Transitions: Task Switching, Interruptions, and Time Between Other Things

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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 Hartunger. 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 ninety three, which is airing in mid March of twenty twenty three. Sarah and I are actually sitting here together in Florida. We are in Fort Lauderdale, enjoying a little many to retreat here, just a quick one, but we are recording and enjoying being here together live. So today's episode is going to be about transitions in its various forms. When we say about transitions, there's lots of ways to think about it. Obviously, there are huge life transitions, which is its own can of worms. We're talking more about the minute transitions, the hour to hour activity to activity transitions we all go through every day, and many people don't particularly like transitions. They certainly can take a fair amount of time. I know that when people have logged their time for me, many people observe just how much time is lost in transition. Not lost in translation, but lost in transition, because we do make many transitions every day between different types of activities, between locations, different energy states, and so forth. But it turns out there's a little bit of research out there, different studies of people's attention and things like that, people who plan for transitions manage them better. So there we go. Whether you like them or not, whether you are personality wise able to deal with them or not, there are ways to be more efficient about them, and in many cases that is a better thing to do. So I've been rambling for a while here, let's transition to Sarah. Well, Hello, Yes, I think this is a great topic because, whether we like it or not, this is something we all have to contend with. Some people do seem more naturally gifted at making quick transitions, and some people tend to mind it more than others. And I actually, in thinking about this topic, I think those two may be uncoupled. I think that probably there's like a four square matrix of people who mind transitions and interruptions and also people who are able to do them quickly, because I identify as someone who is a pretty rapid transitioner. But I don't really like transitions, especially if they are not of my own doing. So this is kind of an interesting and interesting framework to think through. So one example would be, like, if you are going to go running, then how long would it take you to go from the thought that you're going to go running to like being out the door. I'm pretty quick. My husband, we were with him last night, I had a lovely dinner altogether, and he's like, yeah, he admitted it. It takes some really long time. I call it his ramping up, like and I don't even know what happens during ramping up, but like it's not fast, and he eventually gets out there and he's happy and it's great. I would also say that he minds interruptions, perhaps slightly less than me. I don't think he's as zen as some of my colleagues were. Literally, at any moment, I feel like I can ask them a question and they do not mind stopping whatever they're doing, or at least they certainly don't show it, whereas I kind of do mind and I probably do show it a little bit too. So, you know, we're just everybody is different. And even though this is trivial in any one given instance, a lot of these transitions happen so many times throughout the day that there is an additive quality, and so our ability to transition, how we feel about transitioning can can impact us absolutely. Yeah, thinking about that four square matrix. Other people who are able to make quick transitions and don't really mind them are in a very different space than people who hate them and can't make quick ones. I mean, then you just like stock and life throws all these these transitions at you. Yeah, I don't know. I guess I'm probably pretty quick too, and I've people will observe that when I post my time logs or something, that I might decide to go for a run in a forty minute period and then be back on a zoom call five minutes later, and people like, don't you need to shower out? No, I'm on zoom, I'm not in the room. They can't sell me smell a vision because this spelevision does not come into to that. I certainly don't like being interrupted for things that I have not brought into my life that you know, people barge into my office to ask a question or things like that. I do get a little bit frustrated about that. And one of the upsides of self employment and working from home is there's sort of fewer of those, especially if most people are out of the house during the day. But yeah, there's definitely a question of productivity here because let's say that you wish to write a book and you also have a job, on a family and things like that, if you are able to seize let's say thirty minutes during the day that you happen to have to work on that book, and it doesn't bother you to do that, like you're not holding out for no. I can only work on my book if I have four hours to do this. The problem being that four hours is unlikely to just appear in your life if you're a busy person, and so then you know you are able to do more. And I think we've also observed that some people maybe have an idea that it's harder to say, combine work and family responsibilities than it might be because of an inability to transition quickly between