March 1, 2019 • 26 mins
For the last eight weeks, Rebecca and Francesca have tested out workplace hacks to see if any of them do what they claim to do: Make people happier, more creative and more productive.
On the finale of Works for Me, the hosts talk about which methods worked, which ones didn’t and if the self-improvement industry is just a bunch of snake oil.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello. I'm Caitlin. My workplace problem is I'll be in
a meeting and there's a man who likes to sit
right next to me, and you will use this pan
or pencil and just tap incessantly. And I'm having issues
with accountability in returning assignments. I want to know how
to make more time. I guess I could just yank
(00:21):
it out at this hand. I don't know, but that
would make me too many friends. And I've tried several
different things when it comes to time blocking. One thing
to note is I am twenty five years old, and
the group that I am coordinating typically are our superiors.
Sometimes you get out of the time block and it
(00:42):
feels a little bit like you've already You're already behind.
I am curious to hear what you have for group
coordination and accountability. Thanks much, I have a good day.
Bye bye. A lot of you have problems that you're
trying to solve at the office. So today, on the
final episode of Works for Me this season, we're going
to look back at everything we've done and figure out
(01:03):
whether solving work problems even works. Welcome to Works for Me,
the show where we try to solve all of our
work problems using productivity hacks to see if they'll work
(01:24):
for you. I'm Francesco Leafy and I'm back at Greenfield.
So this week is the last show of our season,
so sad, sad, So we're going to do something a
little different. We are going to look back at all
the experiments we did and see if the hacks really
did work for us. Let's get started for our very
(01:45):
first episode, Becca, you decided to make a bullet journal.
This is a hand drawn journal that you customize with
to do lists, calendars and trackers and kind of whatever
else you want to put in it. And a lot
of people get very serious about decorating it because it
really doesn't matter if it's not parfect, because you're the
(02:06):
one who wants to look at it every day. I'm
just like so nervous to mess up that it comes
out looking kind of dumb. Oh my god, is ugly.
I'm really messing up basically, like I'm getting black pen
and places it shouldn't be the how did that happen?
I don't love this pen. Oh god, that's ugly. As
(02:32):
we just heard you, maybe we're not that great at
like the beautiful aspect of it. Because it has this
Instagram quality of people making all these decorations and putting
pretty flowers and illustrations in the borders and using calligraphy
and stuff. But you did find some use from it.
So I want to know, first of all, are you
still bullets turning? Yes, I still have a bullet journal.
(02:54):
It's sitting right here in front of me right now,
and I do still use the to do lists. So
I never kept to do list before the bullet journal,
which I know what was I thinking, um, But now
I write it to do list every day when I
get to work, and I'm pretty strict about writing it,
and I'm pretty strict about crossing things off every day,
(03:16):
and I that is a habit I picked up totally
from this. So I don't do a lot of the
other bullet journal things, but at the very least I
do to do list. Yeah, because you learned how to
do like calendars and activity trackers and all these other
special features. And you're saying, like you mostly it's mostly
just a book of to do list to do list book.
(03:36):
I do a couple other things. I keep a wind's page,
which is very popular in the bullet journal world, where
you write down your winds, which is really good for
people who um have low self esteem or impostors and
worn't get really down about their work yourself. Yeah, and
I did try this other a couple other things, but
mostly to do list journal. But you did. Also. One
(04:00):
of your takeaways from doing the bullet journal in the
first place was that, like, you can kind of pick
and choose the parts of it that work for you. Yeah,
and the big takeaway was that writing things down can
help reveal things about yourself. I'm not as good at
that part, but I did try something called a good
time journal, where you write down all your tasks throughout
the day and you categorize them in a special way
(04:22):
to figure out what you most like about your job.
So that falls into the category of writing things down
to reveal a deeper truth. Maybe I should try that. Yeah,
it's cool. After hearing me go through bullet journaling, did
you take anything from the experiment and apply it to
your work life? You know, while you were doing the
bullet journal, even though originally I thought it was kind
(04:43):
of silly and over the top, like just how much
time people spend on it in the bullet journal world
and how fussy it seemed, but secretly I was actually
kind of catching some of the fever. And at the time,
I think I even bought some jail pens and like
maybe I'd didn't get as far as buying a bullet journal,
but I thought maybe I'd start doing it, but I
(05:04):
couldn't really bring myself to do it. But what I
did instead was I started using a physical journal again.
I have like a date book that has blank pages
in it. I was keeping to do lists in like
lots of different places electronically, and now my to do
list in my appointments are all analog and they're all
in the same place. Yeah, that's great. That's That's exactly
(05:25):
what I use mine for. And I'm proud of you.
Week number two, you were trying to fix your mornings,
which had become a mess according to you. So you
did the rise Up method, which was a six step
method to make the most out of the early hours.
(05:48):
So on day one, after making it out of bed,
I did my level best to follow along with the
yoga video I found on YouTube hold your blank three
and then going side to side, did you want at
a time working away signing with are you still doing
(06:10):
this rise Up method? I kept up with it for months.
I was like a dedicated riser, didn't touch the snooze button.
