Balancing it all

0:00Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37 Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes, joined as always by the co-founders of 37 Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. It has been a bit since we have been together, but we are together now and I want to kick things off with a listener question. This was actually posted on a YouTube video and it says, Hey guys, quick question for you. You often talk about business health, how to feel it, improve it, etc. But to do all that effectively, you really need to be healthy yourselves, right? Good sleep, physical activity, and the like.

0:34I couldn't help but notice Jason seems to be pretty consistent with his workouts. It's genuinely inspiring to see him maintain that. I'm curious how he, and really all of you, managed to balance work with personal well-being like sleep, hobbies, and fitness, considering you always seem to have a ton of work all the time. Thanks. I don't know, Jason, how this person knows about your workout routine.

0:57Kimberly Rhodes:I'm a little bit nervous about that. I don't know how he knows. The stalking happening here, perhaps. But I do think it's an interesting premise that you need to be healthy yourself in order to run a healthy business. Do you guys first, do you agree with that idea? I don't know if that's true or not. I mean, I'm sure you look out there and there seems to be some fairly unhealthy people running businesses that seem to be pretty successful. But the point is like you pay for it one way or another at some point, you know, probably. And health is such a broad term in a sense, like you might be physically healthy yourself, but you might be terrible to your spouse or to your kids, or you might not see them, but you're like at the gym and I don't know what it means.

1:35Kimberly Rhodes:I think ultimately you're probably better off if you live a fairly balanced life, get doing things outside of work, doing things at work, being able to focus in both places, whenever you're doing whatever it is. I don't think it's probably pretty healthy to be, you know, at your kid's game or something and be on your phone working. That doesn't seem healthy, even if you appear to be healthy, you know, so it's, it's probably a matter of balance and focus, taking time out to do the things you're doing and give your full attention to those things and those people that you're with. And then, you know, stop doing those things too.

2:03Kimberly Rhodes:Eight hours is enough. That kind of thing at work, I think is probably a good path towards at least having a chance of being healthier. I also think though, obsession is very unhealthy. So, you know, you can be again, like very physically fit or very good at work, but be like obsessed with it in a way where you're addicted to it. And that's not good either. So I don't know. Health also has these like addictive qualities to it that you have to be very careful about, especially in like the social media influencer world where there's people who are addicted to being a certain way or appearing a certain way.

2:34Kimberly Rhodes:And you're like, is that healthy or not? I don't know. You're probably better off balanced is how I would put it. I'd say, as Jason mentions, plenty of very unhealthy people are running seemingly very successful companies. But the second factor here is for how long? Jason and I have been in business together for damn near a quarter of a century now. And I think that would have been a lot harder if we'd have to carry a deeply unhealthy lifestyle on our back. I see a lot of startup company, Silicon Valley style culture come out of this idea that you can will compress your work life into one sprint, one glorious five, six, seven year sprint where you ignore everything else.

3:20You ignore your family, you ignore your health, you ignore your hobbies, you ignore any other intellectual pursuits, and you just focus on work. And there's clearly a lot of folks who come out on the other side of that, chewed up and spit out. They did not achieve rocket growth. They did not achieve the fantastical exit, but they were still left with the remains of being through that process, which is deeply unhealthy habits around health or food or sleep or deeply unhealthy human relationships. And I have always looked at that and go like, you know what? I don't like those odds. I do not like the odds that if the business thing I'm working on does not pan out, I have to live with the fact that I'm this husk of a human that's left over from a deeply crushing process.

4:11I don't fancy my own chances that high. I want to make sure that what we're working on and what we started working on was just going to be actually even a failure. I'd come out on the other side and I'd like still have my humanness intact. And then if it was going to be a success, and I mean, by all accounts, we've had plenty of success over those years, we'd be able to keep it up. We wouldn't suddenly just like collapse from an early heart attack or just completely burned out of our minds because it had all just been work, work, work, work, work. I think the mania, the addiction that Jason talks about is very often connected to sort of the sprint that like it's going to be over at some point.

4:55And at least for us, I mean, the reward to some extent is that there's not a finish line. I mean, we could call it quits at some point when we've sort of just had enough, but there isn't this artificial point where we can just throw everything to the wind, just get to there, and then it's all going to be magical, right? Like we've spent these two plus decades in a mode of saying, you know what? I want to enjoy my success now too. I don't want to postpone it for seven years, 10 years, or 20 years. I want to enjoy some of the fruits while I'm in my 20s, while I'm in my 30s, and now we're in our 40s.

5:34And I want to have a taste of that, this retirement notion in business culture where you're just like, one day, one day I'm going to enjoy all the spoils of my labor. Not healthy at all. Jason, you mentioned it not being a good idea to be working on your laptop at a kid's activities. I mean, I know you guys both have families, have obviously made a conscious effort to separate that work from every minute of your life. Talk to me a little bit about that. Cause I think for a lot of people who are starting a business, it is all consuming. You've made it not all consuming. How have you done that?

