The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work by Juliet Funt

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work by Juliet Funt “You’re going to want to share copies of this book with your overbooked friends and colleagues, but before you do, take some time to read it yourself. Funt’s wisdom around making space is priceless.” —Seth Godin, author of The Practice Do you wish you could stop the mayhem of work and life and just take a minute? Do you sense you could contribute more if there were a little more room in the day? Does busyness deprive you and your burnt-out team of the oxygen your talents need to catch fire? Many have felt that way, yet taking a pause has seemed impossible—until now. In A Minute to Think, Juliet Funt, a globally recognized warrior in the battle against busyness, provides a powerful guide that will give you the permission, framework, and specific direction you need to do the following: Regain control of your overloaded, caffeinated, inbox-worshiping workday Liberate yourself and your teams from burnout and busywork Reclaim creativity and focus despite the chaos around you Bring thoughtfulness into designing your next work norms Tame the beast of email and escape the mire of meetings Find your precious minute to think You’re not alone in your yearning for freedom from constant reactivity. The global workforce today is so fried that it belongs in the food court of a county fair. We’re relentlessly behind the curve, dousing fires everywhere, and our 3 a.m. insomnia provides the only unscheduled thinking time of the day. What we need reinserted in our lives is the missing element of white space—short periods of open, unscheduled time that, when recaptured, change the very nature of work. White space is the stepping back, the strategic pause, the oxygen that allows the sparks of our efforts to catch fire. White space has the power to radically—and simply—reinvent the way we approach work in this maxed-out, post-COVID 21st-century world. With Juliet’s memorable stories, easy-to-use tools, and razor-sharp instruction, she carves for us an escape route from the overwhelming amount of low-value tasks and the daily avalanche of e-mails, meetings, decks, and reports. Using research, client stories, and a relatable voice, Juliet shows all of us how to reclaim time for thinking and make room for what truly matters. Whether you are an individual trying to build a more sane and humane flow of daily work, a team that wants new levels of efficiency and effectiveness, or an entire organization changing your culture toward thoughtfulness, this book will lead you there.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming in there a great podcast we certainly certainly certainly appreciate you guys tuning in welcome to the show my friends neighbors relatives all the wonderful people that are

in our audience, you in the back there. I especially appreciate you the most. Be sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Tell them to go to iTunes, Google, all those different places. It's syndicated all over the massive web. You can find the Chris Voss Show and all the things that it does and listen to the brilliant authors.

They're going to expand your mind, make you better looking, might even improve the quality of your skin. That's a rumor that I've heard. The lawyers say I can't fully profess to that, but it'll give you a glow because you'll be smarter, and that makes you glow. At least, I don't know. I'm probably getting sued now.

Anyway, guys, we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschristmas. See all the books that we've been reading and reviewing. Go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. We're where all those kids are these days. We just ask the kids, where do we go? And they go, put it over there. And we just do it. So that's the beautiful thing about that. Today, we have an amazing author on the show. Her name is Juliet Funt. She has a new book out. It's coming out August 3rd, 2021. It's called A Minute to Think, which is probably about

all the amount of time I put into any thought that I have. No, I'm just kidding. It's called A Minute to Think, which is probably about all the amount of time I put into any thought that I have. No, I'm just kidding. It's called A Minute to Think. Reclaim creativity, conquer busyness, and do your best work. She's going to be joining us today to talk about it. And she is a regular feature in top global media outlets, including Forbes and Fast Company. She is a renowned keynote speaker and a tough love advisor to the Fortune 500. As the founder and CEO of the boutique efficiency firm Whitespace at Work, she's an evangelist for freeing the potential of companies by unburdening their talent from busy work. Welcome to the show, Juliet. How are you? Thank you so much. We just, we actually just rebranded. So it's a big Juliette. How are you? Thank you so much. We actually just

rebranded, so it's a big celebration week. We are Juliette Funt Group as of this moment. Welcome to our new home, and thanks for having me on yours. There we go. So give us that plug one more time because I said it one way, and that's going to go cut in the edit pile. What's your plug that should be in that bio that was sent to us? Yeah, it's JulietteFunt.com is where you find us. We're the Juliette Funt Group, and come and visit us there. There you go. And if you're watching this live on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube, feel free to give comments or questions and they might end up on the show. So Juliette, you've got this amazing book that's coming out. Congratulations. Writing a book is epic and insane. What motivated you to want to write this book?

What was the thing behind that? I have been in corporate America for 20 years, but never as an employee. I'm a vendor, a contractor, a consultant, a trainer. And so I get to watch from this neutral vantage point, like a tourist, what happens to the world of work when people are drowning in busyness, emails and meetings and decks and reports and paperwork. And what is you see a lot of wasted talent and you see a lot of tolerated misery in just how it feels for regular human beings to wake up every morning and go to work. And I have never been comfortable with that. I've wanted to change it. We've tried to change it in a lot of different ways, but this book became the clearest, most direct emergency toolkit that we could give people to say that there is a different way to

work and that the little spark that you wake up with every morning that has your talent and your earnestness and your drive doesn't have to be snuffed out by lunchtime if you do work differently. That's awesome. So give us an overview of the book, what the details are, and what you've put into it. Sure. It's been a very long labor of love. I spent 10 years in the keynote circuit developing the content, 10 years in corporations teaching the content, and the book has then opened up for us a wonderful dialogue with folks outside of the corporate world. So the book's basic foundational metaphor is that if you were to make a fire, you would want to have the best ingredients. A good dry newspaper, pine needles, maybe some of that industrial toxic white fire starter or some soft wood so it could catch quickly.

