Achieving Work-Life Balance: Insights from CTO Coach Peter Sorgenfrei

Hello everyone, welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth. Today we have Peter Sorgenfrei, who's a coach for CTOs, and he teaches people to find the right balance with work and life. So it's a very interesting topic and very deep topic for me, because currently, you know, I'm part of the hustle. Culture, and Peter has ways to do things better. Welcome, Peter.

Thank you so much for having me, Mike.

Thank you for doing this, Peter. So give us a little bit, maybe, who is Peter?

Well, Peter Sørgenfry is Danish, but I've lived and built companies on 3 different continents. I've built 6 companies in the last 20 years. In New York City for 13 years, London for 3 years. I've been in Paris and Vienna. And now I live in Copenhagen in Denmark. I spent my time coaching founders and CEOs, CTOs, CMOs in becoming better humans, essentially becoming more whole human as they're trying to build their companies.

So you've been across the globe, Peter. Is that the business-driven decisions to be in New York, in Paris, in Vienna, or was that more of I love traveling and I want to combine my business with my passion. So I'm just going to be all around the globe.

So Vienna was a family move. I moved there with my parents. Paris was a move, my first move on my own outside of Denmark to actually speak French and work in Paris. So that was a decision to go work there. London and New York. New York happened first. I essentially wasn't done with my studies and got an opportunity to go work for a car company in New York City for 6 months, like an internship. And that turned into a full-size job, turned into 13 years and a couple of my own companies. And then at some point my wife wanted to move to Denmark and I resisted. So the halfway house became London because it's close enough yet not Denmark. And I built a startup there and then eventually came to Denmark and started building companies here too.

So eventually just gave up. You were like, okay, fine, we'll go to Denmark.

No, when you get to be a parent, where your children grow up and where they go to school and the kind of culture, the kind of environment there is around work-life balance matters more. And I'm sure we're going to get into that in a bit.

I love how you positioned that one, Peter. Would you say then that Denmark as a country has the cultural rooting which has a much better balance, work-life balance?

I would say generally in Scandinavia you have a greater emphasis on actually having a life outside of work. You could argue maybe it's too much, right? So there is a 37-hour workweek here. Most people adhere to it. Clearly, the folks in the startup community spend more hours working on their businesses. But there is free childcare. There's a social system that supports you, free healthcare. So it's a very good place to be if you want to not just work all the time. Really.

I love that. I remember actually having this conversation with my brother. He, he moved to Switzerland. He's a data scientist and he was surprised how people clock out exactly on the time. Because he's coming from Lithuania, which is our home country. So in our world, you have to outwork everybody. So life is work, right? And he sort of brought that to that country, and he was like, that's strange how people just like, it's 5, I'm out, work is done, I'm gonna go do other things now. So it took some time for him to understand that.

And it was a big part of our decision to move from New York, honestly. Um, at the time I was having my own business and, and my wife was working as an executive at a fashion company, um, and we went to the office around 7 in the morning and we would come home at 7 or 8 at night. We had our son and had a full-time nanny, and we kind of looked at each other like, this is not how we want to be parents. So our move away from New York was a move towards having a better family life, because in New York you work all the time.

Yeah, I want to say London is very similar, but I might be doing disfavor to some companies who actually are very much into giving flexibility around the times and allowing people to choose the time when they do work and when they, you know, stay at home and can look after the kids. I feel like remote culture helped that balance to become better or bigger. Do you think in general the remote culture which exists in software engineering actually helps to have a better work-life balance?

That's a tough one, right? Because you could argue that when you can work anytime because you have all the equipment and the setup and everything is digitized, um, you might end up working all the time even though you work out of your house. So remote work reduces the amount of commuting time, let's just say, right? And it reduces potentially the amount of distractions caused by others. But what it increases is the distractions caused by yourself, right? It's easy to, ah, I'm just gonna sit down and have lunch and watch an episode of something on Netflix, and that becomes 2 hours instead of 30 minutes. So, you know, net-net, I think remote is a positive thing, but I still think a lot of companies and individuals struggle with finding the perfect setup.

I love how you positioned it because it's, it's really that. It's, um, you can give people different operational models, remote or hybrid, but how they're actually going to utilize it for their own benefit, that's a, that's a question mark. And a lot of people actually don't know how to actually do remote properly. So as you have mentioned rightfully, they just end up working all the time. They think they have flexible hours they do a little bit work there, they do something, but then it just stretches out and it just becomes like, I don't even have life because you need to have that mindfulness and be in the moment, which is not work. And if it's split in between, you're not really resting, isn't it?

No, it's not. And actually, I've— I don't know if I've coined the term. I'm not going to claim that, but I talk a lot about work-life integration. Which is to, instead of trying to find balance within something which is essentially out of balance because of our devices always being with us, because of most of us being digital workers in some way, knowledge workers, it's about finding that integration so that, for example, somebody like me, I get up super early in the morning. That's always what I've done. I like it. Maybe I actually work for 2 hours before most of the rest of the world gets up. But then maybe in the middle of the day, I spend 2 hours cutting the grass here that I did today and having a nap. So it's about finding out when are you able to perform at your best and then organize your professional and personal life around that, rather than think that the best work you can do is between the hours of 8:30 and 4:30. In the afternoon. That to me in itself, that notion is kind of ridiculous.

Okay, so how do you go about figuring this one out? So let's say I'm an individual and I have the suspicion that I'm much better at, you know, from 5 AM to like 8 AM, or maybe I'm much better from like 12 to 4 in the afternoon. So I do have this feeling that there are my operational hours which are much more fruitful or productive for me, and then some where I just tune out and I can't help myself. How do you actually tactically go about figuring out your, your work hours and how you structure your day for a better productivity and, you know, better work-life balance?

So I think figuring it out is actually not that hard. I mean, most people have a sense of when they have the most energy. So for example, if you go to bed tonight, Mike, and you don't set an alarm for tomorrow, let's say you've had decent sleep this previous week. What time do you naturally wake up?

