Tag

Productivity Archives - Page 10 of 24 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

May 07
0

568: Minimizing Tasks While Maximizing Results with Laura Stack

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Laura Stack says: "The more you take care of yourself, the greater your energy level will be to focus on other people and your work."

Productivity expert Laura Stack shares best–and worst–practices for prioritizing your tasks.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The six steps to optimizing your workflow
  2. The five productivity personality archetypes
  3. How to work from home effectively

About Laura

Laura Stack is a noted expert in employee and team productivity, she’s also best known by her moniker, “The Productivity Pro.” She is also an award-winning keynote speaker and a bestselling author of eight books. She is the President and CEO of The Productivity Pro, Inc., a boutique consulting firm helping leaders increase workplace performance in high-stress environments. 

Laura has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur and Forbes magazine. She is a high-content Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), who educates, entertains, and motivates professionals to deliver bottom-line results. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you Sponsors!

  • Pitney Bowes. Simplify your shipping while saving money. Get a free 30-day trial and 10-lb shipping scale at pb.com/AWESOME

Laura Stack Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Laura Stack
Thanks, Pete. Happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat with you. You are known as The Productivity Pro, and we love talking to productivity pros.

Laura Stack
Okay. Good.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re going to fit right in here. And I want to kick it off by hearing, what is, maybe, your nerdiest productivity practice? Is there anything that’s sort of a guilty pleasure for you in the realm of productivity, whether it’s apps or…?

Laura Stack
Oh, my. You’re going to make me start by telling all my secrets. Well, let’s see. I grew up in a military family. My family is a retired colonel, so I was raised on the Air Force Academy with the old adage of, “The colonel jumps,” and you say, “How high?” And so, he came in for inspection when we did our chores and so my favorite productivity guilty pleasure is I make my bed every day. Yes, I do.

With everything, pillows, European Shams, big pillows, throw pillows. I just think it sets you up for success for the day. It feels good. It helps you feel like things are in order and you’ve already accomplished a goal before your day even begins. So, I would suggest everybody make your bed. That’s what I learned from the colonel.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m intrigued that you called it a guilty pleasure. In a way, it seems like it’s the most opposite of guilty because I think if I didn’t do it…

Laura Stack
Most people don’t. Most people don’t make their bed. They just leave it like it is or they will likely toss things up. I have it neat, orderly pulled, pinned corners. I mean, I make sure that, and it’s maybe a little OCD but just not having anything on the bed when you approach your evening rituals and routines to go to bed, and undoing the bed, it’s oddly comforting just in the sense that it makes you kind of wind down and gives your brain a signal that it is now time to relax. So, there’s just something in the routine of beginning and the end of the day that helps you start and end your day well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s totally true. And it’s a nice reminder, I think, at the end of the day, it’s like, “Hey, well, I accomplished that and it’s a very welcoming sight to go on in there.”

Laura Stack
Exactly, yeah. And not just rumpled sheets that you just got out of. You just feel like it’s just one continuous getting into bed, getting out of bed. Ah, I like rituals with beginning and end. It just feels good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so we’re going to dig into some of your productivity wisdom, and I want to get a touch of your hot takes on how that fits into this coronavirus, working-from-home type context. But maybe before we get into the tools, and the tactics, and the strategies, the nitty-gritty, could you maybe frame it up for us, how do you define productivity and why does being more productive matter?

Laura Stack
Well, for me, productivity is all about value-creation, so I don’t look at it as, “How many things did you get checked off your list during the day? How many hours did you sit there? How much running around and how busy you were?” But the value that you created in the time that you spent, so it literally is a ratio, if it could be measured, which is easier to do in manufacturing because you can count widgets, sales, you can have quotas. It’s a little bit harder when you’re looking at office jobs, leadership roles, HR, so we’d like to look at the impact, or the result, or the value, or the profitability, or however your job is measured.

So, I like to think of it as achieving maximum results in minimum time. So, whatever that ratio would be, would be the most effective. So, if you have 10 things to do, I know, wouldn’t that be great? If you had that 10 things to do and you did nine of them, but left the one that was the most important, or would have the most impact on your business or your job or your team, that would not be a productive day even though you got nine of the 10 things done. I’d much prefer you get three things done if one of them includes one of those high-value activities.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s kind of fun about that flexible definition of productivity and creating value and achieving the goal is, I guess, there are times, maybe it’s a vacation or just sort of season of life in which the value you’re going for is refreshment and rejuvenation and rest.

Laura Stack
That’s right. That’s why it depends how you measure it because there are times where the most productive thing you can do is take care of yourself, or relax, or be with…spend time with a child, or go on vacation. And so, those times of “goofing off” certainly are not at all very valuable. So, productivity can be measured in every aspect of our lives. You could even be productive at the gym. I mean, it’s easy to waste an hour at the gym, just lull around, wander, hardly work, don’t sweat, talk to your friends, a couple half-hearted leg lifts. I mean, I can kill an hour at the gym but it certainly wasn’t a very productive use of my time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, so you got a number of books, and the title I love the most is “What To Do When There’s Too Much To Do.” Boy, I can relate to that.

Laura Stack
Yes, very popular. Everyone loves that title. My first book was titled “Leave the Office Earlier” so that is probably the only title that ever beat “What To Do When There’s Too Much To Do.” It makes people say, “Yup, that’s me. I need that book.” So, yeah, that’s a good one.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so the subtitle there is to, “Reduce Tasks, Increase Results, and Save 90 Minutes a Day.” Can you maybe walk through, yeah, how does one do exactly that?

Laura Stack
Well, I mean, there’s a lot that goes into that, and of course we won’t be able to go into every aspect in this time together. But, essentially, saving 90 minutes a day, what I want people to really focus on is, let’s say, I am working 65 hours a week. I mean, I am just exhausted, all this COVID stuff, I’m in my home office all the time, and I’m putting in extra hours. Whereas, other people right now are slow, almost some of them bored, I have heard, and trying to fill eight hours a day.

So, for some people, that definition means if you’re working a ton of hours, “How can I be more efficient? How can I systematize? How can I automate? How can I streamline, delegate, eliminate?” So, the goal there would be to, “If I can save an hour a day, maybe I can get it down to 60 hours a week, so that would be a great outcome, and so now I get out of the office a little bit earlier.” So, maybe that’s your goal, versus other people who are clocking their 40 hours, maybe they actually want to accomplish greater results than they’re doing now in the same amount of time.

So, for some people, it means actually reducing the number of hours they’re working, and for other people it could mean increasing the value that they produce in the time that they’re working. And so, every person will approach that question just a little bit differently. But, ultimately, that’s the whole goal of the concept of what to do when there’s too much to do. And I break it down into six different steps, and I’m not sure how much of that you want to go through in our time together just in terms of what I call the productivity workflow formula.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, I would love to spend a minute or two on each of these steps so we can get oriented and think about things the way you do.

Laura Stack
Okay. Great. Yeah, so I look at work coming in as a constant flow. So, if you can picture it as a circle with arrows, sadly, the workflow never stops, correct? So, it just continues to come in. So, first, we have to figure out, step one is, “What do we need to do?” You have to determine what to do. So, how do you get your arms around the world of all of your to-dos?

And for many people, that’s a challenge because they have some things written on a sticky note, they have some things that somebody texted them, and they’ve got their email, and they’ve got calls and voicemails, plus, now they have social media, and I’ve got an inbox here, and an inbox there. Many people feel very disjointed with many of their inputs living in several different places, and they don’t really have one system, one way that they can get their arms around everything so that they can even determine what to do. So, that’s the first step is getting that piece organized.

And then after that, you’ve got to figure out, “When am I going to do it?” And so, there is a prioritization, there’s a scheduling, there’s a “What can I realistically fit in? And what is going to get done and when?” So, that’s step two. And then step three is, “How do we actually focus?” Well, we know what to do, we’ve got a little block of time, and we sit down to work on it, and “krrrk” our attention is all over the place. So, I really believe that concentration is a long-lost art, especially when many of us are trying to work at home, it becomes even more challenging.

And then step four is we have to find the information that we need to do the work, and that’s where, if people have overflowing inboxes, poor filing methods, and they can’t put their hands on what they want when they want it, they get stuck on that step. And then the last piece of the loop, and there are six steps, but the fifth step in the loop is to close the loop. So, it’s actually getting work done, turning things in, being efficient, actually trying to maximize how efficiently they can do work. I’ve had people in my office actually watching me work, and so there are systems pieces that you can use to tighten up your efficiency.

And then the last step is managing your own capacity. So, if you got a really bad night, sleepless night because you didn’t make your bed maybe, no, I’m kidding, you’ve got a bad night’s sleep, you’re not going to feel like being energetic and productive. You’re going to want to put your head on the desk and take a nap.

And so, self-care becomes a critically important component of managing one’s productivity. So, that’s kind of the foundation on which everything is based. Without those proper self-care habits, you will not have the energy that you need to devote to your work, to your family, to your loved ones, etc. So, that, in a nutshell, Pete, is the productivity workflow formula.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. I dig it. Well, let’s dig, in particular, to steps two and three, the prioritization and then scheduling, and then the three, the focused concentration bit. So, when it comes to prioritization, I mean, I’m a big believer in the 80/20 Rule and, indeed, some things truly are 16 times as important as others. But how do you go about thinking, asking the questions, making the calls in terms of, “Ah, yes, this is, in fact, way more important than that”? How do you get there?

Laura Stack
Well, I think we all intuitively know what is more important than what. The problem that I see with the way that people prioritize is their tendency to select tasks incorrectly, and there’s a lack of awareness about what people choose to do next. It doesn’t really matter what system you use to prioritize. I mean, I use Microsoft Outlook Tasks because I like being able to drag a task up and down in the tasks list and re-prioritizing very quickly and just accomplishing things in order of importance.

It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to use Tasks. Some people use paper list with the top three sticky note. They put on a sticky note the top three things they need to do in a day. Other people use an app, Todoist. There are so many different methodologies that people use to track their priorities. What I like to look at, instead, is your typical pattern in how you’re going about, creatively procrastinating about not doing those priorities.

So, there are five main kind of priority personality archetypes that I see. The first type of person picks things based upon what they feel like working on. So, you know that there’s this really important thing that you need to do, but people who have this personality tend to pick things based on what’s fun, or easy, or quick because they like that shot of dopamine they get when they check something off a list, and it gives them this real sense of accomplishment, right? So, they’re busy, busy bees. These people just check stuff off because they love that, but they are purposely leaving the thing that is the most important, and they leave the office each day, going, “Ugh, I did it again. I still didn’t get to that really important project.” And, of course, they could but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The next type of person does things based on how they appear. So, in accounting, we call this FIFO, right, first-in first-out. So, this type of person is a reactive person. They react to things as they come in. They get a text, they answer it. They get an email, they answer it. They get a call, they answer it, right? So, they are pretty much letting other people control their schedules, which other people are really good at doing, and they’re not proactive instead.

The third type of person prioritizes based on who’s yelling loudest. This type of person does not have good boundaries. They don’t have good verbal skills around letting people know what the expectations are, what they can do, what they can’t, what they will do, what they won’t. And they allow that old adage “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” and people have their number, and they know they are too nice, and so they end up doing things that are not the most important priority.

The fourth type of person tends to do things as they think of them. So, this type of person kind of talks to themselves constantly. And as they think of things, “Ooh, I need to call Pete about that call next week. Ooh, I’m going to get on and talk to Pete.” And they just make the call. So, as they think of things, they just do it regardless of whether or not it’s the most important thing, and it tends to be because they’re afraid they’re going to forget if they don’t do it, even though they know it’s not necessarily a high priority right then.

And then the last person does things by the order of the sticky note. And so, this type of person has a very random approach. It could look like they have ADHD when you look at them. They have, like, 17 browser tabs open, and seven half-started emails, and four Excel spreadsheets, and two Word documents, and it’s just like, “What are you working on?” And they’re like, “I don’t know,” they just got stuff everywhere. They’ve got papers lined up in a certain order, “Ooh, here’s that business card. I should call this guy.” It’s just all over. So, just a different, disorganized type of approach.

So, those, Pete, are the five patterns of people that I see, and they’re kind of quasi-prioritization methods. So, we really need to think about our patterns, have awareness around them to be able to say, “I’m doing it. I’m doing it. Oh, my gosh, I’m doing it.” Catch yourself doing it, stop yourself from doing that, and really work on what I call triage. It’s just like in a hospital when a patient shows up. They don’t necessarily get treated first in the ER, right? I mean, you could sit there for four hours because other people come in with issues that are more urgent and more critical than yours. And it doesn’t matter if you say, “Well, I was here first,” right? It doesn’t matter, “This patient has a higher need so there’s more value if we treat this patient.”

So, if you think of your office like an emergency room and prioritize, it sounds bad, based on which patient would die first, that’s really the way to look at things. Because if you don’t do this step today, right, this step three days from now is going to be behind, and so we really have to look at what’s going to cause suffering in our lives and work on it that way. As humans, we like to do, emotionally, what we like. And that, by and large, is a really bad way to prioritize, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, this is so excellent in that, you know, most people, myself included when I tackle this issue, it’s sort of like, “Okay. Well, here are the paradigms by which you might assess important tasks that are worthy of high priority. So, maybe it’s the result that you’re after divided by the effort required, like the hours, and maybe it’s profit per hour, or maybe it’s like the one thing question.”

Laura Stack
Yeah, it could be, and it depends on your job, yeah, how that could be measured.

Pete Mockaitis
But in practice, when the rubber meets the road, day in, day out, you know, you might know that, but if you don’t know that, I guess, that’s the first step. Have those conversations with your boss and take a moment, take a breath, do some thinking about what really, really, really matters. But then, in your day-to-day reality, you got to watch out and play defense in terms of these tendencies none of which are conducive to doing what actually matters.

Laura Stack
Yeah. And that assumes, of course, that you have had a conversation with your manager because, if not, you are guessing at best, and you’re going to choose things based on emotion, which is generally not a good way to make decisions. So, assuming you’ve had those conversations, you have to understand, I call it PROI, personal return on investment, “What is my personal return on my investment of time in doing this activity for my results, my value as an employee?”

So, if your company is pumping all these resources into you, you have to look at, “Is what I’m doing, right now, the highest and best use of my time that has the greatest personal return on my investment of time right now?” I mean, when the rubber hits the road, everybody has all these fancy systems, and they’re all trying to 1, 2, 3, A, B, C. It’s like, oh, my gosh, just really looking at if you had to just put everything aside. And a lot of people are experiencing this. Projects that were pet projects, all of a sudden, there is no time for that, and we are focused on critical work. And when it all gets stripped away, that’s the stuff that we need to really be doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, could you share, then…so that’s the prioritization bit in terms of not falling for five suboptimal approaches that we often fall for in terms of prioritizing and scheduling. Well, how do we maintain that focused concentration piece?

Laura Stack
Well, I look at…it depends on the environment, it depends on what your goal is. And if you are a person who needs, in my case, I like silence to focus, whereas my 18-year old son has music going when he’s working on homework. And I personally can’t understand how someone can listen to music because it makes me, in my head, sing along and do the lyrics and all that. But he really just gets in the zone, and he’s able to hone in on his work when he’s got that outside music going.

And so, part of focus is kind of looking at you personally, what are the things that are distracting to you, because you may not find the music distracting? So, I look at kind of four different categories, having each person analyze this for themselves. I use the acronym TYPE for types of distractions that prevent us from focusing.

One is technology, the T. So, having your cell phone, not just on vibrate where “boop boop” it goes off on the desk, and you have this obsessive-compulsive desire to check it. We have this insatiable curiosity. We have to know, “Ooh, what is it?” But if you’ve got your email notifications going off, your phone going off, apps, notifications, different beeps and buzzes and whistles, it’s not a wonder we can’t focus and get an article written for a half hour, or whatever it is that we’re trying to do.

So, we have to create kind of a bubble around ourselves. Forward the phone, turn the phone on stun, you know. It needs to be off not just on buzz or vibrate. I have all my notifications turned off in my email. If you go into your options, the default in Outlook, for example, is that every time you get one email, you get four alerts. It plays a sound, puts an envelope in the system tray, you get an alert, a pop-up alert, and it has the cursor spin. Really? We need four alerts for one email?

