All About Tranquility By Tuesday

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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 two hundred and seventy, airing in early October of twenty twenty two. Today You're going to be talking all things tranquility by Tuesday. I'm so excited about this. I feel like every month I've been asking you, is it time to do the t DVT episode yet, Like I've been really excited about it ever since I read the book, and I you know, I always like your writing. It's how I found you in the first place. And I just think this is such a wonderful one and I'm excited we finally get to chat about it. Yay, yay, No, I'm happy to talk about it too. Obviously, I'm talking about it a lot various different to other podcasts and blogging about it and doing articles for places and interviews for places. But you know, it was a fun book to write. I really enjoyed doing this. I mean, I love the idea of people being able to spend their time both well and in ways that make them happy. So we thought we're going to talk about it, and we're talking about it a week early. It is out next week. But there is a reason for this, Yes, So let's talk a little bit about you know, I follow a number of authors and there's always a discussion of pre orders, and they've become somewhat of a big thing in recent years. And you can elaborate on this, but I've come to understand that pre orders really drive the success of a book for a lot of people. And so if you really want to support an author and you know you're going to by their book anyway, doing it as a pre order is like something really really nice you can do for them that will kind of help that book be distributed more widely in the long term. Yeah, Basically, it shows both the publisher who is determining in this window how many copies to print. I mean, they have an idea, but it will influence that. It influences how many copies retailers order, because if they can see that they're already going to sell out of their first lot, then of course they will reap right, that's what they do. So it influences how many orders get placed, and that's how many you know, you can sell. Like there's a physical book for many of these. Obviously people do ebooks and audiobooks too, and so the physical aspect is slightly less important there, but it influences it as well because it shows everybody that demand for this book is strong, that people are reading this book or talking about this book, so it gets displayed more prominently, it gets more attention from the retailers and how they market it and things like that. So you know, it's just if you have been listening to me, if you've been listening to Sarah and us talking about time topics, and think that you would be interested in Tranquility by Tuesday, I really appreciate that if you would check it out. I have a few pre order bonuses. You can get an excerpt so you can go ahead and start reading. There's a scorecard. You'll get early access to the tranquility by Tuesday. In real life videos, I did a couple time makeover videos with some listeners slash readers, So that was pretty fun. That is I love. I saw a little previews snippet of the videos, and I am it's like delightful to see people I actually kind of know about, either through like the podcast or the blogging world participate in that. So there's some like fun easter eggs in there for listeners who have kind of been paying attention all these years. And I got to say, like this book, as always, it's super cleanly written, like Laura's writing is never it's usually very succinct, and there's a lot. You get a lot out of it for however many pages there are, and this one is very very actionable. I feel like I've enjoyed both types of books you've written, but like Off the Clock felt more theoretical and thoughtful, and this one feels more like no, no no when you read it, like you're going to have things that you can act on right away, or perhaps things that you could do with friends, like this would be a really cool club kind of book to read together and then maybe put some of the tips into action together and see how it works. Yeah, I have a discussion guide that should be out by now that people will be able to access that. You can do it in a one meeting tranquility by Tuesday book club kind of thing. Or you can do nine Rules nine Weeks, which is a nine week program you could do with a couple of friends reading the book together, putting the rules into place together, holding each other accountable. So yeah, if you guys are willing to check out the book, I would really appreciate it. Just as a note here, I mean sometimes you're like, well, what does one copy of a book matter? It actually really does. I mean, just as some numbers here for you. There are about eighteen thousand people downloading this podcast every week, and if a order of the people who are downloading and listening to this podcast pre ordered the book, that would on its own put it on several of the bestseller lists. It's just you don't have to sell that many copies. I mean, unless you happen to come out in a week when like Michelle Obama and James Patterson and JK. Rowling, like whatever, I was a big if everyone had a book out that week. That would be a problem because then the you know, the numbers needed to break through anything would be much higher. But most of the time that's not the case. People, They're