Meet the first app that shows you how much time you have for deep work and shallow work, how much time you spend in meetings, and how you compare to co-workers and globally.
This is great! How do you define 'deep work' as I can imagine some meetings (eg personal blocks of time booked on the calendar) could show up as meetings vs available time for deep work?
@cdcwatson Great q! We define Deep Work as anytime you have a block of 90 minutes of time without meeting interruptions. We only count meetings that have at least 1 other attendee so events with just you don't get counted.
@cdcwatson@bwb what if you use your calendar to block off times for uninterrupted, deep work - i.e. as a signal to peers that you are not available for meetings during that time?
@cdcwatson@ninau Yep it would only count it as a meeting if there is at least one other person beyond yourself in the meeting who accepted the invite. So it would count as deep work as long as it is just you in that event :)
Report
@cdcwatson@bwb nice! does it also recognize when you book appointments in your cal (e.g. dentist appt)?
Report
Can you summarize your privacy policy/standards? For example, is it possible for me to remove my data from your system or disconnect my calendar?
@ps10gel You bet! We connect via a read-only connection and only tabulate your calendar’s metadata to generate these stats. You can request your data be removed at anytime and you can also disconnect your calendar on the settings page in the app. The report updates weekly and if you select the weekly email option it sends you a sketch of your upcoming week every Monday to help you get more time for deep work. Your data is never sold or shared with anyone outside of our company.
This is a really cool product for starting to kill off ineffective meetings. Do you give tactical suggestions on how to improve the KPIs? For that matter, do you give users a notion of what balance we should shoot for? Any sort of recommendations and seeing the metrics trend the right direction would be super-motivating.
@lnchoi We've got a ton of tips on how you can increase deep work time and make meetings more effective, and we are hoping to follow-up with recommendations on the right balance. We try to classify everything as maker or manager to help there. Makers should have a LOT of big blocks of time so they have time to code or for marketing work or other tasks that need focus. Managers are going to have a lot more meetings due to the nature of their jobs but we would still like to see at least half their work days available for deep work. We hope to push an update down the road to show more of that and for now the comparisons can help show that too.
@bwb cool makes sense. one future feature suggestion is to let the user set their own goal on this, and track on a weekly basis if you got closer or further. I think giving the user best practices recos based on their cohort is great, but everyone prob has a different goal...for ex maybe my primary job is managing a large team of customer support ops and I'm totally ok with 20% deep work time for the week. Then you are tying together the data with actionables and a concrete sense of progress (or lack of).
@lnchoi Ah great point, we will see what we can do to give users the ability to set their goals down the road!
Report
The stats are really insightful. Have you considered adding alerting for thresholds? For example, I might want to know when my meetings are coming close to pushing my focus time below 80%. Or maybe the app can make suggestions on moving/scheduling meetings in the future to keep you within the range you need to get work done.
@justinmazzi That is a great idea, we will def look at that!! The weekly email tries to do a little of this and we'd like to do more long term. The weekly email tries to visualize your schedule and show you how you could free up some time -> https://shepherd.com/products/me...
Report
I don't have a business per day but I do schedule calls constantly throughout the day into my gmail calendar. Can Deep Work Stats tell me some background on my gmail calendar? and thank you @bwb
@basicbonsai Yep we crunch 12 months of your google or microsoft calendar and use that to generate these stats around how you work, how much time you have for deep work, around meeting effectiveness, and some comparisons to averages inside your company and globally. If the calls have another attendee they would show up as a meeting, but if it is just you we ignore them as we had to make some assumptions about what was and wasn't a meeting. And, in our testing the majority wanted meetings with just them to not count. Does that help?
Hey @bwb 👋 Love seeing you launch another product after your success in the past.
I remember using some of the earlier versions of this product but it looks like you've added so much more. Nice job.
Couple questions.
1. How many months worth of data do you need to determine these stats? For example, let's say there's a relatively new hire to the org (3 months in) and I or they wanted to see how productive their time was?
2. Is there an ideal company size for this product?
Again, great work Ben!
@jrfarr Thanks :), the most we crunch on this app is 12 months, if someone just started 3 months ago the app can tell and only goes 3 months back when it does the stats. We think that every company can find some benefits, but at around 50+ people and meeting loads start growing we think it can really help!
Spotify
Deep Work Stats
Spotify
Deep Work Stats
Deep Work Stats
Local Lead Game
Deep Work Stats
Icebreakers 3.0 COVID-19 edition
Deep Work Stats
Icebreakers 3.0 COVID-19 edition
Deep Work Stats
Deep Work Stats
Deep Work Stats
Lemon Squeezy
Deep Work Stats