How is performance assessed at your company?
Increase in revenue and new clients?
More features pushed to the user?
Faster design timelines?
More lines of code than last month?
Higher open rate in emails?
A lot of people work too hard to gain credit associated with increasing these metrics. I won’t be the first to tell you that quantity doesn’t guarantee success. At our company, we have chosen to focus on a metric that is unlike those mentioned above. The results have been what we hoped for.
We care about each person at Animal Ventures becoming more interesting through sabbaticals.
After a 3-month product build, our team members took separate sabbaticals that lasted over a month. Some learned the value of living slow while walking 600 miles on The Camino de Santiago. Another drove around Iceland and discovered the young, diverse geography. I explored Greece to study Mediterranean cooking and how to improve my quality of life.
“We don’t control other people, so why put so much stress on yourself by considering everyone’s schedules? The universe laughs when we make plans. “
We all came back from our experiences and put our lessons learned into action. The business becomes stronger each time we do this.
My specific improvement from my adventures in Greece had to do with my dependency of time.
Before my sabbatical, I use to make sure my email inbox and notification counts were at 0 as much as possible. This habit changed after a conversation with a few people from the island of Ikaria.
Ikaria is a blue zone. This means it is an area where many people live beyond 100 years of age. After reading about this island where people forget to die, I was hungry for advice from anyone who lives there.
I was enjoying a tea at a small restaurant overlooking the Aegean Sea. A native provided me with life-altering advice while we were waiting for our tables to be ready:
“John, you seem to care a lot about your agenda today. You see, in Ikaria, we value a relaxed pace of living that ignores watches and clocks. Along with our friends and neighbors, we have a low-stress hormone because we aren’t strict about time.
We don’t control other people, so why put so much stress on yourself by considering everyone’s schedules? The universe laughs when we make plans.
You can instead spend your time going deep in the things you do control, and be happy when you do get the chance to share time with others. Plus, I would imagine most of the incredible things that have happen to you were by surprise, so why not give more room for that to happen? “
I won’t ever forget that moment of clarity while I was taking another sip of tea. After my sabbatical, I have changed for the better.
I am now aware that my inbox and notifications are other people controlling my time and agenda. I know their intent isn’t to make me unproductive, but I know focus on not letting that control my worries. I have 76 unread messages in my inbox right now, and I will likely never get to most of them. It is OK, because they aren’t as important as the project I am working on right now. I get more thinking time, and I have also eliminated the red dots of stress on my phone.
I am producing better, deeper work because of these changes. I am also happy to inform that nothing is falling apart because of my unread messages. I actually missed a conference call last week because I lost track of time while finishing a fascinating prototype. I apologized, the people were understanding, and we eventually had a great conversation about the prototype I finished. That phone call lead to more business, and I am not sure that the call I missed would have.
In today’s mindset of “grind it out” and “staying on top of everything”, answering less emails would seem like a low performance metric. By doing less of one thing and worrying less about time, I am able to give more to the projects that will create more value for our company and make me more interesting.
Our leadership believes this is the kind of work that matters in life. I hope you will consider the importance of sabbaticals and how personal epiphanies improve your company.