Hi.
I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.
And I'm Sarah Hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This episode is airing sort of mid to late May of twenty twenty four. Our title is Conquer the World in forty Hours a Week, which what we're getting at here is an episode about building career capital and raising your
profile without work working around the clock. I think there's often a misconception that if you want to do anything ambitiously with your career, you need to be working eighty hours a week or something, and we emphatically believe that is not the case, partly because we don't believe people generally work eighty hours a week, even when they claim they do.
Right, Sarah, yep, I think this is one of the highlights of one of your books that we're going to talk about that you expose some of the myths around this. But this is hard, and I mean we're going to talk about how many hours we work, and I already can picture people listening to this who are going to be like, that's so low. I can't believe they're getting anything done of substance. I work so much more than that.
That's a lame number. So there's like weird judge layers around this, but I think there's also a lot of just like blatant dishonesty. So it's a very interesting thing to think about.
Yeah, I mean, I track my time, so I am aware of my work hours, and you know, I will admit here that I did it as well. Like I used to talk about working fifty hours a week, and even that was when I was tracking my time after
writing one hundred and sixty eight hours. I'd track a week here and there, but I would always choose specific weeks to track, and it was ones where I knew I was going to be at my desk the whole week, like I wasn't gonna have something else, There wasn't something major coming up that would pull me away from it, and so shockingly like, if everything goes perfectly, I am working longer hours.
But that doesn't always happen.
And so when I began tracking my time continuously, the average those first few years was about forty and since it's dipped a little bit more, I tend to be working more like thirty five to forty hours a week is the average, the long term average on my time logs.
Sarah, have you tracked this loosely?
I mean I went back and kind of looked at my planner the week. Clinical work is easy, I mean I can see when I have patients and when I don't, and I have like basically two and two thirds clinical days, and I tend to work the rest of that other one doing sm other stuff. So it's like, but then the rest of it often gets chopped up by varyious things. So I would estimate thirty five ish, I mean, on a good week.
But I would like to point out that Sarah earns a good salary and is raising her profile with her various creative endeavors as well.
I also will raise my hand and say I think I do things really fast.
Yes, there is that as well.
Yes, she is very efficient which is one of the ways that you can make space for career building activities even if you are going to work more in the forty hour a week range.
Yeah.
When I did research for I Know How She Does It, which was a time diary study looking at women who earned six figures and also have kids at home, most people were not working around the clock. The average on my time logs was just a hair north of forty hours a week, and that included people working in all sorts of careers like the tech industry, finance, legal world, all those things that we think of as being long hours, consulting,
and that was where the average was. The person who was working the longest in the week that we looked at was working sixty nine hours, So nobody worked over
seventy hours. And the person who was working sixty nine was an accountant in busy season, and she sent me her file of her work hours because she does track them for the entire year basically, and we looked at it and her average of billable hours was about fifty which means that she was probably working about fifty five to sixty hours a week on average.
So it's not eighty.
Even people in sort of extreme hours things, and somebody's gonna write us a, look, I.
Did eighty yeah during residency, and when there's times that you're you kind of are working eighty I mean there's not a lot of it's maybe not all intense work, but you're allowed to work up to eighty hours. And there were definitely significant numbers of weeks where that actually was happening with maybe like maybe it was more like seventy four with like a little bit of sleep, one
ho on call or something. Then you know there's a reason there's a time limited amount that people do that, Like no one's going to sign up to do that forever.
Forever, yeah, because it's not really sustainable. And so anyway, that's always something no. But that's something I always you know, push back against when people talk about, oh, well, you know, you shouldn't consider this career because the hours are going
to be crazy. And I think that's one of the ways that men try to get women out of their competition is by claiming that you have to work around the clock, and then if you look at how they're actually working, in many cases they aren't working those hours, or if you know, they're somewhere for those hours, they're not actually working, they're doing whatever because they don't feel like coming home. I don't know that's people's own problem.
But giving that the vast majority of people do not work seventy hours a week, the reality is you have to be able to work less than that advance your career because people are advancing in their careers and not working seventy hours a week. I mean, there was even a time dary study of like CEOs of major companies
and it was not seventy hours a week. So you can build your career working limited hours, but if you want to progress, it's important to be smart about how you allocate your hours, and so part of that is making sure that you make space for the career capital building stuff and put this into your schedule with a more prominent emphasis as opposed to leaving it for the end, which is I think what a lot of us tend to do.
