246: What is Your Job Today? (You Decide)

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello my friends. Welcome to another perfectly imperfect podcast episode. One of my themes for 2020, especially the second half, is to commit to getting work out there. Thank you Seth Godin and his new book the Practice for the motivation to do this, Even when it's not perfect, even when it's not even close. I've talked about overcoming perfectionism on this podcast many times and I usually am all for a philosophy of get scrappy and, you know, get things out. I'm embarrassed by almost every single podcast episode, but here we are approaching 250 and they get out anyway. Somehow, 250 episodes that I'm simultaneously embarrassed by and every now and then proud of have made their way to to your podcast app.

This episode is focusing on something that's been helpful for me this summer. I've had a lot of ups and downs this year, as have so many of us. I shared our personal recipe or series of crazy events that have happened for us in episode 245 and in this one I want to focus more on how I'm getting through it. And I want to hear from you too. If you have some strategies that have been working for you, leave me a voice note. Or if you have a question related to any of this, leave me a voice note. You can do that@pivotmethod.com ask.

This episode is titled what's your job today? And it might not be what you think. For most of us, when I ask you the question what's your job today? Or what's your job? You might think about the work that you do to get paid, whether you work for somebody else or you work for yourself. And oftentimes when you're working for yourself, it means you're working for your clients. In addition to clients and whoever's paying our bills, we also have just a general slew of inboxes. And sometimes we spend the day or even the week working for notifications. We are responding to other people. Maybe we're not even getting paid for that work, but it's part of the broader ecosystem that we work in. So you might see your job as being responsive or as responding to people, whether it's in text messages, email, LinkedIn messages, any other social media inbox that you have. And now we have apps like Voxer and Marco Polo to just add to the mix. When the pandemic hit in mid March, many of you know that I pivoted to doing daily podcasts for three months. That was a really rewarding time. And I tend to do really well when I'm on a streak. And so, in a way, although it was very challenging on our systems to switch from a weekly all of a sudden to a daily podcast production process, including weekends, there is something about a streak and about committing to something every single day that makes it easier for me. And the reason behind that is that it cuts down on decision fatigue. So many of you might have this feeling with working out or even meditating, where, if you have to decide, should I meditate today or should I work out today, or am I going to work out today? Or what time could I work out today? It's so much less likely to happen. Asking the question alone creates some fatigue and almost promises, it almost ensures that it's not going to be something we're doing every day. Otherwise, we would say, I'm doing this today. What time?

A flip side of decision fatigue and just the way our mind tends to work is I read about this in a book called Sugar, Salt, and Fat. It was so good, it came out many, many years ago, that if you are primed by something that you see, so you see a billboard of a hamburger, or you suddenly have the thought to have ice cream, it's very, very difficult not to close that loop. And by the end of the day, you want to seek out a hamburger or you want to go have that ice cream. So by the time we think to ourselves, should I have that ice cream or should I have that hamburger? It's kind of already too late, because it's very hard to resist that open, open loop. And once the debate starts, that decision fatigue sets in, and it's kind of a foregone conclusion. So if you're someone like me that benefits with streaks and even a Little bit of all or nothing thinking. And I'll talk about how that can get in our way as well. It might be easier to say I'm not eating sugar. Like if you do Whole 30. The Whole 30 way of eating, which is quite challenging, I've done it once or twice. Then you could just say, oh, I'm not having sugar for 30 days. So the ice cream question, it's no longer a question, it's no longer an open loop. Well, should I have it? Is it that bad? How much? How about I'll just have a bite? Okay, how about just a second bite? And you can see how there's so many questions that get built in to something as simple as this example that I'm sharing with you. Whereas if you make a rule for yourself or you're on a streak of any kind, it's so much easier because it's just a given.

The one time I was able to have my longest meditation streak ever was a thousand days unbroken. And the reason for that is that once I'm that far into a streak, and as I'm recording, I just saw the clock turn 11. 11. So yes, there's blessing the thousand day streak.

Once I'm that far in, you don't want to disappoint yourself. You don't want to break the streak. That's how I felt with the daily podcast episodes. So why am I. How does this relate to what's your job and what's your job today? Because when you're on a streak, you're so committed to at least one thing. It's very hard to be on a streak for 10 things in our life and work all at the same time. But I do believe that we have the energy and we can greatly benefit by choosing one or two streaks that are meaningful that we know will compound and that the benefits will compound as well over time. So with things like meditating and working out and doing your creative work, or your best work, those strengths compound. It means that each day is not equally powerful. It's actually that day one is powerful in and of itself. But by day 10, you get compound benefits of having done that thing for 10 days in a row. So maybe your brain, for example. My brain would be faster and better and more creative at coming up with the podcast ideas by day 10 than it was day one, where my interviewing skills were way more honed, or my editing was way faster by day 10 than it was day one. With meditation, we know that having consecutive days actually starts to sink in to your, your body, your system. And it has this deeper impact when you can do it so many days in a row. Same thing. If I don't eat sugar, which I'm currently my favorite thing, my guilty pleasure by far, our Dr. Mango slices. And I know they have so much sugar, but I eat them every single day. And I also know that it's probably creating a lot of inflammation and I have this, this little sugar belly that I know. I look at it and I'm like, that's those damn mango slices. Because I, I have way more than a given serving in a day. But hey, it's 2020. So this is the thing that I have allowed myself to do this year.

During the summer when it felt like the sky was falling and we weren't getting sleep and I was losing my mind and just trying to get through the most basic day was taxing to me. Not even including any work, I decided that my job is working out.

I've gone up and down with fitness stuff throughout my life. I mean, sometimes I'm really active and sometimes I'm not active at all. And I have to say, moving in 2019 to a whole new neighborhood with all my favorite yoga, Pilates, et cetera studios used to be just half block away. And they all disappeared when I moved in 2019. And that was almost a preview of what was going to come in 2020 when all of that was going to shut down anyway, even if I was commuting 30 or 40 minutes to my favorite Pilates class and back. So 2019, I had already kind of fallen off the fitness wagon and I was getting by with a yoga Pilates class here and there on the mirror. I ended up buying the mirror when we moved last year, although now I recommend peloton. And heading into the pandemic, I and doing those daily podcasts in the first half of 2020, I just wasn't really taking care of my fitness and I knew that I was feeling extra lethargic because I wasn't working out. And the way that I'm built and the way that my family is engineered, my dad has a mantra, pay for the day. And you do that with exercise. So he goes on these really long, sometimes 9, 10 mile, sometimes 16 mile walks in the evenings and then you pay for the day. So if you get all that adrenaline and his theory has always been that that adrenaline turns toxic in your body if you don't use it. So I knew that some amount of my 2020 lethargy and just lack of any life force and drive and motivation had to do with not applying myself physically in the way that I think all of us are built to do. On some level, we don't all need to be super athletes. But I wasn't doing any cardio at all. So when summer hit, first of all, I ordered the bike, the peloton bike in April and then it arrived June 15th. And when the bike arrived, I decided I'm starting a streak.

It started, I didn't know how long it was going to last. I started, you know, maybe couple days. I just thought I'm going to give my money's worth on this thing and I'm going to make sure that this thing, that by this bike coming into our home, I don't just let it sit there and I don't just let it become some piece of fitness equipment that I never touch or kind of be lackadaisical like, oh, do I want a bike today? So I just thought I'm going to get on this thing every day. And then now that, you know, initial first week has turned into, at the time of this recording, a 14 week streak, I haven't missed a day. There have been a handful of times where I did a yoga, restorative yoga instead of a bike class because biking every single day for 14 weeks is a lot, but in general it's been good. And my, my fitness has improved so much. I can track, they have something called FTP tests. I won't get into all that here, but you can kind of test and benchmark your fitness and I've been doing that every month and it's amazing to see how fast my cardiovascular abilities are improving. Why has this streak been possible? Because I've made some trade offs. So by telling myself my job is working out, I switched the focus. I was feeling like my job is doing my work, but I was failing at that. I didn't have the energy to do it. Just basic family responsibilities, walking the dog, food, the minimum to run our household. I wasn't doing it. So when I switched the focus from my job is my job, as I typically think of it, running my business to my job is working out, I stopped feeling as guilty. It meant that I was giving my best hours for me after reading the newspaper in the morning and sometimes a book, although I haven't read that many books this year, I made my first priority jumping on the bike for a workout. Because I said my job is working out, my job is my health and wellness. And that was for survival when it came to mid 2020. And what it meant is that I didn't feel so guilty that my the first thing I did every day wasn't jumping on the computer. You'll notice the impact of this was I didn't say my job is getting a podcast out every day. So in fact I didn't release any new episodes in July and August because my job in July and August was working out.

