313: What’s the pebble in your shoe? Pivoting from Wall Street to RadReads with Khe Hy

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When you bring peace and freedom, you become an opportunity magnet. You become a creativity magnet. You become a joy and charisma magnet. Right when you just let go of that grip that that unmet need has or that fearful part of you has, you come alive.

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 PODC 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.

Welcome back everybody. I am so delighted to be here in person today, recording in New York City with my friend Kay. He he is the founder and CEO of Rad Reads, an online education company helping professionals lead productive, examined and joyful lives. Kay is a creator of the 10K work productivity method and teaches the popular cohort based course Supercharge your productivity which we'll talk about today. He provides guides, trainings and coaching for a rapidly growing list of people to help them gain back free time, scale their impact and make their own dent in the univers. K was last on the FreeTime podcast and I'll put that link in the show notes and before he founded Rad reads, he spent 15 years working on Wall Street. He was named one of the youngest managing directors at BlackRock and he's been called Oprah for millennials by CNN, which I love. Kay, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. It is so awesome to be here and to do this like real serious. I know in the studio.

I know this is our first time meeting in person though of course we've jammed for the pod and we've had catch up calls before and after that. How is it being back in New York City?

It's been awesome. Like the energy of the city is unreal and family and friends and food and drinking. Definitely a little tired. So excited for my quieter LA surf life in a few days. I mean the serendipity of being able to Just pop in. My kids are at the wax museum next door and hang out and jam on a podcast. Is unprecedented, unparalleled.

I love it. I love it. And I told you I'm going to take you for a dollar pizza slice after this around the corner. It's so yummy. Take us back to your decision to leave blackrock. Because I get asked that a lot of my decision to leave corporate, and I'm curious if you can just take us to the moment where you're contemplating giving up this big, fancy job with probably really good salary and benefits. How did you know that it was time to let that go?

Going back in the time machine. So that was almost eight years ago. I have to set that up with Kay as a kid and Kay as a kid. We know. I grew up in New York City, and we were like lower middle class, but I always, always, always, always wanted Jordans, fancy Jordans. I love Nikes and all that. And my parents would always say, no, they're too expensive. Like, we'll get you these Modells shoes or these knockoffs and so on. And I developed this sense that I wanted agency over my own life. And I wanted agency through, you know, naively, I thought through money and financial security. And so from a very young age, I'm like, I am determined to make as much money as possible. So I went to Yale. I majored in computer science, and then I worked on Wall street for 15 years. Now, to go back to your question, I think probably when I turned 30, started to have the pebble in my shoe. So you know that feeling, listeners, when you have, like a little rock in your shoe and it's annoying enough that you notice it on every footstep, but it's not annoying enough for you to take, stop, look, take it out. Put your shoe back on. And I started to feel that. I've heard Brene Brown refer to it as comfortably numb. I was like, I'm 30 years old. I want to feel alive. And I could just see what my career would look like on that track. Really good money, private schools, you know, multiple cars, all that stuff.

All the Jordans you could wear, all the Jordans.

Jordans you could want. And I saw people 10 years older than me. I was like, I don't want that to be my life in 10 years. But there's this kind of sunk cost fallacy, right? I invested 30 years or 20 years of my life to get to this point. You'd be crazy to walk away from that. And I think it really came down to like that feeling of aliveness. Like I want to wake up every single day and feel alive. It just wasn't going to happen for me in a corporate role. The second was a feeling of alignment with the things that I cared about. I could talk more about that, but I didn't feel in alignment working on Wall street for a few reasons. One was it was a very kind of fixed pie mindset. So I win, you lose. Not. A rising tide lifts all boats. Imagine an industry of mostly insecure men like myself where the belief is that I need to beat you for me to succeed. You can imagine the instincts that that brings out. And again, I just wanted to opt out. I'm like, I just don't believe the world works that way, so I want to opt out. That was one. There was no culture of leadership or management and leadership where managers were. If you were a good manager, that was a penalty.

Really?

