Last week, I wrote a post about how I was getting burned out at Amazon and that isn't happening at Shopify. I thought I'd dig in to that a little more. Here is a chart of how I spent my average work week at Amazon pre pandemic and how my week looks at Shopify now. The biggest driver is not commuting to work and fewer meetings. No commute gives me ~10 hours back. I’m using this time to sleep a little extra each night and time with my family. The other big difference is the amount of meetings I attend has gone down. The big difference here is Shopify has a no meeting Wednesday policy, which I’m leveraging to do deep work. Additionally, I had 4-5 hours of meetings to prep for meetings like 6-pager reviews and Weekly Business metric reviews. This chart doesn’t tell the whole story. I have a lot more time with my family now. During the summer we would have lunch together and during the school year it’s easy for me to walk kids to and from school. At Amazon, I would have a steady flow of email and request after working hours which rarely happens at Shopify. Most weekends I felt behind and would spend time working on deep work that I didn't have time for during the week. I wasn’t present at home. The big win is the time I have gained with my family and flexibility to be an engaged parent. Part of this impact comes from working at a company like Shopify that values your free time and some of it is the outcome of working from home. Actions I should have taken at Amazon would have been to protect my calendar more and push back on recurring meetings. Additionally, I could have protected my time at home by not doing email or checking work messages at home but I had fear of missing out on career progression if I wasn’t always on. I’m glad to be at a company that doesn’t require this self-discipline and this is one of the big reasons I’m not burning out.
Can you please suggest the tools/mechanism you used to track the activities? Especially if your day contains Adhoc meetings without pre-scheduling?
You already slept a lot of hours then I do before covid. I usually had an 6 hours sleep each night. But I also spent more time with family and that is the part I really enjoy.
Ugh, meetings are the worst. At least formal meetings. Especially Scrum rituals. However, whiteboarding and even joint coding or model review deep dives are amazing, though.
4 hours/day in meetings at shopify?! sheesh, that's so crazy.
So is Shopify full remote (after "we all go back")? What you say about hanging up the commute and spending more time with family really resonates, and I'm not looking forward to going back in Jan'22... or whenever they punt to. Love the no meeting wed idea as well. I might have to try that in my mini org. Thanks for the post and congrats on your new role!
Rich V.
2y
Likety split my expirence at Amazon 👍 Can’t tell you the culture shock I had after leaving Amazon where I didn’t have to respond to emails over the weekend. Customer obsession should not come at the expense of employee’s wellness.
I’m finding the same reduced stress for the same reasons. What an incredible difference it makes to: 1) Absense of Always On/ Hyper Responsive culture where heroics are the source of praise and advancement rather than outcomes. 2) Dedicated deep work time for the entire company. Knock also practices no Meeting Wednesday and it’s such a boost for my productivity and mental health. 3) Distributed workforce with everyone working from home removes the drama of us/them, commutes, and challenges us to find ways to spread information asynchronous rather than a default meeting. Meetings are used to collaborate, not report status on something that should have been an email.
Meeting down, deep work time up :) :) :)
Elvis D.
2y
The discussion I most appreciated during my 5 years at Amazon happened during my on-site loop. My lunch buddy said to me a few words I still remember verbatim: “Amazon will take what you give it. So, draw your boundaries on Day 1 and don’t let Amazon cross them.” I’m proud to say I stuck to that and generally refused the crazy hours come what may. My typical week was no more than 45 hours of work. I rarely got or answered emails after 5:30pm or on weekends. Of course I also avoided teams like Ops where insane schedules were the norm. At Amazon I think it’s important to draw those lines, hold them firm, and be very careful about which teams you join. You can see the terrible ones from a mile away (and usually those terrible ones don’t even care to hide it… they take a perverse pleasure in making their 200% yearly turn over rate a badge of pride!)
COO of Summit Interconnect/Board Member
2yLove the data driven analysis. I disagree with several comments on this post with regards to this being an Amazon as a whole issue. It’s a leadership issue if 6-pager and meetings are a barrier to deep work and family time. Paul less explicitly calls this out and puts it on himself to have pushed back. What I found is 6-pagers are themselves deep work that forces real thought by the writer vs PowerPoint. But managers must recognize when something is Just Do It vs 6-pager vs 1-pager and also be conginzant of content vs format/English. The focus must be the idea, communicated effectively, but the perfection is the idea not the style/communication which is where I saw version hell in most cases. Leaders must see past this to keep the ball moving and develop writing skills at the same time. Leaders also must have the backbone to make a decision vs having their team do drafts up the chain for fear of making a command decision on behalf of the customer and company. Blocking meetings is a leadership decision too, there is no Amazon requirement to have meetings beyond W/MBR and OLR - so that’s on the manager and while it need may VP buy to protect prevent cross function meeting it’s possible. Again leadership and not Amazon.