From Here to Autonomy

Don't Hate me Because I Leave the Office at 4pm

It was such a provocative headline on Inc.com I just had to check it out: "Sheryl Sandberg Leaves Work at 5:30. Why Can't You?"  Provocative, I suppose, to women who work full time, on their own or on someone else's business, and who at some point in their careers wanted more in their work day than just work. Women like me, who clicked on the headline in her news aggregator, wondering, "and just how does she do that?"

The Inc. Magazine piece cites a video for Makers.com, a video project on AOL, in which Sandberg says:

"I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I'm home for dinner with my kids at 6:00, and interestingly, I've been doing that since I had kids..."

The messages in the Inc. article were: "Hey if Sheryl can do it, so can you!" and, don't kill yourself working the long hours you think you need to to be successful--studies show there's a diminishing return after 40 hours per week. The piece was actually very thought-provoking, though I must confess I was hung up on the part about Sheryl Sandberg leaving the office at 5:30. Here's why.

The time of day we let ourselves put our work down, while important, does not confirm whether we have work-life balance. While I have burned the midnight oil with the best of them in my earlier startup days, I leave the office at 4pm now. I do this because I have a three-highway commute that takes over an hour each way and I want to make it home for dinner with my husband and 19-month old daughter, at 5:30. (Before we had her I never ate dinner before 8 or 8:30.) But I wouldn't exactly accuse myself of being a "balanced" female entrepreneur.

Sure I get a dose of family time. As the full-time working parent it's my job--and my desire--to take on the caregiving at night and give my daughter a bath, get her in jammies (yes, jammies), read her a book or ten, brush her teeth, and rub her back while she talks to the stuffed animals in her crib. By 7:30 p.m. she's usually asleep. At this time I break out the laptop and work for another two or three hours. And while I don't live in her home and can't confirm, I suspect Sheryl Sandberg does too.

This schedule, adds considerably more time to that 40-hour work week, though I don't point this out to complain. These additional hours at the end of my day are not strenuous or difficult. But the hours I spend traveling are. These are weeks when having dinner with my family is out of the questions, and I suspect this is the case for Sheryl Sandberg too. I suspect that, like me, she travels a good amount of the time, judging by the YouTube videos I see of her at TEDWomen, or the World Economic Forum and considering the global nature of Facebook's business. I applaud Sandberg's insistence on being home with her children during a "typical" work day. But I must check the press who don't qualify her statement with the reality of female entrepreneurs: most days ain't typical.

There's also an unspoken dynamic that should be addressed before we paint a picture of balance and success being SO accessible: power equals freedom; and power usually takes a lot of hours to earn.

Sandberg is the second ranking executive at a powerful company, with the power to address company culture. Women entrepreneurs who are just starting out are often at the mercy of their customers, their advertisers, their VCs. In order to grow their power and the power of their companies they must be in front of the right people, in the right places, often at highly inconvenient times. Before I had my daughter I made it a point to not let geography or time zone be an issue; I simply showed up. You can question whether or not I had to, but I'll argue that many women starting businesses would say there is no choice.

As one female CEO once said to me when I told her that I brought my husband and daughter to a conference, hoping that by bringing them I would get to spend time with them in the mornings and before my daughter's bedtime (which I didn't): "After a few years I just realized I wasn't going to get to make it all work out. The kids would have to stay at home; and I would have to be apart from them. I couldn't make both worlds work together."

Leaving the office at 5:30 is not having the best of both worlds; it's making the most of the world we're in.

You could argue that Sandberg's success makes establishing balance easier than it is for other women. I recall an interview I did for BlogHer with Lisa Belkin back in 2008. We talked a bit about the B word--balance--and why it was such a bugaboo. And not just because, as current professional wisdom holds, balance and excellence are rarely inclusive. I mentioned an article I read in The New York Times early in my professional career that showed how little successful media executives slept. The article depressed me because it made me think that in order for these folks to stay on top they had to maintain an almost superhuman schedule, working until 1 or 2 a.m. and then waking up at 5 a.m. to work out, read the papers, and drink something probiotic before promptly starting work. In the case of the women profiled, there was little to no mention of their family lives.

