The Good Life and How to Get It

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Those things are what we have always called handrails -- physical things that make it almost impossible not to live how we want. But the biggest handrail of all was what we used to call our "three-week trips." Sometimes longer than three weeks but never less; we never skipped them. In the early years they were mostly wilderness trips; later we often went to Latin America. We worked so we could take trips. We loved our work, but we worked so we could take trips. Later, as the business got more intense, it was easy to get confused and begin to think the trips were to refresh us so that we could work better. We fought that thought like the poison that it is. The trips were, are, their own justification.

I have a list of our early three-week trips here on my computer. In 1975 (postgraduation, prebakery) Laura and I hiked 31 days straight, the full height of Montana from Yellowstone to Glacier. In 1976, our first summer with a running business, we left the business with our employees and hopped freight trains from Montana through Canada to the East Coast. When we got back, we were short one employee; they had locked her up in girls' prison for stealing $1,000 from us. Bread quality, though, was still good. In 1977 we hiked from the Crazy Mountains to Cooke City, 27 days on the trail plus the logistics on both ends. A bakery employee dropped us at the trailhead. In 1978 our first daughter, Sally, was born; we only got a 9-day camping trip in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. In 1979, though, we made up for it, driving due north 60 hours through Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon, and into the Northwest Territories. I loaded Sally on my back, Laura carried the food, and we backpacked into the Mackenzies. Sally was six months. One night there were three grizzlies visible from our tent, just picking berries. It goes continually like that, to the present. The actual time away from the business was much longer than those trips suggest, because you need a week or two at least for logistics on wilderness trips like that.

It was the inviolate nature of those weekends and trips that forced us to hire right and train right and invent systems for our people as the business grew. It grew up around that belief system, accommodated to it. Of course, that was fabulous for the business -- imagine a little bakery, or a just-beginning two-employee franchise company, whose people knew they had to do Sundays alone, Mondays alone, August alone -- and that there was no way to call if they got into trouble.

Laura and I work on ourselves, read success stuff, write in our journals, build habits, break habits -- if that's what it takes to have a great life, we're into it. But we really believe that it's the physical solutions that work, not the mental ones. The physical act of leaving has tremendous power. That sounds so obvious. It even sounds easy. And in fact, it is easy, once you get the hang of it.

Handrails
We really like strong lines between things. We carry time cards, and we punch in, punch out, to the nearest five minutes. We know when we're working. We get paid by the hour by Great Harvest. I have a little Excel sheet I keep -- we make a conscious decision each year how many hours we will work. We work less now than we used to. In 1993 we worked 2,986 hours -- that's for the two of us, so if you figure 2,080 hours is full time (52 40-hour weeks) we were working three-quarter time. In 1996 we decided to go to 1,000 hours each, basically half time. The past four years have been controlled, by time card, at exactly that.

Aside from the 1,000-hour rule, we vary our schedule any way we want. Last winter, against a deadline, I worked an 18-hour day followed by a 24-hour day, straight through the night. I love the intensity of being on a roll. Other days we'll drive in for a single meeting and clock less than 2 hours. To some extent the 1,000-hour rule has replaced the rigidness we used to have about weekends and vacations. Right now, for example, I'm billing. It's Sunday, I'm on a lawn chair by the Jefferson River in strong Montana sun, camped really nowhere, 50 miles outside Dillon. I live the life they like to show in the computer ads. Difference is, I have my 1,000-hour spreadsheet, and when my year is done, it's done. I know when I'm working and when I'm not. Writing by a river is nicer than writing inside, but it's still more like writing, less like river.

Never let anyone -- yourself included -- make you 'pay' for taking a vacation.

You can see, by fast-forwarding from our beginnings to now, that what works for us with a 100-plus-bakery franchise is what worked for us with a single retail store. Simple, physical handrails. Handrails that we set, then follow without further questioning. All the good systems, all the good habits, derive from this simple act of partitioning. In the old days working on a Sunday would have been taboo. But the partition between work and play is just as simple and clear today as it was back then.

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