993: How to Boost Your Focus by Streamlining Your Priorities with Marcey Rader

Pete Mockaitis
Marcey, welcome.

Marcey Rader
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be on your podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to be chatting about stuff, productivity, feeling good, working well. That’s a lot of stuff we’d like to chat about here. I’d love to kick us off if we could, could you share any particularly extra surprising, fascinating discoveries you’ve made over your years of researching and teaching about this stuff?

Marcey Rader
I would say that the theme that I see among high achievers, high performers, and I would think that would be people that listen to your podcast, if you’re listening to a podcast called How to be Awesome at Your Job, then you’re trying to achieve something that we tend to think that we will always have time, and that if we get X promotion, then we’ll have time to focus on our health; if we make this amount of money, then we can relax; if we hit this milestone, then we’ll pay more attention to our family. Like, there’s always something that we’re striving for instead of just living in the present.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s intriguing, this notion of “If this unfolds then Y will be the case.” Tell me, is that true?

Marcey Rader
Well, in my circumstances, I would say no. I’m almost 50, I’ll be 50 in September, and my 20s and 30s, I would say to early 40s, I was always chasing more and I actually have a TEDx Talk that I released in April called “The Relentless Pursuit of More” and I lived my whole life that way. It was always waiting for something. My husband and I had been married 26 years, and on our 25th anniversary, we went back and read all of our love letters that we had ever written to each other. And I could not believe that even starting in my 20s, I was always saying things like, “When I get my graduate degree, I’ll be home more,” “When I get this promotion…”

I mean, I was saying that back then and it was such a theme. And reading them all at once, I’m seeing that I had this notion throughout the years of always thinking that if I achieved something else, then I could actually focus on what should have been the most important thing to me, my health and my relationships, it really just hit me over the head. And it wasn’t the first thing to hit me over the head, but it might’ve been one of the last things to make me kind of wake up and smell the coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is rich and juicy and I think worth lingering upon a bit in terms of like the thoughts we believe, the things we say to ourselves here before we get into your beautiful lineup of many swell tactics in your book, Work Well, Play More. So, yeah, this notion is, like, after this happens, then that will be how things will be different. Let’s see, I’m not even crystallizing this so well, but is there a shorthand version we would say to this lie we tell ourselves, like, “After this, after X, then Y”?

Marcey Rader
It’s almost like that app, If This Then That. And it’s just like that. And, as an example, a lot of people will think this as, I’ll give an example from a work perspective, an example from a health perspective. So, with work, if I throw myself into my work and I really prove myself now, I work late, I work weekends, I’m the fastest to respond to emails, and I show them that I can do this, I get the promotion, then everything in my life will be great, because I’ve gotten the promotion.

But I’ve now trained people that this is how I work. I’ve trained people that I work at night, I work on the weekends, I get to inbox zero, I’m there all the time and nothing’s really changed. I’m still on the hamster wheel. From a health perspective, and when you’re in your 20s and 30s, we’ve all heard this, like, “Oh, take care of yourself now. It’ll catch up with you,” but you’re never going to believe it. You’re never going to believe it.

And it absolutely caught up with me. I was probably looked at as one of the healthiest people in the room. I was a triathlete. I competed in over 100 ultra and endurance races throughout my 20s and 30s. I even have a degree in Exercise Science, a Master’s in Health and Exercise Management, but it’s hard to look at yourself with a discerning eye, and I actually triggered Hashimoto’s disease, which is an autoimmune disease.

I also put myself into what’s called hypothalamic amenorrhea, which is where you stop having a menstrual cycle, and affects about 1.6 million American women, and it took 12 years for my body to recover from it, 12 years. And I always thought I had time to fix it, to fix myself. And when I talk to anyone that is experiencing burnout or overwhelm, or they are just kind of pushing, pushing, pushing because they think, “If I get to this, then that will happen and everything will be okay,” there are no guarantees that the that that you’re looking for is going to turn out the way you think it will.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s a powerful story. So, these health conditions, you say you triggered it like. Is it just like the sheer intense effort of work and endurance, exercise feats, triggered these ill health effects inside your body?

Marcey Rader
Yes. So, I traveled 48 weeks a year for almost a decade, and so it was a very high-stress lifestyle traveling all the time, and never went to bed at night until I was at zero inbox, didn’t sleep well, exercised a lot, and it also took a real toll on my relationship with my husband. I’m fortunate that we are still together. And it’s funny, I love the book, The Power of Regret.

