Hi, I’m Elizabeth Adams. I’m one of the Prosper career coaches and this really short session is for anyone who’s struggling to make progress with Prosper, for any number of reasons that all feel about time. I meet a lot of people who struggle with time and I don’t think it’s that you’re bad at time management. Anyone who’s got to doing a postdoc is probably really good at time management. There are multiple priorities, deadlines all the time, lots of different pulls on your time, family, life outside of your postdoc, as well. You’ve got all these to contend with and I’ve split this session into two so that one is about helping you think what really is the barrier that’s stopping me to progressing with Prosper’ and one which is more about thinking, okay, how do I get restarted, how to get engaged, how do I keep up those habits and motivations to really start making progress with it again and come back to it? It’s a little bit about thinking about time and how we relate to it, a little bit about thinking about habits and how do we start forming the positive habits that we want to see. You’re going to need a pen and paper for this, so you might have to pause the video. Get your pen and think about, what’s been the real challenge for you in Prosper? We’re thinking about a specific time or a situation where you were going to do something to do with Prosper – maybe that was looking at an event or a resource, doing some research, fixing up your CV – and then you didn’t. When I say, ‘Prosper,’ I’m using that as shorthand for to do with your career development. It doesn’t need to be the Prosper resources but something to do with thinking about your career planning and progressing with that. In that specific situation, what was it that actually stopped you? What did you find yourself doing instead? How were you feeling at the time? What else was going on? What other nagging doubts, things were you telling yourself in your head? What did you notice about yourself and that context that you were in? Where were you physically and mentally? What outcome would you have liked there to be in this situation? Pause the video, write a few notes on this and then we can go on to the next session. So, we asked our Prosper participants this year, through a survey, and unsurprisingly most of them said work was what got in the way; work, work, work. Absolutely, but thinking about what type of work, so we’ll do some of that. Potentially for some people, it was the lack of structure. Prosper has this challenge where in order to make it meaningful for you, it has to be about finding your own path through it. That means there is lots and lots of stuff. There is no clear start and end point and the Prosper groups that I’ve worked with have approached this in really different ways and there is definitely no one way that fits everybody and it wouldn’t be good to be too prescriptive I think because then you wouldn’t make it meaningful for you. I think finding that place to start for yourself is really important here, the same for time management strategies. There is not one size fits all because, generally, the reasons why people are struggling are very personal and complex. There are no answers but there will be some tips. I understand some people finding it difficult to know where to prioritise their efforts when so much is going on and you’re almost getting this sort of flight or flight, freeze mode where you’re like, I’ll just not do anything because I don’t know what’s going on; I don’t know where is best to use my efforts, and it’s a little bit overwhelming. Notice if that’s you. For some people, there has been something else has come up in work or an unexpected illness, caring responsibilities, something else which has left them feeling like they’re playing catch-up. There is now a backlog of things. Again, they’re not sure which ones to prioritise. They’ve lost those habits and the good habits of being able to keep on top of things and that feeling of overwhelm almost makes them want to sweep it under the carpet and not know how to get back in. Again, just notice if that’s you. For some people, there have been frustrations with logging into the Prosper system, the technology and timescales for videos get put up. Maybe there’s been a preference for live sessions. Again, just noticing, what are the stories you’re telling yourself about Prosper in your head? Where are the frustrations? Who or what are you blaming when you haven’t been able to do it? How do you feel about it? Some of the other things that I’ve noticed through working with people are this difficulty in saying no. That might be saying no to an opportunity, a work opportunity. So, in a positive sense, great thing, going to do this. Maybe that’s a little bit of fear of missing out in which situation, it’s good to ask yourself for what the evidence is to help you say, ‘Yes,’ or, ‘No.’ What are my criteria for saying yes or no to something? Then, what evidence do I have that I would miss out if I didn’t do this? What evidence do I have that this will be good for my career, so being able to take those decisions in a more structured and evidence-based way, so that you’re intentional about how you’re spending your time? Some people also have difficulty saying, ‘No,’ because they feel this guilt. Again, just noticing that in yourself. We all know that guilt is not a particularly helpful emotion, so how can you translate that into something, again, that’s a little bit more evidence-based? How do I know that I’m the only person that would be able to do this? How do I know that, actually, someone else might not benefit from doing this? What are the other options? Could I potentially delay this for a few months? Would that option still be open to me? Then, again, for some people, it’s about people-pleasing and not finding ways to say, ‘No,’ to people because they feel it’s too challenging. I think if that’s something that you struggle with, notice that is the thing that’s behind you making progress with Prosper and just write it down and we’ll come back to these things later, or you might want to look at some other resources as well. The other thing that I struggle with myself, sometimes – and I’ve noticed people in Prosper sometimes struggle with – is this idea of perfectionism or guilt that I should always be doing more. It’s almost like you leave doing the Prosper thing until you have a good chunk of time until you feel that you can really do it justice and maybe you want to have this two-hour gap in your diary where you can really dig deep into your CV, do some research, and really do Prosper as well as you possibly can. Again, maybe there’s something about breaking that down into smaller goals so that you know that you can be making process, but it doesn’t have to have that long period of time. Then, just making sure that you notice that you’re making that progress, so you can put down some of that guilt Then, this third thing is this stoicism. This is a word that I’ve come across a lot when talking to postdocs about their career. It’s something that’s really valued in academia and that’s got its positives but also its negatives. You have to be stoical to work through research and all the challenges of when it doesn’t work. We all recognise that and things don’t work and that’s the nature of research. You have to be stoical and that’s valued so much that, actually, people start to think, oh, I just have to be stoical at all costs. Maybe there’s a bit of overvaluing of that. If you’re struggling to manage your time because you’re just constantly feeling like you need to put more and more time into things that aren’t working, again, it’s just about recognising that, taking a step back and looking for the evidence that will help you make future decisions; rather than feeling yourself getting sucked into it, through lots of different emotions that are going on. Now, I want you to think about a time when you did find the time to do a Prosper activity or a career development activity. What was the context there? Where were you? Where were you physically and mentally? How did it feel and what did you notice? Pause the video, write some notes. Now, I want you to think about what, from that, can you take forward to help you be in the right space and context to be able to do other career development activities? What are the positive emotions and feelings that you want to tap into? How is that going to help you build your motivation? Motivation builds from getting those positive feedback signals, so how can you start on that journey? You might have seen this matrix before in a traditional time management workshop, where you’re asked to categorise your plans ahead for the week as to how important they are and how urgent they are. If something’s really, really important and urgent, you’ll do it right away. If something is urgent but not important that tends to be other people’s priorities and deadlines that they’re pushing on to you. We label those as interruptions. If something isn’t urgent but is important, that tends to be the Prosper work. You know it’s important for your future career, but it’s not urgent and so sometimes it gets pushed back but that’s actually the space where you do quality work, so not quite at that pressure of a deadline that’s got to be tomorrow. You’ve got the space to really think about your goals, think about the quality work. Then, for a lot of us, there is the bottom left-hand corner and there are your distractions, so they’re not urgent and they’re not important. That might be looking at social media. It might be other tasks and things/admin that you’re doing. Sometimes, that’s a retreat that place, you go to it because everything else feels quite overwhelming and you’ll just end up surfing your phone or trying to make progress with busy work that you know isn’t really that important. I think, sometimes, the trap there with Prosper is that you might think, I don’t know what to do so I’ll just go and tick off some of the resources, so you feel like you’re getting a little bit of a buzz because you’re doing Prosper stuff but, actually, is that the thing that’s going to make a difference? Is it going to be meaningful for you? That distraction area, it’s worth noticing when you’re going into that so that you can, then, be aware, okay, I’m falling into this area. I need something to pull myself out of that and pull myself out of my own thoughts. Although this is used as a tool, quite often, for forward planning, today I want you just to use it as a way of thinking about, where was I in the last week? Again, just pause the video and draw out the grid and write a few notes of when you did each one of these things. What were the activities that you were doing that were in crisis mode? What things were you doing that were actual quality work and goal-setting? Where were you fighting with distractions or interruptions and how much time did you spend on each of these? Do that now. There’s a really nice story about how we think about time. Some of you might remember in school you did the science experiments where you added peas and rice and sand into a measuring cylinder and you say that if you added the sand or the rice first, you couldn’t, then, fit the peas in. If you fitted in the peas first and then you put in the smaller things the rice would cluster around about it and then the sand. Then, you could probably fit some more water in as well. The way that we plan our time is a little bit like that, as well. If you’re just putting all the distractions, all the small things, all that sand, you won’t be able to fit in the bigger chunks of things so the quality, meaningful work… Instead, you have to find a way of working out your time so that you’ve worked out what the quality, meaningful work is. You get that into your diary. You protect that time in all sorts of ways. Put that in first, build everything else around it and then celebrate when you’ve done it so that you know that you’re accountable to yourself – and, possibly, to other people – and you can make progress with doing the really important things to you. We’re going to leave that there just now. The purpose of this video was really to help you notice that there are lots of different reasons why you might not be making progress with Prosper and career development. It’s not always about time management, but there will be different things for different people. If you can nail down what that is for you, then you can start to address that.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

Hi, I’m Elizabeth Adams. I’m one of the Prosper career coaches. This really short video is about helping you get back started with making progress with Prosper and your career development, re-engaging with it and finding good habits that help you to make progress, and actually understand and notice how you’re making progress. This statement – people are happiest when making progress with meaningful work – isn’t going to come as a surprise. But what I want you to do is think about what that really means for you in Prosper. We’re all hard-wired to think about risk and reward, so to look for the positive feedback when you get a reward and something feels like it’s making progress. But also to stay away from the risky activities. For us it’s about thinking: which bits of Prosper feel a little bit risky and why am I staying away from that? Which bits feel like they’re rewarding? How can I build up good habits around those? We’ll look at a few ways to do that and a few tweaks you can make to your schedule and how you think about Prosper and how you engage, which bits of it you engage with. The first thing is about making it meaningful for you and not for anyone else. So, it’s quite unstructured but that’s because it helps you to find the way through that’s actually going to make the difference for you. It’s not about doing all the resources, going to all the events, looking at all the different videos and career clusters. It’s about doing quality Prosper, not quantity and blocking out those chunks in your diary so that you can do the quality work. But first you need to really understand why you’re doing it, so pause the video for now and just think about: what are the reasons why I really want to engage with this? Then have them front and centre in your mind. Now I want you to think about the what and the how. Sometimes we get so stuck on thinking about one track, so thinking about the why are we doing this, that actually it feels like we can’t engage with that anymore. If you flick tracks and think about the what and the how. If you were thinking about winning a race – and I used to do lots of cycling – I didn’t visualise the party I was going to have at the end when I won the race, or standing up on the podium. I was thinking about: what are the things that I’m going to be doing that are going to maximise my chances of winning that race? So, if you can start to plan some of those out and start getting things in the diary where you can do a quality bit of Prosper time. It doesn’t have to be a huge bit of time; it could just be 25 minutes. This is the crucial thing; knowing what you’re going to do with that time. Otherwise it’d be really easy to just lose that 25 minutes, ‘I’ll just catch up with one email, I’ll just get the washing on.’ Suddenly that time has gone. So, your first thing to do might be to think about: if I have five blocks of twenty-five minutes in the next two months, what actions am I going to take in each one of those? So you need that planning time upfront so that you can then make sure that the quality time that you do have is meaningful and productive and useful for you. Here are some tips on how you can get started with making progress, whether that’s because you were really enthusiastic with Prosper at the beginning and then you fell off and you feel that you’ve lost that habit and the motivation, or maybe because you’ve reached a point where it doesn’t feel as easy. Maybe because there are some decisions to be made or something else has got in the way, an unexpected life or family event. How can you get back into it? The first thing is about being really honest with yourself that motivation doesn’t show up on its own. We know that. You can’t wait until someone comes and tells you that you want to go to the gym. You’ve got to start something small, even if it’s that quick walk round the block. That will lead up to something bigger and you start to get those rewards and positive reinforcement because you’ve achieved something. You start small and then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So, don’t wait; do one Prosper thing even if it’s just for ten minutes and then look for those positive reinforcements. Then learn what your procrastination loops are and your progress loops and how to disrupt them. If for example you have a New Year’s resolution that you don’t want to eat as much cake when you’re working from home and you know the cake is just there, you might notice that you have a particular loop that at ten o’clock in the morning you’re kind of like a little bit tired, get up from your computer. You go to the fridge and that’s when you get a snack. So, maybe that’s something that you want to disrupt. The first step is in recognising that loop and then the next step is finding a way to disrupt it. A useful way to do that is thinking about your if-then statements. If I find myself having a bit of a slump at ten am and I go to the fridge then I’m going to have a sign up on the fridge that says, ‘Hey, why not go for a walk?’ Or, ‘Have a different type of snack.’ You’ve got to make it really easy for yourself and have those reminders. Another one would be if you were trying to remember to floss your teeth. If I pick up my toothbrush then I need to floss my teeth first. What are your if-then statements for Prosper? What are the things that you can do so that if I find that I’m telling myself, ‘It’s too overwhelming’ then I’ll schedule 20 minutes just to make some goals. If I find that I don’t know what to write on my CV then I’ll go back to my notes from a previous session. Or maybe I’ll go back to my why of why am I doing Prosper? Just have something that disrupts you. It could just be something very, very simple like going out for a walk, something that takes you out of that spiral of, if I feel like I’m too busy then I’ll remind myself about the long-term goals. We focus on the positives or the fun bits of Prosper. We work best when we’re doing meaningful work that we enjoy and that has a purpose. There will be bits that you’ve enjoyed in Prosper. If you think back, what are the bits that really hit with or align with your values where you’ve felt like, yes, I enjoy this. I like the researching bit or I like talking to people. If you focus on those first and try to do more of those and the bits that give you that positive feedback then the rest can come later. Don’t focus on the bit that you feel you have to do, because that’s not going to be very motivating. It’s okay to engage with Prosper in the way that suits you and your particular view of time and the world. Block up all the rabbit holes so where is it that you go to procrastinate? What are the activities you do? Is it looking at emails? Can you turn them off? Is it looking at your phone? Can you go and hide that somewhere else? What are the other things that you do to procrastinate, and the busy work? Can you shut them off so that you can just focus on this one bit of quality work for a time? Set some small goals – so not the outcome, not the standing on the podium – but the smaller goals that you do have control over and are the right goals for you. They won’t be the same as anyone else. It’s got to be something crucially that you do have control over so it won’t be the outcome. What is the process of Prosper that you want to have control over and to move forward? That might be updating your CV. It might be updating your LinkedIn profile. It might be speaking to a few different people about their jobs. It might be spending half-an-hour looking at the jobs on LinkedIn, writing down skills that you are interested in developing, or exploring whether you have those skills. Find something and think about that process rather than the outcome. Then find a way to be accountable. That might be to yourself. This is my secret; that I actually really like colouring things in, so I’ll colour things in if I feel like I’ve made progress. I’ll have a little person and I’ll colour it in every time I make another step on my way. It could be an app or it could be just someone else. Just knowing that you’ve got some way of checking in with yourself that you have met your different goals. Find that accountability and make sure you do that measuring and recording progress so that you can see that you’re starting to progress towards that outcome. It all builds up. It’s not just, ‘I’ll start prosper today, I reach outcome tomorrow.’ There will be different parts of the process, but really recognise every time that we go round our Prosper group and everyone tells me, ‘Oh, I haven’t done anything yet’, that is normal. Actually when you think about it, you probably have done some career things. Sometimes we’re quite tough on ourselves and we don’t always recognise that. So, just take some time at the end of the week to note down what you’ve done, or make it visual if that works for you. Really celebrate the small wins, so give yourself a break. You’ve probably done some great things. Find a way to celebrate that and share with other people. Notice that you’ve done something. That will then give you the positive reinforcement that you’ll want to do more and you’ll want to keep engaging with your career development because you know it’s something that’s really important for you. You’ve thought about your why. You’ve thought about the process and now you can go forward and do it. I know it all sounds very simple and that there are lots and lots of life things that come in from all different directions that we don’t have control over. But if you can come back to these things and just take them one at a time, whenever that happens, then hopefully that can keep shifting you back on track. It won’t be an easy thing but it’s about being intentional with where you’re spending your time rather than being reactive and just addressing the things that come in or the things that are on your phone at the time. I’m wishing you all the best with that intentional use of time. Good luck.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

Today we are here for the first day of the Time and Energy Secrets Five-Day Challenge, so we will be here, every morning for 5 days, for 15 minutes to take you from a place that might be quite tired, exhausted, overwhelmed, worrying how you might even fit Prosper into everything that you already do already, into something much more empowered by the end of the week where you’ve got full control over your own time and energy. Let’s dig into today’s session. We are on day one today of the Time and Energy Secrets Challenge. Secret number one is a high-performance audit, because in order to know where we want to get to with our time and energy, we need to kind of get to grips with what’s happening right now. Before we do that, I want to tell you a little story about my own challenges with time and energy. Some of you will know, some of you may not know, that I’ve also progressed through an academic pathway. When I first started out in my chemistry degree, 43 per cent of the undergraduates were women. Everywhere I looked there was people just like me, all around. I didn’t really notice that there was any kind of leaky pipeline or any problem until the last year of my PhD. I’d just got married. We were starting to think about having a family, so I did this mental flip of two steps ahead, and I noticed that in a department of over 200, only 5 were women. Of those five women, only two had young children. That started to sort of put some seeds of doubt and questions in my mind if this academic pathway was going to be even possible for me, and I conjured up an image of a part-time professor, but it just didn’t look like part-time working was going to be possible. I was recommended for a post-doc, so I just took the next step on that career conveyor belt. Two weeks into that post-doc – I was on a 12-month contract – I fell pregnant. That combination of having been recommended, felt like I didn’t really get it from my own CV and credentials, it was that recommendation, and layering on top of that having gotten pregnant, I felt like I really needed to push to prove myself. Therein started the problems that I had with time and energy in a really big way. I felt like I was always very expendable, like there was another 100 people lined up to take my position, and I really worried about getting that contract extended after that 12 months. I started to say yes to everything, became the go to person to get things done. You know? Working evenings and weekends became a standard occupational hazard. My husband, in my mind, just simply didn’t understand the pressure I was under and what I had to get done. A couple of weeks before I went on maternity leave, people started to give me lots of advice. One person said, ‘Oh, I went back to work two weeks after giving birth. I was on a fellowship. I got a nanny.’ Another person said, ‘I wrote my fellowship in the first 12 weeks after giving birth. They don’t do much for the first 12 weeks.’ I had lots of advice. ‘Make maternity leave look like it didn’t even happen on your CV. Erase that thing. Write grants. Write papers, do all the stuff.’ It really left me feeling like I needed to do something with my maternity leave beyond just having a child. Five days after I had a one-litre haemorrhage giving birth, I was back on the computer furiously typing, typing away to project partners across Europe. That really was the start of my kind of… I call it superwoman mode, but you could call it superhuman mode, of over-giving all the time and doing too much. I felt at that time I had so many plates spinning that, if I put them down. it would all come crashing down around me. It’s madness. It’s absolutely madness to behave in that way, and it has a detrimental effect not just on our health, our relationships, but our careers too. If we are so busy working in our careers, head down, producing, producing that we forget to look up and, on our careers, those people that come in behind us that are very clear about what they want and articulate where they want to go will leapfrog ahead of us, no matter whether we’re in academia or beyond academia at this point. I carried on working that way for a very, very long time. It was completely exhausting, if I have to be honest. I thought, how is everyone else doing this around me? Why do I feel like I’m the only one that can’t keep up here? It wasn’t really until I woke up one morning and I found a hard lump in my left breast that two weeks later, I was at a doctor’s office and they ran a probe over it, all the tests and they said, ‘It’s not what you think it is. It’s a lymph node that’s migrated from your armpit to your breast tissue. Have you been really poorly recently?’ I said, ‘No, I’ve not been really poorly.’ I knew the answer on the way home. I had been going too hard for too long. Something had to change. I had to change. I had to be different. This week really is about learning that new approach. I spent an awful lot of time, energy, and money in figuring this stuff out, and I’m distilling all of those lessons and tools into the next five days so that you don’t have to go through the kind of journey that I did to get to this point. We can cut to the chase and get you these tools much sooner in your career, so that you don’t have to do what I did. I’m just going to go to the chat box, because Rosa is saying it sounds very familiar. Unfortunately, my story is just one of many stories of people who get to the point of burnout in academia. The point of where our health, our relationships, and a whole heap of other things in our lives are suffering because of our own behaviours. Let’s have a look at some of these tools today, because you are the major asset in your career, not your laptop, not the piece of equipment in the lab, not anything else, but you. Remember, if you go down, everything else goes down around you. We need to start to act and prioritise ourselves as the major assets that we are. What would you be prioritising or doing differently if you treated yourself like the major asset that you are? I want you to think about that question for a moment and then put your answers in the chat box. What would you be prioritising or doing differently if you treated yourself like the major asset that you are in your career and in your life? I’ll go quiet and you can put… Remember, in the chat box you can do a direct message to me if you want to keep it anonymous, or you can reply to everybody. What would you be prioritising or doing differently if you started to treat yourself like the major asset that you are? Kathy is saying, ‘I would be trying to get more sleep and more self-care.’ Yes. You will be prioritising your own needs, essentially, own basic needs to be just okay and functioning in the world like sleep and prioritising yourself. We’ll be talking about needs in another session. We have speaking up for myself and making sure I cover my needs more. Thank you. We’ve got taking more time for myself and my well-being. This comes back to taking care of ourselves first. Many of us don’t feature in the equation of work-life balance, yet we’re the ones that have to be there to make it all work. We’ve got spend more time with the family. Yumna is saying health, wellness and have more time with the family. Patricia is saying ensuring time off and wellness. Rosa is saying, ‘I will work on the hour,’ so I think sticking to the kind of boundaries and schedules, and Rahul is saying, ‘Not working – thinking about work outside of working hours.’ This is what I call an energy hangover. We’ll talk about a tool to help you with that in one of the other sessions, where we are still thinking and mulling over work the whole time when we’re with other people and doing other things. How to start to shut that down so we can be fully present for the things and the people that mean most to us. We’ve got, I would focus on my own work rather than ending up prioritising other people’s projects. That’s one of the main challenges I hear a lot, and we will be looking at a tool to help you with that tomorrow. Katerina is saying, ‘I should contain working hours more on a daily basis to get better routine, but that is probably something I have me to blame for, not academia. Just a true workaholic.’ Yes, because we take ourselves wherever we go. If we’re exhibiting these behaviours in academia, yes, there is the culture of competition and overwork in academia, but equally if we take ourselves somewhere else, the grass isn’t always greener. Sometimes we just replay out the same behaviours again. Part of that is to do with why we exhibit the behaviours in the first place. For example, are we trying to prove ourselves in a workplace, or the other beliefs that lead to us doing those behaviours? Or do we simply just don’t have the tools to know how to do this in a different way? We’ll have a look at that too. Jenny’s saying, ‘Prioritise the parts of my job I actually find interesting and enjoy.’ Yes. That we can actually find more flow and more happiness and fun in the work that we are doing. These are really interesting answers. Thank you so much for that. This is the first tool that I want to introduce you to, and we’re going to do a high-performance audit this morning on your leadership platform. In terms of having a really stable platform for your leadership imagine a stool, but instead of four legs, we actually have five legs and we want to make sure that we’ve got a really stable set of legs for that seat to sit on, or tabletop. At the bottom we have our own foundation for growth. This is our leadership trajectory. On the top we have a platform for our own leadership, how we’re going to spring ahead into our leadership. The five pillars that we need to consider planning for on a weekly basis are our relationships, so these could be our intimate relationships, whether you have a partner or family that you look after, or a wider set of family and relationships can also be with friends, colleagues and those kind of relationships too. The health pillar is to do meeting our own needs as well. These are things like food, sleep, water, exercise, fresh air, alone time, connection time with other people, which also kind of falls under this one too. That’s our health. Then in our career pillar, we want to make sure that we are planning in our career too. I know I used to fall into the trap of just showing up, seeing what came into the inbox and seeing what was urgent, and getting stuff done, and then trying to fit in other projects around that. We need to start to make sure we’re being really focused with that. In the wealth pillar – this is one that I hear the most for post-docs as well – is that we kind of let go of thinking about wealth. We need to make sure that we are having time to actually measure and test what’s coming in and what’s going out so we don’t get into trouble, but also thinking about our long-term trajectory as well. When we start in a post-doc, we have already lost a good number of years of not earning a long-term pension pot or long-term investment portfolio. We need to start to think about that because we’ve got a good number of years to catch up on, and that’s something I talk about a lot. Then personal development too. For you, you have all committed to the Prosper project, so this is one of your personal development projects at the moment. We need to make sure that that is featuring in your calendar system on a weekly basis at the moment, and any other personal development that you’re doing too. It’s a separate entity to career itself. What I want you to do first is a leadership audit. This is the performance audit. We want to take each pillar in turn, our wealth, personal development, relationships, health and career, and I want you to give them a score, each one a score between zero and ten where zero… Well, let’s start with ten. Where ten out of ten is, I am doing amazing in this pillar of my life, it’s exactly how I want it to be, I’m getting the outcomes that I’m looking for and I can’t see how it could be even better. Zero out of ten is, oops, I completely forgot that that was even a thing in my life. That’s what I want you to do right now. Give each of these different pillars a score between zero and ten, and then you can share them in the chat box, what your performance audit is. Katerina is saying, ‘My highest is career,’ of course, this is what I tend to find, ‘And lowest is wealth.’ Okay. That’s something that’s completely fallen off the radar. Good to know. Rebecca is saying, ‘The highest is health and the lowest is relationships and wealth.’ Jenny is saying, ‘Lowest is wealth for me too.’ We have an anonymous one; lowest wealth and career, and the highest relationships. They will be different for each and every person. Rosa is saying, ‘Personal development, four; career, seven; wealth, seven; health, eight; and relationships, eight.’ We can see that for Rosa, she’s got quite a good handle on lots of different pillars, but that personal development in particular could do with a bit of oomph behind it. Nikki’s saying, ‘My highest is health, and my lowest is relationships.’ Thank you to all of those that are sharing in the chat box. It’s really interesting to see, and you’ll note that there are some similarities and also some differences between people too. Action one is to share the performance audit, which you’ve all been doing. Make sure you make a note of it, because this is something you can keep auditing on a weekly or at least a monthly basis to see where you’re at with these things. Action number two is to reflect. Having looked at this performance audit, what is your biggest opportunity to improve? Or where is your biggest opportunity to improve? Let us know in the chat box. Where is your biggest area of opportunity to improve? Some of you have started to say it might be your lowest score, but you might actually decide that it’s one of the other pillars where you really want to focus. Let us know which area would you like to focus on in the next, really, quarter, so the next quarter of this year, to see an opportunity to improve those performance audits. Kat’s saying personal development, excellent. Personal development and career. Ren’s is career, Katarina’s relationships, and Rosa, ‘Spend more time on personal development, hopefully with the help of Prosper.’ Absolutely, you’re in the right place for that. Rahul is saying personal development, and Kat’s saying personal development and career. We’ve got health and career, career. Yes, so lots of personal developments, and/or relationships and health, and career. Yes. Wonderful. Really well done, everybody. Yes, you are all naturally by being part of Prosper going to increase those scores in personal development, as long as you’re blocking out time to do that. That’s one of the things that we’re going to be working on tomorrow. Thank you so much for your attention today. We will be here the same time tomorrow to take it to the next level, and we’ll be looking at the art of becoming indistractable tomorrow, because distractions are one of the things that causes the most energy leakages. I’m really looking forward to seeing you all this time tomorrow. Keep those scores to mind and keep your notes, and keep coming back to the notes every time that we’re here together. We will build upon these each and every day. I hope you had a good time, and I will see you all tomorrow morning. Bye for now.

This is the Time and Energy Secrets Five-Day Challenge. Now, yesterday I introduced the Five-Day Challenge. The first part was all about thinking about planning in multiple different competing areas of your life in order to find this mythical unicorn beast, which is the work-life balance. Today we’re moving on to secret number 2, which is the art of becoming in-distractible. Now, it really is the skill of the century. I have three children. My middle child, Jenson, about five years ago, he was really into superheroes. He had this book that he wanted to read every single night. In that book it was all about: which superpower would you choose if you had a choice? Now, I never did hear the answer to that story with him because a phone notification pinged up on my phone. I went down into my phone, a very important email, responded to it. By the time I looked up again he had walked out the room. I sent a really clear message to him on that day; that whatever was on my phone was more important than him. That’s simply not the case. I know my own values and I know that I am a full-time mum first and a business owner second. But in that moment I told him something, a completely different story. There isn’t anything in life that doesn’t depend on our ability to control our own attention spans. This isn’t really a new problem. Many of us think it’s the design of smartphones and other things like that that have become the smartphone era and we can’t suddenly concentrate on things, but it’s not true. Two-thousand five-hundred years ago Plato talked about this particular problem himself. He talked about Akrasia, which is acting against our own better judgement. That’s what happens when we get distracted. I like to look at the etymology of words to really understand this at a deeper level. When I say the word distraction, what is the opposite of distraction? Most people will say focus. Actually when we look at the etymology of the word, the opposite of distraction is actually traction; that grinding, that actually moving forwards in some way whereas that distraction is moving us away from what we want. You’ll notice that each word has the word action in it. Whether you are moving forwards – which is an action – or you’re moving away from what you want, it’s still an action. It’s an action that we’re taking; it’s not something that happens to us. This is what I hear quite a lot from other people. ‘I couldn’t do what I wanted to do because I got distracted.’ When I ask that question, ‘What did you get distracted from?’ They say, ‘Well, it was the boss, the children, the dog, the cat ate my homework’, whatever it is. But actually in this day and age, we can’t call something a distraction unless we have something time blocked in our calendar for us to be distracted from. Otherwise we just simply didn’t plan effectively. You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it’s actually distracting you from. We have to make time for that traction. This is what we’re going to do for today’s challenge. We are going to take each of those five different pillar areas: we have health, wealth, relationships, personal development and career. You’re going to brain dump your to-do list under each of those pillar areas. Now, some people will find it easier to just brain-dump everything on a sheet of paper and then prioritise. Other people will like the headings of each different pillar area and try and dump within each one. Whichever way works for you is fine. You’re then going to prioritise: A, B, C, and D. A means absolutely has to get done today, absolutely has to. B means, it would be nice if I got to that today. C means, I’ll see if I get to it. C tasks for me are like those admin tasks; as soon as you do one – like for example the Hoovering, that’s a household task. As soon as I’ve done the Hoovering, I know it’s going to come back round again. There’ll be more of that Hoovering at some point in the future. Those kind of tasks. D is anything that you could possibly delegate to somebody else. If you knew unequivocally that they would say yes, then put a D next to it and the initials of the person who you possibly could delegate to. Then you’re going to sub-prioritise so for each of those As in particular you’re going to have an A1, A2, A3. If you have a really big A task – like it’s a big whole project – see if you can start to break that project down into some smaller A tasks. These need to be mindful of tasks that you could actually achieve in, say, a 90-minute time block. If you’ve got something that’s too big it’s going to be very difficult for you to get traction because it’s never going to feel like you’ve moved forwards. You’re still going to be on that project every single day, so we need some smaller chunks. Then what we’re going to do is share this week’s A1 tasks for each pillar. You’re actually going to do this now. What we then do is some scheduling. For each priority task we want to make sure that there’s a time block in your calendar for it. Before you could start to shout at me and say, ‘I have no control over my calendar. The meetings are dictated here. I’ve got to do this thing there.’ Believe me, I get it. There is an ‘and’. I want you to be your own advocate for your own time and energy. I had a client at York University who went to her supervisor and she said, ‘When we have meetings in the morning, the mornings are when I’m the most effective at work. Can we shift all meetings to the afternoon so I’ve got the mornings to actually spend on moving tasks forward?’ The supervisor said, ‘I will give you one week to see if it actually works and see if you get more productive.’ In one week the supervisor came back to him and said, ‘Yes, you keep doing that. We’ll keep putting the meetings afternoon because it’s really working well.’ So, don’t think that you can’t challenge and ask to shift things that you feel are completely solid and that you don’t have any control over. The keel zone is the time of day when you are at your best. This is when you really focus, when you do your best work, when you’re the most productive and fruitful out of all the other times during the day. For some of you it will be early in the morning at 6:00 am. For people like me it’s around this time actually is where I would put my keel zone, 9:00 until half-10:00. For others it’s the afternoon, late evening, 11 o’clock at night, 1:00 in the morning. Let me know in the chat box right now: when is your keel zone? It’s usually around the 90-minute to two-hour block when you’re at your best in terms of focus and productivity. Let us know in the chat box; when is your keel zone? Let me know. You’re all going so fast. Rosie’s saying 9:30 until 12:00. Gerald is 9:00 until 11:00. Another 9:00 to 11:00 from Esmerelda. Jenny, the same. Cai is 2:00 until 5:00. One afternooner. Cat’s is at midday. Don’t you get hungry, Cat? I can’t cope with that. Rebecca is 8:00 until 10:00. Yes, so we’ve got some early morningers, afternoon and mid-afternooners. Brian, you’re saying now? Well, you’re in the right place for your keel zone. Andy is 4:00 until 7:00. The only thing that we need to be… Cat’s saying: between coffee and lunch, and a number of times I’m late for lunch because I end up in the zone. That’s how you know when you’re in the zone; because you forget to stop as well. We have to kind of make sure that we’re putting a block around that time so that we don’t end up without our lunch. Katerina is saying, ‘I find it varies.’ If you find that it varies, start to track it for a week and see if you can find any commonality on a weekly basis. Often it’s just that we haven’t quite tuned into it yet. That would be my suggestion to you, Katerina. Wonderful, so really well done with that. Now, the thing to say is, there were a few of you who said 4:00 until 7:00 pm. Now, that might be fine for your particular make-up in terms of where you live, who you live with, all that kind of stuff. If you get a clash with your keel zone and your life – so if my keel zone was 4:00 until 7:00 it would have a major clash with the fact that I’ve got three children – that’s when we have to find the next best time to actually fit that keel zone in. It might be that actually it has to shift forward and say 2:00 until 4:00 or 3:00 until 5:00 for example. Wonderful, so what we’re trying to do is make sure that we do our A1 priority task as close to the start of the day as humanly possible, and making sure that the A1 task gets completed ideally on a Monday. Imagine you’ve finished your A1 task in career Monday morning before midday. Anything else that comes after that is going to feel like a super bonus. It’s really going to drive the momentum that you’re looking for. I suggest that you have a break between the time blocks and you have another priority task here and then lunch. After lunch is a great time when your brain is in your pancreas to actually go ahead and do your email triage. Notice that I’ve not said checking email at the start of the day. That is a sure-fire way to end up changing your whole day structure and your priorities based on other people’s important tasks. That’s why I’m doing it after lunch because then I’ve got an admin hour. I triage the email. Anything that is urgent for other people can get done in the afternoon. This is when I batch together other people’s important tasks with my B priority tasks. I don’t overschedule this. I don’t schedule more than 40 per cent of my time because I know stuff is going to come in during the day that I’ve not accounted for. Just new things happen every day. Then email triage and wrap-up at the end of the day. This is when again we check the email, we reprioritise for the next day, do a brain dump and make sure that we are set with our priority tasks for the morning so we know exactly what we’re doing when we’re coming in without looking at any emails from anybody. Now, some of you might be going, ‘I couldn’t possibly do that.’ With all of these things, be our own biggest experiment. Just try it out. See what happens. If you feel that this is going to be inappropriate for your working relationships, just try it for a week. See what happens. You can even put an out of office on your email saying, ‘I check my emails every lunchtime at this time. You can expect a response during that period of time.’ Be your own best advocate. This thing right at the end is called a bridging ritual. Some people talk about having – and you talked about it yesterday in your major challenges – an energy hangover between work and getting home where we’re still in our head churning over work even though we’re in front of the people and/or things that mean most to us. So, a bridging ritual is something that helps us bridge the gap and close down work and open up that other parts of our lives. Now, these can be really simple things. Even just doing the brain dump of everything and reprioritising the next day can be a bridging ritual. For others it could be having a shower, changing your clothes, getting a nice-smelling hand cream. That can be a bridging ritual. Taking the dog for a walk, going for a bike ride. Anything that has you change your state in some way. It’s also not just a physical thing but a mental shift, too, where you say: okay, this is closed down. Work mode is off. I’m now switching into – for me it might be family mode first and then self-care. For others it might be straight switch into self-care mode, but do the physical and mental shift. Wonderful. If you don’t plan your day effectively, someone else will. This is when other people’s priorities and workloads take over our own – even though we have our own better judgement to effect for that. This is what I want you to do today, then. The action is to get each A1 task in your priority area. So, for example – and then you’re going to schedule them – for example in health this week my A1 task, and it might be multiple things, is: to do two pool swims, two weights sessions, one walk and a 5K open water swim. Those are my maintenance tasks in health so they’re pretty much the same every week. Relationships: this week all I have to do is call my friend. That is my A1 task. In personal development: I’m doing a new course so my A1 task is some pre-course reading and reading one chapter per night. In career my A1 task is: I’ve got to do a tender for the SIGN Network. In wealth: I’ve got to complete my monthly reconciliation. That is just keeping up to date with making sure I’m checking in on my business accounts and my personal accounts on a weekly basis.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

We are on the Time and Energy Secrets 5 Day Challenge. Now during the first session, we looked at how do we actually find balance? Finding the balance was around looking at five different pillars of our lives. Usually, there can also be multiple competing different areas of our lives, where we feel like we might be doing really well in one area, but to the detriment of some of the other areas. It feels like we might be doing quite well, but then failing across other areas. That can often lead to a lot of guilt too. In the session yesterday we looked at the art of becoming indistractable, and how to start to plan for all of these multiple different competing areas of our lives by creating a work plan for the week, which had our A1 tasks in each of these different pillars, that are actually factored into our time blocks in our calendar. If like me you go quite hard on the career pillar, it’s always a good top tip to plan for the other pillars in your calendar first, before you start to add the stuff for work. It’s super-easy to eclipse work, and eclipse everything else for the detriment of work. That brings us to today’s session, and this is secret number three. This is the big one really. It’s making the shift from time management to energy management. Let me tell you why that’s an important shift to make. The problem really is the overwhelm epidemic. A couple of hundred years ago, we had the industrial revolution, and economic value started to be measured at an hourly rate. Someone would pay you X amount of pounds, euros, dollars, whatever currency you’re working in, to do a specific task, to add your value. Therefore, to increase your value, increase the amount you got paid, you had to increase the number of hours that you worked. That’s really when business started to be culturally celebrated. Now those individuals working an 18-hour day, compared with those working an 8-hour day, they’re not more important, we know that at the head level, but we don’t have to scratch too far below the surface to know that this is a problem within our cultures. When did I’m crazy busy become that badge of honour? When did being a martyr become sexy?! We need to make this paradigm shift. It’s really about a well, a well of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual strength that drives personal achievement and inspires other people to follow. This came from a paper from McKinsey & Company, ‘Centred Leadership: How Talented Leaders Thrive’. Notice that it doesn’t just say physical and emotional. Intellectual and physical. It’s having all four components, like an overflowing well, that’s going to make the biggest difference to our leaderships and to our lives. One of the important features here is how do we actually achieve that in reality? How do we achieve this energy abundance, so that we have more than enough to give on a daily basis? I want to start with some definitions. The definition between needs and desires. A need is anything within which, it comes from the Middle English nīed, without which you are in hardship. You are not your best self. In need are things like food, sleep, water, fresh air, exercise, alone time, connection time with other people. Those basic needs for our lives, without which we’re not able to function properly as human beings. A desire is something that we can live without. For example, I definitely need exercise every single week, and I could do lots of different things. I could go walking, running, cycling, swimming, weights, whatever it is that I want to do, but my desire is to go cold-water open-water swimming. Wild swimming, that’s what I desire. Now yes, I can live without it, but when I add it into my life, it fires me up. It really lights me up. Those are the differences between needs and desires. Now if you think about yourself like a phone battery, a lot of the time, as you’ve just established there, we’re doing more than what we’ve actually got energy for. We’re operating at not okay. At the end of the day, you’ve used up more energy than what actually you had available. We’re in the red zone. When we’re in the red zone and we add in a desire, instead of finding that place of joy and fulfilment as I described with my wild swimming, we enter the realm of bad habits. A bad habit for me would be when I used to work at the University of Manchester, at two o’clock in the afternoon, without fail, I would have an energy slump. I would go down to the café, I would grab a chocolate bar, a caffeinated drink, and I would be, sugar-caffeine fuelled my way through the afternoon. Now that’s a bad habit because I’m replacing my need for probably really sleep, for caffeine and sugar. When you think about your needs and desires, what are the bad habit things that creep in for you? What are those bad habits that you know that you have when you don’t meet your needs? Sometimes it’s staying up late watching Netflix, or scrolling on social media to meet a need for connection with other people, or alone time. We self-sabotage. What we’re trying to do is meet our basic needs so we get ourselves to okay. The problem is if we’re operating from not okay and we give to other people, so we take on, we say yes at work, we take on another project. We say, ‘Yes, of course I’ll go and run that errand for you, mum’, or of course I’ll go and do whatever it is for a child at home. We are taking ourselves more into the red zone each and every time. We are self-sacrificing. Whereas if we meet this red line and we continuously replace our basic needs and we operate at okay, I’ve had enough sleep to be able to function in the world, when we give to other people, when we sacrifice for other people, we’re in the realm of generosity because we are overflowing. We have more than enough to give. For some of you out there, there will be people that you are continuously self-sacrificing for, whether that is children, partners, friends, family, whatever it is, you might actually have people that you always have to or choose to self-sacrifice for. It becomes even more important then that you replace this energy somehow. Let’s have a look at how we actually do that. Leadership principle number one is that everything starts with replenishing your energy. We need to start by identifying your replenishable needs. A stable versus a replenishable need. A stable need is something that when we’ve got it, it’s sorted. Once I’ve got a mortgage on a house or I’ve got a contract on a flat, whatever it is, it’s stable for a set period of time. I don’t really have to think about it on a daily basis. That would be a stable need. Whereas a replenishable need, which is what we’re talking about today, is something that we’re always going to have to replace on either a daily or a weekly basis. They fall into four different categories, physiological, psychological, relational – so to do with other people – and spiritual if that is relevant for you. This is my needs creed. I’m going to encourage you to draw your own needs creed at the end of today’s session. These are the minimum things that you need to be just okay and functioning in the world. For example, I’ve got sleep. I obviously need sleep every night, but how much do you need to be okay and functioning? If you look at Matthew Walker’s book,’ Why We Sleep’, he talks about giving yourself an eight-hour sleep opportunity each night. Some of you will need more, some of you may think you need less, but read the book, you might change your mind. If you’re saying I only need six hours sleep, I would question that. I would challenge yourself on that. Liquid as well. Make sure you’re thinking about how much you need and of what type of fluids. Movement, as I said, it doesn’t have to be wild swimming for me, it can just be multiple different things that you can put under the bracket of movement. Food. Connection with other people. Alone time. Some of you might also have prayer or spiritual practices in there as well that you need to be just okay and functioning in the world. I don’t know what these categories are going to be for you. Some will be the same, some will be different. I want you to start to define your basic needs and how much of them you actually need. Then we’re going to look at how we’re going to achieve them. You’ll notice that some of these fall within the category of health, and some will fall in the category of relationships. These are two of our fundamental pillars as well in our five-pillar system of leadership. By meeting your basic needs, you’re often also meeting your needs within those pillars too. What I want you to do is once you have created your needs creed, your minimum viable product, I want you to think about your lead needs. A bit like a husky dog pulls a sled along with it, I want you to think about your lead needs in the same way. These are three of the needs that will pull all the others along for the ride. Say, for example, one of my lead needs is sleep. When I get enough sleep, I make better nutritional choices. I’m more likely to exercise. I’m more likely to take alone time for myself as well. It pulls a lot of the others along for the ride. What are your three lead needs? You’re going to create yourself a little table. Your action for today is to draw out a big circle and map out your needs creed, like a little pizza slice, and then I want you to identify what the top three are. This is where we’re really going to focus. In tomorrow’s session, we’re going to get two more, we’re going to get that table and we’re going to increase it by two more pillars. What that’s going to do is we’re going learn how to activate these lead needs with some really simple activators. I will teach you what activators are for tomorrow, so don’t worry about that. These are ways for us to deeply embed these lead needs into our lives, so we’re more likely to achieve them. Otherwise, as you’ve seen in that diagram, we’re just going to be operating from that red zone in our phone battery all the time. Eventually, we will keep depleting, depleting, depleting, until there is nothing more to give. We don’t want to be that, we want to be overflowing and generous and have more than enough to give to ourselves, the ones we love, and the wider community as well, where we want to make the biggest impact in the world. For today’s session, identify your needs and your three lead needs. Bring them to tomorrow’s session and we’re going to do something really super-cool with those lead needs, to make sure that you can actually activate them in your life. Thank you for today’s session. Go ahead and do that exercise now and bring it with you for tomorrow, and we’ll take it to the next level.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

Today we are continuing our journey on the Time and Energy Secrets Five-Day Challenge. Now, in day one, we talked about how do we actually achieve balance in our lives by looking at multiple different competing pillars of our lives. In session two, which is on Tuesday, we started to look at how we actually start to plan for each of these different pillars using those A1 tasks and the time blocking, and making sure that we minimise the distractions that art of becoming indistractable. Yesterday we started to look at our basic needs, because in terms of health and relationship pillars, these are actually some of the hardest things to achieve in life. Actually making sure that we get enough sleep, food, water, exercise, fresh air, alone time, connection time with other people. It’s one of the most fundamentally difficult things to achieve as a human being, even though we need it to be just okay. One of the questions that came up at the end of last session, which I’m going to address now, and please forgive me and shout in the chat box who actually asked this question because that’s the one part I didn’t write down, it was a question on how do I actually stop giving to other people? Do you remember the diagram we had where we had needs versus desires, and if we were in the phone battery of the red zone of not okay and we keep giving to other people, we’re going to keep depleting to the point of, eventually, burnout. How do we stop giving to other people? That’s a really important part. There will be some people, as we said, that we choose to always self-sacrifice for. I will always self-sacrifice myself for my kids. If they’re poorly or sick in the night I will just keep on getting up. There’s no getting around it. There are some people that will do that for. That’s when replenishment of our energy becomes even more critical, when you have a number of people who you will always self-sacrifice for. What about the rest? What about when your supervisor asks you to take on just another little project or the next thing, or someone else asks you to do something? How can we actually stop giving to those people who we don’t choose to always want to give to? This is when it becomes really important to actually set and maintain our own boundaries, because unfortunately it’s your job to meet your basic needs, not anybody else’s. The actual ownership is on you. We have to learn how to say no gracefully, how to set and maintain those boundaries. One thing could be that you just simply don’t know how to go about saying no in a way that people will hear you. A little conversation template for that is, thank you so much. Instead of saying yes or no, say thank you. Thank you so much for asking me to do whatever it is. I’m not able to do that right now with the schedule that I have. Let’s put our heads together and see if there’s someone else who can help you with that. It’s just a really quick and simple template that gets us still to be liked by other people, we’ve still said thank you, but we’ve also made it clear that it’s a no. If it’s something where you think, okay, in the future I would really like to do that, the fact is I just can’t do it right now, then add an extra little line in at the end that says normally I would absolutely bite your hand off to do that, I really love doing these projects, so do ask me again in the future if the opportunity arises. That’s one thing. It could be that we just don’t know how to say no, but we do now. The other thing could be that you might have a really strong pleasing part of your personality, the part that you really want to be liked by other people, avoid conflict at all costs. It’s going to feel a little bit more challenging for you to use a conversation template. If you do find that you fall into that category, it can be really helpful to get some help and support with digging underneath the surface of the pleasing to understand why, why we actually need to do that. That falls under the category of, I guess, confidence building and looking into limiting beliefs and emotions. It could be on the coaching side or it could be on the counselling therapy side if you need some help and support with that. If it feels like a real challenge. We are on habit stacking today. Now, habit stacking is something that I found in a book called ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear and it’s also in the workbook when you get access to the workbook too. Habit stacking is taking something that you already do, so you’ll be pleased to hear I always brush my teeth in the evening, and it is stacking on top of that something else which we are trying to establish as a new habit. That way you are highly more likely to achieve it because you’re embedding it into a process that you already do. For example, when I’m brushing my teeth in the evening, I’m also setting out my kit for the next day for whatever exercise I’m doing and putting it next to my bed. If I’m trying to establish some more routines and structure around health, that’s the way to do it. Establish a habit stacking process. Now, this comes from… Oh yes, because an idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan any day. It comes from a process called crafting activators. Now, there is some research done by Peter Gollwitzer at New York University. He had some students and he split them into two groups. For the first group he said to them, ‘Okay…’ He dangled a carrot. He said, ‘If you do this paper and you submit it on Boxing Day at such and such a time, you will get extra credit.’ They went off for their holidays, Christmas holidays, and had that instruction. With the other group that were left he said, ‘I’m going to do the same thing for you. I’m going to give you extra credit if you submit this on Boxing Day, this extra paper.’ He then took them through a process to actually think through how they were going to achieve that in reality, and also to give them some prompts, some activators to actually kick them into action. He talked about one of the students saying, ‘Okay, I’m visualising myself. My alarm goes off at half-past-six on Christmas Eve,’ he said. ‘I’m at my dad’s house. When the alarm goes off, I’m going to go straight to his office. I’m going to sit there, I’m going to type the paper, and then I’m going to submit it, and then I’m going to have my breakfast.’ He thought through all the steps. He had an activator. He had his phone alarm going off at six-thirty in the morning, and he walked through what a successful outcome would look like for him and what actions he was going to take. The group that just had… Group A that just had the carrot dangled in front of them, only 35 per cent of them actually submitted that essay for extra credit, whereas the ones who have been through the process of crafting the activators and actions, there were 75 per cent of that group that actually went forward and did it. This process can drastically change how you actually go about meeting those three lead needs. Last time I asked you to think about what are your three lead needs, the ones that if I achieve these it will pull all of the others along for the ride in that alone time and still achieve the same kind of outcome you’re looking for. Rebecca: ‘I fall apart very quickly after two days without mental stimulation.’ Yes. It could be. It could be a basic need for you. Good. Again, reading wouldn’t be a basic need for me. It would be an expression of one of your needs. Katerina saying, ‘I promise you chocolate is a basic need for me.’ I question that myself every single day. Yes, and Kat’s saying, I guess, alone time, kind of. James is also saying time outside. Yes, so that fresh air, time with friends and family, and quiet time. Is time outside and quiet time the same thing? Is that what you’re achieving when you’re outside, or is time outside actually movement and exercise for you? Or, is it alone time? That quiet time, is that again alone time, or is it something else? Just start to question some of your needs there. What we’re doing with these crafting activators is we’re taking each of those lead needs, and we’re walking through an activator that’s going to spring you into action. Something that will activate the action you want to take. For example, if I want to get to sleep and I need an eight-hour sleep opportunity, my kids get up at 6:00 am, I need to set my phone alarm or something to activate me to go to bed at half-past-nine. Now actually, my husband works as quite a good activator because he’s very good at this, but if not, when he’s away I set my phone alarm and that activates me. Phone alarm goes off, get up, go upstairs. For nutrition I decided, a bit like Kat, that I needed to not eat a chocolate bar after each meal. That actually, I was going to have a smoothie instead. My action is I want to make a smoothie instead of eat a chocolate bar, and my activator is habit stacking. I always eat lunch, so at the end of eating lunch, instead of eating a chocolate bar my action is make a smoothie. I made that pathway easier by having the smoothie maker out in my kitchen. Then we’ve got exercise. Again, I’ve told you this one. I brush my teeth in the evening. I lay out my kit next to my bed for the next day so when I wake up, I literally have to climb over the top of my stuff to not do the exercise. Therefore, we’re highly more likely to achieve the outcome that we’re looking for. What could it be for you? This is what I want you to do now, when we finish the session today. I want you to get your lead needs. Think about the activators and then the actions, and then what you can do is a visual rehearsal. This is the action we’re going to take from today’s session. Define the actions and the activators, and then you’re going to embed them with a visual rehearsal. I want you to close your eyes, and I want you to imagine the activator happening. I can see my phone alarm’s buzzing at half-past-nine. I stand up and I go upstairs, and I go to bed, you know? You actually visualise the whole process, the successful outcome. Do that a couple of times with each of those lead needs, and notice the difference that it makes in your brain. It’s really embedding them at quite a subconscious level. That’s it for the content for today’s session. I want you to go ahead and do that process of mapping them out. Habit stacking is taking something that you do habitually all the time, like brushing your teeth, eating a meal if you do it at the same time every day, that kind of thing, things that you do habitually, and you’re stacking on top of it a new routine or something new that you want to establish. For example, if I want to start making a meal plan for the week and I don’t currently do that, I might say, ‘Okay, on a Sunday after I’ve had my Sunday lunch, I then stop and I make the meal plan for the whole of the next week.’ It’s something that you do already, and then you’re adding something on top of that to compound it and make it even more effective. Now, some people will choose to do a lot of habit stacking with, say, a morning routine. This is quite a big thing to do, and it does set you up to win the day. For a morning routine you could habit stack three things. For example, I could go outside and get some exercise. At the same time, I could stack on top of the exercise, something that I do already, I could listen to a podcast or some personal development, and then when I get home I could write some reflections That would be three things that I’m stacking on top of each other during the same kind of time block. There are kind of two different ways. It’s around establishing a new routine, or stacking multiple things on top of something you do already.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

Good morning, everybody. It’s Friday. It’s the final day of our Time and Energy Secrets Challenge, and it’s been a really interesting week for many of you. I’ve been seeing your updates on Twitter and LinkedIn, so thank you for sharing those with me. So where were we up to? So far, we have looked at the five different pillars of your leadership, health, wealth, relationships, personal development and career. Aha! Career as well, and making sure that we are planning for multiple different competing areas of our life on a weekly basis so that we don’t let go of those parts of our lives too. It was also around thinking about health and relationships in particular when we started to look at our basic needs. What are they, first of all, and are we actually meeting them consistently in order to be just okay and functioning in the world? We then started to look yesterday at some habit stacking. So how can I actually achieve these basic needs in reality when we are all, you know, trying to achieve a lot, and are very busy in our lives? So how can we make that a reality? Today, we’re going to look at, rather than, as in session two, we said technology can be very distracting and we want to create the art of becoming in-distractable, we’re now going to look at how we can start to hack back time with technology. So rather than it being a time and energy suck, we’re now going to get something back from our tech. So I want you to start with a check in and I want you to check in on your A1 task that you set way back on Tuesday’s session. So on the second time and energy secrets session that we had, we looked at what were you going to do for your A1 task this week in health, relationships, personal development, career and wealth. So I want you to get those out now and actually do yourself a mini check in. So I like to look at them and go, hmm, my A1, yes, I have achieved all of those things this week. I’ve done that one. I’m on target for that because it’s still ongoing this week. That’s done and that’s still to do this afternoon. So this is a way for us to not just set priorities but actually making sure we’re holding ourselves accountable for them because as any of you know, it’s fine to have a to do list, but if we’re not holding ourself accountable and having check ins, then, you know, we can quickly fall off what was our priorities for the week and end up doing something completely different. I personally set my tasks at the start of the week. I do a midweek check in on a Wednesday and a final check in on a Friday and then a recalibration of the tasks for the next week. So having a good planning session on a Friday or even sometimes on a Monday morning if I haven’t quite managed to do that yet. So make sure that you’re checking in on all of those A1 tasks that you set yourself earlier on in the week and then let us know how you got on towards those. Now one thing to be aware of are that 94 per cent of failures when it comes to setting priorities and managing our time and energy are actually system failures. The way in which we’re doing it rather than a people failure. There are only six per cent of the time it’s actually our own fault. This is really important because if we can get the right system in place, it means that you are highly more likely to be successful, and one of those that I wanted to show you is around clearing the channel. So making sure that we’ve cleared the channel and got the right system to achieve the outcome we’re looking at. There is some research done by Kaiser South San Francisco Medical Hospital and they were looking into medical errors. When you get a medication error, it can have serious consequences for patients and even resulting in death sometimes. They observed the people who were giving and dispensing the medicines. What they found was that they were continuously harassed by other people during their medication rounds. What they did was they thought, how can we actually improve this system? So they did something really kind of simple. They gave them a high-vis jacket and it had ‘medication round in progress,’ and then if someone was wearing that high-vis jacket, you weren’t allowed to speak to them until that jacket was taken off. What they found is that medication errors dropped by 88 per cent from the six months prior. A huge difference. So I want you to think about really clearly how you can clear your channels and minimise distractions. Now you might think, ‘Maybe I’ll just get myself a high-vis jacket.’ You know, if I was in the lab and I didn’t want to be interrupted by other people, I could do that myself. Also, I do this sometimes at home. Not often, but sometimes I actually give myself a concentration crown and I tell my children, ‘When mummy’s wearing the concentration crown, you can’t interrupt mummy because it’s a very royal and important task that she’s doing.’ You can do something similar even with just a sign or some kind of visual that you can prompt people to say, ‘It’s a no for now. Don’t interrupt me.’ If you’re in person, that could be a note on your desk, something on the door of your office if you have your own space. Just to let people know that now’s not the time and then give people a time slot when they can, you know, freely come and talk to you. That would be one of my top tips. The next one is our phones. Our phones are one of the most distracting things that I think that we have around us all of the time. They’re very addictive. One of the features on your phone is actually do not disturb while driving mode where you can actually not access any of the things that you would perhaps go in and go, ‘Ah, just I’ll just check my phone for a minute just while I’m thinking about this.’ It will stop you from doing that and that feature is available to you at any time. There’s also some other things as well. So some research showed that people, when they get their new phones, only a third of people actually change the inbuilt settings that are in their phone, and you can clear that cognitive clutter. When I see my notifications and there are, like, a thousand emails in red on my phone, it kind of sets me off into, ‘Oh, I’m going to have to go and look at them and deal with them.’ Whereas actually, if we turn the notifications and alerts off, there’s nothing on that home feed, you know, that first screen that comes up. There’s no notifications there, and when I go in I’m not seeing social media notifications, although they’re there, I just don’t see them. So it’s my choice when I go in to do that kind of stuff. I have a specific time slot when I am going to look at social media and that way, we’re really not being beholden to our notifications. Another top tip that someone gave me was actually to turn, and I haven’t done this, but they said to turn your phone on to greyscale and that will reduce your consumption of your phone significantly. The person who I know who tried this reduced their phone consumption by 40 per cent just by turning it on to greyscale. You can check that out in your own phone usage should you try these things. If you’re going to try something, make sure you’re trying it for at least a week to see what kind of effect it has, rather than just one sitting or one day. The other thing is that you can actually use tech to block out other tech. So for example, let me know in the chat box if anyone here has used the Forest app on their phone. So the Forest app, a little bit like setting a timer, has a little plant and you set the timer for a specific amount of time. So I’m going to do focus time for, I don’t know, 30 minutes and, over that 30 minutes, that little seed grows into a beautiful tree during that time. If you pick up your phone during that time, the tree dies. So clearly, it’s going to stop us from doing that. Did anyone try that before? Esmeralda says, ‘Yes. I use it,’ and Cat’s saying, ‘I like Forest.’ ‘I do too.’ Even if you don’t use that app, just setting yourself a phone alarm will also work as well. So setting yourself a period of time. The other thing is if you’re on a PC like I am today, you can use something called SelfControl and this is something that will block your access to distracting websites. So you can specify which access you’re allowed. So you might be allowed access to, I don’t know, Google, but you’re not allowed access to Facebook or something else. So we’ve got two ways there. We can block the phone and we can block the PC as well. If we have a tendency to, kind of, open another tab, open up LinkedIn or whatever it is. So make sure that you’re blocking those out if you have those tendencies. The other thing that we can do, and I found this really cool thing called Focusmate, which I think is quite good for virtual working at the moment. So this is having a virtual co-worker, and you log on at a specific time and you meet someone and they might be over across the other side of the world, could be a student revising for a medical exam, whoever it is. You log on and you say, ‘During this hour or during this 90 minutes, I’m planning to do X, Y, Z,’ and they will say, ‘During this time, I am planning to do X, Y, Z.’ You turn your cameras off and mute and then you do that focus time and then at the end you have a check in and you ask each other, ‘How did you go with that? How did you find that?’ That’s replicating basically high level of accountability. Finally, well, not finally, for those people who need accountability at home, maybe you’re taking on the lion’s share or the majority share of doing a lot of the home stuff, whether that’s with a partner or people that you live with. If you’re the person who’s always doing everything and takes on not just the physical load but also the mental load that goes with that too, because it’s not just the load of making the food, it’s also the load of meal planning, going to do the food shop, actually picking it up, putting it away and making the food and washing up. There’s a lot of things that go with the physicality of doing things. So this app is called OurHome and you can list regular and irregular chores and assign points to each task. So you might give five points for making the tea and ten points for coming up with the meal plan. Whatever it is, you can assign the points to it. It’s a gamification, so when you complete the tasks you win those points and you can also be set on time as well. So rather than just points, the amount of time it takes to do a task, then the number of points will then equal the number of minutes too. This way, if, in particular, you’re the one doing everything, you can turn it into a game and enlist other helpers in your house to actually, you know, come on board.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]