Belkin argued the contrary, that very senior women had the resources to help them achieve balance. They had housekeepers, assistants, perhaps even personal chefs and drivers, to help clear away the domestic friction between their personal and professional lives. I have to believe this is true.

I love that Sheryl Sandberg leaves work by 5:30 to have dinner with her family by 6 p.m. But I doubt she's heating up the leftovers or cracking open cans of Chef Boyardee to fit it all in. She's got help; just like I do.

The Disappearance of Downtime

Before becoming an entrepreneur, I set out to write for a living. This sounds like a fantastical existence, but it was actually hard, even if joyous, work. I woke up early in the morning, walked to a coffee shop, and started reading--anything. It didn't matter what I read; the process of focusing on something unrelated to my writing task and caffeine constituted the formula required to tap my creative well. After 45 minutes or so thoughts would bubble up, and my only job was to collect them. Editing would come later in the afternoon, when my mind was tired out and drained of inspiration for the day. I knew to give myself the entire morning for the creative process, even if it yielded only 100 words. Looking back, this process was a pure luxury.

Later, when my company was new--no employees yet, just us founders--I used to plan my day around optimizing productivity, and gone were the mornings that I dedicated to creating. Since much of my work involved communication with sponsors and partners on the East Coast, I reserved the mornings for "busy work"--calls and email primarily. And creative tasks that required more uninterrupted focus time, such as writing proposals or blog posts, I reserved for the afternoon. We didn't have an office, so if I wasn't meeting with my partners in person at a cafe or one of our houses, I did my busy work primarily at home and my uninterrupted work at nearby coffee shops.

Of course, as the business grew, this separation between busy and focus time became much more difficult to maintain. People--God forbid--would occasionally call me back in the afternoon, in the middle of my focus time. Increasingly I found I always needed to speak with people when they called, and I de-prioritized my focus time to the free crevices in my afternoon, which didn't really exist. I tried to schedule in time for creativity like I did appointments--in a short and specific timeframe. I could no longer wait around for ideas to percolate in my mind. I had to force them to come during the period I'd designated to briefly focus. Creative ideas were stifled, deprived of the air they needed to be really great. This bothered me for a long time, but, I reasoned, most professionals have to deal with the pressures of meetings and deadlines. If I was going to grow my business effectively I had to be more productive. I had to back away from things like writing blog posts and reading to stimulate creative thought.

When we received venture funding and hired employees we moved into an office, taking away the change of scenery that normally signaled my uninterrupted focus time, and new activities--meetings, and normal face to face interactions with people--began to fill in. I found pockets of time to sit and think, usually during my hour-long commute to and from the office, but as our East Coast staff grew that time was increasingly used to touch base with clients and colleagues. I would get to our office parking lot not even remembering the drive to work.

As I traveled more I realized that there were built-in periods of disconnectedness when no one could reach me, and I could not reach them even if I wanted to. During these times I finished presentations, sketched out strategies, caught up on business trades, perhaps even wrote a blog post or two. Having this time was what made traveling constantly for the past five years bearable. I knew that once I got off the plane there would be no time to focus anymore; my life would consist of a brief and intense series of trains, taxis, meetings, working lunches, and periods of "downtime", in between used to catch up on email and make calls.

Every year at this time I look at my schedule while it is only marginally complicated compared to how it looked at the end of the previous year, and I ask myself the same question--how do I build in more uninterrupted focus time? And why, during the holidays when I make time to relax and reflect, do I find it so difficult to focus? The blog posts that I expected to ooze out of me have more like sputtered out incoherently. When I have periods of crucial time, like now, I think of all the small quickie tasks that I could be knocking out instead. I check email, my Facebook page, my Twitter feed, my calendar. I realize that I am out of practice.

And I realize that there is an ongoing argument occurring in my mind--the more eloquent side sharing that the multitude means of communication that exist today are not only personally convenient and enriching, but justify my work in social media. I've succeeded because of this shift in the balance of downtime and our obsession with being always on. And I've been plagued by it--the time that I used to take to allow creativity to manifest has evaporated into busyness. Will we, as a society, have a decreasing capability to create because we've erased unplugged reflection from our lives?