And he talks about how when people say things like, “No regrets. No regrets,” we really shouldn’t think about it that way because when we do things that we regret, it means that we have failed at something, that we pushed ourselves, we’ve gone outside of our comfort zone, and things like that. It doesn’t mean that you didn’t learn from something or that you wish you hadn’t even done it. But my biggest regret is pushing myself in those areas so much and losing the focus in my relationships with my friends and with my husband.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and it seems this foundational lie is something that gets in a lot of our heads, “If this, then that.” And I’d love, since you’re on the other side of this now, having gained some wisdom from having been there, how do we prudently discern if we’re fooling ourselves? Because some things are accurate, “If this, then that.” Like, “Hey, if I get a promotion and salary increase, we will be able to afford moving to a better neighborhood or a school district or whatever.”

Like, sometimes that’s really true, “This cause does lead to that effect,” and that’s made perhaps a sensible goal we could feel great about pursuing. But there’s other times we’re just chasing a ghost and it’s to our detriment, we’re like, “What have I been doing with my life here?”

Marcey Rader
Yeah, that is an excellent point, and you are right. If you make X amount of money, then maybe you can move to a better neighborhood, you can buy a different home, you can hire a house cleaner even to help take some of your daily tasks off your plate. You can hire a personal trainer, you can hire an assistant, whatever that is.

And one thing that I work on with my clients is reviewing those goals that we’ve set for ourselves because sometimes those goals are completely arbitrary, they’re not even our goals, and they may have been something that we always thought, like, when we were 25 years old, like, “I need to make six figures,” or, “I need to make this level. I need to make director level” and so on. And we get there, and then for some people, it’s like, “Well, that’s not enough. So, then I need to get more and more and more and more.”

And I’m not saying to not shoot for higher dreams or for higher goals, but it’s just really thinking about, are these your goals, and revisiting them regularly, and thinking through what those are going to get for you, or bring for you. Because, like, I had one client that I worked with that she had a director position, and she was offered a job at a smaller company, and she wouldn’t take it because it was a decrease in title, and she said, “My goal was always be, you know, I want to be a director, and this would be an associate director, maybe even a senior manager.”

And so, she didn’t take it. And two years later, that company had doubled in size, they were sold to another company. The person who she knew, she knew the person that took the job that she interviewed for, cashed out big time, and it was all because of the title that she didn’t want to lose, which was really just arbitrary in the end, and she would’ve gone much further in that smaller company if she would’ve really thought through and not just been stuck on, “I have to have that title.”

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, yeah, this is good. And you’re bringing me back to, I think, maybe high school is one of the first times I thought I had fallen for this myself. And I think I told myself that if I had six-pack abs then I could get the ladies I was interested in in high school.

Marcey Rader

Of course.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s so off because, well, one, apparently, as I’ve kind of learned, most women there didn’t really care about men’s physiques as the selection criterion for their romantic boyfriends. So, there’s that. Just totally misguided.

But it’s funny, it’s sort of like we have a desire, we have some motivation, and there’s something I think natural in the human person, the human psyche, to want to achieve more, to do more, to have more, to be more, and winning. And I love my little competitive in some domains. Winning, in general, is just kind of fun, and in growing and improving just sort of feels good, and so we just kind of go after it. But somehow along the lines we get tricked into thinking that this is much more important and impactful than it truly is.

Marcey Rader
Yes. I had a business coach once that her mantra almost on all of the group coaching calls were, “You’re just not that special.” And it was really funny because her message to us was we’re thinking that people care about us so much more than they actually do. And so, are we doing something for ourselves or because we care about what people think about it so much, and about that title? Like, “What is it going to look like if I have now a title of senior manager instead of director?”

But one of the questions that was posed to me, and I use this all the time now with my clients, I use this in my TEDx, and I actually just released a podcast episode about just this very question, was, “If a journalist were to be following you around all day, writing a story about a day in the life of you, would they say that you are living in alignment with your priorities?” So, if you tell the journalist that, “Oh, my priority is that my health, that I exercise and eat healthy every day, that I’m present with my two young kids, and that I’m very present at work. And maybe I’m a manager, and that during my one-to-ones, I’m very focused on the person. Those are my priorities.”