Yeah, because it meant you couldn't make money. So you are a moneymaker or you're a manager. In their eyes, it wasn't possible to be both. Again, zero sum thinking. I thought that was just ridiculous that you were penalized for being a good manager. One of my reviews, they said, you're doing really well, but you spend too much time managing your team. Too much time managing my team? What are you talking about? And then I've always been a tinkerer. And I love the Internet. I love creating things and coding little projects together. And just for as creative people on Wall street say they are as an industry, they're still emailing themselves documents and attachments and all that. And there was just a dearth of creativity. And this is right when kind of the iPhone came out and social was starting to take off. And I'm like, there's just gotta be more out there.

I didn't realize you grew up in New York City, right?

14Th street and Avenue A, right? By NYU? Yes.

I've always felt that that would give a young person so many unique skills to grow up in the city. Do you feel like you got, I don't know, some kind of superhero? Collection of traits from growing up in such a densely packed place. And a little gritty too.

You know, I'm 43, so. New York in the 80s and early 90s was a very different place. It was definitely like less developed, less saved, like I think much of the world.

And there are even books written about 14th and Avenue A, these types of areas.

I mean, the motorcycle, Alphabet City and all that. I think that you were exposed to a lot. I really Think back, like you just sit in a New York City subway car. You might have a billionaire on one part of the train and someone who's struggling financially on the other part of the train and everything in between, fashionistas and architects and all that. So diversity. It felt like being at the ground zero of diversity, socioeconomic and racial and all different types of diversity. So that was one. We lived a very sheltered. My parents were very strict, so we weren't like going to clubs and the movie kids and that wasn't the New York life that we had. And the third one is one that I've been thinking about recently was, you know, when you were middle class in New York in that time period, it wasn't uncommon to get mugged or jumped as a kid where basically kids who were a couple years older than you would like steal your backpack or take your wallet or things like that. And that happened to me a handful of times growing up, which is now like a studio apartment would be, you know, thousands of dollars in those neighborhoods. And I've been reflecting more as an adult how that fear of feeling so powerless and feeling so afraid to like leave your own house, I was a very scrawny kid too. Really motivated a lot of my professional drive because it was from a place of like, I never want to go back to that again and I never want to put anyone who I care about in that position ever. And I've been thinking a lot about kind of unprocessed trauma. You know, Gabor Mate calls it small T trauma and how it translates into like your core motivations and your insecurities as a 43 year old father of two. And that was a long winded answer of the New York experience. So, you know, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Well, it's fascinating and just wild to imagine that you had to deal with that as a kid. I grew up in San Francisco, right in the inner Richmond, and cannot believe how many things I was allowed to do by myself. Get on buses, go across the city. And when I was really young, thankfully I did not experience getting mugged or at least by fellow students. That'd be so scary. That'd be terrifying. That drive to elevate out of that type of situation got you to Wall Street. And I've had friends share something similar to you about their time on Wall street, which is it's all about money. And ultimately striving every day to earn more and more money is not that rewarding. There's no content there. It's the quest for more and more money that they found it was kind of shallow as well. So you notice the pebble in your shoe. And it's funny that as a kid it's about getting Jordans. And now even if you're wearing Jordans, you might have a pebble in your shoe. When did the pebble become a rock? When did you realize, okay, I can't keep ignoring this for the psychology that you had up till that point. And especially I would imagine with strict parents, you can't just call them and say, mom, dad, I'm quitting, I'm pursuing my passion. I would imagine you'd get quite a lecture.

Their worst nightmare. Yeah, I think it was a slow burn. So you kind of witness you get a performance review and when they said you spend too much time caring about your team, like, what the heck, you know, that's messed up, that's weird. And so there were multiple incidents like that. But I think the biggest one was becoming a father. You would think. And my wife Lisa is an artist, so she is not the primary breadwinner with her career. And so you think having a young kid and a spouse who's an artist, that it would be the worst time to leave that track. But the thing about having a kid was if I think about the times from like age 25 to 32, that's a seven year period that feels like a big blur. There's just like a lot of weddings. That's all that I remember about that seven year period. There's tons of weddings attending them my own. But once you have a kid, time becomes so crystal clear. First of all, we've all been around those parents who are like, oh, baby is 11 weeks old. You're like, you're not even talking in months, you're talking in weeks. So time becomes so crystal clear. And then all of a sudden, it's your baby's first birthday. Like, whoa, that was a year. And then all these flashbacks come back. There's this running joke on Wall street, which is, when's the best time to leave Wall Street? After next year's bonus.