just people don't buy that many books. I guess is what I say that a couple of thousand orders really do matter. So just as a favorite to me, if you enjoy this podcast, I would really appreciate it. I have just made the decision I will have to pre order some for my book club distribution distribute to the neighbors. Basically, well, I could dial in for that meeting. That would be fun, Yes, that would be awesome. Anyway, Yeah, we could go ahead and talk about the topics in the book now that we've done the sales pitch. But yay, So tell me a little bit about, like, I feel like you were thinking about this topic several years ago, and actually the phrase tranquility by Tuesday showed up on your blog all the way back in twenty nineteen. So tell a little bit about how, like, how did this take shape and how did it take that book form? Yeah, so I had been casting about you know, what, what do I want to write about next? I've written many time management books. You always need a new angle if you're going to put something out in front of readers, and so maybe some longtime blog readers might remember that in the fall of twenty nineteen, I did a series of time makeovers on my blog. So I put out to my list that I was willing to do these. If people track their time for a week, sent me, you know, questions, what they thought, you know, their problems were, we would talk. I would run these on the blog, and so over the course of a couple months in the fall of twenty nineteen, I ran several time makeovers, and what I got out of these is I was, you know, honing my advice down to a handful of things that were useful broadly, like, I wanted to see if people have different lives, if people are in different stages of life, what advice seems to work most frequently. And so then I honed this down to nine rules and tranquility by Tuesday. The idea is, well, let me test out these nine rules. Let me see if I do put people through the paces to learn these rules, will it change their lives? How will it change how they spend their time? And so that is you know, how this book came to be and is the Tuesday. Because the idea is that these rules, when put into place, it doesn't necessarily you're not trying to reach some specific place. It's just supposed to enhance your everyday experience, your Tuesdays, your Tuesdays. I mean, Tuesday is the most normal day of the week, right, Mondays have their own baggage, people like, oh fun Fridays or you know, Saturdays, Sundays sort of different, but Tuesday is like the normal day. So if you can change how you spend your time on a normal Tuesday, you have upgraded your life in a significant but doable way. Right. We're not talking about waiting for vacations. We're not talking about sometime in the far future when life is less hectic. It's like, no, no, what can we do in the midst of our complex and occasually chaotic lives to actually enjoy our time to feel like we have enough energy to handle our responsibilities, to feel that even on an average Tuesday, you have something to look forward to. I love it all. Right, Well, talk about how the project itself worked because you actually did some like real life field work slash research here. Yeah, so, I mean part of writing self help for busy people is that I really don't want to waste anyone's time, which is that you know, a couple ideas that I think are kind of cool might be nice, but I would really prefer to see that they do in fact work. So I did two studies. In fact, the first was a pilot version of Tranquility by Tuesday that I had. It was just a few dozen people try out the rules over the course of nine weeks. And this allowed me to do a few things. I mean, one, I could refine the rules themselves, you know, see what people reacted to, what they didn't. I could see, you know, were my instructions clear. I worked with somebody who has a PhD in survey design, by the way, to come up with this survey. So she and I were working together. In the course of doing the pilot, we could see like do people not respond to this question? Like does this question get no answers because everyone finds it confusing? Should we ask this in a different way to make it more clear? Are there too many questions right so people stop answering them somewhere in the middle. So just all these things that we could tweak because we were running through the whole project one time. First, I also wanted to make sure that I would get statistically significant data, because if like nothing happened over nine weeks with these people at their time satisfaction scores weren't rising, that would be a problem. So what I mean by time satisfaction scores is I had a list of you know, it's about thirteen questions for my scale, but questions like you know, yesterday I had enough energy to handle my responsibilities, or I regularly have time just for me generally I'm making progress on my professional goals. Those sorts of questions, and then you could answer one to seven on how much you agreed with it. So one was strongly disagree, seven is strongly agree. And so the idea is to turn sentiments into numbers. And I kept doing that in the course of the study, and yeah, you know, we see if we got results. Did people's time satisfaction scores rise? And they did in the pilot. So then I went and did it again with a much bigger group, this time with about one hundred and fifty people. Wound up doing the whole project