And then this journalist is following you around, and they see that you sleep in, and you grab a Nutri-Grain bar on your way out the door, and you eat your lunch in front of a screen, you’re sitting there all day, during your one-to-one, you’re multitasking, and you’re also reading emails, or during your meetings, you’re also reading emails.

And then at the end of the day, during dinner, you’re also checking your phone every few minutes. That journalist would not be writing a story about your priorities. And so that’s something that I ask myself, that question, multiple times through the week, “If they’re writing about me right now, would they say I’m living what I say my priorities are?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a handy way to cut through it, indeed. 

So, it’s sort of like we assess the potential arbitrariness of a thing rather than just put the blinders on and chase after it full-steam my head. A title, it’s like, “Okay, that’s the goal,” and goals are fun. Pursuing them and growing and learning and improving and getting closer feels good. But, really, what does the title mean? What does it get you? What is its foundational relevance and importance in your life? And it sounds like when you said values, it sounds like that’s where the rubber meets the road. That’s how we, ultimately, assess the worthwhileness of anything.

Marcey Rader
Yes. And to be clear, I am not saying don’t have goals because I absolutely have goals and milestones. And if anybody out there has done StrengthsFinders, I’m number one, Learner, so I am always getting some kind of certification, and I’m reading books, and I’m learning about new things. It’s just I don’t feel like, in my experience with the people that I’ve worked with and then also with myself, that we can really define why we want some of those goals.

And when we look at what we think we’re going to get from them, is that really true? And then also, what do we need to sacrifice to get to those goals? Because sometimes we’re not thinking about that either. And for every yes, every time you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. But also, the reverse is true. If you say, “No, I’m not going to go to another party on Friday night because I need to get my sleep,” but you’re saying yes to going to bed early and waking up on Saturday feeling better. So, there’s always a yes and no, and give and take.

And knowing what you might have to sacrifice, and this is an easy one. A lot of people might say like, “I want to get up early and exercise every day, and that’s my goal,” but they’re not morning people, so they already have one strike against them. They’re getting up early, they’re exercising, but now they’re drinking coffee all day long, which is also not good, and they’re going to bed earlier, which means maybe less time with their partner. And so, really thinking through, “What are the sacrifices that I would need to make? And is it worth it for those changes that will come about from that?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And any pro tips on how we can do a masterful job of making these considerations and evaluations?

Marcey Rader
Well, I’ve been doing something for the last 11 years, and I only have three priorities at a time from a work perspective and a health perspective. And I call them, like, spaceship view are my annual priorities, and airplane view are my quarterly, and then I have three for my monthly, that’s like my skyscraper view, and then I have my weekly three, and that’s what I call my treetop view, and then I have my daily, and that’s just the three total, and that’s where I’m in the weeds, like, in the daily types of tasks.

And I write them down. I actually have a playbook that I write them down in. And continually revisiting those, I’m actually looking at them on my whiteboard right now, I have my annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, keeps it top of mind for me. It’s like that journalist looking at me, writing that story, me making sure that I’m staying on track. But the biggest piece of that is I do reflections on these every, at the end of the week. I reflect on my week at the end of the month. I reflect on the month, quarter, and year.

But quarterly, I do this with three other people and I talk about my lessons earned, my smartest decisions, what worked well, what didn’t work well. I get feedback from them, they share theirs, and then I give them feedback. And so, I’m getting an outsider’s perspective, and that really helps me to kind of stay aligned with what I say my priorities are so that I don’t get kind of tunnel vision sometimes on what it is that I’m shooting for without seeing the big picture.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. All right. Well, so we spent some good time there. Now, tell us what’s the big idea behind your book, Work Well, Play More?

Marcey Rader
So, the subtitle is “Productive Clutter-Free, Healthy Living – One Step at a Time,” and it goes through the course of 12 months, and every month there is a behavior in the area of productivity, the area of clutter, which could include digital, physical, or mental clutter, and then health.

And in each of those categories, there are novice, pro, and master levels. So, if you think of something like James Clear’s Atomic Habits book, awesome book. It’s very conceptual and theory-based, and with a little bit of how. It’s a lot of why and a little bit of how, and mine is a little bit of why but a lot of how. And so, it’s really like a step-by-step and kind of a choose-your-own-adventure book. And I’ve had teams use it in book clubs. I’ve had several groups use it as book clubs, actually, and it’s just really fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, so why don’t we just get a taste there. Month one, productivity, is about notification distractions and handling those. And I love this because, well, I’ve seen research that suggests when people try this ever so briefly, they sometimes stick with it forever. So, lay it on us, Marcey, the why and the how.