things. Yeah, there's probably some truth to that. I feel like I don't know. Well, I was starting to think about kids and transitions and how once you're with kids, transitions tend to tape much much longer because the kids themselves aren't necessarily going to be rapid transitioners. But I think there's also an element of like transition privilege for something where yeah, if you know that, like you're only going to have that thirty minute window and you could either like fritter it away or get that little strength training workout in, then there's probably a little bit of like necessity compressing transitions to the utmost essence of what they need to be so you can get done what you really want to get done. Yeah, we've been joking about people who could only write that book if they were off in their garret for a week, two weeks, three months. Who knows like what they're able to do because somebody else is dealing with their lives or you know, if you know to be able to take half the weekend to go do something, you may not be as concerned about fitting it in during the week. Or if you know that or if you, for instance, feel that it may be your partner's responsibility to deal with all things kids in house related. You may not worry about it taking you as long to transition in and out of things, because that's not your problem. Whereas if you feel like you are asking somebody to say cover for you while you go for a run, then you might naturally make yourself faster because it feels like borrowed time. So yes, I think there is some transition privilege. How yeah, I was gonna say, but it's and we're not saying like, oh, nobody should ever put aside a week and right, because you have actually, on occasion done little longer retreats. I think you've done it to edit some of your works, and absolutely useful. So this is absolutely not to say that those longer times aren't useful. It's just that they aren't always possible for most of us. Yeah, so, given that transitions are inevitable, we have to think about, Okay, well, even if I am not naturally gifted in this area, what can I do to make it faster? You know? What can I do to make it smoother? And so those are some of the things we wanted to talk about in the rest of this episode. Yeah, let's take our transition to an ad break. That was a good segue, right, yes, and then we will be right back. Well we are back talking about transitions. Oh my goodness, we transition back into our episode about transitions. So, as anyone who has kids know, sometimes transitions can be tough, although we joke about this as a if you want them to transition into something that they really want to do, they might have an easier time. Yes, our household, transition into screen time is instantaneous, and in fact there's often a lot of anticipation so that they can slide immediately into their preferred activity the moment that it's allowed. So it's definitely going to vary based on what is being transitioned to. As far as transitioning out of screen time into something else that might need to happen is going to be a harder and slower process with people's enthusiasm changing. But there's a couple of things you can do for yourself and for kids, or you know, give warnings about a specific time. I know that in our household, I try to tell people a few minutes before, like if they are going to have to end what they're doing. Say, okay, you know, if you're you have to be off the computer bok on weekends at eleven o'clock and it's ten forty, I'll go up and say I'm going to bed. You need to be off at eleven, so the person's at least thinking about that. Or you know, you're watching a movie, but we're going to be leaving for insert activity here in fifteen minutes. I'm telling you that so that in ten minutes you can turn it off and go to the bathroom and get your sacks on or whatever it is that you are going to need to do for that. And there's routines with it too, right, Yes, I think kids knowing what to expect, and that can happen by a couple of ways. One of those is repetition and the beauty of routine and doing something over and over again will help them learn that. Like after lunch we play outside, that's our transition, or you know, at the end of the dinner we bring our plates up and we take a bath. Like these routines help. And then also I think providing kids who are old enough to understand, or even young kids at their level, like telling them what to expect like like your warnings, but then also kind of like, Okay, I'm reviewing in a kind of anticipatory way. You know, this weekend, after gymnastics, we're going to stop of the library and then we're going to go home. And I think kids really do appreciate either a visual reminder or you know, going through what's going to happen, because I think it alleviates anxiety, can be a little bit of like positive energy if they're anticipating fun things. And I definitely help that. Think that mental exercise of them, like hearing what's going to happen, probably does something to the neural pathways that actually makes the transition a little bit easier because it's almost like they visualize it. Yeah, and it might help as you're thinking, you know, in our households and in our own personal lives too, about how to handle transitions. If you think about a really good teacher managing a classroom, there's a certain amount of material they've got to get through in the course of the year, and you only have so