Something You Should Know - The High Price of Being So Busy & The Trouble You’ll Cause If You Don’t Have a Will

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

What makes happy people so happy? It is partly due to their attitude and behavior. This episode begins with some of the essential ingredients to create a general sense of happiness. They definitely work if you give them a try. http://www.biopsychiatry.com/happiness/ Who doesn’t love accomplishing all the things on their to-do list? But there is also a cost to doing that when it becomes your primary focus. It just may be that being a little less efficient will actually make you more content according to Tony Crabbe. He is a business psychologist who has worked with companies like Microsoft, News Corporation, Disney, HSBC and the World Bank and he is author of the book Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much (https://amzn.to/2XsxTxD) . Listen as Tony reveals the benefits of changing your focus from efficiency to contentment while still tackling the important things. Not to be morbid but one day your life will come to an end. Even though it is a certainty, many of us are not prepared for it and it can cause real headache for the people you leave behind. When you are gone people need to know things like: Where are your passwords, bank accounts and important papers? Who will take care of your kids? Who gets your possessions? Here to discuss all the things you need to take care of that you may not have even thought about is Adam Seifer. Adam is founder of Everplans (https://www.everplans.com) a life and legacy planning company and he is author of the book In Case You Get Hit by a Bus (https://amzn.to/2Xv70t4). Did you know that your eyes have over 2 million working parts? That is only one fascinating feature about your eyes you likely never knew and that that I explain at the close of today’s episode that https://www.hexarmor.com/posts/12-fascinating-eye-facts PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Indeed is the hiring platform where you can Attract, Interview, and Hire all in one place! Start hiring NOW with a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Offer good for a limited time. Now, your ideas don't have to wait, now, they have everything they need to come to life. Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow U.S. Cellular knows how important your kid’s relationship with technology is. That’s why they’ve partnered with Screen Sanity, a non-profit dedicated to helping kids navigate the digital landscape. For a smarter start to the school year, U.S. Cellular is offering a free basic phone on new eligible lines, providing an alternative to a smartphone for children. Visit https://USCellular.com/BuiltForUS ! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, the few essential ingredients that will give you an overall sense of happiness. Then, the problem with our obsession for being busy and being productive and getting everything done. And actually if we try and do everything we actually achieve nothing and our lives turn to grey. I used to paint as a kid when you mix too many colors on a palette you don't get a rainbow you kind of get this grey sludge and that's what our lives become when we try and do everything and never quite do anything brilliantly. Also do you know what part of your body requires no rest at all? And have you made

preparations for the day you die? Do you have a will? A big part of having a will is to make sure that you name a guardian. You know, everybody's got a crazy sister-in-law or uncle who probably wouldn't be your top choice. They could come petition the judge and ultimately get custody of your children if you don't have a will that names a guardian. All this today on Something You Should Know. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather.

Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. 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. We have, if you're a regular listener, you know that we have talked about the subject of happiness several times on Something You Should Know, and we've come at it from a lot of different angles.

I came across this that I thought was interesting regarding what happy people do and how happy people live their lives. First of all, the happiest people spend the least time alone. Humans are social creatures, and we need to connect with others. Signature strengths are important. Doing the things you are good at and enjoy doing brings a sense of happiness. And then there's gratitude and forgiveness.

Happy people tend to be grateful for what they have and they don't hold grudges. And altruism is important. That rewarding feeling that comes from helping others breeds happiness in almost everyone. And that is something you should know. For many people, being busy is a way of life. We take pride in being busy. We look at busy people as important people because they have so much to do. And there's certainly a sense of accomplishment. I know I felt it. When you have a million things on your to-do list and you get them all done,

well, that feels pretty great. But if you're busy doing all these things on your to-do list, what are you not doing instead? If you weren't so busy, what would you do? What would you rather do? Is being busy a good state to be in? Well, with an interesting perspective on busy is Tony Crabb. Tony is a business psychologist who has worked with companies like Microsoft, Disney, HSBC, and the World Bank. And he's author of a book called Busy, How to Thrive in a World of Too Much. Hey, Tony. It's really nice to be here, Mike. So as I said, a lot of people wear their busyness as a badge of honor. I know busy people who,

