The "Have It All" Trap (And How to Escape It)

Thanks to Shopify for supporting the productivity show. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like ourselves the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/tps. (upbeat music) Welcome to the Proctivity Show, podcast by Asian efficiency. Help you maximize your productivity so you can get everything done without having to sacrifice your health, family, and things that matter to you. We've helped tens of thousands of people save time, be happier, and become more productive. One of the most common questions we get is, should I keep my work and personal tasks together? Or should I separate them? How about my email? How about my calendar? Well, in this episode, we're going to tackle this controversial topic and give you four strategies that have worked well for us and others in the Asian efficiency community. You can find links to everything that we share in the show notes by going to deprovedtivetheshow.com and now, I want to show. (upbeat music) Welcome to another episode of the Proctivity Show. My name is Tan. I'm the founder and CEO of Asian efficiency where we help people become more productive at work and in life. And I'm Brooks. We're super excited to be here. Yeah, today we're gonna be talking about how you can separate work and personal productivity. This is a topic that was inspired by some of the people in our community. Some of our members have shared some of their challenges that they had around this topic. But before we dive into that particular topic, one of the things we always like to do at the Proctivity Show is kind of share some of our favorite resources. So, Brooks, what kind of favorite resources do you have to share this week? All right, so our talk three resources this week. Number one is called Legal Shield. This is a membership. This isn't something I personally love you use, but I know you've used it, Tan. It's a membership you pay a reasonable fee every month, I think. And then you have access to attorneys that you can go to with a legal issue if you need something drawn up, if you need something reviewed, you kind of have them there ready for you in a very cost effective way. So Legal Shield is something I know you've been getting a lot of use out of. The second one is called Fantastical and Fantastical is a calendar app that we've talked about a number of times on the Proctivity Show. It's a Mac and iOS app, only unfortunately, not Android in Windows. And number three is called Trip Mode, which is a Mac or Windows app. It is cross-platform. And what this does is it allows YouTube block apps from accessing the network when you're on mobile data. So it just so happens I've been doing a lot of tethering lately, working not from my office. And what can happen is you've got things running in the background like Dropbox, like iCloud, things that are really using up a lot of data. Trip Mode can block them. So you choose what lets you use your data. This is great, like I said, when you're tethering on the go. Also great if you're staying in, say, a hotel room with, or somewhere with pretty shaky Wi-Fi, you can turn access to the network off from all your apps except what you're using, like your web browser or something. So it really lets you make the most of a shaky internet connection. So Trip Mode is a Mac and Windows app that I use all the time. Awesome. Thank you for sharing, Rick. And we'll have links to all of that in the show. And also if you missed something. Don't worry, just go to deprovedetheshow.com. Or if you're listening to this episode on the podcast app, just go check out the show notes in the podcast app and you'll see the links in there as well. All right, Brooks, before we start diving in, I kind of want to check in with you. What was the inspiration for this topic today, separating personal and work productivity? I kind of revealed to the audience a little bit earlier how this came from our community, but you have the full story. So would you mind sharing with everybody before we dive in why we're doing this episode? Yeah, it's funny. This is actually how it's dual inspirations. This is a question we get all the time. So it comes up whenever we do a webinar, whenever we do question and answer periods, we get asked this question comes up in our forums. This question comes up even when we record the podcast. There's that our community chats alongside with the podcast and it's a question comes up and the question is, should you keep your work stuff and your personal stuff together or keep them separated out? And by stuff, I mean things like task managers, calendars, email, what's the best way to do that? Keep it all together or separated out? So this is a question we get asked all the time and it recently came up in a thread in our Dojo Slack, a Dojo member named Yoke listed it and there was a lot of great responses and participation people with thoughts and advice. So I thought since this question has come up so many times, this would be a great opportunity to tackle it on the podcast once and for all. And answer that question, should you keep your stuff separate? Should you keep it all together? And if you do want to separate it, what's the best way to do that? So think about this as if you have one task manager and the question you might ask yourself, okay, should I use omnifocus as an example for my personal life? But then also for stuff I do at work, right? Or if I'm using a calendar app, should I use that same app for my work stuff or should I have it completely separate? So I might use Outlook at the office but then use busy call or fantastical, like we mentioned today for personal, right? Especially of multiple devices and cross-platform. And so we see a lot of people run into the challenge where they're not sure and the kind of, the same argument can be said related to email inboxes. Some people have a unified email inbox where if you open up an email app, whether it is postbox or mail plane or Outlook, that you have all your email accounts in one app, right? Or you separate it so that when you check email at work, you have Outlook for that. And then when you check email for personal, you use something like mail plane or another app so you can kind of separate it. And I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer to this, but you're gonna find out by this episode if there is. And also, if you ever thought about going separate in that sense, you're going to learn a new way of organizing your life and save a lot more time and have more focus because hint hint, we do think separating work and personal is the way to go, but there's some pros and cons to everything, right? And if you are already combining work and personal stuff, you're gonna be discovering new ways how separating the two will make you even more productive while also stay really responsive because I know that's an objection. And a concern that a lot of people have is when you separate work and personal, you might miss out on important emails or important messages that you might not be responsive to or not react to in a timely manner. So we're gonna address some of that as well today. But also, if you are already separating work and personal, and you're doing really well, then we're gonna share some of my advanced tips as well to make sure that you get the most out of your time and focus. So super excited to dive into this and we have four tips for you here today. So Brooks, what's the first one? - Yeah, the first one is something that I think might seem a little counterintuitive, but it is a really good place to start and that's to see what you can cut out of the things you're already doing. Because a lot of times, the fact that people are generally worrying about or thinking about like how do I juggle my work stuff and my personal stuff usually means that they feel like that there's too much going on. And often if you feel like there's too much going on, there is. This is kind of like the concept of, we talk a lot about the T-Framer, right? Time, energy and attention. And this is one thing that if one of those three is out of whack, then you're gonna start feeling stressed, you're gonna start feeling overwhelmed, you're gonna start feeling low energy. And that's what happens when you've got too much going on. Sometimes you need to kind of like trust your gut and just know that this is the case. And a lot of times we feel that we can't even begin to think about separating out our work and our personal stuff because it's just too overwhelming. There's just too much stuff going on. So the first thing we recommend before you worry about what email app you're using, before you worry about what calendar you're using is look at the things you're doing on a regular basis in your work life and your personal life and see what you can cut out. So think about the T-Framer, something that we're known for, right? So time, energy, intention, as resources that you have at your disposal, but they're finite. It's not unlimited time that you have, you don't have unlimited energy and you don't have unlimited attention. So you have to be mindful of how you use them, right? So think of this as a way of like managing money, right? If you have, let's say $1,000 in your bank account, you can only spend $1,000, right? And when you're overwhelmed, it's like thinking that you have $5,000 in the account and that you wanna spend all of this money only to realize later that you only have $1,000. And now if you go over that, now you're in debt and now you're sacrificing stuff, now you're paying stuff, you're paying interest, you're gonna pay for it in some shape or form, whether it's lack of sleep, a lot more stress, missing deadlines, and so on. And so ideally, you wanna be somebody who, you know, when you know you have $1,000 in your account, that you reinvest anything that you have left over so that it grows over time, right? And the same is true for you. You only have so much time, you only have so much energy, you have a limited amount of attention. So you can't really over commit to too many things because when you do, that's when you get into trouble, right? That's when you start paying penalties, interest fees, and so on. So think of it as the tea framework in a way where you have to be mindful about how you spend your time, energy, and tension, and you only have finite resources to use them. And so the best way to maximize your potential there is to say, okay, out of all the things that I have going on, what are some of the things that I can cut today? And one thing that I've heard from a friend of mine, Kendra went out. I saw her speak at the productivity con. One of the best tips that she shared there was, she said, "What's one thing you can cut from your calendar today? Just one thing, whether it's a meeting, whether it's an appointment, whether it's something that you think you should be doing, and you'd be surprised where you can actually come up with." And I encourage everybody to really look at their calendar and just question, is everything that's on there, really something that you have to do? And that's a really easy place to start because it's already something that you're committed to, right? If you're using a calendar, but then we'll give you some prompts here as well of all the things that you can cut down. Brooks, when you did this exercise for yourself, or have there any things that came up that were easy wins for you, or some of the things that you've seen other people do really well? - Yeah, like some of the things that have worked for me in the past is when I had a corporate job when I was working in a large corporation, I looked, I did exactly what you said, actually, I looked at my calendar, and I tried to do this on a monthly basis. I can't say I did every single month, but I tried, I looked at my calendar for the past month, and looked at the regular meetings that were on there, or the things that were on my calendar, and tried to figure out, okay, what of these do I have to be at? And what don't I? So what I did is some meetings, I just realized like there's actually, I'm just being invited just because I'm being invited. There's actually no real reason I need to be there. So I would just politely decline those. Some I used it as an opportunity to lift up some of the other members of my team. So maybe there was a regular meeting with our QA, our Quality Assurance Department. Instead of me going, what I would do is somebody else on my team, I had them go in my place, and that's great because that A, that frees up my time, I don't need to go, but B, it gives them greater exposure and allows for their growth as well. So think of the meetings that you're going to, and are there ways you can either completely get out of it or have somebody else go to it? So that's one. Another one is like volunteer activities. Do you have to be on that volunteer committee? Like are there other ways that you can serve, that you can assist whatever volunteer organization you're into without having to go to all of those committee meetings all the time? Do you have to be the one to drive the kids to practice every single week? Could you maybe switch it off with another parent that sometimes you take them, sometimes another parent takes them? We all have these responsibilities, and obviously, and this is especially true if you're a parent, it's easy for somebody who doesn't have kids to say, oh, just take things off your calendar, but when you're a parent, your kids are not an optional thing. However, sometimes there is flexibility with some of the things that you have on your calendar that you can work with others to have win-win situations. Other examples, do you have to be the one to go grocery shopping, and do you have to be the one to do laundry? I know these are things we've talked about on the podcast before, but there's ways you can get out of doing those, but still have your groceries done, still have your laundry done, and they can be surprisingly affordable. And even things like, let's say there's, if you look on, and this is what where time tracking comes in to play really handy, is if you look back at what you've been spending your time on during the week, let's say you're spending, I don't know, an hour a day, or an hour a week or two hours a week, assembling some report. Are there things you can do to make that report assembly more efficient, or insert whatever you do in your job? Are there things you can do to make that process more efficient so you just spend a little bit of time on it once, and then it'll save you time every single time going forward. (keyboard clicking) You know that feeling right before you start something new, especially a business? 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There's 16 original flavors and eight zero sugar options and it fits seamlessly into my routine. Morning, post workout, or mid-day slump. Just before recording, I finished one of my long walks and I have a glass of zero sugar cherry lime eight year, which is my go-to lately after walks or the gym. It's awesome. And right now, DripDrop is offering podcast listeners 20% off your first order. Go to dripdrop.com and use promo code TPS. That's dripdrop.com promo code TPS for 20% off. Stock up now at dripdrop.com and use promo code TPS. I think the biggest challenge here is probably challenging your own assumptions about what needs to be done and what cannot be done by you or what you think needs to be done and cannot be done by anybody else. So as a simple example, like you mentioned, Brooks, it's easy to assume that you have to do your own laundry. It's easy to assume that in order for you to eat food that you have to get groceries, right? That you have to touch the banana or touch the avocados. So you know, it's exactly the right softness or the right rightness so that you enjoy your food the most. But I know that can be really challenging for a lot of people to say, well, actually, do I really have to do that or can somebody else do that? And if you've been following the productivity show for a while, you know that one, I don't do any grocery shopping myself. And I do like my bananas a certain way. I do like my avocados a certain way. But I give really good instructions so that somebody else can do that for me, right? So it was like Instacard or if you use some of those like Prime now, part of Amazon, you can give instructions to people. And is it 100% correct all the time? No. But most of the time it is. And that to me is even better than not going to the grocery store and doing all that stuff myself, right? And so the challenge for you, the listener is when you look at your calendar or just the list of things that you've done in the last week or two, all the things that you've done, do you really have to do them? Right. And if you see an opportunity, well, maybe you can give it to somebody else. Maybe it's a partner. Maybe it is somebody in your team. Maybe you can hire somebody to help you do this, right? I was working with a client the other day. He purchased the Automation Academy course and part of the VIP package that he bought. He got a consultation with me on how to automate some of the stuff that he wants in his life, right? So this guy was like traveling all over the world with his wife. They're a little bit older and have all this time in the world now. And they moved out of their home to kind of travel perpetually for the next few years or so. And he had to scan dozens of photos, like I'm talking like hundreds of photos, but because he was on a time crunch, he couldn't really categorize everything. He just had to dump everything through the scanner, put it into a folder, and then figure out later how to actually do it. And so, you know, when he came to me, he said, "Tan, how do I actually automate all of this? How can I go through this stuff?" And because, you know, I was planning to go through this myself over, you know, several weekends to go through the photos, catalog them, and so on. And I said, "Well, do you have to do this or can somebody else do this?" And he said, "Well, my wife doesn't want to do it." I'm like, "Okay, well, is there somebody else that you can do it?" Right? And long story short, we came up with a solution that he could hire somebody to do this. And he was willing to pay, you know, a certain amount of dollars to get somebody else to go through hundreds of photos, categorize them, tag them, rename them in a certain way so that he didn't have to do it. And then eventually he found a nephew or something that wanted to help him out. So that's just an example of challenge and assumption of things that you think you have to do, but you really don't. I know we have some photo organizers that listen to the podcast so they're all pumping their fists. Yes, yes. Yeah, absolutely. So five suggestions, just five quick suggestions for how you can go about doing this because, like you said, we have always and I am a candidate one for this. We all have a lot of internal assumptions of what we do and do not need to do. So very quickly, five things you can do. Number one, say no, even when it's uncomfortable. This is something I really, really struggle with. And so it can actually be a useful exercise to say, notice something that you otherwise would say yes to it just for the practice saying no. So that's one thing you can do. Number two, establish boundaries. So when are people allowed to come to you to talk about certain things? What maybe you have office hours where you can answer questions or maybe you go out of the office for a little bit, just to establish those boundaries. If you work from home, maybe you can close the door, have a sign. I know somebody who had a door tag made up, like you have in hotels, they do not disturb door tag so that his family knows when that door tags on, it's off limits. So what are some things you can do to establish boundaries? Number three, what can you automate? We've talked about this in previous podcast episodes, TPS241, five ways to automate your life and TPS242, how to automate your technology and we'll have links to those in the show notes. So those things that you do on a regular basis, what can you automate so that you only have to set them up once and never have to touch them again. And then finally, get help. So look at getting a personal or an executive assistant. We've talked about that on the podcast before, a house cleaner, use something like task rabbit. I just hired task rabbit to set up a bunch of IKEA for me, trade off with family and friends. So what are those things that you can use to get help to make it so that you are able to focus more on your work or your personal stuff so that you're not feeling constantly so overwhelmed? So again, that is points and tip number one, see what you can cut back. See what you can do less of and challenge those assumptions because chances are you're going to see a lot of opportunities to cut back on things that you have to do. So be sure to do that. Number two here, and that is to reduce and consolidate inputs and capture. So Brooks, why is this so important? What do you mean with that when you talk about reducing and consolidating inputs and capture? That sounds super scientific and geeky. Yeah. I probably should have came up with a friend layer day for that, but it's very simple what I mean by that. If you think, and this is kind of related to this feeling of overwhelm that we have where we can't focus on separating out working personal stuff if we just have so much going on. And this is related, but take into a next level, which is we feel like we have so much coming into our life where we're jotting down notes on sticky notes. We're capturing them in our phone. We're getting voice mails. We're getting things coming in by text. We're getting things coming in on email. We're using a bunch of different apps for a bunch of different things. So once you have control of where things are coming in from and where things are going, then you'll better be able to look at that and segregate. This is what I want to focus on for work. This is what I want to focus on for personal. And then that makes it a lot easier to pick and choose the time and attention that you give things when you know that they are in certain places. So it's being a lot more intentional and controlling how things are coming in and what you're doing with those things. So what's a good example of that, Brooks, that people can relate to in real life? Well, an example might be if you have people coming in all the time, maybe you give out your work email, you sign up for things online with your work email, or you sign up for work things with your personal email. So you've got all this stuff coming in in different places. So one thing you could do, so when you're sitting at your desk at work, you can see like, I don't know, group ons coming into your work address or a carnival cruise is coming into your work email address. Or when you're at home, you've maybe signed up for professional newsletters using or software using your work address. And so you're at home skimming through stuff about your kids little league or whatever. And all of a sudden, you're getting emails about your CRM tool that you use at work. And so it's these things kind of bleeding together and making it hard to segment out because you've got both sides intruding. So that's one simple example. So what you're saying is essentially that when you separate work in personal, whether it is email or task managers, if you siloed them, it makes it a lot easier for you to focus. Yeah, but exactly right. And if you find that like, for example, you've got people dropping by or using Slack, for example. So we use Slack here at A.E.U. It's really great. But what Slack is not great for is capturing actionable things. So if you've got people giving you tasks through Slack, then that is not a great environment. So if you say, okay, anything related to this project that we're working on, yeah, we can have conversations about it in Slack, but actionable things need to go in our ticketing system, for example, then you know you've got everything you don't have to worry about going through Slack, trying to find actionable things. You know everything is flowing into your ticketing system and then you have one place to look for to take action. So that's saving you time. You don't have to look through a bunch of different inboxes and places to look. Everything is flowing into one specific place or you know, we'll never be able to get to one specific place for each, but at least we can eliminate as much as we can. I've also found personally that once you have too many inboxes and you have to think about what goes where, it's really easy to then one have a lot of friction when you're working on stuff. So whenever you're capturing stuff or whenever you're trying to remember stuff and write stuff down or say that somewhere, if you have like 10 different inboxes and 10 different apps, it's so easy to then have like analysis paralysis and say, Oh, where does this go again? And then nothing actually ever happens. And then you never store stuff, right? One simple example of this is, you know, if you or somebody who tends to love to use pen and paper, right, whenever you have like an idea, like some people in downtown Austin will walk around with like a little notebook in their back pocket and then have like a pen with them and they walk around and whenever they come over to an idea or something that they want to remember, they'll write it down. But you know, is there a separation between working personal when you're walking around and thinking about stuff? Not really, right? And so when you're writing stuff down on the notebook, then you have to add an extra step to then say, Okay, is this work or personal where does this go? And then that, you know, translation, quote unquote process is really easy to do and make because now you can kind of, you know, when you sit down and actually think about where does this actually belong? Right? You have this unified inbox in a way. Then you can easily slot stuff in the appropriate places. But when you don't have something like that in place, stuff can be all over the place like you can get carnival emails in your work inbox, which is really distracting and probably very enticing too, more than many people. But if you can get really good at siloing stuff, which is why I think we are big proponents of separating work in personal as much as you can, it's one of the reasons why I use omnifocus for personal and then like something like Gia for stuff that we do at Asian efficiency, right? Well, so my email work inbox is done in mill plane because we use Google Empower services. And then for my personal inbox, I use post box. So I know like if I'm processing email for my personal use, I'm opening up post box, right? But if I'm doing work email, then I know I'm going to email plane and just separating it too and then consolidating certain things, makes things just so much easier, in my opinion. Logging in used to be a hassle with so many accounts. Keeper creates strong and unique passwords, fills in passwords automatically, remembers my logins, and keeps everything organized across all my devices so I can get to what I need instantly wherever I am. Now listeners probably know that Tan and I have used password managers for years, but I always like to keep my eye on the different tools in the space. And so I've been using keeper the last little while. Thanks to keeper for supporting the productivity show. 