Yeah, we had that at Google too.

Yeah. So what happened was seeing the passage of time, watching my daughter go from zero to one, from one to two. Oh my God, it's been two years. And I still go back to the office eight years later and the same coffee stain is on the rug and the giant bag of Costco almonds is like in the snack tray area. It's like, wow, it's been eight years and not that much has changed. And so seeing that and I have this kind of long, lingering fear of mortality, the eternity, the eternal nature of time kind of was like, whoa, time is moving really quickly. And having a child made it crystal clear that you could snap your fingers and 10 years would go by. And I refused to let that happen.

We'll be right back just after this.

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You talked about wanting a greater sense of alignment and aliveness. Specifically. I love that word. When you quit, did you already have rad reads in mind? Had you been developing it as a side hustle? Or did you quit with no trapeze bar that you were jumping to? No branch. Tarzan branch, so to speak.

That was the crazy part of it all, was there was no idea.

I can't believe that. Did you just have a big financial Runway?

So Lisa and I, we had kind of gone through our finances and we had 18 months of living expenses that we would be comfortable running to zero.

Amazing.

So I always joke that that was the angel investment in myself, where there's a 99.9% chance that you incinerate the money and a 0.01% chance that you'd have something spectacular come out of it. It was a very rational way. It's like we have savings. We can incinerate this amount of money in 18 months and not meaningfully change our lives. And let's just see what happens. But it wasn't that foolish or that unstructured as it may seem, because the tinker in me had been trying stuff out for probably five to seven years. Like not like full fledged businesses. But I started a culture blog about the New York City downtown scene of arts and food and music. So I did that. I tried to start this Uber for recruiting. So these are all like quasi business plan wireframes. Sometimes they had landing pages. I secretly tweeted for many, many years under a pseudonym because you weren't allowed to tweet back then. Might still not be allowed to tweet. So I had this portfolio of small bets, and none of them were like Google, like ideas. But what they showed me, they gave me in hindsight, what they gave me. The confidence was like, I know how to put stuff out into the world. And I just didn't have enough time, enough free time, no pun intended, to put it out into the world. So I knew that if I took 18 months, I wasn't going to watch TV and just hang out and drink with my buddies. I was going to just expand on that tinkering time and the. The probability that one of those things would happen would greatly increase in the pivot framework.

I call that piloting.

Of course.

And in your case, you called it a bunch of small bets. And the metaphor often uses racehorses. At the Kentucky Derby, you cannot know which of those small bets is going to work. And so I love that you were a tinkerer and you have this computer science background from college. When did one of them take the lead? When did the front runner emerge?

The frontrunner emerged. And again, in hindsight, through another value of mine, which is this concept of aliveness, which. One of my guiding principles is follow the fun.

I love that.

So I just follow the fun. Like, if it's fun, I just keep doing more of it. I hadn't resigned, but I knew I was leaving. So there's like a little stub period. Before I'd made it official, I was on vacation in Turks and Caicos. My daughter was under a year old, and I just had all this time because I was on vacation. I was on Twitter, but no one on Wall street was on Twitter back then. This was almost nine years ago. And I'd found all these cool articles on Twitter and I just summarized them kind of like your classic substack today. And I'm like, this article is cool. Elon Musk on first principles and a wait, but why? Article on how to pick the perfect career. I remember, like, an Adam Grant piece on give and take, something like that. So I just blurbed them and I just sent them out as a Gmail BCC to 36 people. At the end, there was a sentence that said, I have a lot of free Time right now. I have no idea when I'll do this again. And 36 people wrote back. This was so awesome. When's the next one coming out? And it was just link blogging. It was early for its time. Everyone does that now. But eight or nine years ago, it was early link blogging and people, very quick feedback loop. People like, hey, when's the next one? And it was fun because I was reading these articles anyway and I felt this writer in me emerging. But I didn't identify as a writer, you know, as a computer science finance guy. Like, I'm not a writer. I'm a numbers person. Right. The identity, they were four sentence paragraphs, but they were forcing me to write. And I saw my voice starting to creep out and, like, my opinion starting to hide behind this, like, summary, like this cliff notes of this article. And that was kind of that first thing that just started to realize, like, whoa, this is fun. It's adding value to people. And the snowball started to kind of roll down the hill.

I love your writing style and your voice, and it really is. I mean, it has emerged in that time to be really punchy. And there's so much personality. The one I just read most recently was. I forget what the title was like when 5 million isn't enough. And you were pulling from a very funny succession clip.

When they said it was with Brother Greg. Cousin Greg.

Cousin Greg. He says, 5 million. It's your worst nightmare. Yeah, not too much money to work again, but not enough money to live your life or something like that. And it's fun. That all came from a tweet.

And yeah, you pull out dialogue. The sentences are short and punchy, and you bring them to life in such a unique way. Rad reads, everybody. If you're not subscribed, I highly recommend. You've been doing this now for so long, and I know that the audience, like you said, it keeps snowballing. I have followed a similar format of curating, and every now and then I lose steam because I'll think everybody's doing this now, just like you said. I used to do something called Weekend Coffee Talk, and I would collect all the links at the time. This is 2013. It was for mind, body and business systems at the intersection of mind, body and business.

Funny to look back at our old framings and stuff.

And I wanted to give people fodder for Coffee Talk, that they would have interesting articles or snippets to read. And now, a decade later, sometimes I just lose steam of curating. Is this doing Anything. Am I creating any assets, or am I just kind of regurgitating what's out there? Do you go through cycles like this? Because you've been remarkably consistent as well. So how do you stay motivated? And do you ever think about changing up the format of Rad Reads, given how long you've been doing it?

Yeah, I think about this a lot. And this is where Follow the Fun becomes kind of a very clear test. So I had a podcast for a year. I didn't do it a couple years ago, like, three or four years ago. Committed 52 episodes, and I did it 52 in a row, and I lost interest in it. And I'm quick to cut it off because entrepreneurship, to me, is a vessel for aliveness. And, you know, some people would say it's a vessel for money. And, like, to me, it's a vessel of aliveness first, and the money will follow. That doesn't mean that whenever I hit the proverbial resistance, that I just, like, call it quits, right? But aliveness is a test. So if you take the newsletter, for example, I have a team that writes it for me now. But the aliveness part is that essay where all week I'm like, what weird thing did I stumble upon on the Internet that I want to write about? Right? Like, I wrote about Costco pants the other day, right?

Oh, yeah, I love that one.

And that is, like, this weird. I use Costco pants as this gateway to talk about the dissolution of the ego, right?

Tell us what you mean by that.

There's a line from a comedian named Sheng Wang, and he says something like, you know, lots of people say that they don't care what people think. But the true test of whether you don't care about what someone else thinks is if you're willing to buy your clothes at Costco. He's like, that is when your ego disappears and you give your middle finger to the rest of the world. And I was just kind of thinking, because I had this moment where I was looking to buy. I'm going on tangent here, so cut me off if necessary. But I was looking to buy a new pair of gym shorts. And so I tied it to this little bit where it's the comedian that I find really funny. So I'm like, nike. I'm a Nike guy. I love Nikes. You know, we love Nikes, but Nike shorts are, like, 50 bucks. And, like, I don't really care that much about Nike. So then I'm like, well, I'm a crossfitter. You know, I like People with tattoos and big biceps and all that. And I aspire to be. So I went to Rogue, which is like the CrossFit brand. And I'm like, do I get rogue shorts? They're like 50 bucks. I'm like, I'm not that guy. Like, I'm a 43 year old father of two. Like, who do I think I am? And then I went down all these like, lists. I'm like, I'm just going to Target and I'm just going to buy 20 shorts and they're going to be functional and I just don't care anymore. It was kind of like it made me realize that these brands were a part of my identity. And as I was getting older, I was letting go of the identity of being a crossfitter or of being a sneaker head and I just wanted functionality at a low cost. I found that extremely freeing because you could extend that metaphor to something like aging, where like, there are many ways that we all fight aging in all different ways, shape and form. And that's an identity of youth that we're all trying to hold on to. And it causes a lot of pain by holding on to that identity of youth. Just like you have a lot of pain when you're like, I'm a crossfitter. And then one day you're like, you're not a crossfitter. That little snippet, it literally was a YouTube short about Costco pants. And I happened to see it live. So it had resonated. When I saw him live, it kind of took me down this rabbit hole of what identities are we clinging to? Right? You asked me about consistency. I'm a consistent person. But sometimes I wonder, is that an identity that I'm holding onto too much because culture celebrates consistency. What happens if I don't want to be consistent anymore? Do I not become celebrated? That can hurt. That can be debilitating. So a long winded answer to how a revelation of Costco pants and not giving of what people think can take you down this, like, wow. Like, this is about aging. This is about respect. This is about consistency. It's just a different packaging.

Well, that's something I love about your work and I think one of your taglines is even come for the productivity, stay for the existential. Right. I've really appreciated the writings you've done on even comparison to other people because you mentioned those brands and how we might associate brands or what brands we wear with our identity. And then that also goes with comparison. It's easy to compare in any area of life, not just what basketball shorts you're wearing, but your business, your income. And so I love how you are always digging to these pieces of identity. And what's deeper? One thing that you told me before we hit record is that, you know, one of your flagship courses is supercharge your productivity. And you said, and yet there's so much noise. Productivity isn't just about how to get more done, that there's actual things we need to uncover about outdated ideas about identity. And you mentioned in particular people pleasing, as something that gets in the way of productivity. And so I would love for you to make that connection for us. What does people pleasing, as I've talked about that many times on this show, have to do with productivity, or rather, how does it get in the way?

I'm going to circle back to that. I want to introduce this concept called the five whys, which every listener will enjoy and should try to apply it in some part of their life. And the reason I bring it up is the first is a course is called Supercharger Productivity. It doesn't get more, and I don't love the name, like, more tech bro y than that. Like supercharged. You could see, like Captain America for peak performance. Exactly. And for those of you who know me, I'm a much more slow. I'm like a turtle when it comes to productivity. I like tools and stuff, but I'm very slow moving in a lot of things. But anyway, we have this course and I get someone in the hot. We call it the warm seat. Get someone in the warm seat. And then I ask them, why did you take supercharge your productivity? And they'll say something like, because I'm really poorly organized or I waste a lot of time. And then I'll ask the question again, why is it important that you not waste time? I'll say, well, because there's a lot of things I want to get done in my life. And then I'll ask the question again, why is it important that you get done all the things that you want to get done in your life? And we'll keep going down to. We call it the fifth why 80% of the time. The fifth why is accompanied by an explosion of tears because it usually revolves around a few common themes. One is a sense of unlovability. So if I'm more productive, I'll be more successful, and therefore I'll be more loved by my peers, by my friends, by my parents. Often a lot of it is my parents. This kind of idea of conditional love where like you're only loved if you achieve and if you don't achieve, you're unloved. So lovability is one, fear is another one. That's a big one for me. For me it's like if you're not productive, then everything could be taken away from you and you'd be back. That little kid that got mugged as a 12 year old in the East Village. There is another one of relevance, like ego death, which is like this life is so short and no one will remember us when we're gone. So we must extract as much output in this short life we have. I bring up the five whys because it draws that connection because, you know, come for the productivity. You think you're like, oh, I'm going to like learn how to use a text expander and then like build like a fancy dashboard and maybe learn some getting things done. But then you leave. You're like, oh, dang. I have a fear of rejection because I feel unlovable. I have this starting assumption that my love is conditioned on my achievements. I didn't realize that. And so to pivot back, no pun intended, to your question, people pleasers tend to. I'm going to generalize, but people pleasers tend to fear rejection. And I would ask a people pleaser, what's so scary about rejection? What's so bad about rejection? And someone might say, well, it's like the identity. I don't want to be someone who's known as bad. So you're bad if you say no to a meeting. Right. It's a very tenuous connection, which I'm sure people say to themselves all the time, I'm a bad person. If someone sends me a message, I want to meet you and you say no, you said about you, you're a bad person. That's what the inner monologue might say.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I find the ones that are the hardest are right on the line where maybe that person that wants to meet you is an intro through a mutual friend or someone that might be beneficial, kind of on paper, networking wise, but at that time or at that point in your life, it just needs to be a no. Sometimes those are the ones I lose sleep over where it's not clear cut and I don't know, there have been some cases where I can look back and say it sort of closes a door on certain relationships. It's like saying no. It's no to a big thing. That's the last I'll hear from someone Sometimes.