Hardwood, we learned, burns long. All these things would come together and they would make a beautiful fire for you unless you forgot to add one critical ingredient, space. And if you don't have space in the way that you TP those ingredients, you will never ever have a roaring beautiful fire. And we are exactly the same in the way that we work, in the way that we live, but we forget that this foundational ingredient of space, what we call white space, enables our small spark to ignite and really become the roaring blaze that it can become. And so the book begins with the idea that there's a missing ingredient in life and work. We call it white space because in the old years when I was coaching

executives, we would look at their paper calendars and we would say, hey, there's some white on this calendar. There's some things, some spaces where nothing is planned. And we quickly began to realize that whenever there was open unscheduled time, oh, that day had a lot of promise. All sorts of wonderful, creative, flexible things could happen when there was white space. And so there's this idea that whenever, however you work, if you work in organizations or if you work as an entrepreneur, that there will be a call for you to bring your best, then talks a little bit about the reasons why it is missing things like social conformity, technology, the insatiability of our culture where more is always better and quantity is the default standard. A very interesting one about corporate waste, which I can expand on if you like, there's a very high tolerance for stupid work in the world of work. So we do a lot

of things all day long to look like we're active, but we confuse activity and productivity. So that's where we go. And then really the rest of the book is an owner's manual of how do I get this space? What are the basic simple ways that I can begin to insert it into my day? And then eventually how do I share it with a team or even my family so that I'm working in a spacious, oxygenated environment in all of the things that we do? And what's the best way that we should be utilizing those spaces? Should we let them be free for flow and creativity, or should we take a vacation? What are some of our options?

So the book goes through four different ways that you can use what we would call a strategic pause. Because if you want some space, you have to stop what you're doing. And that strategic pause, we say it's a strategic pause because in the world of risk-averse, fear-based workaholism, you have to prove that it's strategic. If you just say pause, maybe people are afraid it's a lazy pause or an idle pause, but a strategic pause starts to make sense. And are you frozen there, Chris? I know we can edit, but am I all right? I'm good. Okay, great. It looks like I'm frozen, but you let me know. You look good here. So I seem a little stoic right now, but that could be. Maybe it's just your listening face, your resting listening face. So in the use of the pause,

what's really tricky is the recuperative use of white space is always the first thing that people think of. And I will say that right now in this moment of history, oh boy, howdy, do we need a recuperative pause to just exhale and stare at a window and maybe very lightly drool a little bit as we just check out and clear the cache and start over. We need that desperately. But there are also uses of the reflective pause. There are uses of the creative pause, the constructive pause, and what we call a reductive pause, which is when you stop to look at that specific topic I was talking to you about, waste, and where it can be removed or eliminated. Note to self, Juliet says, do more drooling. I think you should be so relaxed. I'm not talking about institutionalized, just that little,

just relaxy little whisper of a piece of drool. But it is that kind of permission to relax and recuperate probably is something that we should hit on harder before we even go anywhere. This has been such a spectacularly interesting 18 months of our working psychology. And everybody doubled down in the beginning. We're hard workers. It was an emergency. We said, okay, in an emergency, hard workers work hard. And so we did, but then it didn't fade. And so we're at this peak of contribution and exertion and longer hours. And then it just kept going and just kept going and just kept going. And so we're seeing frightening numbers now, 52% of people saying they're officially burnt out. 95% of people in a recent monster survey, it was only 700 people, but they said 95% of them

thought about leaving their job. So that sense of, can we use the pause and the space to give ourselves permission to recuperate, I really can't hit that hard enough. And it's what most people think of as white space first before they understand all the different ways that it can be used. One of the things you talk about in your book is regaining control of your overloaded and caffeinated inbox worshiping. I like the inbox worshiping. I have this image of you sacrificing a goat

or something. You're like tearing, you're doing the Aztec thing, ripping hearts out and throwing them down the stairs. That's pretty much what I do with my inbox every morning. I'm pretty sure everyone's the same. You haven't really taken it to that level, Chris. You should see my emails.

I don't know what that means. You just stopped me right in my tracks there. I have no idea. This is another book. Why are we over-caffeinated? And I have some of these people, they're obsessed with inbox zero. You ever met those people? Yes. Yes. Inbox zero reminds me of that skinny black dress that women keep in the back of a closet that they'll never, ever fit in again, but it just tortures them with some sort of aspirational target. It's not a good. So for me, Inbox Zero is not a smart move because it's really an unsustainable practice for 95% of people. If you love it and it's working for you like anything, please go for it. But I believe more in changing our relationship with the incoming email to begin to be able to choose when we do put our attention on something and when we don't. So I'll give you an example. In the book, we talk about the color spectrum of email. Most people have a technicolor relationship with their email. It's in their face, bright neon colors. It's the star of the day. But you can choose to have a volitionally more pastel relationship

with email or even a black and white relationship with email. And then when you get good at it, you can toggle back and forth at will. So if I'm at a live event and I'm on the phone with an email-centric client who's pinging me time sensitive instructions every three minutes, I go Technicolor by choice. But there are ways of just stepping back and realizing that it is not a good enough use of the day for it to be the star. And that sense of being able to ease off the importance of email is absolutely critical to turn your attention then to deeper, richer work, which is what we're avoiding a lot of times in email anyway. Yeah.