So, if you go in and turn those off, at first it kind of freaks most people out because, well, they can actually focus for more than six minutes if they keep their inbox minimized, and they’re not checking them as they’re coming in. But then, better yet, you can set a rule that says, “Hey, every time I get an email from this person,” maybe it’s your manager, or someone in your team, or an important client, “then I want you to play a sound.” So, you begin to use technology to help you determine what’s important and not be distracted by the rest.

The Y is yourself. You’re distracted. Are you doing it to yourself? So, people who follow trails on the internet, or, “Ooh, I wonder what this is?” and click there, and now they’re looking at this, and, “Oh, here’s a video. Let me watch this,” right? We, sometimes, are our own worst enemies because we just go down a huge trail of distraction. And so, keeping yourself focused, if you have to put your dog away because you’re going to play with your dog. You’ve got to close the browser while you’re doing this because you’re going to be tempted to click on Facebook. I mean, whatever it is for you, you have to use a lot of self-discipline in that area.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let me hear a bit more about that. So, self-discipline, you know, kind of put it away, close it. What are some other approaches to prevent yourself from running wild?

Laura Stack
Yeah. My dad, the colonel, he used to say, “Discipline is doing what you know you need to do even if you don’t feel like it.” And so, figuring out how to train yourself to do the task that you dread because those are the ones you naturally are going to procrastinate on. And we can find all kinds of things suddenly to do, “Oh, I need to go throw on a little lingerie,” when we’re faced with a task that we don’t feel like working on, but that we know we need to focus on.

And so, it could be doing a leading task, it could say, “Okay, I’m just going to start this for five minutes. And if I don’t feel like doing it in five minutes, I’m going to make a cup of tea and I’m going to come back and try it again for another five minutes.” So, sometimes some people just need to get a little momentum to get that self-motivation and get off that hump. Maybe it’s a little reward. Some people’s discipline gets better if they know there’s kind of a light at the end of the tunnel. Instead of calling your best friend, you’d say to yourself, “Once I complete this task and focus on X, then I will call my best friend,” or whatever is rewarding to you. It might be a quick walk around the block, “Maybe I’ll eat this piece of dark chocolate,” whatever it is that will help you be more disciplined.

So, discipline still is being able to do something after the feeling of excitement when you first created the task has passed. Now, it’s like, “Okay, that was fun being creative. Now, I actually need to get the work done.” So, those are a few important things in discipline.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think it’s great if you could just get real honest with yourself in terms of, “What’s happening is I don’t want to do this thing and, thusly, I’m tempted to do these other things. Hey, it just seems to be…” As oppose to…because I think it’s so… I’ve done it. It’s so possible to deceive yourself, like, “That laundry really needs to get done now, Laura.”

Laura Stack
Especially at home. We can find all kinds of things to do. And having structure and treating your workday as if you’re in the office, I think, is really important for discipline. I have worked from home for 28 years, and I never show up in my “office” in my robe and slippers. It just doesn’t make me feel sharp. I’m not on top of my game. It makes me feel lazy. And so, it just depends on the person. Whereas, other people go, “Gosh, Laura, that’s not me at all. When I work from home, and I stay in my robe all day, you should see me go.”

So, you do have to kind of understand your personality, your style, your nature, and work with that too, sometimes it’s not discipline. It could be energy level. Maybe you’re not a morning person, so people think, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m lazy. I lack motivation. I just can’t get going.” Well, maybe it’s because you’re not a morning person, and you are trying to do the wrong task at the wrong time. That’s not a matter of discipline at all. It’s a matter of energy management. Maybe you’re better at 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. Or some people get a rush of energy at 7:00 p.m. So, maybe adjusting your schedule to work around some of those constraints will help you a little more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s see. So, there’s TYPE, and we get the technology, we got the yourself. And how about the PE?

Laura Stack
And P is people. I mean, you could be so much more productive if it weren’t for all these people, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Laura Stack
So, I have kids, like many of us do, and they knew from a very young age, they’re grown now, our youngest is 18. But they knew from a very young age, if mom had, I call them cube guards, like they use in the airport when they’re cleaning a restroom, those tapes that they pull across, I had one of those installed in my hallway to my office. So, if the tape was pulled, even when they were five and six years old, my boys knew, “Don’t come into mom’s office because she’s on a call or she’s concentrating.” We always told them, “Someone better be bleeding if you come through the cube guard, through the tape.”

So, you have to really talk with the people in your family so that they understand, “Hey, this is work.  I’m working. Like, I’m not at home.” Yes, we have more flexibility, I think. And, certainly, if we have young children who are being homeschooled and things like that, we have very different constraints that we’re dealing with. But, by and large, we have to set limits with people in our lives. My mother always just guilty of…she’s retired, right? So, it’s 1:00 o’clock in the afternoon, “I’ll just call Laura.” So, it took some time to not hurt her feelings but explained, “Listen, I want to talk with you,” and, “Can we talk in the evenings because I’m working? This is not a good use of my time.”

I, personally, don’t want to be back in my office working at night. Now, maybe other people like it that way. They like being able to blur the boundaries, and they would rather have some personal time with a loved one in the middle of the day, and then do some work at night. Is it right, wrong, good, bad? No. It’s just different, and so you have to look at the people. And when we’re back in traditional offices, a lot of that have to do with coworkers who just drop in, “Hey, got a minute?” And so, letting them know, “Hey, can I call you at 2:00? Or, can you send me a meeting request? Can you get me on my calendar so I can give that some thought?” Being able to kind of push back in a way that says yes to the person but no to the interruption so that we can stay focused on those things that are critically important.

And then the last one is the environment.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us about the environment.

Laura Stack
Well, I work in a home office, and so I have a dog, so if I am working, and a postal, UPS comes to the door and rings the bell, my dog is going to set off barking, and I’ve got to go get the dog, take care of the package. Boom! I just had an interruption. So, we have a sign underneath our ring doorbell, strangely, that says, “Do not ring please.”

And so, when they don’t ring the bell, my dog doesn’t bark, and I’m not interrupting my flow, my concentration. I can go get that package whenever. In other words, we allow things in the environment to dictate our schedules, and we react to things as they happen. So, we have to just notice in our environments, just look around, listen, smell, see, figure out those things that are really drawing your attention, and see if you can proactively put some things in place to keep that from happening again.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s excellent. And I think packages are ideal there in terms of, “Do we need a knock at the door or a ring at the doorbell? Or, can we just make that instruction clear to drop it, leave it, it’s okay, UPS My Choice, whatever.”

Laura Stack
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Inform them, “Well, this is what’s up.”

Laura Stack
Yeah, I can get five packages a day, literally. So, if I’m, one at a time, going to the door to stop my dog from having a meltdown and get a package five times versus when my day is over, one time, I’m going to get five packages. That is a far better use of my time, and it allows me to keep my focus. So, you have to look at every time your attention got pulled in another direction, “What was it? What was that cause?”

I have beautiful Bay windows in my office. I don’t even face that way, Pete. I face the wall, and the windows are actually to my back because people walk by, I’m daydreaming, beautiful sunny weather here in Denver, and I get distracted. My mom says I have OSS. She calls that “Ooh, shiny” syndrome. So, I have to really set myself up so that all of those external stimulus aren’t grabbing my brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Well-said. Well, Laura, we’re covering a lot of good stuff, having a lot of fun. Maybe we’ll just rapid fire, can you give us, perhaps, your top one or two best practices and worst practices for folks finding themselves in a work-from-home situation for the first time?

Laura Stack
Yeah, I think structure is really key. If you have never worked from home, some people aren’t prepared for it. It can be lonely. It can be mentally boring because you don’t have all the same activity, and you find yourself, “Huh. Wow, I didn’t have that commute so I have some extra time here.” So, I would, first of all, resist the urge to cram more in, right? In other words, if you left the house at 7:00 to start work at 8:00, still start work at 8:00. Don’t let that time creep kind of make your day from eight hours into 10 hours. That’s very easy to do in a home office.

So, I would then say set some boundaries because it’s very easy to let your work life blur into your personal life, because now you’re in an office that might be your bedroom, or the dining room, or the kitchen. And so, we have to try to put a little bit of structure in so that we can know when we’re working so that we can stay focused and when we’re not. And when we’re not working, we don’t want to be, “Oh, I’ll just do a couple more emails,” and, boom, here we are back at work again. So, as much as possible, I would try to keep some routine and some structure.

I’m looking forward to beauty salons being open again, for example, so I can go get my nails done and my hair. But, you know, I never do those things during the day. I treat my office like it’s any other workplace even though I’m at home, and I go do those things when I’m off work, on my lunch hour, or on the weekends just like anybody else would do. So, I think trying to create a little bit of routine around that is helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Laura Stack
Well, one of my favorites is Drucker, Peter Drucker, who wrote “The Effective Executive,” which, if you have not read it yet, it is just an evergreen book. I’ve read it probably 30 times when I was working on my MBA many, many years ago. But he said, “There’s nothing so useless as doing with great efficiency that which should not be done at all.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you.

Laura Stack
That’s one of my favorites.

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

Laura Stack
Well, I am always looking at “How can we create greater value?” And I think that by looking at “What is more valuable?” but flipside to that, to me, is getting into groups with your team and with your boss, and asking the opposite question, which is kind of a qualitative study that anybody can do in the workplace to say, “What are the things that we’re doing around here that don’t add value, that waste our time?” And you got to have a little bit of thick skin if you decide you want to do this type of research internally because people are going to tell you, they’ll let you know. And looking at, “What are some processes that we put into place maybe three years ago that aren’t necessary? What is a document that we create that nobody even looks at?”

I have a newsletter that I used to do monthly, and it took me a day to write the newsletter. It was a 2500-word article, I did links, I did polls, I did research. I mean, it was a really great newsletter. And one year, I got the flu here in Denver and couldn’t do the newsletter, and told my team, “I’m sorry, we’re just not going to be able to do it this month. And I know you’re going to hear it from people. Everybody is going to complain that we haven’t done the newsletter.” I got three people who even noticed that it didn’t come out.

And in asking people, they said, “You know what, it just is so long. It takes so much time for me to go through it, and you’re a productivity company.” I’m like, “Oh, right. So, maybe we just need a paragraph.” So, I switched from one day a month to 20 minutes a week. Engagement shot up. Readership shot up. So, don’t keep doing the things the way that you have been doing them. If you’re doing it the same way two years later, it probably needs to be revamped. So, those are my favorite kind of studies to do and lead with – workplace teams because they yield usually some pretty dramatic results.

Pete Mockaitis
And beyond “The Effective Executive,” any other favorite books you’d highlight?

Laura Stack
Well, I would recommend reading non-business books. I like to read classics. I have a collection of books from the Easton Press, which I spent…well, there’s a hundred of them, and you buy them one a month, and so it took me a very long time to complete the collection. But they’re all leather bound, and it was what they wrote it on, the top 100 books. So, “Gulliver’s Travel,” and Charles Dickens, and “Pride and Prejudice.” And so, I think it’s really important for us to kind of expand outside of the typical business book that we really read. And read other things that aren’t in your field that really expands your creativity and field of thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Laura Stack
Well, I told you I love Microsoft Outlook, so that is my favorite tool to organize tasks. But I have a really nifty text-replacement utility that I like that’s called ShortKeys. So, basically, you code pieces of texts that you type all the time. Like, ST prints out my street name in any application, on the web, in a Word document. So, I actually type very quickly because a lot of the words that I use all the time I use as ShortKeys, so it really helps you fly and never retype the same thing twice.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate, and folks quote back to you often?

Laura Stack
Oh, I always use creating maximum results in minimum time, that’s productivity. What is your personal return on your investment of time in doing certain activities? There are certain philosophies that I have, I guess, around that productivity workflow formula that a lot of people use.

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

Laura Stack
Well, they’re welcome to connect with me on Facebook, LinkedIn, wherever, but my website is TheProductivityPro.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Laura Stack
Well, I would just remind everyone to really watch their own energy level. If you’re not eating well, sleeping well, exercising, taking care of yourself, a lot of people think that when they’re busy and they don’t have time, that that is one of the things that gets cut. And I think that’s exactly the wrong approach because the better you feel and the more you take care of yourself, the greater your energy level will be to focus on other people and your works.

So, really resist that tendency to just be a bump on a log. Sometimes the last thing we feel like doing when we come home from work is some exercise, but, gosh, a quick few walks around the block will give you so much more energy that you need going into that evening to go into your second shift of home life and getting some of those things done.

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, thanks so much. This has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck in all your productive adventures.

Laura Stack
Thank you so much for having me, Pete. I appreciate the offer.

Apr 27
0

566: How to Start Focusing and Stop Firefighting with Mike Michalowicz

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Mike Michalowicz shares how to zero in on the most important issues to fix next.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to identify what you need to fix next.
  2. A crucial question you’re forgetting to ask.
  3. The tremendous energy unleashed by providing context for goals.

About Mike

Mike Michalowicz is the entrepreneur behind three multimillion dollar companies and is the author of Profit First, Clockwork, The Pumpkin Plan, and his newest book, Fix This Next: Make the Vital Change That Will Level Up Your Business. Mike is a former small business columnist for The Wall Street Journal and regularly travels the globe as an entrepreneurial advocate.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you Sponsors!

  • Magic Spoon. Enjoy free shipping on delicious, healthy, high-protein cereal that reminds you of childhood. Free shipping on the variety pack at magicspoon.com/HTBA. 

Mike Michalowicz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mike, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Mike Michalowicz
Pete, it’s my joy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Well, I’m excited. I’ve really enjoyed your audiobooks, and you’re kind of a goofball which I am too, so I think feel free to cut loose here. It’s interesting. We had another guest, Simon Sinek, who dubs you as a top contender for the patron saint of entrepreneurs, which is high praise.

Mike Michalowicz
Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m familiar with some stories of saints, and often they include heroically facing adversity. And one of my favorite stories from you involves a tough night at dinner, and some people coming to your aid. Can you share that with us to frame up what you’re all about?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah, yeah. So, I started my entrepreneurial journey very early in life right after college and had a couple of early wins under my belt. I sold my first tech company. I was in computer technology. My first tech company was a private equity exit. My second company was a Fortune 500 acquired us, and I’m like, “I am hot shit. I know everything,” which, by the way, seems like to be the impetus or the start of a downfall for many a person when we believe we know all. And I was just full of arrogance and ignorance.

Well, I started a third business that I leave off my CV conveniently as an angel investor, and I sucked at it. I had no idea what I was doing. I thought, “Hey, I’m so smart I know everything about business. As long as I’m here, we’re making money.” I started 10 companies, and within a mere six months, all of them were out of business. I was paying bills for businesses that didn’t even exist anymore and, also, just blew money on just arrogance.

The big house, I got a place in Hawaii for our sabbatical, our family sabbatical. I just blew money on cars and all stuff. And it took me two years, I got a call from my accountant, he says, “Mike, you hit rock bottom. I think you should declare personal bankruptcy,” something actually I didn’t do. I thought I was responsible. But, as a consequence, I had to lose my possessions. We lost our house 30 days later, cars, everything.

I came home the night I heard this from my accountant, and had to face my family because I hadn’t been telling them the truth of the struggles. I really did think, you know, I had a bank account that was dwindling at an exponential rate, somehow, someone would come in and save the day and acquire this mess I had created, but nothing happened. And I came home to my family and told them, “We’re done. We lost it all.” And I was sobbing. I was just devastated. And I had to face my wife, and say, “I’m sorry. We’re losing the house, and we’re losing our cars, and we’re losing our possessions.”

My daughter was nine years old at the time, and she’s sitting there, and I said, “I’m so sorry but I can’t afford for you to go to horseback riding lessons.” That was like 25 bucks for a group session. And she stood up and just ran away. Everyone was crying. And she ran away. I thought she was running away from me. She ran away to her bedroom to grab her piggybank, and she ran back down to me as fast as she could, and she says, “Daddy, since you can’t provide for us, please use my money to support us.” I think I’m getting chills just thinking about it.

I’ve said that story so many times it’s still as devastating. I was so ashamed of who I was, and the arrogance, and the ignorance. And then I forced my daughter, my nine-year old daughter, to save me? Well, that triggered years of struggle for me to reconcile that. I actually went through a depression, I drank, and ultimately discovered that that moment actually has become a source of light, a seedling for me, to realize I didn’t know much about entrepreneurship, that I had to fix these things. And that became a spark for being an author.

