0:06
So the last couple weeks, we’ve been talking about the creative relationship, you know, and if, if things come to it the creative breakup.

0:17
And this week, we’re sort of rolling into what it looks like for us when we hit a wall, create a burnout, or, you know, writer’s block, that sort of thing. And

0:32
I actually recently, sort of hit a wall.

0:37
Last week, I had a lot going on. We we took an extra shoot that took us out to the Berkshires, which is about two hours from where, from where we’re based, and we did a little shoot out there. And so I kind of took a day off my edit schedule. And

0:56
one of my clients, we release a YouTube video every Saturday at noon, so I still had to edit a video for noon the next day. And

1:06
so I got home from that trip, and I had to edit a lot, and then I had to wake up super early and edit more. And when I finally got that out, by the time we get to Monday, I was very like, tapped Yeah. Tapped Out, yeah.

1:24
And one thing I’ve been finding that really helps me sort of reset

1:30
is so like yesterday, I work from home, you know, I took the morning and I didn’t I answered emails. I was available, but I didn’t, like, sit down in front of Da Vinci or After Effects and, like, try to edit and push through the block. I just sort of answered people. So I’m not a bottleneck. But I sort of took the morning, you know, 234, hours, and then by the time one, one o’clock rolls around, I was ready to go, yeah, like, and sometimes that’s all it takes. It’s like a nice little for me,

2:11
four hour chunk, you know, if you want to break it down, or five hour chunk or something, yeah. And sometimes it’s a day, and usually it lines up with the weekend, where I can kind of get my head straight by Monday, and sometimes it doesn’t Monday, I could not do that. There’s too much going on. You know, we find we usually power through on these things, as it is for most people and well, in their own businesses. But what does that sort of look like for you on a creative burnout? Yeah, the key word that you just said, there was pushing through.

2:47
You know, I

2:49
I probably have experienced mini burnout. Like, not to call what you just experienced like a mini burnout, but certainly, I think people experienced, like big burnouts, where they change career like but the mini ones, yeah, I think I see, I think that might happen every week for me.

3:12
In fact, I’ve created my work environment here at the office to accommodate my

3:20
the mechanisms that I’ve put in place from my big burnout that happened about five years ago,

3:28
six years ago, right before COVID, and it kind of bled into

3:33
the pandemic, which I would never wish I wanted anyone to combine those two things,

3:41
but, but, no, the big burnout happened at the height of in fact, this last, this last year was our biggest revenue year of the 16 we’ve been in business. And what’s been really cool, what was cool about it is, did it with fewer people, and did it without burnout

4:02
in 2019, was at the height of at that time, our largest year had 10 employees. Everybody worked under the same roof. I didn’t have proper structure in place in the business, so too many people were reporting to me instead of reporting to supervisor level or manager level employees.

4:23
We had, we had a Sales Machine in place that just kept generating more work.

4:28
And the the eye was on the wrong thing. The eye was on the the top and bottom line. Not so much on the the longevity, the sustainability of going at 150 miles an hour,

4:45
you know, and so when, when that point had had arrived in late 2019,

4:52
you know, at that point, had already been going almost at that speed for 11 years.

4:59
You know.

5:00
I started the business in 22,008

5:05
and what’s interesting too is,

5:08
you know that hustle everyone always says, like, you know, you know, all the little quips about, like, you know, keeping focused and like, just keep going. And like, the business will, you know, it’ll realize itself over time, etc, like no one ever talks about the fact that, like, if you don’t do that intelligently, you’re just sending yourself up for

5:32
a major burnout.

5:34
And so that happened, that happened to me,

5:38
like I said, and the trigger seems to have been the fact that I,

5:44
I think burnout a lot of times can, can, can also mean taking on too much.

5:51
And it’s funny to think back in that mindset of like, we want all the sales, we want to work with everybody. We’re going to take we’re going to say yes to everything,

6:02
just, you know, just give it to us. And I thought that was the way to build, build the business. So going through the burnout, I didn’t want to, I didn’t even want to think about the business. I, in fact, it took four years off from sales

6:22
and reevaluated what, what, you know,

6:27
the reality of like, I had created a job for myself. I didn’t, actually wasn’t an entrepreneur. I was just a small business owner who went to work every day and was like, was this really what I set out to do? And look where it got me right.