What about for people like me who the email is the source, the fountain of money, if you will, the fountain of funding and the deals. I wake up in the morning and like yourself, I have, I think, Harper Magazine going, hey, we want to have Juliet on the show. We want to book her. I'm like, oh, hurry and get her booked. How do I deal with that? Because the first thing I go to is, of course, I check my Facebook. That's always first. No, I'm just kidding.

And then I check my emails to see what's going on there. And usually I'm looking for fires. That's the first thing I do. That's probably bad, huh? I'm usually looking for fires. Like, I'm looking for somebody emailing me going, the world's on fire and my hair's on fire and we're all going to die. And you're trying to like, okay, any of those real quick. Or candy in a box, what I call candy in a box, which is, ooh, this is one of those emails that makes you want to open it right away because it's candy in a box.

It can be fun. It can be scary. The interesting thing about email is that it's high stimulation and dopamine filled, regardless of whether it's good or bad. So when you get that impact of the guest I've wanted for five years just canceled is the same hit of stimulation as Tony Robbins wants to come on my show. So that temptation is very real. What I would say in order to maintain efficiency and creativity in the day is that email has to be controlled in a autonomous way. Most people believe that it's smart to take a few minutes at your desk

to either become focused or plan your day or think just a little bit before diving into that first check. For a lot of people, just getting through the first cup of coffee or even getting out of bed before the first check is already a challenge. And so that is a wonderful baby stepping to say, I'm not going to check email until I've had a shower.

That sounds crazy, but that's a lot of people are reaching to the side of the bed and checking right away. And then we can move it to, okay, maybe I'm not going to check my first email until I spend two minutes at my desk designing the manner and style and focus of my day. What are the top one or two things, three things that I want to get done today? And then I'm not saying we don't go to the fountain, but we go to the fountain when the day has already had a bit of forethought and structure and then dive on in. Now, once you've dived in, we're big proponents of interval checking, which means that at any schedule that works for you, you do create some sort of on and off switch for when you're taking in email and when you're not. I think we lost your video. You may have hit an on off. Yeah. No, I didn't. I think my camera just went off. Just give me two seconds

here. I'm going to switch to another camera, figure out what happened there. Technology makes your life better. Yeah, we love it. Hang on one second. So what it sounds, I'll just fill as you're doing. Yeah, let's keep talking. It sounds like you just have to, you just have to ask your email for more space. Kind of like my seven first wives did where they're like, we can't see you anymore. We need to reset our relationship with you. We just need more space. Don't call us. We'll call you. That's basically what the restraining order said. So I need to have this sort of relationship with my email. This is where we were heading is that the mind wants to be constantly connected to email. And in that drip of stimulation, that dopamine rat, that little thing that rats go up to or gerbils of that dopamine all day long, we don't have space then to bracket time for more important work.

And if you interval check, you avoid that problem. So that can lunchtime, we like call it the email diet, breakfast, lunch and dinner and maybe another snack. So maybe 9, 12, 1 and 5. And you're coordinating your touching of email with the ways that you are coordinating your body's response to hunger. You could check at the top of every hour. You could check at the top of bottom of every hour. It doesn't really matter what interval you're opening, but what happens, and it's very fun to watch people do this for the first time. When you create an interval where you're not checking email, you're going to say,

okay, I'm not going to check again for 30 minutes. You're going to sit at your desk and the first thing you will realize is you have absolutely no idea what to do because it people and like we advocate, you might want to do something like create a paper anchor. That is a piece of paper that you put next to your desk and on it you write only the three to five most important things that you're going to tackle in the day. Now for you, email might be one of them, but it's more likely an interstitial check that you're touching in between more important projects. And I know that if I have an email-free moment, I might give myself a rest, that recuperative use. I might sit back and think deeply about something that just happened, like a meeting I just finished, or I might prepare with real focus and intention for the next thing that's coming in my day, or I might check my paper anchor, which has those three things. You see,