and looked at not only the quantitative results but also what people answered for the questions, and so the bulk of the book is actually people's responses, right that. You know, if I have them try out one of the nine rules and see what happened, they describe the challenges they face, they describe the results they saw, and that's you know, what the book mostly is is real people talking about how these rules work in real life. And that's what makes it to me both a very fun and practical read because you have like the scientific, actual results of what worked overall, but then it's like tied in with personal vignettes that makes it completely not dry and fun to experience. I have to ask, was this the first time you did your own original study for a book, because I know you did, like a lot of time youse time used data number crunching for prior books, But was this the first time it was your own data set? Well, I mean, for I know how she does it. I collected the data set for thousand, one thousand and one days in the lives of women with you know, professional jobs and children. That was a data set collection too, And I've always had researchers work with me to do some of the more intense number crunching. I have an understanding of it. But I'm not quite as into obviously as somebody with a PhD and survey design, so I wanted to make sure that it was done rigorously. And I'm pretty happy with our results. I think we did a good job, so exciting. Well, we're going to dive into those results right after our break. We will be right back. All right, we are back, and now that we understand how Laura put together her research for tranquility by Tuesday, what were some of your biggest findings. Well, overall, people's general time satisfaction, which is the compilation of this whole thirteen question scale, rose sixteen percent over the course of the nine weeks where they loose these rules. So maybe sixteen percent doesn't sound huge. I mean it's not like doubling. But as I point out, if you are like a money manager, getting a sixteen percent return would sound pretty good. Nothing is over the top difficult to do. So feeling sixteen percent happier about your time is pretty cool. And that's, you know, a very statistically significant result, I mean very small p values, so pretty cool on that. On the individual areas of things, for instance, people felt significantly happier with how they spent their leisure time. One of the questions is, yesterday I was happy with how I spent my leisure time. Scores on that rose twenty percent over the course of the nine weeks. A question like yesterday I didn't waste time on things that weren't important to me. That rose thirty two percent in the course of the nine weeks. And it's because you know, people were thinking about how they wanted to spend their time. They were more aware of where the time was going, they were more aware of making choices, they were more aware of how even small tweaks could make sure that more time was spent mindfully and so thus on things that they were wanting to do. And so that was, you know, pretty cool to see. Were there any rules from the pilot that you ended up throwing out? I'm sorry that was that was a totally unplanned softball, but I just had to No. Actually, we wound up going with those same nine rules. The things that changed were, you know, some of the description emails. So the way the study would work each week I would send you after some initial questions to get demographics, to get how people were spending their time, how they felt about their time. Each week, I would send people an email that taught them a rule, and then they would answer questions about how they planned to implement it in their life, and then questions a week later on how it went right. And so it was mostly those questions that got changed some of them to make it more clear if it was, you know, people were not getting at what we thought like, we moved some of the order around. You know, I edited the emails I sent on the rules to make it more clear what I was getting at, because that would come through if people were answering in some of the qualitative questions. Well, I wasn't quite sure what Laura meant by this, so I tried doing this and maybe that worked too. But if that was the case for enough people saying something like that, then it meant I needed to edit it. Totally makes sense, all right, Well, let's talk about some of the individual rules. We don't have to go through online. Well, we could, but I wanted to talk about a couple of my favorites. So one of them, not stockingly, is that I love planned the week on Fridays. How did you pick Fridays? Tell us a little bit more about this, and I guess I wanted to ask is it okay? Well, I guess it's okay. But my take on it is to plan my work week on Fridays and my personal week on Sundays. And this works for me. But you could give me an argument why I should switch that, and maybe I'll take it under consideration. Yeah. Well, if you have a planning system that is working for you, don't want to interrupt anyone's well functioning life. So I am never going to suggest that. But so Friday is plan on Friday. This rule, it really encompasses two things, and the first part is to plan. That is by far the most important part. I think everybody needs a weekly recurring planning time, and weekly because you live your life in weeks. A week is the unit