Joy at Work - Tidying, Joy-Sparking, and a Deep Dive into Marie Kondo & Scott Sonenshein's New Book

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah hart Unger. 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 fifty three. We're going to be mostly talking about the new Marie condo and Scott's Sun and Shine book, Joy at Work, opening with a little bit about our current lives and routines. That we're recording this a little closer to when we normally record. We've decided that getting too far ahead means we're just sounding irrelevant. So let's how's how's life going? Are you guys keeping your same summer routine as you did kind of your quarantine school year routine. Yes, we are basically keeping the same daily routine going, including some school and there actually hasn't been as much pushback about that as I perhaps expected. I think just because like they sort of don't see any alterative, Like they're stuck here. We have a captive audience. So as long as we continue to let them enjoy their favorite video game in the afternoon, which is Minecraft, they're fairly happy following whatever directives that we put forth in the morning because they kind of understand that they have to complete that in order to earn their prize time. So it's been a very effective carrot and our stick, I guess you could call it. We're not doing anything crazy, we're allowing that well, we're having them continue on the same computer programs. Basically, the school district kept the access open and I believe it's going to be open until like the end of July for their eye ready and their math and all that stuff. So we just kind of devised, actually our nanny kind of devised like a schedule like Okay, on Monday, you do two of this. On Tuesday, you do this, and then we also have him do some reading. Cameron in particular really needs to work on reading and writing skills, having missed out on the second half of his kindergarten year live, which I do think was kind of unfortunate. So we're having him do like a daily journal entry. And actually, I'll say he's making some progress. Like when we started the summer, or at least a few weeks ago, he would basically throw a tantrum even just at the start, And yesterday we had like a fairly peaceful paragraph written and I was very proud and happy. So yeah, we're just keeping it going. And Genevieve's still napping really well in the afternoon. They're all staying up fairly late, like nine thirty ish, but that means that they sleep till a reasonable time, like seven seven thirty, which is helpful. And on a day by day basis, like when I don't think too hard, it's actually pretty pleasant. I just don't think too hard. That's a good, good idea in general, you know. Yeah, we are not doing any sort of school related stuff now that we're done for the year. When this is airing, we maybe at the beach. There's a lot of virtual camp stuff. We've done some of it, not too much because you know, the kids don't like zoom that much. But for Jasper's doing a theater camp Sam and Ruth did a coating camp that was just like two hours a day for a week, and Alex was actually able to go to a real in person camp with baseball. That we are now moved into what our governor calls a green phase, like we're open, so that's kind of exciting. We have a few more in person camps scheduled for later in the summer. All our original ones were canceled, but then some smaller ones have been able to regroup and say, well, we'll start virtual and then go to in person in July and August, and others are sort of just playing it by year. There weren't the kind of things that people sign up for way ahead of time anyway, so it was able to you know, still be there once the new guidance came down. So yeah, I mean we'll see, it's not quite the original summer we had planned, but it should still be okay. Kids playing a lot Pool time, Minecraft time, Minecraft's great. Minecraft is pretty good. Yeah, I don't really see any problem with them. Mean, there's so much worse stuff out there, like exactly like there's a creative element, there's an interactive element. Yeah, and also if their current real world is not all that exciting. Take another world and they can pay with their friends too, right, Yeah, you can have a private world where you like invite specific friends so that you're not playing with like public, but you might have all of your second grade classmates. Yeah. Yeah, so it's pretty cool. I think it's not a bad I do it all. So here's to Minecraft. This will be the summer of Minecraft for everyone. Well, so we're going to talk about joy at work. Sarah, Sarah read it. I read it. This book was some small chunk of it was written by Marie Condo and most of it by Scott's on day. Would you give her that? Yeah, maybe twenty percent? Said ten percent, but I flipped through. I think it's about twenty percent. Okay, but you know she's she's a big name, so let's let's put that on there. But so she talks a little bit about sort of desk tidying, and then Scott talks about probably more of the things we'll talk about in this episode in terms of clearing your schedule of clutter and making better decisions. So clearing decision making clutter and other such ways to be more efficient. So that's probably what the bulk of the book is about so that the tidying part is is kind of an