We started People-First Jobs back in 2019 because we were tired of watching growth-at-all-cost companies get all the attention (and admiration) in the job market. We knew that more and more people were searching for a work environment where they could do fulfilling work at a reasonable pace, with a team that cares deeply about their success and craft—and we wanted to help them find fantastic companies that do just that: Cultivate a people-first workplace.

It’s been incredible to see how far we’ve come since then. People-First Jobs has grown into a community of close to a hundred companies that are committed to the people-first approach. We’ve helped countless job seekers find fulfilling roles with teams that know that prioritizing their people will deliver the best results. Today, PFJ is among the top job boards for companies and candidates who have a high bar when it comes to defining a great workplace.

So when Chris and I sold Postmark and decided that it is time for us to take a break, we knew we wanted to find someone who can continue to take good care of PFJ—ideally a Wildbit team member who knows the product and shares our vision of what it means to be people first. Someone like Bettina.

Bettina is the ideal blend of passion, heart, and business sense to run People-First Jobs moving forward. She has worked at agencies, big companies and small ones, funded businesses as well as bootstrapped ones, in the US and in Germany, both on-site and remote—and while she always worked in marketing roles, her true superpower is her sixth sense for understanding people, and getting to the heart of what motivates humans at work.

At Wildbit, Bettina led Product Marketing for Postmark, and she also took the lead in helping us tell Wildbit’s story of adopting the 4-day workweek. Wildbit introduced the 4-day week back in 2017, but to be honest, not that many people knew about it. We just didn’t do a great job talking about it. When Bettina joined the team in 2020, that changed. From blog posts and webinars to securing press coverage, she helped us turn our experience into valuable, actionable resources for every team that’s curious about more efficient ways of working.

Bettina played a pivotal role in raising awareness for the Wildbit brand, and the impact of that work was felt across products like Postmark, DMARC Digests, and PFJ. That's one of the many reasons why we knew she was a perfect fit. She has the skills, experience, and dedication to help people-first companies tell their story and attract values-aligned talent to their teams.

Bettina will continue to work with Chris Bowler, another former Wildbit team member who has supported People-First Jobs from day one—and I know they’ve got lots of ideas for how to make PFJ even better, for job seekers and member companies alike.

It’s so great to know that People-First Jobs is in great hands, and we can’t wait to see what’s next. We’ll be cheering from the sidelines.

First, a few important points:

• The entire team at Wildbit was offered a position with ActiveCampaign, regardless of whether they worked directly on Postmark or DMARC Digests. And every person (with the exception of Lisa Hebert, our incredible EA) has joined ActiveCampaign.
• Postmark and DMARC Digests will remain available as standalone products, and the team will continue to support them as they did pre-acquisition.
• Beanstalk will remain with Wildbit and continue to run under the leadership of Ilya Sabanin, who built Beanstalk from the ground up 14 years ago!
• People-First Jobs is in need of a plan. We’re working internally to decide how to ensure that it lives on, though long-term not within Wildbit.
• Together, Wildbit (Chris and Natalie) and ActiveCampaign are committed to demonstrating an acquisition that intentionally considers the impact it has on all people involved.

Why now?

There are so many reasons that brought us to this decision, but they boil down to a painful yet ultimately liberating realization: we are both ready to move on—and we can’t faithfully support our team’s fulfillment and our customers’ needs if our heart is no longer in it.

It’s a wild moment when you realize that the business you’ve built and run for over 21 years isn’t your passion anymore. It took us, separately and together, nearly a year of deep introspection to find our way to the truth.

For both of us, Wildbit has defined who we are for our entire adult lives. Chris started the company when he was 19, and Natalie joined shortly after we first met fresh out of high school. When you do something for this long, it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. The team knows we’ve always joked about opening a hotel one day. But that, like any other wild ideas, always felt like a distant fantasy. Over the last year, we realized that we’re ready to explore a world outside of software. We’re ready to slow down a bit, be more present with our kids, and discover ourselves again.

Meanwhile, Wildbit and our products have seen incredible growth over the last couple of years. Postmark, the primary revenue driver, has continued to evolve into the best of the best in our space. It’s beloved by customers, and it’s growing faster than any Wildbit product has ever grown. DMARC Digests, our newest product, has also seen tremendous growth.

And the humans behind these products are the best in the business. They support and drive all the incredible successes we’ve seen. This team cares deeply about the customers and are passionate about building the best tools to deliver emails reliably and solve authentication issues. They have shared and advocated a vision for the products and a team that is unstoppable.

And so we realized it was time. We can no longer provide what our customers and our team needs. We don’t have the drive in us to scale the product or the team in the ways the products now require. We’ve realized that we’re holding back the people we work so hard to support, and that’s not very people first.

Why ActiveCampaign?

In the spring of 2021, ActiveCampaign reached out to our team to discuss a possible integration with Postmark. ActiveCampaign is focused on giving small businesses the email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools they need to create incredible customer experiences. While the product is extremely robust, their customers were asking for functionality to send transactional email. Our team was excited to think through how we could partner with ActiveCampaign.

