The Startup Spouses

Instead of working for the weekend, we find ourselves working on the weekends. It just seems to be the time we’re able to get the most done. And work seems more fun on the weekend. During the week, Kris is focused on his day job and has trouble changing gears; I struggle with working alone and motivating Monday through Friday. When we’ve planned to commit a weekend to working on our business, our productivity skyrockets and we’re able to reach milestones. If we looked at why we’re more productive on the weekends, I would attribute it to:

•  No distractions. When we plan to work on the weekend, we ignore any calls and requests to go out. During the regular work week, it is harder to avoid all distractions (i.e. boss calling) and sometimes they’re welcome (i.e. mom calling - phew, I can take a break). 
• Incentives. We try to compensate for staying in on the weekend by cooking nice meals and drinking wine. We plan our menus early Friday and stock up at Whole Foods for the weekend. Monday through Friday, it feels too indulgent (nevermind time-consuming and expensive) to think about food so much. And it would perhaps be concerning if we started in with the wine on Monday afternoon. 
• Interaction. Fueled by wine and devoid of distractions, we’re able to talk and brainstorm freely. While we work 3 ft away from each other, we don’t often have extended periods of time during which we can explore and plan. 
• Scheduled breaks. On weekends, we take breaks when we want, either to watch a movie or workout. There is more pressure during the week to mimic the 9 - 5 schedule, even though our schedule is fairly open. 

Given the success we have working on the weekends, it’s worth experimenting and trying to implement some of the “weekend” tricks during the week. 

I had an appointment today for a physical, which I haven’t done in over three years. As I waited in the waiting room and then the exam room for two hours, I had plenty of time to think about how life’s necessities get in the way of work. This week, in general, I lost a lot of time. We had an accountant appointment Tuesday, after which I had to sadly revisit all our receipts from 2007. Then I realized last night while writing/watching the Daily Show that the battery in my laptop died. Which means I’ll spend another afternoon this week at the Apple store. I certainly don’t mind visiting the cute guys over at the Genius Bar, but it’s another day lost.

My rant about getting all these boring necessities out of the way is significant to the self-employed because we think about time differently. Now I schedule appointments during the day because I hope I will have more options since I don’t work 9-5. I make time to do organizational tasks, like filing or sorting bills. I also spend a lot of time during the day preparing healthy meals and exercising. While it is nice to pay extra attention to myself and attend to oft-neglected tasks, it also keeps me from my main work.

If I worked in an office environment, I would have tried to do my taxes online, and upon failing, given up and hoped that I never got caught for tax evasion. I would never go to the doctors or any other appointment, which explains why it’s been so many years since I’ve been in the first place. I would ignore my mail and let it accumulate until we have people over, at which point we’d hide it in a box to never be seen again. I would exercise less, eat unhealthily, and save chores for the weekend. Sure, there are those people who have busy jobs, and also manage to keeps their lives in perfect order. I think they’re just evidence that androids are living amongst us unnoticed.

I like that my schedule affords me the opportunity to get more life chores done and be more organized than I have been in a while. But it creates a false sense of productivity. Getting a physical is a item to check off the to-do list, but spending three hours at the doctors does not get one closer to her professional goals.

There are days when you’re just not feeling it - you’re tired, unfocused, inefficient, bored. In the business world, these days are called Fridays. In an office environment, these Fridays can make any worker feel like a kid on a long car ride: you’re strangely optimistic about what will happen when it ends, but the day seems infinitely long. Instead of spending the whole day saying “are we there yet?”, the worker, in true adult fashion, silently stares at her computer screen and waits for the hours to go by with a burning hope that the boss will suggest heading to happy hour at 4pm.

When you work in a company, there are certain strategies for dealing these “Fridays”. The strategies include: drinking lots of coffee, checking your email every 2 minutes, “catching up” with co-workers you haven’t talked to in a while, and cleaning your desk. But what happens when you work from home? These strategies (with the exception of the coffee one) are not effective, because trying to appear busy to yourself is just insane. So what are the self-employed and the entrepreneurs to do with these mediocre days?

