Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and eighty nine, airing in mid February of twenty twenty three. Sarah is going to be interviewing Nick Sonenberg, who is an expert on business systems and organization. He's the author of the book Come Up for Air, which is how to stop drowning and over Work. And we are big fans of not drowning and overwork, so looking forward to that. But first, a little bit of a best of both worlds announcement before we get into the topic of not doing overwork. Sarah, you are recording in a slightly different position than you normally are. Yes, our loyal listeners will remember that Laura and I discussed that we both record in our closets in very uncomfortable positions. I was using my husband's end table and a chair, so I was always kind of twisted and my legs didn't fit under said table, and my microphone was often like falling off because it wasn't a very large table, and Laura was on the floor and also mentioning a lot of back pain. So we felt like it was probably time to see what we can do with these small spaces. Closets are excellent for recording because you can have lots of clothes in there that are absorbing sound and you can block out a lot of outside sound. But so our solution was we shoved tiny desks into our closet, not even that tiny actually, so I wouldn't say I have a huge closet, but it's like a smallish walk in closet, and I was able to shove and Ikia desk to the back a full on chair. We do not have an outlet in this closet, but it's okay because I'm able to stretch the cord around to the outlet right outside the closet door. And I am so comfortable. I'm so excited, Like I feel like this is a new era in podcasting for me. We are finally taking ourselves seriously after lo these many years of recording. Yeah, I'm excited to not be sitting on the floor. Mine is more of a makeshift kind of thing. I just I was like, well, I don't even want to go like find a desk. It's a small space anyway, so it would have been hard to do a traditional desk, even though, like IKI, a small one. However, there's lots of random material around this house. I found a what must be an old like dining table leaf I think that the previous owner must have abandoned somewhere, and then another like shelf that was also abandoned. I stacked those on top of these kind of magazine file containers. I don't know if anyone knows is what they're like from pottery barn or something. They've kind of tan colored anyway, two of them with the two wooden things stacked on top of it. I'm sitting on a bench that was my bench for my old keyboard, and it's working. It's sort of the right height, I guess, and I haven't entirely figured out the microphone placement thing. Yet my microphone for before Breakfast is on one side of where i'd put my computer, so I'm kind of looking back this way for that and the microphone that I used for Best of both worlds because it works differently with going through the laptop. It's all complicated anyway. I've had bad sound quality attempting to do switching microphones. But it's on the left side, so you know, I turned my head backway and forth. It'd be nice to have a microphone like right over the laptop, but I haven't quite figured out how to make that work yet. One of these that will perhaps be the next project. Well, I didn't realize you had like figured it out, a solution, a creative solution, like more and more so than me. And by the way, I didn't even buy this desk. It was just like in our bedroom and I just had to drag it into the closet. That's right. Sometimes you know it's funny. We it was in our Pebbles in the Shoe part of that episode of Things. We were upgrading or not upgrading, as the case may be, and we were talking about how something can be annoying you for a long time, and the solution can be very very easy. Like I mean, in Sarah's case, she was literally moving a desk a couple of feet and she just hadn't done it. I don't know. It's an interesting question why we don't do it. I don't know. I think both of us have personalities that we have a very strong ability to just make do with whatever the situation is, which you know has its upsides, probably has its downsides as well, in the sense of my chronic back pain and Sarah trying to figure out how to not knock her microphone off. But here we are, so yay yay, speaking of making things better. So Sarah does an interview here with nick Son and bar about coming up for air. Do you read a lot of business books, Sarah? I feel like I didn't used to. I mean, I have always loved the personal development sphere kind of unapologetically, whereas probably where I discovered you in the first place. So I mean, I have no qualms about that, but I kind of steered away from those that were more business y just because I didn't feel like they applied to me necessarily. But I think once I officially went part time and kind of gave myself permission to think of my creative work as a more legitimate business. I've been more drawn to those. I recently really enjoyed Free Time by Jenny Blake, and I have on my next to my desk a book called Life Changing Workshops, which I don't know if it's good or not because I haven't read it yet. Because I'm hoping that I can make my workshops life changing, so that would be good. I was drawn to come up for air because I felt like it was a topic that you know, it was really an emphasis on efficiency, but it sounded like it would be relevant for all types of environments, those of us who work in a field like medicine that's more action oriented, as well as those in small businesses or you know, even solo proprietorships or those who work in the corporate world. So it felt like it kind of crossed. It wasn't specific to any one of those audiences. Yeah, because I mean you were mentioning there's some challenges that we all deal with. I mean, you know, regardless of what kind of work you're doing, it's how do you communicate efficiently? Right? And he talks about that and systematizing. I guess that was what I took away from this. Yeah, a lot of systemization, like you know, making sure you capture the work you create in a logical and very organized way so that you don't end up having to reinvent the wheel ways to have effective meetings. Was a really nice section. He goes through email and we have a lot of aligned philosophies there. So yeah, it was useful. I think the book is really interesting in the conversation we had was fun. So I think you guys will enjoy this episode. Awesome. Well, let's go ahead and hear what Nick has to say about how we can all come up for air. Well, I am so excited to welcome Nick Sonnenberg on the Best of both worlds Old. He is an entrepreneur, a writer, and a founder CEO of Leverage, which is an leading operational efficiency consultancy, and he also just published a fascinating book called Come Up for Air, what he calls a practical guide to go from drowning and work to freeing up an extra business day per week for everyone on your team. Welcome Nick, Thanks for having me on the show. So my first question to you is why did you decide to write Come Up for Air. I mean, we all know work has its issues, but there are a great deal many business books out there with different philosophies and promises from the four hour work week to know anything beyond that. So I'm curious, like, what made you feel like you had something really new and exciting to say? What were you trying to accomplish with Come Up for Air? Yeah, no, it's a great question. Well, for one, I felt that the world needed a book like this. There are books like for Our Work Week or Getting Things Done, and those were kind of the classic, but those are more individual productivity books. Right There really hasn't yet been any kind of impactful book around how teams or organizations can be productive. And it's a nuance, but it's a very distinct difference between individual productivity and team productivity. And I wrote the book for myself and my team so that I could have kind of a guidebook for them on how to operate. I wrote it because ultimately my mission is I want to save millions of hours of people's time, and I want people to be able to work on things that give them joy or tap into their unique ability. And I think that this book can really help with that. And also I know what it's like to be drowning and work. My story is we grew very quickly in the early days, and one day my business partner came up to me while we were working in a coworking space, tap me on the shoulder and said he's leaving. He didn't give me two weeks or two days notice. He gave me two minutes notice. And at that point, when we separated the way we ran the company, he was people facing and I was non people facing. So it was a complete disaster because no one knew who I was because the way we had split it up, and early on we were a freelancer marketplace, not operational efficiency consulting and training like we do now. But during that time, and I don't need to go into the details, but it was very difficult. We lost forty percent of revenue in a three month period. More than half of our team members left. Also in that period, before I know what, I'm cashing out my four oh one K, my dad's taking a second mortgage on the house to loan us money for payroll, and you know, there I am kind of the only person now running the company, and we had one hundred and fifty contractors on the team at that point, and I had to make a decision do I bankrupt the company or do I try to clean up the mistakes. We had done some things right because we grew really quickly, but we had all this operational debt that we were sitting on that was making it very hard and very complex, and so ultimately I decided to stick it out. You know, we owed about three quarters of million dollars of debt to people. I thought it was wrong to screw them out of it, and I did see a path to cleaning things up, and so over time, I just started late nights, seven days a week cleaning this company up, and I just started seeing kind of what it was taking to clean it up. You know that you we needed to clean up how we communicated as a team. I wasn't able a couple of clicks to know who was working on what. So I needed to clean up the planning. And then I knew that we had all this knowledge. I'd already spent a lot of time documenting my ex business partner's knowledge. Otherwise we definitely wouldn't have not survived that. But I started seeing this pattern of these three buckets, and people started reaching out to me asking me to consult them. And I worked with Tony Robbins, I worked with poopery, I worked with small find I've worked with a bunch of doctors' offices. I worked with financial advisors. And it didn't matter if you were a small medical practice or you were Tony Robbins. Everyone had kind of very similar issues. You needed to clean up how you communicated, how you planned, and then all the resource and so ultimately the core of leverage started being training and consulting on those things. And ultimately the pattern was just so strong. This stuff was helping just everyone, regardless of size or industry. So I decided that a book would be a great way to get the message out and help a lot of people stop drowning. And work totally makes sense, drowning work, And I don't want that for anyone. Yes, no, that totally makes sense. And I say that as someone who is definitely is a fan of like your Tim Ferriss and David Allen, especially a man that I like, you know, I've read his books like many many times, so really interesting to hear how like you're right, your stuff goes from the individual to how do we make a system that doesn't break individuals and that can succeed more long term. So I wanted to talk about communication first because that was your first like piece of the trio, And my question was not necessarily about how we can best communicate because personally, yeah, I feel like I have a fairly well honed sense of like when should we use synchronous methods and when should we use asynchronous matches? Although I can have you review with our audience what those means. But my real question is how do we get others on board with this without coming off as curmudgeonly or unpleasant Because my personal pet peeve and my husband will say that I'm probably overly sensitive to this is like I get very irritated when people use synchronous methods for things that really should be asynchronous. And I think it's very disrespectful because it's a way of saying, Hey, my time's important, because I want this info for you right now, but I don't care what you're doing. I'm going to interrupt you. So I guess, A, what are those things for the audience? And B how do we help others to get on board with appropriate usage without making any It's a great question. So let's just clarify for the listeners. The difference between synchronous just means you're doing it simultaneously at this moment in time, right. So like this conversation right now is synchronous, like we put time, I'm on our calendar to hop on this video call and we're recording this live, right Versus asynchronous is I put something somewhere and when you have time later you go and look in that drawer and you go and look at it, right. So asynchronous just means there's kind of this I'm going to put this here and then when you have time go and look at it. And so there's a time and a place for both. For example, if you have a performance issue with a team member, you don't want to asynchronously tell them over Slack or email or something like, hey, you're doing a really bad job and you know maybe we're going to fire you right like, that requires a live conversation where it can be both ways. And also facial expression and tonality and all those things make a difference. So there are times and places where synchronous is great, or you want to do a brainstorming session and it does require all this back and forth kind of wrap it back and forth. That's great for synchronous, but there's a lot of things that could be asynchronously. Hey, whenever you have time, I need this report, or when you have time, take a look at this PDF that I put together and tell me if it looks good, right, or I have an idea for something like that's not super urgent. And so I think it's the responsibility of the business owner and entrepreneur to set boundaries and also set up systems so that people can be asynchronous. For example, we have a policy at Leverage that if something's not urgent, don't slack it, meaning like don't like peing someone right now, add it to next week's agenda. We use a tool called a sauna to house those agendas. And you were just talking about David Allen. He's got a great quote that your brain it's for having ideas, not holding ideas. So you need to give people places to put things. Otherwise they need to dump it out of their head. And so whatever is their mode of doing that, which might be synchronous, is how they'll do it. So you need to give them a framework and a place to dump those things. So you need to show them, hey, we use agendas at this company, and you know we have also an sop or a policy that if it's not urgent, it can wait till next week and we have a meeting. Go and add it to this agenda. You also need to have in your culture that you run meetings with agendas at that point though, so you need to have kind of some standard operating procedures that you tell people upfront during the onboarding and training when you hire them. You have to reinforce it. You have to give tough love when people fall off the wagon, which inevitably they will, that you kindly point them in the direction of you know, in the future. This is how we've all aligned on doing things, and it's a never ending process. Like it's constant reinforcement. It's not going to be perfect, but you know, you can get pretty close. I love the emphasis on make sure you have a really good bucket for people to put those things, because I think sometimes my mistake is not maybe emphasizing too much, like the ough that didn't need to be a text, but okay, well where does it need to be right, Like, please add it to my staff messages, I promise I check those every single day. I clear them out every single day so it won't get missed, to make sure you clarify exactly where that message should go if it should not be in a synchronous fashion. So that's a really really good point. All right. Email so speaking of your brain is for having ideas and not holding them. I think email is for processing inputs and not collecting them. I don't know, maybe I'm just in a very David Allen esque mode today, but you do talk about inbox zero in your book, and I love it, And in fact, you even said like, oh, you can have twenty things in there because they're like your active things. And I'm like, no, I actually believe in zero, like getting to actual zero, because I still don't want to collect them. They're like they probably belong somewhere else. So talk a little bit about that, and has that been a challenge to, like you supervise many individuals in your company. Have you been able to help them achieve inbox zero? Is there a lot of pushback? Why is it so unpopular as an idea? I mean, wellt the if you don't know the concept inbox zero basically just is a methodology, so that when you look at your email and you're managing your email, you have I consider it to be not exactly zero, but like twenty thirty something manageable. And I don't distinguish between read or unread. It's any email in your inbox, you know. Most people have tens of thousands, or I've seen hundreds of thousands, And the benefit of it is it can save you so much time and stress looking at and also not just time stress, but there's opportunities that I see every single time. Every single time my team works with someone on this, they always discover some gem of an email that slips through the cracks because they just don't have a good system to make sure that they're you know, filing and dealing with all their email properly. And email is a tricky one because you've been us using it for decades. It's the only tool that's been around for decades. Slack and Asana, notion and all these other tools that I talked about in the book are all relatively new. So people have adopted bad behavior with email. A lot of people are sensitive about how they use their email and think that they've got a good system, and so I think in general it's important that people have a student mindset and that they're always open to a better way. And as long as people have that mindset and they kind of follow are open minded to reading kind of my RAD system reply archive deffer that I lay out in the book, I can guarantee that you'll like that better than pretty much any system that you're following. I've just seen. We've just done this thousands of times and seen the impact of three to five hours a week on average that you can save if you actually process email properly. I think that the most important thing is to have a student mindset and to always be looking for a better way with email. People have been using it for decades. They think that they've got a good system, but vperience. I've just seen three to five hours a week back per person when they follow the RAD system. So that stands for a reply archive and defer. And it's the benefit though of email versus cleaning up other tools. One, it's a tool that's the most commonly used tool that everyone uses constantly. You can save a ton of time quickly, and it doesn't require that much training, Like in a few hours, you can get your email under control and probably The biggest difference is all these other collaboration tools require everyone to be on the same page. Like take Slack, take us on, and take these tools. People need to be using it kind of in a similar way for it to work. Like if you don't know how to use slack, or you don't know when to put something in a channel, or you don't know when to use it, I'm not going to get that much benefit. It's like what's the value of a cell phone. If I'm the only one that owns the cell phone, I have no one to talk to. But with email, even if you don't use email properly, and we're on the same team, but I use it properly, I will still get the benefit. And so when you show people the benefit, like everyone wants to save time. No one likes to be overworked and overstressed. So you know, once you kind of kind of promise them that and showed them very quickly kind of what that feeling is like to look at a clean inbox with nothing in it, It's a pretty easy sell. I love it. Well, We're going to take a very quick ad break and be back to talk about meetings. Speaking of efficiency and saving time, all right, we are back, and you had a really nice section and come up for air on meetings that really emphasized exactly how expensive they are from a financial and time standpoint, and ways in which we can make sure that not to use your company names, we can leverage that time effectively to really make the most of it. So can you talk a little bit about your best practices for meetings? Yeah, I mean meetings is another massive expense, similar to email. I mean, when you think about how much a meeting costs, you take your you know, all the hourly rates of everyone in that meeting, times the length of that meeting. It's one of the biggest expenses in businesses. I think I was reading a stat that it was like, I don't know, one hundred billion dollars or something worth of meetings last year. It's something crazy fifty billion or one hundred billion. It's something on that order of magnitude. And it's not that hard to clean it up. If you don't know what your hourly rate is, just take your salary and divide it by approximately two thousand. There's two thousand hours in a year that you work roughly, and so if you're a one hundred dollars an hour person. Someone else is a fifty dollars an hour person, and the two of you do an hour call, it's one hundred and fifty dollars call. So the more people you add to it, the longer the meeting is, the more expense. If it is, so, it's important that you get the most out of those times. It's just too easy now to just throw things on the calendar and lose track of actually how expensive those calls are. And so the ways to reduce a meeting reduce the number of people, reduce the frequency. You know, does this meeting need to be weekly? Could it be bi weekly or monthly? Does it even need to happen in the first place? You know a lot of meeting. Could this be done asynchronously? Does it have an agenda? You know, you want to make sure that the meetings have an agenda. You're accomplishing what you need to accomplish, you're documenting decisions, you're documenting action items. And then lastly, can you just reduce the length of the meeting? And so there's this kind of there's this other interesting concept where that I talk about in the book, which is it's not just about saving time it's about optimizing time and how time isn't linear. That nine am on a Monday is way more valuable than six pm on a Friday after one hundred zoom calls for the week and you're in the back of an uber and you don't have your your laptop with you, So that nine am on Monday time slot might be the most valuable time slot of the whole week. You maybe have relaxed for the weekend, woke up early, worked out, feel great, and your brain's at a full horse power at nine am on a Monday, and so you want to make sure that you're maximizing your calendar and your precious time around when your brain is at full horse power. So even if you could reduce an hour long meeting from nine to ten on a Monday to forty five minutes, and you make it from nine to nine to forty five, that fifteen minutes that you're fring up might be the equivalent of two hours like in terms of like what you can accomplish with how fresh your brain is. So try to think about can you reduce the length of the meetings? Is there anything that you guys are talking about that could have been done asynchronously. So I'm not saying that you need to cancel the meeting, but if there's fifteen minutes of the meeting that people are just kind of giving report outs, you know, showing some document that they've put together and explaining it, that portion of the meeting could have been done asynchronously, and then on Friday, in the back of an uber, when you're not doing anything that great, you could watch the video of those report outs. You could have a policy where people have to watch it in advance of the Monday meeting. And now come Monday, you've just freed up fifteen minutes a very valuable time for everyone that now they can go and do higher level work. And now you're better utilizing the back of that uber where you're not going to be doing anything that great anyway. And it doesn't have to be the back of an uber. You could be maybe you want to go for a walk and get some vitamin D or something. I don't know, but thinking about not just saving time, but optimizing time and what parts of your meeting could be asynchronous. It requires no tools, it's not that hard of a concept to wrap your head around, and it can make a significant impact. Totally makes sense. I also, I mean this is very adjacent to that, But your discussion of workloads and calculating that and looking at how many hours people actually have to do work when you subtract the time spent with admin and time spent in meetings, talk a little bit about that, because I think that's very much in line with a lot of what Laura does, and especially in that there are executives who may say, oh, I work one hundred hours a week or whatever it is, but then you know, you recognize that, like, well, how many of those hours are actually spent like creating or actually doing work, and how many of them are in meetings, and how many of them are like organizing the work, doing work about work, et cetera. So talk a little bit about your findings there. Yeah, Well, I cite in the book there's a lot of research done about work about work. A SAUNA put out a report and it's like fifty eight percent of people's time they found is work about work. That's going on a scavenger hunt looking for a document that wasn't well organized, that's trying to coordinate to have a meeting and find times that everyone's free. That's you know, processing kind of your inbox when you actually look at the amount of time someone has to do that new initiative. You want to launch a new website, you want to write an article for something, whatever it is that you want to do, and you're trying to figure out, well, how much can I bite off this week. Most people totally don't estimate how much they can actually accomplish in a week because they're not considering how much of this work about worktime or what I call my book admin time you have. So say your target is to work a forty hour week, you don't actually have forty hours to do any of these new initiatives. You have forty hours less. You're pre committed meetings. So look at your calendar. If you've got ten hours of meetings for the week, well that forty just became thirty, right, But maybe it takes you another twenty hours just to process all of your messages. Maybe you're just getting bombarded with Slack messages and Asana messages and emails, and so if that's the case, you're only left with ten hours remaining to do that website or to do that blog. So again that's not rocket science, but I think most people aren't considering their true bandwidth is what their target is, less meetings and less the admin time. And in medicine there's such a parallel to that, right because we all go to med school to want to spend time with patients and make them feel better and talk to them and figure out their stuff, and then you recognize it actually spends so much time, just like reordering new prescriptions and changing the lab orders and documentation taking up a huge chunk of what you're doing, and moving a clinic takes like you know, oh my god. It is very a lot of parallels in the medical world, as I'm sure there are in multiple industries. So definitely something interesting to talk about. Even the third part of my book, on the resource part, where I talk about the importance of documenting process, I cite a surgeon that wrote the book The Checklist Manifesto and how errors and surgical rooms went down like ninety something percent once checklists started getting put into the surgical rooms. A tool gool on it. Yes, I love that book. That's a great book for anybody in any kind of process centric field, whether it's medicine or if you I think their stuff is based on aviation but anything where there's a lot of processes. Well, my last question, and that is actually related to kind of this scavenger hunt that you just mentioned. If you are starting from a mess, you are in a company that's been there for a while, and maybe you're even your division, you recognize that like nothing's documented anywhere, and if anyone were to leave, it would be like an unmitigated disaster. How would you start cleaning it up? Because it's not a small undertaking necessarily, with anything, kind of you eat the elephant one bite at a time, take one process and just try to get that right. With anything, You're better off doing one thing really right than trying to, like half ass, you know, start touching a bunch of different things. So whatever process is the most broken, the most critical of the business, just focus on that, get that one good, and then move on to the next. Awesome. Well, this has been at so much much fun. I did not warn you in advanced Nick, and I apologize for that, But we do like to share a love of the week every week, and I feel like you mentioned so many things that you love in your book that if you can't think of one, I can probably come up with one. But I will give you mine first, and then that'll give you time to think of yours. Okay, So mine is how in Gmail? They Gmail has figured out how to identify promotions and social and then your regular inbox and automatically organizes them. I find this tool super, super helpful. I recently figured out that I could make my we have a Patreon for best of both worlds, and those messages were actually coming into my primary inbox. And even though I love reading those messages, like I don't want them in my primary inbox, and you can actually tell Gmail like no, actually those go into social and it fixed it. And it just makes archiving and cleaning out so much easier with things being automatically categorized like that. So I love that feature of Gmail and gmailger is it an amazing technology? Now? Like how smart some of these tools can be. I would say, mine, I'll just piggyback off you in Gmail. And we talk about this in the book, but most people aren't utilizing the snooze feature in Gmail. There's that little clock icon or an email can magically leave your inbox and then magically come back on the date that you want it to come back, and that's the defer part of RAED and that's a really critical, powerful feature that is underutilized. Yeah, that's a really good point. I've used the delay send, but I have not really made use of snooze, And it does kind of make sense because there's certain things that instead of writing yourself a note, you can just pin yourself with it with the same message. So or it could be, you know, driving directions to some appointment and it's in a month, what are you going to do with that email? It doesn't need to sit there for a month. You just need to come back the morning of that appointment, right. Or you want to write to someone and if you don't hear back from them in a week, you want it to you want to know. But if they write back to you on day three, you want to know on day three. So snoozing will deactivate the sooner of the date that you put or an update to the thread. So it's a really critical part of getting to inbox zero. Totally makes sense. That is awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Tell our listeners the best places where they can find you remind them of the full book title, and also the websites where you can get all the resources that go along with it. You can go and check out my new book, Come Up for Air. We have a website, come upfair dot com. We have a bunch of free resources. You can go there and see where to buy the book. We have some special offers for buying it for your team. Ultimately, this is all about team productivity and you want your team to all speak the same language. And then if you need extra help and you need help on training or consulting with any of your systems, Get Leverage dot com is the training and consulting company that we run that helps people with operational efficiency. Awesome, Well, thank you so much. This has been so much fun to chat about all things productivity, efficiency and teamwork. Thanks for having me. Well, that was awesome. Thank you Sarah and Nick for that conversation. This week's question comes from someone who is in a demanding graduate program and feels overscheduled already just with her course load. She is living on her own, so she's doing all the chores in her house, and she says she doesn't have a lot of disposable income right now, is sort of the natural way that graduate school tends to work. But she says she has a question about setting goals and boundaries in her particular graduate program, that she is frequently told to be optimizing on networking and socializing, as that is one of the big upsides of her prestigious school. The downside is, of course, that she has limited energy and she has big demands on her time in the force a form of a very demanding course load. So you know, she's thinking that networking is a trade off with understanding the course material more deeply. So she's asked us for any tips or suggestions on how to balance making the most of the learning experience that she's getting there while not neglecting building her network. So Sarah, go for it. Yeah, I thought this was an interesting question. I love that she used the word boundaries in her question because to me, that's key to the answer. This is one of those almost like false choice type of dichotomies here, like how can I both network and you know, do this deep academic work. And I think you have to decide, well, how much how much is kind of like the minimal acceptable networking time and see if you can create like a templative sort for yourself, like maybe one weeknight and one weekend event that's just one example, I don't know exactly what you want your schedule to be prioritizing free events since you mentioned finances, and if you know that your calendar is going to, you know, have those two times blocked off, then the rest of the time is a lot of time to get all of that academic work done. And I do think that thinking of it is a finite thing to check off, like Okay, I'm gonna network twice a week, rather than some nebulous expectation that like, oh, I'm supposed to be networking all the time, will kind of help you reframe the task to something that's that's manageable. I also was thinking, may maybe there are some areas where the networking might overlap with the academic work, like a study group. Perhaps. I'm sure that's something you've thought of. But networking doesn't only have to happen late at night in fancy bars, so you know, embrace other opportunities as well. Absolutely, I totally agree that it doesn't have to just happen in fancy bars. And I would throw out here that there are one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week. There is time to study, there is time to interact with other human beings and probably do your chores and sleep as well, So you know, might want to plot that out roughly when you plan to do all those things. But I just want to kind of throw out here that networking. I think we need to have a bit of a mindset shift here about networking. You know, a lot of people are like, oh, I need to network more, and we have this idea that's like you go to an event and you collect business cards or I guess these days LinkedIn contacts or like snink up your phone or whatever it is. You know, back in the old day, we were walking around with those little pocketfuls of business cards that you hand out. But it's absolutely not just about that, and even you know, sometime those things tend not to be all that effective. Or like going to happy hours, it can be fun, but like it's loud, you're not really going to be talking that much with individual people on anything deep. So the goal of networking is not about collecting the business cards. It's about having people who think you are amazing and who in the future will be actively looking for ways to work with you, right, That is the goal. Like the people who are like, hey, if you're ever looking for a job. Call me first. People will be like, we've got to do something together in the future. People who are seeking you out, that is what you want, And so that means that a study group is better than a bar because you're getting to know those people really well and you're working on projects to gather and so they're getting a sense of how amazing you are and that they do want to keep up this relationship long term. You can also look for ways to do things that you'd normally do with others, Like can you exercise with class lights? Maybe you find two other people in this program who want to do early morning walks along the river with you. Not that I'm giving away where she's at school. There's lots of rivers and lots of rivers this particular one people walk along all the time. So you go and walk along the river with your classmates at this place. You know, you could like, I presume you are eating lunch probably between classes, Like, you know, you've got your morning class in an afternoon seminar. You have to eat. Where are you eating? Like, you can make a plan to meet up with someone to eat together. You know, these are just the things you can do in order to nurture those relationships with your classmates, even absent the idea of spending X number of hours in bars each week. Love it, love it all right? Well, anyway, this has been best of both worlds. Sarah was interviewing Nick Sonenberg on how we are coming up for air not drowning and overwork. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore shoe Box on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.

Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and eighty nine, airing in mid February of twenty twenty three. Sarah is going to be interviewing Nick Sonenberg, who is an expert on business systems and organization. He's the author of the book Come Up for Air, which is how to stop drowning and over Work. And we are big fans of not drowning and overwork, so looking forward to that. But first, a little bit of a best of both worlds announcement before we get into the topic of not doing overwork. Sarah, you are recording in a slightly different position than you normally are. Yes, our loyal listeners will remember that Laura and I discussed that we both record in our closets in very uncomfortable positions. I was using my husband's end table and a chair, so I was always kind of twisted and my legs didn't fit under said table, and my microphone was often like falling off because it wasn't a very large table, and Laura was on the floor and also mentioning a lot of back pain. So we felt like it was probably time to see what we can do with these small spaces. Closets are excellent for recording because you can have lots of clothes in there that are absorbing sound and you can block out a lot of outside sound. But so our solution was we shoved tiny desks into our closet, not even that tiny actually, so I wouldn't say I have a huge closet, but it's like a smallish walk in closet, and I was able to shove and Ikia desk to the back a full on chair. We do not have an outlet in this closet, but it's okay because I'm able to stretch the cord around to the outlet right outside the closet door. And I am so comfortable. I'm so excited, Like I feel like this is a new era in podcasting for me. We are finally taking ourselves seriously after lo these many years of recording. Yeah, I'm excited to not be sitting on the floor. Mine is more of a makeshift kind of thing. I just I was like, well, I don't even want to go like find a desk. It's a small space anyway, so it would have been hard to do a traditional desk, even though, like IKI, a small one. However, there's lots of random material around this house. I found a what must be an old like dining table leaf I think that the previous owner must have abandoned somewhere, and then another like shelf that was also abandoned. I stacked those on top of these kind of magazine file containers. I don't know if anyone knows is what they're like from pottery barn or something. They've kind of tan colored anyway, two of them with the two wooden things stacked on top of it. I'm sitting on a bench that was my bench for my old keyboard, and it's working. It's sort of the right height, I guess, and I haven't entirely figured out the microphone placement thing. Yet my microphone for before Breakfast is on one side of where i'd put my computer, so I'm kind of looking back this way for that and the microphone that I used for Best of both worlds because it works differently with going through the laptop. It's all complicated anyway. I've had bad sound quality attempting to do switching microphones. But it's on the left side, so you know, I turned my head backway and forth. It'd be nice to have a microphone like right over the laptop, but I haven't quite figured out how to make that work yet. One of these that will perhaps be the next project. Well, I didn't realize you had like figured it out, a solution, a creative solution, like more and more so than me. And by the way, I didn't even buy this desk. It was just like in our bedroom and I just had to drag it into the closet. That's right. Sometimes you know it's funny. We it was in our Pebbles in the Shoe part of that episode of Things. We were upgrading or not upgrading, as the case may be, and we were talking about how something can be annoying you for a long time, and the solution can be very very easy. Like I mean, in Sarah's case, she was literally moving a desk a couple of feet and she just hadn't done it. I don't know. It's an interesting question why we don't do it. I don't know. I think both of us have personalities that we have a very strong ability to just make do with whatever the situation is, which you know has its upsides, probably has its downsides as well, in the sense of my chronic back pain and Sarah trying to figure out how to not knock her microphone off. But here we are, so yay yay, speaking of making things better. So Sarah does an interview here with nick Son and bar about coming up for air. Do you read a lot of business books, Sarah? I feel like I didn't used to. I mean, I have always loved the personal development sphere kind of unapologetically, whereas probably where I discovered you in the first place. So I mean, I have no qualms about that, but I kind of steered away from those that were more business y just because I didn't feel like they applied to me necessarily. But I think once I officially went part time and kind of gave myself permission to think of my creative work as a more legitimate business. I've been more drawn to those. I recently really enjoyed Free Time by Jenny Blake, and I have on my next to my desk a book called Life Changing Workshops, which I don't know if it's good or not because I haven't read it yet. Because I'm hoping that I can make my workshops life changing, so that would be good. I was drawn to come up for air because I felt like it was a topic that you know, it was really an emphasis on efficiency, but it sounded like it would be relevant for all types of environments, those of us who work in a field like medicine that's more action oriented, as well as those in small businesses or you know, even solo proprietorships or those who work in the corporate world. So it felt like it kind of crossed. It wasn't specific to any one of those audiences. Yeah, because I mean you were mentioning there's some challenges that we all deal with. I mean, you know, regardless of what kind of work you're doing, it's how do you communicate efficiently? Right? And he talks about that and systematizing. I guess that was what I took away from this. Yeah, a lot of systemization, like you know, making sure you capture the work you create in a logical and very organized way so that you don't end up having to reinvent the wheel ways to have effective meetings. Was a really nice section. He goes through email and we have a lot of aligned philosophies there. So yeah, it was useful. I think the book is really interesting in the conversation we had was fun. So I think you guys will enjoy this episode. Awesome. Well, let's go ahead and hear what Nick has to say about how we can all come up for air. Well, I am so excited to welcome Nick Sonnenberg on the Best of both worlds Old. He is an entrepreneur, a writer, and a founder CEO of Leverage, which is an leading operational efficiency consultancy, and he also just published a fascinating book called Come Up for Air, what he calls a practical guide to go from drowning and work to freeing up an extra business day per week for everyone on your team. Welcome Nick, Thanks for having me on the show. So my first question to you is why did you decide to write Come Up for Air. I mean, we all know work has its issues, but there are a great deal many business books out there with different philosophies and promises from the four hour work week to know anything beyond that. So I'm curious, like, what made you feel like you had something really new and exciting to say? What were you trying to accomplish with Come Up for Air? Yeah, no, it's a great question. Well, for one, I felt that the world needed a book like this. There are books like for Our Work Week or Getting Things Done, and those were kind of the classic, but those are more individual productivity books. Right There really hasn't yet been any kind of impactful book around how teams or organizations can be productive. And it's a nuance, but it's a very distinct difference between individual productivity and team productivity. And I wrote the book for myself and my team so that I could have kind of a guidebook for them on how to operate. I wrote it because ultimately my mission is I want to save millions of hours of people's time, and I want people to be able to work on things that give them joy or tap into their unique ability. And I think that this book can really help with that. And also I know what it's like to be drowning and work. My story is we grew very quickly in the early days, and one day my business partner came up to me while we were working in a coworking space, tap me on the shoulder and said he's leaving. He didn't give me two weeks or two days notice. He gave me two minutes notice. And at that point, when we separated the way we ran the company, he was people facing and I was non people facing. So it was a complete disaster because no one knew who I was because the way we had split it up, and early on we were a freelancer marketplace, not operational efficiency consulting and training like we do now. But during that time, and I don't need to go into the details, but it was very difficult. We lost forty percent of revenue in a three month period. More than half of our team members left. Also in that period, before I know what, I'm cashing out my four oh one K, my dad's taking a second mortgage on the house to loan us money for payroll, and you know, there I am kind of the only person now running the company, and we had one hundred and fifty contractors on the team at that point, and I had to make a decision do I bankrupt the company or do I try to clean up the mistakes. We had done some things right because we grew really quickly, but we had all this operational debt that we were sitting on that was making it very hard and very complex, and so ultimately I decided to stick it out. You know, we owed about three quarters of million dollars of debt to people. I thought it was wrong to screw them out of it, and I did see a path to cleaning things up, and so over time, I just started late nights, seven days a week cleaning this company up, and I just started seeing kind of what it was taking to clean it up. You know that you we needed to clean up how we communicated as a team. I wasn't able a couple of clicks to know who was working on what. So I needed to clean up the planning. And then I knew that we had all this knowledge. I'd already spent a lot of time documenting my ex business partner's knowledge. Otherwise we definitely wouldn't have not survived that. But I started seeing this pattern of these three buckets, and people started reaching out to me asking me to consult them. And I worked with Tony Robbins, I worked with poopery, I worked with small find I've worked with a bunch of doctors' offices. I worked with financial advisors. And it didn't matter if you were a small medical practice or you were Tony Robbins. Everyone had kind of very similar issues. You needed to clean up how you communicated, how you planned, and then all the resource and so ultimately the core of leverage started being training and consulting on those things. And ultimately the pattern was just so strong. This stuff was helping just everyone, regardless of size or industry. So I decided that a book would be a great way to get the message out and help a lot of people stop drowning. And work totally makes sense, drowning work, And I don't want that for anyone. Yes, no, that totally makes sense. And I say that as someone who is definitely is a fan of like your Tim Ferriss and David Allen, especially a man that I like, you know, I've read his books like many many times, so really interesting to hear how like you're right, your stuff goes from the individual to how do we make a system that doesn't break individuals and that can succeed more long term. So I wanted to talk about communication first because that was your first like piece of the trio, And my question was not necessarily about how we can best communicate because personally, yeah, I feel like I have a fairly well honed sense of like when should we use synchronous methods and when should we use asynchronous matches? Although I can have you review with our audience what those means. But my real question is how do we get others on board with this without coming off as curmudgeonly or unpleasant Because my personal pet peeve and my husband will say that I'm probably overly sensitive to this is like I get very irritated when people use synchronous methods for things that really should be asynchronous. And I think it's very disrespectful because it's a way of saying, Hey, my time's important, because I want this info for you right now, but I don't care what you're doing. I'm going to interrupt you. So I guess, A, what are those things for the audience? And B how do we help others to get on board with appropriate usage without making any It's a great question. So let's just clarify for the listeners. The difference between synchronous just means you're doing it simultaneously at this moment in time, right. So like this conversation right now is synchronous, like we put time, I'm on our calendar to hop on this video call and we're recording this live, right Versus asynchronous is I put something somewhere and when you have time later you go and look in that drawer and you go and look at it, right. So asynchronous just means there's kind of this I'm going to put this here and then when you have time go and look at it. And so there's a time and a place for both. For example, if you have a performance issue with a team member, you don't want to asynchronously tell them over Slack or email or something like, hey, you're doing a really bad job and you know maybe we're going to fire you right like, that requires a live conversation where it can be both ways. And also facial expression and tonality and all those things make a difference. So there are times and places where synchronous is great, or you want to do a brainstorming session and it does require all this back and forth kind of wrap it back and forth. That's great for synchronous, but there's a lot of things that could be asynchronously. Hey, whenever you have time, I need this report, or when you have time, take a look at this PDF that I put together and tell me if it looks good, right, or I have an idea for something like that's not super urgent. And so I think it's the responsibility of the business owner and entrepreneur to set boundaries and also set up systems so that people can be asynchronous. For example, we have a policy at Leverage that if something's not urgent, don't slack it, meaning like don't like peing someone right now, add it to next week's agenda. We use a tool called a sauna to house those agendas. And you were just talking about David Allen. He's got a great quote that your brain it's for having ideas, not holding ideas. So you need to give people places to put things. Otherwise they need to dump it out of their head. And so whatever is their mode of doing that, which might be synchronous, is how they'll do it. So you need to give them a framework and a place to dump those things. So you need to show them, hey, we use agendas at this company, and you know we have also an sop or a policy that if it's not urgent, it can wait till next week and we have a meeting. Go and add it to this agenda. You also need to have in your culture that you run meetings with agendas at that point though, so you need to have kind of some standard operating procedures that you tell people upfront during the onboarding and training when you hire them. You have to reinforce it. You have to give tough love when people fall off the wagon, which inevitably they will, that you kindly point them in the direction of you know, in the future. This is how we've all aligned on doing things, and it's a never ending process. Like it's constant reinforcement. It's not going to be perfect, but you know, you can get pretty close. I love the emphasis on make sure you have a really good bucket for people to put those things, because I think sometimes my mistake is not maybe emphasizing too much, like the ough that didn't need to be a text, but okay, well where does it need to be right, Like, please add it to my staff messages, I promise I check those every single day. I clear them out every single day so it won't get missed, to make sure you clarify exactly where that message should go if it should not be in a synchronous fashion. So that's a really really good point. All right. Email so speaking of your brain is for having ideas and not holding them. I think email is for processing inputs and not collecting them. I don't know, maybe I'm just in a very David Allen esque mode today, but you do talk about inbox zero in your book, and I love it, And in fact, you even said like, oh, you can have twenty things in there because they're like your active things. And I'm like, no, I actually believe in zero, like getting to actual zero, because I still don't want to collect them. They're like they probably belong somewhere else. So talk a little bit about that, and has that been a challenge to, like you supervise many individuals in your company. Have you been able to help them achieve inbox zero? Is there a lot of pushback? Why is it so unpopular as an idea? I mean, wellt the if you don't know the concept inbox zero basically just is a methodology, so that when you look at your email and you're managing your email, you have I consider it to be not exactly zero, but like twenty thirty something manageable. And I don't distinguish between read or unread. It's any email in your inbox, you know. Most people have tens of thousands, or I've seen hundreds of thousands, And the benefit of it is it can save you so much time and stress looking at and also not just time stress, but there's opportunities that I see every single time. Every single time my team works with someone on this, they always discover some gem of an email that slips through the cracks because they just don't have a good system to make sure that they're you know, filing and dealing with all their email properly. And email is a tricky one because you've been us using it for decades. It's the only tool that's been around for decades. Slack and Asana, notion and all these other tools that I talked about in the book are all relatively new. So people have adopted bad behavior with email. A lot of people are sensitive about how they use their email and think that they've got a good system, and so I think in general it's important that people have a student mindset and that they're always open to a better way. And as long as people have that mindset and they kind of follow are open minded to reading kind of my RAD system reply archive deffer that I lay out in the book, I can guarantee that you'll like that better than pretty much any system that you're following. I've just seen. We've just done this thousands of times and seen the impact of three to five hours a week on average that you can save if you actually process email properly. I think that the most important thing is to have a student mindset and to always be looking for a better way with email. People have been using it for decades. They think that they've got a good system, but vperience. I've just seen three to five hours a week back per person when they follow the RAD system. So that stands for a reply archive and defer. And it's the benefit though of email versus cleaning up other tools. One, it's a tool that's the most commonly used tool that everyone uses constantly. You can save a ton of time quickly, and it doesn't require that much training, Like in a few hours, you can get your email under control and probably The biggest difference is all these other collaboration tools require everyone to be on the same page. Like take Slack, take us on, and take these tools. People need to be using it kind of in a similar way for it to work. Like if you don't know how to use slack, or you don't know when to put something in a channel, or you don't know when to use it, I'm not going to get that much benefit. It's like what's the value of a cell phone. If I'm the only one that owns the cell phone, I have no one to talk to. But with email, even if you don't use email properly, and we're on the same team, but I use it properly, I will still get the benefit. And so when you show people the benefit, like everyone wants to save time. No one likes to be overworked and overstressed. So you know, once you kind of kind of promise them that and showed them very quickly kind of what that feeling is like to look at a clean inbox with nothing in it, It's a pretty easy sell. I love it. Well, We're going to take a very quick ad break and be back to talk about meetings. Speaking of efficiency and saving time, all right, we are back, and you had a really nice section and come up for air on meetings that really emphasized exactly how expensive they are from a financial and time standpoint, and ways in which we can make sure that not to use your company names, we can leverage that time effectively to really make the most of it. So can you talk a little bit about your best practices for meetings? Yeah, I mean meetings is another massive expense, similar to email. I mean, when you think about how much a meeting costs, you take your you know, all the hourly rates of everyone in that meeting, times the length of that meeting. It's one of the biggest expenses in businesses. I think I was reading a stat that it was like, I don't know, one hundred billion dollars or something worth of meetings last year. It's something crazy fifty billion or one hundred billion. It's something on that order of magnitude. And it's not that hard to clean it up. If you don't know what your hourly rate is, just take your salary and divide it by approximately two thousand. There's two thousand hours in a year that you work roughly, and so if you're a one hundred dollars an hour person. Someone else is a fifty dollars an hour person, and the two of you do an hour call, it's one hundred and fifty dollars call. So the more people you add to it, the longer the meeting is, the more expense. If it is, so, it's important that you get the most out of those times. It's just too easy now to just throw things on the calendar and lose track of actually how expensive those calls are. And so the ways to reduce a meeting reduce the number of people, reduce the frequency. You know, does this meeting need to be weekly? Could it be bi weekly or monthly? Does it even need to happen in the first place? You know a lot of meeting. Could this be done asynchronously? Does it have an agenda? You know, you want to make sure that the meetings have an agenda. You're accomplishing what you need to accomplish, you're documenting decisions, you're documenting action items. And then lastly, can you just reduce the length of the meeting? And so there's this kind of there's this other interesting concept where that I talk about in the book, which is it's not just about saving time it's about optimizing time and how time isn't linear. That nine am on a Monday is way more valuable than six pm on a Friday after one hundred zoom calls for the week and you're in the back of an uber and you don't have your your laptop with you, So that nine am on Monday time slot might be the most valuable time slot of the whole week. You maybe have relaxed for the weekend, woke up early, worked out, feel great, and your brain's at a full horse power at nine am on a Monday, and so you want to make sure that you're maximizing your calendar and your precious time around when your brain is at full horse power. So even if you could reduce an hour long meeting from nine to ten on a Monday to forty five minutes, and you make it from nine to nine to forty five, that fifteen minutes that you're fring up might be the equivalent of two hours like in terms of like what you can accomplish with how fresh your brain is. So try to think about can you reduce the length of the meetings? Is there anything that you guys are talking about that could have been done asynchronously. So I'm not saying that you need to cancel the meeting, but if there's fifteen minutes of the meeting that people are just kind of giving report outs, you know, showing some document that they've put together and explaining it, that portion of the meeting could have been done asynchronously, and then on Friday, in the back of an uber, when you're not doing anything that great, you could watch the video of those report outs. You could have a policy where people have to watch it in advance of the Monday meeting. And now come Monday, you've just freed up fifteen minutes a very valuable time for everyone that now they can go and do higher level work. And now you're better utilizing the back of that uber where you're not going to be doing anything that great anyway. And it doesn't have to be the back of an uber. You could be maybe you want to go for a walk and get some vitamin D or something. I don't know, but thinking about not just saving time, but optimizing time and what parts of your meeting could be asynchronous. It requires no tools, it's not that hard of a concept to wrap your head around, and it can make a significant impact. Totally makes sense. I also, I mean this is very adjacent to that, But your discussion of workloads and calculating that and looking at how many hours people actually have to do work when you subtract the time spent with admin and time spent in meetings, talk a little bit about that, because I think that's very much in line with a lot of what Laura does, and especially in that there are executives who may say, oh, I work one hundred hours a week or whatever it is, but then you know, you recognize that, like, well, how many of those hours are actually spent like creating or actually doing work, and how many of them are in meetings, and how many of them are like organizing the work, doing work about work, et cetera. So talk a little bit about your findings there. Yeah, Well, I cite in the book there's a lot of research done about work about work. A SAUNA put out a report and it's like fifty eight percent of people's time they found is work about work. That's going on a scavenger hunt looking for a document that wasn't well organized, that's trying to coordinate to have a meeting and find times that everyone's free. That's you know, processing kind of your inbox when you actually look at the amount of time someone has to do that new initiative. You want to launch a new website, you want to write an article for something, whatever it is that you want to do, and you're trying to figure out, well, how much can I bite off this week. Most people totally don't estimate how much they can actually accomplish in a week because they're not considering how much of this work about worktime or what I call my book admin time you have. So say your target is to work a forty hour week, you don't actually have forty hours to do any of these new initiatives. You have forty hours less. You're pre committed meetings. So look at your calendar. If you've got ten hours of meetings for the week, well that forty just became thirty, right, But maybe it takes you another twenty hours just to process all of your messages. Maybe you're just getting bombarded with Slack messages and Asana messages and emails, and so if that's the case, you're only left with ten hours remaining to do that website or to do that blog. So again that's not rocket science, but I think most people aren't considering their true bandwidth is what their target is, less meetings and less the admin time. And in medicine there's such a parallel to that, right because we all go to med school to want to spend time with patients and make them feel better and talk to them and figure out their stuff, and then you recognize it actually spends so much time, just like reordering new prescriptions and changing the lab orders and documentation taking up a huge chunk of what you're doing, and moving a clinic takes like you know, oh my god. It is very a lot of parallels in the medical world, as I'm sure there are in multiple industries. So definitely something interesting to talk about. Even the third part of my book, on the resource part, where I talk about the importance of documenting process, I cite a surgeon that wrote the book The Checklist Manifesto and how errors and surgical rooms went down like ninety something percent once checklists started getting put into the surgical rooms. A tool gool on it. Yes, I love that book. That's a great book for anybody in any kind of process centric field, whether it's medicine or if you I think their stuff is based on aviation but anything where there's a lot of processes. Well, my last question, and that is actually related to kind of this scavenger hunt that you just mentioned. If you are starting from a mess, you are in a company that's been there for a while, and maybe you're even your division, you recognize that like nothing's documented anywhere, and if anyone were to leave, it would be like an unmitigated disaster. How would you start cleaning it up? Because it's not a small undertaking necessarily, with anything, kind of you eat the elephant one bite at a time, take one process and just try to get that right. With anything, You're better off doing one thing really right than trying to, like half ass, you know, start touching a bunch of different things. So whatever process is the most broken, the most critical of the business, just focus on that, get that one good, and then move on to the next. Awesome. Well, this has been at so much much fun. I did not warn you in advanced Nick, and I apologize for that, But we do like to share a love of the week every week, and I feel like you mentioned so many things that you love in your book that if you can't think of one, I can probably come up with one. But I will give you mine first, and then that'll give you time to think of yours. Okay, So mine is how in Gmail? They Gmail has figured out how to identify promotions and social and then your regular inbox and automatically organizes them. I find this tool super, super helpful. I recently figured out that I could make my we have a Patreon for best of both worlds, and those messages were actually coming into my primary inbox. And even though I love reading those messages, like I don't want them in my primary inbox, and you can actually tell Gmail like no, actually those go into social and it fixed it. And it just makes archiving and cleaning out so much easier with things being automatically categorized like that. So I love that feature of Gmail and gmailger is it an amazing technology? Now? Like how smart some of these tools can be. I would say, mine, I'll just piggyback off you in Gmail. And we talk about this in the book, but most people aren't utilizing the snooze feature in Gmail. There's that little clock icon or an email can magically leave your inbox and then magically come back on the date that you want it to come back, and that's the defer part of RAED and that's a really critical, powerful feature that is underutilized. Yeah, that's a really good point. I've used the delay send, but I have not really made use of snooze, And it does kind of make sense because there's certain things that instead of writing yourself a note, you can just pin yourself with it with the same message. So or it could be, you know, driving directions to some appointment and it's in a month, what are you going to do with that email? It doesn't need to sit there for a month. You just need to come back the morning of that appointment, right. Or you want to write to someone and if you don't hear back from them in a week, you want it to you want to know. But if they write back to you on day three, you want to know on day three. So snoozing will deactivate the sooner of the date that you put or an update to the thread. So it's a really critical part of getting to inbox zero. Totally makes sense. That is awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Tell our listeners the best places where they can find you remind them of the full book title, and also the websites where you can get all the resources that go along with it. You can go and check out my new book, Come Up for Air. We have a website, come upfair dot com. We have a bunch of free resources. You can go there and see where to buy the book. We have some special offers for buying it for your team. Ultimately, this is all about team productivity and you want your team to all speak the same language. And then if you need extra help and you need help on training or consulting with any of your systems, Get Leverage dot com is the training and consulting company that we run that helps people with operational efficiency. Awesome, Well, thank you so much. This has been so much fun to chat about all things productivity, efficiency and teamwork. Thanks for having me. Well, that was awesome. Thank you Sarah and Nick for that conversation. This week's question comes from someone who is in a demanding graduate program and feels overscheduled already just with her course load. She is living on her own, so she's doing all the chores in her house, and she says she doesn't have a lot of disposable income right now, is sort of the natural way that graduate school tends to work. But she says she has a question about setting goals and boundaries in her particular graduate program, that she is frequently told to be optimizing on networking and socializing, as that is one of the big upsides of her prestigious school. The downside is, of course, that she has limited energy and she has big demands on her time in the force a form of a very demanding course load. So you know, she's thinking that networking is a trade off with understanding the course material more deeply. So she's asked us for any tips or suggestions on how to balance making the most of the learning experience that she's getting there while not neglecting building her network. So Sarah, go for it. Yeah, I thought this was an interesting question. I love that she used the word boundaries in her question because to me, that's key to the answer. This is one of those almost like false choice type of dichotomies here, like how can I both network and you know, do this deep academic work. And I think you have to decide, well, how much how much is kind of like the minimal acceptable networking time and see if you can create like a templative sort for yourself, like maybe one weeknight and one weekend event that's just one example, I don't know exactly what you want your schedule to be prioritizing free events since you mentioned finances, and if you know that your calendar is going to, you know, have those two times blocked off, then the rest of the time is a lot of time to get all of that academic work done. And I do think that thinking of it is a finite thing to check off, like Okay, I'm gonna network twice a week, rather than some nebulous expectation that like, oh, I'm supposed to be networking all the time, will kind of help you reframe the task to something that's that's manageable. I also was thinking, may maybe there are some areas where the networking might overlap with the academic work, like a study group. Perhaps. I'm sure that's something you've thought of. But networking doesn't only have to happen late at night in fancy bars, so you know, embrace other opportunities as well. Absolutely, I totally agree that it doesn't have to just happen in fancy bars. And I would throw out here that there are one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week. There is time to study, there is time to interact with other human beings and probably do your chores and sleep as well, So you know, might want to plot that out roughly when you plan to do all those things. But I just want to kind of throw out here that networking. I think we need to have a bit of a mindset shift here about networking. You know, a lot of people are like, oh, I need to network more, and we have this idea that's like you go to an event and you collect business cards or I guess these days LinkedIn contacts or like snink up your phone or whatever it is. You know, back in the old day, we were walking around with those little pocketfuls of business cards that you hand out. But it's absolutely not just about that, and even you know, sometime those things tend not to be all that effective. Or like going to happy hours, it can be fun, but like it's loud, you're not really going to be talking that much with individual people on anything deep. So the goal of networking is not about collecting the business cards. It's about having people who think you are amazing and who in the future will be actively looking for ways to work with you, right, That is the goal. Like the people who are like, hey, if you're ever looking for a job. Call me first. People will be like, we've got to do something together in the future. People who are seeking you out, that is what you want, And so that means that a study group is better than a bar because you're getting to know those people really well and you're working on projects to gather and so they're getting a sense of how amazing you are and that they do want to keep up this relationship long term. You can also look for ways to do things that you'd normally do with others, Like can you exercise with class lights? Maybe you find two other people in this program who want to do early morning walks along the river with you. Not that I'm giving away where she's at school. There's lots of rivers and lots of rivers this particular one people walk along all the time. So you go and walk along the river with your classmates at this place. You know, you could like, I presume you are eating lunch probably between classes, Like, you know, you've got your morning class in an afternoon seminar. You have to eat. Where are you eating? Like, you can make a plan to meet up with someone to eat together. You know, these are just the things you can do in order to nurture those relationships with your classmates, even absent the idea of spending X number of hours in bars each week. Love it, love it all right? Well, anyway, this has been best of both worlds. Sarah was interviewing Nick Sonenberg on how we are coming up for air not drowning and overwork. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore shoe Box on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.