Focused - 129: No One Wants to Work With a Jerk, with Colleen Wainwright

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

Gmail ninja Colleen Wainwright joins us to talk about delegating work to others, the evolution of the attention economy, and working out of email without going crazy.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. How about yourself? Excellent. We got ahead, which means I haven't been able to podcast with you for a little while, and I've missed you. So I'm glad we're on the microphone again. Yeah, this is fun.

Listeners won't know, but we've had a little gap. So it's good to talk to you again, buddy. Absolutely. And we have a guest today. Welcome to the show, Colleen Wainwright. Thank you. Thanks, David. Thanks.

Hi, Mike. Thank you, too. Colleen was on the Mac Power Users years ago. One of my, just, you're one of my favorite people, Colleen, and you're a great guest as well. We've had your name on a list on this show since before it was focused because I feel like you've had an interesting journey in life. And you could have talked about free agents,

but you also can talk a lot about being focused. So we're really pleased that you could take the time to join us today. Thank you. I'm really not sure what I'm less qualified to talk about, focus or being a free agent. That's sort of a toss-up, but I am excited to be here because you guys know a lot and you're fun to talk to. Yeah. Well, Colleen, you don't give yourself enough credit. You've been through the wars. I know for a fact. And I think a lot of this stuff, learning this stuff is, you know, going through it, making the mistakes.

I, you know, Mike and I talk about this in the show once in a while, but we were both hesitant to do the show at the beginning because so many of these productivity shows are like, they tell you they have all the answers and here's the seven easy things you can do to turn your life around and et cetera. And I just don't think it actually works that way. So talking to people who have real life experience and who have a little bit of, you know, they have a few wounds and a few victories they can share with you, I think can really help people. And that's why we asked you to come in today.

Thanks. I agree. I don't think you can have the victories without the wounds, frankly. Yeah. Yeah. We all feel like posers. have the victories without the wounds frankly yeah yeah we all feel like posers yeah colin just a little bit about you you were a fancy pants ad executive and creative director at one phase of your life in a big ad agency yes as a child i was a i was in sort of an ad prodigy yeah and then you went out on your own and you had a web personality, the communicatrix. I did after stop off in commercial acting. Yes. In fact, in your commercial acting, Mike was just talking earlier that now he's starstruck. Oh, that's true.

Explain why, Mike. Yes. Colleen Wainwright is Sniffles from Space Jam. Which is a minor, I guess you could classify it as a minor part, right? Sniffles is only on screen for about 15 seconds, but I've always just loved that scene before you get squished by the monster with the basketball. And I'm a big Space Jam fan. I grew up with it, but my kids absolutely love it too. My oldest is 13 and that's one of their, we got five kids at home and they all love Space Jam. that's one of their... We've got five kids at home, and they all love Space Jam. It's one of their favorite movies.

We're familiar with your voice and your work for a long time. I think I can only talk as fast as I usually do to Sniffles, but you know. It's funny, Mike, because occasionally we do have celebrities on Mac Power Users, and that's the only time my kids have any respect for me. So today at lunch, you can tell them, today I talked to Sniffles, and they suddenly will think celebrities on Mac Power Users. And that's the only time my kids have any respect for me. So today at lunch, you can tell them today I talked to sniffles and they suddenly will think that everything you do is worthwhile. I just got way cooler. Yeah, exactly. Is it sad if I admit I've never seen Space Jam? No, other people have seen it more than enough times to make up for the time

you didn't. All right. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry about that. And then, so, but communicatrix was really a freelance gig and you really had, I was always really impressed with the content you put out and just the voice you had. And then after that, you went back to work for the man. I did. I did. I've been in my current role or I've been in my current, the company I'm at currently for a little over four years, like four and a half years now, and in my current role for a couple of those years. Yeah. And in the new job, it's entertainment adjacent and you report to others and you have others that report to you. I do. And we haven't talked to someone kind of dealing with that stuff in the

context of focus. You know, one of the things that we often hear from listeners is, you know, that's fine for you emails where Mike and I will talk about how rare we look at email and then somebody will write and say, yeah, but my boss is a jerk and I have to check email every 10 minutes. And, and Colleen's boss is not a jerk, but Colleen's office does run on email. So one of the segments we're going to talk about today is how do you stay focused when you do have to spend all day in email? And I'm really looking forward to diving in on some of this stuff with you today, Colleen. Cool. Me too. I don't think of it as that interesting because I do it all day long, but I'm glad it's interesting to somebody. And if it's helpful to anyone,

that's even better. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing, you and I had a nice phone call yesterday and we were talking about, you know, cause we, we are not senior citizens, but we've been around the block a few times. And like, I was telling you how I remember when I first started practicing that there really was no email. Email was a thing, but it hadn't found its way into the law profession yet. And like the most urgent interruption you could get was someone could send you a fax, you know, and the secretary brought those in at the end of the day. So like, I remember a time when we didn't have interruptions and now, you know, fast forward 20 or 30 years and interruptions are everywhere. You know, we've got an interruption devices in

our pockets, on our desks and everywhere else. And I just thought it'd be fun to start the show just reflecting on how you've seen, you know, the attention economy boom during your run. Absolutely. I started, I mean, I am a stone's throw from senior citizenry, by the way, and proud of it. As proud as you can be of something that you have nothing to do with except just staying above ground. But I started my career, my first career, in 83. So in 1983, I worked for a large ad agency in New York, and I remember when they installed the facsimile machine, which had its own room and its own operator, much, I guess, like a teletype used to back in the day.

And it was that sort of thing where that was a big deal. It was expensive to send a fax and took a long time back then, back in the day, really back in the day. really back in the day. But I remember like an interoffice memo, which was literally something that was typed up by someone approved, you know, by somebody else and then routed to everybody. That was a big deal. Like those would drop in the interoffice mail, like in physical mail, there were these things that went around. Maybe there probably still are in the military or something, I don't know, more secure environments, but that was a big deal. And now I sit with my email portal open with just basically a tab in Firefox currently open all day long, which is all tricked out with everything to try and deal with the massive onslaught of stuff coming at me. And of course, there's the phone.

And of course, there's physical interrupt. And of course, there's physical interruptions when I'm in the office. So it's escalated quite a bit. Let's just dive in then on email, because that is a challenge that I think a lot of our listeners face and are looking for solutions for. Sometimes the nature of your work is one where it just comes with a lot of email that you have to process and manage. And I guess I would put that in two categories. The first category is quantity. And the second category is urgency. I mean, you can get a lot of email, but maybe it's not as urgent so you can spend more time in between. Or you can get a lot and it can be urgent. How do you fall on that spectrum?

I get a lot because I'm copied on everything. And a few times they've asked if I want to be taken off anything, but the reality is because of the type of work that I do at my company, I need to have eyes on everything if I need it, and I need a backup copy of everything if I have to go back and look at it when no one else is around just to sort of piece together what's happened. So what I'm getting is I'm getting everything that's funneled to a help email and to departmental emails as well,

except for one department that I'm not directly involved with anymore. And I'm getting my personal email, I mean, personal to the office. So the thing I did, well, first of all, we all look out for each other. It's a great company. I mean, it's probably the best place I've ever worked. Fantastic team, just terrific. And we're still small and scrappy and everyone's in there doing everything. So we all

kind of say, hey, if I haven't seen something, just hit me up in IM or something, let me know. But I set up a series of basically Gmail searches that I store in a dropdown folder, in a list, in a folder, in my toolbar. And the tippy top one is Colleen at my company name so that I can go right to those, find the unread emails to me. And I check that pretty constantly. I can let everything in the inbox pile up, but those I really try to keep an eye on because if someone's trying to get hold of me that way, clients are supposed to copy these other entities, but they don't. So it's important that I have eyes on that as often as possible. And I'm checking that fairly regularly unless I'm in a deep dive on something. So it's almost like a perspective of email. Correct. Give me the stuff that's just coming at me.

That's exactly what it is. If only I could learn how to do that in OmniFocus, right? I can help you with that. I have a thing that can help you with that. What about now, do you have alerts on for that or is it just a thing where you go and check it? No, it's interesting. It's a great question and valid. Alerts in general,

I find extremely disruptive. So unless they're coming from a human being, um, that's different. One of the difficulties I have at the office is when the phone's ringing, which it does pretty much constantly when I'm in the office and that punctuation of the phone ringing, I do a lot of work in spreadsheets, a lot of detail work, and that'll really throw me off. So when I need to focus, I put it in D&D, but I don't have any alerts on, like nothing. I have a lot of things where I can go look for them, but I can't, they won't yell at me, basically, because the yelling is upsetting to me for some reason. I like that, though, the fact that you are a high-volume email person, but you still don't have

notifications turned on. No. Yeah. I do have my IM. I don't get, I do get alerts for IMs, but that's different. That's internal.

So when someone sends a message to you directly, it sounds like that is automatically not just urgent or time sensitive, but it's also important. Do you have any other sort of classifications for the other filters that you use? Is it hilarious? If it's hilarious, you can always let me know. I'm always up for hearing something, seeing something hilarious. Sometimes it's just a crazy gif in an IM. That's kind of it.

It's urgent and important those are the main things that i need to look at but then yes i do have other perspectives great word david um thank you i'll use it moving forward i'd never even thought of that um i have other ones set up for uh just so that i can go through and filter out by department uh what email is going where because i've learned to quickly sort through in those perspectives and I can bulk read. I can just scan in Gmail if I make it small enough that my eyeballs can still pick it up. And then Mark has read an archive, just leaving the things that I do want to see for later. Well, it's interesting because there are some jobs where kind of deep work, for lack of a better term, is the job.

Like if you're an architect and you're designing a house, your job is to make blueprints for a house. I think a lot of the stuff I do requires deep work time, but it sounds to me like a lot of your job is actually that is the job, is to manage the communications. More and more, that's what it's become. I do still have, I don't know, I would say 25 to 30% of my time is spent on projects where I just need to shut everything out and focus. So in those times, in those cases, I do just batten down the hatches and let people know, I'm turning off my IM. I'm here, but I'm not here. So something really needs to be on fire if you want to get in touch with me.

And you can always get through on my phone. I mean, the people who really need to find me can find me. But usually somebody else can handle what's going on. And usually if I'm doing a deep dive on something during the day, it's something that is urgent and important. How do you give notification to everybody that you're going, you know, underground for a little bit? Um, it depends on who's, who it is, but generally I just do it through IM. I let my team, my direct reports know that I'm disappearing for a bit. I let, uh, I have another little IM group set up for my boss and someone who's basically the main traffic cop of the company. He does a lot more than that, but he does wear that hat. And then if I'm in the office,

I'll also let our person who's on the phones know just sometimes so that they know. But usually, D&D does the job for that. So that's not as big a deal. Not surprisingly, I get a lot of email from young attorneys that find their way into the show and they listen to the stuff me and Mike talk about. And they're like, yeah, but my boss, he really governs my time. I don't have the time to do my work. And my advice quite often to them is if you're on a shared calendar system, because almost always these law firms have a a shared calendar. I say,

just block some time for yourself and give it some nebulous name. Like if, if, if everybody's really a jerk at your work, say it's like Smith client, you know, but don't even say you're meeting with the client to say Smith client. And that's just nebulous enough that they'll think, oh, he must have a meeting with the client that you're actually working on the Smith client project, you know, but just like put some blocks in the schedule that you want for your, for your focus time. And, and I've, I've given that advice many times and in almost always it works, you know, even if it's just a little bit, at least gives you some bit of a toehold, right? least gives you some bit of a toehold, right? It's a great idea. I haven't had to do that yet, but it is a great idea. And I will definitely pull that one out if needed. That brings up another point that I wanted to ask you about, because you mentioned at the beginning that you have a great team that you work with. And I think maybe that changes the rules when it comes to how you deal with email.

If you have a boss who's a jerk and they're constantly emailing you and you're trying to fight against that, like David just described, I imagine that changes the approach a little bit. Do you have any experience with that or how do you think your current company culture, how do you think that impacts your approach to email? I agree 100%. I have never been in a situation with a boss who is challenging where that would have been a solution for reasons I can't get into. But I can see how it would be, especially in a larger office. And I am really, really fortunate to work at a place that respects each of us individually from top to bottom.

They've gone out of their way to say it, but they've also gone out of their way to do it. They walk the talk in so many ways every day. So it's just, I haven't needed to do, to resort to those sorts of tricks. Although I, you know, I, and a part of it may just be because we're smaller. I mean, we're not, we're still a pretty scrappy team. Um, and all I have to do is to say the word and everyone's like, oh sure. She doesn't ask for that often. If she's asking for it, she must need it. But yeah, I think that would be the case in certain situations. And like I could travel back in time and if email was invented back in the day,

I would definitely, you know, if those types of interruptions were around in 1983 to 93, then yeah, absolutely. Those are things I would have availed myself of. Well, that's the thing is that email is a relatively new technology, but really it's just a vehicle that we use for communication, right? And David and I just recorded an episode on communication. And it occurs to me that if you trust the people that you work with, your communication is a lot more effective. You don't have to resort to the tricks.

But even prior to email or even outside of email, maybe nowadays, there's probably still communication being the fundamental issue that people need to solve. And maybe email is the thing that bears the brunt of the hatred just because of the sheer volume of email that people get. But really, the issue is the people that you're talking to. It's misuse of the tool. I agree. Email is a really safe target. It gets a little uncomfortable and ugly to start thinking that way about people, so it's easier to dislike the tool. And back in the day, we did do things like we'd leave the office to work. I mean, that was just someone would just disappear and be like, where's so-and-so?

