Welcome to Easy, Breezi.

Your friend who sends you a weekly update on what she's working on, reading through, and thinking about – in a list.

WTF does work-life balance even mean these days?

Last week, I received a response to one of my previous newsletters and it inspired me to dive into this topic

I love this topic because contrary to most advice, your work is your life: you go to work for most of the waking day, during the most formative decades of your life – if you don’t like your job, you won’t like your life.

So let’s talk about it!

When someone says “work-life balance”, this is what you probably start to picture:

• Go to work Monday - Friday

• Do work between 9am and 5pm

• Have activities or hobbies to take part in after work

• Spend time with friends and family on the weekend

• Take three weeks of vacation each year to travel

Here are 5 misconceptions we have around work-life balance:

1. “You need work-life balance to be happy”

2. “It’s wrong to make your work your life”

3. “You’ll regret working so much”

4. “You’ll be more fulfilled if you work less”

5. “Working a lot means no time for hobbies/ other interests”

Last year, I spent 8 months as a freelance fractional Head of Growth for multiple e-commerce brands.

I worked 15-25 hours a week, made $20,000/ month and got to travel to beautiful places around the world.

If you looked up “work-life balance” up in the dictionary, you’d find a picture of me in Hawaii on the beach with my laptop.

It was great.

Except for the fact that I felt completely unsatisfied and unhappy.

I actually think we should avoid striving for work-life balance …

• Traditionally, we’ve defined work-life balance as equal time spent in each place or equilibrium between personal and professional pursuits

• It’s the “equal time” that I dislike – measuring quantity of time spent working feels like such a hollow metric used to assess whether or not we’re living a fruitful life

• I’d encourage you stop chasing this equilibrium of time and instead focus on a concept I use for myself called: Work-Purpose Alignment

What is Work-Purpose Alignment:

Achieving Work-Purpose Alignment means being able to answer YES to the following five statements:

1. I like the day to day work that I am doing

2. While I’m working, I feel aligned to my values*

3. When I do a good job at work, I feel incredibly fulfilled

4. I would happily recommend the work I do to others

5. The work I do makes me an overall better human being

*If you aren’t sure what your values are, I highly recommend Brené Brown’s value exercise

As I’m building Breezi, I’m constantly evaluating myself for Work-Purpose Alignment

1. I like the day to day work that I am doing: Yes, I like designing in Figma, seeing code turn into working products and acquiring users through different growth experiments
   

2. While I’m working, I feel aligned to my values: Yes, my two core values are Freedom and Transformation – I constantly feel like I experience both
   

3. When I do a good job at work, I feel incredibly fulfilled: Yes, when I see our waitlist and demand for Breezi grow, it fuels my fire
   

4. I would happily recommend the work I do to others: Yes, I tell my smart friends that they should quit everyday and build something of their own (or come work for me)
   

5. The work I do makes me an overall better human being: Yes.

So here’s the takeaway

• The initial question was “do I want to be relentlessly building a company or do I want work-life balance and explore other hobbies?”

• That’s not a good question to ask because work-life balance simply is not a good measure of your future happiness

• Instead, focus on identifying whether you have Work-Purpose Alignment

• You can do that by going through the five statements above

• If you can’t answer yes to each one of them, you’re in the wrong job and no amount of work-life balance will make you satisfied

Female Founder World: My go-to place for startup resources

• I’m excited to be partnering with my friends at Female Founder World for this newsletter

• Female Founder World is our fave community for Gen Z and millennial women building consumer business

• They have an insanely helpful guide to all the grants available to female founders in 2023

• I also love their 5-min weekly newsletter on marketing, branding and entrepreneurship!

3 new consumer apps I’ve been trying this week

1. Threads: Instagram’s latest creation, a text-based platform copied from inspired by Twitter
   

2.  Retro: a photo journal app for you and your friends, which honestly just feels like they took the concept of IG dumps and finsta’s and tried to turn it into a product
   

3. Dimensional: an in-depth personality test that uses your social graph to show you similarities and differences among friends

If I were a consumer investor, here’s which ones I’d invest in

1. Not Threads – Instagram did a great job of seamlessly migrating their users to a new platform and making it a carbon copy of another platform so users knew how to perform actions but there’s no real “unlock” of a brand new experience here, it’s been one week and already feels outdated and I predict it will eventually get rolled up into Instagram as a feature
   

2. Not Retro – Honestly, it’s boring. It feels like slow-release BeReal. Where BeReal was instantaneous once a day, Retro is multiple photos at the end of the week
   

3. Yes Dimensional – the organic word of mouth of this product is impressive, I’ve been told to download it and use it from three different people over the last week. The concept of turning personality tests social by layering your results over someone else’s is extremely fascinating however, they’ll have to find a way to keep users engaged outside of forcing them to complete tests over and over again

3 major trends I’m seeing across products

1. Growing number of text-based apps

2. Demand for products that aid in your understanding of self and identity

3. App culture matters more than app benefits/ functionality

Ranking my favorite Emily Henry books

1. Happy Place

2. Book Lovers

3. Beach Read

4. People We Meet On Vacation

My pet peeves as of late

• When people walk into the elevator before you get to walk out

• Small cutting boards

• Entitled elderlies

• When you try to expand your horizons and try new drink at the coffeeshop instead of getting your usual order and it’s not good

• Having to charge my phone three times a day

An excerpt from my journal this past week

• “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – time doesn’t slow down for you. It doesn’t wait. It doesn’t turn around and go “hey you good?”. It just keeps going. If you stop, slow down, wait, you’ll be behind. You have to keep up and keep going”

If you found anything in this newsletter helpful, I'd love to connect on Twitter – tweet me a screenshot of your favorite part and let's chat 👋

I'll be back next week with more lists!