That had been my big challenge in the episode was
like training myself to stop pressing snooze and just face
my demons and get right out of bed and get started,
no matter how tired I felt. And then the other
(06:32):
my other big takeaway was how good it felt to
find time to exercise, to do a little yoga routine
first thing in the morning, every morning. So I was
doing it every day, five days a week for months
and months, and then I got pregnant and I took
a break because I stopped, I think, but I'm looking
(06:53):
forward to going back to it. I think that of
all of the experiments we've done, it probably had like
the most holistic impact on my whole the whole rest
of my life. Like I felt fitter. I started my
day feeling like I was kind of taking control of it.
I wasn't controlled by like whenever my son decides to
(07:13):
wake up and make noise and demand things. I was
just like doing my thing, and I was, you know,
notching a little win the first thing in the morning.
That is amazing considering where you started from. Which was, Yeah,
just like kind of total chaos and really pushing that
snooze button a lot. And I think it is impressive
to do anything in the morning, So I think that's cool.
(07:35):
What about you. Did you have any takeaways from my
morning routine? I was sincerely impressed with you doing exercise
in the morning. I did not change my morning routine
one bit. I know there's so much room for improvement,
but I just can't do it right now. I'm just
I'm not motivated enough. But it's good to know that
(07:57):
that options there the morning exists for me to take
one day. There you go, just not right now. In
episode three, you wanted to work on your concentration and
your ability to really focus deeply on tasks at work.
So you try a method where you built up to
thirty minute sessions of totally uninterrupted focus on one thing.
(08:20):
And I feel so freaking good, Like it's just doing
thirty minutes of writing where you just get through it,
you focus. I feel like a queen. Are you still
a queen? Do you still feel like a queen? Do
you still feel like a focused ruler? You had gotten
(08:40):
like addicted to doing these focus sessions. Are you still
doing them. I have back slot a tiny bit, but
I do still do focus sessions. I would say that
for me, this episode had the biggest impact on my
day to day work life. I when I need to
get work done, I put on my playlist. In fact,
my Spotify Discover has now learned that that's the type
(09:01):
of music that I listened to most often. And I
put a time around for thirty minutes, and I try
it really hard to get through it, and it still works.
I yeah, I'm still into it. I think I haven't
tried to increase the time more and I'm not as
consistent about it, But just knowing that I have that
in my back pocket can make me feel a little
better when I'm feeling a little overwhelmed about a task
(09:23):
I have to do. You told me you've got a
lot of responses to this particular episode. What kind of
feedback were you getting from listeners. Yeah, a lot of
people want to try the focus session. I think it's
something that a lot of people struggle with, and they
were excited to have a pretty concrete, easy thing to do.
I did get some questions from people. They asked how
(09:43):
often I was doing it or how often they should
be doing it in a given day. And my response was,
just as often as you think you need to do
it for me in a given day, I'll do it
anywhere from zero to four times thirty minute sessions. Obviously,
four time means I have a lot of work going
on in that day, so I think you can customize
it for however works for you. Did you ever try
(10:06):
a focus session? Once again, impressionable me. I was influenced
by you, and I totally did. I haven't done it recently,
but basically, any time I've had deep work to do,
like something thoughtful to write, like a script, I have
I expand to the full screen so I can't see
(10:27):
any of the apps, I try to snooze any notifications,
and yeah, I'll do that. I'll do I usually try
to do twenty minutes or thirty minutes, and if I
go longer, that's great, because sometimes you pick it up
and you just get into it and you lose track
of the time, and then you focus for longer than
you intended to, which isn't bad. But I have found
it to be you feel so accomplished, Like you can
(10:48):
hear it in that tape where you're like on top
of the world. I feel great because you get so
much done so quickly, and I think we're used to
like seeing time just disappear without feeling that great about
what we've done in that time. So when you've passed
twenty minutes and you've like written a couple of pages
of something, it's like it feels so compressed and you
(11:10):
feel like a hero. So because you've been telling yourself
for so long that you can't, Yeah, but you can,
but you can. And then I guess the danger is
which you got at in your episode. And I noticed
also that you can then be like we've done that,
like no need to do anything else for the day. Yeah,
I think I do. Think there's another episode on procrastination
to be done next season. An episode for you tried
(11:35):
to reign in a meeting that you thought had gone
off the rails, and you used a bunch of different
techniques for meeting experts to try to get more out
of your meetings. Hello, welcome to the team meeting. Please
help yourself to some rude or doubta enjoy beling with
(12:00):
some of these NINDS enhancing toys. If you need something
to do with your hands, are you still using any
of the techniques to hold meetings like that that the
meeting experts told you about. This is the experiment that
I have fallen off the most on. Some of the
techniques that I learned were, like, make an agenda ahead
of time that you involve everybody else in the meeting
(12:21):
in so that they contribute items and you all collectively
own the discussion. Keep a timed agenda so that things
stay on track and no one person is dominating the conversation,
are talking too much, and like try to keep people
engaged with food on the table and toys and other
kinds of things. And I I pretty much do none
(12:46):
of that when I have this weekly meeting. I think
what I did retain from it was that the other
people in the meeting also rely on it, rely on
it to be a source of information that they can't
really get anywhere else. And so when I'm in the meeting,
I think I do kind of take it more seriously
and I try to make it a little more structured
than it was. But I was run out of time
(13:07):
to prepare for the meeting, and so it's really hard
to make a weekly meeting something that you feel like
you kind of think about a bunch the day before
or even like the hour before. So I don't know.