6:43
So some of them, the coping mechanisms that I not coping mechanisms, but the tools I guess, that I’ve, that I have now, that I use to avoid the big burnout

6:55
is it really centers around meditation

6:59
and mindfulness.

7:03
I don’t know what burnout feels like for you, in terms of like, aside from just like, being tired and in, in being aware of the fact that like, you can step back or you can push through right which one are you going to do? But for me, I got a physical feeling behind my eyes.

7:22
It’s not, it’s not like I’m that I’m tired, right? It’s not

7:29
exactly anything like medical that I can think of, but it’s just like, become my tell, like, Ah, I’ve been pushing a little bit too hard, and depending on the day and what I’m able to do, I’ll either lay down on the couch. I have out of off screen here that I brought in specifically for day naps. Actually

7:50
sleep for 20 minutes, get back up. It’s like it’s magic.

7:56
I actually wanted to delay the start of today’s recording with you, because I was doing another one of my things, which is, I just stay at my desk, where I push back and I just follow my breath for about five minutes and clear my mind. And it’s amazing what those when you build that up on a daily basis, you know, doing those two things. I don’t think it’s a cure all for me, but I think it’s, it’s, it’s a step in that direction to not

8:27
become burnt out again. Of course, organizing the business differently as well has helped a lot.

8:33
So, yeah, so burnout is a real thing. I People would always say, don’t you? Don’t you ever feel burnt out? And I’m like, I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know what burnout is, but wow, when it happens, you undeniably know what burnout you know what it is.

8:53
So, for, so now I’m a big advocate for, for, I guess the I guess. What is everyone saying? Self Care. Yeah,

9:02
self care is essentially, I guess what I was just describing,

9:06
just if you don’t want to disclose this, what did that big burnout look like for you? You

9:14
know, it looked a lot like depression.

9:19
It looked a lot like

9:23
sitting down to do, to do work, and just seeing that inbox full and asking, what is the point of all this? Like,

9:33
all these emails, and, you know, it was, is really striking, because prior to that, you know, like, I said, didn’t say no to anything,

9:42
and I would just grind, send up, send down, grind and grind and grind for over a decade. So

9:49
yeah, to answer your question, it looks like a minor depression.

9:53
It’s like the I the business was my livelihood, so I couldn’t completely leave it alone. In fact, I wanted.

10:00
To shut it, but I couldn’t, because I feel like I owed. I had a responsibility to the clients that we have and a responsibility to the team,

10:08
and so that kept, that kept the doors open.

10:14
But yeah, I would say it’s it’s probably like a minor for me, it hit almost like a minor depression. But outside of work was fine, not I mean, mostly fine,

10:27
but the idea of working or even looking at my phone or

10:34
having patience was all gone. I

10:38
started working four day work weeks for about four years, and like I said, we didn’t do any sales, didn’t just, just manage our current state staple of clients. And

10:50
then one day, like I felt, I felt energized about the business again, and that was last year, and we rebranded, rethought things, doing things differently. And

11:02
yeah, what a, what a, what a ride, though. Yeah, so I, I don’t think it’s to the extent of your burnout, but my largest burnout was, it’s actually around the same time as I think it was around, actually might have been 2017

11:18
I was working in the day at my corporate job, the tech company that,

11:27
you know, they wrote about tech, but they put it in magazines

11:32
and too slow to switch to the internet, yeah. So I was doing video there, you know, 50 plus hours a week, and I was taking on a substantial amount of, you know, side work on top of it,

11:49
and it was not uncommon for me to be drinking

11:54
insanes, amount amounts of caffeine, you know, Having two or three large iced coffees with two shots of espresso in them.

12:05
Was like, common, yeah, I have like two or three of them a day, and then so I was working late into the night, and common working on something, and

12:20
I kind of finished around 2am and I sit down. I remember was on, I put on The Walking Dead.

