EP039 - How to work more efficiently online with Adam Nathan of Almanac
About the episode
This episode focuses on how to create workflows, processes, and better operations for teams that collaborate online a lot. We will talk about documentation, automation, workflow management, and the best tips for better productivity. To discuss this, I invited Adam Nathan, Almanac's co-founder and CEO.
About the guest
After spending time at some of the most complex organizations and companies in the world (White House, Apple, Lyft) Adam realized he was spending more time coordinating work than actually doing it. Taking inspiration from how developers worked in Github and designers worked in Figma, he founded Almanac to build a tool to help teams collaborate in documents with structure and transparency.
Adam holds a systems engineering BA from Duke and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Connect with Adam on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
Quotes from the show
Remote work isn't just an option. It's a disruptive technology that is changing work forever. In some of the tension, we see that some companies haven't updated how they work in this new context.
To decrease operational dysfunction, you need more structure, more transparency, and fewer meetings.
Collaboration is a profoundly human exercise. AI can make us more productive, but in the end, coming up with ideas and making decisions or managing complex projects is something done by humans.
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Welcome everyone, yet another day to talk about the future of work and the future of leadership. Today we will talk about collaboration and knowledge management in a remote workspace, why documentation matters and how to collaborate remotely, especially if you have a team spread across multiple time zones. I have Adam Nathan with me, who's the CEO of Almanac, a remote collaboration and knowledge management tool for remote teams.
Hey, how are you?
I'm fine. How are you? How is the Pacific treating you?
San Francisco's great. Thanks for having me, Peter.
Lovely to have you here. So the first question is all about your journey in remote work? So how did you end up working remotely?
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I'm someone actually who loved offices. I started my career, I got my graduate degree in systems engineering and started of my career actually working in organizations that were highly complex systems. I worked in the Obama White House at the beginning of the administration. Then I was a consultant for very large nonprofits, helping them do organizational transformations, then I ran a strategy team at an airline, and then after business school I worked for eight years as a product manager at Apple and Lyft and Varo. All of which happened in offices. And my journey to remote actually started with what happened in those offices, for me as a product manager, my job, at least on my job description, was to help my employers build really great products people loved. And that was what I was excited to do when I got hired. But in reality, I found myself every day not doing the thing I was hired to do, but instead just sitting in back-to-back meetings constantly trying to respond to the avalanche of email and Slack notifications.
Yeah.
All the core of my job was pushed to the side as I spent basically my entire day and week trying to find basic answers to basic questions. Like, what did Peter think of my idea and did Peter approve my proposal? And you know, where are we tracking on this project? Things that you would think would be automated in the 21st century, ended up taking all my time. And so I started just getting this feeling that I was spending my days at work doing stuff that didn't feel like work. Wasn't the job I was hired for, wasn't the job I woke up in the morning to do. And I have this contrast with the engineers I worked with who used a tool called GitHub, which is essentially a collaborating platform for developing code. And GitHub has these essentially structured approvals called poll requests where engineers can ask each other for feedback even if they're not in the same room. There's a lot of transparency in the tool so you can understand who did what, where, and when. And the engineers just overall were way more productive than I was at getting stuff done and seemingly happier. And so I started asking myself are there ways we can translate aspects of the developer experience to people who do knowledge work, business professionals like you and me? And so we started Almanac with this idea of like, can we build GitHub for documents and we started first thinking about the features that GitHub has, but what we eventually realized was that what GitHub really enabled those engineers to collaborate together in a remote or distributed fashion. Because of the structure and transparency and GitHub engineers didn't need to be in the same room. In fact, they didn't even need to meet at all to do basic things like get feedback or approval or share information or check in where something is. And so my journey to remote was really through this company that I started. And even Almanac when we started, we had an office for the first year as we were building our software. It was in San Francisco. And as I said, I, I love offices. I'm a aesthetic person. I'm very extroverted. And so I love the idea of even when we started the company, it was a dream to think, okay, what would the office look like and what about our furniture and the snacks? And that was kind of a reward for starting a company. And then of course, COVID hit and we had most of our team here in San Francisco and we were always distributed from the start. We've never ever hired engineers or designers or technical folks in San Francisco mostly cuz we couldn't afford it as a young company. But we did have some marketing and sales folks here. And during Covid, everybody essentially moved out of San Francisco as the last employee at Almanac to live in San Francisco. So I actually, I had to pack up the office on my own on a lonely day in September, 2020. And I myself also left San Francisco temporarily for much of Covid. But what was amazing was on the first day of Covid, we of course used our own software. And because we were using Almanac and we had access to these features, it was a pretty seamless transition from working in an office to working remotely and even though it was kind of night and day for us, like a lot of teams to not see each other anymore, our productivity actually didn't slow down. It sped up. And we have seen a lot of our customers have the same insight that depending on how you work, if you update how you work to where you're working. You can actually work much more productively, much faster. Unfortunately a lot of companies are still pretending like they're all together in an office from nine to five so remote to a lot of companies I think feels worse than an office because you're essentially trying to like canoe on land. A lot of companies are still using tools and techniques and practices that were designed for a very different operating environment in this brave new world we now live in. So I become a big convert to remote because I work much better. I'm much happier as a person, but also the team and the company that I manage is also moving a lot faster than it did before and I think what we're doing at Almanac is trying to share that insight with more people.