While an integration would be awesome, the ActiveCampaign team really wanted to bring the two products tightly together. So they asked if we’d be willing to sell. Over the years we’ve been asked to sell Postmark quite a lot, and we’ve always politely declined. This was, at first, a similar story. But this conversation aligned around the same time that both of us had begun to explore our own motivations. So we decided to take an exploratory call with the ActiveCampaign team.

What we discovered, through countless conversations, debates, and discoveries, was a team with great empathy and values, and a true desire to make this an acquisition that served all the human constituents as best as possible.

They’re committed to keeping Postmark and DMARC Digests as standalone products, and nothing will change for our existing customers. There is deep respect for the customers, and an understanding that our audiences overlap but are also different. Over the coming months, an integration between Postmark and ActiveCampaign will give the small businesses who need transactional messaging, marketing automation, CRM, and sales engagement a powerful platform to build relationships with their customers.

The team

But what ultimately sold us on ActiveCampaign was their commitment to supporting our team. Once we decided we were ready for something new, we immediately transitioned to figuring out how you could exit a business without hurting the team that supported building it all along.

We spent the majority of our time in discussions with ActiveCampaign focused on understanding how their company would integrate our team. The good thing is that their leadership team already knew Wildbit and our culture, and addressed that issue from the very beginning. It can’t be a people-first transaction if the team isn’t at the forefront.

In the end, the team at ActiveCampaign really showed up. The majority of our team will continue 4-day work weeks through the end of the year. They gave our leadership team a single champion to report to, ensuring that they can continue to work independently within ActiveCampaign. They are determined to preserve what made the Wildbit culture special, and learn from our commitment to deep, focused work.

Sure, it’s not Wildbit, but that doesn’t make it worse—it’s just different. In a lot of ways, we see it as better for the team. There are more robust employee benefits, like coaching and 401(k) matches for the US-based team. They have more resources to support the Wildbit team in doing work that is fulfilling, from hiring more people to spread the workload to providing access to functional experts and specialized roles. The team will be able to do more of what they want to do. And as a larger organization, ActiveCampaign will have career opportunities that would not be available at Wildbit, both lateral moves and opportunities to grow into management roles.

We’re both fully aware that this was a decision we were making for ourselves, and one that would result in a significant change for the team. We have a deep respect and care for each person, so before we committed to this decision we spent a lot of time thinking about acquisitions in general, and how they can impact the team both positively and negatively. One key theme really stood out that mimics how we’ve always run Wildbit: How can a business be used as a tool to support human beings?

As a private, bootstrapped company, we’ve never had stock options or any kind of employee ownership. Yet at the same time we’ve been privileged to work with people who have committed their careers and their lives to us and Wildbit. In selling Postmark and DMARC Digests, we found a way to share that success together and to do something financially that would not be possible without a transaction like an acquisition. So as part of the transaction we are sharing 10% of the proceeds with the whole team, divided by tenure and contribution. We hope it provides folks with their own chance to have a life-changing moment and maybe even help facilitate taking a break in the future.

What’s the future hold?

We’re thinking of this as the first step in figuring out what’s next. In the immediate future, we’ll both be around to support the Wildbit folks and the ActiveCampaign leadership team to make this acquisition a success story.

And then we’re going to take a real break. We’ll take a bit of time to regroup and figure out what excites us. We’re not sure if that will be in this industry. We’re not sure if that would even be starting another product business. The uncertainty feels scary but invigorating. We’re going to do terrifying things like turning off the ringer on our cell phones at night, stopping checking email every day, and deleting Twitter.

It’s been an incredible 21+ years. We’re so honored to have worked with some of the best folks in this business, presently and in the past. For most of our career at Wildbit, we’d jump out of bed in the morning, energized to prove to the world that you can build a meaningful, profitable, super successful business while prioritizing people above all else. We can’t have asked for anything more in our careers to this point.

And we’ve done it. We did SaaS in 2004! We did remote work and company retreats before they were a thing. We designed a company that allowed folks to change jobs without leaving, building so many products with wonderful, loyal customers. We got to champion a 4-day workweek, inspiring lots of companies to do the same. We’ve made slow, thoughtful growth cool (for some people, lol). We designed and delivered principles and values that mean something. We created an equitable compensation strategy for team members around the globe and defined what our promise of leadership looked like, regardless of whether or not you managed people. And we got to build a safe place to find fulfillment in your work. We are so damn proud of it.

And we take all of it with us, as does the team. This is the end of a chapter, maybe the end of a volume, but the passion and commitment will always continue on. Every person that has had their Wildbit journey can share their experience more broadly. They can advocate for shorter work weeks, for more deep work, for compassion and patience and fulfillment. We both take with us those joys, and also the pains. That includes the poor decisions and the folks that didn’t have positive experiences at Wildbit. We take them all into the future as we decide what we do next to leave the campground better than we found it.

