The two-week cooldown

`0:41:48`

Exhausted. But also pretty good. You can. Yeah, yeah. It's funny because I was a sprinter in high school, so I love sprinting. But if you go all out, you might feel high for a minute, but you can't go all out again. You've got to really catch your breath and you certainly like to sprint. I remember my track coach actually ran in college for a year until I realized that I wasn't good enough. But he made us run 20 200s in a row with just two minutes break in between, and the 200 is an incredibly hard race. You're all out for 200 meters or yards. And after the fifth one I just threw up. I just threw up. It's like that's kind of what work is for a lot of people. It's like 20 200s, they have these sprints and they never seem to end. And there's one sprint after the other, after the other, after the other, after the other.

`0:42:36`

And that's why I don't like the word because you can't layer that back to back to back to back. You cannot sprint back to back, to back, to back in life. And you can't do it at work. People do it at work, but I don't think it actually works. So what we do is after our six week cycles, we typically take what we call a two-week cool down. So we call these cycles, not sprints. A two-week cool down, and we call them cycles because cycles happen again and again and again. Sprints start and end. Cycles happen. There's cycles in life and seasons, and I like that idea that you're prepared for this thing to happen again. Take two weeks, cool down. That's when people can sort of internally freelance. They're still working, but they're kind of tightening up a couple of things. Maybe we just shipped or working on a couple extra days on something that didn't ship that's

`0:43:22`

going to ship in two days, or kind of fixing some bugs and messing around with some stuff that they wanted to get to, but no one ever had time to and was never scheduled. So that's kind a good time to do that. In the meantime, a few of us are shaping up the next cycles projects and finalizing that and writing the pitches up for that. So that's what those cycles are for. It's not that you're stopping work, it's that you're doing other kinds of work. And that I think is replenishing and refreshing, and I think that's the important part versus back to back to back sprints of the same kind of work all the time. You mentioned also that you have no growth goals, that you make decisions a lot on instinct and gut and opinion, which sounds amazing, it's great if you could pull it off. Feels also very hard to operationalize and maybe make the best decisions in times.