Four best productivity tricks from Google

When Google bought Picnik online photo editor in 2010, Lisa Conkergood, head of marketing, [Lisa Conquergood] and the rest of the project team went to Google with it. They continued to work until the closure of the project in 2012. After that, the team left the company and founded the new photo editing site PicMonkey.

However, Conkergood had a chance to experience the productivity and working scheme of one of the most successful companies in the world. “Google’s mission is to organize all the information in the world,” she says. "They do the same inside the company."
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And although the startup is more agile than the corporation, Conkergood and everyone else decided to introduce four tricks to increase productivity, which they learned while working at Google.

1. Use technology to keep remote workers closer to you.

Google has a lot of employees, and Conkergood says they need ways to stay effective as they scale up. The company creates its own tools for work, some of which are later published - such as, for example, Google Hangout.

"Google offices are scattered around the world," says Conkergood. “It is very important to be able to easily put together a lot of people. Telephone conferences are not allowed slideshows. Google Hangouts were created specifically for this. ”

PicMonkey uses Hangouts for meetings with partners. “This allows us to keep a closer connection than just a soulless voice on the phone. When video calls people have less opportunity to escape, check your phone, chat with your neighbor. Reading sign language and body is an important part of communication, and video allows you to do it. ”

2. Remove debris

According to Conkergood, Google’s employees must fill out something called Snippets every week. They write down what they managed to do over the past week, and what they plan to do next.

“The essence of transparency. Everyone has access to the snippets of everyone else. If I need to work on a joint project, I can look at the snippets and see if anyone else is working on it. ”

In a small startup there was no need for such an infrastructure. PicMonkey uses the “Daily Reports” technique, where employees share their three main goals for the upcoming day with the other three, and tell them what obstacles they have in their way.

“This is our point of contact, something like our version of snippets,” says Conkergood. “Transparency helps us work together effectively.”

3. Master the work with the Inbox

The number of letters received while working at Google from Conkergood was enormous. And although the company didn’t have any training for effectively using Gmail, Conkergood says that other people’s documentation and advice helped her save time.

One colleague talked about the presence of the mute button, which allows you to exit the exchange of emails between several interlocutors, if the topic of the conversation has ceased to concern you. Also a useful tool is “priorities in your inbox”, which takes important emails to the top of the list. And it will not be out of place to set up “smart filters” to separate emails that need to be checked no more than once a week.

In PicMonkey, these tools are also used, but now priorities have shifted from internal mail to external. “I get fewer emails, but the percentage of important emails has increased. External letters often relate to business issues, and I need to look at them first. ”

4. Define goals before meetings.

In Google, all meetings had meaning and purpose. "Even before we went there, we already knew the purpose of the meeting, and before we left, it was extremely clear to us what tasks we were facing and who was responsible for their implementation."

This approach is even more important in a startup where it is vital to pinpoint the person responsible for the next steps.

“The advantages of a small organization - everyone is capable of doing different things, and everyone is eager to perform the tasks assigned. But this can lead to confusion about who is responsible for which part of the work. In order to avoid both repetitions and deficiencies, when discussing a task or a project, it is imperative that the person responsible for the task is clearly defined. ”