I've always wanted to create an outreach to, let's say for us, nurses who are overloaded and need more white space, but we've never really worked with the nursing community. What would that look like? Maybe that's on my paper anchor. And it's a task of richness and challenge and what Cal Newport would call deep work that I promise you'll never get to when you're at that gerbil faucet of email. Because there's some days I'm like that. You're just a whipping post for the email and you're just like constantly working on different projects

or you're chasing back and forth with somebody trying to work on a project and you get to the end of your day and you go, what did I do today? And I'm like, I don't know. Email's a problem. Right, you don't have a clue. We know we did eight or nine or 10 hours and there wasn't a single thing where we went,

ah, that was gratifying and of substance. And that's a lot of the problem with modern work. So a technique that we teach that people can use to start bringing this level of thoughtfulness in is called the wedge. And this will be the best training wheels, baby stepping for your listeners to start using white space. The wedge, you imagine a wedge of time, open time that is inserted in between two of the activities of your day. And what the wedge does is it opens up to things that previously would have been connected without it. As an example, let's say you get an email and it's difficult. Before you respond, you might insert a little tiny wedge of thought. Between a meeting and a meeting and a meeting, this is a critically important one in the Zoomaholic world where we need those white,

you should be seeing white spaces in between the meetings on the calendar so that you can recuperate, be a human being, get a bio break, maybe even think about the next thing that you're going to do. And the wedge can even work in this environment we call hallucinated urgency where everything is so urgent. We don't stop adding a wedge between a fire drill and your implementation or between a request and your response. These are wonderful ways to oxygenate the day and very doable for people to start to do. I like the two terms you had. It was hallucinogenic.

We say hallucinated urgency because we are literally high on the rush of this pace. It's just crushing. And then I like the Zoom. What did you call it? Zoom apocalypse or something? It is. I said, I think I might've said Zoomaholic. Zoomaholic. That's it. I've never heard that term before. That threw me off. That's cool. I love it.

You know, but you and I are funny. Like we enjoy the funny, but you have to understand the seriousness of the threat to people right now is COVID has established these new norms. That is that the workday is from seven to seven. So if you go back now into the development of hybrid work without questioning and stopping to say, how are we going to rewrite the meeting norms of what we've gotten used to now in COVID, there will be no way forward unless we take time to do that. We have to find a way to get back the mornings and the late afternoons, maybe even the evenings, because we don't work at home anymore. We live at work, and that's a colossal problem. It definitely is. I've been lucky enough with the podcast.

I actually have a wedge because during the podcast, and we do one to two a day, during the podcast, I have a wedge. I can't really get into my emails. I have to turn off all the phones and all the different distractions because I've got to focus on my guest and the show to give good show as I think Howard Stramer called it. Give good show. I don't know.

I don't know. Yeah, why not? Something like that, yeah. So the one thing we found was I tried to do three a day and then I tried to do some that were back to back and it was killing me because there was not what you called that white space or that wedge between them. And I needed like a decompression time where I would, where I want to get done with the podcast. I'm really hyper-focused. I'm really

thinking about the show, producing the show. There's a lot of stuff that's going on in the old, as you say, the gerbils brain up here going on. It's an old one gerbil with one leg that's still working, but it's still running the wheel. I just put a little hamster food in the air every morning. And what I found was it was just killing me. So I had to make Calendly, the thing we use for our schedule, where there's at least a two hour break between any podcast in the day. So even if I do two, I've got to be able to have a decompression time and I need an hour to decompress. I need like to be able to come out ofression time. And I need an hour to decompress. I need to be able to come out of it. Usually, I have great guests like yourself on.

I have a lot of thoughts that they put in my head. And I kind of like to marinate in those thoughts and go, wow, that's really interesting. Let's go into that. Tell me, if you don't mind, what exactly happens in that decompression hour for you? If we had a nanny cam on you for that decompression hour for the non-private parts of it, what would you do? Pretty much, I'd take the suit off, get back into street clothes. It's like a Mr. Rogers. I switch in the sweater and the shoes and sing the song and go see Mr. Feely.

I'm going to get sued for using these references, I'm sure, by Sesame Street or whoever owns that. But I go hang out with my dogs. My dogs are glad to see me. They're like, I'm going to pet with them, maybe get a coffee or something. They're pretty much just stew and marinate in just what happens. Because sometimes there's a lot of really cool things that happen on this show, and none of them are me. And I learn so much stuff. And I think it's a ponderance period where I just go, what sort of things should I be applying in my life?

Or sometimes it's an epiphany phase where, you know, something that you'll say I'll take as an epiphany. I'll be like, oh, I think I know where I can put that and use that in my life. Sometimes it's a real head spinner. And we had Michael Bender on, I think on Friday, and he said a couple of things from his meeting with Trump that made my head go. Oh yeah, I saw him. Yeah, yeah. But I think that's part of your magic to me as when I was prepping and watching you. I think that the reason that you're a present, loving, fast on your feet host is because I think you seem prepared. So just in the simplest use of the word, you seem prepared. mulling time that you're describing, they too could show up in whatever their next interaction is, whether it's meeting the boss in the hallway over coffee accidentally, or whether it be going in to do the biggest presentation of their life.

They too would have a new sense of confidence and focus because they would actually be prepared. Their minds will have processed the things that you're describing. And that's a big part of our book and our philosophy is, do you actually respect thinking as a business tool? And are you willing to give it to yourself? Do you consider that part of your work? Big debate with attorneys, when we're working with attorneys is, do I bill for thinking time? I think that's just so interesting. I would want my attorney really thinking about my case, staring out a window and maybe pondering and getting lost in what are our possibilities and what haven't I thought of. But we don't have a complementary relationship with

thinking. We have a complementary relationship with action, even if it's pointless. We just like seeing people move. Yeah. And I do another thing too, about 20 minutes or 15 minutes before the show. And then usually there's the green room. It's about five or 10 minutes, about 15 to 20 minutes before everything starts shutting off. It becomes the mental preparation for the show. And there's not really like a lot of thought process going into it.