much instructional time, and so if you're constantly losing time on transitions, you are just up creak, like you're not going to get through all your staff. And so I've observed a few classrooms where people have even done things like have a certain way that papers are handed out or handed back, because if it's done in a different way, it takes a lot longer. And so if it can get to everybody in fewer minutes, then you have lessened that tax on your time or getting to any of the specials, like if you could get to music class in less time, then you have another minute or two of instructional time that it does add up or even you know, in preschool, do you guys the cleanup song? Did you guys have a clean up art? Yes? Okay, so you sing up, you know, clean up? Clean up everybody everywhere? Clean up? Do your share? How does it go? Yes, clean up? And you're right, that is a transition. It's very stereotype. They do it every time. And if you think about it, like with a number of kids they have in those classes and how long it takes to do them. Yeah, it's going to pay up dividends to have these kids doing things, moving through activities, efficiently, eating their snack, efficiently, throwing out their napkin after snack. In fact, it would be interesting to know what proportion of the day little kids spend in transition. In transition, it's got to be enormous. Yeah, although I mean because they're they're trying to streamline it to some degree. I mean, you know, the saying, let's all come to the circle of somebody who started singing what is the weather? Or the weather? But they don't fight it every time. I mean, you know, in your average classroom, most of the type the kids are sort of of that age that the classroom is age is aimed at. The vast majority of them will follow the transition and get to where they're going. It's just that that routine has been built. The expectation is that we get to the rug in an orderly fashion while this song is going, and we are there by the time we are at this part of the song or something, and they do it. And you know, I certainly when I think about like getting out the door with the kids, trying to have it be very similarly orderly, like these are the things we do now we're in the car. You know that these building you know, that's that's the kind of thing. Yes, And it's also nice like if you have a routine like getting out the door, which is basically a transition because you're shepherding your children from kind of the home environment to their next step. Yeah, I think about how like sometimes we have a song play that like ritualizes things. I have like very specific time points when I tend to, you know, remind the kids, Okay, it's seven twenty three, you need to be doing xyz. So yeah, thinking through how to streamline that because it could really I've seen it take much much longer, to everybody's dismay. Yeah, and part of that is organization, right, you want I'm sorry, I'm trying to look through our notes, sorry, to figure out where is this stuff? Yes, so how can you make quicker transitions? So you have a little quote here that thinking that you need all day means you will never do it. I think it's a quote of you, oh yes, me okay, but yes that you know, make the most of these compressed periods of time. So, you know a couple of things. First, thinking through perfectionism is the enemy of getting stuff done. You're not going to have hours of contiguous time. You're not going to be in a less hassled place in the future. You know that, like oh yes, November I'll have time for X, Y or Z, like it's not going to happen. Like you, your life is what it is. So if you want to do something, you need to find a place for it in your life now. And that means that you have to be okay with having less periods of time you can chunk up a task like it helps to think through what you are trying to get done, what the small steps of that are, so that you can then assign a smaller step to a time. You're doing that with your photo books, right, Yes, so I find the idea of sitting down for hours and doing a photobook very daunting, but I do not mind kind of assigning myself one month of photos to go through. It takes me about honestly, probably even closer to five minutes than ten minutes. So it's a great use of those little dead periods of time. I have a note that I want to do it, so that the intention is there, and then yeah, and I know that it's like a productive piece of a project because there's twelve months in a year, and once I'm done with that, it's very easy to you know, dump them into an album that will be auto arranged. The hard part is selecting the photos. So that's a good example of a task that paint the butt. I'm never going to have a if I have three hours clear, that's never going to be what I want to do with the cars, and so the chunking it up is very helpful. Yeah. Absolutely. You can also prepare, you know, so if you do need to get to the gym fast and get back or go for a run, having those clothes laid out, or at least having a very specific place where all your exercise gear always is. You know, your swimsuit and goggles are always in the gym bag, for instance. That's something that you might because then you could just grab it and go as opposed to hunting around for it. Having the work materials for a project readily accessible. Or here's a fun one, thinking about what you could do in little bits of downtime during the work day. I know we