If I knew then ... is a weekly series of essays by small agency founders and executives about what they learned starting out their businesses.
As I look back over my (almost) 40-year career in the business of advertising and marketing, I often recall a line we all lived by when I worked as a young art director at Chiat/Day back in the mid-1980s.
"If you don't come in on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday," we used to say. Another maxim of those halcyon days was the nickname we gave the shop where we so feverishly toiled: ChiatDayNight.
The implication of both aphorisms was obvious. We worked weekends, we worked nights—often overnights. We worked an awful lot. It was a work ethic that stayed with me for years.
So when I started my own agency, it was that mindset I brought to the task. However, now I realize I was only half-right.
The occasional all-nighter can actually be fun, and we still do them at my shop. Not as often as in the early days, but more often than you might think. I've actually found that all-nighters can be profoundly productive, and sometimes it's during those middle-of-the-night sessions that truly brilliant work is realized.
But we try to avoid working weekends as much as possible.
I've come to realize that I was wrong to drag myself into my newly founded shop on so many weekends, and tacitly expect my staff to do the same. Since then I've made it my mission to take as many weekends off as possible, and I encourage the staff to do the same.
