Beyond Busy #74 Working from home

Graham Allcott  0:05  
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Beyond Busy The show where we talk productivity, work life balance and defining happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, it's another COVID special. And we are talking working from home. This is actually the audio from the first Think Productive webinar, which was myself and Grace Marshall on the Productivity Ninjas guide to working from home. So we recorded this about a month ago, we've been running these as live webinars. Most days at the moment, it's kind of once or twice a week and you can find out the dates at thinkproductive/wfh. They're also on there. There's a load of info about how we can help your team, your organisation, your company, with a whole variety of stuff that's either specific to what's going on With COVID, so working from home leading remote teams, and how to supercharge your virtual meetings, but also all of our regular stuff as well. So how to be a Productivity Ninja, how to get your inbox to zero, all that sort of normal productivity stuff that we do. So we're going to talk in this special webinar for an hour. It's myself and Grace Marshall. We'll talk about a few of the key challenges of working from home, we'll talk about how to solve them. And we just thought, let's use the audio and get this out there and, you know, make this a podcast episode as well. So let's get straight into it. Here is our live webinar in audio form with myself and Grace Marshall. Let's do it. 

So welcome, everybody. We're just leave our contact details here right at the beginning. So my name is Graham Allcott. I'm here with Grace Marshall. Hello. And we have basically written this as a response to obviously what's happening out there in the world. So this didn't exist a week ago. And we've since had the first broadcast of this was actually in Australia about 12 hours ago or so. And just for context, we have dates pretty much every day over the next couple of weeks. And it's all live, I think, productive calm. wfh working from home. So if you know people who didn't manage to get onto this first one, know that there'll be more of these coming. So you're all on mute, automatically. The chat is open, as Chris was saying, and we're here for an hour. So let's get cracking through some stuff. If you don't know who we are, by the way, so we think productive for the last decade or so we've been on a mission to help people with everything to do with productivity. So we run sessions called things like getting your inbox zero, fixing meetings, and of course, stuff related to my book, How to be a productivity ninja. And so there's a whole bunch of stuff that we do predominantly The house with clients. So we work, you know, in your offices and obviously, shifting a lot of that to live virtual in the current environments. Well, what we're gonna talk about on this hour is some of the common pitfalls of working from home, how to get started, how to get good work done. We're going to talk about dealing with uncertainty, both in your own work, and just philosophically with what's going on in the world right now. And then we'll talk about work life balance and what to do at the end of the working day, to just kind of help with that as well. So let's get started.

Grace Marshall  3:37  
Yeah, yes. So Graham, do you want to launch a poll first, just see what kind of people we have and where your starting point is at.

Graham Allcott  3:43  
So let's check that on there.

Grace Marshall  3:48  
So this is a poll asking you What's your work from home starting point? Are you completely new to this and have you dabbled with it but you're not feeling confident? Or you fairly confident and you're here many to pick up some tips? Or are you a black belt man So you should be running this session rather than us. Or maybe you're just here to pick up some stuff that you can share with your colleagues. So just to give us an idea of, sort of, you know, where you're coming from what your starting point is at the moment, so we can see who we got on the call.

Graham Allcott  4:15  
So 63% of people saying fairly confident, and 3% view of the black belt masters, so good to have you guys here as well. And a lot of people dabbling and completely new. So that's it. That's useful context for

Grace Marshall  4:30  
great, brilliant. Okay, so let's get started with some of the common pitfalls then. So I guess, yeah, we've worked with people across the whole spectrum. We work with people who, who work from home predominantly with with people who sometimes work from home, and here are the things that we commonly see. Don't worry about. If you can't see the poll, we've only got one poll. So if the technology is not allowing you to see it, don't worry about that. So and, yeah, common pitfalls. First of all, it's what like blue. So you've got the issue of sometimes When you're working from home and you're living at home, it's the same space, life completed to work but also work can bleed into life. Then there's also the issue of connection. So, I'm already seeing a lot of people are feeling like okay, feeling isolated, feeling disconnected. I'm used to being around people used to being in the office, and now I'm stuck at home by myself. Now, depending on your personality, some people might actually feel quite comfortable with that, like Graham, this is not any different from how you normally work right?

Graham Allcott  5:29  
So actually, a lot of my work is from home Think Productive actually a fairly remote teams so most of our Productivity Ninjas are based around the UK. They'll maybe come to the office once a year something like that. And me personally even though I'm based in Brighton and our offices, five minutes down the road in Hove I'm probably there myself physically, once a month if that so this is very familiar terrain for me. And also, I think That gives us a good perspective of the last 10 years or so working like this, we've got plenty to share. So yeah,

Grace Marshall  6:06  
whereas for me, I mean, this is familiar terrain. But as an extrovert, I miss people, as though you those experts, I want you, you might be feeling the same as I say there might be a feeling of disconnection. But at the same time, there could also be a feeling of over connection. Here, the fact that there are so many different ways to get in touch with each other, but you might have instant messenger, and you're texting your WhatsApp and your emails all pinging at the same time, it can feel like everyone wants a piece of me more. So now that you're working from home compared to when you're in the office. And then the third thing is this issue of defining success. So like it or not, when we're working in the office, there are some go to physical clues that we can see, when it looks like we're working hard and we're busy. So whether that's a queue of people coming up to your desk or you're like furiously typing away, there's something visible about the work, whereas when we start working from home, it becomes more invisible. And then we start to grapple How does it how do we grapple with looking like we're doing good work? How do I prove to my boss that I'm working hard? And what happens sometimes for some people we find is that they end up working even longer hours, and they don't take breaks, they don't even get up to go to the loo until you're absolutely desperate. Because it's like, oh, if I don't reply to things really quickly, if I don't look like I'm working, then what if somebody thinks that I'm just watching daytime TV? So there's this whole thing of defining success? And I think there's an opportunity here as well, in terms of how we define success. How do we define what good productivity looks like, rather than just what looks busy?

Graham Allcott  7:35  
I think in general is, you know, for me something really important about the fact that generally working from home is a much maligned thing. And here's a quote from my son in the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity, I think, was there's lots of bleak stuff happening in the world right now. What we are seeing is certainly a reframing of things. So reframing of things like community, for example, seems to be something that's happening in lots of places now. Setting up WhatsApp groups and the like. And I think this has some implications for how we view productivity and managing our attention and various other things. Rather than looking at working from home is this slightly, you know, guilty feeling of working from home? Are you are you really and all that sort of thing? Actually, we might start to rephrase working from home as something much more positive as a result of all of this as well. So let's get started. How do we get started? What does it mean to actually get to work? Great.

Grace Marshall  8:34  
Yeah, absolutely. So getting to work, hopefully, is a really easy question to answer now, in terms of actually physically getting to work because you don't have to do the commute anymore. But actually, how do we get into work mode? So the interesting thing is that our brains are designed to respond to signals. And even if we don't notice it, our normal everyday routine has a way of telling us okay, you're getting into work mode now. So you might be thinking about It's great, I didn't have to commute. I don't have to deal with traffic or the tube or the rush hour. But actually, your brain might still need a few signals putting in programming in and to help you think, okay, now I'm in work mode compared to being in home mode. So you might find it helpful to maybe even give yourself a fake commute. So it might be like a walk around the block if you're allowed to, depending on where you live in the world you are, or you're even just having a bit of a familiar routine that you do as a way of going okay, now I'm transitioning from home mode to being in work mode. And so you have a play with those fake routines and fake commutes, but also you can be little things like, um, you know, what am I What am I wearing, for example, so you might think, okay, now that I'm working from home, one of the beautiful things I can do is stay in bed. Great. I've got the next slide. Yeah, brilliant. So yeah, I could just work from home I could work in my pyjamas. I could be really comfy. Now if that works for you fine. But the caveat here is sometimes you might find you have to get into work mode by putting on some work. So for example, I remember working with a financial advisor once who transitioned to working for himself. And he said, Actually, the thing he was most looking forward to was not having to put a suit and tie on. But he found that until he put a suit and tie on he didn't feel like he was in workload, even though he didn't have to for other people. He had to for himself. Similarly, I was doing some housework the other day and have my shoes on because I was going out to the bins and the phone but the minute I took my shoes off and put my slippers on, I just wanted to sit down, I just want to get comfy. So you might find that actually, you're putting on certain clothes and you might be putting your makeup on putting shoes on those kind of things or even your cup so my husband has a work cup, but he or he has and that helps him to get into work. Psychologists actually have a word for this, they call this enclosed cognition. And so that comes from a little study they did where they were measuring people's concentration. And with half the group, they gave them lab coats like scientist lab coats away. And when they wore the lab coat, they actually made fewer errors I have. And when they told them that the lab coat actually belonged to a painter, the errors went up again. So there's something really bizarre about the way our brain associates different moods, different attention levels, with what we wear.

