The Myth of the 100-Hour Work Week

“Startup founders work 100-hour weeks.” I forget when I first heard this, but I believe it was around the same time I heard about technology startups.

At the time, I was very impressed with the tremendous passion and work ethic of these founders, who could spend 6+ days out of every week doing nothing but eating, sleeping, and working. And that really was exactly what I thought they were doing: getting 100 full hours, every week, of laser-focused productive work time, without taking breaks to chat about non-work things, or stare into space letting their minds drift, or take walks, or exercise, or anything.

Recently (for some complicated reasons I’ll post later), I’ve decided to impose on myself a work week containing as many productive hours as possible. In making my schedule, I took into account all the psychology of learning that I had researched over years of interest in such things: efficient thinking happens on 8 hours of sleep, taking frequent short breaks helps brains remember things by dint of primacy and recency effects, human circadian rhythms are diurnal and therefore napping in the “afternoon slump” is more effective than trying to work through that time, etc. When I was done filling up all my time with little blue boxes in Google Calendar, I tallied up all my productive working time and found that I had only 52 hours.

Now, to be clear, my schedule did not contain quite as much work as it theoretically could have. I had allotted myself an hour to make lunch, and two hours to exercise in the morning, and an hour and a half to socialize in the evenings. The purpose was to make the plan sustainable, so that executing against it wouldn’t burn me out.

But even if I didn’t care about that, I didn’t see how I could have gotten that productive-hours-per-week number up to 100. It just seemed inefficient, based on everything I had read about human brains, for someone to work nose-to-the-grindstone at a task for that many hours. Taking breaks to exercise and eat healthy food and sleep eight hours a night would make their thinking more efficient than just working longer hours.

I had a hypothesis, that people might say they worked for a hundred hours a week, but perhaps, they only spent 60-80 actually being productive. When I’ve worked full-time at an office, having to look productive regardless of whether I actually was, plus inefficient use of work-time doing stuff like chatting with coworkers, and the corporate busywork that comes with a salaried job like that, all took up significant time. This is a very common situation: statistically, the average number of productive hours an office worker has in an 8-hour day is 2 hours and 53 minutes.

But I wasn’t sure about this, and not having worked in a technology startup myself, I wanted to ask someone who had. So, I asked my mom. This was what she told me.

People who say they work 100-hour weeks may be at the office for a hundred hours, but they are actually productive for around 60. The remaining 40 hours is spent taking breaks of various sorts. But the reason they stay at the office for that time is so that they can take breaks in the same space as a bunch of other smart people working on the same set of projects they are. That way, discussions about not-work meld into discussions about work, and produce more productive time for the group in general over time.

This is the optimal workflow for any group of people working on a project for as much time as possible, as it turns out. And it’s used not only by technology startups but in every other area where such a thing may be needed. For example, before she got into tech, my mom worked as a researcher for NASA. They used the same system: people would work for several hours, then take a break and play foosball and talk about something unrelated, then get talking about their work at the foosball table, and then somebody would have an idea and run off to the office to go work on it.

Learning this, I was even more impressed than I had initially been. Apparently, every group of highly-productive people for a very long time had reinvented this same style of working. And now I get to use it, too.

What Is the “Wage Gap”, Anyway?

“For every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 77¢.” You’ve probably heard this statistic thrown around before. But what, really, does it mean? For a statistic we use to benchmark the “wage gap”, it’s a shockingly broad statement. Well, as it turns out, this statistic is legitimate, and it does demonstrate a significant problem with sexism in the modern world – but it doesn’t mean what you think it does.

Growing up, I always knew I wanted to do something big with my life. From fairly early, I was clear on what, though I wasn’t always clear on how (my idea of how to accomplish my goal at age 6 was to take over the country of Australia – how I thought this would help, I no longer remember). Over time, as I grew up, my ideas crystallized into an actual goal: I would become a successful technology startup founder.

Even so, there was always this discontent looming in my head. Being assigned female at birth, I had heard all the horror stories about the ways the patriarchy made womens’ lives hell, in and out of the workplace. And as a person who wanted in particular to make a ton of money, that “77¢ on the dollar” statistic haunted me. If only I’d been born male, I thought, I would be able to make almost 30% more money! For several months in my teens, I seriously considered making a medical transition in order to up my earning potential.

Except, no. Because that isn’t actually how it works.

According to my previous model of the world, the 77¢ thing applied across the board: a woman working any job would make 23% less than a man working the same job, always, in every industry. So a female teacher would make less than a male one, and a female software engineer would also make less than a male one.

