#35 – You have the authority to avoid burnout while working at a startup | Josh Clemente, Tom Griffin, & Mike Haney

At a startup, you need to work hard. But burnout, stress, and overworking are the antithesis of productivity — and only you can use your self-awareness to push back to prevent burnout. Levels’ Founder and President Josh Clemente, Head of Partnerships Tom Griffin, and Editorial Director Mike Haney discussed burnout in general, how it affects people both physically and mentally and what a small startup like Levels can think about as they build their workplace culture.

01:11 – The paradox at Levels

The team at Levels is working to strike a balance between the demanding nature of an early-stage startup and their intentional effort to build a supportive, sustainable culture.

There’s an inherent paradox at Levels and our work culture where at least a seeming paradox. On one hand, we are an extremely self-aware work environment, which is to say, we think a lot about culture and creating the kind of culture that we want and being very intentional about our culture and that culture being one of positive, supportive, great place to work kind of culture. We really want people to have a work life balance. We want people to enjoy work. We don’t want people to feel overworked or burnt out or work from a place of fear. And we do a lot of things here to try to support that. And that’s been true from the very beginning from when the founders first put the company together. It’s a big part of what drives the remote async nature of our work that we are again, very self-aware and very committed to so that people can have their own schedules, so that people can balance work around their lives, take their kids to school, if they want or go work out in the middle of the day, those are all things that are supported and expected. We have a mandatory week of vacation per quarter. We really truly ask people to please take that, both to recharge themselves and to help build resilience into the company. So on one hand, there’s all of that, on the other hand, we are an early stage startup, about 50 people now. Growing fast in a new field that we’re trying to build of metabolic health at a stage in which as we say, “Here we are default dead.”

07:07 – Two categories of burnout

Josh thinks about burnout in two categories: physical burnout and indifference.

I kind of think of burnout in two categories. You’ve got what is probably closer to physical burnout, like total exhaustion that can happen when you’re overexerting for way too long and you’ve just got too much on your plate and are essentially physically drowning, there aren’t enough hours in the day and you’re doing it anyway. And the second one is like indifference that develops over time. And it can be both like you’re aware that you’re at a place that you don’t really align with the mission, or it doesn’t have a mission that you can perceive, or it’s just the culture is not one that rewards the efforts of people like you, and so that ends up in that sort of mode of burnout where you’re living for the weekends and you do not care and your goal is to actually evade work as much as possible because you just don’t care.

09:26 – Conditions leading to burnout

There are many conditions leading to burnout, but most of them fall under two categories: negative and positive ones.

I like this framing and I think it’s worth calling out the environmental conditions that can lead to burnout. And I think that there are sort of two classes as Josh was alluding to. There are negative and maybe unhealthy ones. So for example, that exhaustion that might come from cognitive dissonance around needing to work really hard, but hating the environment you’re in or not feeling aligned with the culture or not liking your manager or not feeling motivated to do the work. But then there are also a lot of positive conditions that you want to some extent, in any work environment that can also lead to burnout. And I think that right now is more the case at Levels.

14:19 – Resisting urgency

A false sense of urgency can quickly lead to burnout, but it is the default mindset in many corporate work environments.

We do have a weird culture in a way where, when you come into this company and for a lot of people, the objective of remote work at previous companies, if they’ve done it at all, has been, “This is temporary. We can’t wait to get out of it. This is like an enforced thing.” So then you come into our company where our objective is not to change and it’s actually to reinforce deep work in all these ways. But we also do weird things like say ignore emails from the CEO. You have to change the way you think about communications to the extent that you can prioritize and task manage and triage and calendar and all those things that kind of go against an internal like just a pavlovian response that we’ve developed in our careers that no, I have to jump on this thing immediately.

24:57 – Managing expectations

The ability to manage your own schedule requires self-awareness and emphasizes the importance of prioritization.

A lot of this seems like it can be derived from our sort of call your shots culture with upfront sort of deep thinking on memos and strategies. And for example, you wrote the content strategy doc, I can’t even remember when that was, over a year ago and then proceeded to just nail every bullet point. And so something that I’ve always found very helpful, and there is a double edge to this sword for sure, which I’ll get to, but having known objectives with deadlines or dates attached and I don’t like deadline because someone’s going to be hammering on your desk if you don’t hit it. I more so like a target that expectations are set on and it can move with new information. So a lot of it is I think just having the anti-priorities or the priorities and thus excluding the everything outside of that box is really helpful for people when you’re stepping into this role and you could do infinite things to push the ball forward, but instead just saying, “I’m going to scope what I work on to set expectations.”

46:42 – The importance of a relaxed workday

Part of mitigating burnout at Levels includes encouraging a calm workday. Being busy for the sake of being busy is not good.

I think for me, it’s been really helpful just knowing how much we value, not just efficiency and time management tactics, but we actually value having a chill environment and a chill, non busy workday. And this has come up more and more recently, and it’s been really helpful for me. Like Sam will say, “Busy is not good. And we all should be striving for a relaxed, non-urgent workday.” And the more we talk about this internally, the more I believe it and then it gives me license to try to cultivate that.

48:36 – The importance of having enough slack in your work week

When you start your work week, your calendar should be about 70% full. And as things come up during the week, you can slot them into that other 30%.

And another thing coming to mind now, probably a million of these, but someone said that you should have enough slack in your work week where when you’re starting your work week, your calendar should be like 60 or 70 or 80, I don’t know what it is, it’s called 70% full. And then if things come up, which they probably will, then you can slot them into that other time and the a 100% pie there not being all of your time, but being whatever you’re allocating towards work, that was also just illuminating to me because it’s like I shouldn’t go into Monday blocking every minute of every day and feeling like if I end up cleaning my kitchen for 30 minutes on Monday, then I’m going to start falling behind and never catch up. But rather, my schedule starts chill and if I can stay on top of things, it remains chill.

52:21 – Working towards a future where work force isn’t burned out

Set people up for success so they’re operating in a way that is optimal and able to stick around long-term.

Optimal is probably hard to get to, but pretty close. And then we’ve got a really exceptional circumstance because you have people who have no intentions of moving on necessarily. They’re here to execute towards the mission and they’re set up to be able to do so. They’re not going to burn out and drop off. And that’s ultimately the goal. A chill work environment, I bet it’ll be interesting to hear. I’d love to poll people in the Silicon Valley tech scene because I think a lot of people have these knee-jerk, negative reactions to that sort of statement. It’s like, “That’s not how unicorns are built.” Well, I disagree. I think that our semantic definition of chill is probably different. We’re not talking about watching cat videos on YouTube all day. Although if you want to, nobody’s going to stop you from doing so. It’s the circumstances where your hair is not on fire.

57:10 – A positive environment

One of the things that makes Levels culture so unique is how relentlessly positive it is.

The other place I think that really makes a difference is not only sort of doing your best work, but one of the other unique things about Levels culture, at least unique from other places I’ve worked, is how relentlessly positive this place is, that everybody is very supportive. It’s just a generally optimistic and supportive and positive vibe. And I know at least for me, if I’m feeling stressed or burnt out, that’s really hard for me to live in that space. I am much more likely to respond negatively to feedback or to feel stressed out about an email or request and respond in a way that is not, I feel like in keeping with the Levels culture. I found the way to sort of live in that positive environment, which is awesome.

01:00:12 – The culture of mandatory vacation

Josh believes in the company’s policy of mandatory time off, but understands there needs to be more leading by example to show the team that it’s an expected and celebrated part of the culture.

The one thing that I took away from this as an action item is, create some process around mandatory time off, maybe we can set up a reminder or something to get people to schedule it if it’s not on the calendar. But I think you’re totally right, Haney. We need signals and just in the way that Elon would sleep on the floor to signal to people that’s what they should be doing, I think we need probably the countervailing sort of signal for this culture.

Josh: (00:06) The goal is to set up the lifestyle that you can continuously execute within and feel really good. And I think that’s where the high performing team or professional athlete concept really resonates is like, you don’t want to see the best athletes not sleeping and ignoring their workouts because they’re watching film or whatever 24/7, you need them to have a balanced lifestyle to execute. And I think similarly, we really do want people to have a balanced life across the board. And we need to represent that with people who are further in their careers and in leadership in particular.

Ben Grynol: (00:45)

I’m Ben Grynol part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Mike Haney: (01:11)

There’s an inherent paradox at Levels and our work culture where at least a seeming paradox. On one hand, we are an extremely self-aware work environment, which is to say, we think a lot about culture and creating the kind of culture that we want and being very intentional about our culture and that culture being one of positive, supportive, great place to work kind of culture. We really want people to have a work life balance. We want people to enjoy work. We don’t want people to feel overworked or burnt out or work from a place of fear. And we do a lot of things here to try to support that. And that’s been true from the very beginning from when the founders first put the company together. It’s a big part of what drives the remote asynch nature of our work that we are again, very self-aware and very committed to so that people can have their own schedules so that people can balance work around their lives, take their kids to school, if they want or go work out in the middle of the day, those are all things that are supported and expected.

Mike Haney: (02:14)

We have a mandatory week of vacation per quarter. We really truly ask people to please take that, both to recharge themselves and to help build resilience into the company. So on one hand, there’s all of that, on the other hand, we are an early stage startup, about 50 people now. Growing fast in a new field that we’re trying to build of metabolic health at a stage in which as we say, “Here we are default dead,” right? We are not yet at that stage of the company where we’re growing super rapidly and wildly profitable, we are still finding product market fit and building the company. And we all want very much to get to default alive, we want to get to that success state.

Mike Haney: (02:58)

In part, because we have a mission that we all hear very much believe in, we’re actually just trying to make the world a healthier place, that’s what we’re trying to do here. Also, because we all have equity, we all have ownership in this company and there’s potentially life changing payouts for folks somewhere down the road if we do achieve that wild success. So all of those factors together push toward an environment in which we all should be working all the time as much as we can, or at least it’s possible to feel that way. There is an infinite amount of work to do and there’s real, tangible output and effects of doing all that work, which is to say that as important as it is for us to create an environment where people don’t ever reach burnout or even get close to that condition, there are also a bunch of conditions here that make it certainly possible for people to get there so how do we reconcile that paradox?

Mike Haney: (03:50)

Well, one of the ways is we talk about it. We just surface this idea. We surface that paradox. We surface talk about and discuss and pick apart some of these countervailing forces. We did that on an earlier podcast in this feed between Ben and Miz. Miz, our head of people ops wrote a memo about burnout, again, as a sort of first way to surface this within the company, called attention to it, here’s what it is, here are the signs, here’s what can lead to it in our specific culture, here’s some things that can help mitigate it. But part of it is also just talking about it as we did in this conversation today with me, Mike Haney, the editorial director, Tom Griffin, our head of partnerships and Josh, one of our founders.

Mike Haney: (04:29)

We just wanted to have a conversation about our own experience in previous jobs with burnout, how we deal with some of these countervailing forces that come up in our day to day, always feeling like there’s more work to do, but also wanting to both live and model a more positive work environment. So we get into all of that in this conversation and come away with some ideas for how we can not just avoid burnout, but promote health. We don’t want to just fix sickness when we get there, we want to promote a healthy work environment. We want to make sure people are living in a sustained healthy way in terms of their work life balance so that burnout doesn’t even become a thing that’s on the radar. So here’s Josh and Tom and I talking about burnout.

Mike Haney: (05:17)

The topic today is burnout and there’s an episode that actually just posted on this with Ben and Miz, kind of anchored around a memo that Miz wrote internally about burnout and how it particularly can creep up in an asynch remote environments and early startups and mission driven startups basically saying we have a lot of the ingredients that could lead our folks to experience burnout. And I think on the other side of it evidenced by the fact that we wrote a memo, recorded a podcast and are now doing a second podcast about it, it is something we are very cognizant of, trying to make sure our folks don’t experience and we want to do everything we can to head it off, it’s something that I thought more about being here than in other jobs. Not because I feel a greater sense of it here, but I think because this culture is so aware…

Mike Haney: (06:12)

This is a very self-aware culture. This is a culture here at Levels that thinks a lot about work and how we work and more than any place I’ve been before. And so it’s just made it more conscious for me. And what I found as I started talking about this internally with folks is I’m not the only one who thinks about this here. And a lot of the people here have come from other startup environments, other early fast growing environments, have experienced burnout in other jobs and so I think the idea behind this podcast is just to sort of have a casual conversation about past experiences, how we think about burnout here specifically. And I don’t see this as having any answers, although if you two have any, that would be great. But I think it’s more just to kind of surface the topic and give folks who are listening to this, who might have similar thoughts, some relatability to know they’re not the only ones thinking about this.

Josh: (07:06)

Just to kick it off, I kind of think of burnout in two categories. You’ve got what is probably closer to physical burnout, like total exhaustion that can happen when you’re overexerting for way too long and you’ve just got too much on your plate and are essentially physically drowning, there aren’t enough hours in the day and you’re doing it anyway. And the second one is like indifference that develops over time. And it can be both like you’re aware that you’re at a place that you don’t really align with the mission, or it doesn’t have a mission that you can perceive, or it’s just the culture is not one that rewards the efforts of people like you and so that ends up in that sort of mode of burnout where you’re living for the weekends and you do not care and your goal is to actually evade work as much as possible because you just don’t care.

Josh: (08:02)

So I kind of think of it in those two bulk categories and like you teed up, I think the first one is much more relevant for Levels at this stage where we are mission driven, many of us are passionate and mission aligned for the company and we really do want to move the ball forward, but we’re early and resources are the limiting factor for sure. And we have this deep work async culture where it’s like you’re kind of just operating in your own life in a sense, you’re not in an office environment where you can kind of go for coffee chats and decompress a little bit so a lot of us will just… I’ll take my calendar and just block the whole thing for nine hours and be like, “This is going to be writing time,” and then I will actually do that.

Josh: (08:50)

And then I surface and my brain is like exploding and the day is gone and I feel like I didn’t get enough done and so I’m pushing well into late hours. And nobody told me to do that, there’s nobody looking over my shoulder, telling me to sit there in the chair, it’s this self-reinforcing mode where I am my harshest critic in the deep asynch environment, I think. Yeah, that’s one of the ones that I’m… I don’t have a solution either, but it seems like just being aware that we have that environment that we’re building inside of and setting up guardrails against it is the best approach.

Tom Griffin: (09:26)

Yeah. I like this framing and I think it’s worth calling out the environmental conditions that can lead to burnout. And I think that there are sort of two classes as Josh was alluding to. There are negative and maybe unhealthy ones. So for example, that exhaustion that might come from cognitive dissonance around needing to work really hard, but hating the environment you’re in or not feeling aligned with the culture or not liking your manager or not feeling motivated to do the work. But then there are also a lot of positive conditions that you want to some extent, in any work environment that can also lead to burnout. And I think that right now is more the case at Levels. And so I’m trying to think of some of the other ones. A lot has to do with just the type of people that we’ve attracted to date and like, you want very hard working people. You want conscientious people who care a lot about the quality of their work and how they’re perceived by their teammates.

Tom Griffin: (10:27)

You want people that are really passionate about the mission and they’re prioritizing their work, maybe over some other aspects of their life, and of course not all of them. And I think we definitely have many people that have been highly visible at the company who fall into that category and I think it does create a culture where there can be more self-imposed pressure. And I think this is the thing that I struggle with, which is like, even when you think about hiring or the type of people that you want to join the team, I’ll still find myself feeling like we absolutely have to avoid overwork and burnout at all costs and then there’s this part of me that’s like, “Well, in order to win, in order to succeed, I still want to keep hiring the best, hardest working people for the “team”.” And I think there are probably a lot of analogies here to sports teams that are some healthy and some not.

Mike Haney: (11:20)

I think the moment I started thinking about burnout here was may`be six months ago. I think it was part of my performance review maybe, or maybe like an annual check in or something that you and I were having a conversation. And I said just sort of off the cuff, I realized a year in or something that I’d felt behind since the day I got here and I didn’t mean a lot by it, but I think it really caught you. And I think it spurred you to kind of go like, “Hey, that’s not the feeling we want folks to have.”

Mike Haney: (11:46)

And that got me thinking about exactly what you’re saying, Tom, the sort of positive conditions that lead to burnout. Because even as I said that, I said, “Look, it’s not because anybody’s been riding me. It’s not that Sam’s been on me to publish more or that anybody’s coming at me about, ‘Why haven’t you executed these priorities?’ It’s just that in a completely self-directed way, I know all the stuff that needs to be done. I want it all to get done. I want us to succeed. I want my department to do well. And so it feels like there’s no end to the things you can do.”

Mike Haney: (12:18)

And there is a little bit of that voice that I think you’re getting at Tom of like on one hand we have an environment that says, “Please have a work life balance, use the async nature to set your own schedule, take weekends, unplug, take the mandatory week of vacation every quarter.” And the other part of you goes like, “Yeah, but if I do that, I’m just going to fall further behind, then it’s going to be a week in which I’m going to spend a week catching up. And yeah, I could take this weekend off, but then Monday’s going to suck because I’m going to have all these other things.”

Mike Haney: (12:45)

And I don’t know that there’s any practical way to get out of that. It feels like A, to have an environment that continues to support that to your point Tom, is important because if you do have managers yelling at you to do more than you have capability, then it’s very difficult to get out of it. And we have all the productivity hacks in the world here. We have all the people talking about how to efficiently use time and deep work and calendaring and scheduling and to dos. But I’m coming to just increasingly think like it’s just a state of mind thing. You just have to come to a point where whatever that voice is, you silence it and you go… It’s almost some degree of like you have to almost embrace some degree of apathy of like it’s not going to get done and I don’t care, I’m not going to get fired and it’ll be fine. But man, that’s hard to stomach, at least for me. And I suspect for most of the folks here, that is a hard feeling to entertain and take seriously.

Tom Griffin: (13:39)

I just think we should expand on this point, I think it’s really important. There are obvious signs of burnout, right? If we think about the corporate lawyer who’s working in his office until 3:00 AM and then is back every morning at 6:00 or 7:00, which I’m thinking of my older brother now, that’s very clear that it’s an unhealthy environment, but I would love to unpack other signs, even thoughts that you might have or other heuristics that you can use that you might not be on the right track. I’d love to hear from you Josh, because you, I know have had some experience with this.

Josh: (14:14)

I’m kind of trying and connect these thoughts in a fairly linear way but, we do have a weird culture in a way where, when you come into this company and for a lot of people, the objective of remote work at previous companies, if they’ve done it at all, has been, “This is temporary. We can’t wait to get out of it. This is like an enforced thing.” So then you come into our company where our objective is not to change and it’s actually to reinforce deep work in all these ways. But we also do weird things like say ignore emails from the CEO. You have to change the way you think about communications to the extent that you can prioritize and task manage and triage and calendar and all those things that kind of go against an internal like just a pavlovian response that we’ve developed in our careers that no, I have to jump on this thing immediately.

Josh: (15:11)

And so I agree with what Haney was saying was that we almost have to deprogram in a way the recognition… or we have to just become super comfortable with the recognition that there will always be more to do, especially in a sort of a first mover market where when you look around like we’re watching in the news, metabolic health is becoming a thing. There’s a new “competitor” or someone else working in metabolic health every day or every week and there’s a lot of pressure. We want to win the space and succeed and so even if nobody in the organization is saying, “We got to move faster, we need more urgency,” and I’ll caveat, in fact, the opposite is happening. Sam has actively pushed back against the use of the term urgency in our culture.

Josh: (15:59)

But even without somebody expressing that deliberately, the pressure builds. We all know what we’re trying to achieve, we know the odds and so telling yourself to slow down or be more deliberate at a certain point, I think it’s unlikely at best. So in my past experience that I’ve been at other companies where I have experienced what I would call overexertion burnout. At SpaceX in particular, every minute of every day you knew essentially the number of hours left in the company’s life and when you’d be back on the job boards looking for something if we didn’t succeed and the pressure was literally stated. If you have extra hours where you’re not doing anything and you’re at home, come to work and work instead, don’t go home.

Josh: (16:51)

We brought laundry services in house. We brought food in house. It got to the point where I was sleeping under my desk and I wasn’t the only one. So that environment, I didn’t hate it, but it burned me out. I just didn’t have anything left and that was really interesting to experience because I still have a tremendous amount of passion for the mission over there but obviously I left. And I left because I had other passions that were stronger and also I had a desire to get more control of my life and my lifestyle. I was living the same life that I had been living for six years. Still had roommates, hadn’t moved the ball forward in a bunch of ways that I wanted to because there just wasn’t any time to focus on it.

Josh: (17:31)

So I know that the culture we’re building here is not that. And that’s why I was so Haney, when you brought that up a few months ago, I was so attuned because it sounded so familiar. It was like, “Yeah. Nobody’s pushing you to do that, but you’re doing it anyway.” And what you were describing was like it reminded me of the theme that I felt except I was being explicitly told to do this so it was a bit surprising. I was like, “Oh-oh, maybe this is a thing that we will see self-replicate if we don’t draw attention to it earlier.”

Josh: (18:02)

So anyway, that’s a bit of a ramble, but I think it was surprising to me. And I had a conversation with Sam about this. And Sam is of the mind that we want to build a culture where people have the recognition that if they burn out, it is because they are pushing themselves in that direction and they are the only ones who can push back, if that makes sense. It’s like we have to raise that awareness because otherwise we’ll be hoping and praying that we find the signs for someone else before it’s too late, so to speak.

Tom Griffin: (18:38)

I think that the founding team has done a great job at making it explicit what we are aiming for. And I’m thinking about Sam, I’m thinking about you, Josh and Sam has been very clear that… he would even go as far to say that if you feel like you are overwhelmed and busy, and I now have two days in a row recording podcast where I’m putting words in Sam’s mouth, but that it is a sign that you are not in control of your time or your to-do list in a way that is optimal and it should serve as a signal to you that you need to take some action around getting more in control of your work.

Tom Griffin: (19:22)

And I think to Sam, that would be some version of either automating the thing, delegating the thing. I mean, we have a framework for this and I think hiring is sort of the last step, but that was pretty eye-opening to me because it forced me to constantly look at my own day and my own work and not be a martyr that essentially was striving to be overworked because that would then serve as a proxy for me that I was doing the right thing, but rather there’s improvement that needs to happen here.

Tom Griffin: (19:55)

And I think for me, I have definitely been sort of not close to burnout at Levels, but I have found I bumped up against those signs where I will start to feel like, “Okay, if I’m not working at night or on the weekend, then I feel like I’ve taken vacation and I’m falling behind.” And I think that is a very good proxy for knowing that you’re probably not on the right path or you need to get in better control of your time. And I was recently in Mexico for a couple of weeks, mostly working remotely and I started to tell friends that I couldn’t go to the dinner that we were planning,” or whatnot and I was basically saying that like, “Guys, it feels like I’ve been working half time and we’ve had stuff going on and I just need to put in a few days and nights of long hours.”

Tom Griffin: (20:49)

And I got feedback from people who were like, “Listen, you’ve been working all day every day. You’ve been working totally normal hours. And it sounds like you’re saying that just because you’re not working on Saturday or at night that you’re working half hours, but you’re not working half time right now, this is a normal day’s work.” And I think that highlighted for me that I needed to reflect on what would be optimal, I guess if I was adequately controlling my workload.

Josh: (21:18)

Yeah. That calibration is really difficult, I think. And I’m curious about both of your thoughts on how we can share calibration across… Heuristics are good. We have a heuristic at the societal level of 40 hour work weeks, that’s the heuristic. And so if people are voluntarily opting into nights, weekends, 80 hour weeks, that is not sustainable, we know that. But some people just prefer to work more and we don’t want to develop… You know what I mean? And so you can kind of accidentally calibrate on someone else’s efforts and this is I think the problem and also the solution is like, we both want people to be able to work the weekend if they need to flex it because they didn’t want to work in the middle of the week.

Josh: (22:02)

We don’t want to have to set some enforced schedule. And if Sam is doing email from the airplane on a Saturday night, it doesn’t mean that everyone else needs to jump to their inboxes on Saturday nights, right? And so I’m curious how you all think about how we can both represent the flexibility and the heuristics of balance without accidentally creating these sort of unintentional and perverse feedback loops where people are copying all of the most extreme behaviors.Mike Haney: (22:31

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I think that is one of the most difficult things here because you know, when I started here and it was early days and I heard the week of vacation per quarter mandatory policy and I didn’t buy it because I’m like, “That seems insane.” That’s more vacation than almost anywhere would ever give and so I looked around to see if anybody was taking it and some people were, but a lot of people were not, and we talked about the sense, but a lot of folks in leadership were not. And so I went like, “Well, that’s not a real thing.” That’s a thing that we’re saying you can do and I watched people do it and they did it and they didn’t get fired. So I knew it was an option, but it also didn’t feel like a thing I should probably do if I wanted to be in the good graces of the team.Mike Haney: (23:18

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And I think that kind of default setting or that kind of demonstration, particularly from leadership is where this gets tricky. Is like, I totally take Sam’s point and a 100% believe him, having worked with him a long time now, when he says, “Look, I’ll work 80 hour weeks because that’s legitimately how I want to spend my time. It in no way means that’s what I expect from you,” but that’s still a hard one to get around. And I know Casey works a ton and I know Josh, you work a ton and I know Ben works a ton. It’s like you look around and you see at least from what we can tell, colleagues working at all hours of the night and not in the sense, I think there’s two things to pick apart, what you were just saying.

Mike Haney: (24:01)

One is that notion of a flexible schedule, which I think is a little bit easier to wrap your head around to say like, “Oh, I take two hours off in the middle of the day because I got to take care of my kid, but then I’ll make it up at night,” but I’m still working the same amount of time as opposed to, “Boy, this person seems to be working constantly. I’m getting emails in the morning and in the afternoon and at night and on the weekends, they’re posting the threads, they’re on all the time.” And again, I don’t know any practical way other than just convincing myself that, that’s okay and it doesn’t matter and I can go ahead and work less if I want to work less and it won’t be taken as like, “Well, we could be doing more in editorial, but I don’t know, I guess anyone is to do other things with his time.” Nobody would explicitly say that here, but it’s hard to escape that feeling of like, “Well, everybody else is working a lot, why aren’t I?”

Josh: (24:57)

A lot of this seems like it can be derived from our sort of call your shots culture with upfront sort of deep thinking on memos and strategies. And for example, you wrote the content strategy doc, I can’t even remember when that was, over a year ago and then proceeded to just nail every bullet point. And so something that I’ve always found very helpful, and there is a double edge to this sword for sure, which I’ll get to, but having known objectives with deadlines or dates attached and I don’t like deadline because someone’s going to be hammering on your desk if you don’t hit it. I more so like a target that expectations are set on and it can move with new information. But having that really helps me as an individual, knowing how I operate, I’m much better when I know in time when something has to be done, because I can scope the amount of how deep I go on that specific task.

Josh: (25:52)

So a lot of it is I think just having the anti-priorities or the priorities and thus excluding the everything outside of that box is really helpful for people when you’re stepping into this role and you could do infinite things to push the ball forward, but instead just saying, “I’m going to scope what I work on to set expectations.” And then once you’re able to get through a full cycle and see, “I was able to do that with a pretty lax schedule and so I can actually probably upregulate a little bit, or in fact, I only hit 3 of 10 items over this quarter and so maybe I need to think about delegating more or scaling myself, those items I think are really helpful in probably the way that we need to go long term to help each person recognize, “This is how we want to do things. Call your shots, execute, learn, improve.”

Josh: (26:43)

The other side of the coin I think, is that when you have dates… Well, I guess the challenge is procrastination. For me, this is something that I’ve also wanted to bring up on this topic is that I tend to create the circumstances for my own overexertion by knowingly procrastinating on items that are looming overhead. And I’m curious if you all have a similar experience here, but if I set a date in the future, I’ll do a ton of work that is tangential, peripheral, helpful, but not the thing until the last moment. This is why I like the dates, is that it helps me to fixate on that objective, but if it’s too far in the future, it’s too abstract. And this is another challenging thing is like, how do we create execution without creating relentless dates that are constantly chasing people? And I don’t like the fear, uncertainty and doubt of feeling as though someone is wielding a schedule over you but at the same time, I’m just curious how often you all feel that the time crunch is either helpful or harmful?

Tom Griffin: (27:57)

I’m not sure I have an answer to that. I certainly relate, and I struggle mightily with procrastination and I should probably revisit Tim Urban’s blog about it for some more inspiration these days because I feel like it’s gotten worse recently so I’m going to sidestep that question. A couple thoughts from earlier first just Haney wanted to say that I feel very similarly and I think I have gotten frustrated maybe at Levels and other places as well when people will say things like, “It doesn’t matter if you work 40 hours or a 100 hours, just get your work done.” And my response is often like, “Assuming all other things being equal, the person working a 100 hours a week if I’m working 40 or 50 is going to be creating a lot more value for the company.”

Tom Griffin: (28:46)

And yes, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re doing better work but if I were to find five more hours in every single day by waking up at 5:00 AM or working until midnight, assuming whatever, I get enough sleep for my brain to function, I’m going to be doing more and sending more emails and producing more documents and that is probably better. And so I don’t have an answer for that, but I just think it’s important to acknowledge that often people will say like, “It’s never better to work more hours. And even if someone’s putting in more hours than you, it is no sign at all that they might be actually doing more work.” And I’m like, “Well, it might be,” so that’s one. I think a lot of it comes down to modeling, which we’ve sort of mentioned, but I distinctly remember many different points from people in leadership, Sam, Casey, even Andrew.

Tom Griffin: (29:36)

Early days, I remember this one day where Casey sent a picture of a hike she was on at 2:00 PM on a Wednesday and my world changed. I was like, “Whoa, so I can go for a walk in the middle of the day.” And I’m an adult here at Levels and I know that, but there was just something fundamentally different about seeing someone who I respected, who I know works really hard. And it was just a glimpse into the fact that this must happen every so often with Casey, she’s not always working. And I think that’s important to acknowledge that it’s really easy to think based on when communication happens in the digital world, that people are working all the time and I’ve come to realize that even the people I think that are working all the time are not working all the time.

Tom Griffin: (30:21)

And if you really were to go down their schedule with them, they’re taking breaks, they’re doing other things, they’re not working all the time. And it’s easy to sort of assume the worst in terms of how people are working relative to you. And then lastly, for me, something that’s been critical is just knowing what my non-negotiables are and that clarifies things for me. I’m pretty militant about getting eight hours of sleep and then reasonably strict about exercise. And I’ve just gotten to a point in my life where I rarely compromise on those things and so there have been times in the past where I’m like, “I don’t have time to exercise today and it’s been four days since I’ve exercise, but I need to do email,” and now when I start to have those thoughts, I’ll be like, “Hell no.”

Tom Griffin: (31:07)

And I’ll get frustrated with myself and I’ll just immediately go to the gym. And I think that if you are carving out time, some social time, sleeping eight hours, reading your book, exercising, family, if you have a family, then that is setting really healthy boundaries and there shouldn’t then be another 20 hours left in the day where you could be working.

Mike Haney: (31:29)

I’m curious on that point. And Josh, if you have the same experience, because you two are both far fitter than me, which tells me that you are prioritizing exercise, when you do that, when you decide like, “Nope, I got to go exercise.” Whatever time of the day, I’m going to do my workout. Do you then make up for that by working that evening? Does it come out? Because that’s what I found myself doing. Is like, I’d like to work out during the middle of the day because it’s when my kid’s at school and I sort of have the freedom and time to go do it and my gym isn’t busy, but then it’s after dinner and it’s eight o’clock and it’s like, “Well, I better put in a couple of hours now because I’d screwed around in the middle of the day and went and didn’t work.”

Mike Haney: (32:09)

I think this part of the conversation to me feels like it’s… I don’t feel like any of that’s contributing to burnout, I think this is more about sort of overwork, but I think this is probably still relevant as it is a step on the way to burnout, right? If you were living in a state of feeling perpetually behind, you were probably even in a very in that sort of positive path to burnout that we talked about before, I’m curious how you guys think about still sort of structuring your day. I guess the last thing I’ll say about it maybe is a framework for this is something I’ve been trying to think about and I haven’t mastered is I’ve always worked with the mindset kind of like you were talking about at SpaceX that like, if I didn’t have anything else to do, I should be working.

Mike Haney: (32:50)

Work sort of takes a priority and everything else slots in as opposed to my dad worked at a factory all’s life. It was like, you went into work at 7:00 AM, the whistle blew at 2:00 and there was no sense that you would do anything else. Work just happened during this very specified time and the rest of the day was yours. And earlier this year I tried completely readjusting my calendar from blocking out personal things and assuming all the other time was work to only blocking out work times and trying to assume that everything else is personal and it has not worked at all. I’ve completely ignored everything that’s come up when it goes like… I schedule email and coms, but other than that when there’s a block of time that comes up, that goes work it’s like, “Whatever, I’m like already working. I’m going to work later.” So I’m curious how you guys think about that scheduling component.

Josh: (33:36)

First of all, I’m pretty sure you were a much more capable endurance athlete than I will ever be. I’m struggling to keep any form of fitness going right now. It’s a 100 and something degrees outside and to Tom’s point, it’s either got to happen in the morning or it’s got to happen in the evening for workouts for me so it’s not currently interfering with my work schedule, but I will say that my approach to this has been… I used to try and manage two different calendars and I still do this to some extent, I still have two email accounts and I think that what’s worked best for me is managing my whole life from one calendar and blocking… If I block off dinner and I block off my calendar for a workout that is at a time that is reasonable it’s like, it’s going to both be cool enough that I can actually do it, but also late enough that I’m not diluting myself.

Josh: (34:32)

I’m not going to work out at 5:00 AM. I’ve tried, it’s just not the person that I am. And so I’ve shifted that to the point where I now know the length of time it takes me to go through the motion, get to the gym, get home, get showered, have breakfast, that needs to be entirely accounted for otherwise it devolves and I’m double booked, some days it gets overbooked and I don’t go at all, it’s the first thing to drop. And I know that my psychology, if I’m not consistent, the way Tom’s describing with sleep and exercise, my quality of output is a disaster and my mood is not good.

Josh: (35:08)

So it has to become part of my work ethic. These are not two different concepts and so I think that it has been helpful for me to combine and have my personal life represented on my work calendar and use calendar management tools like Calendarly so that when I do want to set up a meeting with somebody else, they cannot overbook my life. That’s the non-negotiable going forward. And I found that there are essentially zero downsides. Even in cases where an important meeting gets bumped out a few days or a week, overall we can use asynchronous tools to exchange information, there are ways to work around a calendar that includes your non-negotiables. And it’s a little bit uncomfortable at first, I think for people to like step up and assert themselves, especially early in your career, I think, a lot of us now we have enough time under our belts that we’re like, “Yeah, this is my non-negotiable.”

Josh: (36:06)

I don’t think a lot of people who are fresh out of school know that yet about themselves. And so maybe this is where Tom, I really liked your example of just seeing Casey out taking a walk in the middle of the day was a big indicator, that tells me we should be doing more of this stuff because you know, yesterday at noon, I went to the gym and that was rare. It was a 100 degrees, but I just needed to. I needed to get away from the table and I just felt the urge and I probably should have shared that. And then I think maybe the other thing is setting expectations and communication.

Josh: (36:39)

I think there’s a big value to feeling like if everyone has the same context, like this thing is on track or not on track, it kind of helps to not feel this pressure that you’re being judged by some outside entity who is determining whether or not your efforts are sufficient. Nobody’s sitting here measuring butts and seats time or anything like that. And in fact, if you do go workout in the afternoon and you think to yourself, “Now I got to make up for this by working until 11:00 PM,” it’s likely that no one’s going to notice that either. So if it’s a signaling thing, it’s only signaling to yourself and that’s another thing that I think we need to reinforce, is that you don’t need to… This is not zero-sum, the goal is to set up the lifestyle that you can continuously execute within and feel really good.

Josh: (37:30)

And I think that’s where the high performing team or professional athlete concept really resonates, is you don’t want to see the best athletes not sleeping and ignoring their workouts because they’re just watching film or whatever 24/7, you need them to have a balanced lifestyle to execute. And I think similarly, I know it’s a tired trope, but similarly we really do want people to have a balanced life across the board. And we need to represent that with people who are further in their careers and in leadership in particular.

Tom Griffin: (38:02)

Yeah. I have so many thoughts right now. I guess I’ll start with Haney, to answer your question, sometimes I am going back to the computer later on at night if I were to be doing something during the day. I’m almost always working out during the workday actually and it all depends on your own schedule, right? So I’m almost always doing some work on the weekends, but that’s because I like doing that. I like waking up on a Saturday morning and going to a coffee shop and clearing my email for a couple hours and I don’t have a family and so I have that flexibility. And so I know that I’m working enough hours, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m working enough hours overall. And so then it comes down to the non-negotiables and the actual definition of a non-negotiable like health is a non-negotiable for me.

Tom Griffin: (38:56)

Another specific example would be, I used to think that I could do one non-work related thing every day. So I got into a habit at some point, and this is partially a product of COVID when no one had social lives, but I got into this space where someone would be like, “Can you do drinks or a dinner tonight?” And in my head it was like, “No, because I’m going to the gym.” And I was like, “Okay, this isn’t good.” If I’m going to the gym at my normal time, which might be 2:00 PM, that doesn’t mean that I can’t have dinner with friends because I’m choosing exercise as my one thing. And again, getting back to sort of non-negotiables, it’s like I have decided that having social relationships is important to me and I’ve also decided that exercise is important to me and I can do both and end of story, basically.

Tom Griffin: (39:46)

And it’s not to say that happens every single night, but I think it’s just important to talk about these things. And I remember having a conversation with Sam once where he explained as he has to many people, that he is making this choice to work many hours a week right now and that it’s what he wants to be doing. And then he said something that struck me, which is that almost certainly at some point up ahead in his life, he’s not going to want to work this many hours, even if he’s still CEO of Levels.

Tom Griffin: (40:12)

And I think at the time he was single and he was sort of making this choice to spend all of his waking hours on Levels. And he was like, “But in the future, I’ll probably be in a relationship and I might have other priorities and I might work half the hours and that’s going to be okay too.” And I don’t know, for me, a lot of just these conversations and behaviors that I’ve witnessed are the things that have changed my attitude and mindset and made me a little bit more comfortable with living a balanced life.

Josh: (40:37)

I’m curious how much of the forcing functions that you both have experienced that are pushing you to the border where you’re starting to be like, Okay, this is not a good direction.” How much of it is drawing on hustle culture that you’re seeing other people portraying and how much of it is just something that was second nature, did it on your own, we’re just heading in this direction through self reinforcing behaviors? Was it something that you felt you needed to do that led you in that direction because somebody else is out there saying grind hard, don’t sleep, sleep when you’re dead type stuff, or is it, this just was a natural emergent behavior that you found out was like, okay, I can over index in that direction. I need to set up a little guardrail for myself?

Mike Haney: (41:25)

For me, it’s been both in different environments. So, when I was younger and I was working in editorial, I went to grad school to be a journalist. I got out, I got my dream job working at Popular science. I wanted to be in magazines, I wanted to be in science. And I remember legitimately saying, and actually feeling this at one point that if I won the lottery tomorrow, I wouldn’t quit this job because it was all I wanted to spend my time doing. And I think that was that feeling of like I said, I didn’t have anything else going on and I was happy to work all that time kind of the way Sam’s talking about now, that’s what he wants to spend all his time doing. But in a subsequent job, when I was kind of in your position, Josh, where I was a founder, but not a CEO, but very much the kind of heart and soul of a company that I started, I completely burned myself out because I was pushing myself to… I felt like everything fell back on me.

Mike Haney: (42:26)

That word you used, Tom of martyr is what I very much recognized, at one point that had just gotten so habitual that as the known kind of center of the company in some ways, I felt everything came back to me. If I wasn’t working constantly, I was signaling the wrong things. I was not setting the company up for success. And it became such a part of my identity to be that guy. It’s also like there’s a Midwestern work ethic thing in here where it’s like, I’ve always said, “Well, I might not be the smartest, but I can outwork anybody.” It just so becomes a part of your identity that like, “I will kill myself. I can sleep when I’m dead,” whatever, not because anybody else was necessarily saying it, although it was the culture we created, but it was like I was a part of creating that culture by modeling that behavior and defining myself by those sort of terms but very much sort of self-driven.

Mike Haney: (43:16)

I feel like at Levels it’s been a very different experience and while I’ve not come close to burnout here, the times I have felt exhausted or felt like, “Man, I feel like I’m working too much or I would like to get away from it,” or just those kind of niggling feelings, like I said, of sort of I feel constantly behind is very… some of it’s driven, I guess, still that sort of residue that we’ve been talking about of feeling like I have to perform in that way or it being a part of my identity. But part of it is that kind of hustle culture. We have a different hustle culture here, right?

Mike Haney: (43:50)

It’s not that kind of working in finance or like you said, the sort of corporate law type of thing where that’s the environment but again, it’s an environment where people are working a lot, people are mission driven and even the kind of time management time hack stuff, the degree to which I made the comment at one point here and I think Miz put it in the burnout memo that if you’re feeling overworked here, you’re feeling like you’re not managing things, you can’t blame anybody else, it’s on you because we’ve let people manage their own schedule.

Mike Haney: (44:18)

We’ve talked about it here, that Sam has said like, “You need to recognize the signs in yourself. You need to fix it.” Well, that’s true. And in many ways that’s great, but it also puts it back on you because then you’re like, “Well, if I’m overworked or feeling too busy, it’s just that I’m not being efficient enough with my time. I’m not a time whiz like Sam or like Miz is.” Like, “Oh man, those guys seem to get so much done so quickly. How do I do that? I just need to get better at calendaring and then I can fix it.” So at least for me, it’s a little bit of both. It’s a little bit of self identity thing, but also it is a little bit of that unique Levels hustle culture that can make you feel like you could always be doing more to better manage your life or be more efficient or whatever.

Josh: (45:01)

That’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought of it in that way and I think I can totally see… and I have experienced this as well coming from being a mechanical engineer too, working in information management, the way that someone like Sam does so effortlessly, it was a total shock and all campaign. My inbox has never been at zero before Levels and didn’t even know what that concept meant. I used unread email as the triage mechanism. But learning a lot and seeing what stuff works and what doesn’t, has been unique. But a lot of it has come from essentially coaching sessions with people like Sam who have done this for a long time. And I’m just curious about thoughts from you two on how we can… It’s not about catching the signs of burnout, it’s more about being able to, like you said… When you say it’s on you to catch the signs, that I think is true, but it is always helpful to have a secondary perspective, a third party that you can communicate with.

Josh: (46:01)

And we don’t really have that cultural mechanism in place. We’re experimenting with executive coaching right now across a bunch of people on the team to try to see, “Is this a mechanism that can help with the early onset signs of burnout?” Get ahead of it because you have a third party who’s looking out, who’s not a part of our culture. They understand it, but they’re not working inside of it and so they can say, “Hey, this is potentially going to lead you in the wrong direction.” I’m just interested in whether that feels like a technique that would help, in your opinions or what else we might be able to do inside the culture to be that backbone for people so that they don’t just constantly self reinforce that, “I’m the problem”?

Tom Griffin: (46:42)

Yeah. I think for me, it’s been really helpful just knowing how much we value, not just efficiency and time management tactics, but we actually value having a chill environment and a chill, non busy workday. And this has come up more and more recently, and it’s been really helpful for me. Like Sam will say, “Busy is not good. And we all should be striving for a relaxed, non-urgent workday.” And the more we talk about this internally, the more I believe it and then it gives me license to try to cultivate that. Whereas for most of us being relaxed and… For example, I live in New York city and there has long been just sort of a busyness epidemic here and it’s always been fascinating to me that the first thing you say to anyone who ask, “How’s everything going? How’s work going?” First thing out of your mouth is just, “Good. Just busy. Yeah. Everything’s going well, there’s just real busy.” That’s just how every single conversation starts.

Tom Griffin: (47:52)

And I started doing it and that should not be the first instinct and that signals a problem if you’re a Levels employee and that is your first response. And I think that’s just really important as a value that, that’s what we’re striving and to be really good at your job, it means that you have control over your work. But then in terms of tactics, I think we’ve gotten better at this, around everything from these frameworks for offloading work, right? So sitting down with your person you’re managing and saying like, “How are you feeling? What would you estimate your bandwidth is at right now? And then let’s look at your scope of work and figure out what you can get rid of.” Having that conversation all the time around what you can get rid of, I think is really important.

Tom Griffin: (48:36)

And another thing coming to mind now, probably a million of these, but someone said that you should have enough slack in your work week where when you’re starting your work week, your calendar should be like 60 or 70 or 80, I don’t know what it is, it’s called 70% full. And then if things come up, which they probably will, then you can slot them into that other time and the a 100% pie there not being all of your time, but being whatever you’re allocating towards work, that was also just illuminating to me because it’s like I shouldn’t go into Monday blocking every minute of every day and feeling like if I end up cleaning my kitchen for 30 minutes on Monday, then I’m going to start falling behind and never catch up. But rather, my schedule starts chill and if I can stay on top of things, it remains chill.

Mike Haney: (49:23)

This actually echoes at something that we talk a lot about in what we’re trying to do with our product and our service for people, which is promote health rather than fixed sickness. And I think if we think of burnout the same way that… Several of us have caveated in this conversation of like, “Well, we’re not quite at burnout, or we haven’t approached that point yet, or we’re not burned out at Levels,” but it’s almost as though at Levels, the term should almost never come up, right? The goal should be to create an environment that promotes sort of health in the sense of a healthy work environment and keeps us at that kind of chill workplace vibe and that the departure from that is so minor, but even noticeable at a small amount that you don’t ever get to that point, the chronic disease condition doesn’t build under the surface for so long.

Mike Haney: (50:15)

Whereas I think the normal… when we talk about burnout is like by the time you’re there, you’re really sick already and something has gone horribly wrong. And getting back from that state is a mess. The one other job I felt I didn’t like, I just quit. I left a job that was paying well, working well, I had just had a kid, it was insane. My wife didn’t have a job at the time and I was like, “Nope, I’m leaving. I’m done. I can’t do it anymore.” And at that point, things are broken and now I look back like, “Why did I do that? Boy, I should have stayed there.” And I was like, because at the time it felt like no other option and we don’t want to get to that point.

Mike Haney: (50:53)

And I think tying this back to the sort of efficiency systems, time management time hack kind of stuff that we do here, I like what you’re saying about making sure that we are continually modeling that the point of that stuff is not to make you ever more efficient and squeeze more work into a smaller space, but it is a 100% with this goal of being healthy in terms of your work life balance. It is to buy you free time, it’s not to squeeze more work in and make you feel like you ever have to do more and more and more. I guess the analogy would be over training. It’s like, you can get better and better at training, but if you use that to burn your body out, you’re not getting healthier.

Josh: (51:37)

Yeah. I loved what you said about when you were in just your element and “Even winning the lottery couldn’t convince me to leave this job.” I think we have this assumption, which I hope we will be able to maintain for two orders of magnitude of growth at Levels, which is that people are here because they really, really care about what we’re doing and want it to exist. They’re not doing a job that pays the bills, they’re both doing the job that pays the bills, but they’re working on a mission that they care about. If we can assume that, then all we need to do is set those people up for success so that they’re operating in a way that is borderline optimal.

Josh: (52:21)

Optimal is probably hard to get to, but pretty close. And then we’ve got a really exceptional circumstance because you have people who have no intentions of moving on necessarily. They’re here to execute towards the mission and they’re set up to be able to do so. They’re not going to burn out and drop off. And that’s ultimately the goal. A chill work environment, I bet it’ll be interesting to hear. I’d love to pull people in the Silicon Valley tech scene because I think a lot of people have these knee-jerk, negative reactions to that sort of statement. It’s like, “That’s not how unicorns are built.” Well, I disagree. I think that our semantic definition of chill is probably different. We’re not talking about watching cat videos on YouTube all day.

Josh: (53:06)

Although if you want to, nobody’s going to stop you from doing so. It’s the circumstances where your hair is not on fire. And when people are distracted and working on all of these catastrophic, unexpected problems all day, it’s like, “Great. Everyone’s working at a 100% capacity, but is that the most efficient way to take these people and turn them into a force that is able to achieve the mission?” Actually I am actively reading this book called Creativity, Inc, which is really good. It’s about Pixar and their story. And he’s describing the exact same circumstances, which is that the Pixar team was so obsessed with their work and just thriving in this moment where computer animation was finally able to do something like Toy Story.

Josh: (53:53)

And these are people who were working on the background technology for their whole careers, and then it became a reality and they were just crushing it. And Toy Story 2, I think actually they threw away the whole script or something like that. And suddenly the schedule that they had was cut in half and for the first time, and the only time, as far as the book tells, they lost people to attrition due to burnout.

Josh: (54:22)

It was a total culture destroyer. And that experience was a financial success, but it threatened the overall arching success of Pixar because they just optimized for the wrong thing. Instead of pushing the release date out by a proportional amount, they tried to over-execute. So I think those are the lessons that we’re trying to push for here. It’s not to have a cush “work life balance”, it’s more so just like give… I don’t think anyone here wants cush, they just want to find the right pace and match it to their capabilities so that they can continue to do so. It’s like zone 2 training, you can just do this forever.

Tom Griffin: (55:06)

It’s cliche to say, but it’s worth emphasizing that I think we all believe that we will perform better at our jobs, the bottom line, we will perform better at our jobs if we are not stressed and well slept. And there’s a ton of research on this, even just in the neuroscience and cognitive science space around just what happens to your brain when you’re really stressed out. And there’s a narrowing of focus and a narrowing of attention and it’s really good for certain tasks. Copying copy editing is actually one of them, Haney, so maybe it does make sense for you to be stressed all the time, just kidding. But there are certain tasks where you perform better and you’re more vigilant, but for anything that requires problem solving or creativity, being in a relaxed and non-stressed state allows you to come up with more potential solutions and see a broader landscape of possible solutions. And I think it’s just important for us to keep that in mind.

Tom Griffin: (56:08)

I genuinely feel good and get happy when I see Sam doing something in his personal life or Josh exercising or Casey going on a hike because I’m like, “Great, they’re taking care of themselves.” And I’m so invested in the success of this company that I know our team needs to be at their best. And I’ve absolutely been in the situation where a boss of mine at a previous company was so under-slept and so stressed that at a certain point, I remember he was working on board slides and it was riddled with errors and oversights. And our team talked to each other behind his back and was like, “Someone’s got to step up and get involved and we’re going to take this over from him because he’s just not in a position to be doing this right now.” And it was a terrible feeling. It was like there was no captain, the helm of the ship, and we all want each other to be as healthy as possible because it’s going to give us the best chance of success.

Mike Haney: (57:10)

The other place I think that really makes a difference is not only sort of doing your best work, but one of the other unique things about Levels culture, at least unique from other places I’ve worked is how relentlessly positive this place is, that everybody is very supportive. It’s just a generally optimistic and supportive and positive vibe. And I know at least for me, if I’m feeling stressed or burnt out, that’s really hard for me to live in that space. I am much more likely to respond negatively to feedback or to feel stressed out about an email or request and respond in a way that is not, I feel like in keeping with the Levels culture. I found the way to sort of live in that positive environment, which is awesome. It’s one of my favorite things about working here, because it is just…

Mike Haney: (57:51)

I get off every Friday forum and I say to my wife like, “Wow, that’s an invigorating meeting,” because you just can’t walk away from an experience here without sort of feeling good because everybody’s just happy and supportive and optimistic and cheerful. But if any of us gets burnt out, I think that’s another thing that would start the fall. And I think that’s when politics and back biting and all sorts of the other negative culture stuff that comes up, if you don’t relentlessly feed that positive vibe, that’s what happens when people start getting stressed. So I think in addition to doing creative work, it’s also just creating the good attitude here.

Josh: (58:27)

Yeah. It seems to be like almost an emergent thing where I think if the circumstances are right, people feel positive about how things are going. And just thinking back to my SpaceX days and I know this is the case at Tesla, Elon would go and I think he talked about this in recent interview of some kind. In 2017 or when the Model 3 production line was being spun up and everything, Tesla was on the brink of bankruptcy. He was like, “I had to sleep on the factory floor for weeks because if I didn’t then other people would not like push as hard as I was pushing and everyone needed to push that hard.” And that’s how it’s always been and that’s one way to run a culture, an ecosystem is literally intervene in your body’s physiology with caffeine to the point where you can stay out for 20 hours.

Josh: (59:22)

And then I’ve seen people burn. I’ve seen people have stress-induced immune responses where they developed whole body conditions that are very visible. And it’s something that other people look at as like they’re in the sort of ripple effect of that. They’re like, “I have kids, I can’t have this happen to me. Am I next?” Sort of thing. And as much as I’m proud of things that were achieved over there, the long game is to not operate in that environment and actually to use the positivity of the team and the calibrate off, off that sort of signal whether or not we are overextending ourselves.

Josh: (01:00:04)

It was hard to say that a standup meeting at SpaceX was a positive experience back in those days so, I love that. The one thing that I took away from this as an action item is, create some process around mandatory time off, maybe we can set up a reminder or something to get people to schedule it if it’s not on the calendar. But I think you’re totally right, Haney, we need signals and just in the way that Elon would sleep on the floor to signal to people that’s what they should be doing, I think we need probably the countervailing sort of signal for this culture.