interesting mashup all the though I enjoyed I enjoyed reading. So my first thought when I picked up the book was, like, what is she going to tell me about work? I don't think she's ever had a job like this is absolutely silly. But it turns out Marie Condo did have a brief stint in the corporate world, in the sales world. Yes, she quickly moved up the ladder by cleaning everyone's desk exactly exactly. She'd come in in the morning and clean their desks, then do her sales calls all day, and then you know, continue tidying afterwards. It's a you know she sometimes you realize, realize people are called to certain things things. Yes, and it seemed like she was. I mean, her tidying was fairly contagious and she was able to at least see. I would love to know, like all these people whose lives she tidied up and fixed, Like did she circle back a year later? Like were they still tidy? Because I I'm not entirely as convinced, because I'm not sure she had that long time term relationship. It seems like she would go in and fix everything, and then the person often felt better. Sometimes they would check in with her later. Sometimes the tidying seem to lead to like big momentous decisions and it's you know, I'm talking about it like it's a little silly, but actually to me she comes off as pretty charming. But I can also see the overly tweet aspect as well. We covered the whole life changing magic of tidying up back in episode thirty that we talked about decluttering and why it's so appealing in many cases to people in our kind of crazy, chaotic modern world, and especially when people have lots of moving parts in their lives. Sometimes, you know, a desk is something you can control. You can't control the world, but you can control your desk if you're Stapler's in the right place, So that can be exciting. I do think there are some people and like this takes me to like Gretchen Rubin's book Outer Order in her Calm right, like some people and myself I would put in that category, do tend to just feel like they like the wheels are greased to work better when things are cleared off. But I also feel like those books, Marie Conno's book, Congretchen's book. While useful to that subset of people, you have to recognize that there are many people for which that is just not as useful. Yeah, And we were talking about our own desks. Should we discussion to talk about the state of our desk? And it's funny here because Sarah sent me a picture she had tidied up her desk, but she sent me the before too, and her before is definitely my after, like after I've cleaned my desk. That's about what it looks like. Was her before, because there's there's no I don't know. I it's not entirely true that I don't like clean surfaces. I have kind of drawn a line in the sand for our kitchen tape kitchen island. I like the kitchen island to have nothing on it except a plant in the middle. And that wasn't the case for many months here because we had our homeschool binder on it and stuff, and that was over at one end, so it was okay. I was like, Okay, we'll deal with having the homeschool binder here because that's where people are going to look. But I definitely try to clear everything off of it and encourage others to clear their stuff off of it. And I mean, on some level it's silly because I just often I move whatever is on the island to another part of the kitchen, like right under the microwave, like I'm okay with that part being more cluttered, and that's where I tell people to look for stuff if I moved it off the island. But having the island clear just has that nice expanse. I don't know, maybe I just like to look at the island. I chose that countertop, and I want to see it. Darn it. Well, that definitely, I mean, the whole small messes leads to larger ones is definitely like if you had a few things on that island, it would probably end up with forty things on it. Like That's whereas if you designate a space and you're just like, no, we never let anything accumulate here, it's somehow much easier to maintain. And I do think that's why you do tend to end up with this like big dichotomy. Right Like if you go on a Friday afternoon to an office, there's not that many offices that look like my before. But just like a couple things. They either look like clear, like nobody lives there, like they're like beautiful museum, or they look like some of my colleagues have a lot of extremely productive and are not bothered by it. But like you can't even tell what color the desk is, like nobody knows because it's covered with things. Yeah, but this is the thing I like to say, there's no actual you can definitely have a messy desk and be a productive person. Now there's there is sometimes that you know you have to put your house in order in order to focus that. Some people are like that. Others it's like you're so focused on what you're doing that the details of other things that are sort of irrelevant are not as exciting to you. It's like, you know, you don't look at your wallpaper. It doesn't matter. It's not you're going to send not send an email because you don't like the wallpaper. Yeah, so it just it seems like a sort of irrelevant thing. And as long as you know where is, like, you're not losing it. It doesn't matter if it's in a pile on the desk or in a in a drawer. But you know, roughly what's in that drawer