Ten surprising ways to make lockdown suck a little bit less, with Atlassian's Dom Price

felt like a lot. I just didn't feel like myself and people close to me were really struggling too, And I was just sick of hearing the same old advice for how to cope, learn a new skill, create a ritual, lower year expectations, and so on and look, they are all great pieces of advice, but right now they weren't really helping. So I reached out to someone I knew

would be thinking differently, Dom Price. Dom is the head of R and D and the resident work futurist at Lassion, and he's a friend of mine and a friend of the podcast. Dom and I decided that we would swap our best tips. So in preparation for this interview, I racked my brain for the things that I had done that did make me feel better, but didn't fall into

being a cook some sourdough cliche. So, if you're struggling with lockdown or maybe just everything that's going on in the world right now, I hope that you'll be able to take at least one thing out of this chat to help make things a tiny bit better right now.

ritual reset. And it's just been great to kind of go, like, we have all these these interventions where we kind of think about doing a sprinkling, Right, you think about like seasons and you change your wardrobe and you do a sprinkling. It's like, what's the spring clean for my life? And

specifically what's the spring clean for meetings? You know, because if you think news kills your mojo, amant the nothing kills my vibal mojo, like lack a meeting, And so I'm like, I know they're necessary, evil, but how can I make them better? So the ritual reset was like, how do we, like, if you assume the world's changed, because it has, like my working environment is completely different than it was, So how do I reset my rituals?

And so what we said was, let's list all of our rituals, which ones do we want to keep but tweak right, so they stay that the purpose is the ritual still makes sense, but the way we're going to do it's different because we might be able to do it asynchronous or might be able to do it online, or we're going to do it in a different form because the world has changed. Which ones do we want to keep? And they stay the same, I'll be honest, very few fell into that category. And then which ones?

Which ones do we want to kill? Which ones just aren't required, we don't need them anymore? Whatever, And maybe we use to space the time and the freedom to experiment and try something else. And it has been like the most refreshing thing just to go. Meetings don't own me anymore, I own them.

there isn't. I mean, you can google best practice type of distributed teams and you'll get a hold of and BS articles. So don't do that. I do that. Let's experiment our way out of it, and that in itself has been quite fun.

So we're like, hang on, not only is it sol destroying, we're trying to do this synchronously, and we're using people's like live time, which should be used for something more spontaneous or higher value. So how can we make all of our data supdates asynchronous and how can we make them consumable all around the world so you don't have to physically be in the same place at the same time, because I have colleagues literally all over the world.

And so what you get is a two hundred and forty character limits. So it's like Twitter, and you do your update on a Friday, and it kind of all gets slaunched together over the weekend, and on Monday morning, you get a digest of all the projects you're following, and you get the two hundred and forty character update, and if you want to dig in and find out more, you click through and you can read more. But what it means is I now don't have any status meetings, which I love.

but they're going to connect together. How can we connect in a meaningful way so that I know what you're doing, you know what I'm doing, but we don't have to be in each other's pockets. So you're autonomous and free to do your work, but you're connected in the areas where you need to. And it's so far it's been fascinating experiment.

again for the second year running. And what I did for the last birthday and I repeated it again for this birthday is I created with my daughter Frankie, an idea.

gutted about not being able to travel. There's a whole of stuff that just kind of it was about to get us down, and I'm like, no, no, I know a lot is out of our control, but let's find out the things we can do. So once a week we have treat Day. And it's not like going out for dinner treat day. It's like stupid geeky treat day. So a couple of some days ago, I set up a picnic on the balcony. We moved all the plants around so it looked like we're in in a vineyard.