Graham Allcott  11:33  
And a little tip, if you want to brain signify and you're not able to leave the house, aside from clothes, one of the things I've used quite a lot before is the Joe wicks, hit training type of stuffs. It's like 1015 minutes of exercise, but do that then have a shower and then it's like now I'm getting into my work clothes. So just to create some kind of, you know, like mental transition basically between I'm lounging around at home, having my breakfast, that kind of thing, and suddenly now I'm in That kind of more work base mode. So let's talk about physical space. And this is one of those things where you know, people will be in very different situations, if you have the ability to put your working space in a dedicated room or a specific part of the house, then that's great. If you are working from the kitchen table, you might not feel so lucky. So what are some of the things that we can think about in terms of managing physical space? So one thing to say is try to avoid distractions and multitasking as much as possible. So for example, you don't even if you're working with the kitchen table, try not to be starting to boil the pastor while you're still on a conference call and that kind of stuff. Try and keep a good delineation between those two things. Rather than multitasking, which was always seen as like the holy grail in old time management type books. Think about mono tasking, so working on one thing up to its completion point and then the next thing and then the next thing And also in acting that physically so only having open on the screen in front of you. Windows that relate to the thing that you're actually working on don't have all these different windows open and lots of stuff going on. Likewise, don't have paperwork on the desk in front of you that relates to some other part of work or some other part of life. And you'd be amazed at the focus that you gain just by doing that. One of the workshops we do called Getting your inbox to zero, this is tiny little tip in there, which is turn off your email notifications. And it's probably the thing that I get the most emails back about saying that feedback changed my life, that little things over life is just turning off those notifications. So you don't have that thing in the corner of the screen popping up all the time, trying to get your attention about something else. So keeping focus is as much about what you do physically and in the environment in front of you as it is about you know, mentally, how you think as well. So let's talk about getting good work done. So good work for me looks like having a really good intention being focused, being purposeful. And as I said before, my tasking, focusing really on one thing at a time to do really quality thinking. And sadly, that's not how we always spend our time. One thing to say is that if you generally find that there are days in your working week where you feel a little bit overwhelmed, and the chances are you're feeling that tenfold with what's happening in the world right now. So there's a lovely Buddhist saying, which I think is really appropriate when we think about productivity in order to really just make the point that what's good productivity advice normally is even better productivity advice now says but it's saying is, you should meditate for half an hour a day, half an hour a day, except when you're busy, then you should meditate for an hour a day. So all those good practice productivity things are things that we need to take more seriously now not less. So a little reminder, from the original productivity Ninja, you know, it's really important to just, you know, have pay some attention to the kind of base level simple productivity tips One of the things around this, which I hope, a good few of you are doing already is the idea of having a second brain having a place where you download all of those bits of information, ideas, decisions, nags, all that stuff that's going on in your head, particularly at a time like this. So think about times where you've been one day away from a holiday period, and then you write a big list of stuff. And you just feel more in control, and you just feel better as a result of doing that. So this is a really good tip for right now. Just get it all out of your head. Scientists call this distributed cognition, which basically means once you write it down, you have a better ability to prioritise stuff to really add value to your own thinking and priorities and, and really get the best out of your thinking. So getting it all out of your head into what we call a second brain. So I use an app. The one I use is called nausea. There's an app called to do this which is really, really good and popular to remember the milk crates as a to do as fan and you know, so there's there's a whole number of apps If you're not a big fan of apps, you can do this on pen and paper as well. But getting stuff down so that you basically have two main lists, you have a projects list. So that's the list of all the stuff that you're working on and what those conclusions look like how do you define success in different areas, and then the next physical action that you need to take around each of those things. So being really well defined around that, so that you can physically see yourself doing that next thing. So for example, Chase is not a next physical action, you know, calling someone or emailing someone or mind mapping those next physical actions that you can do. So really being specific with language will help you when you come to look at your to do list to have much more momentum around the things things that you're doing. And it's really important to be thinking about, you know, how we think and our own, you know, base level of productivity habits in particularly in times like this. And we need to think about it. You know, really as if we're simultaneously trying to do two things at the same time. So all of us who work in knowledge, work Essentially, it's about adding value and creating value out of information in some way or another. We're all simultaneously the boss and the work all at the same time. So, as well as having to actually deliver on work, we also have to do the thinking and the definition and defining what work actually means for us and what the end point looks like. So, you know, being really conscious that we need to separate these two things, working out when we're in thinking mode versus when we're in doing mode. And, you know, particularly, you know, what I'm always passionate about is helping people to make space for quality thinking. This feels like a particular time where everyone is, you know, spending a lot of time being very reactive. And it's really hard to make that space for quality thinking. But, you know, without beating ourselves up about it, the more we can try and make that space, the better will will feel in the end.

Grace Marshall  17:48  
Yeah, absolutely. I'm one of the boss moves, thinking things you can do or one of the routines you can get into is start your day with boss mode thinking. And so rather than starting your day with maybe checking your emails and checking Facebook and checking everything else wrong and checking in with everybody else's agenda. Maybe start your day by checking in with your agenda first. So go into boss mode, do some thinking, and maybe plan your top five priorities for today. So if you have a good second brain set up, don't treat that second brain like a to do list that you've just got to keep ploughing on through. And you maybe start to go start to look at constraining and saying, Well, if I could only do five things today, what five things would they be? So a good practice is to maybe use a post it note, because that's a good way of constraining and saying like, it has to fit onto a post it note. Otherwise, if you've got too much on there, you've got too much going on. And it has a really good way of helping you to be ruthless to start thinking, what really matters here. So rather than doing 50 things badly, what five things can I do? Well, today, I feel really good about getting those things done.

Graham Allcott  18:49  
And I think starting the day by being mindful so starting the day by really thinking about what what do I need for me, what's my intention? What's my energy rather than starting the day with the news or email or stuff that you're going to react to, I think can be a really good place to start as well. Let's have a think about attention levels. So this is something that I talked about in my book, How to be a productivity ninja. But we basically have three types of attention. And this is really important, particularly right now. So we have the two to three hours a day where we are most switched on, we have the best energy, and we're able to do our best work and I call that proactive attention. And at the other end of the scale, which is collect, collect the red light on our traffic light here, we have inactive attention. So otherwise known as the kind of mindless zombie attention he made, yeah, zombie mode. So this is where it's like, you know, we've all been there. It's four o'clock in the afternoon, you're looking through your email inbox, you're scrolling up and scrolling down, and you know, the stuff you should be doing, but the lights are on and no one's home. That's inactive attention. And then somewhere in the middle, we have this active attention where Yeah, we can do most of the stuff on our list. Maybe not the most difficult stuff. But certainly better than when we're in that zombie mode. So dividing your, your tasks up into these three different types of attention is a really helpful tip. And in particular, having two or three, you know, parts of your to do list that really relate to these two. So I have a particular mode on my to do list, which is like, proactive attention, mode to the stuff I know is going to be really difficult, really tricky. I separate out on the to do list. So it actually, you know, visually, I can see that and make sure when I know my energy is really good, which for me tends to be in the morning. It's not for everybody, but that is for me. It wasn't when I was younger, by the way, it's just something that kind of changed through life, I think. But I know that enjoying those times I need to make sure I'm being disciplined enough to do the most difficult stuff on my list during that time. So I'm going straight for those kind of things in the morning. And then likewise, I also the flipside of that is not beating myself up, trying to do difficult stuff or even half difficult stuff when I'm in that zombie mode at four o'clock in the afternoon. So I've also got another list Which minus is called mindless on my to do list and it's like it's all the stuff like ordering stuff off Amazon and doing a little bit of research on this thing whatever things I can kind of do with my eyes half shut and you know not beating myself about those times and trying to be more productive than that but just having some useful things to do when you don't necessarily have the best attention

and then it's about how we protect that proactive attention is that two to three hours that we have our productive attention where really we want to be heads down. Cal Newport calls this the monk mode in his book, deep work, you know really focused on doing quality thinking quality, prioritisation, creativity, problem solving all the stuff that our brains are really, really good at. And we need to really make sure that we protect that tension as much as possible because it can get pretty scrambled. This is where one thing that comes in really handy here is the productivity ninja characteristic of stealth and camouflage. So what this found was there was a Study A while ago that found that if you have a one minute email interruption, then it takes you about 15 minutes to recover from that. So getting into stuff in camouflage mode is about saying there must be times in our day where we're actually trying to be deliberately a bit less available. And you know, in an open plan office, this kind of looks like tactical hiding, right? So we quite often when we're in companies talk to people about this idea of tactical hiding. You know, people don't tend to feel too bad about taking two hours away from their desk, to go and sit in someone else's meeting, even if it doesn't necessarily help them solve their part of the world's work. But people feel very guilty about the idea of taking even half an hour away to do really useful planning or quality thinking. And we need to really end this whole sense of guilt around making the space and the time to focus and do quality thinking. Now, of course, where we're at right now, people have a lot of time at home. It's not really necessarily the case that people need To be hiding away from their desk, physically, but we do need to be thinking about digital stealth and camouflage. And so what does that look like in practice? So my favourite button on Microsoft Outlook is the one in the middle there, where it's just circled in red or squared in red, I should say where it says work offline. So that's a really useful button. What that will do is it will allow you to turn off all the incoming new messages. But you can still work on the emails that you've got in front of you, you can still see your calendar and anything else that's in Outlook contacts, etc. But it just allows you to catch up, switch off the rest of the world for a bit and really focused so particularly if you've got, you know, one or two emails that you really need to work on and you just don't need to be distracted by lots of other noise in that time period. That can be a really handy little button to use. And also thinking about your phone and your relationship with your phone. I definitely think in the last few years. The biggest sort of developing challenge around productivity generally is our relationship with our phones and let's not beat around the bush, the brightest minds in the world are sat in Silicon Valley right now as they always are. And their entire job is trying to steal as much of your attention as possible to get you to click on and look at ads. That's the world, right. So I use a particular phone block or app called quality time, which is an Android app. You can also use things like freedom and off time on the iPhone, and even some of the iPhones built in capability. But the idea is it will block your access to certain apps at certain times. So if you decided I want to only look at news in the afternoon, or if you decided, I don't want to see emails between nine and 11. Or I don't want to be able to have access to Instagram until lunchtime like making those decisions. Making them in a really kind of strict way once and then setting up a blocker app will save you so many times or getting interrupted and just allow you to really focus on a nice little app is called forest as well, which solves itself. If I'm typing away on my, you know, Word document or whatever it is, and then I get a bit bored, and it's like, let me go and see what's on my phone, or what's happening, you know, it's really easy to derail ourselves and distract ourselves. So what Forrest does is you set the thing for, say, let's say I'm going to work for half an hour, you know, totally focused for that half an hour periods. And forests in that time grows a tree on the screen. And then if during that time you flip off the forest app to go and look at Instagram or something, the tree dies. So it's a really, really nice, simple little piece of positive psychology to say, I'm not going to look at my phone, I'm going to get totally focused heads down in that mode of using that quality attention as best as I possibly can. Another way of managing attention is

to really think about working in particular bursts. And there's this guy Francesco Cirillo, who invented the Pomodoro Technique named after the kitchen timers that they like tomatoes, and the idea is you work for 25 minutes and then you have one He calls a five minute procrastination break. So five minutes to do whatever you want. And then 25 minutes back on the Pomodoro. And you know, everything that you work on you measure in number of pomodoro is I'm working on this report, it's gonna take me three hours, or whatever it might be. And so it's a really nice way. It's not something that I use day to day, but I definitely have used it in the past when I've been in book writing mode. So I'm going to work on this chapter for 200 hours this morning. And then I'll do another couple of hours on it in the afternoon. And it's a really nice thing, because it's a bit like when you watch the TV show countdown, for those of you familiar with countdown, and it's like you work really fast and your brains working really fast, because time is counting down when it usually counts up. It's I've only got five more seconds to do this or five more minutes to finish this bit of writing, whatever. So just knowing that time has some scarcity is sometimes a nice thing in terms of helping you focus as well.

Grace Marshall  26:51  
It's also really good for the things that you hate doing. And so I find if I put a timer on, it's like, oh, the end is in sight. And so that's really nice. And that's it.

Graham Allcott  27:00  
I only have to work on it for one pomodoro. Right? psychology from being I have to do all of it.

Grace Marshall  27:05  
Definitely. And that's a good example of a frog. So there's a little book by a guy called Brian Tracy called Eat That Frog. And your frog is the unpleasant task that's been hanging around on your students like a bad smell. And the thing about frogs is, the longer you leave it, the worse they seem to smell. And when you finally get on with it, it's often not as bad as you thought. So the idea here is if you eat a frog for breakfast, everything you have afterwards is gonna taste sweet. And so you start you might want to start your day with the hard thing first, get it out of the way, then actually, everything else is gonna be easy By comparison, and you've set yourself up for with momentum and motivation for the rest of the day. Now, this is also it's also much quote, absolutely. So this is also a good way of something you can do virtually. So you could have a frog buddy and accountability buddy, you could set up a virtual checking session. So I've done this before with With my colleague, Kara, a little while ago, we were both working on similar projects. And we just had a day like a make it happen day where we checked in at the beginning and went right. What are you working on first? What am I working on? And then we check in again with morning, how did you get on? And then we have different check ins throughout the day. And it was a great way of keeping us both motivated, keeping that momentum going. And also any places where we got stuck, or we needed some input? We could we have this check in times to do that. So that could be something that you maybe build into some of your work from home and your routines and setups. So yeah, let's talk about why we need breaks. lunchtime, right? And it's not just lunchtime, actually, this is why we need breaks. So I don't know if you've come across the decision fatigue research, but basically, this was a piece of research where they looked at a bunch of parole board judges, and looked at how often would they say yes to parole? And how often would they say no to parole. And they found that at the beginning of the day, your chances of getting parole were about 60% As the day went on, your chances go down after a break, they go back up again, just before lunchtime, you've got no chance. And at the end of the day, you've also got no chance. So what they found was that your ability to make good judgement decisions is like a muscle. Yes, you can train it to do more. But after each decision you make after each rep, that muscle gets tired, it gets fatigued. And when we get to decision fatigue, we basically get to the point where we just go to a default. So for a parole board judge, the default is no because that's the safest answer. But then the question for us is what's my default when I hit decision fatigue, working with one of my clients a little while ago, a company that maybe has a little bit of a meetings addiction, they found that their default was, let's have another meeting. So they actually started creating more and more decisions to make rather than less. And so being able to recognise that you This is why you need a break. So that's how we recover our attention. That's how we get back to that. place where we can do Good thinking. And actually, that's the value of the work that we do is when we're making good decisions, and we're doing good thinking, and so taking breaks, and maybe you starting to have your breaks with other people as well. So for those of you who are thinking, I'm really missing my colleagues, I'm missing that banter around the watercooler around having coffee. How do I recreate that, so it might be doing some virtual coffee, or virtual lunch breaks. If you want to do that with you socialising with people outside of work, that's fine, too. You can maybe catch up with your friends that way, you know, if you don't want to do that with your colleagues, but actually, there's something about maybe using your brakes as a way to reconnect with other people, or reconnect with yourself. So if you're an introvert, and actually you want to have some time to yourself, then make sure those breaks are high value breaks, high value treats. So often our defaults are to go to I'll just scroll on the phone and see what's new on Facebook or what's happening on the news. But if you find that actually at the end of that you feel worse for it. It's a bit like junk food, it might feel like oh yeah, that's my easy go to the, you know, in the instance, but afterwards I feeling worse. And that's not high value break. So it might be swapping back instead for maybe some garden time and being outdoors. And or listen to a piece of music or watch a TED talk and read a book. play the violin. That's mine. Yeah, I love playing the violin to switch off. So whatever it is that helps you to actually feel good afterwards, is a really good monitor a really good way of seeing that's a high value break.

Graham Allcott  31:32  
Yeah, I think I work with so many people who they spend all their day looking at messages. And then they spend all their evening scrolling through different messages on different apps. And I think, looking at how can you make your break times evening times, look and feel different from what you're doing during the day, especially if you're gonna be in the same place the whole time. I think it's really important to just quit well to my lunch about food and fuel. So I wrote this book with a nutritionist called collect her Again a couple of years ago called work fuel, after spending a lot of time being coached by collect, and it really changed my life around nutrition. And what you see on the screen there is the word fuel plates. So this is based on the science of what we should eat to have the best energy for productivity. 50% of our food should be raised by plants, 25%, smarter carbs, 25% proteins, and then thinking particularly about the kind of oils and hydration and everything else that goes into that as well. That is the science of what to eat to have the best energy. And one thing that Collette says that I think is really helpful when you work from home, there was a time where she I was sending her pictures of all the foods that I was eating, and I sent it this really awful. I don't know what it was beans on toast or like something that was like a bit suboptimal. It might have just been toast with Marmite. I was like, this is all I've got in the house. And she sent me back this beautiful bowl of stuff with Keemstar in it and all this stuff. And I you know, I was kind of in defensive mode going Yeah, well, I've got nothing in the house and whatever and That said, You eat well, when you have good food in your fridge. And that's something I've really taken on over the last few years. So just always having a bag of salad in there always having, you know, wraps handy, you know, for me, it's falafel, you know, and, and also thinking about what we might have in terms of tinned food that can help. So one thing that's definitely still on the shelves a lot at the moment is tin fish. And there's a lot of people who will sort of poopoo the idea of tinned food or, you know, tinned fish, but actually it's equally as nutritious. So, thinking about some of those things that we can just have in the cupboards in the fridge. That will just help us to make really quick but good choices. And it doesn't have to take long so most of the lunches I make for myself, take no more than three or four minutes to just throw things together. But it's it's easier to eat healthy when you have that, you know, sort of a good starting point to begin with.

And listen about communications. And so, in particular, some it's something that many of you I'm sure will be Experiencing either for the first time or in much higher frequency than the normal virtual meeting. So we run a whole session called supercharge your virtual meetings. And we just wanted to give you kind of five real quick tips. So first around, this is kind of coming back to this idea of pining for the watercooler and trying to look at how you can replace some of that kind of social time, add in five minutes, the beginning to let people get set up properly, have a little bit of a chat, maybe have some coffee time we've done it before we're on productive meetings we've had, you know, 20 minutes, half an hour of just kind of coffee chat before we start, and that sheduled in. So once you've got that scheduled in it just allows people to connect in a more human way before you start. Stand up. I'm on a standing desk right now. But this is really useful. If most of your time in a in an office would be going to a meeting and then getting up and walking back to desk walking to the next meeting room and so on. And you're losing that by being at home. All day, spend a bit more than the time standing up. That phrase sitting is the new smoking. You know, you, it's actually not healthy for you to stand up all day. But it's really good to be flitting in between sitting and standing. And starting the day with check in or opening around when you start a meeting, so, you know, just asking people to share, perhaps like something that's going on around your, you know, around your house or sharing one thing that's, you know, going well, or your sort of personal experience, you know, sort of through what we're dealing with right now. But starting with something a bit human and allowing everybody to speak because what you're losing by not having face to face, even when you have the camera turned on, which I think is a really good default. And you're kind of losing a little bit of that kind of physicality, body language, and so on. So having some kind of way of just making sure that people connect before you get into the, the content. The chat function can be really useful, particularly for things like, Does everyone agree and rather than everyone say, Yes, and you know, you kind of don't know when you're about to talk over someone often with with video calls, just using the chat for those kind of things. And using the chat also for people to throw ideas, and suddenly you can have 50 ideas on the screen in much less time than it would take everyone to wait for their turn to speak. So sometimes, you know, virtual meetings can actually be even more optimal than, than standard ones. And finally, one way that I think virtual meetings are definitely more optimal, optimal than being together is you can take the action points live on the screen, and therefore you have absolutely no, you know, doubt over what different things mean. It's all there on the screen with real clarity. And I think that can be a really powerful and useful thing. Get clear. So let's talk about communications manifesto is what you see on the on the left hand side of the screen, there is think productive own communications Manifesto. This is just something that we set up to just say, we're going to use slack for these things. We're going to use email for these things. We're going to use this particular channel for this thing and just it's really helped to get a sense of what we're Using for different parts of our work. And I think that's a really just a really handy thing to develop. So if you don't have something clearly written down around that, I think that's a really handy thing. And have something on your own to do lists where you just keep categories for particular people. So, for example, if with your line manager, if you've got 15 things a day that you're going to end up talking to them about, store those up on your to do list, and then when they call you, or if you're calling them, then you've got all those things ready to go through, rather than it be you know, 100 different things that might get missed and 100 different emails, and so on. And then manage expectations. This is a couple of screen grabs, from think productive own Slack channel from last week. So, you know, managing expectations about when you're going to be online versus offline, and what you're doing in that, you know, being slightly offline time and enough, obviously, managing expectations around when you're available when you're not where the boundaries are with that. So I think it's, you know, really important in these kind of times to really, you know, talk about boundaries. And then particularly to talk about hard boundaries versus soft boundaries. So are there particular things that you want to know about, even when you're in childcare mode versus Don't tell me about anything else until I'm back in that work mode? And even these very difficult times? I think it's quite important to try and delineate between when am I in work mode versus when or when am I not, there was a case the other day where someone was trying to be in work mode, and then their child had an accident, because they weren't supervising their kid. And so, you know, we really need to think about that, from a, you know, kind of duty of care point of view those of us with, with kids and also duty of care to people in terms of managing their own lives and stress around this stuff, even if you don't have kids. So you know, I'm a big believer that when you when you're offline, you should be offline, when you're not working, you shouldn't be working. And so if you want to make exceptions to that be really clear about what those exceptions might be.

Grace Marshall  38:50  
Definitely. Okay, let's talk about dealing with uncertainty. So this is why we struggle with change and uncertainty. Something called our lizard brain you might also know is your chimp brain is basically a little part of our brain called the amygdala, which is the primitive part of our brain that's responsible for keeping us alive. And it tends to do that by putting us into either fight or flight mode, it's responsible for that kind of fight or flight, stress response. And all this brain basically sees all change as threat. So when things are changing so quickly at the moment, chances are your lizard brain will be hyperactive. And you know, yes, you can freeze as well, those of you that kind of response, but your lizard brain will be seeing every single change, does that mean oh my goodness, I'm going to do something about that. That could be a threat that could be a threat that can be danger. And so you, one of the things we need to do is start to recognise when is that lizard brain at play, and maybe just pausing for a bit, there's a really useful acronym around decision making called halt. And so that is basically don't make any decisions when you're hungry, angry, lonely or tired. That basically when your lizard brain is in full, full pelt. Like, just stop, and you breathe, give yourself some space, maybe sleep on it, maybe come back to it later, maybe get someone else to send, check that email before you send it back. Those kind of things will help to keep that lizard brain in check. But also noticing that lizard brain and each other as well. It's a bit like the tire totally. If you've got a toddler having a tantrum, you don't try and reason with them. Do you know what sometimes we get adult toddlers as well. So maybe noticing those times to just step away from that argument, and maybe come back to that later. And so that leads us on to ninja agility. And actually, Ninja agility is the fact that we can't plan for everything. So it's how do we respond well to change? How do we set ourselves up? So we've got that flexibility to respond, rather than feel like oh, my goodness, everything's changing, and it's outside of my control. Part of this is a mindset shift, or this is about recognising I can't control everything. And so maybe I need to start Aren't focusing on what I can control. And part of it is also about recognising that we can't plan for everything. So, you know, maybe we need to accept that there is imperfection, and have some margin for when things might go wrong. So when you're planning, you don't plan for every single minute of the day because you can't, and you'll be prepared for the predictably unexpected, the predictably unpredictable, but also recognise that imperfection is going to happen. So some of you are recognising this guy already. I think his video went slightly viral. But you know, I think it's a really good example of how to know what sometimes especially for those of us with kids at home, sometimes this is going to happen. And you know, sometimes it's like, yes, you know what, that's okay. It's okay, that things aren't going to be perfect, but also sometimes making sure that you make a choice in that situation.

Graham Allcott  41:54  
So in my book, The idea of this glory in imperfection, yeah. You know, and that'll That old proverb which is better and better and imperfect dome in Florence than the Castle in the Sky, and actually delivering on stuff. And getting into the habit of delivering stuff delivering your work, that even though it might not be perfect yet is actually a really good skill and a good mindset to develop. We're taught school to make everything perfect and rule under the lines and all that sort of thing. And actually, sometimes, you know, you know, delivering stuff when it's when it's good enough is actually a really useful mindset to have.

And I'd also say I

did see the one did you see that one? There was one with the woman who was on a zoom call, and she took it into the toilet didn't realise.

Grace Marshall  42:39  
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So these things are going to happen. But I'd also say, because we have had some questions come in about like, how do I do this when I'm working from home with kids, and imperfection is absolutely the key here. Don't beat yourself up. Don't try to get everything perfect. And don't feel guilty. So if you need to say to either way, if you need To say to your kids, wait 20 minutes, I'll come back to you, depending on the age of kids, obviously, or, you know, I say to my teenage kids, go fix yourself some lunch. I'm not doing lunch today, there's stuff in the fridge, you sort yourself out, you know, I'm not going to feel guilty about that, because I know they're able to do that. But equally, being able to say to your colleagues, you know what, I know that we said we'd meet at this time, but actually, this is what's going on right now. Can you guys have this call without me? Yeah, that is don't feel guilty about that. Either. Speak up about what you need. And we're proud of each other.

Graham Allcott  43:29  
Yeah. What am I little catchphrases, just when managing people is people first work second, always. And so the always is about saying no matter what's happening, you're dealing with the stuff that's in your life actually comes before you having the time and space and attention for work. And that's a really important principle, I think. Let's talk really quickly about the hidden benefits of working from home. This is not all bad people. There's some good stuff that comes from working from home, a decade or so of mainly So predominantly working from home, I can definitely attest to some of these things. So ninja unorthodoxy things are really in flux and up in the air right now. And what that means is, we get to test and trial and experiment and do things differently. So embrace the unorthodoxy. Try not to hide away from it. Think about your commute, if you no longer have a commute, the thing about commutes is they're a criminal waste of our attention. Often what happens is, people spend an hour of their most quality attention of the day, just driving between one place to another place or sat on a train reading terrible newspapers that are free, or whatever. So you've got that time back, use it wisely, maybe, you know, make out a particular specific plan for that commute time and replace it with something really worthwhile, whether it's learning the violin, or whether it's really quality work that allows you to actually free up some time later on in the day. And think about how you can experiment with your own habits. So maybe changing working hours, starting the day with something different we talked earlier about you know, when you start your day with email, you start your day with everybody else's list of priorities not so just experimenting with what is the standard rhythm of a day look like and how you can, how can you change it. And the doll picture on there is to say, get to know some of the quirks and weirdnesses about your colleagues because this is a really nice thing about the social aspect here is that you're going to get to see inside everyone else's houses. What can you see from that, that just helps you to get to know these people. And there's also some scientific research that says your stress goes down if you stroke your pets so if you've got cats and dogs at home, have them sit next to you and just looking looking up adoringly at you while you're working will actually reduce your stress as well. Definitely therapy right. My other favourite one is that my favourite productivity acronym is non active productivity, non active productivity. So how can you experiment with naps? A it's a good thing. Let's talk about home home time, guys.

Grace Marshall  46:02  
Yeah, so this is home home instead of the OSB like when we go out, but help out. And so you know the difference between working at home, actually home home time. So what we're talking about here is having good boundaries, having some finish lines, and you actually putting those things in place and probably deciding on that ahead of time. If you're waiting until like the late afternoon game, or when should I stop working? That's a harder time to make that decision. So make that decision up front. When are you done for the day? What does your working day look like? What are those finish lines and put those things in place? Because actually switching off is a really good thing for your productivity. Your brain needs breaks, we need to be able to switch off but also we need good recharge moments. Rather than just go on standby. One of the things I often say to people is when you stop working when you have your downtime, do you actually do something that recharges you or do you just go on standby. It's very easy to end up just going on standby. So thinking about How do I recharge? How do I look after myself? Making sure you the basic things like sleep, your sleep, hygiene, phone hygiene. You know, back in the 80s, you had a lot of world leaders who brag about how little sleep they can get away with. But actually, all the research these days, suggests that if we're sleep deprived, the long term cognitive impairment is equivalent to being drunk. So don't do it. Don't sacrifice sleep in the name of productivity? Those of you who are very young children, I know it's not you. It's not ideal. And you have no choice, but don't do it to yourself, right. And so here's the thing. self care, it's not a luxury, it's fuel for your productivity. What can you give yourself in order to be at your best because when you're at your best you can do your best work and do some of those things might not be again, it might be imperfect, you might not be able to do all of those things right now, but maybe looking for what's the one or two small things that I can do for myself that helps me to recharge, what is it that I need? And maybe I can ask that Maybe I can get that to myself. Maybe I can ask that from my colleagues or from my family or my household. And I think I saw earlier there was a question about like high high value breaks and how hard that is, when you've got a family around you, depending on the age of your kids, it can be a really fun activity to just actually go around the family go, what do you enjoy doing? What is play for you? What's something that's recharging for you, and then make sure that each person has an opportunity to have some of that.