of repeat, as a mathematician would put it in the pattern of our lives. You know, Tuesday is not a unit of repeat because Thursday looks different and Saturday looks different. But Monday through Sunday tends to look relatively like your life, and so that's what you want to be looking at. You know, when you have a recurring time, you get in the habit. You also can start sending yourself notes to that time, like, oh, I know I'm going to plan on Friday, so I'll put a note on my calendar for that Friday to think about this question. And that both allows you to not think about that question until that time and to start planning for the future. You know, even something like you know the reservations that a famous restaurant are going to open on a certain day, and so you want to put it on your calendar for that next week. Will you tell yourself that for your planning time, and then you know, to build that window into your week. I mean, it just allows for all sorts of things that are you know, important, and you can start making progress toward long term goals because every week you're thinking about what steps am I going to build in toward my long term goals? And then you reflect back did I do those things? And then what are the next steps? As for Friday. This actually came from a chat I had with David Allen. Of all people who I had been talking about people kind of planning on Sunday night, and I think I had been planning on Sunday night, and he sort of offhand mentioned that a lot of people he knew sort of had Friday as a lighter day and kind of did a weekly review at some point on Friday, and he was talking more about the retrospective review that you know David Allen always talks about. But I was like, oh, Friday, now that's idea, And then I realized, I think Friday is much better for looking forward for a couple of reasons. I mean, one Friday afternoon at least is what an economist might call a low opportunity cost time. Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoon saying I am excited to make progress on my personal and professional goals right now, but you know, we are willing to think maybe what future us should be doing. So if you were just going to waste those minutes, those hours until it was acceptable to sign off, like you may as well repurpose them. It allows you to use more of your work week. Like if you don't plan until Monday morning, which is another popular time, many of the things you're gonna do like can't get going until either Monday afternoon or Tuesday. And if again, people are sliding toward the weekend on Friday, like you've only got three real workdays, then if you are not using all of Monday for execution, so by planning on Friday, you can use more of Monday. I find it better than Sunday for many sorts of planning, just because it's during business hours, and so if there is something you need to do that requires making an appointment, that requires setting up a meeting, like you are more likely to be able to make that happen during Friday business hours versus like Sunday night. But it also just I mean, it allows you to enjoy more of your weekend. I mean, one of the issues when people plan their professional lives on Sunday night at least, is that you will probably be thinking about this question of what I need to do before that Sunday night time, because you know there's all that stuff waiting for you Monday morning. You don't know what it is, you don't know how you're going to deal with it. Maybe you have a time on Sunday night to think about it, but it often just kind of keeps churning until then. Whereas if you have a plan by the time you leave on Friday, then you might be able to relax and enjoy your weekend a little bit more. I love it. I think I actually might try to move a little bit more of my family type planning to Fridays, especially as my work schedule is about to change a little bit and I should have a little bit less administrative burden because often I'm sort of frantically trying to empty out my emails on Friday. But that might be less of the struggle moving forward, So I can see the value in that, And also just kind of having things set before you go into the weekend so you don't feel like half your weekend is like kind of burdened down by this, like, oh, I have to meal plan, I have to put everything up on the weekly board, I have to figure out howghart et cetera, et cetera. So I can see the value there. So maybe I will try that with my little fresh start that I have career wise, I will say I do some of my personal planning on Sunday in terms of the kids activity schedule, because it's been really hard to get everything entirely set on Friday for that, And I send an email to my husband and our nanny on Sunday night that outlines the schedule for the week and confirms you know who's driving where if there's any differences. I mean, we have a pretty set activity schedule at this point, so it's only that you look through it to say, okay, well this is changing. I try to know most of those things by Friday, but sometimes it doesn't get locked in until Sunday. So I will say I do a little bit of planning on Sunday for personal life, but the work week stuff is all planned on Friday, which I think you do too. Yes, I do. I think it's useful for all those reasons you mentioned, and also because nobody from work wants to get an email on Sunday. That's like, let's have a meeting on