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