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Bellingham Business Journal
August 2006

Are you ready to downsize your career?
These local go-getters decided they were missing out on too much while at the office (excerpt)

Morgan Bartlett, Bakerview Square developer
    At the peak of Morgan Bartlett’s workaholism, he awoke at 5:30 a.m., worked until 7:30 or 8 p.m., ate dinner and then hit the sack by 9 — six days a week.
    This schedule didn’t leave much time for seeing his two sons, J.J. and Brandon, or his wife, Laurie.
    From the beginning of his career as a real estate agent and developer, Bartlett wanted to do it all. He developed his first apartment building after moving to Bellingham in 1989.
    “I started in the development business wearing all the hats,” he said. “I’d do everything in the equation from A to Z.”
    He would find the property, do the paperwork on the deal, design the building, build the building, manage and maintain it.
    For the first three to four years of his sons’ lives, Bartlett said, he wasn’t around much due to his increasing number of work hours. His relationships with his family and friends deteriorated quickly.
    “It was desperation,” he said. “It was either make changes, or there was going to be serious fallout.”
    Bartlett also credited 9/11’s profound impact on his psyche, saying the incident made him realize life can be over in a second.
    “It began to hit me pretty hard that I needed to change my priorities,” he said.
    And that’s when Bartlett began doling out the hats he’d been wearing for more than a decade. The first step was hiring a property-management company to oversee his apartment buildings’ tenants. From there he began tossing out the hats like frisbees.
    “If there’s one word that would describe my mantra now, it’s efficiency,” Bartlett said.
    “Now I surround myself with a team of professionals and I’m going to use my God-given gifts to their max. I minimize the amount of work I’m lousy at and I maximize the amount of work I’m good at. I’m the big-picture guy now.”
    For Bartlett, this means working much less — about 25 to 30 hours a week now instead of his previous 80, but using several intense 12-hour work days to focus.
    In order to do this, he set up a work environment that shuts out distraction. His shades are drawn even on hot summer days in his 100-square-foot-office.
    He doesn’t grab coffee drinks at the cafe two storefronts down, and he doesn’t chat up coworkers or take leisurely business lunches.
    The efficiency mantra trickled over into his personal life, too. Tuesdays are “guys’ day out” with his sons, packed with swimming, Pokemon-card buying, pizza and movie matinees.
    “We do more in one day than I used to do with them in a month,” he said.
    Bartlett also recently bought a cabin on Whidbey Island where he spends four days a week with his family during the summer. The culmination of Bartlett’s new lease on life came when he decided to develop Bakerview Square, a project he has almost completely outsourced.
    And while he’s taken a pay cut from the distribution of duties, he said he considers value in a different light now. The challenge came recently when Bartlett considered developing a 35,000-square-foot mixed-use building in Fairhaven, but chose to forgo the project.
    “The bottom line is, four or five years ago I would have made that decision based on money,” he said. “Now I make decisions based on quality of life.”
    Ultimately, Bartlett said, he thinks the problem with overworked Americans is their lack of efficiency.
    “If people focused more on productivity versus number of hours worked, quality of life would go up,” he said. “I think I’m living proof of that.”
   

Read the entire story online at the Bellingham Business Journal.