Interview with Liam from Time Doctor
Liam and Rob met at a conference in Austin, Texas, in 2011. Having discussed the concept of Time Doctor, they struck a friendship that would soon turn into a partnership that would change the way we manage time.
Time Doctor was built to help individuals and organizations be more productive, help stop people from wasting time on distractions, and instead finish what is important to them.
Businesses can rest easy knowing their remote workers are productive since they can easily and quickly track their time.
How did you come up with the idea of Time Doctor? It is a unique name, so how did you think of it?
"My business partner is in Sydney, Australia, and I'm in Montreal, Canada. He's a medical doctor. He practiced medicine as an emergency physician for four to five years. So we just thought to ourselves, well, we're tracking time and doing much more than that, which includes analyzing your time. By utilizing your time wisely, you will become more productive and healthier. So that's how the name came about - Time Doctor."
The workplace has evolved over the last few years. In addition to reducing costs, remote working has become a viable option for companies to hire top talent, and not just for cost reduction. In addition, more and more companies are choosing to be distributed instead of physically located, growing to a valuation of more than a billion dollars even without physical offices.
"Time Doctor is an asynchronous remote organization. We are located in 43 different countries all over the world. No one has a physical office, and we love working remotely. We think it is the best business model that you could have, because it affords someone like me the maximum amount of freedom in my life. I can choose to work from Istanbul, Barcelona, Bali, or Mumbai. It doesn't matter because I can work remotely."
What do you think are the shortcomings of remote work?
Lack of collaboration. By far, that is the biggest issue that is impacting remote versus on-premise teams.
However, you can use an asynchronous work model, which is effective, similar to what we're doing right now at Time Doctor. Netflix would be a good example of asynchronous video consumption. It waits for you to consume it or interact with it.
Asynchronous is a slower model at the beginning, but actually, it's much more productive from an output perspective per employee. We see that it overcomes the lack of collaboration that you usually see inside of remote teams.
How did Time Doctor come into being?
"I was running an online tutoring company, and one of the big problems that I had inside the business was to track time accurately.
There was always a discrepancy in the time submitted by the student and the tutor. And that was destroying the business. Finally, I recognized that Time Doctor could allow for an auditable version of time-tracking so that anyone could see what the actual truth was and what you were doing with your time.
I realized that's what I wanted to kind of commit the next five to 10 years of my life to."
With Time Doctor Software you can:
* Improve the speed and effectiveness of communication in organizations
* Clearly organize, communicate and delegate daily tasks
* Reduce time spent on email and other non-work-related distractions
* Ensure that employees use their time effectively and maintain a healthy work-life balance.
* Reduce time spent on everyday tasks, including commonly generated timesheet reports
Considering the fierce competition in today's business world, how would you highlight the company's competitive advantages, and what makes you stand out from the competition?
"Our entire technology stack and our product are focused on how we help the world transition towards a remote work model.
We have the best tool for people who want to work remotely. Additionally, if you wish to use our tool inside an office, you may do so. It's just that we are not designing for an office experience, we are designing for a remote world experience.
I think that's a significant differentiator in the market. Other time-tracking tools tend to either focus on the office model, that is, the on-premise model, or work in between the two. We built the product specifically for remote teams so that they can work from anywhere in the world."
How has the pandemic affected the growth of Time Doctor?
“In 2020, we grew over 200% year over year. So that was incredibly successful for us. So definitely, for SAAS products, that's a lot of growth to see, and we've still seen a consistent increase in growth, basically post-pandemic.
Obviously, with the whole new variant, we'll see how that one works out. But yeah, as people have transitioned out of the pandemic, what's been left behind is that 40% of the US workforce works remotely, whereas before the pandemic, it was 4% of the US workforce.
This is going to remain consistent and probably increase over the next couple of years. In a post-pandemic world, perhaps 50% of the US workforce will be working remotely by next year."
Given the remote work culture within Time Doctor, how do you encourage creative thinking within your organization?
"We use a lot of tools to be able to bridge that gap. For example, all of our designers have iPads and we use a tool called ‘Miro’ where we all collaborate on a single whiteboard, and we can communicate that way asynchronously.
We communicate through tools like Zoom and Google Meet, which we have found to be effective in this case. However, we also make sure to focus on deep work at the same time. There's a fantastic book by Cal Newport called "Deep Work,” which is entirely focused on basically trying to optimize yourself towards productive, focused work.
We find that if you can optimize your entire workforce for a deep work mindset, you can usually actually overcome a lot of our remote team’s collaborative or creative drawbacks. Generally as an organization, if you can increase your productivity by 200% by going remote. In the event that you have reduced your creativity by 10%, I'll gladly take that any day of the week."
How do you see the future for Time Doctor?
We were a tool that focused on a relatively small niche, 4% of the US workforce, as an example. Now it's 40% of the US workforce, and we perceive that to grow quite aggressively over the next couple of years. So it's going to get more competitive.
Many people are entering our space. Recognizing that the real place where work is going to be done will no longer be a place; it will be everywhere.
We're obviously going to encounter some challenges, but fundamentally for us, it's just sticking to our core mission statement, which is empowering the world's transition towards remote work."
Getting to know Liam Martin personally
What excites you most about your job?
The ability to be able to do something new and different. From the perspective of marketing, which I oversee at the company, the innovation that's currently happening in online marketing is not only getting more aggressive, but it is also accelerating.
When I started, I was good at SEO, and we're still really good at SEO as a company, but the strategies would maybe turn over once every four to five years. Now they're turning over once every 18 months.
So should we get good at Tik Tok? Okay. Well, we can maybe extract six months of value out of that before competitors come in and start to eat our lunch. So it's getting more and more exciting.
It can also mean more work, but that's what kind of keeps me up. It would help if you were up to date with the technology and tried to target clients on various platforms.
How do you motivate yourself to get new ideas?
“I get incredibly inspired by successful entrepreneurs. Consider Elon Musk. He is doing such great things as someone who is building renewable energy, electric cars, spaceships to Mars, and the internet for everyone on planet earth.”
Taking inspiration from innovators and disruptors like Tobias Lutke, Jeff Bezos, and Jack Dorsey, Liam Martin often finds himself questioning, “Is he thinking big enough?”
Liam further adds that a vast majority of the time, in entrepreneurship, the challenge is setting high goals and dreaming big when we always need to level up.
Every company is innovative, or else it isn’t successful. It’s just a question of degree. Needless to say, Time Doctor is leading the race in the Time Management industry.
It was a very motivating and inspiring conversation with Liam Martin as we got the opportunity to learn from one of the leaders in the industry.