6:11Kimberly Rhodes:This is going to sound really trite, but by not making it all consuming, like that's not a great answer, but, but it's the truth. Like David and I just had lunch, we're just talking about this a little bit, which is like, you can make things really hard on yourself. That business can be very hard just because it's hard to get anyone to buy what you're selling. That that's like true fundamentally. So that's hard enough, but you can make things also much harder on yourself by maybe growing a larger organization than you're equipped to handle by taking on too many costs that you can't afford to handle by creating structure and eliminating free time during the day by filling your day up with things and meetings and calendar items and not having enough time to do the work you're trying to do.

6:52Kimberly Rhodes:By feeling like you need to make more things like decks and explanations and things that you don't need to actually make. People fill up their days with all sorts of unnecessary work and too much process and too many layers of things to do. And they find themselves without any time to actually do the work they need to do. And that bleeds into other things. Other things typically lose out to work. Work tends to grab more than it deserves. So I think there's just a tendency for people to make things hard on themselves, understanding so that business is hard to begin with. So that's kind of how it goes.

7:26Kimberly Rhodes:I had this thought during lunch about this idea that a lot of small businesses try to run small versions of big businesses. That's kind of the problem, is that they're trying to do all the things a big business would do, but at their scale versus trying to eliminate all the things they don't need to actually do because they're a small business. That's how you hopefully find your way towards making things a bit easier on yourself. For example, David and I have pretty open calendars. Typically, we don't line ourselves up with a lot of meetings during the week. We don't require anyone else to do this.

8:00Kimberly Rhodes:This is not just our calendar. This is hopefully everybody's calendar at the company. We don't have a lot of things that the company is then digging its fingers into and prying people away from their work. We try to keep that very open. And so, you know, at the end of the day, you've, you've put in a good six, seven hours, maybe, maybe just five hours, whatever it is, but like you've put in enough time for the day that you're done and you don't leave all the work left over to do later on. That's, I think, how you make things hard on yourself. So it is a matter of just actually doing fewer things.

8:28Kimberly Rhodes:There's no real magic here. It is trying to just strip away the stuff that doesn't really matter and getting to that and then just doing the stuff that's left. And I think what you find is that the actual work, the stuff that moves the ball forward, that's not the stuff that requires the 80 hours. As Jason says, it's the fact that you've packed all this other stuff around it. And when people think like, oh, I don't have enough time, I don't have enough time. You don't have enough time for what exactly? You don't have enough time to do the work itself because there's all this other stuff on your plate.

9:00And it reminds me about something. Whenever I get fired up about a new piece of technology, I've been really into the Linux stuff lately. And a common reply I'll get from people is like, who has time for that? Who has time to spend an hour and a half, two hours setting something up? First of all, my immediate response is like, what was your screen on time today? I bet you it was four and a half hours because you're like everyone else. And you doom scroll for an hour a day, two hours a day. Oh, you have time for that? Oh, curious. You have time for that, but you don't have time for a hobby that's going to expand your horizons.

9:32That's going to motivate you and fire you up and try some things. So this is often a very strange conversation because when people say like, how do you find time for the work? How do you find time for your hobbies? How do you find time for this thing? You have the same amount of time. You're just spending it differently and you're choosing not to account for all of this other junk that's in your calendar, both the stuff during your work hours and the stuff during your off hours, and you classify huge swaths of your calendar as somehow immutable. Like, well, these are just the seven meetings I need to have for the first three days of the week.

10:09I mean, I can't do anything about that. Of course you can. Of course you can. If you're running a business, the one thing you can do something about is how you spend your time. You can absolutely decide tomorrow, yeah, I'm just not going to do that anymore. I'm just going to stop having all these things that I've now decided are no longer worth my time, take up my time. And you'll suddenly realize that there's all the time you need. All the time you need. The number of people I've met during my career, where I could in good faith say like, oh yeah, this person needs 80 hours a week just to do the stuff that moves the ball forward, I think I can count on like not even a full hand, but three fingers.

10:49The vast, vast majority of people dilute themselves into thinking that all this junk that they pack the calendar full with is immutable. It's essential. And they're full of shit. They're full of shit towards themselves and their own conception of like how needed they are, how much their fingers need to be in every pie. They're diluted towards how much does this actually move things forward? and they're diluted towards the idea that what if you didn't do these things? Would things just fall apart? What if you just stayed off meetings for this week? What would the whole castle come apart? I think not in most cases.

11:27And either way, you should give it a try. Figure out like, where are the wobbly points here of the house? Can we blow a little hurricane at it? See where it's structurally unsound? Unless you give that a try, you're not gonna know. And you're not gonna know what sort of the essential bits of it. And I think both Jason and I have realized there are very few essential bits in running a business. There's very few things that Jason and I have to do in any given, I was about to say week, but the right time frame is probably month, maybe even quarter. The number of essential tasks that Jason and I have to perform for this thing not to come apart, very, very few things.