12:27
And I’m like, I just didn’t,

12:31
I could feel my, you know, heart, like, beating out of my chest. And I’m like, this is, this is, usually I’m asleep by now. Like, what’s going on here? And, long story short, I thought I was having a heart attack. I was, I was having a panic attack.

12:46
And, you know, an embarrassing ambulance ride later,

12:52
you know, kind of found out that the hard way, like, Yo, like, chill out. Wow. And

13:00
my tell now when I’m doing,

13:03
like, when I’m pushing it too far, is when I’m, like, super tired, and then all of a sudden, there’s like, a switch where I don’t feel tired anymore. Yes, yes. That’s when I go into that, like, flight mode, yeah.

13:19
And that is a that’s like, I’ve I’ve ignored

13:23
all the signs like to go to bed and all that, and I’ve pushed to a point of no return, and now I have to ride out the storm. So that hasn’t happened too much since, you know, that day in 2017 but

13:40
because I’ve incrementally gotten better at noticing, like, Hey, I gotta change how I’m doing this. Or, you know, whatever it looks like. Yeah, that was sort of my

13:54
worst burnout, I guess. And that might even now be burnout, but it was just taking on too much and pushing myself to a point where then I don’t want to work at all. You know, yeah, you know, it was, it was a that was probably about a three or four month

14:14
struggle. I stopped taking on side work completely, kind of like you said, like no new work coming in, and I was putting in the bare minimum at the corporate job.

14:24
Eventually quit the corporate job, right? But, yeah, it was a

14:31
it took a while to get like, excited about doing video again. Yeah, it’s amazing. The thing that we’re passionate about can become like an enemy, right? And when you mentioned your heart, and also that moment of like, being really tired, and then suddenly you have energy and you keep pushing,

14:51
makes me think of a couple of a couple of episodes back we were talking about at the end, like, what are we reading?

14:57
You know, I mentioned Dr Joe Dispenza.

15:00
Is in his book,

15:02
what comes to mind there is he talks about the fact that, like, you know, he has a, like an illustration of a person standing in a circle, and then around that circle are all the things in our day that that pull our energy right? It’s family and friends, it’s conflict, it’s social media, it’s whatever. There’s all these things. We all have this stuff. And what happens is we, we become, become so accustomed to like that being our day, like, when we’re when we first wake up,

15:35
like, technically we’re nobody.

15:38
But then we start remembering our email, we look at our phone, we see, you know, other people in the house with us, like we start remembering who we are, but that remembering of who we are doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s like healthy, obviously, like family and things people in the house, obviously that’s healthy, but

15:58
but in The context, what we’re talking about here is when, when, like a business owner, or just a person in general, that their energy is going out in so many different directions, and then on top of that, there’s all the responsibility of the business. What ends up happening is almost this, like there’s no there’s no energy left for the present.

16:25
You’re just,

16:27
you’re operating, you’re you’re oscillating between the past and the in the future. I got to get this done. I have a meeting tomorrow. I have, oh, this happened yesterday. I want to make sure that it’s just you never, you never in the present moment. So if you’re never in the present moment, you’re never actually experiencing, like, what your body is trying to tell you, right? Like, I don’t time to listen to my heart, or, you know, like my eyes really hurt, but whatever I gotta, I gotta get this thing done.

16:53
So I guess that idea of of being living in the more in the present and looking and having an honest conversation with yourself about what, what is taking your energy away from you,

17:06
you know, and if you had that energy back, what could you create with it? Maybe you create more

17:14
harmony in your work day, right? You have the, you know, the mental head space to think about what harmony in your workday even means, right? So these are some of the things that I put into into practice.

17:27
That’s Listen, Sam, sorry to hear that you had that ambulance experience, that you must been quite frightened to pick up the phone and and go that route.

17:37
Yeah, it was

17:41
a yes. It was, I mean, that’s the best way to put it, scary. And then when you find out, like, they hook you up to the thing, and they’re like, Yeah, you’re, you’re all good, dude, it’s like, okay, great. So glad I called everybody

17:55
and like, your neighbors come out. Like, so I was renting an apartment at the time, so I wasn’t like, super familiar with all my neighbors, but, like, I knew a handful of them. So like, every there’s never an ambulance on that street. So I, like, your your neighbors are out on the street, like, what’s going on? Yeah? Yeah,

18:13
yeah. It’s embarrassing. It’s a real, like, opportunity to evaluate what’s going on. And, you know, sounds like that’s what you did.

