Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - How To Be More Productive - And Have More Time For You

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

Productivity. Box-ticking. Getting more done. A sexy topic, it isn’t. But tackling your to-do list in a timely fashion is a goal worth shooting for - and not just to keep your boss happy. Focusing a little more on how you can best power through your professional obligations can free up precious headspace for the stuff you really want to do. But where do you start? How do you go about changing your habits? And how - in today’s chaotic and changing working world - do you strike a healthy balance? In this episode, Senior Editor Roisín Dervish-O’Kane discusses all this and more, with Caroline Webb, behavioural economist and author of How to have a good day: Harness the power of behavioural science to transform your working life.  Join Women’s Health on Instagram: @womenshealthuk Join Roisín Dervish-O’Kane on Instagram: @roisin.dervishokane Join Caroline Webb on Twitter: @caroline_webb_ Have a goal in mind that you want us to put to the experts? Find us on Instagram @womenshealthuk and drop a voice note into our inbox, telling us your name and your goal, and it could be the subject of a future episode.  Topics:  Why taking your annual leave is key to success How to stick a pin in procrastination How to pitch new ways of working to your boss What’s single-tasking, and why is it useful? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome back to Going for Goal, the new Women's Health podcast. I'm your host, Roshin DeVichokane, and I'll be here each week to help you make good on the health and life goals you really want to nail in 2020.

If it's your first time listening, welcome. And do go back through our archives. You'll find episodes packed with expert information on topics like how to create a lasting fitness routine, how to eat in a way

that benefits the planet's health as well as your own, and how you can edit your social life so that it's actually fun again. This week, we're turning our attention to productivity, the art of powering through our responsibilities and getting stuff done. This week's discussion is inspired by a message we received from listener Danielle. Hi, women's health.

It's Danielle. I was wondering if you had any advice as I've started the new year and I've set my goals for what I want to get out of work, but I just feel so overwhelmed. I feel like I'm working later than my office hours. It's bleeding into my personal life and I just don't know what the best way to tackle this is. Thank you very much to Danielle for sending that in. All the details of how you can do the same are in the show notes.

So, wanting to get more stuff done, productivity, list ticking. It sounds dry as anything, right? After all, we know that we are so much more than to-do lists, empty inboxes and how much we can get done. done in the day. But counterintuitive as it might seem, focusing a little more on how we can best power through our professional obligations and other must-dos might actually free up some precious time and headspace for us to do the things that we really want to. But where do you start? How do you go about changing your habits? And how, in today's chaotic and changing working

world, do you strike balance, hold boundaries and keep your pursuit of productivity in perspective? Here to guide you through all this and more is Caroline Webb, a behavioural economist and author of How to Have a Good Day. She has a seriously impressive CV, a former partner at Global Consulting firm McKinsey. She's now a published author, speaker, and coaches the top brass in business and politics, as well as those on their way up, about how they can run their careers better. And for the next 30 minutes, she'll be doing the same for all of yours. Hello, Caroline. Hi, it's great to be here. Thank you very much for coming on.

So before we get into it, you're an economist and an management consultant with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, not wanting to stereotype, but on paper, you certainly fit the bill of a typical productive person. Have you always had it sussed? Oh, no, no. I mean, I'm a nighttime person for starters. So the whole idea of even just getting to school on time was really a big struggle for me from an early age, going to leximate. going to, getting to work, getting to the office. So I think that that has made me think hard from quite an early age, how to make the most of the time that I have, because it's not always an option for me to just work longer hours. So at what stage in your career were you when you really felt like you'd found your groove, that the systems you had in place were really working for you? Well, I think it's, you know, you make small progress every year. You try new things and so on. But I do think there was one turning point for me that happened quite early in my

career. Because, you know, working hours, standard working hours, nine to five, or, you know, let's be honest, probably a bit longer, nine to six, I was really struggling with getting in for nine because of my late night tendencies. Left to myself, I'll go to sleep at 3 a.m. So I've always tried to kind of figure out, well, you know, what is the right way to make my schedule fit when I'm most productive and when I can do my best work? You can't always change your schedule to fit your body clock. But I noticed that there was a job that I was doing early on in my career. There was a job that I was doing that was focusing on the US economy, the American economy. And of course, the US is at least five hours behind and eight hours behind if it's the West Coast. And so I was working on

