I slept 8 hours

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It feels like a lifetime ago when I worked at Google.

I joined at the peak of covid in 2020, so I never enjoyed the amenities of being an employee there (the office, the cafeteria, the events, the people). Instead, I spent my time alone pressing keys from my Brooklyn apartment.

It was the depths of another grey New York winter, made worse by a legit global pandemic, when Sundar introduced the concept of a “mental wellness day” one Friday at Google.

I can’t imagine how many meetings and consultants it took for them to come up with the concept of a day off, but it was well-received by everyone. Who doesn’t love a three-day weekend?

I spent the day working anyway. But it was liberating to have a day to myself to prioritize all the things I otherwise didn’t have the time to do during the week.

When we started beehiiv, that’s something I took with me from Google. We made the third Friday of every month what we call a “monthly wellness day” or “MWD” for short (i.e. the entire company gets the day off).

Which means at least one guaranteed three-day weekend every month. Some people take advantage and plan a long weekend trip, and others like me get a full day to focus without the day-to-day chaos of typical startup life.

I’m writing this on Friday (which happens to be a MWD).

And how is my “day off” going thus far? Fucking fantastic.

I’ve had more breakthroughs for the business than I typically have in a week, and it’s not even 10am yet. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

The daily grind, the back-to-back meetings, the structure — it doesn’t give you permission to think. I’m typically just going through the motions, checking the box, and accumulating to-do items with each passing encounter.

But today is different. It actually started last night.

I got back late in the afternoon after speaking on a panel at Inc. Founder’s House in Santa Monica. Usually, I start to feel a bit of anxiety as I’m working into the night. I know my alarm is going to go off at 5:30am, and each additional task I take on is just cutting into what’s left of my sleep.

But not last night. Last night I found a groove around 9pm and was knocking out a ton of high-quality work. Because Friday was our monthly wellness day, I could ride out the momentum without stressing about sleep.

I turned off my alarm and slept about 8 hours until I woke up naturally. There's no comparison to the days I'm pulled out of sleep by my alarm. My thoughts are clearer, my energy is higher, and my motivation is dialed.

Friday was one of those days. I woke up and didn’t need to rush through my morning routine and be back from the gym before my 8am meetings. Instead, I lay in bed and thought about our upcoming company offsite and the opening presentation that I had been neglecting to work on for weeks.

No rush, no stress, nowhere to be. I mentally planned out the entire presentation, jotted it down in my Apple Notes, then got out of bed and started my day. Those sorts of creative tasks aren’t meant to be done at a desk, in-between meetings. They require some space to think freely, which often doesn’t happen during the week.

When I did finally make it to the gym, I got into a great flow and spent an extra 20 minutes there. Just being able to live without operating down to the minute on everything is so damn freeing.

You might be a tad confused, reading this inner monologue describing what is essentially “free time.” Maybe it reads as just another Tuesday for you, but for me, and a bunch of other founders that I know, it’s a delicacy.

And I hate that. Because I do my best work, and can provide the greatest contributions to the company when I’m given the space to do so.

What I’m actually describing is the internal conflict of building a successful business that no longer allows me to do the things that I enjoy the most.

We have 130 employees with bi-weekly all hands. I’m running a dozen high-priority initiatives in parallel that all need check-ins to keep the team aligned and unblocked. I have 14 direct reports that I owe time, attention, feedback, and direction. I have board meetings, panels, investor relations, and meetings with vendors and prospects and everyone in between.

That’s the beast I have created — and it’s working. The company is a well-oiled machine, we’re growing faster than ever, and we’re on the precipice of building a generational product.

But I’m a builder. I love creative work. I love bringing big ambitious ideas to life, going heads down and executing, and delivering things that excite people. I want to bring new creative campaigns to market. I want to build the world’s greatest product roadmap down to every last pixel.

I want to spend 72 hours straight with Claude Code and transform how we operate the business. But who has the time to do any of that when this week’s calendar looks like this:

Between yoga, meditation, and breathwork… I’ve gotten pretty good at identifying these often-subconscious feelings. When I start a task in-between meetings, there’s an underlying sense of resistance and pressure to deliver something in the 30 minutes allotted to me before my next meeting.

I’m reluctant to dive in and give it my all, knowing I’m just a few minutes away from getting entirely pulled out of that mental space to join the next meeting.

For example, writing this newsletter is really difficult for me. It takes several hours of uninterrupted time and focus to write it. I can’t get into that headspace in-between meetings.

Who can genuinely do their best, most thoughtful work, with a clock counting down before their next commitment? I certainly can’t. The overly structured yet chaotic reality of startup life isn’t remotely conducive to me producing my best work.

Which is why I fucking love Monthly Wellness Days. I’m happy that many on our team can take the long weekend to relax and reset (as it was intended). And I’m happy I can put on my headphones and build the things that give me life again.

It’s the same reason I love working on the weekends. No distractions. No structure. No expectations.

But that sword cuts both ways. It’d be a lot healthier to enjoy these sunny LA weekends outside on the beach, and with friends.

I’m stuck with the impossible decision between prioritizing life at the expense of the only time I have to do the work that I genuinely enjoy, or prioritizing work with the only time that I have to live.

As a founder, being self-aware about these things matters. A lot of people end up building companies they despise running. I never want to find myself in that situation, so I’ve implemented a lot of things to take back control.

At beehiiv, we have focus days twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Focus days are meant to be meeting free. It’s a massive unlock for productivity.

It allows me to take an extra few minutes in the morning to breathe and think. To be receptive to the world, rather than rushing through it in anticipation of my upcoming meetings. And it allows me to actually focus and do deep work without cramming tasks in-between the 30-minute slots on my calendar.

While it’s not quite the same as the Monthly Wellness Days, it’s better than nothing. There’s still the onslaught of pings and emails that eat away at your time and focus, and the occasional Slack huddle that turns into an unexpected 45-minute meeting, but at least the intention is there.

If it were up to me, we’d have a 4-day workweek. Meetings on Monday to kick-off the week, focus days on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to execute, and end-of-week meetings on Thursday. I genuinely think we would outperform 99% of companies, and have 0% employee attrition.

You gotta earn your stripes though — it’s hard to pull those strings as an unprofitable business.

Beyond that, I try to limit meetings as much as possible. I still probably have a few too many direct reports, but at least our 1:1s are monthly, not weekly. The concept of a weekly employee check-in is absurd to me, and completely unnecessary.

This is all to say, we’ve grown up a lot these past few years. It’s no longer just me and my two cofounders tinkering away on the weekends to bring our vision to life.

I’m just doing whatever I can to keep that early magic alive.

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Shoutout Amy for the reader submission 🫡.

I can legitimately feel the humidity from here, otherwise this setup would be pretty damn chill. Also low-key flex to have a physical globe on your desk these days.

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