if they weren't so busy, they really wouldn't know what to do. So how do you look at busy? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Or it just is what it is? No, I think busy is dumb. I think it's the natural response to a world of too much. I think it's an ill thought out strategy. I think it's a set of bad habits. And quite frankly, I think it's the easy option. And yet, I think people would say, well, so if I wasn't busy, what would I do? Being busy is my life. Busy is what I do. To not be busy means to do what instead? And you know what? There's a lot of research that shows people have a fear of idleness. People are unhappy with idleness and maybe that drives some of the activity. But let me just be clear about what

I mean by busy. Busy is this kind of racing, cramming, juggling, multitasking, frenetic pace where we flatline through our day. We kind of buzz ourselves up with coffee in the morning and cool ourselves down with alcohol in the evening that fills so much of life. And for me, the opposite of busyness isn't relaxation on a beach or sitting idle doing nothing. The opposite of busy is the ability to bring sustained focused attention onto the people you love most or the people that are important to you in work and the things or the problems or the activities that you care most about. So how did we get here? How did we get to the point where being busy means you're important?

You see, that's a great question. Actually, in the pre-industrial age, if you were in Paris in the late 1800s and you were cool, one of the things that was really fashionable to do is to walk a turtle on a piece of string. And the reason for that is turtles walk really, really slowly. So it was a manifestation of quite how much time you had on your hands. We've completely flipped that. And, the research shows today that when we moan, brag about our business, when people say, how are you, and we go into this long parade about quite how busy our lives are, we're actually subtly competing. We research as we actively compete about who can be busier. And so one of the things is we just changed our sets of values in a way that fits with some of the needs of the industrial revolution, but doesn't necessarily fit know, reach for our first shot of busyness or email before our first shot of caffeine. We, some eminent psychologists, put people in an empty room for 15 minutes with nothing to do apart from electrocute themselves. And most people chose to

electrocute themselves because we're hooked on this world of hyperstimulation. And a lot of this drives this need to be busy. Well, one of the things I've always found interesting about this busyness thing is our obsession with, and I interview people on this podcast all the time, about productivity. And it seems like the idea is to find ways to do things faster so you can do more things and then do them faster so you can do more things. And the goal is always to get more done. It isn't to free yourself up from, it isn't finding a way to get things done so you don't have to work so hard. It's just making room for more work. But really we've got hooked in what I call the more game, which is we endlessly, the rules are simple in terms of the way we think about success. The more we do, the faster we do it, the quicker we respond, the more we'll succeed.

And that's kind of dumb. In the last 20 years, the amount of information we all consume has increased by a factor of five. But over the same time period, the amount of content that the average worker produces has increased by a factor of five. But over the same time period, the amount of content that the average worker produces has increased by a factor of 200. So if you hold those numbers together, most of all our well-meaning, more based productivity is just white noise. Nobody can really consume it. And I think that's part of the issue. We're kind of, we're hooked in endlessly doing more, but it doesn't capture attention, which is the heart of the point around the attention economy.

But the stuff that stands out in an attention economy is the stuff that's kind of interesting, that's kind of different. And very few of us have the, we're so busy racing and cramming, we don't create the space for us to have the insight that leads to fresh thinking. So what do you say to the person who says, okay, well, this all sounds great. It would be great to have more time, but here's my day. I have to do this and I have to

do this and I have to do this. It takes this much time to get it done. And that fills up the day. So it would be great to have more free time, but it is impossible. And it's funny, you know, Mike, I would always get a question that would be asked at the end of a talk, and it would go something like this. Look, Tony, you say busy is a choice, but what about me? I'm a single parent. I've got seven children. I run three multimillion dollar projects. My mother-in-law's coming to stay parent. I've got seven children. I run three multimillion dollar projects. My mother-in-law's coming to stay and I've got a dog with leukemia. And they look at me as if, you know, surely I haven't got a choice. And they'd invest great energy in convincing me. And in some respects, what they were looking for almost is absolution. They were looking for me to

