How to make your team 1000x more productive. Literally 1000x

So I came across this question on Quora earlier today: I’m the CEO of a startup with 8 guys. My developers sometimes spend all day at the ping pong table. How do I handle this?

This presents a good opportunity to talk about productivity. It’s fair for employees to get distracted, they’re humans after all. But as a Founder and/or CEO you need to make sure you’re maximizing productivity — which means limiting distractions. Now, I disagree with the idea that you should ride your employees like bulls. Good engineers will simply quit. Instead, you need to inspire your employees. If they’re inspired, they’ll be devoted. Don’t set goals, set missions. They’re not employees, they’re critical members of a team fighting for success.

There was a study (I’ll look for reference) that found NASA teams working on the Apollo 11 mission to be 1000x more productive than their counterparts. Yes, one thousand times. How is this possible? Simple: They were inspired. They had a mission and they were dead set on succeeding. If one piece was out of place, if one calculation was off, people would die and America would fail at putting a man on the moon. Do you think they wasted time? No way in hell.

Look at Tesla and SpaceX. Sure, Elon rides his employees like bulls, but they’re all inspired. They’re fighting to succeed. They’re trying to pull off missions the world deemed impossible — and they’re succeeding. Notice how they turn down jobs at Apple, Google, etc with 2x pay, more prestigious titles, and 5x time off. They stick with Elon and his mission (notice how this strategy also promotes loyalty — side benefit).

The point here is that you need to motivate your team. If they feel like they’re just working, they’ll prioritize ping-pong. But if they’re fighting for a greater purpose, they will set their own priorities straight.

P.S. A little ping-pong break is never a bad thing.