Wednesday. No no, no, yeah no, they don't want to have for that one, so you don't want any one sending it exactly. All right, let's talk about moving before three pm. As I'm sitting here in the most disgusting, sweaty post workout gear, h you look great. We can see each other, by the way, if people are wondering, they're like, wait a minute, aren't you in Pennsylvania and she's in Florida. We can see each other. We have a video conference going while we do the podcast. We found that worked a lot better for managing our conversations. Yes, and you know, maybe some podcasts I know like to put that up on YouTube, but I never, Lauren, I don't usually get dressed up for this, let's put it anyway. So yes, moving before three pm. I am somebody who I really feel like my default state is better if I move pretty much every day unless I'm like taking like a purposeful rest day, and even then I would rather go outside for a walk or something like that. So this is a rule that I feel like I have fully signed up for. And I'm curious how you saw it play out in others' lives who maybe don't have exercise be a habit, Like, how did people do this? Was it mostly incorporating walks? Did people do more formal workouts? And what was the response? Like it was mostly walks. I mean, I think people have their workout times, and I certainly don't want to again. If you have a time that works for you, far be it from me to dissuade for you. So if you go to the gym after work twice a week, that is awesome. If you, you know, jump on the treadmill at night after your kids go to bed, like great, I mean that's a time many people don't use for anything good. And it turns out that exercise at night does not generally interfere with your sleep, you know it. Exercise makes you sleep better, period, and so when it happens tends not to matter quite as much. So, you know, I don't want to tell anyone who's got a regular or eight pm date with their treadmill that they're doing it wrong. That's not my point here. It's it's more that I'm talking about building in little bursts of physical activity into your day. And it can be so easy for many people in our sedentary society to get up in the morning, get to work, sit all day until the end of the day, and then you know, you go home and you sit some more, and it's hard to feel energetic if you are doing that, because our bodies were built to move. I mean, there's all sorts of amazing research about what even small amounts of exercise can do in terms of you know, one of my favorite studies type of studies to collect. I make a file of these is studies that compare exercise to various pharmaceuticals, and especially the ones that are designed to treat sort of long term chronic health problems, whether that be you know, sleep problems, mild depression, some chronic pain. It's signs that exercise can generally help with that. So there's all sorts of things that it does, you know, I don't care it as like any sort of way to lose weight or to look good in a swimsuit has nothing to do with that. So by three pm is because that will force you to take some break during the average person's work day, and if you haven't done it by three pm, three pm and is a good time to do it because that's when most people's energy hits the low point, at least during sort of a nine to five work day, So mid afternoon is by far the lowest energy time of the work day. So getting up to move at three pm would be a very good way to be able to make it through the rest of the day productively without having to resort to caffeine or anything like that. I wish, Oh, go ahead, I just was going to say, I wish more companies would make like the Walking Zoom meeting a thing like feel free to turn your cameras off and take a walk as long as you stay connected, like, because I do feel like you get to a point where you've been sitting for a number of hours and it actually becomes harder to concentrate, and probably moving around and just listening would be better on so many fronts, like more focus, more energy, like more engagement. And yet it depends on the office culture. But I don't think everywhere is accepting of that yet, So I don't know. Maybe there needs to be a nationwide movie, nationwide move and I turn off your camera and go for a walk. But I mean it really encourages sort of strategic thinking about your time because it forces you to look through your day and see, well, where could I get up for ten minutes and walk around? And once you start seeing that you can do that and things don't necessarily fall apart if you do, it can definitely encourage more of a proactive mindset about time in general. Yes, no, that makes sense. It took me the pandemic before I figured out that I could take a walk at lunch at work, and now like pretty much on my regular patient days if I don't have some kind of a meeting, especially if I haven't run that morning, like it's my default activity. But it's like no one was going to stand there and give me permission I had to figure it out that, oh, this is completely doable. Yeah, exactly all right. The last one I wanted to talk about in this segment is effortful before effortless. So I guess my question is is in most cases this just means something else before scrolling. Pretty much that could be what we called this rule, something before scrolling, so effortful before effortless, something before scrolling. We really like our alliterative phrases around here at best of both worlds. But yeah, this rule. I mean, people have probably heard me talking about this before, but we wind up spending the bulk of our leisure time on screens just because it is so easy. It doesn't require a lot of effort. You don't have to plan ahead. You can do it in small chunks of time that are uncertain. And so many of us have had the experience of feeling like we are starved for time. And let you look at your screen time function on your phone. It's like telling you you're spending three hours a day on there. You're like, I'm not, I'm not. No, I'm not, but you are. I mean. It may not all be social media or headlines, but some chunk of it is, and often more than many of us would like to see. So the idea is just to do something that requires a little bit of mindfulness or attention or engagement for even just a couple of minutes before you switch over to the screen time entertainment or the passive screen time. At least you don't have to do it forever. Like I'm not saying anyone has to give up social media. I'm not saying anyone has to give up watching television. There's a lot of great shows on I know that it's just to flip the automatic order. So if you're like, oh, I'd love to do puzzles, where or where can I find the time? Like, well, if you would watch TV after your kids go to sleep at night, maybe do a puzzle for fifteen minutes and then go watch TV. You're not giving up the TV. You're just challenging yourself to do something else for a little bit of time. And you know, one of two things happens, Like you either decide that it feels, you know, so fun to do your effort full fun that you keep going with it. Because generally people do rate those sort of active hobbies and fun as more enjoyable than passive screen time, but even if you don't, you get to be the kind of person who does both. No, that makes sense to me. Certain TV shows almost feel effort I mean, I know that might sung. I guess efforvil is in the eye of the beholder, right, because if it's like a special show that my husband and I are like watching together and we're discussing it and we're like looking forward to it and it feels like an event because we've like finally gotten to that moment of relaxation, to me, that feels much more effortful and purposeful then like pull up my phone and like look at god knows what, check my email for the fiftieth time, or look at social media or things like that. So yeah, I guess that's my take on TV as maybe a step up from this sort of like very haphazard online activity. But I also love the idea of doing a puzzle or something more active, or taking a walk or something like that. How about one night for you. I feel like this is one where some people, particularly women, are going to struggle or say like I can't because I have to be there at bedtime every single night, or something terrible will happen. What would you say to someone that just doesn't feel like it's possible because their partner is resistant, or because they have seventeen children and they all have to have a personalized bedtime routine, what would you say, Yeah, well, we could always come up with excuses. I mean, you know it. I would challenge people to just give it a try. It may turn out that your partner is completely incompetent, and then I'm sorry that that happened. Maybe that's something that you too need to work on. But like you wound up with this person and you know, are still with them and presumably trying to raise children together. So maybe you can work something out right and each of you can have one night off you're your partner can take a night to go do something fun, and you can take a night to go do something fun, and you can cover for each other and learn to you know, develop new skills in the course of this happening. But even if it was you know, maybe you come home a little late after bedtime, like one night a week, and things haven't happened as you wish they would, like you mop up the mess and then you just go from there, but you still got your fun. Like I think it's worth it to have things maybe be off a little bit one night if it means that you feel more excited about life in general. So I challenge people to think about it. And it doesn't have to be a night. Maybe it could be a weekend morning, right, like you trade off weekend mornings that you go do something fun for you, but ideally making a commitment to something because that nudge is it to happen? Right that I sing it a choir and if I don't show up, that's a problem. Like, you know, my voice part expects me to be there. If you play on a softball team, like you know, suddenly they don't have a second basement if you are not there. If you are signed up to work in a soup kitchen and you come every Thursday night and nobody's manning the you know entree, like that's a problem. Right, So you will go even if life is busy, even if you are tired, even if you know a kid would like you to drive them somewhere. You'll work out a different solution. And I think you know that nudges this act of self care to actually happen. Love it. I got book club, I got to work on some other fun evening activities. All right, well, let's take a little bit of a pivot and talk a little bit about your writing process. Can you talk about how does you know we have a lot of people curious about how do you put together a book when you've come up with an idea