Beyond Busy #78 with The Happy Start Up School

Graham Allcott 0:05

Hello, 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. On this episode, it's me it's me talking to Lawrence and Carlos, from the Happy Startup School. Really fun conversation to have. They're so thoughtful and grounded as people that I think they just bring the best out in their guests by just bringing a really nice energy to things. So yeah, really loved it really had a great time on there. And yeah, I think we had just over 100 people tuning in live to it. And we thought we'd just put it out as a podcast as well because it just, you know, seemed like a really good conversation to have right now. So just before we get into it, just to say hope you're well, the whole conversation really is all about productivity in a pandemic. And it talks a lot about some of the work life balance and definitions of success. You know, viewpoints within that, too. So it's very much on brand Beyond Busy this whole conversation. But it's really, you know, steeped in this weird, fuzzy, middle ground that we now find ourselves in. So, you know, lockdown rules are clear, everyone knows what they're doing. Everyone knows what they're not allowed to do. And in some ways, I find this current environment just like even more confusing, because it just feels like what we're allowed to do, again? What's one of the rules so if you're struggling with that, just know you're not alone. And it's at least some tentative steps towards, you know, some kind of economic normality that we might be returning to who knows. Just Taking it a day, a week and, you know, baby steps, time at the moment. So that's just the sort of nature of things but hope you are well hope you're surviving Hope everyone you know is, is okay too. A couple of quick things before we go into the episode. Firstly, just to say if you're listening to this because you are a regular, longtime Beyond Busy listener, and you don't know about my mailing list, then I have been setting up this mailing list over the last five, six weeks. It's called Rev up for the Week. And the idea is just to put some positive ideas in your inbox every Sunday night and just review up for the week. Are you ready for the week ahead? So if you're not signed up, just go to GrahamAllcott.com and on the homepage there you'll see a little form. In fact, I think it's pretty much at the bottom of every page on the site. So just fill in and that'll add you on to the mailing list. And then you'll get my Rev up for the Week emails. And also just to say that this episode is sponsored by Think Productive. So that's my company. And we run productivity workshops, both face to face in normal times, and also completely 100% virtually too. So if you're interested in that we have offices in the UK, in North America, Western Europe, based at the Netherlands and Australia, New Zealand. So if you are in or somewhere near one of those countries around the world, then had to thinkproductive.com, and find out more about how our stuff can really help. We've got a couple of really specific COVID workshops, we've got one called the Productivity Minjas Guide to Working from Home. We have one called Leading Remote Teams, which has actually been our probably most popular one over the last month or so where people are really starting to get their head around, what's the longer term remote working environment and look like and also one called supercharge your virtual meeting. So if any of that interests you along with, of course, how to be a Productivity Ninja, get your inbox zero all that other stuff that we do, then head to thinkproductive.com and we would love to help you out. Let's get into this episode. So this is we're using crowdcast for this, which is not a software that I've used before but it works really well. It's a Friday lunchtime, and I think you're gonna really enjoy this conversation. So let's jump straight in is myself with Laurence and Carlos from Happy Startup School.

Carlos 4:32

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, wherever and whenever you are. Whether you are watching this live today on crowdcast thank you very much and welcome today. Or if you're listening to this on the podcast, I hope you're I hope you're in a different place to where we are now. In this in this chaos that we're finding ourselves in today we are joined by our good friend Graham Allcott. Hi, Graham. How are you?

Graham Allcott 5:03

I'm good. Thank you.

Carlos 5:04

Awesome. And of course, as always, my sidekick I want to call you today, Lawrence,

Laurence 5:11

Your business other half. Thank you.

Carlos 5:15

As with all of these calls, it would be nice to have a bit of a check in to start with and then just say how you're feeling and how your day has been so far. And Graham, about you?

Graham Allcott 5:26

Well, this morning, I press send on a book that I've been working on. Well, it's kind of Yeah, yes, another one. But also, it's one that's been hanging around for a while. So I've been writing this book with one of my colleagues, Haley Watts. It's called How to Fix Meetings. And of course, when the pandemic hit, my publishers came back after the second draft saying, Hey, can we put loads of stuff in about Zoom and just really the the point of the book is all about how you meetings are one of the last spaces for people to share attention. And I fundamentally believe that that is better done face to face. So I kind of fought them a bit on that. But anyway, after spending far too long on a book, it's it's back with my editor and feeling free and relieved. happy about it. So yeah, a bit tired to for that's alright.

Carlos 6:23

Oh, I love the idea of feeling free and really

Laurence 6:31

I'm good, the bit that muggy. It's a bit muggy in Brighton today. Actually, we talked about the sea mist is rolling off the sea after a scorching day or night last night. But you had a busy morning I gave a talk to an Indian startup tech startup conference this morning, which was interesting in between an oil Baron and a VC. So definitely counter counter culture, let's say talking about making happiness your business model but not as good

Graham Allcott 7:00

I bet you had the best slides.

Laurence 7:02

They were really sexy.

Carlos 7:04

By far,

Graham Allcott 7:05

like out of those three, right?

Carlos 7:08

He does remind me of where when we were in, in India, in Chennai, go back home. What was the name of the conference?

Laurence 7:17

It was CII who were like the main I did I like chambers of commerce of India, but like huge, big, you know, everything from big business to small business network. And it was a annual conference in Chennai, a friend of ours invited us along. And I think that's just fair to say like, put us in it by giving us an hour to fill with like 500 suited businessmen at sort of wedding tables. And we were the least smart people there by a mile.

Carlos 7:46

We did have Jack Hubbard, do a rap. Yeah. 500 people in suits, waiting for someone to give them nuggets of wisdom on how to do stuff and where you get started. That's the way we roll.

Yeah, similar to you, Lawrence, I am feeling very muggy the heat is I'm really not enjoying this heat when it comes to sleeping and especially when you have a like one of those temporary type mattresses just soaks up the heat. I just wanted to have some kind of ice bath going on instead of that but so feeling a little bit tired. It would be lovely to hear how everyone else is feeling. So please type into the chat. Whether you're feeling energised, excited, tired, muggy. And also it'll be if you want to if you feel like if you're happy to that was a good place to connect with other people who, for us. Everything that we do is about creating shared spaces, ultimately creating safe spaces to connect with like minded people. So if you'd like to share maybe your Twitter profile LinkedIn profile Instagram, but so People can get a feel for who else is watching. Feel free to do that as well. So yeah, today we're talking about productivity during a pandemic. And ironically, I think I've been feeling the least productive over the past three months and I ever have been. So yeah. How has your experience been Graham over the past three months? You've just written a book. So I hate you being so productive, but how have your productivity levels been like?

Graham Allcott 9:38

I think I mean, his I think maybe the good news is that even even the Productivity Ninja struggles during the pandemic. So like, I write books about this stuff, right. And actually, I think it's been really up and down. And I think what I've noticed a lot of people, you know, people sort of follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn and places talking quite a lot about the guilt that they feel about not being productive at certain points or feeling fearful about whether they're working on the right things. And I think so much about productivity always comes down to fear and guilt. They're very pervasive, you know, lizard brain emotions, that we that we feel quite a lot. So, you know, for me, it's it's definitely been very up and down, like it has for lots of people. And I was just thinking about this before. It's no coincidence that I've really felt the last two weeks have been my most productive for a good while. And they've coincided with, I think, just a general sense, rightly or wrongly, politically, leave that to one side in the country that kind of we're easing out of lockdown that sense seems to be there. And also, it's coincided with the two weeks where my Little boys at school full time. So, you know, I just think that's no coincidence is it and I think when I mean, it's very easy to see the time suck and the time pressures around homeschooling or home, facilitating some learning or home, ignoring homeschooling depending on what you're doing. But I think what's maybe less obvious to see is the, you know, just the mental load and stress that is caused by a period of huge uncertainty. And I think, you know, we've had to adapt and change a lot, just in everyday habits and behaviours. And again, I think it can be very easy to overlook the stressful effect that that has on the mind. And therefore, it's really understandable that there's just less of our attention or less of our emotion, less of our energy left to do really good, productive, interesting, clear work. I just think that that's the truth, right? And I think, for me, that's a really good place to start this conversation because I feel like the alternative, which is to say, Hey, I'm going to use the time in lockdown to learn the violin and, you know, read philosophy and, you know, that stuff that people were particularly sort of spouting on Instagram in the first sort of three, four weeks of this thing. I think again, gets us back into to guilt and feelings of inadequacy very quickly.