Marcey Rader
The number one thing you can do to help with your focus and attention is to turn off your notifications as many as possible, because they are not on to help you be more productive. They’re on to get you to use the tool or the app more. So that is why they’re on as the default. And every time we get one, there is a dopamine response in our brain, and we start to get used to it, and we like it. And dopamine is that anticipation, and it’s the same one that gamblers get.

And so, by turning those off, one, I have never had anybody in over a decade turn them off and turn them back on again. If they did, I don’t know about it. And if you think about your email, like when you get the little pop-up in the lower right-hand corner of your screen, and you’re in the middle of another email, think about your emails like conversations. If I’m talking to you and somebody came up to me and poked me on the shoulder, and said one line and walked away, that would be really distracting, right? But that’s exactly what is happening when we let the notifications come through.

The other thing to think about is you’re not going to forget to check your email. Nobody forgets to check their email. And so, if you worry that you’re going to miss something, are you missing it for a minute, five minutes, an hour? There’s a difference between being reactive and being responsive. And what we want to be is responsive.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then in practice, how do we deal with this, we just straight up get in our phones and say, “No, no, no, no,” on all of the apps and the notifications? Or what do you recommend?

Marcey Rader
I definitely recommend email notifications off, but for your phone, I recommend anything that, any kind of social media, we don’t need to see that somebody liked our post immediately.

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, they liked your post, Marcey?”

Marcey Rader
They liked, and that’s dopamine, like, “Oh, somebody likes me. Somebody likes me.” And so, we don’t need to see that right away. You’re probably not going to forget to go to Instagram. Email, we don’t need. One thing you could, you know, you might want to consider it’s like keeping your phone notification, like your voicemail notification, maybe your text, something like that, but things like Target ads, Target sales, or ESPN or The Weather Channel, we don’t need all of those alerts and banners that come through.

And what a lot of people don’t realize is that you can set hours, focus modes, in your phone, and this is what I love about the iPhone because I actually don’t have badges on my phone, the little bubbles with the numbers even for text. I just check it every once in a while. For voicemail, I do. I do have the badge on because people don’t call anymore. And when somebody calls me, it’s usually important. But the thing with any kind of badge or banner coming across is that you could have it at focus mode that, only during certain times, those come through.

As an example, I don’t get any notifications between 8:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. and that’s because in the morning I’m working out, that’s my time, I don’t want to be interrupted. After 8:00 p.m., that’s when I’m hanging out with my husband. I don’t want to be interrupted. So, you could have different zones for, like, maybe you see badges during work hours but not in the evenings so then you’re not tempted to look.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s super, and, yes, I live my life this way. I do not receive any beeps or buzzes whatsoever with text messages, unless I know, “Oh, I’m in a zone where I need to hear from people right away and reply to them right away.” So, it’s, like, I will shift out of “Do not disturb” ever so temporarily, and then shift right back into it.

And it’s really interesting when you talk about training other people, like people will know, they say, “Oh, hey, we haven’t heard from Pete yet. Oh, yeah, he doesn’t get buzzed on his text messages, so I’m actually going to call him twice so that we could get the update, ‘Hey, we changed the lunch location,’” because I would, I probably would drive to the old lunch location and then oopsies. But so that happens quite rarely, and other people are aware and adapt, and I’d say that the rareness that it does happen is so worth it in terms of what I’ve gained from my attention being reclaimed.

Marcey Rader
I’m so glad you said that, Pete, because when people are so worried that they’re going to miss something, I’m like, “So maybe you miss something once in three months, but you’ve had three months of not being interrupted, like daily, hourly, sometimes every 10 minutes or whatever.” And how you use it is exactly how I recommend using it. Like, when I’m out and I’m meeting friends or whatever, or I’m expecting a call, I will turn it off. Like, it’s so easy to toggle it on and off. It’s just a little tap with your fingers to turn that zone off and be able to get them.

Pete Mockaitis
And we talked about all the settings you can do, and there are so many. I’m still learning more and more about them and they keep updating them with each new version of the software. But I get a kick out of using the Screen Time app and the downtime feature, this is my new discovery, although it’s been around, like, forever, in terms of it’ll just say, “Hey, no, we’re shut down now because you should be sleeping,” basically, it just sort of says.

