Hey there 🕺🏻  I'm Tommy, timeOS Co-Founder & CEO ⋅ LinkedIn

• About me
• I Googled myself so you don’t have to
• Books to live by
• Tweets to live by
• Essays to live by
• My Working Principles
• Communicating with me
• My timeOS Story
• Work from home office setup

About me

Believer in tools for time ⏳ 

Married to my best friend 🤍 

Proud dad to Yalli 🧒🏽, Ray 👶🏻 and Emma 🦮

• I’m based in Tel Aviv, the most expensive city in the world, but I love roaming around with my laptop and gadget backpack — I like to see myself as a local digital nomad.
• I’m a time hacker and obsessed with finding new ways to improve my personal productivity. Ironically, I sometimes waste too much time on it.
• The reason that I'm so obsessed with tools for time is genuinely because deep inside I'm lazy, and probably have the "absent-minded professor" syndrome. Time-management doesn't come naturally nor easily to me, but plays an important role in achieving my mission in life.
• I eat one meal a day () and usually fast for 22 hours everyday (exc. weekends). I find it more suitable for my work-life style and metabolic fitness.
• I sold my first startup when I was 14 to a guy named Genesis through mIRC. When my parents found out they returned the money back because “the internet is a dangerous place.” The second acquisition was a bit more successful (-;
• When I was 15, I studied computer science at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) and was the youngest person to ever finished their C# program.
• I was a full-time musician and singer and studied composing and song-writing in the Rimon School of Music, where I met the love of my life.
• I’m the creator of two popular podcasts 🎧, both of them were ranked #1 in Israel — one in Technology (Od Podcast) and one in all categories (Supertools). Soon we will announce the Magical Show! (bad name, I know) Here some of my favorite episodes →

• I’m a coffee snob ☕️ and I mean it. My favorite coffee roaster is La Cabra. HOC is the only coffee shop that I can drink coffee in Tel Aviv without bitching about it. Here is my Tommy’s Coffee Logbook My home coffee setup →

• I love emojis. My favorite emojis are ⛩️ because I admire the Japanese culture (best coffee methods, food, and aesthetic) and ⏳ as a reminder of how our time in this world is limited. Also use frequently → 🕺🏻, ✨, ☕️, 🙃
• I’m a reader of book 📚 For me, the ability to learn from reading is the biggest superpower of humanity. Books form the foundation of my knowledge. Here is my 2021 book library Readwise

I Googled myself so you don’t have to

• Meet Forbes’ Young Leaders Under 30 Shaping Israel’s Future In 2018
• Article for Notion: Entrepreneur Tommy Barav built a second brain in Notion
• Podcast interview for Product Masterminds: using Google Keep to Power Your Effectiveness.
• Startup Nightmare: A Meeting With Tommy Barav: Building A Time Machine
• Magical's bottom-up fundraising strategy
• I Planned The Perfect Week With Google Calendar
• How To Run Your Life From Your Home Screen
• Notion Office Hours: Supercharged Meetings
• More stuff on my blog — Hebrew | English

Books to live by

Library

15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management

15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management

Essentialism

Essentialism

Delivering Happiness

Delivering Happiness

Originals

Originals

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Remote

Remote

Tweets to live by

Essays to live by

The days are long, but the decades are short -Sam Altman

10 small habits that have a huge return on life -David Foroux

How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit - Rahul Vohra

Advice -Patrick Collison

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule -Paul Graham

The truth about hard work -Kapil Gupta + Naval Ravikant

My Working Principles

• Our time is worth more than money. If possible, trade money for time.
• If you've said it twice, write it down. It's easy to keep doing small easy tasks, but they add up over time and distract from the larger impact you could be focusing on instead. Automate, streamline or outsource repeating tasks to protect your timeNo-code Automation.
• Master your tools. As formal musician I used to write better songs just because I mastered my main instrument, my guitar. It liberated my creativity. Master your work tools. This is not an end in itself, but a way to maintain flow. People who learn, practice and automate their tools can easily be several times as productive as those who do none of those things.
• Calm > busy. Being constantly busy is not something to be proud of, it is an indicator of a failure to plan and manage time effectively. I constantly try to practice .
• No meetings before 11:00. I prefer to take long uninterrupted sessions of Deep Work, usually before 11:00am and after 4:00pm. During these sessions I move to do-not-disturb mode on my mac and phone and try to focus on my most important task. It allows me to do my best creative work. In exchange, when we meet I’ll aim to give you my full attention without context switching.
• I value openness and integrity more than anything.
• Improve continuously. GettingFeedback to CEO is my fuel to becoming a better leader for my team. I believe in the power of above the line.
• Making myself obsolete. As an early-stage CEO you need to be involved in almost everything. My long-term philosophy is to continuously making myself obsolete, and hire people to take over my areas of responsibilities so I can move on to find new opportunities, raise more capital, and bring more resources to our team.
• Don’t compromise your sleep to beat deadlines. In my 20’s I was proud of getting only 4-hour sleep so I can crash my to-do list. It was stupid. Sleep is the most important productivity hack -Why We Sleep. You can find my sleep metrics inside my Magical account.
• With time, I found it more effective to build systems for things I do everyday as opposed to managing a daily to-do list and goals (inspired by Atomic Habits). Here is The one list, and stuff that I avoid doing in my Tommy’s Not-To-Do List.

Communicating with me

• I prefer a long-form writing communication and find it the best way to collaborate on ideas. Most of the time I use Notion doc, a Loom recording, or Email as a replacement for meetings ⛩️timeOS Communication Principles
• I barely monitor DMs. If you need my immediate attention — call me. If it is not urgent - send me an email or mention me on Slack. Please avoid cross-platform posting with me, it makes me anxious. There are no "right" hours to reach out to me. That said, you shouldn't expect me to reply immediately, regardless of the communication method.
• My calendar is visible to everyone on our team and always up-to-date with deep work block, so you can quickly check if I’m available for a quick chit-chat.
• I have ~4 hours a week dedicated to mentorship with my team (aka “Open Office” timeblock). Feel free to just block out time directly with me or by using this booking link.
• When we do meet, I will always ask you “what a successful meeting looks like for you” at the beginning of the meeting (learned it from Eden Shochat). I just want to be useful.
• If we have a 1-on-1 meeting, you will be asked to share agenda items in advance. After the meeting you’ll be asked to rank my performance in our meeting. This feedback means a lot to me and help me grow as a CEO. If you want to reach out for feedback 🙏  feel free to schedule a call with me using this booking link.
• I love hosting magicians for coffee, lunch, dinner, and hack days. If you happen to be around my neighborhood, feel free to reach out and I’ll make you a delicious speciality coffee.

My timeOS Story

This journey started in 2018 when, scratching my own itch, I founded the Supertools community. Over the course of 3 years, we grew from a single productivity enthusiast to a highly-engaged community of more than 45,000 time-hackers.

My personal passion uncovered a world of pain and possibilities — there was something fundamentally flawed with how time is being managed and how work is being done. To turn this community into a business, I started to do workshops and trainings for teams to be more productive using the tools around them. I immediately witnessed the value and impact.

But it didn’t scale.

Couldn’t find a way to productize myself and the community.

I flew to LA, to attend Fusion LA’s accelerator program while being backed by Homeward Ventures (Omri Krigel) and James Kong.

First MVP - a productivity monitoring solution for companies. Piloted with 5 design partners.

We met with ~20 investors. 2 said yes.

COVID STRIKES (Feb 2020).

Couldn’t raised money. Momentum has lost.

Back to square one.

We started by initiating a deep analysis of the community’s needs, aggregating tens of thousands of posts and engagements. We then crossed it with the qualitative research we ran, participated by team leaders from fast-growing multinational teams.

The result was magical.

We came up with ourtimeOS Manifesto , an upvote-style doc with tens of calendar pet-peeves and one clear insight: the calendar screams for innovation.

We realized — it is not only about improving the calendar, it is about completely redefined it to the future of work*

*Read more about our unique community-first approach.

*Founder Letters

Work from home office setup

• Investing in your workspace is essential for productivity. If you need my assistant with finding the best gear for your home setup — don’t hesitate to reach out!
• Here is my Kit page with all my gear and desk gadgets >> https://kit.co/tom.barav/supertools-dream-desk-setup
• A video is worth 1.8 million words, here is my dream office setup [soon in English] →