Personal Effectiveness

I was recently asked “What is your #1 piece of advice that you would give to your younger self?”, and this was the first thing that occurred to me:

I procrastinate. But it’s not because I’m lazy. I procrastinate because something about my highest-priority task makes me subtly (or not-so-subtly) uncomfortable. Fortunately, I’ve found an indispensable three-step process for reliably moving from procrastination to action:

I’ve been obsessed with productivity for a long time. Back when I was an engineering manager at Facebook, I designed the internal team productivity tool that they still use. And in 2009, I co-founded Asana to help teams at companies like Uber, IDEO, and TED be more productive and do great things together.

Spread ideas. Belong anywhere. Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
These are the mission statements of TED, Airbnb, Google, and Tesla.

A few months into my career at Facebook, my manager, Yishan, found out that I was rubbing my colleagues the wrong way. Turned out that I was a jerk, and I didn’t even know it!

When a team—a group of people working together toward a common goal—has clarity, everyone has a clear understanding of everything they need to know about the work required to effectively achieve their goal. What’s our goal?