Balancing a Scaleup and a Family

Job: “Let’s be real: it’s super hard to do both!

I started Remote when our first child was six months old, and a year and a half later, we had our second child. (My wife often calls Remote my third child!)

It’s hard to be a good parent and feel like you’re spending enough time with your kids. It’s hard to build a company and feel like you’re doing enough work.

It’s super hard to balance your energy between the two of them.

However, below are some of the things I do to try to achieve balance…

Structure your Day

My work days are identical, almost always:

• My son wakes up around 5.30am, then my daughter at 6 or 6.30am. I take care of the kids in the morning, bring them to daycare and school at 7.45am. I then go to the gym at around 8:10am, which is conveniently right near my house.
• I usually workout for 30–45 mins, sometimes I do longer sessions, and I try to go to the gym 5 days a week.
• I start working at 9am, or whenever I’m back from the gym, and I work until 5pm. I don’t have a set work schedule, I just do whatever is most important each day.
• At 5pm we pick up the kids from school, sometimes earlier because they have to go to an after school activity, and then I take care of the kids. Once they’re in bed, at around 7.30pm, either I have a free night or I work (depending on the day). Sometimes I also run or cycle at night.

That’s it. Same schedule every day.

Luckily I don’t have to travel much for work, when I do it’s of course very different.

Have a Rigid Schedule

Having a really rigid schedule is my best advice. It creates clarity for everybody in your life and it makes everything simpler. A rigid schedule allows you to say no to meetings, and do them when you actually have time.

You don’t want to constantly make space for work in your personal life. That’s really stressful, and the upside is essentially zero in my experience.

A meeting can wait another day. On aggregate, it’s fine. You should be fast, you should be accurate, you should be working really, really hard to make a company work.

Most of the time, tasks or meetings can usually wait until the next day, later in the day, at night, or early in the morning, without interrupting your family dinner.

But if you don’t have a rigid schedule, then it’s going to be incredibly hard to maintain that. Everybody in both your family and work life will be frustrated, and so will you, because you’ll constantly be having to reset expectations.

Set Boundaries

I try to make it so that when I’m with my wife, I’m just with my wife. Or when I’m with my kids, I’m just with my kids. When I’m out and about in my family, for me it’s really helpful to put my phone away.

But setting strict boundaries as a founder isn’t always realistic. There are times when work demands a lot of time, while at other times, family time seeps into work. Sometimes this means making tough decisions, like choosing to stop working early to spend more time with family.

But by the very nature of being a founder and CEO, I think it’s completely acceptable to check work once in a while.

I try to completely switch from work before going to bed, but I’m not super good at that.

Avoid (Recurring) Meetings

I probably have more meetings than anybody else at Remote, except maybe salespeople. Still, I manage to avoid a lot of them. I think my trick is that I say no to most meetings. That’s it.

Let me explain. I think many people have the inclination to say “Let’s jump on a call to discuss this”. But you could instead just say, “No, let’s not have a meeting, let’s do it via text.” Or let’s try to do it with text first. Let’s try to do it asynchronously. If we fail, we can always do a call, right?

One thing that really kills productivity is recurring meetings. Instead of saying let’s have a meeting when we need it, you say let’s have a meeting every week. That just kills your agenda.

If you work in a mature team, with mature workers, you don’t need to do that. You can just not have any recurring meetings. If you feel like you need a meeting, have a meeting. But if you don’t make it recurring, then you never have all these hard blocks filling up your calendar.

Make Use of Tools (To Reduce Meetings)

We write stuff down a lot. We use Notion for this. It’s our central source of information. We do this across the whole company, via our handbook: remote.com/handbook

We also use Loom a lot to send people things (to view async).

Delegate

If you’re the CEO of a big company, you have to delegate essentially 100% of your tasks. You often start new things, but eventually you have to delegate them. If you don’t, you’ll fail.

What I found over the last few years is that achieving a balance between work and family becomes much easier when you have amazing reports whom you can fully delegate tasks to, without the need for constant supervision or correction.

So hiring amazing people was sort of the solution to balance. I’ve gotten better in part because I hired better people reporting to me.

I’m also very much in favour of giving individuals ownership. I don’t want to be too prescriptive, like setting how many hours they have to work. Let them decide. My team are responsible for their own schedules.

Have A Great Partner

I have an amazing wife. An incredible partner who does the majority of things for our family, so I can spend more time working.

Partners are so incredibly important, and often not talked about, or appreciated publicly. I couldn’t do this without my wife. I couldn’t be the CEO.

And it is hard, because you don’t want to give them all the responsibilities. That’s not fair. Their life is just as important as yours. But at the same time, a scaling company can be incredibly demanding.

I think what is most important about a partner is having somebody that keeps your feet on the ground. Someone who reminds you that your work is actually not that important. Kids do this too.

I care a lot about my company and my work, but in a greater scheme of things, Remote will end for me at some point. Then I’ll still have my family. A great partner can help remind you of that, and help you finding balance.

There are also a lot of points of friction. The challenges are that as a founder and CEO, there’s always infinite work to do. If you’re not well-rested, or you’re stressed and anxious, it can be much easier to choose to work, than to spend time with your partner.

It Takes Time

Achieving work and family balance has been a fairly recent thing for me. I was much worse at it when I started Remote. I was also worse at it when we had one child, because it was easier to let one parent take care of one child.

It’s also much harder when your company is really young and you have things you personally need to do all the time. You have less reports that you can build upon.

For me, it’s a matter of learning and evolving over time. I think that it’s really f***ing painful, at times but that’s the reality. You have to go through it.

That’s it. I hope that’s helpful to other founders.”

— Job van der Voort