But first you know to.
Do that, you want to know what those career capital building activities are, the things that would raise your profile and helpful to even make a list, like Sarah in your life, what do you think of as the career capital building activities?
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely two sides of my career. I feel like on the clinical side, like developing specific areas where I feel really really strong in and working on ways to just like communicate super well with patients about certain things. I think goes a long way, especially because things are repetitive. So if you get excellent at teaching people about their diabetes care, then that just compounds itself and to become known as someone who's really really
good at that. On the other side, I feel like I've focused more on like the delivery and refinement of my ideas in the last year, including packaging them into courses.
I mean, I actually just posted a rant about how I'm not making much progress on the writing side, but I have to give myself credit for having done a lot of important work that I think is a good lead up to that piece, and so yeah, that's kind of I think important, as well as doing activities that lead to more growth, like reaching out to other podcasts, which is something I try to do, promoting the newsletter, and generally trying to make our content really fun and
awesome so that you know, we hope that people find it. So sometimes the core activities can also be important. Yeah,
and share it that's always important too. Yeah, I was thinking in this list for me as we were doing this episode, definitely being on other podcasts and then sharing, because then there's always somebody who's listening to that who is never heard of you before, and inevitably somebody's like, oh, well that sounds like something I'm interested in, and so that kind of expands your influence, as does media appearances. Sometimes writing my own media stuff, so writing articles for
major publications, or speaking gigs for certain places. If you speak for a company, that's awesome, you're sharing news with them, but it's somewhat of a limited thing because it's only within that audience. Sometimes speaking at conferences where different people come in from different places has a little bit more influence just because they all take that back to their own companies and share it, and so it's got just a.
Little bit more of a multiplier effect. So I'm always keeping that in mind too. But as we were thinking about this, I think about there's kind of a four part framework here for how you can build career capital and raise your influence if you are trying to work somewhat limited out not limited but normal hours, normal sustainable hours.
So we're going to be talking about building your schedule so you can prioritize space for the high profile stuff, minimizing other work or being really efficient at it and making life sustainable that way, regularly paying into your career capital account kind of as a habit, and just being everybody's favorite person to work with, because that is how you grow your influence over time. So, Sarah, since we're starting with planning, you need to take this one over.
Yeah, this was the first thing that came to my mind when I was thinking about this, which is that if you do not think about what's going to be the priorities of your week, review your schedule prior to going into Monday, you're already behind. And I do think that planning gives back the time you put into it, like severalfold, and so it's always worth doing. It's worth doing in the rest of life, it's worth doing for work. So making sure that you have a ritual around your
planning for your work. Maybe it's a Friday afternoon, maybe it's a different afternoon to Friday. Does it work where you look at your calendar up ahead, you look for the times that you're going to have like a little bit more quote freedom or ability to do deeper work, and you think about what are the priorities that you're
going to slot in those hours. If you do those things, you'll also be able to put out fires, and as a bonus, not only will you get more done, but probably the whole thing will feel a little bit less stressful as well. So if you don't have a ritual like that in place, I highly encourage you to get one set up.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And you can also try to figure out where you will put this high profile stuff. And one of the things we always wind up not doing is any sort of speculative work or long term kind of thing, And so think, well, maybe Monday morning is where I do it, or if that doesn't work for you, maybe it's like Tuesday afternoon is what I think of a speculative time where I'm maybe not scheduling it quite so tightly, but thinking of that space is when I am doing
that career boosting work. We also want to leave buffer for unexpected emergencies, right, Sarah.
Yes, I feel like I learned from you like leave that free slot because the truth is that as much as we try to estimate what needs to happen, things take longer than you think they will, and there will always be some sort of quote unquote urgent, unexpected task dumped into your lap. So we need to kind of build in the idea that that's going to happen so that when it does happen, it doesn't derail all these
other plans you've already put into place. So having that backup slot, I think that was one of the tranquility by Tuesday tenants is super important, and that again applies to your life, but your work calendar as well.
