Words matter. These are the best Justin Rosenstein Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Know when to email vs. when to meet. Logistics are best handled over a non-immediate communication channel like email or Asana tasks. Detailed status meetings will suck the life out of your day.
The human brain is a product of natural selection. In the face of scarcity, our hominid great-great-uncles were unable to compete against our sapient great-great-grandparents’ abilities to build more elaborate mental models and orchestrate their bodies’ movements in more sophisticated ways.
In a knowledge economy, natural selection favors organizations that can most effectively harness and coordinate collective intellectual energy and creative capacity.
When topics are complex and meaty, don’t create a never-ending email thread. It’s amazing how much time people waste composing and reading carefully-worded essays, when a 5 minute in-person chat would resolve the whole thing.
When I ask people how much time they spend not doing their job – time spent on ‘work-about-work’ or phone calls or e-mails – people regularly tell me 60, or even 90 percent. So if Asana could take that down closer to zero, we could potentially double the effectiveness of humanity.
If you look at the history of communication, new technologies like the phone and e-mail didn’t just let people do things faster; it fundamentally changed the scope of the kinds of projects people dared to take on.
Meetings get a bad rap, and deservedly so – most are disorganized and distracted. But they can be a critical tool for getting your team on the same page.
In general, good tools for staying in sync just haven’t been built and made available to the world.
Working together in concert more smoothly not only helps us move more quickly; it changes the nature of what we can undertake. When we have the confidence that we can orchestrate the group effort required to realize them, we dare bigger dreams.
Whether you’re a programming prodigy or the office manager holding it all together, technology empowers small groups of passionate people with an astonishing degree of leverage to make the world a better place.
Just as the mind emerges from the actions of individual neurons and their cooperation, the success of an organization emerges not only from its individual participants, but also from the interplay between them.
When leaders know how to lead great meetings, there’s less time wasted and less frustration. We have more energy to do the work that matters, realize our full potential, and do great things.
We who work in technology have nurtured an especially rare gift: the opportunity to effect change at an unprecedented scale and rate. Technology, community, and capitalism combine to make Silicon Valley the potential epicenter of vast positive change.