or as I've talked about, I mean my inbox. I don't really delete a lot of stuff. I mean I delete trash, but stuff piles up. I mean it's yeah, it doesn't bother me that it's there. And clearly you are also very productive as is like like my division chief and her desk is what I mentioned and hopefully she doesn't mind. But she's extremely productive here like RVUS which is like a measure of how many patients you see are like the highest in our group, and sots instead of cleaning your desk, I mean exactly so, and not even just that, she does tons of things. So so yeah, I don't see even I don't think there's data to support the I mean, they sort of tried to suggest that it that some people, but I agree, I mean, I'm not impressed with that as the rigor of that data. But you know, if it makes you happy to have a clean desk, then you should know that about yourself, which it totally makes me happy. And then do it. I do wind up, you know, cleaning it off sort of every week or two if it gets too high a pile or if there are piles all over my office, or extraneous things have been dropped here. I will go return them at some point, you know, I'll put it on my list for the weekend, like clean off the desk or clean off the office floor, and try to get it done. I did declutter some of my desk drawers a couple of years ago. I mean, I we just took it. I think they just when we moved to this house. This desk came from our apartment in New York, and I think the movers just like put duct tape over the drawers and like moved everything. Like I didn't take anything out, so it's you know, whatever was in there was in there, and I kind of just stayed there. And so I did, maybe two years ago, go through everything and created a system for what is in each door. And so that's been sort of helpful because I always have stamps and envelopes and related type things for correspondence in one drawer, and so I know where those are and I can go get them very easily. It does not organized like they're just all in there. This actually makes me think of a recent post you wrote, because I was going to say, well, sometimes organizing helps you, helps prevent you from having like redundancy all over the place, like because if you don't know, for example, like where your pens are, you probably have like some in like ten different places. But maybe that's sometimes a good thing. Like there are certain items you mentioned, the plunger, yes, the plunder blog posts where having an extra one may not be such a bad post. Well, I've been thought about now that the well one of the okay, so back up here I wrote a post on maybe buy an extra is the idea. If you have too much stuff, that's not good. But if you don't have enough, that's a problem as well. Like if you only have one bottle of sunscreen in your house, you're constantly going to be looking for it, like where is the sunscreen? Did somebody move the sunscreen? Or oh, we're leaving from the back door instead of by the garage, so that's like nobody's putting it on because they're trying to run out. So better to have extra bottles different places. And among the things I mentioned was the plunger because we had a period of time where a lot of toilets were overflowing in our house from excess toilet paper use, and we're like, where's the plunger. Where's is it upstairs? Is it downstairs? Where do you go? And I realize, okay, maybe just get another plunger. But then somebody comment on my blog that, like, every bathroom should have one, because you would hate to have like a guest you know, you have a guest staying in your guest room or using one of the powder rooms or something and have a situation and they wouldn't have one, like have to go find you, and like it's all a little awkward. So I was like, oh, I hadn't really thought about that, but yeah, maybe it's nice to just put one in each bathroom. So now I have new motivation to go shopping for such things. No, that totally makes sense, and same as like not necessarily keeping all your damps in one place or all your staplers in one place, because sometimes it may look a little more cluttered, but that redundancy helps. I wonder how Marie you would feel about the fact that we ended up applying her book to plungers. It's is it something that sparks joy? I don't know. I mean, it's pretty necessary. I am, Oh my goodness. But so moving to the more calendar aspects because that's what the bulk of the book is in fact about so and written by Scott's Sun and Shine. They have the idea of applying condoism to the calendar. And I really like this idea that you one of the issues with calend you know, we often are kind of trimming around the margins and say like, oh, could I find five minutes here and there? Could I, you know, maybe make this meeting take twenty minutes instead of thirty And that's not nothing like it's exciting, but you may not change your life in those ten minutes. Whereas if you don't start from the perspective of what should I get rid of, but keeping only that which sparks joy on your calendar, that's like an entirely different mindset. It's also just as with stuff impossible, because there's always going to be something like a plunger that you need that doesn't spark joy. I mean, you're not going to get out of your departmental meeting just because it doesn't spark joy. Of course, there's