Yeah, it's a powerful one because that gets into this concept of scarcity. Scarcity based thinking or the scarcity mindset where I would challenge in that example where if someone said you saying no to me now closes the future door of opportunity. There's a strong part of me that says if that's true, then you're not an important part of my life or important part of my business. And I think we all know that intuitively. But again, I'll put myself back in that situation where when I do fear for my own safety. Right. Again, it's like a proxy. Right. It's that little boy that like feels very scared, but that boy will show up when there's like a bad proposal in front of me that like, ah, you could do it for the money, but you're going to kind of be pulling your hair out and you know this is a difficult client to work with, but it's a good amount of money and you don't know when that next check's going to come. Take it. Sign the contract. Sign the contract. If you can connect that in my case, that young boy being like, he's the one that's pushing you to sign the contract. But the more mature or awakened K is like, no, you don't need to sign the contract because young man, you're safe, we're good, we got you. We remember what happened. But this contract's not going to change those feelings, right? So you can start to see them. This scarcity mindset. What happens if I close this door forever? I try to remember that if I close this door forever, that doesn't mean that a hundred more doors won't open in the next year. And they always have. I love that they always have that. One door is really, it's one door of many doors. And there's that trust. If that little boy is still in the driver's seat. You're not operating in the land of business, in the land of relationships from a place of trust. You're operating from a place for a very immature, like age wise place of fear and scarcity and not enoughness and lack. That's why we love that five whys exercise. Because it can take something hyper pragmatic like I want to be more organized and really tie it to some kind of core fear or core unmet desire. You don't solve this little boy's pain and fear, but you lessen its grip on your decision making, which brings peace and freedom. And by the way, when you bring peace and freedom, you become an opportunity magnet. You become a creativity magnet. You become a joy and charisma magnet. Right. When you just let go of that grip that, that unmet need has or that fearful part of you has, you come alive. And that's why I think the most beautiful part of all this productivity work is like drawing that connection. And so when someone's like, should I get this new notion template? They're like, oh, little boy, little boy, little boy wants it, but it's not really going to change much. And like, we're safe, we're good, like many opportunities will come. We got this, we got this, we got this. And then you move on.

It's so interesting that like you said, it is called supercharger productivity and it's kind of the Trojan horse is all this inner work and the five whys that the true way to supercharge is by removing all this clutter. I think about that a lot too, that every year I feel like my job is just to notice what's in the way and clear it.

Yes.

It's less about at this point, at least it seems it's less about brand new projects or massive moves. It's like continuing to get rid of the things that are no longer fun.

Exactly.

Or shift them in some way. Someone on your team just wrote an article as well about Inbox Zero.

Oh, yes, Marian. Shout out. Marian, oh my gosh.

Shout out to.

She's a super fan of yours.

Oh, that's amazing. Well, tell her I loved this piece. It was on how to achieve Inbox Zero everywhere. She calls it Rise. Right. What does it stand for?

Reach Inbox Zero everywhere. Yes. Okay.

That means all your inboxes, email, social media, and it's in less than 30 minutes. My jaw hit the floor and then I'm reading and all sounding good, but this is where that people pleasing tendency can get in the way because there were certain aspects of getting to inbox zero where I thought it takes me so long to read and consider something and then I write back something that feels really careful and robust. I'm not one of those three word email responders and I don't know, I'm just wondering if you can tell us if you've been able to try this rise technique and how you've evolved in this way specifically as it relates to inboxes. Because the other thing is as we all grow in our career, the more successful or the more visible, the more even good opportunities you're going to get or good wonderful emails. So how have you evolved to keep up with it and what aspects of your inner monologue have you needed to get awareness around? And then quiet.

Yes. Oof. The inbox thing is no joke. Especially because we've been doing more and more on social. As you increase your social footprint, the DMs, the comments, I mean it just goes through the roof. I guess there's a few ways I'm not a hardcore rise. I'm a little bit more of a grazer than Marion is, but I try to keep many of those principles intact. So there's a few like very strong principles. The major principle for me is managing energy as opposed to time. Email responding to any inbox will always fall in my low energy zone.