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That's keepersecurity.com/tps for 60% off. sent off personal and family plans. Make sure you use our link so they know we sent you. That's Keeperssecurity.com/TPS. Yeah, so what you wanna do is you wanna take a set back and look and say like how are information and tasks coming into your life? How are you capturing them? What are you using? Do you have bits of information all over the place? Are you using a bunch of different apps? Use a great example of people walking around with notebooks which can be a really great solution. By the time this episode comes out, we should have a new course in the Dojo, for example, all about using the bullet journal method for amongst other things, capturing tasks. So that's really great. However, for me, as an example of what I'm talking about reducing inputs, for me, what I used to do is I used to always carry around like a field note, notebook, these little notebooks. And I would use it to jot things down, but I would also sometimes whip out my phone and capture things in an app like Drafts and sometimes capture at other places. So I found I was capturing things in a bunch of different places and I would have like an omnifocus task every day, go through notebook, which is nothing wrong with doing that, but I realized that I always have my phone. I'm always using my phone. So what's the point of having this extra inbox that's one more place I have to check? So I stopped with the notebook and just used drafts. For other people who more prefer using pen and paper to capture things down, that's totally great too. But just be intentional. Think about what it is that you're using to capture and then think about, are you able to eliminate any of those? Going by email, are there email lists that you can unsubscribe to or create filters for so that you don't have to see them? Like we talked about, do you have work emails bleeding into personal and vice versa? Can you just use one way or maybe two ways to capture things? Or maybe one way for personal, one way for work? See if you can create integrations so that, like those I was talking about with Slack, maybe you can set up an integrations so that maybe if you star emails in Slack, it automatically sends them to your task manager. So that's eliminating that one more thing that you need to check. And we actually talked about this in an episode, TPS282 about web automation. So yeah, for me, eliminating that paper notebook really allowed me to silo more and focus more on the things that I capture. And then I could focus more on that separating work and personal. So that is tip number two, simplify and streamline how pieces of information and tasks get stored in your life. All right, so let's move on to tip number three here. And that is to have tunnel vision. Now, tunnel vision can kind of sound a little scary, especially if you're somebody who is very creative and you love to brainstorm and come up with ideas out of the box. But when it comes to being more focused and having more control about what you want to accomplish, having tunnel vision is a great thing. So Brooks, can you explain to everybody what you mean with this? Yeah, we love creativity. I'm actually right now reading or listening to an audio book called Range, which is all about being generalists and how information and inspiration from one place can inform another place. So you're right. Tunnel vision in the creativity sense is not what you want. However, when it gets down to the time to actually get things done, you want that tunnel vision. You want that focus. So once you have information coming in, you've cut things down, you've consolidated your inputs and putting them into one or two places, then you want this ability to control what you focus on and when. So what we recommend is that you quote unquote enable tunnel vision, which means you make it so that you can, for example, only see your work email without getting distracted by your personal email or only see your personal tasks without getting distracted by and thinking about your work tasks or only see your work and personal calendar. So it gives you that ability to focus without overwhelm. Now, it is helpful to take a set back and be able to see a holistic view. But when it gets down to time to focus, that's when you really want to enable tunnel vision and be able to focus just on your thing. So ideally, you want your task manager, your email, your calendar setup to give you that ability to have tunnel vision when you want it. And this is actually something I have actually come 180 on this one. I used to, for example, using the email example, I used to be a big proponent of piping everything into one place. So I would have my personal emails, my work emails, my other emails all going into one account because to my mind, it was a much more efficient way to do it. You don't have to go clicking around and going to a bunch of different places. Everything's coming to one inbox. So to me, it was just way more efficient. And yeah, it probably is more efficient to do it that way. But what I realize is it might be more efficient, but I don't, I personally believe, I have the duty to be disagreed with, but I personally believe that it is more efficient maybe, but it's not more effective. Because then, like I said, you're getting distracted by things. So now I've gone completely the other way and I have totally separate email inboxes. I can see a unified inbox if I want to, but I almost never do that. I'm usually firewalling and segmenting off the email that I'm looking for so that looking at, I should say, so that there isn't any bleed or distraction. - And I think the word distraction is really important here, especially if you're somebody who wants to do great work. If you're somebody who wants to accomplish a lot of things and get accuracy, you want to make sure that you're hitting the spot, hitting the mark, hitting your goals, then being able to focus and not get distracted is really important. So the example here, maybe to illustrate this, is imagine being a patient and you're about to go into surgery and the surgeon is there and he has a checklist of all the things that he has to go through or she has to go through to make sure that the surgery is a major success. So let's say you come in for shoulder surgery or something or even brain surgery to make it even more scary for some of us here. One mistake could totally mess you up for the rest of your life. Would you want your surgeon to be checking email while he's performing surgery on you? Of course not. Or if he's following a checklist and one of the things on the checklist as he's performing surgery is to check in on some work email and then also on some personal email at the same time and taking a phone call and blah, blah, blah, blah, of course you don't want that to happen. But derailleur is most of us do operate that way when we're focused on doing something or we tell ourselves we need to focus on doing something. We end up doing all these other different things and then the quality of work that we can produce is actually not at its full potential because we get distracted by all these different things. And when you have something like a unified email inbox or you have your personal stuff and your work stuff in the same place when you're looking at things like your calendar or your email or your task manager, it's really easy to get distracted. So let's say you're at work and then all of a sudden you get an email about this carnival trip that you want to go on at some point. It's not easy to click on that notification and then go down this rabbit hole and then all of a sudden you're on YouTube watching reviews of this particular boat, right? And you go, oh my gosh, I just lost it an hour and a half. Where did it go? Whereas if you actually had tunnel vision and you set up an environment where you allowed that to happen, meaning your system is your apps, the tools that you use, right? If you have, for example, no unified inbox, that's the way of shaping your environment to allow you to have tunnel vision, right? And the more you can shape your environment to allow you to have that, the easier this for you to focus and actually do one thing at a time and to stop multitasking, not getting distracted so much and so on. So think about all the different ways that you can enable yourself to have tunnel vision. It's not just a thing of like willpower or like that you can only do it if you have lots of energy and stuff like that. Like I think we can all agree that being able to focus on one thing at a time is a good thing, right? And if we can have our environment be shaped in a way that helps us even better and whether it is the way you use particular email app or how you set it up or account and so on, those are the little details we're talking about now that I think are really important as well and can make a big difference. - Yeah, and there's different ways to do it. So using email as an example, the example you gave is an extreme and a great example is what you can do is you can actually use different email apps for different purposes. So you were saying when you have mail plane, when you have post box or for example, for me I use email app called Spark. I don't use different apps generally for work and personal, however it is set up as different accounts. So when I'm in my personal email, I don't see emails from work and vice versa. So there's two ways to go it. If you find it's too distracting even to know in your app that you see that other account there, then the approach that Tan mentioned of using different apps is actually a great approach. As far as tasks go, you can again, use different task managers if you want to. You could have your personal task manager and your work task manager. Another option could be using an app like for example, I use OmniFocus and for me, I have my work tasks and my personal tasks in different folders and then just focus on whatever mode I happen to be in work mode or personal mode. So I don't see those personal tasks in my list. I can go again, see a holistic view of everything I need to do today, but when it comes time to focus time in that mode, I have that ability to zero in on. So it's really, really just personal preference. Another example is calendars. So we personally recommend, or generally recommend having personal calendar, a work calendar, and even sometimes different types of calendars that you can turn on and off. So this, again, you have the ability to have a full holistic view of your day. You can see all your time blocks. If you put time blocks on your calendar, you can see all your appointments. But when it comes to focusing on work, you can turn off those personal appointments. So you don't see them. You don't think about them. And same thing when it's say the weekend, you could have your work calendar turned off. So you're not thinking about that meeting that you have on Wednesday because you see it there in your calendar. You're only focusing on say your family or whatever you should be focusing on at that time. We actually have an article that we'll link to in the show notes called why you should color code your calendar that goes step by step through this concept of having different calendars and turning them on and off during different contexts. All right. So that is tip number three is to make sure that you have tunnel vision. All right. So let's move on to tip number four is and that is to embrace intentional imbalance. Now, if you've been following the productivity show for a while, you know that we don't really believe in work life balance. There's really no such thing. And when it comes to intentional balance, what we mean with that is that when you want to go after your goals, whenever you want to accomplish something, you can't really do it all at once. You have to you can get everything, but not all at the same time. You have to do it one step at a time. And when you have let's say three things you want to accomplish instead of doing them all at once, it's better to focus on one and achieving that first before you move on to the next one. That's why we say intentional imbalance, meaning that you know what, you're going to focus and zoom in on one particular area that you want to focus on knowing that everything else will be okay. Right. And then moving on once you actually have accomplished that. That's a better way of going about things than actually trying to do everything at once. Brooks, I'm curious to hear what is your take on intentional imbalance? Yeah. And you bring up a great point that we've been talking in this episode about separating work and personal, not balancing work and personal. And it's like let's say you're at the, we call it here the, the P&E or play land or I think in the States is like a state fair. You know, you're there. You see this ride you really want to go on, but you're with your kid and they want you to win them a stuffed animal or something like that. Chances are by the end of the day, you are going to be able to do both, but you can't do both things at once. So it's a deciding what your priority is and then focusing on that priority to actually make progress on it and then switch it up. So another example is, as I'm recording this podcast, my son is upstairs. He's homesick from work and thankfully he's being quiet. Now I am deciding to be down here recording a podcast instead of being up with him mainly because he's almost 15. So he can, you know, he's totally fine. However, if he was younger, my intentional imbalance might be different. I might have to reschedule the podcast or change the time so I could be up there, you know, helping him and taking care of him instead. So this is the decision I'm making. I'm not up there feeding him chicken soup while he's vegetarian. So he wouldn't have chicken soup. I'm not up there feeding him miso soup. I'm instead down here recording a podcast. So that is my version of intentional imbalance. And another example is when I was working in my corporate job, I had a side hustle and we're going to talk a lot more about that in the next episode, spoiler alert next week. But for now, when I was doing my side hustle, I used to go downtown earlier in the morning before my job started to work on that downtown. Now I had a young family at that time. And so of course, I would rather be at home spending time with my son in the morning during that time. However, I made the decision to focus on my side hustle and sacrifice a bit of time. So I could go down early and build that business knowing that long run, it would pay off. So the balance swung the other way when I was able to start working from home. So these are the things we talk about with intentional imbalance. And this comes into play with this concept of separating work in personal because that's why this ability to separate out becomes so important because once you know you have your work stuff siloed and your personal stuff siloed and you've got your systems and tunnel vision set up to support that, then you can use this concept of an intentional imbalance to really focus in on your work stuff. And then really when you're not working really focus in on your personal stuff and you've got that all planned out. I mean, this stuff's going to happen of course stuff's going to pop up and mess it up a little bit. But if you're intentional about that imbalance, then it makes it more likely that you're going to have more quality work time and more quality personal time as well. One thing that I always think about here is that you can have everything you want, just not all at once. And I think that's a great way to kind of summarize this point. So that is tip number four and that is to embrace intentional imbalance. So today we talked about how you can separate work on personal productivity and one thing is you can always expect from Asian efficiency and the productivity show that we keep it simple and actionable. So before we end today's podcast, we want to make sure we give you a few action steps that you can take. So the first thing that we recommend you do is see what you can simplify in your life and work so you have more time to focus. Right. So we talked a little bit about cutting back on things and simplification of like where you store stuff and how you get pieces of information and tasking you to your life. How can you simplify all of that? Right. So think about that. And then number two, plan your work and personal calendar for the next week and then decide what you're going to focus on and when. So those are two action steps that we recommend you take action on today. And as always, thanks for listening to the productivity show.