Rest and recovery

At Lookback, we are currently in two months of “pre-slowdown”, and we are going into one month of “slowdown” for July. On top of this, we encourage every employee to take at least 40 days paid time off (PTO) in a year. This means, as a company, we spend about 25-33% of the year in some sort of rest and recovery mode.

When I discuss this model with outsiders, reactions range from “that’s nice!” to “that’s lazy!”. But I’ve actually never had anyone telling me, “that’s productive!”.

But it really is. It is extremely productive! And that’s a big part of why we are doing it this way. There is no conflict between putting humans first and running a productive business - on the contrary!

In this letter, I argue that rest and recovery is a key part of productivity and value creation, and should be treated accordingly by founders and CEO’s. I also go through, in detail, how we do rest and recovery at Lookback.

Unlearning the established view

Let’s start with a basic truth: Great products and services do NOT mainly come from hours worked. The real drivers are things like creativity, collaboration and good decision making.

Yet most people, not the least managers, think about “hours worked” as a key thing. And most people think about rest and recovery as an employee benefit, rather than as something that is a natural part of productive work.

This doesn’t make any sense. At least not in industries like tech. And least of all in product-led tech companies. We need to unlearn this assumption!

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that hours worked do not matter at all. Obviously, the time input matters. Not only is time a fundamental input to get over meaningful thresholds of key drivers like creativity, collaboration and good decision making - you can also do more of these things, if you spend more time on it. And that matters to the output of greatness so to speak.

So, for example, if your team doesn’t spend a sufficient coordinated time-effort on a project, it may never be finished, and even if it is finished, the output just won’t be good enough. Conversely, if your team figures out how to build something awesome together, and they then invest even more time building things together, they are likely to generate even more awesome stuff, than they would have if they spent less time together.

Therefore, it is only natural, and perfectly reasonable that we as CEOs and founders spend significant efforts on figuring out how to get more hours out of the machine. And it’s also intuitive that “rest and recovery” seems to be in conflict with those efforts.

This is all uncontroversial, and I’m not arguing against any of that.

However, it is only true up to a certain point - and that really matters! It is definitely possible to run the machine too hot. And if you do, you not only bring value output down to zero, by putting the machine in idle - you break the machine! You go from temporarily not outputting value, to actually destroying value.

The following graph shows my estimate of how “hours worked/time input” relates to value creation.

Now, why does the curve look like that? That’s a very important question to really dig into and spend time thinking about. The short answer is that the curve looks like that because time input is a bad metric for predicting value creation in creative industries.

What we should be looking at are things like human energy, focus and flow. We rarely do, partly because these things are really hard to measure, partly because they used to matter more than they do today.

Optimize for “flow hours at work”

The thing you really want to generate more of is “flow hours at work”, not “hours worked”. Flow only happens under certain conditions - and hours worked is PART of that. You need to have been at something long enough to get into the flow. But you also need to be energized, rested, focused, in a place of trust, and in a place of motivation. So if you’re exhausted from having spent too many hours worked in too short a time, you won’t enter flow. This is true both from an individual point of view, but perhaps even more relevant at the team level.

This is why the curve looks like it does. It takes some time for a team to enter the flow zone, and they can’t stay there forever without proper rest and recovery. What you should be thinking about is to keep your team in the flow zone as much as possible. And you should definitely make sure they don’t go into the exhaustion zone. The exhaustion zone is where you start breaking the machine - where you make long term damage to motivation, team relationships, collaboration, and personal health. You are cutting into muscle at this point and you may never properly recover from it.

So you really don’t need to be a nice human-centered person to invest in rest and recovery. This is for evil capitalist as well! :-) Proper rest and recovery management is not only good for people. It’s great for the business too!

Rest and recovery is about way more than PTO!

If you start thinking about rest and recovery as part of flow optimization, you quickly realize that it is not nearly enough to work with classic notions of time off. You need to take a much more sophisticated approach.

Time off is just the beginning. It doesn’t scale very well. If team members are off all the time and that’s the only means of recovery, you’ll create a significant energy and motivation drain in your team. It will disrupt flow, it will make people doubt that the group can accomplishing meaningful things, it will force people to compensate for missing teammates instead of working on their own things. Which, in turn, will make people feel like they don’t want to, or don’t have time to take vacation. The list goes on, and this is the kind of unhealthy dynamic that leads to no one taking time off in companies with unlimited PTO.

People need proper PTO, no doubt. But just giving people a lot of potential PTO days won’t lead to proper PTO. It will lead to people feeling bad about going on PTO, and that’s a horrible starting point for rest and recovery.

Company wide slowdown

In addition to PTO, we introduced “summer slowdowns” at Lookback. These are set periods (for us it is every July) where there are no meetings or team requests. Every team member is working (unless they chose to take PTO at this time) but no one is being told what to do. Not from management, and not from teammates either!

This is an important component of rest and recovery, because it allows people to catch up with things, and to just work on joyful projects in a place protected from “context switch” and obligations. Most people tend to get way more out of their PTO if they’ve had a chance to finish individual work backlog lists beforehand, and it also reduces stress during the year to know that there will be time to catch up later. Others prefer to take PTO during slowdown, because they don’t have to worry about missing meetings during this time. It depends on the role, but everyone tends to find their own rewarding use of the slowdown.

The first year we did this, we learned that planning is key - and especially for customer facing roles. Make slowdown a fair and realistic possibility for the entire team, by setting clear expectations with external stakeholders!

Pre-slowdown for product work

This year we were so encouraged by the many benefits of slowdown - including a boost in productivity - that we decided to add a two month “pre-slowdown” period for product work before the slowdown.

Pre-slowdown is like slowdown but with meetings. So everyone works on whatever they feel like working on, but all the standing team meetings are still on, and all the normal cross team comms are up and running. So, for example, the product team will get information about feature requests etc, but they don’t have to do anything about it unless they feel like it. And the research team keeps on researching, but without having to coordinate with product if they don’t want to. Etc.

But how do we have time for this?

Well. Because guess what happens?

Everyone just keeps working on great stuff. While having fun and feeling good about themselves and each other!

Perhaps we won’t all work on the exact things that we would have prioritized in the regular processes, but still highly relevant stuff. Sometimes probably more relevant than what those setting priority would have picked.

And why wouldn’t people keep working on relevant and valuable stuff?

Creative people will spend their time creating great things, whether you count their hours or not. If they, on top of that, are properly rested, happy, motivated, in a place where they enjoy collaborating with their teammates, and in a place where they are able to navigate and debate difficult tradeoffs without getting into conflicts - then only great things will follow!

Of course, people are different - some will not participate in this kind of setup in responsible ways, and you can’t allow abuse and free-riding in a system like this. However, at least in my experience, this is way less common than one might think, and is best handled on an individual basis, rather than by forcing an entire team to focus on hours worked.

I hope that this letter inspires even the most traditional capitalists out there to consider investing way more in rest and recovery, and I wish you all a great start to the summer! (Or winter if you’re down under).