Time at C4E
C4E is built on freedom as a fundamental. When we started, the lowest hanging fruit was creating a space where you choose your working hours; instead of being dictated by a timesheet or reports.
Now, with 2 people, freedom comes easy. You realise that timesheets serve no purpose within a group that is overcommunicating and has self-accountability.
But, with time (from 2 to 12 to 30+ people), we had to discover new ways to make sure this freedom remained. More importantly, it co-existed with other values – of growth, reliability, and overcommunication.
In this note, we’ve particularly talked about freedom of time. And how we’re creating it for ourselves.
Here goes.
1/ Everyone signs up for cal.com and makes two links.
One would be for internal use, and one for the rest of the world. On this, you put your time slots. No minimum hours. No maximum hours. You decide how much time you want to allocate to things. But, we must have an overlap from 11 AM to 4 PM, making sure these don’t spill into focus hours.
These slots will take into account our no-calls-Wednesdays. Chores. Travel. Personal blocks. Maker-manager styles of working. Everything.
For now, we’re relying on cal.com to help us with this. At some point, we also want to make our calendar tool at C4E Labs because it can be SO much better.
2/ We re-emphasised (for ourselves), Wednesdays are strictly no-calls days!
This is not a new one. However, this time, we don’t want to fall off the bandwagon. But there are mostly just two reasons why we break this rule –
When there’s an important deliverable / discussion for any of our clients or projects (we make a promise of reliability to our clients; work triumphs over structures). But, we also don’t let rare cases of a fake sense of urgency come in.
Or, when we want to say hello to each other. On second thought, I wouldn’t count this as falling off 😀
3/ Sundays are strictly chutti. And Saturdays are your choice.
In this case, chutti can mean different things to different people. But, the idea is to not pull each other into work on a Sunday. You can independently choose to work on things, read, write, chill. But, highly encouraged to not pull someone in.
4/ No more stand-ups before 11 AM.
The change must start from us. To be strict with no calls before 11 am, we moved the only two sacrosanct calls in the week from 10.30 AM to 12 noon.
5/ First, writing-first!
One of the most powerful enablers of freedom of time has been adopting a writing-first habit. Learning from Matt Mochary‘s ways, we moved to doing written reviews before meeting on calls.
I will quote SG’s rule of thumb too here – each hour of each person is worth a crore. We ought to optimise our time, don’t we?
So, instead of spending time verbally giving updates to each other, we write them down. It gives us clarity of thought. Allows us to have more meaningful conversations about our work. And then, use the time for things like FV’s cat stories and strategic conversations.
6/ Each thing has to be responded to within 24 hours!
No exceptions at all. If someone’s reached out to us, we want to respect their time. Even when we don’t have an answer, it’s important to acknowledge.
7/ If we’ve said 11 AM, it will be 5 minutes before 11 AM.
Part of respecting someone’s time is following through on promises. I read somewhere – when you give someone a time, assume that they’ve dropped everything else to be available then. So, you must show up. We learned this from one of our mentors, Rajesh Grover, and I am glad to report that it has become second nature.
I will leave you with a quote from this video by Alex Hormozi on productivity systems – the cost of freedom is hard work and ceasing control.
For us, these are the processes and what seem like rules are the cost we must pay.