say, actually, for you, busy isn't a choice. But when I dig further, in almost all cases, there is a difficult conversation or a tricky choice that isn't happening. And so what do you say to that guy, the guy whose mother-in-law is coming and his dog has leukemia? What's your advice to him? Yeah, well, it starts with making choices. So the standard question when we're deciding if we should do something or if we want to do something is whether or not. Whether or not I should go to that meeting, whether or not I should cook that fancy meal for the mother-in-law, whether or not I should sign my child up for that other afterschool activity or whatever the case may be. Now, the answer to all of these, almost always, if we ask the question that way, is yes,

because these are all worthwhile things. These are all valuable things. But if we start from an assumption that we can't do it all, and actually, if we try and do it all, when we try and do everything, we actually achieve nothing. And our lives turn to gray. I used to paint as a kid. And when you mix too many colors on a palette, you don't get a rainbow. You kind of get this gray sludge. And that's what our lives become when we try and do everything and never quite do anything brilliantly. And so instead of saying whether or not, maybe we should ask a different question, which is something more like, if I'm saying yes to this, what am I saying no to? What's the cost? Because what happens, Mike, most often is when we choose whether or not we should do

something, the thing that we often forget about is the important thing. It might be the playing Lego with Johnny. It might be thinking about the new strategy for the business if it's a work related thing, as opposed to the immediate and urgent and pressing thing, which always gets the noise. So part of it is just actually having the courage to make trade-offs and allowing yourself to be a little bit sloppy, because actually, when we try and be perfect, we end up being fairly inadequate at everything. It's not that we start with sloppiness, but it comes back to we're getting really clear on the people, on the conversations, on the activities that you care about most, and putting real energy into those, and just accepting as a consequence that other things won't be able to be perfect. If we start from trying to get everything perfect, what gets squeezed out? What gets squeezed out is the stuff that in years to come we will always look back on with regret. We're talking about being busy and the problem of being too busy too much of the time.

And my guest is Tony Crabb. He's author of the book Busy, How to Thrive in a World of Too Much. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe.

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to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. So, Tony, this idea of not being perfect, that perfection isn't always better and that being sloppy is OK. I mean, when you look at kids, I mean, it used to be the kids after school, that was their time to hang out with their friends and ride their bikes and do what they want. And now kids are very scheduled. It's not sloppy. It's very, very structured. But we know one of the things that happens when children have this kind of massively structured environment, albeit well-intentioned, is part of the brain, the central executive, doesn't develop properly. And that's essential for creativity. It's essential for autonomy.

It's essential for self-management, if you like, as we go through life later on. And so one of the, it's funny, one of the things, one of the phrases that our children most associate with us and kind of grown whenever we say it, but we still say it, is whenever we kind of say, look, technology off kids. And they turn to us inevitably and say, but daddy, I'm bored, as if it's my job to fix that. And our response is, and that's our greatest gift to you. Because unless we have boredom, and this applies to adults as well, by the way, boredom is a hugely important thing for the brain to allow our brain to make sense of what's going on. I mean, when do we have, if I ever asked most people, when do you have your best ideas? They will nearly always say in the shower.

Why is that? It's probably because it's about the only day, only time of the day when they're not either producing something or stimulating themselves or consuming something. And when we're off task or free play for children, parts of the brain can fire up that are important for making sense of things, that are important for creativity. And we, you know, even with the children, we know the kind of decline in free play that's hit society has been associated with massive increases in mental health. In the UK, there's been something like, I think, a 48% increase in mental health issues of children over the last decade.

And that's partly associated with this lack of unstructured freedom, sloppiness even. So the next time my kid says, I'm bored, I'm going to tell him, and that's my gift to you. Exactly. But you know what? Two or three minutes later, he'll be making some kind of cool thing with a, with a washing up bottle or whatever, or painting a picture and doing something that is genuinely interesting. Or actually, quite frankly, just having a conversation. And so what do you say though, to people who just, I mean,

I can imagine people listening to you going, yeah, well, this is really great, you know, for other people, I'm sure this is really good, but I wouldn't know how to even approach what he's talking about. I mean, how would you even begin to put your toe in the water here if you're one of those people who gets up and starts a hundred miles an hour? Well, look, there's a few things. I mean, actually, the doing nothing is one of the hardest things. I think what I would say is think about, rather than thinking about time, because managing time is a really out-of-date thing to do. I don't think that time is our ultimate commodity anymore.

