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Dustin Moskovitz

lines on the record: 95
first: 2023-08-10
most recent: 2023-08-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Either full consciousness or a great deal of consciousness live and die in the world. I think I was reading a stat, but it's something like nine chickens are slaughtered every year for every human on earth. So it's something close to 100 million chickens. And so if you can improve the welfare of those animals a little bit, you can reduce quite a lot of suffering. And that gets you to a very clear subjective point about the good because a lot of people will say, this doesn't matter at all. You should spend infinite money on helping one human before you think at all about these chickens or these cows. And I think that's a judgment call. I think it's fair that people have different points of view on that. But from the perspective as a single funder in the space, it's something that we feel sympathetic to. And then the last category is global catastrophic risks. So these are, there's been a debate about the name recently, but I think the clearest definition is these are things that actually cause extinction or cause modern civilization.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the goals, and can kind of trade off the different opportunities against each other in a fairly clean way, though it can still get still involve a lot of judgment. So there's a lot of debate about whether the goal should be about mortality or perhaps subjective happiness or perhaps earning power, which is a kind of like proxy for economic empowerment, giving people as much choice in the world as possible. But often you're debating things that are very similar. You're going to help avoid a child death through malaria bed nets or perhaps through iodine supplementation and they have pretty similar. Well, maybe that's not a great example for avoiding a death. Avoiding intestinal worms is like something that would really mess you up. So that's an easy compare. Second big category is animal welfare. And there we work especially on factory farm animal welfare because that's where a very large amount of the animals with”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is where I think some of the subjectivity comes in because I don't think there is one answer to what that metric is. So the one that is sort of easiest to understand is global health and well-being. So we do a lot of work, particularly in the developing world, particularly around malaria is probably the single largest destination for our grant money. And there it is often just measured in the number of lives saved or the equivalent. So that's this idea of a quality adjusted life year that kind of lets you convert the value of helping somebody avoid debilitating disease or maybe takes years off their life or even increases their earning power. How might you make that equivalent to helping a child make it past their fifth year because malaria bed nets are helping them avoid a fatal infection? And so in global health and well-being, that's where you kind of have the most similar”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different places that sometimes look very strange because it turns out that when you're the next philanthropist on the margin, the thing that does the most good is often something that's important that other people aren't doing for whatever reason. You know, it doesn't have enough attention or it's not as sexy or it requires really kind of going deep on the logic of why this is important. And so you end up not doing the things that most other people are doing. And so the overarching framework that we use for choosing cause areas, it has to be important, hard to do good without working on important things. It has to be tractable. So it has to be possible to make progress. And then it should be neglected so that you're doing good because this is the good that other people aren't doing. So it's a form of sort of comparative advantage.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's really an idea, and some people call it a movement, but it's really, it brings together people who are interested in asking the question, how do we do the most good? And that can take the form of philanthropic donations. It can take the form of how you spend your career, like maybe which nonprofit you would work for. Or in a lot of cases, they're part of what's called earning to give. And so they just choose a sort of normal career with a high paying job with a plan to then donate some of their earnings as effectively as they can. And so that leads you to a certain set of ideas. So as a philanthropist, I think of effective altruist as defined by cause agnosticism. So that means rather than coming to philanthropy with what I care about is education or what I care about is climate, you're coming with just the point of view I'd like to do the most good. And that leads you to”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel the need to preface this with there's some disagreement about what it is. So I'll tell you my perspective, which...”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally. So for a long time with energy, people thought, well, we'd run out of oil at some point. And that would be the end of energy. Of course, we have all these alternative sources now that can supplant it. And, you know, these are also solutions to CO2 problems. The TV one is nice just because there was a while people didn't think you would be able to have the sort of cathode ray tube TVs anymore because the salient was going to go away. And then now we have liquid crystal displays that don't involve the element at all. And so this is an example of SASCO bias because people couldn't imagine a different way to accomplish the goal of getting a crisp video image to people in a broadcast format. And so he just goes through a bunch of examples like that and gives you this sense of like how powerful humanity really is and what the power of compounding knowledge really is.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moments in humanity where it's felt like that's not true. There was a resource running out, there was an irreconcilable conflict, and people just couldn't see the way to the future. And what happens is the pressure builds up and you get more and more attention on solving this problem. And lo and behold, it gets solved. And sometimes the reason it's so scary is a form of status quo bias. So people think everything will be exactly like it is now, except we won't have this important resource. I think there's a story about particular element that's needed that was needed for TVs in the 50s. Do you know what I'm talking about?”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Been a while since I've gone through it myself, but I've read it probably three times. First of all, I find it just really fascinating and enjoyable. Before reading that book, for a long time I said that Girdel Ashra Bach was my favorite book, but I had never finished it. It's tough. It's tough. It's tough. It's tough. Yeah. But it's really entertaining. And some of the ways that it's entertaining, I think, also feature in Beginning of Infinity. Like he has these sections in between the chapters that are more narrative and fun without nearly as much math. There's a little bit, but it's not like GEB, where you have, you know, you have to have advanced math degree to get through it. But the big lesson from it is this idea that problems are soluble. We build on knowledge and no matter how immense a problem seems, as long as it is possible to solve within the laws of natural physics, it generally can be solved. And over time, you know, we've had all these crisis.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it still comes out anyway, and it comes out in the wrong, you know, for a totally different situation that's unrelated to the thing you're really angry about. And so it's really important to like go through that. And part of the way I do that is maybe I'll just write it all out. You know, I'll have like a Google Doc or an Asana task and just kind of go crazy, just, you know, stream of consciousness, sometimes move your body, hit things. You know, I really want to put that in there too as an important part of doing this well. And then once you've processed your feelings and like move them through your body, then you can have that about the line conversation.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes when you're talking about this, you get the sense of everyone kind of has to be a Zen monk and like totally in control of their emotions. I also just want to really emphasize one of the commitments is feel your feelings. And sometimes that means like purposely going below those line as far as you can, getting on the drama triangle, making it playful and just like hamming it up, really making that person like the biggest, scariest villain monster you can. I really think that's an important part of it. And everyone's going to have like a different way of doing it. But I think if you try and, you've talked about struggling with anger management in the past. I think I do that too. If you try and solve that by withholding and containing all that anger, you end up lower back pain.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're in different positions of power or different positions with respect to the decision being made, but they each need to play their role in a mindful way and be as above the line as they can and be present. And that's really what we're going for.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To really listen to people on why they're disappointed or unhappy and reflect that back to them, not just be a literal sounding board, but actually be engaged in empathetic conversation. I think that goes the longest way. And sometimes people use, you know, conscious leadership has a literal clearing script. The facts are when this happened, I generated this story or I had these feelings. And this is meant to explicitly get away from language like you did this and that made me feel angry. You know, the whole idea with conscious leadership is you're responsible for your own feelings and, you know, you're going to have a reaction that doesn't necessarily mean the person was trying to hurt you or that that's really what happened. Often it has to do with, you know, stuff from your past or your childhood or situations like that that you don't want to experience again and your body is bringing them up again. And so just trying to bring some awareness to that, bring it into the room. There's two people in the context.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a big company, so I don't think it happens the same way everywhere. But what I try and coach people to do and what I experience with my immediate team is that we do try and get into this mode. You know, it's a little bit conscious leadership. It's a little bit nonviolent communication, but very speaking on arguably, reflecting back what the other person said to make sure that they feel understood. I've definitely, over the years, My biggest takeaway with conflict is people want to feel heard more than they want the decision change. A lot of it is just you got to make the space for that. And if you're going to do some difficult change management, you just got to accept that there's going to be some of that. And it's important to do it at the right times. Can't have everyone get involved before the decision is made, but the people who especially need to be bought in and need to help you with the change management after it, they kind of need to be heard before it's finalized. And then even after it's communicated, you're going to have.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just want to add to the other thing, it's a lot like cognitive behavioral therapy. So if you want to take a more Western approach, I think it gets at the same ends with very similar methods.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Commitments framework, but it's bad if it's just always appall on every hour of every day and every decision and you want to not grip around those things. And so it's useful sometimes to indulge in how is the story not true. And, you know, with Diana, she'll go all the way to fear of death. Like, you know, imagine your own funeral and like whatever your deepest anxiety is and just try and loosen your grip on that.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shut down and all of our employees wasted all this time and part of their career doing it. And she'd say, well, how's the opposite of that story true? What about the experiences they got building a sauna? What about the value your customers got while Asana was alive? And obviously I'm still there. So it's not like this coaching led me to think I should leave Asana or shut it down, but it helped me understand that I was choosing to be there in everyday is in some sense a new decision. I can't just walk away tomorrow like that has other kinds of consequences that I choose not to accept. But in the longer arc of time, I have agency here. The Assan employees have agency, our customers have agency, and it's much more productive for me to engage with the problems from above the line rather than from this place of fear and scarcity and anxiety. And there's time and place for that. You also need to feel all feelings.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think the one that has been most difficult for me and I think is maybe universal for entrepreneurs in general is just this sense of huge responsibility to keep going and endure and persevere and do well by your employees and this sort of thing. And it's very easy to feel like you're trapped and that there's no other possibility. You're kind of just Sisyphus as a leader. And I don't want to scare my place. Like I'm not like thinking about leaving right now, but I think going through the coaching of this really helped because she would just constantly deny me on anything that I really believed. Like it would be terrible if Asana had it a different CEO. And it's like, well, how's the opposite of that story true? Maybe a new CEO would, you know, bring in fresh perspective and like they'd have more energy and like, you know, things like this. Or be terrible if.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's interesting. It's changed over time. I don't have a one-on-one coaching relationship with her at the moment, but a lot of it, you know, when I first started, I was a total novice on the commitments and I had a lot of stories I was holding tightly and they were impacting my energy because I believe them. And she really helped me a lot with that. Part of the reason I don't work with her anymore is like I kind of know what she's going to say every time. And so I'll do the back and forth on my own.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd love to shift. Maybe you can help me shift. But just be aware. And so that's very useful. And it comes up all the time in my one-on-ones with how I coach people. In fact, I start all my one-on-ones just with, how are you feeling? Because often it will emerge. Well, they're feeling below the line or there's something going on in their life. And that's going to affect our conversation. And I'd rather know about it than not.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think it was, you know, almost 12 or 14 years ago, I went to an event, Southern California. And then, you know, as we were starting Asana, it became just kind of the framework that we wanted everyone to learn. I think 15 commitments is really great. I also think it's very similar to other frameworks, but it's nice to have a similar set of language. And this idea of holding stories lightly and understanding the other perspective more, it also relates to something Jack brought up with Byron Catie, so she loves to preface any thought with, I have a story that these are all kind of related ideas. But having the 15 commitments is something very concrete and language like being above the line, below the line. It's really helpful for everyone in the company to know what those terms mean so that you can shorthand them. And so now you'll go into a meeting and somebody will be in a bad mood and frustrated about a decision we're making and they'll just voice out loud. I'm below the line about this. I'm expressing some frustration, but that doesn't mean stop what you're doing or I'm like throwing my body on the tracks. It just means that that's where I'm at right now.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's partially for the same reason I don't like being video recorded. I find that part of my attention is lost in a video call. And it depends a lot on the quality of the connection and the audio and the video. I don't know what your experience is like, but you're quite pixelated from me right now. And so it's like a little harder to pick up on your body language, your emotional cues. And I just find after a video call, I'm so drained. And if it's a team meeting, I find the control flow very difficult. It's very difficult for people to interrupt or interject. They literally raise their hands to sort of put themselves in the queue. I just find it a lot less efficient than being in a room and having the more sort of natural cadence of dialogue. And again, the AV issues pop up in the team meetings too. And it's a disaster every time. I don't know. We're three years into the pandemic and all the same problems from 2020 are still here.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. You know, I think of it as you can be an IC in your manager role as well. It's like when you're not in meetings, you're producing things and coaching people. And then Friday, partially because I really prefer in-person meetings, ends up being pretty light as well, even though I'm here just like a couple meetings and a lot of work block time as well.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that the weekly cadence, like including no meeting Wednesday, really defines a lot, a lot falls out from that. So Asana has an office-centric hybrid policy. So we're Wednesdays, since they have no meetings, you can work from home, totally fluid. Fridays are also pretty fluid. And I'm here on a Friday, but relatively low attendance. And so Monday, Tuesday, Thursday is when a lot of our meetings are going to happen, including my team meets Tuesday afternoon. And I'd love to say I designed that for a particular reason, but really that's when our calendar is aligned in the right kind of way. And then, you know, I mentioned I have the kind of Tuesday, Thursday morning work blocks for getting more stuff done. And between those and Wednesday, that's sort of the me time, the IC time. And then most of the rest of Monday, Tuesday, Thursday will be meetings.