In March twenty twenty, Simon Griffiths was watching as toilet paper sold out across Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. Even as the CEO of Toilet Paper Innovators Who Gives a Crap, he never imagined the same thing was about to happen in Australia, the UK and the US. But on March four, things took a dramatic turn as the Great toilet Paper was broke out across supermarket aisles. Sales rose by thirty to forty times what they would do in a regular day. Who Gives a Crap sold out with half a million
buyers on their waiting list. The challenge excited Simon Griffiths, and over an eight week period, the company pushed its systems to the absolute limit. So how did Simon keep his team motivated? Who Gives a Crap donates fifty percent of profits towards building toilets and providing sanitation to those in need. So Simon knew that he and his team it was their moment to shine. Having a purpose at the heart of the company propelled the team into action.
My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. So I'm very excited to share this chat with Simon because I've actually known him for
nearly a decade. We first met when we spoke at Tedex Melbourne together, and I remember running an idea generation session for Who Gives a Crap when they had just launched and were still working out of Simon's inner city apartment. In this chat, Simon gets really practical about a whole range of things, from how he thinks about goal setting, how he links purpose with productivity, and how he is obsessed with working on his weaknesses. So let's start by going back to March twenty twenty.
It was a really interesting time for me personally. We'd had a second child at the end of January, and so I was six weeks into my eight weeks of parental leave, and I noticed that our daily sales in the last couple of days of February were up fifty percent. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And we'd sort of seen the run on toilet paper in Hong Kong and then Singapore and Japan and said, oh, that would never happen
in any of the markets we're in. You know, you imagine that phenomenon in Australia or the UK, the US, It's just not possible. And then the first day of March, our sales were up two x on a regular day. The next day they were up five x on a regular day, and the day after that they hit twelve x. And then they looked like they were going to do thirty to forty times what a regular day of sales
would be on the fourth of March. And so we realized, you know, pretty quickly that this phenomenon that we'd seen happen in other parts of the world was happening here in Australia and photos of empty shelves are being shared on social media, and we just had tens of thousands of social media it's coming in saying why are you buying toilet paper from supermarkets? You should be buying from he gives a crap. They sell environmentally friendly product and
use their profits to help build toilets. And so we got sent viral by our customers and that was what led to this exponential growth day on day that got us to the point where we realized pretty quickly that we had to mark our stores sold out to hold onto product for our subscribers. We want to make sure never ever run out of product again, and our business customers who we knew relied on us to keep the bathroom in their businesses running, and so we marked our
site as sold out. We sold out globally pretty quickly, and we turned on an email sign up so you could find out when we were back in stock. We thought we'd get a few thousand people on that waitlist, and we ended up with more than half a million people on there, which was a little bit unexpected and created a pretty serious business challenge of how do we get toilet paper to the most people possible?
Wow, half a million. Do you remember your emotions, like how are you feeling day to day or hour to hour during this insane period of time?
Yeah, it was crazy. And I think the other part of that was I got phone calls from like radio stations at six in the morning, and we had a six week old baby at home and I was looking after our four year old son at the same time, and so I got pulled back from parental leave and
basically did before week of media. So was driving to and from TV interviews and doing radio in the car and talking to journalists in between, and it was really full on kind of an amazing way to come back into the business because it was a real kind of high which was super fun. But yeah, I think it
was really mixed emotions across the company. I think there's an excitement to it, which is pretty amazing to be in a business that's really humming and buzzing, but also this terrifying feeling of knowing that this is happening because there's something horrible going on in the world and that's creating a whole lot of panic that is obviously not
good to have in society. And then for our teams, I think some of the growth side of the business so like this is incredible, on some of the upside of the business are like, oh my god, we're going to run out of stock. And so there was even those mixed emotions going on in our team, which made it quite hard to really keep our eye on the ball because there was a lot of emotion makes it hard to be rational, and there was a lot of emotion at that point in time.
Definitely, an emotion makes decision making a whole lot harder. I'm curious, at a really practical level, how did you change the way that you approached your work during that time.