It seems to me that there are 3 options:

1. Tough it out. You can chose to accept your minimal productivity, and ride out the work day anyway. With this approach you may be able to get a few small tasks done, thus getting you closer to your goals. However, it may take you way longer than it otherwise would on a better day to accomplish this. For me, this is the most depressing approach. It does not feel good to finish something in 4 hours when it should have taken 30 minutes. And even if I stare at the computer until 2 am, I know that my output is virtually non-existent, despite computer face time. Toughing it out sucks, but sometimes it must be done.
2. Work on non-critical or non-work-related tasks. This option is the equivalent to the worker bee cleaning her desk. This is when you do laundry, wash the floors, organize your mail, etc. You feel productive because you are still getting things done, albeit while blaring 80s music and not really thinking too much. This approach works if you’re totally delusional, which I am.
3. Cut your losses and head to happy hour. If you aren’t good at sitting around getting nothing done and lying to yourself about it, this step might be for you. If this choice sounds selfish and unproductive, well it is. But that does not make the afternoon Bloody Mary any less sweet (I mean spicy). In the creative process, this would be like your “artist’s date” where you would be “re-filling your well.” So maybe cutting the work week short is lazy, or maybe it’s just the thing you need to energize you.

-Kate Miffitt 

My husband and I are opposites on many fronts, which is a good thing in many cases, and certainly in our business ventures. We tend to balance out each other’s strengths and shortcomings. Kris is definitely the CEO type; he’s creative, inspired, unafraid of failure, interested in throwing ideas out and seeing what sticks. I probably am more the COO type; I am strategic, systematic, organized, and interested in understanding how things work. He’s the idealist; I’m the realist. It’s a nice combination, when in the right balance. What happens when it gets out of whack? Plenty, as it turns out. We’re trying to operate in the rapid prototyping mode; get a product together quickly, get feedback, edit, repeat until satisfied/gazillionaires. But we’ve each managed to create roadblocks to our progress that are just byproducts of our personalities.

It might have sounded flattering when I described Kris above, it was not intended to be. His manic creativity and idea generation is sometimes more of a problem than anything else. For example, just as we were poised to be ready to get a site up on schedule in mid-February, Kris had another idea. A good idea, one that if implemented correctly could at least be a short-term win in a less competitive space. So we dropped everything and have spent two weeks developing this. The inherent problem is that this could go on infinitely, as I have seen in the past with Kris’s ideas. He comes up with an idea, is quick to start implementing, and promptly abandons it when the next idea comes along. I am only lucky that he does not do this with wives. Will the idea-chasing ever pay off? Not without some serious follow through somewhere.

I have certainly created some bumps along the way myself. Because I am so concerned with how things work, I often think more about the process than the product. And because I’m a long-term thinker, I’m not a great short-term doer. Bummer, because I’m currently the main resource in developing our product. To date, I have created a few delays. The first was that I didn’t feel comfortable contacting vendors without an @domain.com email. Nevermind that we don’t have a website or anything yet. So I delayed a task for three days because I didn’t have the “right” email address. Absurd. I also agonized for days over what systems we would use for communicating, tracking, planning, and project management. I mean, we are a married couple who live and work in the same small space, and I’m obsessing over setting up my Outlook calendar and deciding whether we should use Basecamp, or if Google docs is sufficient. Systems thinking is useful when you actually have something to organize, but apparently a handicap when you have no content.

So we’re still experimenting and trying to find the best way to make use of our respective skills. We have a lot of potential as business partners, but we both need to stop looking at our different big pictures and start working already.

I feel like I’m being sucked into some weird entrepreneurial vortex in which I get lost for hours looking at blogs and websites and products from small businesses. When I was a cubicle resident, I hardly met anyone that worked on their own, and when I did it was like my bikini waxer or masseuse or someone who provided a tangible service, and seemed to be struggling a bit doing so. Now that we’re venturing out on our own, I feel like everybody – the peeps at the coffee shop, the peeps who write blogs, etc – works for themselves. I enjoy being a newcomer to this world, but I have to watch myself because I find that I’m so engrossed in observing that I forget to participate. What are my deliverables for this week? What tangible thing am I working on?

I haven’t been this inspired and excited about work in . . .well, ever. The problem is that it’s not translating neatly into production. I’m trapped in happy look-at-all-the-entrepreneurs land, and not getting my own work done.