And I found out that the person who would have been playing at the vineyard we would have gone to found their Spotify playlist. Put that on. I got some Western Australian wines from the bottle shop and we sat and we had a picnic on a Sunday afternoon.

you do with what you've got in the house. But it's just a break from this mundane Like it seems like you're musing. It seems to feel down in this mundane and I'm like, we can. We can sit and wallow and faster if we want, which we can do six days a week, and then one day week, let's just do something completely stupid and random and fun. Right. So we've now got a backlog of like once a week treats that we're going to try, and they sort of vary from the crazy to the stupid, but the

common thread throughout them all is they're going to be fun. Right. It's going to be cheesy, but it's going to be fun. And it's just a nice little treat just to sort of, you know, keep your mind going and keep your mojo going.

they sound like really memorable moments. And how great is that that we can actually create these memorable moments in lockdown? And what the book talks about is it thinks about this idea we assume that these moments that stick in our memory in a good way just kind of they sort of it's random, like we can't control these amazing moments. But the book actually talks about, well you can, like

you can construct and manufacture memorable moments. And I feel like that's what you're doing with treat Day.

it's not ideal. I'd rather be Western Australia in the actual vineyard. But the next best thing is I'll go to the bottlestop, have a corner, I'll get a few bottles of bottles of the West Australian mine, and we'll recreate the right And actually, sometimes those constraints almost make it more fun, like it's more silly, and it just reminds you, like if you don't have a laugh every day or you find the thing to laugh about, you

start to question what the point is. And I think we owe that to ourselves.

know how they understood the construct and empathy. That read an article or book whatever and sort of intelligently that understood it. The actual practice of how do you demonstrate empathy? That's that's what they were struggling with. And what we found was that the default was this, and you've heard the phrager, we're all in the same boat, this realization that we might all be in the same storm, but we're in very different boats. We're experiencing we're experiencing this

in a very different, almost unique way. And so we built a very simple exercise. It was it was so liberating for a lot of our people to go, here's an exercise you can do with your people just to understand, like base level, how do you gain an understanding of the situation each individual that you're working with is going through. And in typical that lasting fashion, we made it like a scoring system. But just having that conversation opened up so much simplicity to going, oh, like none of us

can see the chaos behind the camera. And so what we do is we fill in the blanks with our own assumptions. And when we do that, it's really dangerous because our ow assumptions are normally based off our experience and our world. And so we just said, like in the next whatever, next two three weeks, whenever we're having a meeting, team, meeting, whatever, just come our X amount of time and have the conversation. What is each person's experience.

Let them share their experience of working from home, which was a combination of their work from home set up, there care responsibilities, Have they got a home office, what kind of set up have they got, how distracted are they? And what their social network and their work network was like. So we found that like newer a Lassians just haven't got the same networks that and I'm super privileged. I've got eight years, I've got networks that they haven't got.

But I've got to meet these people. So what your network was like? And then the nature of your role. Is your role one that can be done in isolationally you quite independent, or is your role one that's relying on a whold of people, in which case you're probably experiencing hell, right, now right, because you're doing the same job, but it's infinitely harder. And just getting that understanding from our teammates was this great superpower, going, ah, well, now

I know that's the situation. I'm actually I'm better informed on how I can help you. It's no longer just an intent to help. I can actually help because I understand your situation. And that's been a massive shift for us from this this almost like desire and intent to help but not knowing how I'm feeling super blocked and therefore guessing and getting it wrong, to going we don't

have to guess. All you have to do is ask, right, just as you've explained, you'd have to guess and turn up with a bowl full of food and they're like, I don't need food, I need a hug. Or I don't need a hug, I need a chat. And you're like, oh, I just guessed, right, versus don't guess, just ask and listen, and suddenly we can start to tailor our solutions to help people in a genuine fashion.

home thing. Right. My colleague Eugene, who you won't manly mentioning this, both him and his wife work full time and they've got two kids and the homeschooling right, and they've not got a spare room, so he's in the complete opposite quadrant to me. The thing is, when I'm on a zoom call with Eugene, I can't see that because Eugene is really cleanly right, he positions himself whereby he looks like it's just me and him. But what I can't see is the utter chaos going on around

he's juggling. So when we have that chat, you're like, Okay, how can we better work together? Because you've been distracted by fifty things. Every time we talk, I want to think you're not concentrating where you are. So we actually had a very purposeful conversation, how do we work better together so that you can be present and effective? And what do those times look like? And then how do

we structure this work? And so what we quickly realized was there was probably three or four hours worth of work a day that he needed to be online for. We wanted to work synchronously as a team, but the rest could be done a synchronous See like cool, you

can do that whenever you want. So suddenly the construct of nine to five has gone away, and so with different care options and responsibilities, him and his partner now managed to juggle it where they can both menifully country to work, they can homeschool, and they don't want to kill each other. Right, And so you're like, oh, I would never have been able to guess at that without asking those questions. So that hole set up your social network and then the nature of your role. We've actually

published it. It's called The Work Life Impact Play, So it's published online.

And I remembered something that Matt Mullenwack, who's the co founder of WordPress and Automatic and builds the software about a third of the Internet's websites are built on, he talked about how something he did in his life, and this was an interview I had with him quite a few years ago now, is that he would just make small changes in his physical environment to nudge himself towards

better behaviors. So, for example, on his bedside table, if he had the kindle sitting on top of the phone, he was more likely to read a book, but if he had his phone sitting on top of his kindle, he was more likely to scroll on his phone. And so what I started to do is I started to pack my iPad into a draw, not take my phone with me for a break, and instead I would have like either you know, some paper articles or a book

that I was reading on the bench. So basically making it really easy to do something that would provide a more enriching.

get approval from the VP of Talent. And it was like, well, that seems like a lot of friction, Like yeah, because we don't want you to do the fourth interview, like you shouldn't need it, like get it done in three. And so they purposely added friction to the process. Right, So there's lots of examples of that. I've been similar. But I think the problem I have with that is I have this amazing power of rushzation where every time I do anything remotely good, I congratulate myself, and whenever

I do anything bad, I choose to ignore it. One of the things I've had to do to kind of in a very similar vein but a little bit more,

a little bit more meta, was design your week. So one of the things I realized a while ago was I was like, my weeks are happening to me, and whilst I look back at them and go, yeah, it's all right or not too bad, or i'd use generic phrases, I'm like, I feel like I need to take a little bit more ownership with my week, similar to you, you want to add in more positive things, remove the negatives. And so design your week was my way of saying,

I can't just be opportunistic. I need to plan for happiness. And so what I do on a Friday afternoon is I reflect on the week that's gone, and you know whether it worked in terms of a portfolio. Did I do the right amount of stuff for this week? Did I plant some seeds this week that I're going to germinate and give me good value in the year's time. Did I nurture some existing seed, Like what did my mix of work look like? And then how did I

mix my synchronous with asynchronous time? And how much did I invest in me? And so I asked myself first questions of a fred afternoon looking back at the week that's gone. Then I designed the week ahead, and so what that means is I prioritize certain things. So one of the first things I lock in now in my week ahead is my walks, my daily walk. So I go for a walk a couple of days a week

with my girlfriend. I've got mates around the area who were in my five kilometer radius, and we go for walks, and I lock those in, right, And it's not apologetic. I'm like going to lock those in because that synchronous time that walk only works if that person is free, and I'm free, So we're going to do that then, and then I lock it on the stuffe. You got dentist, doctors, you might have dropped off kids, pick up kids. You look all that stuff in. Then you go, right, what's

my synchronous work time? And how do I agree that? What's my contract with my colleagues? You know, it's no point me being on nine till twelve if they're on one till four, right, So what's our synchronous time? And what's the purposeful things you want to do in that synchronous time? That's the highest value stuff for us to do together, and then how do I slop my asynchronous time around that. So, for example, first thing this morning, me and my girlfriend went for a walk. I've got

a morning's worth of work. From about one o'clock, we're going to sit on the balcony and read. So I've got a book that I'm in the middle of. She's got a book she's in the middle love. And the reason we're doing that is she's in full time study right now and she's got a lecture between four pm that probably finishes about eight pm. So I'll work four to eight, right, But I'm not going to work nine till twelve and fort late and everything in between, because

then I've just stretched the day. So what I've done is I've broken down the day almost into modular components, and I mix and match them. Because i know Friday afternoon, the team I'm working with is actually online in the US, They're not going to be online Friday afterning, so it doesn't matter that I'm reading, right, And it feels a bit weird the first time you do it, because I'm like, I'm getting paid and I'm reading a really good John Rishard novel. Right, but I'm not because I'm going to

work later. Right, So it's balancing the books and using your body's energy and your balance and your you know, I know you do a lot of work on chronotypes and stuff. It's like workout a scale that works for you. But for so many knowledge workers, and I know this is a privilege for knowledge workers. It doesn't have to be nine to five Monday to Friday. Right. You can start to play around at the margins and that design your week on purpose helps me get a little bit

more balanced. And then what I probably might do is adding your idea of how do I reduce the friction on the positive parts of that and maybe add a bit of friction to the negative parts.

hours a week. I'm still delivering the outcomes I need to do. All I've done is tweak the time, and I feel better for it and effective. So what is it I'm actually feeling guilty about, Like because I didn't feel guilty on Saturday. I don't think it. Lastian felt guilty on Saturday when I was working and they weren't paying me.

which makes me hungry. But so what I'm trying to do now is you know that you're on the phone, you can lock yourself out of social media.

we've we've massively over indexed. And I've shared this with you before, is that the work part of us, that the bit that gains productivity or profit, I think we've over indexed on and I believe we've under indexed on the other massively important parts of our life around people, which is our kind of family and society and the connections whether were they physical or virtual, connections we have with with family and community, around us with the planet,

So around how we think about our carbon footprint and how we live our life, you know, given the resources we've got around us, and how we don't abuse them and build a sustainable way of living life. And then purpose, like just not the simple questions. It sounds like a very simple question, but like why do I do what I do? And what's the long term impact on what I have and for me, you know, it's a constant reminder.

Even though I've talked about this a lot, it's a constant remind I've still not built the muscle, which is why I always go back to it, which is am I balanced? And if I'm not balanced? What actions can I take to true up my balance? And I think for me in the last year or so, the amount of BS articles about you know, while you're in lockdown, you should be learning new skills. And if you don't go out of lockdown with a new blah blah, I might have a bit more empathy for the experience people

are having. And maybe people just want to be balanced. Maybe doing a little bit less and I know you've done like the four day week experiment stuff. Maybe spending a little bit less time, doubling down on work, doing enough, but actually spending more time with your family and community and society, or more time on the planet and leaving a legacy or your impact right, your purpose. Maybe that will give us more happiness. And I just think we

owe it to ourselves. You know. I like to talk to about the phrase I treat yourself kindly, and people get that, but I don't think they know how it is. I'm like, all right, if you want to treat yourself kindly, give yourself a score on these four things, productivity, people, planet, and purpose. And then where you're struggling, pick an action to improve it. I can and just give it a

red hot go. And I think when we realize we've all got the same twenty four hours in a day, We've not all got the same constraints, but we've all got the same twenty four hours in a day, I think it's beholding on us to find the things that we can do, not get overly carried away with the things that we can't. And so that's just I use that as a constant anchor, a positive anchor to go where am I at and what can I do to

strike more balance? And there's a lot of that that is out of my control, but there's also a fair bit that's within my control.

When you're trying to sell me something, I tend not to reply, but most genuine LinkedIn connections, I like to have a conversation if people have got questions or queries or want to challenge me onso or even share their own ideas. I think I think we've got way more to give to the community if we stop trying to sell to each other. So any of those any of those.

by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios. And thank you to Mattin Nimba who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.