I think I still have a lot of work to
do in this area. Did you learn anything from my
meetings adventures? Not really. I don't have the same meeting
(13:27):
problem as you. I think it's so specific, so I
don't know. I think that's fair. I've heard a lot
from listeners that a lot of people have issues with meetings,
but none of them are really the same issues. Some
people have too many meetings and they just want to
know how to have fewer, or some people have meetings
where they never get a chance to talk. So you
can't solve everybody's meeting problems in one episode. This this
(13:49):
episode really felt like the one where it's like the
big existential problem everybody has, just like meetings are on
everybody's minds, but for different reasons. We also learned that
like canceling all meetings is not the answer either, because
meetings do serve a purpose. So I don't know, man
meetings crack that NT yet. Yeah. In episode five, you
(14:25):
wanted to address the fact that you didn't feel like
you had anyone to talk to about your long term
career goals, so you went out mentor hunting. You used
a four step method to find somebody who could be
a sort of official career mentor for you. Hi, Arian
Hayman Nush Hi Jodi, Hi Rebecca. My name is Becca
green My name is Becca Greenfield. I'm a reporter. I'm
(14:46):
on the Race, Class and Gender in the Right Place
team here, I admired. So have you continued your mentor
hunt or are you still talking to Manus Samaroti, who
was the woman who end up kind of meeting your
mentor needs in that episode. I have not tried to
(15:06):
find a different mentor yet. Um. The process is a lot,
and I think it's it's emotionally exhausting to just reach
out to people all the time and networking and being
social and all that. I've tried some of the tricks
that the mentor expert Ellen and Shirt told me to
keeping up my relationship with Manuche, which is, you know,
(15:26):
reaching out to her about other things. Um. I sent
her that episode when it came out. She was really
nice and put it in her newsletter. So I think
the relationship is slowly continuing and building, but it's still
not to level in my fantasy mind of us gabbing
all the time about my my career stuff. What was
your what's your unrealistic fantasy that you would meet once
(15:49):
a month and have like, yeah, a two hour dinner.
Yeah that sounds great. I feel okay about that. I
think it's a really big goal, and so I'm just
happy that I even tried to chip away at it
in an episode. Have you tried to fend a mentor?
And I inspire you? I have not gone out looking
for a mentor, but I was impressed by your journey,
(16:10):
and I think what I took away from it was
that you should always go after bigger, bigger things, and
also just like bigger people than you, then you think
you're entitled to because you got the encouraging thing with
a lot of people wrote you back. So it just
kind of reminded me that, like, we're always a little
people always have a tiny bit more time for us
(16:30):
than we expect them to. Yeah, people are nice. In
episode six, we worked on our problem together. We sought
out a management coach to help us with our teamwork. Obviously,
the two of you really like each other, you really
respect each other, and which is great. What we're going
to move into now is I'm gonna ask you about
(16:52):
some things that have been challenges between the two of you,
and I'm going to let either of you start. I
can start, okay, since Becka started with the nice things,
so he gave us some tips for working better together,
things like talking to each other in person rather than
over chat. Um, not making every situation into or not
feeling like every single situation is an emergency and urgent
(17:15):
it has to be dealt with right away, and phrasing
requests in a way that showed how we individually feel
about them, not like their demands. Um. Do you feel
like you're still using these tips now? I think the
one that's stuck with me the most is trying to
(17:36):
realize that not everything is an emergency all the time.
I don't think I've particularly tried to talk in person more.
I noted a time where I did the thing that
he said we weren't supposed to do, which was, instead
of leading with my emotions, lead with you need to
do X thing in this time. But I remember looking
back and thinking, oh, I probably should have done the
(17:58):
emotions thing. So it's a mixed bag, how about you.
I also haven't been doing a great job of keeping
up with talking in person. I think we talk in
person a lot, but I've definitely noticed a couple of
times when I've expressed my displeasure with how something was
handled over chat and then I've been like, should I
pick this up in real life? But then by then
(18:18):
it's kind of like past and it doesn't feel like
a big enough deal to keep going with it, and
we don't have a podcast that we're recording that is
an incentive to like have a sit down conversation. I
do think when we talk in person, and we do
talk in person a lot, we always get more out
of it than when we try to like sort through
a problem over chat um. But I haven't increased I
(18:40):
haven't increased my I r L time. I One of
the things I've tried to do more that he also
recommended to us was kind of giving more context for
why when I have to triage or when I have
to change the way we're doing something, um, like what
else is going on with my workload that I might
want to make and then offer a solution. And I've
(19:02):
as a result, I felt a little less bad about
doing it because my issue was, like I was kind
of getting I was having a lot of guilt about things,
and then I just wasn't talking about them. I also
thought the upshot of our whole session was good, like
we came away from it feeling like we do work
pretty well together and that the problems that we had
to solve were relatively minor unsolvable, And so I think
(19:25):
that that left a good like halo on our whole collaboration.
In episode seven, you tried in Box zero to tackle
your unruly in box. You know what, I'm just I
just gotta do it. This is crazy. I have thousands
of emails in here. Oh my god, this is nerve wracking. Okay,
am I really doing this? Okay, here we go shift, click, delete, delete, delete.
(19:55):
So in the course of the episode, you really transformed
yourself and it went from someone who ignored emails to
someone who ignored everyone else to answer her emails. Are
you still that person? Yes, I'm still I'm still fully
in box zero. I make sure by the end of
the day that when I leave the office there's nothing
in my inbox. I've either deleted it or filed into folders.
(20:17):
And as for what has had the biggest effect on
my workplace productivity, it's had some downsides like, yes, I do.
Sometimes I'm distracted in meetings because I'm checking emails, and
sometimes I spend too much time on email. But it's
had more upsides because I am incentivized to react to
(20:39):
things really quickly because I want so badly to get
them out of my inbox. So like little dumb, annoying
tasks that I might have previously ignored, I just do
them right away. The converse of that is that for
the bigger tasks, the things that I get emails about
that I previously might have avoided because they were too
daunting and scary, Now I have a whole system for
(21:01):
dealing with them, and I know exactly what's on my
plate because I'm not worried that there's like three dozen
emails buried at the bottom of a list of spam
that I'm forgetting about. Emails are like a debt. It's
like what you owe to other people. And in the
past I just wasn't balancing my checkbook. And now I
know what I owe and so I can deal with
(21:21):
my expenses as they come in. So I think the
benefits are worth the distraction that email is to you now,
because I think that is the biggest criticism of being
into email. Yeah, I mean I think that the ongoing
challenge is limiting the amount of emails that I get
so that it isn't a huge distraction. As I've been
going along, I've been trying as many new methods as
(21:42):
I can to get fewer emails. Like I act really
proactive if I'm on an email thread that I shouldn't
be on, or I make new folders and filters as
I realize they're necessary, And so when I sit back
down at my desk, it's not like thirty new emails.
It's like ten new emails and eight or ane of
them I can delete right away. So I don't think
(22:04):
it's sucking up as much time as it was right
after I started doing it. What about you? Did you
take any email tips away from my experience? No, there
are so many things I want to do that you did,
Like color coding recipients I think would be really helpful,
um making folders. Don't have any of those. I just
(22:25):
have not been proactive. But I I don't feel like
I have the same angs about email as you did
going into the experiment. I my system kind of works.
I don't think people I don't know maybe if I
pulled my colleagues, I would say I'm terrible at email,
but I am pretty responsive, um, and I don't care
(22:45):
about spam piling up in my inbox. So that's what
I'm gonna tell myself. No, I think if it works
for you, there's no reason to change it. And I
think that that's like a big I think that's a
valid criticism of inbox zero is not everybody needs to
do it. I think if if, if it's not a
psychic drain on you to have that number of emails
in your inbox and it's not actively disrupting your work
(23:06):
life the way it was with me. Absolutely everybody doesn't
need to be an inbox zero person. Now that we've
done all these experiments on ourselves and wondering what you
think about this whole industry where we've convinced ourselves that
we need to constantly be optimizing ourselves for work. Probably
not great for us that we think about this stuff
(23:28):
all the time. It's probably like, you know, we're just
cogs in the capitalist machine and just making our employers
very happy by you know, trying to constantly improve ourselves. However,
I do think that there's a reason that all of
these productivity experts have cropped up, like why that is
a job you can have and why it's an industry
(23:49):
that's thriving because we haven't adapted well enough, I think,
to all of the new technologies we work with and
the new systems that we work with in a modern office,
and so it just creates I think it creates more
strife than in the past. So a lot of people
are coming at that problem and like, whether they're solutions
work or whether they're just snake oil salesman is kind
(24:11):
of what we're trying to find out. What do you think? Yeah,
I'm of two minds. One thing, it's like the fact
that we even feel like we need to be the
most productive people in the world is sissiffician. You know,
you can always get better and better and is that
the point of life and work? But then the other
thing is practical, and it's like we are at work
(24:33):
all day and we want to feel good and be
efficient and do the best that we can so that
we can't have lives outside of work and we're not
anxious all the time. And I think that some of
these hacks do help with that, and that's that's good.
I don't want to I don't want to downplay the
importance of that. On the other hand, like you said,
some of it is complete snake oil that's kind of
(24:55):
feeding into these pathologies that people have where it's like
I gotta be better for what. Yeah. I think that
one of the things we wanted to do with the
show was kind of like expose some of the silliness
of some of these solutions. But also we were really
committed to the idea that we only wanted to try
to solve problems we were really having, Like we weren't
just doing stunts for the sake of it. We actually
(25:16):
wanted to take stuff that was specific to what we
were going through at work and see if we could
fix it. And I think that's probably the key, is
that it's nice to know that there are solutions out
there and that if you commit yourself to a problem
you're having at work, you can solve it. But it's wrong,
I think, to think that you need to solve all
of these problems or that everybody needs to be approaching
(25:39):
all of these kind of tasks the same way. Like
you just said, you have a stuff over stuffed inbox.
It doesn't really make your job any harder, and you
don't really care, so you don't have to fix it.
And I think that that's great. I think that's a
perfectly good insight you have. And some of these problems
are not for us to fix. Yeah, and that's it
(26:07):
for this season of works for Me. Thank you so
much to our listeners who listened and subscribed and rated
and reviewed. We really appreciated all of the feedback you've
given us. If you have more, you can still leave
us a voicemail at two one to six one seven
zero one six that might end up in the next
season of our show, and stay subscribed so that we
(26:29):
can stay in your fees and keep you up to
date about what's coming next. The show was produced by
Tofur Foreheads and hosted by Me Rebecca Greenfield and Me.
