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Let’s talk about Golden Rituals. Last August, Reid Hoffman and I had a wide-ranging conversation on . One of the topics we discussed was the idea of Golden Rituals and a framework from my friend and close advisor, Bing Gordon:Every company has a small list of Golden Rituals. A few criteria:(1) They are named.(2) Every employee knows them by their first Friday.(3) They are templated.We discussed the iconic examples — , , , etc. The most distinctive Golden Ritual at Coda is , our unique way of running meetings. This conversation turned into a fun project. I decided to meet as many teams as I could, and try to catalog “Rituals of Great Teams.” Since then I’ve talked to hundreds of teams — interviews, roundtable discussions, a survey or two, and lots of fun doc spelunking. As I met team after team and heard about both (a) the rituals they are proud of and (b) what they are hoping to learn from others, I found remarkable alignment. I’m working on publishing the collection of rituals —Shishir MehrotraCEO and co-founderThe Docket is Coda’s version of the staff picks shelf at your local bookstore. Every month, we recommend published docs that we’ve personally read, loved, and copied. In this special edition, all the recommendations are written and curated by our CEO and co-founder . See past installments 
Many of Google’s iconic processes have spread throughout other companies (probably the most famous: John Doerr’s writeup on ). In this doc, Shiva highlights another Google best practice - managing a Launch Calendar. Shiva is an icon of the tech industry - having held senior roles at Google, YouTube, Spotify, WeWork, and now Facebook - and has seen many companies struggle to scale their launch processes. He turned a complicated matrix of reviewers and initiatives into a steamlined playbook. This doc gives a peek into how Google navigated the matrix.
I’ve found myself recommending Dave’s doc constantly. If you have ever looked for ways to make your meetings more productive, this is a must-read catalog of meeting rituals. The core observation is simple: great meetings are designed, much in the way products are designed. Sometimes you optimize for speed, sometimes for creativity, other times for inclusion, and so on — work backward from those goals and design your meetings. My favorite example in the doc is the — we’ve adopted it as a commonly used ritual within our own team at Coda.
One of the most overlooked rituals on a team is how they handle employee-manager 1-on-1s. Our Head of HR, Raechel, is our resident thought-leader on how other teams run this process and has invented an amazing best practice toolkit. I’m sure for most people the 1-on-1 doc is what Raechel calls a “forever scroll” mega doc - full of 60 pages of notes broken up by date markers. Her template recognizes that every employee-manager relationship is unique and switches the process to break it up into key steps. My favorite part is the Partnership Agreement - it quickly became a staple of my own 1-1s.
Few tools have impacted my personal productivity like this doc. Des’ doc started with a very which said “Your email is what *others* think you should work on. Your to-do list is what *you* think you should work on. Your calendar is (usually) what you *actually* work on. How much do they overlap in your world?” Des transformed this insight into a toolkit that syncs your to-do list, email, and calendar into a single doc and then aligns the three every week with a simple workflow. It even gives you a score at the end. I’ve been running this system myself for over a year now, and I’ve discovered that any week where my “Des score” exceeds 50% is a good week for me. This was a humbling (and actionable!) observation — I only naturally have control over half my time, so it is very important to make the most of it!
In my experience (and in the words of Bing Gordon), rituals are named and templated. The Doc Gallery’s most popular docs speak to the flexibility of rituals beyond these boundaries. - A resource for making informed decisions as we again reshape the workplace. - An evaluation system for sourcing your SaaS startup’s next finance tool. - A collection of free, time-saving templates for better workflows, cross-functional partnerships, and internal visibility.
Not every great ritual is captured in a doc on the trending list. Some are simply stand-alone templates, building blocks composed in a way that makes life easier. Here are a few templates you probably aren’t using but should. - Design a more convenient doc with this Excel-style readability hack. - Take the edge off of quarterly business reviews with a hub for stakeholders.
Find these templates and more in your Explore panel or with the / command.
...this ...this doc from if you feel generous, are on speaking terms with your neighbors, or still have a gaping hole left by your missing copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. ...this doc from if you are missing a pair of dice, question the existence of randomness, or think statistics class was real a hoot.
The Docket
April 2021
A special Docket from Shishir: Our CEO’s list of practical rituals from great teams and leaders.
, but for now, I’d like to highlight some of my early findings.
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by Shiva Rajaraman, VP Product Facebook & former CTO WeWork
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by , CEO at Gamestorming Group
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by , Head of HR at Coda
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by , Intercom co-founder and CSO
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