This also allowed me to.

Dedicate as much time as I wanted to give my body for the workouts. And then I would get off a bike ride, then I might go take a shower and then I would think, oh, I really feel like stretching and I would do a yoga class and then around 12 or 1 maybe I would think about is there work that I absolutely need to get done today? If you've listened to this podcast for a while, you know that my ideal what I think is humane to work is 20 to 30 hours a week, 30 being a max if there's a lot going on. I really believe that with clear, focused, strategic time, about a four hour sprint every day, or even better yet, a six hour sprint three times a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is enough. I think it's plenty. We can get plenty done. Yes, it does involve some systems and, and delegating and planning, but it can be done. And if you have any responsibilities at all outside of your work, this to me is what allows you to still be a present family member and take care of your health and wellness and get enough sleep and get enough rest. Especially when we are being so psychologically taxed this year in every regard.

So this my job is working out was a really good mindset. It got me to be on this 14 day streak and it got me to the point where the endorphins that have come from working out, I actually look forward to them now. So I never thought this would happen, but I'm at a point now where the habit has formed and the endorphin rush. I look forward to it. So they say, you know, it's kind of the one good addiction is getting addicted to exercise. Not over training of course, but I look forward to the bike ride. So now I'm shifting and because of that interview with Seth, hopefully it's come out by now. But if not, it will be any episode now. I don't know what order exactly. I'll slot this one in.

Reading his book the Practice, which comes out in November. Ah, it was just such a kick in the pants to start shipping again and stop holding myself. I noticed that by the afternoons I was often feeling hot. It was summer, lethargic, I didn't know what to come to the podcast and say, and I didn't really have the energy to even review episodes or edit them or finalize them or create the show notes. Everything seemed monumental to me. Everything seemed incredibly overwhelming.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I mean, this is kind of how I'm built. Like, I go through periods of surges of a lot of energy and productivity, and then I go through these periods where I need a lot of time away. I've barely looked at my email in over a month, so that's a trade off where I've, I've, I've. I've not said my job is my email inbox, and people are gonna have to be really patient right now. But that's just not. It's not at the very tip top of my list because the available time and energy that I have is so much lower than. Than what it is during boom times, let's call it.

So now, with the peloton habit so ingrained. And I'll put a promo code in the show notes just in case you end up getting a bike and you want a hundred dollars toward accessories, you can always check the show notes for things like that. If I have a promo code that benefits you, I'll always share it.

Now, I was ready to shift, and I mentioned Seth and the practice. Now I thought, okay, I'm already looking forward to this bike ride every day. So now I'm gonna shift. My job is the podcast. What does that mean? It means that the first thing that I do before I respond to email, before I handle almost any other task on my plate, is record a podcast. This might not happen every single day because you, you voted. You weighed in on the podcast listener survey and let me know that weekly is your preferred format. Maybe not for every single person, but the majority said weekly was your preferred frequency. Although, who knows? If I get on a roll with my job as my podcast, then maybe we'll come out twice a week. We'll see. Everything is a work in progress. And as my radical reimagining episode 245 goes, everything is up for grabs. So if I shift now to say my job is my podcast, what that means is that the podcast comes first, and that will get my best available energy and even. And now I need to earn the bike ride by doing a podcast or doing one big strategic task every now and then that will be related to a client project or I'm creating some new LinkedIn learning courses or writing a forward or even a blurb to somebody's book. Those are things that required me to really dive, dive deeply, immerse myself and be very thoughtful and come up with something new and original. Even if it's a book blurb, it still needs to be a couple sentences that will really honor the book that this person is asking me to blurb.

There may be periods of your life and family life where you say, my job is helping my children get through virtual school. You might say, my job is cooking. So maybe you want to go on a health kick for you or your household, and you want to say, my job is healthy food for the household. So every day, your whole day can actually orient around making this happen. And you know that every day, that's your focus. And, and actually part of this is saying this has been a successful day. So when, you know, riders not yet a year old, and there are many, many days or weeks this year where it's like, our job is taking care of our puppy. He has a ton of energy. German shepherds. He's already £95 and he's not even a year old. And it used to be we could go for a walk in the morning and then come home and he would sleep all day until his afternoon walk for 5pm well, not today. The day of this recording, Michael took him out from 6 to 7:30. We live close enough to Central park to do that, which is really fun from time to time. And then sure enough, I come in, I'm starting to try to record a podcast. And he has all this energy and he's bringing a ball and he's. He shoves the ball at our leg or at our hip and he's like, has all this energy. So I shifted and I said, all right, I'm gonna take him, teach him how to, how to run with me. I'm not a runner in the, in the. My daily workout streak. I've had two runs, today being the second, but I thought 20 minutes. My job is working out. That still is carrying over, even though my job is also this podcast and my job is also taking care of Ryder. So I think. And sure enough, he did get tired out. Now I think he is napping peacefully somewhere down the hall.

Obviously, we often have several jobs running in parallel.

I just offer you this episode to say, what do you want to choose as your job today or this week or for this phase or season? And this can always shift once if your job is eating healthfully or your job is working out. Of course, I'm not saying that you're not going to do any work, but I'm saying that you can drop the guilt and you can also stop giving your very best window to everybody else. So if your job is working out, you get to do that first. Or your job is raising a puppy and training a puppy, you get to do that first, you get to feel accomplished. You think, yes, I met my mission for today and now what do I need to work on now? What are my top three work priorities for the day? But just because you have work tasks to work on or things that might be due, you know, I like to think about work. Email is a task, by the way. My friend Pierre Coand taught me that, that when you treat email like a task, it has a start time and an end time. So I've now set up an email response tracker for myself where I log what time I start, I log what time I finish, I log the number of emails when I start, the number when I finish, my time per email. Like I'm trying to really just raise awareness and not have email on just steady, constant drip in the background of everything that I do that drives me crazy with the start and an end time. I might tackle email as a task two or three times a week. I certainly don't do it every day because I'm not a brain surgeon. Nothing that I do is that urgent. And usually people know how to get ahold of me if something is just absolutely urgent and needs a response same day or within 24 hours. But I also don't train people, even, even those that I love the most. Email's never really my top priority in that sense. Not that the people emailing me aren't people that I love and adore and, you know, really important in my life. But I don't mind if I have a reputation for being slow to respond to email.

So I think there's, it's choosing what you want to be known for as well. And what are you willing to make trade offs about in terms of your own availability and the things that people say you're good at. Like, I cannot imagine. There are people that I know, there are authors that I know that are so good at email and it is part of their reputation. It's this delightful thing. It's like, oh my God, they wrote me back and I couldn't believe it and they responded right away and it creates so much joy for the people they interact with. And then there's maybe someone like me where I love really beautiful messages and I love responding when I can, but I definitely won't be fast about it. And so it's okay with me if on my deathbed people are not saying, she was so responsive to email. That's okay with me. I would rather someone say her books changed my life or her podcast got me through 2020. That'd be amazing. You know, that'd be amazing. So right now, where I'm at in my life and my capacity.

That is a trade off for me. And I never want to plant the seed that things in your life or work have to be either or. I love asking creative questions as I share in pivot, I call them combinatorial questions, where you say, how can I take care of my health and wellness and be really responsive to my co workers or my clients? You can always ask that question as an and and see where that takes you.

One thing that came up in our Momentum 2020 summit from Kathy Onetto. She's just launching her project Sustainable Ambition. You can check it out@sustainableambition.com she shared with us that the level of ambition you have at any season of your life can change. So it's. It might be helpful to ask and try to understand how ambitious do you want to be right now and in what areas of your life? So if you want to be ambitious about homeschooling your kids, is there another area of your life that you want to taper back, you know, pull back a little bit on your ambitiousness? Or maybe it's a season of kind of what age you're at and based on your energy levels. And maybe when you are in your 20s, you're super duper ambitious about everything and you want to be the best and at whatever it is you're attempting. And then maybe that changes over time and you think, you know, oh, I don't know. I actually don't need to be the best. Like, for me, with this podcast, like, do I need to be the number one or even the top 20 podcasts in iTunes and then obsess over that? Uh, no, that's okay. If not, you know, it. These things could always be nice. But it takes a lot of commitment to. To choose something like that, and especially if it relates to external factors that you really don't have complete control over, that takes a lot of energy. So I have friends, people who I know who launch podcasts, and they think I am determined to get into the top 100 in the business categories or in entrepreneurship, and they make it happen. And they email their friends and they ask for reviews and they, like, make it happen. That's somebody that's choosing to be Very ambitious in that area at that time. So maybe like I'm just giving, I'm giving the examples about myself just cause it's coming to mind and maybe it will help you think through yours. Maybe with the podcast, for example, my ambition is less about how many people listen, but can I figure out a resonant, listener supportive model that has integrity? I want to be ambitious about that. And the way that I feel myself being ambitious is looking and saying, yes, I see that what everyone else is doing is having sponsors and reading ads for companies, but I don't really want to do that. So it feels ambitious to try to say, oh yeah, yeah, I can skirt this thing that is actually working in the way that the vast majority of podcasts are monetized. I only know one that's listener supported without sponsored ads and that's Sam Harris. But hey, there's one, there's one, there's a couple more that have members only like subscription based models for their podcast. And so I got my eyes on those. I'm exploring, I'm looking for examples. That's where my ambition is. But even there it's not this ambition of like, all right, my ambition is to earn six figures on the podcast by the end of the year. You know, that's a very ambitious approach and it's okay not to be so ambitious about every single thing and just picking. You know, I love what Seth Godin said. I took his podcasting workshop over the summer and he said it's just the size of your audience doesn't matter if you run a science podcast and you only have six listeners. But those six listeners are a Nobel prize winner, Neil degrasse Tyson. Pick four more some famous science fiction author and pick a few others, your heroes then. Isn't that a success? Isn't that most important? That's definitely how I feel here on the Pivot podcast. I know we have such an incredible community of all of you who are out there listening wherever you are. And that's where I'm focusing. If you can even call it ambition, is just the quality of the connection of who each of you is and how I can serve you better and how we can continue this conversation and continue creating a calming, helpful, inspiring place in your audio landscape. Let's call it. So shout out to Kathy. Kathy, thank you so much for introducing this idea of sustainable ambition. And she's just getting that all off the ground. But I'll hopefully I'll have Kathy on the show at some point too to talk more about this.

I hope you found this solo riff helpful in in any way at all? I'd love to hear your feedback. You can always leave me a voice note@pivotmethod.com Ask and check out the show notes for this episode. I'll put the promo code I do have for peloton if you end up getting a bike. I I'm never attached to that. I just put it there in case. I know it's always nice to get a little in this case, $100 credit to accessories, which will get you your shoes if you end up getting a bike.

So what's your job? What's your job today? What's your job this week? It doesn't have to be what you think. It doesn't have to be the work that you do or the work that you owe you Tell me, what is your job today? Thanks so much for listening everybody.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot Lists, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.