And you can override it if you want to but it’s kind of nice that, oh, you’re scrolling something, and then your phone is like, “Oh, no, now you’re on downtime.” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, you’re probably right, phone. All right. I guess we’re done.”

Marcey Rader
Yeah, it’s just a little reminder. It’s a good nudge. It’s a good nudge to remind you, like, “Yeah, all right. All right, do you really need to be scrolling right now?” And that is one thing, because we’re talking about phones. Really think hard about whether or not you want to take your company to bed with you. Because when you look at your email in bed, or if you wake up, and before you ever get out of bed, you’re looking at your emails, you’re sleeping with your manager, you’re sleeping with your coworkers.

Like, you’re taking them into your sacred space. Do you really want your company in bed with you? I don’t. I don’t. So, now that I’ve given that visual to all of your listeners, they’ll be like, “Eww!” throw their phone across the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Marcey. So, removing notifications is one simple thing we can do that has just a tremendous outsized results for that effort. So, that’s the kind of stuff we love hearing about, Marcey. Could you lay on us another one or two things that’s pretty low amount of effort yet just exceptionally high levels of good benefits returned to us?

Marcey Rader
Yes. So, there is nothing magical about a 60-minute meeting, but that is the default and everybody schedules 60-minute meetings, but you can’t get off the meeting and on a meeting in the same minute. It’s very hard. And we all need biology breaks, right? We all go to the bathroom. We have to drink water. We have to step away. We have to take some notes. So, you can go into your settings, for Gmail it’s called Speedy Meetings; for Outlook, you can go into your File options, Calendar, and change all of your meetings to either be 50 minutes or 45 minutes or 25 minutes or 15 minutes, and then you don’t have to think about it.

Because I am all about systematizing everything and not having to think about too much. And so, if you do that, then any meeting you schedule is automatically going to be shorter. And you need that time for your brain especially if you are on back-to-back video meetings, because they actually have done brain scans and they show stress, how stress builds up in the brain with back-to-back meetings.

Because as that meeting that you’re on now is starting to get towards the end, you’re already starting to be stressed, “Am I going to get off in time to get on to my new meeting?” So that would be another one that I would say just make it simple for yourself. Go in, change your settings, and make your meeting shorter.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And tell me, if we do have five minutes in between meetings, do you have any pro tips on what are the best means to recover energy, de-stress, motivation boost in a jiffy?

Marcey Rader
Look away from your screen, get up if you can. And the reason why it’s important to look away from your screen is that it’s drying our eyes out, we blink less when we’re staring at a screen. If it’s a TV far on a wall, we tend not to do it. But when we’re staring up close to a monitor, we blink less so it makes our eyes dry. But also, when we’re staring at a screen that’s close, we can get what’s called screen apnea, like sleep apnea, but screen apnea, and we actually are breathing shallow.

And when you know this, I’ll have a lot of people say like, “Oh, my gosh, I caught myself breathing really shallow,” and you might find yourself even holding your breath. And people tend to do this even more when they’re doing things like social media or checking email. And so, when we’re breathing shallow, it creates tension in our shoulders, our neck. It can also cause headaches, but it even affects our digestion because we’re not taking deep breaths or our diaphragm isn’t moving up and down as it should.

So even though you might think, “Oh, I’m going to use these five minutes just to check my email real quick,” it’s best to actually get up and just move around a little bit and look away from the screen, and then come back to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then so, each month, we got the productivity piece, we got the declutter piece, we got the health piece. Can you likewise share with us, what’s a top practice that you have found in yourself and your clients is just transformational in terms of the amount of energy, attention, focus, good moods that we can bring with us to everything we do?

Marcey Rader
It’s hard for me to narrow it down to one, but I’m going to just choose this one, and that is narrowing down your priorities to no more than three. And, Pete, most people now are just overloaded with work. I hear that everybody’s under-resourced and “I have eight priorities,” “I have ten priorities.” You can’t. I’m only going to give you three. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have eight tasks to do, but it is, you know, you have no more than three priorities.