It would be 6:45 if that was a question, but I feel like—

Yeah. Yep. Continue, please. Okay. So you wake up naturally, right? So then the next thing you do is you notice, okay, what does my body, what does my mind need right now? Is it ready to sit down and write code? Or does it need to be outside for a little bit to do some movement? Do I really need to eat right now? Or actually, is it a habit that we get up, we eat, and then all the sequences of the things? So it's about being aware of what happens and being intentional with the choices that you make. And you can do that throughout a couple of days and kind of note down saying, actually, it's best for me to do my deep thinking work in the early afternoon. That's when I can really think. And it's best for me to do my social interactions maybe in the first part of the day because that's when I have a surplus of social energy. And so mapping that out is not hard. I think what's difficult for a lot of people is actually then doing it because we live in organizations typically unless we're like me who answers to no one. But we do live in places where there are meetings and collaborations and other things happening. And there are certain schedules. And so, the next thing I advise my clients to is to say, "Okay, start letting your calendar reflect your energy levels." So, for example, if you have a lot of energy for other people in the first part of the day, that's when you're going to schedule your one-on-ones. That's when you're going to schedule your big important meetings with other people. And if you have no energy for other humans in in the afternoon and you just want to sit and code and think and be by yourself, you block your calendar to do that. What happens is many people get dictated by somebody else's agenda, somebody else's energy level. But no matter how high or how low you are on the totem pole, you can still govern your time a little bit by putting in these time blocks in your calendar.

So that's what would be a first question, which is very tactical to me. So I'm in a way a middle layer management, right? So I mean, you know, like stuck in the middle, let's say like this. So a lot of my calendar is actually dictated by a schedule which is on frequency. So it's like every week is the same time, it's the same day, and it actually involves a lot more people, right? So it involves a lot more stakeholders which I need to account to. So let's say that time is like the worst time for me. How do I actually go about changing that? Because, you know, that meeting has another like 15 people which are much higher in the paycheck than I do, than I am.

Well, I'll give you a real-world example of exactly that. So a client of mine has a call which is very late in the afternoon, early evening, and it's a 2.5-hour meeting every single week. Here in Europe, because there are people in the United States that are also on this call. And what this person did was simply raise the question saying, there's a number of us on this call, it's late in the afternoon, early evening, is it possible that we move this to an earlier time slot in the day CET, so Central European Time, and therefore earlier in the day EST, so, so the time in whether their counterparties are. And somebody said, sure, why not? But if you don't raise the question, you're not going to change it. The other thing you should do, Mike, even if you're middle management and if you feel like somebody else is dictating your time, is you should actually look at the meetings that you're participating in, all of your meetings, no matter what time they are. And you should ask the question to yourself saying, do I need to be in this meeting? Does this meeting need to happen? I know I've written about this ad nauseam, but, but if I looked at the vast majority of professional human beings' calendars, I bet you I can find 30% time where they don't need to be doing what they have been doing simply by asking the question, do I need to be in this meeting, or could this meeting be an email?

I love that. There was a study somewhere, I think it was Microsoft who, who did it, It was like $1.2 billion a year loss of money in the meetings where people just participate. Well, actually, sorry, not participate. They are present, but they don't participate, which actually leads to, you know, conclusion, should they even be in this meeting? I fully agree it can be cleaned up, and I'm very, very aware of that. Is that maybe my personality to some extent that I want to be in all the meetings and just listen? Maybe, you know, it's like I feel like I'm going to miss details. It's like why in general people want to be in the meetings or why it's like from your experience, if you would be cleaning up my diary, it's like how would you tactically approach what is the criteria of the meetings I could remove from my diary?

There's a couple of questions in there, Mike. So I'm going to try and address them in turn. Some of it is cultural. So in certain cultures, showing up in the meeting means that you contribute, even though if you don't. So that's one thing too that you have to deal with. The other thing is to think about the meetings you've been in. Have you actually been fully present? Have you actually listened? Or did you look at your phone in between or write notes and doodles?

Yeah. Do multitasking, check emails while you're in the meeting or phone.

Did you actively contribute to the dialogue? If you start asking yourself those questions, you'll see that there are a bunch of meetings where you don't. If you're the invitee, so I'm the one hosting the meeting and I invited you, I would go to that person saying, hey, you've invited me to this recurring meeting, I appreciate that. What do you expect that I contribute with in these meetings? What is it? Where can I add value to the meeting? And the person might say, well, we always need your perspective on production schedules. You have the option of saying, you know what, why don't I start sending you a brief, you know, the day before this meeting with what's the status on the production schedule, and then I'll skip the meeting. And then if you need anything, I'm always available on Slack or WhatsApp or whatever. So you can find ways of taking yourself out of the meetings where you're absolutely not required. How do you— Yeah, go ahead.

How do you monitor success of such endeavor? So let's say I would take myself from the meetings, but on the receiving end, someone is losing me within the meeting. Maybe I do feel that I'm not contributing well. Maybe I'm contributing very little and it's infrequent and it's, you know, sometimes I am contributing, sometimes I'm not. Maybe I go, you know what, I will send you a report and an email with the summary but the person goes, uh, I don't want to read your emails. Like, I don't want to be given more information. I just want you to be in the meeting and tell me something when, when there's a situation where you can contribute. So they on the receiving end, they go like, you know what, I'm actually not happy with you not participating in the meeting.