I write my business books to solve problems not only for others but for my own problems, my own misunderstandings around business, and simplify the journey and, hopefully, prevent others from experiencing the fallacies and the arrogance and ignorance that I did.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is powerful, and thank you for sharing that again with our audience here.

Mike Michalowicz
My joy.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you are renowned as an author for entrepreneurs and small business owners. And in chatting with your publicity folks, I was like, “Well, I love Mike’s flavor, but we’ve got a little bit of a different audience here, which is more so professionals, kind of in the middle of the hierarchy as opposed to the owners.” But there’s a lot of great sort of tools and frameworks and approaches that are totally applicable in your next opus here, “Fix This Next.” So, can you orient us a little bit in terms of what’s the book about and why is it helpful?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah. So, what I did is I wanted to figure out, “Is there a common DNA or structure for businesses?” And I’m convinced I found it. And it’s something that we all can use regardless of our title or role. We all have a responsibility for the health of the business because collectively it moves us altogether. So, what I did was I wanted to see if there’s a common DNA.

And I, first, started looking at humanity ourselves – me, you, everyone listening in. If you look at the essence of who we are, we’re identical. If you peel back the stuff we judge, the skin, the height, male, female, and we look at the essence of it, the makeup is basically the same. If I was having a heart attack, the doctor wouldn’t say to me, “Where’s your heart? Do you keep it in your foot? Is it in your ear?” No. The heart is in the same place for all humanity, so they know how to operate on us.

Well, the same is true for business. If we peel back the skin of the business, a manufacturer versus a professional services company, or vice versa, we will find there’s a common structure, that’s what I call the business hierarchy of needs. The business hierarchy of needs, I translated from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which defines human needs.

So, this is a quick session on Maslow. Maslow studied human needs and discovered and argues that all of us have base physiological needs. We need to breathe water, I’m sorry, breathe water. Breathe air, drink water, eat food. And if those needs aren’t being satisfied, then we can’t survive. But once they’re satisfied, we go to the next level which is safety needs. We need protection from the elements or harm. Once that’s satisfied, we move onto the longing, the need for relationships, and so forth. And we keep on climbing up ultimately to self-actualization.

But, if at any time, a base-level need is not satisfied, let’s say you and I are having this conversation, we consider it intellectual conversation, we consider it as part of self-actualization, if I start choking on the food I’m eating, well, all of a sudden, my Maslow hierarchy brings me right down to the physiological need of getting that out of my throat.

Well, our business has a hierarchy of needs too. Real quickly, they are sales, that’s the foundation, that’s the creation of oxygen for business; profit, the creation of stability for an organization, without it a business can’t sustain; order, the creation of efficiency, consistency; then there’s impact, which is the creation of transformation, it’s where we have service to our clients beyond the transaction, beyond the commodity; and the highest level is legacy, the creation of permanence, where there’s no dependency on the people that are running the operation, the company is designed for its continued service, and others can come and go, but the business lives on permanently.

The difference between Maslow’s hierarchy and the business hierarchy, while they’re very similar, is one great distinction. Maslow talked about human needs and how we are biologically, neurologically wired into our needs. If you and I, Pete, are walking down a dark alley, and we get the creeps, like someone is going to kill us, what will we do? We will, hopefully, turn around and walk out. And we should because our senses – sight, smell, touch – those senses are triggering, “There’s danger here.”

But the thing is we, as business professionals, are not neurologically wired into our business. We say we trust our gut. I think this is what we got to do. I can feel it. But, really, we need the empirical data to evaluate exactly what the true needs in our business, focus on that, resolve that, and then move onto the next need, resolve that, and so forth, and continue to progress forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly. And so then, let’s talk about the particulars for how that really can be transformational for folks. I’d love to hear some tales about some professionals, some organizations, who applied some of this rigor to great effect.

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah. So, I’ll share a coffee shop that does this, and the team rallied around it with what’s going on. As we’re recording this, with the economic crisis, COVID, this company is responding. And let’s evaluate the business hierarchy needs just a little bit further. So, the business hierarchy needs, the five levels, the foundational need is sales. Now, again, the sales is the creation of cash. If your product, your service, your company, your division does not have consistent sales, is not bringing oxygen into that division, so we need to address that first.

And you address it to the adequate levels of supporting profit. That’s actually the simplest base question, “Do I have enough sales to support profitability? If I don’t, we have a sales issue. If we do have sales so we have profit, but we’re not profitable, we actually have a profit issue. Do we have enough margin? Are we controlling the debt we have, and so forth?” Once profit is addressed, we ask ourselves, “Is it adequate to support the layer above it, which is order, efficiency?”

Now, one argument I want to make here is that we’re not ignoring efficiency. You have to have some order and efficiencies in our sales process when we’re doing that. You have to have some system for profitability. I’m just saying this one becomes your concentrated effort. You don’t ignore sales when you’re working on order. You continue it but they must work in relation.

When you get to the order level, this is where it becomes our concentration to resolve efficiency. Now, actually, let me start off with this story because I think it’s the best. This is Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, it’s in the SEC conference. I mean, talking about an organization, thousands and thousands, actually, I think tens of thousands of employees, a massive organization. They implemented the business hierarchy of needs in their own form. They did this before I wrote the book, but they’re far in this process inherently.

And what they noticed back in, I believe, it was the early 2000s, that the school had noticeably less applicants than any of the other SEC schools. So, the first thing we do is, when we have a problem, we ask ourselves, “Where does this reside in this hierarchy?” Well, application is as similar as prospects. They have less prospects, and that’s a sales-level need. So, the company identified, “Okay, we have a need in the sales level, the most foundational level of the business hierarchy.”

Then they asked, “What’s the triggers behind it?” And they went through a process called OMEN. I write about it in the “Fix This Next” book, but OMEN stands for Objective, Measurement, Evaluation frequency, Nurture. It simply means identify what the problem is, measure the process, regularly revisit it, and tweak and change things as we move along, nurture.

They identified this challenge of not getting enough prospects, and they start interviewing prospects of why they aren’t signing up. And they find that the primary reason is the campus ain’t so pretty. One of the biggest determining factors of a student picking a college happens within the first five minutes of visiting a campus. It’s their first impression. And back then, Ole Miss didn’t have such a pretty campus. So, they realized, “We have an issue.”

They then went to their frontline, the people that beautify the campus, the landscape maintenance team, and they said, “We need a more attractive campus. What do we need to do?” Well, interesting, and this happens sometimes in the business hierarchy that needs get interlinked. And the maintenance team said, “Well, we want to do beautification projects. We don’t have enough time.” Now, their campus is a thousand plus acres, that’s a lot of acreage to maintain, and they only have a crew of a certain size, and so Ole Miss was forced upon a decision, “Do we double or triple our team, or do we enable our team to find alternative solutions?”

Well, it wasn’t in their budget to triple the maintenance team so the team had to figure it out. And one thing they noticed is the biggest time-consuming element, now this is an efficiency thing, an order level, one of the challenges at the order level was how long it took to mow or maintain the properties. When they were mowing, the fastest way to mow a property is to go in a straight line. But when they were coming upon trees, they had to navigate around the low-hanging limbs. When they got to a mulch pattern, that was in a square, they had to kind of jostle around that pattern. And when a garbage can was in the grass, they had to kind of go around and get out with the weed whacker.

So, the team said, “If we want to increase efficiency here, cut the limbs off the tree so we can go right under them, 10 feet high,” which, by the way, is a great way to beautify trees, they raised the limbs. They said, “Change the square patterns and angular patterns of mulch always to an oval so we can do sweeping motions right around it and continue on.” They made decisions to increase efficiency which allowed them now to maintain the property in half the time, freeing up the other half of their time to work on beautification of the campus.

Well, fast-forward only a mere few years, Ole Miss became the most beautiful campus. It has the reputation for the most beautiful campus in the SEC conference, perhaps in all of the nation, one of the top-rated campuses on attraction, on its beauty. And you won’t be surprised, they had an exponential increase in their prospects, their applications. So, that’s an example where leadership identified, “We have a problem.” But instead of just saying, “We got to fix the way this place looks,” they looked at the hierarchy, and said, “This is a sales issue. Where do prospects first enter the campus?” That was their first beautification project was near the administration building where students will come in, the students center, and so forth.

They spoke with the frontline, the people that are closest to the problem, and got their direction. And in this case, they killed two birds with one stone. They brought efficiency to their organization at the order level while addressing a sales issue. So, that’s an example of how this business hierarchy of needs is a great way to diagnose and pinpoint what we need to work on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is awesome. And, boy, way back in the day, we interviewed Jeff McManus, who leads up the team.

Mike Michalowicz
Oh, yeah, Jeff is the leader of that team. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, yeah, he shared some more elements to the story, so that was fun. Well, so then, I imagine then in a business or an organization, you’re going to come up with dozens or hundreds of problems or opportunities, as my favorite reference, that you’d notice that could benefit from some attention. So, if you’re thinking about the hierarchy of needs, how do you determine who wins? I mean, do the sales issues always win because they’re at the base of the needs? Or, how do we kind of navigate and triage that?

Mike Michalowicz
Great question. As opportunities or challenges present themselves, you always address the base level first because if the base is compromised, the entire foundation of the structure is. I set a reference to that coffee shop so let me explain how they did this. This coffee shop was growing, and multiple team members, they built a second location, they then opened a roastery facility where they’re preparing coffee. And what they noticed is they’ve been in business for 13 years, and rapidly growing coffee companies. It’s called Cottonwood Coffee, by the way, in South Dakota.

And the leader of that organization, his name is Jacob, noticed that when he looked at the business hierarchy of needs, that they had some sales issues and prospect attractions and so forth. But, also, said, “We’ve been in business for 13 years. We’re one of the most established providers in this area. We’re beyond sales issues. We’re really about impact and legacy of being of service to our community.” And he tried to continue the focus there but the business kept on kind of getting stalled in its growth. Well, finally, he said, “You know what, maybe it is a sales issue.” And he went back to the community they were serving and how they were serving them. And by getting back to the base, all of a sudden, that opened up sales and it allowed them to build up the rest of the structure.

Picture this like building an actual structure building that has five levels. If you want to build a tall building with a big top and you want to have a huge impact, you can’t have a little needlepoint structure below it. It’ll collapse on that. It won’t be strong enough It’s like a pyramid. You must have a foundation that’s adequate and substantial to support the level above it. And that level must be adequate to support the next. If, at any time, we want to grow up stronger at a higher level, we need to make sure the foundation is appropriate to support it. So, this is not a ladder. You don’t just climb up and aspire to be at the top. You cycle through, constantly strengthening the base and the lower levels to support the higher levels.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m hearing that. I guess I’m just imagining an organization in which it’s sort of like, “Okay, we got 60 problems/opportunities. They’re sprinkled across all of these dimensions, and some of them fall into sales.” So, I think it’s a good argument that you got to handle that before to really kind of flourish and have that foundation. I guess I’m thinking, in a way, you know, hey, sales, everything could always be better. So, how do you go about maybe doing the data collection or the benchmarking to say, “Oh, I thought our sales were fine. Oh, but maybe they’re not. I thought our profits were fine. Oh, but maybe they’re not”? Because I think they could always be better. So, what do you think of that?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah, everything could always be better, but it can only be better in relation. So, the simple question, and there is no specific number I can share, but what I can say is that, “Is the base adequate to support enough and substantial elements to the next level? Is sales strong enough to support our target and goal and profit?” And a lot of this is just communication.

I’m surprised at how many divisions. We have some public companies that implemented the business hierarchy of needs, and these divisions are taking on without consideration of the overall business hierarchy of needs. So, there’s a greater business hierarchy, and then within each division becomes its own little hierarchy so we got to work in relation to that. So, what’s the major corporate goal and need specifically?

Then we look back and we say, “In our division or in our field of responsibility, do I have adequate sales to support the profit expectation for me? And if so, then I actually have a profit issue if profit isn’t there. It’s not a sales issue.” Sadly, I see businesses go, “You know, we just need to sell more. We’re going to sell our way out of this.” It’s the most common thing I see from business leaders, and it’s one of the biggest mistakes because sales do not translate to profit. I see businesses sell unprofitable items. And while their sales dollars go up, the profit margins are getting thinner and thinner, and the business is actually struggling more. So, it’s all in relation.

We need clarity from the next one who we’re connected to, the next leader that we’re working with, and, “What are the proper expectations to drive your needs? What are the sales expectations? What degree of efficiency? How many resources can we use to get this stuff done? And what are the turnaround times?” Those are questions we have to have clarity on. In that way, we’re speaking up the chain all the way to the leader or leaders of our organization to understand the needs and they drive them back down. So, it works in relation and it works through communication.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then it sounds like there’s expectation setting and communicating that’s going forward.

Mike Michalowicz
Oh, yeah, of course, right? It’s funny, I say of course and yet it doesn’t happen. I’m shocked at how many businesses have arbitrary goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at is the arbitrariness. Like, how do we un-arbitrary them and make them based on something real?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah. And the similar question is, “Why and how is this serviced?” I worked for a Fortune 500 after they got acquired, and I was blown away by the lack of communication at least around goal-setting. There’s a lot of communication around red tape but there was not a lot of communication around goal-setting. And so, when I was told, “Hey, Mike, your department has to do X.” I said, “Why?” And they’re like, “Because that’s what we told you.” I’m like, “But what’s the reasoning behind it?” And that started an understanding of the importance of how it serves the company in a greater whole.

Now, in context, it actually empowered me in that division. I only worked there for a year before I went back out and started my own business, but then it gave me context of why I need to achieve, what I need to achieve. That’s a very empowering thing, so get the context.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that so much because when you ask why, they’re like, “What?” It’s like, “No one’s ever really asked me that before, Mike. I just got accustomed to telling people what they need to do, and then they try to do it.”

Mike Michalowicz
They just do it. Yeah, it was shocking. And part of it, too, I think was just history, “That’s what we always do. We just pick 10% higher.” “Well, why not pick 50% higher?” “Well, because we never do that.” So, that context. And it isn’t to be challenging in the confrontational sense. It’s we’re challenging in seeking clarity. And just because, in that case, the leader of our department wasn’t telling me that, didn’t mean it was right to ignore that, that I had a responsibility to step up and ask, which made us both better leaders, I think, as a result.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. So, then let’s zoom into the professional who’s somewhere in the middle of things, and they then communicated a target, “We need to reduce the manufacturing waste rate by 10% or the conversion rate of clients needs to be increased by 10%,” it’s like something. And maybe have a good conversation about, “Well, why?” “Oh, I see how that makes sense, interrelates and fits with the other dimensions.” How do you go about making that happen in terms of determining what to fix next within a narrower scope of your responsibilities?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah, so this is where we present the hierarchy of needs. So, you talked about conversion, you talked about manufacturing, the factor of efficiency.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so two separate kinds of…

Mike Michalowicz
Two separate things. One was an order level; one was a sales level. So, what we do is we go back to our department leads and say, “Listen, I’ve been given direction in this hierarchy, and there’s two different demands.” The default is we always go to the base. But do we understand, is that a necessity? Because the leader can be giving you arbitrary goals. Do we have adequate sales to, first, drive that efficiency and will have a greater impact on our business? Or do need the sales in place first in order to make the investment in building the efficiency? So, we have to figure out the sequence.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Like, you might be too small to make investing in the super cool technology or robot, but what?

Mike Michalowicz
Oh, my God. I see companies that have so much potential efficiency but so low flow because it becomes actually less efficient. I worked with a major playset manufacturer, one of the bigger ones there, over $100 million in revenue, and what’s so fascinating is they had this massive equipment, and the complexity in setting it up was so time-consuming. Now, they had the demand. Once that system was set, it was just ring out process to process, so the gain was in more volume. But if they just placed one playset through that, the 16 hours of setting up, someone could hand-paint three playsets on their own. It’d be faster, actually, to do hand painting. So, this stuff always works in relation.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great perspective there. Okay. Well, then I’d love to hear, in terms of sort of what’s the alternative, like if we’re not thinking in this way, I guess it’s not arbitrary and you’re not motivated and inspired because you’re not connected to the why. You could misallocate your resources and attention on things that don’t really matter. Could you sort of share with us kind of what does life look like when you’re doing this versus not doing this? And what are some of the best and worst practices to making sure you’re doing this well?

Mike Michalowicz
So, with the business hierarchy of needs and the fix this next process, the first thing we always talk about is what’s called lifestyle congruence. It is the base of motivation, “How does this serve you? If you do something, how does it serve you?” And this is how all humanity is wired. So, there’s more than just the organizational needs. It’s how the organizational needs translate to the service of you? Does it give you an opportunity to climb the corporate ladder? Does it give you actually more time, more free time? What objectives are you serving on your own? So, it’s that interpersonal relationship.

Without the hierarchy of needs, without the understanding, I’ve seen business professionals get into a very much an action-reaction mode, meaning there’s some trigger, a request, a demand, that incessant string of email coming in, and we just put out fire after fire after fire. Something comes in, we react to it, but there’s no contemplation.

So, the business hierarchy of needs, the differentiator is an action, a trigger that happens, but now there’s contemplation between the action-reaction. There’s an intentional pregnant pause to say, “How is this of service to the organization? How is this congruent with what I’m trying to set as my own objectives?” And now we move much more deliberately.

The business hierarchy of needs helps us focus on the next impactful thing to do. Without it, people focus on the next apparent thing, and there’s a constant stream of apparent issues and so it becomes a randomization. Those divisions, those leaders often make a few steps forward, and a few steps back, and a few steps forward. The ones who are deliberately identifying the most impactful thing and act on it are much more effective in moving forward consistently, and growing to their objectives.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. Well, can you walk us through maybe a couple more examples of there’s someone, and they are…we got a set of responsibilities for a division, and then they are doing some real smart prioritization of fixing the right thing next.

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah, so I was working with a corporation which I want to leave nameless, but since the COVID incident, they’ve lost a massive volume of customers. Actually, the experience, it’s more massive churn. They’re losing customers but they’re gaining. And I may or may not have said to the board of this company, maybe I just gave it away there, I said to the board of this company, and we had an impromptu discussion. The company was working on the impact level.

Now, by all means, you don’t ignore sales. They had sustainable sales and it continues to grow on its own but where the concentrated effort need to be was on impact of being great and great service. All of a sudden, with this shift and this drop in clients, because these clients were not business or a B2B business, and these other clients coming in, now all attention went to sales. The leadership team redirected their focus and said, “How do we cater to this new market? How do we serve these customers that are leaving us almost at a whim because of fear? How do we protect them and retain the core function?” They provided very necessary function for these businesses. Without them, they may go out of business. You need this function. And then, “How do we re-address it?”

So, very quickly on the dime, they saw an issue present itself just when this case broke, or they noticed the metrics, the empirical data of a drop of customers, and all leadership looked there and said, “We will achieve legacy and impact. We have been satisfying that but, for now, we can’t stop building that third and fourth floor of the building. We got to get back in the basement because we have a crack in the foundation,” and leadership went down there, they responded very rapidly as a result. And the story will reveal itself over the next months, perhaps a year or two ahead, but their quick response and deliberate response has put a tourniquet on potential massive loss if they just said, “You know what, we’re going to just continue to focus at this level and not redirect our attention.”

And I think they would’ve been made aware of it because they always looked at the business hierarchy of needs and are asking, “Where do we need our attention now?” They’re responding quicker than if they weren’t considering that hierarchy.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love it if you can give us, are there any sort of shortcuts or really kind of quick questions or indicators or acid tests that might make you say, “Aha! I have a hunch that I need to focus my energies over here.”

Mike Michalowicz
Yes. So, quick indicator is if you’re taking on debt, if you have increasing demand on budgets, and you don’t have increasing sales, so if debt is increasing in excess of sales and profit, that’s a massive indicator that we actually have a profit issue, there’s a margin issue in the organization. One of the shortcut techniques that I love I see companies implementing right now is in repositioning. If an offering, if you are not buying an offering, to try to sell harder, particularly at the macroeconomics that’s occurring now, it’s not usually a right response. We’re using a technique called one step prior.

Here’s what it is. You look at your final offering. I’ll just use the restaurant because probably everyone on this call has experiences with a restaurant. When you go to a restaurant and you sit down, they deliver food to your table. That’s the end product. But if we look one step prior to that, well, what are they doing? They’re carrying the food to you, they’re delivering it. Well, that’s an offering in itself, the delivery of food, and some restaurants are responding that way. What happens one step prior to that? Well, there’s a preparation of food. A restaurant could make that an offering, make it a new product by recording the 10 most popular recipes and deliver that as a new product offering. What happens one step prior to that? Well, there’s the procurement of raw materials, the inventory, the meats and vegetables. Maybe they can sell that.

So, I see organizations reconsidering if they’re to stop in sales, or you some empirical data with a drop off, one option, too, is reconsider the packaging in the first place, and that’s a real simple shortcut to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, tell me, Mike, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah. So, the last thing I just want to mention is, well, there’s a resource for you, if I can share that, and there’s a process. So, I’ll do the process first, it’s called OMEN, it stands for Objective, Measurement, Evaluation frequency, and Nurture. Once we identify what to work on, you can use OMEN as a simple structure to measure and ensure the progress, the results you want.

Then there’s a resource that I’m encouraging people to use because it’s totally free and it’s a quick evaluation for your division, your business. It’s at FixThisNext.com. So, if you go to FixThisNext.com, you could go on a free evaluation. You can take a 5-minute, this is a series of questions, to really pinpoint what to work on next. And there’s no download. The results appear on the screen, and you can take action on it. So, it’s a good compass or guidance tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Thank you. Well, now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mike Michalowicz
Oh, I have it above my desk at home, and I’m going to bring a big one and put it in our hallway here at our office, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” In my final assessment of business and life, the most successful people are the ones who are most joyous, it’s the ones who truly are simply themselves, and allow the business to be a platform to be more of themselves.

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

Mike Michalowicz
Right now, I’m studying quantum physics, and I’m studying this concept of [31:47] but basically that we’re in a box universe. Actually, that’s not even the right term but that all time has happened simultaneously. So, the past, the present, and the future has already all occurred. It’s all available. It’s time slicing effectively, and so it’s a mind wrap. I’ve been studying it intensely and really trying to wrap my head around it, and it’s changing our perspective of life itself.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! Could you point us to a book, a resource, to get in that?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah. Well, Stephen Hawking has some good resource around that. “Simple Answers to Big Questions” is a good starting point, and then the BBC has some really great basic teachings in some of these ethereal concepts.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book in general?

Mike Michalowicz
Well, I say current one, it’s appealing to me, it’s called “100 Days of Rejection” by Jia Jiang, I think, is his last name. And it’s just this guy who studied the power of intentionally being rejected. It’s really a cool concept.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Mike Michalowicz
A favorite tool? We use a tool called Voxer here in our office for rapid communication. It’s a really cool way to batch communication and keep a record of communication. I think, particularly, in the virtualization of business that’s really being enforced now, you have to, that we need a new way to have still a semi-tactile experience and engage, and this has superseded voicemail or email. It’s just a better form of communication for us called Voxer.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think my friend Lisa who’s also on the podcast, Lisa Cummings, loves Voxer. And how about a favorite habit, something that helps you be awesome?

Mike Michalowicz
Well, every morning, I exercise. And after that, I do a singing bowl. It’s a bowl that you hit and you can rub a stick on it, and it rings. And I use that for meditation or prayer time. It’s just a great way for me to put thoughts out into our world and universe, and it’s a great way to sense relief too.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you move the bowl and do you say anything or just think or…?

Mike Michalowicz
No. So, a singing bowl, it’s like a bowl, like a cereal bowl made of metal. You tap a stick on it and it makes a chime sound. And then, as you move the stick around, the vibrations continue so the chime actually gets louder and louder, and you can make it softer, and there’s ways to change directions on the chime. And the visualization I use, is it puts out sound waves or vibrations into the world, and so as I have my thoughts, and I put thoughts out for the goodness of humanity, of people, health, I can see it visually going out. So, it’s kind of a cool visualization tool and an audio tool.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, and they quote it back to you often?

Mike Michalowicz
You know, one thing that’s been really powerful is “People speak the truth through their wallets, not their words.” And I’ve used that as an asset. It’s measure people by their action, particularly when we’re in a business. Are they willing to spend or not? Because if they’re saying, “We support this. We love it,” and they don’t spend, they don’t support it. They don’t love it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve lived that a few times.

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah.

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

Mike Michalowicz
So, you can go to FixThisNext.com to do that evaluation. And if you want to learn more about my research of business and business operations, you can go to MikeMichalowicz.com. But here’s the deal, Pete, no one can spell Michalowicz so I have a shortcut. It’s Mike Motorbike, as in the motorcycle, it’s my nickname in high school, so I still own it. So, MikeMotorbike.com. And if you go there, all my research is available for free on blogs and podcasts. I also have my books there. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal, and it’s all for free at MikeMotorbike.com.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Mike Michalowicz
Yeah, listen, this is the time to step up. And the world kind of got punched all business leaders in the face right now, and it’s also asking you to turn up the heat because we need the economy to keep going. So, the call to action is really a call to arms. It’s time for us as business professionals to step up, step forward, and start kicking some ass.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mike, thank you. This has been a lot of fun. I wish you all kinds of luck as you’re fixing things next.

Mike Michalowicz
Exactly. Thank you.

Apr 13
0

562: How to Get More Done by Working Less with Alex Pang

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Alex Pang says: "It is possible to rethink and redesign everything about how we work."

Alex Pang discusses how to significantly boost your productivity while working fewer hours.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How working fewer hours greatly increases productivity
  2. Small productivity hacks that save a massive amount of time
  3. When you should and shouldn’t multitask

About Alex:

Alex Pang is the founder of Strategy and Rest, a consultancy devoted to helping companies and individuals harness the power of rest to shorten workdays, while staying focused and productive. He is the author of 4 books and have been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and the New Yorker.

Pang is also an international speaker and has led workshops across the globe on the future of work and how deliberate rest makes creative careers more productive and sustainable. He received his B.A. and Ph.D in History of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you Sponsors!

  • Pitney Bowes. Simplify your shipping while saving money. Get a free 30-day trial and 10-lb shipping scale at pb.com/AWESOME
  • StoryWorth. Preserve and pass on memories with StoryWorth at StoryWorth.com/awesome

Alex Pang Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Alex, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Oh, thanks very much. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about working less and shorter and resting effectively, and so I’ll mention right up front that I found it more difficult to rest when there’s all this chaotic pandemic news around me. How are you finding rest during this time?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
I think it’s a challenge for everybody. I do an awful lot of work from home and work remotely anyway, so for me the biggest disruption is not being able to travel, but someone who mainly writes books for a living, kind of shelters in place anyway. So, I am fortunate to be less disrupted than many people I know.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Well, I’m glad to hear that you’re doing well and that’s working out. I want to hear about your latest book Shorter. You’ve written a few. So, tell me, what made you think that the world needed you to craft this one?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
So, Shorter is essentially a sequel to my previous book Rest which was about the hidden role of rest in the lives of really creative and prolific people. And when I was promoting that book, I got a lot of questions along the lines of, “Okay, this all sounds great in theory, but if you’re a single mom or a working professional, how do you make the case to your boss or your clients that you should rest more?”

And so, I started looking for organizations that had figured out how to do this, and fairly quickly stumbled on these companies that had moved to 4-day workweeks or 6-hour days that not only were recognizing the importance of rest for creative work, for doing good work, but also were changing how they worked, redesigning their work days in order to make it available to everybody without cutting salaries and without hurting their productivity or their profitability.

And so, the fact that I was seeing these companies all over the world in a variety of industries, often in industries where overwork is the norm, like software, advertising, call centers, restaurants, made me think these are actually doing something really significant that was worth sharing with the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. I’ll tell you I was a fan of all the line graphs in your book. I’m a sucker for real numbers. So, could you share with us a couple of the most striking pieces of research, whether it’s a case study or two, or more of a global kind of survey, that really makes a compelling case that, in fact, if you’re working a shorter amount of time, you can see the same or better results?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Well, in organizations that have done this, what I am seeing is that if they are thoughtful about how they redesign their work days, if they explain it well to clients, if they use technology well, they’re able, actually, to not just maintain the same levels of productivity or profitability, but often increase them. So, for example, there’s a call center in Glasgow, Scotland, and Glasgow turns out to be like the call center of Europe, there are lots of these companies up there called Pursuit Marketing.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s the Scottish accents or…

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Exactly, yeah. Oh, yeah. And a couple of years ago, they made the move to a 4-day workweek, and they found that, after they did this, their productivity went up something like 40%, dropped down a little bit, and then settled down at about 30% higher than normal. So, even though they were working 4-day weeks, they were doing more business, generating more revenue for their clients than they had been when they were working 5-day weeks.

And they, not surprisingly, were also more profitable as a result, and they saw absenteeism and turnover dropped really substantially. This is an industry where people do an awful lot of job-hopping, you’re constantly attracted to the next job by a new set of potential performance bonuses and other incentives, so people generally move quite a bit. But after they moved to a 4-day week, attrition dropped to single-digit percentages which is absolutely unheard of.

Pete Mockaitis
Annually.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Yeah, annually.

Pete Mockaitis
In call centers that is striking.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Which is unheard of in the industry. So, that’s one. And this is also an industry where you measure absolutely everything, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Average Handle Time, First-Call Resolution, da, da, da.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Precisely. And so, they had really good numbers that illustrated that even in an industry where having constant contact with prospective customers, being on the phone a lot, where those kinds of things really matter, where you would not think necessarily that shortening working hours could deliver results, even in those kinds of industries, this turns out to pay off.

And this is a story that I saw over and over again, right? Places that whether it is very topline numbers, like just revenues and profitability, or whether it is the results of weekly surveys either internally with employees or externally with clients, or in terms of things like industry prizes and awards given. When done well, basically, all of those numbers, over time, go up into the right.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s striking. And so, I think you said if we started with a 40% productivity boost, then we hit a 30%. Now, let’s clarify a couple of these. I guess if you’re reducing hours by 20%, five to four days, and you’re getting a productivity boost of 30%, you’re actually producing more in four days than you are in five.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you see folks take like five 8-hour days and turn it into four 10-hour days, or is it just, no, four 8-hour days?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Sure. There certainly are companies that convert to four 10-hour days including some fairly big ones now offer that option, especially in Japan. So, 7-Eleven does this and a number of other large companies. But what I was particularly interested in were companies that were shortening the total number of hours that people were working.

Generally, this means going from 40 hours to 32 or 30. So, doing four 8-hour days or five 6-hours. In the restaurant industry, because people are often working 12- or 13-hour days, to go to a 4-day week means you’re going to 48 hours, but still, even there, you’re going from like 60 or 70 hours down to something substantially lower.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
So, really, what I was interested in for this book was absolute change in working hours as opposed to just taking 40 hours and moving them around differently on the calendar.

Pete Mockaitis
And this is intriguing. Well, I’ve got my own theories but I want to hear yours, you’re the expert. What’s your hot take there on the mechanisms by which less time yields greater results? Is it they’re more rejuvenated so they have more creative ideas to solve the customer caller’s problem? Is it fewer silly mistakes that cause…? Like, what are the sources of productivity gains from working less?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Very broadly speaking, having more time for recovery means that you have more energy on the job, and that matters whether you’re in a creative industry, or you’re a maître d’, or you’re working in a call center. The second thing is that, in knowledge work, in office work, there are estimates that through multitasking, poorly-run meetings, interruptions, we lose an average of about two hours a day of productive time.

And so, if you can eliminate that stuff and get that time back, you go a long way to being able to do five days’ worth of work in four days. And what the companies that I’ve seen do, essentially, is figure out ways to get those two hours back. So, the second part, the redesigning your work day to use your time more effectively, gives you the fundamental ability to fit five days’ worth of work into four. And then, I think, having the extra time to cultivate other hobbies, to rest and relax, to deal with life admin, that gives you an additional boost that accounts for that increase in productivity or creativity on top of the 20% that you need to make up for working fewer hours.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then, I’d love to dig into some of the how-to here even for individuals or teams. Like, I’m running all these, we’ll have the ability to persuade the top decision-maker at the organization that this is what we want to do. But I’m sure there are some leeway to be done here and there, particularly when more people are working from home right now. So, how do we go make it happen?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
So, the first thing that almost everybody does is dramatically shorten meetings, eliminate the standing Monday morning hour-long meeting, take the traditional meetings and make them half as long or less. Our calendar programs kind of default to running meetings for an hour which means that people tend to drift in, things start a little bit late, you check your email, you chat a little bit, then you do some business, and then maybe you pad out the time at the end by talking about what you did on the weekend, etc. By making meetings much sharper, more pointed, often smaller, having agendas and decisions that need to be made, and then focusing on those and then getting out of there, you can save an organization an amazing amount of time.

The next thing is getting technology distractions under control. So, implementing norms where you have email checks at particular times a day, you’re more thoughtful about how you use tools like Slack and other messaging programs, can go a long way to eliminating the kind of everyday state of what Microsoft executive, Linda Stone, called continuous partial attention, that state where you’re kind of focused on one thing but you’ve also got an eye on your inbox and you kind of toggle between different activities or different things that capture your attention. That feels like a very productive way to work but every study indicates that, actually, it’s not.

Pete Mockaitis
I might just sort of linger there for a moment. I think that’s critical. It feels productive so we do it and it feels good to do it but, in fact, if you actually took a look at your output, your outcomes generated, it’s lower. And I think that’s fascinating stuff. Do you have some insight into, like, the biochemistry? I’ve heard that we get a little bit of a dopamine hit in terms of, “Hey, there was an email, and now it’s gone. That’s done. I’ve done something. It might be tiny but it’s done. Ooh, and I did a lot of tiny things, therefore, I did a lot, or I feel I did a lot,” but, really, it’s like, “Hey, those 20 inconsequential emails versus that one meaty piece of thought that will generate thousands of dollars, they’re not at all equal in terms of their value.”

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
No, they’re not. Definitely not. And it is certainly the case that, as creatures who often seek novelty, and especially those of us who are in creative industries, tend to…we are a little more likely to like new stuff, to like stimulation, than sometimes people who are happy in other kinds of businesses. We have something of a bias toward this. But it’s also the case that there’s a real difference between the kind, in productive terms, between the kind of sort of multitasking where you’re juggling several different things that all aim at the same endpoint.

So, when you’re giving a talk, for example, you’re managing your slides, you’ve got the points you’re trying to make, you’re reading the room, you’re interacting with people, there’s actually an awful lot of different cognitive strains that are happening at once. But because all of them go to making a good performance, helping an audience understand some new thing, helping them solve a problem, it doesn’t feel like the kind of cognitive overload that trying to simultaneously be on a conference call and look at a spreadsheet about an unrelated thing incurs.

The problem is that, through a combination of organizational habit, through the fact that for most of human history, we haven’t had a lot of opportunity to do that second sort of multitasking, to look at multiple screens at once, we’re not yet very well-tuned to recognizing the difference between that really  productive, engaging kind of multitasking that involves multiple channels that all build to the same goal, and this other kind that feels productive, but which is actually a lot harder for us to manage and gives us the feeling of engagement and the feeling of productivity without very much productivity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is just a heck of a distinction because I’m thinking about times in which I’ve sort of been in charge of an event, like I’m pulled in very many directions kind of all at once, like, “Oh, the food is here, the volunteers are there, and the attendees are there, and, ooh, here’s an unexpected issue.” And so, for me, it’s when I’m properly prepared, it’s exhilarating as opposed to anxiety-provoking. But it’s all geared toward making a great event, great experience for the people who are present, and that works.

Versus, it might give a similar sensation if I’m doing five completely different things but rapidly switching between them, but they don’t, actually, synergistically helping each other. It’s just sort of like, “Oh, I’m cleaning my Mac files in one place, and my emails in another place, and my voicemails in another place, and maybe I’m switching between all three because that can happen, but they’re not actually helping each other at all. I’m not learning one from one source. So, that’s a really powerful distinction, I think. Thank you.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
And, actually, companies that move to 4-day weeks are pretty explicit about recognizing that distinction. And one of the most important ways in which they express it is by redesigning their work day so that they carve and set aside times for what Cal Newport calls deep work, right? It’s a couple hours of the day, usually in the late morning, when you can be…you have permission to be a little antisocial, to not answer the phone, you’re expected not to ask people those one quick question that turns into a 10-minute conversation, but rather everyone has permission to focus on their most important or most challenging, tasks.

And so, by creating that time, and creating it for everybody, you make it easier for people to get into that state of concentration, that flow state, and to get substantial stuff done. So, I think that’s another really important thing that I see these companies doing. And then the fourth and final one is using technology to augment people’s abilities, right? You, essentially…

Pete Mockaitis
I’m a cyborg, if you will.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Yeah, you automate kind of ordinary stuff, or of less significant, less value-added tasks, but you use technology to augment people’s ability to do really significant creative tasks.

Pete Mockaitis
We have an example of that. So, I can think of all sorts of ways to automate. We had Wade Foster from Zapier on the show earlier, which is cool. I’m a big fan of outsourcing whether it’s through a personal assistant service or to some folks in developing countries where there are some…the dollar can go farther and provide a good living wage with fewer total dollars. But tell me about using technology to do the big hard stuff.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Sure. And there are plenty of these companies who do have relationships with virtual assistants in the Philippines or Malaysia or such, but a good example is an accounting company called Farnell Clarke based in the UK. Farnell Clarke does cloud-based accounting. An awful lot of the accounting industry is still working on pen and paper or on personal computers using software loaded up onto people’s machines.

What Farnell Clarke’s specialty for years had been using cloud-based services like, I think Xero is one of them, there are a couple others that own most of this market, and moving clients onto those systems to make basic things like quarterly reporting, tax filling, that sort of stuff easier. What they have also realized once they moved to a 4-day week was that automating all that stuff freed up a whole bunch of time for the accountants that they could now spend on stuff like financial consulting or providing financial services, keeping in touch with clients often through Skype, and Zoom, and other tools, with which we have all become intimately familiar in the last few weeks.

And between those two things and then also becoming familiar with other kinds of financial planning tools or research tools, making it possible for the company to go from just mainly doing tax preparation kinds of stuff, ordinary bookkeeping, to more labor-intensive or more creatively-intensive kinds of financial advisory work. And then there are other versions of this that you see with, let’s say, restaurants or garages where people are using fairly ordinary tools, sometimes in far more labor-intensive kinds of ways. But I think that the Farnell Clarke example is a nice illustration of how cloud-based tools can be used in this manner.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool to see sort of like the virtuous cycle effect there in terms of, “Hey, now that we’ve freed up some time, we could put some time into something that yields even more cool benefits.” So, that’s really cool. I’m curious, when folks are saying, “Alex, this is awesome. Yes, we’re going to go forth and do this,” what are some common mistakes or hiccups that folks run into that you can give a watch-out, a heads up, to?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Right. I think that the first thing is that I’ve never encountered a company that said, “We spent too much time planning this. We spent too much time thinking about what could go wrong,” or thinking through contingencies, doing scenarios. I think that the more you’re able to plan in advance the better, partly because you do actually come up with problems that you might not foresee, but also because giving everybody an opportunity to think this through is really important in building confidence that they can actually make it work.

I think another thing that has killed off experiments in a couple places was letting everybody choose their own day versus deciding, “Everybody is going to take these days off. So, the office is going to be closed on Fridays,” or, “Half the workforce is on from Monday to Thursday, the other half is Tuesday to Friday if the office needs to stay open five days a week.”

So, I think that recognizing that you have to design with your own culture in mind, and you want to make sure that you don’t disrupt that. And then, finally the other thing is that it’s really important to make the transition something that the employees themselves drive, right?

Every company has a leader at the top who, for various reasons, decides, “This is an experiment worth trying and a risk worth taking.” But the actual implementation is done by employees themselves. And they have to be able to conduct, to experiment with different ways of working, to try things out, to prototype, to rapidly iterate, and to also be sure that if this works out, that they’re going to keep the kind of benefits of the time saved by learning how to be more productive and how to use technology better.

The only other places where this experiment falls apart is where there’s a sense that, “We’re going to do all this stuff but, ultimately, and the company is going to get 20% more work out of us, but we’re going to go back to a traditional schedule.” So, I think that being very clear that everybody is going to benefit from these changes, is a really important thing to establish and to honor from the outset.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell me, Alex, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Yeah, I think that the other critical thing is that everybody worries about how clients will react. And I was amazed to hear exactly one story of a prospective client who had objected to a company moving to a 4-day week. Clients, it turns out, are incredibly supportive of this partly because they have the same kinds of problems that companies moving into 4-day weeks do with work-life balance, with burnout, with recruitment and retention and sustainability.

So, I think that involving clients early on, making clear to them that this is what you’re trying to do, that you’re still available under emergencies, all of that is important, but you’ll also find kind of sometimes contrary to your initial expectations or worries that clients can be some of your biggest allies.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
I often remember a line from Bertrand Russell from his essay about the uses of idleness, where he talks about how we could, by now, have a 4-hour work day. And he says that modern technology offers the prospect of convenience and ease for all, or a future that offers overwork for a few and idleness for many. And it feels to me like that he was really onto something there, that in a sense we have, for various reasons, chosen the second future, but it’s not too late to choose the first one.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Probably the book that has affected or changed my life more than any other in the last ten years has been Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow, which is the classic study of flow states, what they are, why they’re important, and why they not only make us happy but are essential for living a good life. And I think that for those of us who really enjoy our work, who love nothing more than getting lost in an interesting problem, Csikszentmihalyi offers a great key for understanding what it is that is so rewarding about really interesting problems, about really good work, and a foundation for thinking about how we can build on that to make our lives better, not just to be more productive, not just to be more successful, but to become better people, and to have better, more sustainable lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Well-said. And I like that you pronounced his name perfectly.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Hey.

Pete Mockaitis
I had to look that up and practice it a few times because I name-drop his as well. It’s an excellent book. And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Scrivener. It’s a kind of supercharged word processor that also has a bunch of organizational kind of outlining tools. I’ve written three books using Scrivener, and without it, I probably would’ve written like one and a half. It is for writers, what something like Lightroom is for photographers. It’s not simple and it’s got, definitely, a learning curve. But once you figure it out, you can’t live without it.

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

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
So, if you want to learn more, my company website is www.Strategy.rest. Rest is now a top-level domain, very happily for me. And then on Instagram, on Twitter, and pretty much everything else, I am @askpang. So, those are the best places to find me. And, of course, the books are available in fine bookstores, virtual and, one day, one hopes again, physical everywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
It is possible to rethink and redesign everything about how we work. And that even starting with small things, like changing how you run meetings, can have very big impacts over the long run. It can start teaching you how to improve things that you’ve kind of put up with for years, that everyone complains about but no one has figured out how to change. These things actually turn out to be changeable. They turn out to be fixable. And when we take a kind of more experimental, more skeptical approach to how we work, and we ask the question, “Why is it this way? Can it be different? And what can we do to figure out how to improve it?” it turns out you can do dramatic things that pay off both for your company and for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Alex, thank you. This has been a ton of fun. I wish you lots of luck in all the ways that you’re working shorter.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Oh, thanks very much. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Apr 09
0

561: The Ultimate Guide to Working Remotely with Lisette Sutherland

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Lisette Sutherland says: "When you're remote, you cannot be sloppy. You need these systems in place."

Lisette Sutherland shares expert tips and tricks for working from home masterfully.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The remote worker hierarchy of needs
  2. Smarter alternatives to online meetings
  3. Three tips for managing distractions while working remotely

About Lisette:

Lisette Sutherland is the director of Collaboration Superpowers, a company that helps people work together from anywhere through online and in-person workshops. She also produces a weekly podcast featuring interviews with remote working experts highlighting the challenges and successes of working with virtual teams. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

Lisette Sutherland Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Lisette, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Lisette Sutherland
Thanks for having me. I’m really honored to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, we’re honored to have you. Remote work is a hot topic right about now, and you are quite the authority. I’ve been impressed at checking out all of your stuff, and you’ve got some cool stories about just what folks can achieve with remote work. And I’d love it if you could maybe open us up by sharing the tale about the hyperloop pod contest.

Lisette Sutherland
Yeah, I love that story. Yeah, it was random. My husband actually said, “You’ve got to check out what these guys are doing.” So, I invited them on the podcast, and it turns out that SpaceX started a competition for who could build a hyperloop or a hyper pod for the hyperloop, which is a superfast transportation system that can take a commute of 7 hours and squeeze it into 30 minutes. I mean, you’re basically getting shot through a gravity tube.

And I wouldn’t want to be the beta tester, right? That would be not the funnest. But, anyway, so it’s a superfast transportation system, and this one guy, Tom, put out on Reddit that he wanted to join the competition and asked if there was anybody else that would like to join him. And one year later, with a team of 400 remote volunteers from all over the world, they actually came in finalist in the competition, and they’re still doing stuff on it to this day. I mean, not the same people, of course, but the project continues, and they’re still working on the hyper pod.

So, it just showed to me that when people want to, at great distances and projects of great complexity, that we can do great things together if we just get the right people together, which is actually the origin of why I find remote work so exciting to begin with. It’s sort of this idea of like think of the things we could solve. I mean, with the current coronavirus, we’re right in the middle of it right now, with that, we’re going to need global solutions, global problem-solving, everybody working together on that, I think. So, for me, that’s what makes it so exciting.

Pete Mockaitis
That is very cool. And so, yeah, 400 people just kind of random, like, “Yeah, I find this interesting. Let’s get after it.” And to be a finalist amongst, I imagine, I don’t know the economics of this whole project or contest, but I imagine, again, some pros who like this is their company and this is their business, and transportation is their thing, and they want to a piece of the action.

Lisette Sutherland
For sure. Like, universities have been competing, and, yeah, totally.

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool. That is cool. So, well, boy, you’ve been studying remote work for quite a long time, and were remote working before many of us knew that you could.

Lisette Sutherland
Before it was cool.

Pete Mockaitis
So, well, maybe you could open us up by sharing, have there been a couple of sort of fascinating or surprising discoveries you’ve made that would be useful for us to know?

Lisette Sutherland
Well, for one, most people when they think of remote working, you get this image of somebody laying on the beach, right? You’re going to see it, like a beach with a laptop and an umbrella drink or with an umbrella over you. And I think that a lot of people are discovering that that is not what remote working is all about. And if anybody has ever tried working from the beach, you would know that that is a ridiculous idea because sun on the laptop, and sand on the laptop, I mean, it’s complete…it’s hot, like the laptop is hot on your lap, so it is totally not the right atmosphere for working, like doing any real serious work. So, I always laugh at those stock photos.

But what has been surprising for me is how reluctant people are to try new things. I mean, it goes for me too. I get stuck in my own rut so I’m not on a high horse here, that’s for sure. But how reluctant we all are to try new things, and how, you know, I’ve been telling people for years and years, not that everyone listens to me, but I’ve been saying for years and years, “Regardless of whether you’re allow people to go remote, you should have the processes in place in order to support that in case something happens.”

And in the past, that “in case,” so that something would’ve been sick kids at home, or transportation strike, or bad weather, or the plumber that comes between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m., it never occurred  to me that it would be like a global pandemic virus, of course, so it was like an extreme situation. But it does surprise me now how much people are struggling with some of the basic things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that’s a good opening. So, what are some of the basic things that we just got to get handled?

Lisette Sutherland
Well, I would say the first thing is infrastructure. So, many people are not used to using video in the video conferencing, although that is changing quickly. And I always tell people, like, that is really important if you’re on a team where camaraderie and trust and team building is really important. There are some teams out there where that’s not super important, and so, in that case, video may not be useful. But for the majority of teams, if you’re not feeling connected, it’s usually because you can’t see each

So, there’s infrastructure, so video, a decent headset, it doesn’t have to be the beautiful QC35 Bose . That was a gift from my rich sister. So, thank you, sis. But a reasonable headset. And then, I would say, one thing that I’m telling people right now is, given that we’ve been at home for like a week or two now for most people that have been trying this, or maybe three, and I would say it’s time to get comfortable knowing that this is going to be happening for the next four to 12 weeks. We don’t know.

