How Wealthsimple, one of Canada's top fintech companies, uses Clockwise to maximize their time

Wealthsimple is one of Canada’s top financial technology companies. Their mission is to make investing (and saving and trading) accessible. They offer a robo-advisor product, an active trading app, and other tools that are helping people to better manage their money. They have 886 employees, all working remotely throughout Canada.

We sat down with Nate Smith, Wealthsimple’s Principal Software Engineer, to talk about how their team uses Clockwise to maximize their time and continue to grow one of Canada’s top fintech companies.

How Wealthsimple used Clockwise to master asynchronous work

We’re always curious about the circumstances that bring companies all around the globe to find, and love, Clockwise. Wealthsimple’s story was especially relatable. “I started to use it at my previous gig at CircleCI, which had a much more globally distributed team,” Smith shared. “Since I moved to Wealthsimple, I’ve had a lot more meetings. I started just before the pandemic. We very rapidly transitioned to a remote company and had all of the challenges that come with that. Getting used to asynchronous work, for example. Instead of getting into meetings all day, Clockwise really helped to manage my calendar, because that is not something I like to do.”

The implementation of Clockwise at Wealthsimple occurred “organically,” which is a trend we’ve spotted when speaking to many of our enterprise clients. “There were a few people at the company who were using it. Then whole teams started to adopt it because it was easier than playing calendar Tetris,” said Smith. “There wasn’t really an active push to make it happen.” 

Focus Time, every Engineer’s best friend

Any Engineer will tell you: Without uninterrupted Focus Time, there’s no code. Clockwise has shifted the way workdays look, not only for Smith but for all the Engineers on his team. “I find it difficult to hold big chunks of time for the Engineering work I have to get done, and Clockwise just makes that an automatic thing.”

“We’re all trying to keep long stretches of time available on our calendars and trying to prevent our days from getting chopped up into little bits,” he said. “Clockwise maximizes Focus Time, and that’s been super valuable for the team.”

“It's not so much a time saver as it is a time maximizer. I really like the features that keep me from having to context switch all the time.” 

Scheduling that’s intuitive and automatic

“The scheduling,” Smith went on to say. “It's phenomenal. Just being able to schedule in the way that I think. Like if I need to talk to somebody this week, I can just go into Clockwise and say, Get me 30 minutes with this person this week, and it will take care of that. And if there is an opportunity to increase my Focus Time or their Focus Time, Clockwise usually takes it. Not having to think about it and not having to pull up like three or four people's calendars and then look for the blank spots — that's been the feature that I use the most.”

“It is one of the better products that I use every day. You’d have to pry it out of my cold dead hands,” Smith joked. “I would not be able to do what it does in terms of maintaining my time and just dealing with the chaos that is scheduling meetings.”

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