the bossbabe podcast - 411. CEO Mama: Context Switching, Transitioning From Work to Mom Mode + Getting More Done In Less Time with Lindsay Roselle

Episode Date: August 24, 2024

Constantly feeling pulled between work + mama-mode? Always running from thing to thing, context switching between tasks, and feeling overwhelmed in the process? We’ve got you mama! In today’s episode, Lindsay shares really practical tips to help you transition more smoothly in your day, manage the mental load of motherhood/ building a business, and care for your nervous system in the process. If you’re a mama, press play because this one’s for you!  TIMESTAMPS 0:00 - Introduction 2:50 - Transitions 6:25 - Context Switching  11:25 - Practical Tips For Transition Rituals 16:45 - Nervous System Fray RESOURCES + LINKS Click Here To Apply For The Next Cohort of CEO Mama. Join The Société: Our Exclusive Membership To Help You Build A Freedom-Based Business. Get Our Weekly Newsletter & Get Insights From Natalie Every Single Week On All Things Strategy, Motherhood, Business Growth + More.  Drop Us A Review On The Podcast + Send Us A Screenshot & We’ll Send You Natalie’s 7-Figure Operating System Completely FREE (value $1,997)  FOLLOW ceomama: @ceomama Natalie Ellis: @iamnatalie Lindsay Roselle: @lindsayroselle

Hello, welcome back to the show. This is Lindsay. And today we have another CEO Mama episode for you. And this is a repurposed episode of Motherload. And this episode is all about transitions and context switching, which I think for me personally, were two big learnings in my work mom life that really helped me regulate my nervous system and feel more peace in how I go about my day, especially as somebody who works from home. And so if you are a work from home mama, this episode is especially for you. But I think it's valuable to everyone because I do go into depth on transitions and some of the psychology around having transitions in your day, like transition from in the morning into work mode and then transition out of work mode. And

if you're working from home and your kids are around how to manage that. So I have some really practical tips about that stuff. And then with context switching, you know, if you haven't heard of context switching before, it's this tendency a lot of us have to kind of jump around all day long, like jump from tab to tab, jump from task on the laptop to notification on the phone, to distraction with the dog, to go do some laundry, to go make some lunch. Oh, the kids are screaming. To jump from thing to thing to thing and kind of lose our way in focused work and how hard it is for our brain to come back into focus when we are jumping around context to context. So this episode has lots of great practical tips. And of course, just my real life anecdotal stories of how I've managed this and how I've

experienced it. Because everything that I share on the Boss Bay podcast, on the Motherlode podcast, everywhere that I share anything is all based on my own personal learning and mistakes and growth in my own life. So I hope this is a really practical and useful episode for you. I find nailing transitions and being really disciplined about context switching help my days feel much more productive. And I can get more done in less time, which I know a lot of us have that need where we feel like we need to get

more things accomplished in shorter hours of the day because we are moms, because we're busy, we have all these other commitments. And, you know, when I really buckle down and look at how much time I waste to context switching or not having the right transition rituals built in, I waste a lot of time. So when I dial these things in and even listening back to this episode to get ready to do this intro really helped me even look at my current life and go, ooh, there's, I have some habits right now that I need to tighten up so that I am more productive with the time that I do have to work every day. So anyway, I hope it's very practical for you and helpful. And as always, I appreciate you being here and listening. And if you have any questions about context switching or transitions, shoot me a DM. I love to talk about this stuff. Thank you. Hello, and welcome back to today's episode. Today is a mini episode,

and I want to talk a little bit about transitions and context switching. And both of these things relate to time management. And I think on a deeper level, they really speak to mindset and to how we manage the mental load. And that's why I love these two topics of conversation. And I want to bring more awareness to both of these things because I hear so much from so many ambitious mamas who are either working from home or working out of the home where everything feels like a rush and everything feels distracted and it never feels like there's

enough time to get everything done. And it's like, okay, true, valid. Yes. And are there ways that we can better manage our time and ways that we can be a little bit more structured and a little more disciplined with our time so that even though we are under the mother load and yes, you're going to have a million things on your to-do list at the end of every day, that's okay. But let's give you some structure so that you're not moving between every section of your day, just constantly feeling like the thing you just

