Writing this from Blacklist with two days left in Bali. It’s absolutely pissing it down, the first time it’s rained properly during the day in about three months. The roads are empty and I have the coffee shop to myself.
Bali has spent three months giving me blue skies, outdoor breakfasts and sunsets, then decided to turn into England two days before I leave. Probably useful acclimatisation.
The strange thing is I don’t actually feel that reflective about leaving anymore. I think I did enough of that last week. I still have the feeling of not being ready to leave but at least I now know why. My head has already moved to what happens next as the coming weeks are going to be…BUSY.
Balance might be the wrong goal.
We’ve spent the last three months in a very family heavy season. I’ve still worked a lot, Toucan hasn’t slowed down and Twenty One hasn’t slowed down, but the shape of my days has been completely different.
More breakfasts together. More time with Abby & Cody. More outdoor life, more training and a lot less background noise.
I calculated the time saving of not commuting, not cooking, washing up, cleaning or doing laundry. It’s over 13 hours a week. No wonder my relationships with my wife and son have thrived.
I’ve loved it.
But in about a week and a half, I’ll be living almost the opposite life.
We’ve got five days in Bangkok on the way home, then 5 days in the UK before I fly to California. First its Seattle for Amazon Accelerate, then a few days with Luke, Dan and Sophie for our exec team offsite and we finish off with San Francisco for Amazon Ads unBoxed.
That will be a time zone shift of 14 hours in 2 × 7 hour chunks across less than a week. Might have to stock up on diazepam before we leave Bali 😂.
It’s going to be intense in the best way. Long days, lots of people, lots of conversations, lots of coffee and not enough sleep.
And I genuinely cannot wait.
I’m honestly so glad I feel that way, because I don’t think wanting that makes everything I’ve said about family time over the last few months less true. I want both. I just don’t think I want both equally every single day.
There are periods where family should get more of me. There are periods where work should. There are periods where training becomes the thing I’m pushing hardest.
Trying to give everything exactly the same amount of attention all the time sounds balanced. It’s also unrealistic, and probably makes your output quite mediocre.
I think that’s the balance I actually want. Not every day looking perfectly curated, not every week having the perfect ratio, just knowing when it’s time to lean harder in one direction and having enough awareness to lean back before something else starts paying the price.
Bali has been one season. California and then the UK will be another.
I’m excited for both.
If I’m in fewer rooms, they need to be better rooms.
The bit I’m probably most excited about in California isn’t actually the conferences.
Accelerate and unBoxed will be amazing as always. But the few days in between will be more important.
Luke, Dan, Sophie and I will all be in the same place, which only happens 2-3 times a year. Dan lives in Australia. Luke, Sophie and I are usually in the UK. For the last three months I’ve been in Bali.
Most of the year, Toucan is being run across time zones. It works really well.
We’ve spent years building the business so decisions don’t need to wait for me. I don’t want to be in every client meeting or needing to approve every hire…nor should I be. There are people far more capable of making those decisions.
But that has made me think differently about the rooms I do choose to be in.
If I’m involved less often, the involvement needs to matter more.
Our exec sessions are exactly that. A few days where we can sit together and talk properly about the next six months, rather than whatever has managed to become urgent that day or week.
Where are we going? What’s slowing us down? What are we tolerating that we shouldn’t be? What do we need to build now for where we want Toucan to be next year?
Those are the conversations I enjoy most. And actually…most of the time the best chats were never on our agenda to start with. Small chats on the way to pick up our Starbucks at 8am or over all you can eat sushi at 6pm is usually where it happens.
You can technically have these meetings on Teams.
But it’s not even close to the same.
“The goal was never to make the business need less leadership. It was to make sure leadership spends its time on the decisions that actually change something.”
That’s the part of building Toucan I enjoy most now. Not being needed everywhere, but being useful in the places that matter.
Remote works. Being there still matters.
I’ve spent the last three months proving to myself again that I can run my part of Toucan from Bali. The business didn’t fall apart. Quite the opposite. That’s not a surprise, I’m just one cog in a perfect team.
But I’m very bought into remote work.
I also think people sometimes take that conclusion too far. Just because you can work from anywhere doesn’t mean being somewhere stops mattering.
There are things that happen when you put people in the same room/office that just don’t happen in scheduled thirty minute calls. There’s no avoiding that reality.
Someone says something in the office that starts a completely different conversation. You bump into somebody at a conference and five minutes later you’re talking about something that would never have justified a Teams call. Someone on stage says one thing that changes how you’re thinking about a problem.
That stuff is hard to manufacture remotely.
And it’s a big reason I love conference season and why I love being in the office.
I always come home with more ideas than I left with.
Accelerate puts me around Amazon, brands, partners and people I’ve known in the industry for years. unBoxed does the same on the advertising side. Then in the middle I get a few days with the people actually responsible for where Toucan goes next.
That’s a very high concentration of useful conversations.
There’s work I can do perfectly well from Blacklist in Bali. There’s work I probably do better here actually. But there are also weeks where the best thing I can do is get on a plane, throw myself into a conference and be completely immersed in it.
The next few weeks are one of those.
Two days left in Bali. I’m going to enjoy them properly.
Then five days in Bangkok, home, Harvey, family, and then it’s time to fly to Seattle and put some proper clothes on for once.
That's issue twenty two.
Bali’s sending me home with some rain to make the transition easier. Very thoughtful.