[gb] Studio

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent.

In some ways the traditional business/life structure seems backwards—spending 8-10 hours a day with people you may or may not get along with, while spending the margins of your life with loved ones.

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – Work, Family, Health, Friends and Spirit and you’re keeping all of these in the Air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.

But the other four Balls – Family, Health, Friends and Spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these; they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for it.

Thing two that I think is special is that there’s very little friction here. There’s no commutes; we’re living in a world where it doesn’t matter whether you’re sitting at your desk in your office, you’re sitting in your home, you’re sitting in a coffee shop, you can get work done. Especially with software and Internet-related things, you’re always connected, and as a result, the integration and probably the ability to sustain a level of intensity that’s required is higher.

One of the things [Toffler] said was that we should move from the idea of a career as a linear progression up the ranks in a single organization to that of a career as a portfolio of jobs that you hold over time in a series of different organizations.

We agreed that a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn’t have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn’t—and other time-consuming activities.

This is in part the tyranny of the 8-hour work day paradigm. When the work is progressing as planned and the core issues have been addressed, the right move for the manager is often to step back. But if all you know how do is “manage”, there’s no fallback. Nothing else to fill your time with.