18:22
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I know. I don’t know if anyone that’s listening to this that

18:28
doesn’t recognize what we’re talking about.

18:32
It’s, it’s like I said earlier,

18:36
you know, because if, if we’re going back, you know, 11 years or something before I had my, my major burnout,

18:45
yeah, I had the you mentioned you were basically working two jobs. Like you had your day job and then you had your side gig. All of those years were in there for me as well. And people would, would, would say, like, wow, like, you work a nine to five, and then

19:01
you go home, take care of family things, and then you work, like, eight to midnight, and you do that every day. Like, yeah,

19:09
you know, I do. And like, don’t you feel burnt out? Like, I don’t know what that means. No, I don’t. So I, you know, I guess, I guess we’re here today to say that, like, if you’re in that hustle mode.

19:23
You know, my suggestion is to be mindful of of how many different directions your energy is going out, because eventually, like you’ll just run out. The body is really good of staying in survival mode for a long time,

19:38
but it will start to start to tell you things, whether it’s your heart, like

19:43
today, for me, it’s my my lungs feel tight because I’ve been, you know, doing, talking a lot,

19:52
bouncing around, and so I know that once I get through the next few meetings, that I’m going to find myself taking a nap and.

20:00
Resetting, right? But the old, old me would have just get a coffee keep going, right? So I guess if there’s any takeaways there, I think the listening to your body and trying to be present and not being in denial about burnout won’t happen to me.

20:16
You know?

20:18
Yeah, it

20:20
really changed how I I quit caffeine after that incident, and I was off caffeine for probably,

20:31
probably is up until 2022

20:36
or maybe close to 2023 and I start drinking, I have one cup of coffee a day in the morning, small, that’s it.

20:44
Rarely, there’s instances where I have a second cup, yeah, but it’s usually, like, in a social setting, so I feel obligated, yeah, I try to get decaf or something. But like, you know that probably that was, can probably contributing to a little bit of the, you know, anxiety with a lowercase a. I don’t think I really have, like, clinical anxiety or anything. It was just a

21:10
a moment of, yeah, too much.

21:15
And the other things I’ve kind of implemented to

21:20
kind of offset anything like that happening ever again is just

21:27
on the weekends, trying to completely

21:31
disconnect from work, right? No work emails.

21:36
Try to watch something that has nothing to do with what’s going on at work. You know,

21:42
whatever, movie, you know, podcast, whatever, yeah, try not to tie everything to work for me. And somehow some you use some way or another, it usually, in my mind, gets rooted back to work, but trying to find as many opportunities as I can to sort of break up

22:01
the day for me, and try not to make the days

22:06
the same kind of and it’s hard to do that in video, but it can get that way with if you’re just sitting at a computer editing all day, it almost doesn’t matter what the project is, Yep.

22:19
But it takes different forms for everybody,

22:23
and some is more catastrophic than others.

22:27
Like, I think we might, we might have been talking about this before we started, but, like, you’re saying how it’s like some people quit the industry they’re in, right,

22:38
which you know, is probably the extreme end of it, like

22:43
completely walking away from something you’ve spent maybe your whole life working on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I started training to become a coach. I

22:54
was going to close the doors on the on the business and do this other thing completely.

23:01
But, yeah, I just couldn’t do it for some of the reasons you mentioned, just

23:08
understanding that the idea for that wasn’t coming from a place of

23:14
wasn’t coming from like a clean place. It was as a decision based off of like a like a foggy mind, you know,

23:23
and

23:25
I think, I think your comments about coffee are super valid. I I go back and forth. I’m

23:35
I drink a fair amount of coffee,

23:39
but my diet has improved significantly. And I, in my fitness has improved significantly as well. In my general, like,

23:52
general health

23:55
has it’s, you wouldn’t even recognize me, I guess if you, if you, I mean physically, yeah. But like, my decisions and my eating habits and just making time for those things, and

24:08
my heart was constantly at like, you know, 80 beats per minute or whatever, like, all day, like every day, never really calming down or even understanding, or even understanding what, what my resting heart rate was, because it was never, never felt like it was resting, right?