transitioned out of didn't get done well, or you needed more time for it. So transitions are the ritual or the practice that you implement that moves you from one section of the day to the next. So for this example, for me, I'm talking about, okay, in the morning, what's my transition out of mom mode and into work mode? Now I work from home. So my transition is not, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, my transition is not getting in the car and driving to work. If that is your transition, this will look differently for you. Sometimes I feel a little resentment towards RT because he gets to get in his car and drive to work. And I'm like, oh, you get that 20 minute ritual or you get that 20 minute transition time to go from dad mode into work mode. Like how do I implement that at home? And then same at the end

of the day for me, it's like, okay, most days I have childcare until four or five o'clock. And so for me, it's okay at the end of the day, how am I managing my time and my work rhythm so that as four o'clock approaches or as five o'clock approaches, I'm not working until 3.58 and I'm in the middle of a task and then my nanny walks out the door and says, see you tomorrow and I need to finish something, but my kids are hounding me.

That has happened more times than I can count. And that both damages the quality of whatever task I was in the middle of that now is going to get stopped in the middle. And it damages the quality of my attitude when I step into mom mode because I'm annoyed that I just needed five more minutes and now my kids need something. And when can I get back to this task to give it five more minutes? So for me, transitions are getting from mom mode into work mode in the mornings and then out of work mode and into mom mode in the evenings.

Yours may look differently than that because your schedule is different or you have a different work rhythm during the day. But for the purpose of this conversation, I want you to think about transitions being you having to shift from like one main mode into the other. So work to mom, mom to date night, date night to mom, mom to friend, mom to family member, whatever it is. this conversation, no matter what the situation is that you're stepping into or out of, the transition is really the practice of looking at, instead of rushing from one thing into the next, it's giving yourself a set amount of time with a little ritual or a little practice and saying, okay, closing this and moving into this. And I'll come back to in a minute what the rituals and the practices can look like. The other thing that I want to cover quickly today is this phenomenon called context switching, which has been extensively researched

and mostly unanimously concluded that it is really, really bad for you. Context switching is the idea of your brain switching tabs. Like if you imagine that your brain is Chrome, an internet browser, and it has 100 tabs open, context switching is constantly moving between tabs and going, Oh, I'm going to look at this. And then I get this email. So I'm going to go look at this email. And now my phone buzzed. And there's a text message, I'm gonna go look at this now. Oh, I'm back to this tab. Okay, oh, this tabs open, and it's playing music, like your brain only has a certain capacity to know what's going on on a certain number of tabs.

And every time you get interrupted with a notification or you lack the mental discipline of staying single focus, so you're jumping between things. Every time you do that, you're causing your brain a little more overwhelmed and you're causing a little bit more of the fight or flight mode in your nervous system because your brain wants to close loops. Like it wants to know something system because your brain wants to close loops. Like it wants to know something's done. It wants to stay on a point of focus. And you do too. Like your, your conscious mind wants to get things done. It wants to know the answer, right? Like answers are safety. Our nervous system is wired for safety. So getting something done, having an

answer feels really good when we don't do that. And we're constantly jumping between things and you're getting halfway done on, on a number of different things, even if it doesn't feel like it, you're raising that undercurrent of stress and of the sympathetic nervous system in your body, because it's just asking your brain to remember more things. It's asking the capacity to grow. And you may not be supporting, you know, you may not have the ability to support that level of capacity. So context switching is one of these things where I think a lot of us do it as a habit because we're so distracted. And because we don't have good digital hygiene, we have all our notifications turned on. We can see all the little red, you know, numbers pop up on our apps, on our

phones and on our laptops, our computers. And so even if you're trying to stay focused, if you're getting this barrage of notifications, your brain, it's very hard to stay disciplined, you're going to want to go check what all those things are. And then your context switching, you're going between an email to Oh, somebody sent me a text message. Oh, I'm gonna go put Spotify on Oh, this I don't like this song. Oh, I need to get back that email, moving around like that. It's just, it's distracting. It lowers your level of productivity. It lowers some of these studies say like lowers your intelligence. It lowers your ability to get thoughts out that are the highest quality thoughts that you can create or the highest quality ideas you can create because

your brain doesn't have time to like get into that flow state or into the deeper work state where you can access more of the creative thinking. So context switching, I think, is an important conversation for mamas too, because when I think of myself, context for me, like there's a big conversation around this for me just in the digital space of work mode where, yes, I have 47 tabs open and I have my phone sitting right here and I do listen to music and all these distracting things. And I work from home. So I have the additional stimulus of hearing my kids. So I see my nanny pull in and I know my kids are home. And even if I'm in the middle of something, part of me is like, oh, are they going to come knock on my door? Do they want

to hug? And I'm like, oh, context switching. I just was in the middle of an email and now I'm listening for what my kids are talking about or what, you know, what attitude they're in as they come home from the activity they were just at. And so I think for moms, there's this whole added layer of temptation to context switch when you're home and you can hear your kids because you're also innately going to be listening for them. And so that's another layer of difficulty in managing the mental load and really looking at capacity management for ambitious mamas who are working from home is not only like the digital side of context switching, but the environmental context switching that happens when we're at home. Now, if you're someone who works out of the home,

this also applies to you in all of the digital ways with notifications and all of that. But it's, it also, contact switching is a really common thing that people talk about in office environments or work environments where you're getting interrupted a lot, or, you know, you're having to move from meeting to meeting to meeting and you're not able to, you know, you have a meeting and there's follow-up tasks, but you have to go right into the next meeting. So you don't get the space or the time to close loops and complete things before you're into the next context. And so all of this is to say, some of this stuff is unavoidable based on what you do for a living or the environment that you're in at home. And I get that, you know, for me, it's like, it's unavoidable. I can hear my kids. My office is not a hundred percent soundproof, but there's things that we can do to help

make this better. So when we're talking about transitions, the rituals of transitions that I like to do, which are like the transitions again, are the bigger intentional movement from one mode to the next. For me, I work from home and I have a home office. So in my example, I like to close the door to my office. That to me is like, okay, I'm going into work mode. I'm closing the door. The kids know I'm here. So if there's an emergency, okay. But that signals to my brain and it signals to them that I'm not like, it's not an open door policy.

Don't come in and out. I don't want to be interrupted. And it tells my brain I'm now in work mode. Yes, I can still hear my kids, but I'm in work mode. I also turn on music and I like non-lyric focus music and like electronic focus music. And that cues my brain. There's a couple songs that are always like my first couple songs and that somehow cues my brain. It's like, okay, it's work mode. And I bring my coffee into the office. So it's like, okay, I'm drinking coffee. I have these couple songs and I close the door. That's the transition from mom to work. And then at the end of the day, as long as I leave myself enough time, which I don't always, but I try to, I like to kind of reverse that. So I will usually like go get a cup of tea about 30 minutes before the transition out of work mode into mom mode.

So I'll leave my office, go into the kitchen and get a cup of tea. Then I have about 30 minutes before my nanny leaves. From there, I leave my door open so that the kids know still not to bother me as long as the nanny's still here. It's not like come bother mom time, but I leave the door open so that I can start to hear what's going on with the kids. And that helps me from a nervous system standpoint to know what I'm going to be walking into. Like, are they grouchy? Have they been fighting? What activity are they in the middle of? Because there's some activities that I like and some that I don't, you know, I'm like,

if they're playing Legos, cool. I'll just go sit down. As soon as our nanny leaves, I'll just sit down and keep playing Legos with them. But like, if they have the Play-Doh out, I don't really want to do that. I don't love Play-Doh. So, you know, I'm like, damn. And then I might text my nanny and be like, hey, can you wrap up Play-Doh before I come out of the office so that that's just done? And then I can start a new activity with them. So for me, the transition from work to mom is both like closing loops with work, writing a to-do list for tomorrow, making sure there's nothing else urgent, all of that. And it's also listening to the environment around me because I

work from home. It's listening to the environment around me and knowing what I'm about to walk into so that my mindset is set for mom mode. If you're someone who commutes and you have to drive to and from work, you can do the same thing in your car. You know, you can listen to a song, a certain song or a certain playlist or something where that gets you into work mode in the morning. And then same thing on the drive home. It's like, okay, I'm going to give myself five minutes of the drive home to kind of mentally review the day. And then I'm going to play this song. That's kind of like my chill out song. So that when I walk in the door at the end of the day, I am ready to be in mom mode. And then with context switching, this is a harder one because the world we live in is just an overstimulated world. And I struggle with this as

much as you do, you know, where even though I've turned off all my notifications on my phone and on my laptop, which I highly suggest you do if you have not done that, that is the first thing you have to do to lower your, the amount of context switching you're doing. But if you're someone who is working from home and your kids are around, whether you have someone helping you or not, context switching, the best way that I have found to make context switching better, if you are also in the presence of your children is to task build. Instead of sitting down and going, I have this big, long thing I have to do today, and I'm just going to sit here and figure out the order it needs to get done in. I will pre-plan. This is kind of productivity 101, but there's a bigger conversation about this and other tools that I'll share in other episodes.

But for context switching, the thing that has worked the best for me is to know every subtask that has to get done under a bigger task and what order they need to get done in. And if I do that preparation ahead of time with a task, a project, or any kind of to do that needs to get done, if I know, okay, I've got to do these three things in this order, doing that, then for some reason, I context switch less when I'm doing one thing at a time that are unique, discrete tasks, even if they're part of a bigger task, than if I were to sit down and go, okay, I got to get this big task done.

Because what happens is if you're in the middle of a big task and you get interrupted or you context switch and you have to come back to where you were, your brain takes like 10 minutes to figure out where it was in the process. Whereas if you have a list or you have it all written out of like, okay, there's seven subtasks and I'm on number four, then when you come back from getting interrupted or you come back from context switching, you already know because you have it written out right there. Oh, I'm on task four. Okay, I'm going to jump back in. So it just cuts down on the time, the recovery time of figuring out where you were in the process. So the remedy to context switching is building out more detail in your to-do list and understanding like what tasks build into getting something accomplished and

is it's digital hygiene and interruption hygiene really trying to limit how much interruption you're going to get both from your own devices giving you alarms and notifications and from the environment around you interrupting you, which I know as a mom is hard, but got to do the best that you can in terms of limiting how much you're going to get interrupted in the middle of a task. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one platform, Kajabi. You know I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place. So it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business you know. Get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting

organized and making things as smooth as possible. I definitely recommend Kajabi to all of my clients and students so if you're listening and haven't checked out Kajabi yet now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering Boss Babe listeners a 30-day free trial go to kajabi.com slash boss babe to claim your 30-day free trial that's kajabi.com slash boss babe. So the last thing I want to touch on really quick is with the lack of a transition and that rush in and out of mom and work mode constantly. And with context switching where you're jumping between tasks, because then it's taking your brain a long time to get back into focus. Overall, what that's doing is it's just causing nervous system fray. It's raising

your sympathetic nervous system. It's making everything feel more rushed and more frantic. And at some point, it's going to overload the capacity of your brain that's already under the mental load. So this stuff is important to me. And I want to talk about it. And I want to share it. And I want to encourage you to put these practices in place because when we start to look at how do you manage the mental load, like how do you lighten the mother load? There's so much to that conversation, but one of the things is how you manage your time. One of the most important things is how you manage time. When we're losing time to context switching or when we're rushing time, when we're in these transitions and that's causing kind of fallout on both sides of the transition. We didn't get enough done at work and now we're

stressed out when we're with our kids. All of that is just making everything feel heavier. So in conclusion, I really, really encourage you to build transitions into your day, especially the mom into work and work into mom mode transition. And then I really encourage you to look at how much you're context switching during the day and put in some hygiene around notifications if you haven't already done that. And to figure out what you need to reduce distraction and reduce interruption, both mental rumination interruption and actual environmental interruption in your, in your work environment, especially if you're working from home. So as always, um, these little mini episodes, they don't go super into depth, but I hope that this was helpful. It at least plants some seeds and that these conversations, I love to have them. We have them a lot in the

collective. So if you want to go deeper into these conversations, make sure you are in the mother load collective and you're welcome to send me a DM. And if you have any questions or want to share anything from today's episode, thank you again for listening and I will see you on a future episode. Wait, wait, wait, before you go, I would love to send you my seven figure CEO operating system completely free as a gift. All you've got to do is leave us a review on this podcast because it really supports the growth of this show. This is my digital masterclass where I'll show you what my freedom-based daily, weekly, and monthly schedule

looks like as an eight-figure CEO, mama, and high performer, and I'll walk you through step-by-step how to create this for yourself. It includes a full video training from me and a plug-and-play spreadsheet to literally create your own operating system. It's one of our best trainings and it's worth $1,997 but I will unlock access for you for free when you leave us a review. I know, wild, right? All you have to do is leave your review on the podcast, take a screenshot of it and then head over to bossbabe.com slash review to upload it and then you'll get instant access to the

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