like this? So how did you go from the study to the book itself? Yeah, So, once we had all the data, both qualitative and quantitative, we started pulling out quotes that you know, illustrated each of these points, like how people were feeling about different rules, the challenges they faced, how they overcame those challenges. Would get various anecdotes with that, And so I gave myself a writing schedule over the summer of twenty twenty one. So once I had all my data, I would start cranking it out. So what this would look like is, say, you know, each week, I would do one chapter, Like so chapter one would be a week in late June, and I would, you know, crank out a draft of the chapter Monday and Tuesday. I would do some edits on Wednesday and Thursday day, with Friday as my open day. Because I build an open space, which turns out to be one of the tranquility by Tuesday rules. But that was there in case stuff comes up, or you know, I couldn't work as much earlier in the week as I wanted to, or something else got pushed because I was working so hard on the book. And I would build in breaks into this schedule too, so I would write, say the introduction, chapter one and two, and then have a week off for mop up, so anything that needed to go back to during that time, and then maybe I do three, four, and five, and then take a week that was open and so on to get through the book. And yeah, that's how I wrote a draft of it. And then once you have a draft, obviously it has to go in through edits. My editor worked on it and you know, came back to me and did this basically twice, and then you know, it's it's been pretty much set since early spring of twenty twenty two. The book writing process is such that everything pretty much has to be set by then. So, yeah, we've just been waiting for it to come out then for the last six months. Here. I remember one thing that you did is that you did like a solo beach retreat, was that to finish the edits on this book. It was, so in late October of twenty twenty one, I went to Cape May for two nights, sort of two full days, two nights, and just hold myself up in a hotel room there with a nice view of the beach. But I wanted to be able to get through the whole book in one fell swoop without constantly being interrupted by things like, you know, having to take a kid somewhere or have a kid ask a question. You know, even when you work from a home, there's just always stuff like I wanted to remove everything and allow myself to get a sense of the book as a whole. And so I went to the hotel. I started working the first night, got up and ran on the beach in the morning, and then spent the whole day working and got through some stuff and you know, finished the next morning. And it was good. It was good to really have that time. I've done that for a few other books, you know, I did it for Off Clock, and that was really helpful, just to kind of when you are in that deep editing phase, to be able to experience the book all at once, I mean kind of as a reader might and instead of being in these short bits where you can't necessarily think of the whole book in your head simultaneously. No, that makes sense. And your book definitely feels like it comes together as a finished product rather than a series of disjointed steps. So I guess it paid off. Plus it was probably kind of fun as well. And speaking of fun, we have our listener. Well. Actually, first I just wanted to mention before we move on to our listener question, which does relate to this book's themes, that if you enjoyed this conversation and if you enjoy best at both worlds, I really do advise you that you're you're most likely going to really enjoy Tranquility by Tuesday. And if you're going to get it anyway, you might as well get it now. So Laura's not going to want to like tootor our own horn, but really definitely consider pre ordering it, pre ordering it as books, buying it for your book club, et cetera. I do not think you will regret it, all right, our question, our question is, and this relates very much to the themes of the books. Somebody wrote that they love the idea of big and literal adventures but struggle to come up with ideas and struggle to know which is big and which is little. Yeah, well so yeah, the rule is one big adventure and one little adventure, and we can get sort of you know, as we analyze the text, what is the exact meaning of one big adventure and one little adventure? I mean, what I say in the book is roughly that a big adventure is three to four hours, So think half a weekend day, something you could do on a weekend morning before a kid's nap in the afternoon. A little adventures just an hour could be less than an hour, could happen on a lunch break a weekday evening, just as long as it's out of the ordinary. And the idea of having two per week is just to get yourself on a good pace of doing something that is different, right, something that makes your week feel like it is memorable instead of being the same thing over and over again. But you know, two relatively small adventures each week is not going to exhaust or bankrupt anyone like you can still spend a lot of time hanging out in your pajamas if that is what you wish to do. As for finding adventures, I mean, this is skills we use all the time. As we're thinking what do we do with kids, for instance on a rainy Saturday. I mean, you're always kind of come up with