There's usually just, it's usually just closing the rest of the world off. And everybody knows Chris is going on air. It's usually just, it's usually just closing the rest of the world off. And everybody knows Chris is going on air. It's time to, I don't check emails. I don't look at Facebook. I don't, whatever.

About the only emails that I'm looking at sometimes before the show is if a guest is running late and I'm thinking maybe they're having trouble with the link. But other than that, it's all closed off.

All the notifications are closed off. But that helps me. But what I was getting to too was a lot of people that are in corporate world that you and I don't have the privilege of doing what we want when we want to. And a lot of people in the corporate world, my corporate friends, they're just like, Chris, I've seen like eight to 10 hours of back-to-back Zoom. Like I've been on Zoom since, like you say, Zoomaholic. And there's just no space. And of course, some of our meetings where people are just, this could have been an email, buddy. Any more tips you want to address on that?

Oh, there's so many. It's not uncommon, the seven to seven, eight to six, six to eight. I see it all the time. So one way you brought it up accidentally, I'll teach you a tool that's very foundational to our work, which is to separate two-dimensional and three-dimensional communication, especially for teams. So if you think about every message, it will have a content category and it will have a medium that it wants to be communicated in. And I'll explain that to you. There's 2D content, and that is stuff that is very simple. Yes, no, fact-driven, can you meet me at 9 o'clock, please send the report, that sort of level of information. That belongs in a 2D or two-dimensional medium.

It fits well in email, chats, texts, maybe even a deck. Then there's three-dimensional content, which is richer. Think of it as 3D. It can have creativity, nuance, maybe conflict or challenge lives inside 3D. That wants and craves a three-dimensional medium, such as a place where I can see your face or hear your voice. That's phone calls, Zoom, chat, face-to-face. Where we get in trouble, especially an enormous amount of these overzoomed meetings, happen when we put 2D content in a 3D medium. So that is when we lose time.

When we're reading things, that's the old mug that says, I just attended another meeting that could have been an email. And you just mentioned it is we're shoving two-dimensional, simple reporting out content into what should be a three-dimensional medium. That's a mistake. Conversely, if you take 3D content, which is rich, and you put it in a two-dimensional medium. That's a mistake. Conversely, if you take 3D content, which is rich, and you put it in a two-dimensional medium like email, that's when you compromise the richness of the communication. And in corporate, this is the flag for this thing when you know this is

going on is when you're on a thread and the emails are long in the thread and they just keep going and people are hashing and they're trying to talk about something. And it's because they're trapped in a two-dimensional medium that should be a three-dimensional conversation. If they could hear each other's voices and see facial cues and listen to intonation, they would hash through that far faster than they are doing on an email thread. So this is fantastic language for teams to be able to play with together. You could just stop and say, I think this is 3D. I'm walking over. Or, hey, I think this is 2D. Can we stop for a minute and just write this out? We'll share it on a Google Doc and go take this 20 minutes back. So 2D versus 3D, very easy to do. And we'll begin to aggressively chop down some of those meetings.

Now, do I need 3D glasses for this? You don't, but it would be so fun. And then we get Fantasia playing in the back of the meeting so that the mushrooms are coming out at you. Ladies and gentlemen, we've reached the 3D part of the presentation. I can give you one more. Do you want one more for meetings? Yes, please. This is great. Because this is one of the favorites.

It's such a subtle tool, but it's funny how many comments people make about this tool. The tool is called SBH, and here's the favorites. It's such a subtle tool, but it's funny how many comments people make about this tool. The tool is called SBH, and here's the idea. The idea is that when you're sitting in a meeting that feels boring, you will often digitally multitask to take care of that boring feeling. The problem is that when you do that, you are missing the instruction of the boredom because, yeah, sometimes work is boring, but a lot of times it's because you shouldn't even be in that meeting because you're the wrong person or it's redundant content or it's just pointless dialogue that shouldn't be had. So when you're sitting in a meeting where you feel bored and you don't digitally multitask and you really tap into that, you're going to soon figure out

whether you're actually contributing or actually benefiting or whether you shouldn't be here. And that is S-B-H stands for shouldn't be here. So the instruction is inside your head, and it's very important that you don't say this out loud, really super duper important to say in your head, S-B-H. and what happens is you start getting over time so uncomfortable with this clear, undeniable clarity that you shouldn't be in the meeting in the first place. That will slowly lead you to figure out how to decline in the future or talk to the person who's calling the meeting and say, I need to opt out. And then teams can get together and discuss their SBH insights and then it gets even richer. Yeah. When I worked for Cincinnati Bell as a facility trainer for about a year,

I was really flustered one day, really tired. And I was working like just the ginormous hours training. And I came into a meeting that I wanted to do or that I was supposed to be in. And I really didn't want to do the meeting. It sounded like something that should have been email. And I made the SBH comment out loud. And that one, that did not go over well. I was asked to leave the meeting. And later, the facility manager said, we need to have a talk with you. Yeah, it's an inside voice tool. That's not an outside voice tool. I was missing that inside voice. It's always an inside voice. That's what my psychologist tells me. Whichever one of the voices that's running the show that day.