What happened was we realized, in the end, more than six hundred thousand people on our weight list, we were never going to have enough toilet paper in our warehouses to be able to email half a million people and say hey, we're back in stock, because we'd sell out
straight away. We have more arriving every week into our warehouse, but we'd never have enough to service all of those customers at once, and so we had to come up with a plan of, you know, how do we try to get toilet paper into the most houses possible because people don't need a big forty eight roll box, which is what they're typically buying from us. They just need a six pack today and then send more toilet paper
in the future. And so we kind of broke the problem down into how do we get the most orders out possible, And we realized that inventory was the biggest constraint, and so we repacked our big forty eight row boxes into two twenty four packs so we could double the number of orders that we could ship. We hired and trained twenty five freelancers in a week to triple our customer service capacity, because we knew that if you send double the number of orders, you get twice as many
customer service inquiries coming in. And then we set up an invite only version of our website and we sent just enough emails every day to sell just enough orders to take our warehouses to their absolute daily limits of the number of orders that they could pick and pack and dispatch before the wheel would fall off. And so we did that for eight weeks, sending just enough emails every day to take our warehouses to their absolute limits
based on pick and pack volumes and inventory. And at the end of that eight week period, after a lot of early mornings, late nights, breaking the Shopify API, like all sorts of crazy stuff going on, pushing all of our system to their absolute limits, at the end of that eight week period, we had got through that whole email list and were able to come back in stock
properly and run the website as normal. And so our team at the start of that whole process realized that that was our moment to shine as a remote first
company that sells toilet paper online. It was like we'd been training for twenty twenty for the five or six years prior, and so everyone's got their heads down and worked really hard, knowing that if we got this right and we solved this problem in the right way, it would ultimately end up in this huge donation at the end of the financial which for us is the thirtieth
of June. And so when we got to the end of that mailing list in June and then made a five million dollar donation at the end of June, it was the icing on the cake of all of this incredible work that had come before that. And so back to your question of how did we work through that period, I think what was really interesting was that there was
two things that were really important. The first was that we framed the problem in the right way, and so getting to thective of getting toilet paper to the most people possible actually took us a long time to distill down that that was the problem that we had to solve, and we were trying to figure out, like, we've got a global toilet paper problem. How do we solve this? Do we ship in toilet paper in seven four seven jets?
Like what's the right solution here, which obviously for us isn't what we wanted to do from an environmental perspective, but we're trying to figure out, like, let's look at all solutions and see what's possible. And it took to getting to the distilled version of how do we get toilet paper to the most people possible? That actually allowed us to understand what the constraints were in our business that would hold us back and how we could overcome
them to ultimately reach the most people possible. And the other part of it was having purpose at the root of who we are meant that our team jumped into the problem without us having to ask them to work
early mornings or late nights. I think everyone knew that because we had this huge problem in front of us and if we got it right, it would mean so many new customers coming into the bussiness that we had to dig deep and try to solve it to ultimately create this amazing donation at the end of the financial year.
That is amazing. I remember reading that on social media and I'm a subscriber as well, so congratulations, it's amazing. And you said that purpose is at the root of who gives a crap? And you made the decision when you started the business that you would donate fifty percent of profits to charitable causes. And I wanted to know why fifty percent. I mean, it's a nice even number, but why not more or why not less?
The original concept was a nonprofit toilet paper company, and we won a spot at a social business incubator in Boulder, Colorado called the Unreasonable Institute in the year that we
did it's now called Uncharted. And while we were there, we had all of these mentors from really amazing backgrounds, corporate philanthropists, all sorts of very backgrounds, and a lot of them challenged us and said, if this is a nonprofit, we don't think you can grow it as fast as if it's a for profit company, because you won't be able to use equity investments to help you accelerate the
growth of the company. You won't be able to offer equity packages to your early staff members who are probably taking big pay cuts to come and work for you, and all these other things. And so we really felt strongly about using the company to create the most impact possible. And when we zoomed out and thought, how do we create the most impact possible if we're constraining the growth of the business by the nonprofit status, then is there a version of it being a for profit business that
can actually be more impactful. And we got to the place of, well, if we can grow at least twice as fast, then we can have more impact donating fifty percent of our profits if that enables that extra two x plus growth, And so that was the theory behind it, but really wanting to keep the core message to our customer that without the sanitation problem existing in the developing world, there was no reason for our business to exist, and so fifty percent of profits really sent that message home.