stuff. And one thing I do is get on email lists for area organizations because you know, every institution, every organization has some sort of programming, right, that's what they do, That's what the people who run them are always thinking about what new programs are we going to put out there, And so if you are on the email list for these organizations, you will see that your you know, library system has a new art exhibit at the branch that is not the one you normally go to, but it's not too far away, and so that might be something you could do one weekday evening or on a lunch break, and that would be a little adventure. For instance, you can always do your routines in a slightly different way. So if you exercise in some capacity, maybe instead of walking in one place, you take a different trail right, or you try a different exercise class than you have tried before, or you run with somebody new, or maybe you bike to a destination like bike an errand right and bring your lock and do the errand and bike back like that. If that's not something you normally do. That could be a way to shake that up a little bit. You can always be a tourist in your own town. That wherever you live, there are various things that people are told to do when they are visiting, and those can be things that you try out as well. Probably many of them are fun, and that's why they are recommended to people. So maybe it's that great Hamburger place that you know everyone has to try, or maybe it's a hike that's near town that you want to do, or it's a drive in theater that you know is really old and historic and you know you never have gone to it, but they do show occasional movies like that's something you could do. That would be an adventure as well, you know, I mean, and honestly, it's more a state of mind than anything else. And so even in the darkest days of lockdown, there were ways to have adventures, and I did Tranquility by Tuesday the Project. In the spring of twenty twenty one in the US, at least a lot of people were coming out of a lot of those restrictions, but there were still some in various places that people were coming from, and you know, they'd still come up with stuff like I mean, people built a little bridge out of sticks over a stream in their backyard, right, Like that was something they did with their kids as an adventure. Somebody did a chalk game of shoots and ladders on their driveway, Like that's a little adventure. So there's always something you can do. I love it well. Other than Tranquility by Tuesday, which is our official love of the week this week, our unofficial loves of the week, I guess I will share mine is a very Laura Vandercamp inspired stationary find. And the reason I say that is because everybody knows that one of the things she advocates trying every once in a while or continuously, depending on what you're looking for, is to track your time. And perhaps if you are inspired to do so by a Tranquility by Tuesday, you could also track some of these metrics. And I discovered this little study planner called the Cocuyo Campus Daily, a five study planner. It's available for a whopping five dollars and fifty cents on jet pens, and it has sixty days worth where you can actually pretty nicely write out what your schedule expect for the day. You can do some fun color coding. There would be space down below where you could, you know, cross off your TBT metrics and the price is right on points. So if you wanted to do this for I mean sixty days takes you through two months, you could buy two of these for ten bucks and you know, go through things for more than ten weeks. Sounds great. Yeah, have to check that out. I know a lot of people do enjoy or at least find it useful to try tracking their time for a while. And if you're not big on spreadsheets, that would be another way to do it. So my love of the week I have two. One is the series of nine icons that we came up with to show the nine rules. So if you look at any of my you know, peripheral stuff that's coming out of the scorecard, the Tranquility by Tuesday scorecard or the discussion guides or the excerpt if you pre order like, they have these icons on them for the nine rules, and they're really cute looking. They're very eye catchy. So I love that. I'm also really enjoying and happy to be sharing my Tranquility by Tuesday in real life videos. It was so fun to do this, like I had not produced with somebody like a series of my own videos. I've been interviewed for stuff, and you know, done segments for things, but I'd never conceived of what I would do sort of from start to end and think about how we could get the footage for it and who might want to do it and how we would show it. And it was a new skill. It was something I'd wanted to do for a while. And I'm really happy with all these turned out, so please check those out as well. Awesome, love it well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking all things tranquility by Tuesday, and I definitely want to thank everyone for pre ordering the book for buying it on October eleventh, if you want to wait till end, but if you want to order it the week early, happy to send you all the bonuses. I really do appreciate everyone's support. It is so fun to share a book with a supportive community and to know that people are reading it. So thank you so much, Thank you, and 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