How top engineers manage time: Matt Martin on Clockwise

Executive overview

Most people react to their week rather than design it. Without intentionality, others will consume your time by default — meetings, emails, Slack, and tickets are all competing demands on a shared resource with no regulator.

The fix is simple but resisted: each Monday, identify your three to five most critical outcomes, then verify your calendar actually has the focus time to achieve them.

Clockwise automates this at scale — moving meetings, creating focus blocks, and optimising schedules across entire organisations so individuals get time back without manual effort.

The tragedy of shared time

• Time in modern organisations is a shared resource, but nobody regulates it
• Anyone can grab your calendar slot, send a Slack, file a Jira ticket — all competing for attention
• Unregulated shared resources get depleted — the same economic principle as pollution without a regulator
• Most people never step back to audit how they spend their week because it feels like a luxury when drowning

The weekly intentionality practice

• At the start of each week, ask: what are the three to five most critical things to accomplish?
• Check your calendar — do you actually have the focus time to do them?
• If not, move things around and block the time before the week fills up
• Time blocking to the specific task works for some; broad focus blocks work for others — either is valid
• Without this, Friday arrives and the whole week was spent on small fires

How Clockwise was built and grew

• Founded after noticing engineers complained of no time to focus — even when calendars looked manageable on the surface
• Early proof of concept: ran a virtualised optimisation on a large engineering org's real calendar data, giving back thousands of hours — a VP saw it and said "if you can deliver that, I'll buy it"
• Seed round from Accel (2017), Series A from Greylock — product remained in private beta until summer 2019
• Public launch to all Google Calendar users in 2019; started with ~1,200 users and compounded from there
• Growth was viral-within-organisations: one user seeds a team, the product improves as more teammates join

Solving the single-player problem

• Core value of Clockwise requires multiple users — optimising one calendar in isolation is limited
• Built single-player features (calendar sync, colour-coding focus days, travel time, lunch blocks) to give instant value on signup
• These features bought time for the viral loop to activate within each organisation
• Companies like Uber, Netflix, Pinterest, and Instacart now have large deployments