Yeah, I mean I think it's smart in general, but in particular if you are trying to do career capital boosting work or some long term project that is going to raise your profile. What happens is people like I'm going to get to it this week, and then what happens this week, Well, your biggest client has an emergency or one of your kids get sick, and you're like, well, I couldn't get to it this week because this unexpected
thing happened. It's like, well, guess what, something unexpected is going to happen every single week, which is why you will never get around to writing that business plan or submitting that article for publication, or making a video of yourself that you can send into that conference to be
a speaker or whatever it is. Because something is always going to come up, and since you don't have to do the career profile boosting thing, you don't, so in order to make sure that those things don't derail you, you build in space for the emergency to happen.
And speaking in building in space, one other buffer to think about is processing time after meetings if you can help it, and you can't always. I know some company cultures just kind of book you back to back, although it seems like a lot of the larger companies are starting to do like fifty minute meetings or twenty five
minute meetings to kind of help with this. But you are going to need to take time to think about what was just said, to write down any to dos, to capture kind of the essence so you don't forget about what happened and have to revisit it. So not only do you need that unexpected spot buffer, but kind of not booking things back to back as a practice and assuming you'll need some processing time for each thing
that you do is smart. And speaking of buffers, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
Well, we are back talking about how to conquer the world in forty hours a week, trying to figure out how we can do career boosting work if we don't wish to work excessive hours, if we want to have a work life balance that is sustainable over the long term. And so we talked about building a schedule that allows you to have space for these longer term, speculative kind of ventures. But one of the ways that we also make space is to minimize the sort of work that
is not necessarily career boosting. Profile raising may have to get done, but it isn't necessarily your top priority.
So let's talk about meetings.
You said processing time after meetings, Sarah, But what can we do to make every meeting be a little bit less of a waste of time?
Well, our prior guest, Laura may Martin, talked about how she doesn't go to any meeting without an agenda, and maybe that might be extreme in your personal circumstance.
Did she ask you for an agenda before you interviewed her?
No? No, okay, oh no, she didn't. That must be an exception. Probably her PR firm was like, no one's going to give you an agenda, so just be.
On the one up for you so you have one.
I mean, this is a very high profile podcast and a coveted slot, so you know she wouldn't want to do something to put that in jeopardy.
Okay, But for your average run of the mill meeting, we need an agenda.
Yes, okay, So I mean if there's not specifically an agenda, you're not demanding an agenda. Still, you can think through what is the point of meeting? What do you want to get out of this meeting, because that can help you do a couple of things. It can help you prepare to make the time that you're spending with a person more useful. It might even help you tell them what to prepare if you realize that the roadblock is
going to be on their side. Perhaps you have done this in your review of the week prior and are like, ooh, I'm meeting with the person i'm supervising, but I don't know what they've done. So you tell them submit me a paragraph like before the meeting so we have something to chat about, and really just like make sure you actually have to go to said meeting, because sometimes if you think through the meeting and what the purpose is, and you really can't come up with one, And it's
just like about FaceTime. You know, there's probably enough other meetings that you have FaceTime. And again this may vary depending on what the culture is of where you are. But if there is any way there is some meeting that you find may not be the most important, you could perhaps point out the fifteen other meetings on your calendar that week and maybe you could just get the notes for that one. So really understanding what the purpose the meeting is for can do can do a lot
for you, especially in advance. You don't want to be having these thoughts three minutes before the meeting starts.
Absolutely.
Another idea is, you know, sometimes we waste a lot of time because we are waiting for other things from other people and we can't sort of start on anything else, and we're constantly tracking things down. So you have a system as well, Sarah, for looping back on stuff.
Yes, it's funny, that's a funny I put the phrase in there. But then I'm also like, you know, when you get a email from someone like two days after they sent you an email that you like didn't feel like responding to, and they're like looping them back and you're like, oh my god.
Momping this up to the top of your inbox.
That's just like more when it's like an unsolicited thing. But that's not really what we're talking about here. Looping back to me means like something's on the back burner and I don't want to forget about it, but I don't want it to like bother me, and I also don't want to fail to deal with it all together.
So making sure you have some kind of reliable place to put things that you need to check back on and a ritual that includes checking that folder or place those two things will allow you to kind of put
them out of your mind but also not missing. So my practice is to have I actually don't have this in my personal email, I haven't needed it, But in my work like outlook email, like at clinical work, there's a waiting on folder where if there's something that's just like cooking, like I've asked for something I'm waiting for a response, I just put it in there, and every single week when I do kind of like my clean out and review process, I just check and glance and
see what's in there, and if there's anything I need to send a bump up email about although I never ever.
Just pinging you, Sarah.
Yeah, well, our.
Friend Laura May Martin will tell us though, I mean, this is in her book. The problem is if you don't answer the email, you're going to get something else. It's going to be a second email or third email, it's going to be an instant chat, or somebody's going to add a calend, you know, meeting to your calendar to get an answer. So even if you can't answer, you're better off at least responding and saying, you know, I'll be working on this on Tuesday.
I'll get back to you on Wednesday, and then people feel heard.
Another way to sort of work more sustainable hours is to make sure you're only working on a certain number of things at once, and we learn this from our conversation with Cal Newport on slow productivity. But the way I like to think of it is, actually, and we're recording this shortly after tax day, is that every project you were doing has some sort of administrative tax associated
with it. And so the issue is if you have a ton of projects going on at once, each one of those is exacting its own administrative tax, and that can wind up adding up to a significant number of hours, Whereas if you limit the number of projects you take on at any one point, you have fewer hours devoted to the administrative tax, and the amount you're working is still the same. Like, if you're working on five projects and each has two hours of tax a week, that's
ten hours of tax. If you're working on three at once, you still have those extra hours that you would have been devoting to the other two, but you only have six hours of administration. And so ideally you're getting through those three quicker, if at all possible, because you're devoting more time to it at the moment, and then when you're done with each one, you can add another project,
but you're still limiting that total administrative tax time. So that's one way you can sort of make life feel sustainable. And then Sarah is a big fan of vacation.
Yeah, so you know, this isn't in the realm of minimizing, but this is in the realm of sustainability. And this isn't necessarily going to apply to someone who is only entrepreneurial, as Laura will discuss, But if you work for anyone else and you are offered vacation time. You should take it, enjoy it, plant look forward to it. It is going to create some kind of long jam work wise, but for most people, if you don't take it, your odds of getting burned out and just kind of tired of
what you're doing are so much higher. And it really is included as a benefit in many many jobs. I'm actually a not a huge fan of these new unlimited vacation situations because I feel like that's a mind game, and often people are then afraid to take it because if you have unlimited vacation, like what has really owed to you, But if you have like specific amounts of vacation that you can take, I hope everyone listened to This is like thinking about how to use that and
use it well. Some of it for family, some of it for yourself, some of it for fun. You need some reflective rest.
Time, absolutely, So that's about making life sustainable and minimizing the work that is not the highest profile things you are doing.
We also want to make.
It a habit to regularly pay into your career capital account. And obviously, when you think about a bank account, it's like money that is built up over time that you can draw upon if you need it right. So a lot of that is about the connections you have in life, so building genuine work relationships. So Sarah, what do you did the notes for that? So what do you mean by building genuine work relationships as part of career capital?
Taking time to get to know your colleagues, maintaining relationships from older positions that you've had, connecting over non work topics as well as work topics. I'm not suggesting to be best friends with every single person in your office, but just making a point to getting to know people. If you noticed your front desk person was away for a week, asked them where they went, Asked them if they enjoyed it, Like, ask them if they went to Germany,
Like what do they do there? Like actually getting to know the other humans you're working with just makes it so much more fun and at the same time, like sometimes it can lead to opportunities you might not expect. And one practice I've talked about before in this podcast is I really try to make Friday a social lunch day.
It is challenging. I like struck out last week. I was like, actually, no, I was going to strike out, and then at the last the eleventh hour someone texting me and was like I can go, and I was like, perfect, I'll meet you, and then another person actually ended up coming. So it was great and it doesn't have to be long. I mean we probably met for like twenty five minutes because both of us had to run and see afternoon patients. But still we also then saw some other doctors in
a different specialty and like talk to them. So like having that camaraderie is super helpful and can pay off in more ways than one.
Yeah, because a lot of opportunities do come through other people, right, And even in a huge corporation where you'd think like they're going to choose people who are best for a job, they're going to choose people to staff on this project that they knew who has expertise in it, Like, no, they do not. They are staffing the person that the project manager knows and has worked within the past. And if they're like, oh, shoot, now we need somebody who's
an expert in this, what do they do? That person asks the people they've worked with on the past six projects, like, hey, who should we ask to do this?
Who do they suggest?
The person they know and have been hanging out with I mean, it is amazing how human it still is, even in very huge places. But with that in mind, you want to be the person that they are thinking about.
If it's something high profile, something that you know would be building a skill set, So getting to know your colleagues, getting to know people who are external because obviously you may not work for that same place forever, and if you do decide at some point that you would like to go somewhere else, it is so much better to have a friend at XYZ Corporation who's like, hey, you should totally check out the resume from this person I
know and whose work I respect. Like you will almost automatically at least get an interview if somebody out of company has forwarded a resume.
That's just the way most companies work.
So worth keeping in mind if you're ever going to be job hunting in your life.
And I would also.
Suggest proactively reaching out to people. One of our former guests, Molly Beck, wrote a book many years ago called reach Out, which is about her own method which every day she reaches out to someone, and you know, it doesn't have
to be elaborate. It's maybe somebody that you knew in the past and want to reconnect with somebody you met recently, just a close colleague or friend that you've been thinking of and you know, wanted to share something with, or a total blind like I'm just going to reach out to this person in the universe because they did something and I want to. And I was the target of a Molly Beck reach out back in twenty thirteen, I believe,
and we've kept in touch ever since. So I just suggest viewing the universe as a wonderful place of possibilities of people, and there's no reason not to reach out. You might not hear back from people. I'm sure she's sent many that have resulted in crickets, but she does enough of it that she's built a fantastic network by doing that.
You also wrote go to stuff, go to stuff. Maybe I love that.
Yeah, I mean, because okay, here is the thought here. I think a lot of people, if they feel very busy in their personal lives, they become very focused on doing.
The stuff of their job.
Right.
It's like, well, I can't go to the happy hour because I have to see my kids after work. Well, okay, we may all want to see our kids after work, but you're probably already doing that five days a week, maybe once every two weeks. You don't go immediately home, you know, you do something else and you're still with your kids immediately after work nine out of ten days. But you are at least showing that you are willing to go to things and build sort of relationships outside
of working hours. So, whether that is industry events, if there's a happy hour with a group of people you work with, if it is a speaker on a topic that is of relevance to your industry that's happening in your town, it might be worth going to. That might be worth going to a conference. Maybe you pick two or three a year that are worth putting the effort into traveling too. But just showing your face is going to go a long way. You don't have to do
it every night. Nobody does it every night. Like this is often viewed as I can either or situation like either I go out with colleagues or I go home with and see my family, and I can't do both and I'd be a terrible parent if I didn't see my family, so ergo, I can't go out. And it's like, well, okay, only if you're viewing it one specific night, But people have listened to this podcast long enough no to think
one hundred and sixty eight hours, not twenty four. So don't view the one night where thing is in conflict as the only time there is. There's a lot of other times where things aren't in conflict, So you can be the kind of person who does both agree. So on that note, we'll take another ad break and we'll be back with a little bit more on how to build career capital.
Well, we are back talking about how to.
Conquer the world in forty hours a week, and one way that we can continue to build our career capital is to become better at what we do. I mean, some of this is just happens over time. I mean, I'm sure that Sarah, your initial sharing how to care for diabetes on like day one of you working as a physician was probably a little bit more awkward than now many years in, but you've also actively taken steps to improve at what you were doing.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think a lot of that comes from kind of learning by doing, but some of it may come from asking for feedback from whoever your audience is. Some of it comes from interacting with other professionals and asking how they do and kind of taking the best snippets of what you hear, like, Oh, that's a really good analogy. I'll try to use that.
Some of it might be reading industry stuff. I learn a ton of conferences, both the academic stuff presented, but then just as much value from like, oh, how do you guys do this over there? As I just said, So, yeah, I think it's really important and it makes your job so much more fun. I find that when I don't do those things, I don't know, it just feels a
little bit more stagnant. So I think the sustainability piece also links directly with the improvement piece, because finding ways in which to grow in our careers makes those careers more rewarding, keeps our brains active, and it's probably going to lead to more opportunities and success. So there's really no reason to decide that at some point that you're sort of done with improvement or learning.
Yeah, well, if you are feeling that maybe it's time to make a change in something else, I mean, unless you know there are reasons people don't like you're three years away from retirement in someplace with a great pension.
I get it. I totally get it.
But if that's not the case, you might wonder what there is in life that you might want to change in a way that you can keep learning and growing and don't just feel like you are punching in the clock.
Lauren and I had a little well we kind of disagreed on one. Okay, Harvy out to this, which is that I wrote that I will say in the young baby years, like the pumping years, the kind of not getting sleep years, which isn't that much time in the grand scheme of things, even if you have five kids, that's like five years if you pumped a year with each of them out of a fairly long career. That is the one time I felt like stagnation was the
only option. I mean, I don't mean that, and obviously there's still subtle things you can do, but for me, that was a time I felt like it was actually helpful to give myself permission to be like, get your notes done, see your patients, do what you need to take care of them, and like the extras can wait until you're not chained to this thing because you have to then also get home to feed the baby who wants you. Like it was a brief period of time. It wasn't that much fun. I don't think I lost
that much. But if that happens to be you or Snary right now, I kind of give you permission to coast. But maybe Laura doesn't.
Well I'll point out, I mean, maybe you were coasting in job number one. But we started this podcast when you were five months pregnant with Genevieve, and we built it for the first year while you were doing it around feeding her whatever. So I mean I would maybe argue with even your retelling of the history of events here.
And I would also say that again.
If you are in a limited hour situation because you are dealing with a nursing schedule or you know, very young baby or something like that, is maybe you want to spend more of your time of your limited time on the big payoff stuff versus all the basic stuff of your job. So maybe this is a great opportunity
when you're coming back from eternity leave. Somebody else has been covering that boring staff meeting that you've been running since time memorial, Like, huh, maybe my deputy could keep doing that while I spend that hour.
I would have been doing that reaching.
Out to people outside my company and showing them the great work I've done on something you know that's not a trade secret, but I can my profile that way, So I would just you know, you might want to rebalance it that way.
Awesome. I think depends maybe on your industry, your flexibility, and what the deliverables look like. But I'm glad to know I didn't seem like I was slacking on the podcast.
No, exactly.
And finally, the last part of this is being everyone's favorite person to work with. And you say, well, what does this have to do with building career capital? What does this have to do with raising your profile? And it's getting back to the idea of building those work relationships. But people want to work with people that it is pleasant to work with, Like this increases your influence in so many ways because people are like, if they have
a choice, they want to do pleasant things. And if working with you is a pleasant experience, then the number of people who want to work with you rises, and as such, your ability to command what you wish within the market of your corporation, within the free market as a consultant rises the more demand there is for you. So how do you become everyone's favorite person to work with. Well, partly it's about making sure that everything you touch has
done extremely well and efficiently. I mean Sarah's talked about this with some of her medical processes, right.
Yes, like become you know, emptying your inbox, like making sure not to let loose ends go undone. But also on the process side of things, if you see something that is happening again and again that feels sort of like it's not running smoothly, like it sort of gums up the works every time, then this is something to like almost like get into that sort of lean methodology six sigma, Like what can we do to make this
just like smooth sailing? Like work as a team, figure out a process, because when you solve those kinds of problems, people notice and it makes your life a million times easier. I feel like, you know, we're talking about diabetes a lot today, but like that is something I won't take cared of For this. It wasn't really me, but our group and certain people in our group have taken great pains to make so smooth because we have new diagnoses multiple times a week, and if every single time that
was like, oh, what do we do with this? It would be a nightmare, and instead I feel like it's just like we everyone it's a choreographed like beautiful dance. I don't know, like people know what their role is, we know what to do, we have a process. But it amazes me that I've been in places or situations where it seems like, Okay, surely this has to come up in time and time. Again, I don't have a great example on the tip of my tongue, but like, surely I'm not the first person who have asked for
XYZ and it seems like it was. So find those things in your work and deal with them.
And then be unfailingly reliable.
Like if you say you were going to do something, do it by the time you said you would do
it in the format that you said it would be done. Now, of course we all understand that there are things that come up that you can't but if that is going to happen, letting people know that as soon as possible and coming up with a way that you can help solve that problem for whoever it is going to inconvenience goes a long way toward making you still be reliable even if the original deliverable wasn't doable, and then part of that is only taking on what you can do.
But that's an entirely different topic.
And the hope this goes off we're full circle now because this all goes back to planning, because that planning session where you figure things out, you know what you have on your plate, is going to be the way in which you're able to accomplish this reliability.
Absolutely. Well, we'll pivot now to our Q and A here. So this is from a person who works as a pharmacist and she is potentially adding a different business to her what she's doing. She's particularly opening something new and she also wants to get some new certifications. But because she's going to be doing something new, she doesn't necessarily want all her colleagues to know about it. Now, there
is downtime at the pharmacy. There turns out to be times when people are not lined up to get their expertise on things, and so she would like to use that time for advancing her career. However, sometimes her colleagues, when there's not a lot going on, will just come over and talk, hang out, shoot the breeze, whatever people
do when they're bored at work. So she's saying, how can I politely get people to stop doing that without calling attention to the fact that I am kind of setting myself up to do something big and new during this downtime.
So, Sarah, what do you think this can be challenging?
I mean, my answer wouldn't be to cut off that person or people entirely, because you want to build those relationships. And I think if you become the one that always is like cold shoulder, but I think you could kind of like a balance, or maybe you make light of it and be like, Okay, I love that gossip time, but like, I really have to get XYZ done. You
can be vague about it. I also think headphones could be really strategically employed here because if it looks like you're listening to something could be like a meeting, a podcast, whatever, then people might take the hint. It doesn't have to mean you have anything going on the headphones, but maybe some white noise would be helpful.
Yeah, I think she could legitimately say, yeah, you know, I'd like to spend a little time studying tonight, so I'm just gonna be over here doing that. If you guys need me, And I mean, if they ask you what you're studying for again, pharmacy, like there's new stuff coming out all the time, or you could be studying for an advanced certification, where like nobody really would need to question that, like why on earth do you need that.
It's like, well, because I'm a pharmacist, and you know I need to be on top of my field to better serve the people we work with. So I mean, that's that's a pretty obvious thing. So I don't think you need to be too specific about it. I mean, especially if you're studying electronically, like I would be if there's a textbook that's related to something that has nothing to do with what you guys currently do.
But I don't think that's the case.
I think you're probably on an iPad and so nobody knows what you're doing. One way you can sort of proactively deal with the fact that people do want to chat is if you're seeing things are winding down, like go check in with anyone you know, say like, hey, how's it going, and just want to chat what's up? Like budget yourself, Like five to ten minutes for each person that would normally want to talk with you get that little short conversation over with it, then go do
your thing. Be like oh that's great, Yeah, okay, I'm still going to go study now. You know, if you guys need me, let me know. And that way, people feel like you asked about their weekend on Monday, you asked on Thursday and Friday what they're going to do on the weekend, Like you had that little small talk conversation, but you're still getting time for your thing.
Love it well, love of the week. On this career episode, I'm going to go on brand on theme here. I love paid time off. I love it. I love having a specific amount of it. I mean, I guess I wouldn't love that if it was like three days a year, that I'd be very resentful. Then I have a reasonable amount of it. I like allocating it, I like thinking about it, and I like that it kind of comes as a benefit of my job.
Yeah, so I have never had PTO.
I was thinking back of, like, have I had any job where I was like accruing paid time off? I don't believe I was, because you know, I did my like service jobs in high school and college.
I was a part time worker.
So you usually aren't necessarily fully accruing time with that, and you know, then I did an internship where I wasn't I was paid, but I wasn't like getting paid time off or anything. It's not like part of the job with that. And then I went and worked for myself and well, Vandercam Inc. Is a wonderful place to work in many ways, or paid time off policies somewhat to stingy. So yeah, no, I've never had that. But
obviously I take tons of vacation. I'm generally just doing things like checking in on email for thirty minutes in the morning two or three times when I'm off, and then I can take however much time I want, as long as I meet my deliverable.
So that is an.
Upside, sometimes a downside, but mostly an upside of self employment. So I guess I would say my love of the week, since it can't be PTO, is having been in the same business for a long long time. So recently, for various reasons, I've been meeting with a lot of people in the publishing world at lots of different houses, and the upside is I know somebody at every single one
of them. You know, I'm having meetings with teams. It's always I know somebody from somewhere in it that you know, they worked at somewhere I published with in the past, or they were at a magazine that I was familiar with, or I interviewed them as an expert or on something.
You know.
It's just there's always someone and that was kind of fun to see. So an upside of having you know, I don't think of myself as a great networker, but just from the sheer fact of being in something for decades, you meet people, and sometimes the people who you met who are so awesome, like early in your career, wind up in places of influence and power, and that's really really cool to see. So this has been best of
both worlds. We've been talking about how to conquer the world in forty hours a week, make space for career building, career capital building work even if you don't want to work around the clock, because guess what, nobody really works around the clock. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.
Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you.
Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
This has been the best of both worlds podcasts.
Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.