Something You Should Know - How to Solve Problems Before They Happen & How to Be Productive Working From Home

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

Don’t you just hate it when you burn your tongue from drinking or eating something too hot? This episode begins with some first-aid for the next time you inadvertently put something in your mouth that is way too hot. http://www.yogawiz.com/blog/home-remedies/home-remedies-remedy-for-healing-burnt-burning-tonguepain-sensation.html Wouldn’t it be great if you could solve problems BEFORE they happen? You can – in fact you do. You change the oil in your car to prevent problems before they happen. With a slightly different way of thinking, we can solve a lot of problems that way according to Dan Heath author of the book Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen (https://amzn.to/3atB1Os). Listen as he explains this fascination method of problem solving. Is it better to exercise first thing in the morning or in the afternoon? Listen as I explain the pros and cons to both. http://www.womenshealthmag.com/weight-loss/best-time-to-work-out-to-lose-weight Many people are working from home during the coronavirus pandemic who don’t normally work from home. If you are one of them, you have likely discovered that it is more difficult and challenging than you probably thought. Productivity expert Maura Nevel Thomas author of the book Attention Management  (https://amzn.to/3ajnskJ) joins me to discuss how people working from home can overcome the distractions and stay focused. This Week's Sponsors -AirMedCare Network.Go to www.AirMedCareNetwork.com/something and get up to a $50 gift card when you use the promo code: something -Better Help. Get 10% off your first month by going to www.BetterHelp.com/sysk and use the promo code: sysk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back. There was one swing on a playground in Brooklyn that had been responsible for multiple lawsuits. All somebody needed to do was go out and raise this swing six inches, and all of the injuries would have been eliminated, but nobody thought to do that. Also, what's the best time of day to exercise?

And many of us are working from home because of the coronavirus, so you'll hear some excellent advice to stay focused and get things done. We all have things that, oh, if only I had the time, I would do X. Well, for many of us, now is that time. And that can also keep us busy and distracted from the worry and the fear. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like

Something You Should Know, you're gonna like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman

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Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I mentioned a couple of episodes ago, and it bears repeating, I think, because this is obviously an information-focused podcast,

and yet we're not doing a lot of things about the coronavirus epidemic. And, again, that is simply because there are so many sources, up-to-the-minute sources of information about that everywhere. And also because we record this podcast one, two, sometimes three days before it actually publishes, we don't want to be putting information out that is three days old and potentially out of date. So we're staying on the sidelines of the up-to-the-minute coronavirus information. And there are other things to talk about besides the coronavirus. I know I get a little overloaded on coronavirus information and need a break.

And so we're the break. And we start today with something that happens to everybody. It happened to me not long ago. That is when you burn your tongue or the roof of your mouth with a really hot beverage like coffee or hot chocolate or really hot pizza. What do you do? Well, there are a few remedies that can help. First, find some sugar.

A teaspoon of sugar on a burnt tongue can help ease the pain on contact. You hold the sugary tongue up against the roof of your mouth until the sugar dissolves. And if you don't have any sugar handy, get an ice cube or some cold water to numb the tongue and reduce the swelling. Tea that's been cooled down can also soothe a burnt tongue, especially black tea, chamomile, or orange pico tea. If you really did a number on your tongue, stay away from certain foods until it heals. Tomatoes, citrus fruits, vinegar, and salty foods like potato chips

will actually interrupt the healing process. And that is something you should know. Imagine if you could solve problems before they happen. Well, the fact is you do, and the perfect example, I think, is when you change the oil in your car. You take your car in for an oil change not because there's anything wrong with it. You know that if you don't take it in for an oil change not because there's anything wrong with it. You know that if you don't take it in for an oil change, you're asking for trouble down the road. So you change the oil to prevent the problem before it happens.

Yet so much of our life is putting out fires, not preventing them. But what if you could actually solve a lot more problems before they happen in the first place? Well, that's what Dan Heath has been looking into, and he has authored several really interesting books. His latest is called Upstream, The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. Hey, Dan, welcome. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on the show.

