I asked to move our Apply cofounder work to 10 a.m. Eastern.
That meant 7 a.m. for me in Santa Monica, which was the point. I was there for my mom's birthday and Mother's Day. I wanted to get the work done early and then focus on her.
Mom was Gisi. She deserved the day.
I spend a lot of time trying to make travel days behave like workdays. Move the early meeting. Take the call before everybody else is awake. Answer the important things. Tell the team where I will not be. Then close the laptop before the reason for the trip disappears underneath the schedule.
That was the plan in Santa Monica.
Work did not disappear because I flew west. I was still splitting time between Wahoo and Apply. I let the Wahoo team know I would miss a standup and asked them to ping me if anything was urgent. The following week in Atlanta was already packed.
The calendar had all the normal pressure to keep expanding. Wahoo had its work. Apply had its work. Atlanta was waiting. None of that meant the birthday should become a background tab.
There was also an email about getting a tiny Apple TV remote holder made through a 3D-printing service. It used a Flic button and a file somebody had already put on the internet. This was not important work. It was exactly the kind of small object problem I could apparently still find while trying to clear the schedule.
I had not designed the file. I did not need a product roadmap. I wanted one small printed piece that made a button and a remote stay together. Order it. Test it. Move on.
My brain apparently needed one side project before breakfast.
I liked Santa Monica. I sent a friend a message that the weather there was never bad, although I was still hoping for some good sunny middays. The forecast did its job.
The morning was for the calls. Coffee, laptop, East Coast time, keep things moving. The useful part of starting at 7 was knowing there would be an end.
My camera roll from the trip has the beach, the water, and three nearly identical photographs of a woman walking toward me from the edge of the Pacific. She is wearing jeans and a white jacket. The sky is clear. There are no laptops in the frame.
That was the point of moving everything early.
The workday started at 7. The rest of the day belonged to Mom.