S4 E74: Taking a sabbatical to reduce stress and reflect on success
with tech CEO dad Aaron Coleman
Key Takeways
I don't think I slept for four months at the start of COVID and I saw so many of the things that I'm usually able to keep together just completely deteriorate. And, it was like little things. Jessica would ask me, how come I put the milk creamer back in the cupboard instead of the refrigerator. And that's very unlike me cuz one of my, superpowers that I know I'm good at is in a crisis I can compartmentalize. It's kinda like the matrix. Everything just slows down for me. I just saw that erode for the first time.
The sabbatical for me, really was at a point where I felt like things are in a good spot and I can really take the time off, but I still, two years later just needed to exhale. whenever I was like sitting there, literally on the beach, I'm thinking to myself, what the hell am I doing? The mantra in my mind was, Exhale that's your job right now.
The other thing I'll say is, and you talked about this too you have feelings of maybe resentment or maybe disassociated from the things that you should be feeling about your job. I started a business from nothing. And I think if you had told me 10 years ago that we would be where we are today, I would've been ecstatic I guess I got to 10 years and I didn't feel like accomplished in a way that, on paper, I should feel. That was a problem, I just felt like, all right, take some time to let that sink in.
So one book that I really liked is Stolen Focus by Johann Hari's, the New York Times Best Seller. Even as someone who's loved technology forever, I think we've really found ourselves societally in a spot where these tools are working against us in a lot of ways: just the sheer interruption factor and there's so much information. Like I remember 10 years ago when I sat down to start Fitabase, like I could sit down at the laptop with a coffee at 9:00 AM and I would blink and it would be two o'clock. Anything you're really proud of in your life you did that probably in the state of flow where you were working in longer periods of time where you were in that set of flow, you were engaged, you didn't have distractions. And we've really built into the work world, into the way that we do meetings, the way in which we measured our success in business or personal life. It's become so fragmented. So I turned off, I turned off all the push notifications on my phone. I started reading, longer form things. And I tried to essentially do things in a slower, longer form flow state, projects around the house. And that was really good for my brain, I think. I think it's good for everybody's brain.
I very intentionally did not take venture capital to start a tech company. I was really influenced by David Emer Henson and Jason Fried of Base Camp 37 Signals who built a really great bootstrap company and talk about all the benefits of which not going for a high growth company where your metrics are not normal business metrics. It's just getting to the next huge milestone. So I actually, I reject the premise that institutions are able to manage that as a temporary state. And I think you set the tone early on.
I think 40 hours is enough and I've said that and I've borrowed that from other entrepreneurs too. And I model that I really don't work more than 40 hours. And our Slack channels and our emails are ghost towns after hours. We've really come to a place where work and home have bled together in a way that is just I don't think it's good for business. Turnover costs are very expensive for companies. I can tell you that personally. But we don't even factor that right into the cost of anything. How I manage burnout company-wise is look at it as a real liability on the balance sheet.
Sometimes opportunities come along, or a crisis comes along and we have to move things around. And part of the ability to do that is that everybody is not operating all the time in tachometer pegged to the red section. If you run a company where that's the case, that's a liability for the company. It's an liability for an individual, also, because, they're not recharging at night, they're not getting a break on the weekends. You're not able to react quickly and maybe your competitors are. I do really care about everybody who works for me. I care about their success personally and professionally. I just don't think it's good for business.
I do think the future of work looks a lot more expansive than the way we have it, I think, 20, 30 hours a week you might find really great candidates, really great employees who they can't give you after hours or but they can really do an amazing job with their best 20 hours of the week. And actually I think, if you could accommodate that, it's a pretty amazing value for the business as well.
I fear that some of the things structurally we continue to build upon, high cost of housing inequalities and in the way in which we make accessible work to different people at different phases of life. I don't know if I have subscribed to you know, love what you do, but be in a position where you can always have other things that you can dig into and learn and reinvent yourself to do. And I think we do that with better social safety nets and surfacing the ways in which work is working and not working for people, and the way in which we give people meaningful satisfaction in their work as the prerequisite for creating roles and jobs within companies.
Bio
Aaron is Founder & CEO of Fitabase, a company dedicated to bringing new and advanced wearable technology tools to the research community. He has spent the last 11 years leading Fitabase from an early experiment to a profitable and sustainable business. Fitabase today has powered over 1,200 research studies and continues to develop new initiatives and tools focused on using data and sensors to create innovative ways to improve scientific research. Aaron has studied how to build simple and elegant ready-to-use software solutions that scale and his role is both a business owner and software architect. Prior to Fitabase, Aaron led a small software team at UCSD’s Center for Wireless Population Health Systems that developed mobile and social-media integrated tools for an intervention promoting healthy lifestyle behavior change. He’s also a multiple-time winner of various app hackathons, including Michelle Obama’s Apps for Healthy Kids contest, for which he was recognized at the White House. Aaron lives in San Diego with his wife Jesica, and two daughters Adina and Maya.
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