Building a Business — Breaks are Important

Every summer we meet up and go on a vacation together. Over the years we’ve taken ferries to small islands, driven up mountains, and detoured around forest fires. This year we took it easy and rented a cabin near 100+ wineries. We planned this retreat months in advance and as the date approached, we quickly realized it would be right in the middle of our final push to release our payments feature.

Normally taking a trip isn’t a huge deal, but we are bootstrapping Arc so time is scarce.

The weekends are when we get huge chunks of work completed.

We had to make a choice:
1. Cancel our trip and push hard to get payments out
2. Delay our payments release a day or two and enjoy our vacation

Clearly, we chose to enjoy our vacation. Now, it would be insane for the three of us to get together and not work on Arc at all. So we squeezed in some quality conversations and focused work between 70km bike rides and winery tours. We just made sure to keep the emphasis on our retreat.

This was another time where our mantra has been tested, “Live life and love work from anywhere”, and it worked perfectly. We lived our lives and had an amazing weekend and we were able to make some focused progress on our next feature.

The common startup mentality is to be 24/7 and “always on”. We are taking a different path and creating the life we want with a business we love. It’s part of our DNA. We work hard to reach our goals, both with our lives and our company.

You may notice there’s no photo credit this week. That’s because these are photos of us on our break!

Originally published at blog.unioncode.com on August 14, 2016.