This week, the largest publicly traded company in Canada by market capitalization — the Royal Bank of Canada — told its employees to return to the office at least four days a week starting this fall (you know, once the summer is over). This is a first among Canada's largest banks, but it's still more timid than what US banks have been doing. JPMorgan Chase, for instance, asked its employees at the start of this year to return to the office 5 days a week. Goldman Sachs did the same way back in March 2022. And when people weren't doing it, they sent reminders.

Since at least 2023, RBC has been saying that remote work is hurting productivity. And if that is true, then this is an imperative. Of course, it's also a positive thing for cities. In-office work is a centralizing force. But the really important thing to be focused on here is productivity. Canada has an existential productivity crisis. We used to closely track the US, until we didn't. From 2001 to 2021, the US saw its labor productivity grow at roughly 2% per year. In Canada, our growth rate fell to 0.9% per year, which is why this chart from Statistics Canada looks the way it does.

What this suggests is that the Canadian economy has not yet entered the 21st century. We haven't innovated enough. We aren't commercializing enough of our research. We aren't taking enough risks and funding new ideas. We aren't starting enough big new companies (despite being smart and highly educated). And I would argue that we over-indexed on housing and construction. And I say this last point as a real estate developer! Though it's not as self-sabotaging as it may seem. Developers need a strong macro environment in which to build into. You can't grow a robust economy by just building housing.

Now, I don't know if any of these things will absolutely require people to be in an office 5 days a week. Maybe hybrid is enough. Productivity isn't perfectly correlated with in-office work from what I can tell. But I do know that for Canada to enter the 21st century it's going to require hard work, a culture of greater risk taking, more innovation and entrepreneurship, and a relentless desire to out-compete the rest of the world. The goal is to be the best, or at least it damn well should be. But for this to happen, I do believe that, broadly speaking, it will demand more, not less, time together with people.

Cover photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Back in 2016, I wrote a post called "Manager vs. maker," where I cited an essay by Paul Graham that talks about these two modes of working. To quickly summarize, the manager's schedule is for bosses. It's a calendar broken down into units of an hour that gets filled with lots of calls and meetings. Things are said, and then the manager moves on to the next appointment.

Makers, on the other hand, can't operate in units of an hour. If you write, program, design buildings, create financial models, or do anything that requires uninterrupted focus, sporadic meetings are the most effective way to neutralize any sort of productivity. You need solid blocks of time. I was reminded of this post today because, as I said back in 2016, I like making things.

But it's even more than that. Deep work, reading, and strategic thought are, in my opinion, how you win. And to do these things you also need solid blocks of time. You need mental space. And the 12 minutes you have before your next call, isn't it. So I'm reviving my old post, and Graham's old essay from 2009, as a reminder to myself to be more ruthless about saying no and guarding my calendar.

Because:

Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

Don't kill off ambitious projects. Block time for them.

Sahil Bloom tweeted this out a few days ago:

And it really resonated with me. I'm sure it does with a lot of you as well. I'm guilty of feeling this guilt. Because by definition, if you have a strong desire to do or to achieve something, then you're going to want to spend a lot time working toward it. And any time not spent working toward it, can feel like an unnecessary slowdown or delay.

But it's easy to let time melt away when you're in this headspace and I'm trying to be better at not letting this happen. For one thing, there are diminishing returns to work. We all need free time and rest. It makes us better at everything else we do in life.

It's also really easy to fill our lives with unnecessary bullshit. The same thing happens in our homes when we're not paying attention: we end up collecting unnecessary stuff. So as Paul Graham argues in this 2016 essay called "Life Is Short", it's important to "relentlessly prune bullshit." Focus on the things that matter, and don't wait.

When you're ambitious, I think it's easy to become focused on the future. I've been told I do this too much. Achieving something usually requires hard work and determination, and that likely means it won't happen today; it'll happen at some point in the future. So it can be easy to discount the present. But nobody knows how much healthy future we all have.

These are all things that I'm trying to be better at and so I'm writing them down here as a reminder. How do you manage your work-life balance?

Cover photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash