Let Go and Haul: how I plan my weeks (and bonus slide material!)
Week 23, 2018 – Palm Springs, San Francisco, Brooklyn
Hi! I’m back, and I missed you! Even though unplugging for a few days to lounge in a pool in Palm Springs was super necessary, not writing this actually felt kind of weird. This is what I was up to last Sunday:
I’m not gonna lie, I definitely thought twice about including this vacay pic in here but one of the things I set out to do with this email is show myself as the multi-faceted human I am. I’m not into women having to hold back and being only allowed to present their “business side”. The more we see each other as the whole humans we are, the more empathy we have for each other. OK! Back to regular programming:
Journey: where we’re at
On my way back to NYC I did a day of meetings in SF that included on our music strategy (that’s my next big job now that the raise is done) and a computer vision dinner put on by Shasta. Four of the Visioncamp companies from our accelerator cohort were there so it felt like a mini-reunion. It was so cool to reconnect and see how far we’ve all come since mid April. I feel lucky to have such awesome peers from that program.
This week was a transition week for me, shifting my energy from focusing externally to focusing internally. I got to lead our usual Friday retrospective with the team in NYC and it was such an awesome feeling to be with the “pack” again. I’m like a dog that way, I’m lost without my pack, just howling at the moon like a weirdo or walking around with a box stuck on my head.
On Friday night Anton and I were leaving the studio at 8pm after on-boarding all our summer interns and new hires (wheeee) and I checked our bank balance to see seven figures in there for the first time. Fuck yeah!
Journal: what I learned
A personal learning was underscored to me this week – how important it is for me to have reward I’m looking forward to at the end of the week. “What’s my reward” is something I started adding to my weekly personal planning about six months ago, and I love it. Without this section I forget to schedule something for myself because the weeks are so busy. Monday to Friday I just burn. Friday nights I feel like I get off a very fast moving train and if I don’t know where I’m going next it feels like I got off at the wrong stop in the middle of the night in nowheresville – dark, empty, kinda lonely. I’m extremely extroverted, so my rewards are usually social one since that’s where I get my energy from, and that requires scheduling.
This week I neglected my usual planning because I didn’t work on Monday and Tuesday I was in transit and by the time I got back to NYC on Wednesday morning it was go go go and too late to bother. This meant I forgot to schedule my reward but this ended up being a good reminder and learning to write about instead :) Silver linings!
Here’s an example of what my weekly planning notes look like. I do this every Monday at 7am and review it daily in the morning to carve out my three most important things each day to ensure I’m not accidentally just “staying busy” but really working on the three most gnarly things that are going to move the needle. Everything else usually doesn’t get done and that’s okay.
I shared this in a lecture I did at Cornell Tech last fall for a class on Reflection. You can check out the whole thing in GSlides if you’re curious about how I do personal and team reflection to learn and measure progress.
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I haven’t had to do “this week in annoying men” here for a while which is AWESOME. That means the men I’ve been interacting with have been helpful and supportive! This week brought a few offhanded comments that made me 🙄 though.
“You raised a lot more than I though you were going to be able to cobble together. If I’d known this I might have suggested a different strategy” and then “Woah, you’re really thinking big about this aren’t you?”
lolololol. So I exceed your expectations. Of course I did! Don’t you know I have to work 200% harder just to exist here? Some men have low expectations of women. That sucks, and we need to be aware of it because it means we might not get pushed, challenged, or encouraged the way our male peers do. (For example, I can count on one hand the number of men in my life that encouraged me to be a founder). This just means we need to be extra careful to set our own goals, our own expectations of ourselves, cheer ourselves on and put people around us who want to support us. If you’re a dude and you say things like this to women, just don’t. It’s not helpful!
Jams: what I’m into
I caught up with one of my favorite NYC minds Eli yesterday and we ended up talking about Kanye, who I used to really not be into but something changed in the last year – maybe it was him, maybe it was me, maybe it was both of us but I am now very much into the complicated music of Kanye.
Kanye and Cudi make a great team, and KIDS SEE GHOSTS is an album I’m going to have on repeat.
Summer Walker’s a new artist who dropped this track Deep a couple weeks ago and I’m 100% here for it.