I’m an extrovert. Working from home is hard.
I wrote recently about quitting my job in higher ed and cofounding a tech startup.
I did it! I’m working on a tech startup in Silicon Valley! So exciting! So glamorous!
Except…it’s not. Mostly, I’m in sweatpants at my laptop. There’s a to-do list a mile long. But being busy is nothing new — I’m a working mom of two, I’m used to THAT. What’s hard for me is figuring out how to be busy, alone.
Independence is great, but it can be lonely.
My company has 3 people. 2 of us are working on Kronistic full time, and our 3rd cofounder does what he can around his fulltime job as a professor. My fulltime partner, our CTO, is 8 time zones away and also pretty busy building the product.
I have 1–3 virtual meetings a week with my team each week. These meetings are my anchors. Thankfully the meetings are basically never canceled, since Kronistic, our product, is all about automatically (re)scheduling meetings. Outside of meetings, we communicate regularly asyncronously, mostly on slack and GitHub. We work together to set goals and discuss high level steps for the product. But with a team this small, each of us is more or less on our own to execute any given task in the queue.
I have meetings with users and potential users. Sometimes I meet with vendors or bankers or accountants. Hopefully soon I’ll meet with some VCs. In general, meetings with new people are energizing and often fun for me, but they also demand a lot of attention and effort. I suppose that means it’s probably a good thing that I don’t have that many of them (yet).
So, day-to-day, I’m mostly working alone in every sense of the word for most of the day. And it hardly feels like work, but not in the sense of being oh-so easy and fun. I mean that it doesn’t feel real. I’m sitting at home, alone. I’m trying to learn a whole industry from scratch with very little feedback about how I’m doing. I’m not getting paid (yet). I have no boss (in fact, I’m the boss!). I’m working on Kronistic purely because I believe in the product, the team, and what the company could become. It still feels like a passion project, not a job.
I feel like I should be SO. PRODUCTIVE. No coworkers or students are coming into my office unannounced to demand help with their crisis of the day. My kids are at school and daycare. My husband is at his office. I care about the work in front of me. I have the time and flexibility to set my own priorities and tackle them in whatever way works best for me. It’s all me! me! me!
But being alone drains me. I’m not a “me” person. I’m an “us” person.
If I’m anything, I’m an extrovert.
I score insanely high for extroversion in every personality test known to millennial-kind.
If you’ve ever met me in real life, this will not be a surprise to you. I love to talk — and also to listen. I am intensely interested in everyone’s point of view. I feel most alive in animated conversation with a small group.
Plenty of wise advice says to think before you speak. This is good advice but it doesn’t quite work for me. I think out loud. I am an external processor. I have spent a lifetime striving to be my authentic extroverted self in a way that doesn’t domineer or hijack conversation.
So, my goal is to listen before I speak. When I’m at my best, I ask questions first, and second, and third. Then I reply — sometimes at length, but always with an eagerness for RESPONSE. It’s not the talking that I need. It’s being heard and receiving feedback, and then responding in turn. These virtuous cycles of exchange are how I process the world.
When I’m alone, it’s hard for me to process what’s happening in my mind with rigor and clarity. I use various tools — writing (this blog!), mind mapping, lists for days. If these strategies aren’t working, I will text or slack a thought partner and hope they’re available for a near-synchronous conversation.
But for anything that matters, these tools only take me so far. I have to take the outputs from my solo processing into a human-to-human conversation in order for my thoughts to crystallize. Many of my best ideas come out almost by accident in a conversation. They seem like random, sudden insights, but they’re not. These ideas are the hard-won results of many hours of internal processing finally having an opportunity to break through to consciousness.
So at the end of a day of working at home, I feel absolutely exhausted. The first people I see after work are generally my kids, ages 3 and 6. That certainly breaks up the silence, but hardly supports mental clarity! By the time the kids are in bed, I’m practically vibrating with all the unprocessed thoughts in my mind. My poor husband, who has also been working all day and parenting all evening, has to choose between doing something relaxing to unwind while his wife becomes increasingly grumpy, or patiently listening while I tell him EVERYTHING I’VE BEEN THINKING ALL DAY.
I’m not practicing my “listening first” strategy in this scenario. I have to skip straight to talking (cough cough word vomiting) and just hope he has enough energy in his own tank to respond.
Staying home is heavenly…for introverts.
Most of my friends are introverts, or at least not as super-charged extroverts as I am. I hear from my introvert friends and from books like Quiet that modern American culture is inherently built for extroverts. I think that’s probably true — everywhere you go, there’s nonstop stimuli.
But I don’t go anywhere.
That’s not actually true. Sometimes I take my laptop and go work at a coffee shop or in the library. I’m thinking about paying for a coworking space. Of course, there’s no one there to talk to me in those places, but at least I hear human voices in the background. I also try to build in phone calls and zoom chats with friends, family, and mentors into my week. Those social breaks recharge my battery and help me return to my laptop with fresh eyes.
But even though I know getting out of the house or calling my mom will be good for me, I struggle to do it. Being at home is so easy. Leaving is so much work. I’d have to put on real pants. Plus, there’s always laundry or dishes or dinner to do in the house, and hey if I can keep my hands busy chopping vegetables while my brain is crunching on some user feedback, that’s two birds with one stone, right?
Inertia seems to be a social law as much as a physical one. I need an outside force.
Connection is the key.
A few weeks ago, I went up to the city for one day for a series of networking events during SF Tech Week. I was nervous. This was my first time going to anything in person in my new guise as the CEO of a startup. I knew I was going to be surrounded by “real” Silicon Valley types like engineers and VCs and hackers.
And I was. And it was AWESOME.
Nobody there knew or cared that I have an English degree. They thought the story of leaving academic administration to start a company addressing a pain point from my office job made perfect sense. I told them my story, and they responded.
There were moments where I felt like I didn’t know what was going on. I heard lingo and acronyms I didn’t know, cultural narratives I didn’t share. But instead of feeling excluded, I just felt new. And the very nature of Silicon Valley is that “new” is the most exciting thing to be. Even people who are serial entrepeneurs are starting THIS company for the first time.
I’ve been trying to learn the foreign language of startups and entrepreneurship out of a textbook (actually, worse than that — out of google search results). But the best way to learn a foreign language is to immerse yourself in it.
So I’m looking for opportunities to connect in real life with other entrepreneurs. For me, “real life” can be zoom, but it can’t be social media. Thinking about social media is a post for another day, but for now let’s just say it makes me (and many others) feel more alone.
This week, I met with the CEO and founder of Germ Network. She invited me to join a community of fellow female founders. I am excited to develop my own network of founders, especially women from nontech backgrounds with big ideas breaking the world of startups
If you are a founder or know a founder, please reach out! I’m at emily@kronistic.com. I’m eager to meet you and learn your story! I’ll use Kronistic to set up a meeting for us. ;-)
I’m also building in more face-to-face connections with my existing network, including the communities that matter to me. I want to connect with my kids’ school and local causes that support my values.
Finally, I’m striving to set realistic expectations on myself about my productivity. I can be very productive alone — when I have energy. I need to build in time to achieve that energy. That’s productive, too.
