๐๏ธ #44: On Finding balance between work and everything else; Behind the scenes of building a startup; and 5 things
Why I don't believe in work-life balance, Magical Audios and where we started, and the 5 things that are keeping me awake at night lately
Hola friends! ๐
The last few days have been amazeballs!
I finally managed to flow properly from downward-facing dog to chaturanga to cobra. By flow properly, I mean I did not belly-flop. Ok so it was 3 times out of 10 but thatโs still 3 more than zero. So Iโm happy! ๐
We launched Magical Audios and our first offerings are live! Itโs all so new and there are a lot of kinks to iron out. But Iโm so proud and getting feedback from people is so exciting! ๐ฑ
And speaking of feedback - the feedback (and new subscribers) Iโve been getting since I wrote about my burnout saga (1, 2) has been overwhelming. Thank you all for sharing them. ๐
What about you? What amazing things have been going on with you lately? Iโd love to know more about you! Leave your answers in the comments. ๐ซถ
Now on to this weekโs thoughts and feelings!
Reintroducing work and trying to find balance
Building in Public the Series: Magical Audios
5 Things Iโm Loving
๐
Kax
01 Re-introducing work back into my life and trying to find balance
Yoga has been teaching me a lot lately about how I can reintroduce work back into my life without spiraling into anxiety all over again.
Our yoga teacher taught us new poses and flow in last week's practice. We were to transition from chair pose to warrior 3 to tree pose.
Itโs a tricky flow and I couldnโt do it.
Or I canโt unless I make adjustments like barely lifting my feet off the floor or breathing a little bit slower so I can find stability.
Making adjustments is important. Understanding my bodyโs limits is important too. Iโm always tempted to force myself to do more or do it โrightโ the first time โ get my feet up higher or push my hips back a bit more. Even though I could barely hold myself upright or never mind that my left ankle was throbbing again, a reminder of an old injury. My body clearly telling me, โweโre good here.โ
So I need to accept. And learn to be stable first in what my body allows me to be in before I can move forward. I need to โlet my body decideโ, as my yoga teacher would tell me.
This newsletter is not about yoga.
Iโve been re-introducing โworkโ back into my day-to-day. Or should I say โadding more workโ because chores and errands are work too.
Last week we launched our startup
Iโm taking in new coaching clients again
And Iโve even started to say yes to more social activities
So now Iโve been paying attention to how my body and my brain are adjusting to the reintroduction of the exciting but also uncomfortable stretch between pressure, learning, and growth.
Most days have been amazing. And I am still infatuated with this new reality that 90% of my time is spent on things I enjoy doing.
But on some days, old enemies still show up at my door. Fear of rejection. Perfectionism. And the urge to do one more thing even if itโs the 5th โone more thingโ and Iโm already outside the window Iโve given myself to work.
So Iโm listening and feeling.
Listening to what my intuition is telling me to do. Feeling if my body is ready to take on more than what I already have. While also making sure that I am not holding myself back because Iโm afraid.
Or worse, taking on more, compromising my balance, precisely because Iโm afraid.
My therapist recently told me about the Rule of 8:
8 hours of rest (at least. non-negotiable.)
8 hours of exercise and leisure
8 hours of work and learning
Supposedly, if I follow this rule, I can have a well-balanced life.
โThis seems unachievable and frankly too rigid. A bit of obsolete life advice from the 70sโ was my feedback to my therapist. Thankfully, my therapist didnโt throw me out of his office.
But that comment was pretty much evidence of how, once again, Iโve missed the point.
The rule is meant to be a guideline. A reminder to be intentional with my time:
To not fill every gap I can find in my day with work.
To prioritize exercise and rest (that includes naps!)
To allow for space to learn new skills but also to play.
Notice that I never said work-life balance? Mostly because I reject the idea of work-life balance (as well as work-life harmony). Not the balance or harmony part. But the part wherein work is a category of its own, with the same weight and importance as life.
I prefer to see work as a part of life not separate from it.
I prefer to believe that work and life are not two things that need to be balanced. But that work is just one part that needs to be balanced with friendships, movements, naps, hobbies, and everything else that makes up our individual lives.
The how? By using the Rule of 8 as high-level guidance to help me structure my week and even my month (a framework, if you will, and not a strict rule to follow). Designing my calendar accordingly helps me anticipate when my life is falling off balance by helping me identify what I am over-prioritizing and inversely, what I am compromising.
Am I feeling shitty because Iโm over-prioritizing work again? OR am I feeling shitty because Iโve been spending too much time on the sofa binge-watching K-dramas?
Knowing helps me adjust. Adjusting helps me balance. And being in balance keeps me healthy.
And the work to do just that is my new definition of productivity.
***
If youโre a product person and youโve burned out or have gotten anxiety because of work (or youโre going through it right now). If youโre feeling overwhelmed by the demands of your day-to-day and you want to have a more sustainable approach to your work and career in Product Management...
I have available slots for coaching again and Iโd love to help you.
02 Building Magical Audios in public: Finding opportunities and validating problems
Itโs all so exciting! But the road to launch has not been paved with glitter and gold. Weโre constantly finding kinks so weโre iterating and fixing things daily.
So Iโm adding this new section in my newsletter to share our version of the realities of building a startup/business from scratch.
For those who have an idea that theyโve been meaning to flesh out, I hope this inspires you and I hope we can give you ideas on how to move forward when you have no resources.
For the Product Managers, constantly frustrated about how theyโre not โdoing Product Management properlyโ, I hope this gives you comfort and remind you that the only true measure of success is the result you generate and not how well you follow a framework ๐.
How did we get here?
My co-founders and I found each other in late 2023. We connected because of our shared values, mission, and beliefs:
Because of our experiences, we know that women continue to be underserved when it comes to our healing and well-being.
Because of our heritage and our roots, we believe that traditional and legitimate, alternative healing practices are under-rated at best and antagonized at worst.
Because of our dreams, we want a better way of working, running a business, and building something sustainable without compromising our personal needs.
We had a foundation. But we didnโt know yet what we were going to do exactly. But we had some rough ideas. We knew we wanted to:
Center our product around hypnotherapy/self-hypnosis (for now).
Create an eco-system that provides relevant and varied solutions for women through self-serve, community, and access to experts.
Create an app that curates and personalizes the healing experience for our users.
What was our first step?
The problems we wanted to solve were hypothesized from our experiences and the experiences of our friends and family and their friends and family. We had some insights. But we needed more evidence.
So we did our research. We didnโt have any budget and not a lot of time, so we needed to be resourceful:
We sent out surveys and shared them with our network on social media. We used Google Forms for the survey and posted the request for answers on Linkedin.
We set up online events hosted on Google Meet or Zoom to do live hypnotherapy sessions, to get peopleโs first reaction towards the concept.
We constantly socialized our hypotheses every chance we got. And we lurked in so many communities to just listen to the things women would talk about.
We read tons of published material we could find on womenโs health, hypnotherapy, and alternative medicine (the good, the bad, the ugly) and sought out experts to weigh in on the topic (I even asked my therapist about it ๐ค).
And we looked up all of the existing players in the domain, including the service providers and influencers on social media.
While I couldnโt tell you what framework we used to structure our research (because we didnโt use any, at least not consciously), there were a couple of principles that we followed:
We framed our hypotheses as questions that we wanted to find answers to. โIs it true?โ was a question we always asked ourselves.
We made sure we talked to women who were very different from us so we could avoid confirmation bias.
Even if we actively sought to invalidate our hypotheses and made sure we talked to people with different backgrounds from ours, we still found ourselves talking to the same kind of women repeatedly. Same in the way that they were:
Frustrated by how the only solution there is for their period pain is Ibuprofen.
Confused and frightened by the symptoms their body was exhibiting brought on by more frequent and obvious hormonal changes.
Exhausted and stressed from having to juggle multiple things: their ambitions and career growth, taking care of their families and themselves.
Discouraged because access to therapy is difficult and expensive where they were, on top of how being in therapy is seen negatively by their community.
I have never been good at research and none of us are trained to do it. But we made do with the tools and skills that we had. ๐
We made sure that we had a clear purpose for this research:
To validate our hypotheses about our target market and the problems that we wanted to solve
To start getting early feedback about some of our ideas
Then What?
Now that we had validated problems, and some early but good signals about the solution we wanted to build - we made our first mistake.
We started building.
But Iโll share that part of the story in the next newsletterโฆ
02 5 Things Iโm Loving This Week
John Cutlerโs perspective on why product transformations fail
Bridgerton Season 3 even though I think the writers did POLIN a huge disservice
Happy Startup Schoolโs article: How do you navigate when you have no idea where youโre going
Finally got around to picking up Range again. It was especially cathartic when I had a bit of a spiral trying to figure out my next steps after I got fired ๐
What are you loving these days?
Weโre almost at 1000 subscribers! Help me help more people with practical strategies and relatable stories on Leadership, Product Management, Startup Building, and Career Growth by sharing my newsletter with your friends, colleagues, and neighbors! ๐ซถ
If you reached the end of this issue, Iโd love to read your thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions in the comments. ๐ซถ
Also:
The work/life โbalanceโ topic is so important, and itโs so interesting to see how itโs evolving as we have more and more expectations to be โonโ or available thanks to our phones and the WFH boundaries falling over during the pandemic.
I like an analogy from YouTuber/Podcast host CGP Grey on how you have to balance work, relationships, health, and home: Each of these is an imaginary light bulb and you have to distribute your energy across them all. If you are giving 100% to work, the other bulbs will be completely dark. To turn up one of the bulbs, you have to pull from somewhere else. I use this analogy and am transparent with my team/management at work (and at home with my partner). If I have something important happening at home thatโs taking my energy, I am clear about that and manage work accordingly. And vice versa at home, I know I have a busy period at work, I set that expectation with my partner. There have been times when we know that to manage at home, we actually board our dogs or hire a dog walker to lighten the load at home to help support the energy need for that โlight bulbโ.
"I prefer to believe that work and life are not two things that need to be balanced. But that work is just one part that needs to be balanced with friendships, movements, naps, hobbies, and everything else that makes up our individual lives."
100%. I can't help but bring my product brain around me with every product I use but continually remind myself that it's not my duty to fix all the things. Just to make the best of what is in front of me with the tools I have and focus on making those things the best they can be.