143: Exploring Time, Money, and Energy Capacity with Tara McMullin and Charlie Gilkey (Replay)

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Do we really all have the same 24 hours as Beyonce? This was the tongue in cheek title that we gave to a recent Spotify Live conversation. It was my first time piloting this new tech tool. I invited my friends Tara McMullen, who you heard from last week, and Charlie Gilke, who's also a previous guest of the pod, to answer this question that Tara prompts in her new book, what Works? Hope you'll pardon slightly lower audio quality than usual because we're calling in from our phones. We explore time, money and energy capacity. How do you say no? What are the consequences of saying yes when you really shouldn't? Charlie gives us a handy four letter acronym team for gauging different types of capacity even though the meme is well meaning. Hey, we all have the same 24 hours. Let's make the most of it. Sometimes it can lead to more shame and blame than is actually helpful. We talk about saying no even before you get over committed and hit that wall and your urge is to ghost on someone or something. And if you have a team, how to help your team members as well. Stay motivated, stay challenged while also not tipping to the side of boredom or burnout. With that, I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and thanks again for your patience with Less Than Perfect Audio.

Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome to the first official Spotify Live pilot. I am thrilled to have all of you who are here live with us in the room and some of you may be listening from the future on one of our three podcast feeds. I am beyond excited to introduce two people that I've known for over a decade in this wild online world. Please help give a very warm virtual welcome to My co hosts. For today's conversation on energy, time and financial capacity, we are joined by Tara McMullen, host of the what Works podcast and author of the forthcoming book what Works launching the first week of November. This is in honor of you gave me an excuse to try some new tech. Welcome, Tara.

I am always happy to be in excuse to try new tech. Yes, I know. I figured if anyone would be game.

It'S you and Charlie. Charlie Gilke is host of the Productive Flourishing podcast. He's the author of Start Finishing and he's got a new book in the works on team habits and I affectionately call him Charlie Cakes. Charlie Cakes, welcome to the show, Jen Cakes.

Thanks so much for having me. And I'm excited to be jamming with both of you. I'm really interested to see what all we get into today.

Me too. So we'll get to the Beyonce question soon. The billion dollar Beyonce question. And I have to say that was sparked from me reading an early copy of Tara's book. So all credit to Tara. But first, I want to know how both of you define capacity. How do you each define and think about that, whether it is financial capacity, time, or energy wise.

So the way I define capacity for myself and the way I define it in my book is, is that it's our access to available resources at any given time. So that is thinking about time, it's thinking about money, it's thinking about energy, health, community, support, relationships, skills, knowledge, all of those resources that I can draw on to help me move through my responsibilities and my projects and the things that I'm creating. The sum total of that is that's my capacity at that given time and at different times, I have access to different resources. And that means that my capacity may expand or contract based on the resources that I have access to. So that's how I define it.

You write in the book, when you talk about calculating capacity, you say that a lot of people, and this audience is mostly business owners, have no idea what there's actually is that positive thinking can't make up for a lack of capacity. What do you think creates that gap? And then we'll go to Charlie about what creates that gap between our perceived capacity and then what ends up being actual reality, which so often leads to disappointment.

Yes, in a nutshell, that's exactly it. I think it's three things. The first being that we are just in a media environment that's saturated with messages, doubt how much more we could be doing right, how much more we could be optimizing, how Much harder we could be working, how much we shouldn't be quitting. It's just this sort of relentless stream of messages about the limitlessness of our capacity. And, you know, those messages can be kind of motivating from time to time, but they do create a lot of just extremely unrealistic expectations about what our capacity actually is. And so we internalize those messages and we start to think, oh, I actually have more capacity than I really do. The second thing is that we tend to really kind of silo the different areas of our life and our work so that we are not considering how our resources are actually spread over all of those things. I think often folks, despite the fact that they know better, like intellectually know better, the way they respond to demands at work or demands at home or demands in our relationships is that each of those are sort of its own bucket of capacity. When that's of course not the case. Right. We only have one well to drink from. And when we try and think of them as separate, we overestimate our capacity by quite a lot. And then the third thing is that we tend to think in terms of time and money. We think in terms of productivity and value, but capacity is so much more multidimensional than that. And so we forget about emotional bandwidth, we forget about mental bandwidth, we forget about physical energy, physical limitations. And all of those things can draw on our capacity as well. And so if we're not accounting for those things, we're likely to over commit ourselves just because we're not thinking, oh, I'm drawing down on this balance right now.

Yes. And then that check inevitably comes due. I often think about that saying, don't write a check that your body can't cash. Or at least I modified it to be about physical energy capacity. And sometimes in the moment we're writing all these checks, adding all this stuff to our calendar, and then the day comes and we're having a hard day. So. Yeah. How about you, Charlie? How do you define capacity?

Well, I'll be real here. I just kind of want to co opt Tara's definition on this one. But on the real though, what I love about what she said there is it's not just the individual holistic look at your resources. Right. So historically I defined capacity as your availability to use the time unity and attention that you have. I've also added money now, so it's kind of team T E A M. But I think the important piece that we share on this one is that the resources that are out there are greater than we can tap into at a lot of times. And a lot of times that comes down to really energy and attention. Not tie, not even money in a lot of ways. Because you still have to direct your time, you still have to direct your money. And if you just don't have the energetic bandwidth or the attentional bandwidth to do that, because stuff going on in the world. I was talking to our community about this yesterday. Between potential energy and kinetic energy, we have resources around us, whether it's our social capital, whether it's our financial capital, whether it's our temporal capital that's just like potential energy out and around us. And I'm always interested in what can we actually harness and channel into kinetic energy that does some work for us into our lives. And when you think about it that way, it usually comes down to your energy and attention. You're just either so overwhelmed and overloaded. Just as a sidebar, as a helpful sort of thing to think about if you're ever feeling overwhelmed, I would like people to start thinking in terms of being overloaded because you're never really overwhelmed when you're not overloaded. And so you can solve the load problem, but you can't really solve the whelm problem. And so anyway, as I got a little bit off there with that sidebar, I would say it's that availability to tap into the time, energy, attention and money that you have available.

Leave it to you to go ahead and create a handy acronym for us.

Thank you.

I love the team acronym. And that's so perfect because your forthcoming book is at least a working title is Team Habits and that's the heart of the book. How can we even begin to gauge or measure team capacity so that no one on the team is getting, as you said, overloaded or conversely, bored on the flip side, when it's so hard to do it even for ourselves?

You know, the thing about working in teams is that any activity you do in a team is not just the movement that you as a person do. And any activity in a team becomes a social activity. And it adds this additional layer of emotional complexity and relationship and things like that. I think we sometimes forget that in the team context that that's what can sometimes makes working in teams so overwhelming is because it's like you can't just send an email and you gotta like send the email and think about how it affects your team, or you can't just send a slack message, or you can't just write the post. There's all these other social and emotional dynamics that get added on top of that. And so I think what a lot of times we will do, if we're thinking in an individualistic way, when we're talking about our teams, we'll sort of look at our capacity and we'll look at our team's capacity and we'll compare that to the work that needs to be done and then can't figure out why it's not adding up. Well, part of what's going on is there's this social overhead that happens in collective activity that draws against the team's total capacity. So it's a weird thing if you're not really paying attention to that social overhead. What you'll find is that sometimes working in teams is making everyone less effective because of bad team habits and work ways. But when you really can channel that social overhead and create really strong belonging and meaning and purpose and team sense, then it actually becomes a force multiplier. And so one of the things that I would say there is, even in the context of our team, it's not just the amount of hours they have available that's the common fail, right? It's not just adding up hours, saying we should be able to get a dose, it's actually how much.

Try not to reference a blog post that I wrote Tuesday and that's very hard to do, as you both know.

Reference away as you wish.

The blog post comes from me reflecting on a couple of lines from CO from Coactive Leadership that really talked about leadership development being growing the scope of the world in which people can be responsible for. Now, the thing in a team is even though you might have a lot of people, there's a certain number of goals and priorities that your team can hold onto and be responsible for irregardless of the time that they have available. And so the trick when you start looking at team capacities, it's like, you know, the individual's capacity, it's social overhead and it's like, how big of a world can we co weave together? And when that world gets too big, you feel the fray either through burnout or through a lot of scatteredness. And when the world is too small, that's where you get disengagement and boredom. And so as leaders and teammates, what we're always trying to do is look at what's that Goldilocks zone of just right engagement that's not over pushing us versus what's too little and we're just like, you know, not really into it.

That's consistent with a diagram I show from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and he defines a flow state, as many of you know by now as the state of near ecstatic bliss where times pass and you don't even realize it. And it strikes me that when we're in flow, we're also at a capacity sweet spot. And that the two levers to create flow are challenge and skill. So one of the things I examine and what I actually talk about a lot when I'm talking to companies is that sometimes burnout comes because there's too much challenge and not enough skill to meet that challenge. And the challenge is not just the workload. It could be challenged, personally challenged globally, mental health challenges. And so that all adds to our Charlie, you give us a five project quota and as you say, often one or two of those at the very least ends up being a personal project. And we have to acknowledge that, that we're complete and full human beings and that sometimes on our five project dance card, more than a handful are on the personal front. And that does impact how many work projects we could actually take on, realistically.

Absolutely. I mean, because it's not like there's a work well of energy and then a. This is what Tara said earlier, right? There's a work well of energy and then there's a personal well of energy and we get to stack fully against both wells. No, it's one well of energy that you sort of distribute across multiple things. And yeah, when a project is everything, anything that takes time, energy and attention, what we see often is that because we're not converting our personal dreams, goals and aspirations into actual projects, they're not ending up on our schedules. And when that's the case, we become really great workers who are a husk of full people.

That's a mic drop. Very well said.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I can't wait for you all to read what works. I was Actually annoyed when I had to put it down and go to work and go to my desk and take calls and things. I devoured it in two days. Less than that. Sarah, there's a section in the book where you talk about the difference between rigidity and rigor. And there's been so much talk the last few years about pivoting and adaptability and flexibility, and all three of us are advocates for that, for that agility. But I really loved Nuance is your middle name, and I really loved the nuanced description. So I just want to read a little excerpt and then have you expand for us. You say rigidity will never give us enough space to stretch out and explore our humanity. Rigor, on the other hand, requires dexterity. Rigor requires finesse. Rigor requires practice. To approach personal and professional growth with rigor is to approach it with curiosity. It inspires us to unusual and sometimes uncomfortable questions. A rigorous life is one full of learning, delight, and openness. I wish you the best in questioning your assumptions about what's necessary or possible and finding what works for you. What do you think is important about bringing in this conversation about rigidity versus rigor as it relates to capacity and the ambitions that so many of us have, especially for our creative pursuits?

Yeah, so this distinction is a really important one to me. One of the most frequent questions I receive, even long before I started talking about this whole kind of goal setting or not goal setting process, was how do I create a plan I can stick to? Right? I would get it every January, every December, every January, right on time. I'd get it every September. You know, every time people were starting to think about, okay, what am I going to do for the next quarter? What am I going to do for the next six months? What are my big goals for this year? The question was always, how do I make a plan I can stick to? Over time, as I engaged with that question more and more, one of the things that I noticed was despite people, as you said, Jenny, buying into the idea of pivoting and being flexible, the way that they thought about plans was very rigid. So sticking to a plan meant right out from point A to point Z, all of the steps that you're going to take to create a particular outcome. And then as they would actually be trying to execute that plan, they'd have a really hard time rigidly sticking to that set of paths and they'd get down on themselves about it. And I've been there, I've gotten down on myself about it as well. And what kind of where I came to with it is that it's not a bad thing obviously to make a plan. But for me, planning is a learning process. It's always a work in progress. It's not something that is designed to be stuck to. It's something that's designed as a guide for learning and a guide for curiosity and a guide for where you might go or where you might not go. And that's where the rigor piece comes in. Because if we're not approaching our plans with rigidity, if we're not approaching our goals with rigidity, then we can engage this other thing, which is rigor. We can look at each task on the to do list or each sort of milestone in the plan and ask ourselves big questions about, you know, what have I learned to this point and how does that help me shape this next piece of the puzzle? Or is this still the next piece of the puzzle? Do I still want this even? Like, is this the path I still want to be on or do I need to go somewhere else? And for me, that's the rigor piece. It's being willing to really engage with the plan and to learn from the plan as opposed to approaching it really with a lot of rigidity. I think one of the reasons that we default to thinking of our plans as rigid or approaching them rigidly is that that's sort of when we are overloaded or as I typically say, over committed. When we're over committed.

Sticking to a plan and being rigid about it has a sense of sort of like potential relief. Like all I need to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other on this plan and everything will be okay. And so we might be what looks like on the surface, hyper productive. We're often extremely disengaged with the work itself and we're not able to learn from it. We're not able to see where we might have gotten off track. Maybe not with the plan, but instead with our values or with our sense of humanity or other areas of our capacity. And again, then when you kind of switch into that rigor mode and approach a plan or a goal or an idea with rigor, it does allow.

For a lot more just engagement with that thing. But when you're more engaged with the idea, it's probably going to require more capacity because it's going to take more time, it's going to take more thought, it's going to take more even emotional buy in. And that's not a bad thing. That's a wonderful thing. So that's Kind of the distinction for me and sort of how it plays into this idea of capacity and access to resources.

I love that because it gives us permission to redirect our rigor to the things that really matter. And you, all three of us are very rigorous in our deep work, but we're also discerning about what that is. And there's a lot that we need to say no to. And all three of us have learned that the hard way over and over and over again. One thing I admire about both of you is that you're exceptional communicators about your capacity. And NOMA submitted the question in advance. She said, how do you effectively and professionally communicate that you have had enough, slash, cannot devote more energy to something. Tara, this builds on some of what you and I talked about for the podcast conversation on free time about your book. But I'd love if both of you could just weigh in a little bit of what do you do when you hit the wall? You're over committed, overloaded. You're over it, and you need to start saying no and you need to start disappointing people. Where have you gotten to in terms of how you communicate this? And I'll just say it again, like, Tara, I've been so inspired by some of your communications around this because it's given me permission to do the same. But I know it must not have been easy to get to the point where you're so clearly communicating either what your actual capacity is or the fact that your capacity has changed and now things are going to change.

Yeah, it's taken a lot of practice. I have no problem talking about things that other people might consider kind of vulnerable or risky. Right. Like, I have no problem talking about my experiences with depression, with anxiety, like, my mental health stuff. I treat it very objectively. Right? Like, it's not a thing for me to talk about it, but it is a thing for me to disappoint people and to let people down. And I had to do some serious sort of reasoning with myself to understand that the most disappointing thing that I can do with someone who is counting on me or looking to me for something is to ghost. Because that's my preference. Like, my preference is to just go, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to tell you that I can't do the thing that I said I would do anymore. I don't want to tell you no. When you ask for something, I would rather just ghost. But it started to become really clear to me that was not working. And that it wasn't saving anybody from disappointment and wasn't saving me from the heartbreak that comes with that disappointment. And so, you know, just a little bit I'd start practicing with just saying I don't have the energy for this right now or you know, my social bucket is completely full and I really need some alone time work wise for the next couple of weeks, you know, and just kind of very clearly communicating that with people and just little bit by little bit practicing it. And it's just been a process and I've kind of allowed myself to just kind of let it happen. Trying to stay true to what I legitimately can say yes to and what I legitimately need to say no to, but at the same time not expecting that I'm going to have the right script, the right excuse, the right way of getting out of something, instead just being honest and learning as I go what lands for people, what might not land for people, and trying also to communicate before I'm over committed. So instead of having to say no way I can say, you know, the next couple of weeks are really full. I'm going to need another couple weeks after that to recover. How's two months from now look like? Right. And so thinking about just being really open with my capacity before it gets to be a problem has also helped ease the communication piece a little bit more as well.

Thank you so much for sharing that. And we have a question. What's your Myers Briggs?

Oh, my Myers Briggs is intp.

Oh, fascinating, Charlie Cakes. What is your Myers Briggs?

So I'm pretty center line in Myers Briggs. Like if you had to look at the points, I'm right in the middle of them, but it leans a little bit. So I think I'm an ENTP when it comes to that.

I'm really surprised they're both P's.

I'm having a moment of shock right now. Like, how do I not know this?

Yeah, I'm super borderline across all of them, to be honest. So that's one of those where I'm like, yeah, that's what it says and I just kind of roll with it. What I want to acknowledge about this thing as it comes to communicating capacity is just I want to acknowledge that women in our society get way more demands on their capacity than men do. And so people assume I'm busy in full and that my time is super valuable. And so they don't ask for it ne nearly as much as they do of my clients who are actually clients and colleagues who are just as busy and just as Full and just as committed. And so there's a thing there that's in our society that I just want to acknowledge. Makes it easier for me to navigate some of these conversations. And it's just real. I learned this really early in my coaching practice when I kept having female clients ask me, how do you handle the life story emails that come through? Y' all know what I'm talking about. Tara Diddy know what I'm talking about. I'm like, what are you talking about? And they're like, yeah, times a day I get these life, life, these what's going on with my life emails. And I'm like, oh. And over the course of my, you know, 15 year career, if I've gotten 10 of those, that's probably a lot. So again, there's just a different way in which society respects man's time than they do within time. And we don't have to get super intersectional because it's not like I have all of white male privilege when it comes to those types of things. Yeah, I went there, but because it's easier for me, right? It's easier for me to say, look, I'm on a deadline. That's, I'm always on the deadline turns out for something. So I'm like, oh, I've got a launch coming up or I've got a deadline or I'm just coming off of that, or I'm going on vacation. But I think part of the mindset for me is unless you're a client, you have no real claim on my time. I don't have to apologize for a whole lot now. There's people I'm in relationship with, like you too. If you could do, come and ask me to do something, I'm like, oh, I really want to do that. And I know I can't do that right now. And from, I think Tara, you and I talked about this from more philosophy. There's a principle called implies can. Whenever you come up with like someone should do something or that's an obligation to do that, you have to step back and say, can that person do it? And where there's no can, there's no alt, right? And if I see that just I'm at capacity, I'm going to be at capacity for the next quarter. I don't carry a lot of weight being like, I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to do that. And I'll also flip it and say like what Tara mentioned, I can't do it this quarter, but will next quarter work for you or I can't do that specific thing that you want me to do. But what I can do is this, assuming I've got the. And so I would just say on that front, I think if you approach it from a perspective that maybe you don't owe someone else your time from the jump, it just makes it easier to be honest about what you can and can't do. And I also know, especially for the types of things people ask me for, there's a real cost to doing it poorly. There's a real, real cost of doing it poorly. And if I'm way over committed, I'm going to do it poorly or I'm going to do something else poorly because I'm overstretched and I'm trying to just feed all the little buckets with a little bit of energy. And so it just gets to a point to where I'm like, the reality is the best way to let people down is to say yes to something I know I can't do. And so I don't.

What helps me do that too is reconnecting and remembering those times where I'm in a fetal position under my desk and I go, let's not get there. Let's not get to that point again. And you're right. Even today, I had to have a hard conversation. I felt sick to my stomach. It's just nauseating. I'm with you, Tara. I would rather ghost wherever I can. And the urge to ghost, I have to fight it so hard. And then I feel absolutely nauseous. But it just needs to be done sometimes. So I don't find that the no's or the tough conversations get so much easier, but I just know that they need to be done. And you're right, Charlie. I hate to promise something I can't deliver. And then it's also obvious to me sometimes I'll show up in an event that I actually left the house because of a should, not because I actually had the energy for it. And it ends up inevitably being lame. I'm not there for very long. I do that ghosting style exit where I don't say anything or I don't make great connections. And it would have been better that I stayed home if I had just given myself the permission. I'll report that I am almost positive I'm an INFJ, but in my early 20s, I would test as an E.

I didn't want to leave an elephant.

What were you to say, Tyler?

I was going to comment about my personal relationships just on How I say no to those, because those are actually the harder ones for me a lot of ways. And I would just say that that for me comes down to being honest. Like, my best friends know I'm terrible about proactively following up and inviting and doing those types of things that really keep relationships thriving. And they'll know a whole lot for two weeks after a deadline and things like that. And it's not about them. It's just what I'm going through. And it's just having some upfront conversations about that and just asking for that acceptance of, like, I want to do better in these places. And this is also who I am in this moment. And if that's not going to work, we need to have that conversation, because I know in this moment I can't be that guy. And let's talk about it. And sometimes that just means that we're not going to be in that close sort of friends thing. But most of my friends are also people that are in similar ways where they're going to be on a project for six months and they'll disappear and they know we're here. And we can get high fives and random texts and come up when we come up. But I think it's just being honest that that's how you show up in the world, even if it's not the way you would like to. And reconciling that from the very beginning.

My friend Sarah told me, my love language is putting people in my book because I might not talk to you for three years, but I'll give you a shout out somewhere in the next book.

That is also my love. I am so glad that you said that because that is just like, I feel very. Oh, thank you. Now it's like, I will link, I will send. This is how I stay in touch with people.

That's right. You'll get a podcast shout out. I appreciate it, Tara. You even sent your email and you said, my book is launching. And if you're BCC'd, we might not be in communication regularly. But please know if you're included on this email, you're on my mind and in my heart, essentially. Oh, so you gave me so much permission. When I saw that, I was like, she said it. She put it into words so perfectly. Because I always feel guilty. I have a lot of guilt and I want to get to Q and A. And one of the questions is about dropping the guilt and shame around all this. But you know why we're all here. We still have to get to our Billion dollar Beyonce question. Tara, you prompted this whole event because in the book you write that we have the same 24 hours as Beyonce. The productivity gurus will tell us. And if we're just talking about the measure of time, that's certainly true. But time isn't so much about the time you have to fill and much more about how you fill your time. And in this case, Beyonce has a very, very different 24 hours than you do. And then you cite an article that talks about how they have 88 employees across three properties and probably many, many more because the article's almost a decade old. So tell us about this Beyonce trope that we all have the same 24 hours and why you included this in what works. And as I want to hear your take on the million dollar question first, and then we'll go to Charlie.

Yeah, I mean, I think that I included it more just to be tongue in cheek than anything, but the concept behind it, I think it's really fascinating. So, you know, earlier I mentioned that we live in this media environment that's saturated with messages that are sort of, they're couched as inspiration, but at the same time they're kind of shamey and like, it's a negative kind of motivation. So one of those being you have the same 24 hours as Beyonce. The implication, of course, being that if Beyonce can fit this, that or the other thing in, if Beyonce can create these amazing albums and these amazing videos and do all of this just incredibly rigorous artistic work, then certainly you should too, right? Like you can do it. Okay, fine. So the reason I actually think this question is, I mean, philosophically, we could spend way more than an hour just talking about this one question. But one of the things that I've become really obsessed with around this idea of time and how we use it is the difference between clock time and then the time that we sort of live in and actually experience time things in. Clock time is essentially a product of management thinking. It's a product of capitalism. It's a product of trying to optimize our own and workers time in order to increase productivity sort of writ large. So even before, you know, scientific management and the assembly line and all of these things were sort of a part of the way we think, think about work. We were still trying to figure out how do we take a human's day and make it as productive as possible. Right? And so when we think about those 24 hours, that 24 hours, just like money, is arbitrary in most ways, that time of the 24 hour span is pretty arbitrary. I read a great paper by a theorist named Barbara Adam who looked at this difference between clock time and our lived experience. And she really makes the point that throughout our day, like just take one day, we experience each hour of that day sometimes drastically differently from the next hour. Jenny, earlier you mentioned flow. And in a flow state, as the conventional wisdom goes, we lose track of time. But often in losing track of time, we're actually gaining time. We get more done in the flow state or we get deeper work done in the flow state. And so even though we forget about the clock, it actually has this sense of expansion of time expanding. On the flip side, of course, you know, if there's something, again, Jenny, you meant like a stomach churning conversation, the moments before that stomach churning conversation happens can fly by, right? And you can feel like, oh, this really snuck up on me, even though I've been fretting about it all day long. And so we have just this very strange expansion and contraction of the actual experience of time moving forward. Every single day, every time we switch tasks at work, the experience of time shifts. And so all that to say that what we experience as 24 hours is on the calendar, on the clock, it looks the same. But what we put in that time, how we use that time changes our experience of it. And Beyonce has the resources, right? Money, other human capital, so other people's hours, plus a giant network of people, you know, all of these things. She has then the resources to fill more of her time with those expansive periods when she's doing flow state type work, when she's able to focus on one thing or maybe, you know, when she's spending time with her kids. That's also, again, a time when we kind of create a sense of additional time, of more expansive time. So yes, she has access to resources that allow her to experience her 24 hours differently then I experience my 24 hours or the next person experiences that 24 hours. And so to me, that's one of the most fascinating pieces of this question of like thinking about what we fit in 24 hours and what the product of those 24 hours is.

I love how you talk about clock time and just putting a label on that and so that we can separate clock time from the way we experience time. That's just such helpful Free me.

We'll be right back just after this.

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How about you, Charlie? How do you tackle this question?

Yeah, I mean, to directly answer the question. Yes, and it's the wrong question. And it points to the same thing that Tara was just saying. And you know, when I started thinking about clock time a while ago, it reminded me of the Albert Einstein quote. And it goes like when you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on the hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That's relativity, right? And so, yeah, it's just even commenting that, you know, whether you look at it from a purely experiential point of view or a scientific point of view, time is not nearly the convention we've made it. And were it not for trains, we would probably have a completely different understanding of time as it is right now. But to, you know, I'm just going to co sign what Tara said. Here's the thing I'd say about that quote. It has so many subtleties to it. Like it celebrates Beyonce, right. It's got that rhyme and cadence to it that's sticky to the ear. It's trying to point out that it's the way that she makes decisions, but it just like becomes a meatball sundae of all the wrong things.

Meatball Sunday. I love how you say now it's the wrong question. It's like I'm just giving you a hard time. It's like, oh, I wish I would have known when we set up the event.

We're kidding. I'm kidding. It's such a juicy one because we see it on memes all the time. So that's why I'm really happy we're here unpacking it. We had one question I just wanted to make sure to ask and then we'll go to Jeremy's question on teams. Oh, I've been thinking a lot about this and actually I'm so glad you asked, Sarah, because it kind of relates to the question I was going to secretly pass off of what someone else submitted, but.

Sometimes I get down on myself that technically speaking, according to clock time, I have the same as Beyonce, but we might just have completely different personality types and energy styles. And something that I've grown in my awareness over the years is that as a highly sensitive, empathic, introverted business owner, I run my business very differently out of necessity than someone who's a hard driving, metrics oriented, world conquering builder. And there's a lot of that energy in the business space, in the podcast space. For some reason, those podcasts go straight to the top of the charts. It seems to be what a lot of people want. And when I try to compare myself to that energy measuring stick, forget the 24 hours, like you said, Tara, that's clock time. But that doesn't describe energy time, peopling time, exerting time. I find being married challenges my energy because I live with someone now and actually I had never lived with anyone I was dating and now we're married and I love my husband so much, but almost like my peopling quota decreased significantly because there's someone around more and that's something I've just had to own. So the way I would answer this question is similar to both of you. Yes, technically speaking, we have the same 24 hours in clock time, but that does not mean we have the same energy, inclination, battery size, ambitions, and, yeah, team and financial resources. I try not to compare. I call it the personal development police. And I think the personal development police, Tony Robbins would say, well, yeah, Beyonce has more money, but you can earn that money. You can earn as much as you want and then you can get your own team. And on some sense that may be true according to the PDPs, but I feel like my dharma, my calling in this world may or may not be to have a gajillion dollars. I'm always trying to operate for the highest good for all involved. And I don't assume that more money fixes anything. Therefore, I may or may not want to have 88 employees. And honestly, if I had 88, I'd have hives. That's where you'd find me, under my desk. I definitely don't want to manage that much complexity, so I'm okay with accepting less output because no way in the hell do I want to take that or that much responsibility. So that's my take. Did I answer the question? This is a tricky one.

I hope you answered that okay.

I think you answered it quite well. And you know, I kind of to slide something in. I didn't know where all we were really going to go with this one on the. I was joking with Tara on the podcast about how much I appreciate her talking about the codes of our society. Like, that's the rule. Like, we're not supposed to talk about the cultural code that sort of infuses all of this stuff, but sort of the hustle, bro. Productivity is always going to rise to the top in our society because it reinforces the white patriarchal values of our society. And whether or not it actually works for most of us, like, that's the script. And so we all know that's the script. We might not consciously say that, but we know that's what we're supposed to do. And when the script doesn't work for us, we beat ourselves up because that's what the script tells us to do. And when it does work for us, well, we reinforce that script because it worked for us either way, right? Yeah. But when you really look at it in our space, this is gonna make me sound more pessimistic than most people, like, if you don't know me, you know. But like, when you look at the fact that a lot of folks are burnt out, broke and broken with the common advice, maybe we should probably step back and say, is this good advice at root? Maybe there's something underneath all this stuff that's not working at a macro level that we should be questioning. We should be really saying something about it and saying, like, maybe we opt out of that. And it's not just opt out. I'm not an anti guy if I can't give a pro sort of spin on it. But maybe it's time for us to think, like, how much of this mechanistic, reductionistic sort of way of thinking that's been, you know, a reinforcement of these values just needs to be rejected at its root so that we can create something else.

I completely agree that at the heart of hustle culture is those white patriarchal values. And also I think that hustle culture is trying to provide a solution to a sort of an existentially large problem that we have in the 21st century economy, which is that our economic life, our political life, our cultural life is inherently unstable. And I think all three of us are elder millennials. I mean, I grew up with the idea that if you did this, that and the other thing, you'd have this very stable middle class life. Right. And for, you know, maybe the tail end of Gen X that might have been true. But for me, it was not going to be true. And I'm lucky enough to have graduated pre Great Recession, pre interest rates going through the roof on student loans, pre college costing as much as it does now. But regardless of all of that, you know, I still kind of launched into an economy that was inherently in flux. And now we have a politic that is completely broken and national discourse that's broken. And so Hustle culture comes in and says, you know, you have the same 24 hours of Beyonce. What are you going to do to fix your stability problem? It's not an individual problem. It's a cultural problem. It's an economic problem. It's a political problem, and we can't fix it on our own. There are things that we can do to find a deeper sense of stability on a regular basis, but they're not things that are related to Hustle. There are things like measuring your capacity and making sure that you're working within it. There are things like pursuing activities that are satisfying to you, whether that's at work or outside of work. And those aren't things that look like a productive use of time necessarily. They're not things that necessarily have great financial value on an economic scale, but they are things that provide a sort of an more even sense of stability than trying to constantly keep up with a system that is completely broken.

Hear, hear. So good. Thank you. And really, Tara, you've done so much work in the new book explaining this and really digging in. And by the way, your podcast series, Self Help, llc, is exactly this what you just shared. So, listeners, anyone who's here with us live or in the future from the recording, be sure to check out Self Help llc, because every single episode, Tara takes her shovel and just digs and digs and digs and gets to really deep stuff around this. We had a question from Jeremy. He asked about how do you balance team capacity versus the, let's say the owner or the leader's capacity? And then what about balancing the leader's vision with what the team can actually do, whether by skill or by their time and energy?

So I'll sort of jump into the first prong of this. This is where I go back to just understanding that it's not just about your team's time. It does turn out that well. Several different ways to do it. I can be brief here. I could try to be brief here. I think everyone a leader in the business. There's sort of three decks. You're thinking about one. What's your company priorities and where that needs to go, what's your sub macro team priorities? Two is what are your personal priorities? And those might be different in any given moment. Hopefully you're either ahead or behind your team. Ahead, thinking about what's coming and converting that strategy into stuff that they can operationalize and know or behind, seeing where standards and standards aren't being met, where there needs to be additional training and readiness built, so and so forth. So you're either in front or behind your team most of the time. And then the third sort of thing is the relationship between those two, because if you're too far out, your team is going to not know what's going on. If you're too far behind, they're going to be sort of waiting. Now, it is not a matter of just adding up time because at a certain point it's going to come down to there are too many macro projects going on that we can't weave together in a coherent way. And trust me, my team is always having this conversation with me about this and Angela about this. And with the double visionary company, you end up with a lot of that. And so, Jeremy, to specifically answer this question, I think separating it a bit from the time energy or the time component of it and thinking about what's the span of attention my team can see through with a level of excellence that will keep us going is really the sort of question on there. And that unfortunately it's likely going to be different than what you think what your vision might be. And it's going to be not you replicating your visionary power. Like your visionary power. Time, number of teammates equals like capacity. That's not the way this works. It's like yours. And then the team executes on a lot of it. Tara, Jenny, was that helpful? Yeah, I'm trying to get it in.

Super helpful. And hey, listen, we'll do another Spotify live when your book's coming out on team habit, because you are literally writing the book on this answer and this topic.

Cool.

Something that Charlie said just then reminded me of something that Charlie said earlier that I wanted to respond to, which is, I think that often when we're looking at questions of capacity, we're thinking about, do I have room to squeeze this in? As opposed to do I have what I need to do this? Well, do I have what I need to do this in a way that's going to be satisfying to me, that's going to meet my standards. And so what I heard Charlie say just now is, does my team have the attention available to do this with the level of excellence that matters to us as a team. And I think that that is a question that we do not ask nearly enough, whether it has to do with our teams or with ourselves. And when we start asking that question instead of can I squeeze it in, it really changes the way you communicate with others like we talked about earlier. And it changes the way you relate to the work yourself as well. And it makes it easier to understand your capacity in the moment.

Well, speaking of squeezing something in and our clock time capacity, we only have a couple minutes left, so I'm going to go ahead and steal a two part closing question. Part one, what is one thing you do that expands your capacity, that creates capacity for you? And then part two, you both know by now the permission slip. If you could give everybody listening to this permission to do something differently or drop something, what would it be? Let's go to Tara first. Do you want to start?

Okay, two part questions. I think the thing that creates the most capacity for me is my morning routine, which specifically includes a long walk or a long run. And during that time I am listening to podcasts and I'm learning things. And I know that might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it really fuels me both physically and mentally for the day ahead. And I find that that routine has really expanded my capacity, generally speaking. And then permission slip wise, I mean, I think that thing that I want to leave people with is really what I was just saying a minute ago around switching the question from can I squeeze this in to do I have what I need to do this as well as I want to, to do this in a way that satisfies me at a level of excellence that I expect for myself or for others. So I think that those are my parting words.

Beautiful. Thank you. Over to you, Charlie.

I would say that mine is think walking, which I would define as walking without having a bunch of screens and other podcasts and other things like that. Because that actually interrupts my capacity building process so I can listen to music, but that's about it. And so that that's my best way most go to way of building capacity for myself. And so for the commission slip, I'm going to encourage people to do a one for one trade out of projects. So drop an economic project that really doesn't have to happen this quarter and replace that with a self care project that would really fuel you for this quarter.

Awesome. My capacity builder is, I almost think of it as mischievously stealing time in the morning, even if the clock says 10am But I haven't done my reading and quiet time yet. I steal it from the typical factory schedule and then you hereby have permission to say no to as many social invitations as you say yes to this season or this week. With that, thank you all so much. If you haven't already pre ordered what Works, Tara's brand new book, I definitely encourage you to do that because if you enjoyed this conversation, you're going to love the book. Tara and Charlie, I just want to give you the final chance to say where people can find you and keep in touch. And this will go out via email too.

Yeah. So the book explorewhatworks.com book all the info is there, all the links are there and then the podcast is the other best place to find me and so you can find it on Spotify, any other podcast platform and it's just called what Works.

And for me, all roads lead to productiveflourishing dot com. You can find my previous book, start finishing my forthcoming book Team Habits and also my podcast there at Productive Flourishing.

Amazing. And I'm at pod link, freetime and itsfreetime.com the new book is Free Time. Thank you so much Tara and Charlie. I cannot think of any better way to spend our time than with both of you. Thank you so so much.

Thanks everybody.

Thanks Jenny. Happy Experimenting.

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