had a couple of people working from home who are trying to find more time for things like instrument practice. And if you are working at home you could theoretically do it, but if it involves you know, ten different steps of going and finding your instrument and getting it all together, then going to find your music and then getting yourself set up in a spot. It's just going to take more time than might seem worth it. Whereas if it is there, so you know, if you put your guitar in your office, then you can pick it up and play it when you have a short amount of time. If your music is right there, you don't have to go hunting for it. You can seize small bits of time in a way that you just can't if it's going to take a lot more time. So thinking through how you can be ready for small amounts of time so that you can make quicker transitions as helpful. And it is true that generally being organized and knowing where the things are in your house that you need is going to shorten your transition time because we do spend a lot of time searching or compiling. I mean I even think about again getting out the door in the morning, and my current rituals to like throw everything that we need to leave the house like at the door. But if I had to go search for my kids' backpacks and like find my keys in a new spot every time, whatever, it would take twice as long. Yeah, Coats, backpacks, shoes are all in the mudroom, which is where we leave from. The various car keys are in a little basket in the mudroom ready to go. Or even when I'm going for a run or something in the winter, obviously you need more gear for outdoor running. But I have my headband and my gloves on a shelf in the mudroom, so I can just grab those and go, and it takes a lot less time to get out the door than if I was hunting for them everywhere, which is something to think about in general with kids activity bags for instance, can everything stay in one bag? Once it's clean, you'll put it back in the bag, and the bag is in one place, it can just be grabbed and go. Or if you have sort of a mobile office, like what are the things you need? If it's maybe a planner and your lap top and your phone, those are the things that need to go in your bag to go, but you have that very clear where those are and how those can get in the bag and get out the door quickly. Badging a secret in the Tranquility by Tuesday rules is something that can actually help to eliminate like unnecessary transitions. Yeah, there's because we're talking about that, there's this distinction between transitions that you need to do between different activities. So you want to go for a run, you have a little bit of time, you can do it. Get back on with your life. You have a little bit of time to work on a long term project. You can get yourself into it, get out, go do something else. People wind up making many transitions during the day for reasons that are not necessarily all that great. That you've just chosen to check email when you didn't need to, or you have looked at your phone to answer a quick text, or you have decided to pop up from something that you were doing and go do some something else because it occurred to you, and that can wind up distracting you a lot from what you intended to do. It's funny. I've been working on a novel and one of the things that has been really helpful, I think I mentioned this in a previous thing, but the zoom hours. So I meet up with a group of other writers and we all have our screens on, we have our sound off, but it just is an awareness of, oh, this is the time, these are the two hours I want to devote to this novel, and so I'm less likely to get up and go move the laundry or go, you know, deal with something else during that time, because I want to. If I'm constantly popping in and out of the screen, it's like, well what are you doing? Nobody's going to ask, but it does feel like there is that accountability there now. Obviously those things need to get done. So this brings us to tranquility. By Tuesday rule number eight, batch the little things, So keep a list of all these things that might cause transitions if you tried to do that in the moment, but don't if you batch them all together. And there's a common productivity rule out there, it's called a two minute rule, which is the idea is if something is going to take less than two minutes, you should just do it when you think about it, as opposed to putting it off for some later time. And on some level it makes sense even thinking about transitions, because it's like once that thought is in your brain, you're going to have to get it back into your brain another time. So that's adding another transition if you don't do it now. But the problem is you might not know that it's a two minute a task, like you might think it's a two minute task, but actually it's a ten minute task, and that's problematic. It may start out as a two minute task like oh, I just need to email my colleague those figures like I need to send for that attachment. But once you go to your inbox to send your colleague that attachment, you are in your inbox and there are other messages there that you haven't read, and so you're like, oh well, let me look at those. And next thing, you know, you're two minute tasks has you know, consume twenty plus minutes. So it's really been a huge thing. And sometimes it's that you're struggling with something that's complicated or difficult, and you've allowed yourself