Francisca Levi and Francisca Leivie is Bloomberg's head of podcast.
Thanks for listening. Bye,
Hello. I'm Caitlin. My workplace problem is I'll be in
a meeting and there's a man who likes to sit
right next to me, and you will use this pan
or pencil and just tap incessantly. And I'm having issues
with accountability in returning assignments. I want to know how
to make more time. I guess I could just yank
(00:21):
it out at this hand. I don't know, but that
would make me too many friends. And I've tried several
different things when it comes to time blocking. One thing
to note is I am twenty five years old, and
the group that I am coordinating typically are our superiors.
Sometimes you get out of the time block and it
(00:42):
feels a little bit like you've already You're already behind.
I am curious to hear what you have for group
coordination and accountability. Thanks much, I have a good day.
Bye bye. A lot of you have problems that you're
trying to solve at the office. So today, on the
final episode of Works for Me this season, we're going
to look back at everything we've done and figure out
(01:03):
whether solving work problems even works. Welcome to Works for Me,
the show where we try to solve all of our
work problems using productivity hacks to see if they'll work
(01:24):
for you. I'm Francesco Leafy and I'm back at Greenfield.
So this week is the last show of our season,
so sad, sad, So we're going to do something a
little different. We are going to look back at all
the experiments we did and see if the hacks really
did work for us. Let's get started for our very
(01:45):
first episode, Becca, you decided to make a bullet journal.
This is a hand drawn journal that you customize with
to do lists, calendars and trackers and kind of whatever
else you want to put in it. And a lot
of people get very serious about decorating it because it
really doesn't matter if it's not parfect, because you're the
(02:06):
one who wants to look at it every day. I'm
just like so nervous to mess up that it comes
out looking kind of dumb. Oh my god, is ugly.
I'm really messing up basically, like I'm getting black pen
and places it shouldn't be the how did that happen?
I don't love this pen. Oh god, that's ugly. As
(02:32):
we just heard you, maybe we're not that great at
like the beautiful aspect of it. Because it has this
Instagram quality of people making all these decorations and putting
pretty flowers and illustrations in the borders and using calligraphy
and stuff. But you did find some use from it.
So I want to know, first of all, are you
still bullets turning? Yes, I still have a bullet journal.
(02:54):
It's sitting right here in front of me right now,
and I do still use the to do lists. So
I never kept to do list before the bullet journal,
which I know what was I thinking, um, But now
I write it to do list every day when I
get to work, and I'm pretty strict about writing it,
and I'm pretty strict about crossing things off every day,
(03:16):
and I that is a habit I picked up totally
from this. So I don't do a lot of the
other bullet journal things, but at the very least I
do to do list. Yeah, because you learned how to
do like calendars and activity trackers and all these other
special features. And you're saying, like you mostly it's mostly
just a book of to do list to do list book.
(03:36):
I do a couple other things. I keep a wind's page,
which is very popular in the bullet journal world, where
you write down your winds, which is really good for
people who um have low self esteem or impostors and
worn't get really down about their work yourself. Yeah, and
I did try this other a couple other things, but
mostly to do list journal. But you did. Also. One
(04:00):
of your takeaways from doing the bullet journal in the
first place was that, like, you can kind of pick
and choose the parts of it that work for you. Yeah,
and the big takeaway was that writing things down can
help reveal things about yourself. I'm not as good at
that part, but I did try something called a good
time journal, where you write down all your tasks throughout
the day and you categorize them in a special way
(04:22):
to figure out what you most like about your job.
So that falls into the category of writing things down
to reveal a deeper truth. Maybe I should try that. Yeah,
it's cool. After hearing me go through bullet journaling, did
you take anything from the experiment and apply it to
your work life? You know, while you were doing the
bullet journal, even though originally I thought it was kind
(04:43):
of silly and over the top, like just how much
time people spend on it in the bullet journal world
and how fussy it seemed, but secretly I was actually
kind of catching some of the fever. And at the time,
I think I even bought some jail pens and like
maybe I'd didn't get as far as buying a bullet journal,
but I thought maybe I'd start doing it, but I
(05:04):
couldn't really bring myself to do it. But what I
did instead was I started using a physical journal again.
I have like a date book that has blank pages
in it. I was keeping to do lists in like
lots of different places electronically, and now my to do
list in my appointments are all analog and they're all
in the same place. Yeah, that's great. That's That's exactly
(05:25):
what I use mine for. And I'm proud of you.
Week number two, you were trying to fix your mornings,
which had become a mess according to you. So you
did the rise Up method, which was a six step
method to make the most out of the early hours.
(05:48):
So on day one, after making it out of bed,
I did my level best to follow along with the
yoga video I found on YouTube hold your blank three
and then going side to side, did you want at
a time working away signing with are you still doing
(06:10):
this rise Up method? I kept up with it for months.
I was like a dedicated riser, didn't touch the snooze button.
That had been my big challenge in the episode was
like training myself to stop pressing snooze and just face
my demons and get right out of bed and get started,
no matter how tired I felt. And then the other
(06:32):
my other big takeaway was how good it felt to
find time to exercise, to do a little yoga routine
first thing in the morning, every morning. So I was
doing it every day, five days a week for months
and months, and then I got pregnant and I took
a break because I stopped, I think, but I'm looking
(06:53):
forward to going back to it. I think that of
all of the experiments we've done, it probably had like
the most holistic impact on my whole the whole rest
of my life. Like I felt fitter. I started my
day feeling like I was kind of taking control of it.
I wasn't controlled by like whenever my son decides to
(07:13):
wake up and make noise and demand things. I was
just like doing my thing, and I was, you know,
notching a little win the first thing in the morning.
That is amazing considering where you started from. Which was, Yeah,
just like kind of total chaos and really pushing that
snooze button a lot. And I think it is impressive
to do anything in the morning, So I think that's cool.
(07:35):
What about you. Did you have any takeaways from my
morning routine? I was sincerely impressed with you doing exercise
in the morning. I did not change my morning routine
one bit. I know there's so much room for improvement,
but I just can't do it right now. I'm just
I'm not motivated enough. But it's good to know that
(07:57):
that options there the morning exists for me to take
one day. There you go, just not right now. In
episode three, you wanted to work on your concentration and
your ability to really focus deeply on tasks at work.
So you try a method where you built up to
thirty minute sessions of totally uninterrupted focus on one thing.
(08:20):
And I feel so freaking good, Like it's just doing
thirty minutes of writing where you just get through it,
you focus. I feel like a queen. Are you still
a queen? Do you still feel like a queen? Do
you still feel like a focused ruler? You had gotten
(08:40):
like addicted to doing these focus sessions. Are you still
doing them. I have back slot a tiny bit, but
I do still do focus sessions. I would say that
for me, this episode had the biggest impact on my
day to day work life. I when I need to
get work done, I put on my playlist. In fact,
my Spotify Discover has now learned that that's the type
(09:01):
of music that I listened to most often. And I
put a time around for thirty minutes, and I try
it really hard to get through it, and it still works.
I yeah, I'm still into it. I think I haven't
tried to increase the time more and I'm not as
consistent about it, But just knowing that I have that
in my back pocket can make me feel a little
better when I'm feeling a little overwhelmed about a task
(09:23):
I have to do. You told me you've got a
lot of responses to this particular episode. What kind of
feedback were you getting from listeners. Yeah, a lot of
people want to try the focus session. I think it's
something that a lot of people struggle with, and they
were excited to have a pretty concrete, easy thing to do.
I did get some questions from people. They asked how
(09:43):
often I was doing it or how often they should
be doing it in a given day. And my response was,
just as often as you think you need to do
it for me in a given day, I'll do it
anywhere from zero to four times thirty minute sessions. Obviously,
four time means I have a lot of work going
on in that day, so I think you can customize
it for however works for you. Did you ever try
(10:06):
a focus session? Once again, impressionable me. I was influenced
by you, and I totally did. I haven't done it recently,
but basically, any time I've had deep work to do,
like something thoughtful to write, like a script, I have
I expand to the full screen so I can't see
(10:27):
any of the apps, I try to snooze any notifications,
and yeah, I'll do that. I'll do I usually try
to do twenty minutes or thirty minutes, and if I
go longer, that's great, because sometimes you pick it up
and you just get into it and you lose track
of the time, and then you focus for longer than
you intended to, which isn't bad. But I have found
it to be you feel so accomplished, Like you can
(10:48):
hear it in that tape where you're like on top
of the world. I feel great because you get so
much done so quickly, and I think we're used to
like seeing time just disappear without feeling that great about
what we've done in that time. So when you've passed
twenty minutes and you've like written a couple of pages
of something, it's like it feels so compressed and you
(11:10):
feel like a hero. So because you've been telling yourself
for so long that you can't, Yeah, but you can,
but you can. And then I guess the danger is
which you got at in your episode. And I noticed
also that you can then be like we've done that,
like no need to do anything else for the day. Yeah,
I think I do. Think there's another episode on procrastination
to be done next season. An episode for you tried
(11:35):
to reign in a meeting that you thought had gone
off the rails, and you used a bunch of different
techniques for meeting experts to try to get more out
of your meetings. Hello, welcome to the team meeting. Please
help yourself to some rude or doubta enjoy beling with
(12:00):
some of these NINDS enhancing toys. If you need something
to do with your hands, are you still using any
of the techniques to hold meetings like that that the
meeting experts told you about. This is the experiment that
I have fallen off the most on. Some of the
techniques that I learned were, like, make an agenda ahead
of time that you involve everybody else in the meeting
(12:21):
in so that they contribute items and you all collectively
own the discussion. Keep a timed agenda so that things
stay on track and no one person is dominating the conversation,
are talking too much, and like try to keep people
engaged with food on the table and toys and other
kinds of things. And I I pretty much do none
(12:46):
of that when I have this weekly meeting. I think
what I did retain from it was that the other
people in the meeting also rely on it, rely on
it to be a source of information that they can't
really get anywhere else. And so when I'm in the meeting,
I think I do kind of take it more seriously
and I try to make it a little more structured
than it was. But I was run out of time
(13:07):
to prepare for the meeting, and so it's really hard
to make a weekly meeting something that you feel like
you kind of think about a bunch the day before
or even like the hour before. So I don't know.
I think I still have a lot of work to
do in this area. Did you learn anything from my
meetings adventures? Not really. I don't have the same meeting
(13:27):
problem as you. I think it's so specific, so I
don't know. I think that's fair. I've heard a lot
from listeners that a lot of people have issues with meetings,
but none of them are really the same issues. Some
people have too many meetings and they just want to
know how to have fewer, or some people have meetings
where they never get a chance to talk. So you
can't solve everybody's meeting problems in one episode. This this
(13:49):
episode really felt like the one where it's like the
big existential problem everybody has, just like meetings are on
everybody's minds, but for different reasons. We also learned that
like canceling all meetings is not the answer either, because
meetings do serve a purpose. So I don't know, man
meetings crack that NT yet. Yeah. In episode five, you
(14:25):
wanted to address the fact that you didn't feel like
you had anyone to talk to about your long term
career goals, so you went out mentor hunting. You used
a four step method to find somebody who could be
a sort of official career mentor for you. Hi, Arian
Hayman Nush Hi Jodi, Hi Rebecca. My name is Becca
green My name is Becca Greenfield. I'm a reporter. I'm
(14:46):
on the Race, Class and Gender in the Right Place
team here, I admired. So have you continued your mentor
hunt or are you still talking to Manus Samaroti, who
was the woman who end up kind of meeting your
mentor needs in that episode. I have not tried to
(15:06):
find a different mentor yet. Um. The process is a lot,
and I think it's it's emotionally exhausting to just reach
out to people all the time and networking and being
social and all that. I've tried some of the tricks
that the mentor expert Ellen and Shirt told me to
keeping up my relationship with Manuche, which is, you know,
(15:26):
reaching out to her about other things. Um. I sent
her that episode when it came out. She was really
nice and put it in her newsletter. So I think
the relationship is slowly continuing and building, but it's still
not to level in my fantasy mind of us gabbing
all the time about my my career stuff. What was
your what's your unrealistic fantasy that you would meet once
(15:49):
a month and have like, yeah, a two hour dinner.
Yeah that sounds great. I feel okay about that. I
think it's a really big goal, and so I'm just
happy that I even tried to chip away at it
in an episode. Have you tried to fend a mentor?
And I inspire you? I have not gone out looking
for a mentor, but I was impressed by your journey,
(16:10):
and I think what I took away from it was
that you should always go after bigger, bigger things, and
also just like bigger people than you, then you think
you're entitled to because you got the encouraging thing with
a lot of people wrote you back. So it just
kind of reminded me that, like, we're always a little
people always have a tiny bit more time for us
(16:30):
than we expect them to. Yeah, people are nice. In
episode six, we worked on our problem together. We sought
out a management coach to help us with our teamwork. Obviously,
the two of you really like each other, you really
respect each other, and which is great. What we're going
to move into now is I'm gonna ask you about
(16:52):
some things that have been challenges between the two of you,
and I'm going to let either of you start. I
can start, okay, since Becka started with the nice things,
so he gave us some tips for working better together,
things like talking to each other in person rather than
over chat. Um, not making every situation into or not
feeling like every single situation is an emergency and urgent
(17:15):
it has to be dealt with right away, and phrasing
requests in a way that showed how we individually feel
about them, not like their demands. Um. Do you feel
like you're still using these tips now? I think the
one that's stuck with me the most is trying to
(17:36):
realize that not everything is an emergency all the time.
I don't think I've particularly tried to talk in person more.
I noted a time where I did the thing that
he said we weren't supposed to do, which was, instead
of leading with my emotions, lead with you need to
do X thing in this time. But I remember looking
back and thinking, oh, I probably should have done the
(17:58):
emotions thing. So it's a mixed bag, how about you.
I also haven't been doing a great job of keeping
up with talking in person. I think we talk in
person a lot, but I've definitely noticed a couple of
times when I've expressed my displeasure with how something was
handled over chat and then I've been like, should I
pick this up in real life? But then by then
(18:18):
it's kind of like past and it doesn't feel like
a big enough deal to keep going with it, and
we don't have a podcast that we're recording that is
an incentive to like have a sit down conversation. I
do think when we talk in person, and we do
talk in person a lot, we always get more out
of it than when we try to like sort through
a problem over chat um. But I haven't increased I
(18:40):
haven't increased my I r L time. I One of
the things I've tried to do more that he also
recommended to us was kind of giving more context for
why when I have to triage or when I have
to change the way we're doing something, um, like what
else is going on with my workload that I might
want to make and then offer a solution. And I've
(19:02):
as a result, I felt a little less bad about
doing it because my issue was, like I was kind
of getting I was having a lot of guilt about things,
and then I just wasn't talking about them. I also
thought the upshot of our whole session was good, like
we came away from it feeling like we do work
pretty well together and that the problems that we had
to solve were relatively minor unsolvable, And so I think
(19:25):
that that left a good like halo on our whole collaboration.
In episode seven, you tried in Box zero to tackle
your unruly in box. You know what, I'm just I
just gotta do it. This is crazy. I have thousands
of emails in here. Oh my god, this is nerve wracking. Okay,
am I really doing this? Okay, here we go shift, click, delete, delete, delete.
(19:55):
So in the course of the episode, you really transformed
yourself and it went from someone who ignored emails to
someone who ignored everyone else to answer her emails. Are
you still that person? Yes, I'm still I'm still fully
in box zero. I make sure by the end of
the day that when I leave the office there's nothing
in my inbox. I've either deleted it or filed into folders.
(20:17):
And as for what has had the biggest effect on
my workplace productivity, it's had some downsides like, yes, I do.
Sometimes I'm distracted in meetings because I'm checking emails, and
sometimes I spend too much time on email. But it's
had more upsides because I am incentivized to react to
(20:39):
things really quickly because I want so badly to get
them out of my inbox. So like little dumb, annoying
tasks that I might have previously ignored, I just do
them right away. The converse of that is that for
the bigger tasks, the things that I get emails about
that I previously might have avoided because they were too
daunting and scary, Now I have a whole system for
(21:01):
dealing with them, and I know exactly what's on my
plate because I'm not worried that there's like three dozen
emails buried at the bottom of a list of spam
that I'm forgetting about. Emails are like a debt. It's
like what you owe to other people. And in the
past I just wasn't balancing my checkbook. And now I
know what I owe and so I can deal with
(21:21):
my expenses as they come in. So I think the
benefits are worth the distraction that email is to you now,
because I think that is the biggest criticism of being
into email. Yeah, I mean I think that the ongoing
challenge is limiting the amount of emails that I get
so that it isn't a huge distraction. As I've been
going along, I've been trying as many new methods as
(21:42):
I can to get fewer emails. Like I act really
proactive if I'm on an email thread that I shouldn't
be on, or I make new folders and filters as
I realize they're necessary, And so when I sit back
down at my desk, it's not like thirty new emails.
It's like ten new emails and eight or ane of
them I can delete right away. So I don't think
(22:04):
it's sucking up as much time as it was right
after I started doing it. What about you? Did you
take any email tips away from my experience? No, there
are so many things I want to do that you did,
Like color coding recipients I think would be really helpful,
um making folders. Don't have any of those. I just
(22:25):
have not been proactive. But I I don't feel like
I have the same angs about email as you did
going into the experiment. I my system kind of works.
I don't think people I don't know maybe if I
pulled my colleagues, I would say I'm terrible at email,
but I am pretty responsive, um, and I don't care
(22:45):
about spam piling up in my inbox. So that's what
I'm gonna tell myself. No, I think if it works
for you, there's no reason to change it. And I
think that that's like a big I think that's a
valid criticism of inbox zero is not everybody needs to
do it. I think if if, if it's not a
psychic drain on you to have that number of emails
in your inbox and it's not actively disrupting your work
(23:06):
life the way it was with me. Absolutely everybody doesn't
need to be an inbox zero person. Now that we've
done all these experiments on ourselves and wondering what you
think about this whole industry where we've convinced ourselves that
we need to constantly be optimizing ourselves for work. Probably
not great for us that we think about this stuff
(23:28):
all the time. It's probably like, you know, we're just
cogs in the capitalist machine and just making our employers
very happy by you know, trying to constantly improve ourselves. However,
I do think that there's a reason that all of
these productivity experts have cropped up, like why that is
a job you can have and why it's an industry
(23:49):
that's thriving because we haven't adapted well enough, I think,
to all of the new technologies we work with and
the new systems that we work with in a modern office,
and so it just creates I think it creates more
strife than in the past. So a lot of people
are coming at that problem and like, whether they're solutions
work or whether they're just snake oil salesman is kind
(24:11):
of what we're trying to find out. What do you think? Yeah,
I'm of two minds. One thing, it's like the fact
that we even feel like we need to be the
most productive people in the world is sissiffician. You know,
you can always get better and better and is that
the point of life and work? But then the other
thing is practical, and it's like we are at work
(24:33):
all day and we want to feel good and be
efficient and do the best that we can so that
we can't have lives outside of work and we're not
anxious all the time. And I think that some of
these hacks do help with that, and that's that's good.
I don't want to I don't want to downplay the
importance of that. On the other hand, like you said,
some of it is complete snake oil that's kind of
(24:55):
feeding into these pathologies that people have where it's like
I gotta be better for what. Yeah. I think that
one of the things we wanted to do with the
show was kind of like expose some of the silliness
of some of these solutions. But also we were really
committed to the idea that we only wanted to try
to solve problems we were really having, Like we weren't
just doing stunts for the sake of it. We actually
(25:16):
wanted to take stuff that was specific to what we
were going through at work and see if we could
fix it. And I think that's probably the key, is
that it's nice to know that there are solutions out
there and that if you commit yourself to a problem
you're having at work, you can solve it. But it's wrong,
I think, to think that you need to solve all
of these problems or that everybody needs to be approaching
(25:39):
all of these kind of tasks the same way. Like
you just said, you have a stuff over stuffed inbox.
It doesn't really make your job any harder, and you
don't really care, so you don't have to fix it.
And I think that that's great. I think that's a
perfectly good insight you have. And some of these problems
are not for us to fix. Yeah, and that's it
(26:07):
for this season of works for Me. Thank you so
much to our listeners who listened and subscribed and rated
and reviewed. We really appreciated all of the feedback you've
given us. If you have more, you can still leave
us a voicemail at two one to six one seven
zero one six that might end up in the next
season of our show, and stay subscribed so that we
(26:29):
can stay in your fees and keep you up to
date about what's coming next. The show was produced by
Tofur Foreheads and hosted by Me Rebecca Greenfield and Me.
Francisca Levi and Francisca Leivie is Bloomberg's head of podcast.
Thanks for listening. Bye,
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