Like, oh, I don't know. Especially if you worked at a big enough agency where they'd have to spend some time looking for you. You can get away with that for a while. So that's a good way to get things done. Yeah. I was thinking about just email and electronic communications in general. And I read that Cal Newport book, A World Without Email, which Mike and I have been meaning to talk about on the show for like ever. And we keep pushing it because we never get to it. But, uh, and it,

one of the things he talks about is how the car industry changed. Like originally, um, you know, everybody, if you, if you bought, if you had a car factory,

you'd have a station and there'd be a couple of guys that built a car in that station. You know, they, they got the frame, they put the engine in, they, you know, they built it soup to nuts themselves. And then Henry Ford had the idea of like the moving conveyor belt of a factory line and all the improvements that came with that. I feel like we are still in the build a car in a bay phase of electronic communications, that like we are all monkeys in this cage and the you know the carrot has just been stuck in front of us and it's just

too early and we haven't figured out yet how to effectively use these tools but also get our work done i think that's a fair assessment that's a really that's a great analogy it is it's still early days yeah 50 years from now i i don't think people are going to have the same complaints about the stuff that we have now. At least I hope not. That's too depressing to even contemplate. So, yes, it'll be different in 50 years. Very different. And everyone will be organized and communication will be clean and there'll be no duplication of effort.

And, yeah, it'll be great. 50 years from now, I'm just going to tell my AI, hey, tell Colleen's AI to do something. And then Colleen's AI will say, tell Sparky he's full of it. And then our AIs will have like 50 emails back and forth and you and I will never read any of them. I won't read anything because I'll be 110.

I won't be able to see anything by then. You're forgetting about your bionic implants. Oh, that's right. I forgot. Oh, you're right. That's 30 years from now. So you've got these email perspectives. You've got the one for you.

You've got a couple others. Where has that system worked for you? And where has it broken down? Because that's kind of a different paradigm for email than most people use. It is. Here's where it breaks down. It breaks down, I think, when I'm trying to track things. Tracking is very difficult. It's good for new incoming. It is bad for keeping eyes on stuff and like where something at, which I think my, I think Kanban's better for that. Something where you can visualize it. My team's been trialing some software that they like. It's an add on to Gmail that just makes it easier to see

in, in KB view. And, and they really love it because even though I built up this crazy system of labels before I, I kind of turned everything over to them. I built up this crazy system of labels before I kind of turned everything over to them, I mean, in the course of my doing all that work before I had direct reports, which they're still using and we still use, they really like that quick visualization. You can't really do that with drop-down searches. It just doesn't pop. It's like when I look at my inbox, sometimes I've said it looks like a big bowl of Jolly Rancher sometimes with all my crazy labels on it. I feel like in the last year I've talked to so many people that have found religion with Kanban. Yeah.

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going to look. So head over to squarespace.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, for a free trial with no credit card required. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code FOCUSED to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash FOCUSED. And when you decide to sign up, use the offer code FOCUSED to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the FOCUS podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. All right, so we teased you before the break about Kanban. So you're using it currently with email. What is the name of that plugin?

It is called Drag. And we found it when we were searching for a ticketing system we we literally handle everything and we do a high volume of tickets um in email just because things have sort of grown faster than we can find tools to you know adapt but we've been trying laying drag and while i'm not sure that it will be a ticketing solution for us, it does seem to be a great KB Kanban solution. And it's fairly inexpensive and fairly easy to use. And you could do a personal one, too. You don't need to do it with a team. Yeah.

I want to talk about personal versus team in a minute. start out, I think like that idea of simplicity with a Kanban board is super important, especially with a team, because everybody on the team has to understand how it works, not only, you know, how to read it, but how to make changes to it. And some of these Kanban tools are like, they're like the modern equivalent of project management software, where it has a bunch of bells and whistles, but just to do the basic functions, nobody knows how to do that stuff. Yeah. I mean, I've only dipped my toe in the water because our IT team uses something else, not that to manage their projects.

It's something much more complex. And I looked at it and I just ran away. It's like, it just looked like a really scary spreadsheet to me. And Mike, you guys use Kanban at Suite Setup, right? We do. We switched to Notion specifically so we could use Kanban for the blog content that we create. And we use it for the projects, like the courses and stuff that we make as well. And I've had experience with Kanban before I joined the Suite Setup team. I've been a big believer in that format. I think maybe the tool that scared Colleen away, especially if it was a technical team, might be something like Jira, which I've used in the past and I totally understand why that would be intimidating. intimidating. I do want to just iterate, though, that Kanban doesn't have to be something super complicated with a bunch of different types of things in it. Really, all you need for Kanban

is the simple list. And again, going back to World Without Email by Cal Newport, he does a good job describing this. But just a list of things that you're going to do, a list of things that are active, and a list of things that are done, and then seeing those things move from left to right is strangely satisfying. Well, the times I dropped in on their Kanban view, because we'll do a little catch-up sometimes as a team, and I'm like, wow, that looks so peaceful, just knowing where everything is without having to hunt through labels. So I could see that. Yeah, I find it.

I think peaceful. I've never thought about that, but I think peaceful is the right word for it because it settles your mind. You just kind of know where things stand. And I have a very small team for the Max Barkey stuff, but all the field guides are made out of an air table Kanban board. the max barky stuff but all the field guides are made out of an air table kanban board and um the p there's basically three and a half of us working on those videos and um as soon as i brought the kanban view air table added it two or three years ago as soon as i brought that in

everybody on the team from the super nerdy to the super not nerdy, everybody immediately got it. And it just seems like things move faster now because people don't have to go into database mode to figure out what they're supposed to do today. They just look at the visual field and there it is. You don't need to know anything about task management to look at a Kanban board and get a feel for how much progress you've made. People kind of inherently understand that, which I think maybe that's the big topic here is regardless of the team that

you're working with, that's what you're going after, right? Is everybody being on the same page, everybody being in alignment, going in the same direction towards a common goal and working together to make sure that the work gets done. Absolutely. I had a thought when you were talking about it, like you can all look at it and it just makes sense, removes the anxiety. The other part of it is it's kind of gamification in a way because it's like watching a horse race except they're going in the wrong direction.

But they're all moving, as they move over, it's like, oh, look at that. You know, they won, they won, they won. Like, we're winning. This one's pulling ahead. It's fun. Come on, design review. Daddy needs a new pair of shoes. A bunch of horse names like that.

That's great. Yeah, you know, I think that's true. And then to get back to your other point, personal versus team-based. So I brought it into the system as a team management tool for the field guides. But I liked it so much that I have been kind of on this little mini journey the last six months of building my own personal board. And it's really evolved a lot. Mike and I were just talking about it the other day. And for me, I've got different areas of my life. You know, there's Max Parkey, there's field guides, there's lawyer, there's

personal. And each one, I just have two categories. It's either on hold or it's active. But having that view on my computer anytime to see which projects for each view is either active or on hold like to you know this episode of the focused podcast is active and it's been active for two days i've been talking to colleen to get set up and working on the outline and all that and then once we finish this i will put it on hold and then when we get to publication data to get active again then i'll delete it because it's done. And there's just something very satisfying for me at the end of the day to check in on

the personal Kanban. I find it a very good focus tool. I imagine. I wonder if it's just that most of us are more visual than we know, visually oriented. Yeah. And it's just, again, it relieves that anxiety. I can see it and it's just it again it relieves that anxiety i can see it and it lets my brain process it and give me some relief if someone asks you directions to your house do you write down um directions like go down euclid avenue for five

miles and then turn right or do you draw a map uh i have literally gone to whatever map service i'm using at the time yeah done a screenshot and then then I put in, like, I mark it up and send it to people. Yeah, so you're a map person. I mean, that question used to work more before, you know, GPS and satellite system. But, like, when we were younger, you didn't have that option. We had the Thomas guide in our trunk, right? Right. So you would draw a map.