Carlos 12:31

There's the thing that resonated a lot for me, there's this that feeling of uncertainty and so you suddenly everything stopped. And so there's a say, Oh, well, maybe we don't need to do anything but then if you couple that with uncertainty, all that nothing that's just gets filled in with fear of like, Oh shit, what's gonna happen next. And well, that's my assumption with with maybe some people who just who, who are very used to being busy How about you, Lawrence? What was your flexion? on sort of like dealing with productivity over these past few months?

Laurence 13:08

Yeah, like Graham, I think I firstly felt like there'd be a lot of time expensive time because, like, well, we had some stuff to sort out beginning like cancelling our events. So there's lots of practical things we had to do, which actually made us more busy with kids at home, which felt quite stressful. And then thinking about what does work look like business look like for the rest of the year, and was trying to navigate an online programme of founders who are also going through the same transitions or questions. But then I kind of found peace with it. Really, I think it's for me, it's more. I've always liked the idea of working less, but be more efficient with my time. And so in some ways, I remember this and the kids were young. When I got a puppy a couple of years ago. It sounds strange, but having to look after something else or having less time to focus on work actually meant you have to be more than I prioritise your work. Better, and actually, hopefully, once I've been more productive, or maybe been more effective in the time I have worked and unaccepting, like Graham said that some things just slip. And that's fine. And, you know, realise that Actually, no, I'm not gonna have more time because I've got two kids at home and my wife's work at home, and we're bumping into each other around the house and, and I'll go look after my mom around the corner in the neighbour. And so it's like, Ah, you know, you could spend the whole day sort of helping everyone else. And then actually, you've got like, an hour to get some work done, and you feel bad about it. So I think we had about three weeks of it and then realised Yeah, to stop, like you said, lose the guilt, because we're just trying to do our best really.

Graham Allcott 14:36

I'm just noticing Kim's comment in the chat there saying I'm logged on to teach me to slow down, which I'd say has increased my productivity paradox. And I think both this idea of slow and fast and the sort of the paradox there and also just the paradox around time and productivity, I think a really useful things to mention. So generally, when you have constraint. When you have, let's say, you know that you only have this one hour in the day to do stuff, it will focus the mind to really think about what's your biggest priority. Now that 80 8020 Classic kind of productivity idea of the, you know, 20% of what you do is what adds 80% of the value until you look for those 20%. I did a experiment a few years ago, I did this year of extreme productivity experiments, and one of them was called flipping the nine to five, where I worked five to nine, and I did it five to 9am for a couple of weeks, which is actually still how I've got this book done, actually, in the last couple of weeks has been a lot of five times but I'm just working four hours a day. And what I really learned from that was I you know, I've written a book about productivity, I live and breathe I talk to clients about it all the time. But just changing my day from nine to five to five to nine suddenly just made me think wow, like, this stuff that I was allowing into my space and you know, making space for that actually. You know, was a bit less relevant or a bit less useful. And when you've only got four hours, it really focuses you to do the most important work and the best work. So it's it's a weird thing like constraint. As long as you've clarified, it can be a really useful tool for productivity. And you can kind of see it as a positive rather than a negative. But it's about that clarity. So it's about saying, This is the hour that I've got these the two hours I've got and putting boundaries around that putting some deadlines and times around that maybe handover with your, you know, other half if you've got kids at home, that kind of thing, but just having a really strong boundary around that stuff. And like a like from here to here. And yeah, you'll be amazed at what you can do in 234 hours as opposed to having a full day.

Laurence 16:44

When someone says productivity, you must get this all the time that in my head, there's an impression that I haven't been productive because I haven't put the hours in, like you said, versus if I look back in the last few months, I actually think in terms of the outcome of the work we've done has actually been very effective, but maybe not been hugely productive in terms of it's not been as many hours put into it. But you said, so do you get that the whole idea of the language around it being difficult for some people?

Graham Allcott 17:09

Yeah, I think so I think often, internally within think productive. So we're going into companies and selling workshops on on productivity, getting your inbox to zero fixing meetings, and how to be a productivity Ninja, this kind of stuff. And often, the conversation that we're having with the person who books us is about productivity, and that being linked to better returns better profit, like outcomes for the business. And then the conversation we have in the room when we're running workshops, it's much more around managing your stress, working smarter, not harder, you know, getting a better balance with the work that you do. So it's kind of like this double edged sword thing where actually when you when you give people that autonomy and ability to really look after their own minds and to make their own constraints make their own rules. Their own schedules, all that sort of stuff. And you tend to just find better outcomes. But of course, what's what that's kicking back against often, particularly in bigger companies is just this whole presenteeism thing. You know, like, you're seen as being successful and efficient if you're sat at your desk, and the ones who get noticed the ones who sends the email at eight o'clock at night saying, Hey, who wants to get pizza guys, you know, and all that sort of stuff. As just nonsense. You know, I think there's a lot of talk about hustle and sort of hustle culture. The whole Gary Vee sort of cult is built around this idea of work your face off work 100 hours a day, and all that sort of stuff. And you know, actually, it's a really suboptimal way to work. Like you look at the science of it and the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in pretty quickly. If you're doing a knowledge work job. It's more like 30 hours and 40 hours. So if buy some time on a Thursday morning, you're feeling really tired and fried. You've probably done it mentally, emotionally energetically for the week. And I think, you know, we really need to get back to a conversation around Lawrence, as you were saying, you know, what's the, what's the outcome there? what's the what's the sort of productive thing I want to bring to the world rather than, like, have I, you know, put all of those hours into to make something happen.

Carlos 19:25

So the things that spring up for me when you're talking there, there's Lastly, the last thing is real clear intention. What is it I'm trying to create? Or what is the purpose of this work that I'm trying to do? And the other aspect there is focus. And I'm curious to hear from people I'm gonna put a quick little poll out to see who's uh, who's working from home right now. So, answer that and because one of the challenges, whether you're working from home or not, and I think I see Also with a lot of people in our community, entrepreneurs and startups is distraction and not being able to focus on a specific piece of work because our there's this other thing and there's this other thing and there's this other thing, Oh, am I doing the right thing right now. So I hear from you this real need to, to be present with the work and to focus on it, and how that means you become more effective. Is there anything that you've learned around actually then deciding that this is the right thing to be doing right now and to stop yourself drifting off to Oh, but there's that another social media and there's marketing and there's this?

Graham Allcott 20:38

Yeah, loads. I think, I mean, one of the things that I learned very early on in my career was the Stephen Covey story about big rocks, which I think is it's just such a useful way to think about your work. So basically, if you think about if you've got big rock And pebbles and sand and you've got to put it all in the jar. If you want to get everything in, you want to start with the big rocks, and then you fill the kind of smaller things in around it. And I still kind of think about that. today and particularly in, in my mind, it's like, I choose one big rock for the morning and one big rock for the afternoon. And if I'm doing a long day, as I've done a few recently where it's like I'm doing a kind of five to nine shift, and then I'm having an hour off, and then I'm doing another morning shift and then an afternoon shift. I'll kind of think about it as being two, maybe three. I think if you've got, if you've written down seven top priorities, you have no priorities. Right? So you've got to get really clear about your choices. So that's the first thing. I think the second thing which is particularly important in times like this is around agility and coming back to those decisions that you've made regularly. And in many cases, it's about renegotiating your commitments with yourself, right? So it's like I was gonna do this thing. And then three weeks later, the world's changed. And another three weeks later, the world changed again. So one of the things I do every week and it's it's in the book is this idea of the weekly review. So I have a, I have a checklist for it. If you want to find the checklist, just go if you just Google think productive, weekly checklists to be able to find a couple of examples there. But basically, the checklist is about walking me through what's on my plate, what work I'm doing, what my calendar looks like, looking at my projects list, which I think is one of the most underrated and most important pieces of productivity infrastructure, if you like, it's not the to do list, but actually the projects list like what's my list of the bigger outcomes I'm trying to try to get to. So I look through that. And I want to make sure I've got at least a good sense of what the next physical action is that I need to do on any of those projects, but also a really good sense of Like how tactically that's gonna play out over the weekend, Leann saying, Yeah, similar to the GTD weekly review, that's really where I, I learned the whole idea of reviewers from David Allen GTD. And a lot of people start doing some kind of weekly checklist weekly review process, and get three or four weeks into it and then kind of fall out of love with it or stop doing it. And for me, the power is like doing it consecutively like doing it 234567 you know, weeks in a row, what you start to see is you just have a much greater sense of control of what you're doing. And also your I think the more you do this stuff, the easier it gets to become ruthless in your thinking. And what I mean by that is ruthless with screening things out that you don't want to do. ruthless with renegotiating even though I said to myself, I was gonna do this. And maybe I said to some other people, I was going to do this. I'm actually going to change my mind on that because it's no longer worth me spending four hours of my time on so it's those kind of comments. So we have to have regularly with ourselves. And often we don't have those conversations explicitly as part of the process, we have them in the shower or walking the dog or while we're making a cup of tea. And we, we half have to fall, but we never quite finish it. And I think having some kind of checklist to be able to focus on with that is a really good way of finishing that thinking. And in my head, this, like, there's a massive difference between doing between doing 90% of that thinking and doing all of it is just like an infinite benefit, right? You've got to get to the end of that thinking in order for it to really have an impact.

Carlos 24:33

It sounds like there's a discipline to this. And to do this on a regular basis. And my immediate thought is then making yourself do that and then why they're trying to do that review thinking oh my god, should I be doing something else? Yeah. how's this gonna work with the right system? Right, this is this gonna help? Yes, and this is really interesting. In terms of like, building up that muscle, I don't know what it is, did you find it quite easy for you to just slip into that and have that as a regular practice? Or did you go through dips of doing it and then stopping and then? And then yeah, just if someone was trying to struggle to even just have that simple discipline? Well, yeah, it's been,

Graham Allcott 25:19

yeah, it reminds me of, because, you know, really what that's about is about getting to a sort of level of clarity that helps you to manage your own stress and manage your own uncertainty and everything because, you know, like, part of the nature of work is that you're living with uncertainty all the time. Right. And that's something that can be quite difficult to just put down on a Friday and have a weekend. And so being able to live with that sort of constant sense of uncertainty, particularly if you're an entrepreneur as well right where you're, you're responsible not just for your uncertainty, but for everybody else's to what really starts to happen is that once you are done Doing that regularly and you start to feel a bit more in control of that you feel more comfortable with you like where you're at with that stuff. It just has such a such an amazing kind of stress relieving benefit, like is the time in my week where I feel most empowered, I feel most momentum. I feel really good about being able to put that down on a Thursday and Friday, my my weeks tend to finish on a Thursday and then pick it back up again on the Monday. And so it's one of those where like, slightly, paradoxically, the more you do it, the more you understand the benefit of it, and the more you prioritise it. But if you think about it's kind of stress relieving benefits, then I suppose the way to think about it, it's a bit like that Buddhist saying, which is like, you should meditate for half an hour a day except when you're busy, then you should meditate for an hour a day. And it's one of those where, yeah, when you've got when you really feel that up against it, and I do this too, like I have weeks where it's like, okay, I'll just I'll do the checklist next week. That's fine. And then suddenly, three weeks have gone by and sudden Do you start to feel, you know, just the fog comes in or you just feel really uncertain about about whether you're making the right choices and stuff? And it's like, oh, yeah, sure enough, go back to doing that, that weekly process and you just instantly feel better at the end of it. So it's one of those that it's very easy to forget how useful it is. And yet, a lot of our work is about helping people to to make stick some of those really valuable self discipline habits, it's Yeah, if there was a secret sauce or kind of special potion you could drink that would make you do that stuff all the time. Hey, I would love it. And I would, I would take that pill every day. Be I'd be a bit concerned because I'd sort of be out of a job right. It's kind of a lot of what we do is the fact that this is difficult and people do struggle with it. But yeah, I think it's it's very valuable.

Carlos 27:52

The word habit sprang out for me very quickly, and it's that thing of the challenge we always have human nature's difficult to cultivate new habits, and I'm wondering is as to whether doing it as a group can help, because I've always heard that, you know, when you're doing a new habit, whether it's the gym or anything new, having that doing it as a group as a collective, where you hold each other accountable to it, whether that's something that can help. I don't know if that's something that you've seen people try.

Graham Allcott 28:20

Yeah, have and also just in pairs, just like having a body like a review, buddy, right. And what's really interesting about that is there's something in our psychology to do with intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, where we're really happy to let ourselves down and not do it, but we don't want to let someone else down. So if we've got, you know, 11 until one is our have a coffee and review time with a with our buddy, we have to show up and be there and we'll show up for that other person. And that forces us to then show up for ourselves. And, yes, I think groups it's easier to sneak out of a group if there's 10 of you. And suddenly there's nine and no one notices but you If you've got one buddy, and it's like, you've got a time that really works well, for the two of you to both do it every week, I think it's really valuable way of doing it.

Carlos 29:09

I think Kim just hit the nail on the head there. It's like productivity review body she's in. So who wants to join him or if you want to

Graham Allcott 29:19

offer out your. And I think the other thing about it just in terms of if you're literally going to do that right now and sort of pick someone out. I think it's really important to do. I think this is a big issue generally not just with review, but it's really important to make space for quality thinking. And so in my experience, doing a review first thing on the Monday morning when everyone else is emailing you isn't a great plan. Doing it when you're in the house with kids coming and tapping you on the shoulder isn't a great plan, right. And so, you know, back in the days of people working in offices, I would always say if there's a day in your week where you're working from home and you're on your own and you have solitude that's the day to do it. That review process or if that's not happening for you, can you go to the coffee shop around the corner? Can you just find a different space to be able to do that? So I think it's it's really important as well as being in the habit of doing it regularly is doing it regularly at a time where you have that space for quality thinking,

Carlos 30:17

I was wondering, you, Lawrence, you're experiencing this because, you know, knowing you, that you're, you're governed also by your energy, so less, you know, being compelled to do it at a certain time each week. doesn't always work for you.

Laurence 30:34

Yes, and no, I think I always been different during lockdown as well, I think because we've had this programme running. And so we've used Monday morning to catch up with Lana who's on. He's one of the coaches in the programme. So that's been really useful because we've had a momentum around that thing in terms of the check in weekly check in to see, you know, what do we learn last week? What can we tweak we do differently this week. In terms of putting something in the diary each week, yeah, because I think everything's been influx so much. I find it hard to find that flow as often as possible. And I think one of the few constants is actually this weekly. webinar ready, which has been great. It's been a nice place to just have chats like this. And so I found that useful personally. But yeah, I think it's when I see a food diary, I just feel stressed, I think, I'm sure a lot of lots of people. So whilst on the one hand, I like the idea of a rhythm and planning, when my diary starts to get really full, I start to forget anxiety feeling. And so whilst it's not all about me, following my energy, I think there's something about like Mike Graham said, if you get to the point on a Thursday, where you're done, then you're done then just walk away from the thing you're trying to do. And I've tried to follow that more in lockdown. That was kind of where I was curious. Maybe we can tap into this, some point and read the conversations around the well being side of this because I think you highlighted this in your posts that led to this call was and you read the book about nutrition right a couple of years ago about how we can eat better To be more productive, and so I'm curious to know about I know personally when, when I'm feeling a lack of energy to something that tells me I need to take some time out. And even if it's just 10 minutes, whatever, like you said, meditate walk or whatever it might be, and then come back to it fresher with with fresh eyes.

Graham Allcott 32:14

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think food foods are vital things I asked him before about my extreme productivity experiments doing flipping the nine to five, I did another one, which was all about eating the optimum diet for productivity. So looking at foods that particularly fuel the brain that led on to working with a nutritionist and doing a lot of reading around the, the science as much as it is, there's still a lot that we don't know about how the brain works, but a lot of the science around different foods and also how we digest different foods. And that's all in a book called work fuel, which actually we're going to we're going to release it was a book that was so there's loads of nutrition books but there wasn't particularly a nutrition book that was about how to have energy and how to have energy in a busy working environment. So we thought hey, this is like a huge there's a huge gap in the market here is there a market and that gap turns out there wasn't. We're actually going to release it again as a more general book around having energy and with a little bit less of a productivity slump. And so I don't know if that's yet up on Amazon but it's it's two out in January. And it's going to be called How to have the energy as simple as that. remotely work for you one that still if you want to get it now you can get

Laurence 33:41

This reminds me of when he came to altitude, he did a workshop they knew about the key concepts of the book, and I think the next few weeks afterwards everyone sending you pictures.

Graham Allcott 33:51

Yeah. Which is kind of how it started for me was coaching with collected the co author of the book and I would send her You know, pictures of my plates, and she would send it back. But one of the main messages that she kept telling me that became a main message in the book is the idea of eat the rainbow. So there's a whole range of different nutrients that you get from, from different coloured foods. So having a salad where everything is green, it's good for you, but it's not actually optimal. So adding in the red tomatoes and the yellow peppers and you know, having different colours of things in there, beetroots carrots, and different things like that will really help you to develop the energy around around your work. And the other one that was really big for me and this gets into a little bit kind of, you know, certainly this was my personal experience rather than it being medical advice, but to look for foods that contain tryptophan, a lot of nuts have tryptophan, avocado has tryptophan. tryptophan is a very good and Turkey if you're a meat eater, and various other foods, but it's a really important amino acid that basically supports, like your body's dealing with stress. So if you're dealing with a lot of stress, a lot of adrenaline and kind of adrenal function, and it's really helped by eating certain foods, so it's you know, and that's just one example, there's hundreds of things that you can do around that, that just turn kind of average meals into really optimal meals without the need to do paleo or, you know, sort of bullet coffees in the morning and all that all that sort of crazy extreme stuff. There's the good news is you don't need to be extreme with food. You just need to be consistent with it. So that's definitely a thing. But I think there's it there is a more general thing here about energy as well. And I think you know, I mean, all the sciences like in terms of exercise that you actually don't need to do that much to get a really big benefit. So just doing 1015 minutes, doing a little bit of jokes in the morning. I've been doing the Joe Rick's hit training long before it was cool. But you know, even just 15 minutes That just wakes the brain up. And I really noticed that if I'm having a lazy day where I've not done some exercise early on in the day, I really noticed that my brain is not quite as engaged. And then the days where it's like I did my 15 minute hit training early on, it's like, oh, who would have thunk it? I guess it's actually worked so often, it's like doing the simple things really consistently and well. Can just really help. Yeah,

Carlos 36:27

hmm. Again, it comes to me comes back to that idea of trying to cultivate a habit that is sometimes hard to start trying to do some physical exercise in the morning. I know a lot of people really struggle with it, but over time, how that can really just, you feel the benefits. So a bit like the review, and the morning exercise, how it takes time for that to really kick in.

Graham Allcott 36:55

Nice Justin Leon's put high tryptophan foods in the chat fair handy. I'd forgotten the exit high interest. I have eggs pretty much every morning. And that was a big change that working with cholesterol about. I was never someone that was that bothered about breakfast. And again, it turns out particularly having protein early in the day really helps you metabolism and helps you get the best from the other foods that you're putting in

Laurence 37:23

for you guys, but I think foods been one of the few sort of highlights of how to enjoy food more and have more time to cook and eat.

Graham Allcott 37:32

Yeah, there's a lot of people reporting we eBay's one of our clients that think productive and then I'm having a conversation with someone at eBay a few years ago saying that everyone has the eBay Hearthstone, which is basically like when you start working at eBay, you get so used to the fact that it's like free smoothies, free pastries, free food all day like you know lunch carts coming round with all this amazing food. They just put on half a stone like really quickly and I think a lot of people Sort of reporting the lockdown half a stone as well right because just next time

Laurence 38:06

we can't anymore

Carlos 38:08

that's that's the distraction potentially I think the majority of people saying we will answer the poll they they are working from home. And so there's that that distraction of the kitchen distraction of the kids if you have them, distraction of paternity living in the working in the place that you normally live, and then seeing that he could have dishes as you're tapping away at the computer now that can be a challenge.

Laurence 38:36

And I've read a lot about and I've certainly struggled with at the early part lockdown, not sleeping as well. And that makes you more tired than then you probably need more sugar and start to binge.

Carlos 38:45

Yeah, I've had the worst sleeping habits over this past few months. It's, I think the fact that I don't need to go anywhere. I used to have a habit of at least going to the CO working space on a regular basis each week, but because you're at home, you don't need To get changed.

Laurence 39:03

We don't want to know where you're wearing the lower half now and see that

Graham Allcott 39:08

whole days from bed side.

Carlos 39:16

But it adds to this idea of the slide, you're talking about the uncertainty, but also the potential absence of structure. Unless you're really disciplined. I think that can be a big challenge for people. I just want to say if you have any questions for Graham, or anything that pops up, we already got a question from Kim that we can address in a bit. But if you do have any other questions that pop up for you, no matter how silly you may think they are, they'll help us because it's always good for sometimes a great inspiration for the conversation. So please post any question in the Ask a Question feature here on crowdcast. But yeah, on that, maybe do you want to have a look at this first question from Kim? To see what so she says what tips Do you have for small business owners, social entrepreneurs who feel the demands of their clients, but want to work sustainably? For the business? And personally?

Graham Allcott 40:11

Yeah, I mean, this maybe is one that I have some good practical experience with. So, so think productive. My company for the last eight years now maybe even nine years has been working for a week. So we have throughout that whole time, like, clients have never a lot of clients for the first few years we were doing it. It felt it felt like a really daring thing that was not mainstream, you know, in any way. So you didn't have like just Cinder Arden coming out saying, Hey, guys, maybe the whole world should work a four day week, like it wasn't a mainstream thing that was even on the horizon. So we felt very defensive about it in terms of not telling our story about it and wanting to keep that from clients. We'd still get emails and phone calls on the Friday when everyone else is working Monday to Thursday. So it's like how do you still stay, you know, present for clients. And the way we managed to make that work was basically, everybody would work one Friday and four. So there was always one person whose job it is to just be that first port of contact, you know, when that's needed, but it just allows everybody else to do a four day week, and then everyone kind of takes turns on it. So that was kind of how we worked with that. And I think, you know, if, if by sustainably in that question, part of that is about taking some downtime and setting some boundaries around when you're going to get back to people and when you when you're not, it's really worth thinking about as a team. How can you sort of play around with those schedules, we've kind of used we have a email inboxes that are called things like Hello, I think productive client clients, I think productive So generally, you'll get the same person on it, but it makes it easier for us to then give that inbox for someone else to manage for a day or two. You know, to transfer the phone to someone else's mobile and that kind of thing. So just using the technology in that way, I think is really helpful. I would also say that I think in the current climate that we're in, I think there's a general lessening of the expectation around that. And so, you know, if you're still feeling that same pressure, maybe the good news is, when you take a step back, there isn't actually the same expectation from clients that you need to be on 24 seven, you know, depending on what you're doing, if you're, you know, Chris, Chris witties, pa doing the science advice or something? Yeah, you probably need to be on 24 seven, but actually a lot of client work. And we've definitely noticed this. People are giving you more leeway in terms of not getting back to them within the hour or within the day, whatever your your sort of standard procedures and practices are. So I think there's just there is a bit of a, an acknowledgment that life and work are more blurred and more difficult and more in flux than perhaps they are in sort of normal life. So I think it's just worth it. taking that into account to the other one that I think it's a really nice little tip and trick is using your using your out of office or using your email signature to just give clients a really good indication that these are my working days or the out of office comes back saying, Hey, I'm out now until Thursday, or whatever the whatever the thing is, they're just kind of using that as the way to manage the boundary or even just, Hey, I'm taking the morning to work offline, I'm not going to be on email, I'll be back on email at noon, or something and setting that up as an out of office just for that three, four hours in the morning. So kind of using the technology a little bit to help you to set those clear boundaries. And as I said before, I think boundaries of constraints work really well but only when you're clear. So again, it's like actually defining that rather than saying, I wish people wouldn't call me in the morning but like actually setting it as these are my times to be online, makes a difference in the same way that you know if you're dealing with staff you know, One of the things often I like when I'm coaching people I'll often talk about is the idea of having surgery hours for your team, right? So it's like, I'm going to do my work in the morning and then two till four, those are my surgery hours, feel free always to book me in anytime you need my time and attention between two and four, like any day, my diary's open. And that open door policy between two and four allows you to have a closed door for some of those other hours. And so again, just putting those things in some kind of boundary in some kind of constraint, just often allows you to open that stuff up.