This is brilliant. I love this. So should we give some space every day to maybe we need to just block out time on the calendar and say, this is my creative white space, creative time. This is my time to look at the wall, look out the window and think about whatever, whatever. Daydream of it. Maybe it's doing that. Maybe it don't. I want every single person listening to just ask yourself, don't you deserve to just take

a minute? Even if it was just, first of all, just to start with that basic premise of, oh my gosh, don't we deserve to just take a minute? And then within that minute, I love the idea of having it scheduled. If for some people they can actually do that 10, 15, 30 minutes. That's sort of the advanced use. Most people are going to start with the time it takes to nuke a burrito. And they're standing there in front of the microwave.

And if they could just not take their phone out during that 30 seconds, that might be their very first, that might be their first exhale in 18 months of just beautiful open time. And then from there we can and do work on moving it to our calendars as do, I will say, incredibly successful people. Jeff Weiner from LinkedIn, famous for blocking nothing on his calendar. Phil Knight of Nike fame used to have a daydreaming chair in his living room. And the only thing the chair was used for was daydreaming. So if people start blocking out some thinking time, creative time, they'll be following in the steps of great people. What they may want to do if they don't work in a white space converted environment where people get it, they might want to put things like strategy time, thinking time, something a little bit more nondescript because obviously he's going to know what white space is until they know.

I have a client in New York who just puts big data because nobody knows what it means, but they won't bug him when he's doing it. So anything that holds your space for you, I think is a positive move. If you have like executive secretaries that are always filling your time, you just put, don't take this space or I'll murder someone. I don't know. That's good. A little scary for your VA there. Well, you know don't take this space or I'll murder someone. I don't know. That's good. A little scary for your VA there. Well, you know, you gotta keep them in line. I'm just kidding.

No, this is really brilliant. I'm lucky. My friends, they ask me, they're like, how come you're always thinking about stuff and you're creating stuff? You're making these kind of these posts on Facebook where you're like, ah, I'm thinking about this right now. And then five minutes later,

ah, I'm thinking about this right now. And they're like, why do you do that? And I'm like, I have a wife and kids. I just have my two dogs. And so I have a lot of time to think about stuff and ponder things. And I'm always thinking about business. So that's why my eighth wife just left me. I just got the text message.

So now I'm up to eight. I was seven earlier. Now it's eight. Those of you trying to keep track on the show. Well, I like that I'm present for these seminal moments in your life. That's pretty exciting. Just wait. I'm in Utah. There'll be in your life. That's pretty exciting. Just wait. I'm in Utah.

There'll be a ninth one here any second. Anyway. Kids and wife and dog, I think it's really important that we throw in here too that when people, when you have LASIK surgery, you don't have it at work. And then you go home and you see the old way. You just have a change in your lens. And so this lens of space, this should go home with us. This should be the way we schedule our children, the way we schedule our weekends. There should be oxygen to feed the fire of passion and joy and hobbies and service.

And if we don't learn to translate the tools we're talking about back into our home lives, we're missing a big part of the gravy there that we could be getting. And that's what I was setting out to lead you into. Do parents, mothers especially, because mothers are really intensive in being great mothers, do they need to take some space out? Like my mom, I'm writing my book right now, and one of the stories they tell is how our mothers back in the age when I grew up in the 70s and 80s would throw you literally out of the house and say, don't come back until dinner.

And I talk about some of the adventures and some of the things that built our character with that. But it was giving her some white space. And given the type of kids we are, she needed it because we were horrible children. And I can attest to that, Your Honor. So do parents and people that are in those things, maybe school coaches or different people that are in different positions of leadership, that maybe they need to take some white space to take some time to do that, to get away from all the noise. It's not a corporate tool. It's everybody's tool. We have retirees and small town doctors in

the book and all sorts of people who find value in pausing. And whether it's a mother or a father or any parent we're talking about, I have three boys, 11, 13, 15. I know this relentless ride of parenting. I'm surprised that you, I don't think she sent you out for white space. I think she sent you out so she could get all the things done, the brutal work of endless parenthood. And she probably worked her butt off. I don't think she took fiction and a cigarette and it was probably a cigarette in those days, but that's not how parents use it. If they have a moment of time, they flip a switch from professional achievement to domestic achievement and they begin cooking better, cleaning better, doing better. The gutters

are calling, the closet says Marie Kondo me, there's always something to do at home. And this is a big tangential problem. I would pay just about anything in the whole world if my three boys could have grown up in an age where I said, go get on your bike and see you after dinner and I'll scream into the dusk and you'll come back. But that's just not where we live. the enormous recuperative benefits of little sips of time. We need to give ourselves permission to not be active in achieving in all of the home opportunities to achieve. And when you do that from the parenting side, you are more, it's like in a movie where they put something in slow motion and it's a cue to you to say, this is important, this is important, this is important. And when you experience the beauties of your dogs or a sunset or your children with that slow motion, slowed down, white space experience, you take it in on a much deeper level. There's a story in the book about,

I came home one day, my children who were little were standing at the door. They had a blender and they were wearing little tiny aprons. They were jumping up and down. They said, we're making you a penis colada. And these little moments happen a thousand times a day as a parent, but you're on the phone and you're busy and you're making asparagus and you miss them. And that's the tragedy. We did that one time with a dog where we took strawberry yogurt and we were at the height of our boxer. We have one of those purebred boxer dogs. And my brother, we were just a little bit higher than the boxer, but we took like a giant tub of strawberry yogurt and I smeared down one side and just made a strawberry yogurt coat on one side. My brother stood on the other and made a strawberry

coat on the dog. And somehow my mom didn't quite appreciate it as much as we thought it would, but we were trying to give her some white space, creativity, just open her mind to. Yes. We never know. try uh different flavors next time it's probably a great person but that you know what that first of all i love it when my children do crazy stuff because it is a display of their creativity and they have more of it when now we're flipped to the children's side of white space when kids have more white space which means unscheduled time without a screen, that has to be the new definition in our culture. First, they wade through the anxious boredom muck of being angry about the openness, and then they find things. And then they end up coating the dog with yogurt, or they end up creating a climbing gym by putting things up

on the wall, or they end up writing a story for their D&D campaign. There's so many different things that children can touch when they're forced into that beautiful vacuum of having a little space. So it's for both sides. It's for the parenting side and also for the kid's side. There you go. What I do with my kids to give them web space, I send them to military school until they're 18. So call me guys when 18 hits. So one thing you talk about in your bio is identifying low value tasks, emails, meetings, tasks, and report. Is that important for us to do is to go, this is a low value, high value, or did I take a little bit too much out of the PR thing they sent me? No, it's beautiful. And let's now, okay, now we stayed home for a little while. Let's go back to

the office. Now it's the next morning you walk into work and you're back at the office. Let's say you work in at least a medium size and up company reports that get logged without being processed. It's just the way that work works. And actually, we know a lot about this because one of our specialties is that we quantify it, meaning that we take salary data and we figure out what it costs. And that is where business leaders usually pay more attention. It's about a million dollars of annual waste on nonsense work for every 50 people in an organization. That's every single year. So this idea of using the pause, I don't know if you remember about 20 minutes ago, I mentioned that the pause can be used to be reductive. I'm not that old, Julia. The mind isn't, you know.

We talk about a lot of stuff and it's not your world. It's so deep in me but that sense of in a mathematical sense can you reduce the things around you by taking a pause and realizing i just filled the cc line with seven people out of complete reflex and habit and there's only one of them that actually has an action on this thread. Can I remove the other six? I just invited five people to a meeting and three of them are there just in case they have five minutes of data to share somewhere within an hour. Can I release those people and have them send something ahead of time? That's when we're pausing and using space to push down those low value tasks. I just got my message from my ninth wife leaving me. So evidently,

there are some releasing of people that are going on. Sorry. It's all about letting go, baby. All about the callback. So this is really important. I love this idea of giving space to be creative because I've done that over my life with my businesses. It's one of the ways I used to innovate. I would walk through my office sometimes late at night and I'd be like searching for like an answer, a resolution, innovation. They'd look at things and be like, how do I get out of the box? Somewhere I'm stuck in the box of how I'm thinking like this is the rule, well, this is the way it's supposed to be. And I have to sit there and go, how do I get out of this? And so I love the analogies they're using. I was just going through the PR thing. And one of the

things you talked about in here is the white space is the stepping back, the strategic pause. And we talked about making that strategic and making sure it's a part of your day and the oxygen that allows the sparks of our efforts to catch fire. I really love that phrase. Do you want to expand on that? Anything? Yes, that you've been talking about.

I feel like I've accidentally met a white space natural. And that's probably part of the reason that you do a lot of great work because you're giving yourself that space. And there are people who do this. You've been talking about creativity as a thread throughout, but we haven't specifically hit on creativity. There are people who do this with spectacular result. One of them in the book is a wonderful guy named John, who is a security guard at a Fortune 200 company. But it's a company that happens to pride itself on having a lot of innovative patents. And they have an innovation department and they have a lot of smart people. But in the entire company, it is actually John the security guard who holds the record for the most patents that have been filed in this company.

And it's a fantastic moment. He's a really creative guy. Obviously, this is not an average thinker, but I have a strong guess that it is because his job is 95% white space, waiting, sitting, being prepared, being on deck, being on duty, and 5% dedicated tasks. The punchline of the whole story is that he was promoted two different times into the innovation department to become one of the innovation guys. And he stayed for a while, and he asked for a demotion back to security twice because he couldn't get any work done. He couldn't come up with anything because the tasks that he was assigned actually kept him from being. Let me ask you this is I'm asking for a friend is Call of Duty video games. Is that a low value or high value during your day? I'm asking for a friend. I'll just stare at you like

a mom. Just are you done? But in all seriousness, though, I could be I'm thinking about the conversation I've been having with you about this. And I'm thinking that maybe I'm asking you questions and it's a weird way to put this, but is, is, am I trying to find creative space? And that's one of the reasons I'm using the escape of video games. Am I going to get creative or think about other thoughts? Or is that just busying my mind when really I should be like, the reason I'm trying to escape is because I'm searching for white space and really that's not achieving me for it.