US economic forecasting and commentary. And I realized that nothing happened until basically 1pm, UK time, because that's when the markets opened in the US. And I thought, I I wonder whether I could ask whether I could come in later. And I did. And it was transformational. I mean, they didn't let me come in at 1pm. That would have been perfect, but I couldn't do it. But 10 a.m.

They let me come in at 10 on the door every day. And it was such a revelation. And I would always be the last to leave as a result. But that was fine with me. That suited me. And then I moved on to another job. And I actually asked for the same thing. And I realized that I could just carry on doing that.

Of course, if there's an 8 a.m. meeting, I'm going to come in. I'm not, you know, I'm not so self-absorbed that I'm going to just, no, I'm so sorry. You know, I'm just going to be asleep at that point. But I think just knowing yourself and being clear enough about what's going to work for you and then being, you know, taking that step to have conversations with people around you, that happened really early on for me and it made me a little braver about making some of the choices later on in my career. And so then, being more productive, we all think that we want to do. do it. But what does it actually mean? And kind of what's the point of it? I liked your intro because you talked about the fact that it often feels like a really dry topic. It's just like get more done, knows the grindstone, work harder girl. But actually, I think of productivity more about making the most of your time, your life, in fact. I mean, you know, we've got a limited amount of time in any day, in any week, in any year, in our lives. And if that means, you That means that, you know, if time is not elastic, then every time we say yes to something

or we give time to something, we're taking time away from something else. We're saying no to something else. Every yes is a no to something else. And so I think of it as saying yes to the things that really make life feel like they're worth living. And some of that is about accomplishment, a sense of self-worth, you know, feeling good about what you're doing, and feeling that you're doing a good job and that you're doing work that feels meaningful and purposeful. But some of it's about other things. stuff, as you said. It's about connection. It's about fitting that you've got time for family and

friends and you feel connected to the human race. And all of those things are important for us to live a good life. Absolutely. And the better choices we make about where we put our time, then the more we get to do all the things that really matter. All the fun stuff. So simply increasing your output is the end goal here. It's a means to achieve a sense of being on top of things. So you're freed up to choose how to spend your remaining time and energy as you see fit. So you get the right balance that you feel like, okay, you look back at the end of the day and you feel like, yeah, that was a good day. I spent, there might have been difficult moments and annoying people, but I feel like I spent my time in the best way I could. Fantastic. And so that's one big misconception about productivity then, the idea that it's all about getting more done for the sake of getting more done.

What are some others? Well, I think one aspect of productivity that's not really focused on is that actually we are way more productive. We get way more done if we think hard about what we're not doing. Interesting. Right. So research is really clear on this that actually the longer it is since we've taken a break, the poorer our decisions are. Like we make dumber decisions.

And you know that if you've gone on a shopping trip and you're three hours in and you buy their terrible shirt that you should never have bought. The longer it is since you've taken a break, the less sharp, less smart you're going to be. But we have a bit of a tendency to think that, you know, more is more like work longer work more that's that's what productivity is actually you're more productive if you take a short break and then come back to what you're doing before you'll be smarter you make a bit of decision and you'll work faster if you do it that way interesting and so when you're talking about the research saying that breaks are important is this breaks as in going to get a cup of tea

or does that translate into holidays or long weekends actually you know yeah it scales right up you know there's fantastically clear research about the fact that people who properly take holidays and properly decouple from work and really disconnect. I mean, there are sort of all sorts of correlations between that and achieving promotions and so forth. So, yeah, and then if we shrink it back to the sort of the single day, even taking two minutes to take your focus away and then come back to a topic has been shown to help you get to better insight on the thing that you are wrestling with, the thing that you're trying to figure out.

Is it like a mini version of having a good night's sleep, you know, where you sleep on something and then suddenly you wake up, everything's clear. Yes. Nice. It's good to know that you can do that at work, even if your company doesn't have nap pods. Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, frankly, even standing up and stretching and shifting your focus or even doing another task that is actually quite different, even that has been shown to make a difference. If you just give your mind a chance to refresh, your brain a chance to shift focus. I mean, the real things happening underneath the surface, your brain is still working on the project or the topic. you were working on before. It's doing what scientists would call more encoding and consolidation of the information, making linkages between different, you know, things that you've known in the past and what you're working on now. And that's why you come back with fresh insight. There's a real process that underpins this. It's so cool when you think about all the stuff that's going on

in the background, like all the little kind of mediating jobs. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, so yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that's really helped me throughout my life is paradoxically working less, is actually being smart about when to take breaks, when to set boundaries, when to get home, just really thinking hard about, you know, it's like your brain is a, like a race car. You don't drive race cars the whole time. You have pit stops and you have pit stops because you need to change the tires and change the oil and so on. I'm not a motorhead, actually. I don't know why I'm using this example.

But, you know, we wouldn't run a machine 24 hours a day. And I think we need to think about our brains, you know, a little bit more of a sophisticated way, give it occasional time to power down before powering back up again. Okay, so now let's look at what Danielle and others in that position can do to up their output and wrestle back some control over their time. Because it's quite overwhelming, isn't it, starting this? If you feel like your way of working really isn't working, where do you need to start when it comes to changing it? Yeah. Well, I'm a huge fan of picking one tiny, tiny thing to change and then focusing on that. I do think a lot of the challenge when

people start to think about their productivity is that they make themselves a list of 10 things they're going to change in the way that they go about everything. And it's in itself overwhelming, which then adds to the overwhelming feeling that you're trying to fix. So I think, you know, really picking, perhaps, you know, as you're listening to this, you know, one thing that you hear that we're talking about that sounds interesting and do that and try that and not beat yourself up if it doesn't work for the first week, but just persist and try out different ways of doing it. So I think, you know, that's the sort of meta point is, you know, be kind to yourself, try one thing first. If someone said to me, yeah, yeah, yeah, but, you know, if you were to do one thing, what would

you do? Yeah. I think I've already mentioned breaks, so I guess I get a pass on that one. But I would say, you know, thinking hard about how you batch and zone, batch and zone. batch and zone. Yes. This is in service of something called single-tasking, which is the opposite of multitasking. And on a women's podcast, I can say this. You know, there's been a little bit of a history of people thinking that women can somehow multitask better than men. I think they may have had to.

But if you look at the research, it's the same for men and women. We can't actually multitask, at least when we're doing things that require any kind of conscious attention. We've actually got an ability to only pay attention. to one thing consciously at a time. So when we think we're masterfully kind of answering our email, while we're kind of looking at our screen and kind of supposedly being on a conference call, which we're really paying attention to, not.

And then, you know, colleague comes by and waves at us. And, you know, we think that we're doing these things in parallel. What we're actually asking our poor brain to do is switch, our attention from one thing to the next. And it's doing it so fast you don't even notice it. But each of those little switches actually takes a little bit of time, tiny, and it takes a little bit of mental energy. And so when we're juggling the whole day through, we feel like we're really busy,

but we're actually slowing ourselves down. And research is getting clear on this. We slow ourselves down by at least 30%. And we make between three and, well, we make many more, many more errors. You know, we screw things up. Okay. And we find that, you know, this holds, even when people are asked to do two super simple things at once. And so if you're if you're slowing yourself down and you're making many more

mistakes by juggling, obviously you want to try and do as much single tasking as you can, one thing at a time. It sounds like our grandmother's advice, right? Totally. How do we, so if we're in the like, I'm thinking of even like my office now, you're in like an open plan office, you've got emails, you've got Slack notifications, you've got people chatting, you've got stuff on your phone, almost saying, thinking how do I, how do I? I go about single tasking within that context. Yeah. And, you know, by the way, I am very realistic about this. And that's why I say, you know, we have to start small. We have to look for the wiggle room. We have to kind of work with the grain of the, you know, the organization, the team, the setting that we're in.

So batching and zoning. What that means is like try to be kind to your brain and not making your brain change direction repeatedly. So group together your email processing as much as possible. Now, to be clear, I know, emails are coming in all day, Slack messages are coming in all day. But as much as you can, if you can say, you know what, I'm going to really blitz my email, two or three times a day, or maybe when you're traveling, then you're not having that interject itself while you're trying to think. And that means you're better able to do good quality thinking faster. Remember, 30% slower. You'll be 30% faster if you're not constantly being interrupted by messages. Wow. And so that's quite a prize even if you did it for only half an hour in a day even if you just sent a note to

your colleagues and said just going offline for half an hour to do some thinking about this project it doesn't have to be kind of hokey language it can be quite practical and pragmatic sounding you're going to do that work better and you're going to do it faster so batching as much as possible your email processing and then zoning is like being smart about when is your best thinking time you know what what zone of the day is going to to be the best time for you to do the hardest work. And, you know, don't put your email processing time in that zone. Put your best thinking time in that zone as far as you can. And of course, it takes a while to nudge your schedule in that direction, especially if you've got meetings

that are being set by other people. But the more that you know when your best thinking time is, then the more you can gradually say, you know what, could we do 11 instead of two for their meeting? Or would it work if we just finished half an hour earlier? You can start to do a little bit of what I did earlier on in my career and say, you know, would it be okay if? And then you're in a much stronger position to do single task and get your work done faster and smarter. I love the way you said earlier about to give myself some good thinking time on this project. And I don't know whether this is my bias working in an environment where it's all where you're putting out stuff constantly, where you're creating things all the time. But often you don't really think that

you need to devote time to good thinking. Yeah. Which is crazy, isn't it? Because of course you do. And you will do in like in strategic roles in every kind of job. Yeah, absolutely. And it, but it applies in our personal lives too. I mean, there's just sometimes where you're like, you're trying to decide like what's the, I'm thinking about, oh, this sounds very female, but I'm thinking about buying a new blender, right? I need to, I need to take some time to actually do some research and actually think about, you know, actually what am I going to get? Thinking time doesn't have to be, okay, I'm not going to solve climate change. it can be also just times when we know we've got a bit of a complex task to do we've got to research some options come to a point of view and that sort of thing i mean you you've used this in your personal life i have i have and something actually after reading your after reading your book which is called how to have a good day which is a great title why thank you but yeah so i remember so when i first interviewed you that was when you were doing press for that so 2016 oh yeah that's right um yeah and the two things that i really took out of that um because i

don't think I've, I don't think I've swallowed all the advice and act on it wholesale. It's a life's journey. But the thing, the two things that I found really helpful are this idea of batching my tasks and then saying, feeling like I've got the agency to say to people, right, I'm going to be off email for an hour. Yeah. Because I need to write this thing or I need to think about this thing. And that was so scary to do at the start because I think, I think,

especially as a millennial in the workplace, there's lots of negative stereotypes around millennials thinking that the entire workplace revolves around them and it's all about their needs and what they want to do and their career path. So I found it hard to ask for that to kind of put myself at the centre. And then what happened? Everyone said, yeah, sure. And now I do it all the time. And it's unbeatable. Yeah, absolutely. We would and I can open plan office with breakout areas and stuff so I can just go sit there, headphones on, no emails. And I think, you know, for those of you are thinking, oh, but could I do it? I don't know.

I think the trick is to position it as a performance boost, not as a kind of bit of time off. It's really about saying in order to do some deeper thinking about this topic or this project or this deadline, I'm just going to go offline for, you know, half an hour. And I would start small initially, you know, don't tell people you're going off for half a day. And, you know, but, you know, try small amounts and then, you know, you know, try small amounts. notice that actually the world doesn't fall apart. And, you know, of course, sometimes you do have to set up ways that people can reach you if it's really urgent. You know, and that happens for people at all levels of seniority, you know, have to be thoughtful about, okay, well, if something really

bad happens or something really important happens, how can I be reached? But there are ways around that. You can set VIP settings on your phone so that your phone will ring if that person calls, but it's on do not disturb for everybody else. You can arrange for, you know, people to text you if it's really crucial. But, you know, you've closed your email down. And, you know, there are ways around it, actually. And I think, you know, just as you describe, it turns out, you know, you feel really, really bold the first time. And then you're like, oh, my God, they said yes.

And everything's fine. And now I've got this half an hour that I can spend time thinking. And it's not the punchiest thing in the world or the most, like, ridiculous self-absorbed thing to ask for. No, no, no. But it is about how you frame it. Of course. So this, I know this is something that people struggle with as well. And again, if we're thinking about that, not wanting to sound like it's all about you or you think you deserve special treatment. Yeah. How is it best to pitch that then to your line manager or your big boss? Yeah. Well, actually, there's a story in the book, which is a, was a UK CEO is working for a global company.

So she was quite, quite senior. She had a, her boss, her global boss was very much the all-was-on kind of type. She actually said to him that she was trying to, she'd read some science and she'd understand, she'd understood now that there are productivity implications of trying to do more single. She was really explicit with him. She said, I'm trying to do more batching and less grazing, like constant grazing. And so she had an open conversation with him. And I do think actually referring to the science can be a little bit helpful because in, you know, especially if you're trying to set new team norms and you're having a conversation about why it's worth doing this, you know, citing the evidence on the fact that you're going to be 30% faster. That's quite a win. Yeah. Show the receipts. Yeah. And I do think, you know, the broader point is absolutely about saying, I know I do better work if I get a bit of time to think that's undisturbed or undistracted. Is it okay if I just take a bit of time to offline to go?

and work on this and then I'll be back at and then you're very clear when you're back. Yeah. Is that selling it into bosses? Because even if, you know, they're people, but at the same time, it is a business and everyone is thinking about how they operate within that business. So pitching it in terms of what they stand to gain from you being more productive. Absolutely right. Yeah, you put it better than me.

That's exactly right. Exactly right. And I think, you know, being clear when you're coming back, you know, everybody struggles with uncertainty. Actually, you know, the brain mostly processes uncertainty as a threat. So actually being certain, being clear about when you're there is almost as good as actually being there the whole time. In fact, it's much better because you do better work. So saying to someone, I'm going to this meeting at 3 and are back at 4.30 is better than just disappearing. And in the same way, saying I'm going to go do some work on this project in the quiet room, whatever, and I'll be back at 4.30.

it's actually quite nice to know, okay, well, she'll be back at 4.30. Yeah. And I want to talk about procrastination as well. Maybe later. Maybe later. Very good. Very good. I read a book by a MIT lecturer and investor near E.L.

I know that you work with quite a lot. And it was called Interstractable. And in it, he argues that Focus is the real lost art of our age. and he talks about time management, essentially being pain management, so that learning not to give into distraction is learning how to forego that short-lived spike of pleasure that we get from procrastination. What is the science behind why procrastination feels so good and how do we resist its pull? Well, our brains are actually obviously fabulously complex and accomplished and so forth, but there are some things that are harder for our brains.

And one thing is thinking about the future. So it's much easier for us to process and think about things that are concrete and they're here and now. Things that are in the future are sort of abstract and then require a bit of effort to actually conceptualise and kind of get our heads around. And so if you think about what a task is, especially a big, chunky task, you've got to do the work now and that takes effort. And so there's a bit of a cost to that. And the payoff might be, I don't know, year from now or a few days from now. it might be, it's certainly further away than the pain or the cost of getting things done now. And so the trick with procrastination is to acknowledge, first of all, that actually it's quite

reasonable for us to have this focus on the here and now. But we need, if we're doing a big task that only pays off in the future, we need to work with that and say, okay, well, how can I decrease the immediate costs of starting work on it now? And how can I increase the apparent benefits of getting it done? So first of all, if you think about decreasing the costs of getting something done, take the smallest first step, the very smallest first step. Because often when you've got this huge, humongous project, I don't even know where to start. It seems like it's really incredibly difficult. But if you take the very, very first small step, I mean, you know, maybe you're setting up this podcast and you're like, I don't even like, oh my God, who do I get as the guests?

And it's just like there are all these shows. and okay very first small step what are the topics we want to cover okay all right and actually it's not even that it's like let me get a piece of paper so that I can start to take some notes on what the topics are we're going to cover and that is your first step

and if you put that on your to-do list and you get that done that's something you can get done frankly in half an hour then you feel good about that and then you feel oh right then I've got a bit of motivation to do the next bit. So that's the first thing. Very smallest first step. And if it's, if you're still not doing, it's probably not a small enough step. Just like start with a very small step. Because we think it's almost silly. It's like, it's almost a bit of like an office

cliche that when you know you write things on your to-do list, almost just so you can scratch them off and it feels really good. But you're saying actually that's do it, do it, do it. Absolutely. There's really good, there's really good science behind that. Yeah. No, I mean, you need to feel that sense of reward and pleasure for the near-term immediate hit. And the other thing is to actually, to think about how to make it social, you know, how do you make it feel like, you know, the commitment that you're making actually has a social payoff that might be sooner than the long-term outcome. So, you know, exercising is a classic one, right?

You don't see any effects for quite a long time. That's why it's so hard. But if you agree to go to the gym with a friend or. or you kind of agree to just walk to the next meeting with a colleague and you have a nice chat in the way, then that gives you a sense of immediate payoff. So they're the two things, smallest, tiniest, ridiculous, most ridiculously tiny, smallest first thing,

and then see whether you can make it social. And that gives you more of a sense of immediate pleasure and satisfaction. Brilliant. And with all of these things, how can Danielle and everyone else listening, how do they kind of monitor their progress? I know we were joking earlier saying that it's, It's a journey and it's a lifelong thing. But yeah, how do you know when you're getting it right?

I think that's a good question because, you know, I do think that more and more people are learning about the costs of multitasking, the importance of bringing your attention to a single point of focus again, learning how to do that. And then people, you know, will try and go offline. You know, they'll switch off their notifications. They'll close down browser tabs. They'll do all the right things.

they'll try and do it for 90 minutes. And when I was starting on this, you know, I thought the same thing. I thought, well, you know, I'll go offline for 90 minutes. But actually start small, right? It's the same thing as with procrastination. I realized that I actually had to set myself a goal of really going offline and not clicking around and opening the browser and looking at cat videos. I had to do that for five minutes, first of all, and then build up from there. And I think keeping track of starting very small and then keeping track of these small wins

and not dismissing them if you maybe tried but it didn't work, you still tried. When you think about a kid learning to ride a bike, you know, we fell off how many times? As an adult, I think that when we try a new way to kind of manage ourselves and manage our time, you know, we think that it's got to be right first time. And actually, you know, we need to channel a bit of that in a six-year-old where we were okay with the fact that actually maybe it didn't work first time. And we, you know, we're pleased that we tried. And I guess it feeds into your point almost at the start where you were saying like this wasn't a natural being a super organised or productive person. You didn't kind of grow up feeling like you were that kind of person.

So it's all the more important then if you don't see these being your strengths that you, kind of kind to yourself as you let yourself get better. Yeah, and you know, for some people, and one nice thing to do is at the end of the day, you know, find a way to make some notes. It could be a little notepad by the side of your bed or it could be, you know, on your phone as you're on the tube home

or some way of capturing some review of the day and pat yourself on the back for the things that you did well. And actually, that's a general recipe for mental well-being, actually. I have to say, because so often there are little good things that happen during the day, but our brains are tuned to focus a little bit more on the negatives, even the most optimistic of us. And so it's actually really nice to say, okay, what did I try? What were the little successes? Maybe there's some big ones.

And actually that really helps you feel a sense of progress in whatever you're trying to change in your life. Okay. And then going back to the point about work-life balance, such an annoying phrase. But is it important with productivity to see your life as something more than your work? Like, I guess it follows that when you have relationships and hobbies that enrich you outside of your work role, you're probably more likely to power through your responsibilities to be able to spend time doing them. I know I'm someone personally who's prone to overworking when there's like stuff going on personally or stuff I'd rather not think about. Interesting. Well, you know, we're complex creatures, aren't we?

I mean, there are all sorts of things that matter to us. And I do think there is pretty clear evidence that however introverted or extroverted we are, if you look at global happiness surveys done by the UN by other reputable organizations, we see a real connection between the degree of connectedness we feel with people and the degree of well-being that we feel. And of course, we can feel really connected to people at work, right? I mean, there are some teams, and I look back, you know, people who, the connections that we have, the mutual understanding we have was just so precious. It was wonderful. So I don't think it's just about saying get your work done as fast as you can so that you can spend time with the people you care about. It's also about saying, okay, well, how do I make the time at work feel meaningful and enjoyable? How do I recognize the fact that connection is as important as accomplishment when you're thinking about your own sense of self?

and so yeah but I will say that actually I do have a lot of outside interests and that maybe helped me along the way because music was always a big thing what kind of music playing or listening yeah I'm a lapsed pianist I was a I play the piano a lot when I was a kid and you know it was a big part of my life if you go back to someone who knew me when I was 16 17 they'll say he's still playing the piano actually what happened was that I ended up starting to sing more which is great because you don't have to take a piano with you like yours have your voice with you And so there have been periods in my life when I've done more or less of that. But actually, you know, trying to say, okay, well, if this is important to me, and if I know that this gives me a lift and, you know, you'll have something else that gives you a lift and, you know, everyone has something else. And if you think about, okay, well, what do I know gives me joy and gives me, like, tops up the tank, the end gives me energy. It's really a productivity hack.

It's a productivity intervention to make time for it. Interesting. So yeah, think about what your thing is. And if you can't, yeah, if you're listening and you can't identify what that thing is that builds you up energy wise. That's a good place to start. It's to say, okay, what is it that puts energy back in the tank? Have a think and look back over, you know, the last few years. Maybe you have to go back a few years and say, okay, well, hang on, what is it that gives me pleasure that gives me a lift? You know, is it a bit of DIY? Is it, you know, talking to a particular friend? Is it, yeah, whatever. I mean, we're all different. But just figure out how to give yourself a bit more of that. And to prioritize it. Nice. There's so much there. Thank you. There's so much useful takeaway information.

If there's one thing that you'd like Danielle to know or one tip that can help her on her lifelong journey of tuning in to her productivity, what would it be? I think it would be to do the reflection to make sure that she's really self-aware about what gives her energy and what depletes her energy. and figure out how to create more space for the things that give her energy. Because a lot of us, you know, we go from task to task to task to task, and we don't take a step back and say, well, what is it I actually want here? What is this all in service of? And that goes back to the question you asked right at the beginning, which is why do we care about productivity?

We care about it because we want to say yes, the right things. It's important for our happiness, right? Right, yeah, exactly. Brilliant. Okay, Caroline, thank you so much for coming on the show. And thanks to Danielle for inspiring this week's episode. if you want to do the same, all you need to do is send us a voice clip via the direct message function on Instagram with your name and the goal you want to achieve. And thanks to all of you for listening.

If you are enjoying the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as it really helps other people find us. We'll be back next week, but from now, it's goodbye from me and thanks to my guest, Caroline. Thank you so much for having me. See you next week.