Sometimes you don't have a choice, right? I mean, we all have bosses and boards and things. So if somebody really wants you to sit there and, and listen and take notes and pay attention for the eventuality that you can contribute, fine. You kind of have to. That's one of the contracts of being in an organization. There are certain things you quote unquote have to do even though they're not the most productive. What I'm advocating is having the dialogue with yourself and with the people. It's about being intentional. I talk about intentional leadership a lot. It's about being intentional with your choices. You could also argue, and you asked me about that before and I didn't quite answer it, That fear of missing out. So, if Mike is not in this meeting, Mike is worried that he's going to miss something. I don't know if you've had this experience in the past. But oftentimes, when we're not involved in something, we're actually not missing much. Right? I mean, even if you go, let's say you enjoy soccer and/or football. Soccer, right? Yeah, football. And let's say you're a Tottenham fan and Tottenham's playing Arsenal. And there's this fantastic goal and you weren't at the stadium that day, but everybody talks about this goal and it's like amazing. Is your life going to change? No. It, you know, what, what's going to happen? Nothing's going to happen. This, this fear of missing out is something that we're telling ourselves, uh, especially in a work context, as being an important driver of our participation. But honestly, the only thing you should worry about missing out is time with your loved ones and your friends and your family, because that's what at the end of life matters. We know this from studies too, right? Nobody's on their deathbed saying, oh, I should have been— I wasn't in that meeting where we decided what should go on slide 17 in the PowerPoint, right? I missed these meetings. Yeah. So I just encourage everybody, all the people listening to this, watching this, just look at your diary, look at your calendar and say, do I need to be in all this stuff? And how do I get out some of it? And I guarantee you it'll be easier than you think and you'll be happier for it.

I love the approach as well to slicing your day into an actual workable hours, which is, let's say, 8, and then giving a different monetary value to those hours, meaning that, you know, if it's Monday, You fresh after the weekend, you know that your best hours are from like 9 to 12, you know, maybe you give like £200 per hour rate. Friday afternoons, you know, you're clocking out, your mind is not there. So something from like 2 PM to 6 PM, it's maybe like £50 an hour. So then suddenly your diary becomes this monetary value driven. And to some, it's, to some people, that's an actual you know, good measurement. So then they suddenly, if you get slotted a meeting where potentially you don't even need to be in and that's your expensive hour, you know, that's like your 200 hours, you go like, you know, is that a good investment of my time? It just allows to sort of calculate where your time goes. I use that myself. I mean, it does, it does help.

It's a very effective technique. Another question you could raise is, would this person pay me £200, $200 to be in this meeting.

Yep.

It's all they wouldn't unless you're, unless you're their psychotherapist or their lawyer, right?

Exactly.

Um, so there, there was somebody, I don't know if you saw this, there was somebody some years ago who built a plugin to, um, to Google's Calendar that calculated the cost of the meeting based on who was invited for that meeting.

That's such a good plugin.

No, I mean, I mean, it was, it was, I think it was a mug up, right? But, but basically the idea is Peter, Mike, Susan, Jane, and Bob are having a meeting for 30 minutes. You know, you're a senior vice president, I'm, you know, some, some manager, and the others have different titles. That would have different values, and we would actually see in our calendar this hour essentially costs the firm $3,500. Should we do that? Should we have this meeting or should we just do it as an email? Right? That's another way of illustrating it.

Oh, that— but that's such a powerful plugin, isn't it? Because in theory you could plug this in with something like a Workday HR tool, which actually has the salary. So you can literally extract an hourly rate of people within the meeting and just have like a side note, like, this meeting is that much. Thousands. And you could build some OKRs around this, like none of the meetings should cost more like £600. People would get forced to think about who's in and why.

And Jeff Bezos, right, is famous for his pizza rule, max 3 people in a meeting. I think Elon Musk does a similar thing, which is not entirely true because, you know, I know he's in meetings where there are more people than 3. So, but, but again, do— does everybody who's— it's the same thing with BCC. I don't know if we're going down a tangent here, if this is what you want to talk about, right? But the email culture of BCCing everybody and their cousin is just robbing us of attention. So, and it starts with the sender, kind of like communications. It's my responsibility that you understand what I'm saying, not your responsibility to interpret, right? So if I'm sending an email Do I need to CC Mike, Susan, Bob, and Jane on this? Or is it okay if it's just me sending an email to Susan and Mike is on CC? And what does CC actually mean? Does he have to do something? Does he have to respond? You know, how does he— people are not very good at handling those kind of things in companies, and it's robbing us for time and attention that's super valuable.

It's almost like there should be like internal time— I want to say time management, but it's not a time management. It's like how to not waste time with emails and meetings. Like, you know, here's the best practices, and company culturally teaches everybody to just be better with that. I never worked for any enterprise or, you know, startup or a scale-up who actually have a proactive approach to making sure that people don't waste time in these domains. Yeah, you pointed out, right, Filipita, we are drifting a little bit. So let's go back to that work-life and hustle culture. So this one is esoteric, you know, as a question. Why do you think we even have a hustle culture so, so with such a strong grip in some of the countries across the globe?

Well, in the startup community, I honestly think it started with the startup bros in California, right? It is a very masculine, very sort of Type A personality culture, and has always been that, right? It was the internet cowboys. It was, you know, the explorers in a way that were tougher than the rest. And out of that came just like a win at all cost kind of thing, or work ourselves to the bone to be as successful as we could, as fast as we could. And that then permeated as, as those people became successful entrepreneurs, sold companies to, to industrials, corporates, then they became VCs, then they kind of permeated that. And it's, it's kind of a wave that came from, from over there that is rolled out through the industry. Um, there's nothing wrong with wanting to win. There's nothing wrong with wanting to succeed. Uh, it's healthy. That's how we've evolved as a species, because we wanted to do better. But there's something wrong with it when it's killing us, right? It's, it's, it's detrimental to the mental and physical health of generations to think that being a professional means sacrificing your mind and body to be successful. And that's why I opine against it.