Of the reason why we exist is because the sanitation problem is there, and we believe that this fifty percent mechanism will allow us to tackle that problem in the fastest way possible. And we think that's that's played out. You know, the fifty percent model means that we have cash flow in the business to be able to grow
the business year on year. It's been able to help us now go global and we sell into thirty six countries globally today with warehousing in three continents, and as a result of kind of getting that fifty percent right, we think that we have definitely been able to grow more than twice as big, and ultimately that's meant that we'll have more impact today but importantly more impact in the long run as well.
I feel like I can I can hear birds chirping in the background. Is that right?
That's a real yeah. We live in our south of Melbourne on the Moines and Peninsula and it's a like a hazard of doing podcasts. Oh, I love it.
It's an unusual sound that I don't often hear when I'm interviewing people, but it's probably a good segue into the fact that you are a remote first organization and you did it way before it was almost a business requirement. And I want to know, having been a remote first organization for many years, how do you balance having staff work from anywhere but making sure that they're motivated and proactive when you can't actually see them every day.
What we come back to around motivation is Dan Pink's theory from Drive around motivation not being linked to money or remuneration or in this instance, FaceTime. It's linked to autonomy, mastery and purpose, and so we think a lot about how to build those three things into our business. You know, autonomy being setting clear goals and then getting out of
the way and allowing people to achieve them. Mastery being working on a core skill set that someone wants to truly master themselves, and purpose being something that we're very lucky to have embedded in our DNA and have it in spades. But so we have to think a lot about how do we connect the everyday actions of the team to the greater purpose that we have as business. And so we have our thirty year b HAG, which is to make sure that everyone in the world has
access to a toilet. And then we have our five year vision, which tells us where we need to be in the next five years to enable us to hit that thirty year goal. And then from there we come down to our annual strategy, which tells us what we have to do this year to set us up to hit that five year vision to get to the thirty
year b HAG. And then from there we come down to our quarterly OKRs, which tell us what the company has to do and what every team has to do, and for a lot of individuals, what every individual has to do this quarter to help us hit the individual goals, to hit the functional goals, to hit the team goals to hit our annual strategy, to hit our five year vision,
to hit that thirty year b HAG. And if we get that right, then it purposes a part of those OKRs, and so it kind of lines up autonomy and the clear goal setting and then getting out of people's way mastery where people are working on those core skill sets that we check in on every year to make sure that they're still the right skill set or developing people in the right way, and then purpose really understand how what we're doing today and this quarter ultimately helps us
to get to that big thirty year goal that we have. And so when we get that right, the motivation just comes from there and it's not something that we have
to think too much about. You know, we need to obviously check that we're moving in the right direction, but it's really embedded into how we work and so we just trust that people will do the right thing and we also want to give them the flexibility so that a big part of not being in the office is that you can do things that you would not otherwise be able to do. So you can drop the kids
off or pick them up from school. You can, for me personally, go surfing when the swells good and the wind's blowing offshore, which doesn't happen all that often, and you don't want to miss those great surf days. If it's important to you, you can go to the gym. And we have this belief that if you're on a call with someone and they'd rather be somewhere else, then you probably don't want to be on that call with someone while they're thinking about that other thing that they could
be doing. And so people make it clear and transparent around what it is that they're doing in the middle of the day to pick up their kids from school or go surfing and have that much the calendar, but that they'll make that up and make sure that their work gets done throughout the rest of the week in
the way that makes the most sense for them. And so we have always flipped that work life balance on its head and think about it more as being life work balance as long as the performance outcomes are there and we're achieving what we need to, which our business is a big requirement because we're still growing very quickly, and that requires a lot of discipline to make sure that we get that right.
So life work balance, so people are putting things like school pickup or dentist appointment or whatever in their work diary. So how else are you driving that life work balance.
Yeah, it's a good question. I'm sort of not going to directly answer your question here, but I don't think it's as simple as I'm making it out there. I think we also realize that FaceTime is very important, and so we started with a completely remote team initially, and I think probably two or three years in we brought everyone together for the first time and realized how much
benefit there was from having FaceTime together. Now, some companies would have said, well, we need to have an office and co locate everyone and make sure that we've got FaceTime every day, whereas we said, how do we create those moments of FaceTime on the right frequency that makes sense for the teams and the company in order to get the outcomes that we need without sacrificing the benefits that people have from the flexibility that comes from being
able to work remotely most of the time. And so we ended up making a few shifts. We stopped hiring people anywhere in the world and instead started to focus our hiring on global hubs. So in Australia, we've got
Melbourne's our hub. In the Philippines, we have Manilla. In the US, we have LA and we've focused our hiring on those areas so that although people are working from home a lot of the time, they can still come together and do things socially or spend time in the office and for different functions, particularly in Australia, we've got more operational functions where there's more focus on deep work or headphone style work. People prefer to work at home
a bit more. And so the Melbourne Hub said, will come together one day a week and we'll choose what day that is individually, so not everyone will be in the office at the same time, whereas our LA Hub we're working more on marketing and digital product and creative, more collaborative functions. And they said, we'd like to work together three days a week and it will be Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, so that we're all in the office at the same time.
And Manila Hub said, the traffic is terrible, you know, doesn't make sense to spend time together during the week because we end up with one to four hours in the traffic to meet up for a day. So let's catch up on a weekend, and we'll do that every one or two months instead, and our China hub said we'll travel together, so we'll spend time on the road in seeing our production partners together and that's our way
of getting our own FaceTime. And then we bring the whole company together for one week of the year where we launch our new strategy for the year ahead and we connect people either into the purpose of the business by taking them into the field to see the work of our partners firsthand. So the last time we did that was with Water eight in Cambodia and half the team unfortunately came to down with food poisoning, which gave them a little bit more empathy for the problem we're
trying to solve than what we're expecting. And then every other year we do that in a city hub, so we've started in Melbourne. We did that in Manila last year or the year before, and then in twenty twenty we weren't able to travel, so we've got a little bit of catching up to do once things return to normal again.
I really like how you've let the different hubs determine their own rhythm in terms of how much FaceTime they need, rather than dictating that from the top, Am I correct in assuming that you basically said to each hub, you guys, just figure it out what works for you and do that.
Yeah, that's correct, And I split my time now between the Melbourne hub and we're in the Los Angeles hub usually for three months a year, not at the moment because travel is not a thing, but that means for me, I prefer to be at home four days a week, but when I'm in LA I have to go into the office three days a week. They're the rules, and so the team decides that, and the team holds each other to account. And obviously there's some flexibility in that.
If people need to work from home for a little bit, then of course we make that work, and then we do other stuff like there's a remote work policy where someone can apply to travel and work remotely for up to three months a year, provided that they get signed off from their manager, so they could be in Bali or wherever they want, provided they make that work with their manager and their team. So usually that means working
on the same time zone. So the first person that did this actually applied to go to Ireland and the deal was that he could totally do that if he was able to make his meetings work, which meant that he stayed up until two or three am, three days a week to squeeze it all in and he was happy to do that. So it worked out well. Wow.
Now you mentioned okay as, and I assume that a lot of listeners will be familiar with what they are for those that are not. The stands for objectives and key results and originally came from Intel by a guy called John Duer And for anyone that wants to read more about it, Measure what Matters is a brilliant book. We use okay as at Inventium and I'm always interested in how companies apply okayrs. So, for you, bringing it back to those elements of motivation that Dan Pink writes about,
do you let people set their own OKRs? How does that work in practice in terms of individuals having or setting okayrs.
So we use them at an annual company wide level, and then a quarterly company wide level, and then a quarterly functional level, so that the company wide okays trickle down to the teams, and then we have them set for the teams, and then some teams and some individuals will also have their own personal OKRs, and usually there's always some work stuff in there, and usually there's some personal stuff in there as well, which gives the managers a bit of an insight into what's important for that
individual outside of work. So often there'll be something around, you know, quite common to see exercise or you know, some of these kind of things that people might usually have as a years resolution creeping into their personal OKRs, which is really cool because then you get this level of accountability that I think is hard to have otherwise. And so the company, any OKRs get set between the executive team and our planning team, which are two leadership teams.
I don't like that word. You should have leaders ever owned the business, not just in teams, but really they get set in collaboration and then same with the functional OKR as that happens with the teams, and then their executive rep work to sign off those functional OKRs, and then the personal OKRs usually get set by the individual with a little bit of help from their functional head.
But if you're in a team with a little bit of help with their functional head or their manager, if you're a manager who's got many reports, then you can't really go in depth to set everyone's individual personal OKRs, but you want to be able to make sure that they're laddering up to what you're trying to achieve as a team, to get that cascading effect that allows you to make sure that the OKRs are ultimately going to help us achieve what we need to do.
I like that you've got personal okays. I don't think i've come across that. What made you decide to do that originally?
Yeah, So we tried it originally because we thought that it was beautiful to have them cast aid through the whole organization. So knowing that connecting everyone's individual work up to the work of the team and the company, which allowed us to have that link of mission to metrics and that link from individual work today to the greater purpose that we have as an organization. But we found that for some people it was too much, and some
teams it was too much. I think OKRs are an amazing tool, but they take a few, I would say a few years to get into the rhythm of really distilling them, the process of creating them down so that it's not so much work that it's overwhelming. And I think we found with personal OKRs that they're amazing for
kind of holding to account. But for some people it's too much to have so many layers of OKRs in the organization, and so we've made the personal ones optional, and we find that some teams and some individuals will use them, whereas other teams and other individuals are happy just to use the functional OKRs and divide up ownership of those amongst their team.
Do you have any personal okayrs for yourself? Is that something you've been doing.
I did personal OKRs probably the first three quarters that we had them, and I found them amazingly useful. So for me, I was trying to exercise more and I set myself a goal of three to four times a week of exercise, and because they were my personal OKRs, it made it really easy for me to you know, and everyone knew them. They were shared company wide, anyone
could see them. It made it really easy for me to say, I would love to have that meeting then, but I have to go and do some exercise otherwise I won't hit my personal krs. And so they became a very powerful tool for me to create new habits in my workday that everyone understood why they were important to me, because I laid out that that was specifically
something I was focusing on personally that quarter. Now I have more of a rolling to do list that I look at and prioritize every quarter and set the goals for the quarter ahead. But exercise is more baked into my routine these days, and so I'm not trying to make a big shift there, which is probably why I haven't shared those as publicly as what I did for the first few quarters that we ran them.
I'm inspired to suggest inventive takes on some personal okays as well.
I really like that. Now.
Something I've read about Who Gives a Crap is that you tell staff that you're in the business of delight, and I want to know, like, how do you demonstrate that both to people within the business and also to your customers.
I think to our customers, it's just a part of the customer experience, and so it's not something that we talk about externally, but internally it's something that we come back to a lot, and so there's lots of different examples of this, but I think that it's often very easy to say, well, if we're in the toilet paper business, we just do this. But if we ask ourselves a question of well, what would we do if we're in the business of delight to how we solve this problem?
Then you'll come at it from a very different place. So I think that our packaging is an example of that, where when we very first had the early kind of concept for who Gives a Crap, we realized that we weren't going to be in supermarkets, which is where most toilet paper was sold when we first got started, so we could think about our packaging a little bit more creatively and differently, and we said, okay, well, if we put ourselves in the shoes of the customer, how do
they think about toilet paper being in their house? And you often see rolls being stacked up in the bathroom, and so we said, well, what if we could wrap every role individually and design the packaging so that when it's stacked up, it creates a really fun, delightful moment.
And so we took inspiration from I think one of the co founders, Danny, who was working on this with me, had walked past the barbershop and seen one of those red and white striped poles earlier in the day, and so he mocked up, what would it look like if we had these roles and you stack them on top of each other, and they created that sort of barber pole effect with a red and white striped wrapper, And so that was what led us to initially say, well,
what if we did forty eight different design wrappers boxes, And I said, well, our production team will kill us. We can probably do five, And so we mocked up five different roles, with the first of them being a red, orange and blue striped wrapper with a white stripe in there as well. Was one of the very first designs that we did that part of our first packaging. And so I think we have a lot of wouldn't it be cool if moments, and packaging was certainly one of those.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could design something that was so beautiful our customers would want to take it out of the back of the bathroom cupboard where toilet
paper is traditionally stored and put it on display. And there's probably fifty ideas that we have for every one or two that stick, and packaging was one of the one or two that really stuck in a way that was meaningful for our customer to the point where when people first opened up boxes it was so delightful that they wanted to take a photo of that and share that with someone else, either in a text message or
WhatsApp or on social media. And so I think if we come back to that putting ourselves in the shoes of the customer and saying, well, what if we're in the business of delight, how would we insert delight into this moment? It allows us to think very differently about what we would do rather than just being a regular old toilet paper company.
I feel like you've achieved that so well. I know within my own home. I had some people over for dinner last night, and I made sure that I topped up my little pile of who gives toilet paper in the bathroom because it just looks so cool. Now. One of the things I love about your brand is how you use humor and especially puns, which you have done from day one, and I'm personally surprised at how few businesses use humor at all. I mean, let alone use
humor as amazingly as you guys do. And I want to know how do you personally encourage humor at work and with your team, because I just feel it's so core to who you are and why you have built such a lovable brand.
Yeah, I mean I think like this is just like a core part of our culture. I think we have this philosophy of if you can't have a laugh at work, then what's the point of being at work? And so we sort of have a culture in a way and a brand now that self selects people that thrive in that environment and want to be there, to have a bit of fun and to think about things a little bit differently. And I think the challenging part of that is really being content of crafting a culture that's quirky
fun rather than dirty fun. And we tread this fine line and we say that our brand name is the dirtiest thing that you'll ever hear us say. And so all of our humor has to be witty and clever and quirky without going down the path of being gross
and disgusting. And that cannot necessarily be an easy thing to do for a toilet paper company, but it's something that we think about a lot, and particularly as we're interviewing for our creative team, for example, we'd really test how people think about the humor and the brand.
How do you test someone's humor.
A big part of our interview processes is the homework assignment. So we have a five stage interview process, and I think the fourth stage of that is a homework assignment where we get someone to usually do four to eight hours of work and we pay them for that time because we don't want ideas for free or people to think that we're taking advantage of them, which is certainly
not the intent. And with our creative team in particular, that can be a brainstorming session with our other team members to understand how they id eate and what nuggets of ideas they group together to turn into something that they think will be potentially a good campaign for the brand.
And so an environment like that allows us to understand, yeah, like how someone approaches the humor of the brand, what they think is good humor versus bad humor and why, and we can find what are the kind of culture ads or the humor ads of the people that will potentially join the team. And so homeworks keep out of every role that we interview for, but especially key I think in the creative team, because you learn so much about how someone approaches their work in that session.
Will you deliberately ask them like, come up with something that uses humor that would be inappropriate for who gives it crap?
That's a great question. I know we've definitely asked for jokes on job applications and stuff like that, so it can become a really early filter in the process. I don't know if you've ever asked for inappropriate jokes, but yeah, I can check with the team. That's a good question.
So when you're recruiting for any role, will that be a prerequisite that people I don't know, how do you learn if someone's funny and they're willing to have fun at work through a recruitment process.
This is something we think a lot about in some of the more serious functions as well. So finance is a great example of this, where we need people in that function who can take really serious concepts and break them down into bite sized chunks that relate to their team.
And so we're looking for the way that people go above and beyond and if someone in finance can insert humor into what they're doing, then for us, that's just like a huge win because it's a function that has a terrible reputation for being stale and boring, and if we can change that within our business and make it more fun. Then that's a real win for us in terms of how we're building a culture that rewards the right things and helps engage our team in what some
people perceive as being less exciting parts of the business. Personally. You know, I'm a big finance fan, so I'd never say that out loud.
I'd so like, when you're recruiting a finance person, how would you find out if they can do these things, if they can communicate complex concepts clearly and maybe with a bit of.
Humor as well. So again, homework assignments here is so important and so now brief. For our homework assignments, we encourage people to use jokes and gifts and emojis and allow them to start bringing out their own personality through what they're presenting back to the team. And so it becomes a real moment of allowing someone to get access to our brand guidelines, interpret them, and then use them to create a presentation that for a finance person would
typically be quite boring and straight. And if they can turn that into something that hits the right brand notes even a little bit, then it gives us an indication or a glimpse into what might be possible for that individual, and so we make all of our brand guidelines available through that process to help guide people on that journey and then see how they interpret them and what they come back with it as the end result.
I like the idea of being encouraged to use gifts and memes as part of a home work assignment for getting a job. That sounds very appealing. Now, something I've heard about you is that you're someone that is very aware of your strengths and also your weaknesses, and that you're very proactive in working on your weaknesses or addressing those and improving those. And I want to know what are you currently working on in yourself to improve.
Yeah, first of all, that's very flattering to here. I think it's worth pointing out that there's a lot of weaknesses still, so there's always a lot to be able to work on, which is good and bad. And I'm an optimizer, so I love finding a problem and then figuring out what the optimal solution to that problem is.
When you start looking at what your own weaknesses are, this becomes a really interesting challenge for someone who loves to optimize, because you start to find what are the tricks and the tools that you can use to break your own habits and to allow you to be more efficient or better at things that you find really challenging. But it can also be very emotionally draining because you're always holding a mirror up to yourself to try and understand what's not perfect and what can be done better.
And I think everyone has a lot of imperfections. And so the other thing to acknowledge here is that I think that for me, this happens in like in step changes, where I'll go through periods of really intensely working on something and being really disciplined about making progress on that thing that I'm working on, and then inevitably I'll be underwater with a project and I revert back to what
my current set of habits is. And so what that means is that you make these leaps and bounds, and then you might have a stagnant period and then you do some self reflection and figure out what it is that isn't working and that you want to improve on before you start working on it again. And so it's not this linear kind of improvement that you make. It's often these big, jagged kind of step changes or nonlinear
progressions with a kind of jagged line through them. At the moment, I think mobile phone is a big one, so trying to use my phone less to be more present, and so for me often the success comes from not changing behavior so much as removing the things that make it easier to slip into bad habits. So I don't
have any social media apps on my phone. I've removed Slack from my phone At the moment, I run my phone on black and white to make it less addictive, and then I get locked out of all of my apps between nine pm and six am, so that after a certain time I physically can't use my phone without kind of using a jail break, and then setting screen time limits for most apps so there's a maximum of half an hour on most things, so that if I accidentally go down a wormhole, then I get pulled back
out of it by my phone. So that's a big one for me at the moment. Another one is on figuring out that there's some tasks that I can do them myself, but it might take three or four hours, whereas other people who are really good at them can do them in half an hour. And so dead and so often I'll procrastinate those tasks because they're things that I find really challenging, and as a result, they're often
the last thing to be done. And so the trick that I've got there at the moment is that I'll actually schedule time with someone else who I know is really amazing at that task and can do it incredibly quickly, because if we work on it together for half an
hour an hour, I can get it completely done. And so that becomes a little bit of a trick to now instead of procrastinating and being worried about doing this thing that I don't enjoy doing and prioritizing everything else in front of it, now I have a time where once I get into that half an hour hour long meeting, this is the only thing that we'll work on, and by the end of it will be finished and we
can put it behind us. And so that's another kind of trick for removing the thing that makes it hard to get started in the first place. So that's often how I think about trying to improve on those weaknesses.