So, there’s a lot of makeshift offices right now. And I would say, actually, given that it’s going to be this long, invest in a decent chair, or a sit-stand desk, or whatever it is that you need in order to be productive. Maybe it’s an extra monitor. But I think that most people don’t have the basic infrastructure in place to be able to do this well. And, fair enough, they’ve never had to do it before. It’s all been provided for at the office in most

And then the other thing that I really would highlight is that we need to learn how to design and deliver great online meetings. And the thing that I’m noticing right now is that people are in online video calls all day long. Like, we’ve gone remote and, all of a sudden, we’re just like on the phone all day. And my suggestion to people is, it’s not healthy, number one. So, one, we need to shorten our meetings and take more physical breaks in between meetings, like this back-to-back video meeting thing is not healthy. And the other is we need to start to go more asynchronous with our communications. It can’t just be all online together. There’s got to be more that we can pull out

So, I would say for people that are just starting out, it’s time to think about infrastructure, and then how to design these meetings because you can’t do back-to-back. I mean, you can but it’s not great.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we talk about this, you named these infrastructure things that my mind is like firing off tools left and right. So, maybe we’ll just go buck-wild for a minute or two because this is a rabbit hole you could just sort of, “Oh, here are 60 apps that I love.”

Lisette Sutherland
Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure.

Pete Mockaitis
But while we’re on the topic, let’s hit a couple. For chairs, I tell you what, I think, I’ve mentioned it before, but the Autonomous ErgoChair II from Autonomous.ai, and we’ll put these in the show notes. I’ve been impressed at how many things you can adjust at a price that’s lower than Herman Miller at a comfort that’s approaching that. So, in terms of value and performance I think that’s pretty cool.

For headsets, I love the Sennheiser SC60s for audio quality. And for sit-stand desk, there’s a lot of good ones. I got the UPLIFT Desk. And I think infrastructure, you also talked about just internet speed. Do you have any figures there, like, “These many megabits per second is probably okay and this much is not”? Because I think a lot of people say, “Oh, sorry. Oh, oh, sorry. I’m kind of cutting out. Oop, oop.” And I think they don’t actually know how much is enough. So, can you lay that down for us?

Lisette Sutherland
At a very minimum, if you’re going to do video conferencing, at a minimum, you’re going to want at least 10-20 Megabits per second. At a

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Upstream and downstream?

Lisette Sutherland
I don’t actually remember which one is which, but I think it’s upstream. Yeah, at home I have 200 Megabits per second, it’s like superfast and it does everything. But, yeah, you want at least 10-20 Megabits per second, if not faster. But it is the foundational layer of the remote worker’s hierarchy of needs. Like, I’m sure everybody has seen the cartoon with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and like Wi-Fi is the bottom layer. But with remote working, that is so true because you need a reasonable amount of bandwidth in order to run some of these tools that make remote working a joy

So, like video conferencing or virtual offices, if you want to go way far out, you can start getting into virtual reality or things like that. But bandwidth is going…that’s not where you want to save your money. You want to invest in as fast as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, is Speedtest.net where you like to go to double-check your speeds?

Lisette Sutherland
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. Well, I did all the tool-dropping. Sorry to steal the fun. Lisette, please, are there some of your faves that you want to mention while we’re going for it here?

Lisette Sutherland
Well, so there’s pros and cons to all tools, and I would say I’m a total tool junkie. So, speaking of rabbit holes, I could go down this one forever. However, it’s not about the tool. It’s about the behavior that the tool enables. That’s what we’re going for. So, when you’re thinking about what the tool that you want to use, you have to think about, “Okay, what are we trying to accomplish? What is our objective here?” But I do have some

I mean, Zoom is my favorite video conferencing tool. I know it has security flaws.

However, the features that Zoom has that I think are just exceptional, and nobody else has them as good as Zoom has them, is breakout room functionality.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Lisette Sutherland
So, the video quality is excellent, you’re not dependent on each other’s bandwidth, which is very common with other tools like Skype for Business. The lowest bandwidth actually affects everybody else on the call.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, really?

Lisette Sutherland
That’s why it’s so bad.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I know.

Lisette Sutherland
That’s one of the reasons why that’s so bad.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I always kind of wondered. Zoom just kind of works better. I don’t know. Well, that’s probably why. Thank you.

Lisette Sutherland
Yeah, that’s part why for many. I’m a Skype for Business hater, by the way, so we won’t go down that route. But breakout rooms, so if you’re trying to make online meetings more engaging, or workshops, or anything more engaging, breakout rooms are the way to go. We do it in in-person workshops, we do it in in-person meetings and brainstorming sessions, so why wouldn’t we do it online? So, that’s the feature that I think makes Zoom like awesome. Plus, they have polling and whiteboards and some other fun things in

But some other fun tools that people wouldn’t know about, which I think would be more applicable for this podcast, are things like virtual offices. And it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s an office that you go to online, and you’re looking at a floor plan, and on that floor plan you see these individual boxes and avatars. So, if you’re in that office, you can only see and hear the people that are in the same office as you, but you can double-click on another office and just pop yourself in, just like walking down the hall in a normal office building. You could just double-click, pop in, say hi, and then go back to your own

Pete Mockaitis
Well, intriguing. Is there a software website or platform I go to to get me a virtual office?

Lisette Sutherland
There are many. There’s like 25 different ones.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow. Okay.

Lisette Sutherland
My very favorite one is Sococo. That’s my very favorite. But there’s also Remo, Workabout Workplace. I mean, for every tool, there’s a million competitors. But I think they’re awesome because it creates a new kind of presence. And for people, when we’re online, we have all these meetings because we need to talk to each other, but you don’t want to just call because you don’t want to interrupt somebody. With a virtual office, you can see where people are, and see if they’re interruptible, and then go just like virtually knock on their door. So, these kinds of things, I think, are really changing the playing field in terms of what’s possible now.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is really intriguing. And I hope there’s a virtual foosball table because that’s a lot of fun. Walk over to that and go poom, poom, poom.

Lisette Sutherland
You know, video games are the virtual foosball tables of today, right? And I encourage companies to actually put video games in their offices because that’s the modern-day version of the ping-pong table or foosball.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’ve recently been connecting with my buddy, Connor, in the pandemic by playing Fortnite, and it was just, I thought like, “Isn’t this for 12-year old boys?” He’s like, “Maybe but it’s so fun.” And so, I kind of got bit by the bug there. It really is fun.

Lisette Sutherland
I just bought myself an Oculus Quest.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow.

Lisette Sutherland
I am amazed at how good it is. I did the ISS, the space station. You get to take a tour at the space station.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, also to your point about being asynchronous, boy, I love Loom myself, which is, if you’re not familiar, listeners, it’s a means by which I can record a video, a screen capture, of what I’m doing, so perfect for like constructions and processes and documents, like, “Hey, team, here’s how we’re going to do this thing. Here’s how you apply for this. Or, here’s how you vet a guest and determine if they’re worthy of an in-depth investigation, kind of whatever.”

And what’s cool about Loom, use Loom.com, is that it’s practically instantaneous in terms of click, it’s recording my screen, click, done, and like within seconds, here’s my link. And I found that impressive. So, Lisette, any other asynchronous tools that can be a really nice means of reducing the number of synchronous meetings?

Lisette Sutherland
Well, I’m also a Loom fan. I use it with my assistants all the time because, yeah, it’s so great to show a video rather than type out email instructions.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Instead of sending long emails, I might just say, “Hey, I made you a video response with Loom,” which is awesome.

Lisette Sutherland
Yeah. And, actually, I think that that is, speaking of other asynchronous tools, people should be thinking more about instead of sending text messages, sending video messages with your screen, or showing something. But I guess, to get back to your question, the biggest tip I can give is if you’re still using email as your primary source of communication, you should be thinking about some sort of a group chat system, like Slack or Teams. I mean, there’s a million of them out there but Slack is probably the most popular at the

But companies that don’t have that yet, you don’t know how much pain you’re in. And, to be fair, I don’t think that these group instant messages systems they solve everything, but in terms of transparent and fast communication, if you’re using email for that, you can evolve and should evolve from there into some sort of a transparent platform.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so, yeah, maybe let’s zoom out a little bit from tools now because we took the plunge and I think both of us can succumb to this. Well, so I’m curious about Slack and email in particular. In the realm of distractions, talking about that kind of ball of wax there, I find personally, because I’ve been remote working with my business for at least a decade here. But lately, in the particulars of the coronavirus pandemic, I find that I’m – obsessed might be a strong word – but I’m checking news frequently, more frequently than I need to or should or is advantageous for me.

And I think that that’s one source of distraction, is the pseudo-work work, “I need to be informed” you know? And another form of distraction could be maybe just too frequently checking out the Slack or the email because, yeah, you’re tired and that’s easy and you’re sort of curious, you want a novel stimulus. So, how do we slay that dragon?

Lisette Sutherland
Yeah, this is a tough one. I think this is the thing that most people struggle with, and that’s boundaries, boundaries on our time and our attention. That is one of the lovely things about working in an office is that there is a very clear boundary on when work starts and when it ends. It’s pretty clear. And there’s a transition period of commuting in and commuting out of the office, so that’s also very clear. But when we’re like this and everything is freeform, we have to be self-disciplined and put boundaries in place for ourselves. And that is not to be underestimated in terms of its

I’m sure everybody, especially right now, back in the old days, I can’t believe I’m saying that, you used to get your newspaper once a day and that’s where you got your news. But, now, it’s like every time something happens, everybody is on it, like the whole world. You know everything happening wherever you want, anytime. You just have to find the right news source, right? And so, it’s really addicting, and especially when there’s something like this going on. It’s just like all-consuming.

So, in terms of distractions and notifications, one is you have got to get your own notifications under control for yourself, so whatever those rules are. For me I turn everything off. And then you’ve got a time box where you’re going to place your attention. So, for example, I allow myself to look at the news three times a day, like when I wake up because I can’t help. I want a cup of coffee and the news, that’s just what I want. After lunch, just as I transition into the afternoon, and then after dinner, just as a way to relax. And I feel like three times a day, if I can accomplish that, that’s pretty

But these boundaries, it’s super hard. And to make it more visceral for people, I usually use the analogy of weight loss. Like, we all know what the formula is for weight loss, right? Super easy. We move more and eat less. But if you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you know that it’s not as simple as that formula, right? Like it is and it isn’t. It’s super hard to do. So, it’s the same with boundaries. Like, really easy to put boundaries in place, really hard to maintain them over long periods of

So, this is one of the great challenges. I think when you master this, you hit the golden ticket. But I haven’t mastered it myself. I’m constantly struggling with this, and always working

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s reassuring to hear that this is the golden ticket because that tends to be my own experience as well, is in the days that I’m successful at sort of having a plan, “Hey, during these times, this is what happens,” then things go excellently. And then when it gets all loosey-goosey, then it’s like, “Oh, today was kind of disappointing. I wanted to do five big, amazing, cool things, and I did two. Hmm, bummer.” So, yeah, I think that’s great. Time-boxing your attention, like, “These are the times that I will do this.” And so, you use news, but we could also say, “Check Slack messages, check email,” in those same ways. Well, with your many guests in your podcast or your own experience, have you encountered some best practices for sticking with those boundaries to getting the job done?

Lisette Sutherland
One of my favorites is from an academic life coach that I interviewed, Gretchen Wagner, and she teaches college students how to do study techniques. And what she said is, “Visualize your time.” So, we all know what we need to get done during the day, then put it on your calendar and visualize how much time each thing might take. So, like, “Okay, I’ve got to do finances today. I’m kind of estimating one and a half hours for email.” Actually, put it in your calendar as an event of like one and a half hour just so that you can manage your own expectations in terms of, because sometimes I have a list, and I’m like, “Oh, I could totally do that all in one day.” And then you get halfway through and it’s like, “I’m on crack. There’s no way you can do these all in one day. Had I visualized my time I might know that.” So, that would be

Another guy does a retrospective of his office once a year, who was Michael Sliwinski who does Nozbe. He also runs Productive! Magazine, that was a good interview actually. And he does a retrospective on his home office once a year, and he just goes through what’s working, what’s not working, and he just rearranges. And I think he said he takes everything out and then puts it all back in a new way or something. So, I was like, “Oh, that’s an interesting idea,” because I look around, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, there’s a few piles that there’s a few things that could be cleaned

The most common one, people use Pomodoro time technique, you know, 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, 25 minutes on, and then 10 minutes off. That’s my favorite. That’s one that I use because I’m not a morning person so I really need a rhythm to get going in the morning, otherwise I could just like sit at my desk and look at things for way too long. So, yeah, those are

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yes. Well, that’s helpful. Thank you. I appreciate that. Well, maybe let’s shift gears a bit to, let’s call it management accountability, taking care of business. So, I think that for some people, working from home is like a joke that goes into scare quotes, like, “Ho, ho, what that really means is I’m doing almost nothing, and I’m occasionally checking my email.” So, we’ve talked about some ways to make that not the case with the infrastructure, with the boundaries. And so, I’m wondering, if you’re managing someone or collaborating with someone, then you really need them to handle their business. How do we do that well? You’re managing remotely versus being in person is a different game.

Lisette Sutherland
Oh, for sure. If you’re a micromanager, you’re going to hate remote working because you can’t, you simply can’t micromanage. There’s no way to do it. I’m sure you could put some sort of a monitoring system, keystroke, taking pictures of you in place, but I would never recommend that. I think it’s horrible. Nobody wants that. Think about yourself. Would you really want

What I would say. There’s three really important things. One is you want to set expectations so that everybody knows what success and failure look like. Remote working is results-oriented work. It’s not hours-based work. So, you want to set out what do you expect people to get accomplished and by when. And the more detailed you can be, the better it is,

Software, like agile software teams will use sprints of one or two weeks where they set out, they have a sprint-planning session, and they set out what they’re going to accomplish that week. And then at the end of the week, they have a demonstration of what they built, what they’ve done, and they do a retrospective over how it went, like what went well, what didn’t go well, how can they improve for the future. And then they set the next week’s sprint. So, that is a great way of doing results-based work and sort of taking small pieces as

So, really, setting expectations and what is the objective, and what are the results. And then get out of the way of your professionals as a leader. Like, you hired people because they’re supposed to have the ability to do a particular job. I think the role of the leader is to set the goal posts and then remove any impediment that might get in the way of that professional in getting to that goal post. So, that’s setting

Then number two would be creating a team agreement, so that is just outlining what are the best ways of working together. So, what kind of information do we need to share and where is it stored? Are there security protocols necessary to get to it? How are we going to communicate with each other? Which tools and what tools are you going to use for what? Are there expected response times, these kinds of things? And then collaboration, how do you know what each other are doing? And how are you giving each other

So, a standard team agreement, just setting out some basics. It doesn’t have to be a big rulebook but just setting out some basic guidelines and principles for how you’re going to work together so that you can avoid all the basic

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Lisette Sutherland
And then number three would be put feedback loops in place. These retrospectives that the agile software teams are awesome. I mean, it gives the team a chance to celebrate successes when they have them, it gives them a chance to blow steam when they need to blow steam, and it gives them also a chance to bring up little things that you might not bring up in the moment because it’s just too small, like talking about it might make it into a bigger thing than it is. But these retrospectives give you a space to just be like, “You know that thing you did last week? Like, totally annoying.” Sometimes you’ve got to just say that, you’ve got to just get it off your chest, otherwise it’ll explode in weird ways. So, I would say, as a manager, if you’ve got those things down, setting expectations, creating a team agreement, and putting feedback loops in place, you’re going to get

Pete Mockaitis
You know what’s so intriguing about that is that these practices would make all the difference for an in-person team as well.

Lisette Sutherland
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
I think it’s easier for you to sort of lose track of what the heck is going on. And I think it just maybe, I thought to summarize, it’s just like the remote piece just makes it…it just sort of amplifies it all in terms of, like, you might notice that something is not working in person faster because you’re right there, as opposed to remotely, it’s like, you can maybe go weeks before you discover it’s not fine.

I also love that agile example. When you have to demonstrate the thing kind of publicly in a short timeframe, boy, there’s a boatload of accountability there in terms of so if you were goofing off and watching funny cat videos for the whole work day, you would either need to stay up late to get it done or embarrass yourself publicly, like, “Yeah, this doesn’t really work and I’m not done. Sorry, guys.” And then you’re like, “Note to self: Never do that again. That felt terrible.”

Lisette Sutherland
Right. Nobody wants to be in that position. So, yeah, you’re right. It amplifies the good and the bad. So, it’s going to amplify the George Costanzas on your team, you know, that are just always trying to get away with laziness, or it’s going to amplify, you know, if they’re rock stars, they’re going to be rock stars remote as well. But it’s going to amplify communication challenges. And I would say, when you’re in person, you can be sloppy about some of these things. And when you’re remote, you cannot be sloppy. You need these systems in place.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s well-said. Then, at the same time though, remote does have really cool advantages. And I guess there’s a debate on whether you are more or less productive when remote. And you said your studies, your research reveals that most people would prefer, in their dreamworld, to have a combo of sometimes in the office with the colleagues and sometimes remote. So, I don’t want to use the word hacks, but what are the special opportunities that are possible when remote working that really boost productivity that we don’t have access to when we are obligated to go to an office?

For example, I was just chatting with some guys in my men’s group, and we said, “Hey, one thing that’s cool about remote work is that I can sort of rearrange my day how I want it. Like, I might take a shower at 10:00 a.m. after doing an hour, an hour and a half of work just because I’m having a sleepy lull time, and why not be under hot water because I’m not going to get much done at the computer, and then I’m rejuvenated from having had the shower to do another round of work.” So, I think that’s pretty cool. It’s not as easy to do in a workplace, “Hey, see you soon, boss. I’m going to take my 10:00 a.m. shower. Be right back.” Probably not as doable.

Lisette Sutherland
I mean, you could but nobody would do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Lisette Sutherland
I think that’s the number one thing is, one, designing your lifestyle around, because I’m that person. I’m like I do my shower late, or I like to just get to work, and then a few hours later, I’m like, “Okay, I need a break.” And then I go running, and then take my shower, and then continue, so that’s totally me. But there’s also all kinds of things. Like, when I used to work in an office, it was always freezing cold in the office, like I was freezing. I had sweaters and all kinds of stuff. It’d be like superhot outside and I was in my sweater in the

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Lisette Sutherland
So, there’s temperature which is never good. There’s noise which you can’t control. I have a little candle that I burn on my desk, it’s like this cute little candle thing in here. And so, you couldn’t do that in an office. You’re not getting people burning candles at their desks. And, also, in between my virtual meetings, I like to do some jumping jacks, or squats, or just something that gets the blood

Pete Mockaitis
Or take a nap.

Lisette Sutherland
Yeah, I’m not a napper.

Pete Mockaitis
You dance.

Lisette Sutherland
I’ve never been a napper. Yeah, but you could dance. I’d dance for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
You could be ridiculous.

Lisette Sutherland
And I would never do it at the office. But, here, I just have to close the curtain so that the neighbor can’t see me, but I can just boogie down. And I think that that’s pretty great.

Pete Mockaitis
It is.

Lisette Sutherland
You can just design your productivity. So, yeah, if you have the right space.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s intriguing. Maybe the master key or theme there is like wherever there is a social norm that is preventing or compelling you to do something that’s not actually valuable, you can kind of just chuck it, it’s like, “I’m going to have a dance party. I’m going to work in my underwear. I’m going to take a nap. I’m going to take…” You can kind of be as weird as you need to be if it’s helpful and productive.

Lisette Sutherland
And I think if you are getting your results done, then I say, “Let your freak flag,” because, I mean, it’s great. We’re all diverse. I just think, “Great. If you’re getting your work done, have a really good time.” And it’s great that we can reward results instead of time because if two people are doing a marketing report, and one person, it takes them a whole week to do it, and the other person, it takes him four hours to do it, well, good for the person that took four hours. If they’re the same quality, great. We should be rewarding people getting things done, not how long they take. I can draw stuff out forever if you’re paying me on an

I remember being in an office thinking like, “What’s the rush? I can just work on this forever,” kind of thing. But now that I work for myself, it’s just like, “Okay, I’ve got like three deadlines. I got to get it done. I’m on the ball.” So, it’s just different motivations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fun. That’s well-said. Well, I’d love it if you have any other random tips, tricks, tools, do’s, don’ts before we hear about some of your favorite things. I got to chime in one real quick because I’m at looking them. I love earplugs, I think, at an office or at home. My door blocks a lot of the noise but sometimes two-year old’s screams will still penetrate it and really catch my attention. And I guess primally that’s what they’re supposed to do. So, earplugs plus noise-cancelling headphones is just lose all track of everything else but the work. It’s pretty fun. So, what else do you want to make sure to mention before we hear some favorite things?

Lisette Sutherland
Well, I would say use visual cues. When you’re using video, that’s one of the benefits because, for instance, you can use cards to

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, you’re on mute.” That’s so cool.

Lisette Sutherland
…”Hey, you’re on mute,” or, “Dang, it’s totally awesome. I really love that

Pete Mockaitis
Did you make those cards? Where do I get them?

Lisette Sutherland
Yes, they’re on the website. I could send you a pack. I’ll send you a pack.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you.

Lisette Sutherland
Or if you want just to express, like, “Oh, I love the idea. I love the

Pete Mockaitis
She’s holding the cards. We’re audio only. Just to make sure they don’t miss it, Lisette. She’s holding up cool cards that say things like, “Awesome,” or “Heart,” or “You’re on mute,” or, “Should we record?” And so, it enables you to convey a message without interrupting somebody, and just sort of make it interesting and visually dynamic. That’s brilliant.

Lisette Sutherland
And beautiful. And I would say one of the best cards, the most popular card out there after “You’re on mute” because that one everybody does, is this one, and it’s called “Elmo” and it stands for “Enough! Let’s move on.” And this is for that person in your meetings online or in-person that just goes on and on and on. And if you don’t know who I’m talking about, it’s probably you, right? But this is your visual indicator to let that person know because they’re going on and on because they don’t know that you’re ready to move on. So, if you can just show them, “Okay, got it. Let’s go on to the next point.” So, that takes your

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s so handy about those cards, I’m not trying to be an ad for you but I am, that’s fine, is that different platforms will have emojis or whatever, but a lot of times, I think in Slack, like it’s sort of often the default is to be hidden, like in the chat box, and it’s like, “Oh, there’s a chat. Let me click it,” versus, if you’re going on and on, you will probably not stop to click it.

Lisette Sutherland
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And if multiple people are holding up the “Enough! Let’s move on” card, it’s like, “Okay, that’s very clear. A strong majority got the point.”

Lisette Sutherland
Yeah, like one Elmo where it doesn’t have to change the conversation but if, all of a sudden, four or five, then you know, people are done.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. That’s good. All right. Well, Lisette, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Lisette Sutherland
It’s a very simple one but I think it’s perfectly apt in this time, and it’s from Mr. Rogers, so I love it even more knowing that it’s from that. And I don’t know the exact quote, but he says something of, “Look for and be one of the helpers.” So, I really like that because it speaks to me on a number of levels. In these times where everybody is stressed, and everybody is going through something difficult, the whole world is at the moment, that we need to be looking for opportunities and ways to help each other just to take some of the bleakness out.

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

Lisette Sutherland
This one is a bit of a silly one so I won’t spend too much time on it. But there is a bit of research that shows that when one person has spoken once in a meeting, they’re more likely to speak again. So, this bit of research, I think, is my favorite because it gives you an opportunity, or makes the case for using icebreaker questions, or warmup questions, or check-ins before a meeting starts. I use them for all my meetings with teams that I know really well.

I just do a quick silly icebreaker question, like, favorite food, favorite vacation spot, or, “Take a picture of your shoes and show us what’s on your feet,” just something.
And there’s a lot of kickback against icebreakers, but i would say that it doesn’t have to be silly. You could also use things like, “What are you hoping to get out of this meeting today? Why did you come? Or what are you hoping to contribute to this meeting today?” So just getting people to state so it doesn’t have to be silly. But I think icebreakers, and the research that shows when people have spoken once, they’re more likely to speak again, I think that that’s encouraging for all my meetings.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Lisette Sutherland
One book that I really, really love, and it’s going to be a professional one, I’ve got it right here because I’ve been using it a lot, is this book called Beyond Bullet Points.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I got that one.

Lisette Sutherland
It’s a great book.

Pete Mockaitis
I think mine was the first edition. Oh, that’s nice.

Lisette Sutherland
Oh, you see I’ve used it quite often. But I think people’s presentations are just terrible most of the time. I mean, talk about, you know, they’re always like tons of bullet points with eight-point font. And I don’t know about you, but I cannot read and listen at the same time. I just can’t do it. I can’t multitask maybe. So, this book Beyond Bullet Points if you’re giving a presentation, or you’re doing anything online, use this book because it tells you how to create a compelling story even if you’re not a good storyteller, and it tells you how to create compelling slides even if you’re not a designer. So, that’s my favorite book right now.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool? You’ve mentioned a few.

Lisette Sutherland
Right now, the Oculus Quest is my favorite tool right now. Really, I’m blown away by the experience as you could have. I’ve been canoeing in the Artic, I’ve been at the International Space Station, and it feels…I’m learning Tai chi, like I’m doing all the calm stuff because it makes me really nauseated, but I’m really enjoying the experience. Virtual reality is so great.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it sounds like such a great way to get out when you can’t get out.

Lisette Sutherland
Totally. That’s why I bought it, I was like, “I want to be able to have some sort of outdoor experience.”

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit?

Lisette Sutherland
At the moment, my favorite habit is intermittent fasting, and I’m really enjoying that. I do it so that I don’t eat between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. So, it’s not a severe fast or anything but I feel better when I like it. So, that’s the habit I’m going to keep.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that people really connect with and you’re known for?

Lisette Sutherland
The super cards, that’s definitely so. And beyond that, people know that I’m really crazy about telepresence robots, and I just think the potential for telepresence robots are great. So, if you don’t know what they are, they’re drivable robots where you beam in just like any video conferencing tool, and you drive them using the arrow keys on your keyboard. And what I like is that it simulates a human in the office. And so, if you’re one of the only remote people in an all in-person company, beaming in via robot can be an awesome way of giving yourself more presence in that office. It sounds really far out but these things are pretty inexpensive these days.

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

Lisette Sutherland
CollaborationSuperpowers.com. Everything is there. Everything.

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

Lisette Sutherland
For all the people that don’t like turning their videos on, just try it. Just try it on a couple of calls and see what the difference is. So, I know that’s a simple one but I think in these times, we need to learn how to connect and be closer in new ways, and video calls, I think, are the way to do it. It’s your one step into the new reality.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lisette, thank you. This has been a treat. And I wish you lots of luck in all of your superpower collaborative adventures.

Lisette Sutherland
Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Mar 16
0

554: How Doing Less Results in Achieving More with Celeste Headlee

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Award-winning journalist and speaker Celeste Headlee shares how doing nothing can help you accomplish everything.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why idleness isn’t laziness
  2. What’s causing you burnout
  3. The productivity benefits of shorter work hours

About Celeste:

Celeste Headlee is an award-winning journalist, professional speaker and author of Heard Mentality and We Need To Talk: How To Have Conversations That Matter. In her 20-year career in public radio, she has been the Executive Producer of On Second Thought at Georgia Public Radio and anchored programs including Tell Me More, Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. She also served as co-host of the national morning news show, The Takeaway, from PRI and WNYC, and anchored presidential coverage in 2012 for PBS World Channel. Celeste’s TEDx Talk 10 ways to have a better conversation has over 19 million total views to date.

Items Mentioned in the Show

Thank you, sponsors!

Celeste Headlee Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Celeste, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Celeste Headlee
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat again. And, first, I was very curious, as you filled out the form, you mentioned that your dog has a best friend whom your dog texts. Please explain.

Celeste Headlee
Well, I mean, obviously, I text on behalf of my dog.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.

Celeste Headlee
But they have a very close relationship, and my dog has a very expressive face, so I read the facial expressions and then I text it. My neighbor across the street has a dog named Choco, a lab mix, and they took her away for three months. They went on a road trip, and so Sam has missed Choco horribly, so the dogs would text back and forth to each other for the three months while Choco was away. Their reunion was lovely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is lovely. Well, that explains a lot. I mean, I was very intrigued, like, “How is this working in terms of texting? And is the best friend another dog or is it a…?” Now, that’s all good and clear. I’m curious how they got to be so tight to begin with. What forges a bond between the dogs?

Celeste Headlee
I really don’t know. My dog is pretty particular about which dogs she likes and which she just tolerates. The vast majority of canine kind belongs in the second category, she’s fine with them but she just tolerates them. But something about Choco, the very first day they met, she just fell in love. That was her puppy, and they have been bonded. They’ve been a bonded pair ever since.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so talking about pair bonding, the last time we discussed, we had a great conversation and listening and such, and that was a fun one. So, listeners, that is over at Episode 221 if you’d like to resurface that one. But now you’re onto some new territory, or maybe, I imagine, there’s some interrelationships there. You’re talking about doing nothing, well, your book title I love, “Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving.” Captivating and I think resonant for many. So, boy, there’s lots to say here, but maybe I’ll just put you on the spot. What’s maybe the most fascinating and surprising thing you discovered when you were researching and putting this book together?

Celeste Headlee
I think that number one is how long this has been going on, right? Because this sort of modern hustle culture that is making so many of us unhappy, I think we tend to associate it with technology and social media and some very recent developments. But when I started researching it, it dates back to 19th century Scotland.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s where hustling began?

Celeste Headlee
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
The Scottish hustlers.

Celeste Headlee
The Scottish engineer. Funnily enough, one of the things I talk about is how we’re always trying to have the best, the ultimate, which is, in moderation, that’s a wonderful impulse, but that Scottish engineer, he wasn’t inventing the steam engine, he had a steam engine, he thought it was terrible so he was just trying to improve it. And that’s how the Industrial Revolution began. So, that was the biggest surprise for me that this has been going on for well over 250 years.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you’re saying that the start of hustle culture coincided with the start of the Industrial Revolution in that I guess there’s an optimizing mindset. Or are you also saying that individual workers are like, “Oh, wow, okay. I do more, I get more”?

Celeste Headlee
Okay. So, human beings did things and lived a certain way for most of our 300,000 years on the planet. I’m talking about homo sapiens. And when the Industrial Revolution came along, it literally changed everything, and that’s another surprising thing for me, because when you’re in history class, AP US History or whatever, and you’re learning about the Industrial Revolution, I don’t think you really understand how much changed, and how not only our work changed but like almost every aspect of our lives and our personal relationships. But the biggest thing is that time became money.

Time did not equal money before the Industrial Revolution. In other words, your task, that what you made was what was worth something. It didn’t matter how long it took you.
another thing that shifted during the Industrial Revolution is, before that time, first of all, we didn’t work very much. Medieval serfs worked less than half a year. And it was because of this idea that, number one, most people were at some level entrepreneurs. Even serfs had a certain amount of land that they farm for themselves. They got done putting their two hours in for their lord, or whatever, and then they went home, and they took care of their stuff. You had all these women who had knitting businesses and quilting businesses, and they made textiles and all these other things. The Industrial Revolution just decimated the female business owner population.

[06:38]

But, also, it sort of disempowered a lot of workers. So, whereas, you would’ve had all these different workers with their own set of tools, when they moved into a factory, they no longer owned the tools, they no longer owned the product left. It became this very centralized industrial culture, and people, for the first time in like the early 20th century, more people lived in cities than they did in rural areas. Just like literally everything changed. And it happened so rapidly that people weren’t quite ready for how dramatic that change was.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s kind of where it began. So, it wasn’t the internet, it wasn’t the iPhone, it wasn’t Instagram. It was the Industrial Revolution. So, that’s handy to orient kind of what’s going on there. And so then, if your advice is…the title is “Do Nothing.” Is that what you suggest is the answer to our overwork, overdoing, underliving world? What do you mean by that and how is that an optimal answer kind of relative to our alternatives?

Celeste Headlee
Well, the point being that idleness is not laziness. In other words, a fisherman is busy while he’s idle. Same with most security guards, right? They’re working while they’re idle. Whereas, if you’re bike-riding, you’re actually quite active when you’re at leisure. Our ideas of these concepts of leisure, laziness, and idleness are really kind of screwed up, and partly because we have this sort of work addiction so we don’t really understand that idleness is required by the human body and the human mind.

The human mind just doesn’t persist. That’s not how it works. It pulses. It needs regular breaks, it needs rests, and in order to do its absolute best work, it needs short bursts of focused attention. And at this point, very few workers really get focused time when there’s no distractions. You walk through an office and you’ll see everybody with like 50 tabs open on their browser, and their email open, and their smartphone there, and their Fitbit, and their Slack going.

People don’t work without distraction, and yet that is the most fertile ground for the brain in terms of creative problem-solving and productivity. So, number one, we’re not as productive as we think we are. That’s a delusion. And, number two, you need downtime. That’s how you keep your brain working at its best.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I think I buy that in terms of that’s what would make for some great outcomes during the course of doing your work. And so then, when we talk about doing nothing, what does that look, sound, feel like in practice?

Celeste Headlee
First of all, I’d say try out boredom. Try to feel bored again. And in order to do that, you need to put away your smartphone. I am not the person that’s going to tell you to get rid of your technology. I think technology is fine. But I do think you have to put limits on how much you use it. So, every once in a while, put your smartphone away, go take a walk without your phone. Sit down on the couch and just sit there for a little while and see what comes to mind.

Every once in a while, I say, “Oh, my God, I have a porch,” or I remember my porch. Maybe I’ll go sit on it for a little while, and I just force myself to sit. And if you do that, frankly, you can’t do it for a really long period of time. Your brain just doesn’t like to be bored, and so things will come to you. You’ll start thinking about stuff. You’ll maybe remember that kit you bought to make your own, I don’t know, apple hard cider or whatever, “Oh, yeah, maybe I want to do that. Maybe I want to do work on playing the guitar,” or whatever it may be. But things will come to you, and you’ll remember things, and there’ll be new thoughts.

All the time that you’re idle or bored, your brain is still working. It’s working almost exactly as hard as it does when you’re trying to make it do productive work, right? So, when it’s idle though and not focused and directed, what it’s doing is like sifting through memory, sifting through information that you’ve taken in, thinking of things that you haven’t thought in quite some time, and it’s making new connections. It’s making surprising connections.

And so, you’re going to have, perhaps, thoughts you’ve never had before. That won’t happen if you’re always directing your mind to do something and produce something. You need to let it sort of sit back and kind of browse through the shelves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. So, you’re saying it’s key that we have some time for this idle stuff as opposed to being go, go, go, go, go sort of constantly, and that’s counterproductive to our ends. Could you share some of the most striking, I guess, studies or data points or numbers that reinforce this for the workaholics who need a little bit more encouragement?

Celeste Headlee
Well, we have a lot of different case studies that prove this point, and one of the ones that I revisit a couple times in the book is Sahlgrenska Hospital. And one of the reasons I think it’s so striking is because we think of the medical profession as just requiring punishing hours. They have cots in their break rooms for a reason. And so, Sahlgrenska Hospital was having a huge productivity problem. Their staff was working incredibly hard, and yet the wait to get a surgery done was months long, and they were just completely overwhelmed, and they decided to experiment with cutting hours.

So, in this one orthopedic unit, they cut everybody’s hours down so they never worked longer than six hours at a time. Six hours at a time. I mean, think about that in a hospital. And they had all these funds set aside prepared to hire on a bunch more people to cover the gaps. But what they found was they didn’t have to hire anybody. In fact, productivity went up, the wait for surgery went down to just a few weeks. You could get in within two or three weeks. And they actually found they were not only getting more done in less time but the morale went straight through the roof. Why? Because they were actually getting rest.

Surprisingly enough, when the brain is rested and the body is rested, you make way fewer errors. And errors is wasted time, right?

Pete Mockaitis
I see, yeah.

Celeste Headlee
You’ve done work that has to be corrected.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess that’s kind of a spooky thing if all the surgeons were making errors previously.

Celeste Headlee
I’m not trying to give you nightmares.

Pete Mockaitis
The United States error situation. Well, I buy that in terms of you make the errors which require fixing. Or even if it’s not an explicit, “Ooh, you did A when you should’ve done B,” I think about it sometimes like you just didn’t have the idea that would’ve been five times as fast as what you did instead. It’s like, “Oh, I could’ve done that.”

Celeste Headlee
Think about it this way, the way that we’re working right now where we’re either in burnout or on the edge of burnout. What’s happening neurologically is that you’re so stressed and overwhelmed that you’re in fight or flight. That means the part of your brain that is ruling your brain in making decisions is your amygdala. Now, your amygdala is the oldest evolutionary part of your brain. It is your monkey brain. And that is the one that you want if you’re being chased by a tiger. You want absolute pure instinct to take over. Like, you need that one to take the wheel when you’re in crisis, and then hand the wheel back because that is the toddler in the room.

Then you want the rest of your brain, especially your prefrontal cortex, which is right behind your forehead, that’s what you want generally making your decisions. That’s the part that thinks twice. That’s the part that considers. It’s mature. It’s your executive thinking capacity. But when you’re in burnout, it’s your amygdala all the time. You’re in fight or flight all the time, which, number one, means you’re stressed. Your cortisol levels are quite high. Your heart rate is usually elevated. And, again, you are making decisions based on fear. You’re not making decisions that are carefully considered. You’re making decisions instinctually, gut instinct, which means you’re making bad decisions.

You’re not just making bad decisions about what to do at any moment at a time, you’re making bad decisions about your priorities, you’re making bad decisions about what to eat, how much sleep you need. All the things that you need to do, you’re making bad decisions. And so, of course, it’s wasting your time, of course it’s not leading you to the kind of creativity and innovation most of us want. If we could just relax a little bit and create an environment in which your body and brain can do their best work, you will not lose productivity. In fact, you might find, just like the hospital did, your productivity will go up.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, recently, we had Michael Hyatt on the show who told a similar story about free to focus and his executives, and they grew revenue, and they worked less, like 11 hours a week less. So, I mean, that’s a message that I love hearing because I would like to work less and achieve more, so it sounds very appealing. Do you have a sense for what is the sweet spot either on a weekly work-hour basis or a daily kind of on/off rest cycle basis? Like, what’s your hunch for productivity maximization? What’s the ballpark range of how much is too much versus not enough versus just about right?

Celeste Headlee
So, we do have a lot of these records. Some of the most productive people in history worked maybe four or five hours a day. They ran a study at the University of Illinois in which they followed…

Pete Mockaitis
I.L.L. That’s right.

Celeste Headlee
That’s right. Is it your alma mater?

Pete Mockaitis
It sure is.

Celeste Headlee
They followed, and this is a while ago, I want to say it was the 1970s. It could’ve been the ‘50s. In any case, they followed a whole bunch of scientists around for quite a length of time, and they found the least productive among them were the ones who worked more than 50 hours a week. The most productive were those who worked between 12 and 20 hours a week. Charles Darwin worked four hours a day. Charles Dickens worked four hours a day. Prionka Ray worked four hours a day. We happen to know, just based on anecdotal evidence, that the average person has maybe four hours of focused work in them on any given day.

Now, that said, obviously that’s an average. I had to figure it out for myself. And, anybody, I explain how to do that in the book, but you’re going to have to find out for yourself what is the amount of time that you can work before it starts becoming counterproductive. But if you think that it’s eight hours or, God forbid, 10 or 12, that’s wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s intriguing. I guess with the examples that you gave us, I think that makes a ton of sense in terms of like scientists. Like, those who need a breakthrough, or a great idea, or an innovation, then that totally adds up, “Hey, you need more idle time so your brain can do all those things you were describing that can lead you there.” And then, as opposed to when you’re in an Industrial Revolution type mode, it’s sort of like you don’t need to get a great idea, but you do need to, I don’t know, tighten a bolt or kind of whatever, stick this thing in that thing. Although, those jobs are fewer and fewer, and not ones that mostly is less some tasks.

Celeste Headlee
Fewer and fewer but also, remember this, Henry Ford didn’t shorten his work hours for his workers to eight hours because he wanted to be generous. He shortened those work hours because he found that if they started working more than that, they started making errors and screwing things up to the point where productivity went down. We have known, even going back to the 19th century, we have records of businesses that when they shortened work hours, actually saw productivity go up, and that’s partly because of accuracy, it’s partly because the brain and body just worked better and they’re more fluid, and they’re just better fit to get things done when they’re well-rested and they’ve had breaks. So, it’s not just the knowledge worker. It’s pretty much any worker, you need rest.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And so, with those four hours, are there some themes or patterns in that they are more so in the morning, recently after sleep, or are they kind of like all over the place based on people’s unique cycles and ways of working?

Celeste Headlee
Interesting enough, again, we’re talking about averages here. So, the average person is actually better first thing in the morning if it requires any kind of real thought, and that’s especially true of people who are not morning people. So, the more tired and groggy you are, actually the more innovative you are first thing in the morning, oddly enough. Again, these are averages. You have to figure this stuff out for yourself, which means you can’t read some article on the web that says, “Oh, successful people wake up at 4:30 a.m. and immediately do hot yoga,” or whatever it may be. You need to figure out for yourself what works best for you. On average, mornings are good.

But there’s wide variance in the end. Maybe you have the kind of home situation where your mornings are noisy and chaotic. That used to be my life, in which case mornings were very difficult for me, and I would do some of my best work in the afternoon. That’s not true anymore, and now I’m back to doing my best work in the mornings.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s funny, when you mentioned chaotic mornings, I don’t know if you can hear the toddlers screaming.

Celeste Headlee
I can.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, ahh, that’s good feedback about the microphone selection.

Celeste Headlee
I remember.

Pete Mockaitis
The door blocks a lot but not everything. Anyway, okay, so that’s handy there. And so then, I want to get your take, when it comes to sort of the rest, the rejuvenation, you mentioned, hey, just being bored and trying that on for size is good and cool and helpful. What are some of the other perspectives or best practices in terms of really making the most of your rest time?

Celeste Headlee
So, I think the first thing is that you need to stop multitasking because the human brain can’t multitask. You need to stop trying to multitask. You need to start learning, and it is a learning process, learning to do one thing at a time. That is the way the brain works best. And when I say one thing at a time, let me be totally clear. That having your email inbox open all the time is distracting to your brain. Your brain sees that as you try to multitask, because even if you’re not actively looking at the email inbox, your brain is preparing for a notification to come in, it is devoting energy to that.

The same is true as if your smartphone is visible. Your brain is then trying to multitask, preparing for an alert to come in. It does not make a distinction between a notification coming on your phone and somebody knocking at the door. Same thing for your brain, so you have to put it out of sight. And if you really want to make the best use of what you have, your big, meaty, homo sapiens brain, give it its best environment, meaning that let it do one thing at a time. You will be shocked when you do that, how much you can get done. Close out your extra tabs and focus. Say, “Right now, this is what I’m working on,” and work on that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Understood. Well, tell me, Celeste, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Celeste Headlee
The last thing I would mention is that you may not actually have a great handle on how you’re spending your time. Time perception is generally low. Time perception is the accuracy with which you know how your time is spent and it’s, in general, fairly low. So, the first thing I had to do was track my time. I had to like spend a couple weeks, every couple of hours I would go back and say, “Okay, here’s what I did for a couple hours.” And I realized I was spending time on stuff that I really didn’t want to spend that much time on it. So, when you feel overwhelmed and overworked, it may just be that you’re not fully aware of where your time is going.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Celeste Headlee
I think it really relates in terms of becoming very focused on any one thing, and it’s a quote from Nietzsche, which says, I want to make sure I get this correct, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” So, I like that because sometimes we become so obsessed and focused on something, we sort of think the ends justify the means, and you can become a monster.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Celeste Headlee
So, I’ll tell you about one of my favorites which is this one in which they were testing stress responses. And they got this group of young girls together and they’d made them do a very stressful thing. They made them solve math problems in front of an audience. And, not surprisingly, the cortisol levels of all these girls went through the roof. They were very stressed out. Cortisol is your stress hormone. And they divided them into four groups.

One of the groups had no contact from their mother after this was over. One of the groups, their mother was waiting for them backstage. Another of the groups got a phone call from their mother, and the last group got a text from their mom, right? So, not surprisingly, the group that had no contact whatsoever, their cortisol level stayed completely elevated, there was almost no change. They were very stressed out. The girls whose moms were waiting backstage, they saw massive drop in their stress, they started to relax. Both of those were unsurprising, right?

But here’s the thing. The girls who got a phone call from their moms, saw their cortisol levels, their stress dropped at almost the same amount as those who had their mother waiting backstage. The girls who got a text, no change. That text did nothing to their stress levels. So, when we’re saving time and we think that we’re checking off the box by sending the text to someone, as far as your brain and your emotions are concerned, it doesn’t do it. We don’t recognize that as authentic social contact.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s so…man, this is really hitting home because, just yesterday, it was my buddy Brent’s birthday, he listens to the show. Hey, Brent.

Celeste Headlee
Happy Birthday, Brent.

Pete Mockaitis
And I thought, “Oh, I should give him a call. But I’m hearing a thing, hearing a thing, hearing a thing, I don’t know.” And so, I texted him and didn’t call him, and I’m like, “I really should’ve called him.”

Celeste Headlee
Yeah, you should’ve called him. Sorry, Brent.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Brent, know I was thinking about you, but it did nothing for your biochemistry when I sent you that text message, okay.

Celeste Headlee
Exactly. Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you.

Celeste Headlee
Fascinating, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Humbled and corrected and learning. All right. How about a favorite book?

Celeste Headlee
A book I just finished reading not too long ago is called “The Paris Library,” and it’s a novel but it’s based on the true story of these librarians at the American library in Paris during the German occupation who hid away a lot of the books and made sure they were sending out books to all the soldiers. It’s just kind of like, I think the tagline is something like “Sometimes heroism comes from the quietest of places.” And it’s a war book in which there’s no violence, but there’s no lack of heroism because of that. I just really loved it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thanks. And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Celeste Headlee
My favorite tool is my little GPS collar for my dog because when we’re walking in the woods and she’s not coming when I call her, I know exactly where she is, and I don’t have to worry.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it is handy. Thank you.

Celeste Headlee
It is.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit, something that helps you stay awesome at your job?

Celeste Headlee
I make sure that I meditate every day. And I know it’s kind of like the gym, if you don’t go to the gym, you kind of feel icky. It’s the same thing for me for meditation, is that if I don’t do it, I can tell the difference, so I make sure that I do it usually in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Celeste Headlee
So, one of the things I’m always talking about is how human beings are a hive mind, and I write about this in this new book, that we do our best work in groups, not alone. And there’s tons of evidence that even the uneducated or ill-prepared group will outperform the most educated and experienced expert. So, one of the ways I explain this is I say, “There’s only two species that can take down a bison.” Have you ever seen a bison actually in person?

Pete Mockaitis
I think from a distance, like I’m in a train, so not up close.

Celeste Headlee
Yeah. So, a bison is a freaking impressive animal, right? These are like 2200 pounds of solid muscle. They can run more than 40 miles an hour. With their horns, they can pick up a truck. Like, this is an amazing beast, and not stupid. There’s only two species that can really take them down. They are, of course, wolves and humans. And what do wolves and humans have in common? They’re pack animals.

And this is just sort of a way of explaining how human beings have been so successful. It’s because we have to take down this incredible beast so we sit there and we have these communication skills that allow us to find out who’s the best on horseback, who has the best aim with a spear, who thinks geometrically and can peel one of them off of the herd, who’s the best at butchering an animal, who’s the strongest and is going to be able to get this thing onto the sled to get it back to the village. That’s what we’re able to accomplish with our advanced communication skills. And no expert is going to help you with some of these tasks that have helped us survived.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Celeste, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Celeste Headlee
Go to CelesteHeadlee.com, it’s where I gather all the info in one convenient place.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Celeste Headlee
Yes. Find at least 20 minutes a day when you don’t have your smartphone with you. Twenty minutes. You can do it. You can survive. As of 2007, before 2007, there was no iPhone. Like, it’s been very recent that we were able to survive without them. So, find 15 or 20 minutes, and you walk away and leave your smartphone.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Celeste, thanks for this, and good luck in all your adventures.

Celeste Headlee
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.