And I think eventually it leads to the burnout. It actually makes you even less productive. Like, if you constantly, you know, overworking yourself, you will reach a point where physically your body will go like, nope. And you're gonna sleep poorly. You'll have concentration issues, and that will just go to be, you know, being less productive. You'll feel like you're doing 8 hours or 12 hours a day, but that's not gonna— the results will just not compare as you being fresh and ready to go for 4 hours and having like a deep work session for half a day. I personally experienced that myself. I read a book called The 5 AM Club. And I took it like a Bible. And in about like 9 months, I developed like a heart condition, which was like heart palpitations. And I ended up in hospital and they did the test and, you know, they were like, we can't find anything. And the doctor talked with me and he's like, like, you just overworked. Like, you just have to take a holiday, just sleep off, do nothing for 6 weeks. And I did. And it, you know, came back, the willingness, the, you know, being able to do more. So 100%, 100%.

And I, um, so I, I agree with you there. I have Robin's book, Robin Sharma, who wrote 5 AM Club. I have it somewhere here. Um, and, and, you know, there are some ideas in the book that actually are helpful, um, in terms of driving performance and driving sort of progress in the things that you want to do. Um, Cal Newport, which is also somewhere over there on the shelf, uh, wrote Deep Work, right? Which is the other idea that you talk about. And again, a lot of the stuff that I work on with my clients is not rocket science. And you know it too. Are you going to be as creative, as innovative, as clear-sighted at 5 o'clock in the evening when you've been working since 8 o'clock in the morning in front of a screen in poorly lit, poorly ventilated environments with a lunch that consisted of something that was deep fried? The answer is no.

It's simple as that. Yeah, it's a hard no.

It's a hard no. So, so back to our— where we started our conversation around energy, you know, I'd pay Mike twice his rate an hour if I got his best hours every single day. And you, you may know it from yourself. I mean, I know it from myself that I can get more done than most people in the first 3 or 4 hours of the day that they get done the entire day. Why? Because I'm in control. I decide this is when I'm gonna put the pedal to the metal. But I also know it's kind of like a gazelle, or Messi the football player. You kind of move around slowly on the savanna or the football field, and when you're needed, when you need to perform, that's when you exert the energy. That's when you put on the speed and agility. And that's when you run up and score. In the Messi case, if you look at him playing soccer, he actually walks around the midfield a lot, and then all of a sudden he moves really quickly and he's exactly where he needs to be. And I think entrepreneurship is the same thing. It is actually not a marathon. It's a series of well-timed, carefully measured out sprints. Okay. And that's, I think, is a helpful way to think about it.

I agree. I didn't, but now I do. Before, I actually burned myself out by chasing, uh, uh, one of the ventures. I, I was different opinion. I was definitely of an opinion that you have to outwork others, uh, to get to the point of success. And that, that would be my, um, follow-up question is Do we, like, do we have to outwork others, or, or just being sustainable is actually a lot more valuable? Because effectively what you're doing is you're preparing yourself for this, you know, huge marathon which will be your business, which might take you into years, right?

No, I— so everything is, is a little bit balanced. I don't think you can be successful creating innovative high-growth companies by not putting in a fair amount of hours. It does take more than going to work at the supermarket stocking the vegetable section, right? I mean, and no offense to the people who do that, but it's, it's a known process, it's a known environment, it's known schedule, everything is known. Building fast-moving companies in innovative industries everything is unknown. Regulation, technology, consumer demand, the employees you need to do— everything is unknown. There's always something that you don't know, and because of that, you need to apply yourself more than in other areas where things are known. It's just how the mental arithmetic will work out. Um, so you need to work at it, uh, but you can only sustain it if you find a way to also integrate other aspects of your life. And so whether it's figuring out how you use your energy, that's one thing, as we've talked about. The other thing is making sure you spend time with your loved ones and your friends, making sure you eat right, sleep right, get some exercise. If you do those 4 things, you can work 10 hours a day. That's fine. As long as you also get to do the other things and get your rest. The problem then arises that there's only 24 hours in the day, and typically people don't get the sleep that they need, and then everything else slides from there.

And effectively, if you are a founder, uh, the whole business is in your hands. And if you burn yourself out, or you're just not sustainable, or how you manage your energy, that will just go nowhere, right? So, so your success is in your hands. Which leads me to a question. Let's say you are doing well, you are founder, you have a venture, it's doing well, it's growing, maybe you raised money, maybe it's organically. How do you go about actually from the get-go putting that mindset or that culture in your business for all employees to seek that life and work integration?

It's a tough one. Right, because most people who start companies don't know what we know. I'm putting you and me in the same bucket, even though I'm probably somewhat older than you, but my experience has taught me that you need to do these things. When you start, you don't know that. So how do you do it? By listening to something like this, listening to our ideas today, by reading books about the topic, maybe working with an experienced founder, coach, CEO, somebody like me who can, who can help you make those choices and encourage you to do that. But it's difficult. I think it starts with reserving time for yourself. Honestly, that's maybe the first thing. So make sure that you have time to think and reflect that is only yours, not with your family, not with your team, but just you, because those are the moments where you can reflect upon how things are going and make adjustments. What happens to most startup founders is they get going, they're like the frog in the pot and the water is starting to boil, and before they know it, they're toast. You can only avoid that if having space for yourself that is unscheduled. So a couple of hours every week where it's just you and yourself, uh, to look back. So I would do that as number one. Number two, I would delegate as much as I possibly could, as fast as I possibly could. The number one thing that breaks the back of founders is they think they can do everything and they should do everything because nobody can do it as well as they can. That's just not true. So investing in the resources so that there's somebody to take off, you know, your mental and physical load is really important. This is a little bit controversial, and certainly in the VC circles I argue all the time that the first hire essentially should be an assistant because that person can free up a tremendous amount of mental and physical time for the founder, which makes the likelihood of the startup becoming successful much greater since the founder doesn't end up breaking their neck. I've seen it on my own body. I, you know, I've built 6 companies and my first hire has more or less always been somebody who could take over stuff that I was supposed to do, but it was more important that somebody else did it.

Um, I love that.

That's a very good shout.

I have a similar saying where I go, not, not how, but who. Anytime, you know, I have a bigger challenge, I try to gravitate towards that saying, not how, but who. Because if you start thinking about how, you're effectively doing that. You know, if you're coming up with solutions, you know, you're doing that. If you start thinking about who could do that for me, then you're thinking delegation and hire.

I'm going to challenge that one, Mike. I'd start with why should we be doing this?

Yeah, of course. That's a better one.

Because again, tip back to the whole meeting thing, right? A client says, oh, we want you to build this product feature. What most companies do is like they jump and they start doing. A clever company says, well, why does this actually fit our plans? Does this fit what we want to do? What are the impact on our resources? You know, okay, we'll decide to do it. And then you get to the who, who should actually do it, and what does that mean for other things, right? So being more planful, again, back to being intentional Being more planful about the choices you make and the resources you expend. Again, you can show me your calendar. I'd be happy to look at it. But you can also show me your to-do list. And I recently had a client, a female CEO of a construction company. When we started working together, she had 83 items on her to-do list, all more or less marked urgent. I got a PDF of that and I just took a red pen. I said, you don't need to be doing this, this, this, this, and this. She didn't agree with all of them, but we cut it down to 27. So 56 tasks on her list disappeared from one day to another. And guess what? Nothing broke, nothing fell apart, but her mental space was much more clear. She actually could prioritize those 20-odd numbers and say, okay, these are the 3 I'm going to be doing today, and these 3 I'm going to be doing tomorrow, right? We make lists, we fill our calendar, we, you know, do all the tasks ourselves when the job is actually to try and avoid doing anything, which sounds super counterintuitive. But essentially, as a founder, you should be spending your time making sure that you meet the vision, making sure that you can build what you need to build. You shouldn't be doing the building.

So when it comes to that, you do listen to that example, Peter. So did she end up delegating these 56 items which disappeared, or is it more like, let's just not do it and see what happens?

So I have a good friend, Henrik, who is a time management expert. And, you know, there are all sorts of models like delegating, disregard. This, then the other. I forget. There's like 4 Ds or something that he uses. In her case, it was not actually delegation. It was just something that was on the list that when pressed upon it saying, is it something that the company needs to do? Yes or no? And sometimes the answer was yes, at some point. I'm like, okay, great. We're going to toss that one out. And if it's important enough, it's going to come back into your mind. You don't have to worry about it. If it's something that the company— so it's kind of like the Eisenhower Matrix. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, right? But is it urgent and important? So on. Is it something that the company needs to do right now? Yes, absolutely, she would say. And I'd say, okay, why? Well, because if we don't do this, then that's— then you're like, okay, let's buy that argument. And then we get to the who should do it. Actually, it's not you, CEO. It's your head of production who should be doing that. So we're going to talk to that person and say, this needs to be done by this point for these reasons. One of the more important things you can also do as a CEO is to show your organization that you know how to prioritize. There's nothing worse for a team if the CEO is overwhelmed with a bunch of different tasks that everybody kind of knows are not super important, but because the CEO says they are, they become it. Um, So you want to have a captain of the ship who has a steady hand on the rudder and says, we're going in that direction, which means we need to do these 4 things or 3 things, and that's where we're sailing towards. If you do that, then the rest of the team will follow and learn.

I love that. It does have this top-down notion. So if I'm a CEO, of course I make choices and I go, here's a focus, here's items. So I stop down, everybody will get realigned towards those items. But what if you in the middle, like, like you're not gonna affect bottom-up processes because, you know, it's your processes? Would that still work in such a way where you can just like cross items out, or would that be like a potentially different approach?

Uh, slightly different. You can't make unilateral decisions in the same way, um, and certainly many organizations are not necessarily evolved or mature enough to let you do that. But you can do the same thing as we talked about before on time management. You can look at all the things that are on your list. You can talk to whomever is your manager and say, Mike, I have all these things on my to-do list. Honestly, I don't know how to prioritize them, or I want to prioritize them in this way. Does that work for the contingencies across the organization or for what you expect of me? And then Mike says, yeah, that works. I can agree to these priorities. You could also say to Mike, say, we have this thing on my— this thing is on my list, but honestly, do we really need that this quarter, or is it something that we want to do at the end of the year? And then Mike might go, yeah, we do it in the end of the year. Boom, off the list. Um, so it's about having conversations, right? It's about acknowledging and not just doing something without knowing why you're doing it.

It does, it does feel like a, a proper alignment sessions where you just come in a room and you go like, here's what I have, you know, is this important? It's just sort of aligned with whatever that stream is, if you're in the middle or if it's top-down. But yeah, I totally get it. I mean, it's, uh, it's probably overlooked.

And then yeah, but I actually, I actually think tech teams are pretty good at this. The tech teams that I work with are pretty good at prioritizing what service or feature to build next, uh, in what order. You know, tech teams are typically pretty good at this because they're working with dependencies and interconnectedness all the time, so they have an understanding of, of what implication it has if we do this thing before that thing before this thing, right? The trouble arises in other areas of the business, be it finance or marketing or sales or business development, whatever it is, operations, those areas tend to have more a sense of, I have a bunch of to-dos and I actually don't know which one are more important than the others. And unfortunately, the relationship between managers and the people that they manage are not necessarily such that the manager can actually help prioritize, because unfortunately a lot of managers will say Oh, well, I trust you. You just figure it out. And then you have an employee who doesn't know how to figure it out, and then they get overwhelmed because they haven't gotten the support that they needed from their manager. So if you're the middle layer and you're listening to this, the most important thing you can do for the people working for you is help set clear direction and clear expectations.

Yep. Fully agree. It comes back to this proactiveness and reactiveness elements. Like if you, If you don't take a knee and think about your to-do list and reshuffle it towards the focus, and you're reacting all the time, you're just putting fires because what you're going to be working on in the given day will be whatever is at the top of the list, which is likely given to you like in the last half an hour by someone. And you're just trying to knock these out without much thinking about the whys and being strategic about why you're doing this and when you're doing this, you're always going to be in that hamster wheel. At some point you need to take a knee and just go like, is this a good process for me?

Yeah, exactly. So I also talk about, you know, responding versus reacting, right? Or reflecting versus reacting. You can use both. If somebody asks you to do something, before you say yes or no, just have a moment saying, Do I understand why this needs to be done? And if you do, then you can respond. Because the outcome also becomes better, right? If you asked me to do something and I don't understand why we're doing it, chances are I won't be able to deliver such a good result back to you as I otherwise could. So it's actually in the service of whomever is asking me, my manager, and it's in the service of the company just to have a moment of saying, Why are we doing this? Okay, great. Now I know. Now I can do my best job.

I love that. It's so simple. Like, it is simple. It's such a simple concept. But when you, when you talk with people and when you see how people do it, like, it just doesn't happen like that. People just say, yeah, okay, I'll take it. Maybe it comes from, I don't know, willingness to serve or just because the manager above you told you, so you just take it. But it's very rare I myself, when I delegate tasks, I get that question asked back to me, like, why, why should I be doing this? Should I be in this meeting which you added? I'm just trying to think now, you know, from a management perspective, people don't come out and ask these questions or, or provide similar feedback.

So it's—

but it's so simple, right?

And, and a big part of that is cultural. Uh, you know, I think originally you're from Lithuania, right? There's, there's a certain way of doing things there. Um, certainly I've lived in the United States, there's a certain way of doing things there. And maybe it's my Nordic Scandinavian approach to management, right? I mean, one of the things that surprised me— I built a company in Denmark before I did this thing. I had 70 employees in 5 different countries, but they were all Danish. Uh, most of them were Danish. They asked me questions all the time about why we're doing stuff, right? And that was a little bit surprising because my previous company in London, they didn't. So even though I encouraged it, they wouldn't do it in London, whereas in Copenhagen, I was constantly challenged on where we were going and how we're doing it. And as a manager, you have to be calm and confident enough to say, this is because people are generally interested in creating the best output outcome they can, not because they're challenging my authority or challenging my ideas. And that requires a manager who rests within him or herself and can deal with it. And honestly, that's something you have to learn. It's not something that comes naturally to most.

Yeah, I do agree, because at least in London, when you're asking a lot of questions, the perception which might be biased to some extent, but is that you questioning the authority or are you questioning the decision which has been made? And the more you ask, the more you're probably rubbing wrongly with some people and you get— you can feel the conflict, you know, arising in conversations like that. I want to take us back a little bit. You mentioned that, that me time, right? So, so if you pushing hard, you know, maybe you starting your, your, your venture And we established that there has to be more hours. They need to be strategically placed, but you likely will need to, you know, do more, but you still need to have that time for yourself. So how do you yourself do it and maybe advice of how those hours should look like? You know, what is me time?

So the way I do it is, as I mentioned earlier, I get up early in the morning. So I wake up naturally around 4:30, 5:00, 5:30 in the morning. So me time is typically between that hour and the family getting up or being woken up to go to school, which leaves me some days with 2, 2.5 hours. What I do is I go— I live near the ocean, so I actually go and jump in the ocean every day. 365. It's something that I've done for the last 5 years. It gives me tremendous joy and clarity, and then I spend some time in nature doing that. So that's the first thing I do. I then meditate. I know it's kind of a joke now that you have to meditate and take ice bath to be successful. That's not what I'm saying, but it— for me, it's helpful to get calmness and clarity of mind. And then I typically work for an hour. I sit and I write stuff. I post an awful lot on LinkedIn, do a bunch of videos and stuff. So I do that for an hour or so because I like doing that. That gives me energy. So that's me time. And then the other thing I do, and I have a very fortunate situation, is that most days I have lunch around 11, 11:30, and then I have a nap. Of half an hour, which is also me time. It's also something I use to recharge. So those are the things I do. I think for, for everybody listening to this, you have to figure out doing something that does not involve a screen. You know, me time is not watching Netflix or Instagram Reels or things like that. Me time is something that does not involve a screen because your brain should have an opportunity to kind of just wander and, and, or just be with you, right? Be calm, be quiet. Um, so without a screen, being outside is super helpful for most, um, because we are, we are animals. We actually do like to be outside. So going to a park or a forest or anywhere outside really is always a good idea for me time. Some people enjoy movement, so sports, bike rides, running, that could be me-time. Other people would rather read a book or garden or something else. But it's about doing something that you really enjoy and that gives you energy. So try and find the spaces in the day where you can do that.

It's positive charge, isn't it? Nap for 30 minutes. How do you nap for 30 minutes, Peter?

So I have a very fixed routine. In my couch, on my couch in my living room, I lie down, I put on a blanket. I've just had lunch, mind you. So typically when we have lunch, all our energy goes to our belly. So I'm naturally almost sedated at that point. I put on the same playlist, which is called Peaceful Meditation. It's on Spotify. And then I ask my Google Home system, and I'm not going to do it now because then it's going to do it, to set an alarm in 25 minutes. Do you— and then I lie there on my back, and most days at some point I drift off, and then I wake up when the alarm rings, and then I get up immediately because if I stay down, I become groggy, right? So it's that magic sleep 15 to 20 minutes of sleep. Not much more than that, because then it kind of stays with you for the rest of the afternoon.

Do you actually reach a resting eye movement phase where you, you know, the REM, where you actually go to sleep, or is it more of like just relaxing and— but you're still present effectively? You're not sleeping?

No, I am sleeping.

You are sleeping.

I'm gone. Yeah, um, and the funny thing is I have, you know, I have a Whoop band on, right? And I have the Oura Ring right now, it's charging. And so I measure everything, um, but my resting heart rate is so low that just sitting here talking to you, sometimes the devices think that I'm sleeping. So my data is not, uh, not perfect. I think what you— and you shouldn't worry too much about the data, honestly. I think what you should try and do is try and give yourself that space. Try it for a week, see what happens.

I mean, I never did naps, but I heard very good things about, you know, half an hour naps and just putting them in your life as how much more you can do after nap for the rest of the day. I just go for a walk, you know, I just go in the local, it's not a forest, but it's as close as you can get, you know, here in UK to the forest and just wander around for like 20 to half an hour. It does recharge you quite well.

But I think, you know, as adults, you know, I just wrote a newsletter about naps the other day and people were responding that as kids we resisted naps, as adults we cherish them. Right. But still, for many adults, it's, it's, they difficult. Also, if you work in an office environment, where are you going to go and nap in the middle of the day? So many of my clients who don't have that opportunity, I actually just suggest that they go for a walk. I said, go outside for a walk 30 minutes every day after lunch. And it's not to go get lunch. It's after you've had your lunch, go outside and go for a walk. And then, of course, you can hear the opposition saying, well, I don't have time to go for half an hour after lunch. I'm busy. I'm like, well, Let's go back to square one. What are you actually doing? Should you be doing all those things? Right. And then we have that conversation. Okay.

So I got one which is personal to me. So when I came to UK and, you know, went to enter the labor markets and started working for companies, I really felt bad to give myself time. I felt like I just need to work all the time. I think it's cultural. But how does one approach that, you know, mental mindset of actually feeling bad to give yourself time, especially in like a, you know, remote setting? Like, you know, it's 12, maybe my diary is freer and I think it's a good idea to go for a walk, but I'm feeling guilty because it's not my lunchtime.

That's a good— that's a great question. And I, and I know many people in that situation. I think it starts with asking yourself another question, which is, am I delivering the things that are expected of me and then some? Can my team members, colleagues, can they count on me? Am I meeting my deadlines? Is my output of a standard or a level that I want it to be or better? If the answer is yes to those questions, whether you did that in 15 hours or in 50 hours, actually matters a lot less. Are you delivering what's expected of you or above? And are you feeling good about what you've delivered? If you don't, then we need to address that. Then we need to talk about what is it? Why is it? Why are you not feeling good about what you're delivering, Mike? And then it could be misaligned expectations. It could be not having the tools to deliver the job. It could be having too many things to do. All these issues. So in my Am I, am I okay with what I'm doing? Am I okay with what I'm delivering? Is, you know, my bosses, my colleagues, are they happy with my performance? The answer is yes. Why shouldn't you be able to nap for 30 minutes in the middle of the day? Mhm.

That's what I'm thinking. Maybe the, the guiltiness comes from the fact that somewhere subconsciously you're thinking that you not delivering enough, and that might be, uh, not true. You might be delivering more than you actually need, but culturally speaking, because you think you need to outwork everybody. That's what you're thinking. So just having a conversation with your direct line manager and going like, you know, what's the feedback? You know, am I doing the right things? Am I doing these well? And if the positive feedback is there, that means all is well, you know, go, go for that walk. Which leads me to follow up. So let's say I'm in a quite dependent and important position like a CTO or maybe I'm, you know, CXO in general. So I'm constantly being asked things, right? Like, it's just nonstop. Like, you know, people depending on me, they constantly sending me emails and then pinging on Slack or whatnot. And I really want to tune out, but I feel like if I tune out and give myself that me time, things will break or things will stop progressing. It's very similar, you know, like feeling guilty, feeling that without you things will not progress. Is the solution similar?

I think the solution is somewhat similar, but to that CTO, I would help them start asking people, asking stuff of them, saying, Mike, do I need to have an opinion about this? Okay. That simple question to the person asking you. I did that a lot in my last company. Somebody would come to me and say, hey, what do you think of XYZ? And I would say, do I need to have an opinion about this? And in most cases, people would say, no, actually you don't, but I just wanted to check to be sure. And then I'd say, you know what? I trust you. I hired you because you're good at what you do. Just make the decision that you think is best. You don't need my approval on everything. All right. So you have to teach your direct reports and the people coming to you. If you do that, those things will go down. And of course, somebody's going to do something that they shouldn't have done and that you may have avoided, right? But in most cases, those decisions are not fatal. In most cases, those decisions are just not the best decisions, but you'll survive. And then you can use them as teaching moments. That's infinitely better than you being involved in every single minutia as a CTO.

I love that. Um, so we'll change the gears, Peter. We have this question, um, which is in the spirit of a show, which goes like this: in your opinion and in your view, what is one most important thing for any tech venture growth?

Sell every day.

Selling.

Sales saves everything. It's not about creating that killer feature that somebody might want and that's going to turn the ship around. It's, it's not about, you know, getting those hires in that are key. It's about selling. So the number one piece of advice that I give anybody is make sure that 5 new people know that you exist and what you do every single day, 7 days a week. You can do that by being public. Build in public is a new thing, right? Everybody's doing it. That's great. More people know. You can do it on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, you name it, whatever your platform is. But make sure that 5 new people exist and know that you exist and know what you do every single day. Um, is it marketing? Sorry, is it marketing?

How do you make people know about yourself?

So, you know, the way I did it is I just started sharing my ideas in a public space, which was LinkedIn. And now, you know, 45,000 people follow me and, and 20-odd thousand people subscribe to my newsletters. And like, you know, thousands of people see my stuff every single day, new people. Um, so is that marketing? Yes. Is it branding? Maybe. Is it sales? Indirectly. Um, it's more about this idea that without having somebody eventually buying whatever you're selling, you don't have a business, no matter how fine-tuned and delicious it is. My favorite story about this, if you will indulge me, is I work for Mercedes-Benz, and they told me the story about the C-Class, which at the time was the smallest Mercedes. Now they have all sorts of things, but like a little sedan. They wanted to introduce it to the United States market. This was the best engineered car, mind you, right? German engineering, Perfect car. Everything was perfect on this thing. They brought it to the United States. Nobody bought it. The German engineers were like, why aren't— why isn't everybody buying this car? It's the perfect car. We've this perfect specimen of an automobile. And an American car sales guy goes, because it doesn't have a cup holder. So they installed literally a, you know, $5— at the time, this is many years ago, right, in the '60s— a $5 cup holder plastic into one of those air vents that you have, ventilation vents in the car. All of a sudden, the car sold. So you can have the best product, but if you haven't exposed it to the market, if you haven't exposed it to customers and actually modified it in a way that they will buy it, you don't have a business. And the only way you do that is by people knowing you exist. Same thing for careers. I don't know if any of the people listening to this are thinking about what they're going to do next, but the way that you get a job is by people knowing who you are and what you do. And it's not by sending your resume to a job application. It's about being public about the things that you're good at and why people should consider working with you.

It's a very good story.

Yeah, I love it. I mean, it's so— but you can think about it in many cases, right? You know, you've worked with a lot of technical teams and a lot of times they worry about, you know, a checkout flow being perfect or, you know, what's the color of the button? Hmm. That matters if you're Amazon and can run millions of experiments a minute, whether you move it a pixel to the left and the right and whether that causes more sales, that matters. And that's what they're doing at Amazon, right? That's why their website is the way it is because it sells. It sells stuff more than if it looked differently. But if you're starting out, the only thing you need to do is you need to put something in front of people and figure out what works and what doesn't, and then iterate on that. You shouldn't be hiding from— I mean, everybody should be building in public, in my opinion. The whole idea of having a stealth startup, to me as well, is ludicrous. I'm going off on a tangent again.

No, but that's a strong opinion, Peter. And I, as a person who as well, you know, tried to build many of them which failed, as a person who sold couple of them, that's a— that's, that's what happens. Like, like if you're gonna build in your garage for like half a year without even showing anybody, you have no idea if people will buy. If no one's buying, it doesn't matter what you have built, you have no business.

No, you know, the way I started the current business I have is I wrote a bunch of people about the idea of a very intimate, personal CEO and founder coach. I wasn't pitching them. I had nothing to sell. I just talked about the idea. And a bunch of them got back to me and said, that sounds amazing. Where do I buy it? How much is it? And how do we get going? And so, you know, you could hide something that is highly proprietary, like a drug formula, for example, or new way of doing aluminum, or aluminum as you would say in the UK, right? But anything else, if you're building another webshop or if you're building another app or something, start getting it out there because you're going to spend a lot of time and a lot of money not knowing whether what you have will ever fly. Yep.

I can't remember exactly who wrote the book, um, uh, Business in 48 Hours or something like that, but it literally was about that.

This is in a weekend.

Oh, here you go.

Yep, yep, yeah, that's the one. That's also on the shelf here. It's called The Million Dollar Weekend.

Yeah, it's Noah, Noah something, right? Yeah, here you go. Yeah, yeah, that's the one. Yeah, it has the same concept. It's like you got an idea, in like 2 days you can package it in such a way that you can ask people, is this something you would pay for? And then you get someone to actually pay at least couple of people, and then you have— yeah, you know you have something, then you go build it, right?

Yeah.

And I feel like a lot of founders just— yeah, they go upside down. They think they need to create something perfect, otherwise, you know, people will not buy. And they spend so much time and energy and money as well, and then at the end of the day, they try to sell it and people go like, nah, that's not what we needed, or that's not what we wanted. All right, so, um, we just had a— at the end, Peter, Very last question. If I'm listening right now and I'm going like, everything you guys saying is awesome, and I want to see more of that life and work integration, what are a couple things I can do today? So I'm, I finished listening this, what can I go and do in the next couple of days to get my journey started?

Well, you can, you can find all the stuff that I've published on the topic. Um, Google my name and find me on LinkedIn, YouTube, and other places. That's a start, 'cause I've talked about this in a variety of ways and giving tips. But more tactically and less about me, honestly, is review your time. Look at your calendar, look at how you're spending your time. Ask yourself the question, is this how I wanna be spending my time? If the answer is no, figure out what you can change fast. That's number one. Number two is to ensure that you get me time every single day. Because in me time you end up seeing other avenues and doing other things. So I would start doing that every single day. And then number 3 is I would seriously consider speaking to a professional that can help you kind of get clear on what it is that you want to do. You know, we go to the dentist, we— some of us go to the gym and maybe have a trainer. We have professionals helping us in so many areas of our lives. But in our careers, it's very rare that we actually engage with a professional to help us out unless we're looking for a job coach or we're so experienced and senior that we can afford having a professional coach alongside. That whole middle layer, the beginning tier, talk to somebody who's ahead of you. Ask them how they did it. Or find somebody like me and spend an hour with me and I will help you get on the right track.

Thank you, Peter. And anyone listening, check the show notes. If it's on podcast, it will be in the show notes. If it's on YouTube you're watching, it will be in the show notes how to get in touch with Peter. And I think the last point you mentioned, Peter, is where, you know, people have potentially that struggle of like, do I want to, you know, pay someone to tell me things? But the example about the dentist or an example of, you know, going to like GP or any doctor with any condition It's a very good example. I personally was a person who was unwilling to pay for coaches and mentors until I slowly started doing it. And now I got a mentor and a coach for many things in life, and the acceleration and the value exchange is just not comparable. You can read, you know, 10 books in a couple of months. You'll get that in a couple of sessions, and the coach will point you directly where you need to be going. So it's just the efficiency of the knowledge transfer with the coach and mentor is on another level. So my advice would be as well, don't hesitate, do it. Thank you, Peter, for being in the show. Hopefully that was useful to you or enjoyable because it was useful to us. So thanks for attending.

Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun. Thank you. Cheers, Peter.