I’m Justin Rosenstein, Co-Founder of Asana, and This Is How I Work
Unsurprisingly, the creator of Asana , the popular project management tool, is following his work closely with impatience. For Justin Rosenstein, every little thing matters, from the smallest details of how his product works to five glasses of water neatly lined up on his desk to prepare for the day.
Of course, he keeps track of all this using his own application. Justin created Asana in 2011 with Dustin Moskowitz, drawing on his Facebook and Google experience to explore better ways to collaborate and manage workflows. With his Lifehacker style, Justin applies the same perspective to almost every aspect of his life, optimizing his health with vitamins, supplements and meditation breaks, collaborating with teammates on challenging projects, and avoiding the pitfalls of multitasking. Here’s a look at how it works.
Location: San Francisco Mission District. Current place of work: Co-founder and Head of Product Department at Asana. One word that best describes how you work: purposeful . Both in terms of making a conscious choice about what I will work on next, based on its importance, and in relation to the broader purpose of the work that I do, even when I get stuck on some implementation details. Current mobile device: iPhone Current computer: MacBook Pro
What apps, software and tools can’t you live without?
I would like to think that I could live comfortably without any modern technology :-), but I am grateful for:
- SizeUp , to quickly change the order of the windows without using the mouse. Typically, I try to learn keyboard shortcuts for every piece of software I use – not because I so desperately want those extra few seconds back, but because I want to keep flowing .
- Do not disturb on my phone and all the features that allow me to turn off notifications. The temptations to multitask are great as it makes me feel more productive, but research is clear that interruption is a huge drain on productivity.
- Insight Timer , a simple timer for enjoyable meditation breaks. I try to take meditation breaks a couple of times a day. The “lost” few minutes of productivity are easily compensated for by the increased focus, energy, and joy I experience during the rest of the day.
- You are your gym . Tons of research (and first-hand experience) show the benefits of exercise for productivity and well-being, but the friction from going to the gym is so great that I won’t go as often as I want to. You Are Your Own Gym guides you through a bodyweight training regimen that requires no equipment.
- Asana . It doesn’t have to be an Asana, but I really recommend everyone to use some kind of work tracking system. Not only does it keep track of every part of my life and work, but it manages the flow of all the teams I work for, so I don’t need endless meetings to keep everyone on the same page.
How is your workplace arranged?
A seating table, sitting on an open floor plan asana, on top of which are:
- Monitor / wireless keyboard / wireless mouse.
- Five tall glasses of water that I place on the table early in the day and drink throughout the day to make sure I’m fully hydrated. One contains Athletic Greens , a supplement that Tim Ferris recommends, and the other contains Chinese medicine herbs that are either good for my energy or a damn good placebo.
- Blue light has been shown to improve your mood if you keep it on for a few minutes every morning.
- Three daily vitamin boxes with a ton of supplements my doctor recommended to improve energy and health, including krill and fish oil, vitamin C, drenamine, calcium magnesium, and immune-boosting mushrooms.
- A timer reminding me to take a break every 90 minutes.
- Freehand drawing pad and pen.
- Plant your friends.
What’s your best time-saving shortcut or life hack?
We will. Some people like to work alone, but for complex tasks I usually find it painful and distraction-prone. Therefore, I try to go through my list of tasks at the beginning of the week and, for each item, find a teammate who would be pleased to collaborate on this work. Sometimes tasks that would take me two days can be completed in two hours with the right partner. (“Pair programming” is common in software development, but it works for anything.)
When there is no suitable friend, I actually talk to myself, making friends with a word processor or a magazine: I start by writing down the important questions, and then I write down the answers. I’ve had long, strategic, productive conversations with my notebook like this, almost pretending to write like two different people walking back and forth with each other.
Both friendship and pseudo-friendship are really helpful in overcoming procrastination associated with discomfort .
I usually ask people what they use as to-do list managers … and I suspect your answer is Asana. What do you use to keep track of things besides asana?