You bet. So explain why you took a look at this and why you think this is important to talk about. My interest in this topic goes back to a parable that's pretty well known in public health circles, but not well outside it. And it's originally attributed to a guy named Irving Zola. And the parable goes like this. You and a friend are having a picnic by the side of a river. And just as you've laid out your picnic blanket, getting ready to eat, you hear a noise from the direction of the river. And you look back and there's a child thrashing around in the water, apparently drowning. And so, of course, both of you instinctively jump in and

you fish the child out and you bring them to the shore. And just as your adrenaline is starting to subside a little bit, you hear another shout and you look back, there's a different child drowning in the river. So back in you go and you fish that child out. And no sooner have you brought that child to shore that you look back, there are two more kids drowning in the river. And it begins a kind of revolving door of rescue where you're in and out and fishing kids out. And just as you're starting to grow fatigued from all the rescue work, your friend swims towards shore and steps out, seeming to walk away and leave you alone. And you say, hey, where are you going? I need your help.

All these kids are drowning. We can't just leave. And your friend says, well, I'm going upstream to tackle the guy who's throwing all these kids in the river. In life, whether we're talking about our personal lives or in our businesses or even in society, I think that too often we find our attention focused downstream on the reaction, the reaction, the reaction, and we never make our way upstream to try to tackle the systems and the forces that are causing the problems in the first place. Because that's just how we kind of think. I mean, I don't know if we grow up and learn how to think that way, but you solve problems when they arise. You just don't think about doing what you said.

And then also, like if you're going to go upstream and fix the problem, well, some of these problems are so complex. Some of these systems are government or whatever. Where would you even start to solve that? It's incredibly complicated to solve problems upstream. I'll give you a simple example.

I had a conversation with a deputy police chief about a decade ago, and he had this thought experiment where he said, imagine two police officers and one of those police officers goes downtown where there's a very chaotic intersection. It's a place where cars have collisions a lot of times. And the officer just kind of stations herself visibly in the intersection. And because she's there and drivers see her, they slow down, they get a little bit more cautious and accidents are prevented. And then he says, imagine a second officer that goes to a different part of downtown where there is a prohibited right turn. And she stations herself around the corner. And he says, indisputably, it's the first one. She's preventing crashes. She might be preventing injuries or deaths. But if you ask a different question, which of these officers gets rewarded? Which of them gets praised? Which of them

gets promoted? It's the second officer because she comes back with this stack full of tickets that show what a good job she's done. And meanwhile, that first officer, how does she prove she did anything? You think about there was a guy commuting downtown that morning who crossed through this intersection. And in an alternate reality where the police officer hadn't been there, he would have been in a car crash, possibly fatal. His life was saved by virtue of the officer being there that morning. He'll never know it, nor will the officer ever know that she saved him in particular. And so there's a kind of maddening ambiguity about upstream efforts that I think is interesting. It's like even as you and I

could probably say, well, of course you want to go upstream and keep the kids from being thrown in the river. What I wanted to show in the book was basically two things. Number one, there are lots of obstacles to getting upstream. And number two, despite the presence of those obstacles, we've got to try because that's the only recipe for permanently improving systems in our lives and our work and in our communities. Well, but maybe that's happening. I mean, like you say, when you prevent things from happening, you never know they would have happened. So there may be a lot of this going on because we just never see it. No question.

Yeah. In fact, everywhere you look, there's the evidence of people before us that have had the foresight and the patience to do this for us. You think about the rate of car accidents and fatalities has declined from, oh boy, I better make sure I'm getting my denominator right. My memory is that, say, 50 years ago was about five deaths per 100 million miles traveled. And today, it's down to one. There's been an 80% reduction in fatalities. And you ask, how is that? So, I mean, are we all just naturally better drivers today? And the answer is no. I don't think driving ability has improved a lick. It's all about the systems that have been designed

to try to forestall those problems. It's about safer roads. It's about better lighting. It's about better brake systems. It's about seatbelts and airbags. It's about mothers against drunk driving, reducing the incidence of drunk driving on the roads. And we're talking about thousands of people over decades who are all committed to this idea of what if we put our hands together? What if we put our resources toward preventing bad things from happening? And like the police officer in that story, those people will never know who they helped. They won't know who those thousands of people are whose lives were saved because of their work, but we can see in the data that it happened.

And that's the power of upstream thinking. Can you bring this down to a more personal level? I mean, we can talk about, you know, how police deploy their officers and how that affects policies and all that. But what about on a more personal level? Yeah, it's a fair question. I think the advantage of upstream thinking is it works really on any level. You can think about it at the national level, like with the healthcare example, but you can think about it in your own life. I'll give you the most trivial example possible from my own life. As you know, I'm a writer, and I tend to write in coffee shops. I don't know why that works for me, some busy, loud coffee shop,

but it does. And so I'm used to shuttling my laptop around. I'll go to the coffee shop and write for a while, then I'll come back to my office. And so I'm constantly packing my laptop, unpacking it. I bring a power cord and I plug it in at the coffee shop, pack it back up, bring it back to my office, plug it in there. And after a while, I mean mean after years of this behavior, it occurred to me, hey, what if I just bought two power cords and one of them could live forever in my backpack where I carry around my laptop and one of them could be just strapped down on my desk so that when I come back, I can just plug it in and not have to mess with unpacking the power cord. And I'm not telling that story to share my genius with you because I don't think there is much genius there.

But it's almost a clue that in our lives, so often we adapt to problems or we come to take problems for granted that need not exist. You know, that I had just come to accept a reality where I was forever going to have this nuisance of power cord shuffling. And yet the actual amount of labor it took to fix that problem was I had to go online for five minutes and press, you know, buy. And one of the interesting things to me about this work is why is that shift in our thinking so difficult? And why do we choose to endure things

that we might have prevented? Well, human nature, don't you think? Because, I mean, here's the simplest example I can think of. If you want to not get lung cancer, don't smoke. There isn't a smoker alive that knows that their risk of lung cancer is huge compared to a non-smoker, and yet they still smoke. So there's an example of clear upstream thinking, stop smoking, prevent cancer, and many people ignore it. Many people don't, but many people ignore the advice. No, it's definitely true. And I think something like smoking is compounded by the addictive nature of the product. But I think you're pointing out that there's something universal at play here. And I think that something is tunneling, which is a word I stole from a couple of psychologists who wrote a book called Scarcity.

So let me explain what this is. There was a researcher named Anita Tucker who followed around a bunch of nurses as they went through their day. So she shadowed them for hundreds of hours as part of our dissertation at Harvard. And she found about what you'd expect, that these nurses were constantly dealing with unexpected problems, like they couldn't get the right medication at the right moment, or they ran out of towels and had to run around and find some somewhere. This one morning, Anita Tucker described a situation where there was a nurse who was checking out a new mother. You know, she was ready to take her baby home.

And as part of that checkout process, they have to remove the security anklet from the baby's leg. And unfortunately, they couldn't find it. It had fallen off somewhere. So they do this frantic search and it turns up in the bassinet. And then Anita Tucker says three hours later, the exact same thing happens with a different mother. The anklet's missing again. They do another frantic search and this time they can't find it at all. So the nurse goes to the boss. They figure out an alternate checkout process and the mothers are dismissed. And so this is what it's like to be a nurse. You're running around, you're trying to figure out novel solutions to problems,

you're being resourceful, you don't have to run for help every time something goes wrong, you can handle it. And it's kind of an admirable portrait when I say it that way. But if you look at this from another perspective, what you realize, it's something that's a bit shocking, which is the system I'm describing here is one that will never improve. It's one that will never get better. Because what these nurses have learned to do is work around problems. But they're never going upstream to solve them at the system's level. And back to this word tunneling, that's essentially what tunneling is. And to be clear,

like the point of this story is not to throw stones at nurses, quite the opposite. My point here is that I think all of us are tunneling in our own professions in the same way that when we're juggling too many things, too many issues, too many problems, we kind of abandon the idea that we might strategically prioritize them. And we just kind of get in the tunnel. If you can picture that in your mind, just being in a tunnel, there's only one direction. There's forward. You hit an obstacle, you try to get it behind you as quickly as you can so you can keep

making progress. And the great trap of being in the tunnel is that it's self-perpetuating. What those nurses did is they solved their problems in the moment. You know, they got the mother dismissed, they got a fresh set of towels, but they also doomed themselves to solving exactly the same kind of problems the next week and the next month. And so I think this is what we have to overcome, this kind of universal force of tunneling, if we're going to get serious about solving problems. A problem, though, I see is that, and using your example of that guy throwing kids in the river, so we go upstream and tackle him and get him to stop. Well, there are a lot of cases

where that guy is hard to find, that the cause of the problem is hard to find upstream. And if you can't find it, you can't fix it. Yeah, I know. I know exactly what you mean that that often what we find is when we start trying to get to the root cause of a problem, it gets really confusing. It gets very complex. I mean, there's a comfort in rescue because it's very tangible. You see the kid thrashing in the river, you can pull them out, you feel good, you get glory from your friends because you rescued a kid. And then when you start talking about, well, what caused this to begin with, all of a sudden you've got a debate, you've got a discussion, and it can get very confusing. And that's why one of the themes that stuck out in my research was so often to solve problems rather than just react to them required a different set of people to come together.

One of my favorite stories in the book is about the city of Rockford, which is the second biggest city in Illinois behind Chicago. And it became the first city in the US to solve the problem of veteran homelessness. And what's fascinating about it, I talked to the former mayor, a guy named Larry Morrissey. And he said he'd been working on homelessness for nine years. Rockford's one of these places that was an industrial hub and then all the factories closed and all the problems that come along with that. And he said they'd basically gotten nowhere on homelessness in nine years. I mean, they just tread water at best. And he said they discovered something in the 10th year where in a period of 10 months,

they went from nowhere to that first city achievement that I talked about. And so I was asking him how they did this. And he described the following changes. Number one, they stopped treating it as a problem where everybody got to stay in their silos, you know, because there's so many people that have a stake in homelessness, ranging from the homeless people themselves to social services, to the VA, to the police, to homeless shelters, to the fire department. And everybody kind of did their little piece of the puzzle, but they never really collaborated.

So the first thing they did was they brought everybody around the same table. And then the second thing was they didn't just bring them around the table to pontificate, you know, to brainstorm about, you know, the origins of homelessness and how to solve it at a societal level. What they did was they oriented people around specific homeless individuals. So their meetings involved what they called a by name list. They keep a real time census of every homeless person in the community. And when they meet, they talk about Mike. They talk about Steve and they say, OK, who's seen Steve left? Well, Steve last rather.

Well, I saw him in the under the bridge last week. He still got his tent under there. He's he's coming to the shelter a few times a week to get lunch. Okay, who's going to reach out to them and see if he's ready to be housed? Well, someone raises their hand and said, we'll do that this week. And that's what the meetings are like. They're very concrete. They're very human. And the result of that is you come to understand all the moving parts in the system so much better because you see them through the lens of these real individual cases. And that taught me something powerful that what feels like macro change often starts with micro understanding that you can't help thousands of people or millions until you can help one. And I think that's part of the antidote here, is learning how to change the way we collaborate

and learning how to get closer to the systems that yield the problems. Dan Heath is my guest. He is a writer and researcher, and he's author of the book Upstream, the quest to solve problems before they happen. He's author of the book Upstream, The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared.

It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing

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holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. So Dan, I think one of the problems in trying to identify those upstream problems is that we live in an era of specialization. You know, in the factory, one person does one job, is not necessarily aware of what everyone else does or how they do it. They just know that to do their one job. So they don't see the big picture enough to know how to tackle the big picture as a whole. Exactly right. And what we're fighting there is, I mean, most organizations are designed with great care and intention to divide people up and to force them to specialize within silos.

And it's not that there's some evil intent there. That's the source of great efficiencies. You know, you have the one guy on the assembly line whose job it is to screw in the widgets. And by God, with a lot of practice, he gets very efficient at screwing in the widgets. But that very same structure is also the deterrent to solving bigger problems than exist at any one level of that kind of fragmented infrastructure. Like just to be more tangible about this, there's a story about Expedia, which is the online travel site where you can book hotels or airfare or whatever. They had a problem back in 2012 where of every hundred customers who booked a reservation on the site, 58 of them ended up calling the call

center for support, which is just kind of mind boggling, right? Because the whole point of an online travel site is that you can do it yourself. And yet almost 60% of the people who did it themselves ended up needing help. So this guy named Ryan O'Neill starts digging into this to figure out what in the world is going on. And he figures out the number one reason that people are calling is to get a copy of their itinerary. That's it, to get a copy of their itinerary. 20 million calls were placed in 2012. That's like every single person in Florida calling Expedia in one year to request a copy of their itinerary. And so if you ask, how do you solve that problem?

It doesn't take a genius, right? Well, they added a branch to the IVR, press two if you're calling for a copy of your itinerary. They allowed people to self-serve online. They changed the way that they sent out the confirmation so that they wouldn't end up in spam, which was part of the problem. The solutions were easy. The more interesting thing to me is, how does a problem like that boil up to that point? Why wasn't there a kind of red flag triggered when you got your seven millionth call for an itinerary? And the answer is back to that idea of fragmentation, where at Expedia, like virtually every other business, you have these distinct groups of

people with different goals. The marketing team's goal is to attract people to Expedia. And then you've got a product team whose job it is to design such a smooth, easy interface that they get to the point of booking a transaction. And then you've got the IT team whose job it is to keep everything humming and keep uptime as high as possible. And then you've got the call center and their job is to resolve people's issues quickly and keep people happy. And on an individual basis, all those goals make perfect sense. They sound logical.

But then when you ask a very basic question like, whose job in this ecosystem is it to make sure that customers don't need to call us for help? The answer is nobody. It's nobody's job. And in fact, it's even worse than that. Like there's no one in this whole system who would even be rewarded if that happened. It just seems, as I said before, that even when you decide to tackle a problem upstream, doesn't mean you'll always find the problem upstream and you may find something else. You may say this is the solution and in fact it's not. Well, this is another layer of the upstream challenge is thinking in systems and realizing that when we intervene in systems, they're likely to have

unintended consequences. Like there was an example in New York City where a Google engineer, a young guy was walking through Central Park and a branch from an oak tree fell down and hit him on the head and caused brain injuries and paralysis. And it was just a horrible tragedy. And it seems like one of those freak things that just happen. And then later, the controller of New York City, a guy named Scott Stringer, he started analyzing the claims that had been paid out by the city to settle lawsuits. So this engineer I talked about had settled a claim for $11 million from his injuries. What Stringer discovered was there were actually a bunch of settlements

from falling branches. And so Stringer was thinking, well, what in the world? And he began to dig around, come to find out that the city's pruning budget had been cut in previous years in an effort to save money. And so here you've got, you know, an interesting side effect, right? From within the silo of the parks department, what's the presenting problem? The problem is we got to cut our budget. They think, okay, we've got too much money in the pruning budget. We can cut back there. From their perspective within that part of the system, it all looked good. They did save the money. But then what they weren't seeing was that the side effect of that was they're not pruning these old dead branches. The dead branches are falling. They're hurting people. And as one of

Scott Stringer's colleagues said, whatever money we thought we were saving on the maintenance side, we were just paying right out on the lawsuit side. So Stringer's office starts mapping out the nature of these claims they're paying. They created a program called Claimstat where they mapped and indexed the tens of thousands of annual claims made against the city. And they start finding these just remarkable patterns. They found there was one swing on a playground in Brooklyn that had been responsible for multiple lawsuits. All somebody needed to do was go out and raise this swing six inches and all of the injuries would have been eliminated.

But nobody thought to do that. Nobody could see it. And so that's part of the challenge is when we get involved in these complex systems, we can't just focus on the part. We can't just obsess on the fact that, okay, parks needs to save money. We'll cut money from within parks. We've got to ask ourselves, what is the effect of cutting this thing within the park's budget? And are we paying attention to the side consequences? Well, what I really like about this is it makes you think differently.

It makes you look at problems differently. It makes you look upstream instead of just focusing on the symptom of the problem right here and now, which can open up all kinds of possibilities. Dan Heath has been my guest. The book is called Upstream, The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. And there is a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Dan. Thanks so much, Mike. Hey, everyone.

Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things

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A lot of people are working from home today who don't normally work from home. And if you don't normally work from home, you are likely finding it different. Very different. And if you have kids who are home from school, you are finding it very, very, very different. Maura Neville-Thomas is here to help with that. She's a productivity expert and author of the book, very different. Maura Neville Thomas is here to help with that. She's a productivity expert and author of the book, Attention Management. With so many people working from home, she's here to help those people, and really anyone, keep their attention focused and get their

work done, even with all that's going on with the coronavirus crisis. Hi, Maura. Welcome. Thanks for having me on. I'm happy to be here. So people are finding as they are told to work from home that it isn't just a case of taking your work home and setting up shop in your den or your kitchen table and everything's the same. It's very different. There are a lot of distractions in the house. So where do we begin? Yes. When we're all at work, we have constant distractions at work. And one of the keys to managing your attention that I tell people about when you're at work

is to control your environment, which means giving your coworkers a signal that you don't want to be disturbed, but your four-year-old isn't going to understand that. Right? a signal that you don't want to be disturbed, but your four-year-old isn't going to understand that. So tempering your expectations and matching the work to the situation, analyzing the work that you need to do and the situation that you have in front of you and accepting that we can only do the best we can. But people are saying, how am I supposed to do important work when my kids are interrupting me all the time? And the answer is you can't. You really can't. So understanding that and sort of giving ourselves a break is going to be really important. One of the things that people who work from home will tell you, and I've worked from home

for a lot of my career, I can attest to this, that even if there are no kids, there's something very different about working at home in the sense that are you at work? Are you at home? There are distractions in the house, things that need, dishes need to be cleaned. There's just something about being at home that is very, I don't know, it's just, it like gets in the way of doing your work. Absolutely. It's a different location, and when our routine changes, that in itself is distracting. But one of the great things about working from home, I mean, there are many great things about working from home. And so if we recognize those and use them to our advantage, then I think it helps put aside some of that distraction.

For example, it's hard at work to build in some physical activity in the middle of your work day, but when you're home, you can take a break and take the dog for a walk, or you can maybe put in some laundry and do some dishes and do something physical, which is a much better type of break for yourself if your work requires reading and writing and that kind of detail work. Then oftentimes when we take a break at work, we'll take a break from reading a report and we'll switch to reading sports scores or reading Facebook. But really, that's take a break from reading a report and we'll switch to reading sports scores or reading Facebook. But really, that's not a break. It might be a little more interesting to us, but it's not a break for your brain. So at work, at home, we have an opportunity to get a

real break by doing a different type of activity that really does give our brain a break. So if we can embrace the upside and try to use that to our advantage, then we can also tie it into sort of a reward. I have this thing I need to do. I really want to take the dog for a walk. I will give myself permission to take the dog for a walk when I finish this task. One of the things I find really helpful when working at home, and it also applies, I guess, when you're working at the office, is to have a plan. I find that if I don't have a written down plan for how the day is going to go when I'm working at home, I don't get as much done. And what's interesting, though, is when I do have a plan, the day doesn't really go very much like the plan, but I still get a lot more done. Absolutely. Eisenhower said, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

So you're exactly right. We need a plan for our day, and that's part of a workflow management system, right? You identify all the things that you need to do. You organize those things. You prioritize them. And then things happen and your plans change and you have to work new things into your day that you didn't know were coming.

But having that plan to begin with helps you absorb those new activities in a way that not having a plan would sort of maintain the chaos. Do you think there's a good way to create that plan? I know everybody's different, but is there somewhat of a template of how that plan ought to look, given the fact that you are perhaps at home, there are other people in the house who are stuck at home too? Any suggestions on that? Absolutely.

I am not a fan of making appointments with yourself. That's what a lot of people do. They take their to-do list and they say, at 9 o'clock I'm going to do this, and at 10 o'clock I'm going to do this, and at 11 o'clock I'm going to do this. But what I find is that that ends up just making us sort of rearrange our calendar a whole lot instead of actually getting things done. So I would say keep the things that are what I call that have a strong relationship to time. If you have a meeting with other people, for example, that's happening at a certain time, and so you don't have any flexibility there. That meeting is at two. But if you have to call and cancel your dentist appointment and you have to edit a report and you have to write an article, you could probably do

those things at 9.30 or at 10.15 or at noon. And so don't put those things on your calendar. Those things have what I call a weak relationship to time. And things that have a weak relationship to time, I believe, belong on your task list. And then prioritize your task list by due date, but not using your calendar. So give those tasks a due date by priority. Well, if this one is really important, I should do it today. And if that one can wait a little bit, I'll do that tomorrow. So assign dates, but assign them by due date on your task list

rather than by putting them on your calendar. This whole concept of working from home when you don't normally work at home certainly creates problems for managers because typically managers are in the same room or the same building or the same floor of the office, to kind of keep their eye on things, to see people working. And I imagine that managing people who are at their home from your home is challenging. A lot of managers are not used to evaluating work in any other way except she's sitting at her desk, so I guess she's working. And now we can't see people, right? FaceTime in the office is no longer a useful metric. And then some people try to prove that

they're working by communicating all the time and sending perhaps unnecessary communications all day long. So in order to head that off, I'm recommending to leaders that they get with their team members and agree together what will your objectives be for this week. And then at the end of the week, the team member can report in on the status of all of those projects. Did they meet their objectives? If not, why? Priorities change, all of that stuff happens. But at least then people can use that goal to say, well, as long as I get this work done, I'm still carrying my weight. And some of that work might have to happen when the kids are in bed. It is difficult for us

to keep work from home from turning into working all the time. So that's why I mentioned earlier to recognize what kind of work you have to do and then allocate that to the times that it will make sense to do it. What are some of the other challenges that you find when people have to work from home and managers have to manage from home? What else is disruptive? I don't think that people are being clear as far as weekly objectives. I think that a lot of leaders just sort of assume, well, they know what they need to get done, and so they're just home working, I guess. But we need some sort of common language to use so that leaders can, so that workers can plan appropriately around their other obligations

and that leaders can ensure that projects are moving forward and people are putting in, you know, the appropriate amount of time given their situation. So we don't know how long people are going to be working from home and different businesses and different offices will be at home longer than others. And so what else are we missing? What else do we need to pay attention to that might get lost in the translation of moving work from the office to the house? One of the things I think that is on all of our plates now that perhaps wasn't a month ago is how do we shift our business model to keep up with this changing environment? And that is deep work, right? That is work that requires

thinking and creativity and uninterrupted brainpower momentum. And so that is work that has to get done so that businesses can keep moving forward. So I think managing remotely is a different situation, but it's absolutely possible for businesses to continue with the important work that they need to do. I think we just need a lot more clarity than we have when everybody is working together in the same place and can sort of see what everybody's doing. Well, it seems like that clarity thing and being very deliberate about this would help. Because I think what happens, my sense of what happens is, okay, so now we're going to work from home and nobody ever really talks about, and therefore things are going to be different in the following ways. We just assume that everybody's going to work at home and everything else stays the same. You're right. That's why we need to sort of raise some awareness as far as what is going to be different and how are we going to handle this. One of the pitfalls that I'm sharing with my

leader clients is to set very clear expectations. This is important even when everybody is in the office, but it's really important when people are distributed. Be very clear about, take an inventory of the communication tools that are in use at your organization and provide very clear guidelines about which communication device should be used in which situation. So, for example, use team collaboration tools when you are sharing information about projects that other team members are involved in. Use email for routine requests and communication and use the phone or text in the case of urgent or time-sensitive information, especially after hours. Because now we also have the possibility

that flex time, right, everybody's working from home, so everybody might not be working the same hours. So if we're all working different hours, that's going to seem like work is happening around the clock. In fact, work will be happening around the clock. So how can we avoid having everybody work around the clock? Setting some guidelines about communication, which channel is useful in which situation, and also how do we communicate after hours. So, for example, if you need to work from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m., then you should do that, but maybe don't impose your work schedule on other people. So, for example, schedule the send of the email to go out during business hours. Lastly, it seems like if you're going to be working from home

and you don't typically work from home or you don't typically work from home very often that the other people in the house that we need to have a meeting we need to talk about the fact that things are going to be different and that even if your four-year-old is a four-year-old still you can get some cooperation that will make this go better. Absolutely.

Everybody's household is going to be different, but if there are people in the house that need to be cared for and there are two adults in the house to care for them, then probably working in shifts is a really good idea. One parent works or one adult works for an hour or two in a room with a closed door and the other adult takes care of the caring, right, the caregiving, and then at some point they switch so that both adults can get work done if there are more self-sufficient people in the house that's certainly a different story

teenagers can understand you know make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich i'm going to be working all day and i'll check in with you periodically right that kind of thing so you're right ground rules need to be set and they're going to be different depending on the home situation. Since the title of your book is Attention Management, can you explain that a little bit? Talk about what that means? Attention management is something that I've been speaking and writing about for a decade and it is, I think, really important now because attention management is about recognizing, the ultimate goal of attention management is about recognizing your thoughts

and your brain state and shifting to a more productive brain state given what's in front of you. During these times, it's so easy for us to get stuck in this cycle of rumination and worry and anxiety and what's going to happen and what about this and what about that. I think it's so important for us to recognize when we're in that state and shift. I have found personally that action is the antidote to fear and anxiety for me. So I am doing the best that I can to take advantage of the downtime to do those things. We all have things that, oh, if only I had the time, I would do X, whether that's personal or professional. Well, for many of us, now is that time. And that can be a really exciting prospect.

And that can also keep us busy and distracted from the worry and the fear. So I think that's the best advice that I can give right now. Well this is good because not only is it helpful for people who are working at home who don't normally work at home and good for people who work at home who do work at home but it's good productivity advice just for everybody when they get back to work no matter whether they're working at home or the office. Maura Neville-Thomas

has been my guest. She's a productivity expert, and she's author of the book, Attention Management. You'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you for coming on, Maura. Thanks, Mike. I hope you found it useful. Even with a lot of gyms and fitness centers closed because of the coronavirus,

it is still important to exercise, which brings up the question, is it better to exercise in the morning or the afternoon? The technical answer is it doesn't really matter. There's no advantage one way or the other. However, getting it done in the morning often results in working out more overall per week. That's because morning is the time of day when people have the least amount of obligations that can prevent them from getting their workout in.

However, nighttime workouts can help manage stress levels after a tense day, which can boost your progress toward weight loss goals, according to the experts. That's because getting sweaty squashes the stress hormone cortisol, which has been linked to an increase in belly fat. So there are benefits to both. The most important thing is to make sure that exercise happens. So really, whichever works best for your schedule is the best way to go. And that is something you should know. Stay safe. I'm Mike Carruthers.

Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer,

unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan.

Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.