Recently, I interviewed with a company looking for someone creative: their current leaders are highly analytical and they want to add more visionary, innovative thinking to the mix. I wrote that down as a risk. A few years back, a CEO told me he was thrilled with how well I…

I love collaboration. That’s simplistic, but true: I’m my most energized, creative, and successful self— and I create the best products — when I’m collaborating constantly. To some extent, that’s just about me. But working with teams across a variety of companies, I’m comfortable saying they could stand to collaborate…

Suppose you had two choices when chatting with your friends. The first will give you a great messaging experience, but you (and those friends) need to sign up for a new app to get it. The second requires no sign-up, but sometimes fails to deliver messages without telling you; send…

In fall 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, on the day the San Francisco sky turned blood-red from wildfire smoke, we founded Miter. We started with a simple observation and a hypothesis. The observation: everybody hates meetings. That’s not rocket science, I know: it’s well-documented and near-universally recognized. In…

by Ashley Whillans (Miter’s behavioral science advisor), Dave Feldman, and Damian Wisniewski. Originally published in Harvard Business Review. It’s no secret: most meetings are terrible. As a behavioral scientist and two founders of a startup devoted to improving meetings, that’s the easy part of our pitch. But fixing them? …

This week, Adobe acquired Figma for $20B. Now, it’s time for pundits to tell you what combination of business savvy, luck, unfair advantage, and/or evil machinations led to Figma’s success. Including me! Seriously: I’ve never worked for Figma. Or any of its competitors. But the analysis I’ve seen so far…

by Ashley Whillans, Dave Feldman, and Damian Wisniewski Most people hate meetings: they feel like a waste of time. Only 17% of senior executives report that their meetings are productive. One critical reason is a lack of concrete and specific goals. Research suggests that an explicit goal can help teams…

by Ashley Whillans (Miter’s behavioral science advisor), Dave Feldman, and Damian Wisniewski. Originally published in Harvard Business Review. Everyone hates meetings. Attending too many can be highly stressful and tiring, and both productivity and quality take a hit when employees tune out, become demotivated, and lose valuable heads-down work time. As such, it’s hardly a surprise that managers in one survey reported 83% of the meetings on their calendars were unproductive, or that US-based professionals rated meetings as the “number one office productivity killer.”

This was originally published in January 2021. I’ve made a few updates to reflect changes since then. By now, you’ve probably heard of Webflow — the flexible, no-code way to build your website. More and more startups are turning to Webflow instead of Wordpress, Drupal, Squarespace, or Wix. And the…