Embrace your pace.

There are two things almost everyone on the planet would appreciate more of: money and time. The entire productivity industry emerged from the desire to give us more of the latter, as if time was something that exists in greater supply to those who know how to hack it. (This approach did, however, generate a lot more money for some of the CEOs behind the movement to maximize our every moment.)

Productivity’s attempt to make more time available by helping us do more faster came from a well-intentioned place. Available time = what you have to do X the speed you do it. But it also requires people to buy into the belief that more is the answer. The more speed, the more available time. Straightforward, defensible, seemingly doable…until it’s not. Turns out we humans have limitations on both how much we can do and how fast we can do things.

Which brings us to the concept of pace, a steady and consistent speed of movement. It something that’s guiding our work at Bosa, both in what we’re building and how we’re going about the business of, well, building the business.

Like many industries, the default in startup-land is to work as hard and fast as humanly possible. Photos of product leaders sleeping in their offices, stories about founders missing family milestones, accounts of consistent 80 hour workweeks are shared like badges of honor, not a recipe for burnout. Productivity culture thrives here. Pursuit of rapid growth growth at all costs requires a pace akin to sprinting for an entire marathon. It’s an interesting culture to operate a company like Bosa within. Who would we be if we built a product to help people shift away from productivity culture by holding ourselves and our team to those very rules we’re trying to break?

We need to determine our pace. We get to decide what rate of speed is right for us, one that is meaningful and sustainable over time so we reach millions of people stressed out by the mental load without sacrificing ourselves in the process. If the problem we’re trying to solve with Bosa, results in more available time, what other variables can we consider outside of more speed and more to do? That’s what we’re in the midst of figuring out, and pace is a key component. It’s a constant in the equation, not a variable, and we get to name it.

This is true for you, too. You get to set your pace. You get to play with the variables in your equation. Are you willing to keep dialing up the speed or the quantity of things to get done? If that works for you, right on. But if you’re like us and millions of others, you already know that the threshold on one or both of these is real. You may have already learned where more becomes too much. Use this to think about what pace feels right for you — not too slow, not too fast, but just right. Your Goldilocks pace.

We’re excited to share more about our experiments with pace with you as we go. What we learn about pace as a constant, what new equations we may come up with and our personal perspectives as we take control of our speed rather than it controlling us. Doing more to do more? So last year. Doing what’s best at the best pace? That’s what the next year — and beyond — looks like.