Speaker 1: Hello there, It's Amantha.
Speaker 2: I'm currently on a Christmas break, so I've handpicked a
Speaker 2: bunch of my favorite episodes from the last year to
Speaker 2: share with you. Okay, on with today's best of episode,
Speaker 2: how are you coping with this whole global pandemic thing.
Speaker 2: I'm in Melbourne in Lockdown number six and it is
Speaker 2: pretty tough going. I feel like I'm more reliant on
Speaker 2: my devices than ever before because they're like a window
Speaker 2: to the outside world. But I have a feeling that
Speaker 2: checking ABC News ten times a day isn't very good
Speaker 2: for my mental health. So in today's show, I have
Speaker 2: an alternative to share. My name is doctor Ramantha Imba.
Speaker 2: I'm an organizational psychologist and founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium,
Speaker 2: and this is how I work, a show about how
Speaker 2: to help you do your best work. I'm trying something
Speaker 2: different today because Lockdown could be a bit lonely, so
Speaker 2: I thought it might be fun to have a little
Speaker 2: catch up with a fellow productivity nerd, my mate, Lisa Lyong.
Speaker 2: Lisa is the host of the top ranking ABC podcast
Speaker 2: This Working Life, and she is just an all around
Speaker 2: awesome person I've known for years. Lisa was keen to
Speaker 2: know more about some new calendar software I've been using
Speaker 2: that has changed my life. But we start by having
Speaker 2: a chat about a ritual that Lisa has been trying
Speaker 2: lately called a tech sabbath.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was something that did emerge out of COVID
Speaker 3: and when I think it was March last year, we
Speaker 3: noticed that there was a lack of contextual markers when
Speaker 3: we all started working from home. And Colin James, who
Speaker 3: does a lot of work in the communications space, he
Speaker 3: used this term, and I just think it's fantastic to say,
Speaker 3: our contextual markers are the things that we did as
Speaker 3: we commuted to work. For example, it's making your first
Speaker 3: cup of coffee, it's even putting on your work clothes.
Speaker 3: So these are the things that remind us all we're
Speaker 3: in work mode.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: With all of these disappearing when we were working from home,
Speaker 3: we lost all sense of time and work just got overwhelming.
Speaker 3: And I definitely found myself in that place, and so
Speaker 3: I started to look for routines and rituals that would
Speaker 3: support me in just trying to bring a bit more
Speaker 3: I guess focus in my life and consciousness. And we
Speaker 3: came across the work of Kasper to Kyle, who studied
Speaker 3: at the Harvard Divinity School, he's actually non denominational. He's
Speaker 3: just really fascinated in ancient wisdom in religious practices. And
Speaker 3: in his book he actually focuses on something called the
Speaker 3: Friday tech Sabbath, So it's a secular ritual, but it
Speaker 3: does look at the beautiful ritual of Shabbat, and from
Speaker 3: sundown Friday until sundown Saturday. In the secular version, you're
Speaker 3: just switching off all your devices, so it's my bile
Speaker 3: phone and laptop predominantly.
Speaker 1: And you know, so I just tried.
Speaker 2: That, Like, how did it go? What would you remember
Speaker 2: the very first tech Sabbath that you did, and what
Speaker 2: that felt like.
Speaker 3: The first time I tried it, I did. I was
Speaker 3: very strict, so I turned off my phone and I
Speaker 3: turned off my laptop and I actually put them away.
Speaker 3: And I noticed that on the Saturday my hand.
Speaker 1: Kept on twitching trying to reach for my phone. My
Speaker 1: body was sort of like it was so weird. So
Speaker 1: that was the main thing that I noticed.
Speaker 3: And then I did notice when I switched back my
Speaker 3: phone that I had actually felt a little bit more refreshed,
Speaker 3: so all the noise had sort of dissipated, but definitely
Speaker 3: at the start, I was feeling anxious because like, nobody
Speaker 3: could contact me, Amanda, I know.
Speaker 2: And that's what I was going to ask, like, I mean,
Speaker 2: did you make any provisions for let's just say there
Speaker 2: was a family emergency and your phone switched off? Like,
Speaker 2: how does that work?
Speaker 3: So the practical things that I had to do was
Speaker 3: before I switched off my phone on the Friday. You
Speaker 3: do have to really spend maybe an hour preparing things
Speaker 3: because on the Saturday, if I was going out to
Speaker 3: a cafe, I would just let people know who needed
Speaker 3: to know I'll be at this cafe at that time.
