How did WFH → Work Creep?
What I'm Up To (Monayyy?), What I Reflected On (DeFi Investing), and What's Occupying My Mind (Investment Apps) - all part of Allen's Friday Flights
HELLO to the Friday Flights
These are a flight of personal updates from me and it’ll be centered around what I’m up to, what I reflected on, and what book (or even thing) occupies my mind. Makes sense why I’d have a different selection of topics since I often choose samplers and flights when I go out to eat and drink.
Ciao!
Allen
Past Friday Flights
What I’m Up To
TL;DR: Money, I think.
The Things:
Still working on my Wooble.
I learned about how to legally form and lead a syndicate to do joint investments on companies. Maybe this becomes a 2024 superpower.
DeFi Investing: I deposited $954 BUSD Stablecoins into a DeFi Protocol, took a loan out for $944 USDX Stablecoin which is backed by my deposited BUSD, and with a combine portfolio value $1,898 - earned $12 in 5 days. That’s $2.40 per day. At this rate, I would earn $876 in 1 year, which if I’m lucky, that’s a 91.8% gain. wtf. (Assumes crypto goes up LOL)
CFO Mixer: Went to a CFO and Financial Professionals Mixer in Orange County. So that was neat. Decent wine. It’s a small world. There weren’t that many Asians, and I think I found them all.
Forgetting about LinkedIn (I should pick this back up)
Ate a Campo e Carbon, a pop-up restaurant in someone’s backyard. It’s the most LA experience of all time and 100% recommend it.
Got to meet to Aaron and Chirag this week. Hello.
What I Reflected On
TL;DR: Multi Part Series based on Remote Working
Note: Part 1 of possibly 3
How did WFH → Work Creep?
March 17, 2020, is the day my employer (at the time) issued a work-from-home mandate. There was a lot of fear and uncertainty met by physical relief from an exhausted workforce.
Gone were the commuting time that would force many of us to get up at 7:00 a.m., get ready, drive, park, and be in the office by 9:00 a.m. Here were the days of rolling out of bed at 8:57 a.m. to start work at 9:00 a.m.
An extra 2 to 4 hours a day was suddenly available for all of us commuters. You know how much happiness there is knowing I wasn’t going to spent 1.5 hours to drive 15 miles to work?
Or knowing I didn’t have to get on the metro that day?
The joy there is knowing I wasn’t going to spend $16 on parking plus $10 on sub-par office food eateries?
A lot!
Here were the days where we saved time commuting.
So where did all this saved time go?
Work.
It all went to work.
Zooming Back to Back
TL;DR: Zoom, zoom, zoom!
In something that is both ironic, and maybe fitting of a paradox, I found myself working a lot more. It wasn’t just me - it was everyone around me, and everyone I spoke to, iterating the same thing. Ask the staff (associate). Ask the manager. Ask the partner. Ask the partner’s partner. Yeah we’re all working more.
We saved time commuting. That was true.
But now we spend that time directly working, and more.
Once the illusion that we would be “returning to the office in 2 weeks 4 weeks 8 weeks July Fall 2020” went away, it was common to have working days that look like this:
8a.m. to 5 p.m. - phone calls, team meetings, video calls, more calls, and more calls
5 p.m. - 10 p.m. - actually doing some work, sending emails, documenting things, updating a deck or spec,
10:00 p.m. - 12 :00 a.m. - engage the off-shore team if you were in charge of one, or knew you’d be behind if you didn’t
Put some breaks and food in there liberally.
Rinse and repeat.
You’d open people’s calendars and see oceans of blocked time, with people “sniping” 15 minutes to 30 minutes where they could. You ever see someone’s calendar fill up live?
I’d have East Coast people messing with the West Coast and not respecting this thing called Time Zones.
While I am many years late, I finally understood what my managers, senior managers, and partners were sayin about “how there’s no time to do the work”.
Bandaids to a Deeper Problem
TL;DR: Work creep strikes again
To combat this great surge in work meetings, I’d have teams try these:
“no meetings days”
“ghost booking meetings for yourself”
“reduce calendar meetings by 5 minutes”
Here’s what happened:
The first idea gives great respite, but if you work in a regulatory deadline driven environment, or a place that feels high stakes, you start to ration that time out to select people out of necessity and reduction of stress.
The second idea doesn’t really work if you don’t own your schedule and you have 3-7 projects and stakeholders to go figure. Alternatively, it doesn’t work if you aren’t concrete on your boundaries - which is its own muscle on its own.
The third idea isn’t respected unless you are the one who organized it.
It seems that no matter what is tried - including reducing workload or hiring more - work creep simply came back up.
Looking back, 2020 and 2021 were simply exhausting years spent in front of a screen. For many people, 2022 is a continuation of 2020.
I was reminded of how much people are working when I attended both a CFO mixer this week, and another conference a few weekends ago, and heard the same exhausted stories from every single person I caught up with or met.
Everyone saved physical time in exchange for more work time. They are still doing it today.
So, what’s the deeper problem?
It took my own complete extra crispy burnout and a career break for me to figure out what my problem is. Come back next week for part 2.
What thing occupies my mind
TL;DR: Can’t buy real-estate, so I guess these apps will have to do.
Millennial Woes
See this nice home? Yeah I don’t own it, and won’t be owning any time soon.
I’ve heard of the mantra of buying a real-estate property and then renting it out. You get a home (asset), and you can sell it later for higher value, and at the same time, you can live rent-free because you paid the mortgage, assuming you live there.
Since I don’t have the capital or the willpower to invest in what is currently a very over priced market, and investing in stocks, options, and cryptos aren’t enough to keep my focus and interest, here are a couple of other apps I’ve put some dollars into that aren’t betterment, high yield savings accounts, or ETFs.
Investment Apps
Fundrise - Invest in Real Estate Development (REIT)
Here.co - Crowd Invest in Vacation Homes in return for fractional ownership
Masterworks - Crowd Invest in Art in return for fractional ownership
How they all work:
Many wealth building fintech apps focus on “paying you interest” or something like that. These really don’t, and if they do, they aren’t the main focus.
All three apps are making the bet that the value of the real asset you help buy today will be worth more in the future, and when you sell your stake (or the company sells the asset and thus, sells everyone’s stake), you’ll earn money.
Essentially, these apps allow you to buy, hold, and appreciate real assets. Since I’ve put money in all 3, I can do a technical/quantitative analysis on how well they performed - but if I did, that would be its own newsletter piece, each.
So have at it. (I have referral codes for anyone interested).