FocusTime: Brian Lovin on boring routines and capturing inspiration

How the founder and CEO of Campsite is focusing on what matters most

Brian Lovin is a designer and software engineer. He’s currently building Campsite, a full-stack communication platform that brings a team’s posts, calls, docs, and chat into one place. He lives in San Francisco, and he previously worked at GitHub, Facebook and Buffer. As a founder and CEO who has to spend time on so many different things as well as focusing on building a product, we were very excited to hear how Brian manages his time.

First off, why Campsite?

Three things are top of mind:

The world is hungry for a simpler, more cohesive way to get work done — a workflow that doesn’t require so many apps and tab hopping. It’s really easy for information to get lost, for conversations to happen in multiple places, and for teams to get bogged down with different ways to do basic things in every app they use. I shouldn’t need five different apps to have a conversation with my team and make decisions.

AI is, of course, creating new product opportunities for us. Great AI experiences need lots of data and context to be genuinely useful. But right now, most communication tools are struggling to provide great AI insights because they can only see one small slice of a team’s work. Bringing AI into a platform like Campsite, where posts, docs, call recordings, and chat all live together, means that we have more connective data to work with when we build out AI systems. This should result in higher-quality output as teams are looking for information or making decisions together.

Finally, it has become a huge operational burden on companies to use so many specialized communication tools, each with their own login system, billing system, security system, import and export system, and so on. This means more employee training, drawn-out procurement processes, and a higher risk of data being lost or locked away in any given app.

How do you have a good week?

We value flow time at Campsite. This means: we have as few scheduled meetings as possible, and we bookend the week with meetings for alignment. Everything in the middle is left for deep work.

So for me, this looks like:

• Two team meetings, one on Monday to get the week started and call our shots, and one on Friday to recap the week and align on what’s on deck for the following week.
• Before each of these meetings I’m spending time with my co-founder to make sure we’re on the same page about priorities and where we’re investing time.

Outside of those two scheduled meetings, we mostly work async on Campsite using posts. We’ve found that posts + comments are the perfect middle-ground between noisy chat and long-form docs.

The rest of my week is usually different, but almost always involves talking to customers (either doing live research calls, or staying on top of support tickets and feature requests) and building product (I mostly spend time on design and front-end dev).

That seems pretty focused and clean. How do you figure out what is important?

I’m a heavy Things user for my personal tasks. I usually have one or two primary things I want to accomplish each week, and then plenty of “side quest” tasks that fill in the space in between. I’ve found that if I try to have too many “primary things” each week, I don’t make much progress on anything because it’s easier to procrastinate with the side quests. So for example, my priority right now is getting our new landing page designed and built; everything else is secondary.

For our team, we use Linear to plan our projects and track tasks. Project prioritization is a mix of art and science, but at our early stage it’s a bit more on the art side. We have a lot of incoming data: customer feedback, metrics, and our own insights from dogfooding Campsite. All of this data helps shape the roadmap into something that is (hopefully) cohesive and impactful. But it also changes a lot; sometimes the top priority from last week needs to get canned if we learn something new from this week’s customer calls or metrics.

At the end of the day, though, it’s probably the same for us as most startups: there’s too much to do, and not enough time. So we’re constantly trying to make sure we work on the highest-impact projects that have the lowest time investment, all while finding time to patch papercuts and keep the overall product feeling polished and high-quality.

What is something you've learned about having an impact and getting better at work you'd love everyone to copy?

I realize this is a boring answer, but the biggest productivity unlock for me in the past couple of years has been through building a better understanding of my own physiology. It’s not something I paid as much attention to in my 20’s, but in my 30’s I really watch my sleep, diet, and exercise, and try to triangulate how those things impact my energy and output each day.

For me, some big unlocks have been:

• Eating mostly the same thing every day; my first meal is almost always after noon
• Work out 5 times per week, a mix of cardio, weights, and core stability work
• Go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day

These things together make life feel a bit more predictable — boring, even — but I’ve found that the consistency has a massive impact on my overall productivity.

On the flip side of that, I believe that motivation and inspiration are fleeting. It’s why I don’t really believe that great work happens from 9-5. Sometimes you’re motivated late at night, or are inspired by an idea on the weekend. Seize those moments! Work on a Saturday, or hack on something late at night!

I’m always trying to pay attention to these feelings, even it means disrupting part of my routine.