Now, I know that you're also a big reader, and I'm curious around what are some of the books that you've read, maybe in the last few years that have had the big impact on how you think about your business and the way that you approach your work.
Yeah, I'm actually less of a reader since we've had kids. I find it much more challenging now to read books than what I ever did before. But as I said before, we live in the countryside so inevitably spend a lot of the time in the car. Everything's just a bit further away than what it was when we lived in the city, and so a lot of my consumption of information outside of work now happens through like podcasts or
clubhouse or other bits and pieces. So the one podcast that I've actually found I listened to the most often is actually the Wall Street Journal's daily podcast called The Journal, which is like this kind of deep dive into one topic every day that goes for fifteen minutes in total.
And that's a great way of me staying on top of what's going on, particularly with sort of American news, which I think in the last couple of years has been pretty fascinating to have that snapshot into another country when we have been able to spend time there.
Any other podcasts that you find that you dip into and find particularly useful.
Yeah. I mean I'm a real sucker for business podcasts, so How I Built This is a big one, Amantha. I love listening to How I Work as well. Yeah. I kind of dip in and out of different business related podcasts, usually on one and a half time speed, so I can try to get through them quickly. But I don't have something that I listen to religiously. Go through periods where I'll listen to something a lot and then I'll stop and listen to something else. And so
I think twenty VC will be in there. I listen to that for a lot for a while, and a few other podcasts along those lines.
I'll link to all those in the show notes. And one thing you might want to check out that I've gotten into in the last few months is Pivot with Scott Galloway and Carra Swisher.
I feel like you'd like that one, Yeah, And I've been meaning to get into Malcolm Gladwell's podcast as well. Yes, it is very very good.
And any books like back when you didn't have little people occupying your time and maybe depriving you of some sleep, are there any books that were fundamental in influencing the way that you work and think I.
Feel like this one's obvious now, but the lean startup ten years ago revolutionized how we thought about what we were working on, and just the encouragement to get things into market as fast as possible, knowing that they're half baked or eighty percent ready, because you don't know what you don't know, and you'll learn so much from putting things out into the world. That is just like at the heart of almost everything we do it who gives
a crap. There's some situations where you don't want to launch something that's half baked, but generally speaking, anything that's customer facing or trying to get out into market as quickly as possible to try and learn from that. So that's still the number one book that I recommend to any new entrepreneur because I think it is so different to what you get taught at university or in the corporate world that people really need to read that to get used to their thinking.
I couldn't agree more. And now my final question for you, if people want to connect with you and who gives a crown in some way, shape or form and maybe order some toilet paper, what is the best way to do that?
So we're just at who Gives a Crap dot org and shipping now US, UK, Australia, and we've just opened up European warehouse that we're shipping into all of Europe, a lot of it with free shipping, which is super exciting. And then personally I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn I'm just at Simon Griffiths on Twitter and LinkedIn something a little bit similar but I can't corre remember what it is. And then more recently a clubhouse I found really interesting.
It's an app to be able to be a fly on the wall at a conference that you can duck in and out of with some amazing speakers. So on there, more and more amazing.
I will link to all that in the show notes.
Simon, It's been so.
Good talking and learning all these new things about you that I did not previously know. So thank you so much for your time.
Yeah, thank Samantha. I feel like a long time coming, so super nice to chat and to do this together.
Hello there, I hope you enjoyed this chat with Simon. If you did, and you know someone else that might enjoy it, why not share it with them now next week on the show. I'm very excited to have Yob van Dervaut, who is the co founder and CEO of remote dot Com and the XVP of Product for git Lab, and we will be talking about the world of remote working the optimal office set up, which I will say
Yob setup is amazing and so much more. So make sure you have clicked subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast to be alerted when that episode drops and how I Work is produced by Inventing Him with production support from Dead Set Studios. The producer for this episode was Jenna Coder and thank you to Martin Nimba who did the audio mix and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise. That is it for today and I'll see you next time.