I love the journey. Thanks for sharing. It's also personal and also inspiring. And I love the fact that even though that you operate and manage a company that is essentially designed for remote teams, you do love the office and it's so great because most people, I think they're missing the point on the whole remote teams and remote operations because you specifically, by the way, address on your website in messaging that it is designed for remote teams, the tool, however, I do think that it's designed for everyone, and it can be used by every company in general because let's say you have a I mean we had this covid situation of course, where everyone forced to work remotely a little bit. But what happens if you are on a maternity leave or a paid leave or you just try things out for taking a one or two month of sabbatical from the office. How can you collaborate and contribute to the office work if you do not have some sort of like a hub where you host all your documents, all the work that you do, not just on the project management system, but in a something like a tangible infrastructure. So I think it's for everyone because it actually brings everyone to the shared state to use a developer term from GitHub that everyone understands.
Just on that, you know, I think it's important to level set a couple things cuz of course there's some loud voices out there who have said things like, oh, remote work is over, or Remote work is a failed experiment. Number one, every company at scale is a distributed company. Because we live in a globalized economy. If you look at any large company over several thousand people, they have teams spread across different locations. Some of them are, you know, even in the past if they were in offices, they were still distributed or remote in the sense that they're not all together in the same room. And teams have been working across time zones and geographies of course, for a long time of, and we have customers at Almanac that are very large old organizations like the National Forest Service or the American Red Cross, and I call them distributed before it was cool because they have always been trying to figure out how do we work optimally you know across different time zones and geographies. You know, number two, if you look at small companies, remote was a one-way door into remote work. 22 percent of workers in America white collar professionals worked remotely before the pandemic. Today, that number is 66%. A lot of things have gone away about the pandemic. Like we don't wear masks anymore and we don't have Zoom parties anymore, but the one trend that has stuck around it, Remote work. And that's because, yes, it's better for our employees, as you mentioned, it's much more flexible. It's also better for employers. They can hire better talent at lower costs and run a much more efficient operation. And so I like calling remote work internet work because if you think about what we just did is move from move work from the physical world to move work to the internet. Obviously the internet is a much more powerful technology that allows for so many more opportunities. It's like before we could only have access to friends who live locally, but when Facebook came around, now we can connect with people all over the world. Obviously social media is a much more powerful tool than disconnecting in the real world. And I think the same thing is happening to the enterprise. And so remote work isn't just an option. It's a disruptive technology that is changing work forever. I think what we're seeing in some of the tension is that some people as I mentioned, haven't really updated how they work for this new context. And so of course, if you're trying to do things the old way in a new world there's a lot of tension there. And that's also true, there's a pervasive sense of burnout, a sense of meeting and message overload. A lot of chaos when it comes to collaboration and, and those tensions are concentrated in companies that haven't changed how they work. And so for a lot of people, remote is worse than the office because they're still using methods that are designed for the office rather than for internet.
A hundred percent agree, and I think why we have these conversations is because we had to figure out how to work remotely because we were forced to work remotely for a set period of time. But on the long run, I don't think that we need to figure out where we should work. We should figure out how we should work and when we should work.