Pico Iyer wrote in the New York Times this week:

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

He shares how a premium has been placed on opportunities that allow us to unplug--fancy spas, even moves to rural areas. But ultimately we have an inability to sit still.

In the early days of my company we had the challenge of proving to sponsors and advertisers the value of social media. While we suspected that recommendations by digital influencers were valuable, there was no tangible proof for years that social media could move the needle for marketers. Now they are convinced. How, similarly, can I make the case for unplugged reflection time? How can we show that it ultimately makes us more productive?

 

Concerns of a Mom returning to work

This is the last weekend of my maternity leave, which I've anticipated for a long time. I've been planning the timing of things in my head and practicing on the breast pump--which for all its necessary function also is a bit dehumanizing. Even as I rely on them, I'm a bit repulsed by the pump, the plastic milk storage bags, these poor facsimiles of maternal role replacement. I know, I know, many women have done this before me; broken the seal of the little bubble of constancy created around them and their child. It has to be done sometime, but I still find myself recoiling from the inevitable pop.

I remember asking a woman in my office who had recently returned from maternity leave how she felt to be back. She was glad to be working again but confessed that she cried dropping her son off at daycare. A friend of mine who returned to work three months ago said she cried every day for two weeks very morning, after dropping off her daughter with a shared nanny. I'm lucky: My husband will be staying at home with my daughter--no emotional drop-offs; no wondering if she's clean or scared. I don't imagine myself crying, but rather digging in to work like I've done for the past 17 years. Work has a way of helping me temporarily forget things. But I worry: what if I don't temporarily forget? What if I find it too easy to forget?

I must confess, I miss being focused on things for longer than three minutes, with no distractions.

My child has not been away from me for 3.5 months. There was one day when Daddy took her out thinking he would come home sooner, but, amazed that she took a bottle in her sleep, he stayed out a whopping six hours. Aside from that anomalous day we've been apart no longer than three hours. Never has a relatively short eight hour work day seemed like such a hurdle.

We've tried to get her to take a bottle (asleep or awake) for two months, and we have had no luck aside from the aforementioned "dream feed". Sometimes she screams during our attempts; most times she plays with the nipple of the bottle, thinking we're offering her a new toy, happy to chew on it for a few seconds but ultimately rejecting it. We've offered the bottle with Mommy out of sight, with Mommy in the room, with Mommy subbing it in for the breast during a nursing, with experienced Grandmas and Aunts helming the effort, with Daddy begging her to consider, with bottles that look like boobs, with bottles that look like pacifiers, and with bottles that look like bottles, but nada.

We're now resorting to what friends tell us is the final, most effective method: Mommy goes back to work and makes the baby take a bottle or starve. This option is more than unsettling.

The babe also doesn't like to sleep in her crib. The past three months has elapsed over a long series of hand-offs between me and my husband; and if you are the one she falls asleep on, you must transition her to the nearest bed-like surface. Sometimes this can be a crib, or co-sleeper, or reclined baby swing or couch. The transition is done with the grace and precision of an experienced tai chi practitioner, as the babe cannot feel any slackening, dropping, or fidgeting or she will wake up.

This on-demand service will be impossible to continue when I go back to work, including the days when I'm working from home. In other words, unless we get this kid trained to fall asleep on her own, in her own bed, my husband will be the sole set of arms for eight-hour stretches of time. I've been praying for him and reminding him that, in retrospect, these times pass by all too quickly.

There were short stretches during my leave when I took a work call, sat in on an important meeting, responded to email, jotted down some thoughts I had about something business-related. All of these moments were all-encompassing. I know myself, and while I often multitask, I cannot integrate mothering with working. Both must be done exclusively during the times I've designated for them.

This, in itself, is a mixed blessing because it forces me to keep these realms separate, but it also forces them to compete. The work side can no longer sneak in minutes, that turn into hours, pursuing unscheduled ideas and entering spontaneous discussions. All of my spontaneity will be paradoxically planned; hemmed into my work day. The Mom side has to acknowledge the future I'm building at its short-term expense. I'll miss some milestones of my daughter's development and catch her at the crankier end of the day.

