Trevor Gerzen's Blog

The Naive Optimist: We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m

I think there’s something messed up about the startup culture in the USA. The belief is that you have to work 6-7 days a week and spend all your mental cycles on your company. Nothing but pledging your soul to your startup yields success, right?

Not in my experience.

We work a 4-day week at …

I really appreciate Ryan’s thinking on this and agree with him. I’ve often thought that the culture I’ve seen around me of Go! Go! Go! just to Go! Go! Go! is not healthy. There is a difference between working on a computer where you are focused on this one device, either sitting or standing, but you can’t really write code or create designs while jogging on a regular basis.

When I was working from home I really enjoyed being able to do simple things like swap the laundry out in-between coding or designing, having my kitchen available to whip up lunch, going out for a quick exercise and not having to worry about how I was going to handle showering or whatever. Maybe those are somewhat superficial but I realize the importance of breaking up your day so it’s not just the “daily grind”, because it seems in my opinion that’s exactly what it is. A grind that yields dust.

It’s primarily mental activity for hours. I’ve noticed that it’s tremendously important for me to get away from the computer, get away from technology, put down the cell phone and just talk to people. Ask my wife what she is thinking, ask my friends what they’re laughing about. The same goes for me at work. I’ve found myself laughing with my co-workers more and not just clocking in, clocking out.

I think about start-up culture only because I’ve been part of it, a little bit, and have looked from the outside, in. You see that there is a lot of the same thing you see in manual labor happening. People get burnt out. I’ve had to watch this in my own life, coming dangerously close to being ground to dust.

I agree with Ryan, I want to have time and energy for my family. No kids yet, but I do have a wife, friends, the family I grew up with, responsibilities. I have plenty to encourage me to be wise about my time and energy so that I can enjoy my life with all of them and be reliable.