Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - A Four-Step Formula for Beating WFH Burnout

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Work’s a bit different these day, isn't it? Neat desks have been replaced with multitasking kitchen tables, colleagues with noisy family members, and some semblance of work-life balance with a messy mélange of the two. We want things to be business as usual; to get our heads down and plough on, grateful – amidst massive economic insecurity – to still have a job. But, if you’re finding it really bloody difficult to do so in these altered circumstances, you’re not alone. Joining Roisín to discuss how we can all navigate this new work world order is Nir Eyal, behavioural engineering expert, author of Indistractable: How To Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, and (good news for any working parents listening) a seasoned home-schooler. In this episode, he explains why the current situation is so ripe for burnout and shares simple tactics to help us fine-tune our focus so we can work, and live, better - during these unprecedented times, and beyond.   Join Women’s Health on Instagram: @womenshealthuk Join Roisín on Instagram: @roisin.dervishokane Join Nir on Instagram: @neyal99   Topics: How to map your values onto your time when creating a schedule Smarter ways to discuss workload with your boss How to stop your children interrupting you Two tech recommendations to conquer distraction Why self-compassionate people tend to be the most successful Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ontario, the wait is over. The gold standard of online casinos has arrived. Golden Nugget online casino is live, bringing Vegas-style excitement and a world-class gaming experience right to your fingertips. Whether you're a seasoned player or just starting, signing up is fast and simple. And in just a few clicks, you can have access to our exclusive library of the best slots and top-tier table games. Make the most of your downtime with unbeatable promotions and jackpots that can turn any mundane moment

into a golden opportunity at Golden Nugget Online Casino. Take a spin on the slots, challenge yourself at the tables, or join a live dealer game to feel the thrill of real-time action, all from the comfort of your own devices. Why settle for less when you can go for the gold at Golden Nugget Online Casino. Gambling problem call connects Ontario 1866531-260. 19 and over, physically present in Ontario.

Eligibility restrictions apply. See Golden Nuggett Casino.com for details. responsibly. Now streaming on Paramount Plus. It's the epic return of Mayor of Kingstown. Warden? You know who I am? Starring Academy Award nominee Jeremy Runner. I swear in these walls.

Emmy Award winner Edie Falco. You're an ex-con who ran this place for years. And now, now you can't do that. And Bafto Award winner Lenny James. You're about to have a plague of outsiders descend on your town? Let me tell you this. It's got to be consequences. Mayor of Kingstown. New season now streaming on

Paramount Plus. Hello, you're listening to Going for Goal, the weekly women's health podcast with me, journalist and women's health senior editor, Rochene Devershokane. This podcast is all about helping you achieve the health and wellness goals you care about, goals that have changed, as all our lives have, as a result of the ongoing coronavirus crisis. When we asked on Instagram what you wanted to get out of the show in these extraordinary times, the message was simple. You'd like our experts' advice on how to stay healthy and sane while staying at home.

So for the foreseeable, that's what we're going to be helping you to do. This week, we're looking at the goal of how you can navigate working from home without burning out. Now, from the off, I think it's important to say that, in a way, it's a privilege to be working from home right now at a time when so many key workers are doing jobs that put them in danger, and also when so many have lost their jobs. Half of UK businesses have sought to furlough their staff. The Department for Work and Pensions have received almost 1 million applications for the universal credit benefit.

Then there's the country's army of zero hours contract workers, many of whom have been let go with zero safety net. If you have lost your job, our hearts go out to you at what is no doubt a horrendously difficult time. But even when you're working, I'm grateful to be doing so, and you're determined for things to be business as usual, it can be a real challenge to maintain your output, never mind to retain some semblance of work-life balance. If anyone can help you navigate these tricky working waters, it's today's guest.