The ultimate commodity that's in short supply is attention. And that's supported by some research by one of the chief economists at the Bank of England. But when you think about attention, what it means to manage attention, there are three elements to it. Attention has a direction. It's like a flashlight. It points in different directions. Attention has an intensity, an intensity of focus. And attention has a duration duration how long it lingers

in any given place and so thinking about a day about how do we intentionally point our attention onto stuff that we truly care about how often have we got to the end of a day and we've been busy but we can't really remember what we actually did but it seems that so much of the day, yeah, it may be mundane things that you don't remember doing, but it doesn't mean they weren't important or necessary to get done. They had to get done. They just weren't particularly interesting or exciting. You still, you know, you have to drop the clothes off of the dry cleaners because if you don't, you don't have clean clothes so those things are necessary but i guess what you're saying is that that we have a tendency to gravitate to those

things those are the easier things to do they're they're quicker they're easy to check off the to-do list and we tend to go towards that in given moment, given a choice between simple but dull activity or something that's a little trickier, that might be a deep conversation with your son. It might be starting that complex report that you were going to write. In any given moment, the choice between these two things, you're going to choose the simple and dull activity. And so what often happens is we get into this frenetic activity and we feel, because we've got loads of dopamine flowing around, like we're being super uber effective. But actually, probably what we're doing is just making lots of choices in the grip of temptation for small, meaningless stuff, as opposed to big things. When we're at home, we fub each other. Are you familiar with the

word fubbing, Mike? Fubbing is this notion of snubbing someone with your phone, being effectively rude to someone with your phone. So mid-conversation, you just whip out your phone and have a quick glance. Or you're in a meeting and you just open the laptop. Don't mind me. I'm just doing a few emails. I'll join the meeting at the right time. And we fub people all the time and therefore are never fully involved in those conversations. And just getting into some simple habits around being fully present, putting the phone away, we actually know that just putting your phone on the table makes the other person like you less because they know you're only semi-present. Actually, I've got a friend of mine who started a fight back against fubbing and he carries a book of poetry.

And if anyone ever fubs him, he whips out his book of poetry, reads a couple of verses and puts it back in his pocket with no explanation whatsoever just to make the point that just because it's a phone, it's still odd to disrupt a conversation by looking at it. So thinking about your day less about how do I maximize my minutes and thinking instead about how do I persistently point my attention to what matters? How do I get really immersed and present with the people I care about or matter to me and on the problems, and how do I avoid the temptation of distractions will be a smart place to start.

I want to get you to talk about the idea that, you know, there are people who are busy and the concept of not being busy makes no sense to them. What would they do? I mean, if they weren't busy, that's, that's what, that's what people do. They do stuff. They go places, they run errands, they, they do what they do. And, and there's a, a joy there. There's, there's like a sense of accomplishment of, I got all these things done. Things are off my to-do list. And they can't really comprehend what you're talking about. I would answer that question in so many different ways. So first is we've got to differentiate buzz from joy. So the fact is busyness gives us a buzz because of the dopamine. But actually, it undermines the joy.

It reduces our ability to be fully present in our conversation. We see we're kind of surrounded by people who are just living lives of partial attention, never fully present. And if you actually think about the times when you were most joyful, when you were most truly happy over the last few weeks and months, it would have been a time when you immersed your attention with reckless abandon into the conversation or the activity you were doing. And that isn't busyness. That's just, because busyness is what, again, coming back to my point at the start, busyness is just kind of

racing and cramming and juggling. So moving away from business doesn't mean that our lives aren't full. I'm not arguing for doing a lot less necessarily what i'm asking what i'm suggesting is we do things for longer with less interruptions we focus deeper with more intensity um and we bring our attention more regularly to the things that really matter i mean 58 of knowledge workers are saying they do less than 30 minutes thinking a day. 30% say they do no thinking at all each day, which kind of is bonkers. We see empathy levels of US students has dropped by 40% over the last couple of decades, because we're getting into, and this is also mirrored, by the way, in organizations,

because we're getting out of the habit of being fully present with people. So what I'm not arguing and suggesting is that we just give up everything and go into idle life. What I am suggesting is have a look at your life and ask yourself, to what degree are you doing the things that truly you truly care about to what degree you've been fully present with the people you really love and if the answer to that is well I could do a bit better on that then make small choices that allow you to spend a little bit more time with deep attention with the people that you love most, with the people that matter to you most in the organization or in your work, or on the activities that you know will truly add value either to your life or the organization.

And small shifts and small choices that we make to put a bit more time into those, even if they require tricky choices or tricky conversations to allow us to do those. We'll make a big difference, not only in the quality of our lives and the quality of our work, but we'll also make a big difference in the sense of control we feel over our lives. Well, speaking just from my own experience, I know that trying to change the way you live your life or spend your day or get things done. Changing that is hard, but with more and more coming at us, maybe we could be a little more intentional because, you know, as I go through my day, a lot of it is on autopilot. And by maybe making some more intentional choices about what I choose to do, things could be a lot easier and a lot better. Tony Crabb has been my guest.

He's a business psychologist and author of the book, Busy, How to Thrive in a World of Too Much. And you'll find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Tony. It's been a real pleasure. I mean, obviously, I mean, I knew you were going to be a pro given the success of the work that you do. But it was very, very easy to talk to you. And thanks ever so much. 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.

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Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. 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 going to 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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Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. There will come a time when you're not here. Hopefully, that's a long way off, but that day will come. And when it does come, what will happen to all your stuff, all your money, all your possessions? What will happen to all the people you leave behind?

The fact is, you could unknowingly make things very difficult for your family if you don't make the proper arrangements. And if you don't decide what's going to happen after you're gone, someone else will. And it may not be what you wanted at all. That's why Adam Seifer is here. Adam is an entrepreneur and founder of Everplans, which is a life and legacy planning company, and he is author of the book, In Case You Get Hit by a Bus. Hey, Adam. Hi, Mike. It's really good to be here. Thank you so much for having me. So we hear that phrase a lot, you know, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow, so you better be prepared.

But people don't really seem to think that's going to happen because they're not prepared. Many of us are not prepared for that day when we're not here. And people don't think that they will get hit by a bus. I mean, you know, what are the chances? They're actually pretty low. But what we've discovered is that buses come in a lot of different sizes and flavors. And I think this is more than just about actual buses. And so before we get into the details, just in kind of a shopping list form, what are the big things? What are the big things people should do that they regret not doing or their family wish had been done beforehand? What are they? I think there's some foundational stuff that can really make things difficult for your family if you didn't get it together.

Things like your critical passwords, some basic information about your assets and where they the, the wills, the trusts, the, the medical directives, information about any insurance policies you have and your digital accounts. And then, and then there's this last bucket that we like to think about, which we call the finishing touches. It's, it's the way you want to be remembered. It's information about your funeral. It's, it's important family memories that you want to make sure. It's information about your funeral. It's important family memories that

you want to make sure don't evaporate if something happens to you. And I think if you do have those things, things go great. And I think if you're missing big chunks of that, that's the thing that people end up really regretting because it leaves their family with a big mess. Since we all inevitably will die, and I think people have a real problem with addressing this stuff, why do you suppose that is? Why, when we know this is the final result, we all must go. Why do we leave this undone? Man, I think there's a lot of reasons. I think for some people, it's the effort and the logistics. You know, nobody wants to take three days off from work to organize all of their information and get everything together. But I think for a lot of people, it's, it's, it's

something more than that. It's, it's getting into this stuff. It's acknowledging that you're going to die. And, and I think people don't really feel comfortable with that. And so it becomes an easy thing to push off for some other day. Yeah. Well, I mean, I've, I've felt that there's almost this sense I think people have that if you address the issue, that that somehow brings it on, that you're dabbling in your own death. Yeah, but like you just said a couple of minutes ago, it's happening whether you think you brought it on or not. And so, you know, I think for most people finding a way to put aside superstition and, and, and just get into it, um, they're going to end up feeling heroic. Um, everybody that I know who has actually put some time into getting together a plan for their family has, has felt great about themselves and, and it's, it themselves. And they haven't ended up feeling badly. Well, you said a few minutes ago that, you know, nobody wants to take three days off.

And I found that when I looked at my own stuff that I need to make sure is taken care of, I couldn't do it in a three-day blitz. I can do a little bit at a time.. I can do a little bit at a time and I have done a little bit at a time, but I would no more be able to dive into this for three days than, I mean, I just couldn't. Yeah. And we don't think anybody should. I think what you're talking about is exactly what we hope people will do. Just build up a little bit of momentum. Do a couple of things. It'll make you feel really good.

And then you'll want to do a few more. And then you'll want to do a few more. And there's no reason to sit down and make it a three-day project. So what would you do first? Like if you wanted to get people to kind of yank them into the pool here, where do we put our toe in the water? Yeah. You know, there's, there's a couple of things that we think are so important. The first thing is critical passwords to your phone,

your laptop and maybe your primary email account. Because in the old days, if something were to happen to you, everybody would wait around for the mail. And they would start looking through bills and other stuff that came in as a way of untangling your mess. But a lot of people aren't getting bills in the mail anymore. And so that doesn't work anymore. And so if somebody doesn't have access to your email account and your phone, because a lot of people have two-factor authentication on a lot of their important accounts, they can really end up having a long-term mess to unwind. And so we love to have people start there. We also like to make sure that you share a little bit of information about your key assets. You don't have to tell your family how much money you have in which bank account, but

just letting them know that there's an account at this bank or you've been working with that advisor can really make a big difference. There are billions of dollars in unclaimed assets floating around out there because the family never even knew that they existed in the first place. What does the law say or what is the general practice of if someone dies and they have money in their bank account that is maybe the primary source of money, is it okay for other family members to log in and use that money? Or is that, are we committing federal crimes here? Well, I'm not sure about a federal crime, but generally the way it's supposed

to work is that after somebody dies, you go through something called probate. And that's where there's a full accounting done of all of the assets and the executor of the estate, which is the person that you've appointed, can show essentially a judge that they've done an accounting for everything. And then now it's time to open things up and make sure that the people who were supposed to get each thing actually get it and that any liabilities or debts that you have are properly paid off before everybody goes out and buys a boat. If somebody does die and the family does have access to their bank account, unless it's a joint account with joint tenancy with a spouse or a partner, it's probably not a good idea to get into that account and start taking out big

amounts of money because it can interfere with the probate process. Well, what happens though, what I was meaning more is like, you got to pay the electric bill, you got to pay the mortgage, and if the money's in that account, especially if it's auto paying anyway, you can't wait for probate judge. I mean, that could be weeks away. Well, yeah. And that's what happens to a lot of people who don't do planning. And that's why we've been on such a mission for the last 10 years to help families get these plans in place. I had a situation with my own parents where my mom died about a year ago. And for some reason, despite all of our best efforts to put good plans in place,

the primary bank account that she had with my dad was not a joint tenancy account. And so when she died, he was not able to access that account. And so I had to step in and help him make sure that the bills kept getting paid in the interim while we worked on probate. And so you don't want that to happen. It's pretty easy to not have it happen. And it just takes a small amount of planning ahead. I don't know what the statistics are, but I remember hearing that they're amazingly low in terms of the number of people who have a will. Yeah.

Do you know what the stats are? I think it's less than 50%. And it's a real shame because it's something that's very easy to get. And we think everybody should have one. For most people, a will doesn't even really end up being about who gets which part of their assets. Because a lot of people don't even have that much to leave behind. It's more a way to make sure that your family doesn't go through any sort of unnecessary drama and stress. First, if you have children, a big part of having a will is to make sure that you name a guardian in case something happens to both parents. And if you don't name a guardian for your minor children, then a judge can appoint

somebody, which means that everybody's got a family where there's some crazy sister-in-law or uncle who probably wouldn't be your top choice for raising your children. They could come petition the judge and ultimately get custody of your children if you don't have a will that names a guardian. And then on the other side of things, you don't have a will that names a guardian. And then on the other side of things, you need to name an executor in your will. And so even if you're not leaving anything behind, naming an executor can really help your family out a lot because without an executor, someone in your family, if you die, will have to petition a judge to become the administrator of your estate.

And frequently, they'll have to put up a personal bond against any value that might be in the estate until probate is settled. And so, it's time-consuming, it's annoying, it can be expensive, and it's really easy to avoid. There's so many places to get a basic will done for cheap or even for free. And a lot of them are online, so you can do them right from home. What's the difference between a will and a trust, and when do you use which? Yeah, a trust is a way of putting aside certain assets so they almost don't really belong to you anymore. They belong to the trust. The trust is almost like a little mini company that you set up to manage that asset. And so one reason that people use trusts is to make sure that that money or that asset has very specific rules around when somebody can access it and how they can access it. So for instance,

if you die and you just leave your assets in a will, at some point the assets get distributed. But if you put them in a trust, you can leave behind a whole series of instructions to make sure maybe that somebody has to finish college before they can get that money or that they have to take good care of somebody that you left behind in order to get that money. Another reason that people will put something into a trust is for tax purposes. Trusts are taxed differently than individuals are. And so there are a lot of different strategies around putting assets in a trust to maximize the tax outcome. Don't people use trusts? So for example, my wife and I might set up a trust and then if I die, well, nothing happens to the

stuff that's in the trust because my wife is still alive and she's managing the trust and basically it just moves over to her. Exactly. Yes. And so that can create a kind of continuity that avoids the probate process because it's not really part of your estate. It's in a trust. And there are a lot of people, for instance, who create trusts just for their life insurance policy payouts so that the payout from the insurance policy will go right into that trust. When you die and you leave instructions, or if you say, you know, when I die, I want to be buried in this suit or whatever it is you say, do those words mean anything? I want to donate my organs, but I didn't sign a card. I mean, does everything have to be written, or can people say, well, you know, Uncle Bill said he wanted to, you know, be buried upside down.

I mean, I don't know what it would be, but I just mean, do those words carry any weight, or is everything got to be written down? It's a good question. Words do carry a lot of weight, but frequently they only carry the weight with the person that heard them. And there may be other people involved that weren't there when you said it. And so you may end up putting someone in your family in a really difficult position if they're the only one that knows that you want it to be buried upside down. The rest of the family might not agree and make things very difficult.

But as soon as you commit something to paper, then it's much harder to dispute. And then if you go the extra step and you commit it to paper in a way that's sort of legally acceptable and legally valid and something like a will, then you have a much better chance of seeing your wishes carried out. I don't want to get too far into the legal weeds here, but when you die, if you leave instructions when you die, and they're, I guess, not really legal, like you leave all your money to your cat

kind of thing. What does that do? If you really want to leave all of your money to your cat, that's a good example of why you should probably have a trust. Because I think if you put that in your will, you're going to get people in your family that are going to contest it. And we've seen that happen with some celebrities. I think Leona Helmsley left a whole bunch of money to her pets. And there were some family members that really didn't like that very much. What are some of the other, gosh, if only, that happen when people die, that things that didn't get done that should have gotten done and would have made life so much easier if they had gotten done. What else besides what we've talked about thus far comes up? Yeah, one area that can be really, really dramatic is medical directives. It's always the case,

or mostly the case that towards the end of your life, you reach a point where it's very difficult for you to properly advocate for yourself. And so somebody else has to start making decisions and, you know, you put your family in a really tough position. If you've never communicated your wishes about what you do and you don't want, um, first of all, because individuals have to start making really tough decisions that they're going to have to live with the consequences of for the rest of their lives. And there can be a lot of guilt involved, but also people in your family might not see eye to eye.

And that's where you get issues like with the Terry Schiavo case years ago, where some people in the family wanted to take her off life support and some people wanted to keep her on. And ultimately, nobody was really able to follow her wishes because they were not properly specified. And so setting up a living will and naming a healthcare proxy can be another thing that people can give as a gift, essentially, to their family. On a practical level, though, if you're on life support or you're incapacitated and can't make your own decisions, even if you've written down, you know, pull the plug and, you know, let me go. If family members don't want to do that, won't doctors typically go along with the family to avoid lawsuits and everything else?

It definitely does happen. And so the more paperwork that you can arm the person you trust to be your healthcare proxy with, the better chance they have of making sure that the doctors in the hospital feel like it's an easy decision to go along with what you wanted. I had an experience with my own mom when she passed a year ago. And thankfully, because of what I do, I knew ahead of time to sit down with her and my dad six months before and go through everything that she did and did not want and made sure that we got her advanced directive in place, which included her living will and her naming me properly as her healthcare proxy. And then when the end came and hospice came, there was sort of like a bunch of defaults that they were expecting to do, none of which my mom wanted. My mom wanted to be at

home and surrounded by family. And the default hospice path was to take her out of the house and bring her to a hospice facility for her final days, which is exactly what she wouldn't want. And it was so great to know what she wanted. And it was so great to have the things in place that made it easy for me to enforce those decisions. And so instead of having these agonizing conversations with lawyers at the end, I just got to sit and watch TV and talk to my mom and be with my dad. And it was it was amazing. It was it really was a gift. Yeah, it is.

It is so interesting to me how people don't address this until it's too late often. And and then it's too late. And yet it is so inevitable i mean we're all going to go and yet we avoid this like the plague what's really phenomenal is that for people that we can push hard enough to actually sit down and do it they can't believe that they had been avoiding it that whole time that the feeling of relief that they got from doing it was far greater than any trepidation that they had had going into it. And sometimes it just takes a little bit of nudge from somebody who knows what they're doing or somebody who cares about you and has been through it themselves. I think that's the real magic to this.

Because I've even felt, I mean, I still have things I need to do, but having done what I've already done has made me feel better. It actually does provide a little momentum to keep going. And it was just like the initial, do I really want to open up this can of worms kind of thing? But it was nowhere near as morbid or horrible as I thought it would be. And at the end of the day, it felt pretty good. Like I, like I did the grownup thing. Yeah, totally. And when I was sitting and talking to my mom and dad, um, the, the first few minutes were a little bit awkward. It was tough to break the ice and get going. But the further we got into it, the more it ended up feeling like almost like a scavenger hunt of their lives. And they felt like, oh, here's an opportunity to remind Adam of this.

Or, oh, you know what? I bet I have this document somewhere in a file cabinet that no one would ever know about. I should probably go look for that. And it almost creates a life of its own. And as I said, it can almost be fun to have an opportunity to not just unburden yourself, but to also start reviewing the great things that have happened in your life. Well, it's not only an important topic because it's going to apply to everybody, but actually it's interesting when you can, you know, distance yourself from the fact that it's your own death you're talking about. It's really rather interesting and so crucial to understand.

Adam Seifer has been my guest. He is the founder of Everplans, a life and legacy planning company, and he's author of the book, In Case You Get Hit by a Bus. And there is a link to his book and to Everplans in the show notes. Your eyes are amazing. First, they're very busy, blinking over 10 million times a year. Your eyes can distinguish between 500 different shades of gray. Eyes can process 36,000 bits of information per hour, and under the right circumstances, the human eye can discern a candle from 14 miles away. Did you know it's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open? The eye is the only part of the human body that can operate at 100% ability at any moment without rest. Although your eyelids and muscles surrounding your eye require rest,

your eyes do not. And that is something you should know. I know I ask you frequently to share this podcast with someone else because it's how we grow our audience. Our audience grows pretty much organically from people like you telling someone else to give it a listen, and then they become listeners too. It really helps us, and I would really appreciate it. I'm Micah Ruthers. 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 co-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 Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot.

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