The CEO with an Empty Calendar

“So this is it,” says Amir. 

“Oh my god,” I say. My jaw drops. 

His calendar is almost completely empty. There are meetings, yes, but they’re drifting like planets in outer space. They dot the darkened landscape but with unimaginably vast distances between them.

Amir continues to explain. He seems oblivious to my cosmic level of shock.

“This is a pretty busy week of meetings actually because our CTO is on paternity leave. I’m doing a lot of his final reviews of engineering hires. So this is actually more meetings than usual.”

I’m incredulous. I’m curious. Frankly, I am almost offended. He’s the CEO of an 80 person company and this — THIS — is his daily calendar? He’s got fewer meetings than Robinson Crusoe.

The question is: how does he do it? And why?

Amir Salihefendić is the founder of Doist. They make the popular todo app Todoist and the workplace communication platform Twist. He started Doist as a side project in 2007 and today he manages a fully remote team of 80 working across his two products. 

I’m glad I talked to Amir for this interview, because he spoke directly to something I struggle with every day. As Nathan and I build out the Everything bundle, we’ve had to figure out how to balance creating an organization with doing our best creative work. Sometimes it feels like that’s impossible.

Creative work means being all alone in your room. Creating organizations means being in every room, all at once. It’s hard.

But after talking to Amir I realized that in the age of remote work, it’s actually possible. You can be alone in your room, and also in every room at the same time as long as you set things up properly. It takes some sacrifices, but if creative work is important to you it’s doable.

In this interview we look at how Amir uses Todoist to keep himself organized, how his company uses remote work and asynchronous communication to get more creative work done, and — yes — how he’s set things up so that he can manage a growing team of 80 with almost no meetings.

It’s a fascinating interview, so let’s dive in! 

Amir introduces himself

I’m the CEO of Doist. We’re the makers of the popular todo app Todoist and the workplace communication platform Twist. Doist is completely bootstrapped — I started it as a side project in 2007. I never thought it would become a company, but we’re up to about 80 employees now. We are a fully remote team and have been since the beginning.

How I use Todoist

I’m a very big user of todo lists. I’ve used Todoist every day since I started building it, and I’m at about 60,000 tasks completed. I have everything inside of my Todoist: life stuff, work stuff, everything. I’ve used it probably every day since 2007.

This is my Todoist. I’ve done about 26 or so tasks today, and I have only one left.

One nice thing about Todoist is that it allows me to see where I’m spending my time. Each todo is assigned to a project, and Todoist graphs out which projects I’m working on.

You can see a a lot of my work is tasks where I have to respond to something in Twist or in email. Some of it is recurring tasks where I have to review things — for example we have what we call “snippets” at Doist where each team posts on a weekly basis what they’re working on. So I have recurring tasks to review those snippets. I even manage my social media posts — I add tweets I want to send as tasks to remind me to do them.

I spend much of my time learning 

One of my biggest projects in Todoist is called Learning.

I spend a lot of my week reading through stuff — articles, newsletters, books, even videos. Everything that I’m going to read starts out as a todo in my Learning project. I schedule it for a particular day, and I check it off when I’m done. 

I do this because a big portion of Doist culture is centered around growth. We are very focused on it. The best way to grow is to learn — and so if I wasn’t learning constantly I wouldn’t be part of the culture we have here. A big chunk of what I do is trying to learn as much as possible.

Honestly, I also just find it fun. 

I’m looking for mental models that will help me be better at my job. For example, in Divinations you recently wrote a series on disruption — something like that is really relevant for anyone who runs a startup. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to use it for, but it helps me update my model of what I need to worry about, or what our opportunity is. Which is basically my job as the CEO. 

As an extension of my own personal learning, I also have a project called Culture where I put any article or tweet that I think would be relevant for the team at Doist. For example, Lenny Rachitsky recently had a great article on B2B startups. So I put it in my Culture project and I’ll share it with the team in Twist in our Inspiration channel when I get a chance.