Yes.
Because that's the main question. That's the ultimate question, and I think mostly enterprise companies, like, you know, like the boring big companies, like for example, a big four consulting company. They do have offices around the globe and they share the knowledge that they generate within that office with the other offices that they have, how do they share the knowledge? Do they have a meeting and a Google Doc or something, right? It's just like, I don't know, it's like old Schoolish, but why don't they have, why don't they adopt some sort of tools or some sort of practices that remote companies already using? Small or medium size growing companies because it just gives them a little bit more clarity, more boost on the productivity, right?
Yeah. You know, products like Confluence and SharePoint have existed for a while and are huge enterprise products. You know, core productivity applications, to your point, are the most successful enterprise products of all time. You know, Microsoft Office is a 25 billion runway rate business that's still growing 20% every quarter. So people need ways to create and collaborate and share knowledge. When you look at the companies who are, I think, On the leading edge of performance companies like Amazon or Google, we've talked to them to understand how exactly they're working and they basically built Jerry Rig systems of Almanac because while kind of the first wave of internet tools basically took a piece of paper and put it on a computer, and then that piece of paper went from on your computer to the internet so we could all work on it together. What was missing was some of the workflows and so now we're all in the same piece of paper, but how do I know that Peter read it? How do I know what Peter thought about it? Did Peter approve it? And so even at Amazon they built basically the system where you could send like a task around a connected to a document to say, Hey Peter, can you look at this? And then they had, they built this like super jerry rig system that would then mark, show if you open the document and you read it. You know, Google very ironically, at the top of their proposals, they put a little box with like a checkbox that is like a manual task that somebody writes out, and they use the top of a document to understand its status. Of course, none of this is super automated. None of it's very pretty. But what you see is that companies who have thought intentionally about how are we gonna work? In a distributed context, have innovated beyond the tools that we have now to something that looks often a lot like Almanac. You know, the rest of us, I think are just catching up to where those companies are. But I think it's a continual effort to try and figure out how do we work more productively, how to work faster. You know, that I think when we talk to our customers, I used to think that like, People thought a successful week was a week where they could get into a flow state and do deep work, and I was influenced with a lot of reading on this. In actuality, we've talked to like 5,000 people. Most people judge a successful week by one in which they just got stuff done when they were able to check off everything on their to-do list. It's not necessarily about like deep creative work, it's just about moving the ball forward. And the enemy in moving the ball forward are distractions and delays and dysfunction. And a lot of what's happening now, the gunk in the system is because people haven't like, fully optimized the rails in which they're getting work done. And it can be the hours you spend like looking for a file or responding to messages on Slack, those aren't like fulfilling hours for most people. That just feels like stuff they have to do in order to get to the stuff on the other side. And I think it's a continual process to optimize how we all work so that we can move faster and just get more stuff done.
I think people really underestimate how much time and energy is wasted just by, sorry, where can I find that document? Or have you seen this document before? You know this kind of stuff which happens every day for multiple minutes, multiple hours on average it contributes to even full work days. If you count everything together or on average that people are just don't know where things are or have they've written, approved, seen or moved forward by anyone. So it's really hard and I think it's really hard to see the value because usually these are just frictions or slacks. But when you add that together, it's, it's huge. So you mentioned one, one keyword, which, sorry, I have to jump on. Intent. Intent and I think The biggest difference between remote work and non remote work or office work is the intention. So you need to design workflows and processes intentionally just to make sure that everyone sees the clarity and and engaged in working. What are the other challenges that you see in terms of working remotely?
Yeah. You know and just on that point, I actually think best companies are intentional about how they work no matter where they work. You know, one of the things that people often say about remote is like, oh, for creative activities like brainstorming, like we need to be in person to do brainstorming. And we've actually interviewed a lot of people about how to do brainstorming well, and what we found is that you can run a really shitty brainstorm in person and I, you may have been in one where, you know, you walk into a room and it's not clear with question you're answering and the conversation's really chaotic. One person dominates with a bunch of bad ideas. It's unclear if you made a decision. There are no next steps. Whereas when you look at best practices for for great brainstorming, It's about starting with a clear question, giving people time to think on their own and come up with multiple answers. Grouping and prioritizing those answers as a team. Clarifying what direction you're moving in and making sure that people know what their task is after the meeting. Those best practices you can do in person. You can do them remotely, you can do them in a meeting. You can do them async. And so I think what you see is that the best performing teams are intentional regardless of where they work. I would agree with you that When you're in an office, you can kind of paper over the dysfunction, which is meeting all the time. And so it kind of feels productive cuz you're sitting with other people, but you're not actually moving very fast in an office either. And I think what, to your question on the tensions in remote work, people do try and paper over the dysfunction remotely with things like email and slack and we did a survey recently where we asked people what percent of their time they spend sitting in meetings. Responding to messages or looking for information. McKinsey asked the same question 10 years ago. That's in an often cited study, and I think they found that people spent 68% of their time doing those three activities. Today in 2023, the number is 95%. And so what, what we see happening is that there's just this overuse of meetings and messages, especially in a remote context to try and mitigate the dysfunction of not being intentional about how you work. And what we found is to battle that those tensions, you need three things. You need more structure, you need more transparency, and you need fewer meetings. And if we could boil basically all the best practices, all the insights, all the lessons we've learned from thousands of people that we talked to over the years. It's those three things. And the best way to do it is actually to just bake it into how your processes work, the tools that you use, so that it's not something you have to think about. If I had to think every day about, you know, I care a lot about my health and fitness. If I had to make a choice every day about what I was going to eat, I probably would eat a lot of bad stuff because if I'm really hungry, I want something that's like sugary or fatty, I probably don't wanna make it myself. I wanna order it in. And so if given the choice every day to just Eat random stuff, I probably would eat in a pretty unhealthy way. Best practice around nutrition and diet is to set a schedule and to do some meal planning and to have healthy foods in your house and to have some stuff prepped so that it's just really easy to make the healthy choice. And in the same way, I think to change your behavior in an office. Behavior change needs to be automated. It needs to be something that's just right in front of you there that you can do without thinking about it, rather than something that you're gonna have to consciously process. Cuz work is hard, life is hard, and no one rethink about how they're, how they're gonna work every single meeting, every single day.
Totally, totally. Let me jump on one thing that you, you said again transparency because I think the other two, I wouldn't say easier to do, but it's like more translusive and more direct thing that you can influence an approach in the workplace. But transparency is something that you cannot really create directly, it's something that just happens indirectly through a lot of direct controlled actions in a set period of time. So how can you create transference processes? And I already said the key word of processes. Sorry. How can you create transparent processes? A, b what is the, and what do you think? What is the, the extent of transparency? So how transparent should you be? And is there a line which you cross, which you might cross, and it just fires back into productivity.
Yeah, I think that it's hard to make a global recommendation on transparency cuz every company is different. And even projects within companies or teams can have different levels of transparency. So, for example, we're a very transparent company at Almanac. But we don't share like, employee compensation data or employee reviews for obvious reasons. Some companies actually do those things, our comfort level is a little bit more conservative, but I think we probably are more liberal generally than most companies. But in general, I just don't believe that there's like one answer around globally how transparent you should be. It's, you know, even in some industries you have to be more confidential. What I do think is possible to say in a general sense is that on a project or on a doc level what people need to understand is like, what is the status of this doc? How did it get to this point? Who did what and when and then for key milestones, like was this reviewed, was this approved? To understand how much they can trust that information. And so, you know, I think on a document or project level, creating as much transparency as possible around essentially like an activity feed of work. I think what people spend a lot of time trying to do is understand the context of work, like, Where is this thing and can I trust it? And so I think that's one area for companies to optimize is to create that context around the work itself so that people can make decisions about whether or not it's useful to them. And then once the once information is final on a project. Once it's been approved, for example, storing that information in a place that's well organized and easily accessible, we've seen that people spend upwards of like 35, 40% of their week just like looking for information. And that's a huge waste of time because often people have written down a lot of stuff in the process of doing work and so, Connecting the active collaboration they're doing, for example, in documents to knowledge management to where they're storing that information, making that connection seamless is we think a best practice that more companies should adopt. Because often people think about their wiki or their knowledge management tools, like a separate thing from where they're doing work. And so it's this like whole process to go and update Confluence and then someone's job to like go back through Confluence and be like, oh, well, what information here is actually still relevant and what should we delete? And you know that no one has time to do that, that that feels like more overhead work. No one enjoys updating Confluence. And so what we see as key to transparency is number one, making sure that there's active context around work that's happening so people understand how to use it. And number two, turning that active work once it's finalized or approved, like into something that people can access later via a wiki or knowledge base. And automating all that so that it's not something, again, you have to think about. It's not someone's job, it's just something that happens as part of the workflows of a company.
Perfect. Perfect. We always talk about tools, right? And how to optimize tools to make work a little bit more efficient or productive, but I personally do think that of course tools matter to an extent. But what matters more is more simpler than that, it's like people, have some champion within the team. What do you think in terms of like an internal weekend and the, and the project management hub who should be the one who's kinda like the champion or the main responsible person who's updating them and managing that? Because I guess. You need to nominate at least one person to be responsible for that because it's, everyone is responsible. This means no one is.
I think how a team operates is ultimately the choice of the leader. And so I think you've seen that change has to start with the top, whether it's the CEO of the company, especially in small companies, it's often the founder or the, like head of the team, the vp, or e v P director you know, even if there's someone on the team who believes like, Hey, we should operate more transparency, you need the head of the team to endorse that, that behavior. And we've seen where Almanac has been most successfully implemented. It's it's because the leader of the team says, Hey, I wanna make things better. Here's how we're gonna do it. And I think the choice to be better is not something that every company is gonna pursue. There's lots of companies that are fine living with the dysfunction. Some companies where working efficiently doesn't matter. You know, I don't know where that would be, but some companies just don't care and some people don't care about it. And there's always gonna be a distribution of companies on a spectrum of how effective or fast or efficient they are. At almanac we focus on companies that want to be better at work, especially if they're remote, but really to your earlier point, anywhere. And so the change often starts from the top. Even if they're buying the tool at Almanac, what they're really buying is the behavior change. When people come to us, some people come saying, Hey, we want a better wiki, or we want a better document editor. But once we dig into it, what they're really looking for is the ability to operate faster or the ability to operate with more transparency or more structure. And so, What they're buying when they're buying Almanac isn't just a new tool. They're buying a different way of working. And it does take everybody to kind of adopt or evolve with the new tool. I think that's true in many cases. But what we've tried to do you know, I like this quote that, you know, we shape our tools and after that they shape us. You know, the tool influences how you work. If you use Google Docs, I think Google Docs is an amazing tool but Google Drive I've never been able to stay organized in and I've heard that from a lot of our customers who switch over from Google. It means like you're probably not gonna spend a lot of time on organizing your knowledge Well because drive is a really hard product to use. And I think every product has pros and cons, including Almanac. But you know, I think there are some products that place an emphasis on organization and on automation. And so I think the job of the toolmaker is to make it easy for people to adopt a certain behavior. That's what at Almanac we focus on trying to automate out the overhead work. And so that's what a lot of our customers come to us for. That's how we make people successful. You know, notion, for example, is a great tool that helps you consolidate like all different tools in one place. And so if you want to combine docs and databases, notion's gonna make it really easy for you to do that. You know, I, I think it's hard for people to change behavior and so, yes, well, I think the leader has to consciously say, we're gonna work a different way. I think the tool ends up kind of influencing how people work and because as I said, I don't think people have time often to just think about like, This overhead stuff. I think people are just often focused on getting stuff done during the day and it's hard to get people to do more than, more than that cuz Yeah. Just work is hard.
Perfect. Yeah. And, and, and change is really hard. You mentioned that sometimes people, yeah, they don't really care, but I think it's a little bit more, people not just don't care, but they already use some sort of set of tools like Google Drive or whatever, it doesn't matter, but they use something. And if they want to change to a new tool which is fundamental by the way, this is one thing that's really clear. It's not like a new chat tool or a new email. So there is something, it's a foundational aspect of how you work. So you pretty much reinstall how you work with your company when you change that. Now, changing that, it's not just hard, it takes at least well time. And meanwhile, during the change you lose the time a little bit because of the change, right? So change should happen organically and step by step. So if we can go into like a little bit more actionable here what should be the first steps if I'm already using a tool. If I'm a startup, it's easy, right? I just, you know, start working with Almanac or whatever tool that is on the market. I put up everything there and, you know, organically build the company through there. But if I'm already a scale up with like hundred on 200 people, and also by the way, this is reflecting back to my practices so hard to change people to use and set the different tools because they get frightened because of the lose of the time. And I always recommend them to take small steps and build up the habit. So what are the, the, the recommendations that you might can get to these people who are afraid of changing?
Yeah, I mean people don't change on their own. They change often when the status quo is untenable. So, you know, most of our customers come to us when work a slow down to the point where they're not getting much done at all, where they're losing people on the team because employee satisfaction or retention surveys say that the process dysfunction and, and chaos is a risk to people staying. And so and you know, we, we have customers come to us who say, this quarter we are trying to be more async, or it's a goal to reduce our number of meetings, or it's a goal to move faster. And so I just don't think that people like change because they have nothing else to do. I think they change when they can't keep going on the way they have. And so we often find customers in some state of need around like, okay, we gotta do this now. And I just don't believe that people will change in any other state. And in terms of tactically, What to do, we recommend often like, starting over and I think that's the benefit of going to new tools. You can just kinda like leave a whole bunch of stuff behind. And so we provide a lot of templates around first how to set up like folder taxonomy and handbook structures so that based on best practices that we've seen from hundreds of customers around, here's how you should organize. I'm sure it doesn't stick in most companies or it evolves, but, you know, people don't want a wiki. They act, they want to understand how to stay organized. That's what they're buying. That's what we're selling. And so understanding what is the best way to stay organized? How should you be dividing up stuff? Yeah. What are the owners, what should the ownership structure look like of different folders or projects? You know, we have a tool called workflows where essentially you can turn a folder where you store documents into a process through these statuses, and you can attach automations to statuses. So by clicking a button, as you move a document from draft to review that one click kicks off. Basically a stack where it'll send other people a task to look at the document. And we have workflow templates based on common types of collaboration we see people doing. So if you are. Moving through an O K R process doing like pr r d reviews, doing marketing copy reviews. You know, many companies do those things in the same types of way. Maybe there's 20% difference between companies, but there's often a similar type of workflow. And what we help companies do is also set up these these workflows in Almanac so that all the team has to do is press a button and the document moves through the process that the managers want the company to adopt. And so, Essentially templates is my answer. Templates for how to stay organized templates for
That's a good answer, don't worry.
And what we try and do at Almanac is make it easy even for the champion or the buyer inside the organization because they sometimes don't even know what they want. And so what we've done is spend time, you know, doing research with literally thousands of the highest performing remote teams to understand like what are the small things that they have done to make them move faster and just build them into our platform.
Templates can cut time and productivity in half if you are using them efficiently. You published I don't know, maybe a week or two ago or maybe I just saw it two weeks ago. Yeah. Modern War Work Principles and that was a document that that happened to be appearing on, on your blog, I think. And I love this so much. So can you talk a little bit more about that in terms of why was it important to figure out maybe new types of PR principles for the modern work?
Yeah. You know, as I, as I said, when people come to Almanac, they're not just looking for another tool. They're looking for a different way of working. And in general, we believe that as I think you do remote isn't going to be improved just through another tool. We do need to rethink how we work in this new context. And so as we are tool makers at Almanac. As we were building a tool, we were saying, well, the right answer here isn't just to look at like Notion or Google Docs or anything else and say like, what's wrong with them and how do we improve it? The right way to approach building a tool is actually to talk to people who have figured out how to work on the internet maybe long before the rest of us, long before the pandemic hit, to understand specifically what was their earned insight around how to do something better. And so we've talked to thousands and thousands of people across, I think, the fastest teams on the internet. Teams like Stripe and Amazon and GitLab, and Doist and Andela people who have been doing this a very long time to understand like specifically tactically like what enables 'em to work? You know, you mentioned something before around templates. There's this concept on woodworking around jibs, which are basically like small pieces of wood that you use to move faster or to operate more precision. For example if you have to cut a piece of wood a hundred times, there's like a small device you can use to just move the new piece of wood to the right location, cut the saw. And so you move a lot faster, you move with more accuracy and higher quality and, and a lot of work we have devices like that, essentially small things we can use to work better. And we were trying to figure out like what are the jibs around internet work? And are there ways to, there's a lot of specific things you can do, but also if you were to abstract them away from just the, the context of company X or Y or Z, what are some high level principles that are common across everything that we've heard. And so this is very similar actually to Agile we think many people don't know how Agile came about, but the last big technology wave before the internet was the personal computer which came around in the early nineties. And the personal computer made work faster for lots of people except for one group, which were at the time, software developers. Software developers were using a collaborative approach called Waterfall. Were essentially, One team couldn't start their work until the team before finished. And so while everyone around them started to create and move a lot faster, cuz they could type out their thoughts on a computer. Software developers were like waiting for the baton from the person before them. And as a result software projects would take years to complete. They would often be outdated the moment they launched. A famous example is the space shuttle, which took four decades to complete and was using technology on its first flight that was three decades old. And so, you know, essentially software developers started to burn out because they were like, I'm not working very efficiently. My work doesn't matter. It was kind of a joke of a department. If you look at movies from the nineties, like I, the IT office spaces, office space, yeah bumbling nerds in the back, not, not very effective. And so a group of software developers came together to say, how do we update the way that we work to build software in the age of the personal computer? And Agile was the result. And Agile is a set of yes there's lots of tools and tactics that have come around that kind of are inspired by Agile. But the agile method is just a set of principles that you can use no matter where you work. And so we thought at Almanac that what we need is not just better tools of course, and better tactics, but also a high level set of principles that reflect how the best people on the internet have already figured out how to do this. And so that's what we put together with a modern work method. And a lot of them, we think just by like trying to follow those principles can make you work faster. And ultimately what we heard everybody say was that the goal of a team is to produce business value as fast as possible while keeping work sustainable. And so the modern work method is really around how you, how you can achieve that for your team.
I will link the collection in the show notes for our listeners, but it was truly inspiring. Also, by the way I value a lot the historical perspective. I'm a huge historical nerd anyway. How do you see the future then? Just to closing up how do you see, what do you think will be the shaping trend for the future of work in this and next year?
Yeah, I mean I think it's really hard to predict the future these days with how fast everything is moving. But what I hope for is, I guess a world in which everybody wakes up excited to do work every day and gets to spend their time doing work that is creative, work that matters to them, work that only they can do. And I think that's possible or enabled through a world in which technology can automate out all the overhead, all the bullshit. And, you know, I think AI is a part of that, but the thing about collaboration is it's a deeply human exercise. Collaboration can make it, or AI can make us more productive. But in the end, coming up with ideas, making decisions managing complex projects I think is only something that can be done by humans, because I think it's a uniquely human trait to imagine the future. And I think that's the kind of work that will stay For humans, even in a world where we have really powerful technology. And I hope that everyone's work or enable pushes us more towards that kind of world. And I think there will be, I think about, you know, internet work, internet really as a form of disruptive technology. And I think most waves of disruption take about 30 years to get fully implemented and the iPhone came out in 2008, we're about 15 years into having the internet in our pockets and all around us. And so we're only like halfway through this disruptive wave. And so I think right now it's, it's very normal to see some tension and some pushback because not everybody has evolved yet. The new technology is everywhere, but we haven't actually figured out how to integrate it into all parts of our lives, especially at work. And so, you know, I think what will happen in the next couple years is some companies will as I think we're already seeing an almanac, some companies will say, Hey you know, internet work, remote work is here to stay. How do we make it work for us? Some companies will resist and say, Hey, like, we want to go back to the office. We wanna go back to the past. I think the companies that embrace the future will end up winning. They will end up being more productive. I think they will be more profitable. I think their employees will be happier. And so I think we'll see like a redistribution of success. And I think the companies that win will be companies that change how they work.
I love it. Thank you for sharing the predictions it was super inspiring. Where can people find you and Almanac?
Sure. Well, Almanac, you can find us at almanac.io. And the modern work method, I think is modern work method.com. And I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn at Adam p Nathan.
Thank you, appreciate for your time. Appreciate us coming here, Peter, and I wish you the best of luck and the best of success with Almanac.
Awesome. Thanks for having me.