Laurence 44:33

Well, it feels like with the client side of things, and just remember the agency days when we were working with clients, I think it's a lot easier when you set out from the beginning with that arrangement. Setting it or changing the way you work when they've had a certain expectation of your availability can be difficult. I think the other thing was just for me, the storyteller sounds so important. So there's the practical side of how it works, but then there's why you're doing it and what that means in terms of the effectiveness of the Work you create for them. So how you can tell the story that you're actually going to be a better service to them by being less available, if that makes sense?

Graham Allcott 45:08

Yeah, absolutely. I'm just looking at Kim's comment in there as well saying please, can you say something about managing the workload personally? When they see it, so yeah, clients and team and all that over there, but like, yeah, I've got what I don't feel like I can fit into a seven day week, how can I do it in a four day week? So what I'd say about that is so actually, there was a survey a couple of years ago, some research around happiness and which come which countries in the world had the best work life balance and the least amount of stress? And as always, in these kind of surveys, Denmark came out as the top of the Scandinavians are so smug and they they get everything right. And they went to Denmark to interview people and said, you know, why? Why does Denmark have the best work life balance and, and the least stress and this guy on the TV news is like, Well, it's very simple. If you want to reduce stress, just lower your expectations. And I think that's probably, you know, a really important point to sort of talk to Kim's question there is like, I think we need to really understand that like a productivity ninja is a human and not superhero, right? Like there's a limit to what we do, there are no special powers. We do have human levels of energy. And, you know, actually, the best way to really feed that productivity is to do less, not more separating when you feel under pressure, you know, corollary to my sleep before but just actually taking that step back and kind of, you know, deliberately having some, some days where you're doing a bit less will give you the stamina to over a long period of time to do more. And sort of keep you from burnout. You know, the world, the world always needs. What we do for the next 20 or 30 years at like. 90 95% capacity, not The next half a year at 110% capacity and then burn out. Right. So all these things are a marathon, not sprint. So I think that's important. And I think, again, you know, coming back to what has to map before with the idea of the weekly checklist. One of the most important things about that for me is that it allows you to go through your projects and your actions and make sure you've got a really nicely to define project every time. And then also really clear, what are the next physical things I need to do on each of those items. And like, I think when you do that really regularly, it makes it much easier to start saying no to more things to start to recognise where the energy and value is, you know, in amongst these 30 things I want to do, actually, these three are where the money is, or these three are, where my love is, or these three are where people really need my help right now. And so I think, you know, often we don't we don't spend enough time on that thinking. Enough time on that. Like, you know, real deep thinking around linking the priorities that we see in our projects to our sort of deeper values, wider purpose, you know, company value, whatever we're trying to create. And so I think the more we do that, the easier it is to say no to some of those things.

Carlos 48:23

I think that also, I think springs up for me a deeper level, is giving yourself permission to let people down. My title, my experience of this is always wanting to make sure everyone's happy, and you know, you do your best work for everyone. And how that can really stop you from not doing because you don't want to feel like you're letting people down. So there's, and this I think, for me, is quite fundamental thing and quite one of the most challenging things, I believe, is just saying, Okay, I'm going to screw up here or I'm going to miss that email or I'm not going to be able to deliver on that time. frame. Not because I'm lazy or I'm not diligent. It's just, I'm going to have to let something go one plate is just going to have to fall at some point. And you have not been beating myself up about it. And more often than not, it doesn't end up being the disaster I thought it was going to be.

Graham Allcott 49:19

Yeah, absolutely. So fail faster, right. So if there's 50 things rather than trying to think that you can get to 50 things, recognise which of the two or three that needs to drop or the five or 10, you need to try and get comfortable with that. I think a big part of if you're going to manage your attention really ruthlessly, and what is what I mean by that is deliberately being ignorant to certain things, whether that's turning off email, whether it's putting phone blockers on your phone, I use a thing on my phone called quality time, which is an app on Android. There's similar ones for iPhone like freedom off time. And what those apps will do is block certain parts of your phone set blocks. For me, Instagram, Twitter, Google Chrome, all that stuff is blocked for certain times of the day. What that means is I am going to miss some at replies on Twitter or some messages on LinkedIn. Or I'm going to miss a load of stuff where people are like, you know, maybe people really want response in the next hour. Like I didn't look at LinkedIn over the last hour before this call. And I put a thing out there saying, hey, doing this podcast thing with happy startups, like evolve, if anyone replied saying or where's the link? I didn't see that. So there'll be small things where we need to, we'll be having words about that Graham. I did actually about an hour before I sent the link to someone, but then I turned it off, right. And it's the same with email. And there was actually this week is a really interesting thing with that where I, I basically kept my inbox at zero all week. But my action folder, the things I still need to get back to people on has been slowly creeping up as I've been doing this book. And I've deliberately just spent as little time I'm on email this week as I can possibly get away with because my brain and my attention needs to be on a book. And I don't know, those of you in the, in the chat on the call have written books, you'll know that like a book is one of the very few things where you can't really put it all down on paper like a to do list like you have to sort of carry it in your head in a weird way. And it just means that your head just has no space for anything else. And so I think that's really true of like anything of like real value in the world, you've got to have a deep level of attention to you know, Cal Newport uses this phrase, the deep work. And you've got to really screen out a lot of that noise and stuff. And so, you know, the art of letting small bad things happen, I think is a really important part of productivity and the art of failing faster is a really important part of it. And I think Tim Ferriss calls it having a low inflammation, diet, and selective ignorance, you know, I think is a really important phrase as we think about how we manage intention is it's our attention that really counts in our time, right? It's how we manage our attention that matters.

Laurence 52:05

I love the idea of make time really took about infinity pool apps. The idea of these apps a dislike, you know, always on and there's always more data to swallow. Yeah.

Carlos 52:18

There's that I think the thing is two things come to mind. There's the attention. So have that focused attention to do the thing that you're doing at the moment. And then the intention, that these are the important things and when you're talking about the rocks, in the jar, these and everything else, even if it is important to someone else, unfortunately, it's not part of my intention. And so I being able to then drop those things and not put them in the jar, because they're not within the direction I want to go. And I feel that's another fundamental thing I feel, particularly the people we work with is with less intention. You have less attention because you're not sure what to say no to anything. Because you're so you want to everything and so difficult one to deal with. But I think a fundamental one,

Graham Allcott 53:07

I think it's almost like it's a bit it's almost put on the same level is hypocrisy, right? Like hypocrisy is often the worst thing someone in public life can be or a politician can be or a manager can be right. But right up there with hypocrisy is the idea that I said I was going to do this. And now I'm no longer going to do this. And I think if you've got a good reason why the world has changed, my priorities have changed. My intention is not that I think we need to get much more comfortable with that idea. And do that on a much more regular basis. And in fact, I know you guys from a few years ago when you had your shared space, and you just decided we're no longer going to have this co working space like that was our thing before. We really believed in it and now we no longer believe in it. Like, I think we need to get much more comfortable with the idea of saying no to things that we previously had said yes to.

Carlos 54:10

Yeah. Well, links to a previous conversation about closing well with Tom Nixon. Yeah, when something more creative energy,

Graham Allcott 54:21

really love that conversation with Tom.

Carlos 54:25

Okay, I have another question here from Alex. And would you have any advice about how to remain productive when your workload is quieter than usual? During the pandemic, my usual work is definitely slowed down and I found it difficult to remain productive.

Graham Allcott 54:42

Well, that sounds like great news to me is it's probably an easier game to win. So you could look at it on that surface level. But I think in all seriousness, I think, you know, for for a lot of people they've they've gone through the Opposite that right where it's like, my workload is just now. It's travelled, and I've got kids at home to teach and all this kind of stuff. And actually, I think it's just as much of a problem, if suddenly it feels like there's just much less work to do, like, how do I, how do I, you know, keep myself in a good momentum and a good rhythm and all that sort of stuff, says Parkinson's Law, which says work expands to fill the time available. And I would suggest that if your workload is gone down, you need to be really mindful of Parkinson's Law. I would say that with that there are kind of two options. One is you feel more of that you keep trying to work at the same kind of momentum and then you have two choices. You either fill more of that space with leisure, sitting in the park, you know, social distancing, seeing friends or whatever. Or you ask yourself a different question, which is like, Are there other projects that I can now use to fill that So maybe that's professional development stuff. I know, training is still permissible to everybody, even if you're on furlough. So and there's so much of it out there at the moment in terms of free resources and stuff. We've got a few of our own, which I'll mentioned a few minutes. But you know, I think just filling that with me and maybe with more creative or explorative explorative is that word exploration projects, right, where it's like, actually, I get to experiment with maybe this new product that we might try and create, or at least doing some research around that new products that I was thinking about, whatever those things are. So, you know, I think there's a sort of sense of either being proactive with how do I temporarily kind of fill that gap with more meaningful, useful stuff that I can put out into the world or you do the opposite, which is to create more of a constraint and say, I'm still going to work at full pelt. I'm just going to do it for a few hours and have a better balance. temporarily. I think both are fine, like, but I'd say both are better than just succumbing to Parkinson's Law and stretching out the work in a really unsatisfactory way and then beating yourself up about it.

Laurence 57:18

Okay, thoughts Lawrence? Krauss just said that Parkinson's Law really hits home for me is it when the days when you haven't got much on cc to fill it with? crap?

Graham Allcott 57:27

It was a really good challenge, I think with any thing that you're working on is set out. So there's the planning fallacy, right? Where psychologically people always underestimate how long things are going to take. If you do that estimation at the beginning, and let's say you're working on a piece of writing or something that you think is going to take two hours, like playing around with that saying, What would this look like if I did it in 30 minutes, I'm just really messing with your own brain around that like often Parkinson's Law works in reverse. You know, so if you if you own Give yourself 30 minutes, you will produce something half decent 30 minutes.

Laurence 58:03

Hmm, just a good example of that as the talker gave this morning I was planning on spending yesterday afternoon on it and life got in the way, ended up spending an hour this morning and I think actually pretty good, more effective outcome. But like you said, that just focus the mind of like, what? Rather than, oh, I could do this or I could do that. It's like, Okay, I'm gonna have time to think just just do and sometimes that pays dividends away. I think there's,

Carlos 58:29

there's like two, two different types of work I feel we're talking about. There's this idea of productive work things that feel like they're going to deliver value immediately. And I, my, what I hear from Alex's question, from my perspective is that I've got less work, I need to work on what I have got better, but for some reason that's not happening. And there's an energy thing, an emotion thing. They're about, oh, I don't have enough work. And so I'm the focused. I don't have the time. Attention. And so I'm not, I'm not getting these things done as quickly as you as I should do. And maybe there's something around, okay, if I was, if I knew I could use this time to find more clients or market myself better or something, there was a real strong intention. Maybe you could fill that time or structure better. But then the other aspect of this is the idea of creative work, where you do need to just essentially fill it with, like you said, thinking about it. And, and not necessarily creating straightaway, but having that space to wander and, and to just drift, but it's still intentionally doing that, rather than in between washing the dishes, or looking after the kids, you'd like spending your time doing that. So I wonder if there's something around not only thinking about productive work, but how can you introduce some creative space as well?

Graham Allcott 59:54

Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that often is the first podcast question I get asked is always what's your definition of productivity? You guys didn't ask me that which I'm very grateful for. But, you know, over the years I've sort of had different ones but the one I always use now is that productivity is ultimately about making space for what matters. And if you think about where all the best ideas you've ever had come from, they probably didn't come when you were saying your desk doing emails, they probably came in the shower or when you're walking in the woods or you know, someplace else so I think maybe you know, maybe there's something again, where and I certainly feel this a lot is like, feeling guilty. For the idea of once I've created that space actually using it to go for a walk or have some downtime and get inspiration and like, because this is gonna sound really pretentious now, but because I'm in Brighton after all, because a big part of my work. Work is about creating writing, you know, books, courses, all this sort of stuff a couple of times a year, I have to remind myself of that, and I'm not very good at following it through, but I always write a couple of times a year I write in my, in my notes, be my to do this manager. Your job is to go for a walk in the woods. And, you know, seeing it in that way that like actually what's going to help me generate ideas and solve problems and recognise the thing that's stuck in my business or whatever those things are, you know, that's gonna unhook and reveal itself. Like when I go for a walk in the woods and when I'm consciously not putting my attention onto emails and social media and like all that frenetic stuff. And as I say, I'm not particularly great at once I've created that space actually using it for those things, but I think it's a really good, that's, that's one of the things that I'm always working on is, you know, trying to use that space in the way that leads to the bigger inspirations.

Carlos 1:02:04

One thing that springs to mind about if you do have that space and you want to fill it up, one of the things that I've experienced through the work that we're doing is connecting with others. If you can get a chance to just have a conversation or be part of a group, and Steven that talking around ideas or even challenges like this, having a space like this where you think I'm struggling with this, or this is a bit difficult. There, we can all get too busy, particularly now in lockdown in our own little bubbles, trying to make things happen on our own, and forgetting that just reaching out and having a conversation to one or two other people. We found that over and over again, how that just shifts the energy. And you just see things you didn't see before. Yeah, so and that's productive, and that can help. We have another couple of questions before we kick off on. Finish off we got Leanne here. She says clearly most compelling Knees will now let their teams have the choice to continue working from home probably as part of a hybrid mix with the office and third spaces. Are you seeing an uplift in employers wanting to train their teams in productivity as being remote mean as being remote means more trust is needed. And the focus should be less on hours worked and more on outcomes delivered is is there a shift to come?

Graham Allcott 1:03:23

I think the shifts happening. We we launched a new workshop a few weeks ago called leading remote teams to sort of respond to that demand that we were seeing. And yeah, getting great feedback from people, which to me says that it is scratching an itch like people are definitely thinking about that. I think for me the shift that is maybe more I think, I think we'll go back very quickly to a sort of hybrid model where I do think there'll be more working for him than than there was before the pandemic but there'll be nowhere near the level of working from home that sending that there is now there are a few companies I think in quite a forward thinking way, I saw a charity yesterday saying, Hey, we're going to get rid of our London office and just everybody be remote. But I think they'll be from what I'm seeing, there'll be the exceptions rather than what everyone will do. I think most people will still have big offices and stuff. I think the biggest shift that is more difficult is removing that presenteeism, which for me is always about trust and autonomy. So there's kind of two ways that you manage people, right one is you, you sort of keep an eye on them and like, just keep walking into the room and just make sure they're still at our desks and make sure that you don't see Facebook, on their computer or whatever. And the other way that you manage people is you give them the outcomes that you want to deliver. You coach them, you invest in them, and then you let them get out of the way and let them get the hell on with it. Right. And that level of autonomy and trust is uncomfortable for people. So I think we're I mean, I there was a thing I saw a couple of weeks ago, where there's a Company developing software that will basically track people as they're working at their desks. I think it's the worst. Just absolutely the worst. And I think, you know, one of the, one of the real, hidden, you know, unexpected positive outcomes of this whole pandemic situation is the amount of, of teams and the amount of employers who are who've let everyone work from home, which was banned before or not allowed in that level before. And it turns out that they've gone with it and done their work. Like if you trust people, you know, then actually, generally people are good and generally people will be motivated and do good work. And so I think, you know, for me, I think there is still there's a big shift in a lot of people's minds around that that whole kind of put, have they done their hours, you know, all that sort of, like monitoring of moments of counting of hours spent. Went up the other extreme you've got, you know, people working in Amazon warehouses wearing nappies, because they're not, they're not allowed to clock the three minutes it would take to get to the toilet and stuff. You know, it's that stuff is still serious and real and exists. And, yeah, I just think that will be the the ultimate test is if we can kind of really as a society start to trust people to do work in a much more autonomous way. And yeah, I mean, that's how we've run think productive for years, you know, people sort of working in different parts of the country home offices, we have had a central space, but we've had a lot of people remote. I, even when we had a central space was in the office like, you know, a day a month if that. And yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how how that plays out over the next few months.

Laurence 1:06:48

Reminds me of years ago, last minute, Khan came out and travel company online. I think we're the first online travel company and there's still a button for the buses coming and it will bring out like a spreadsheet or something. Have pie charts and make it look like you're busy. Yeah, you can't be booking holidays at work. That's just outrageous.

Carlos 1:07:07

I think Leanne mentioned Zen is she says, it's all about all about culture in a way. And I believe, and leadership. Well, I wanted to acknowledge, like, you know, when we were running an agency, we wanted to give people as much freedom as possible autonomy to get their work done. So it's, it isn't as simple as well, because there's that pressure as a founder as leader, you've got revenue to generate that you've got this cash flow you're trying to manage. And so there's a real tension. What do you think? Are they doing the work they need to because we need to get that money in because if you don't get the money, so really, that's why when the answer is, it's about culture, it really is about the ethos of Ukraine and as a founder, as a leader, where your attention is and where that fear is and, and so yeah, I totally feel I believe I would have loved I love the idea of giving people much more autonomy and freedom to do that. But there's the acknowledging also the, the pressures of work, I can understand why that can be difficult for some people. So

Graham Allcott 1:08:12

yeah, one of the things we say on that leading remote teams workshop is that basically culture comes from physical spaces. But it also comes from leadership. And so how you set the culture in terms of the team dynamic, the culture in terms of how often you meet how you meet, you know what numbers you're, you know, particularly keeping an eye on and trying to grip you know, all those kind of really key elements of running a team. You can do that without physical space, but, but they do need to be there. Right. And also, like digital spaces can be really useful for setting culture you know, think productive, uses slack. And just those little little, you know, celebrate tree emojis and smiley faces and hearts and stuff. Flight can actually really add a very rich layer of sort of human interaction to culture, even when people are not even seeing each other face to face.

Carlos 1:09:10

I'm gonna see this, I'm gonna go to questions and answers box zero. And the last question to answer here we are, it's from Laura and she asks, How can you build up or boost your attention span? I feel like mine's declined a great deal over lockdown because I've been split screening too much. So maybe some quick tips on that before we go.

Graham Allcott 1:09:34

Yeah, so there's, there's two things about that. One is the natural energy that you have in the brain. So we talked before about food, exercise, fresh air sleep, trying not to have alcohol the night before that sort of stuff. You'll just generally have more energy. I'm a big fan. I love a evening beer. So I'm a big fan of the brew dog, nanny state beer and stuff so I can have my my beer. Richard, but it's like naught percent. So I still sleep because you basically you sleep much worse if you if you have our call that said, you know, there are days or days where the beer is okay. But yeah, so So one is about just the general energy that you allow your brain to be creating by via food and exercise everything else. On the other side of it, it's then what do you put that attention to? And what do you screen out of that? And so I think things like phone block apps, the idea of mono tasking rather than multitasking. So taking all the bits of paper that relate to something else off your desk, closing all the windows that you're working on, you know, really, a lot of you if you're feeling like you can't focus, look at how many 50 things you have surrounding you that are not related to the thing you're working on. Get rid of 49 of them. You might find that you can focus a lot more right so often this is environmental and it's about the psyche of how we approach attention. Rather than necessarily about, oh, my brain just isn't working. Like usually there's this stuff that you can do that will really help.

Carlos 1:11:05

Hmm. On top of that, for me, I found really, really useful just being very just timeboxing. Under there's the Pomodoro Technique. But I've, one of the things that always gets me with my attention is like, I got to do this thing and do that thing. And if I spend too much time on this thing, I will get these other things done. So if I could say, All right, I'm going to do just this for 25 minutes. And I know that's all I'm going to do. And I will have time for other stuff. Inevitably what happens at the end of 25 minutes, I want to do some more, some more. I get into that zone, but it's that initial bit of, again, not enough intention or there's too many other things I'm thinking about the stops me narrowing down the focus. So I found that really useful.

Graham Allcott 1:11:46

All right, like if you if you just create momentum, then momentum feeds itself like I think in terms of like momentum and motivation, I feel like with sent with my work, I'm either on the spiral up, or I'm on a spiral, like there's no standings. So if you can push that momentum and just, you know all those things like tricking yourselves, but tricking yourself by saying, I'm just gonna do the first 20 minutes of this really horrible thing. Yeah, that involves Excel spreadsheets whenever you open Excel, and you start and there's a such a big setup cost, in terms of the energy of the brain in terms of just switching into a different thing. And then suddenly, I'm in Excel, and it just suddenly feels way easier than it did 10 minutes ago. And it's like, yeah, give me all the receipts. I'll do. Yeah, but momentum is a really important thing.

Laurence 1:12:34

Um, first of all, there's loads of great stuff in the work about, like, creating an environment for you to succeed isn't about getting the right environment. They even talked about JK Rowling booking the Gleneagles suite to finish a book because she needed somewhere away from the traditional environment. So yeah, we're all bad at managing our own time and willpower.

Graham Allcott 1:12:54

And it's the idea that if you've paid for the Gleneagles suite, then you better make it better. All right. Yeah, cost you that much money. There's a thing I saw years ago, which was you set yourself a task, and then you have to report back whether you completed it or not. And if you didn't complete it, you've already given your credit card details and it donates money to a bank. Remember, you really hate. I didn't do this thing. And now the consequences Donald Trump's election campaign has received a new donation.

Laurence 1:13:24

Right. So one guy years ago, he I think he's scheduled a tweet to go out every morning at a certain time. So if you didn't get up in time to remove it.

Graham Allcott 1:13:33

That's brilliant.

Carlos 1:13:36

Oh, there you go. Everything you need to have focus and productivity. So we come to an end. Thank you very much, Graham, for sharing your time and your knowledge and so always good to chat. Before we leave a quick, shameless promotion, bit of the bit of the show, if people want to find out more about your staff If you have anything that you'd like to direct people to, yeah, please tell us.

Graham Allcott 1:14:05

Yeah, so my company's called think productive. So we do workshops for yes, some of the leaders and most leading and most interesting companies in the world on productivity, getting in boxes to zero, all that sort of stuff. We do have a set of resources, particularly around working from home. So if you just go to think productive.com, forward slash w f h for working from home, just loads of free resources you can download. And there's also I think, the recording of one of our first webinars on working from home specifically. So think productive.com forward slash wfh. I also do a podcast called Beyond busy. So go and subscribe to that there's, you can actually Google the previous episode with lots and colleagues. And I've also just recently started a weekly mailing list. So if you just go to Graham Allcott comm I've launched this thing called rev up for the week. The idea is just every Sunday night, some public have interesting thoughts into your inbox for the week ahead. So yeah, it there's, there's a forum on the homepage of the website, Graham Allcott calm if you want to sign up for that.

Carlos 1:15:09

Awesome, thank you very much. And for those of you who who love to connect with each other and get that energy and sense of not feeling alone, we next week we have our regular monthly ideas cafe. We used to do these live in Brighton but now due to what's happening, we are doing them online. And so there's a zoom call that we we host and it's a great place to meet network connect with people just feel learn from about new things, but ultimately be able to share your knowledge and share a space with other people and all from the comfort of your laptop. It starts at 8:45am UK time and we usually finish around about 1030 if you have a question or a challenge, it's also a great place to get some really powerful free Advice. So I hope to see you there. That's next Thursday 845. And the other thing I wanted to share is that we are, we just finished our 2020 vision programme. Leann who's on the call was part of that. It was an amazing experience, particularly given the the challenges we had with the pandemic. But if you're a solopreneur, or a solo founder, who wants to magnify the impact of their work, and wants to have the support of other people on that journey, we're going to offer a space for you to do that journey in over six months with myself, Lawrence and our good friend, Lana. And we're going to use our experience of hosting spaces and also using technology to build community and to also help essentially get more clarity about the work we want to do very much about what Greg was talking about today is was that clear intention for what you want to do. So if that's of interest, we'll put a quick link into the chat as well. Is there anything else Lawrence that you'd like to share?

Laurence 1:17:03

Just to say we didn't pay like early answers post that. I mean, that's a pretty good, amazing it's been. Yeah, I would say my doubts about doing a solely online programme because we launched it before COVID. But yeah, it's been amazing many amazing people from all around the world. Yeah, it's been incredible. So yeah, looking forward to doing it again later in the year. And we wouldn't be able to do if it was if summer camp wasn't cancelled. So in some ways, yeah. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Carlos 1:17:31

Exactly. space. That was a Parkinson's Law. Yeah. Brilliant. Thank you very much, everyone. Cheers, Graham. Thanks. Yeah, you take care Have a great rest of the day and have a lovely spacious and productive weekend to see Mr. Still there if anyone's interested.

Laurence 1:17:51

Take care. Bye bye.

Graham Allcott 1:18:00

Thanks again to Laurence and Carlos for having me That was really good fun. And thanks also to Carlos for following up and providing me, servicing me with video that I could use to make this audio and make it into a podcast. So thanks Carlos for help with that. Thanks also to Mark Steadman, my producer on the show and podiant, my podcast platform, and also to our sponsors, Think Productive. If you're interested in productivity workshops, help through COVID help out of COVID thinkproductive.com and we have offices around the world that can help you. A couple things I want to say real quick before we finish. First is just a couple of recommendations of things that you might want to check out on Iplayer and Netflix. So if you're in the UK or have access to Iplayer somehow Then go check out I May Destroy You. So I had about three or four people say you need to go watch this thing. And I don't usually watch a lot of drama. And oh my god, I was hooked. It's so so good. Mechanical, just what an incredible writer and feels like this year's Fleabag in a way, just in. There's definitely some kind of stylistic similarities with the two protagonists and the fact that it's kind of written by the main actor as well. It's pretty disturbing. So a lot of it is to do with rape and consent and there's a lot of drugs in it and various other things like that. So not want to watch with the kids. But just absolutely just superb. So check out I May Destroy You have also been watching The A Word which , yeah so those of you who don't know I've got a son who's autistic and The A Word is a whole show about the parents of an autistic son and how they deal with that diagnosis and then how the wider little community around the little boy sort of deals with his autism. So yeah, really close to home. The first two series I really loved and there were so many bits in there that just felt very well observed. The only thing that is lacking is an episode just with someone just sat at a table doing paperwork, a lot of paperwork. A fair like paperwork is not reflected in the episodes enough. And if you know they need to find a way to make that watchable and interesting. Anyway, so yeah, The A Word. Check it out, and I May Destroy You. And I'm never watching a lot of Netflix recently, but I did watch The Last Dance, which I know everyone's seen by now. very fascinated by Michael Jordan's just winning mentality like just that relentless drive to win is absolutely fascinating and something that I think very few people have you know, just to keep winning and keep winning and keep winning. The star of the show for me though, is definitely Dennis Rodman. Like, just the way he explains how him being naughty and just you flying off to Las Vegas to have a three day party when he should be training is just the natural order of things in the world. It's just like, just the funniest thing, just such a funny dude. So yeah, go check out those. Oh, and the Miles Davis thing the Miles Davis bio pic, which is on Iplayer. It's a while since I've watched it, but if you haven't seen that, it's just beautiful and amazing. And I'm a big Miles Davis fan, as I've probably talked about at some point on here before but If, even if you're not just seeing his influence across music for such a long time, and just how he changed and developed throughout throughout his life, just an amazing story. So go check those out. And the other thing I would say is just that we are looking, we've had a really good year with the podcast in terms of just watching the numbers really grow. Turns out when you spend time actually telling people that you have a podcast, people tune into it! Okay, so this took me three years to figure that out. I'm just so bad with marketing. Just it really, it sort of makes me feel a bit achy. So I don't do very much of it. But I've been trying this year to to really take that stuff much more seriously, and yet it seems to be working. So thank you for tuning in and you're fairly new to the podcast and you have huge back catalogue of podcasts to go check out when you start commuting again but if you would like to let us know what you'd like me to do with this platform I'd love to hear your thoughts just graham@thinkproductive.co.uk on the email. So who would you like on as guests? What more would you like to see focused on through the podcast topics you'd like me to cover? other suggestions really, for things that you think I could do? I mean, we've kept pretty much to a fairly straight interview format. It's kind of weird saying that after this episode, which is obviously like a little bit different because it's someone interviewing me pretty much but you know, generally it's me interviewing someone. But it doesn't always have to be like that. It could be other things. So if you have suggestions or thoughts about other things you'd like me to cover on Beyond Busy let me know graham@thinkproductive.co.uk, also at Graham Allcott on Instagram, if you want to add me on there, and I do check DMs. On the othe rhand Graham Allcott on Twitter, and I don't check DMs on Twitter. So don't expect to apply if you email me there. And as I mentioned the beginning, if you're not on my mailing list, just GrahamAllcott.com, and you can fill in a little form on there and be part of that. So no excuse not to contact me. I'm not a complete recluse. Some people I know, throw that accusation at me a little bit. But yeah, you can contact me and I'd love to hear your thoughts on Beyond Busy. I had some really good suggestions, actually, I should say for guests, particularly after I put a blog post about Black Lives Matter. And I said, I've been a bit slack on diversity in my podcast guests, and I want to elevate some more black voices over the next few months and had some really good suggestions along that line as well. And people recommending colleagues and people I knew who were just really interesting black voices got some of those in the diary. Ready to go? So watch this space on that one but um, yeah, just in general just let me know what you want from from being busy. Guests wise, topics wise, all that sort of stuff. Just always happy to hear your thoughts as we head into the summer. And hope you're well hope you are surviving this fuzzy middle ground world that we live in where we're not quite sure what we're allowed to do or not. But stay well. We'll be back in two weeks time with with another episode.

So until then, take care. Bye for now.

Links

• Subscribe to Graham's newsletter

• Watch the event on CrowdCast

• The Think Productive weekly checklist

• Work Fuel

• QualityTime Android app

• Freedom for iOS

• The Friday Fireside with Tom Nixon - Closing well

• The Happy Startup School

• I May Destroy You

• The A Word

• The Last Dance

• Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool

• How to be a Productivity Ninja