And I should better utilize that time to white space. I don't want to villainize recreation in the pursuit of white space. We get to relax. I get to veg out and watch Lucifer on Netflix and I get to, and that's part of our human. So for me, Netflix for you, video games,

I think that there are edges that need to be created with very addictive technology. And we've seen all over the globe, especially men, lose themselves into gaming to a point that is starting to now be beyond their own control. So I will just say that recreation in its proper dose, like sugar in its proper dose, like spending in its proper dose, I think is a beautiful permission of being alive that we get to have fun. But I think that I wouldn't call video gaming or Netflix white space. The people ask a lot of exercise counts. The line I sometimes draw is if you're out for a run and you're just listening to music, I would call that white space. But if you're watching breaking bad on a treadmill, your mind is tethered. It is tethered to the plot of the show. If you're gaming, it's tethered to the plot of the game. I don't think of that as white space because you are tethered. But once you snip the tether and now you're just

listening to music and running in the park, then I would, in my personal definition of white space, call that a check mark. There you go. I've got some comments that are coming in. Matthew says, I've had a few, but mostly there's no questions. So we need questions, people. Let's see. Matthew states, seriously, I hate being CC'd for no reason. Is this probably a good way to take in and do it, removing people, like you said, and trying to focus that down? It's so clear to me when we hire people in our company who used to work in big companies and they come in and they just CC everybody in the whole company on every email. It's just hilarious. So here's how you change that. You get your team together and you teach them a technique called WAIT, and it stands for whose action is this. Now email,

most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time should actually be a request for an action. Hey, Chris, I need you to do something. But it's not in the way that we use it. We put all these people up in a surgery. They have that glass room where everybody is sitting and looking down at the surgery. That's where we put people in the CC line. They're watching the action, but they're not part of it. So if we say we put the people in the CC line and we say, whose action is this? And we wait, we want to remove almost everybody who doesn't have an action. Sometimes you want FaceTime with your boss and sometimes you're showing off and sometimes there's a thread for legal reasons, but most of the time it's just a poor habit and that weight technique will really

curb it. There you go. Matthew has a, he calls them action vultures. That's funny. He just responded to his name as action vultures, he calls them. He has a good question here that's interesting that probably we should touch on. He's basically, I think, questioning, is white space more a form of procrastination in avoiding work that needs to get done? Or I don't know. I'm trying to figure that one out, but I figured that we'd maybe address is some of this procrastinating. No, it's purposeful and it's really difficult. So people don't people do procrastination, things that are fun and easy.

Taking space in our busy world is not easy. It's very purposeful. But if you think of it, I don't know if Matthew, if you happen to ever lift weights, but when somebody lifts weights, they do 10 or 15 and then they have a minute off. Or if you do high intensity training, you do a hard burst and then you have 30 seconds off. The way that people work now is they're doing 250 curls in a row without a break. And that's not possible. It's not going to produce the highest results.

So through that recuperative lens, white space is not procrastination. It's like an Olympian preparing the body for the next set. In the other uses, reflection, creativity, construction, reduction, these are the ways that the smartest people work. And it's the only way that we are going to get through the result, the remnants of the burnout that we're experiencing now post-COVID. There has to just be some more space in the day. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. What else do you want to tease on the book? Is there anything we haven't covered and maybe you want to touch on? Yeah. I think when you release a book under a business label, it comes out as a business book. And the most interesting thing that we've seen

in these months of letting people preview the content is this is everybody's tool. And I think that people will find that their student child who's in university or their busy mother who does volunteer candy striping at the hospital will probably need a minute to think just as much as your next C-suite big shot leader does. There you go. There you go. Julia, give us your plugs as we go out so people can order up the book and find out more. Yeah, please do. We're going to launch this before the order. So obviously pre-order is a very exciting time. We have all sorts of fun perks that you get when you pre-order. You can do that at your favorite bookseller, or you can visit us at juliettefunt.com. There we have prepared for you some content. Even if you don't buy the book, you can take the busyness test, which is an assessment that will

help you determine where busyness is specifically coming for you personally and what you can begin to do about it. I love it. That's something you do. And then give us that.com one more time, if you would, please. julietteFunt.com, just my name. There you go. Juliette, it's been wonderful having the show. It's definitely been enlightening to myself and our audience. We've learned a lot of stuff and I'm going to go decompress after and think about it. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your data. Thank you so much. Thank you. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to youtube.com for just Christmas. Hit

the bell notification button so you you can get all this, see all the stuff we're doing and all the new uploads. Also go to youtube.com. For just Christmas. I just said that. Go to goodreads.com. For just Christmas. But you don't go to YouTube twice.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different places. Go see those as well. Check out the book. Order it wherever fine books are sold. Only where the fine books are sold though.

A minute to think. Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work by Juliet Funt. Thank you very much, Juliet, for being on the show. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you.