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Key Takeaways
- When Covid shut everything down, we experienced a 600% demand surge almost overnight. Instead of forcing long work hours, I told my team to take breaks and engage in non-work-related activities.
- Stepping away from work and engaging in activities that require your full attention improves performance.
- Identify the task you dread the most each day, and knock it out early. Then, take a break. This helps you build momentum and adds up to sustained performance over time.
I was CTO at Automation Anywhere when Covid shut everything down. Our cloud product demand surged 600% almost overnight. Businesses suddenly discovered their employees weren’t going back to the office for months — maybe longer — and they needed automation to survive. This wasn’t a scenario anyone had planned for. There was no playbook.
My investors had one natural fear: Would the crisis kill employee productivity? Would we let our customers down? Would the business weather the storm?
Most leaders would have required 80-hour workweeks. We did the opposite.
I told my team to take walks. Read a book. Learn something new. Play a sport, go for a hike — whatever helped them step away from their screens. It worked. We didn’t just survive the storm; we ran faster than ever.
Related: To Improve Productivity, Tell Your Team to Go Take a Hike
The trust realization
I learned something in those first chaotic weeks. We didn’t have a motivation issue. In spite of the virus, in spite of all the uncertainty, employees wanted to keep working — to maintain their work relationships. People longed to do something meaningful when everything else felt hopeless and out of their control.
While motivation wasn’t the challenge, creating a clear understanding of what was most important and developing the tools and culture necessary to foster trust was. So that’s what we focused on. Not micromanaging. Not surveillance. Not having to check in every hour. Trust.
The result? Employees were grateful for the autonomy. And grateful employees work harder not because they’re being forced to, but because they genuinely want to.
The case for stepping back
As it turned out, there was science behind what felt like instinct at the time. Researchers at San Francisco State University have discovered that people who regularly participate in non-work-related activities (creative hobbies, sports, etc.) that require the participant to become fully absorbed are likely to perform 15-30% better on performance evaluations than those who don’t.
Personally, I have experienced this throughout my career, from managing 10,000 engineers at Ericsson to leading Sauce Labs as CEO, and I have always found that stress is best managed when you allow yourself to take a figurative step back and evaluate the situation objectively.
To me, finding time to do something that requires your full attention, such as playing squash, is the best way to allow your mind to detach and return to the problem at hand with objectivity.
For larger, more complex problems, I use walking. Typically 10 miles. Walking helps to corral your thoughts and provides a structure for evaluating them. There is something about moving physically and having open space that seems to unlock clarity.
It was during one of these 10-mile hikes that I made one of the most critical strategic decisions for Sauce Labs — to go all-in on AI-based test authoring and intelligence for large engineering teams. This was a fundamental bet on what our customers needed and where the market would go.
It wasn’t an incremental improvement. It was a tremendous leap of faith that resulted in immediate product-market fit and real customer excitement. It didn’t come from a boardroom. It came from a trail.
Related: 3 Ways to Get Employees to Actually Take a Break
Eat the frog first
There is a fine line here. I’m not suggesting you avoid hard work. In fact, quite the opposite.
My strategy is to “eat the frog first.” Identify the task you dread the most each day — the one you’re most tempted to delay — and knock it out early. Don’t let it sit on your to-do list, draining mental energy.
When you do the hardest thing first, you build momentum. You create good energy that will carry you through the remaining work.
But here’s the trick: After you eat the frog, go take a walk. Play a game. Do whatever you want. The cumulative effect of taking short breaks every day adds up to sustained performance over time.
This isn’t about being lazy; it’s about being human. We aren’t machines. When we attempt to function like machines — processing tasks continuously without rest — we fail. Our decisions get worse. We burn out.
Related: The Easiest Thing I Did to Get Promoted Quickly at Google and Meta Was to ‘Eat the Frog’ For My Boss
The one framework that has lasted through six career transitions
Throughout my career, I’ve been an engineer, a startup founder, a CTO/CPO at several companies, and now I’m a CEO. Each transition required learning a whole new set of skills, while unlearning old habits that served me so well in the past.
The only constant I’ve maintained is spending 30 minutes per day doing something unrelated to technology — sometimes that’s squash, sometimes it’s a long walk, and sometimes it’s simply reading about topics unrelated to software.
Investing in this area has value. It doesn’t waste time. It keeps your thinking fresh when everything else about your job is pushing you toward narrow focus and tunnel vision. You need the ability to step back and look at things clearly.
Trust your people. Eat the frog first. Then, go take a walk.
Key Takeaways
- When Covid shut everything down, we experienced a 600% demand surge almost overnight. Instead of forcing long work hours, I told my team to take breaks and engage in non-work-related activities.
- Stepping away from work and engaging in activities that require your full attention improves performance.
- Identify the task you dread the most each day, and knock it out early. Then, take a break. This helps you build momentum and adds up to sustained performance over time.
I was CTO at Automation Anywhere when Covid shut everything down. Our cloud product demand surged 600% almost overnight. Businesses suddenly discovered their employees weren’t going back to the office for months — maybe longer — and they needed automation to survive. This wasn’t a scenario anyone had planned for. There was no playbook.
My investors had one natural fear: Would the crisis kill employee productivity? Would we let our customers down? Would the business weather the storm?
