Making More Time with Dr. Christina Shenvi

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred and seventy nine, which is airing in early January of twenty twenty one. We are recording in twenty twenty still, but we're wishing our future listeners a happy new Year, and happy new Year to future Laura and Sarah as well. Sarah, do you have any exercise plans for the new year. I know you always set sort of exercise goals and have big, exciting new projects. How's that going for you? I have not read. I do have an exciting announcement, which is that I've been able to procure weights that I've been trying to get all because they were all still down. It was like diggle digsaw puzzles and clorax wipes, right, like these were the things that was like completely. So I had like fifteen pound weights and twenty I mean I had ones less than that as well, and then I had twenty five pound weights. But there are certain exercises where like fifteen was getting kind of easy, but twenty five was like I could do half of a stem of a wrap. Yeah yeah, so so I really wanted like those interval ones. And now I have seventeen point fives and twenty so I feel like very excited about that. So, I mean, I'm just going to keep working on my strength stuff. I probably will keep doing the kind of beach body programs that I've been doing. I do kind of want to train for like a faster five K, and now it would be the season to do it, not like the spring or summer in our climate. So we'll see if I can do some kind of combo. And I think that I will do the eighty day obsession yet again this summer. I think it's a perfect use of our horrible summer weather and I just enjoyed the challenge of it. So yeah, those are my twenty twenty one fitness goals. Nothing crazy. Yeah, I'm not setting anything crazy either. I just plan to keep running four to five times a week most days, get over ten thousand steps one way or another. I keep saying I want to strength train. I'm pretty sure I don't actually want a strength train, because I would have done it by now if I truly wished to do it. I have a kettlebell and resistance bands in my office and occasionally I pick them up. So maybe that's something I will just, you know, try to do. As I say, three times a week is a habit, maybe I'll just do it lately three times a week and see how it goes. And yeah, when sometimes when we say I don't have time, it really means it's not a priority, and I think I should just accept that. Maybe acceptance will be our message of twenty twenty one, thatstens is actually a wonderful message. It is all right, Well, let's go to our guest. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Christina Shenvy to the podcast. I'll be interviewing her today. So Christina, can you introduce yourself to our listeners. Thanks Laura, I'm so excited to talk with your listeners on this podcast. Yes, I am a practicing emergency medicine physician and assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, and one of the things that I'm really passionate about is helping students and also other professionals understand how to use their time better. So we share a lot of excitement about that topic, clearly, And that's one of the things I do is I coach students, and now I've started coaching faculty and teaching about time management. I also have four kids, so not the five that you have, but it's pretty awesome. I feel like a lot is nine kids enough to like make a soccer team or something. Yeah, not quite but yeah, between the what maybe it is getting my sports mixed up, but between the two of us, we have a lot of off sproats and a lot of young ones and a lot of interest in time management too. How old are yours? My kids are five, seven, ten, eleven, okay, right, packed in there and six. At one point they were like six ' five two and one right exactly. Yeah, yes, there's always a think of those days and sort of yeah, many many flashbacks, so and what made you decide to I mean, give me you have this broad interest like time management and things like that. I mean, what brought you to medicine then as kind of your primary career. Well, really, I've had kind of a winding path. I get really curious about things and then delve into them. So I actually did a PhD first in chemical biology, and then decided I want to go to med school and then did residency and fellowship. And I've always really loved education, and so I got into the education realm in the School of Medicine and was hired on to be an academic coach to coach students, and I realized that a lot of the struggles that they were having with academics really came down to time management. And then as I delved more into that and into some of the educational psychology literature, I realized that a lot of the time management problems are really trouble managing your own mind. And that's where I feel like I can really make a difference with people. Yeah, so what is your job coaching students and faculty actually look like? Then? Do the people get referred to you? Can they just use you as a resource? I mean how does that work? Yeah. So now I'm director of our Office of Academic Excellence, it's called So we have about thirteen of us who help students, and students can come and ask for help, or if they're not doing that well in a course, the course director might refer them to us. Or if I monitor the scores, I have like giant Excel spreadsheets with all the data points and if it looks like as students not doing as well as they could, then I'll email them and reach out to them. And then with faculty, I've been running workshops at different institutions for faculty on time management and habit formation, will power, how to maintain agency over your time, all those sorts of things. Yeah, and so you do a lot of workshops and things like that, right, Are there are any of those ever open to the public or Yes, there are two upcoming in January and February that I've opened up to the public for the first time, which will be really fun and if your listeners are interested, you can find out more information about those at www. Dot time for your Life dot org. Awesome. So let's talk about your time management system here. So you you have three aspects of it. You have the compass, the clock, and the key very good three, and you can see there's like flashing on a screen or something and the music plays behind. But wanted to talk a little bit about what that means, sort of broad term, and then we'll take our ad break and then we'll get we'll delve deeper into it. So first, the compass I think about this is really understanding where you want to go, because you can't measure how well you're doing your with your time or how well you're using your time unless you know what you want to be putting your time towards. So the compass is making sure you're focusing on the right things, making sure you have the right things on your plate. You know, Laura, one of the problems so many people tell me they have is the too much on my plate problem, And so you can't tell what needs to be on your plate unless you know where you want to be going. So I think about this as kind of your big picture or your big mission or vision or values what's really important to you. So if you had thirty years to live, what would you really want to accomplish? Or what about if you had twenty years or ten years or five years what are those things that are really important to you. I kind of think about this too, like a general in you know, one of those war rooms, and with that map, maybe it can be a hologram map if we're thinking like Marvel comics and that kind of thing. But they're thinking about where to deploy their troops. And you would never waste troops on a battle that's not going to help you win the war. So you have to know what is that war that I'm fighting, what is it that I want to do, and then you can figure out how to deploy your troops, which is your time and energy to the right places, all right, So that's our compass and then our clock. Yeah, so the clock is really about doing the right things. Well, so once you understand, like what are the things that I need to do, then you can break it down to an individual day. So if I say, okay, for you, maybe writing that next book is your big thing that you need to do, So then you can break it down and say, today, what are the critical actions that I need to do and kind of list them and then prioritize them. So it's really about strategy and then prioritization, and when you think about those things, you can think about what kind of work they are, because not all work is the same for you. Maybe writing that chapter draft is deep work that you really need to focus on and have at least an hour block of time to work on, whereas shooting out some scheduling emails or dealing with your bills and paperwork. That's what I think of as shallow work. You really don't need your entiremental focus and you can kind of knock out things really quickly. So when I'm looking at my day from a strategy standpoint, then I think about, Okay, I need to block off chunks of time for my deep work, whether that's meeting with students, or that's writing a presentation or writing an article or something like that, and then my other shallow work I can slot in between as kind of breaks from my deep work, because your brain needs a break from thinking really deeply. You can only think deeply for about an hour and a half to two hours at a time. So one of the things I'll do is I'll put in that deep work on my calendar. And it works better if you specify what you're going to do, because if you show up to your work or your desk and you're like, okay, well what should I do today? Then you're less likely to really be working on those high priority actions because your mind will say, oh well, let me just you know, check my email real quick, or let me just that, let me just thought is always a distractor. Let me just check Instagram, Let me just check Facebook real quick. Let me just see how many likes that got on Twitter, and then all of a sudden, you've lost an hour. So if you plan ahead of time what you're going to use your deep work for, then that reduces the likelihood that you're going to then go off on a tangent. So I'll put in my deep worktime on my calendar, decide ahead of time what I'm going to do with it, and then take away any sort of distraction. Close down my email, my phone, I take my watch off. I have one of the Apple watches that will tap me if I get a text, So I take that off, and then I set an alarm for five minutes before whatever my next meeting is, so that I don't even have to look at the clock and keep track of time. I know once my alarm goes off, I'll have five minutes to like reset and then jump on my next in this case, in this day and age, zoom meeting, So that can really help you make sure you're getting those high priority tasks done. The second part of that of the clock is efficiency. So you know, if you think about you have all these things on your plate, how can you create more space on your plate, Well if you shrunk each of the items. So every single thing that you do, if you do it more efficiently, then you'll have more time. When I was a med student, I almost went into certain I loved surgery, so I spent a lot of time doing rotations in ther and I remember the surgeons were always so quick and efficient with their movements, and I kind of thought, like, what's the rush? But then I realized, if every single movement you do you're fifty percent faster or twice as fast, then you'll finish that whole case overall in two hours instead of four hours. So those small incremental differences in just tying a knot or you know, connecting two pieces of whatever will add up to huge changes over the long term. We're going to hear a little bit more about how to do daily things more efficiently. In just a minute, when we're back from our break, Hey listeners, my family recently bought a new house with more bedrooms, which means we need some new mattresses. But there was a problem. I was not so excited about visiting a mattress store during a pandemic. But I also didn't want to buy a mattress online that might not be right for me. So I'm glad I found Helix Sleep. Helix has a quiz that takes just two minutes to complete and matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress. They have several different models to choose, from soft, medium, firm ones that cool you down if you sleep hot, and mattresses especially for plus size folks. I took the Helix quiz and was matched with the Dusk model, probably because I sleep on my stomach. The mattress is great, soft, but supportive, and with a baby who sometimes keeps me up at night, I want to enjoy all the sleep I can get. So if you're looking for a mattress, go to helixsleep dot com slash best of take the two minute sleep quiz, order the mattress you're match to, and it comes right to your doors shipped for free. No Mattress store. They have a ten year warranty and you get to try it out for one hundred nights risk free. They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love it, but you know what you will. Helix was awarded the number one best overall mattress pick of twenty twenty by GQ and Wired Magazine. Helix is offering up to two hundred dollars off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners at helixsleep dot com slash Best of That's Helix Sleep dot com slash best of All. Right, so I am back with Christina Sheenvi, who is talking about her time management system that she uses to coach busy med students and faculty members. We've been talking about the compass, which is the big goals in life, figuring out where we're going. Now we're talking about the clock, which is how to be more efficient and effective in our daily schedules. So you're talking about how surgeons were very efficient with their movements. What does that look like for those of us who aren't doing surgery. Yes, so think about it really comes down to being aware and tensional with what you're doing. So if you're sending an email, if you're kind of dawdling with it and at the same time like looking at your phone or being distracted or you know, watching movies, you're not really being efficient with your time. So saying Okay, for the next ten minutes, I'm going to do my emails and I'm going to just knock them out one after another, and really being efficient with that or anything that you're doing. Just looking at your your how you're spending your time and saying, am I doing this efficiently? And that means, you know, for your deep work to do it well, you really have to focus. I don't know if you've read cal Newport's book Deep Work, but he gives what he calls the deep work equation, which is that the high quality work produced equals time spent doing it, time's intensity of focus. So you can have either a lot of time doing something with a shallow focus or a smaller amount of time doing something with a really deep focus. And the other thing that comes into play here is we have to have assist to manage all the things we have to do, because if you're there trying to write your chapter and then you all of a sudden are thinking, oh man, I've got to pick up diapers, or I've got to get my car checked, or I've got to pay this bill. All those thoughts are like live balls, like bouncing around in your head, and you really can't work on your deep work if you've got all these thoughts bouncing around that you're trying to carry. So you have to have a system to offload that. Whether that's for me. What I do is I am a little old fashioned. I like my paper to do list. I have a clipboard and you know, not even a digital clipboard, like an actual physical clipboard and a piece of paper. And I have different categories of my to do items. So when something pops in my head, like I've got to do that, you know, renewal paperwork for my job, then under my admin category, I'll write a little checkbox and I'll write that I have to do that, and if I know it, I'll write the do date. That way, that offloads it from my brain so that I can really focus on what I'm doing. And that part of focus is it plays into the last of the three things we had, the compass, the clock, and now the key, which is controlling your mind. So talk about what that means that really is the key because a lot of times, you know, we can clear our physical space, we can clear our digital space, but then how do you clear the mental space? I love David Allen's book Getting Things Done, and one of the things he said is that most people have never experienced what it's like to think of only the thing that they're doing. And the trouble is, then, you know, those thoughts of oh, I've got to pick up diapers or I've got to get my car checked, they're relatively easy to manage, But how do we manage the thoughts that are more challenging, like oh, what if I write this book and nobody reads it? Or what if I publish this article and everyone hates it or people tweet out that it's terrible. So those kind of thoughts are much more challenging to deal with. I was working with a student one time who was saying she was struggling with her grades and her classes, and she said she just had so much trouble focusing, and so we talked about, well, are you, you know, studying in a quiet space? Have you cleared your phone out of the room, shut down your email? She had done all that and then I just said, you know, sometimes it can be really hard to study when you're very anxious about failing, or when you're having thoughts of you know, if this doesn't go well, I'm not going to be able to be a doctor. And at that point she just started crying, because that's where we get hung up the most often. So once you've done all the kind of tactical measures of clearing your digital space, clearing your physical space, you have to think about becoming aware of your own thoughts. A lot of times people procrastinate out of several things, sometimes what's called self worth preservation, because if you withhold effort, then if it doesn't go well, if your article gets rejected, then you don't feel as bad. And there's tons of data on this too that if you withhold effort and it fails, then you don't feel as much shame. So we naturally when we're afraid, when we're doing something that's a little outside our comfort zone, then we are tempted to withhold effort or procrastinate or kind of be disorganized or whatever it may be. So really the key starts with creating awareness of our thoughts. What is the thought that is keeping me from putting my whole self and my whole effort into this, or what are the emotions that I'm avoiding by avoiding this task. So I had a paper that I had to write, and I just kept putting it off, and finally I realized, you know, it's not that I couldn't make time for this, but I didn't because I didn't want to feel that self doubt that I knew I would feel, or that frustration or insecurity or boredom if it's kind of a boring piece of work. So we avoid tasks to avoid feeling those emotions. So the first step is creating awareness and then really creating space between ourselves and our thoughts. We tend to do what's called cognitive fusion, where we think a thought and we automatically believe that it's true and we don't actually examine it. So the next step is really examining is this a valid thought or is this a thought that I want to entertain? Is this a thought that's serving me? This thought of I don't want to do this because it's so boring, or I'm just dreading doing this, that thought itself is creating the emotion of dread or of avoidance and then learning how to kind of manage our thoughts by intentionally choosing thoughts that will allow us to take action. And this requires This is not a quick fix by any means. This is not like a life hack like try this once. It's kind of like exercising, you know, you don't eat a salad once three years ago and then be healthy. You have to eat that salad every day and exercise, you know, every week to be healthy. So this is the kind of thing that you learn to do as a habit. But a great place to start is just writing down those thoughts and being just radically honest with yourself. When you find yourself procrastinating or avoiding something, writing down what is it that you're avoiding? Is it boredom? And then asking yourself, well, can I tolerate boredom to get this job done? Or if it's frustration or self doubt, can I tolerate self doubt in order to get this done? And then another method to overcome this is intentionally choosing new thoughts. So instead of the thought of I really hate that I have to write this paper or study for this test, or do this thing in my job that I don't like choosing thoughts like I have full control over my time. Isn't it great that I get to choose everything that I do. I don't have to go to work, I choose to go to work every day. Isn't it great that I can use my creativity towards writing this paper? Or isn't it cool that I get to study the human body by studying for this exam? And those thoughts then create the feeling of self confidence, motivation and allow you to then move and get it done. So that's really the key of how to how to manage your own mind around this. Yeah, it's interesting. My kids signed up for I signed them up for rock climbing classes, which are on pause now with our various COVID restrictions. But my five year old is really a bit of an acrobatic monkey, and so I'm quite sure he was going to love it, and he does. But on the first day I heard him talking to the instructor and he was a little like, you know, that's a kind of tall wall, very high, and she was talking with them about, you know, what they could do. And he came back to me later and I said, because he kept climbing up to the top again and again and again, and I was just like, wow, you know, you look so fearless. And he said, no, no, I was kind of scared of heights, but I'm in charge of myself. Oh. And you know, I was like, that's that's so true. You can be in charge of yourself and not you know that fear is interesting. Yeah, I'm gonna I can still climb to the top, right, I can be afraid and still do it. Yes, exactly. Yeah, So that's great, that's wonderful. Let's talk a little bit about, you know, how you manage your time and your day to day life because obviously you have a busy schedule with a medical practice and coaching and then your family life too. What what does your sort of family responsibilities look like and how you decide those and things like that. One of the things that's things that's really helped in my family and my husband and I is to have a really clear idea of who does what in the house. We very much have shared expectations. Actually he probably does more of the house work than I do, but that way we know whose job it is and we just kind of do it. So he does dishes, I do laundry. I do taxes and pay all the bills. He tends to pick up more of the kids toys, or as your kids get older, thinking about well what do the kids do? My kids are old enough now they can you know, put their own laundry in the washer and dryer and pick up their rooms. And that way you don't have to negotiate each time. And the overarching idea for me about kind of clearing your mind is offloading as much as you possibly can to preserve your cognitive functioning. So you know, we think we can think about a lot of different things and multitask and task switch and do a bunch of stuff at once. And you can do simple things, a lot of simple things at once, but not complex things. So as much as possible if you can preserve your cognitive load by offloading other things other decisions, so it's never a decision of who's going to do the taxes. I just do it that way, we don't have to, you know, go through that each time that comes up. The other thing that we do is we put everything on our calendar. We live and die by our shared Google calendar. That way, I don't schedule something the same time as he has something, or the kids have something, or you know, we've got to dinner or something like that back when dinners used to happen pre COVID. And you can put a lot of things that are recurring. So I put on our calendar each week whether it's trash or recycling day, or when I need to change the air conditioning filters, or I put on even to recur every year, all the birthdays for family members and friends, or are recurring every six months when I need to sit down and look at my goals and my big vision and values and kind of reassess my strategy. So if you put things on your calendar, that offloads them from your mind and that helps preseruly right on your calendar, think big thoughts. I mean the so I think the entry is due one, five and ten year goal sheet. So I have a little sheet that I do every year where I look at what do I want to accomplish in the next one year, five year, or ten years, and then what steps do I need to do to get there? And often the five and ten years are very vague, like I really don't have a great idea. I'm not like one of those people who's saying, oh, I want to be in this roll in five years, and here's my ten step plan. I kind of know what I want to accomplish in the next year, but I like to just dream about ideas and put things out there. So that's something I try to do every year. Okay, And so you guys all just your kids put stuff on the calendar too, or how does that? Kids don't have access to the calendar quite yet, mostly because I'm worried they would mess it up, but they might have quite understand it. Might just delete various things or meetings when they want me to be home. But at some point, yes, I'll give them access so they can add things. Okay, No, that's an And in terms of you know, you made a point, I'm looking at our notes here about you know, rest and recreation, like what what does that wind up looking like in a very busy life? How do you recharge? Yeah? I try to think about what is really going to renew my mind and what is just mindless entertainment. And not to say that there's not a place for mindless entertainment or watching a movie or things like that, but at some point there's a line where you go from this is really renewing my mind and it's going to make me feel more energized later to now at three am and I'm pressing next episode, and I know I'm going to feel worse tomorrow. Because sometimes if we get into that habit of just turning on the entertainment or cracking open our beer and vegging out on the couch, that often doesn't actually make us feel more arrested or more renewed. Instead, at the end of the day we feel like, oh no, now I didn't do this other thing that I was supposed to do, and now I feel worse. So figuring out what is renewing for me going to the gym or exercising. Certainly, getting enough sleep is important, but also connecting with friends is really important. I would so much rather have a twenty minute conversation with a friend than watch a movie for two hours, so that will be a much more renewing thing for my own mind. Because when you've been doing deep work or difficult work, or handling these emotions of feeling bored, insecure, or self doubt, those are very draining to feel. Those are very draining to manage your mind around, and so you need to find a way to kind of renew your mind and reset for the next day. Very cool. So I wonder if you could talk us through a little bit about your own schedule, like when you're doing different things, like you know patient care, and you know your office work, your student facing work, your family stuff. Just talk like through a day, a day to day kind of schedule. So the interesting thing about being an er doctor is almost no day is the same because the shifts are all different. So how I manage my calendar is I have some big things that can't be moved. So my shifts are eight hours long and they can be overnight, weekends, holidays, evenings, mornings, anytime. So those I have to set in. And if I have an overnight shift, then I put on my calendar sleep for eight hours the next day. Otherwise I'll accidentally schedule me during that time and won't put down time to sleep. So I block off those big things. And then there's some standing meetings that I either lead or that I'm part of that are on my calendar and I can't move those other things. I think about what time of day do I work best to do my deep work, And I tend to do my deep work best in the kind of nine am to noon time, and then maybe in the afternoon too, So I'll put big chunks of time there to do the big projects, whether that's creating a lecture, writing article, doing my big strategic thinking, or whatever it may be. So I'll set those times aside and try to make them at least an hour long. And then in between those, I'll have breaks of ten to twenty minutes where I'll do the shallow work of emails scheduling all those sorts of things. And then I'll schedule my student meetings, typically for the end of the day from three to five pm, partly because i love meeting with people with the students, but I'm also very much an introvert, so after several hours of back to back meetings, I'm exhausted. So if I do those in the morning, then I just am so tired for the rest of the day. So, in thinking about the strategy, you know, back to the general deploying their troops, I know that this type of work, the meetings one on one, is going to be just tiring for me because of my introvert nature. So I'm going to put those at the end of the day so that then I go home after that, whereas the deep strategic work I'm going to put at the start of the day because that's when I focus better, Okay, And so the work day ends maybe a little after five, after you've done this ends at five and then or five thirty six, and then I'll come home, get the kid, help get the kids dinner, play with the kids. They go to bed at seven thirty, and then I do more work. So typically, I know, and you've written about this about the second shift and the mosaic, and it definitely feels like that. It's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle or a Tetris puzzle where all the pieces you're trying to fit together, but then all the pieces often are moving or change shape and things like that. But typically we'll get the kids to bed and then I'll do some more work from eight pm till ten pm or whatever it may be. I'm right now, I'm also doing an MBA, So that's what I've been doing in the evenings. A lot is my MBA, homework and reading. But other times I'll just do writing or things like that, because why not, why not? Why the five year plan? Yeah, exactly. So we always end our episodes with a love of the week, something that we're really enjoying right now. I'm going to say that sledding is my love of the week. So we're recording this in mid December where we just got a lot of snow in the Northeast here and mid Atlantic region, and my family bought a new house recently. We haven't moved there yet, but it has a hill in the front year. So we took our sleds over there yesterday and zoomed on down. It was fun. I zoomed too, it was I really enjoyed that part. So that's my love of the week. What are you really enjoying right now? Well, my love of the week, to be honest, Laura, yesterday I may have tiered up a little bit with tears of joy when I got the first dose of the COVID vaccine. This has just felt like such a light that there is finally light. There's still a long tunnel, but there's a little pinprick of light out there that just feels so good. So that was my love of the week this week. Yeah, now that's an awesome one. Sarah I just posted pictures on her blog of her getting her vaccine as well, and her husband did I think on Wednesday this week. So yeah, lots of people getting it hopefully and more to come very soon, even by the time this air is in mid January. But we can, you know, really celebrate that that is happening. That can be our love of the year. Yes, everybody vaccinated and we can all, you know, hug each other and feel humanly. I think I may be wearing a mask in like some public places, not about COVID, but I'm like, I really like not having not getting colds. Yeah, I have not got a hold in a long time, and my kids haven't either, and like you know, who knew. I mean, the money that we've saved on Kleenex alone is probably seven hundred dollars because nobody's not hold. Like nobody's thrown up, I mean knocking on wood like crazy right now, but like that hasn't happened all year. We are and no colds. You know, I might wear a mask on an airplane for like the rest of my life. Yeah, I think a lot of people will. I think, especially working in the hospital, we might too, just to avoid those kinds of things. Yeah, of course, I mean I'll go see people again, like, yeah, I'll people again, but but wearing a mask exactly. All right, well, Christina, thanks so much for doing this and remind our listeners where they can go find you. You You said the address earlier, but let's hear it. Yes, you can go to time for your Life dot org. Is that all held out? Time for your your Life? Yep, all the words spelled out, And you can go there and find my blog posts where I've been writing about different aspects of time management and mind management, managing your own mind, not other people's minds. And you can find more information about my workshop in January and February. Awesome. Well, thanks Christina for coming on. Thank you, Laura. All right, well that was great. We're back with our question and answer section. This question came from Instagram tips on job searching and switching while pregnant. We actually get versions of this question a fair amount because obviously a lot of our listeners are in the you know, baby having stages of their lives, and you know, moving around between jobs is one way that people do also advance their careers early in the career growth years. That's actually a way that many people are able to take their salaries, take their responsibilities up a significant notch and so you know, these things may overlap, that pregnancy and seeking out new opportunities can happen at the same time. So, Sarah, you have actually started a new job while pregnant, right, yes, I have. In fact, my first interview that I had for my job, I was pregnant with Annabel, and when I set foot to start working in August of twenty thirteen, I had found out, like the month prior that I was pregnant with Cameron. So yep, I have done it and it worked out completely fine. To be honest, the maternity leave always seems really long when you think about it, but it's really really like I just want to emphasize, like twelve weeks goes by so fast, and then the job is still there for you to do, and usually people can cobble together enough solutions so that your absence for twelve weeks doesn't matter so much. And in fact, sometimes when you're in a new position, it matters even less because like you haven't ramped up yet, whatever, you don't have any responsibilities yet, right, just a you know, you've just started exactly, like no one assumes that you're going to be, you know, carrying the weight of a fully you know, hit the ground running employee on day one. Anyway, so there you go. So yes, from my personal experience, it was fine. I've now still been at that same organization for the last seven and a half years now, and I don't think anyone remembers that, although I remember being like horrified that I had to tell my my boss basically like so, yeah, that bump there is a baby, so yeah, yeah, how did you have that conversation? Did you literally do that, like, you know, let's sit down and talk. Yeah, I did. I mean I think I waited, like I was like, I'm gonna work for a week because I don't want to be like the first days. And then like literally like one weekend, I was like, you know, doctor whatever, can I speak with you? And you know, we were more formal back then because I didn't know her as well, although I have a wonderful like senior leader and she's the same one, and so it's not surprising that she it was like fine, and I was like, so, you know, I'm pregnant and she was like, well, we assume that was going to happen one day another you only had one kid, And I was like, well, yeah, you're right, Yeah, exactly. And I think I took like I think I might have taken a ten week maternity leave then because some of it was unpaid or eleven weeks, like it wasn't quite twelve, but it was very close to twelve. And it was fine. It was just fine. I mean I came back, I pumped, I ramped everything up, and now it's just kind of like, you know, a memory. And I did look up, like, are people allowed to ask you if you're pregnant while you're interviewing for a job. It gets a little bit sticky because you're not allowed to discriminate against somebody for being pregnant. So if you ask somebody if they are pregnant or planning to get pregnant, the interviewer is taking a legal risk because you could then knock at the job and then sue them and say it's because you asked if I was pregnant, and then you're discriminated against me, and then they'd have to prove that like they didn't pick you for some other reason and blah blah blah blah blah. So I mean that should empower you a little bit to know that you don't necessarily have to answer that question. And actually this was a Forbes article that came up when I searched for this, and they mentioned like, you can say something like I think what you want to know is whether I'll be around for the December rush. The answer for that is yes. Or I think you're asking whether I'm committed to the job. The answer to that question is yes. Let me tell you about a time at my current job where something came up and I was able to get help and get through it or whatever, you know, et cetera. You can switch to question to address what you think is their concerns. Yes, yeah, I think, I mean, I think there's interviewing while visibly pregnant is you know, going to be hard and people can you know, even if you can't legally discriminate, there's a million reasons somebody might not get a job. So it's also very hard to prove that you didn't get a job because of pregnancy discrimination. So I understand that this this is going to be a challenging thing to do. But you know, hopefully you have been you know, always building up career capital that you're coming into an interview situation, not just like I've never heard of this company before, They don't know me at all, Like it's random, Like hopefully this is coming in in a very warm situation, like even they've invited you to come in, like you know four people at the company who can all vouch for you, in which case they're like, oh, this is great. You know, we're going to get her. She's going to take twelve weeks and then she's going to come back and be, you know, the best contributor ever. So it's just saying that, like in general in life, you want to be in a more powerful situation in these and if you are, you have a different experience than if you don't. And I recognize that that can be very difficult sort of early on in the career, but that's one of the reasons that, you know, it is so good to be building up your career capital, to be constantly networking, to be you know, going to conferences and meeting people at different organizations, to have you know, a half dozen people who have been like, hey, if you're ever thinking of switching jobs, call me first, Like, oh my goodness. If you have that, then probably your bump isn't going to matter quite as much. So that's hopefully the place that you can get yourself to be love it all right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been, you know, talking about all sorts of wonderful things. With this episode, we're recording ahead of time. I don't even know what we've been talking about in this episode, but we'll be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.