Failing at Fun-employment?
This post is a personal update on the past two weeks and some speculation on the future.
It’s been an amazing two weeks since I left Jive. My typical day is filled with three to six meetings or events. I’ve been hanging out with tons of interesting makers, entrepreneurs, and investors; nearly every day is brimming with great conversations.
I’ve said it before and I feel it even more now: San Francisco has an incredible density of awesome, brilliant people who are trying to change the world and have funding to do so. It’s probably the single thing I love most about this city.
As amazing as the past two weeks have been, I’m not giving myself enough time to think and tinker. Of the past 14 days, only one has been completely free and my calendar is crammed. At the beginning of the month I envisioned having lots of fun meetings but also exploring my startup ideas, hacking on fun projects, blogging, and building some new habits (e.g. exercise, drawing); I’ve done almost exclusively the former.
The rest of September is going to be just as crazy - I leave Thursday for a wedding in Alabama and then am spending next week in NYC / NJ. Once I get back I aim to be much more careful with my time.
I’ll probably try a few different tactics for making the most of my time:
- Blocking out parts of the day (week) during which I won’t schedule any meetings. I know many execs who do this at work and they value it
- Finding people to cowork with - even if we spend a chunk of time geeking out, I still find it immensely useful to be working next to someone equally engaged
- Clustering meetings geographically - I’m spending way too much time shuttling cross town or down to Palo Alto
- Taking a short trip outside of the city - maybe a week up in Napa or down in Santa Cruz - where I won’t be distracted by the awesome activities in SF
If all goes well, I’ll be blogging a bit more. Some topics I want to cover:
- An overview of Collaborative Production - likely a series of posts on where I want to focus my startup efforts
- Showing off Jam-Sync the app I built with my brother
- More musings on fun-employment