BEST OF: GitLab's Head of Remote, Darren Murph, on how to create corporate culture when no one works from the office

Today's show is a best of episode because I've been taking a few weeks off over summer to recharge, and so I've been going through the last two and a half years of doing How I Work and picking out some of my favorite interviews to re share with you. So very excited about two Day's interview. It was one of my favorites from twenty to twenty. And my guest is Darren Murph as git Lab's head of Remote. That is what Darren does. That is his actual job title.

And if you've never heard of GitLab, it's the world's largest all remote company with over thirteen hundred team members across over sixty seven countries with no company owned officers. So Darren has spent his career leading remote teams and charting remote transformations, and he also is the author of git Lab's Remote Playbook, which I definitely highly recommend checking out. Darren also holds a Guinness World Record as the planet's

most prolific professional blogger, having published ten million words. Now, before I head to Darren, I just want to say a big thank you to everyone that has been leaving reviews in Apple podcasts orever you listen to this show. It's so appreciated. It's just amazing getting listener feedback. It really is totally wonderful. And if you yet to leave

a review, I would be so so so grateful. If maybe today is the day that you might take, you know, five or ten seconds out of your date to leave a star rating or write some words helps other people find the show, and it's really just lovely getting feedback on your own work, to be honest. So on that note, let's head to Darren to his about how he works. Darren, Welcome to the show.

COVID nineteen. And on top of us being in our homes, none of us are adequately prepared even going out for dinner or drinks or going to get groceries. All of this is more complex right now. We're all a lot more isolated. There are a lot of things happening outside of our control that many people are conflating with remote work because it is their first experience with remote work.

But I assure you it is not the same. And indeed, I've been encouraged by some people saying even though I'm working remotely during a pandemic, there are some things that are very encouraging, and frankly, I can't imagine going back into the office full time, and that encourages me because if people can find the silver lining in remote work and work from home, now, just imagine how amazing it is once travel restrictions are lifted.

so things are pretty full on here now. When it comes to remote work, you literally wrote the book on it. So get Lab, where you're head of remote, has a remote working handbook which is such a good read. I'm going to link to it in the show notes, and I want to pull out some of the things that I quite liked that were sort of like some little

surprising gems. And then I want to hear from you, what are some of your favorite pieces of advice or tips from the handbook, because there's just so much in there.

So some of my favorites were to adopt a self service and self learning mentality, which I really like because I feel like often and I've experienced this myself with Inventium, which I've been my innovation consults here that I've been running for the last fourteen years, where you can sort of sometimes make poor recruitment choices and people come in with that sort of helpless mentality and ask everyone else for advice as opposed to sort of taking things on

board themselves, which is critical in a remote environment. I love make documentation everyone's responsibility, and that again I think have a three thousand plus page handbook where I imagine everyone has documented rules and practices and all sorts of things like that there should be no unwritten rules in remote culture. I might even get you to just talk

a bit about what you mean there. And also one of my favorites encouraging the use of emojis so that you can communicate emotion, which I thought was really cool. So I don't know if you want to comment on any of those. They were some of my favorites, but I also want to know what some of your favorite things are in that handbook.

written down. So although I am conversing with you, my knowledge is at work with people all around the world able to tap into that and use it to move

their projects forward. This is the power of documentation. Instead of someone having to tap me on the virtual shoulder and ask me a question, I'm able to proactively answer everything that they're asking with a link and in the get lab way of working, if someone were to genuinely ask me something that is net new and is not documented, I would of course get them that answer, but then I would immediately document it so that anyone else who has this question going forward would simply be able to

find it online. This is a much more inclusive way to communicate and to scale knowledge, But it definitely takes a special type of person who thinks this way, because the human default is that is to default to synchronicity and to default to async feels a little bit awkward

at first. Oftentimes it feels a bit cold until you realize that by doing so, you're making everyone else's day much more efficient, and you're giving them more time back to spend with their family, with neighbors, with community members, all of which is a much more useful way to spend time when you're talking about the net impact to society versus asking someone a question for the five hundredth time, I was going to highlight a few of the favorites

of mine, you listed a few favorites of yours. The get Lab values page is an absolute treasure trove. If you google get lab values, you'll find six core values. Probably words you've heard before, things like iteration, collaboration, results, but all of those terms in a vacuum can mean something different to each individual. Underneath each value are thousands of words called sub values, which substantiate and explain how each of these values are lived with no physical building

that we commute into each day. There are a couple of these that, when strung together, are incredibly powerful. So a few of these in a row that I love are kindness, assume positive intent, no ego. No ego is a huge one. Don't let each other fail. Blameless problem solving. This is amazing because it enables you to solve every problem knowing that there's not going to be blamed. There is no agenda. We are simply trying to solve the problem.

And although this sounds extremely simple, this is very much against the grain in most corporate structures. And the last one that I'll share right now is short toes. This is the one that caught my attention when I first came to get LAB. I saw short toes and thought, what in the world could that mean? Well, I get lab.

It's not possible for you to step on anyone's toes or contribute to someone else's domain because everyone has short toes, and that creates a welcome atmosphere for all of us to put forth our best knowledge, regardless of what department of the company we're in.

of synchronous communication. Can you explain what you mean by that, like how companies do default to synchronous communication and what are the steps that a company needs to take to not do that because it's so well entrenched into most company cultures.

same place at the same time. You may hear things like, oh, but I prefer synchronicity, I prefer to be together, and most of that is because people don't have a solid baseline of how this could work well in any other fashion. So synchronicity is the default for a lot of people. They feel like reaching out and having conversations with people or tapping someone on the shoulder. It feels very productive. It makes you feel like you're contributing meaningfully to the organization.

But in truth, these types of meetings and ad hoc interruptions are massively disruptive to the bottom line. They're massively disruptive to people's mental health. It's very difficult to get into a state of flow and make meaningful progress on any line of work if you're continuously being interrupted. There is a reason that Google is a machine and not a person, because if someone just essentially taps you as Google all day, you're going to get tired of answering

those queries at some point. So it's a fundamentally more inclusive way to communicate your knowledge and to scale your knowledge by writing it down once so that it can be interpreted and used a limitless amount of times. But it takes a culture that is understanding of that. And indeed, if you look at the get lab onboarding process, we lay out guides that explain exactly how to adopt a self service mentality. We even have a handbook guide on how to use the handbook. We have another guide on

how to search the handbook. We are very prescriptive and articulate about the information infrastructure that we have set up. We essentially see the handbook as yet another product or tool. And so if you were coming into any company, you would expect an onboarding to get used to a key tool to do work, and we see the handbook as a key tool to do work.

it's the easiest thing to do. And I want to know when you do have meetings at get lab, what are the different rules that you have in place, because I know there are some rules and guidelines for having meetings at get lab. Imagine that it is quite a significant thing if you're invited to a meeting it get lab, given it's not the default. Is that fair to say?

a bias towards a synchronous. In fact, bias towards a synchronous is one of the sub values of our diversity, inclusion and belonging value because it allows for a more inclusive course of voices to contribute to a project. So there's a five step process that, of course we have documented on questioning every meeting. The first is what is the outcome I am trying to achieve that has led me to a desire to schedule a meeting. You need

to write that down and articulate that. Number two is can the desired outcome be broken down into smaller tasks? If you can break things down to more incremental pieces, it's more likely that you can accomplish each individual element of that through an asynchronous means. Number three is can the desired outcome be achieved or work towards by dog fooding and using a get lab issue or merge request. Now, this is where it's important for me to point out that all of get lab uses get lab the product

to collaborate. It is the heartbeat of our asynchronous workflow. So if you don't have a tool like this, you will need one. It is extremely hard to lean fully into a synchronous using a hodgepodge of phone calls, carrier pigeons, and email. You're going to need a tool at the heart of it. The fourth one is am I trying to gather consensus? If you are consensus gathering can be

done asynchronously. Anyone can open up a get lab issue or a mural board or a Figma board and gather input and consensus, and then you can save the meeting until the decision making needs to occur. And even that decision making, which is step five, we ask people to consider can the decision be made asynchronously? And if it cannot, then we default to a synchronous meeting, but we will reserve that for the very end, and then if we have to have a meeting, we make it quite difficult

for this to happen. Every meeting has to have an agenda attached to the calendar invite, so that temporal documentation takes place live during the meeting, and then the meeting organizer is responsible for transcribing and contextualizing any takeaways from that meeting into the get lab handbook, so that the most amount of people can benefit from the knowledge that

was gained in that meeting. It takes a cultural mindset company wide for this to actually work and be meaningful, but our people fundamentally believe that synchronous time is very precious and we would rather reserve that for informal communication, for coffee chats, for team wide trivia sessions and scavenger hunts, things that help us build bonds as a team, than

just another work meeting. Now, of course we still have work meetings, but if we're rigorous enough to cut our meetings down by even fifty percent, most people listening to this would think, Wow, if I could have fifty percent fewer meetings, I think my zoom fatigue would go away.

So we're not trying to eliminate meetings We're just trying to have a thorough process so that you question it because if you're going to have to write down the takeaway anyway, we would love for you to start by writing it down instead of doing double work with a meeting first and then writing it down.

I mean, granted we don't have that many meetings, but if someone sets a meeting, they need to have a payout otherwise they can't put the meeting in the diary, which just acts as a nice little barrier for people to think, do I actually need this meeting or could this be done some other way. I want to pick up on a couple of things that you said there when you were describing that process, and you said you'll deliberately recruit people who have a bias towards a synchronicity

or a synchronous communication. How do you assess that in a recruitment process.

we work work. All of our interviews are done over zoom. There is no in person element, so again, you're not going to accidentally end up here. You're going to be pretty sure of what you're walking into. But mostly we look for great storytellers, people that love to think through problems and communicate with high detail and low precision. We can do writing exercises, but a lot of this just

comes through in storytelling. We love to ask questions of tell me a time when you worked remotely, when you moved a project forward, when you were in one place and your cohorts were in another. And for some people they answer, I've never been able to work remotely, That's

why I want a job here. But you can actually dig a little deeper and say, well, have you ever worked on let's say, a presentation while you were on an airplane, or while you were in a hotel conference center and the rest of your team was at work, or the rest of your colleagues at university were in the library. And then they'll usually say, oh, yeah, I actually do have an example of that. It's like, well, that's remote working. You might not have considered it remote working.

Indeed it was remote working. And we also like to pull up our values page and in there you'll notice a subvalue that says culture fit is a bad excuse. What that means is we try to hire for values fit, which is to say, we want to make sure the get Lab values resonate with anyone joining the company, and then we invite them to bring one hundred percent of their full culture to make our culture better. So we don't want to hire for culture fit, we want to

hire for values fit. And then increase the diversity of the culture that comes along with that.

Get Lab really only uses four key products across the company. Now, some of our departments use certain things like MARKETO and Marketing Operations and Salesforce and things like that, but for all of our team to collaborate as a team, we use g Suite, we use Zoom, we use get lab the product, and Slack for informal communication. So that goes to show we really don't use Slack for work. We expire our Slack messages after ninety days so that it's

only useful for informal communication. We want the work to happen and get lab so the key piece there is make sure you have a project management and collaboration tool that strongly supports asynchronous inputs and workflows. Get Lab is what we use. There are a host of others, but it's on your IT and operations team to thoroughly vet this. And I would say do a tools audit and make sure that you have something there. And then of course you have to document how you want people to work

in it. It has to be a user guide on how to get work done so that everyone is leaning into that same product instead of fracturing work and splintering it here, there and everywhere. It really is key to get universal buy in, and it takes time. For transitioning companies, it takes time. It is a very jarring thing if you are used to working one way and now you're

working another. But for those companies that want to put in the effort now, in six to twelve months, you'll be so thankful that you did, and you'll only wonder why you didn't start this earlier. The truth is, everything I'm saying is not remote exclusive. It is required in a remote setting, but even if you go back to being a co located company or a hybrid remote company, all of this will make your company more cohesive and more disciplined.

bonds together. It's such an important week people will mark it off as if nothing can touch this, and when we hire new people, we proactively give them the next available contribute and they they love it. They look forward to it. I know when I joined the company, it was one of the first things that I wanted to know, Hey, when is the next get Lab contribute? I can't wait

to meet everyone. So forecasting in a post COVID world where travel restrictions are lists lifted and we can do this, I would say for leaders, make in person a core part of how you build strategy. But with a hybrid or all remote company, you're going to need to be more intentional about when and where travel happens and how you facilitate those very important in person interactions. So bottom line there is don't try to do this without ever

seeing anyone. We are relational, communal beings and in person matters a lot. So here's the paradoxical one. The further away you are as a team, the more you need to let go as a manager and allow people to simply be where they are. So instead of having lots of virtual happy hours and things of that nature, which by the way, we do it get Lab, we prefer to structure and atmosphere where people can do their work very efficiently and then leave war as soon as possible.

We want people to be able to go back home, engage with their family, engage with their neighbors, engage with their community. That is what matters to them. They have specifically chosen to work here so that they can be in a place that matters to them, So we want to empower them to be in that place as much

as humanly possible. So how that pours back into culture is that I see a NonStop photo role on our company, slack of pictures and stories and videos of people that are making meaningful impacts in societies all over the world. We have people in over sixty five countries. It is so fascinating to see how each person chooses to engage and interact in each of their communities. And when I see that that builds culture, that tells me this is

exactly who this person is. The more curious and the more interesting the person is on your team for us, the more it builds culture. So it is paradoxical that we would encourage you to spend more time outside of work to actually pour back into company culture. But when you hire a team that is specifically looking for that, that is indeed what happens.

fit with the culture, And I imagine what happens. I mean when I think about culture as a psychologist, I think about, well, it's a set of norms and behaviors and so forth. It's almost through And can I correct me if I'm getting this wrong, But because you're recruiting people that have these really core values that get lab ofspouses, then that's where the behavioral norms are coming in, because

you know, they do prefer this way of working. They value things like kindness and humility and things like that, and they then become the culture. Almost Does that make sense?

treat each other and how we see the world. And when you write that down, you can interview for it, and you can ask people does this work for you? And so culturally it ends up working out that we have people that generally we love and get along with because they share our values, and values and culture are very tightly connected, especially in a remote company.

a fine bar. You don't necessarily need thousands of raw, raw champions for your culture right now, So we'll start there, but forecasting in a different space when we can get back to that. It really comes down to leadership. Thriving as a remote worker. You can only get so far as an individual, and then there's a certain point where the gate has to be lifted up and the rest of that liberation in that atmosphere it has to be enabled by leadership. It has to be enabled and modeled

by leadership. And frankly, now is as good a time as any for leaders to question their values. To open their website, look at what the values say and ask themselves are these still relevant for the post COVID universe. This is a massive sea change. This is a complete re architecting of how many digital firms are going to look and do work. Going forward, things might be different.

I encourage leaders to write down what's it like to work here at my company, and if you're not thrilled with the answer, you might need to change some things coming out of this now. For individuals who might not be in that leadership perspective, this is now a very important time to get introspective and make sure that the go forward plan at your company aligns with what you want culturally. I do expect globally some short term attrition

as these shifting sands happen. People are going to take a look at what the go forward plan is for their company. And some people are going to say, you know, I opted into a more rigid culture, a more co located culture. This isn't going to work for me. I may need to find a different place that is more aligned with the current season of life that I'm in. Some people are going to see this as an incredibly

progressive thing. They're going to celebrate it, and they're going to be grateful that we're finally ushering ourselves into the future of work. It's a strange and unfortunate way to get here, but we're here nevertheless. So I wouldn't say you have to satisfy one hundred percent of your workforce, you just need to be extremely articulate on what the go forward plan is and then help people that are going to be on board with it, and then for those that don't want to be there, maybe even look

to how the airlines have done voluntary exit packages. This is an amazing time. These are not usual times. There are not there's not a playbook for how this is going to work out, So some extreme circumstances could see their way to fruition.

have to plan for engagements and interactions. Now this becomes a lot more obvious if you have a tool like get lab at the heart of your workflows, because anyone can put down just a one sentence idea and then share it company wide with a single link, and the amount of feedback and incubation that can happen on that is far more than you would get from just one or two people randomly in a hallway. It is a far more inclusive and expansive way to incubate this type

of innovation. You simply need a tool at the heart of it to make it possible. So it sounds a bit paradoxical, but you really do have to work to plan innovation. And if you take a hard look at any office that's ever been invented, office lobbies, office cafeterias, these were intentionally designed structures for informal communication. So in a remote setting you have to recreate that. We use Slack.

We have topical channels where people can talk about specific things, whether it's mental health or hiking, or a certain product that kind of thing, or you can put meetings on optional meetings with agendas that people can contribute to asynchronously, so you have to plan for it. Remote makes you be intentional about a lot of things that you're able

to take for granted in a physical space. But I assure you, somewhere before you showed up at the office there was some planning done to help encourage that type of thing.

the new baseline. That is the gold standard. But when you think about it, well, number one, it was only three people, So what if that idea could be made even better if three thousand people had access to contribute to it without negatively impacting the schedule of any one person. And then the other thing is you're not requiring people to be available and online at the exact same time. So running into each other in in a hallway, I

get it. I've been there. It is a pretty cool moment when it happens, but it's an even cooler moment when it happens in a remote setting, and you can get a ton more feedback. You just have to create the atmosphere where it works hundred percent.

the default. Sometimes they feel a bit awkward at first, but nevertheless they ensure that we retain and remain in our remote first workflows, so inspiring our Slack messages after ninety days is one of those. If you know that your work is going to vanish after ninety days, then it's a pretty great forcing function to start the work where it's going to end up, which is in a

get lab issue or a get lab merge request. So if we don't do long, lengthy work in Slack, the only thing it's useful for is quick pings to usually direct people's attention to a get lab issue or informal communication. And this solves another major issue for remote teams, which is where do we just converse as humans, not as colleagues, but as humans. Well, if you aren't using Slack or teams for work, now you can just converse as humans.

The great example I have of that is we have a parenting channel, and now that so many parents have children at home, they're dealing with remote learning for the first time ever. A lot of our parents are doubling as teachers aids at the moment. This is an amazing medium where all of our parents can come together and share tips all around the world of how they're doing it, and they can trade shifts and work across teams. It's amazing. I don't think this would exist if Slack was primarily

for work. People might not feel ass comfortable being themselves and bringing things up, like hey, I'm a parent and I need some help. But because we don't really do work in there, it's a perfect place for that. This is yet another example of not really reinventing the wheel. A lot of companies use Slack and Microsoft teams, but if you just use it slightly differently, now it becomes this amazing enabler for remote work.

of why this is. But about a year ago, someone asked me if I had heard of Kingman's formula, to which I replied, no, I have not, So I googled it and it's the mathematics behind this notion. And I was so excited to finally find someone that is intelligent about math, that put actual data in numbers behind something that I've long since known was true in my heart of hearts. The crux of this is if you have your entire day pre booked with meetings, it leaves no

room whatsoever for real life to happen. So if anything at all happens, if your child stubs their toe and you need to go address that, even for eight minutes of your day, it has a massive oftentimes catastrophically negative impact on your mental health, on the schedules of many other people, and there's this cascading set of effects that could go well beyond the day for a simple eight minute ordeal at home. So I view that is a

massive risk. And if you extrapolate that over an entire company, if you have everyone booked at one hundred percent, where is the room for ingenuity? Teams are worried about serendipitous conversations. Let me tell you, being booked at one hundred percent is a guarantee that your company is going to have no innovation and no serendipitous conversations because there's no time for that. So we actively block our schedules. At get lab,

everyone has a public calendar by default. We encourage people to go in there right as they're onboarding and block out things like hours that you want to take your kid to and from school, or hours that you prefer to exercise, or hours that you prefer to be away for lunch. Anything you can think of, feel free to block it. And when people book meetings and you see something like hey, I'm exercising, you really do think twice

about booking over that. Because the golden rule, would you really want someone to book a meeting time with you if you were doing something that was important to your personal life.

is a big deal. I've there's a book called Time Off by John Fitch, and in it he says that your rest ethic is just as important as your work ethic. And this is for the core of it. For me, it is just as important for you to put meaningful attention on when you're going to rest as it is when you're going to work. It's just think of it as inhaling and exhaling. If you only do one or the other and never do the opposite, at some point this becomes a problem, and working and resting follows the same.

For Jaggery.

link to in the show notes. What it reminds me of is I've heard Adam Grant talk about the idea of creating a one page operating manual which answers a few different questions around I think you know what your strengths and weaknesses are, what your pet peeves are, how to get the best out of me, how to respond to feedback those sorts of things, and it's something that you can then share with your teammates so that you

can work more effectively together. I think that I'm sort of paraphrasing that somewhat accurately, and I feel like your read me page is kind of like an operating manual to knowing how to work with you, or be it one that is very, very detailed, which I love. Can you talk me through well, I guess for people that you know, I'm assuming that people will probably follow that

link after hearing us talk about it. But for those that haven't been to your read me page, what does it look like and how did it come about?

many reasons, but it goes back to scaling knowledge. If you're working with me for the first time, we've never met in person. We might not even know what each other looks like. It's probably going to take quite a few hours at best to build some sort of rapport, and there will be a lot of answering questions back and forth for each other to get an understanding of each other. This allows for a much more efficient process.

You can read this entire page in roughly two minutes and you'll learn more about me than it would take you two weeks to learn this in person. I've been around enough and heard enough feedback that I feel like I can write this down and just get straight to

the point. And an operating manual about people, if you're willing to put it out there, is super beneficial because other people then come to you and they know exactly how to make your day more efficient, and then conversely, they have a better understanding of how you're reacting to them. So where did this come from? Two places? One the

get Lab ceo. If you look up the Getlab ceo page, he lists out very similar things, even talking about his common flaws, things that he has received feedback on time and time again that he's still actively working to improve upon as a human being. And I thought, well, if our CEO could model that type of thing, maybe I should write something like that as well. There's also a gentleman named Jeremy on our team who created or read me about himself that I used as a template and

I built on that. So kudos to Jeremy for writing that down first. Read me's for people aren't necessarily new, but I think read me as an operating manual within a remote setting is incredibly powerful, especially for people that aren't drafting on in person relationships. When you're genuinely working with someone that's net new, it's a big deal.

template without even asking for permission. But the core areas that need to be in there are about you, what you think you are, what matters to you, what makes you a person, And then another second on how you can help me, and then another section on your working style, one more section on what you assume about others, one on what you want to earn, and then communicating with me. This is a really important one, especially in a remote setting.

I really like a synchronous communication. I really like written communication. If you can engage with me over text instead of jumping straight into a voice or video call. I generally prefer that that is not the case for everyone, and this is why it is very useful to have that written down so so that there are as few misinterpretations as possible.

by that. The folks that doist have also open sourced a lot of their knowledge, which I think is amazing. And there's another startup called Almanac. They're essentially building a knowledge base and they're going to have version control in this as well, so that you can use this to build your own company handbook if you're a bit overwhelmed thinking how can I replicate the get lab handbook for

my company? Almanac allows you to pull from open source templates from the world's best knowledge, so you don't have to start from scratch. So I think what they're doing is incredibly powerful and it could not come at a better time now that so many companies are suddenly remote. So go to Almanac, and they have done the legwork of finding the world's best open source knowledge on all of this. And I'll close with one other thing, and that's a ton of small companies you've never heard of,

but will in five years. I think what will happen is in five to eight years, it's going to seem like an overnight phenomenon that the percentage of all remote companies is going to skyrocket. It's going to seem like it happened overnight. But indeed what is happening is they're all being born as startups in twenty twenty, when you can't go to an office. They have no other choice. So they're simply building and scaling their team all remote,

and they're never going to know anything different. And then, of course some of them are going to grow and grow, and then there will be a few massive exits and IPOs, and it will seem to the mainstream that overnight this became some amazing phenomenon. But pay close attention to the small companies, the five, ten, fifteen, fifty person companies that

are doing this all remote. What they are writing down, what they are building right now is a model for how to do it, and a lot of that actually can be scaled up and extrapolated even into larger legacy organizations.

whole other level. I want to know what are some of your favorite gadgets that you're loving right now, you know that help you be better at remote work, or more productive, or just happier in general.

read me. In fact, I have my entire videocam setup and I love it. It's much better than a webcam. I do a lot of interviews and it's fun to tinker with this. Yob, the CEO of remote dot Com, has an even more amazing setup. Be sure to check out the remote dot com blog for a look at what he uses. I think this is a fun new space all time. My favorite gadget is the MacBook Air. It fundamentally reshaped computing. It's still one of my favorite computers. Ever,

I still keep one around as a secondary. I think it's like ten years old now or something. It is amazing how productive it still is. My all time favorite moment from covering technology for almost a decade is being at what became Steve Jobs's final product keynote. So I was fortunate to be in the auditorium for many of the iPhone launches and the Mac launches, and it was special.

They didn't invite very many editors to those events and I was able to be there in person with what became the final keynote from Steve Jobs and still have the lanyard from that event, So very cool. Lots of great memories from that era.

the brand. I got it on the Apple Store, speaking of Apple, and it basically counts the number of skips that you do, which I'm currently getting a lot of joy out of every morning. I'm going to do two hundred skips and that will kind of warm me up to do my home gym. I'm really loving that at the moment. Is there anything in your life, maybe outside of your office, that you're liking from a gadget point of view, that's.

somewhere else. I want to be on the road. I want to be exploring a new place, exploring a new culture, and I want to travel as efficiently and as luxuriously as possible. And there are some fun credit cards that allow you to earn points and buy free travel. It's amazing what you can do if you start digging down that rabbit hole. I actually spent a stint at the Points Guy. They are the go to resource on all of this. So my fun out of office gadgets would

all be related to airline travel. I have a backpack that I think is very efficient that we could nerd out on for a while. But most of it comes back to committing to an airline, sticking with them, and then enjoying the perks that come from that.

you want. But this backpack is expressly designed to be accessed from the top, and so I just love the organization and the compartmentalization because it works really well when you have one shoved in the overhead and you don't want to pull the whole thing down, or you have one shoved under the seat in front of you. You might can tell that I'm a million mile around Delta, and I really do spend a ton of time in planes, and so something is nuanced in that really does improve my quality of life.