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personal effectiveness · Humanity Working

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: Was it too hot?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Or it might just be that Ryan has a horrible voice.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Paul just comes into me and said he thought I had a voice for radio on Friday, so you can't come back on that now.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I can't.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was just I was just attempting to throw a shade and it didn't really work very well, Ryan.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, Paul, let's start with you.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: How would you define personal effectiveness?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think defining it is actually very simple, but it's really hard to do.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: So you can think about personal effectiveness, and the way we think about it is you know what to do, you know how you're going to do it, and you're able to do it.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: And when you think about that in terms of the context of our own lives, those three things, getting those three things right at any one time can actually be fairly difficult.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: I can think of times in my life, for example, where I've had a pretty clear understanding of the things that I need to do, but I got no idea how I'm gonna do it.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what I'm gonna do first, I don't know what I'm gonna do next, uh, I don't know how to prioritize it, what order it's gonna be in.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Or there may be still other times where you're thinking about it in terms of you've got your method down fairly well uh in terms of how you're gonna accomplish things, um, but you really don't know what you're supposed to be doing.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Some of us wake up in the morning with no clue as to what we're supposed to be doing on a day-to-day basis, even though we've got tons of things potentially that we're gonna be able to do.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, that third dimension that I think a lot of us underestimate, um, and it's really our ability to be able to execute with high performance on a day-to-day basis.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that could be related to things like how much rest we've got, how much other aspects of our lives are are interfering, how underlying the levels of underlying stress we're suffering from, things of that nature.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: But unless you think of personal effectiveness across all three of those different dimensions, um, then it's going to be extremely hard to be effective on a day-to-day basis.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I'll just like wake up and look at my calendar every day.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's the first thing you do.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Is like, what what meetings do I have today?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like how, you know, is that most people's definition of effectiveness is like, am I on time for my first meeting today?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a little odd when you think about it, isn't it?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because number one, how much of that is under your own control, right?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Versus the control of other people who have happened to put meetings on your calendar.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then number two, that implies somehow that if you wake up in the morning and you don't have a bunch of meetings on your calendar, then what do you do then?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: When if your first meeting's at one in the afternoon, do you just sort of hang out until until things uh start to structure starts to appear in your life?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so there's obviously quite a lot of uh movement out there in terms of people thinking about how to um take control of their own calendar, um, so that effectively the the person who really has ownership of the calendar is you, um, and you're scheduling things in your calendar that are to do with you, not just to do with all the work that you're doing with other people.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: But most of us don't have that discipline.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so our week effectively reflects a bunch of decisions that other people have made about how our week should look.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that actually reminds me of um a text my mom sent me over the weekend.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: She said, I saw this quote today and I thought of you.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: Seriously, it just happened over the like 24 hours.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: If you talk about it, it's a dream.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: If you envision it, it's possible.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: If you schedule it, it's real.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: So when I received that message from my mom, I I wanted to come up with a thoughtful response.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: And uh there was something that just was uh was bothering me about it, and I couldn't figure out what it is.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I started typing up a bunch of stuff and I ended up with this really long-winded response to my mom.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: Anyways, I ended up just picking up the phone and calling her and talking it through.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it was in that conversation, I found out that uh that quote is accredited to Tony Robbins, um, who's got a lot of great quotes, in fact, and a and a tremendous amount of wisdom.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, my opinion, however, is that this particular quote, while really good and thoughtful and wise in its own right, um just ended too soon.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, because if you think about what comes after the end of that quote, uh it can be quite complex.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: For example, just because you have it on your calendar doesn't necessarily mean that uh you are gonna do it.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't necessarily mean that you're prepared to do it, it doesn't necessarily mean you know who to do it with, uh, and you really need all those ingredients uh if you're really gonna get something accomplished.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or indeed you scheduled it with the right intent.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: How many of us, for example, turn down uh meeting requests with other people based on the fact that it's not actually gonna um drive anything forward for us or for them, or it's a useful meeting to take.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, most of us um simply get meeting requests, accept meeting requests, and then find out during the meeting whether it was useful or not.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then we complain that we have too many meetings, right?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: So we're not putting any thought up front as to what our day is gonna look like, what our week is gonna look like.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: We just simply, most of us just simply kind of uh bumble along, letting the other seven billion people out there determine what our week is gonna look like.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's so true.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's so true.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, how'd you get into this area?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think it's interesting.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you know, I started thinking about this before, and I'm like, what career path did I have that led to this?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, I'm not really sure if it was career related or not.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was very personal, in fact.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I just mentioned my mom.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: The reason why she sends me quotes like that is because I've always been fascinated with learning new techniques, learning new ways of doing things.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, I was probably the most annoying kid on the planet that had that childlike curiosity turn up to 11.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was always asking why things are working where they were, why to do this this way instead of this way.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so for me, I found myself, my journey, my path was to identify a way that I could learn as much as I could learn without driving myself crazy.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so I wanted to read every book, I wanted to read every article, I wanted to, you know, I just wanted to absorb as much as I could, as much information as I could.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: But it gets to the point where you just you can't sustain that.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I had to, I found myself in every job that I've had, from product development to marketing to sales, uh, to just operational leadership.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_02: I found myself being fascinated with operations, efficiencies, how to do things the right way that maximizes the people, the process, and the technology that are involved.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so I found myself almost in the same role across every different discipline, and that is finding new and creative, um, even scientifically based ways of doing things that can increase my own productivity and then that of the teams that I lead.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think, yeah, I was thinking about this actually a little bit over the weekend myself, and I can actually trace back my interest in this all the way back to the first job um that I got in IT, uh, which would have been, I guess, in about 1995.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm dating myself here, but I think it was about then.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And um at that time, the first job I got was in IT training, and I was teaching people uh that predominantly had never used things like Word or Excel uh or tools of that nature or PowerPoint, etc., uh, teaching them how to use those tools.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um we were talking a long time back, like I think it was Word 2 that people were using, for example, at that point.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Word Perfect uh 5.1 was the uh was the big word processing tool for people.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: If we remember that far back, the blue screen and the edit codes and all that kind of stuff.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: So so my job was to teach people to use tools like that.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um and as I say, many of the people that I was teaching had literally never laid their hands on a on a computer before.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um I would teach people and uh how to use windows, for example, and I would uh say do X, then do Y, and then close a window.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And on one occasion I had somebody literally get up out of a chair and close a window because they hadn't got in their brain what closing windows meant.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um so this was a very um a very interesting time because you had a whole bunch of people um that were not accustomed uh to computers, not accustomed to using technology, um, and had methods, if you like, to be productive in their workplace and were now being introduced to these things that were called a productivity suite, um, or were they were the early uh types of applications that were considered to be productivity applications, and you would watch their productivity shoot way down as they were trying to become accustomed to using these tools.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then it would kind of start to inch back up again.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously there were a bunch of benefits that they got from them and allowed you to do certain things yourself that previously you were reliant upon other people to do.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I saw those benefits a lot, but it always struck me as a little bit um curious that this stuff was referred to as productivity software, when in many cases the level of productivity for the individual was going down.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, collectively, potentially, uh the level of productivity overall may have been going up because we weren't relying on a whole bunch of other people to do uh pieces of work that we uh that we could now get uh get accomplished ourselves.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so this has been kind of a theme that has gone through my life, but I've never really escaped that idea as to how closely are existing technologies related to the underlying goal or the underlying aim, which is to make people more personally effective.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's very little technology out there that looks at it from that angle.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I think it sort of stems all the way back to that.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: But we started to think about it, Ryan and I, much, much more seriously when we began to work together as two people that were very uh interested in this field, and we really started to question about how we could get from uh sort of almost like stumbling through work, as it were, to a point where we were as effective as we ourselves could be.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what we realized was that we could go grab any tool we wanted to try to help us be that way, but until we started to think about it in terms of those three dimensions that I mentioned earlier, and until we started to focus on those three dimensions, then we were never going to be able to perform at the level that we really wanted to.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then once we did start to think about it in those three dimensions, and we did start to address those three those three dimensions, that's when our own level of personal effectiveness started to increase, and that's when we started to think about how we could take that learning um and help other people benefit from those learnings as well.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you handed somebody, let's say we'll make up a typewriter, right?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say let's hand them a typewriter.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the only difference between the old typewriter and this typewriter is that you can hit backspace, right?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you can go back and you can uh you can delete the word that you've already typed, which of course is something that you can't really do with a with a conventional typewriter.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: So you then hand somebody that typewriter and you say, go write a chapter of a book.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the other part of this thought experiment, you have somebody that you stick in front of a computer, um, a multitasking operating system, give them the 20 browser tabs that they that they would traditionally have open once they when they start working, have notifications switched on, have their uh mobile phones sitting next to them with text messages going off, and tell them to write a chapter of a book.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty much guarantee, without conducting this thought experiment, that the person sat in the darkened room with a typewriter that does nothing other than a typewriter and no other distractions, versus the person sitting there with the word processor and all of the distractions in that tool, plus all of the distractions in the rest of the multitasking operating system, plus the distractions from the mobile phone, pretty much guarantee the first person's getting their chapter written faster than the second person.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a these things we don't really think through, which is yes, flexibility is awesome.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you get a whole bunch of uh benefits associated with that flexibility, but there are downsides that we don't really think through in terms of what it does to our ability to focus and and be effective.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, wow, yeah, that's a really good point.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's almost like you want to return to the typewriter metaphorically, right?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: Ability to focus and the benefit of all of these tools we've worked so hard to come up with.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: So uh yeah, that's really cool.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's really cool.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: So by extension, then in the current climate, do you think all these tools are actually making us more personally effective?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: These productivity tools, if you like, first I think you need to kind of reframe it as to what's what's considered a tool or not.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um as you mentioned, there's there's a lot of software tools or even paper-based tools, um, but there's also a lot of know-how.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you search for the problem that you're actually trying to solve, help me get more done, or help me uh be more efficient or more effective, what you're going to get are a bunch of articles essentially about um productivity gurus and their advice to how to be more productive.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: You'll see a lot of uh follow these 10 steps for my secret productivity recipe.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: And um, it's actually very complicated, right?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: You look at these 10 steps, and if you were to complete all those things, that that's what it takes to be productive.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, completing all 10 of those things means you've got to be a productivity guru, just like the person that you just started following, right?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um and people don't really have the time to do that.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, if you go the direction of just a tool, the tool's not designed around your objectives, it's not designed um around making you personally more effective.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's typically designed to get you more organized, um, maybe even complete more tasks or organize those tasks in the form of projects.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, those are very helpful in a work setting, but don't really help when you're in a very unstructured and ambiguous setting, which is, you know, the life.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: And then trying to stitch both of those two things together is is is very difficult because now you've got some advice, some guidance on on somebody else's interpretation of how to be productive.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: And on the other side, you've got a bunch of tools that ostensibly help you to uh be more productive, and you've got to basically grow your own system that will work for you.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: And then lastly, you've got to do all that while maintaining your own, you know, personal health and well-being.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so that's that's three things that need to coincide in order for you to be at your best.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: And again, you'd have to be a productivity guru, you'd have to be a software tools expert, and you'd have to be a life coach in order to get all those things done and get them accomplished.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I yeah, yeah, I was just gonna say, I think I would agree with that, and I would add in one other element, which is pretty much all of us on a day-to-day basis, um have complicated lives at this point.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and what I mean by complicated lives is multiple competing demands for our time, attention, and activity.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And those multiple competing demands could be your main job and a side gig you're doing, it could be your work and your family, it could be the main job you have at work and some other thing that you've volunteered for at work.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: No matter what it is, we have these pretty complicated demands on our time.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the nature of the work that we do, who we're doing it with, the time zones that we're in, and so on, as technology has improved and allowed us to work across traditional organizational boundaries, to work across time zones easily, to set up conference goals really easily with people, the nature of the work that we're doing has become much, much more loose and ambiguous.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so it becomes incumbent upon us, the flexible entity in the system, the human being in the system, to figure out how to make all of that work.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we're kidding ourselves if we expect that every human being on the planet should just be naturally good at that, right?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: We don't for everything else, we don't assume that everybody is naturally good at it.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: The analogy often uses cooking, right?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: So people, you've got people that love to home cook and they love to make a great meal, and you've got other people that frankly suck at cooking, right?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: But everybody needs to eat, everybody needs to have some kind of uh food, and hopefully that food can be relatively healthy and relatively good for us and things like that.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: But we accept the fact that there are people that are good cooks and there are people that are bad cooks.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there are people that are naturally very, very into organizing themselves and making sure that they can be personally effective, and that's a relatively small proportion of the population, but then there's everybody else, and everybody else still needs the same results, they still need to effectively get through life in a way that doesn't stress them out like crazy at the end of the day, and in a way that allows them to meet their work commitments and allows them to be uh fulfill and follow through on their personal commitments as well.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: They all need the same results, but some people are good at it and some people are not good at it.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And what technology has largely been when it's been at its best, is to help us be better at the things that we're not necessarily so good at ourselves.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's where traditional productivity software has failed people because it assumes that the human being is gonna come in and make up for its deficiencies.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: It assumes that the human being is going to do the hard work that Ryan was talking about to try to figure out what is their own personal effectiveness system and that the human being is gonna be uh well enough rested and have enough self-awareness to take care of themselves enough to be able to execute on those things.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Technology should be helping us with those things, and it does not.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: Or it does it in pockets, right?
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: Or like a little bit here or there.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I noticed a a new feature the other day in in Outlook, for example, that that says uh I was I was typing an email to a a colleague at in the evening, and it said, Hey, why don't you just schedule this to send in the morning instead of sending it now?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Because that sends a message like as a leader that people feel like they need to answer you right away.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And really, you don't need that answer right away, you're just doing your doing your gig and doing your your work because that's when you got to it, right?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: To your point about life is more complicated.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: And and so if the first time you're able to do your email as a leader is at 7 p.m., so be it, that doesn't mean your your team needs to respond to you at 7 p.m.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: So those types of things, and you you both have touched on this, which I think is really cool, is is that the the life part and the human part is often left off the table when you talk about tools and productivity.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think that really speaks to uh obviously that's gonna have an impact on the organization that you work for, your own organization, your home, all of these things if you can't bring them together.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, talk a little bit about how you think life and organizations are impacted by this kind of gap in in in tools or productivity or in personal effectiveness.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I want to do?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm going to Google right now, I'm searching the definition of organization.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: An organized body of people with particular purpose, especially a business, society, association, et cetera.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the et cetera says a lot there.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: And everything else, right?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we we we could have just stopped at the first couple of words.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the definition of an organization is a bunch of people.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: So if if we don't get people right.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Then organizations aren't going to work, right?
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's what it is a collection of people that are organized in a certain way, that believe in a common set of beliefs and cultural norms and things like that.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: Well, so for some reason, we started using the term organization to just mean work.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: You know, or it's kind of become synonymous with that.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what organization do you work for, right?
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um an organization is any group of people that share a common set of beliefs that are doing something together, your family, your friends, uh, your nonprofit that you work for, uh your bridge club, you know, it doesn't really matter.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's all an all organization.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: So why is it that only companies, which is one form of organization, why is it that only companies are investing in solving these kind of challenges, right?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: So we've got massive homegrown line of business applications that companies invest billions in to help organize their people, to make sure that they stay on task, to make sure that that organizational uh scaffolding that they've erected is maintained.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but we don't do any of that in our regular lives outside of work.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, now things have gotten a lot more complicated.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot more sophistication to what is considered an organization, sophistication in terms of your family, um, especially what we've seen over the past year with uh bringing your kids home for school and things like that.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: There's a much different relationship that you have with that school organization, or you should say the organization around your child's education, the teachers, the tutors, your grandparents, their friends, and people that that help them.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: So you're building organizations more often than you actually realize.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: And and why aren't we using the sophistication of technology and process that which we learned in the enterprise organizations?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: Why aren't we applying that to the rest of our lives?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: We're really missing a trick.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think the other point that I'd make about the organizations that we work for is that there's been this very significant shift over the course of the last 15 years or so.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that I think we're still getting our heads around what the overall impact of it is.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the shift that I'm referring to is the trade-off that those of us working inside organizations and the organizations that we work for have made between them giving us additional flexibility, the ability to be able to do aspects of our work in the four walls of the organization itself, and aspects of our work outside the organization at home, obviously exacerbated by COVID, etc.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the trade-off of sort of moving into what used to be referred to as flexi time, but sort of flexible working hours, um, and for large proportions of the population to just have flexible working hours without formally defining it.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the ability, for example, for you to, you know, catch up on your email while you're at your kids' ballgame and all that kind of stuff, or duck out of work in order to be able to do something in your personal life, those kind of things.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's one side of that trade-off.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, the other side of it is um you never leave work.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: You never fully leave work.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, the reason is our mobile devices and our mobile devices having the constant reminders and the pings and so on of work and the decision that you're expected to make out of hours, or that email that you're expected to send out of hours, those types of things.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't think that trade-off was ever explicitly stated inside most organizations.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was just here, have a non-work, uh have a work mobile device initially, and then it was here, use your iPhone and get your work email on it, right?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: All of these things that effectively are sort of being gifts given to uh people from the organizations in which they work, and the result of it being this formalized work hours, non-work hours thing being replaced by blended, confusing mix of work hours and non-work hours for the you know 18 hours a day that we are in some way switched on and awake.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the reason that that is very important is probably twofold.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: So the first piece of it is because we never consciously thought about it, because we just it just sort of we just sort of drifted into it, we're now wrestling with the consequences that that has for all of the people that are working inside these organizations.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, what type of toll is that taking on people's mental health, the fact that they can never really switch off from work?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: What type of effect does it have on their personal effectiveness and their performance, the fact that they cannot do those things?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that there is never really a formalized break between uh, you know, where you're consciously switching off from the work environment.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Those are things that as a society we are figuring out and we're seeing different rates of burnout and mental illness and so on that are emerging from that, uh, from that type of thing.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that first part of it is very important.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: But the second part of it, which is probably equally important, is if our organizations, the organizations that we work for, are now having their world kind of drift into the rest of our lives, then that means effectively that just as the things that we're doing in the rest of our lives can be negatively affected by that, it also means that the rest of our lives can potentially negatively affect the work that we're doing inside the organization.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, if I'm not functioning well in another part of my life, that's gonna bleed over into the work environment and it's gonna cause issues for the organization that I work for.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so it implies that anything that really is dealing with personal effectiveness, if it exists and pretends that the only person that matters is the person that shows up to work and the whole person doesn't matter, then it's missing a trick.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's not actually going to be it's not actually going to be effective.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not going to do the thing that theoretically it's supposed to do, because the person that is using it is not just an entity when they're switched on in the work environment.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: They are an entity every 24 hours a day, basically, right?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the that's really why I think in many cases these personal effectiveness tools haven't, or I should say personal productivity tools, they're not personal effectiveness tools, these personal productivity tools are missing a trick because they ex they exist in a world that doesn't exist anymore.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: They exist in this this sort of fictional version of work that is aligned to the particular organization that you work for versus being aligned to the people that are actually doing the work.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um I get migraines and uh and and I've used to get really bad ones now as I've been a bit older I I still get them.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um I had a I had a but they're not as bad as they were, they're not as severe and debilitating as they once were.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um but uh I I had it under control for a better part of my 30s, and over the past couple of years, um they've gotten worse actually.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: And the thing that's very interesting, if I think about those um those attributes of personal effectiveness that are gonna be the common refrain in in this podcast, is um I think I I over-pivot on organization and and efficiency.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I I kind of leave the wellness part uh you know off to the to the side, or like I'll get to it later.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then there never is a later.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um why is it that I can quote every single um productivity, you know, book, um, fiction or nonfiction, you know, uh every article that's almost ever been written on the topic of pro why why can I do all that?
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I can't tell you um what the migraine research um has produced over the past three years.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh why don't I invest more time into that?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's something that I can't be at my best, and Paul knows as well, because there's been times where we've uh you know had to reschedule meetings or he's had to take meetings alone when it was supposed to be the both of us that I couldn't attend.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I was not at my best and I could not perform.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: So all of that great work that I put into getting organized and getting more effective and more productive and all that stuff doesn't matter if I can't show up.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so um I that's something that I personally get wrong is I don't put enough time and attention into what it takes for me to truly be well enough to prov perform on all that that great productivity uh or knowledge that I've amassed.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's one thing that I wanted to mention about the nature of the conversations that Ryan and I have been able to have about this that has been where we've really been helped by the uh by this concept of these of these three um intersecting principles where effectively it's not it is about you know what to do, you know how you're gonna do it, and that you're able to do it.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: By virtue of having that almost like as a framework, it allows us to have conversations with ourselves and with each other about those three things.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, you can effectively say to each other, you know, hey, I know when you get on a roll and you like go work through the night, that's great that you're on a roll, but what's the downstream impact of that?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: And is the downstream impact of that greater than the the rush in the moment of getting on something and and working super hard on it and then paying the price the next day or two days for uh for the cool stuff that you've done?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: So this framework for us has been very, very effective, and we think that um as we explore it more over the course of these podcasts, our hope is that other people will start to think about it, not just in terms of their own lives, but in terms of the working relationships that they have with people and how to have good conversations with others about what it is to uh to be effective.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um speaking for me, you know and Paul, just quickly, oddly enough, but you know, Paul Paul has basically become my migraine coach, not not my doctor, not my family members, not a network of of sufferers that collaborate on this, because uh by opening myself up to the cause and effect of of these things and by opening up my relationship with my with my colleague, my co-founder, to this other part of my life has allowed him to assess my well-being because my well-being is important to him, not just as a friend, but it's also important to him as a as a business partner, right?
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_02: Because if I'm unable to do my job effectively, that all-nighter that I pulled on that thing doesn't really mean anything because I can't show up for work the next day.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's creating almost new facets of relationships within your existing relationships by exposing them to the the balance of your life.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's really interesting.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: So speaking for me, in terms of where I've struggled, um for me, it's I get to a point in some cases where there is so much stuff to do um across so many different aspects of my life, that at some point um I get to a point where it sort of paralyzes me.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I I I know, having spoken to some other people, that they struggle with this as well, where it's almost like the more work you have to do, the less likely you are to be able to jump in and do part of it.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so I have had those times, particularly when I uh funnily enough, when I've come back from like a vacation or something like that, and uh the work has piled up.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: And in at least in theory, we're like, okay, I had a great vacation, I'm rested, I'm ready to go, you know, etc.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: But now I've got half as much work to do again as I had previously.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's all sitting there in front of me, no matter how well it's organized, it's all there.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know what to do first.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it takes me, I almost have to work through it as like a funk, right?
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to get out of that funk and then say, okay, we're gonna get started on something, and then when we do get started on something, it will make you feel better.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what I think is quite interesting about that when I think about it in terms of those three dimensions, is they're all kind of interrelated with each other there, right?
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, number one, I've got a bunch of new stuff potentially, and I haven't organized it properly, so I don't really know what I should be doing first in any case.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, number two, any system I have in terms of doing it effectively has kind of broken down and it's broken down because of the sheer volume of work, and I don't feel like I got time to use that system.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then number three, those two things are putting me in a funk, and as a result, making me less able to uh to execute.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's something that I uh that I really do struggle with, particularly at times uh when work has become overwhelming, or at times where um there is additional stuff on my per on the personal side or something like that that has just over started to uh overwhelm my ability to cope with it.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that those that other insight is a very important part of it.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: In some cases, when we are when we're looking at our work environment and work seems overwhelming, in some cases it's not because anything about the work environment itself has changed.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's because some other aspect of our life has got a little bit more busy or a little bit more crazy.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so now the ability to be able to focus on that work environment has has gone down, and because of that, it feels overwhelming.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: So these sort of cause and effect things um are things that we're now starting to become much more aware of um and using that in order to be able to try to improve our own personal effectiveness over time.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's really interesting.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: I I it it's funny how you your mind plays those tricks on you, right?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because like I it's that time of year again where you just start like I have to gather taxes and get my taxes together, and I hate it, and I hate it, and I put it on my calendar, and it won't take that long to pull it together, but I hate it and I look at it and it just and I move it, yeah, and it just keeps back.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: Most people love it.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just uh, you know, that but that impacts to your point.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: The the reason this I I I that triggered this in my mind is like that is such a great point when you look at, for example, taxes, due taxes in my calendar next to the other work that I have to do, you're just like, oh, I don't want to do that one.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it kind of paints this pallor on the other ones, like uh, or it makes the other one seem really exciting.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like, let me go do those other 10 things I've been putting off.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it it it it's the the human uh aspect is just is just so interesting there.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um well, you know what's also interesting, Matt, is how we started, excuse me, this conversation between you and I before we started recording was uh uh how was your weekend?
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, my weekend was actually really stressful.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and I I was just telling Matt uh you know, Paul, before you joined, I was telling him uh, you know, I got up Monday morning and I'm like, oh my god, they got it Saturday.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: I need a break.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh just to get just to let you know where my head's at on a Monday morning.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_02: But um, as Paul, you know, my my kids are in um you know uh athletics and and they they travel and we're always taking them to stuff.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and you know, so Paul knows this very well as my co-founder that there's a lot of cases where you know Monday morning I'm not terribly fresh because I haven't had any kind of a break, and it's been you know just as stressful as a work day, if not more so, um are my weekends.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh you know, that's something that you've got to adjust for.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I need to get into a better rhythm of again, this going harkens back to what I could do better, um, recognizing that to don't just hit in Monday like that weekend didn't happen, hit Monday like it did happen.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and prep and prep you for that and maybe proactively know that that's gonna happen in advance and and you know, maybe uh schedule it for you differently and and think about it differently.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's really that's really cool.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's one thing that kind of popped into my head as we were talking through this, and I I think it's something to do with um the culture um that we have, particularly in the United States, and I see increasingly in my original home country of the United Kingdom.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I spent about half my life in the UK and about half my life in the in the US, so I know I know both pretty well at this point.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I and the one thing as we've been thinking more about this third circle is that particularly in the work environment, there is very, very little attention paid to this idea of being well and being able to be able to execute on the great plans that we have.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's odd, and I think it's I think it's extremely odd when you consider how much advance there has been in other fields to make sure that people are personally effective.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: Think about sports, for example.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it used to be back in the eight back in the 80s and and 90s and so on, that sports was, you know, you had your exceptional athletes, but there wasn't necessarily a huge amount of focus on training methods or rest and recovery or any of those kind of things.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: You just have these exceptional individuals who seem to do better than other individuals, and nobody really knew why.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: But over the course of the last um, let's say 20 years, as sports science has advanced, um, we've got to a point now where this is down pretty much to an art form.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if you think about, for example, Olympic athletes, they have this set of goals that require them to perform at an exceptional uh level uh in a particular time frame.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: They have to show up at the Olympic Games and they have to nail it.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: And everything that they do in that period of time up to that point is centered around making sure they can nail it.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do they emphasize things like?
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they emphasize things like what goes into their body.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: They emphasize things like how much sleep do I get, how much rest and recovery do I get, how much high intensity stuff do I do, but also how much low intensity stuff do I do in order to be able to make sure that I can perform at this peak level.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's now accepted and celebrated in the area of sports.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: And there is a common understanding that for people to be truly personally effective, they need to do all of those things and they need to effectively treat their minds and their bodies in such a way to allow them to be super personally effective.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: In the work environment, where every organization that we work for wants us to be personally effective and whereby we want to execute on the goals that we have, we don't think about any of that.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: We just push through.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's even like a uh that there's even like a sort of celebration of just working hard, working continuously, working hard until you drop, just keep going, you're indestructible, etc.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's celebrated.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: The I get three hours sleep a night because I work so hard is celebrated.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the idea of the entrepreneur who just foregoes sleep in order to be able to uh to do these various other things, to use that as an example.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: Those things are still culturally celebrated in our organization.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: And if you flip that background to sports, that would be the equivalent of somebody saying, you know what I'm gonna do?
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna train 17 hours every day, not get any sleep, break down, get horribly injured, and then start again.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna try and win a gold medal that way, right?
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make any sense in that analogy, and it doesn't make any sense in our regular world.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: But there is so much cultural bias towards this idea of pushing through, uh pushing through until something breaks that we're gonna have to overcome that in order to be the truly personally affected people that we need to be.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and Matt, just to kind of close out on that point um and to provide a sense of why we're doing this, not just this podcast, but why Paul and I have essentially devoted our lives to helping solve this problem.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, at first it starts with illuminating that it is a problem.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's still a lot of people that that don't truly understand what's happening, the the cause of the stress, the cause of the rampant burnout.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we're trying to get to the root cause of that.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so what we're hopeful to do with uh with this podcast, this being our inaugural episode, is to try to illuminate this problem and start to build a dialogue with as many people as we can so that we can continue to learn and we can continue to experiment on new ways of doing things and understand the sources of these things because addressing the symptoms, we've already tried that.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, addressing the symptoms isn't isn't a solution at all to this problem that's a pandemic now in its own right.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's got to really be reinvention and we've got to reimagine um this scenario, and then that's what we really intend to do.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: The Way Too Busy podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at Billion Minds dot com.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: Billion Minds, creating practical tools for our way too busy lives.