FounderQuest This Is Fine. Settling Into The New Normal.
Show Notes:
The world is burning, yet we find ourselves settling into our weird new daily routines. This week Josh, Starr, and Ben discuss the importance of company transparency during a crisis, Tiger King, and, political trigger warning, separating health coverage from employment. Bring your marshmallows, chocolate and crackers!
Links:
The Witcher 3
The Office - Micheal's casual jeans
Justin Jackson – Good Businesses Have Margin
Full Transcript:
Starr:
I was thinking this show we could talk about... I don't know just kind of getting settled into this sort of weird, new normal. Even though it's hopefully temporary. The last few shows I feel were-
Josh:
Wait, you're saying we actually have a topic this show? Because that actually, in itself, means that we must really be settling in if we actually have a topic this week.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean the last few weeks, it's like personally, I felt like I had no idea what was going on in the world, or my life, or anything. It was just everything got blown up. I'm starting to figure out how the pieces are going to fit together. So this week I feel personally like I kind of am getting a little bit of an idea of like how it's going to be. It's just a matter of keeping on doing it for two months? I don't know... how long? However long?
Josh:
Y'all getting a little bit of a routine dialed in now?
Starr:
Yeah. Exactly. The situation in my house is that my wife is also working from home. She also works in tech as a writer. So basically we switch off during the work day. I work mornings, she works the afternoons. And then we take turns watching the kid. And then we both try and steal scraps of time during naps, and in the evening, or whatever, to do things that we couldn't do during our lifetime. I feel like I'm at the point where I'm kind of able to sort of scrape by the stuff I need to do. It might be a little bit hard to do extra stuff, to start getting ahead, but as far as just making sure that the wheels stay on the car, and stuff like that? On the work I'm doing, at least, it's possible. What about you guys? I think y'all's work situations have changed less than mine.
Josh:
Yeah, mine hasn't changed a whole lot, to be honest. Because I was commuting to an office for a little while early last year, and over the course of... like late last year, I'd moved everything back home, including... I've got my home gym now. So pretty much my day was already spent at home. And we have young kids, but I was already home with them. My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and takes care of them and stuff. She's kind of going crazy right now because we had to tell our babysitter that she can't come because... but that's the thing, lock down. So yeah, we have a lot less help right now. I guess that's the big difference. I've been taking a little bit more time, in my work day, to stop and help with the kids and stuff. Like put them down for naps, or that sort of thing.
Starr:
My question for you is, what did you know that the rest of us didn't? You've obviously been prepping for this, Josh. You've got your home gym. You've been going on this for at least six months.
Josh:
Yeah. I'm just a hermit. I don't know. Usually my work week is pretty much the same as it's has been for the last six months. I usually will get up and do some reading. I ride my stationary bike that's in my office. I do some work. I work out. Do a little bit more work, and then it's family time. Before all of this happened, during the week, my major outings usually revolved around food, so just like getting lunch or something. I'm not doing that, but we replaced that with getting out. We still try to get out for walks and things. I even still have the occasional outing here and there as well. I don't know.
Ben:
Yeah, my schedule hasn't changed a whole lot either. I'm still getting that six hours or five hours of sleep every night. Waking up at 5:00 or whatever in the morning. Working. See, everyone else is asleep. My kids are older. They're teenagers, so they're sleeping till noon anyway, right? So I'm working from like 6:00 to noon-ish. Grab some lunch-
Josh:
Yeah, and then the play the Witcher for the other eight hours a day, before they go back to sleep.
Starr:
Wait, does the Witcher even work if you try and play it at like 4:00 AM? Isn't it down for maintenance every night?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Every night from like 4:00 to 6:00 AM?
Ben:
I don't know. Wouldn't know. Never tried. Yeah, and then like lunch. And then I'll do a little bit of work, maybe, in the afternoon sometimes, if I feel like it. I'll go for a walk, go for a run. I do miss going to the gym regularly, because I was still doing that. So that's kind of a bummer but, I've got the weights in my garage, and doing that.
Josh:
Got some stuff, yeah.
Ben:
It's not really that much of a difference, except that I don't go to my office every day now, even though, I'm really usually the only one here. Still, I felt like, "It's probably a good idea not to go into the germ environment." Just shelter in place. And just bring my stuff home. Yeah, not much changed for me.
Starr:
That makes sense. I don't know, it's pretty different working in this new environment. Normally my days... We work 30-hour weeks at Honeybadger, and I though I have like a 40-hour week to fit that into? Now I'm trying to fit that into like a 20-hour week. So things are a bit more hectic. There's a bit less of a leisurely pace to things. And then also, there's no downtime. There's like 30 minutes of downtime. Or maybe that downtime is when Ida gets her iPad or something. And she refuses to nap.
Josh:
Routines really help us kind of get through this sort of thing. I've been trying to keep changes to the routine minimal. Or take steps to maintain routines that we did before. Or replace things.
Starr:
Yeah, that makes sense. The sort of systems that we've put in place... and I'm thinking about the stuff I put in place around the blog, in terms of project management, honestly is just saving me right now, because I have zero extra capacity to remember things. So like the other day I forgot to mark an article that was in fact done, as done. And it was still in the needed to be edited category. And so I sent it to this person who is doing some editing for us, and she's like, "You sent me this last week." It's because I forgot to mark it done.
Starr:
Let's talk about some more, maybe productivity or business-why things. Personally, one thing I'm trying to do to get through and sort of supplement the fact that I'm so stretched now is to get in a little bit of help on the editing side of all these blog posts I'm doing. What I had been doing previously is I had been essentially doing all of the big editing stuff and then outsourcing a kind of proofreading to a service called Scribendi. They're actually pretty good, so I would recommend them if you need that sort of thing. But I'm experimenting with having an actual, in-person relationship with an editor who's Melissa, who's a previous sort of author of ours. We published a article that she wrote about Pry recently. That's actually been really good for us.
Josh:...