12:07Now, maybe there were a little more of that in the early days when there were fewer of us. There were more things that directly rested on our shoulders. Okay, sort of, but also very often not really. When we're smaller, we have fewer customers. There are fewer obligations. There's actually more leeway. There's more flex. If we're down for, not if we were, when we were down for 10 minutes in a given day, in the early days, it wasn't the kind of catastrophe. It is now when we have 100 ,000 plus customers and literally millions of users, the criticality has gone way up. And this is something else I find that's kind of funny, is that in the early days, you have an inflated sense of how bad a thing's going to be.

12:51You fuck up a little bit. Do you know what? The vast majority of customers you will ever have, if you're going to have a successful business, haven't even showed up yet. I don't even know who the fuck you are. You haven't been introduced. There's no memory here of you screwing up a bit in the early days, of course, you've got to treat the customers you have. The few you have, you've got to treat them well and all this other stuff. But the criticality part and the essentialness part, all of that stuff have warped in your little head and you can warp them a different way. Reality is remarkably malleable when it comes to this kind of business stuff.

13:26And you can completely change the composition of how your time and your week and your month and your quarter is put together.

13:33Kimberly Rhodes:Another example of this is like, so I share my email address with all new customers and it's on the web and whatever. So I'll get emails from customers and I'll respond to them and they go, I don't know how you have time to do this. I go, what else am I supposed to be doing? Like if I don't have time to respond to my customers who have a question and I can't take a moment out of my day to get back to people, I'm so busy. I can't take a moment to get back to people. I'm not answering a thousand emails a day. It might be a handful. I have time for that. Like, of course I do. Like, why are you surprised that I don't have time for that?

14:05Kimberly Rhodes:Like, what does your day look like where you don't have a few moments to get back to somebody? And like, you know, I don't really ask people that directly when they respond, cause I don't want to deal with it. But like, I would be curious to ask, like, how are you so surprised that I have a moment? What does your day look like? And one of the things I've heard from a lot of like executive style people is that like, well, you know, I've got this meeting and that I'm like, what are you doing? these meetings like, well, strategy. You don't need to have a strategy meeting like what every week. Like, I don't understand.

14:31Kimberly Rhodes:Like what exactly has changed this week versus last week? What are all these discussions about? I don't ultimately go into it, but I'm just like, you set out what you're going to do and you do that for a while and then you can decide what to do next. Like, why are you revisiting everything all the time or micromanaging things all the time in that way? You should have plenty of time to get back to people. So there should be plenty of empty space in a day. That is a good day and a good use of time. People think it's a bad use of time because it's not full. If your day is not full, then you're not using your time wisely.

15:04Kimberly Rhodes:You're using your time wisely when you have time to use. That's what I think you should be optimizing for. That reminds me of, I think it's DeMarco has this trade-off between efficiency and availability. and there's a lot of executives, business type people who think about efficiency. I think about efficiency a lot too. And sometimes we think about it so much and we think about, how can we pack in more? Like here's some open space, like let's jam some stuff in there. Every single time you jam something in there, availability disappears. Like ability to react disappears. And I think at the executive level, you should mostly have availability, mostly have capacity to react.

15:48for all the things that come up. Like, that's your job. There's a bunch of other people in the organization who will have a job that's, you're a programmer. Like, you're going to move this ball forward. We've got to ship this feature, and we want to do those things. So that's what you're focused on. At the executive level, you should be the least busy person. If you're running the ship, and you're the one who have to react to both fires and customers and serendipities and insights and whatnot, you should have the most open schedule, the least to do of anyone in the organization. That's very rarely how I hear from people at the top

16:24Kimberly Rhodes:think about themselves. Oh, do you know what? Yeah, I mean, I'm quite leisurely scheduled this week. There's a lot of open time. I have the same experience as Jason. Sometimes I'll reply back to someone who asks like, hey, can we have him chat about something? And if I really actually care about this thing, I usually just say, yeah, what about tomorrow at 11? And they're like, what do you mean tomorrow? Like, isn't your schedule booked for weeks solid? Like, no, you know what? It's not. A lot of the time it's fully open. Sometimes it's got a little bit of spots on it. But very often I can say, do you know what?

16:57If it's something I really care about, I've made sure that I have that availability to react present in my schedule. Let's do it tomorrow. This is what I've always loved about Buffett. It's like, I don't run a calendar, of course. Perhaps you'd say, easy to say when you're worth$100 billion. I don't know. I don't think it's that easy. Most people I hear who are worth billions of dollars, they have personal managers who run their schedules and calendars because they've got so much shit in it. So clearly whatever Buffett is doing, kind of difficult, right? But he always says like, I'm not going to plan something out.

17:26I'm not going to book a meeting for you. Let's meet tomorrow. If this is important, this is urgent, like let's get me tomorrow. That's the payoff to some extent from having done the stuff, being able to have that availability. And then I'd say the other part of it is, I mean, if there's nothing to do, I also think that's perhaps one of the most dangerous things for any executive who have the power to tell other people what to do. So you need, at the very least, a hobby. You need to have something in the business that you want to do yourself with your own goddamn hands, such that when there is just free space that you can't just lean back and use to think about things or react to, you're not tempted to pull everyone else off everything else and chase some new harebrained idea that you have.

18:10No, you actually have your own stuff that you could just sit down and do for a couple of hours. I've certainly enjoyed that over the years, just finding things sometimes directly in the business that totally crucial need to be done. And I feel like I'm uniquely suited to do that. And then I do that. Other times it's things that like, I don't actually fully know how this connects to the business yet. When we did our cloud exit thing, that came in part because I had spent some wandering time just learning about some technologies that kind of seemed interesting. and I wanted to level up on, but that wasn't completely directed in its learning and its outcome and its output and so forth.

18:46And I think sort of taking that time when there is the free space to work on your own things instead of constantly telling everyone else what to do. It's very healthy when you're trying to sort of have time for everything. Something I've been doing lately is

18:59Kimberly Rhodes:I don't like scheduled calls. I don't like how there's been a trend to schedule every call, in fact. So when someone like this journalist reached out to me, wanted to talk about something. I'm like, just call me tomorrow. Like when I don't know, just call me. I'll answer or I won't. And if I don't, I'll call you back. And if we play phone tag, then so be it. Like rather than fill up my day with like, well, now I can't talk to him or I can't talk to anyone else, but him between 11 and 12, because it's booked. Just call me when you're free. And if I'm free, I'll answer. Like you can use your time so much better that way.

19:34Kimberly Rhodes:It seems like your people, I would assume think that you're like using your time worse in a sense, or more loosely because it's not scheduled. Like what if he calls while you're on another call, then I'll call him back later when I have a free moment. Like I just want free space to move. Because when I look at my calendar and I see blocks pre-scheduled, it means I can't do anything else. And I don't like that feeling. That's not a good feeling to have. And it's not actually an efficient use of your time, I don't think. So same thing is true with friends for now. All of a sudden, like friends want to schedule phone calls.

20:04Kimberly Rhodes:Like just call me, dude, just call me whenever. I don't know. Call me whenever that's enough. Just I'll call you back. Remember how we used to do that? We do that again. Like we seem to all get in touch. Didn't we? Is scheduling things actually making us more in touch? It doesn't seem like it actually is. It seems like it's creating obligations. I don't want that. I don't need that. And I think that in a business setting, you want to, I think, eliminate those kinds of moments that feel like obligations and allow yourself to just be sort of a little bit more fluid, like David's saying, having time open to react and just to be and to think and to see where things go, that's the right way to use your day, I think.

20:43Speaking of scheduling, we've talked about this on previous podcasts, but I think it's worth revisiting again. I did a live Ask Us Anything session earlier today. And one of the questions we got about Basecamp was how you can see someone else's calendar. Like, I want to schedule something. I want to put something on someone's calendar. How can I see that? Of course, the answer is you can't see someone else's calendar. There's a reason behind that. You guys kind of talk me through that because I think how we work, or Jason, kind of answered your question about how people get so busy. I think a lot of it is other people putting things on your calendar.

21:15Like you might plan how your day is going to go and then all these appointments pop up in your calendar when people have the ability to do that. So kind of talk me through the 37 Signals philosophy of that and how we work a little bit differently.

21:28Kimberly Rhodes:Well, I think if people looked at their own calendars and you asked them honestly, like, how many things did you put there? Not like said yes to, but that like you initiated compared to the things that other people initiated. Most people would say most stuff on my calendar is initiated by somebody else. Other things took my time. Other people took my time. And this is what I have left. That's kind of a crappy day to feel like this is what I have left. So at 37 Signals, you can't take someone else's time. You can create an event. You can invite someone for sure. that's possible, but you can't see someone else's calendar.

22:01Kimberly Rhodes:You can't see empty space that you can take. If you want someone's time, you ask them, like literally you might ping them or, or that's like direct messaging and base camp say, Hey, are you free at 11? Let's do this thing. And maybe they'll go, I, yeah, maybe hit me up or I don't know, hit me up this afternoon. That's often something that we like, I'll talk with my designers and be like, I'm free this afternoon. Just hit me up whenever you're around. That's the extent of it. And they'll hit me up. And if I'm around, I'm around. If I'm not, I'm not. And guess what? We'll connect eventually. Like there's nothing magical about 2 PM.