As in you tackle it when your energy is low, not at a creative peak.

Exactly. Which for me is usually like between 3 and 5pm do you ever find.

You'Re so tired by that time, like 3 and 5, I can barely do anything.

Yeah.

How do you even have the motivation to do email in that window?

For me, in that moment, it actually is a little like soothing. It's kind of like a binky or something. Or it's just like, like it's so mindless and I write relatively short emails so that would be the main way is to batch the like. If I am responding to Twitter DMs at 8 o' clock in the morning, I'm doing something wrong. But if I'm doing it at 6pm at night, like that's fine. And I also, I don't have email on my phone. We're kindred spirits in that way. I go on and off with slack more just Like a convenience thing to have it versus checking it a lot. And I don't have social on my phone except for Instagram because you kind of have to have it on your phone. But like I don't have Twitter on my phone so there's some decent boundaries there. And I try really hard to turn my power down. All of my devices at about 7:30 every night and I go to bed at like 9:30. So like two hours of device free time. So that's the first one. Batching and time versus energy. I think the second concept is more tactical, is just like a quick scan. So like I'll scan and so if there's, I use an example if there's a contract where if I sign it, you know, we get 15 grand in our bank account, I'll scan, I'll see it, I'll sign it and I'll scan. But everything else will be pushed until that low energy window. That's the other one. The third concept is to minimize to me cognitive load. Like having to think about too many things makes me unhappy. So I try as best as I can to minimize cognitive load for that. What I do with messages and it's a little bit longer to do, but any message that is a semblance of a task. So in your example, like Requires more than 5 minutes to respond to. I archive it and I create a task for it. And then we could get into different task management philosophies. But it's like if you need to write a 10 minute email to me, that's not an email, that's a task. An email is like, are we meeting at this time? Like, you know, did you get this document? Like it's communication, it's not making like important decisions. Right. That's a task. And then I'm going to like schedule it in my day or like prioritize it according to other things. So those are like a few ways that I would incorporate rise into my workflow.

Cool. So we're gonna experiment with slotting inbox management to a low energy window with the five whys. If you could leave listeners with one other experiment to try, maybe related to supercharger productivity. Or it could be just something you're experimenting with now after listening to this, what would it be?

It's gonna sound so crazy.

Those are the best ones.

I was going to say every day, but let's start small. Twice a week, take a piece of paper and a pen and go somewhere quiet and reflect on a question. A question about your life, about your business. And just Write for yourself not to publish. And you could ask yourself again, like, what is the pebble in my shoe? You could ask yourself like a future casting question, like, if everything went great in my life, what does my life look like in 10 years? Right. You could ask a question about your relationships, like, who are the most important people in my life and am I showing up for them? And you can have a list. The Internet is full of reflection questions. It's less about the question itself, but it's more about creating that space for you to engage with your thoughts. Because our thoughts, like you mentioned earlier, like they can block up, they can gunk up our thinking, but they can also, by releasing, by unblocking them, you can really find that like deep satisfaction, that clarity, that self understanding, that self awareness. And the thing that we're all looking for is like that sense of peace.

So awesome. I love it. Thank you, Kay. And follow your fun as well.

Yes.

It's such a good prompt. What would it look like to follow my fun this week, this month, this year, this life? You tell us where can people learn more and keep in touch and even learn more about the course?

Yes. So if you head over to Radreads co, the famous infamous newsletter that Jenny has talked about, just hitting send on issue 375 tonight, that will be the hub for everything in terms of socials, most active on Twitter, LinkedIn. We'll put the links in the bio, Instagram and YouTube and maybe even TikTok.

Amazing. That'll be a new experiment for you.

Yes, that is in the experimentation category right now. Cool.

We'll put links to all these and the articles we mentioned in the show notes. Thank you so much for being with me in person, Kay. This was so fun.

Thank you, Jenny. It's such a pleasure. I love everything that you put into the world and to do this in person with you all the listeners is really a special experience for me.

Right back at you. Big thanks everybody for listening.

Thanks.

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 List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening, 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.

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