And the way to think about, like, “Well, how do I choose which are my priorities?” There’s a couple of ways. One, if I were to go on vacation tomorrow, what would I absolutely have to get done today? Because that’s everyone’s most important or most productive day, the day before they go on vacation because you’re not going to mess around doing silly stuff. Or if you think about it, like, you took your laptop to a coffee shop, and you only have 30 minutes of juice, or an hour of juice because you forgot your cord, what would you work on? And thinking through it that way, and then prioritizing your day around those top tasks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when we prioritize our day around the top tasks, what does that look like in practice?

Marcey Rader
Well, for most people, doing at least one of those top tasks first before you hit your inbox is how I would say to start your day, because your inbox is another person’s agenda. And so, if you go there first, then your whole day can be derailed right then. And so, doing at least one of your priorities to at least feel accomplished and check the box for something that is just for you is really important to have that feeling that you’ve done something, and you’ve accomplished, and you’re more likely to stay on task the rest of the day.

The reason why I say for most people is that, if you are like a night person, like a night owl, then you actually need to warm up a little bit first, and doing more like admin type tasks in the first part of your day might be better for you. But because that’s a minority of people that are night owls, that’s why I say for most people.

The other thing about going to your inbox first is that so many people are remote, and if you start work at 8:00 or 8:30 or 7:30, most people don’t know exactly when you start work for the day. So, if you feel like, “I have to check my email first, I have to check my email first,” and it’s 8:00 o’clock, well, how are they going to know that you started at 8:00 if you end up processing your email at 8:30? So, spend that first 30 minutes on something for you instead of another person’s agenda.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Marcey Rader
I love the quote, “Talk doesn’t cook rice.” It’s a Chinese proverb, and I’ve had a T-shirt, I say it all the time, because I’m a very action person. If I say it, it’s going to happen. And so, “Talk doesn’t cook rice.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Marcey Rader
This is something that I just learned from a neuroscientist, and I never knew why, so now I know the why, and it’s called the cathedral effect. So, if we want to be creative, or we’re trying to solve a problem, you want to go outside, that’s best. But if not, be somewhere with a very high ceiling in a big room. But if you want to get really focused on a certain project or just get stuff done, then you want to be in a room with low ceilings and more closed in.

I used to belong to a co-working space, and I would go and stand in the telephone booth for two, three hours there. But I would get so much done standing in this little tiny booth, and I didn’t know the words why, and it’s because of the cathedral effect. And that is something I just find fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so what’s the neuroscience behind it? Like, I’m in a tiny room and then it’s, like, I just make it happen.

Marcey Rader

It’s something about, like, the low ceiling and the closed-in space makes you stay more on task and focused. And when we’re outside or in a room with really high ceilings, we’re more likely to come up with creative solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think Walt Disney, allegedly, the legend goes, would have his people in different rooms based on the task. If they were dreaming big thoughts and stories, they’d be in one space versus if they were really editing down and drawing hundreds of images, then they were in a much less beautiful, more cramped contained space. I don’t know if that’s true but that is the legend.

Marcey Rader

Well, I want to look that up because that would be a good example for me to use.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Marcey Rader

Yeah, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care. And Rina Raphael is a journalist, and she did such an amazing job. 

But she just debunks so many myths in the book from marketing of wellness products and so on, but also how marketing towards health, wellness, and cleaning products and different things like that, have affected women, and goes into like medical research and how women are.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite tool?

Marcey Rader

ClickUp. So, our company uses ClickUp project management system, and we hardly ever email each other internally. Every bit of communication is within ClickUp.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quoted back to you often?

Marcey Rader

I talk a lot about movement opportunities and finding opportunities, or movement snacks during the day. And so, a lot of people will say, after they hear me speak, because I talk about movement opportunities from a productivity perspective, not just from a health perspective, but how it can affect your creativity and make you more alert in the afternoons and so on. And so, a lot of people will message me after presentations that I give, and talk about movement opportunities that they found.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Marcey Rader

HelloRaderCo.com, H-E-L-L-O-R-A-D-E-R-C-O.com, or the book website WorkWellPlayMore.com.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Marcey Rader

I have a gift.

Pete Mockaitis

Please.

Marcey Rader
If people want to go to HelloRaderCo.com/gift, the first chapter of the book, the whole month one, with the productivity and turning off notifications, the clutter, and also the health habits for novice, pro, and master are in there, and they can download that for free.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Perfect. Thank you. Well, Marcey, this has been lovely. I wish you much fun, work and play.

Marcey Rader
Thank you. Thank you for having me.