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For individual productivity. So Newmaning Wednesday is sort of a hack of just we are going to synchronize everyone's calendar so that they don't have meeting blocks on Wednesdays. A lot of people at Asana go further. They'll add additional blocks maybe Tuesday and Thursday morning, you know, try and find a couple other maybe a half day or third of a day segments where they can try and keep their calendar clear. Everyone else tries to respect this as much as they can. Of course, things happen, customer meetings happen. You're not always in control of that, but we try and do our best. So partly it's just about having those focus blocks. And partly it's about having long enough blocks to get into some deep thinking work and, you know, be able to have these longer periods of reflection. And I just find even as a manager, if I have just a half hour, an hour, I'm going to do something small, something tactical just so I can feel productive. It's hard to get into that deep thinking state. So that's really what.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, I still follow it quite religiously. It is a bit case by case throughout the company, and that often results from people trying to schedule meetings with me on Wednesdays What are you doing? Why aren't you doing no meeting Wednesday? And yeah, it comes from two places. One, maybe I think it was 2011, Paul Graham had this really famous blog post, The Maker Manager Schedule. And it was just kind of pointing out that meetings end up on your calendar kind of at the behest of management and team leads and project managers. And that is their entire day. So they're just kind of like stacking their calendar end to end. But IC is really, especially in software, really need these long focus blocks to get into their work. They need to kind of like load up the context and their short-term memory, get into flow, and have a good 90-year, 120 minute session to get useful workout. And so if you don't interfere, the natural thing that happens is kind of your calendar gets chopped up and you don't have any of these two hour blocks. You just have these half hour and hour blocks and you get a little bit of work done and it's just overall sub-op.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think I'm quite that quantitative about it. We do have OKRs at Asuna, and one thing I do with the help of my assistant Lauren is I look at my coming month and I try and organize it under the company objectives. And so some of the objectives are about financial management, and that includes all my time engaging with investors and with the finance team here. Some of it's about the product, some of it's about engaging with customers. And so if I do have customer meetings, that's kind of slotting in there. And I think that's a good monthly checkpoint for, am I personally contributing to the goals where I think I'm leveraged? Sometimes the sections look too long, sometimes they look too short, and can kind of course correct from there. But I try not to have too many fixed rules other than my sort of energy gauge. Am I trending towards burnout or not? Do I have the energy to do the things I need to do? And a lot of that more is sort of day-to-day and week-to-week manager.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Slack, and I just sort of like swag an estimate for how long I spend on that per week, or interacting with customers and those come up on the customer's cadence. I don't have like a sort of set block in my calendar for that, but I look back maybe over the past month or two and just sort of like estimate looking backwards how much time I spent. And then what's left, I just sort of count as this is desktime, this is focused time and try and sort of gut check, does this feel right or am I kidding myself about something and look for other sources of time? And that led me to add in my lunch hour and like coffee breaks and stuff like that. And it's hard the first time, but then every year I'm kind of just like tweaking it and that part, you know, only takes 20 minutes or so.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of starts with here are the hours for work, here are the hours for home, here are the hours for sleep. So I got that sort of biggest pie chart. And then for work, I have a tab that's like here are my recurring meetings. This is how frequently they happen. This is how long they are. In some cases, I have prep time. For example, we have a board meeting, quarterly. It is a three and a half hour meeting. I need two hours of prep. There's also some committee meetings. And so this sort of amortizes out to something like two hours a month or something like that, or like 30 minutes a week. So it becomes a part of the chunk. And those things don't change very often and are really kind of the bulk of it. And where the most leverage is in changing something. So, you know, I think that those end up adding up to like something like 30% of the work time. And then I have another tab that is more, you know, more abstract. It's like responding to things.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I hear these stories about a lot of startups with like a thousand people, and they say, well, the founders in every interview to make sure this person's a fit and, you know, things like that, I gave up on long ago. Part of it just takes, I love to make these little spreadsheet models and I have one that's just sort of showing me how I use my time based on what the recurring meetings are and some things I know are going to happen week to week or month to month. And I try and go back to it on maybe an annual basis. And that can sort of help me see here is a big time suck and it's just sort of out of proportion. Can I somehow reduce this to be more appropriate use of my time or give it to somebody else? And that kind of helps me each step of the way. I don't know if there's anything in particular that felt like a, you know, sort of ripping it out of my heart or something like that.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a tough question. I think that in some sense it's just an evolution of at the beginning of Asana, I just owned everything and I had to consciously decide to delegate and often did it too late and needed to sort of hit a breaking point and need to just kind of declare bankruptcy on something. But looking back, a lot of those just ended up being effective and good to delegate. But I used to do everything from guiding and presenting it almost every all hands, sort of like all that presentation content was me. And now I'm most often in the audience or I've got like a short bit or I'm showing up for the Q&A. I used to do kind of like the year in review and try and read about what happened with kind of like every goal outcome and every project. And just as the organization scaled, it just was too much and you kind of have to do that more different levels of abstraction where I'm kind of doing the very highest level one.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a meeting the other day that was just a list of key questions. And it was like these questions need to be answered by August 15th, these by September 1st, these by September 15th. And they had recommendations on the first set. And I was like, great, let's just answer the first six right now in this meeting. We did. We got through some of the September 1st ones as well. And if every meeting could have that.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to. And the sort of other flip side of this is often the choices that are hardest matter the least in exactly this way, where the outcomes are going to be really similar. It turns out you didn't have a strong opinion. And so you shouldn't spend too much energy on that. So pick your battles is sort of the first way of going about it. And then the second is delegate where possible. And so, you know, it doesn't have to be my choice in the first place. And it's good to empower people. You have to be a little careful though, because if it's one of these, the outcomes are similar. you have to coach that person too because they might end up locked in the same sort of trap of thinking about it too long and getting trained and things like that and then the third is you know being really clear about your goals we try and start every meeting with not only what are the goals of the project we're talking about but what are the goals of this meeting what decisions are we trying to make and being as clear as possible about what those decisions are and when they need to be made and putting deadlines on them i have to praise i saw the the best slide i've ever seen”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of the paradox of choice is just this idea that if you have a choice between two things, the longer you consider them both or even being exposed to the second choice kind of makes you devalue either outcome. If you choose path A, you're always thinking about what could have been with path B and vice versa. And there's some really interesting psychological research people have done sort of proving this in controlled settings. And so you kind of don't want to indulge that mindset if you can avoid it. And I think the easiest way to do that is to just pick your battles. So at my level, that involves often, you know, maybe just saying, I don't care. I don't have a preference. Certainly in my personal life, I try and do that as often as possible. You know, my wife is always showing me art for the house or something. And it's just like if I don't have a strong opinion, I don't express any opinion at all, which is worse for her. Often she'd want me to. But, you know, I prefer not to kind of like bind my preference if I don't.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And, you know, some of this is aspirational. Like, I think we get in these long decision loops as well, especially at work. First, maybe I should explain the paradox of choice too. Do you think your listeners should be?”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like breaks during your day as well, and take your nights and your weekends, and all of that is important. So it's almost like a fractal of the balance between rest and work. And I think you have to actually coach people to do that. They don't necessarily do it naturally.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business around not only a new product, but in our case a new category. And so we knew it wouldn't be a three or four year thing. And then I flipped the company or something like that, you know, be in it for a long time. Now it's been 13 or 14 years and I still have really long runway in front of me. And so a lot of my mentality is just I've got to be able to keep going for as long as possible and not burn out. And I want that for as much as my team as possible because I really heavily value institutional knowledge and the strength you get from having high trust relationships. And so I really try and coach my team around that. And I encourage them to do that with their leads and so on throughout the organization. One of my favorite phrases is like, don't let the long breaks get in the way of the small breaks. So sometimes people are like, oh, like a year from now, I'm going to take a sabbatical and kind of get in this mentality of I'm just going to work really hard for the next year. It's like, no, you should still take like a three-day weekend, maybe a, you know, vacation or so before that.