The career edge no one wants to admit to

If you want to get ahead, you need to be available

👋 Hi, it’s Greg and Taylor. We’re holding a talk on The Science of Focus in the Age of Distraction on March 13. RSVP here.

I worked at one of the coldest companies when it was hot: AOL.

They bought the online shopping company I co-founded, then sucked me into HQ in Dulles. I dragged my wife Cindy and our three-year-old twins to Virginia and became the VP of e-commerce.

The company was on fire, crushing incumbent competitors and making headlines – like OpenAI today. And the work hours were long – usually about 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., or at least to 7 p.m. and a working dinner.

But to really matter at AOL, working long hours was not enough. You had to be available all the time, via email and instant messenger.

I noticed it most on Sunday evenings, when it seemed like all the people that mattered at the company were chatting online, getting a jump on the week. I got the impression as the months went by that it was the same couple hundred people – the VPs, team leaders, and high-ambition ICs who were willing to brainstorm, answer questions, and propose solutions on Sunday night.

I loved it – both the work and the feeling that I was in this club. My wife did not. But it seemed like the price you had to pay to be considered someone who was essential to driving the company forward. (It also helped justify it that the stock was one of the best performing on the NASDAQ for years.)

I still think this level of availability and engagement is what you need to be considered essential in high-performance teams or companies.

You simply will not get executives’ attention, get close to the inner workings of your business, and beat out your peers without it.

Here’s why – and how to do it without going crazy or “going Elon” and sleeping in the office.

– Greg

The unsaid truth: Availability = access

Most leaders we know do not “turn off” or stop communicating about the business at 5 or 6 p.m.

This is usually for one of two reasons:

• There’s an urgent issue outside of working hours, and your client, boss, etc. needs someone to jump in and help

• There’s no crisis, but your boss (or boss’ boss) is thinking about the business on a Saturday morning, weekday night, or over the holiday “break”, so they shoot you a thought or a question outside your working hours

In both scenarios, the people who consistently respond in that moment get an advantage – they get access to leaders and what’s keeping them up. If you don’t respond, the executive will likely move on to the next person – and that’s who they’ll call on next time.

Being available vs. working all the time

Being available doesn’t mean you’re working on the weekend every weekend. For the most part, you won’t be. But it does mean you have to check your work email, Slack, Teams, etc. when you’re off the clock – minimum 1x day on the weekend, probably more.

However, it doesn’t mean that you respond to everything that comes through outside working hours. If you did, you’d have no boundaries (and good leaders don’t usually expect this). It requires practicing judgment on how valuable your response will be in that moment.

Our rule of thumb is:

1. Respond 95% of the time when it’s actually urgent. The 5% is for unusual situations – don’t make your best friend pause her wedding so you can weigh in on a phishing crisis. But for the most part, you should respond in clear moments of crisis (e.g., website outage, angry client, last-minute client request, PR disaster, etc.).

2. Respond 50% of the time when it’s not urgent. These are situations like your boss messaging you, “Should we change our pricing for this product?” on a Saturday. You could wait until Monday to respond. But responding in the moment lets you engage with their current train of thought and capitalize on the fact that you’re top of mind.

The key in this second scenario is to engage, but not necessarily start the work. Respond to 1) acknowledge that you’re also thinking about the business when they are and 2) potentially ask a question or two about what they’re thinking.

But don’t start working up the plan, unless they explicitly ask for it on a fast timeline.

How to be available without ruining your life

For the most part, being available means making consistent, small sacrifices to your personal downtime, rather than making large, unforgivable sacrifices (like working all evening, every evening or interrupting major life events).

But your personal downtime is important, so here are a few things that have worked for us to be available without going overboard:

• Turn off notifications except for messages from very important people. Slack has a VIP function that lets you do this. This means you’re not checking every single random message that comes through – you’re just engaging if the message is from your boss, CEO, CFO, etc.

• Acknowledge but delay – aka, put a thumbs up on a message, or say “makes sense – I’ll look at it in the morning.” This also gives the person the ability to say, “Actually, I need to talk about it now” – which they won’t do if you’re radio silent.

• Use the “remind me later” feature. You don’t have to engage with your boss’ thought five minutes after they send it. Remind yourself to respond in three hours when you’ve got some free time.

Our advice

For us personally, the gains of being available outweigh the drawbacks. It’s made us both go-to people – which we value. We like work, and we like the feeling that we’re at the center of the action, and integral to our team or company.

But this advice assumes that you are the same – that you also want to be that go-to person or you care so much about the problem or customer that your organization is focused on. If you check one or both of these boxes, then consider working this way, so your ambition can be turned into access. If not, turn off your work notifications all weekend.

Ultimately, make the choice consciously. Do it because you want those benefits – not because someone is pinging you. And if you do it, don’t resent it.

Have a great week,

Greg & Taylor

P.S. We’re holding an event on March 13: The Science of Focus in the Age of Distraction. Sign up here.