The Trelloing of marriage
A couple months ago, Austen, who runs YC Combinator company Lambda School, which provides a free tech bootcamp education until you get a job (and then you pay a percentage of your salary), tweeted this about his marriage:
It sounds ridiculous, but is awesome. Try it.
He was, understandably, met with ridicule, and, as they say on Twitter, ratioed. After all, what would a one-on-one with a spouse even look like? Are there OKRs or KPIs? Who is the manager and who’s the direct report?
“Leslie, I just don’t see you performing up to standard with Braxtyn. Unless you start changing her diaper more often, we’re going to have to put you on a performance improvement plan.”
It would be easy to make fun of (and it is, it’s great material) if it were a one-off. But this trend of increasingly blending home and work life has morphed from just doing emails, to answering Slack messages and pushing commits at night, to, now using technical methods in family life.
Just a couple months ago, I read a plethora of posts about families doing agile, so much so, that Trello, the unofficial app of low-key agile planning adopted it into a post.
Elisabeth, being the curious one, immediately asked me, “Daddy, what’s a backlog?” I responded by explaining that a backlog is everything we need to do before leaving Paris. Elisabeth quickly asked, “Can I add the Eiffel tower carrousel to the backlog?” Of course, we said yes!
Trello mentions Bruce Feiler, who adopted agile for his family:
Feiler is not the only parent to introduce a scrum process in his family to help kids become independent and empowered and parents less stressed.
There is a growing movement of parents implementing agile strategies at home. From weekly standups to logistical coordination, there are lots of ways to adapt agile ideas into your home. Aside from the tangible solutions to scheduling, agile practices also help to instill a core set of values in children at surprisingly early ages. We asked a few agile families to share their experiences.
Before you get too weirded out, it’s important to add a little historical context. The Gilbreths, for example, would not find anything wrong with any of this. In the early part of the 20th century, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were two psychologists/scientists (aka the first management consultants) who had 12 kids and did all kinds of studies, both at the office and at home on what constituted efficiency in the workplace. They were contemporaries of Taylor, who sought out efficiency by means of doing more. The Gilbreths, on the other hand, sought efficiency through shorter movements.
And, as Wikipedia notes, they often brought their work home:
Frank and Lillian Gilbreth often used their large family (and Frank himself) as guinea pigs in experiments. Their family exploits are lovingly detailed in the 1948 book Cheaper by the Dozen, written by son Frank Jr. and daughter Ernestine
(I highly recommend the book, it’s very sweet and funny.)
But, what the Gilbreths were doing was highly unusual. Today, at a time when our free time is no longer delimited by boundaries and our phone screens are always available, it seems like a great idea to incorporate work efficiency and modern technical concepts into our lives, no matter how private we might try to keep them.
How can it be otherwise? We spend all of our time at work and connected, versus previous eras when leaving work at home genuinely meant leaving it at home until the next day. We work in snippets and snatches.
Possibly the worst recent example of this insidious blend of Silicon Valley corporatism and personal life is this story about an influencer who pitched her own wedding to brands before even being engaged, including a pitch deck:
Between her posts, Fuchs has peppered in commentary from her fans to build excitement. “There’s a surprise engagement wedding (no one really knows right now) happening on @fashionambitionist Stories this Tuesday and I am completely invested in it!” reads a post she shared from one Instagram user, @geneelizabeth908. Media outlets including People, Elite Daily, and the Daily Mail all covered the drama as it unfolded. “Gabriel Grossman’s Instagram Story Proposal to Marissa Fuchs Is What Viral Dreams Are Made Of,” the Elite Daily headline reads. “Is this the most extravagant proposal EVER?” wondered the Daily Mail. Fuchs has gained more than 20,000 followers since first posting about the proposal.
But as fans waited eagerly for each new surprise, brand marketers couldn’t believe it was all going to plan. Many knew exactly how the proposal would play out, hour by hour. They knew the couple’s engagement hashtag. They knew what hotels Fuchs would be staying at, where she would eat, and when she’d post to her feed. They had seen it all before, in a pitch deck. The viral proposal appears to be a meticulously planned marketing stunt.
Stuff like this makes me sad. Not only from the perspective of consumerist culture, but from the fact that, for most of us, what this means is that we can never separate our online identity and our work identity from our own in any meaningful way.
In the 1940s when the Gilbreths were doing their work, most people could at least come home from the office, hang up their hat, and not think about work for 12 more hours. We have no luxury of doing that anymore.
So can we really blame Austen, who is ostensibly working 10+ hour days on keeping his company going, for constantly thinking about work? To some extent, I think the answer is, yes.
If you have the following and the success today, I think it’s your responsibility to denormalize hustle as much as is humanly possible. And a good place to start is by talking about how you come home, unplug, and don’t pick up the phone when you’re out with your wife to dinner. That, to me, is the true one on one experience.
Art: The Marriage Contract, William Hogarth, 1743
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