Rolling the Dice — Paul Murphy

Originally published on Tumblr.

This isn’t about investing in startups. It’s about shaping my life around running a startup.

When you run a startup you try to make everything predictable. You come up with systems for everything. I have a system for managing business cards. I have a note taking system. I have a system for keeping in touch with people. Of course I have several systems when I program. I have a shaving pattern. I wash my body in the same order every day. I even line up my toiletries in a way that guaranties I don’t forget anything.

Why?

Because my work is all-consuming, and I think about it all the time, so I get distracted. Also, my patterns bring a little order into my otherwise completely unpredictable life. Without them I’d be overwhelmed.

Before I came up with a shower routine, I know I washed my hair several times on some days, and not at all on others. I started organizing my toiletries not because I couldn’t remember whether or not I’d put on deodorant (that happened all the time and my rule was that doing it twice couldn’t hurt), but because it once took me two days to realize that I didn’t like the taste of the new toothpaste because it wasn’t toothpaste. So it’s easy to see why I like patterns.

But sometimes patterns get boring, not just for me, but also for other people. When I exercised by myself, I had incredibly rigorous routines. Something would have to be terribly wrong for me to break them. But now I like to exercise with my wife, and she doesn’t like routine nearly as much as I do. The end result is that we almost stopped exercising altogether. Every time she wanted to, I had already engaged in some other activity. If it didn’t fit into a pattern, I couldn’t do it.

We’ve been trying to solve this problem for months, and I think we’ve finally come up with a good solution.

We’ve agreed to wake up 2 hours and 10 minutes before our first meeting, but no later than 6:50. That’s randomizes our wake up time since my first meeting can be any time from 7:00 to 10:00. So why not 2 hours? Why the extra 10 minutes? Because the first snooze cycle on an iPhone is 9 minutes. People who don’t like routine like to snooze apparently, even though study after study shows that it’s not good for you. The remaining two hours allow for 30-45 minutes of exercise (depending on whether or not a journey is required), a dog walk, breakfast, and a shower.

Some of you are probably thinking this sounds an awful lot like a pattern, despite the semi-predictable wakeup time. It is, but not entirely, because after the alarm goes off, or after a snooze, we roll the dice (die to be accurate) to determine what we do next.

If it’s a 1, we go swimming.
If it’s a 2, we do yoga.
If it’s a 3, we garden. Not very intense, but it has to get done sometimes.
If it’s a 4, we run.
If it’s a 5, we do mat and weight work.
If it’s a 6, we go swimming. Yea, we like to swim. And so does the dog.

It’s probably a bit extreme to engineer randomness to this degree, but I like it. And if this works out, we may increase the number of options by introducing a second die.

PS. Any investor or employee reading this, you can breath easy. I don’t intend to introduce any more randomness into the office. The dice stay home.