It’s often the most difficult, scary, and painful decisions that are the right ones. This is right for the two of us, right for Postmark’s customers, and right for our team. In 2011 Derek Sivers wrote a book called Anything You Want. And he shared an anecdote about when he realized the business wasn’t his passion anymore. That his heart wasn’t in it. And he got advice from Seth Godin that seems so simple, but so hard. “If you care, sell”. We care more about Postmark and our team than we can summon in words. We care so deeply, that despite the pain, we know it’s right.

With all of our love and tremendous gratitude,

Chris and Natalie

P.S. We wouldn’t have been able to get through this process without an amazing team of advisors behind us. Our investment bankers, Founders Advisors, supported us every step of the way. They prepared us, guided us, and made sure we never felt alone. They made this life-changing outcome possible. Alongside was our legal team at Growth Counsel. They were practical, dedicated, and always had our back. And they made sure that by the time we signed on the dotted line, everyone was still friends. Thank you to both teams.

After a few of us read the article, we thought it a good idea to invite Rand for a follow-up chat with our CEO and co-founder Natalie Nagele. We like to talk about the small details that build a big business, and we particularly like to do so in public, where our audience can ask questions that help us dig deeper.  

Rand came over on February 9th. If you missed the conversation or would like to watch it again, click play below (the video is split into chapters if you want to skip to the bits you care about) ↓

📚 Links and resources from our panelists

• Rand’s book, Lost and Founder
• Natalie’s guide to deep work at Wildbit
• People-First Jobs
• SparkToro
• Cal Newport, Deep Work
• Bo Burlingham, Small Giants

💡 Highlights 

1. Hustle work is never ‘done’

Rand: “To me, hustle has always meant working hard for the sake of work; that it is respectable, and impressive, and important, and valuable to work many long hours because working long hours is a goal in and of itself. It is not the outcome that one is seeking, but rather the practice of it. [...] I absolutely shared those beliefs and followed, and worshiped, and was in awe of many of those people who wore their hard work and long hours as a badge of honor. I have slowly, over time, opened my eyes to the reality that maybe this is not true: and now in the last few years, I’ve come around to the idea that I think it’s a problematic at best, pernicious myth.”

Natalie: “With hustle culture, there’s no end. There’s no ‘done’. There’s no ‘enough’. In the context of focus work, hustle culture creates this perception that it’s never done, which also adds a lot of anxiety to our culture.”

2. Deep work is fulfilling but tiring work

Natalie: “To me, [doing] deep work and getting in a flow state is magical because you’re using your superpower, you’re able to accomplish something, and your mind wants that. It’s beautiful—but it should exhaust you, and it probably does. And usually, if you do 2 hours of really good deep work, you [then] need to take a break, take a walk. To me, that’s why it’s hard: it’s hard on your body, on your mind. It’s like you’ve used up a lot of energy, like powerful energy in your body and your mind.”

“Newport’s book [Deep Work] talks a lot about the capacity of your brain to do deep work; and the capacity taps out at about 4 hours a day […] versus the alternative, which is react[ing] to things all day long. We’re using a different part of our brain. We are probably exhausted, but it’s from distraction, it’s from multitasking, it’s from too many inputs that don’t align. And it’s not as fulfilling, because we didn’t actually do anything that used a flow state.”

3. Data can help convince managers of the value of deep work  

Rand: “How do I embrace [deep work and chill work] practically myself, and then try and convince other people that I work with: my boss, team, client, et cetera? One of the best ways to do it is to present conversations like the one we’re having. There is an incredible amount of data out there that shows that you do your best work in this deep state of flow, that 4 hours a day is the maximum for that, that if you are well-rested and emotionally happy and feeling psychologically safe, the quality of your decision-making and the quality of your work goes up massively.”

Natalie: “In most cases, your boss cares about output. So if you can, change the narrative from ‘hours’ or ‘response times’ to what are we trying to accomplish here? There are conversations to be had. I think sometimes it’s really hard, especially in larger organizations, to try to change the entire culture of the organization; there’s some value in trying to find small iterations of that, to just start to show that deep work works, that being ’on’ all the time isn’t necessary.”

“Your boss would be really surprised when they found out how much time you don’t spend doing work that you’re getting paid for. Nobody hired you to check email—I don’t think any of us had a job description that says email checker. You’re hired because you’re a software developer, designer, a writer. That’s your unique ability. That’s what they’re paying you for.
One of my favorite ways is to start recording your time: record your hours for two, three, four weeks, and hand that to your boss. When they start to see that it’s 70% meetings, 20% email checking, and 10% maybe getting the actual projects done, they can quantify that math really fast, and you’ve just became a really expensive robot. And they don’t want that.”

4. Focus is crucial to deep work and flow—especially in a remote-first setting

Rand: “I try and find a time, place, and position where I know that I do my best work—which is generally here in this office, which is out back in my house. I have my email not open, and I’m just in whatever state of flow I need to be in, and I concentrate on it. And in the first 15 minutes, if I can’t get into that state of flow, I will go do other work, clear out my backlog, and try to come back to that big project later.”

Natalie: “I schedule it, so it has to happen. Cal [Newport] talks about this a lot. There’s different ways to do it, but I’ll schedule deep work on my calendar; I know myself enough to know the hours of the day and the meeting that comes before and after, and what that means.”

Rand: “When you switch to a remote-first work environment and a distributed team approach in many time zones, you as the leadership team or the manager or the person who’s doing the work has to build a structure that does not require time-sensitive collaboration. Your job is to design projects that are useful and valuable to the business, that don’t require the same hours from people. And this also is a key to deep work—because you can almost never have multiple people deep-working, same time, same time zone. And that flexibility creates a lot more mental health opportunities for people who like to work out in the morning, or got to pick up kids from school early, and so on.”

5. Why we should talk about work-life integration 

Natalie: “I’ve thought a lot about work-life integration, more than work-life balance. If you have fulfilling work, where work-life balance falls apart is that it tries to create really strict walls around work and really strict walls around life. And what that does [...] is it creates an artificial sense of rest, and then it forces a strict work period.”

“What we’ve tried to do instead is create an environment for fulfilling work—it may come at a point where it’s 8:00pm and you’re really inspired and got excited about something and want to work: that’s okay. And then come in later the next day, take a rest, pick up your kid from work, go do a two-hour bike ride [...]. It’s not forcing one versus the other.”

6. What makes a company people-first:

Rand: “I think this is when the leadership and the structure of the organization care more about the long-term health, and happiness, fulfillment, quality-of-work that the team does, than it does about raw financial or economic growth. And I think that weirdly enough [...] if you prioritize people, very often you end up doing better at the economic and financial growth. It’s kind of awesome because you can prioritize the thing that, if you are a human being who cares lots about other human beings and less about the quantity of capital in your bank account, you can do the right thing and also increase the quantity of capital in all the bank accounts. You can do both. That’s the important message. Both can be accomplished.”

One of the biggest misconceptions about the 4-day workweek is that it’s as simple as cutting a day from your company’s typical schedule. It’s not that easy. If you want to move to a 32h week and still be successful, you’ll have to master one thing first: Deep work.

You can’t cut a workday without changing how you work

Most businesses can’t expect to reduce their working week by 20% without fundamentally rethinking how that business operates. If you keep doing what you’re doing but just cut a day, your 4-day workweek experiment will fail.

You can’t shift to a 4-day work week without rethinking how you do work.

Successfully implementing a 4-day workweek requires a shift in how we perceive and approach work itself. It may sound harsh, but a significant amount of the “work” we do during an average week is perfunctory at best and performative at worst. This can be hard for some people to accept because, culturally, subjective value judgments about “work ethic” are often intrinsically linked to our sense of self. Hard work is perceived as virtuous, whereas seeking to work less is often interpreted as “laziness.”

Recent data shows that most salaried employees do only three hours (or less) of meaningfully productive work per day. That same data also shows that working longer hours often has a detrimental impact on the quality of work produced. Some companies struggle to recognize this and respond to these challenges by enforcing draconian measures that track employees’ computer use, limit breaks, enforce mandatory overtime to compensate for “downtime,” and other controls that punish workers in the pursuit of productivity gains.

Some companies, however, come at this from the opposite angle. Rather than focusing on the number of hours worked—or the time you spent in your seat—they’re focusing on outcomes or the quality of work produced. For many of these companies, the concept of deep work is fundamental to this mindset.

In his 2016 book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, author Cal Newport describes deep work as:

“Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

Deep work is the work we hire people to do; the specializations and expertise that define careers and helps businesses grow. Deep work is what a writer does when they write or an artist does when they paint or, in the software world, what a developer does when they write code. By contrast, much of the work that detracts from deep work—the emails, the meetings, the tedious but vital administrative tasks—could be considered “shallow” work. There’s no getting around the necessity of shallow work, but it’s not why we hire people. When you’re looking to reduce work time, you have to figure out how your team can use the remaining time in the most efficient way, and optimizing for deep work is the key.

Periods of uninterrupted time to think and concentrate is crucial to the concept of the 4-day workweek. This cannot happen accidentally—it must be treated as an organizational priority.

Enabling deep work is crucial to the success of a 4-day workweek

Wildbit first started experimenting with a 4-day workweek in 2017, and since then, it’s become a fundamental part of who we are as an organization and how we work as a team. People ask us about our experiences with a 4-day week all the time, and—understandably—one of the most common questions we get is how other companies can implement a 4-day week and succeed. We’ve learned a lot about ourselves and our work over the past few years, and we’ve found that there are five main strategies that have laid the groundwork for our success.

1. Give your team the flexibility they need

Different people work in different ways, especially when it comes to prolonged periods of focused concentration. This is why flexibility is critical in creating an environment in which deep work can happen.

If people do their best work early in the morning, they should be able to do so. If other team members are night owls who find it easier to focus later in the evening, let them. There may be some administrative considerations to think about, such as how much overlap there should be between the schedules of team members across different time zones, but generally speaking, your team should have the freedom to set their own hours and do their work in a way that aligns with how they work and the rest of their lives.

This kind of flexibility isn’t just about scheduling, however. It’s about trusting your team to get the job done, and that they know best when and how that should happen. This can be a difficult transition for managers used to rigid schedules and top-down management. That said, many people respond positively to having greater agency over their work, and more autonomy often translates into greater job satisfaction and higher productivity. Trust your team and give them the support they need to create their own schedules.

At Wildbit, we believe that we can expect individuals to be responsible for their own productivity only if we create an environment where they can maximize their focus. It's a mutual agreement. We promise to give you all the flexibility you need if you promise to do really good work when you can.

2. Avoid the day-to-day distractions that interrupt your team’s flow

Constant distractions are one of the major impediments to deep work, which is why you should be ruthless about trying to minimize them. This doesn’t just mean being deliberate about scheduling meetings. It also means being mindful about which situations require immediate attention—and which don’t.

Is this question worth a Slack message that might interrupt your coworker? Or could this be an email that your colleague can respond to later? Plus, to protect your own deep work times, be disciplined about when and how to respond to external distractions, such as email.

This will only work if your team is encouraged to set firm boundaries. Employees need to know that it’s okay to delay responding to an email if they’re in a period of deep work, not left to guess or infer. We’ve found it’s important to be just as intentional about communicating these values as we are about limiting distractions, so be sure to demonstrate these behaviors as a manager and proactively let employees know that such boundaries are positive.

3. Plan intentionally and consistently

Leaders aren’t always aware of how their actions can contribute towards chaos and confusion. Robert Sutton, a professor at Stanford University, observed that leaders often—and unintentionally—waste employees’ time: “They make offhand comments and don’t consider that their employees may interpret them as commands.”

When we evaluated what needed to change as part of introducing a 32-hour workweek, we realized that we, too, created noise for our team without realizing it. It would not be uncommon for one of us to send a Sunday-night email with that next great idea, leading the team to wonder, "Am I changing direction now? What's going on here?". These distractions and feelings of uncertainty are the nemesis of deep work.

As we introduced the 32-hour workweek, we also implemented a company-wide cadence of strategic planning and deep work time. At the beginning of each quarter, we come together to plan and prioritize. During this time, no actual work is getting done. We’re focused on strategy, collaborative planning, and resolving questions in real-time. By the end of the planning phase, the entire team is on the same page about what we want to achieve—and for the rest of the quarter, we focus on executing the work.

4. Empower small, independent teams

Deep work manifests differently from one team to another and from one person to another. If you’re working in a big team, it’s much harder to find a rhythm that accommodates everyone’s deep work preferences.

That’s why here at Wildbit, we create small, independent project teams that focus on the different goals we’ve set for the quarter. Depending on the type of project, we might have team members across engineering, design, QA, or marketing and customer success come together, but in general, those teams are no bigger than 5 people. These small autonomous teams can move quickly and make decisions independently of other teams. But most importantly, they can set their own terms to facilitate deep, focused work.

5. Prioritize what really matters

Cultivating a culture in which deep work is sacred means being comfortable saying “no.”

Just as individual teams should be given the autonomy to make decisions that facilitate deep work, they should also be encouraged to prioritize what really matters. This might translate to opting out of meetings that aren’t essential or focusing on one project over another. This may feel uncomfortable initially, but it’s not about “skipping” work—it’s about identifying what really matters to specific teams and giving them the freedom to do what’s best for that team and focus on work that will have the biggest impact.

Prioritization also matters at the organizational level. Just as individual teams can and should prioritize what really matters to them, companies need to think strategically and focus on priorities that will help the business succeed; if a company is focused on the wrong things, it doesn’t matter how lean, smart, or productive individual teams might be.

Looking over the five points above, some people might think that their company already does all of this within the context of a traditional workweek. Why not optimize for these factors and stick to a five-day week? Because doing so overlooks one of the most important aspects behind deep work and the four-day workweek: rest.

Rest is a crucial aspect of deep, focused work

Just as we need to be intentional about creating space for knowledge workers to engage in deep, uninterrupted work, we also need to be just as intentional about giving workers the time and space they need to truly rest and recharge. This isn’t just about productivity. It’s about prioritizing an individual’s whole self, not just their work—a vital aspect of people-first operations.

Adequate rest is the direct counterbalance to deep, focused work. You cannot have one without the other. Acknowledging this means recognizing our limitations as human beings.

We’re not built to focus intently for 50 or 60 hours a week—it’s just not practical or realistic.

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Watch Natalie's full talk on the Tugboat Institute's website →

In addition to facilitating deep, focused work, a third day off every week can have a range of positive impacts for both employers and employees, including increased productivity, reduced costs, healthier employees, and improved employee happiness and satisfaction. But there’s another, often-overlooked benefit of a third day off every week–time for our brains to subconsciously tackle the most difficult, vexing problems we encounter during the course of our work, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “intelligent cognitive rest.”

Different parts of the brain handle different cognitive functions depending on whether we’re actively focusing on the task at hand. Neuroscientists refer to the part of the brain that handles unfocused thought as the default mode network. This part of the brain is most active during times when the mind isn’t actively focusing on a specific task, a state known as wakeful rest. The default mode network consumes a full 20% of the body’s energy while at rest and is responsible for forging connections between ideas and memories, stimulating creative thought, and subconsciously analyzing information gathered during periods of active focus.

Perhaps surprisingly, actively focusing on a task only uses 5% more energy than intelligent cognitive rest, which reveals just how hard our brains are actually working when our minds are supposedly wandering. Giving our brains time to rest and process information can have a powerful impact on our problem-solving capabilities, and a three-day weekend allows us to take advantage of this subconscious thought when we return to a focused state of deep work. This is why we advocate for four days of work followed by three days of rest, as opposed to taking an additional day off in the middle of the workweek.

When we talk about rest, we don’t just mean in the context of three-day weekends. It can be just as important—and beneficial—to rest during the course of a workday. Giving ourselves time to think away from the distractions of a screen can stimulate creative thought and help us solve difficult problems. This is because actively focusing on a problem or task deactivates the default mode network, which is why we often have “breakthrough” ideas while showering or walking.

Work hard, rest hard

If deep work is fundamental to the concept of a 4-day workweek, then “deep rest” is just as important.

Challenging the five-day workweek—a paradigm that has dominated and shaped workplace culture for the better part of a century—will take time. Making the decision to actively reduce the length of the workweek can be difficult, and the financial and economic pressures are very real for new and established companies alike. But the fundamental nature of work is changing rapidly, and systems first conceived during the Industrial Revolution are simply no longer fit for purpose in the world of knowledge work.

We’ve proven that companies can approach work in a different way while building growing, profitable businesses that put people first, and there are dozens more that have done the same. We want to encourage other businesses to do the same, and we hope you’ll join us as we continue to learn, grow, and support one another.

Learn more about the 4-day workweek

What other companies have already moved to the 4-day workweek? And should your team do the same?

Learn more →

Special thanks to the folks at Animalz for their help creating this post.

I am the newest member of the Wildbit family, working on the Customer Success team for Postmark!

I'm based in County Derry, Northern Ireland with my Husband and our 2 young kids. Sleep is a distant memory, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

I've been working in the world of email for the past 11 years or so, starting off as an email developer for a small web agency in England, before working in support for another ESP. I love talking to customers across the globe and helping with any queries along the way!

Outside of work you can find me hiking up some mountains, chasing after my kids, and attempting to cook (mostly burning stuff!). If I somehow find a spare hour in the evening (lol!), I'll be reading on my kindle or catching up on the latest TV series. I also love live music, and try to squeeze in a gig or festival when I can.

Jordan told me great things about Wildbit, so when the Customer Success role popped up, I couldn’t wait to apply! I am so excited to be part of a such a great team and can't wait to see where this journey takes us.

Why would we downsize?

Four years ago we moved into a beautiful building in Old City Philadelphia. We had the opportunity to design what we always dreamed of – private offices, bright and open, team lunches, community meetups. About a third of the team resided in Philadelphia, so it made sense to have a home base.

While we’ve always had a remote-first mentality for process and communication, we planned to hire more people in Philadelphia. As time went on, the opposite happened. We hired more remote team members, and some people who lived in the city moved out of the city. As this trend continued, our 10,000 sqft office went from 13 people down to six. You can imagine the dip in energy.

For the better part of 2019 the office was quiet. We noticed people came in less and worked at home more often. The value of the office was wearing off and in a way, it was having a negative effect on the team in Philadelphia. People starting wondering: Do I have to come in? If no one else is there, should I stay home? Or, I just don’t feel motivated at the office.

After several months of this, we knew it was time for a new approach.

Rethinking the HQ

As Natalie and I reflected on what to do next, we came up with three priorities:

1. Remote-first: The new office will be treated as transient space. Show up if you want, or if you’re in town, but there is no expectation to be there.
2. Renewed energy: An office is about renewing energy. Not just for the Philadelphia team, but team members who come into town to visit.
3. Low maintenance: Managing an office is a lot of work. If we don’t need it as a company, we should not be spending time on it.

The obvious choice was a coworking space. It will provide the energy and require little to no maintenance. However, we write and speak a lot about the importance of focus work, and we despised the fishbowl environments that most coworking offers.

We landed on a hybrid approach. A purpose-built, closed door suite with private offices inside of an active coworking space. It’s much, much smaller than our old office – going from 10,000 to 800 sqft. We have five closed door private offices, a lounge, and a work/dining table.

Immediately outside of our office is the common area, with phone booths, break-out spaces, and open seating. It provides just enough energy as you come and go for the day, but without the commotion or noise. Before if there were only two people in our office it was lonely. Now, you can be the only person here, yet when you walk in there is a lot happening. You can take a break to the snack area or common space to regroup and recharge. It’s similar to why I love living in a city, where I can hide away in the comfort of my home, then take a walk and absorb the energy happening around me.

Come and go as you please

The big shift is that the new office is not an HQ. No one has a permanent desk. (Well, except for Natalie). Instead, it’s there as needed, whether it’s someone coming into town or a local team member who needs to get out of the house. A few weeks ago, the Conveyor team got together for a mini-retreat, so we all used the space. Next week, it might be empty. And that’s ok.

While I would always prefer to work in the same office as everyone (we clearly have the most amazing team on the planet), this shift feels like the right approach for the team as a whole. It feels like we are truly remote-first again.

Hello, friends and supporters of Wildbit! I’m Amy Chantasirivisal, also known as “Amy C.” or “Amy with-the-long-last-name” in various circles. I also happen to be one of Wildbit’s newest employees -- I came on board earlier this summer as the Postmark team’s Director of Engineering. I’m based out of the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’ve spent a good chunk of my career first as a front-end engineer, then as a leader at a number of different Silicon Valley startups.

As I’ve settled into my role in the past weeks, I’ve often thought to myself, “Everyone here is so responsible, do they really need me here?” (Natalie, if you’re reading this, the answer is, “Yes. Yes, you do.” Please let me stay. 🙏)

But in all seriousness, embarking on this role has given me a different set of opportunities for engineering management and leadership than I’ve been focused on in the past. The distributed and global nature of our team means that, yes, every individual here is highly self-sufficient. Without needing to spend as much time on individual accountability, I get the privilege of taking time to think about and work on team growth, effective engineering processes and practices, and technical strategy. I’m really excited to contribute my perspective on these topics, and more, over time.

While my time in the startup space has given me a ton of valuable perspective on how different aspects of businesses are run, I knew I had to be a part of the Wildbit team after combing through the company blog. The things that drew me into the startup world in the first place -- vision, initiative, autonomy, people -- all exist at Wildbit, with the added benefit of being an established company. 🎉

Connect with me in the digital world (LinkedIn, Twitter) if you want to talk about team culture, engineering, hiring, diversity and inclusion, parenthood, womanhood, mentorship, cats, baking, cooking, pop culture, and/or board games. 💻👶🐈🍰🍔🎮

Retreats have been a staple in Wildbit’s culture for the majority of its existence and this year we went on #14. As a remote-first team, it’s the one time a year we all get together in the same room to hash out planning for the team and the products. We also get in plenty of personal time to connect over mutual hobbies, family stories, and recent adventures. It’s exhilarating and exhausting, business and pleasure, reflective and progressive. As the (self-dubbed) “friendly, neighborhood retreat captain“, I manage all things logistics for the trip. I do a fair share of research based on what others have done for their companies so I’m happy to contribute my experiences to the online conversation.

This was my second go at planning a team retreat — you can read about my perspective of the 2018 trip here. I have to say planning felt much calmer and easier for me this year after having one under my belt. I still lived in my planning spreadsheet, overcommunicated with the vendors, and gave the team more details than they cared for, but I had a clearer mindset of the outcomes. Plus, I learned last year no matter how much prep I did in advance, things will still go wrong. I think I was more accepting this year that I had to do my best job planning and roll with the things that go awry.

First thing I did was collect dates that work for the entire team by collecting the dates that did not work. We don’t schedule our retreat on the same dates each year so I have to see what everyone has going on in the April/May/June timeframe. By process of elimination, we found one week that worked for everyone this year. It’s nice to have some more flexibility on which week we go but we were able to nail it down enough in advance that it worked for everyone. While I was collecting dates, I was also having the conversation with Thi and Natalie about budget for the trip. It has worked the past couple years to be about $2,000 USD/person and something we shoot to stay around. The breakdown is about 30% for flights, 50% for lodging and meals, and the remaining 20% for miscellaneous costs (ground transportation, activities, etc.) Where people are traveling from will certainly impact the cost of flights but it usually evens out between the entire group.

Like last year, I worked with Justin from HelmsBriscoe to find the best spot for our team. Looking back at my first email to him for 2019 planning, I got the ball rolling 8 months out. This was 3 months after we returned from last year’s trip! I mentioned we were looking to do the United States again and stay around the East Coast. Since we are spread across the globe from British Columbia, Canada to Bucharest, Romania — about 5,500 miles — it has been helpful to stick to a somewhat “central” location. Justin did his magic (so many hours of work but he makes it so easy for me it feels like magic on my end) and we landed on the The Stowehof in Stowe, Vermont.

Last year, instead of renting a large home like we have in the past, we gave resort-life a try. It worked out really well for us so we went that route again this year. This includes things like a fully-staffed kitchen, bar, housekeeping, and on-site activities for our team. With the full buyout we had the run of the place to have meetings in the main lobby area and found random cubbies for smaller break out sessions. Our meals were prepared to accommodate all our varying dietary needs (vegetarian, vegan, keto, etc.) and served on the schedule that worked best for us. It’s also nice to not have to deal with taking out the trash and running/emptying the dishwasher multiple times a day.

We did try a few new things this year. Due to the arrangement of the buyout we were able to give everyone their own room. While the size of the venue and budget play a large role in sorting out how many rooms we need, it’s pretty cool we were able to work it out that no one had to share. A bunch of folks responded in the post-retreat survey they loved being able to go back to their room for alone time and felt rejuvenated when getting back with the group. Plus, who doesn’t like just having freedom in their own personal space? Our team is 75% introverts so we know it’s important to recognize the balance of meetings, togetherness, and recharging while on a week-long business trip. Even as an extrovert myself, I found I was looking forward to those intermittent opportunities to go back to my room and turn my brain off in the middle of the day.

Another new thing we did was hear from someone outside of Wildbit for some related business perspective. We usually try to incorporate a field trip during the week to shake things up. This year we popped over to the Ben & Jerry’s Factory for a tour and tasting of their finest pints fresh from the production line. We were also able to setup a chat with their Grand Poobah of Public Relations, Sean Greenwood. While we are navigating some exciting things for the future of Wildbit, it was so refreshing and relevant to hear Sean speak of the things Ben & Jerry’s stand for. Learning how they prioritize social impact as part of their double bottom line, we left the factory feeling inspired and a little giddy from all the ice cream. It was a memorable visit and the team was overwhelmingly impressed with the correlation between their mission and what we’re exploring. We made a pit stop on the way back to the resort at Vermont Artisan Coffee & Tea Co. to counteract the sugar with some caffeine. Tom kindly gave us a tour of the roastery and fueled us up for the rest of the day.

A few other things that were unique to this year’s trip:

• The past few years were spent in warmer climates so it was different to head somewhere with some milder weather. The days were nice enough to spend outside but would get chilly enough to have the fire pit going in the evening. The mountain scenery was also very beautiful and added to the “lodge” experience.
• We had 6 new faces attend retreat this year (24% of the team) so it was on my radar to make sure they felt included, comfortable, and knew what to expect. It is a unique trip and can certainly be overwhelming to process all the energy going around. We have a brief FAQ in our handbook about retreats and we realized I should blow that out to a more detailed framework for everyone to reference, whether they are new or a reminder of why/how/where we do retreats.
• On one of the first retreat trips, a much younger Wildbit team engaged in a game of flip cup. This was a first for most of the team at that time and became a fun tradition over the years. This year we decided to switch things up — I split everyone into teams (trying to diversify between products, departments, tenure, and geographic location) for a picture scavenger hunt around the property. Complete with a bonus lightning round, everyone was a winner! (but I really had to score the answers and announce the winners because we are way too competitive for “participation” recognition 😉)
• We ambitiously purchased two 2,000-piece puzzles for the trip — one box was never opened and the other one still haunts some of us.

Being able to rely on other teams to take care of our team is a major consideration for me when planning so I like to sing the praises of those who know how to get it done. Ryan, Melissa, Kyle, Alyssa and everyone at the Stowehof were prepared, kind, and diligent in making our trip go smoothly. They were ready for us before we arrived and truly made us feel at home until the last of us rolled out. We had a lot of detailed communication for months leading up to our trip and they fully upheld their end of the deal. Another team that delivered for us (literally) was Fleet Transportation. Ashley impressively coordinated all the pickups and dropoffs with me in advance. As expected, we had a few hiccups with flights and her team rolled with the changes and made sure we all got where we needed to be. I was a little uneasy scheduling a 3:30am pickup for 3 of our guys but Steve, Michael, and Ethan were reliable, prompt, and super friendly for all of our travels that week. I almost can’t believe how fluid everything went this year so I have to give credit to the people that helped make it happen!

So how did it all breakdown for 2019? 6 nights for 25 team members came to:

• Flights = $16,390
• Food and Beverage = $15,679
• Lodging = $12,683
• Ground Transportation = $2,809
• Everything else = $1,698 (tips, activities, items purchased and shipped in advance, meal reimbursements at airport, and Uber to/from home airports)
• Total = $49,260 or $1,970/person

I do find by getting everything arranged in advance, I am able to fully participate in the week with the rest of the team. Once everyone lands, the week runs itself and I am basically in troubleshooting mode. Then I hold my breath for everyone to make it home with minimal airline issues. I really can't believe how quickly the week goes by leaving me partially relieved and mostly saddened. Next year will be Wildbit’s 20th Birthday so it won’t be long before I dive into what I expect to be a milestone trip!

I'm pretty deng passionate about 📧 email (I know, right?!), but the most important take aways of who I am are as follows:

1. 🥧 Pie. I like it. Throw in some 🍦 and buddy you've got yourself a new best friend.
2. 🍕 Pizza. Pie's younger (but equally delicious) sibling. You can take a gander at my homemade walleye and mango salsa pizza here.
3. 🌲 I live up in northern Minnesnowtah and am currently restoring a 100-year-old log house and guest cabin.
4. 🚤 Current owner of four boats and zero motors. I need more motors.
5. 🚶🏽 I once Forrest Gump'd it across the country for charity, but walked instead of ran because I'm no T. Hanks.
6. 🎥 I used to film weddings, but found it too hard to not participate during the dancing portion of the night.

Well, friendo, there you have it! So what are you waiting for? Get out there and find me a question. I'll get you the answer faster than you can say "Boy howdy, that was fast!".

What's more, include the super secret text "JordanIsAwesome" within your support request and I may even whip you up your own personal gif, free of charge :^)

Happy sending!