things you can do to make it better, but it's just an entirely different mindset and far more radical and I think kind of more exciting to think in those terms. Well, and she talks about actively like placing things that do bring you joy onto your calendar, and like she mentions that certain corporate organizations I think Google is one of them, Like they have a policy where you can basically spend x amount of hours per week doing something that brings you joy. All right, this is I'm sorry that the Google twenty percent anecdote has been used in every business book. So is it not true? Just no, it was true? Like then oh I see here saying I wonder if it is still true. But I mean, I think I could apply this to my own job, even if it's not officially there. But let me tell you the whole, like the idea of like clearing off the day and putting on only what sparks joy, Like when you work for a big organization like that, that that I mean, it's not just the departmental meeting. It's like fifteen thousand different meetings and aspects of my job. And even though I really do love my job as a whole, I find it hard to like practically imagine. I feel like if I can get to a point where, like I don't know, less than thirty percent of my day is spent doing things I really don't like that I'm winning? Is that bad? And maybe thirty percent sparks joy and the other forty percent are just neutral. Yeah, no, that would be great. All right, Well let's take a quick ad break, so we're back talking about Marie Conda and Scott Sunenshein's book Joy at Work. The question of whether you can keep only that on your calendar, which sparks joy. Pretty sure that they have stuff on their calendar that doesn't spark joy too, we all do. I mean, it's just the nature of life. But it is a kind of cool thought, right, like yes, yes, well maybe by the time you reach the success level of Marie Kondo, you can pare away a lot of the non joy sparking stuff. But she admits that, you know, along the way to getting there, actually she did do a lot of things that were typical her. That's joy sparking, the other sort of cool time concept of that. So you think of that as like zero based budgeting here, like you don't start from chipping away from what you exist, start from nothing and go go from there. But also another the idea of sunk costs. So she always has, you know, talking about clutter that you can just because you spend a lot of money on an object doesn't mean you have to keep it. Like you can thank it for its service to you. And it's very sort of Shintoist type thing, but you thank the object it's spirits for giving you happiness and then send it on its way. And you could sort of do the same thing with time, Like people will spend a lot of time on a project and say, well, I can't stop now. I mean I've devoted ten hours to it. My team has devoted six weeks to this project. We can't quit now. What you can, you can, like the sunk costs are gone. There is nothing you can do to get that time back. So any additional hour you put into it is, as they say, throwing good money after bad. That hour still needs to be evaluated in terms of whether that hour is worthwhile. And so I like that idea as well, that you know you can stop doing things just because you've been doing them for a long time, doesn't mean that you have to in order to give respect to the hours that have already been spent on it. Yes, and I think that applies both to project and as standing rotational things that seem to you know, you're quarterly this or weekly that or monthly that. Like you're right, it's so easy to just keep doing that meeting because it feels essential because you've done it. But like, really every month it should be like questioned, like is this necessary now? How about now? Because many times it's not, and you find yourself or maybe you experiment with like the maximum interval that any gathering needs to take place, like, well it's a monthly meeting. Let's see what happens if we change it to quarterly. Okay, well that was fine, let's change it to yearly. Oh wait, did you need to have an agency? Never exactly because you never good for you? Yes, yes, you know. One of the parts that was from actually Marie Condo is part of the book the idea of taking a picture and letting it go. So this was more on the clutter idea, if you have sentimental clutter, that you can actually take a picture of something and then let it go. And there was apparently a study of students cleaning out their dorms and they tracked what was donated what was not, and if they encouraged students to take a picture and then donate it the donation piles were actually much bigger then if they were not given that instruction, if they were just told to clean out and get rid of stuff. And I found that was true too. We cleaned out part of our closet because for now at least that's where Henry's going to be sleeping, as in a crib in the master bedroom closet, and so we had to sort of clear out half of it completely and so get rid of a lot of stuff. And so because of that, some of the clutter is of course sentimental, some of the clothes or oh this was when I wore this thing and Michael wore this to whatever. I found that if I took a picture of it, then I was totally okay putting it in the giveaway pile. Now, of course, the giveaway pile is still sitting there because nobody's taking donations yet. But eventually it will get out of the way, and I think I'll be fine with letting it go. No, that's awesome, I can see that. I should see if that will work on my husband, who has quite a collection of actually much better. When we first were together, he had like bookcases, bookcases filled with like college finders, and papers and stuff, and those are long gone, so he's come a very long way actually recently, like I noticed that our sort of memorabilia type of stuff was getting smaller, but it was still like annoying me. It wouldn't annoy you, I'm sure, But then I recognize that, you know what, if we got like some dedicated boxes and just put it in that somehow, I could like move on. I think a step beyond that would be taking pictures of it. And I don't know if we're going to get there, but well, sorry, that was a digressions. And then my favorite Marie and Scott time tip is they say, let me think about that and get back to you. So how do we keep schedule clutter from invading our calendars in the future. Well, you know, it's very easy to say yes to some that's something that's far in the future, because I mean, a you feel like you're assigning it to a different person. Like people have very difficult time envisioning themselves in the future. They also look at their calendar for say December, and it looks pretty free, like there's there's nothing on there for December. So if you ask them to do something in December, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm free on December tenth at ten o'clock. Sure, I'll do that. Of course, eventually it will be December tenth, and you will probably have other things going on, and you may or may not wish to do this thing that you agreed to back in June. So they say, you know, if you have trouble saying no in the moment, or you're even just not sure by yourself time, say let me think about that and get back to you, or let me check my schedule and get back to you, and then you can take a more rational view of what is on your plate figure out if this thing you are being asked to do sparks joy and if not, then you can follow up later and say no, I will not be able to do that by yourself time, So you don't say yes out of the sort of social awkwardness of the situation. As long. I love that tip, as long as nobody that I'm asking to do, nobody else should listen to this. Yeah, because I totally take advantage of that, and I purposely make sure I because a lot of my job has to do with making sure that various teaching things are arranged and I think that most physicians actually do like teaching, but they're also extremely busy. So on any given day, if I were to like throw a resident at them, they would be like, I don't have time for that, but somehow like their ideal stuff. They're happy to work in that teaching session or that rotation. So yes, so you can take advantage of yes, exactly both sides of that one. Yes exactly. So yes, ask people in for stuff far in the future if you want them to do it for you. All right, Sarah, your notes, Well, we've covered a lot of them. I guess I did kind of like the mention and this was a proportion that was done by Marie Condo about clean up of your digital spaces. Of course I liked it because I'm an inbox zero devotee, but sometimes I have a lot of like folders and junk on my work computer, and I don't know, maybe it doesn't matter, but as I read it, it seemed like she had a good case for getting rid of a lot of them, just because when you are trying to find a document and there's a million cluttered things to sift through, it can be frustrating, and then that can actually be kind of friction that messes with your productivity because if you can't find what you need, then you're more likely to just give up and like go do something easier. So I do kind of think there is probably a happy medium, like I'm not going to open every single document and file it, but I could probably just get rid of a lot of old stuff and just throw it all into one archive folder and like, I don't know, just get it out of the way to make things easier to find. So I was motivated by that. What do you think I'd be forced to clean out my digital space because my computer is running out of hard drive space. So I've realized I had stuff on there that I didn't need. I you know, never went through anything, but I need a new computer fairly soon. I was going to say, actually you could or you could just get like a you know, like a portable hard drive, dump everything on there, and then like yes or fresh exactly urgency. There was a section. I mean, again, this is like not new business advice, but it's still worth thinking about because you know, there was one section that I that I did, like they wrote research finds that half at executives' activities last less than nine minutes, leaving them without much time for deep thought. Factory foreman average five hundred and eighty three discrete activities for an eight hour shift. Mid level employees averaged only one thirty minute or greater uninterrupted time block about once every other day. When I read that, I was like, yes, you felt mean I felt seen. And then I paid more attention the next day about the number of times I was interrupted. And this was working at work, not at home. I mean it was like every time I was trying to do something fairly deep, either somebody knocked on my door, somebody texted me, someone tiger texted me, which is like another texting thing we have. I was stupid enough to have I outlook open, so that was interrupting. I mean that's my own fault, but like a lot of those texts, like I guess it's a culture thing, like, but it's also on me, right, Like I could have turned on do not disturb. I don't have to respond to people instantly because if they're not texting about urgent things. But at the same time, when you get a text and it's from kind of a colleague that's either right under you or like parallel to you, like you feel compelled to reply, So I just I don't have an answer. I find this very challenging, and I feel like, well, I guess the one answer is like, when you are focusing on a project, just put your phone on do not disturb, and like maybe even put a sign outside your door that's like, I need sixty minutes unless there's an emergency, leave me alone. If there is, call me. Because the default is that we're interrupted constantly. And I'm not a factory worker, but still I'm interrupted constantly. Yeah, so yeah, But I mean, the one upside of that statistic, and I totally believe that that people only like have one thirty or an uninterrupted session like every other day, is that if you are working at home over the past few months and you haven't been before, and you have your kids home, as many people do, and you're getting interrupted a lot, the good thing to recognize is that your office wasn't paradise like the comparison. You may feel like you're very fragmented now, but you were probably fragmented then too, and it may be in a different way. But let's not pretend that it was this oasis of hours of productivity where no one ever interrupted you. No one ever came by to be like, yeah, did you see John's shirt? Like you know, it's just there's all kinds of stupid stuff that interrupts people in offices and stuff that seems productive that people get interrupted in offices for too, So it will all be okay. But that said, if you do have the ability to focus for a bit, don't hurt your own productivity, Like, don't, don't don't create an own goal situation here, just as Sarah was saying, put your phone and do not disturb. Don't stop in the middle to go check if the meat made it out of the freezer, Like, just keep working and try. If you get past thirty minutes, that is awesome. Celebrate that fact because you can do a lot in uninterrupted time. You can do a lot in uninterrupted thirty minutes. It's actually true. But yeah, when I read that section, I was like, oh my god. And I do think it's a problem that the more open offices there are, and the more kind of like now culture and texting types of apps that we're using at work, But the worst it's getting. Honestly, I don't think well, I don't know. I wasn't in the workforce like this twenty years ago, but I doubt it was as bad. I just don't think people's phones were ringing the way. Yeah I did a little. The phones is different, but yeah, yeah, we interrupt ourselves more, I think too, because we have the ability to You can look at your you can be in your you know, turn off outlook in your computer, and then pick up your phone and like look on it, so it just doesn't get to you one way or the other. Cool anything else from the book you wanted to know? Those were my highlights. I will say I enjoyed reading it. It made me like a little more if you just sort of need to pick me up to get you a little more excited about work or making your work life better. I think there are enjoyable pieces to the book, and it's written in kind of that positive Maricondo tone that again some people may find overly tweet or just a little silly, but I enjoy it, so I urge you to check it out. All right, So here's our listener question for the week. It came from Instagram, which you guys can find us Best of Both Worlds podcasts over at Instagram, and it says I listened to a recent podcast episode and wanted to hear about how you get up so early. This is clearly aimed at Sarah. It's getting to bed that is a huge struggle for me, as there is often a lot to do, and recently my kids have had trouble getting to sleep. What advice do you have? I think up early to get work done would be so beneficial for me. So, Sarah, how do you get to bed on time? Yeah? I don't know. So the problem with this is like the way to get up early is to go to bed fairly early, and it sounds like this person is struggling with that. So I don't know that I'm going to have a magic bullet. I do think maybe like a gradual Well, two things, if you force yourself to get up early a couple of days, you may be tired enough that you would do fall asleep earlier. So that's one way to kind of shift you. You kind of have to accept the idea that you can't have long kid free mornings and evenings. You kind of have to pick one because they're not going to sleep anymore. So like in my case, I've kind of engineered it so I have longer kid free mornings than evenings, and we get around that and still have like some time for my husband and I to talk to each other by like allowing them to watch some movies at night, so then we get to actually talk. But you can't have books, So I think you need to analyze kind of which works better for you. And I don't know if you're you know, a caffeine user, but I do feel like one of the best ways to dive into going to bed earlier is to to force yourself to get up early for a few days. But I'm also a natural morning person, so that it's hard for me. I don't know if that would extrapolate to someone who just naturally is driven to stay up late. That's never been me. So maybe in your case, the answer isn't that. I mean, maybe maybe you need to embrace your evenings. I don't know, what do you think. I think she's right that getting up early to work is probably the way to go. I mean, there are very few true night owls. There are some as like ten percent of the population, but a lot of the people who say I'm not a morning person, it's more that they're tired in the morning, and that's because they're going to bed later. And that's because the evening is when you have that quiet, kid free time, like you've done your chores, you're you know, now you have this like me time and people want to enjoy it, and so it feels like, well, going to bed early means I'm cutting that off, Like I don't want to do that. So yes, as you said, you cannot have both kid free evening time and kid free morning time. And if you want to use it to work, then you're going to have to recognize that you're probably going to have less leisure time. So that's a trade off and you have to decide if that is worth it to you, and it may not be, Like if you don't actually like your job that much, for instance, like that seems like a bad trade off, Like why would you give up your exciting, wonderful me time at night just to get up early to do work? Right like that, that's probably not a trade off that's going to make you happy long term, and so you won't do it, is basically how that's going to play out. Now. If it is that you're really excited, you have the stuff that you really want to get to and it's not happened because you know, you don't have quiet time during the day anymore, well, then you might be more motivated. And so if you kind of say, okay, I'm going to be in bed, you know, thirty minutes after my kids go to bed, that can be you know, sort of wind yourself down, and that could give you a little bit of time to do that. You know, and it's hard, but if that is actually a priority to you to get up early to work, then it's it could be you know, you'll probably get in the habit of doing it. Yes, all right, so we move on to our love of the week. Yes, let's let's do our love of the week. Okay, I can go first. Sorry, I you know, with a lot of attention on anti racism right now and kind of the I don't know, the giant movement for everybody to diversify their feeds and listening and such, I've definitely joined. And one podcast that I have found really kind of just fun to listen to and interesting is Code Switch. I already knew the host, Gene Dunby, well he's one of the co hosts him and Sharene Miraji, but I knew him from pop culture Happy Hours so it was like a friendly voice that I already kind of knew. But they just talk about all kinds of issues. He's black, and she I think is either I don't want to get her heritage wrong. I think she maybe mixed race or maybe Hispanic and black. But they just have these great conversations about like like they were talking about like why why now, like you know, why why has everything changed? Or why is this the year for so much change? Or they talked about like why has their podcast become so interesting to everyone now when it wasn't before. But they have a nice conversational style and they're both highly intelligent and fun to listen to. So code switch on NPR. Switch All right, sounds sounds good? Yeah, God, I'm still loving my Libby app. I'm not going to say this every every week, am I going to tell you? But I've been on a Tony Morrison reading kick of late you know, which probably people have gotten assigned a book of hers in high school, college, whatever. But it's kind of fun to reread a sign books as adult because you're coming to it from a different Like I don't have to write a term paper on this, like comparing you know, the symbolism of chapter two with like some other random thing. So I recently finished reading Jazz, which you know is one of her shorter books, sort of more accessible. If anyone's looking for a place to start, I would I would recommend that. And what's about? What's that? What's it about? Like? Is it about jazz? It's about well no, but it's about nineteen twenties Harlem. And sort of the way it's written is in terms of she's very lyrical and it moves around to different characters. It's like you already know the plot in the first paragraph, but then like a jazz theme, it comes from different angles. It comes in this sort of the tone of the language, it gets at this rhythm of jazz. So it's it's a very cool meta aspect to the books. So I would I would write come in that people are looking for something to read. And you know, if you if you read the Bluest Eye or Beloved, those are the ones that are often assigned in class, try checking this on out. It's a really sort of more I think accessible one that you're not writing a term paper on. That's a good summer read, good summer. Yes, all right, Well this has been best of both worlds. We have been talking about joy at work, Marie Condo, Scott Son, and Tine. We will 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.