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 in mid April of twenty twenty five. We are going to be talking about RTO that is
returning to work. Five years after the pandemic began, a number of organizations have started to get people back into the office more frequently and if several have issued mandates that people be there five days a week, which is even different than pre pandemic, when a lot of people had worked from home Fridays. So you know, we are going to devote this episode to strategies that might make life feel better, more doable, time in the office feel
more useful. If you are working somewhere that has started requiring your presence in the office a little bit more frequently. Before we begin, Sarah, are you ready for a little soapbox moment?
Yes, I think this is an opportune time for a I don't know trademark Laura Vandercam soapbox rant segment.
And you wrote it.
It's really eloquent and I'm going to let you just roll with it.
Yes, So my thoughts on our too, I mean, highbred and remote work was honestly one of the best and probably the only good thing to come out of the pandemic. It's kind of ridiculous that we are even doing this episode. And I have seen this over the years as I have studied workplace I mean, particularly in the pre COVID era, when a lot of workplaces I mean people would tell you like, oh, we just can't work from home. It might work for other people, but it never worked for
our organization. I Mean. The truth is, some people in power do not like remote work because they like to feel powerful and have people acting deferential to them in the office and being in a space where it is very clear that you have a bigger and fancier office than other people, and you have the status and there are all these hordes of people working for you that you are seeing presiding over them like a king over his subjects. It has very little to do with productivity.
I mean people will listen to that and then wax eloquent about face to face work and the wonderful things that happen face to face. And I totally agree, Like Sarah and I love to get together when we can. This is the first episode in a while that wasn't recorded in her closet, with us sitting two inches from each other sharing a microphone, like it's a lot of
fun to do things to gather in person. That said, this is not an either or matter, because forty hours a week in the same cubicle with the exact same people can totally be overkill. There's much to be said for a balance of both, with people treated as an adults and knowledge work judged based on outcomes, not time in a seat. And yes, that is so much harder to manage. I get that. I am a person who
manages people as well. But the upsides are great because there's no reason for people to be wasting time and money and gas if they are just going to email and call other people on a particular day, and it's also great for organizations to be able to hire people from outside a sixty minute radius of the office. One more part of this rant, which is that if you are working somewhere where they have claimed that people just can't work from home, that doesn't change after five pm
or before nine am. You still can't work from home. So there's absolutely no reason really for people to have cell phones or laptops or anything like that, because clearly you can't work from home. There is no reason to even try to do anything outside the office if you cannot work from home. So all really you need is a single like I don't know, bat signal kind of thing that could summon you back to the office so you could do work, as that's the only place work
can be done. I mean that means no emails after hours, right, it's impossible for people to work from home.
I mean that actually might be a trade off some people would choose.
But I'm saying I don't think those organizations are saying that. I don't think the organization are saying our emails will stop working at five pm. Nobody will be able to log on before night am because you cannot work from outside the office. Like, No, they're not saying that. They're just saying you have to work in the office between whatever eight thirty and four thirty, whatever the hours are, and we might reach you outside that too. Then you can work from home, then it's fine, but it's only
these set hours. I don't know. Anyway, we want to deal with life as it is, not life as it should be, so soapbox regardless, this episode is about how to survive RTO, especially if that is a five day a week RTO for you. All right, Sarah, I'm done.
The rets of the episode will be all me, since I have lots of positive things to say about face to face work. No, to be fair, I mean we're going to talk about how I do actually prefer to do a lot of my work outside of the home.
I do my creative work from home still, although honestly, if I had a cute little office, maybe a couple miles away, I probably might elect to go there, especially in the afternoons when certain people may be descending upon my home, making it a little bit more difficult to concentrate. My house is not that big and it gets very loud very quickly. So I do my creative work from home, and I used to do some of my graduate medical education work from home during COVID, but then pretty much
all of my patient care work is in person. There was a time during COVID that they really sent everybody out of the clinical areas and I had to do telehealth, and I learned that I absolutely hate telehealth with a
fiery passion. Now I don't mind doing some telehealth visits over the course of a work day, Like sometimes a patient lives three hours away and I can only practice within the state of Florida, by the way, so I have to ask, like, are you in Florida, Okay, great, then we can have our telehealth from like Ocala or wherever. So there are some patients that I see telehealth and that's fine, But doing full days of telehealth I find ineffective, exhausting,
and like basic almost torture. I mean that might just be a me thing, but we're going to talk about various benefits of being in person, but for me, it's the exhausting aspect of the communication when it's not face
to face that is probably my least favorite part. So I'm somebody who kind of enjoys a little bit more about going somewhere to do my work, and so I was maybe a little bit more easily able to come up with some reframings that we will provide for you today as well as so that we can appreciate a
few of the benefits. But that said, I one hundred percent wholeheartedly agree with Laura that, like the idea of the mandate for one hundred percent seems so silly and excessive, and I am thinking of you if that impacts you, especially if you signed up for a situation that didn't look like that. That feels so unfair to me. And I do feel like hybrid or like a mostly remote situation and can be so wonderful for many people. So this is not to say that I'm like, yeah, get your butt back in the seat.
Yeah, I mean, I totally get that that. I mean, especially things like patient care. It often is good to have the picking up on things. But you know, like your status meeting for like the project that's been going on with for six months, I mean, it seems a little odd that the once a week check in would always have to be in person. You know, when you see these people all the time. There's a good balance
to be had, but Okay, So the positives. One, some people do have a split thing where it's easier to focus in a place that is primed for work focus. Now, I will say offices are distracting places, but if you have structured it right, perhaps it is or possible.
Yeah, if you've structured it right, if you have a door that you can close. But also it depends on your makeup, right, and some people have harder time focusing than others in general. But there is something to be said that if you're used to being in a particular environment, and if you're kind of conditioned yourself to like, Okay,
I have my routine. I walk through the door, I get my coffee at little office coffee shop, I walk upstairs, I put my laptop down, and then I like start, Like you can kind of prime yourself into a really nice ritual. I guess that's not to say you couldn't do something similar at home, but it might be harder with like the everyday things kind of still around, Like it's the same environment you're going to be in when you're having breakfast with the kids potentially or relaxing after work.
So some people I think do benefit from having kind of a work specific environment. I do sort of my brain knows to get into gear to like start going through patient results when I sit down at my work desk, I mean for better or forwear. Could I cultivate that somewhere else? Maybe? But I think for some people, I'm probably not the only person who gets a little bit of a priming benefit from being in a work zone. That's number one positive.
Yeah, what are another? Okay?
So this one and I think this one I sort of alluded to and as one of my biggest biggest ones, is just that face to face communication is less tiring and more enjoyable for most people when you're actually doing it in person versus on a screen. There are just all of these. I think it's actually more important when you are explaining something that someone doesn't understand, or interacting
with someone that you don't know very well. Like I don't really have a problem connecting with you on a screen right now, but if I were pitching something or I was like trying to get a sense of like what you thought, it's just so much harder to sort of tailor the discussion based on someone else's reaction when you're not looking at them. It also is just harder
for you to see if they're understanding. So that gets again like if you're in any kind of a job where a lot of times you are explaining things to people, it gets so weirdly tiring when you're trying to do it with this like medium in between. So for that in person, I think is just more pleasant, more relaxing.
And one example I'll use for my non clinical life is that we used to do these big residency recruitment blitzes where we'd like interview batches of twelve to fifteen applicants at once for our residency program, and we did it in person, and then we had COVID, so we went to zoom. I found it so much more tiring on zoom to give this speech and to smile and to stay engaged and to even like gauge these people, Like it was harder to really get an impression of
anybody through a screen than it was in person. Now, was it more practical for them, absolutely, But then on the downside, for them, they weren't able to actually see the place where they might spend the next god knows how many years of their life. So I don't know, there's pluses and minuses but for me, that zoom fatigue is real, and I much prefer the efficiency. I guess it is like their efficiency is gained from face to
face communication. That sounds backwards because you're not driving somewhere, but just the read on people on the way.
That you can understand each other. All right, let's just quick run through like other people being in the home.
Yes, So that's another huge benefit from my perspective is that when I'm at work seeing patients, my kids are not at work with me seeing patients, so I am like really can be in the zone and if I you know, I guess I could get texted by something, and sometimes I do, but they kind of aren't there, so the opportunity to get interrupted, especially if there are half days. If there are, you know, you have important things to do at that four o'clock hour when kids
would otherwise be arriving home. I much prefer being somewhere else if I'm trying to get work done, And that also holds true for non kid related home obligations, like you aren't going to be the default package getter a repair person because you aren't there. You cannot talk to the exterminator because you aren't there. Or maybe you and your partner now have to negotiate instead of you always being the default one if you happen to previously have
the more flexible job. Now, I know that can actually be logistically problematic for some people because if you don't have anybody at home, then it just becomes hard to do those things in general. But if you do have kids and you have someone at home with those kids for at least part of the day, then sometimes that person can then absorb that role that you would have been doing if you were there. And everybody wins.
Yeah, I would say, well, even if you are working from home, hopefully if you have young kids, you have somebody caring for them other than you, And one of the things of having it be a paid caregiver is you can like make sure they get out of the house.
That's always been one of our job descriptions with our Nana's which there's also people I know who I've talked to who have been trying to work from home and their partner is staying home with their kids, and that's a much harder one to navigate because it's a little bit harder to force your partner to get out of the house. With the kids because they're making their own
choices about what they're doing as opposed to working for you. Okay, well we're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back talking more about urto Well, we are back talking all things return to office, so real quick, Sarah. Office culture is potentially a positive for people being back in more of a face to face environment. Yeah.
One thing that I enjoy about going to work in a physical location is that office culture grows naturally that way. And I've been in my office for twelve years now and consider lots of the people that I work with to be real friends. So it can be fun to celebrate a birthday, a holiday, or just even chat for.
A few minutes.
Plus, there's a side benefit of the casual like actual work that might be easy to kind of fit in on the fly. I have colleagues that will walk into each other's office and be like, I got these set of laughs on a patient. They don't totally make sense to me. Let's can we talk about it? And yes, that could happen. You could kind of like text someone and see if they wanted to call you or FaceTime you, but it might be less likely to happen with that person not being accessible like that.
Yeah, although I would say you're not in the office five days a week either, right, I mean, you know, it's just the thing you could have both. Right. There are certain kinds of work that are best done to gather in person that casual back and forth banter, and then there's other kinds that casual back and forth banter is taking you away from doing. Right, there's certain sort of heads down concentration kind of work that is quite difficult to do if people are by being like, what
do you think of this? And if that's less likely to happen, that could be a benefit for that sorts of work. So again, this is why hybrid work tends to be the best option then with some guidelines around it, but mostly be people being treated as adults. But yet, those are some things to think about possibly ways to reframe this. But we had a few sort of survival
tactics to talk about as well. One is, if you do suddenly have a longer commute that you were having to do more frequently, try to think of this as me time. Like, yes, commuting is often boring, stressful, but it's too much time to completely write off in your life. So as you are planning your weeks, plan your commutes, right, actually, think of this time. Think of what you will do during this time. For a lot of people, that's things
like listening to audiobooks. So make sure that your audiobooks are packed. You've chosen well for the week, you're excited about what you're going to listen to, or maybe you've chosen an album to listen.
To Tuesday morning, so you're obviously.
Morning well and on Monday morning you can listen to best like Plans, And if you listen to before breakfast, hope your commute is probably not that short. It's like four minutes. But on Wednesdays I do an interview that's a little closer to thirty minutes, so you could.
Listen to So we figured out three other days already only you've got something.
But you know it can also be a rev up or decompression time, right, Sarah, Oh, totally.
For me, that's an enormous benefit. I usually do. Lately, I've been doing music in the morning and then podcasts in the afternoon, and I've done it actually either direction. I kind of like to mix it up, but my kids usually want to play various of their music in the morning. Then I sort of pivot to my music once I've dropped off the last kid on the way to the office. And then I have different podcasts that I often listen to on different days based on when they come out, So you kind of just get a
routine out of it. And like, I am not someone who would say I even hate my commute. I did hate my commute when I drove from Miami Beach. That was terrible, because I think what makes a commute bad is a big unpredictability aspect, because you're like always hoping it's going to be pretty good. But if you can engineer a commute that's at least even if it's not that short, if it's fairly predictable. Obviously people don't have control over that, but you can just see it as like,
all right, I got thirty minutes. I'm hanging out in the car. I can either call someone or I can listen to something, but like, I don't really have anything else to do. I can't really do anything else productive, so I might as well enjoy it.
Yeah, a commute can also be social time. I mean, probably not every day, but carpling never really caught on as a big hit because people value the flexibility of having their own vehicle. But there might be some people that you like enough to forego that flexibility just on occasion. So commuting with a friend once every two weeks, like if you work anywhere near a friend of yours, that could be an amazing way to build in some time together.
Or maybe it's with your spouse once a week or so, even if it's like ten minutes outside your normal drive, it might be worth it to you extra twenty minutes in order to spend like that extra ninety minutes there and back with your spouse once a week. It might be as much time as you guys get together if you have young kids in a busy life. So yeah, those are ways to think about it too.
Yeah, it's funny when I when Josh first started working at the same health system minded, I was like, oh, well, go to work together. That happened zero time because he doesn't actually work at the same hospital that I do, so there's really no opportunity for that. But it would have been cute if it had worked out.
It would have been cute. Another sort of survival strategy mentally at least, is to quote a certain Sarah Hartunger, make it worth the commute, right, Sarah.
Yes, well I didn't remember that I said that, but I'm glad I did. That's a good quote.
Yeah, because you may have to go in, but just for your own sanity, make sure there is at least something you are doing when you are in the office that would have been hard to do remotely. In many cases, that is something that is social. So try to start a regular lunch group, maybe plug into or start your own employee resource group. Maybe it's a mentoring program or a mentoring connection that you are committing to mentor someone once a week or so, so you know you're going
in to talk with them. But something that makes it very clear why you are doing this, because, yeah, if you have a day where you're just emailing and calling people in other places, it will feel very tedious, and we would like to avoid that if possible.
Yes, Now the next thing would be boundaries. Kind of as we implied in the very beginning, if you can't work from home, then that gives you the leeway to say you're not going to work from home. No, we're kidding, We're being tongue in cheek about that aspect of it, but sometimes it can kind of promote a little bit of a natural separation. And I will say for myself, I struggle much more with kind of shutting down on days that I'm working for myself at home versus days
that I'm driving home. And I'm driving home it's like very very obvious, like I was at work and now I'm done with work, and I don't generally take home clinical work unless it's a call week or something like that. So if you are someone who struggles with the boundaries, maybe you could reframe as like, this will help me to set clearer boundaries, even if that does mean doing very specific split shifts at certain times if work necessitates it.
Yeah, because one of the things that I definitely found studying people's schedules in the pre COVID era, people worry with a long commute that if you have young kids who go to bed relatively early, you will have very limited time with them on weekday evenings. Now you might have time with them on weekday mornings, you have time with them on weekends, but the weekday evening, if you have a child who goes to bed at like seven or seven thirty and you're not home from your commute
until six six thirty. It sort of limits the evening. Again, my children never did this. I would read about people doing this. I'm like, oh, that sounds rough. Like my child has never gone to bed at seven thirty pm. No one ever, none of them babies, doesn't matter. Nobody has ever gone to bed at seven thirty pm. But if it is you, then you might consider working a split shift, which is that you get out of your office as soon as humanly possible. I don't know, try
to end at four thirty five max. But start the commute, then get home, have a longer evening with your family, and then do a little bit of work at night after the kids went to bed. Because I'm probably believing in a lot of these jobs, you actually can work from home. It's just that you're not supposed to be. But if you're doing it at nine o'clock at night, people will probably be fine with it.
Yeah, and we've talked about this before, but usually you want that work from home to be doing a specific project, getting a discrete thing done, versus like I'm just gonna like go into my email and like browse around a little brows around.
Yeah, you are not going to get through a one thousand email backlog from nine to ten at night, like, so don't try like make yourself a to do list for this split second shift saying Okay, these are the three things I did not finish before I left the office today and do in fact have to do before tomorrow. So maybe preparing for a meeting, sending two responses to email, and whatever something else you had to do, that's a
more reasonable thing to do. You want to be intentional about breaks, right, Sarah, Yeah, And.
I think this is particularly important when you're out of work because it might require a little bit of preparation. So maybe it means asking a friend to go out to lunch with you once a week. Maybe that means bringing a book so you can spend your lunch time doing that, or bringing comfortable shoes so you can take a walk during lunch. But most workdays are not going to be like you doing intents work from the minute you get there until the minute you clock out, whether
you actually clock out or not. But you know what I mean, And so it makes sense to actually think about how you might want to spend those breaks well rather than just kind of letting them happen in default activity probably scrolling, not just scrolling not going to be that thrilling.
Yeah, especially if you do need to leave early for your commute and in winter you're somewhere that the commute will get you home after the sun has gone down. You probably want to arrange to see the sky in the course of your work day. So take some sort of break where you get outside, whether that's to grab coffee at a local coffee shop, just to go for a ten minute walk somewhere, if you go out for lunch, just invent a reason to go outside, like you don't actually need one.
The gen zs are all touch grass. We're like, no, see the sky.
See the sky. Okay, well you could touch the grass and see the sky. I don't know. If you're at a skyscaper there may not be so much grass right next to you, but the sky you might be able
to still see. So really totally, totally, And you also want to make sure that you've planned in time for your personal to do because these things don't stop just because you are working in an office and you probably feel a little bit you know, there's some things that will be harder to do if you are in an office as opposed to in a home office in terms of managing life, administration and such that has to happen, So you might need to strategically plan in a personal
day every so often to take care of anything that is hard to make happen.
Agree, I used to do a lot of that, because there's certain things that just have to be business hours and certain things where it has to be you, like going to your own doctor's appointment or getting your passport renewed. Like, you cannot outsource those things even if you'd like to.
So I would strategically have like our full day off every couple of months or so and try to batch things, because it's true you won't have that flexibility, especially if your work is a good distance away, so you're not going to have access to those things that are close to your house exactly.
Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break and then we'll be back with a little bit more about rto Well, we are back talking all things RT returning to the office, especially for people who are in a situation where you now need to be in your workplace in person five days a week, which, as we discussed earlier, is probably overkill, but we are dealing with life as it is, not as we wish it would be.
The key thing to think about is that if you are no longer at home during the day, you may need to account for presence, like somebody being there at various points that you may have taken for granted that that was you at previous points, but now you're going to have to figure out how that's going to work. So packages that might night to be signed for, like that's not going to work. Your dog You can't walk the dog as a break if you are not there
meeting contractors, which again is a massive time suck. If you are working from home, but you may have been the one who did it. If like there was a sudden leak that happened in your household or emergency childcare stuff. If you and your partner are both working an hour away from your kid's school, you need to figure out who and how somebody gets there. If there's someone who is like vomiting profusely, what goes on, you know?
I mean, I feel like some schools are just going to have to wait an hour because they're parents are going to work. And if parents are required to work at their workplaces like that's hard to have. Everybody have a backup person in case their kid happened to get sick in the middle of a day and they're too far away school with it.
Yeah, I know. So if you have family living beer by, that could be yet another thing you ask them to help with if that happens, or having a network of babysitters or something that some people have during the day availability again just as an option, or you know, and kids get sick too, and if you cannot work from home, that would require you to take a sick day yourself, which seems very inefficient from the point of view of the organization. But I'm not sure how they're dealing with that.
If they're not allowing people to work from home, I guess you're just not allowed to have sick children. I don't know. Oh my goodness.
My hope is that in instances like that, or because that's an interesting question, like let's say there is a hurricane warning and everyone's home, but there's no hurricane yet. Would the company rather make everyone take pl and have nothing get accomplished that day, or would they rather, on specific occasions let them work from home. Oh my goodness, I don't know.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that it is posted to work from home, like this idea that you know you can't. Yeah, if there's a giant snowstorm like people, of course you'd rather have people work from home than lose a week of productivity. But yes, I think it's a very short sighted idea. But whatever, we do feel for people who are dealing with this situation. We do. This is hard.
We're thinking of you, and we were trying to offer some good We're trying to keep your spirits up and give you some ideas, and there is always I did mention here also that keep kicking butt at your job, because the more awesome you are and the more valuable you are, you never know, maybe you could start by negotiating away some of this requirement if they really really need you badly enough. I guess it depends on the company culture, but maybe you would have some wiggle room there.
Yeah, Or even if the company culture is the expectation you're there, if it's not truly centrally enforced, then your manager maybe like whatever, Like I know, she's going to
get her work done. And you can always go look for another job, because there are still plenty of places that treat people like adults and say, you know, you can work in the office a certain number of days, you can work from home as you decide is necessary, and we look forward to seeing that more people want to work there than work elsewhere.
I can't believe we were able to record this episode remotely, Laura, I.
Know, how is that even possible? Sarah? It's like, how could this business exist if people can't work from home? All right?
Well, mega to our Q and A.
All right, so Sarah sent me a two part question. I think we're just going to do the second part because that was the It's a multipart coastion, Okay, So she says, we're looking at this is a family with two looking at three children. We are looking at moving closer to extended family in a couple of years, right when our oldest child is getting close to kindergarten age. I understand schools should be a major factor and where exactly to buy a house, but how does one actually
figure out which are the good schools? I am told the best way is to talk to parents there, but since we currently live out of state, that seems tricky on evaluating quality of schools. Projecting forward to see what middle or high school options kids might have, and where a school district is headed over the next fifteen years. Am I vastly overthinking of this? But I don't want to get stuck either moving or paying three private school tuitions.
Any tips about what to think about in general and planning to settle in a larger metropolitan area as a working parent, Okay, Sarah.
Well, I think it's a good thing to think about. I wouldn't put this under the category of overthinking or anything like that. Although the idea that you're going to know exactly what the schools are going to look like in fifteen years, yeah, we probably can't help too much with that piece, but I think it is worth asking around. Like you can do a lot online sloothing, like find out if there are bulletin boards for that community on
Facebook or whatsopp or whatever, and or on Reddit. Actually, I've seen this kind of thing as and you can just sort of say, I'm thinking about moving to blah blah blah city, like what are the most awesome school districts? Or are you really happy in one of the school districts, And you'll start to see patterns. Most likely said, of course, like your kid's success is probably going to have a lot more to do with the kids and the specific
school that they go to. And I will give you the disclaimer that we move to our area partly for the school districts and are paying three private school tuitions, partly just because the needs of our kids were a little bit different than we had anticipated and it turned out the fit was the best, and since we could
do it, we just went in that direction. But no regrets, because a area that has really good school districts tends to have a lot of kids and a big kind of kid culture, which means lots of activities and playgrounds and community events and stuff like that. So all those things tend to track together, and I would do the best you can to get some people to kind of sharea A real estate agent also might know, Yeah, yeah, no, that's true.
Where would you suggest in this area we look if we really value having good public schools. It's yeah, we moved to this area. You know. I'm in the Lower Marion township in Pennsylvania a lot because we had heard the public schools were very good here, and I think they are. If you went to a selective college, you've probably met people from the various high schools in this area, And so you might also look around, like do you
hear about the high schools in that area? In like state competitions, in national competitions, do people mention the area as being higher priced because of the schools? Right? Like you will see that in real estate ads, Like they'll say like this is in this district in the first line in the real estate ads. Economics are funny that way. Because she says she doesn't want to pay three private school tuitions, you may wind up having that baked into
your house price. If you choose a very good public school district, you are kind of paying the tuition in the form of your granite countertops. But that's just kind of the way economics works, right, But just other things to look at. I have the teachers been there forever? That might be something you could sleuth out, because if very few teachers are quitting that neighborhood elementary school, that might be something that suggests it's pretty good place to work.
When people love to work somewhere, that generally means it's pretty good, all right. Well. Linking this to our earlier segment, though, I would say, like patient care education is something that probably doesn't work as well virtually. I've had several kids do online classes, and it definitely can work for older kids, especially for subjects that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise. I think for things like six year olds not so good with remote work.
Definitely was not successful in our house. I'm telling you, I mean we did that.
Yeah, like adults who are doing something versus six year olds and what they are capable of managing in terms of their own time, attention and so forth. So you know, there's something we shouldn't have offices that are treating people
like six year olds. But I digress. Look for places that teachers love teaching, for places where it's mentioned in the real estate ads, look for the high schools being mentioned in competitions, and yeah, we'll just always keep an open mind though, because even the best school district, it might not work for your own kid for one reason or the other.
And it might be so much cheaper to live somewhere the dozen of good schools that the private school payment question is a wash. And also depending on what state you are in, there are different vouchers and all sorts of things we could get into, so that are a little bit too political for this podcast, but they happen to exist in various places no matter what we.
Do think of them. All Right, moving on, I think that was enough. But love of the week, all right, Sarah, Yours is a new love. Yeah.
I mean I've always loved it but not really used it. So decaff coffee just so glad it exists because I'm not fully on decaf, but like, I feel like I'm somewhat sensitive to caffeine right now, but I can still have coffee and I can have like a little bit of caffeine and like modulate that on the ratio of caffeine. So I'm just like very happy and I can go to Starbucks and get decaf cappuccinos and stuff, and this is good.
Yeah, that it actually exists, that there are options because.
I don't really like tea that much, so it's good to have.
How do they decaffeinate coffee?
I don't know it's Swiss, but it always says Swiss process. I'm like, I don't know what that process is, but those Swiss have figured it out somehow.
It takes out the caffeine, or you can have places that just add caffeine for no real reason just to make their their drinks. Their juice is more addictive. That's exciting too. So I'm going to say that I am drinking this Perrier Perie. How do you Perier Perrier? I'm so not fancy, but the Seltzer water because I've gotten to that as my evening drink of choice. It is probably better than having a craft beer in general. And yet you still want something that's a little special and bubbly,
not juice or coke or anything like that. So drinking a lot of Perier right now.
I feel like Perier is like I drink a lot of like Lacroix, but Perie is classier.
So I think that's cool. Some of my children have, you know, we get the Lacroix too that you know, I kind of think of the Perier as mine and the Lacroix is for the kids. But then one or two kids who see me drinking the Periy and they want the Perier and then they take like two SIPs in check the canon. It makes me so so unhappy. It is sad. It is said, like why why did you do that? All right, well, this has been best
of both worlds. We've been talking return to office strategies, ways of thinking about it, strategies for making the most of your day, for not losing your sanity over the commute. 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 shoe Box 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.