Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us. So today I am delighted to welcome Meredith Monday Schwartz to Before Breakfast.
Meredith is the CEO of Here Comes the Guide, a wedding website, and is one of the brains behind the Currently Reading podcast. So Meredith, welcome to the show.
Oh, thank you. I've been reading your books forever and I love talking to you.
Oh I'm so excited that we can have this conversation. So tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.
Well, as you said, I wear a couple of different hats. So I am the CEO of Here Comes the Guide. We are forty four all women, and so we are creating a company that we want to see more of in the world, and we happened to be in the wedding space, so I'm very very busy there. And then also I do Currently Reading, which is a podcast about books and reading. My partner Katie Cobb, and I have been doing that for eight eight seasons now. I had
to stop and double check myself. We've been doing it for eight seasons now, and we just it's the most fun to be able to talk about the books that were currently reading, whether we like them, didn't like them, spicy opinions welcome, We just have a good time. So it's a lot to balance, but it's all things that are really meaningful to me.
I love that. I love that. It's good to be busy in life with things that we enjoy. So I wanted to start with Here Comes the Guide because you guys kind of came on my radar many years ago, as I know that you had transitioned to being a mostly remote company prior to the pandemic. Now, a lot of people discovered that as a situation and they had to in twenty twenty, but you guys had done that before that. So what led to that and how did that come up?
So I have been at Here Comes the Guide actually since I was twenty four years old, so back in like literally pre internet day, so I've been at Here Comes the Guide forever. But it started out which there were just three of us. Now they're forty four of us.
I look at Here Comes the Guide as being a massive experiment about creating a company that allows women to have as much of it all as they can have, so a career that's meaningful to them, where they can see that they are doing really important work, and also the ability to have a life. So this balance is
a really important thing to me. So we actually bought out our founder in twenty seventeen, and at that point I immediately said, we are becoming a fully distributed company because it was clear to me we'd done a lot of remote before then, mostly because we had some people who worked for Here Comes the Guide. We were in Berkeley, California,
move away one of them, her husband was deployed. I didn't want to lose this fantastic teammate, so I was like, you know what, move to Maryland and you're going to keep working for Here Comes the Guide. We had that happen a couple of different times where I was able to retain fantastic talent if I was just okay with them being where they needed to live. And then I really really enjoyed working from home myself, really works with
kind of my very introverted self. I love being a part of a team, but I also like having space to decompress when I need to. So when we took over from our founder, we went fully distributed. We let go of our Berkeley office and all of the overhead associated with that, and we have never looked back, and
so we have grown so much since then. We've gotten really really good at hiring for remote positions, which is, you know, that's a really intentional project in and of itself, because you have to hire a very specific kind of person. But we have found our sweet spot and we are so glad that we that we are fully distributed. We're also a very connected team. So even though we are, one of our core values is we can be together even if we're not all together.
Yeah. Absolutely, Well, the pandemic was rough for weddings, but at least you guys had figured out how to work as a remote team before that. But as you observed this then, like from you know, twenty twenty to twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, and you saw other organizations experimenting with this, what do you think most people got wrong? I mean, I know you were hiring very specifically for people who could do this, and you had figured out
managing distributed teams. What were people What mistakes were people making with this?
There's a lot of layers to that. I think the biggest mistake that people can make is to not be hiring with that mindset. But when companies found themselves in that position, I think a lot of companies approached it from the mindset that their employees were going to try to rip them off, that they were going to not
work on purpose. They didn't trust in the intention of their employee, and the employee feels that when you're putting things on people's computers to see how often are they moving their mouths, when you're demanding that they log in and lock out at really specific time, it just all really messes with the ability for the employee to feel that they are being trusted. I always tell everyone that I hire, I am so not interested in micromanaging anybody.
If I can't trust you to do the work because you care about doing it for your own self, then I have no desire to do business with you. So I hire from the mindset of people, if they care about the company that they're working for, are going to do the best work that they can do. So to me, that like going all the way to the other end where you mistrust your staff automatically makes people people When they feel mistrusted, they automatically don't have the same level
of loyalty to the person who's mistrusting them. They're being treated like children. So that's the biggest mistake that I saw employees me employers.
Yeah, And with that though, I mean, you have to manage a little bit differently. I'm sure you are managing largely about certain results outcomes, and then you also have to have systems like if people have a quick question, like you can't stop by people's desk when you're fully remote, and if you're in different time zones, that introduces its own complications. So what are some of your best practices there?
Right, So there's again there's a lot of different elements of this. From a work product perspective. I operate on a trust, put verify way of doing things right, so I know the role that each person is fulfilling. I know what that role needs to produce over the course of a week or a month, or a quarter or a year. And so we have a a lot of systems in place that we've built into our own bespoke CRM that allows us to get a sense of what
people are producing over the course of the week. Now, first of all, I'm not judging it day by day because I don't think that that's a fair judgment. But we do have a sense overall of the work. So I'm not The result I'm looking for is to have this specific role, this work product done. The result I don't care if you're moving your mouth every thirty seconds,
That to me is tracking the wrong thing. I do care that you're getting the work done that I hired you to do in the best way possible, the way that fits you and your personality in the best way. So we absolutely have built in multiple layers of trust, but verify where we can look at work product.
Yeah. Absolutely, Well, let's talk a little bit about virtual meetings because I know that this is something that a lot of people have struggled with and you know, zoom fatigue over the years. What do you do to make these more engaging and build that sort of level of trust and interaction in a virtual way.
So from a meeting, we're just talking about meetings. Let me start by saying I hate most meetings right, So we meet as little as possible so that people can do the work that they need to do. Like I feel like me and my leadership team, our job is to give air cover to our people and then stay out of their way. And so we manage everything. I mean, teams meet. We you know, we absolutely meet and connect regularly, but we're really careful to say, does this meeting actually
have to happen? Are the exact right people there? I saw something on TikTok the other day where someone was saying, literally, the only time I turned my mic on through that whole meeting was when I said goodbye at the end of it, and I thought, then, why are you even in that meeting? And I just so I don't love meetings. Most meetings done wrong make me absolutely crazy. And from
a connection standpoint, we are really real. We are obsessed with our culture and our ways that we connect, and we do a lot of different things that increase that connection. One of the things that we do is we do a quarterly connection event where we all get together. Yes, it's on Google Meet. Yes, we have a company wide cameras on policy. Again, if your camera is off, I have to ask, why are you even in that meeting. If I don't need to see you and interact with you,
then why are you in the meeting? And so we have a cameras on policy. And also we do these connection events where we actually have a team that plans them, where we spend time together every quarter doing something that has nothing to do with work. So we've done like a murder mystery we did, like you know, we've done some like crafting, different you know, craft related things we did, like watercolor painting. As I'm saying all of this, I
hear everyone's eyes rolling back in their head. I understand how cheesy it sounds. Our group of women loves to hang out with each other, like honestly, we could. We could do almost nothing in our annually. We do annual retreats where we all get together, and yes we do quite a bit of work, but we also just hang out and cook together and get up early and have coffee together. And we hire for culture. We hire girls girls.
We don't hire mean girls. Ever. I will fire a mean girl immediately, like so fast it would make her head spin, and it has. And so we hire for culture in addition to hiring for the ability to do the work. So we enjoy spending time together. Whether it's virtually, there's a lot of connection that can happen virtually. Some of my best friends I've never met in real life. I challenge the notion that you can't connect virtually.
Absolutely. Well, We're going to take a quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Meredith Monday Schwartz. Well, I am back talking with Meredith Monday Schwartz, who is the CEO of Here Comes the Guide, a wedding website, and is also one of the brains behind the Currently Reading podcast. So, Meredith, listening to you and knowings we your work over the years, I know you like to get things done, So I want to pivot to talking
about your own personal productivity. Do you have any you know we talk a lot about morning routines on this show. Do you have any sort of morning routine in your life right now?
I absolutely do, And my morning routine has changed over the course of my career. Right it's different when we have little ones. My kid, my youngest is fourteen, he's in high school. My older three are off and launched and doing their thing, and so my mornings look more the way that I want them to look now I'm not. I'm a super early riser. I really like to sleep until seven. The older I get. I'm fifty two, I now like like about nine hours of sleep. Ten years
ago I probably only wanted seven. So that's been an interesting thing. So I sleep until seven, seven thirty sometimes, and then I get up and I always make a cup of coffee. I love to do morning read I'm always reading something nonfiction in the morning, and then I I do morning pages. Do you do morning.
Pages, Laura, I don't, but tell us about them.
Okay, morning pages is from It's from a very famous book. I'm sure everyone listening to this has heard about this by Julia Cameron, called The Artist's Way. The idea of morning pages is basically, it's just a brain dump. You get a notebook. I try not to use a precious notebook. I try to use a very like, a very workman like notebook, and then you just brain dump anything that is in your head. It doesn't have to make sense,
it doesn't have to be pros. Lots of times I'll do listing, you know, I'll make lists and it's just you know, she says, three full pages. I do one full page because that's a big notebook, and it fits in my time, and I'm the boss of my own morning routine. And it has helped so much from an emotional perspective because it's daily journaling, right whatever, but also
from a business perspective. I will often have some business idea that is on the periphery of my brain, and somehow, when I do that brain dump in the morning, in the beginning of my day, what was on the periphery comes to the forefront. So I do that and then I go I work out with a trainer multiple days a week to do some heavy lifting, and then get into my workday when I come home.
Absolutely, And do you have any sort of structure for your workday that makes the most sense for you. I do.
I do time blocking, and so I do different things during different time blocks on different days. So for example, company wide, we have no meetings on Wednesdays. You literally aren't allowed to make, you know, a non emergency meeting on a Wednesday, So everyone knows we don't have any
meetings on Wednesdays. Mondays, I do leadership stuff, you know, Friday, we actually have a four day work week, so we don't work on Fridays and so Fridays is my currently reading day, So my week definitely has a rhythm to it.
And do you have a particular time of day that you do best with sort of heads down kind of focused work versus more of the like I mean sending messages to team members or emails or things like that.
Yeah, my morning is when I am the clearest to do focused work, writing, creative work, any of that. So I try not to put any meetings on my schedule until noon and really give myself from like nine to noon each day to have in whatever time block that is, to have that that really focused work, because that's when my brain is firing. By the time I get to the afternoon, I need to be less creative And can I do a lot better with emails and meetings and
those kinds of things. But again, we're really trying to limit meetings, so if I'm in a meeting, I have to be on for it.
Yeah. Well, let's pivot to talking about reading here. You mentioned you read it nonfiction in the morning, and then the fiction, which I know a lot of currently reading, is about when does that happen in your schedule?
Oh gosh, so right, So we Katie and I each every week bring three books a week to talk about. So that means that I have to read at least twelve books a month to keep up with the podcast schedule, which actually is not a problem because that's kind of my normal lifelong reading habit. But I like to read before I get up in the morning, fiction, especially on the weekends. This is I'm going to tell you, and I know a lot of people are going to have They're going to think I'm nuts. I wake up seven
to seven thirty on the weekends. Again, I don't have littles anymore. When my grandkids aren't there and I wake up at seven, I don't. I try not to get out of bed until eleven o'clock on the weekday mornings. I will read for a lot of that time so that you know, I will have a couple of cups of coffee. Reading in bed is my favorite place to read.
I have a full set up with my kindle and my Kindle stand and my Kindle remote literally where I can just be laying like I'm laying in a coffin and just be turning the pages on my kindle and I will just crush. I will just crush for several hours. So I love I've done that my whole life. I love to read in the morning.
Well, I would say, you have to get up out of bed to get your coffee. I assume that there's a.
My husband does that, that's his does it for you?
Oh? How lovely?
That is his? That is his main job. Like you know, like you had one job, Johnny.
Job, go make your coffee and bring it over to you. Right, Oh, I love it. Well, then you don't have to get up at all. I mean, you know, maybe a bathroom trip exactly.
It's my favorite thing. It is so indulgent. And there were so many years if having four kids, where obviously that schedule just was not on the table. So I lean into it like crazy now.
Yes, absolutely, Well maybe that's my goals for as soon as mine are as old as yours. Well we'll get there eventually. All right, Well, we're gonna take one more quick ad break and then I will be back with more from Meredith Monday Shorts. Well, I am back talking with Meredith Monday. Schwartz is the CEO of Here Comes the Guide also one are the hosts of the Currently Reading podcast. So how do you figure out what to
read next? Since I mean, you're reading at least one hundred and forty four books a year, it sounds like you've got to keep the uh, keep the train moving. How are you figuring that out right?
Well, this is not a small thing, even for someone who reads for a living like I do. I'm a mood reader. There are planned readers and mood readers. And I don't understand people who say, here are the books that I'm going to read in December. I love that for them. It's fantastic. I could never read like that. So I'm a mood reader. I always have a book going in every format. So I'm always reading four books. So my morning read one of my kindle, an audiobook,
and then a print book. So I always have four going at a time and every time I get so that gives me the ability to switch around a lot based on my moods. And so I mean, I'm super plugged into the book world. I'm very very lucky that way, and so I have lots of different sources. Instagram is
a really really big one. I'm very big on Bookstagram, and so I take pictures of books that are interesting to me, and I caption them in a very specific way in the actual photo app on my iPhone, and then when I'm in the mood for something, I will kind of flip through that. I also put a lot of holds in the library, so at any point I'll have fifteen twenty thirty books home from the library and I'll do a book flight. So I'll pick five books.
I'll read the first paragraph chapter of those five books in which everyone grabs me that's what I'm reading next.
And with that, then will you not read a book? I mean, after you've started it, you gotten a ways into it, if you decide, yeah, this isn't this isn't happening, right.
So if I do a book flight and I'm just testing, then I then all of those other four that I didn't choose, they could come up again in the future. The question of dnf ing or did not finish is one that comes up so much for us in the book world. I am a pretty profligate DNF for if I can't afford to get stuck behind a book, and there are too many books in the world for me
to do that. And also it's not fair to the author for me to push through when a book's not working for me, because inevitably I won't have any great to say about it when I'm having to push that hard. So I read about ten percent or fifty pages. If it's not flowing very easily, I'll set it down. Sometimes I'll say i'm in our inning it not right now instead of DNFING, because DNF is kind of like I might never return to that in our end means there was something I liked about it, but it just wasn't
fitting what I needed right now. So I have two separate kind of categories of not finishing a book.
Yeah, well, because you said you're a mood reader, and so something that's not for you right now, I mean maybe you'll feel more like you like a cozy kind of book in winter versus the summer, or something like that.
Yeah. I've had books that I have started two or three different times because I'll think this book is made in a lab for me, but for some reason it's not working, and then the fourth time it's absolutely perfect. I believe in bookish serendipity. I think if a book, if you need a book, it is going to find you, and it is going to find you at the right time. But we have to help that happen. By trusting when it's not the right time and letting it go.
Yeah. Well, I do like the advice to abandon a book that isn't working for you, because to maintain any sort of swift reading schedule, you can't get stuck because then your pace falls off. Then you're only reading, you know, six books a month or two because you stopped in the middle of one, and you don't turn reading time potential leisure time into reading time, right.
And there's no question that that's something that Katie and I have to be very mindful of. But this issue for normal day to day readers comes up a lot, and I will talk so often with people who are like I bet, I just feel guilty. I feel guilty setting down a book. The author worked so hard on it, and they did, and that's true, and they did. But again, if you want to respect that work, save it for
a time that it's working for you better. Just because it's not you're not the reader for it now doesn't mean that ten years from now it might not be your favorite book of all time. And I've heard that story, which is why I say that that's happened many times.
Yeah, absolutely well, Meredith, I always ask my guests a question, which is, what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome? All right?
I have a very specific practice that I put into practice once my therapist told me to do it. It sounds really simple, but it has changed a very difficult part of each day for me. So when I finish my work day, like a lot of moms, I have to then go into dinner, practice taking, you know, get boy to practice, you know, all of those things. I found that that transition had been difficult for me. So the idea is that at the end of each work day, take five minutes. I take five minutes to ask myself
what do I need right now? So it's checking in with my mind, how busy a day was it, how much energy did it take from me? It's checking in with my body. Do I need to just take some deep breaths, Do I need to stretch? Do I need to sit quietly for a little bit, and then acting on what it is that that check in has brought to me. It sounds really simple, but I realized I was never asking myself that question at the end of
the day. When I started doing that and started taking five ten minutes, to give myself what I actually needed. Right then the whole rest of the evening went more smoothly. So that's really changed that really rough transition period into something that's working a lot better.
I love that. And what's something you're looking forward to right now?
I am looking forward to my annual reading retreat in March. Every year, me and three fantastic readers. We go for four days and we literally have a highly scheduled reading retreats, like it's sort of tongue in cheek scheduling, but darned if we don't stick to the schedule, which we put on bookmarks and we read and then we get together and talk about what we're reading, and then we read, and then we have lunch, and then we read and
go for a walk and then we read. We have dinner in It is my favorite trip of the year.
I love it.
Well.
Reading with friends is a great way to boost the enjoyment of reading. So, Meredith, where can people find you?
So you can find our show at currently Reading podcast and you can find me at Meredith Monday Schwartz on Instagram.
Excellent. Well, Meredith, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback about this or any other episode, you can always reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com and in the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
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