Speaker 3: So it's basically going back to a world before your
Speaker 3: mobile phone. So then I got a bit slack, to
Speaker 3: be honest, because I was doing it by myself. So
Speaker 3: the two point zero version of the text e as
Speaker 3: ritual was enlisting our mutual acquaintance and friend, Pinny Lacasso,
Speaker 3: So we came up with more of a ritual.
Speaker 1: So the ritual was literally light a candle, dance to
Speaker 1: a song.
Speaker 3: We had a chant or a mantra, which is I
Speaker 3: am enough, that was enough, and it's time to shut
Speaker 3: off our devices and let them sleep and then we
Speaker 3: would blow out the candle. And it was much more
Speaker 3: effective doing it with someone else, because I think there
Speaker 3: is something about mutual accountability knowing that you're not alone
Speaker 3: in this. And also I do want to cheat because
Speaker 3: I didn't want her to catch me out.
Speaker 2: And now I know that something else that you did
Speaker 2: is you actually got a song commissioned.
Speaker 3: I had come across an amazing singer songwriter called Little
Speaker 3: Green Amy Nelson, and she.
Speaker 1: Sort of just.
Speaker 3: Creates just beautiful, really clean, beautiful songs, and she plays
Speaker 3: all of the instruments, so she has self taught herself
Speaker 3: seven different instruments.
Speaker 1: And so I.
Speaker 3: Contacted her and just said, Amy, here's a concept, and
Speaker 3: I just gave her exactly what I gave to you,
Speaker 3: just then this is what it is. And she came
Speaker 3: up with this incredible song, which is now the song
Speaker 3: that we listened to a dark too when we do
Speaker 3: it our Friday take seventh.
Speaker 2: Amazing and let's let's listen to a bit of that song.
Speaker 4: Now, Free your Mind is Friday. Close your eyes and
Speaker 4: say goodbye to Cyber. Free your Mind is Friday. Good
Speaker 4: night too. Oh device maybe it was a tough week
Speaker 4: maybe it was good. Maybe nothing when like your thought
Speaker 4: it would.
Speaker 5: But night it's Friday. So I am enough. You are enough.
Speaker 5: We are enough. I am enough. You are enough. We
Speaker 5: are enough. I am enough, you are enough. We ironough
Speaker 5: it's sweet dreams.
Speaker 3: Beloved laptop, my beloved mobs, give you a break as
Speaker 3: well as my earlobes. Stop the coobland screens, Stop the
Speaker 3: bitch watching audio book, Thanks for the space frolic in nature,
Speaker 3: get lost in the street, no GPS to take yours.
Speaker 2: That is such a beautiful song, Lisa.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, it's like hatche, isn't it?
Speaker 3: And it just she has so beautifully captured the whole field.
Speaker 1: I think of a I take Sabbath. Did you notice
Speaker 1: that I was rappy at the end.
Speaker 5: That's me?
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Would you give it a go?
Speaker 2: I would definitely give it a go. Funnily enough, so,
Speaker 2: I don't sleep with my mobile phone in my room.
Speaker 2: So my mobile phone sleeps downstairs. I sleep upstairs. And
Speaker 2: a few weeks ago my parents actually said to me,
Speaker 2: because I don't have a landline, that would probably be
Speaker 2: weird to have a landline. But my parents said to me,
Speaker 2: what if we have an emergency in the middle of
Speaker 2: the night, how do we contact you? And I said, well,
Speaker 2: there's no way of actually contacting me. And so my
Speaker 2: dad had a spare phone and he has now brought
Speaker 2: that over. He bought a SIM card for it. And
Speaker 2: so I do have this phone, like it's an iPhone
Speaker 2: that sleeps next to me, but literally the only function
Speaker 2: it has because every call is blocked except for calls
Speaker 2: from my mom or my dad's mobile, So it sleeps
Speaker 2: next to me if there's an emergency. So that would
Speaker 2: be the one thing that I would worry about, like
Speaker 2: if there was an emergency with my daughter or with
Speaker 2: my parents, how would people contact me? But that could
Speaker 2: actually be overcome by how I've overcome that. I'm not
Speaker 2: contactable pretty much between the hours of nine pm at
Speaker 2: night and say six or seven am in the morning.
Speaker 1: I call that my burner phone as that.
Speaker 3: So I do actually have a really old school Nokia
Speaker 3: And you've just reminded me which I sometimes had put
Speaker 3: my SIM card in if I was like, you know what,
Speaker 3: I probably do need to be contactable, but I don't
Speaker 3: actually want to have a phone that reminds me of work.
Speaker 1: It's just that when.
Speaker 3: I was trying to use it because it is so
Speaker 3: old school it's really hard to use. I client of
Speaker 3: gave up on it, but I did try that for
Speaker 3: a little while, and I wonder whether that would be
Speaker 3: you know, as you say, a really good option is
Speaker 3: just a really you know, one of those real old phone,
Speaker 3: so you can't be tempted at all.
Speaker 2: A nockier was it like.
Speaker 3: Sixty one or something and everything I sort of felt
Speaker 3: vaguely cool until I was so frustrated that I couldn't
Speaker 3: use it anymore.
Speaker 2: Now, something that I'm excited about is new software that
Speaker 2: I've been using to manage my to do list and
Speaker 2: calendar workflow.
Speaker 1: Oh I love your hacks, So describe this one.
Speaker 2: Okay, See this software is called Motion, but just to
Speaker 2: make it super confusing, there's actually two software solutions for
Speaker 2: calendars called Motion. So the one that I am talking
Speaker 2: about is motion dot io. That is the website and
Speaker 2: I will link to that in the show notes. And
Speaker 2: I actually I got recommended to it by John Zaratsky,
Speaker 2: who was a guest on the show quite a while ago,
Speaker 2: and he's quite well known for co writing Sprint, which
Speaker 2: is the book about Google Ventures designs. Sprint process with
Speaker 2: Jack Nap, and also with Jack Napp wrote the book
Speaker 2: Make Time, which is a brilliant book around productivity and
Speaker 2: tax and things like that. So John said that something
Speaker 2: he's been using he's been playing around with different calendar software,
Speaker 2: and so that's how I got into Motion and what
Speaker 2: I love like. So prior to Motion, my workflow is
Speaker 2: I would use Things as my to do list software,
Speaker 2: and I would have a list for deep work tasks
Speaker 2: that I need to get done, so things that typically
Speaker 2: going to require at least an hour of my time
Speaker 2: and deep concentration, and then a shallow work list things
Speaker 2: that are quick and easy and simple to do or
Speaker 2: don't require a lot of brain power. And then what
Speaker 2: I would have to do is, I would, you know,
Speaker 2: if I'm planning my week and I time box my diary,
Speaker 2: so I essentially set meetings with myself to complete deep
Speaker 2: work tasks, and then I also have reminders for like
Speaker 2: quick things that I need to do within Google Calendar.
Speaker 2: I'd sort of be, you know, checking my to do
Speaker 2: list every now and then and then timeboxing and then
Speaker 2: I'd have my reminders, but some reminders would sort of
Speaker 2: carry on over for several days before I got to
Speaker 2: them and it was all like a bit messy and imperfect.
Speaker 2: And what I love about Motion, and I've never seen
Speaker 2: this before in calendar software, is that it combines both
Speaker 2: of those software, if you like, into the one. So
Speaker 2: on the left hand side of my screen that is
Speaker 2: my task list, and so I can create new tasks
Speaker 2: within my calendar software, I can allocate how much time
Speaker 2: I think they will take me, and then I can
Speaker 2: drag and drop those tasks into my calendar, which takes
Speaker 2: up the rest of the screen. So the majority of
Speaker 2: the screen is my calendar, like the view that you
Speaker 2: would see on Google Calendar, but there's a column down
Speaker 2: the left hand side that is my task list, and
Speaker 2: so it will drag and I'll drag and drop those
Speaker 2: into my days, so I can timebox effectively. And then
Speaker 2: what I also love, because we've time boxing, the time passes,
Speaker 2: you finish your task and it's like okay, good, done that,
Speaker 2: onto the next but you don't get that beautiful dopamine
Speaker 2: hit of ticking something off the list if you timebox
Speaker 2: in the traditional way. But with Motion, there's a little box,
Speaker 2: a little white box that you tick when you've done
Speaker 2: the task, and then it does like a little animation
Speaker 2: and then it's marked off as done, and then it
Speaker 2: becomes kind of grayed out. And then the other thing
Speaker 2: that I really love is that if I'm ahead of schedule,
Speaker 2: if I've basically overestimated how much time my task will take,
Speaker 2: I can look sort of to further in the day
Speaker 2: and go, oh, I think I might try to tackle
Speaker 2: this thing, but I'd plan for the afternoon and then
Speaker 2: I tick it off and then it moves itself to
Speaker 2: the morning once it's done, and then I've got some
Speaker 2: free time. So it is gold. It has completely changed
Speaker 2: my workflow around how I manage my calendar.
Speaker 3: So in terms of the task list, I think it's
Speaker 3: really important to understand how big are the task that
Speaker 3: you're putting in your task list on the left hand side,
Speaker 3: and what would you define as being a.
