How our startup boosted productivity with ‘get s*** done’ day

During the pandemic, we realized that we were swamped with work and overloaded with information. So we came up with an idea to fix that.

At Travelpayouts, we plan a strategy for a year, then each team plans iterations for every quarter, and within a quarter, we plan for two weeks ahead. By doing it this way, every day propels the company toward its goals.

However, unexpected challenges and tasks show up in all areas on a daily basis. For example, managers are sometimes overloaded with meetings that affect their productivity. So it is not surprising that some tasks just fall short of deadlines and accumulate over time.

To improve our productivity, we introduced a Getting Shit Done Day (GSDD): Our employees define clear-cut goals and receive specific, usually non-trivial, tasks with little to no communication involved (we encourage our employees to avoid social media on this day, but we are not looking over their shoulder). The goal of GSDD is to increase the amount of time we spend in deep work by minimizing distractions for one day every other week.

After two months of testing the GSDD in our marketing and business development departments, we’ve seen some results. First, long-term projects, which took weeks before, began to wrap up earlier. Second, we were able to explore a few topics that we never got around to: For example, monetizing our own traffic through affiliate programs, effective outreach methods and email marketing best practices.

Thanks to the GSDD, we have also delved into tasks that were otherwise sidelined:

1. We rebuilt the chain of emails to inactive partners that always required updates but never were a priority. After we redesigned it, we immediately saw a 17% increase in open rates and a 32% increase in CR relative to the old version.
2. We improved the structure of our internal knowledge base in Confluence. After the updates, the database became easy to navigate for all team members.
3. We found issues in Travelpayouts’ registration sources. We have well-built analytics that record everything, so the task of finding problems was never a priority. However, after implementing GSDD, we were able to recognize sources for 7% of sign-ups.
4. We were able to optimize our working hours and increase the efficiency of our team members, which has already increased our revenue by 8%.
5. We found more time to tackle other challenges. For example, we’ve gone through our own blog and updated many service links to affiliate links, which brought us an additional $10,000. We can spend this money on our marketing needs. We are now expecting this channel to be an additional source of income toward our marketing efforts and to reward employees in our marketing team.

Although it is sometimes tricky to work with non-routine tasks, especially those eternally postponed, our team continues to complete them and improves performance. That is something we value a lot.

The steps we took to implement GSDD

Like all of our initiatives and innovations, GSDD started with a team discussion. We didn’t have a clear understanding of how to perform these days, so we started practicing them as an experiment. Right after the first day, all the team members provided positive feedback. However, we have identified a few problems.

The main issue with the first GSDD was that we didn’t plan for the next iteration (10 working days) well, and missing a day in the new format. Accordingly, we began to plan our iterations more clearly, taking into account the one day we set aside for GSDD.

Besides that, on the first day of the GSDD, the managers were still taking calls and that affected their productivity. Now, we have added a no-call practice to the GSDD.

That said, we plead guilty: We are still communicating on the GSDDs, doing stand-ups and demos. At the moment, we have already practiced six of these days, and committed to having them on Fridays for all the teams.

Here are the rules that apply to GSDD:

• GSDD takes place once every two weeks.
• Priority tasks and urgent problems are more important than GSDDs.
• We practice deep working and take no calls. We also notify people outside the team, like freelancers, who can distract the GSDD.
• Each employee discusses with their manager a specific task that will be performed on the GSDD in advance.

Despite the rules, we are quite flexible. For example, the basic no-call rule is in place, but if there is something important, or it is required, then it is still an option.