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HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan has a method to avoid the “Sunday scaries” — starting her workweek early.
“I’m not scared of Sundays,” Rangan said on a recent episode of the Grit podcast. “I enjoy it because it’s my time. I get to decide what I’m learning, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, what I’m writing. It is completely my schedule. I have nothing else to disturb me except my own thoughts.”
Rangan said there hasn’t been a weekend in the past fifteen years that she hasn’t been working, though she hedges that it’s not always particularly grueling.
“I can’t claim that I work really hard,” she said. “I have a schedule that works for me.”
Rangan said she uses the day to prepare, more than anything else. Keeping up with the ever-shifting trends within the tech industry demands a decent amount of study, she added — she often uses Sundays for catching up, learning, and “play.”
“Sunday morning, it’s a full workday for me, and it’s my workday,” Rangan said. “This is the time I read, this is the time I do deep thinking, this is the time I write. It’s a full day.”
Rangan has set a hard line, though. Whenever she’s finally done with work on Friday night, she’s firmly clocking out for her version of the weekend.
“Then what I try to do is, Friday night whenever I’m done — it might be 8, 9, 10 — whatever time I’m done on Friday, I don’t touch my computer and I don’t think about work ’til Sunday morning,” Rangan said.
Her boundaries came about, in part, thanks to the blurring of the home and the workplace during the pandemic. Because there was no real distinction between her office and what had previously been places of rest, Rangan said she had to set mental limits.
“One of the things I found, especially post-COVID or during the pandemic, is that there was no constraint,” she said. “Your office was two minutes away from your kitchen, and so you’re working all the time.”
The CEO said that when she does pause on Saturdays, she doesn’t send out so much as an email, even if a board member is trying to get a hold of her.
“My team knows that most of the time, almost always, I will schedule it for Monday morning,” Rangan said. “They’re probably waiting for the 5 a.m. Monday morning string of emails from me. But I work on Sundays, and I think on Sundays, and I do everything, and then I send it out. That’s my day. I enjoy my Sundays.”
Monday through Friday, it’s lots of meetings and long days.
“During the work week, I start probably around 6, 6:30, and my first call is at 7,” she said. “Then it’s a full day—lots of calls like everybody else. Then I’ll have dinner with the kids and then I’ll work ’till 11. That’s my schedule. Any day is maybe 12, 14, 15 hours.”
To operate at full capacity, Rangan says that stopping, even if only for a day, is a nonnegotiable.
“I’ve constrained myself on that to say I need a break,” she said. “It’s almost like peak performance requires peak rest. You do need to take breaks.”
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