Shawn Ellis recounts a snow day when his son Brody interrupted his marketing deadline, illustrating the chaos of remote work with kids. He draws on Viktor Frankl's idea that there's space between stimulus and response, then offers practical fixes: turn off notifications, prioritize ruthlessly, and choose how you react to distractions.
Chapters
How many people work from a home office? And how many of you have kids at home? Yeah, so for you guys, we're gonna have a support group. We'll meet right over here afterward. Because you know what, I had a day, it was earlier this year where Brody was home from school unexpectedly. I work from home too. And you know, he was home from school, I think it was a snow day or something, which in Nashville meant there were flurries probably. But So we had a snow day and he's home and I'm thinking, okay, it is what it is while it is, right? I'm the moment guy. We're gonna make this work. I'm gonna have my hands open and we're gonna make this work. So I get Brody set up on the couch to watch TV because I'm that good of a parent. But I'm like, I gotta find a way to get through this day. So I get him set up on the couch to watch TV and then I go in my office because I got this marketing project to work on. And I sit down to work on that and it It's beautiful. It's magic. I figured it out. I did it. That was for like a minute. Then I get a call from one of my colleagues who just closed a deal. And he calls me and says, hey, Shawn, can you do the contract real fast? The client's going out of the office in like 2 hours. So now all of a sudden, OK, well, I've got to do that. That's the priority? Sure, I'm on it. So I get set up here. I'm going to do the contract. Then I get a call from somebody else with questions about something. So OK, wait. Let me do that, take the call. Got that settled. Back to the contract. Okay, so I'm gonna get focused. What was I doing? Yeah, contract. So I sit down, then I hear, all of a sudden I hear from the couch, "Dad, I'm going poop!" Because there we are. So I'm like, "All right, buddy, awesome." What was I doing? Contract. So back to the contract. Then I hear, "Dad, I'm done!" You know, you ever have a day where it just feels like you're dealing with stuff all day? You ever have one of those days? But again, okay, contract, back to the contract. So I'm sitting there doing the contract, not much longer goes by, hey dad, can you download this app? I don't know, whatever it was. And okay, in a minute, buddy. And this goes on. It's a day in the life, right? Distractions always coming at us. They say we're in a state these days of continuous partial attention. There's just so much stuff coming at us. So there's a different kind of CPA for you. I know if you got kids, that story may sound familiar to you, but even if you don't have kids, I know this is what you guys deal with, whether it's, you know, you got a client, you're dealing with a client, and then all of a sudden this other client calls and they got an issue that needs to resolve right now, or whatever it may be. Or maybe you're working on something and then the court investigator calls, and you got to take that call, right? You can't put them off, so you got to take that call, take care of them. Whatever it is, you got to pivot on a dime, just All day long, constantly having to pivot from one thing to another. And it would be great if we could set all these distractions aside, and some of them we can. Sometimes it's as simple as turning off notifications. Sometimes it's not. Some of this stuff is just coming at us, there's nothing we can do about it. You know what? Whatever happens, there's— that's out of my control. But I can choose how I respond. I have the ability to choose how I respond. And to talk about how powerful that is, Have any of you guys ever read a book or heard of a book called Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl? Yeah. For the rest of you, I couldn't recommend that book highly enough. A speaker friend of mine recommended it to me when I was going through a tough time, and it's full of just all kinds of powerful nuggets because that, that book was written by a man named Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl was a psychologist, but he was also— became a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. So you have a guy who understands the the human mind, he understands human behavior, and now he's put in the most difficult of circumstances and he gets to observe himself and others, all these other prisoners. It's just horrific, horrific conditions, but you know what? Some people were able to make something out of that. And here's what he found. In the book, he said that between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. So in other words, we got life, something happens over here. It could be a big life event, or it could be just one of those little surprises that comes up during the day. It's the slide that you didn't expect. But so you've got something happens, and then over here we're going to choose how we get to respond to it. What are we going to do with this? But in this space is where we can process and think, okay, based on my goals, my values, my priorities, whatever it is, you kind of run everything through this lens and you figure out, okay, what, what is the right thing right now? What do I do with this?
