The day that should have drained me

Read time: 5 minutes

It was 5:30 pm on a Thursday and I had been at my favorite coffee shop, Simona's, since 10:30 that morning.

Every few hours I'd rotate between the modern second-floor library, with its leather sofas and high-top tables, and the outdoor patio overlooking the pool at the attached hotel.

Seven straight hours, basically talking to people the entire time.

I'd landed back in Austin from Vermont at 12:30 am the night before and hadn't gotten a full night's rest. If you looked at my Garmin watch, the scores would have told you I was drained.

Instead I felt energized.

For most of my life I would have told you that's not how I work. I enjoy time to myself to read, to think, to run the calculations. Then from time to time I enjoy getting together with others to discuss. And in this phase of my entrepreneurial journey, I've designed my whole week around protecting that.

I block out ~2 days a week where I don't have any meetings and I can just write and think and have what I call my inefficiently productive days. I love those days.

Sometimes when my girlfriend Brittany and I talk through my schedule and I see a day stacked with calls, I'll only half joke: "Ugh, I have to actually talk to people today."

The meeting days are just the cost of running a business. Necessary, but usually draining.

And since I was just coming back from a 3 day vacation, that Thursday was supposed to be one of the heavy ones.

–

A couple weeks earlier, my buddy Alex (yes, the same Alex from the Final Four trip) texted me that he was going on a biking trip. Monday through Wednesday, in Vermont, two weeks out. He figured I probably couldn't swing it, but he invited me anyway.

It just so happened I'd had my eye on a newsletter conference in New York that same week, the Friday before. At the same time, Brittany and I had been trying to plan a trip to a national park, but it had just fallen through — between the weddings, the bachelorette parties, and her limited PTO, it wasn't coming together. So with the nature trip off the table and the conference and biking dates lining up, it felt like a big signal to send it.

So I did. I bought the tickets, got ahead on client work, moved my meetings, and took three days off the grid.

I try to get away in nature now and then to reflect on my business and life somewhere different than my day-to-day. It's hard to zoom out when you're deep in the execution.

But this time there was no problem I was trying to solve. I just knew I enjoy my conversations with Alex, I enjoy riding my bike and being in nature, and I enjoy exploring a new place. We spent three days riding through the Vermont countryside. We reminisced on our trip to Indianapolis for the Final Four, discussed work, shared books we'd been reading, and just enjoyed being in this new place.

And the whole reason I could drop into a trip with two weeks' notice and turn my weekend from the typical Saturday-Sunday into a Monday-Wednesday is that I built my life that way on purpose.

A couple years ago I wrote about this and called it building my life by design. The whole point was to stop planning my life around a job and start designing it around the things that actually give me energy, then figure out how the work fits into that picture.

This trip was that idea in action.

—

That packed Thursday at the coffee shop was the day I got back from the biking trip with Alex.

Here is what it actually looked like:

I started the morning meeting Mitchell in person, a friend who's building his own freelance writing and consulting business, for our weekly coworking session. Then a coaching call with Christian, my business coach. A monthly check-in with Lucas, a mentor of mine. My weekly accountability meeting with three other guys in my mastermind group. Two client calls squeezed in between.

I wasn't drained at all afterward. So I asked myself why. I'd just done the exact thing I tell Brittany I dread, which was back-to-back meetings all day.

I sat with it for a few minutes, wondering if it was the common topics, or the location, or whether it just happened to be a good day. But then I thought back to some of the brutal days that drained me. And I realized it wasn't just that I was talking a lot on those days. It was who I was talking to.

On that Thursday at Simona's, I spent the entire day with people who give me energy. 

Mitchell, building the same kind of thing I am.
Lucas, who helped give me perspective on how far I've come over the past two years.
My pod, who pushed back on a story I'd been telling myself and made me feel less alone in it.
Christian, who knows the questions I've been wrestling with and reflects my own energy back to me.

Even the client calls were with people I actually want to be working with.

–

I've been out on my own for 2.5 years now, and that whole time I figured I'd designed my life pretty well. 

I built my week around protecting my alone time, incorporating the productively inefficient days I love, and bracing myself for the call-heavy days. I'd gotten the how dialed in. But didn't focus enough on the who.

Because that Thursday wasn't a fluke. 

It was a preview of what every week could feel like. The only reason a day like that is rare is that I'd designed my week down to the hour while not focusing enough on who I’m surrounding myself with on a consistent basis. Those are people I see once a month, every couple of weeks, maybe once a week. Most days it's just me, with some back and forth with a client over Slack between calls.

Protecting my time was the first version of building my life by design. Choosing who fills it is the next one.

And what I've realized I miss most about my days in consulting is the people. It's the teammates you get to work with and learn from on a daily basis. I miss being in the trenches with people, working on hard problems together, bouncing ideas off each other, and figuring things out (even if it sucked at times).

I've finally been saying this enough that I'm ready to commit to making it happen. My goal for the rest of the year is to find someone or some people who I can build with. I don't know what it will look like and I want to make sure it's the right people, but I know that the right partnership / team will help me go much further and have more fun than I am alone.

If you made it this far and have any ideas on ways we might be able to work together on something (even if it's small), hit reply and let's chat!

Thank you for reading! As always please reply and let me know what resonated, what didn’t, or what you question. I love chatting about this stuff!

Cheers,

Andrew