A lecturer in Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Near Eyal teaches, writes and consults about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. His latest book, Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, looks at the power of focus in a hyper-stimulated world and offers a blueprint for how everyone can organize their tasks in a smarter way that leaves more time for the things you care about. Welcome to Going for Goal, Neer. Thank you so much. Great to be here. So tell everyone where you are calling from. What's your work set up look like? So I'm in Singapore at the moment. And this isn't too different from my normal life other than I normally live in New York. But I work from home. I've been working from home for the past six years or so. And my daughter has been homeschooled for the same amount of time. So for us, this is kind of, you know, for folks who are quarantined.

these days. This is kind of, you know, welcome to my lifestyle. Other than, you know, missing, seeing friends, we've come accustomed to this lifestyle, which is nice in that a lot of the problems that many folks are facing these days being thrust into something that wasn't a decision, but imposed upon them, this work from home and homeschool lifestyle. My wife and I went through this struggle several years ago when we decided to work from home and decided to homeschool. And so that was actually the catalyst for why I wrote Indistractable is that because I was working from home and didn't have the constraints of an office setting, because we decided to homeschool. And so we didn't have, my daughter didn't have

the constraints of a, of a scheduled school day. And that was now our responsibility to figure out. I found that it was, it was maddening. It was a really difficult transition. And now many people have seen how difficult that kind of transition can be. And that was a big part of the motivation to write this book, was that I found that I just wasn't able to focus in my current workplace environment. And so it took me five years of research to try and figure out what is distraction, how do we avoid burnout and procrastination so that we can do what we really want to do with our time and attention and life.

So this sounds like it's required reading for people, especially those, I don't have children myself, but especially those who, as you say, are homeschooling and working at the same time, which, as I've had, many of the moms in our office is a challenge to say. It certainly can be. The good news is that there's some light at the end of the tunnel here, that there are some techniques that we can use tried and true tactics that help us live the kind of life we want by helping us decide how to spend our attention.

There's a reason we call it paying attention. There is a cost, a value, a price to our attention. And I think that a lot of folks, you know, even before this current COVID crisis, were struggling with their attention. When I wrote Indistractable, it was published in October. And when I wrote the book, it was really to address the struggle that many of us have around staying focused in a world full of digital distraction. But now more than ever, when you combine not only the digital distractions, the access to distraction,

We also have that combined with heightened stress, anxiety, uncertainty in the world. And so that has created this distraction cocktail, this perfect storm of distraction, where many people find it very difficult to stay focused on their work without checking the news or able to take care of their kids properly and with their full attention without checking Instagram for a minute while you want to be with your kids, whether it's taking care of your body and making sure you have the time for proper rest, proper exercise. exercise, proper nutrition. And a lot of these things are going by the wayside for people because it feels like life is a complete mess right now with everything that's going on. And so I really want to share what I've learned over the past five years of research into the deeper psychology of distraction and how I think we can all become indestructible. When we spoke last, it was in, it was when you were doing publicity for indestructible. And it was for a piece that sparked the idea for this podcast. It was all about the goals worth shooting for in 2020. Obviously now, as we alluded to,

goals are very different now. I think we probably had marathons or promotions or there was all sorts in there, but it seems to me like focus is a really important one now, as you say now, more than ever. And can you kind of just can you make the link then between, because this podcast, we're talking about burnout. Why? why can the current work from home situation for parents but also non-parents? Why can this be such a situation that can be so ripe for burnout? Right. So what we find is that there's a certain type of work experience, workplace environment that literally drives us crazy. And I don't use that term lightly. There is a type of work environment that leads to depression and

anxiety disorder. And this comes from work done by two researchers by the name of Stans. fielding candy out of Oxford, and they found that it's not the type of work you do that is correlated with depression anxiety disorder. So when I first came across this research, and before I looked into the study and what the study actually concluded, I asked myself, what type of work would make one depressed and anxious? And I thought it would be depressing work, having to be a veterinarian that puts down puppies or working in a slaughterhouse or maybe a mortician, that's the kind of work that you would think would make us depressed. And not at all. That is not at all the case. It's not the work you do with the environment you do it in. And it turns out that there's a confluence

of two factors that when taken together lead to the type of workplace environment that causes anxiety and depression disorder and also burnout. And that is the confluence of the confluence. of high expectations coupled with low control. High expectations and low control. So if you have high expectations with high control, no problem, that's where people flourish. If you feel like this is a difficult challenge, but I got this, I'm in control, I can do this,

I can rise to the occasion, we actually find that that's very beneficial for psychological flourishing and well-being. But if we have one of those factors removed, we have high expectations, and yet now we have low control, this is very psychologically difficult for us to get through. And this is what causes depression, anxiety, and for many people, burnout for some individuals in some workplaces and environments.

And that, I think, typifies what we're seeing today. When it comes to burnout, what we have is people who are, you know, the expectations are just as high as ever. We're expected to have our work completed on time. We're expected to have our finances in order. We're expected to have our kids properly fed and educated all at home. We expect so much of ourselves still. And yet our level of control and agency has suddenly been taken from us.

We no longer feel that sense of control that we used to before this crisis. And so that is very psychologically destabilizing. And as a result of that psychological destabilization, the result of feelings of anxiety, depression, burnout. What people generally do, they experience what we call internal triggers. Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from. And so this is the root cause of distraction. You know, when people think of distraction or procrastination, what they tend to think of is the pings and dings. But those are just the symptoms, right? Your phone, your computer, the news, those are just the symptoms. The real cause of the problem

of distraction and procrastination is these internal. internal triggers. It's the desire to escape from an uncomfortable sensation. So whether it's fear, uncertainty, loneliness, fatigue, all of these things can provide the internal triggers which we seek to escape from. And so if it's too much news, too much booze, too much Facebook, too much football, whatever the case might be, the worst we feel, the more likely we are to seek psychological escape through distraction. And so that's where that can be a very harmful behavior. And the worse we feel, the more out of control we feel, the more burned out we feel, the more likely we are to seek distraction, which is a harmful as opposed to a helpful behavior.

You know, it's very important as we work from home. We have to learn these new behaviors and new habits. And for many of us, you know, the pings and dings that we get into a routine around at work are now changed, right? We have a new workplace environment. We have new external triggers, so it's no longer just the pings and dings from our email and our phone. Now we have the added external trigger of our kids. And the way you're explaining it then, it sounds almost cyclical. So as you say, we've got this perfect storm and then that makes us feel rubbish, which makes us more likely to reach for distraction, which then is probably going to make us feel more disempowered, and then round and round it goes.

That's exactly right. Yeah, that's right. So the more we create a habit around alleviating that discomfort in a harmful manner that leads towards distraction rather than the opposite of distraction is not focused. The opposite of distraction is traction. And if you actually look at the source of both words, traction and distraction, and they both come from the same Latin root, Trajahre, which means to pull. And you notice that both words end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N, that spells action. So traction is any action that pulls us towards what we want, right?

Things that actions that pull us towards becoming the kind of people we want to be, living according to our values, that's acts of traction. The opposite of traction is distraction, any action that pulls us away from what we really want to do, that pulls us away from living, the kind of lives we want and living according to our values. And so what we find is when people get into the habit of turning to something to alleviate that discomfort habitually, whether it's, you know, checking the news constantly or, you know, checking Facebook or Instagram or email or whatever it might be to alleviate that discomfort, the internal triggers, which are the real source of the problem. The more we get into that habit, we teach ourselves to turn to the those things outside of us to help alleviate that discomfort when what we really need to do

is to arm ourselves with a toolkit that we can use to use those internal triggers, those uncomfortable emotional states to lead us towards traction rather than distraction. So these feelings of burnout, anxiety, procrastination, distraction, these are totally normal feelings. You know, many people tend to catastrophize and ruminate on these sensations because I think that, you know, for the most part, the self-help in is. has really not served people with this message that we're somehow supposed to be happy all the time. I don't know where people got this idea that somehow if you're not happy and satisfied and life isn't perfect all the time, that somehow you're not normal, nothing could be further from the truth. Our species, evolution has given us this trait of perpetual disquietude.

And so the message I want to pass on to people is that feeling bad is not bad. there's nothing wrong with discomfort. It's how you deal with that discomfort. So it's how you respond to those internal triggers. Hence the word responsibility. You can't necessarily control how you feel, right? Many people don't understand this fact that you have very little control over your feelings. Very much in the same way, you can't control the urge to sneeze.

You don't control that urge. It's just something that happens. What you can do is to choose how you respond to that. sensation. Do you sneeze all over everyone or do you take a tissue and make sure that you cover your nose so that you don't get anyone else sick? It's about how you respond to those sensations and urges. Very similar way how you respond to your internal triggers of boredom, fatigue, loneliness, anxiety, uncertainty. How we respond to those internal triggers defines how we spend our time, our attention, and our life. And in a situation like now, as you're saying,

there's even more distractions. I'm thinking of the even like scary news alerts. And can that add an extra like emotional layer onto the burnout, which then in turn drives us to these distracting behaviors? So this brings up a terrific point. So distraction is nothing new. You know, many people think that it's the technology that's doing it to us. And I really take issue with that point of view because if you look historically, distraction is nothing new. Plato, 2,500 years ago, talked about this very same problem. He called it Accracia, the tendency that we have to do things against our better interest. So people have been distracted for thousands of years, right? It's not the iPhone or Facebook's fault. And so this is really nothing new. But I will say that if you are looking for a distraction,

it's easier than ever to find. That because we constantly have these devices with us at all times, that if you get into the habit of using, you know, the screen, the bottle, the phone, whatever it might be to relieve these internal triggers in a harmful manner, as opposed to a helpful manner, that can get you into the habit of a self-defeating behavior. The good news is that this is just a habit. For the vast majority of people, it's not an addiction, right? We don't want to use that kind of terminology unless it's actually a clinical description, that the vast majority people are not addicted to their devices. They are distracted by their devices. And so it's very important that people know that we do have agency over these distractions. And there's some very

simple things we can do. For example, you know, you mentioned the news alerts. Is it important to stay up to date? Absolutely. We should stay up to date and what's going on. But we don't want to have these devices control us. We should control them. And so one of the most simple and yet effective techniques you can adopt is to use a schedule. Now more than ever. I know you've probably heard this advice before, but I want to expand on this a little bit because it's, you know, the reason you keep hearing is there's actually some great science. Thousands of studies now has shown that just this tactic of making what's called an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way of saying you're going to plan out what you do and when you're going to do it, has been shown to be highly effective and healthy people

stay on track with their long-term goals. And we want to do more than just plan our day. And this is, by the way, incredibly important when we lack structure. That, you know, now that we don't have a particular time when we need to wake up and make breakfast and send the kids off to school and get to work and have those meetings, without that kind of structure, this can really be maddening for people. We need to bring back that structure in our lives to give ourselves some routine. It's incredibly important, particularly if you have kids at home, to get yourself and them on a schedule. Put it up in the middle of the house on a big piece of paper so that everybody knows the household

routine and have a schedule for yourself, right? And what I advise people to do is to construct this schedule based on your values. Values are attributes of the person you want to become. And so I'm not going to tell you what your value should be. That's up to you. But I think it behooves all of us to ask ourselves, what would the person we want to become do with their day? How would they spend their time?

How much time would they spend exercising or having time to play with their kids or calling their parents or their friends? How much time would they spend doing work? And when we subdivide work, there's two types of work. We have what's called reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is the kind of work that tends to eat up our entire day. The emails, the Slack notifications, the phone calls. That's the responding type of work where we are at the behest of whoever needs us. Now, everyone's job has some degree of that.

But if we don't make time for the reflective work and schedule that time in and protect it with our lives, it's going to get crowded out with the reactive work. And the reactive work has been shown to make us feel less in control. So back to what we said earlier about high expectations and low control, by setting a schedule for yourself, defining for yourself how you spend your time. And again, it's not up to me to tell you how to spend your time. if you want to spend time playing video games and watching Netflix, do it. But schedule that time, have that time a portion in your day. There's nothing wrong with going on Facebook and enjoying Instagram and watching YouTube videos as long as you do it on your schedule, not someone else's. So the way we escape burnout, the way we escape procrastination and distraction is to have a schedule

that we ourselves make up. So it's not that we're following somebody else's orders. We have the agency to plan our time in advance. And by having a schedule, that schedule and protecting that sacred reflective work time, giving ourselves the time to think, the time to process, the time to plan ahead, this restores this sense of control and agency that so many of us are missing right now. That's such a fantastic point. So for anyone listening who hasn't really set themselves up with a schedule yet, they're responding to, I don't know, video conferences at work and they're, but they're kind of almost just going with the flow. It's sensible advice for them then to kind of grab the ball by the horns and take some action about the

kind of day that they want to have ASAP. Absolutely. And one of the techniques, one of the most more advanced techniques, so after you've made this kind of schedule, what we want to do as well is to synchronize our schedule. We call us schedule sync. And by that I mean, we sit down with the stakeholders in our life, whether that's your significant other, your roommate, even your boss. And what you want to do is to sit down with them. Anyone who deserves your time, who you owe time to, doing this weekly schedule sync is a life changer. It's incredibly empowering. Here's what you're going to do. You're going to make yourself a weekly schedule. And you can use any tool. You can use Google calendar. You can use Microsoft Office. I don't care. But if you can

even use a piece of paper, once you have that artifact of a schedule to show someone else, you can synchronize that schedule. So here's how it works with your boss. You send your boss to your calendar, you know, literally the time that you are going to spend working for your boss, whether that's from home or when we go back into the office, doesn't matter. And you show them, hey, look, here's how I'm going to spend my time working for you based on the priorities you've given me. Now, you see this other list, okay, on this other piece of paper. I put the list of all the things I didn't find time for in my week ahead. If there's anything that's incorrect, can you help me reprioritize? Okay. Help me move those things that are on this list that I won't have time for. Help me.

me move those around so I do have time for the important things. Why is this so important? Because most managers have very little visibility into how their teams spend their time. So your boss will love you for this. They'll worship the ground you walk on because they don't want to ask you to do this because they're fearful that you're going to think you're being micromanaged. So if you proactively do this, you're essentially managing your manager. The other reason this is so powerful is that one of the worst pieces of advice that I hear constantly is if you want to stay focused, you have to learn how to say no. What a stupid piece of advice. You're going to tell the person who cuts your checks, you're going to tell them to their face no. You're going to get fired. That's terrible

advice. So instead, don't be the one who says no. Make your boss or your manager the one who says no, because now they can reprioritize how you spend your time by saying, nope, this task is actually way more important. Can we move that around? Now you're giving them visibility into your calendar as well as running by them that time that you need in your day for focused work when you are not to be interrupted. So they know, hey boss, you know what? From 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., I need some time to think. You know, that's the time when I will not be responding to emails every 30 seconds. That's the time when I won't be on group chat. That's the time when I won't pick up the phone because I need time to think. But the rest of the day, here's how I'm going to be available. So whether that's with your boss, with your significant other, you know, I do this with my wife.

Once a week, we sit down and do this schedule sync. It has made all the difference in our marriage. We've been married for 18 years. We used to constantly fight about household responsibilities. I'm supposed to do this and why hasn't the trash been taken out and, you know, why didn't you do the dishes, all these things. And I was expecting my wife to be my babysitter and to do. just tell me what to do. And I didn't realize I was asking her to essentially have yet another job to be my my nanny. And so since we have this schedule sync, that's no longer the case. I know exactly

what needs to get done and when it needs to happen because we have this weekly schedule sync. It's absolutely made all the difference in my marriage. Interesting. So we've spoken there about working out your own schedule. And then secondly, sharing that schedule with, I love that expression, the other stakeholders in your life. What's another tip that can help people shift their focus away from distraction and burnout towards focus and traction towards what they really want to achieve? Absolutely. So there's four big techniques, four big strategies, I should say. Number one is master the internal triggers. And there's a lot of things that we can do around helping us be more in control of these uncomfortable emotional states. That's the most important first step. Then we want to

make time for traction. That's what we just discussed in terms of making. a calendar and synchronizing it with the stakeholders in our life. Then we want to hack back the external triggers. So whether it's the pings and dings on your phone, whether it's your kids, your spouse, whatever it might be hacking back those external triggers. And the reason I say use the term hack, you know, a computer hacker in computer hacker parlance to hack means to gain unauthorized access to something. So the key question here is for these external triggers, they're not necessarily bad. The external triggers, if they serve you, that's great.

So if a ping on your phone says, hey, it's time for that meeting, it's time for that exercise that you plan to do, whatever the case might be, that's serving you. But if you're doing one thing, and now an external trigger takes you off track, now it's leading you towards distraction and you are serving it.

So we want to ask ourselves for all the external triggers in our life, whether it's from our phones, our computers, the news, our kids, whatever the case might be, we have to ask ourselves, is this external trigger serving me or am I serving it? And believe it or not, what you'll find is that a lot of the external triggers that are hardest to solve, it's not the technology.

That can actually be figured out pretty quickly. It's the other external triggers, tending to be other people, right? So a lot of people listening to me right now who are struggling with homeschool. Let me give you one quick tip that will change your life. If you find that you're trying to get work done and your kids or your spouse, interrupt you, right? You've planned out your day, just like I told you to do, and you focus on a task, and yet your kid decides to interrupt you. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to find the most ridiculous hat you have. Okay? Find a hat that you can't miss when you wear it. And what you want to do is to sit down with your kids, and you can do this with a child of even three or four years old. It actually works with spouses as well. What you want to do, it doesn't work in the workplace. Don't do this at work, okay? And you'll see you a minute.

What you want to do is you want to sit down with your child and say, look, this hat is mommy or daddy's concentration crown. And when mommy or daddy wear this hat, it means that I'm doing the kind of work I need to do that I can't afford to be interrupted. So that means for that time when I'm wearing the hat and sit down and show them in your schedule, you know, it's going to be from 9 to 930 or, you know, 10 to 11, whatever, it's going to be the time that you're going to wear this hat. when mommy or daddy is wearing the concentration crown, that means I can't be interrupted, okay?

And so what you're doing is you're sending a very clear signal that people around you know that you are not to be interrupted because how does someone know if you're really busy? They don't. So you need to send some kind of some obvious message to them without having to turn to them and say, honey, please don't interrupt me right now. So that's a killer technique that anyone can use right now. You know what's better than the one big thing? Two big things.

Exactly. The new iPhone 17 Pro on TELUS's five-year rate plan price lock. Yep, it's the most powerful iPhone ever, plus more peace of mind with your bill over five years. This is big. Get the new iPhone 17 Pro at TELUS.com slash iPhone 17 Pro on select plans. Conditions and exclusions apply. I love it. Everyone at home listening is probably thinking, like, what is the most ridiculous hat I own? My wife actually went on to Amazon and she bought this this like wreath that she puts around her head that has these light up LED lights. It's awesome. And I think it was like $5 on Amazon. It's been a lifesaver. Love it. It's great. I'm glad that we got a tip for parents in there. Is there anything, is there any other tactics that you'd like to share with our listeners? Sure. So the last strategy. So we talked about the first three, the first three are master the internal triggers, make time.

for traction, hackback external triggers. And I'm giving you kind of a sample platter of some of the techniques. There's a lot more in the book. There's hundreds of different things you can do. And then you can pick and choose your favorite. But the last strategy is to prevent distraction with PACTS. And PACs are when we use a pre-commitment device. We make a promise in advance to make sure that we don't get distracted. So this fourth step is the firewall. It's the last line of defense to make sure we don't get distracted. And ironically, we can use technology to prevent technology distraction. So a couple tools I use every day. One tool is this great app called Forest. And Forest, every time you want to do focused work, whether it's, I need to work on that big project,

I need to finish this report, I need to just, you know, think without distraction. You open up this app, it's free. You dial in how much time you want to do focused work for. And then a little virtual tree is planted, a cute little virtual tree. Now, if you pick up your phone and do anything with it during that a lot of time, the cute little virtual tree dies. And you don't want to be a virtual tree murderer. So you're not going to chop down the virtual tree by picking up your phone. It's enough of a reminder to tell you, oh, that's not what I want to do right now. So that's this app called Forest. Another great technology that I actually loved so much that I actually decided to invest in the company. It's called focusmate.com.

focusmate.com. And the way focusmate works is, you know, if you work remotely, if you're working from home, and you find it's difficult to start working when you say you will, you go on tofocusmate.com and you find yourself a focusmate. You'll see this calendar with thousands of people who want to find someone else like you, who wants to do focused work. You select that person. So you say, okay, 9 a.m., I'm going to sit down with Tony virtually. And at 9 a.m., if you don't show up, you get a bad review. So that's your incentive to show up tomorrow morning and work with Tony. Now, you don't actually do anything with that person. You just see them on your screen and you'll see them working and they see you working. So you know, you exchange pleasantries for about, you know, 10 seconds and you get to work. Incredibly effective. Because what you're doing is you're entering into a pact, a pre-commendment with this other person to stay focused on what you said you would do. My next question was actually going to be about accountability. so you've already answered it.

It's so interesting, isn't it? Accountability seems so important, even if it's with these, even if it's, and communication, even if it's with these kind of virtual buddies as well as your boss or your kids or your boyfriend or your husband, your partner. Absolutely.

And the reason this is so important, by the way, is that, you know, for many people to do it with someone they know is a little bit uncomfortable, right? If now I have to sit down with my spouse and maybe they don't struggle with distraction, and I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit that I'm struggling with distraction and procrastination. I don't want to have to like ask them to stop their day.

And maybe I need coverage so that while my significant other is watching our child, that's my focused work time. So a tool like a focus made that gives us an anonymous accountability partner can be incredibly effective. You don't have to explain anything. That person is there for the exact same reason you're there and it can be a wonderful tool. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There's a lot more. I love that. Okay. the final thing that I wanted to say was just a point about self-compassion. I touched on it just then when you were saying people can often feel a bit guilty or a bit embarrassed for not being their 100% their most productive. But obviously at the moment, people aren't just, they're not just working from home. They're working from home for the foreseeable while something really scary is going on.

How useful do you think it is to be compassionate with yourself? for any managers listening with their team members at this time? It's incredibly important. So we know there's been several studies who find that people who are more self-compassionate are actually the ones who accomplish their long-term goals. They're much more likely to accomplish their long-term goals. And this is a little bit counterintuitive because, you know, many people think that, well, if I'm soft on myself, if I don't push myself,

if I don't, you know, talk to myself like a coach or a drill sergeant, then I'm going to be lazy. And it's actually the exact opposite. It's the person who talks to themselves the way you would talk to a good friend. That's the person who turns out to accomplish their long-term goals. They're much more likely to accomplish what they said they would do. And so this rule of talking to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend is very, very important.

For many of us, and myself included, I mean, I was extremely guilty of this. I would, if people could get into my head and hear, how I talk to myself, they would think I was the biggest bully in the world, right? And I would never talk to anybody else the way I talked to myself. You know, I would tell myself, oh, look, you're lazy, and there you go again doing this, and, you know, you have such a short attention span. Why can't you just concentrate? And that type of self-talk, you would never say that to another person, right? You would be a bully if you said that to another person, and yet we say it to ourselves all the time. So if you can remind yourself to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend

with the kind of compassion you would use with someone you love very much, that's how we should talk to ourselves. Because remember, we all will stumble on the road to becoming indistractable, that this is part of being a human being. The idea here is to learn from these past experiences so that when we do become distracted, we know why we fell off track, why we lost control so that we can do something about it in the future. Okay, and there is so much information in there. I hope you've all been scribbling down. We'll definitely put some of these tips online as well.

Nid, if you could tell our listeners one thing that you want them to take away from this whole conversation about, you know, how they can orient themselves away from burnout and towards track and focus at this very difficult time while working from home, what would it be? It's really about finding agency and control. anything that you can do to feel more in control. The reason, you know, we know that there's a lot of evidence, for example, that exercise, you know, you hear this advice on, you know, exercise is very good for you. The trouble is that I think by not explaining why it's so good for you, people have yet

another thing to ruminate around why they're not doing. So great, now I'm not exercising enough either. Wonderful. Now I feel even worse about myself. It's not, it turns out what we are currently seeing, it's not. so much the physical aspects of exercise, even though that's great too, it's more so the act of doing what you said you would do. It's the self-efficacy portion of, you know what, I said I would go take a walk, and I did. That's psychologically why exercise is so beneficial to us. And we know

that exercise actually is an antidepressant, but why it's an antidepressant, I think, has much more to do with agency and control than it does the physiological effects of increasing your heart rate or your metabolism or what other mumbo jumbo. It's really about having something that you said you would do and you did. So even if it's a simple act of planning an afternoon, right, having a bedtime, having a wake up time, making your bed, any small act that shows you that you have agency and control, this is the antidote to burnout, distraction, and procrastination. And of course, we build this over time. We add more and more to it to show ourselves we're able of accomplishing more and more of what we said we would do.

Marvelous. Nir, thank you so much for coming on going for goal and sharing your wisdom. I think a lot of people are going to find that tremendously helpful. I know I have. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. And thanks to all of you for listening. Now, before I go, I have to tell you about an amazing offer that's currently running on Women's Health magazine.

You can now get six issues. for £6,000 sent direct to your door, which is a massive saving of 76% on carefully curated award-winning journalism on topics like health, wellness, nutrition, fitness and beauty. All you need to do is go tohurstmagins.com.com. As ever, if you've liked this podcast, do rate and leave a review on Apple Podcast as it really helps other people find us. I'll be back next week with another episode to help you stay healthy and sane while staying home. Until then, take care everyone.