I would always draw a map. I would never write out directions. And I always think that is like the little indicator that I'm a visual person. Like I would never think to write down directions. I would only draw a map. It's very helpful, I think, for me. Or even just if I give people landmarks, you know, so that when they are there, you know, you describe it.

And then when they're there, like, oh, that's that thing they described, the big dinosaur by the side of the road or whatever it is. So speaking of making maps, what other sorts of things? I mean, Kanban is great, but it's only one tool that you could use to get everybody going in the same direction and working on the same thing in the right way. What are some of the other things that you would use to manage your projects effectively? Good question. I do use lists. I do write things down a lot. And I also keep things, this is embarrassing. The lists I'm not embarrassed about. That's fine. It's old school. It works. It works. But I do keep a lot of stuff in email, again, with groups of tags. Usually I'll just have like a recurring reminder. Each person has an at tag and then I'll tag it

with the month, you know, MM month and DD day. And then tell Gmail, just tell me when this is, you know, I should look at this again. Sometimes it's set to the day of our one-on-one. I have a one-on-one with my boss every week and I have one-on-ones with my direct reports unless something is needed sooner and then I may check up on it. But that's basically my really elaborate system, kind of embarrassed to say. So I also rely on other people saying, hey, what happened to this thing? Like, oh, that, yeah, we were working on that. We'll get that right over to you. I don't think there's anything to be ashamed of there.

We had Ken Kaysan recently, the CEO of the Omni Group. And in Deep Focus, the special episode we do for people who support the show directly, we asked him about some of his custom perspectives. directly, we asked him about some of his custom perspectives. And he shared that he has these OmniFocus perspectives set up for the individual people on his team so that when he goes into a one-on-one meeting, like you just described, everything is right there. So essentially, you're accomplishing the same goal, just using a different tool. And I think that's kind of fascinating to see how people use these things in different ways. And I think that's kind of fascinating to see how people use these things in different ways.

Thanks. That's actually very reassuring. Similar to I got reassurance from a client indirectly. She wasn't trying to reassure me, but she actually said, oh, I hate it. We all live in email. We're all managing everything in email. She was apologizing for not getting back on something sooner, but saying, I track everything through email because that's where we live. And it was oddly reassuring to know that I was in the same boat. I think we all, at least in entertainment, we cut each other some slack because we're still all using these older tools and they're not made for this. But that's a great, again, this whole perspectives talk is like,

oh, am I going to take a look at OmniFocus again? That might be a good idea. Well, one of the things that you're doing that you don't give yourself enough credit for is it sounds to me like you're aggressively using the Gmail features, labels, tags. There's a lot to Gmail that I don't think most people touch. Like the ability to tag an email to remind you in a week that you need to deal with this email. That's like a step beyond. That's almost turning Gmail into a task manager. It is sort of, it's task manager adjacent. It doesn't do everything a task manager does, I'm sure.

Because it's also receiving email constantly. But especially if you set up with filters so that things are being labeled automatically and funneled into these slots, then it is. It's pretty effective. You can do an awful lot. It's very robust. And I never thought I would be someone who lived in Gmail because I was always, you know, an email client person, but you know, like separate standalone email client person. But I really, really like it. And I like all the shortcuts. And now I find when I have to use,

you know, I can't stand it on my phone going into that app. It drives me bananas looking for things. I always tell people people if you're going to go to gmail go all the way and do use gmail the way you know the creator intended you know use the chrome browser and use gmail on the web because i think that's where you get the all the features you know you put it in an app and suddenly features start breaking. 100%. And the keyboard shortcuts are amazing. It's definitely the most effective way to use Gmail once you start to understand some of those keyboard shortcuts. A lot of the apps just have basic support for them. But if you look at all of them that are available inside of the web view, it's pretty amazing. The other thing that stands out to me

based on your use of Gmail, it sounds like, Colleen, is that you can make this work because you have a couple of assumptions that you're making regarding the email that comes in. And you kind of alluded to that doesn't all fit this criteria, but you kind of automatically filter out the junk. And this has always been one of the things that drove me nuts when I saw people try to use email as a task manager is that you have a whole bunch of things coming in and you don't have any sort of system to tell you what you need to take action on. But when you get something from somebody, you are assuming, and I'm assuming rightly so, that this is something that you need to take action on,

and it is something that you should be doing. And I think the slippery slope with email is when you have a bunch of people who are able to make requests of you, and a lot of them don't really matter. I think that's correct. And I have some labels to deal with that. Funny you should mention, I have two labels which I found extremely useful. One is VIP. And that's like fairly obvious who's getting those kinds of tags. And then the other one is be very careful. one is be very careful and be very careful just really means it's sort of a catch-all term i'll let you use your imagination but one of the the use cases for it is just situations where i really am going to need to slow down and pay extra attention before diving into this email so those are kinds of things that are good heads up for me. And the more of those kind of, you know, if I come up with other big separators, things that will work like that, I would add them, but I'm really careful to sort of add those one at a time, really on an as needed basis. And then do you create like

dropdowns for that, like VIPs and be very careful so you can segregate those when you need to? I actually use text expander snippets to just pop them into search. Okay. Makes sense. I feel like there's a lot of people who could benefit from a be very careful tag being applied automatically to the majority of their email. After practicing law nearly 30 years, I will agree. I think nothing has got more people fired from their jobs than the reply all button in an email application. Oh, forward is your friend. I mean, you know, drafting forward, drafting forward. Just getting the nuts and bolts of it a little bit. So you've got labels and I guess which are the Gmail equivalent of tags. Do you, are there some others that you

could share? Because I think a lot of people are struggling with this, and maybe they could pick up some of these tips and use it in their Gmail application. That's a great question. I'll have to log into the other computer, so I'll have to use my memory in the meantime. I'm on my home rig right now. I swapped out.

But let me think about combinations. So I have a few weekly tasks that I have to do actually some sometimes they wind up being daily depending on how much activity we're having like closing accounts and so I have again some filters set up I do the whole month month day day that's turned out to be extremely useful but I have things set up so that you mean by that um i have i have 12 it's basically like i guess a tickler file but an email so i have all the months set up all the days of the month set up um in the format mm and then dash oh one and then i have jan

and that so that it will they always line up together on the email so that i can find when things are due or when i've done things or however that email's labeled. And that's been very useful. I also have, so when there's a situation, for example, where I have to close accounts daily or weekly or whatever it winds up being, those are a safe search and a dropdown. Those are a safe search and a dropdown, and it's a certain set of parameters, criteria, including subject line, and then the type of transfer that's happened that's telling me what to do so that they just populate one dropdown label or dropdown search. And I can pull them all up at once and go through boom, boom, boom, boom, and take care of things really quickly. Earlier, you mentioned you, you future schedule things to like where you're like, this is something I need to deal with next Tuesday. How are you pulling that off?

That is a, I really just use Gmail has this function now where you can snooze things, which is not a very high tech thing, but that's what I use. I do, I do label, I try to label them as well though, just in case that doesn't work so that I could always pull it up on the day if I want to like a tickler file. Yeah. I made fun of snoozing email when it first came in. I thought it was a really dumb idea. And then I started using it and realized that it's actually very helpful for certain types of email. It is. Yeah. All this stuff I think is very, Gmail really lends itself to this kind of stuff. Like if you were an Apple mail, It is. from now, I would imagine that whatever our electronic communications are will be much

more along the vein of something that can assist you in future scheduling and sorting than what we're currently getting. Well, it's either that or train people to use subject lines, and I don't think that's going to ever happen. People like to march to the beat of their own drummer. They march to the drum of re, re, re, re. Re, right. to. I really haven't subscribed to many new podcasts. But there's something that's really enjoyable about finding a new show, especially one that is fascinating and provides story-based insights like the HPE Tech Talk podcast. Now, I'm a football fan, and Tottenham Hotspurs are actually my favorite team. So naturally, I picked the episode with Sanjeev Katwa, the CTO of the

Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, where they talked about all of the things that they had incorporated technology-wise into their new stadium. It's pretty fascinating. 1,600 wireless access points to make sure that you've got coverage no matter where you are in the stadium. It's a completely cashless stadium where you can enter with just a mobile device. And I think it's fascinating to hear about N17 and the Twitch channel and all of the other things that Tottenham is doing in order to engage with fans who aren't at the stadium and how all of that is empowered by the tech infrastructure at the stadium. It's a really fascinating episode.

I learned a lot. And if you have an affinity for tech, but you really like the storytelling of podcasts like 99% Invisible or something like that, I really think you will enjoy the HPE Tech Talk podcast. And if you want to listen to, you can expect topics like how to tackle issues when it comes to high-performance computing, applying tech for the good of the people, planet, and communities, the future of technology, data management, disruptive software ecosystems, and AI, and much more. And this show takes you straight to the source interviewing some seriously impressive tech leaders like Dr. Michael Roberts from ISS

US National Lab, Emily Christensen, a master candidate in applied data science at USC, or Monica Livingston from Intel. So check out Tech Talk wherever you get your podcasts. Search for Tech Talk Now or click the link in the show notes. Our thanks to the HPE Tech Talk podcast for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Now, Colleen, I mean, I've known you a long time. And when you told me you have direct reports, the first thing I thought was how lucky those people are, because Colleen is actually a very compassionate person who would actually try to think about the people that are working for her and make it easier.

But how do you do that with focus? How do you keep them on task but not be a jerk at the same time? First of all, that's very nice of you to say thank you. I do try to be considerate. I, for the most part, had pretty good bosses and been lucky, and I've tried to take those lessons in stride and just apply them myself. I've been extremely fortunate with my direct reports. I have two currently, and they are outstanding, like smarter than I am, faster than I am, no more than I did at the ages that I was at their ages. That was a mess of a sentence. But they're just way, way more on top of things than I am. So that part's great.

And like I said, sometimes they'll remind me of things. What I really tried to do was, as best I could, was spend a ridiculous amount of time and energy up front, making sure each of them, really, that my first direct report felt comfortable with doing all the different tasks we had. And then being very clear about what I really wanted to have done a specific way and trying to keep that to a minimum. I mean, I really try to only say specifically do it this way because I found when we do it these other three ways, you know, if you give people an explanation that this and this and this happens, if people understand, if people have an understanding of it, if they know you're

just not being some kind of crazy autocrat, I think there's a lot more acceptance. And it also helps maybe teach them how to do this further down the road when it's their turn to manage. And I will say that my initial direct report has done just a bang up job doing the bulk of the training of our newest team member because he's just, you know, we spent the time together and also he's very adept. So I think that's the, to me, it's a system that really works is really spend the time up front. You know, people take, they'll take to some things really quickly and some things will take longer. That's all fine. It still has to be organic. Understand that there's going to be a little bit of a time sink up front, but it really pays off in spades down the road. And then all I need to

do is make adjustments. The most challenging thing for me has been to teach or to share, I guess, pass along or train people in how to think and communicate. That is much harder. And again, I've been really, really lucky in that both of these people are terrific communicators. But there are some things you just know at almost 60 years old, you know, in this many years, you know, on the planet working with people in business that you can't know at 30 or 40. It's not possible. So in that way, I try to provide a little bit more hands-on guidance. Like, why don't you draft this? Like, first I'll draft it and say, you know, we'll draft it with them, say an email response.

And I'll walk through why I'm saying something. And then the next time I'll say, why don't you do it? You know, maybe I'll give them a little pep talk. And then, you know, we sort of go in stages. And then anything that seems a little off, well, we just take care of that in the one-on-one. But they do a great job. I mean, I don't know what you would do if it was someone who was harder to train, honestly. When my wife went through the Disney management program, and this was back in the early 90s,

and when she graduated from that, she became the assistant manager of one of the stores at Disneyland. And the manager said on the first day, she said, my job is to train you to be better at my job than I am. You know? And I thought, wow, what a great like attitude to have toward people that come to work for you. And I've always carried that with me when I had people that worked under me, I don't have that many people that work under me anymore, but, but I think that's a really healthy attitude. And the other thing you talked about was just kind of communicating up front. I mean, if you want to have someone direct report to you so you can do your work, communicating to them what they're supposed to do is just so essential.

them what they're supposed to do is just so essential. I can't imagine throwing somebody in there with a manual or even just something to do and then just the next thing and then the next thing. Yeah, no, I think it's good. Just spend the time up front. And people feel cared for. And I think if they feel cared for, that also makes a difference. But I agree 100% on that. I would love for them to be better. It's scary, but if you get better than me at my job, that means I'm supposed to be doing something else and I get to move into another area and learn something else.

So terrific, because we got to move up and we got to do different things and grow. Yeah. Now, Mr. Schmitz, I happen to know, he hasn't mentioned it on the show, but he suddenly has a helper. You've got someone on your team. It's true. Yep. Got an assistant. So are you learning this wisdom the hard way, Mike, or have you already figured it out? I'm learning it the hard way. So any tips

that you have, Colleen, I am all ears. A couple of things you said that kind of piqued my interest. You mentioned the time sink at the beginning and spending a ridiculous amount of time getting your first direct report trained to do things. And then you also mentioned that you would do something and then you would say, okay, how about you try to draft it this time? say, okay, how about you try to draft it this time? And I think that there's some gold to be mined there. So if you don't mind, I'd love to hear what you have to say about how to delegate these things effectively. You're kind of implying, and I've heard this said before, we're like, I'm going to do it, and then I'm going to have you watch me do it, and then I'm going to watch you do it, and then eventually you're able to do it on your own. But what sort of other advice

would you give someone who's trying to offload a task and get someone else to be able to do it effectively? I think that exactly describes the process. That was a perfect summation of it. To expand it a little bit, what I found, it's a soft skill, but what's really required of me is something that I was not in a great supply of, I think, when I started this job in this role. But patience, just patience is super important. And then for me to remember that I didn't know this, that something that seems really obvious to me might not be obvious to someone else. Like they're a different person with a different collection of experiences. And they show me again, these direct reports every day about all the things that I just

missed because I was born, you know, 30 and 40 years before they were whatever. So we all bring to the table what we have. And if I'm trying to help them see things a certain way, I have to understand they've literally never looked at something this way. So, you know, just patience, good being good natured about it, remembering that I had to learn. I'd much rather because it was so painful for me when I failed publicly. because it was so painful for me when I failed publicly, I try to give people the chance to make their mistakes with me, you know, that they're learning, you know, as they learn, instead of making them like, you don't want to say, oh, just go and send it to the client. And then they send something and there's, you know, some egregious error or some just, you know, a political misstep. So it's better to talk those things through amongst ourselves.

And then we can, you know, take it public with the client. And even still, you know, I'll still make mistakes, but then I admit, oh, I should have looked at it this way. Oh, that's another big thing, copping to where I'm wrong. I think sometimes, because I felt the tendency in myself, it's like, I'd rather just hand it off because it's like, ah, this is sort of sticky. Let's let them figure it out. Well, you know, that's, that's kind of cruel, isn't it? If someone's never had that experience and you're already, you know, balking at doing something because something about it makes you uncomfortable or, you know, speaking me

terms, it makes me uncomfortable. Why am I going to foist it on this person who's got even less experience than I do? That doesn't really seem fair. It applies in parenting as well as having direct reports. It's just being able to fess up to the fact that, oh no, I made a mistake or this is something that's hard for me. Like even when like sharing how to do something new, telling the person the different ways you've done this in the past that didn't work and why it didn't work. I really feel like that

is when it works. I mean, whenever you try to be like, oh no, I know it all and this is how you do it, whether it's your kids or your direct reports, you're not really communicating with those people. Agreed. I think people are sometimes astonished by honesty because a lot of the culture is don't look bad, look like you know everything, don't show any weakness. Whereas I've learned kind of the hard way, if I just admit up front, I screwed this up or I didn't know what I was doing or boy, I made a mistake. How can I correct this? It's disarming to people, which isn't really the intention, but it humanizes me. It humanizes the whole situation. I think on some level they know, oh, I've been a human who's screwed up. So that's helpful. And it just makes everything so much easier going forward when we're

not doing all this posturing. You mentioned at the beginning of this segment, you made a comment about teaching people to think and communicate. And then you also mentioned soft skills not too long ago. I'm curious if that has any weight in your selection of your direct reports, like when you were hiring these people, were these qualities that you looked for? Or are these things that you are trying to foster on the job? Because I think these tend to be the things that are more difficult. It's easy to walk through like the specific, this is what you have to do to complete a task, teaching somebody to think critically or communicate effectively maybe is a little

bit harder. So do you have a process for that? I guess I do have a process. Thanks for helping me externalize it. My first direct report was someone in the company who was sort of looking for a change. And I knew he was comfortable with numbers, comfortable with detail work, eager to take on new projects. And those were qualities, I think,

or I just think those are great qualities. Those, those are the kind of people I like to work with, probably because that's, you know, I think that's the kind of person I am. And I'd had enough interactions with this person, just verbally and seeing his emails, where I was like, this is, this is fine. And if we get into areas that require more new nuance or more politesse with the clients, we can, we can work with that. But those hard skills have to be there first. Like it's an all things being equal type of situation. You don't need to be trained in exactly what I do, but you need to know you need to be a detail oriented person, or it's just not going to work in this department. The other, the most recent direct hire came in pre-vetted by someone I really trust at work. And he had a long work history with this person. I literally, and she'd also worked with a sister company of ours. And I'd met her before and liked her just in the brief encounter. And then we had just a terrific, one of those really smart, fun, fluid conversations over

Zoom the very first time. And I just thought, okay, this person gets it. There's just not even any question. I'm not going to fret about this one second and any sort of little noodling we need to do to a lot of times it's okay, you get it. And now we need to maybe make it a little more formal because this is a credit card company. We have to be formal in a lot of ways and precise, but still work that human angle. And that is a kind of an odd thing to wrap your head around. But she was clearly smart enough and

a good enough communicator that that wasn't going to be an issue. So it was more a matter of, you already speak French really well. There's this particular dialect or this other romance language that you need to be semi-fluent in. Let's talk about that now, if that makes sense. Sure. You were able to identify the core competencies and then you kind of knew that those would translate into the specific things that the job was going to require. That was so much more succinct. I am embarrassed, but thank you. Yes. And Mike Schmitz will do that to you once in a while. You just got to get used to it. I'm sorry. As I stumble around, he always just nails it. What's more important, like mindset or skill set? Oof. Mindset. I mean, you got to work with people all day long. Nobody wants to work with a jerk.

I totally agree. Skills can be taught, but mindset does not change. Yeah. And nobody wants to work with a jerk, David. What does that mean, Colleen? It means I move forward cautiously. I used to have a rule when we hired people, if they don't have a lot of experience, but they have a good attitude, that's cool. But the one thing I don't want is I had, we called in the office, the no dementors rule. I don't want any dementors being hired. And dementors are the people who walk in the room, the no dementors rule. I don't want any dementors being hired, you know, and you know, dementors are the people who walk in the room and suck all the happiness out of the room. They're out there. You got to watch out for those. Yeah. And sometimes they can be really,

really competent, but yeah. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Life's too short. Yep. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Memberful. Head over to memberful.com slash focused for best-in-class membership software for independent creators, publishers, educators, podcasters, and more. And get started now with no credit card required. Memberful is the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience, used by the biggest creators on the web. It generates sustainable recurring income while diversifying your revenue stream. You might have heard us talking about the RelayFM membership program, but what you might not know is that Memberful is the platform we use for that program, and they make it super easy to generate

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All right, Colleen. So we've been dealing with a pandemic, you know, something that, uh, that none of us ever expected to deal with. And I'm glad you got through it okay. But you work for a company that, and I'll just set this up for the audience, that says, hey, you can work from home if you want, but we also have an office you can come into. an office you can come into. And right now, a lot of our listeners are struggling with this. They've got companies that want them to come back or tell them they don't have to come back, and they're just trying to figure out what they should do. And as someone who's going through those decisions right now, I thought it'd be fun to talk to you about that.

Sure. That's a great topic. Again, I work for the most amazing company. And of course, it was mandated here in California that we work from home for a while. But then the office did open up with restrictions, with COVID restrictions for a while. And we do have a support team on the phones. And we didn't have a way for those support people to answer phones remotely without being transferred out, which becomes a real burden on the one person who has to be there playing traffic cop. So we had a skeleton crew in the office and then people did start coming back as they were comfortable. I have a preexisting condition. So I was told by my

doctor that I should not be doing that until I was vaccinated. So I just hung tight. And when I was finally able to come back in, they'd said to me, well, you can continue to work from home for, you know, whatever, a couple, you know, but you'll be here, you'll be there, whatever you want to do, whatever you're comfortable with. And having spent, you know, a year and some months here on my, on my, by my lonesome, months here by my lonesome, I really had come to appreciate the je ne sais quoi of being in an office and interacting with my fellow humans. And I don't just mean the social aspect, although I think it's important for human beings to spend some social time with each other, even though as an introvert, I very much enjoy time alone. But there is sort of an easy facility that happens, a transmission of ideas that happens in person that doesn't always

happen when we're not together. That said, I also think there are great benefits to working from home. Today actually is my early day. I start at 6 a.m. on Thursdays because of one of my weekly tasks. So they said immediately, oh yeah, you don't have to come in ever on a Thursday again if you don't want. I'm like, yeah, I think that's a great idea. It really helps even to not have the tiny commute. So that's terrific. And then there are other times when you got to wait for the whatever to come. But I'm really happy with right now my one day from home and then an occasional extra day as needed for whatever the things need to be taken care of from home. Or frankly, if I had some sort of deep work to do, it would be easier to do that from home. I also, all that said, I live very close

to my office in Los Angeles terms. I am less than six miles from my office. And right now we're still kind of dealing. It's not COVID commute time, but it's not bad. If I were truly remote and it was truly arduous and was going to affect quality of life and I don't know, stress levels, I suppose. So quality of work, then I might spend more time working from home and come in less often. My direct reports both live in, they live further out than I do. And we've already discussed it. And one of them's, you know, going to school after work and, you know, taking a fairly rigorous course load.

And so I said, listen, you know, we could do one day a week, two day, whatever you want. You can keep working from home. And we all decided sort of as a group, okay, one day a week, we'll definitely all be in the office together. And then we'll see about the other days. But for now, they're going to keep it to a minimum for a variety of reasons, which I'm totally fine with. So I think like whatever allows you to do your best, both for yourself so that you can show up as your best for the company, and then, of course, whatever works for the company because they're your employer. Yeah. I mean, it really isn't a one-solution-fits-all problem.

Not at all. No. And it's too bad that I think a lot of companies kind of look at it as an on-off thing as opposed to a palette with colors that you can combine and, you know, create new colors. Yeah. There's one advantage that's come out of COVID, I think, in this regard. It's that historically, I mean, we heard from listeners and people who wanted to do more working at home, but their employers never trusted them. Like there was this idea like, oh, you want to work at home so you can play with your dog all day. You don't want to do work. And I think a lot of employers learned during COVID that, no, people are grown up. And if you give them the freedom to work at home, they're still going to work for you.

And I think that's good. So suddenly some employers are more willing to consider it, but it's still, there's still costs and benefits to it. I mean, I was just reading a study recently and I, I didn't save the link. I wish I had, but just talking about, there's like an inherent loss of relationship. Like if, if you're on a team of five and three people are at the office and two people are at home, those other two people are not thought of in the way that the other three are because management sees the other three every day. And you know, there's just, there's an inherent problem. Yeah. I will tell you that's, I agree that it's got to be the case. I haven't read the report, but it makes so much sense.

If only because we have a very strange office. The building was like a condo build. It was built to be condos and then they turned it, it never was condos, they turned it into offices. But anyway, it's this strange little, you know, rabbit's warren of offices. And my first couple of offices were over in a part of the office that everybody was in. And then I got moved across the hall

because they ran out of room and this and that and the other. And they would forget, like they'd literally forget to invite me to sing happy birthday when there were cupcakes, or they would forget, like I would just, they'd all leave and I'd be the only one left in the office and no one would say goodbye. It was this bizarre sort of thing of, wow, I'm kind of on a desert island here and everybody on the mainland just forgot about me. They all bugged out. It's pretty crazy. And you didn't get cupcakes.

And they got the cupcakes. Dang it. Yeah. One of the interesting things about all of this, I think, is like you said, out of sight, out of mind. I think another thing that people have learned about everyone being forced to work from home, at least for the knowledge work industry, is that people aren't going to work eight hours a day anyway, so they're not going to produce eight hours worth of work. So it's hard to measure the effectiveness of the time that you spend on a specific task. And it's kind of forced people

to look at what actually gets produced, what actually gets done. And kind of along that vein, I'm curious what else you've seen that is harder working from home, working remotely. For context, I just read this book, Digital Body Language by Erica Dewan, which was very good. And it talked about how a lot of companies and organizations kind of inadvertently alienate people who are working remotely just because they aren't set up and they're not used to the norms that go along with that in order to make that effective. Simple things like if someone's joining a meeting remotely, then everyone should have their own computer, have their own headset, so everyone's on the same level playing field in terms of communicating in the meeting.

Now, you mentioned that a lot of your work happens in email, and email seems like the perfect candidate for I can do this anywhere. But what are the other things that you've noticed that maybe lend itself well to working from home versus challenges with that and things that really are better suited for we're all doing this together in the office good question i would say there are certain types of tasks where even if they require some sussing out they may require some consultation on the details like i'm i'm thinking of i i manage the fraud department at my company. And so we're submitting disputes

all the time. And sometimes these disputes get really complex and we do have to consult with each other over Zoom or the phone or whatever, or we did in person back in the day when we were all in the office together. But those types of things can still be handled remotely because there's not much emotion behind them. It's just a task that, I mean, it's a project that needs to be done, series of tasks, but it's a project that needs to be done, series of tasks, but it's still something that can be checked off. The things that work more easily as a group are when we are trying to figure out larger solutions. We're trying to get our arms around a problem or whatever. And it helps. I don't know if there's some sort of weird kinetic energy or something that happens when humans are in a room together, but occasionally someone will have the brilliant

idea on Zoom, that does happen. But more often I've seen people sort of spark off each other in a room when we're trying to envision something to move the company forward. And when we've run into a kind of a problem that no one can get their head around, I'm trying to think of specific examples that I could share. But does that make sense, that kind of division? Mike, do you have like a great super Mike Schmitz summary of what I just said? Brainstorming works better in a room. Yeah, I guess collaborative and creative would be the monikers I would apply to that. But maybe it's something a little bit broader than that. I do agree, though, that if you get people in the same room and you're

brainstorming about something, that's way different than getting everybody on a Zoom call and brainstorming that way. And I'm in an interesting position because the suite setup team that I work with, the full-time team, all is in the same city and I am the only remote worker. So when I'm calling in for the weekly meetings, they're all in the same space sitting at the same table and I'm on the TV at the end of the table, blown up on Zoom, and they've got a speakerphone in the middle. So it's a little bit weird sometimes. So I think it can work, but I also think that it doesn't just, it's harder to get that momentum, to get that synergy when you are in different locations. Also, as humans, I mean, so much of our communication is nonverbal. And when you're in a box in the middle of the table or on a screen at the end of the table, you just don't get, you're not getting a lot of the bandwidth that's happening.

True. I'm guessing like anything else, there's certain personality types that are going to do better in a physical environment than they would in that video environment. That may be part of it. Well, I am probably 98% introverted on the scale. So I think I would kind of default to the ideal candidate for would prefer to join a virtual meeting because you can. Erica talks about this in the book, the digital body language book, that technology gives you a mask that you can hide behind. And I guess even though I am extremely introverted, I have been present enough in those live brainstorming sessions to see the value of them. And if I had my choice, that would be the one that I would choose every single time.

You would choose the live? Yes. Yes. Because I see the value that that has, even though it's uncomfortable for me personally sometimes. You just need to schedule that time afterwards to recharge yourself, Mike. You put that on your calendar so everyone can see it. Exactly. I mean, for me, the hang up with it is just the lost time in getting there. You know, just one of the silver linings of the pandemic was I was able to do almost all my client work over Zoom. And now I'm getting back to where I got to go to meetings and I got to spend, you know,

Southern California. So it's like, no matter where they are, it's at least a half hour there and back. And it's like that time adds up, you know? So. Absolutely. That is an issue for me, but I'll find my balance too. We all got to deal with it. But it is interesting because a lot of the defaults have now been reset and that gives us an opportunity to think about it. But it is interesting because a lot of the defaults have now been reset and that gives us an opportunity to think about it. And it sounds like you've kind of found your balance. Thursdays are at home and you like the separation from home. That's a good question. When you were working home all the time after having been going into office, did you find you worked more or less? I probably, to Mike's point earlier, I think I probably was working the same amount of hours, but it was spread over a much broader range of hours. So I had a lot more challenging of a time with boundaries is really what it comes down

to because everything's right there. I think that's true for most people. I think most people would, if they looked at, if they tracked their time, would find that they actually spent more hours on work while they were working from home because you don't know when to stop. Whereas once you leave the office, your brain throws a switch and you can go home and, you know, watch whatever you want on TV or, you know, go knit a quilt or whatever you do at home. Whereas when you work in the same place that you knit your quilts, it's hard to find time for the quilts. It is.

At the same time, I will say my step count went way down. At first it went up because I was just anxiously walking, you know, everywhere pacing around my neighborhood. But what I found was as pandemic wore on, I was going out less and less because it was the same walk. And because I thought, oh, I can do it later. But later never came, David and Mike, it never came. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the things that I did at the very beginning of the pandemic is I made a commitment to myself to get outside every single day. So I either ran or biked every single day from March of last year through October. And I feel like that helped me weather it a lot better. It did a lot which is impossible to measure for my mental and emotional state.

And Mike's in Wisconsin, so that's actually saying something. I'm pretty sure I would go outside one day in Wisconsin, and then I would not go outside again until April. That's pretty much the way I would handle it, I think. Midwest March is no joke. Yeah. It's true. Well, the challenges of being focused with all the plates you have in the air are something that I think we all admire, and I know it's hard. What does focus mean to you?

When you think about the word, what is a focus, and where is it it hard and where is it easy for you? That's such an easy question. I'll just toss this right off. Yeah, I know. I'm good at that. Oh, David. Focus to me is being able to comfortably turn my attention to whatever matters now, to whatever matters now, to bring my full awareness to whatever matters now. And I think that sometimes it's easier to tell what's focuses by the feelings that surround it, like that, you know, that accompany it, I guess, when I'm in that focused flow state. And what I notice is, well, first of all, time changes when I'm focused. It flies by. And there's a feeling of, it wouldn't always be peace or calm, but there's a sort of a

relief in knowing that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be right now. I have a lot of anxiety. I didn't realize this until pandemic, how much anxiety I walk around to be right now. I have a lot of anxiety. I didn't realize this until pandemic, how much anxiety I walk around with all the time. But these copious amounts of time with myself on tasks have sort of shown me. And when I have something that I can bring my full attention to with a reasonable degree of comfortability, there's a relief from that anxiety. So at the end of the day, I don't feel drained. I may be tired, but I still sort of feel energized in a way, if that makes sense. No, totally. I think that's, as humans, that's how we're wired. I mean, for hundreds, thousand years, we wandered the plains avoiding tigers and shooting buffalo or catching buffalo.

I mean, cavemen didn't worry about multitasking, right? So I think when you do find focus, I think it does bring a sense of comfort. But now I'm getting super hippy-dippy. You bring up a good point, though. This whole multitasking thing is a line. It's fast task, task switching, and that is exhausting to switch tasks constantly during the day. It is mentally exhausting and, and it takes its physical toll as well because, you know, it's using up energy. So it's probably stressing out muscles that you're not even aware

of and that, you know, they're expending energy and goodness knows what else. So yeah, I think that's not how we're built. Yeah. Physiologically, the brain burns more calories than any muscle. And, you know, that's things we have to think about. I mean, as we put more strain on it, it gets harder to stay focused. Exactly. Well, I appreciate you coming by and talking to us today about all this stuff. And it's always fun talking to you, Colleen Wainwright. So thank you so much. I know I've been kind of bugging you. I'm not sure if you just agreed to come on the show to shut me up or you actually wanted, but we'll take it either way. Well, thank you. It was so much fun. Again, I think that by any hesitancy I had about it was just around, I don't really think I'm qualified to speak on this topic at all. But I do see the point in, hey, we're all just humans. We all have things tugging at our attention all the time.

And maybe if we shared our ways that we deal with those things, those little pesky things picking at us every which way in that. One, again, it's reassuring to know that you're not the only one. And two, it might pick something up that's useful. Yeah. And who knew that you were a Gmail ninja? I didn't know that. So Colleen was telling me, Mike, that she has getting ready to start a bullet journal. She's into paper journaling. And I'm like, oh boy, we're going to make that today's deep focus because the challenge will be shutting Mike Schmitz up during deep focus today because we're going to go down paper journaling. So if you're a Deep Focus subscriber, we appreciate that and stay tuned for that. Otherwise, we are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focused. I want to thank our

sponsors today, and that is our friends over at HPE Tech Talk, Memberful and Squarespace. friends over at HPE Tech Talk, memberful on Squarespace. Colleen, where do people find you on the internet these days? Well, I occasionally will do drive-bys of Instagram and Twitter, but I don't really post much there. I do still have a moribund website, which is hosted by Squarespace, that is communicatrix.com, and it's got my oeuvre, as it were, on there. So you can check that out if you're interested in what I used to do. Yeah, yeah. We'll put that in the show link so people can check it out. And thanks a lot for listening, and we'll see you next time.