Graham Allcott  48:27  
I had a really good lesson about in this at the end of last week, where I worked a stupid number of hours last week, and I knew I was kind of running on empty and I was alone with my little boy and one of my neighbours said, Hey, do you want to just come round, leave him with me for 20 minutes and you go for a run. And honestly, I slept better that night than I had for the whole week. Because you know, that run just recharge me and endorphins and energy and all that stuff. You know, so it can be really easy to neglect these really basic things when we're in periods of high stress. Lots of change, etc. And I think the same is also true of productivity in general. So I have this little saying productivity is about making space for what matters. And you know, right now don't feel too guilty about the idea of saying no to things that don't necessarily feel like they're the biggest priority, it's fine to renegotiate the stuff that was on your to do list, you know, two or three weeks ago versus the stuff that really needs to count now. And ultimately, we get to this place of making much better decisions and doing much more impactful work when we a do less, and be make the space to do that thinking of what needs to stay what needs to go, you know, it's about using that quality thinking to help derive that sense of, of ruthlessness around what we're going to put our time and attention to. And you know, it's a weird, so weird little contradiction thing. But when you do less stuff, you make more impact. So make the space for the stuff that really matters, and don't apply Eyes for what else needs to shift to make that happen. And finally, I just want to make is that we, we've talked a little bit about imperfection already. And I think let's embrace the fact that during those periods, we are human, we do have limitations. There's a lot of books that talk about productivity almost in terms of you should be perfect, and you should be a superhero. And I really firmly believe that when it comes to productivity, no one has special powers. And you might look like a superhero. Sometimes if you're doing this stuff consistently, and really, you know, driving really good productivity. Everyone else might mistake you for some kind of superhero, but let's embrace the fact that we are all human, we have limitations. And, you know, really embrace that and be mindful of giving yourself that that break over the next few weeks. So we're gonna take some questions. Grace is just going to start looking at the q&a and then read a couple of questions out for us. Just while we're doing that, just throw binder have our contact details. We're going to talk in a couple of minutes about a couple of the other things that we have available, I think productive. I'd love you to subscribe to my podcast. It's called Beyond busy. I'm going to continue with episodes over this period to keep you entertained, hopefully. So please do subscribe to be on busy, just had Tim Campos on podcast isn't the ex CIO of Facebook, so talking about Facebook and, and also his new venture as well, that my book is how to be a productivity ninja. Grace's book is how to be really productive. There's a both available. Yeah, they're on that big website, but they're also on hive, which is a UK based website for ordering books and they take their stock from local bookstore so important at times like this, and think productive is our company. So you can go to think realty.com give you more information on that in a set price. What are we saying on the questions? I haven't been reading the chat by the way. So if anyone's been DirectX in particular things that me I haven't seen it so but

Grace Marshall  52:03  
yeah, probably into the q&a, there's something on the chat that you want answering pop on to the q&a, there are a couple of things where people just wanted to kind of reiterations. So Holt was hungry, angry, lonely and tired.

Graham Allcott  52:16  
That's what I got. I picked that one up from people who are sort of managing markets and financial data and that kind of thing. And I think, you know, particularly in terms of how you make decisions during crisis times, I think it's really

Grace Marshall  52:31  
definitely coms Manifesto. I think we're going to share that in the work from home link. Right. So

Graham Allcott  52:36  
yes, I don't think it's on there right now. But we will put it on there. Because this is a thing that we I mean, this isn't something we developed last week. This is the thing we've been using and living by for for three, four years. And it grew out of our email etiquette workshop, which is all about, you know, how to think about etiquette of email and culture of email as a team. And then we thought, well actually hang on. This isn't just about email. It's about comms more generally and what's happened slack and everything else. So yeah, really useful thing. And even if you don't, I mean, I think it's good to you don't have to have a nice graphically designed page, even if you just have five bullet points that you send out on email or put into a Word document something that will just give people a good sense of clarity around it. And you can just do that at the start a team meeting, you know, just 1015 minutes just to kind of get clear. You'd be amazed actually, when you do that the kind of bugbears that people have or the things that people bring up.

Grace Marshall  53:30  
Yeah, yeah. So we'll definitely show an example of that. Yeah. And that will let you know the link for where all those resources can be later.

Yeah, so

Unknown Speaker  53:41  
question here. How do you find a suitable space to work if you're limited for spaces in your home or have others working from home under the same roof now? Yeah, yeah, really good question. I mean, certainly I'm we're really lucky that we've got everyone in a separate space here. But if you're in a flatshare, and things like that, it's going to be tricky, isn't it?

Graham Allcott  53:59  
Yeah. And I think what I'd say on that is even if all you have is a kitchen surface or you know, even if it's just somewhere in your living room, you know, have one, one chair in your living room as where you're going to work from. And then the other part of the sofa is where you sit and chill. So that's that brain signifier thing this is real stuff, right? So you know actually just delineating it in your head between Okay, now I'm in relaxation mode. Now I'm in work mode, I think that really helps. And also trying to minimise the kind of setup time of that. So you know, having stuff on a board, you know, investing in a big, big word or something that will just allow you to just pick stuff up, move off the kitchen table, whatever those things might be. I'm in my, in my shed at the bottom of my garden, as I very lovingly affectionately refer to as here, but yeah, if you're, you know, if you're doing this from the corner of a room, which I've certainly done myself in the past, having a way to just, you know, just investing 10 minutes in just thinking about the ways to just quickly pick stuff up and put it down and all that sort of thing.

Unknown Speaker  55:01  
And also just negotiating. So you might be negotiating space with people, you also might be negotiating sound. So one of the things that I had to say my husband had the gardeners over trimming the hedges today. And we were like, okay, you need to be really quiet between half one and half, two because I'm doing this, but then also imperfection as well. So just before we came online, a huge Bumblebee came in here. So I had to disappear just now to open the door for it. And that's the sort of stuff is going to happen as well. There's quite a few. A

Graham Allcott  55:26  
couple of questions before we finish.

Unknown Speaker  55:28  
Absolutely. So there's quite a few questions here about kids. So yeah, currently, My children are home from school, finding it difficult to actually do my work and sit down, explaining my seven year old work to her and quite a few similar sort of things.

Graham Allcott  55:41  
And I'm in that boat too. And I was asked this the other day and my take on this is back to that experimentation and unorthodoxy thing. So I have really good energy levels and it's very quiet early in the morning before my son gets up, and I have less good energy but it's also quiet able for me, and I'm able to work after he goes to bed in the evening. So moving some of those, you know, hours of work into the times where the house is a bit more quiet and kids are in bed or, or whatever i think i think that can really help. And that's no substitute for when you've got to be online, obviously, in the middle of the day, and they're around. So I'm aware that they're, you know, this huge challenges A lot of people have around my stuff right now,

Grace Marshall  56:23  
when my kids were

Graham Allcott  56:24  
trying to not be perfect that stuff like and trying to manage those those boundaries, the bosses,

Grace Marshall  56:30  
I used to have them with kids and without kids missed years on being proactive. So when they're around kids can do when they're having a nap or they're like happy for the telly, here's what I can get on with. So that could be another thing with your second brain to help you with that.

Graham Allcott  56:44  
Yeah, and certainly most of the things that are on my mindless list I could do when my son is around and without sort of, you know, jeopardising his safety obviously. So there's, you know, there's that kind of base level, you know, first it's the duty of care, isn't it? To your kids, and then it and then it's like, what can I? What can I usefully do during that time? And I think maybe again, not beating ourselves up about doing the most important work when clearly we're going to be half distracted and kind of half in and half out in terms of our attention. But yeah, again that prioritising that really quality attention, I think is the most important thing.

Grace Marshall  57:20  
Absolutely. What tools do you find best to maintain the social across the desk chats that you don't get in a series of formal video conferences? Do what you can actually just keep zoom open. I do

Graham Allcott  57:31  
that actually. When I've been I've just been writing a book with one of our other ninjas, Haley, we're writing a book all about meetings, face to face meetings. Students come out in September, I think we're probably removing the date of that, because I don't think many people that bothered about hearing about face to face meetings then. But yeah, we will work for two to three hours and just do a kind of sprint of writing but just leave zoom open. So like, okay, Graham's typing, where he's doing his own thing. We're not collaborating. But then every now and again, it's like Haley, have we done anything about this or just something might pop up and I found that a really useful way to work. The other one is WhatsApp. I love WhatsApp voice in particular. And that thing of not sure what to do about this, what do you think? And being able to hear that into intonation in someone's voice is much more powerful in terms of communication, I think, than just an email or a text message on WhatsApp or wherever. So the voice message thing on WhatsApp I think is really nice thing. Me and Elena who's been productive Managing Director, we communicate almost exclusively through WhatsApp voice. It's it's been 95% of our entire communication is what's up voice messages. And generally under about a minute long, sometimes much longer.

Grace Marshall  58:46  
And I think your meetings book does have stuff about online meetings as well, right?

Graham Allcott  58:50  
It does. Yeah, but I think that you know, chances are a lot of stuff we're getting moved back with it.

Grace Marshall  58:56  
The um, the other thing to mention is the books as well. So any of the books you recommend to read well clearly how to be productive D ninja will talk you through how to get your second brain set up all of those things. And my book is a little bit different people have described it as the journey like or the companion to the journey. So if you stick around lizard brain suffer I'm kind of switching mindset and there's a load of stuff in there that's that's useful for that, as well as things like ditching guilt and jumping off the guilt train saying no, some really good examples on how to say no and set boundaries on there, as well as all the other productivity ninja books as well. Right?

Graham Allcott  59:34  
Yeah, right. So work for you. I mentioned there, which is the Book about how to eat to have the best energy for productivity. A couple of other ones that I like so we've mentioned really briefly Cal Newport there and his monk mode idea that's from a book called Deep work, which is one of my favourite productivity books. The other one I really love is Seth Golden's book linchpin

which is really nice.

Grace Marshall  59:58  
So I really like them. Adam grants originals. Really good for thinking unorthodoxy and thinking creatively, especially in times like this. Bernie Browns always my go to when it comes to dealing with that kind of lizard brain side of things and you know, those kind of feelings of guilt or shame and vulnerability. So, yeah, she's got some really good stuff as particularly around how do we deal with like fear and uncertainty.

Graham Allcott  1:00:22  
But she's better on Ted than in books. No,

Grace Marshall  1:00:24  
actually, she reads her own books as well. So Ted, Ted Talks. Yes, her books are really good and really easy to digest. And plus, she also reads them so if you want to listen to it on audio, and audible and audiobook, then yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Graham Allcott  1:00:39  
I never read my own books on Audible.

I was advised against

Grace Marshall  1:00:46  
How do you keep up with second brain discipline when you have an urgent deadline, which appears more important than updating brain number two?

Graham Allcott  1:00:52  
Well, I think the thing is, so a couple of things on that one is yes, if there's something like massively urgent my second break We'll go a little bit out of kilter. So I'll neglected for two or three days for sure. And I think that's okay. The trick is not to let it get beyond the two to three days. So as soon as you can, jumping back in and doing that bit more maintenance around second brain, because ultimately it's about trust, but when you trust your second brain, that it holds everything, then you can drop everything and go and do the urgent thing because you because you know what you're dropping, and you know, it's all contained in that second brain. Whereas if it gets three weeks, four weeks down the track and you haven't been maintaining it, it's just a longer job to put it back together. So definitely don't beat yourself up. If there's a couple of days where you're not, you know, feeling fully on top of second brain. I think that's really normal. Yeah, it's good one here has to add to that, Chris.

Grace Marshall  1:01:48  
Yeah, I mean, it's a tool. It's a tool that serves you not something that drives you in terms of the relationship you have with that.

Graham Allcott  1:01:56  
There's definitely people send me emails saying I'm doing this tonight. percent and I'm doing this 90%. But I don't feel good about it. And it's like so I think sometimes people get too. There's there's a certain type of person who gets too anxious about, about doing productivity perfectly and productivity being the end goal. And I think neither of those things are

Grace Marshall  1:02:17  
useful. Yeah. There's an interesting question here. How can you maintain motivation whilst work events seem to world events seem to make work feel a bit pointless? If you're not working from home services? I've got some thoughts about this. What do you think? Right?

Graham Allcott  1:02:31  
Yeah. Well, I mean, Matthew met Matthew, one of our colleagues mentioned this last week, and I wholeheartedly agree with him. He said, the people he knows that are dealing with this the best and are the happiest, and the people who are on social media the least and looking at news the least, I don't really look at news beyond like a few minutes a day, I'll have a look at the BBC site. And what you'll find is everybody else sends you the stuff you need to hear about anyway, so I'm not going to sit down every day waste. Half an hour of my time watching government news conferences and stuff. Likewise, Facebook and you know, Twitter, they can be spaces that are full of kindness and nice acts and stuff, but they're also, I think, quite stressful spaces. And they don't want to spend time and so I think that that's a good you'll be surprised if you just say no to a lot of that stuff. For me, it increases motivation. And I think, you know, ultimately, we're in a, we're in a time period right now where there's a lot of stuff that's up for grabs, a lot of stuffs gonna change a lot of stuffs under threat. And I think looking at where, where you sit within that challenge, either for you or your company or for your community. I think there's there's a whole up whole heap of useful stuff that does not involve being working in a hospital or my neighbour works on the My neighbour is a volunteer on the lifeboats down here in Brighton, but it's like, the stuff that doesn't involve that stuff, but is really vital. It's all to be done right now. So I think there's, you know, there's a, there's a lot of reasons to do good work.

Grace Marshall  1:04:06  
And I think so my view on this, I thought about it a lot, I've seen a lot of particularly small business owners kind of going well, I need to keep alive and afloat, but at the same time, the services I offer and maybe around like communication, or around your creativity and things like that. And so my view is, look, if you there are going to be people who are going to be worried about how am I going to pay the mortgage, how am I going to feed my family. And if that's you, you do when you're in that space, you don't have bandwidth and think about anything else. So if that's you don't, you just give yourself a break. Don't feel like you have to reinvent your business, you have to get your that kind of stuff right now. Just do what you need to do make choices that are kind to you and you and to people around you. But if you're in a position where you've got a bit more cognitive bandwidth, but maybe if you've got some buffer and new business or you've got some time on your hands like you've got that bandwidth, then use that You know, to think creatively, and you're How can I use myself to serve people to help people? And don't you know, now is not the time to hide that light under a bushel man's not the time to go or what will people think about me, if I start putting that out there, it's like, if you've got stuff that will help put it out there, and do it in the service of those who don't have the bandwidth

Graham Allcott  1:05:18  
to do that. And also, I wonder if there was something that, let's say, three, four months ago, before all this happened, you were regularly sat at your desk thinking I've only had a month, where the world it's where the world stopped. And I could really focus on developing that thing, you know, the website for the college thing that you do, or you know, hobbies that you want to learn or a skill that you want to learn or something that you want to put out there as a voluntary thing, or a side hustle to work, whatever, whatever the thing is, it kind of feels to me like there's there's gonna be a lot of people with very little time in the next two, three months, and there's probably also going to be some people who are finding a lot more time on their hands than they used to and If that's you, so gift, right? Certainly, there's plenty of downside, but maybe there's some flicker of upsides to that as well.

Grace Marshall  1:06:09  
Oh, hi Haley. Haley's gonna trampoline. I'm

Graham Allcott  1:06:12  
just looking through Oh, trudging through the track.

Grace Marshall  1:06:15  
Let me just let me just share a tip. So if you're feeling really tired, and you haven't moved, if you have a trampoline, go and use it, you are allowed to and that was my secret tip. Whenever I needed to work when I was tired when the kids were little. I would bounce on the trampoline. It's great way to wake

Graham Allcott  1:06:33  
up because Haley's got a trampoline in her house. Yeah.

Grace Marshall  1:06:36  
So she's off to bounce on the trampoline. When,

Graham Allcott  1:06:38  
when I went round to do a writing day at Haley's house, I had a great play on the trampoline is

Grace Marshall  1:06:44  
brilliant.

Graham Allcott  1:06:45  
Right, one more question. Last but definitely not least, the best question of the day.

Grace Marshall  1:06:52  
Oh, that's special. You look through it.

Oh, what if you don't even have a chair or table having to work from bed, then it's fixed.

Graham Allcott  1:07:02  
Yeah, you know, the thing is the ergonomics of that are really not good. Yeah, so I in all seriousness doing that for a long period of time, I think is really quite dangerous in terms of things like you know, bad backs and bad posture and RSI and all this kind of thing. So I would if that's your if that's like really what you see is the only default that you have right now I would ask a different question which is what do I need? What can I go out and get off Gumtree or from a neighbour or borrow or you know anything but you know, actually stand up at the kitchen counter if the alternative is bed. Yeah, ergonomics are really important.

Grace Marshall  1:07:50  
And also, you know, maybe look at your living space, maybe look at typing less. So, like we're going to talk about voice messages. You can record you voice messages and email them and things like that. So maybe look at where you can speak more and type less. And you're not doing this all the time. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So listen, guys, we've answered some of your questions. But I'm aware we haven't answered all of them. So do get in touch if there's a particular thing you'd like us to answer. So So our contract is right at the beginning, here, please do get in touch with us. And we will answer as many as we can. And we are running these sessions as well. In house, a lot of clients, a lot of companies have said, Look, can you come and do something for us. So if your organisation would like to hold this for your people, and get in touch with us, the link at the bottom will lead you to all the resources for the workshop, but also the sessions that we do. So we're doing a 90 minute session in house where we can do some action planning and make it a little bit more bespoke for like the specific policies or tech or whatever it is that's going on within your work context. We do do a session called supercharge your virtual meetings as well. So if you need some help with that, we can definitely help and also leading Remote teams. So actually, John's talk a little bit about that green.

Graham Allcott  1:09:04  
Yeah. So leading leading remote teams, obviously huge issue at the moment. So picking up on some of those things we talked about there around communications manifestos, and you know how to have conversations with other people in the team around when they are first is one of the on, and many other things as well. So, yeah, that that's something that we're just launching with some of our clients in response to what's happening as well. And not forgetting all the regular stuff that we do as well. So how to be a productivity ninja and getting your email inbox zero, where, you know, we're running all of those as live virtual sessions as well. So our our normal stuff applies. And it's, you know, we're very much trying to make it as much as possible business as usual. Through this period. Yeah. So just just for me, just to say thank you to everybody for being here on this call for this hour. Yeah, just a reiteration of those three workshops that we I think can really help for your teams and organisations right now. And you'll find loads more detail and some really nice resources that we've put on the web page dedicated to working from home. So think productive.com Ford slash w, f h and drop us a line and let us know what you think as well.

Grace Marshall  1:10:19  
Brilliant. Thanks so much, guys.

Graham Allcott  1:10:27  
So hope you enjoyed that. And thanks to a few people as part of this episode, and just making this whole thinkproductive.com/wfh project happen. So I want to firstly just thank grace for really being with me every step of the way. We, we wrote two new workshops in two weeks. And just to put that in perspective, usually they take about three or four months. So we were absolutely breakneck speeding and developing through this stuff and being grateful spent many hours in the week before that, putting that together just on the phone just frantically working out where things go and how things fit together and all that stuff. And yeah, I always just love working with Grace. So thank you Grace. Thanks also to Elena our superstar MD think productive steering the ship just generally over the last few weeks or months it's been as everyone knows, it's been a pretty interesting time. But also for touching up the slides and making sure that we've got you know, all the sort of correct details on there. I'm a bit sloppy in the way that I do it and Elena has a bit more detail focused so always have to sort of have the firt the first meal they go through his mind to create them and then the second meal they go through is the latest kind of perfect them and make them good. So thanks for that. Thanks also to Jess for putting the the webpage together. Thinkproductive.com/wfh and really the whole team around the world, you know, there's been just such a lot of interesting collaboration happening, new stuff happening. And, you know, it's been good to see it's a really difficult time for a company like ours who, you know, predominantly work face to face, I still think working face to face is better, you know, as a learning experience as an immersive experience as a way of leaving the room and people have got their inboxes to zero or they've got a plan around meetings, or they've got a plan rather, they're in productivity. It's just better to do this things face to face, in my view, having done both, but we have adapted we a lot of our stuff has gone online. And, you know, a few of our clients have postponed stuff until the autumn but quite a few of our clients have actually been doing stuff on zoom and moving things in that way as well, which is very helpful in terms of a cash flow and keeping our ninjas busy and all of that so, so yeah, just thank you to all of those people. Obviously this episode sponsored by Think Productive as per usual, thanks also to Mark Steadman, my producer on the show, and Emilie, my assistant for getting the word out around this and various other things. The other thing I just want to mention is my new mailing list. So if you go to www.grahamallcott.com, you'll see at the bottom of each page, little sign up for weekend, sign up for my mailing list every Sunday, just sending out something positive for the week ahead. So sign up there. It's growing. We had like 17 people in the first one and went out a couple of weeks ago, and it's now rocketing up, so, so really good to see. And I'm really working on trying to get round to everybody that I know, and just sending them emails saying, Hey, I'm doing this mailing list, you wanna sign up, but it's just such a laborious process. It's a bit like, yeah, I mean, maybe it's one of those things that you should do at the start of your career, not like 10 or 11 years in But hey, I'm, you know, better late than never. So yeah, sign up to the mailing list. I'd love you to sign up to that grahamallcott.com And the other thing I just wanted to mention before I finish is last week's episode so had some really good reactions to the episode with Katz Kiely, and what she's been doing around getting PPE onto the front lines. So if you if you go to frontline live, you'll get the gist of it and find out more and obviously you can listen to the episodes. I mean, it's a fascinating episode anyway, but in terms of what she's doing right now, just super important. So if you know of anyone on the frontline in the NHS, working without the protective equipment that they need, then all they need to do is go onto Twitter and put the hashtag frontline map and then hashtag their postcode, so the postcode of where they work, and then the hashtag of what they need. So we need masks, we need this, we need that whatever. And just put those three hashtags are the tweets. And what that will do is we'll just map it Companies then picking that up. A lot of companies are just delivering stuff for free just to bypass a lot of the NHS procurement rules and all that just to get the right equipment to the right place as quickly as possible. So amazing work being done by Katz there and her team, all volunteer led frontline dot live is the website where you can find out a bit more. And yeah, I just can't emphasise enough like pass that message on to anybody that you know, working in the NHS working on the front line. And yeah, let's just solve this stupid ridiculous PP problem. It's just it feels ridiculous. It feels ridiculous to me by the way that we've got people who are 100 years old, like walking around and fundraising for the NHS as well like when all this is over, can we have a conversation please about how the NHS should not be a charity. We pay tax and the tax should fund the NHS and that should not be cut as it has been in real terms for the last however many years It's just it makes me so mad that it's almost become acceptable and normal because we're in this situation that we need to fundraise for the NHS. I just think that is just a ludicrous idea. Anyway getting on my hobbyhorse, I'll jump off and say Say good night. 

Goodbye and see you in a week or so types so as always with this episode you can find a lot of further details at get beyond busy comm you can find out what I'm doing at Graham Allcott calm and you can find out more about how think productive can help you with working from home at think productive comm forward slash w f h. We'll be back either in a week or two. You know the drill by now. I never have it quite worked out, but certainly within the next two weeks with another episode. So until then, take care