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, generally, I think a lot of what I've learned as a leader over time is just how much of a marathon the work really is. And I think that a lot of culture and tech industry encourages you to sprint just as much as possible and really focuses on short-term productivity measures. And the consequence of that is people burn out. And so, you know, definitely something we experienced with Facebook and I've seen Asana as well from time to time is when people leave the company, they're not necessarily going somewhere else. They're kind of retiring or they're taking a long sabbatical. They've sort of decided in order to have a good break. I actually have to quit entirely. I can't just do a two or three week break and come back and it'll be too stressful to even have the mental overhead of what's waiting for me. And so, you know, when we were setting out to do Asana, we knew it was a big project, you know, this enterprise cloud collaboration software takes a really long time to build a”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just for fun at the bottom there, but it does include some things that happen to be energy trains as well and videotaping in there.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This extroversion budget. It's almost like a video game energy bar for me that drains down. And so especially on a vender who's the head of people here at Asana, just really encouraged me, hey, just a lot easier for everyone to manage your budget if they understand how it works. And so the more people know about you, the better. And so I put it out there. And then the things I hate lists, I originally also sort of created that. That's a screenshot on Asana board and originally created that just for fun with my team. A few of them also have one.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there was a sort of phase where a lot of people were doing this and publishing them online. And it sort of coincided with the real catalyst for me was a book. I can't remember the title. I think it's the making of a manager, but it's by Julie Zu, who's an old colleague from Facebook at the time. And she was one of the design leads there. A great just sort of tactical book on how to be a manager and it includes Julie's sort of guide to Julie. And in the book, it's sort of framed as this is for your immediate reports. And I originally wrote this doc for them just for my team. They said, hey, this is great. We'd really love for the whole company to actually be exposed to this. And so now it's included in onboarding. I don't really know how many Asanas actually go through the whole thing and onboarding, but I tried to make it kind of fun and interesting to read. So hopefully some of them would. And part of the reason we did that is because, yeah, I have some quirks. I'm an introvert and a CEO role, and I care a lot about managing my energy and kind of what I think of.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're basically equivalent, but they have a smell. And my wife really just likes it. The lidocaine ones have the same impact, but they don't have a smell. So I really like those. And basically, if you feel this tweak or just now I use them all the time, like after a workout, just slap it on my lower back, wear it for six or seven hours. And usually that just helps things really release, even if I'm still, you know, sitting up during that six or seven hours, not doing anything special. And usually I'll have like a pretty good back crack at the end of that or something like that. I also love to put them kind of between my shoulder blades again for the neck tension. And it just feels like this incredible hack, it's totally topical, so it doesn't mess with your head or make you, you know, drowsy or anything like that. And yeah, I've just really loved them. I buy them probably 20 a month or something like that at this point.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I spent a lot of my 20s doing the classic throughout your back thing, innocuous ways. Like one time I did it while sneezing and I had been like tying my shoes. So I had like my legs crossed. And this is very frustrating. You throw out your back and you're sort of laid up for three or four days. So it definitely went deep on just trying to get advice on what to do. And that can lead you in a lot of directions, including to psychological mechanisms like the Dr. Sarno stuff. And also I just became very acutely aware of it. So I could sort of feel my back feels like a little tweaked right now. That's usually what it feels like, you know, a couple days before this injury happens, this acute thing. And so I learned that when that happens, I need to address it. I either need to relax or I need to do yoga or something like that. And eventually I found these Lydocaine patches. First I bought the biofreeze ones, which are menthol-based. They work great.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've really gotten to just kind of know it better and better over time. And even I think last night I found like a new kind of angle that really got into, you know, under my shoulder blade and just the right way. And I really appreciate it. And there's other products like this, like the Theracane. I've tried them. I'm sure some of them are almost as good. But this is the one I really love. They're also, they're really cheap. I think they're about $30 and they're completely indestructible. I still have the first one I bought 10 years ago, in addition to probably nine others. So it's my favorite among many of these kind of tools.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, of course. So this is the back buddy. It's a massage tool. I have my own right here as well. And similarly, wherever I go, I have them and home in the gym. I travel with a sort of collapsible version. So this is something that I first found maybe 10 years ago. I think literally just by trying to look at the highest rated Amazon products. And I was like, oh, wow, this thing has like, I think at the time like 45,000 ratings and it was near a five-star rating. I thought this must be great. And so I got one and it's been almost a love affair ever since.”
2023-08-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #686: Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Asana and Facebook — Energy Management, Coaching for Endurance, No Meeting Wednesdays, Understanding the Real Risks of AI, Embracing Frictionless Work with AI, The Value of Holding Stories Loosely, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT