Balance Hacks

You have two young beautiful children and a very busy career. What do you do to make sure you have balance in your life, that it's not all work all the time?

Yeah, I've learned a few hacks along the way. I mean, I certainly haven't succeeded all the time in feeling like my life is balanced. I kind of subscribe to the adage that you can have it all, but you can't have it all at the same time. And so for me, it's been thinking about the different seasons in my life, thinking about the different weeks, days, months, years and finding balance across a longer season. And so one of the very tactical things that I've done for years that has really helped me, is just in managing my own calendar, in managing my own time, I have everything color coded.

It sounds very silly and very simple, but let me tell you, it has really saved me in keeping me sane and keeping me feel like I have balance, because I can look at a specific week and say you know, green is internal meetings, and yellow is investor meetings, and purple is entrepreneur meetings and maybe like gray is travel time. If I can look at a specific week and say like, wow, I'm spending all of this time in the office, or I'm spending all of this time with entrepreneurs, or I'm spending all of this time on the road traveling. Then I can kind of feel like maybe next week I need to kind of find a better balance. And so that's been a way for me to say, I'm not so hard on myself on a given day, or a given week, but really over the course of a given month. I try to find a balance across a lot of different things.

And so how do you encourage your employees to maintain the balance? Are they all color-coding too?

I hope so. It works for me. You know, at TaskRabbit I think we're a very familial culture. And we had a lot of young famlies that were part of the team. And so, I think because I had a young family at the time too, I mean people follow your example. And so I was out of the office at 5:30 everyday, and home, so I could spend 90 minutes with my kids before they went to sleep, right? And maybe I'd come in a little bit later in the morning, particularly when I had a newborn at home and wanted to get a couple feedings in before I go into the office. And so I think those things did matter.

You know, now at Fuel it's more about our portfolio of entrepreneurs, and really empowering them and encouraging them to live a healthy lifestyle, to really take care of themselves. That's actually one of our big pillars at fuel that Chris and I have really invested in. It's about not just investing the dollars into a company, but really investing in a founder's health and wellness as well, because that's what makes them sustainable, and that's what makes the company sustainable as well.