And I'll abandon someone I once left before, years ago, with whom I'd become reacquainted over the past three months. She knows how to sit in a room without looking at the clock. She forgets appointments. She sometimes forgets to bring her cell phone with her when she's out. She calls her friends in the middle of the day and apologizes if she catches them working. She finds joy in crazy things like changing diapers. She's not hankering to go places. She gets weepy from looking at babies, particularly ones she has to leave.   

Where did all my hobbies go?

My business partner, Lisa, passed along a questionnaire from a blogger who will be writing about the working habits of female entrepreneurs. Both Lisa and my other partner, Elisa, had responded; I tried not to read their answers as I approached the questions, but I couldn't help but notice that our answers were eerily similar--with the exception that, as a parent, Lisa spends about 1/3 of her time parenting. Elisa and I try to eak in workouts, books/TV and the occasional cooked meal when we're not working or sleeping.

What amazed me about all of our responses:

--Our hours worked: We tend to put in similar amounts of hours, getting up early to address email, getting in a full work day, and jumping back on our computers to address email/reading after our dinners and activities with friends/spouses/children.

--Our time on email: It's an ever-present thing, even when we're traveling or "offline".

--Our dwindling hobbies: Elisa is a theater buff, and Lisa used to ski a ton. I used to go to yoga class religiously and write creatively. These pursuits were not in our answers, or they were mentioned as rare activities squeezed in while on vacation, or with the words "try to" preceding them, as in, "I TRY to catch a show once a month."

As I was typing my responses to these questions about what I did outside of work--working on a Saturday morning, as I tend to knock out reading I didn't get to during the week--I looked over at my husband, Jesse, embarrassed.

"Jeezus hun! I don't have hobbies anymore."

"You think?" he said, with no small amount of sarcasm.

I love to read profiles of other entrepreneurs, with the voraciousness many have while reading People, In-Style, or some other publication detailing the lives of the rich and famous. I love to hear how they spend their time, down to their commute routines. There's a column in Inc Magazine that showcases a different entrepreneur every month, detailing his/her typical work day. And I marvel at those who do such things as cycle religiously for two hours before sunrise, or who are competitive flamenco dancers on the side. How do they do it and run a business? I wonder.  

I think back to early in my career in New York City, when I worked at several media conglomerates and made it a goal of mine to hit all of the new plays, films, and hot spots I could afford that were listed in Time Out NY magazine. Going through old boxes this past month as I prepared for a move, I found an old collection of Playbills and matchbooks--proof that, once, I did stuff that was not work-related. I found old manuscripts and magazine clips and was amazed at the consecutive hours of creative time it must have taken to write it all. Though I wanted to pare down all the random detritus I'd collected over the years, I couldn't get myself to throw this stuff away.

Jesse and I stole away for a bagel this morning, and I bragged to him that every Saturday, back when I lived in New York more than 10 years ago, I used to walk to a local bagel shop, order one with one of three of my favorite shmear flavors, then stop over at the coffee shop across the street to read The New Yorker or a book I was reading with my book club. I didn't have a mobile phone or a laptop; it was a purely analog pursuit. And I'd spend hours there, enough to get my thoughts swirling. I'd go home and write up a storm.

I used to regularly host friends for dinner, planning the menu days before and often prepping food most of a Saturday afternoon. Or I'd endeavor to bake something I'd never made before.

I used to take classes on such things as fiction writing, winetasting, boxing, or improvisational acting, and attend book readings after work.

I feel slightly wistful, but hardly regretful, of the changes; I'm more mindful of them. On the other side of the coin, 10 years ago I yearned for more adventure out of my work, and to do more than read manuscripts and edit articles eight hours a day. I wished I could travel more. I wished that I could work for myself and maybe even support a family with my work. I wished that the time I did have wasn't spent wishing for more.

I may have no hobbies, but in that last respect the grass is most certainly greener today.

PowerPoint Confessions #1: A Week in the Life of an Entrepreneur

PowerPoint Confessions, Vol 1: A Week in an Entrepreneur's Life

View more documents from JoryDJ.

UPDATE: Major disappointment with SlideShare. All the notations I've put in the deck, which are meant to give you some insights into how I plan my week, are not viewable. Will see if I can get some help from SS, or this first installment of PowerPoint Confessions is a bit of a fail.

Back in November I was in DC, visiting New Media Strategies and chatting with their Director of Engagement Leslie Bradshaw, who turned me onto a cool idea--something she had been doing on her own blog--PowerPoint posts.

I have a love-hate relationship with PowerPoint. On the one hand, I hate when people over-rely on it to relay a message. However I love it as a stimulator of thought. Visuals can often make a point more powerfully than words. For instance: I can tell advertisers about the power of the BlogHer community, or I can show them pictures of women bonding at the conference, their Tweets and comments upon engaging with a brand, and a chart of the increase in brand awareness that ensued. These are more powerful than just taking my word for it.

I speak a lot to marketers, media professionals, and reporters who want to better grok the social media space. At some point this year it occurred to me that the creativity I once reserved for my previous blog Pause was now going into PowerPoint slides describing trends on the Internet. What if I brought these two worlds together, and created visual posts detailing anything from media analysis to the mundanities of the workday?

I was sold on the PowerPoint Concept; I just needed topics. Tresha gave me one in my comments section:

a simple request: a blogpost that offers your schedule. there's no typical schedule but what's a day in the life of Jory look like 5 am - 1 am? 4am to midnight. or 11pm? what? how you a lot time each hour? my why behind that? I think it's just a supportive hug to one another. We are all getting much done and have different demands. 

Initially I thought, who really cares about when I eat breakfast, or if I even bother to eat breakfast? But then I thought of what I tend to ask entrepreneurs I meet: Not "How did you grow your business?" but "What time do you wake up?" "When do you go to bed?" "Do you make dinner?" "Who tucks the kids in?" To me, addressing the everyday and learning how to make it work is the key to entrepreneurial longevity.

So here, my first installment in PowerPoint Confessions, with a nod to both Tresha and Leslie, a week in my life--the first installment of PowerPoint Confessions. It truly is confessional, because I offer up the often nonsensical way I plan things in Outlook (nonsensical to others, not to me). No laughing, please.

Creatvity On-Demand: Is this possible?

In my efforts to get more creativity out of my work and not wait until the weekend for divine inspiration, I've been capturing ideas for the blog and interesting pieces to read as I find them and store them for when I can fully digest and interpret them later.

This is meant to save me from what often happens when I am inspired at an inopportune time and run down a rabbit hole with an idea, blowing off work I need to do and disorienting myself for the remainder of the day.

So how is it going? OK. Not great. Just OK. I've noticed that when I go back to these pieces that inspired me, I have lost the thread of thought on which I wanted to elaborate or the piece just doesn't interest me like it did. Sometimes I'll scribble some thoughts down to help trigger me later. For instance, in my inspiration file I see terms that in some cases only I understand: "MPT, Chris Rock, legacy building, Tweet--sleep is for the week." I wish myself luck piecing it together. (By the way, these terms will be incorporated into a post coming soon; they actually mean something to me.)

Despite the fact that creative geniuses like Twyla Tharp are successful with programming periods of creativity into their day, and happiness is strongly linked to having outlets for creativity (this was cemented for me when I took this quiz),  I find that managing the flow of creativity is often pretty difficult. It's tough to be creative on demand.

This year I hosted a sponsored video show called TheJuice, in which I got to speak to experts about all aspects of life balance. My partners thought it would be right up my alley, possibly because of my obsession with studying, if not achieving, balance. One of the experts, Jennifer Lee, of Artizen Coaching is an expert in inspiring creativity. She works with entrepreneurs who rely heavily on it to do their jobs. She provided some great insights for bloggers, who have to pull rabbits out of their hats regularly. Still, I wonder, even after blogging all this time, how do some people have the ability to always be in the flow of creation?

A friend of mine, a documentary filmmaker, told me once that creativity is like running. The first few times you go out, you feel awful, like you are out of shape and incapable of enjoying the process, but through ongoing practice you eventually get your footing and even start thriving on running. It worked for me that way when I started blogging back in '04--I stumbled to find concepts, and eventually had to tear myself away from my laptop I was so infused with ideas and conversations in my head. I also had the luxury of hours to spend on my writing, during which I could fidget, fart, check email, and wait for words to come to me naturally.

Few entrepreneurs have this luxury, even those who write books as a big part of their living. I'm always amazed by pals who are writing books and running a business. How do you segment your day to get the most out of both endeavors?

I've had to settle for a hybrid form of creativity--proposals and presentations. This requires summoning ideas that meet a set of criteria, as client needs are not always what I'm moved to impart, but I can choose how to impart them. I never thought of this sort of thing as creative until I witnessed how others did them poorly. You know who I'm talking about, the person who reads off power point bullets pulled from the sales deck, or proposals that are so disjointed you wonder how a client could put the pieces together? It's a new pride that I have in my creative abilities, even if I'm not writing the great American novel that I am helping people connect the dots. I'll take this form of creativity ... for now.

Other mini refuge periods: Flights, and a blogreading period I've inserted into my mornings. Yes folks, I'm getting up earlier these days. Something I never thought possible. I'm still training my body to fall asleep earlier so I'm not exactly bursting with energy, but I'm more satisfied with my day by carving out this time.

Are People Who Sleep Less More Successful?

Early in my working life in New York City I read a feature story, I think it was in the Times Business section, about the sleeping habits of top-performing media executives. The common thread among all of them: They slept no more than 5 hours a night. Most slept less. This tendency to not sleep was positioned in this article as a competitive edge, even a requirement to being successful.

I remember feeling discouraged. I had been slogging it out at magazines and was looking for some way to distinguish myself, but I wasn't an early riser. As a teenager I often slept until 10 or 11 in the morning. An early-bird class I had one semester nearly did me in. In college, I dropped the one class I had that began before 10.  I was fortunate to work in an industry where people ambled in between 9 and 10am. I never minded working late.

But the luminaries in this article--many of whom I forget now, interestingly, though I do recall book publisher Judith Regan--often worked long hours. A typical routine: Wake up at 4am; jump on the treadmill (these folks had the money and the space in their Manhattan apartments to have exercise equipment in their homes, something I aspired to have); shower and get dressed; read all of the dailies; and still manage to get into the office before everyone else.

For a while I tried to wake up early--around 6am--to fit in a workout before going to the office, but the effort was short-lived. My body much preferred working out in the evening and the scramble to and from the gym took too much time. I loved to read, but I could never get through all of my material on a subway ride. I figured I was just too inefficient and lazy.

Years later I still wonder how it's possible to hold to this kind of schedule. I work longer days now, but I can't function if I can't sleep at least 6 hours (insomnia notwithstanding). If I have to get up early for a meeting, or to catch a plane, I'll get up; I have to. But it's been only recently that I've accepted that all things being equal, I prefer to sleep in.

My evolving definition of Working Smart

2009 was the year of getting organized. Sort of. I spent the latter half of my holiday vacation last year training myself to work differently. Don't get me wrong, I've managed to do things somewhat right over the past 16 years of my working life, but more than ever in my career I felt like I needed a working makeover--a new framework for productivity.

If you'd sat down with any of my past bosses (including myself, as I've had numerous stints of self-employment), all of them could say I was organized. They may not have praised my communication style, or how I presented, or my problem-solving skills, but dang-it I was ORGANIZED. But as an entrepreneur I've found that being organized is just the ticket to admission into the stadium. No one gets a front-row seat, or to even perform on-stage, unless she's strategically organized.

There's been a quantum shift in the type of work that I do. I've always had busy work, information gathering, creative work, and what I call "social time", when I must actually interface with people, whether on the phone or in-person, what Tony Bacigalupo refers to (quoting the uber-smart start-up supporter Paul Graham) as "Management Time". But in the past few years I've had much less control over when I can schedule these types of work. I attribute this shift to three circumstances: