Thinking is Work. Give Yourself Time to Do It.
This is what my calendar looked like one year after we started Wistia. And this is what my calendar looked like last year, 10 years after we began.
Look at all those meetings. I dreamed that someday my calendar would be full of important things to do. Being busy felt like natural byproduct of success. This is what the calendar of someone who is running a 100-person company should look like, right?
Thinking is work
In the early days of starting a company, you have nothing but time. And when you have tons of time, you do a lot of stuff that didn’t look like work.
For example, here’s a video I just found recently of one of those days when we had nothing but time, a year after we started.
I had taped a point-and-shoot camera onto a golf club and spun it around in front of myself. I was playing around with a new way to shoot video and invented the selfie stick on accident. That’s the kind of thing that can happen when you have nothing but time.
Alas, we never thought to commercialize the selfie stick! But, with all that free time, we did figure out how to build a product, find customers, market ourselves, build a culture, and do all the other things you need to do to create a business.
So don’t let all the space in the 2007 calendar fool you. Like the 2016 calendar, it was full — full of unstructured time for thinking about the company.
It’s hard to see open-ended thinking as work because so much of it doesn’t result in concrete changes and progress. And yet, the most important and influential ideas come from open-ended thinking.
Becoming more productive to get more time
The challenge is figuring out how to create enough time to think, even though that time may end up feeling unproductive.
Initially, my strategy was to use tactics and tools that would help me be more efficient with my time. That meant putting no-meeting blocks on my calendar, living at Inbox Zero, and using a combination of Weekly Diaries, task list automation, and virtual assistants so that I could stay on top of what was important while hopefully having time to think.
And while this did help me stay productive, the time to think was always the first time to go. This meant that time to think wormed itself into my life into other ways: I would wake up at night thinking about the business, redirect conversations with my wife Alexandra — generally, I was becoming less present at home.
I was resigned to the fact that my life would be a bit unbalanced and that I would always need to work to figure out how to be productive, have time to think, and save time for family and friends.
But it turns out that there is a way to create the time to think and to stay productive. I learned this key lesson at a dinner with my friend, Ben.
Productivity is a people problem
Last summer, I was having dinner with Ben Chestnut, the CEO of Mailchimp. If you don’t know MailChimp, they are insanely popular, successful, have an inspiring brand, and have generally built a fantastic business.
Ben and I were catching up and sharing stories, which really meant that I was asking him a million questions. Eventually, I asked Ben how he stays productive enough so that he has time to think. He looked back at me with a slightly puzzled look on his face.
He said, “People always ask me about how to be more productive, but it’s never a productivity problem: it’s a people problem.”
Ben looked me in the eye and told me that either I wasn’t delegating enough or I didn’t have the right people around me.
I was dumbfounded.
I’d never thought of productivity as a people problem.
I’d always thought I’d been pretty good at delegating. Over the years, I’ve asked for tons of help. And I’ve been proud of the products, events, and content that happened completely without my intervention. I never thought that I could get more time to think by delegating, and I assumed that the things I was currently involved in were things I should be involved in.
After that conversation, I started to think about my productivity differently. Do I really need to be in the meetings? Or am I actually slowing people down by not giving them enough ownership? Do I have the people around who can run things without me? Am I slowing the company down by being too involved?
I took Ben’s advice and started delegating much more. And not just delegating solutions, but truly delegating the problems that needed to be solved. If I needed to be in the meeting, then I hadn’t done a good job of delegating or I didn’t have the right people.
The funny thing about thinking about productivity as a people problem is that, if you do have the right people, you can improve things much faster than you could ever expect. Three weeks after receiving Ben’s advice, I had gone from a jam-packed schedule to one where 50% of my time was free. Suddenly, I found myself with a lot of time to think.
Don’t feel guilty
It is easy to feel guilty if you find yourself with the time to think. We have a tech culture that reveres the hustle. Crazy work hours and paying your dues are the norm. The challenge is that, when scaling, that thinking time becomes even more important, and much harder to get.
Don’t make the same mistake I did.
Ask yourself: Do you have enough time to invent the selfie stick? Or more importantly, do you have enough time to realize that you did? If not, no matter where you are in your journey, you probably need more time to think.
