January 1st, 2018
This is the third installment of “Monday Routines,” in which software people like you recount their Monday rituals. The goal is to peer into their day-to-day patterns and habits as they lead teams, collaborate, and deliver great software. Hopefully you’ll discover a tidbit or two to help you with your routine.
Patrick Campbell is the CEO and Co-founder of Price Intelligently, a provider of software and services that helps companies optimize SaaS pricing. We had a chance to sit down with him last fall.
EXERCISE AND MEDITATION I get up around 6 and workout. When I say workout, it’s more like 30 minutes on an elliptical type thing. Then I typically do fifteen minutes of meditation. Depending on the day, sometimes it’s 10 minutes, sometimes 30. It sounds kind of hokey, and I guess now it’s all the rage, but meditation pretty much changed my mental state. It may be placebo, but it centers me.
WHOLE FOODS AND WSJ I have the amazing advantage of living next to a Whole Foods. I should be making this myself but I’ll go and get a coffee and breakfast and read the Wall Street Journal. I would love to say that I read all the tech blogs, and get all my tech news, but when you’re inside the world of tech, sometimes you lose sight of what’s going on outside. There will be a terrorist attack in the Middle East, but it’s not big enough for the story to be plastered everywhere, so you don’t really see it. Or this giant company just purchased this other giant company, and no one’s reading about it because it’s pharmaceuticals or petroleum.
I admit that I don’t read every word, though. It’s more skimming than reading.
MEETING-HEAVY MONDAY, MEETING-FREE WEEK Right now I still do a lot of our business development or sales, and so I try to make sure I’ve no meetings scheduled on Monday mornings. Then I do my one-on-ones with the exec team: our Head of Product, Sales, People Ops, and Product Marketing.
Then we will do a leadership meeting and an all-hands meeting. Every week. I encourage every leadership member of the team to hold all of their one-on-ones and meetings on Monday. Some say that’s counterintuitive, but we’ve found it allows the rest of the week to be as meeting-free as possible. The theory is that all the switching costs happen on Monday.
I’m in meetings from 10:30 AM until 6 PM. Typically I don’t get out for lunch. Today, for example, I haven’t even gone through all of my emails or worked on anything outside of a meeting.
Some might think that’s hell, but now I won’t have any meetings for the rest of the week—unless they’re with customers.
NETFLIX AND BED At 6 PM I’ll start clearing out my email and will be done by around 7, then go get some food. For the past few weeks, however, we’ve had some 9 or 10 PM meetings since we just started working with some Australian companies. That’s put some weird bookends on our days, since we’re working late and really early.
But on a normal Monday I’ll walk home from the office and spend some time with my girlfriend, Jenny. Then I’ll try to work on house stuff, or read, or do some things that aren’t work-related.
And then there’s another golden hour for me between 8-9 or 9-10. I’ll finish email or anything else that I need to do. After that, I’ll wind down for bed, which could include another half hour on the elliptical or a walk. More often than not, it’s a Netflix and go to bed situation.
REBUILDING ROUTINE For me establishing routine has been hard. Because we’re bootstrapped, we just had so much insanity, needing to do everything and all at once. There were to-do items I would have preferred to space out but something had to be done by tomorrow, so I’d stay up till 3 AM. It was “get sleep while you can” for those first few years. It was not sustainable at all.
Each new hire allowed me to stop doing things, but there was still so much to do. Now I’m trying to rebuild routine into my life. Just getting those 10-15 minutes of meditation was the first step. Basic levels of fitness and meditation have helped.
STRONG THROUGH ADVERSITY For 12 weeks in the fall of 2016 I was in radiation treatment for cancer. So that was part of the daily routine for a while: Wake up early, quick workout, eat some food, meditate, go to either Tufts or MGH, get radiation therapy, come to work. Thankfully that’s no longer the case. I’m in remission, essentially, and everything’s great.
Patrick is on Twitter at @patticus and contributes frequently to the excellent Price Intelligently Blog.