But in actuality, the reason that women make on average 23% less than men is that women take jobs that pay on average 23% less. A female software engineer doesn’t get paid less than a male one – in fact, although women do make up a statistical minority of the programming/technology world, those who are a part of that space tend to make more than men, since women tend toward leadership roles. However, most women are not software engineers; most women are teachers, nurses, secretaries, cashiers, and retail workers. And these jobs pay much less than male-dominated jobs.

So, the source of the gender wage gap is not endemic sexism? Well, not quite. There is a reason that women on average choose jobs that pay less.

When my grandmother was young, there was a common saying in her college, that the women were only there to get their “Mrs. degree”. After she graduated, employers refused to take her on because she “was just going to get married and leave the workforce”.

When my mother was young, many of the other girls in her Catholic school made excuses for their lack of willingness to attempt difficult intellectual pursuits because they were “just girls”. (Her father never let her make these excuses, which is a decent part of what made my mother how she is.)

When I was young, I attended a series of all-girls STEM bootcamps that were designed to encourage girls to go into technical fields. I never much understood the point, because it had never occurred to me that gender had any relation at all to career choices.

Historically, women have been told that their being female limited their career options, or that certain careers were “less feminine”. Women who were told this type of thing comprise a significant portion of the women alive today. And hence, the 27% wage gap.

If you account for differences in college majors, occupations, working hours, and parental leave, the difference between women and men across the board is more like 3-6%.

But hang on, 3-6% is still significant. Where does that come from?

That small (but present) difference likely arises from a large variety of factors, including some amount of (real!) sex discrimination in the workplace. Still, my best guess on the biggest reason for the remaining gap is this:

Women are not systematically taught career skills.

I know a lot of men who were taught how to do business by their fathers, who own businesses. I can attest to the usefulness of learning business at a young age: I worked in my mom’s businesses most of my youth. It is possible to learn how to negotiate a salary, or interview effectively, or manage a team, without the ready-made mentor of a business-savvy parent, but it’s much more difficult. Most of the women in the workforce today don’t have that advantage.

Just working for a while doesn’t magically bestow upon you the skills you need to get paid what you’re worth. You aren’t going to learn how to interview well just by doing it a whole bunch – at a minimum, to understand the whole process you’ll need to come at it from both ends. And you aren’t going to learn how to be an effective manager without getting advice from someone who is.

The easiest way to learn these things is, obviously, to have a parent who will teach it to you. In absence of such, many women are left without critical career skills, and make less money as a result.

This means a number of things. First, we as a society need to stop gendering careers. That girls-only STEM program I went to should be abolished, because it should not be a novel concept to anyone that girls can be technicians (though the general concept of allowing young people to shadow technical professionals was a great thing to have; my brother should just have been allowed to attend).

Second, any individual women who are busy making excuses for their poor work ethic and poor salaries, blaming their gender, should get ahold of their bootstraps and start pulling themselves up.

Third, if any parent cannot provide their children with a satisfactory training in business, that is a critical failure, and they should do their best to outsource that training which they cannot provide themselves (ie, they should send their children to a program which can provide such training).

And fourth, most obviously, sexism in general should be eradicated.

Lastly, we all need accurate information on what the wage gaps endemic to our workplaces are, and what causes them. If we have an inaccurate picture of the reason for such statistics as “for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 77¢”, we are doomed to waste our efforts on ineffective solutions. And given how bloody slowly change happens in modern politics, inefficiency is not an available option.

What I Learned on the Other Side of the Interviewing Table

Seven months ago, I was interviewing for an intern position at Upgrow. Now, I’m doing it again – but this time, I’m the interviewer.

As we gain more clients, it’s become more difficult to keep up with the workload, so we’ve been looking to hire another intern for the SEO team. I came on as an intern through Praxis and I trust their process to produce someone valuable, so I recommended that as a source. My boss asked me to do an initial screening.

I took a troll through their talent portal and checked on candidates’ profiles. I also asked one of the advisors about who to contact with hiring inquiries, and contacted the person she pointed me to. Soon, I had an initial list of candidates, and I set up interviews with them.

And then I taught myself how to interview, because I had never done it before.

Working as I did intimately with all our SEO clients, I knew exactly what type of person we needed, but that wasn’t even half the work. I needed to find a way to pick that type of person out in an interview. People want to get jobs, and interviewees are always trying to find a way to play the system, to act as though they have the traits you want regardless of whether they really do or not. Presented with a slew of imposters, it’s the interviewer’s job to find the genuinely skilled candidates. That’s why interview questions are always so convoluted.

I knew all this, because I’d played this game from the interviewee side: I knew the right answer to “tell me about yourself”, I had a set of rehearsed stories to tell in response to a wide array of questions, and I always went into an interview knowing exactly what type of picture I wanted to paint of myself. What I didn’t know was how to play the game from the other side.

So, I contacted my mother, who’s been a hiring manager for over twenty years, and asked for advice. I described the type of person I wanted, and we discussed what questions I should ask.

The environment at Upgrow, where I work, is very fast-paced and multifaceted. But of course if I asked “do you work well in a fast-paced environment?”, the candidate would just say “yes”.

How could I get around this? I could ask a question more like “can you give me an example of a place you worked that was fast-paced – what made it that way, and what about it was most challenging?”. By asking for an example, I can get more information about their previous experience.

Further, when I ask “what was most challenging”, they have to say something, which would tell me about what they find difficult. Plus, since all candidates want to make themselves look good, they would also tell me (for free!) how they handle things being hard. It has the benefits of the “what’s your biggest weakness” question without the overly-general aspects that make the latter question less useful. (Ex. “My biggest weakness is that I work too hard, I’m too devoted to your company, and I’m too perfect.”)

In general, asking for examples and challenges is very helpful, and I asked a few more similarly-formatted questions.

Another trait I very much needed in an SEO intern was commitment to efficiency. The internet is gigantic, there’s always a ton of data to sift through doing anything with SEO, and if you’re not careful you can spend 6 hours doing something manually just because you hadn’t thought to look for a faster way. But again, I couldn’t ask straight-up.

Asking for an example might have worked here, but I got another strategy that worked even better: an open-ended question. I asked, “Can you tell me a way that you have improved at doing your job in the past? Have you done it by increasing the quality of your work, by improving your efficiency, or something else?”

The open-ended aspect made it seem like there were multiple possible correct answers. None of these dispositions are inherently bad – and the interviewees know this – but they don’t know which one I’m looking for. So, they’re forced to tell the truth, in absence of anything else to do.

With the “give me an example” type question, the candidate knows the right answer. However, they need to give you a true or non-disprovably false story without significant hesitation, which limits their ability to BS. However, with the open-ended question, the candidate doesn’t even know what answer you’re looking for. They can’t try to spoon-feed you what you want to hear, because they don’t know what you want to hear. For that reason, this was the second most valuable question I asked in these interviews.

The single most valuable question I asked went like this. “If you’re given an assignment by someone, and you know that on the one hand that person is pretty busy and you don’t want to disturb them, but on the other hand you don’t know exactly what they want and you don’t want to do it wrong. How would you handle this situation?”

This is another open-ended question, but it’s better than the previous one for the quality I’m selecting for because it’s a scenario instead of a summary. In any human communication, there’s always the question of operational definitions. If someone says “I care about efficiency”, what do they mean by that? They might be the type of person who gets hopelessly bored with monotonous work, and will automate a solution instead, because automation is more interesting. (That’s me, by the way, hi.) But they might also be the type of person who gets frustrated with any inefficiency in a process and hyper-focuses on fixing that inefficiency instead of looking at the broader picture and asking whether it’s worthwhile.

In my efficiency question, this wasn’t a problem, because not a single candidate (who answered correctly) just said “yeah I improve my efficiency” and then shut up. They all went on to talk about what efficiency meant to them, or tell a story about a time that they improved the efficiency of a process at one of their previous jobs, or something. However, it would have been an issue if I’d tried to ask them about how they deal with an ambiguous task in the same way.

Posing a situation to an interviewee gains the best of both words from the other types of questions: it gives you the personal specificity from “give me an example” ones plus the interviewee’s lack of knowledge of the correct answer from open-ended ones.

Outside of the interviews and the questions I asked in them, there were a few more things I learned from the other side of the hiring table.

Many aspects of the hiring process are designed to be as efficient as possible. This makes sense: like in SEO, there is a ton of information to go through, and maximal efficiency in culling it into something useful you can base decisions on is critical to making those decisions effectively.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the majority of the time spent during the hiring process actually comes from the interviewee, not the interviewer. When I was job-hunting seriously during my Praxis placement process, I would regularly spend 6-8 hours a day on it. Even recently, when I was doing a less ardent job-hunt on top of my regular job as my internship was ending and I was making sure I had a backup plan in the unlikely case that Upgrow didn’t hire me on full-time, I spent at least 2-3 hours a day on it.

By contrast, when I was on the hiring end, I spent about 5 hours a week on it. I had other responsibilities, managing client accounts and getting my SEO work done. This was one task among many, not my single highest priority, or even my highest off-hours priority. And for everyone who isn’t a recruiter, this is always how the hiring process goes.

I’ve realized that this focus on efficiency is the reason the interview process works the way it does, where the interviewee is expected to sweat every detail and respond immediately, but the interviewer responds more slowly and sometimes not at all. It’s because the interviewee has one job – getting hired – but for the interviewer, hiring is one job among many.

As a final remark, I think that being the interviewer has actually made me a better interviewee. The hiring game is much more transparent now, even despite the fact that I’ve always had an experienced hiring manager for a mom who could explain things from that side. I haven’t just heard about it, I’ve personally experienced it, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my deep-dive into the professional world over the past six months, it’s that pure knowledge is always trumped by experience.

You Have Enough Hours in the Day, You’re Just Not Using Them

I’ve recently realized that my workflow can be a lot more efficient.

I thought it was fine, but as it turns out, it was just what I was used to. Humans can get used to anything, and if we don’t have anything outside us telling us that these conditions are unacceptable, we tend to just, well, accept them.

I started feeling like I didn’t have time to do anything shortly after I arrived in SF. While it’s gotten somewhat better, it still feels like I want to get more done than there are hours in the day.

I didn’t actually realize that was a warning sign for a while, because I had no reference group. I don’t succumb to the usual time traps: I open social media approximately twice a year, I don’t watch TV, I don’t make a habit of being intoxicated, I have no time-consuming hobbies that aren’t contributing to improving my career.

But I realized that not succumbing to the obvious time-sucks doesn’t mean you’ve evaded them all.

I’d previously learned that when something about your life feels chaotic, you’re probably just bad at predicting it; it feels from the inside like the thing is inherently unpredictable, but it isn’t. In the same way, I realized, when you feel like there aren’t enough hours in a day, you probably have some energy/time sink somewhere. That’s what an inefficient system feels like from the inside: not having enough time.

That was what I was missing: there is a difference between being actually good at efficiency and simply not shooting yourself in the foot. I had to do better than just not screwing up. I had to actively work on being better.

I’m currently in the process of optimizing my workflow and trying to get stuff done faster. There’s a decent amount of up-front work to make it happen, turns out.

Instead of taking notes in my plain-text no-frills Notes app, I’ve started taking notes in Vim. Learning the keyboard shortcuts for navigation, then forcing myself to actually use them, took an hour or so. I’d be reaching for the mouse to highlight and delete something, or reaching for the backspace key, but then I’d stop myself, push caps lock (which I remapped to escape for convenience), and type the shortcut instead. After I got the knack of it, I felt myself working faster as I laid out the steps I’d need to take to build an iPhone app I’ve been working on.

I also recently forked my friend Lahwran’s dotfiles repository, which downloads (among many other very useful tools) an excellent window tiling program called Amethyst. No more switching between tabs while trying to hold something in my head!

I’m making better use of my train rides to and from work now, too. I’ve found that physical books are good, because they don’t require wifi, so I’ve been steadily reading through the small collection I brought with me on the plane, plus borrowed a biography of Elon Musk from my boss, which I’ve been reading for life trajectory inspiration.

Finally, I’ve felt like I had no time to sit down and write blog posts on here. But I realized, I don’t have to. There are other methods of documentation that are faster to jot down: for example, Twitter. I was hesitant for a long time, because I was worried it would be a net negative for time, but I’ve been posting quick updates about projects and publishing quick thoughts on there, and it seems to work out well. (My handle is @JenyaLestina, if you’d like to take a look.)

The moral of all of this is that if your life is hard for some reason, it doesn’t have to stay that way. People like to complain about life, but that doesn’t mean it has to suck. If your life is difficult – even in a minor way – don’t stand there and take it. Fix it.

Another Reason to Get Straight to the Work World

I’ve discussed in previous posts some reasons you should get a real-world job either before or instead of going to college. For one thing, college has an extremely high opportunity cost, in both time and money. For another, the purpose of college has become muddled to such an extent that the reasons people tell you to go are almost entirely desynchronized with the actual reasons you may want to go.

Today, I have another reason that you should at least take a gap year to work a bit first. And this one applies even if you’re 100% sold on college.

When I took a marketing job, I expected to do, well, marketing. Yeah, the job was in San Francisco, so I expected (and wanted) to do marketing for tech companies, but that didn’t change my fundamental assumption. My job title was “Digital Marketer” and so I thought I was going to do digital marketing.

As I found out over the course of the next few months, an employer will use any skill you have if they can find a use for it. By the four-month mark, I had done everything from graphic design to sales to web design to JavaScript programming.

This isn’t just because I work for a micro-company, although this probably happened faster and more thoroughly because of that. Any company will do this. And that’s the key distinction between the work world and college.

If you sign up for a college class in marketing, you won’t accidentally end up programming in JavaScript or creating website wireframes. You’ll do the coursework – nothing more, nothing less. When you go to college, you get exactly what you sign up for. When you get a real-world job, your responsibilities may start out as what you expected, but eventually you’ll probably end up doing a whole bunch of stuff that wasn’t in the original job description, based on a combination of what the company needs and what you can do.

In short: College is static; the work world is flexible.

Often, the fact that college works this way feeds the harmful “that’s not my job” mentality, which will poison your career and dampen your options. If you’re reluctant to take on any responsibility beyond the bare minimum of what you were hired to do, you’ll never be given any additional responsibility. Even if you avoid this mentality, getting some real-world work experience early on will serve you well, in or out of college.

If you’re in the sort of profession where you need a college degree, or you’ve otherwise decided you’re Going To College, consider taking a gap year, or getting a part-time job in your field early into your degree. The flexibility you acquire from doing real work is worth its weight in gold.

12 Things I’ve Learned from My Apprenticeship So Far

…In approximately chronological order.

I’ve learned a lot about jobs and the work world from my Praxis apprenticeship thus far. I could just keep this knowledge to myself, but why would I? I can make no guarantees that these insights are generalizable, but I’ve tried to explain them.

  1. Pay attention to the vibes you get off the people interviewing you. Vibes/auras/senses/whatever are just other words for “thin slicing”, when your subconscious knows something based on a well-trained intuition that you simply don’t know consciously yet. You don’t get much time in an interview and you need to take every opportunity to understand your potential future bosses. Knowing whether you’re going to like a job starts with knowing whether you’re going to like the people, and knowing that starts with thin slicing, aka, vibes.
  2. Interviews are a two-way street. At the same time that you’re being interviewed, you should be interviewing. Come up with your own sly interview questions that get your interviewer to tell you more about the job and the company than the simple words they say, just as they’re asking you sly interview questions to get you to reveal more about yourself than you say. At the same time that you’re making yourself look more appealing to them, they’re making themselves look more appealing to you. Know this and use it to your advantage.
  3. That ‘welcome lunch’ is not just a friendly gesture. In fact, this is another interview with a slightly different purpose: gauging your interpersonal skills. Nobody wants a new hire who doesn’t get along with the whole team, and that’s what this lunch is for. Understand that purpose and ace this test.
  4. The only way to survive at a startup is to train hard and train fast. The best way to thrive in any company is to do the same. The quicker you bring yourself up to speed, by actively asking questions, by reading job materials in your off hours, by immersing yourself fully into your role, the quicker you can become indispensable.
  5. Don’t speak, just do. I read in one of many brilliant business books that a great leader never has an off day. The same is true of any great employee. Even if you have off days, you’re tired, you’re achy, you don’t feel great, you’re stressed, you don’t say anything about it. You buckle down and you get the work done and you say nothing to anybody about how hard you’re working. They will see the results and it will be worth more than a million words.
  6. Always be “on”. An actor is “on” from the instant they step into their character. A gymnast is “on” from the instant they begin their routine. And an employee is “on” from the instant they step into the office. In all these areas there is an energy that you must project, and the act of projecting that energy is what us performers call being “on”. You deliberately cultivate this energy – it doesn’t happen naturally. It’s tiring at first, but you get used it; it’s a muscle like any other and you have to use it to improve it. Presidential candidates are absolute beefcakes in this area: they’re “on” nearly every minute of every day. Fortunately for you, all you’ve gotta do is be “on” in the office.
  7. The “I’ll do it myself” mindset is just fine, but avoid it while training. “Doing it yourself” while you don’t know what you’re doing is a huge waste of your time and your company’s. Take the time to learn, then do it yourself correctly.
  8. Your boss isn’t always right, but pretend they are. This is especially true if your boss is insecure, which some are. If, for example, your boss throws a hissy fit over a remark you made, don’t defend yourself: just stop doing whatever it was that pissed off your boss. Your second quickest ticket out the door of any office is a pissed-off boss. (Your quickest ticket is a pissed-off client.)
  9. Your clients aren’t always right, but they’re right more often than you might think. At least in marketing, there’s this idea that we marketers know better than everyone. And we do – about marketing. But most of us know jack-shit about programming, which makes our technical clients furious sometimes. Cut your clients some slack when they correct your usage of their industry jargon. Also, make super ultra sure it never happens again.
  10. Nobody should ever have to correct you in the same way twice. The single most frustrating thing on the planet is to have to tell somebody something multiple times. It’s an incredibly silly idea that everyone could pay enough attention to everyone else all the time to always remember everything they say, but we all have such inflated egos that we can’t help feeling like that’s the way it should be. Your boss and your clients have this feeling too. Humor them. Never forget anything they say and never need to be corrected more than once.
  11. Humility isn’t a mere confession of your fallibility; humility is actions taken in anticipation of your failure. The only useful declaration of fallibility is the one followed immediately by action. Preparing for your failure will make it way less sucky when you succumb to being a normal human and failing at something at some point.
  12. Your career path determines how hard you work at your job, and vice versa. If your plan is to advance in your role, work super hard at that. If your plan is to move into another role, perform to a solid level and spend your spare time moving toward your next career step with as much vigor as you can muster.

These are the things I can give handy advice for; there are of course some things I haven’t sorted out yet. I hope that given another three months I’ll be able to give handy advice for those, too.

Working Overtime and a Pesach Away from Home: Week 6 at Upgrow, Inc.

I think my perception of time may be getting out of whack. The weeks go by so quickly, I feel like I write one of these updates every day. I wonder what makes time seem like it goes by so quickly—if I had to venture a guess, it would involve the percentage of time that we spend fully conscious of our surroundings. Childhood is spent in this state in perpetuity, adolescence sees it notably less, and adulthood allows it rarely if at all. If that’s the case, is this a necessary evil that comes along with becoming an adult? Or—and I admit this search for an alternative is motivated by a desire to believe this is a possibility—is there a method to slow time back down again?

I’m not sure. If the root cause is indeed a lack of awareness of grounded reality (as opposed to the abstractions which so often fill modern adulthood), a possible solution would be to systematically cultivate this awareness. But while I’ve done this by accident while intoxicated, the idea of doing it deliberately while not under any external influence is heretofore untested by me. I’ll have to update you on that next week.

I bring this up because of what I mentioned previously – about overcoming akrasia. The issue is that when I was in school, I would sit about, actively procrastinating on an assignment and knowing I was doing so. This was the form of akrasia that I thought I might be dealing with again, perhaps unknowingly. But not so; this new akrasia comes as thinking “I’d like to do this thing tonight” while standing on the train home, then coming home and eating dinner and then suddenly four hours have passed and where on earth did that darkness outside the window come from, oh I guess it’s bedtime now well maybe I’ll get to do the thing tomorrow.

So the problem of overcoming akrasia as a college student was solved by getting so overwhelmingly angry with myself that I had to either get my work done or go crazy, but the problem of overcoming it as a working professional seems to necessitate slowing down the perceived passage of time, or if that’s impossible, learning to get more done faster. (Ideally, it would involve doing both.)

Besides my difficulties with getting extra work done in my downtime, I’m doing very well at my actual job. Last week I worked a few hours overtime getting important projects done on very short notice, and my bosses seem to be very happy with me. I’m assisting in the management transition and taking on as much work as I can, which extends beyond my job description into some agency marketing work, including proofreading blog posts for the company blog.

My old boss had a few odd aspects to his workflow: for example, he always had way more projects than he could feasibly finish, he never assigned due dates or deadlines to anything, he rarely specified goals or provided scope specifications, and he was basically never completely transparent with the rest of the company. My new boss is exactly the opposite of all these things, which seems to be working out a lot better. I hope that, whatever company my old boss decided to work for, that it’s a better culture fit for him. He did say it paid a lot better.

The biggest thing I think I need to do at work is not get complacent with my current success. Life has demonstrated numerous times that it can turn on a dime and I need to be prepared for that possibility; and also, mere adequacy has never really been my style anyway. I need to keep taking on more responsibilities and getting even better at the ones I already have.

We have a contract writer who works on the SEO team with me, and I think I just got about as good as he is at writing articles. Now I think it’s time for me to start blowing his stuff out of the water. There’s not much better you can get for SEO than an A++ grade on Clearscope, but there’s plenty of room to improve in terms of rhetorical quality and speed. In every area, I need to make these sorts of improvements.

Outside of everything work-related, Passover (Pesach) was this past weekend, and this was the first time I had one away from home. I had my birthday away from home as well, but I was in the middle of moving in then, and I’d had very little time for any kind of real ceremony. I ate some cupcakes with friends in the community center and my fiancé bought me a stuffed rabbit. But Pesach… that’s a pretty big deal, the kind of thing my parents typically make a big fancy dinner and bring the extended family over for.

Really, Pesach is more “Jewish Christmas” than Chanukah is, despite the fact that the latter happens around Christmastime. (Other cultures have no obligation to stick their major religious holidays around Christmas, y’know.) So if you’d like, you can say this was sorta like my first Christmas away from home.

I didn’t sit around and mope, don’t worry, I’m not that much of an introvert. In fact, I went to a ceremony that was in fact much larger than my family’s—and I have a big family. There were perhaps thirty people there, a good ten percent of which weren’t even Jewish; they just decided to “come in and make Passover”, as the Haggadah says. And speaking of that, we used a rewritten “rationalist’s Haggadah”, which was equal parts tear-jerking and hilarious. After we ate a nice meal, we told a bunch of stories, sung bad parodies of songs from Hamilton and Portal (which were in fact a part of the rewritten Haggadah), and then hung around in a cuddle pile on beanbags in the living room, telling stupid jokes well into the night. I have a few drawings of this night that I think I’ll post here whenever I get around to finishing them.

The next morning I opened some care packages my parents had sent my fiancé and I, which included a lot of candy and chocolate, pancake and hot cocoa mix. (Why hot cocoa in the late spring? Why not? It’s California, it never gets below 50ºF here. Now’s as good a time as ever.) And I hung around being mostly out of it for most of the day, for some combination of the alcohol, the weed, and the staying up five hours past my normal bedtime, eating chocolate in my PJs. The only problem was that I fell off a motor scooter later that day while running an errand. Still, all in all, a pretty good first-Pesach-as-a-grownup.

Farewells and Changes: Week 5 at Upgrow, Inc.

At the beginning of this week, I found out my boss is leaving by the end of this week. Initially, I didn’t know what that was going to mean. After all, despite our previous difficulties, he taught me almost everything I know about SEO. The only way I know how to do most things is the way he taught me. Further, beyond the cursory interactions of office smalltalk and the occasional question about some techie thing, I’d had almost no interaction with anyone else at Upgrow until this week. (Well, except Yitzchak. I suppose I should be saying “anyone more experienced than me”.) The exclusive focus had been becoming a better assistant to my boss, and now that he’s leaving, I didn’t know what to do.

Up to this point, the entire SEO team of our company has been three people: my boss, a part-time contractor, and me. So I realized, with my boss leaving, I was going to have to step up. How was that going to happen? The first obvious thing is that we’re in the process of onboarding two new clients, which is a big front-loaded process involving an SEO audit for their entire website. I’d want to prioritize that in addition to my other projects, and further, get to know the rest of my team better.

With that plan in mind, I got started working on Monday. By Wednesday, I’d met the person who might end up becoming my new boss – a fun guy with an intense smile. He’s part-time for now, and he has other clients, but he may come on full-time later on. (Or maybe not: nothing is static in the realm of business.) I got on very well with him, and it turns out he has a background in tech as well. We talked over lunch about programming, career paths, and other such things.

Over the course of the week, I worked with my soon-to-be-ex-boss to transition all my projects as best as I could, and I got the go-ahead to start sitting in on client meetings (one of my main goals for this week, since it seems like a long time coming). I started deliberately talking more with the co-founders in order to take on more projects, and I’m happy that I click much better with everyone else at the office than I did with my boss. I’m usually a very sociable person, and clicking badly with someone like that threw me off a little. I’m glad it was just that relationship, but I’m also glad I found someone like that so early in my career: it taught me a ton of valuable lessons about the corporate environment which I’m sure to use from here on out.

Overall, everyone, especially the co-founders, have been doing their best to make the transition smooth. Still, there’s always that period where almost nothing actually needs to get done and things can just coast on momentum for a bit, and I think this week was that period. If things are going to go downhill, I anticipate that they’re going to start doing so next week.

As such, for next week, on top of continuing what I started this week, I’m planning on overcoming a bit of akrasia. I keep saying I’m going to get stuff done on the weekends and after my workdays, and yet I keep not doing it. I recall something Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, about the three types of hard work necessary to accomplish difficult things. First, you have to not run away, which takes seconds; second, you need to sit down and work, which takes hours; and third, you need to stick at it, which takes years. The first and third come naturally to me at this point, but the second one has always been hard.

It could theoretically be comforting, to think that one of my favorite writers has the same issues I do with working long hours, and I could leave it there. But then I think, that’s no excuse. In Eliezer’s own words, reality is not graded on a curve. If I’m trying to do something really difficult, I need to get a lot better at this. I’m not putting in a desperate effort as if my life were at stake, though of course, it is. That’s about to change.

Priorities, Talks, and an Entirely-Un-Asked-For T-Shirt: Week 4 at Upgrow, Inc.

This week, as I promised I would do last week, I made a priority-ordered list of what needs to get done outside of work. Or, more properly, I decided on the One Thing that I’m going to do as much as possible for the next month, then laid out a rough timeline of the priorities for the rest of my apprenticeship.

In short, for the next month, I’m going to continue focusing on improving my Adulting On My Own skills, both in and outside the workplace. That means making sure I’m financially stable for the long haul, cultivating good relationships with my housemates as well as my coworkers, working on improving my marketing skills, and—this is the hard part—maintaining connections I made while I was staying at Reach.

I also got done a handful of other things which I didn’t plan to do in the last update but which are nonetheless very important. First off, I’ve started having weekly meetings on Friday evenings with Yitzchak, my Praxis pal who finally arrived in SF to work at the office in person about two weeks ago. This past meeting, we discussed humanism, religion, morality, and all other kinds of very fun deep topics.

That’s not all, and this last one surprised me too. After work on Tuesday, I was researching one of our clients in the hopes of understanding their industry better, and I ran across an industry talk the next day that the client was hosting at their office! I could not believe my luck and signed up for the talk right away, telling my advisors at Praxis that I couldn’t make the weekly Wednesday call. After work, I took a leisurely walk down to the office, had a nice dinner at a nearby burger place, and went to the talk. There were all kinds of cool people there, and the actual talk itself was about all sorts of cutting-edge time series database related stuff. I got to see a dashboard for a software that won’t exist until September! (No, I can’t show it to you, you perv. Wait till September like the rest of the public.)

After the talk, I chatted with a bunch of different people with the express intent of getting LinkedIn connections, because I’d eat a burrito with a fork before I’d walk away from a social event without making online connections. Turns out, one of the people I ended up talking to was the person on the client staff who hired our company in the first place! We had a super nice chat, discussed tech and marketing, and at the end she not only told me to help myself to the company-branded stickers they were handing out, she also grabbed me an entirely exclusive t-shirt and branded socks! I was literally so stoked. Nobody else got a t-shirt or socks! What did I do to deserve this privilege?? They’re really nice socks and I actually haven’t even taken them out of the packaging yet because they’re so awesome, although I did wear the t-shirt to work on Friday.

Anyway. It has officially been a month at this new job! Month 1 of 6 complete, and honestly it’s going pretty well. I’ve got a cheap and small but nice room in a group house with a signed lease and a security deposit, a relationship with my boss that’s moving in the direction of amicable, weekly discussions with a coworker that I’m becoming very good friends with, and some sweet company swag (and an open offer from my boss to maybe go to other client events to gather intel? what?). Next week, I’m going to work on doing a little bit more of all my stated goals, since I didn’t actually get around to making them in the first place till Wednesday and so I only had half a week to start implementing them. We’ll have to see how that goes; stay tuned!

The Importance of Perseverance and Umbrellas: Week 2 at Upgrow, Inc.

This job is getting very difficult, but not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, marketing is itself hard, but it’s actually been harder acclimating to the work environment. Not just the startup environment, though that definitely contributes, but my interactions with the people there. I made a few stupid social mistakes early on, and I have a few personality clashes with my direct supervisor which I need to work on.

Some of the most important things I’ve learned from this job so far, then, have actually been about how to work through such problems. I am learning a ton about marketing, because my supervisor is ridiculously good at what he does. But I could have learned marketing from any expert marketer: having an expert marketer that I don’t naturally get along with very well is an additional level of challenge, and I’m learning a lot about the social rules of the white-collar workplace as a result.

I would be lying to say it’s all sunshine and roses: actually, I seem to have brought a rare rainstorm to sunny San Francisco. But like the umbrella that snapped in half on the first day after I moved here and left me to walk soaking wet for miles, these difficulties are teaching me perseverance, as well as the importance of having a good umbrella.

As to the actual marketing work, it’s incredibly interesting. I never realized SEO could be so complicated: the last time I checked, keyword stuffing and cloaking were frequently-used tactics. Now, it’s all about knowing your audience and getting voluntary backlinks from reputable sites.

One of my recent projects I’ve been working on for a handful of clients is that latter, we call it “link building”. This encompasses many things, from posting useful answers on forums to giving helpful information to reporters, but what I’m currently working on is getting links from individual peoples’ blogs. Basically, the process is that I figure out some people who blog about the thing our client does, and I see if there’s a place on their blog where they’d improve their content by linking to our client. Then, I send an outreach email, asking for the link.

Outside of work, my life is less difficult and more surreal. Living with rationalists, I keep having very interesting conversations. Interesting, both in the sense of intriguing and strange. People here regularly use phrases like “terminal value”, “cached thought”, “operational definition”, and “cognitive dissonance”. Everyone knows the ANI/AGI/ASI distinction. I have only met one other person who is not currently working as a programmer. And yet, we have these discussions laying about on couches, playing stupid card games, and drinking wine out of boxes. I went for cheap Chinese with some dude who works for Google.

Since I’m living in a community center until I can move into my permanent residence, there are all sorts of people and events which come through here. I’ve learned about the YIMBY movement, about animal rights activism and the clinically proven benefits of meditation. It’s so interesting learning about so many different points of view and political movements that I’d never heard of in any great detail before.

California has, in general, been a healing force for me, mostly due to one of the first friends I made here. No later than two hours after landing in CA, I met an absolute ray of sunshine who helped me through the rain, and continues to do so. He’s made awesome, healthy food that I’ve been able to take in for lunch sometimes, led some of the best meditation sessions I’ve ever attended, and generically made the whole environment and experience very positive. We’re both moving out of the community center soon, but I very much hope we can stay in touch after we’re no longer housemates. This friend, along with my fiancé and my mom, have been my umbrella.

I dearly hope this metaphor made sense.