Welcome back. My guest today is Tim Campos, CEO of Woven and ex-CIO of Facebook. We live in a world with a surplus of information. How we cut through that noise and arrive at a place where we can make effective decisions quickly is the job of productivity systems. And yet, so many of us are struggling massively and drowning in overload. As someone who doubled the productivity of Facebook's workforce, Tim knows the limitations of high pressure, high growth, high information environments. And today we get to learn his best tips on how you can improve your productivity. In other news, my tan's pretty good. I am enjoying Dubai. I have to say getting some winter sun has been a very rare, enjoyable change. Gonna have to be back in the UK at some point soon. And December is probably the busiest month I've ever had for recording. So we have some absolutely insane guests coming up soon. Keep your eyes peeled. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Tim Campos.
Hey, hey, welcome back. I'm joined by Tim Campos. Tim, welcome to the show.

**Tim Campos** (1:32)
Great to be here, thanks for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:34)
Pleasure to have you on, man. So, start us off. What got you interested in productivity to begin with?

**Tim Campos** (1:41)
Well, yeah, I've been in productivity for maybe almost two decades now.
I was a CIO for Facebook for almost seven years, and my job there was the productivity of the workforce. Prior to that, I was the CIO for another company, and my job there was the productivity of the business. When I go back even to the beginning of my career, a big part of what made me an effective software engineer and engineering leader is, I was very jealous of my own and my team's productivity. How much can we get done in the amount of time that we have? That led me to focus a lot on automation and streamlining things, and so it's really been a big part of my life, even though it's really been the last four years that I have really claimed ownership of like, this is the thing I'm focused on right now. But yeah, it's been a big part of my life for a long time.

**Chris Williamson** (2:42)
What are the changes you've seen over 20 years?

**Tim Campos** (2:45)
Well, we have a lot more technology now than we did before. I don't want to date myself too much, but coming into the workforce, when I did, technology was relatively new. So you had a lot of office automation that was basically looking at things like, okay, we used to manage things on paper, and here's how we're going to manage it in the digital world. So whether you take the concept of a document or a file, and you basically represent that in a computer. Fast forward another 20 years, we've started to throw that stuff out the window. We don't think about files as much as we think about just links to things. Even the technologies like email. What is email? Email is the electronic memoranda. That is basically its history. Memoranda are cool when you can only communicate on paper, but when you're in the digital universe, they are completely like way too much overhead. That's why people have moved to Slack and Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and text messaging and all those other things. They are far more efficient ways to communicate.
I think we're in this wave now where we're starting to throw away the history of the technologies that we utilize, even things like slides, like PowerPoint slides. Why are they even called slides? Because they used to be cellophane slides that you would put in a slide projector to present your ideas out there. And just imagine how much friction went into producing those slides so you didn't really care about how they were authored or whether they were dynamic. But in today's universe, they're all digital, right? Who wants a static slide with just a couple bullets? You need animation, video and other stuff. So we're starting to throw away all that stuff and evolve into a pure digital universe where we're not constrained by how things have evolved in the past, but we're really thinking towards the future, and especially with mobile devices and ubiquitous connectivity, that things can be really dynamic and rich to facilitate that productivity.

**Chris Williamson** (5:01)
I've got a buddy, my industry is Nightlife, and one of my friends, Ray Chan, the owner and CEO of Candy Pants, he was pitching for his first event in Vegas. So he's going in and he's thinking, all of us are very competent at what we do, but we're just small time British events creators. Why should some huge time club owner of Aria or XS or wherever he was in Vegas, listen to him? And they were brainstorming around, how can we really sort of make an impact with this? So what they decided to do was get a specialist 360 videography crew and film at all of their other events in Dubai, in Marbella, in the UK, elsewhere, on the yacht at the Abu Dhabi F1, everything. And they rock up to this meeting and it's in the 75th floor of some beautiful hotel in Vegas or whatever. And the guys come in and they say, okay, Ray, like, let's crack on, man, do you want to show us your presentation? And he pulls out a bunch of Oculus Go's and puts them on top of all of the guy's heads. And then he starts talking through as they experience, they're looking around, they're on the yacht in Abu Dhabi. Then they change and they're in the middle of a pool party in Mabea, then it changes again and they're in a nightclub in the UK. And yeah, when he told me that story, I was like, holy shit, this is really getting stepped up a notch, isn't it, for presentations?