Speaker 2: Task, So it is all sorts of things. So it
Speaker 2: might be like, for example, today, I've got a two
Speaker 2: hour task that I've time blocked for when we stop talking, Lisa,
Speaker 2: and that is I have a keynote coming up that
Speaker 2: I feel like I need about two hours to like
Speaker 2: kind of iterate a current keynote to turn into this
Speaker 2: final keynote that I'm delivering in about a week's time,
Speaker 2: so that's a two hour time block. But then I'll
Speaker 2: also have quick five minute tasks like I had to
Speaker 2: make a couple of phone calls today for example.
Speaker 3: And then are you putting together your task list the
Speaker 3: night before or a week in advance or.
Speaker 2: No, it's ongoing. So whenever a task comes into my mind,
Speaker 2: I put it on the task list, and then when
Speaker 2: I'm at my computer, my desktop, I then allocate time
Speaker 2: to it. So essentially I'm running task list zero, kind
Speaker 2: of like inbox zero where you've cleaned out in bogs,
Speaker 2: but it's taskless zero because every task that you have
Speaker 2: now has time allocated to it in the diary, which
Speaker 2: I think is very very powerful, Like psychologically, that feels
Speaker 2: really good.
Speaker 3: And then my final question is because I've also been
Speaker 3: timeboxing for quite a while and I find it really helpful.
Speaker 3: But sometimes I look at my diary and I'm quite
Speaker 3: frightened because every it looks like everything is accountable. I mean,
Speaker 3: it looks like wall to wall meetings, even though I
Speaker 3: know it's not. How do you feel about looking at
Speaker 3: a calendar, which you know, pretty much at first glance,
Speaker 3: looks very full.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't do that, so I don't fill up
Speaker 2: my calendar. I don't book myself at one hundred percent.
Speaker 2: So I got that tip actually from Darren Murph, who
Speaker 2: is the head of remote at git Lab, who I
Speaker 2: had on how I work quite a while ago now,
Speaker 2: and one of his big things was he never books
Speaker 2: himself at one hundred percent because it doesn't allow for
Speaker 2: things going wrong, emergency is happening, things running over time.
Speaker 2: And also I heard this echoed from Nicky Sparshot, who
Speaker 2: heads up Unilever for Australia and New Zealand, and she
Speaker 2: tries to put ninety minutes of buffer time in her
Speaker 2: diary every day. So for me, I generally have some
Speaker 2: buffer time. I'll always block out lunch so I will
Speaker 2: have a lunch break. But you know, look that's also
Speaker 2: contingency if something goes wrong and I need to actually
Speaker 2: do a bit of work there. But also I tend
Speaker 2: not to book anything after about three point thirty or
Speaker 2: four o'clock in the afternoon.
Speaker 1: So that's actually blank.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just blank.
Speaker 3: So near Ale, who both of us who have spoken
Speaker 3: to and who is you know, sort of has his
Speaker 3: own approach to time boxing. So he accounts for all time,
Speaker 3: and that includes downtime. So in his calendar it'll say, say,
Speaker 3: from three point thirty do nothing time. But even so
Speaker 3: that is blocked out. And so what I was playing
Speaker 3: around with is like I'll put in some health thing first,
Speaker 3: so it might be my morning routine or my lunch
Speaker 3: break or but it is all accounted for. So I
Speaker 3: think I am playing around with. Or if I put
Speaker 3: that in my diary, I know it's definitely accounted for.
Speaker 3: But unless it's a different color, it can sometimes look
Speaker 3: scarier than it is in reality.
Speaker 2: I'd say definitely. I think color coding diary like it's
Speaker 2: just a good hack, so visually it's not overwhelming, but.
Speaker 3: I like maybe going blank, although people can then like
Speaker 3: put in invites, whereas if I block it out, then
Speaker 3: at least you know, I've got a little note that
Speaker 3: sort of says, actually that's blocked out for you know,
Speaker 3: afternoon sleep.
Speaker 2: I just I just block it out and do not
Speaker 2: book in capital letters in a really aggressive kind of sod. Lisa,
Speaker 2: it has been great chatting with you. We have to
Speaker 2: do this again sometime. I love chatting to fellow productivity nerds.
Speaker 3: I know it's so great, and good luck with the
Speaker 3: motion trial and I'll report back as we go on
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 2: Hello. There, that is it for today's show. If you
Speaker 2: enjoyed today's episode, why not share it with someone else
Speaker 2: that you think would benefit and maybe get some useful
Speaker 2: tips to improve the way that they work. How I
Speaker 2: Work is produced by Inventing with production support from the
Speaker 2: Dead Set Studios. And thank you to Martin Nimba who
Speaker 2: does the audio mix for every show and makes everything
Speaker 2: sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See
Speaker 2: you next time.