Give up the work-life balance illusion with Jamila Rizvi

guest appearances in some of my meetings and presentations. My guest today, fellow Melbournite, Jamilla Risby, has definitely experienced that, having spent over two hundred and sixty days in lockdown, and indeed when we recorded this chat, we were both still in lockdown. Jamilla is the chief creative officer of nine's Future Women, a weekly columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the host of the Briefing podcast,

and a recovering workaholic. In her early twenties, Jamilla was a political staffer for ex Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and someone who used to talk to her boss in the morning before saying.

for convincing your friends to edit your work? And what are Jamilla's tricks for building rapport super quickly with people that she interviews on her podcast for Future Women.

emotional engagement of home. I find it useful to be able to disconnect from that when I'm writing. I also know that I am a morning person, and so I try my best to schedule the highest sort of intellectual workload in the morning because I know if I need to be really creative, if I'm writing a column, for example, I need my best possible brain space. I don't know why people clear their emails at nine am when they

start work like that. For me, that's a waste of my best brain time on something that I can easily do at six or seven pm. Kind of chilled out at the end of the day. So I try to work and sort of hack my time to when I'm going to be most productive.

home working, I didn't really need to do that. You know. I could be in the living room, I could be in the bedroom, I could be at the kitchen table, I could be in the study, I could be wherever I felt like it on that given day. Whereas I've realized I really need my own space that is always

my space that other things don't creep into. I've needed to separate my workspace from where I go to sleep because otherwise that kind of causes and creates stress for me, and I need to be able to This sounds awful, but I need to be able to shut out my family. I need to be able to close the door and say not right now, because for me, particularly if I'm writing about something that's traumatic or upsetting, I can't do

that properly. I can't do that well. If there's the chance that my son's going to come bursting in at any moment asking me to fix a transformer.

computer because I speak better when i'm standing. And I'd done about forty minutes of the speech and we were up to the Q and A, and my son came in and it was an urgent lego problem and something needed to be fixed, and I couldn't fix it quickly while still looking at the camera. And he was five at the time, and he just refused to leap, like he flat out refused to leave, and I had to do the last ten minutes of the of the conversation just holding him in one arm while he talked about

this lego character. I think one of the good things, and I'm not one for looking for silver linings in such an enormous tragedy, but one of the good things that has come out of the pandemic experience, I think has been not a blurring of but a greater understanding that the boundaries between work life and home life are false boundaries, that really you can't be your most efficient working self without being the same self that looks after a child or goes home to someone you love in

the evenings and cooks dinner, or cleans the house or walks the dog, whatever it might be. That those two people are inextricably linked. And if you are feeling unwell or you've had tragic family news, we tend to be understanding of that that that will impact your work, but

only for a very brief period of time. I think what the pandemic's done is it's given us this little zoom porthal into people's laune rooms and their lives at home, and I do think we're a little bit more understanding that it's not just great tragedies that impact your efficiency and your effectiveness at work, that your work self and your personal self are all the same self, and because they're indivisible, we have to be more understanding and accepting

that people who are working people are also people outside.

But this particular afternoon, I was doing a podcast interview, and Frankie decided that it was a great moment to sneak into my study where I record the interviews from and just hit under the desk and then was kind of like pulling at my leg, like, oh my gosh, I can't even talk to her because I'm in the middle of an interview and I really don't want to

put the guest off. And so I'll write her a note and I'll ask her a question that will take her a long time to do a handwritten response, but she was really quick, and so then I then started this little series of handwritten notes.

So when I get that sense of okay, I'm romping towards the end of this chapter, this is flowing, this feels good. I love this sense of all the words are just coming out, I force myself to stop because that way, I don't stop thinking about that feeling, and I want that feeling back, and that sense of a chapter being unfinished or a thought being broken before I can get it all down on the page is so painful that I am itching to sit back down and

write again. Whereas if I stop neatly at the conclusion of a chapter or the end of an opinion piece, the motivation for me to get back to writing isn't there, because I feel complete and I don't feel that that sort of unfinished self. So that really helps me. And I also try and remind myself not doing it very well at the moment, but I try and remind myself that writing is a muscle. And you know, Mia Friedman

taught me this when I first started working at MoMA. Mia, that writing is a muscle and you've got to work it. You've got to work it out the same way you work out your physical muscles. And if you don't lift weights for six months, if you don't write an opinion piece for six months, or you don't write part of your novel for six months, or you don't write for children for six months, and then you sit down to do that project, well, you're going to be out of shape.

But the more you write, the easier it becomes. And I think that discipline is what gets me to my best writing. And I don't exhibit it all the time, but my best writing comes when I've been writing every day and I've been doing it for some time.

whatever it might be. And I hold myself to that because if I think about the deadline as a whole, I get quite overwhelmed with how much I have to do. But if I set the deadline in small chunks, they feel more achievable. I've been working on a podcast for Future Women recently, and that podcast is really complicated and has literally hundreds of guests who we've spoken to and

so many bits and pieces. So we created this huge spreadsheet and we colored the whole spreadsheet red and slowly by bit, every day, another box goes green as we do another interview, or we edit something, or we script something, or we send that off for the next stage, or it gets checked through legal or approved by a client. And I get enormous satisfaction out of watching the red turn orange and the orange turned green. It gives me a sense of achievement.

whether it makes the final letit or not. I often speak about my own experiences, my own difficulties, and I think that shared vulnerability creates a level of connection and a level of warmth and a level of permissiveness to share things you might not otherwise have shared before. Just a few months ago, I was interviewing Danny Minogue for

the Weekend Briefing. And I've met Danny once before, but you know, we certainly don't know each other well in any way, and we sat down for this interview, and she is someone who you know, is interviewed every day of a life. So it's one of the challenges with an interview like that, is, well, how do you get something new and something interesting that her fans haven't heard before because they can listen to her on so many platforms with so many different interviewers, And that particular day.

We talked a lot about motherhood and the realization of knowing you're pregnant and the uncertainty that comes with that and the excitement at the same time, and she ended up sharing an experience that she'd had, which was during the UK phone hacking scandal, and because a story about her pregnancy was going to be splashed all over the front pages of the UK papers before she had even told her family, she had to call her family in Australia and wake them up and tell them she was

pregnant in this horrible moment, and she, you know, she spoke about having that joyous moment stolen, that telling your mom and your dad and your sister and your brother that you're going to have a baby should be a glorious, warm family memory, but for her it had to be this rushed phone call where she was full of fear and she just had to get off the phone to

get back to the lawyers. And we talked about how that felt like it had been stolen from her, and she spoke so beautifully and eloquently, and I didn't know at the time, but she hadn't spoken about that before publicly, and I think the reason she was willing to was that we'd shared that vulnerability of what it feels like to be a new mum and what it feels like to be pregnant and unsure and scared for the first time. And I'm not sure we would have gotten to that story if she hadn't felt safe.

read it? Or what if my family read this? Or where what if people know that already? Or what if I need to use this word to impress people. I'm good at kind of pushing all of that away and working with someone and their writing, so we just think about who they're writing for, and we don't think about all the mess around it. We just think about their audience and what their audience might or might not know.

We tried not to assume knowledge. We try not to approach the main point tentatively and slowly and in a roundabout fashion, but just get to it. Make the point, get in there, and get there quickly and effectively, and make the audience understand what we understand. I do think that no matter how good an editor you are, you can't edit yourself. And everyone needs an editor. And one of the tragedies of online publishing the last few years is that there's so little money and space for that now.

So often I'll write a column for online and I just get an email back saying this is great, and then it's online ten minutes later. And that might feel good the first couple of times, but after a while you realize that it would be so much better if if someone had the time to spend with you to make it better.

a whole bunch of people to read my books. I get my formal editors to read them, whether it's a Future Women book with Hachet or one of my own books with Penguin or Puffin. I always have my editors read them, of course, but I try to have friends, I have family read sections of them. I send things that are relevant to friends with legal backgrounds, friends who

have gone through a similar emotional experience. I draw on their own interests and the things that have happened to them in their lives that mean that they can bring a perspective. My sister, who is a children's performer, is an extraordinary editor. She often sort of takes me out of the sort of writery, you know, the sort of esoteric stuff that we can get caught up with, and goes, sorry, what are you talking about? What does that work mean?

Why are you saying that? And she's so good at that, she's such a clear communicator because she's used to communicating with little children. So I don't think an editor has

to be a professional editor. I think there are so many people in your life you can draw on, and there are writers groups and writers' rooms you can join where you can get strangers who are interested in writing and who are good writers to comment on your work, and I think all of that commentary is what helps make it the best it can be.

that I'm loving. So if you would like to receive that, you can sign up for that at Howiwork dot cod That's how I Work dot c O. Are there certain questions that you ask people when you're getting them to edit your work and they're not an editor per se, Like, are there specific things that you're asking your editors in inverted commas to do?

that looks different from every angle. You hold it up and you walk around it, and you're in exact from the top and from the bottom, and from the sides and diagonally, and then you do it again in case the sun's changed. That's what I was trying to do

with my writing. I was trying to explore women's experiences of the pandemic from every angle and every facade, So considering what it was like for women who were nurses, who were nursing patients, but also at the same time considering the experience of that patient, and then what was the experience of that patient's sister, What was the experience of that patient's mother who lived on the other side of the country, What was the experience of the mother

who perhaps lost work during that pandemic, or the mother who gave up work to stay at home with her kids and is missing it, or the woman who was doing IVF who had to stop her search for motherhood because it wasn't an option. So that was the kind of writing I was doing. And for me, I always try and make my writing inclusive, So I'll often ask people who've had different experiences, is where I've touched on

your experienceerience? Does it feel authentic? If I haven't touched on your experience, where are the gaps that you see? Because all of us write read with our own prism of knowledge, and so we see gaps according to what we've lived, not according to what the writer has lived. I will often ask people where they stood up for the first time to get a drink of water or to do something else, like where did I lose them?

I often ask them to underline passages that felt strongest, the lines that stayed with them, Particularly with big chunks of data or research, I often ask, tell me where you sort of stop taking this in, where it stopped being compelling or convincing. And one of the things I find when people write, and I'd certainly do it, is that we often take a little while to get started.

So often when you're working with someone's work for yours, for example, working with someone who's writing maybe ay fifteen hundred two thousand words for a publication, you'll have a look at it and then you'll say, Okay, you really warmed up and you got started at about four hundred words. So why do we have the first four hundred Are

they important? And if they're not, what does this essay or contribution or opinion piece look like if we just delete four hundred words, Why don't we just start at the most important bit rather than kind of go for a little walk around the garden before we get to the front door.

that has an element of universality. So in workloff Body, for example, I talk about traveling to Camera for Christmas to see my family for the first time in almost nine months because of the pandemic, and the kind of the bits and pieces that happen at Christmas, you know, the past, the prawns and shall we have another slice of pie? Or should we do the crackers now or should we do them later? And that kind of thing. So what I'm doing there is trying to set a

scene that is my scene. It's a personal scene, but it's a scene a lot of people can relate to, even if they didn't travel the same way I did to the same place or have Christmas with my family. You know, most Australians celebrate Christmas in some form, religious or otherwise. Even if they didn't, most people get together

with family at the end of the year. Many of us were prevented from seeing our family during twenty twenty and that was this sense of reunion, but a somewhat dole in reunion because it wasn't quite as joyful as we would have wanted to be, because the pandemic wasn't over. There was sort of almost this pause in Australia, is it going to be okay? Now? So we were almost

pretending to do what we always did every year. And so for me, what I was trying to do there is, yes, capture the universal experience, but also without saying it, capture that thought that everyone's had, which is what a joyous, wonderful Christmas? But is it really the same? You know, I think a lot of us are thinking that right now. You know, we're all looking to the end of the year in twenty twenty one, is this sort of great day of everything's going to go back to normal now?

The truth is we're all wondering in the back of our heads what is normal and are we ever going to get back to normal? So I think it's setting a scene. It's looking for that universality of the personal and tapping into that unspoken thought that hooks people in. I then go from that to the macro. So instead of talking about me and my Christmas, I go bigger. I talk about women's experience of the pandemic and how it impacted women differently at work, at home, with their families,

their health, their mental health, whatever it might be. And then once I've made my broader point on that exploration, I try to come back. Sometimes it's to the same personal story, sometimes it's to a different personal story, but I come back to myself or the person I was talking about at the beginning, and I kind of go full circle with what's happened to them now.

Right for me, it absolutely wasn't for me. It was a really stark realization of how desperately I wanted to be alive, to live the life I already had. I didn't any want to change things. I just wanted to be Jeremy's wife and to be rough his mum, and to be mims sister, And I wanted to keep being the life that I was living because it's such a meaningful, exciting, joyful one. And I have the privilege of this incredible job that gives me such freedom to do stuff I love.

So for me, yeah, it had changed my approach to work because I think it made me realize how lucky I am to do what I do, not how lucky I am to have gotten here because I worked hard and I think I'm good at my job, but not everyone gets to do what they love to earn a living. And I think it also provided an impetus to slow down a little bit, to do the same work, but to cut myself some slack, to stop running at one hundred miles an hour, because the reality was that my

body can't do that anymore. That I had to find ways to be efficient, to be effective, to do the work that matters to me, to do the good work, so to speak, but to do it in a way that is sustainable for a disabled body that isn't capable of doing what it used to.

but it wasn't going to put me in hospital. I can't do the physical exhaust exertion of like ten meetings in the city, go go, go all day, go from a speech to another presentation, to a meeting, to this to that, stay out for dinner and drinks, and party all night. My body's not up to that anymore. I have quite significant memory loss. So it means I also have some changes to my work around, just processes that make sure that I show up for this podcast conversation,

you know. And those processes have to be more thorough and more intricate than they used to be, because for me, if it's not in my diary, it's not going to happen. If I don't take notes, then I'm not going to remember. I need to be more strict about how I use my time and energy.

My team are extraordinary. So the people I work with and the people who work for me are so good at catching me. All of the meetings that I attend at work, someone will be taking notes, Someone will summarize the meeting and email them afterwards, and I always attach that to the diary invite, so I can always go back and recall what happened. I get up in the morning, first thing, I look at my calendar for the day. I go and I make my son breakfast, I feed the dog, and then I look at my calendar for

the day. I have a shower, and I look at my calendar for the day. So I keep looking at it until it's squarely in my mind. And I think the big one is I write everything down. I have a very intricate system of lists and notes and reminders and shared calendars, and that means that I can pretty much imitate how I used to be.

And they said, try us, try us, like, try and try and teach us, try and show us what it is to be sick. You know, of course we can't know it, but we want to know the best we can.

We're your friends. Anyway, she went to the kitchen and she pulled out all the spoons from the kitchen drawer and brought them back to the table and laid them out, and she said, okay, so which of you has twelve spoons for the day, and you've got twelve spoons, you might use one spoon up getting up in the morning, getting the kid's food, feeding the dog, getting dressed, having a shower, getting out the door and getting to work

might take another spoon to get through the commute. You might need four spoons to get through your meetings in the morning, three spoons to get through the big presentation in the afternoon, another spoon to get home on the commute, two spoons to get through the evening being with your family, and you've got a couple of leftover when you go to bed. There are some days you might use up close to all the spoons. There are some days you might only use five or six of them, so you've

got a lot left in the tank. There are days where I wake up and I've got three spoons, not twelve, And so when you've got three not twelve, you have to be judicious with how you use them. And on those days you have to make decisions that other people don't have to bake because energy is so precious, and what you can and can't do in the midst of pain or exhaustion or low blood pressure or whatever it might be, it's different. It's different to other people.

probably damaged our relationship a little bit. So the second time around, after my craniotomy, I threw everything at him that was my priority. If I only had one spoon for the day, my one spoon was playing Transformers on the bed with my son, you know, and maybe that took priority over getting up out of that bed that day. So I came back to what my core priorities are, and they change over time, not hugely, but I think

they do change. You know. At the moment, I'm really trying to prioritize my hunt's son's homeschooling, trying to prioritize my work at Future Women, which I love and it's so important, and I'm trying to prioritize my health. And I don't think those things are going to radically change anytime soon, but your priorities do change, and I think coming back to sorry what you do doesn't always reflect

what the priorities are. And so I think coming back to them and going is it really worth expending my energy on this when I don't have unlimited amounts of it is a really good practice, whether you're unwell or well.

really cool. I love people who are open and honest and follow up, and a number of my very good friends are friends I've made us adults friends who I've had a single work interaction with, but they followed it up with an email or I followed it up to say, let's hang out, let's go out to lunch, let's do something together, let's see where this relationship goes, rather than having a single work interaction and not speaking to one

another again. I think when you have that moment with someone, it's the same as a romantic moment, you know when you've clicked with someone, when someone is someone, when someone is a person you want to spend more time with, who you're attracted to as a mate, who you are excited by his conversation makes you think in different ways and explore new horizons. I think that the pressure is on, and the pressure comes from feeling like you have to

be restrained. I just recommend diving on in and trying to hang out with someone that you enjoy spending time with.

was the junior baby on the team. And I think you know what I took away from working in politics was a sense of pragmatism, was a sense of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, of moving slowly in order to take people with you. I'm someone with a tendency to rush, but taking slow and deliberate steps towards a goal and biding your time will often make it more likely that you'll achieve it.

close and personal with death a bunch of times. The work of Amani Hater here in Australia more recently, who wrote The Mother Wound that was about is about her experiences following the murder of her mother by her father and her adjustment of thinking and how she has dealt with grief and what that has meant for her life and the course of her life, and how she mothers have lost her mother in such a violent and deliberate and devastating act.

And I think there are so many women who've lived through the last period of the pandemic and have found that it has changed them in a myriad of ways. The same is true for the women whose experiences are reflected in this book. And I think you'll find a lot of yourself and a lot of the women you know in this book, and I think ultimately it will be both comforting and uplifting.

growing a business and making tough decisions. How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support from Dead Sets. The producers for this episode were Jenna Koder and Liam Redon. And thank you to Matt Nimba, who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound so.