24:26
So anyway, these are all like, it all kind of comes together to today,

24:34
you know, and in efforts to avoid that, not because of like, because it puts their business at risk, but it puts our, like, health at risk, you know,

24:47
getting getting up from the like you were mentioning, just like sitting and editing for hours.

24:53
It’s similar for me, I except I’d be sitting and doing, you know, whatever, just multiple things in that hour.

25:02
I actually make it a point to, I’ve been exploring Cambridge by foot. I go about two mile walk every day, just in the middle of the day. I just get up and just go for a walk. When I come back, it’s amazing. Like, I’m ready. My mind is like, ready and fresh to to like, I almost think of it as like, if you’re just sitting and not thinking about it. Thinking about anything, your mind is kind of like just wide open, but like when you’re sitting in your editing video, or you’re even if you’re writing a very technical email, you’re so narrowly pointed for a long time that concentration and the amount of brain calories required to stay at that point of concentration is intense. And if you’re doing that all day, there’s something has to something has to give. You know,

25:49
when we were in the office, when I had the whole team in the office, back in the day, I would encourage mental breaks. You know, like you sent that email that took you five minutes to write and a lot, like, had to do all this research prior to sending it,

26:01
take a break. Like, look at your phone, you know. Like, go outside, do something to reset. Don’t just go to the next task immediately. These are some of the things that

26:14
that maybe will be helpful to people listening. Yeah, so big thing we did when we moved into this space is stand up, sit down, desks. Yeah. So every I tried every hour for a while now it’s closer to every 90 minutes. Every two hours, I kind of alternate, yeah, and some days it’s I all day sitting, some days one, only one time was all day standing.

26:42
But it helps. It does help just

26:46
standing up, looking at a little differently. You know, better posture, whatever. It kind of helps break up the

26:54
break up the day. Yeah, so, yeah, I just looked a lot of different ways. Yeah, a little you just brought to mind when

27:03
I was going through that, that training program, that training,

27:08
I don’t know, the coach training, one of the one of the instructors had it, had her workstation set up in such a way that she had managed to put a treadmill, like, under her desk or something. And so, you know, that was really something where we were continuing with the meeting, but she was clearly walking, but clearly was not going anywhere, but she was like, The Walking movements, right? There’s really something to get used to seeing that. But I was like, Good for her. You know, because these, those calls were, like, hours and hours long.

27:45
Have you ever seen the show IT Crowd NOW, you know I’m talking about, it’s a BBC comedy about a night, an IT team in a big corporation. They kind of poked fun at the the walking desk thing. There was this, you know, employee that was running, a

28:08
competing, competing in a digital triathlon

28:13
during the meeting. She was, she was like running at one point, and then she was like swimming. It’s hilarious. It made me think that would it’s that’s kind of true. Like,

28:23
I guess it’s good for the person, but it is kind of distracting to you in the meeting. Like, clearly that person is walking, yeah,

28:31
yeah, exactly,

28:33
yeah. Why my desk looks like it’s the type that would go up and down because doesn’t have drawers or anything. But

28:41
no. Things pretty stationary. I should look into that. That’s a great idea. Yeah, it was about, I think there are just under $300

28:49
Amazon, we got a probably middle of the middle sized one. I think they make one that’s bigger and they make smaller ones. But best, one of the better decisions like this table the podcast setups on is, I could sit or stand, yeah, looks like you’re standing now. Yeah, I’m standing right now. Yeah, I tend to be more locked in when I’m standing. So especially for a conversation, going back and thinking about those days, it’s really something.

29:19
What’s interesting too, is I don’t know, I don’t know what within our body, what’s really happening. But it’s almost like

29:28
the part that I do think back on from time to time is, like, it took about four years to come back around. Like, that seems,

29:36
that seems like a lot, a really long time. But I guess if you’re thinking of it in terms of, like, if you’ve been coiling rope for like, 11 years, 12 years of just coiling this thing, right, and it gets so it’s so tight that you can’t move it anymore. Yeah, I guess I should be thankful that it didn’t take 11 years to go back to center. It took four years to go sort of to the point where it could be.

30:00
Be, you know, maneuver it again or whatever. But it seems to be, yeah,

30:07
and if you draw the parallel, because I think it was like three or four months for me, right,

30:13
to get kind of back to normal, if, if I just, if that didn’t happen that night, right, like, I didn’t have a panic attack or whatever, and I just kept forging on for the next several years, and then had an incident like you did, and then maybe it does take three, four years, like, right? Like, it’s

30:32
so I guess in a way, it’s probably a good thing that happened, in a sense, because I now I pay way closer attention to, all right? I need to take a break. All right. I need a morning to myself. I need a day to myself or whatever, yep,

30:47
to try and avoid a crash, yeah, one of the things that was really eye opening to me was

30:59
if I didn’t return that email the same day, the

31:03
client will still talk to me later, right? Like I didn’t have to be immediate with the work.

31:09
I can. I can stop work at

31:12
provided there are no like deadlines and major things happening, but I can start work almost at any point during the day, and it’s still going to be there tomorrow, right? And it sounds so obvious, but I think when you’re operating a business from a place of fear, you or scarcity mindset, or

31:34
whatever it is, you think that you have to immediately reply to people, immediately, do this, immediately, do that. Like, I’ve got these five things to do. I got to do them all today, or I just, I can’t go to bed. Like, that’s how I was operating for a long, long time, and when I was just like, You know what? Nope, I’m gonna get to it when I get to it. Now, granted, this is all within, like, a professional timelines. Like, it wasn’t like, making people wait months, but maybe it was an extra day or two days before

32:05
I would do the thing. But guess what? It had a better quality to it. I was more mindful on the task that I was doing, and I was just more present with it.

32:16
And the benefit is I also wasn’t contributing to like, a minor or a larger burnout at the same time. So if you compound that over however many clients you have,

32:28
that was a real big eye opener for me, and really a sad one, because during like, the workaholic phases of building the business and working all the time, a lot of my personal relationships took a hit because of that. And you read about this like you hear people talking about this like you it’s like a sad casualty of

32:48
that’s possible. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it tends to

32:53
right. So it’s like looking back and be like, Wow, all those vacations I took, and I was taking client calls or

33:00
sneaking away to write some emails. I didn’t need to do any of that stuff, you know.

33:06
But it took a it took it was just like a hard lesson to learn over the last six months. Shout out to shout out to Morgan Molitor of a contractor coalition Summit.

33:18
We video. We filmed the contractor coalition Summit. It’s a event where

33:24
Nick schifr, Brad love it, Tyler, grace and Morgan monitor talk about kind of the back end of construction businesses and how to make your business more profitable. All that, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of overlap to what we do, you know, in the creative field to building, as we’ve discussed before,

33:43
one of the things Morgan talked about, which I

33:47
in the most recent event, was

33:52
you don’t owe someone a response.

33:58
Like if someone emails you at 10am you don’t, you don’t have to respond by 1001. Like you don’t. You don’t owe that person a response no matter what client, non client, whatever it is, at first, I’m like, I’ve always kind of practiced Ohio. Only handle it once. You know, I heard that

34:18
Warren Buffett, you know, whatever.

34:21
Not that I’m particularly fond of him or anything, but I heard that, like, only handle it once, like an email or a text or something. Then you’re not opening it and forgetting it. You just get done, right? Yeah, and I’ve kind of gone away from that since hearing Morgan say, like, you don’t owe someone that immediate response, like saying what you’re saying,

34:43
I can get back to them in 24 hours, 36 hours, maybe in 48 hours. I mean, if you’re letting it sit there for a week,

34:50
you know, unless you’re following up with someone who hasn’t responded to you or something different, yeah, but you know, you don’t have to that. You.

35:00
Despite it being an instantaneous culture, you know, we get Amazon the same day delivery and all these things, we don’t owe people

35:09
that immediate response. You just simply put Yeah. And if it’s if it’s a simple one answer, yeah, like a yes, no question or something, and it doesn’t require a lot of thought, like, by all means, Ohio, handle it once. But like, if it’s an in like, you’re saying, like, an in depth thing that you got to sit down, you got to be in there, whatever, like, and type it out or research it like, you don’t owe them that instant response. And I’ve really started to internalize that, yeah, I think it’s been super helpful. Yeah, takes a lot of stress off. If you’re looking at your inbox,

35:47
it can be, you know, I try to keep my my inbox quite trim. I actually use that as almost like a to do list, and keep things marked as unread, knowing I need to go back to it, that type of thing.

36:01
But, yeah, it’s really liberating. If you, if you can, can operate that way.

36:09
I still find that I do. In fact, this might be bleeding into another topic we want to talk about some time, but like setting boundaries.

36:19
You know, there are times when I’m I happen to reply to an email after hours, but I actually schedule it for the next morning, rather than sending it right then,

36:28
because it it kind of like communicates if you’re sending email at all times of the day, communicates that you’re available all times of the day. And it’s such that weird expectation.

36:40
You know, I got a email and a text message on Saturday this past weekend to do a

36:48
to do a marketing activity and this whole thing, and

36:52
I replied to it on Monday, yep, you know, the subject line said urgent, and I replied to it on Monday, you know, Now I understood what they meant by urgent. It really wasn’t urgent because we didn’t do it until Tuesday. We actually did the thing yesterday, and everybody was happy. But if I had made myself available on Saturday, they would have taken advantage of me being available on Saturday, you know.

37:16
So, yeah, scheduling emails

37:21
and just putting, putting boundaries around your time,

37:25
all of these things will contribute to just a happier, healthier you, which the client wants they don’t want disgruntled, burnt out, you know, caffeine riddled, riddled

37:40
vendor that they’re that they’re paying money to right, like they want a healthy, happy person that is doing their best work. So if that means not receiving something.

37:51
Now we’re talking very generally, obviously, if there’s deadlines and milestones, like we’re adhering to those things for prioritizing, but for things that are,

38:00
you know, that can, that can wait a couple of days using that time to, you know, go back to that like, word of like, self care, just like taking care of yourself. Yeah, I switched. So I switched to iPhone about a year ago.

38:15
Been an Android user, probably since 2011

38:19
and I switched to iPhone last year just because I use Mac computers. And I don’t know why I didn’t switch sooner, but the one thing I missed greatly was an Android you could schedule text messages. Oh, wow. Apple has brought it back or incorporated it in this a couple updates ago. I think, in November, maybe they brought it in cool,

38:45
yeah, send later. Feature

38:47
a text message. Yeah, check that out. It’s on the plus.

38:54
So on Android, you’d hold down the send button and it’d give you an option, you know, send at 8am Monday, right? Yep, I missed that. I’m like, that’s one of my biggest complaints about the iPhone. It’s like, come on. Like, the androids had this since, I don’t know, 2013 or something, yeah, like, come on.

39:14
But, yeah, I’ve been a big,

39:17
big user of scheduling emails, scheduling text messages, because it’s like, Okay, I am up at 4am

39:25
you know. But I don’t want people to think it’s okay, okay to give me a call at 4am yeah, or wake them up for that matter, like, I’ll have it, you know, go out at eight, no, but I’m responding to it, but go slow at eight. But, yeah,

39:41
super powerful feature to have. Yeah, thanks for it. That’s nice tip. I’m gonna look into that. I try to keep clients out of my text messages, but sometimes it’s inevitable, especially nowadays, with all these like one time passwords and all these things you need to get to access certain websites, they end up with your your personal phone number. But.

40:00
Um, but yeah, scheduling would be good. I mean, just scheduling things in my personal life would be nice to schedule. You know, follow up with people. But

40:11
no, no, I know what you mean. There’s only, there’s like, an echelon of clients of mine that are in the text sphere. It’s usually

40:20
email and slack, and then kind of the upper clients have the text, not that they abuse it. It’s probably me abusing it, if anything, but yeah,

40:33
and it’s usually in their best interest, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, just the world we’re in now. I mean, it’s just another,

40:43
like, I remember text messages being like, very personal thing, yeah? But now it’s really just another avenue,

40:53
you know? So, yeah, yeah.

40:56
Well, as we kind of wrap this up,

41:00
any kind of closing thoughts on the matter?

41:04
Yeah, I think, I think that anyone that’s that’s hustling and

41:10
grinding, and I read something over the weekend like, it’s not a it’s not it’s not bragging to say how busy you are. It’s no longer seen as like

41:22
a thing that means that you’re doing a good job. I think it actually means that you you should be paying attention to some of the signs that your body might be telling you and the quality of your work might be telling you. I think,

41:35
yeah, I’m an advocate now for taking time out and if any, if, if someone takes away just like one tip that we gave today, I think, I think that would be, that’d be really awesome.

41:47
Yeah, hustle culture can only really take you so far,

41:53
and it’s definitely,

41:56
it doesn’t get you bonus points in the game, right?

42:02
For sure. Yeah,

42:04
any, any piece of content you

42:10
took a lake at over the last week. Yeah, I’m still reading Dispenza, reading a different book now. And, yeah, just like the,

42:20
the the

42:22
mystic nature of electrons

42:26
and how an electron it was, there it was that it’s called collapsing the wave, the or like the

42:37
the with the viewer effect, meaning an electron can be in simultaneous places all at once, but when, when an observer looks for it, it appears it’s collapsing the wave. And that right, there was breakthrough science that connects mind with matter.

43:03
The mind, the electron responding to the person looking for it

43:11
goes in the double slit, double slit theory, experiment and stuff like that too. But as though that’s like the first chapter of this book is

43:21
talking about how, like, you know, what are we all made up of? We’re all made up of atoms. What’s within the atom? It’s 99% empty. The atom is, right? And so it’s the big thing. You know, when, like, a light is flashing so fast it looks like it’s always off or always on, because it’s just, it’s, it’s like, it’s so it’s so steady, that is, you don’t see that it’s switching, Yep,

43:50
yeah, that’s basically what we see around us. Like, this table is not physical, the computer, like, none of this stuff is actually physical. It’s just

43:58
the frequency is so fast that we don’t see that when it’s not there. Yeah.

44:05
And so how our mind and consciousness play in with that? So it’s not a, it’s not a light read, but it’s not a it’s not as dense as it might sound.

44:16
Yeah, no, I remember hearing something along the lines, if you made an atom the size of, like a baseball park, the neutron would be the size of a period on a newspaper, yeah, I think that was, I think that was the kind of size comparison, yeah,

44:34
or the nucleus, sorry, the center, the center, yeah, yeah.

44:39
I did have one final thought before we close out on the on the burnout thing, and sometimes grinding and hustling can be detrimental to the product,

44:51
and knowing when to kind of turn it off and pick it up tomorrow might save you three hours of rework, because what you did was.

45:00
Detrimental to the overall project. Yeah, that just kind of popped into my head before we signed off here. That’s true, and I started to watch, it’s hard for me to watch series like HBO series now be you know, I have a two year old almost three now, but I did start Penguin,

45:23
which takes place in the

45:26
the newest Batman film. Like they kind of, they make these new universes with every film. I actually really like the one with Robert Pattinson as Batman, or Bruce Wayne. I really enjoyed it. But I, I’m really enjoying this series. It, it could stand alone as itself if you took away the Batman side of things, yeah,

45:50
which is usually a pretty telltale sign of something that’s well written.

45:55
I’m only a couple episodes in, but it’s, it’s really enjoyable.

46:02
So thanks all I’ve got nice Yeah, well, I’d like to just acknowledge this is episode 10 for us, which little bit of a milestone. So kudos. And for anyone that’s been listening all along, thank you. And if this is your first episode, check out the other ones. If you like this one, yeah, we appreciate you. Most podcasts don’t make it like some crazy percent don’t make it to Episode 10. So it is, it is a good milestone. Cool. Good for us. Yeah, all right, well, we’ll

46:35
See you all next week. You

47:11
sure.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai