Meredith Monday Schwartz Interview. Ep 38

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, 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. We're going to be excited to talk this week with Meredith Monday Schwartz, who some of our listeners probably know from her Penelope Loves Lists days. We have a lot of people who are sort of the Penelope Loves Lists kind of readers in our listeners. But she's now running a company called Here Comes the Guide. We're gonna be talking with her on managing remote and flexible workers, how you can manage a workforce that way and be the kind of boss that lots of people who want flexible work would love to work for. So we're very excited about that. But speaking of work, we are recording this on March sixth, and Sarah went back to work yesterday. Sarah, how did it go well? First, let me note that that means I'm off the day after I started back. Good schedule wasn't my initial plan. I had planned to be off on Wednesday, but then I had been invited to a meeting that I absolutely have to go to on Wednesday. So I said, you know what, I'm just going to take the day off after my first day because I'm probably going to need to breathe. And I'm actually really glad I did that. I'm not going to say it was traumatic, but it's it is stressful going back after a hiatus like that. Yeah, but I would say on the whole it went well. I didn't fall behind with my patients. I think I have one note that I have to write today. I had a nearly full schedule. They had told me that they were going to put half the number of my usual patients in, but haha, that never It's fine. I knew what wasn't gonna happen. I looked at my skull tull the day before I went, yeah, I know, and yeah, I saw like one less than my normal number. And I was able to pump more than Genevieve drink, So that's, you know, always a big win. The only negative is that I was so tired by the end of the day. I literally could not read my kid's story. I was stumbling on the wards and it was eight fifteen. I was like, Annabelle, I actually can't read this anymore. I have to just lie down on this couch and you're gonna fall asleep. And they did. And that's because the baby Genevieve had gotten up at midnight and then like three forty five and A I had a lot of anxiety going into my first day, and B I was like, well, my first morning pump is where I get most of my milk. How am I possibly going to do this? I can't go back to bed at like four you know, it was like four am after I had fed her. Because by the time that happens, that means I won't have time to pump before I leave, and so I'm stuck pumping at four am. So I did. So I was basically up from three forty five on on a very stressful day. So wow, that took a lot out of me. But I recovered overnight. Last night and hopefully, you know, normally her morning wake up is more like closer to five, which is much more doable, so hopefully she just won't pull that again. Yeah, but the day went all right, you're you're feeling good. It did, and I will say I did a few little hacks to help with that. It wasn't really my first day in the office because I actually on Friday decided I would kind of set up my little pumping studio and bring Genevieve in to say hi to everybody. Friday afternoons tend to be a little bit more actually a lot more relaxed because a lot of people are not seeing out patients, They're just kind of checking up on stuff. So I figured it was the perfect time to just show up, get all my hugs out of the way, I mean, not out of the way, but really, you know, reconnect with people so that I wouldn't have to you know, I could really focus on work my actual first day, knowing that i'd be much more time crunched, I ordered a cube fridge for my office, which actually fit in perfectly, so I'm able to just throw my milk in there rather than running all the way back to the office. Fridge when I'm pumping, So that's helpful. And yeah, I think that was you know, even though it's kind of sad to spend one of your last days at the office, it was one hundred percent worth it. I would highly recommend that for anybody going back, especially if they know that their first day is not going to be just a light day. Those of us in medicine, you know, in other industries, they'd probably say, oh, you know, we will just keep it light. It's just they're just going to give you patients because their patients have been waiting for you to come back. And it's probably not even going to be the low matance patients. It's going to be the patients who are waiting who were like, I need to be seen the first first days available opportunity. And actually I had wonderful patients yesterday, so that was a plus. But I'm glad I did that prep work. It would have been a disaster without it. Yeah that if you had been trying to fit in all those nice conversations of oh how are you, how's the baby, while you're also on a full patient load on day one, absolutely it would have been tough. And I actually think the idea of not having a full week back that first week has some upsides too, like if it is possible to, I mean, I know you want to, especially if people have sort of shorter maternity leaves, you're not going to want to play around with it too much. But just the idea of maybe starting on a Thursday or something, yeah, I've actually, Yeah, starting on a Thursday or Friday is a great option. Or Yeah, saving a couple of days so that you can, you know, do a slightly lighter first week would make sense for a lot of people. For me, since I work four days, I can kind of naturally make that happen anyway. But I really today is really nice. I needed to recover after that kind of rush of anxiety and emotions and all that. But now you're back in, and I'm back in, and I've left, you know, one day at a time. I missed the I did miss the baby. I mean, if there's something about you know, we talk about how like it's true, she doesn't care, probably nearly as much as my older kids would care. There's probably just some hormonal mechanism that makes you very sadave your baby. But she also was fine tonight and fine this morning, and I'm lucky to have weekends and an extra day with her for the most part. So and she did well with bottles and everything. Oh yeah, she I knew, Yeah, I kid love bottles. They don't even I don't know you know that. You they talk about like you need to give them a bottle so they'll get used to it. And all three of mine like the first time they met a bottle, they were like, this is the best ever. It's more than I get paranoid about them not wanting me after the bottle. But that's another story. I day one went back then it went well, yay, yeah, so onward from there. All right, well, we're excited to be talking with Meredith, so we'll go ahead and start that interview. Well, we're very excited to welcome Meredith Monday Schwartz to the best of both worlds. So, Meredith, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself a little bit about you, your family, and your career history. Excellent, I would love to. So. I am a mom of four. We have three kids who are much older. In fact, they're a lot of We have a blended family, so we have twenty eight twenty almost twenty three, almost nineteen. And then my husband and I have our son together, who is six, so we are kind of doing that, you know, blended family thing. We have kids in every stage, which is always exciting. And then I am also the CEO of a wedding website, a wedding resource website called Here Comes the Guide, and I've actually been there for twenty years this year. Wow. And so you started that up right as the whole wedding industry was moving online. Then it actually our founder started it in nineteen eighty nine, so well before there was even an internet, and so I joined in actually nineteen ninety seven, and that was the year that we started the website component of what we do. Yeah. So we've been doing this for a really really long time, and we've certainly seen all the different iterations of kind of online presences and you know, the social media and all of that. Yeh, we've been doing it for a long time. Yeah. And so the current business model, you said that all your employees are remote, So how does that work? What does that even look like? So it's interesting. So, yeah, we had an office in Berkeley, California for the first what twenty nine years of our company and then when we bought at our founder, we really took a hard look. It was one of those things whe we were looking at every single dollar spent, every single dollar earned, and we just looked at our actual physical office and we said, geez, we've grown to a point where well over half of us are spread across the country. So we're going to go ahead and just give a try to being a fully distributed team. And it has been so wonderful. Now, this was a long, slow process, so I don't I think one of the things that we really did right was we didn't try to do this overnight, because that would be a huge logistical issue, and I think it would also be a cultural issue if you tried to do it really really quickly. But we over the course of probably four years previous to the actual official get rid of the office moment, we had been moving with that idea in mind, and so we had been slowly moving from everyone, you know, all of us who were in Berkeley be in the office five days a week to four to three to two, and then for the whole year previous to making the move, we only were in the office one day a week, and so that gave us the ability to take a lot of our systems and begin to move them away from the physical office. And so once we actually had most of that down, there were two pieces that kind of sealed the deal for us. One of which we moved to a voice over IP system for our phones, and we use a tool called dial Pad, and so that enables us to literally work from call and receive calls not only from anywhere, but from any of our devices, our computer, our cell phones, all of that tremendous flexibility. And then the super fun piece of what we started using, which I wasn't exactly sure was going to go over as well as it did, but man, it's changed everything for us. It's a piece of software and you know, you can download online called so Coco, and it's a virtual office and you can design your sort of virtual office and you it's like you're looking at an overhead of an office, like you're looking at an office from above right, and so you can see as people log on, you can see their little avatar in their office, and you can very quickly text message with someone, you can very quickly video conference literally within three seconds, I can quote unquote knock on the door of any of my co workers. We can pop in if we're available, and we're looking and speaking to each other via video as if we were just in the next room. That is so cool. That's like a second live or some city, and you're like, at work, you must feel like you're there. Does it feel like that? It does feel like that. And I think we were expecting to get a lot of the actual concrete benefits right of the video, you know, quick video conferencing and all of that good stuff. What we weren't expecting was that having the virtual office would give us the feeling of being together because sometimes just glancing, you know, when you work from home all day, it can be awesome, and it can also be isolating. And just being able to see all the little happy avatars at their desks and you know, being able to say, oh, there's Shannon over there in South Carolina, and there's Lisa and she's in Texas, and knowing that you're literally seconds away from not only two of you talking, but we have full staff meetings. All twenty three of us can physically see each other. And I think it makes a difference in any you know, group of people who are you know, in contact with each other. But I think, especially in a group of women, being able to have conversations where we can see each other every day, it really adds to the fabric of the relationship. So we do a lot of our meetings that way, but very frankly, I encourage a lot of just random like knocking the door, hop in and check how you know, Like just today, out of twenty three of us, I think four of us have kids who are homesick with the virus of some sort. So we're all checking in with each other, how's this little been doing, how's that little been doing. So a lot of times our connections are not necessarily hardcore work related, but it again increases that fabric, that sisterhood culture that I think is absolutely the secret to our success. That here comes the guide. Well, let's talk about that sisterhood because you hired for that, right, I mean, that was part of how you built this out one hundred percent. When I took over the company in two thousand and seven, I absolutely knew the exact kind of company that I wanted to build. I knew the kind of people who I wanted on my team, and I knew that it was going to be super important in having a group of women work together. There were a couple things that were absolutely non negotiable, and the biggest thing was that our first core value is the sisterhood first, always, and what that means to us is it has to be a group of people who care more about the team than they care of themselves individually, and it has to be a group of people who are zero drama. There's no room for any kind of drama or clickiness or back seven or even letting kind of stuff fester, because if you do that, you guys know that it's a super slippery slope. So I to your point, I hired and it's really important to me. And one of the roles that I maintain as CEO and I will continue to maintain is hiring and then also maintaining that culture and maintaining that no drama policy. And so we have a great team, and we seriously believe that because we have that strong sisterhood that it enables us to do our work better. Not just oh, you know, it's fun we want to bring each other's hair, but literally it helps us to be a more profitable company. Breaking each other's hair virtually is going to be an interesting experience, But you can talk about that because hiring is very hard to get right, and for anyone who's who's done it, they know that. So I'm curious how you can select in the hiring process or what you ask or what you look for in order to get people who are no drama. And also, of course, because you are virtual, people who are self starters, people who are self motivated, who don't actually need one looking over them to make sure that everything's getting done. Absolutely, so we have I have another website that's called Penelope Loves Lists, and the sort of thought behind that website is that a Penelope is a type of person. And I bring this up because that type of person type a super organized, you know, kind of you know, I guess a sort of old fashioned word people would call them, like anal or you know whatever. That that kind of that kind of person is definitely who I'm hiring for. And so what I'm looking for is I'm looking for someone who's super detail oriented, and that's important to our work. I'm looking for someone who's incredibly organized in her systems, in her thoughts, keeps a lot of lists, you know, someone for whom being organized is really the lifeline. And that makes a big difference in our business to doing this particular kind of job really well. And most importantly, and this goes to the point of managing a remote team. I'm looking for someone a little controversial, but I am hiring and I interview to hear someone who is harder on themselves than I could ever be. We call that the insecure overachiever, by the way, and that is a perfect way to describe the Penelope personality. And so it's not to say that I want to foster any kind of insecurity, but I really believe that there's this a type of person. This is a person who's who was like this when they were little, and they're going to be like this until they're old and they're you know, there's some tools and strategies that we can use to make sure we're super healthy emotionally around it, but at the very base, we all have to care about own our own work more than caring what a manager thinks. So we're more than caring about a financial goal. And if I can find those people, and so far I have, I've been really lucky to be able to find those people. I find that for our team, that's what works really, really well because I can't teach somebody how to care. I can't teach someone to care at a visceral level. But when you find this particular kind of person, I don't have to teach them because they care to a fault. Are all of your employer Are you familiar with Gretchen Rubin's tendencies? Are these all upholders? And is there any problem that you see sometimes where people do think too much alike like or do you think they're diverse in other ways? So that's exactly a fantastic point that you bring up, because I am obsessed with Gretchen Rubin. I am obsessed with the four tendencies. And actually the four Tendencies quiz is one of the three personality tests that we have every new employee take. And so what's interesting is that, in fact, we only out of twenty three of us, we only have three upholders on staff. I'm one of those that and then the rest of everybody are divided pretty equally between obligers and questioners. And to your point, I would one hundred percent think if it was all what was all upholders, we would not be well served by that. But the mix, the mix of questioners obligers and upholders. There are no rebels, which does not say that, of course, rebels can't be incredibly successful. I just am not sure that this maybe is the exact right kind of fit, but we'll see. Maybe I'll be surprised in the future. But yes, I think that the tendencies come into playing big time. And I think that mix of those personality types keeps us from being although we all have a certain set of ways in which we are similar, I think that mix keeps us from being overly homogeneous. So I'd love to talk a little bit about the practicalities of managing you know, remote and flexible workers. I mean, one thing I've heard from other bosses with the situation having very clear guidelines, you know, on what people are trying to achieve, because then you can't be there monitoring what they're doing. So you have very clear guidelines and what you need to achieve, but that you also need to be careful, especially if you've got a lot of people who are you know, obligers in this sense, that you have to set some limits on remote work because I mean, technically you could be on all the time, like you know, Sarah comes to an office and she leaves at some point right when she's done with her work. But if you are, you know, working remotely, like then emails can happen at any point, the you know, ims can happen at any point. So I'm curious how you both set guidelines and then also how you help people still balance their lives. Absolutely, I think that's an excellent question. So I think it starts with setting our expectations. Exactly what you're saying. I think it's really important that I and my CEO are my COEO are really clear about what we expect big picture, but also quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, That level of communication is absolutely key. So it starts with that. One of the things that as far as how we are aware of what's going on, we have a couple layers of awareness. One of those is at the end of every day, all of our employees send a short It really is short, it's a few bullet points, but we call them an end of day and basically it's just a short overview of what it is that they worked on. And we can also there are several other metrics that we can check, but the majority of the time that gives us a really, really good sense. And then we meet with each of our employees the director, They meet with their direct report you know, at least every other week, if not you know, every week, depending on how long they've been with the company. So again a lot of exchange of information. And then we also meet quarterly to do what we call a quarterly check in, which is you know, where we have one on one with each employee to really talk through, Okay, what did this last quarter look like, what were we hoping to accomplish, what did the what was super important for the employee to accomplish. Are there things that she wanted to move forward on, you know, and did that happen? Is there air cover we can provide to make that happen you know better going forward? And then of course are there any points you know of improvement that need to happen. So those are layers of ways that we can watch what work is happening. And of course then we have our huge customer management system where we can see you know, the the contacts that are being made and invoices that are being made, not that good stuff. So I think there's got to be a ton of their very clear communication in both directions and then as far as to your really excellent question, how do we manage remote work. We have a very strict eight hour a day policy and we hold people to it. So we have flexible scheduling in that each employee can kind of decide, you know, for some people, for their families, it works better for them to work, say seven am to three pm, and some people like to work a little bit later. So once they choose a schedule that works best for them, we say basically pick it and stick it. We want people to work that eight hours, and we want them to work it, you know, hard and fast. We want them to be going absolutely grinding as you know, as much as is healthy during that period of time, and then it's got to be done for the day. You need to know, I put in my best eight hours and it's going to be there tomorrow. And so we do not encourage intact we actively discourage a situation where people are responding to emails at night or certainly I or my COEO would never be texting people about work at night. And I think that that's a piece of it too, is that we need to set from the management, the leadership team needs to set that part of the culture. If I am constantly saying, look, I want you to have work life balance, But I'm texting them at nine o'clock at night asking them a question about work. That's a dissonant message. That is, you know that it's not going to help. And so we've just set those parameters really clearly and we live them on the daily. All right. That is awesome. Yeah, and I think rare but maybe increasing a little bit as people learn, companies learn that in order to retain mentally and physically healthy employees, we've got to create some boundaries. So that's fantastic. You guys are at the forefront. Yeah, I mean the one issue of that though, I mean I would say like as a working parent, I mean, I know I do often do some of the work at night after the kids go to bed, because it lets me have a more reasonable life during the day. Well, are you allowed tell us about the flexibility? Like would you could you have your stability in any of this? Yes, So there definitely is flexibility, and I'll tell you when it really mostly comes into play. We kind of liken it to a rubber band, right, Like rubber bands are made to be stretched so that they can come back into shape. So basically, as I said, right now, I have four employees myself included, who are home working at home with our little one who would normally be at school or daycare who's homesick. There's gonna be for all of those who are in that category today, there's going to be there's no way that we're going to be able to work that straight eight right because there's just stuff that you need to do to be able to help your little one during the day, and so in this case, at night, I'm likely they are likely to put in an hour to if it makes sense. If it doesn't make sense, they may just start fresh tomorrow and use some you know, some paid time off which is completely available to them. But if it makes sense, then they want to. Absolutely you can hop on and do some of the work at night. We just want to be sure that that's not happening every single day. For the slippery slope issue that you brought up. If it's an everyday occurrence, then all of a sudden, when are we working? When are we not working? But at the times where life gets in the way, or you need to go to a performance, you need to go to a doctor's appointment, you need to be with your little one. That's where the flexibility really does come into play. And win absolutely. They can put in some hours super early later whatever's convenient. And you guys get together though, face to face from time to time, right, we do. We have two off sites or off sites a year, and we have so much fun. They Actually we do some work, but we try to do some work that is different than the kind of work we normally do, so we'll try to do something super creative just so we're all working together. We're together in the same room, and we're also kind of clearing our chakras, you know, hitting the reset button, freshening our minds up, so that when we get back to our regular work, we're even fresher than we were before. But yes, we we look so forward to getting together at those times because we work during the day, but then we have night you know, we make dinner for each other at night and get massages and you know, spend an extra day, you know, just shopping and swimming and playing together and all of that. And we have had, you know, some of our best bonding are you know, is on those trips, and so we very much look forward to them, and they definitely add to our overall efficacy as a group. They sound fun. I'll come to the next one. Absolutely, you would have a blast. Oh my goodness, Laura, I definitely want to hear more work focused questions. But I also loved Meredith's overview of her daily schedule, so I'm wondering if that. Yeah, our listeners always love hearing people's actual logistics and what their lives look like. So you know, we know you're trying to create a good work life mix for the people who work for you, So let's talk about yours. Why don't you walk our listeners through a normal workday. Basically, my day really starts at about six thirty i'd say roughly, spend a little time with the husband, and then I immediately review, I grab my phone. I'm one of those I know that we're not supposed to, but I do. I do definitely grab my phone. Since half my staff works on the East Coast and I'm on the West Coast, it's really important to me that I just get a general sense at that time of kind of how the day is going, and put out any fires, answer any quick emails that need to happen, and then at about seven fifteen, Jackson, my six year old, comes in and I spend a half hour with him. Well, my husband gets up and kind of gets coffee, going, gets breakfast, going, feeds the animals, that kind of thing. I spend a half hour with Jackson reading. I have him read to me. He's six, so it's a really important time in his reading life, and so we spend that time together. It's been a huge benefit to his skills. But also we're getting that snuggle time right, and so every single day I know he knows, I know that we're going to get that that half hour of just snuggling together doing something that we both love. So that always kind of sets my day off right. At about seven forty five, I get up, I get dressed for my workout at that point, and then I go out to the kitchen and I kind of do my morning stuff, you know, my emptying the dishwasher, shining up the kitchen after breakfast, those kinds of things, make sure beds are made, I get a little laundry in, and I feel like that is a piece that taking that time at that juncture of the morning is a piece that really helps me keep sane as far as working from home because I feel like I kind of, you know, continue to maintain control over the house and how it's looking and all of that good stuff. Then at about eight fifteen, Johnny takes Jackson too, and I sit down with my cup of coffee and I do my morning routine, which is really just about a half hour, and I basically do a little bit of journaling. I try to journal three things I'm grateful for. And then I also try to write down and this has been something that's been a big thing for me. I try to write down what I'm most anxious about, and somehow just writing it down takes a little bit of power away from it, and that's been huge for me. And then also I sort of journal a few thoughts for the day from a business perspective. What are the things that I'm what are the issues maybe I'm chewing over, And I try to write that out a little bit, and then that helps me get a good perspective. And then I spend a few minutes reading whatever book, sort of productivity book or life hack book, those kinds of things. I love, those kinds of books, We love them. And so yes, yes, in fact, i'm reading right now, I'm reading Jennysincero's You Are a Badass. Have you guys read that one? No? But it was actually I was. I thought that would be an excellent book for me to put on my kindle to read while pumping. So I actually was gonna how is it? Is it good? It's really good? And I have to say I didn't I wasn't super interested. It felt for a long time because I didn't really know. It felt like maybe because I read so many of these kinds of books, I felt kind of like, I'm not sure I really need this one. This book is fantastic way the way that she writes about concepts that yes had been written about before. For sure. It's been really like I just have a light bulb moment after light buld moment. So I'm finishing that up right now and I highly recommend it. I'm getting ready to go into her next book, which is I Think You're a Badass with Money. Yes, and so love that, but just getting that few minutes and again I'm only reading a chapter which is maybe five minutes. It's really small period of time that I'm taking for that particular kind of reading. But it just plants a little idea in my brain that I can chew on in the back of my mind or access during the day. So it's kind of like just it sets me up to be in the right mental state to proceed through my day the way that I want to, and then at a forty five I go do my workout and so and this is an example from a work perspective. Lots of my teammates do exactly this, where we kind of get into the day a little bit, and then I have a friend who takes a break and runs for an hour. I have a friend who takes a break and goes to a yoga class I have, you know, so lots of us kind of do this where we're we get into the day and then get our workout in. Some people do it later in the day. I do it about eight forty five. I do three days a week if yoga, and I do three days a week of cardio, and that mix has been super effective for me. I was doing all yoga for a while, and I just found that for me that the hardcore sweat of cardio was something that I needed at least a couple of days a week, but then the yoga was something that I needed too, So that combination has been really, really effective for me. So I do about a half hour to forty five minutes of a workout. Then I grab an apple and a second cup of coffee, and I go to my desk and usually I do mostly meetings in that block, from you know, breakfast to lunch I do. I have most of my meetings scheduled. I break for lunch, watch a little bit of TV, and then I'm back at my desk about a half hour later. And my afternoons I try to save for quiet work that takes more concentration, and so I always have a second or a third and maybe even fourth cup of coffee during that block because I need it. And then I wrap up around five, and I put my phone completely away like I live, literally put it at the other side of the house on the charger where I can't see it or hear it, because I'm very tempted if I don't if I don't do that, and so I will. I put it completely away. From five to seven, we're doing dinner, homework. Take Jackson to karate, that kind of thing. Do you go to karate? I do know, I see you did, You're absolutely I do you take good book at karate, but that's you know, during that time. Yeah, he's he's doing his things, so he's good to go. Although I have lately been trying to actually read if I go, you know, when I go to karate, read a book, like a fiction book that i'm you know, instead of being on my phone. I'm probably only successful about half the time, but I'm working on it. And then we you know, seven o'clock Jackson goes to bed, he reads for about a half hour. Will I take a shower, and then I try to and seven to eight o'clock kind of take in a shower, reading a book that I want to be reading, getting a little bit of time completely on my own, and then at eight join up with my husband. And there might be a little more work at that time of day for me. I don't expect it in my staff, but a lot of times I do some more work at that time of day. And then my husband and I go to bed about ten thirty. So do it all again the next day. Sounds good. We love the detailed schedule. We're all about the detailed schedule because you can always learn. You can always learn something even if your day looks very different, like it's a nice reminder and an inspiration to just shove your phone completely out of sight during some window. I think many of us want to do that and then struggle. But I like your hard cutoffs except for crime. Yet exactly exactly it is. It's a struggle for sure to not feel like, oh I just I just want to check because there was that one email I wanted to see if that person got back to me. That kind of it's a really really big struggle, and I have to say I it is not easy for me to do, and there's sundays I'm more successful than others, but that's something that I try as sociated during that one block to be really good about it. So just pivoting a little bit to advice for for our listeners. You know, we have a lot of people who are in management or aspire to be and would like to be able to allow people who work with them to work flexibly, maybe work remotely and all that. How could you sort of dip your toe into you're especially if you're in a more traditional company culture and then suddenly you're in management. How can you make that work? Absolutely? I think that again what we did that was the most successful in moving us to where we are right now is taking it really slow. So what I would say is if you have, if you're a manager, and you have members of your team who've expressed that this would something, this would be something that they would love to do, I would say, first of all, you have to make sure does your gut tell you that you can that this would be a good move for that person, for that person's work if it's Sometimes there are different kinds of work that simply I mean, Sarah, you fall into this category that just can't be done at home, mostly mostly funny, because actually there's a lot of moves towards more telemedicine, and you never know, my job may not be as in person ten years from now as it is now. But yes, you're right, there are some constraints exactly. And then and I think that's one kind of issue. But then the other issue is if your gut tells you that that particular person, something about it is niggling at you that maybe that you know it's not right for that particular person, then I think as a manager, you have to really really listen to your gut and think about why am I having that thought? Because ideally you want to have people on your team that you know that even if you're not looking, they're going to be doing a really good job. So I'm just you know, taking a really close look at that. I think is a good idea just from a team health perspective. Once you've decided that both the work would be okay from home or some you know, some portion of it, and that the person is someone who you feel can handle it, then I would say dip just like you said, dip your toe in the water. Let them start with an afternoon. Maybe you just say, you know what, let's try Friday afternoon. Let's see how that works. And then maybe they expand to all day Friday, and then they expand to Wednesday and Friday. This is exactly how we did it. Here comes to guide and just slowly over time as we felt as we saw that results were not only as good, they were better. When we were working from home, we were able to get more concentrated work, more done in a period of time than we were in our physical office. Then it becomes a lot easier to expand that both, you know, with an individual person and then across teams, because then you can see your results and you can feel really good about. Yes, this is this is not only working. We're thriving in this way. So I think it just has to be something. If it's where you want to go, you just have to make a plan and slowly execute on. Why do you think you were more productive in this set up? Oh? I mean there's no question that if you when you're together in an office at least I'll just speak for our office there, it becomes a lot easier to spend the five or ten minutes kind of chatting about this or that, whereas otherwise you'd go straight to your desk and be right back at whatever you're doing. Now. Again, it's not to say that I don't encourage that kind of connection, but we found that on the days that we were working from home, we could just zoom through a ton of work compared to when we were actually you know, around other people and the distractions that come with working. We kind of had an open plan office where you can hear a lot and because a lot of what we do is straight up sales that's on the phone, there's always kind of a hum and you could get a little distracted, you know by that. And so I think that that was a piece of it. And that really goes to kind of one of my platforms about you know, managing remote teams or one of the soap issues for me is that I I mean, we found that there is just absolutely no question that even if my team is working eight hours a day compared to other teams, especially you know, we're very close to Silicon Valley here where this expectation is, you know, sixty seventy eighty hours of work. I will put my team up against any team as far as how much they can get done in eight hours. Now. I don't know if it's because the vast majority of us are moms and so we're super used to having to be like, Okay, I'm gonna power through this, and I'm going to power through that. But they get so much done in that eight hours and then come back fresh to the next day. So it's a system that works really well for our company. That's great, and it seems like it's working for you. If you put in your notes here that you have an almost zero percent turnover, right, we do. That's actually a metric that we're super super proud of, and it's you know, a lot of that has to do with the culture, no question, But a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's pretty awesome to have a job where it's portable, right, you can go your husband. We have a couple of people who work for me whose husbands are in the military, and then just jobs in general change when they know that they can pick up and they can go to you know, almost anywhere and continue to do their job. It just makes it just makes a lot of sense. It's a huge benefit. I mean, that's that's amazing, just that guarantee. I mean, why would you want to leave if you're happy and you have that degree of portability and flexibility. I can see why you have that statistic. That's amazing. Anything else, Sarah, you want to get a throw in there? Not Well. I will say that I am a long time Penelope loves List reader and I'm sad that it's not really being I don't think unless it still exists and it just doesn't come to my feed Lee, any plans to resurrect that. Am I missing something? Are you still writing there? No? You know what, You're totally right, And it's one of those things where I don't want to say that we're never going to resurrect Penelope Loves list Right now, we're so concentrated on growing here comes the Guide and doing a lot of really fun and interesting things there that we have kind of had to had to turn down Penelope for now. But I love it, and I'm definitely not willing to say that at some point where we won't find a way to wrap it into what we're already doing, or you know, have it continue to be at some thing I still do. I love, I absolutely love it, So maybe someday, well, our listeners can check out your archives if nothing else, Well, there's a lot of a section at the end here where we all we do our love of the weeks, so they don't have to be profound. They can be pretty mundane. And mine is definitely mundane this week, so we'll have you share years in a minute, but mine is pure l because we are we are hand sanitizer addicts around here, which you know, it's the getting the kids in the habit of putting the hand sanitized around when they come home or when they've been out doing whatever. It's been a winter of a lot of crud going around, as as Meredith knows, given the number of her employees who are have sick kids home with them, So anything we can do to fight that is just awesome. So yay Purel Sarah. How about you? Yes, Corell. Well, since we open this with my first day back at work, I will give you love and hate to my spectra s too. Breast pump. People have asked me, you know which one do I use? Do I like it? They are all terrible, I think compared to a baby, but this is the best one that I've used. And I've used the like industrial rent rented Symphony, and I've used a pump and style and this one is a little quieter and seems to suck a little better. So yay love hate to my spectras. Too. Awesome about you, Meredith? Yeah, okay, all right. So I mean, so the number one thing that I thought of as soon as you said that was I talked about the fact that I do yoga. The only reason that I'm able to do that three times a week is because I do it at home, and so I have to give my love to the YouTube channel Yoga with Adrian. She is so awesome. She's absolutely introduced me to yoga and helped me to develop my home practice in a way that's been really beneficial to me. So I have to give a shout out to yoga with Adrian. And then I read a book recently that I loved so much that I just have to share it. And it's called The Castle of Water and it's by Dane Hucklebridge believe it's the author's name. But it's a stranded on a deserted island, like literally, there's a plane crash and these two people survive and they're stranded literally on a deserted island for an extended period of time. It's a man and a woman and I won't say anything more about that, but it is just one of the best books I've read in a really, really long time. It's not super long, absolutely a page turner, but it's really beautiful and it speaks to Largerie is She's in all the good stuff and all the feeling. So I definitely have to give a love to The Castle of Water. Right, we'll post put that on, put it on my lip. We're on it all right, Well, thank you so much for doing this, Meredith. We really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Oh, thank you. I have absolutely loved it. Our Q and A for the week comes from a listener who I think wrote in to Laura. This is someone who I'm going to read a bit of her question. She's thirty three years old, and she says, I'm considering the idea of taking the ELSAT and applying to law school. My kids are eleven, eight and four, so I'm past the baby stages. She's currently making a good salary as a paralegal and enjoys her job, but she says I'm ready for a new challenge. I have two choices. Be the best paralegal I can be and seek new opportunities as they come, or halt life for a season in order to attend law school, after which I will be a late thirty something lawyer and a see if candidates ten years younger than me. Should I start down this path toward law school or should I find contentment where I'm at? That is a tough question. I was sort of framed as am I too old for law school? I think the title she put on this email, which no, I don't think anyone's ever too old for law school. But you know, obviously the question of whether to go back to school is a huge one for people, and particularly something that can be sort of all consuming, like like law school a professional school in general, could be quite a commitment. So I wrote back to her a couple of things. I mean, first, one thing that's important to understand. This woman had done really well in college, like she graduated summa cum laude, but she said she just wanted to be a stay at home mom. Coming out of college, she got married, she had three children relatively, you know, early she had been working two mornings a week as a legal secretary, and then she decided that she could incorporate work into her life, and so she started, you know, a job as a paralegal. She caught up basically with other people around her age, like she was really gung ho about it, loving her j So this question is that she's around lawyers all the time and sees that she'd kind of like to have the professional career that they have. So questions should she start now? And I think the better question to be asking is before you go to law school, is do you want to be a lawyer or otherwise want to be something that absolutely requires a law degree. And the question for that is as you look at both the lawyers you work with and the ones you meet through your other interactions. Does their day to day life look like the life you want? And the reason I'm asking this is because, for whatever reason, the legal profession we're going to, we're gonna have some future guests who are lawyers. We've had pass ones who love law. It's just I know that a lot of people have gone into law partly because they're watching like Law and Order or something like that, and then the reality of it is different, and there's the whole billible hour thing, which a lot of people really dislike it. It happens to be a field, be a feel where a lot of people decide later that it's not really what they wanted to do. So I think the first thing to make sure is that you know exactly what your day to day will look like and that that is the life you want before you make this investment of time. If it's more that you want a more professional career, there are lots of other ways into that. I mean, one you can just apply for jobs you know you've got a college degree is to see, you know, a great work with history, see what you can do. You know. There might be things like getting an MBA would be a shorter process, for instance, and many of those are are very doable online, you know, or at least a sort of small in classroom commitment and more online coursework, and then you know you have a professional career options with with the MBA. But if you look at it and say, yeah, you know, I this is I really truly want to be a practicing lawyer. I love what they do. I love what the lawyers around me do. I think I could do well in this and would enjoy it, then sure, go for it. And I think you know, there are ways to make it work with family life. For anything that a parent truly wants to do. I mean, what would you say, Sarah, Yeah, I mean to me, I have to sort of contrast it with what I know about medicine and really three years of school and then being able to market yourself at least hope. I mean, I don't know what the job market looks like for lawyers, but even if she couldn't find her dream job, assuming that she did very well in law school, which I think this woman has a very good chance of doing, I would think that she could find something. Three years is pretty good. I mean, coming from the medical perspective, where it's you know, to get a job actually practicing medicine. It's four years of med school, three years of residency. If you're not doing a specialty in which you're usually not treated particularly well, then three more years of a specialty or even more that the three years to me sounds like, oh yeah, that's a pretty good deal. I mean, I agree, just to make sure that you do want that day to day life as a lawyer, and it's not about looking around you and saying I could do that too, because I mean there is a temptation to that. I hear that from some nurse practitioners that like sometimes they feel tempted. They feel like they could do with the other doctors do and their job is not treated with as much respect, so that that tempts them to want to get the extra you know, education. But at the end of the day, you have to actually do the math in terms of time and money whether that would actually be worth it. And I would say in an older like nurse practitioner a PA, it may not be worth it. If they're younger and they have tons of years to practice ahead of them, then it may be. So yeah, I think that if this is financially doable and you do want the life of a lawyer three years doesn't sound too terrible. And I also would encourage, you know, again, depending on the finances, look into grants and scholarships in a not terribly expensive private law school if you can, as long as you know that you could still get career opportunities there, because I do think that, you know, it may be tempted to go for a big name, but settling yourself with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt would be pretty daunting. Yeah, at that I would say that she put her options halt life for a season in order to attend law school. So I don't know that you would actually have to halt for a season. Well you can, yeah, Well she's got three kids, so she's kind of hault life. There's you're still going to have those three kids through the time of law school. You know, there may be sort of ways to go slightly quicker through. I mean, I don't know a lot of traditional law schools. Obviously, you're not going in the summer. You're working at a firm in the summer, which is a way to earn money too. Like, right, if you could, you could pay for part of your law school with you know, your summer jobs, and you could also, but or maybe it's possible to go through classwork quicker. If you worked and did class work in the summers too, maybe you'd be able to get through it faster. I would say, you know, my husband went through law school, I mean back when he was in his twenties, so it's not like you know a anyway, but by living very frugally and then you know, taking the money he earned from his summer stints because summer legal jobs I think pay reasonably well. And then you know, he was paying off his loans within one year afterwards, because again you know, having this law degree, you can then earn a fairly good salary coming out. And not just in the legal world. I mean he wound up working for a consulting firm but sort of similar level, so he was he was debt free by a year afterwards. So I mean, you know, even the finances could in theory work themselves out relatively quickly. But I think you probably want to want to run those numbers very hair throw up some models. Yes, definitactly those numbers, and you know, if your family's on board with it, great, you know, I think obviously if the family isn't on board with it, that's an entirely different matter, but hopefully best of all worlds hair there the children will be inspired by seeing mom tackle her coursework, learn good study habits from her, learn the importance of education from seeing her go through it as well. So yeah, upsides to it, but obviously she has to figure out what works for her well. This has been best of both worlds. We've been talking with Meredith Monday Schwartz on how to be a good Boy. Lots of career topics in this one, so we're looking forward to next week where we'll be talking more about making work in life system. 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.