No dude. This is all Asana. Regardless of whether you are using an asana or something else, I find it very important to keep every tiny detail of every part of my life in one place. I have a project for each part of my job (product, management, culture, recruiting, marketing …) and then a project for each part of my personal life (health, community, spirituality, charity, entertainment …)). I use Google Calendar to set aside large chunks of time to work in different areas, so that I don’t desperately switch between different types of work, and so that when I sit down to work on an area, I can pick the highest priority from that. specific project. And I stick to a general schedule: “I want to spend four hours a week on management, four hours a week on recruiting, a full week every six months on strategy.”
What device, besides a phone and a computer, can you not live without and why?
Fuck the gadgets. I don’t want to live without cats.
What are some of the things you do best in everyday life? What’s your secret?
Delegation. Some people strive to be irreplaceable, but my goal is the opposite: to constantly defend myself. Once I figured out how to do something well, I immediately try to teach it to someone who would be happy to take responsibility. That way, they can learn and grow in a new field, and I can move on to looking for something else that I don’t understand yet.
What do you listen to while you work? Have a favorite playlist? Maybe we can talk on the radio? Or do you prefer silence?
Silence. Sometimes I wear big headphones and don’t turn on the music, just to keep it quiet.
Here is a weird question I was thinking about. Instead of asking what you are reading now, what book would you give someone?
When it comes to maximum efficiency, one of my favorite books is Tony Schwartz’s The Power of Total Participation: Managing Energy, Not Time – The Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal . Even the title of the book is a powerful reminder. It details how to organize your life to give you as much energy as possible so that instead of trying to work slowly and hard for 60 hours a week, you can accomplish more by being extremely focused in short bursts.
I also recommend 15 Commitments to Conscious Leadership , based on the leadership training program we offer to every Asana employee, many of whom report profound changes in their lives and work. Learning the skills from her book was one of the most important experiences in my life, and it has revolutionized me both as a person and as a leader. Conscious Leadership makes Asana’s communication clearer and more credible, and I believe Asana as a company is more effective in achieving its mission.
How do you replenish? What do you do when you want to forget about work
Meditation, yoga, dancing, sleeping, mindful eating, spending time in nature, music, festivals, running, socializing with friends, chocolate.
What is your sleep pattern? Are you a night owl or get up early?
I sleep from about 10 pm to 7 am every night. That’s how much sleep my body needs, for better and for worse.
Fill in the blank: I would like _________ to answer these same questions.
In fact, I was just discussing with a friend that I wish I had a deeper understanding of how people like Elon Musk, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Barack Obama or Beyoncé can be so prolific on so many different projects. … Overall, I think it would be really helpful for leaders to share information about how we work day-to-day / minute-by-minute, which is common in most professions / professions, but to a lesser extent in leadership. So thanks for this series of interviews.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Use ‘we’ instead of ‘me’. I think this is the best advice I have received on leadership issues. That was 10 years ago and it really changed my leadership style a lot. I used to find it tempting to talk about “my product” or “my plan.” I scarcely paid attention to how this subtly demotivated the teams I worked with who were spending so much time building it.
But it was also imprecise: no significant achievement is the result of the efforts of one person. The media and culture often fetishize leaders – as if Steve Jobs were the sole creator of the iPhone – but in most cases, great things are co-creation.
Changing my language – from “I” to “we” – was the first step in changing my attitude. It sounds crazy today to think of the people working on Asana as “my” employees working on my project. They are my teammates and together we are creating our collective brainchild, the Asana product.
What else would you like to add that might be of interest to readers and fans?
Optimizing your ability to get the job done is only important if what you are doing is important. Achieving a goal quickly matters only if you are moving towards a goal that you deeply care about. If you have the luxury of having some kind of choice about what you’re working on: Take a lot of time to reflect on a regular basis. Think about the kind of world you want to see. Consider how you can apply your unique set of skills, passions and attitudes to contribute to shaping the world in the direction you want.