to be distracted to get away from this. Yeah, escape distraction, the escape distraction, and it looks like you're being productive, like oh I have to answer this email, but in fact you really didn't all the time. And you know, so you have taken yourself away from the big thing. So make a list, do it all at one time. I try to do a lot of these things on Fridays. I know many people can't wait that long for many sort of batch type tasks. But let's say that you decide to mostly devote your morning to kind of more focused work, and then you could take say forty five minutes after lunch to quickly bang through all those things that would have taken you away from that work that you can just get them done in sequence, and so that's minimized the number of transitions. Yes, because when you're doing a bunch of tiny things all at once, it feels more just like an hour of tiny things rather than a whole I mean, yes, you are probably transitioning from one task to another, but that's so true. Plus that mental shift of like if I know I'm going to be doing it on Friday at three, then I'm not doing it right now. So yes, I love that, And I also agree that the two minute rule can be helpful. Like I think my thought is like, if someone's already going through their inbox, like they're already in that processing mindset, and they come across something that's two minutes, like that might be fine. But in general I totally agree with you that, like, first of all, how do you know what's going to take two minutes? And second of all, it's rarely worth stopping something else that you're doing. I mean, I'm not going to stop in the middle of a run and do something that takes two minutes. But I probably shouldn't stop in the middle of writing a patient note either, So yeah. Anyway, So this brings us to the idea of planning, though it's fair specialty, so because transitions and planning are very closely lit. I mean, I don't know if it's obvious, but they are, yes, because it makes sense that you have to have an understanding of how long these transitions take and where and where they fit into your day. And planning is a really big piece of knowing what you might want to do with smaller bits of time, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel every time you end up with twenty minutes where you could do something. My personal habit is to have like a little daily habit tractor tracker on my daily planner that I use on paper. You guys know that if your best life plans listeners as well. And this is like a little cue to me that like, when I do have a bit of time, I can look to see if I've checked off all those boxes. And often things that fit into transitions for me are like my duo lingo. That's a great transition activity. Because do it in like five minutes, or like meditation, like doing a little headspace if you need some mental cool down time between activities. The other things on my little habit tracker, just in case you're curious, are going outside, reading, and listening to some kind of music. So all of those are things that can be done pretty quickly, are pretty flexible with respect to how much time you have. So you may want to come up with yourself a menu of things that you are interested in doing, and come up with some kind of visual reminders so you can think about how you might use those kind of like little awkward bits well, and even just planning what you need to do over the course of a week. You know, if you do your Friday planning rule number two plan on Fridays, you know what needs to get done, and so when you are thinking through the steps to that, you can then assign yourself steps for a day and you might be more motivated to get through them when you do have time, being like this is a step toward something I have identified as important over the course of the week. I think the key thing though, with all of this is to understand that transitions are inevitable and you have to be realistic and schedule some time for them, and I really fun. This kind of goes both ways, right you people get caught in various traps on this. You know, if you think transitions have to take a really long long time, that might keep you from ever starting things, and that would be a problem. On the other hand, if you don't build in time for transitions, that is a pretty common culprit. And people who are chronically late is that they haven't realized that the time when you are putting on your shoes and the time that you're backing your car out of the driveway, that space between those two is not zero. And if you think it's zero, that's why you are five to ten minutes late everywhere. Whereas if you acknowledge that, okay, it's takes some time to put on shoes, put on my coat, grab my handbag, get the keys, get the kids, make sure they have their shoes on, get out the door, get everyone strapped in if you have car seats or arranged in the vehicle, or however you are getting out the door. You know, all this takes some non zero amount of time, and yet it's a transition. People don't necessarily think about the number of people are like, Okay, well takes fifteen minutes to get to this place, so if we have to be there at ten, we'll leave at ninety five. Ninety five they're putting on shooes. Then you're late. You're five to ten minutes late. You have to build that transition time in. I think some people are much better at doing that naturally than others, so we probably both do that. I assume that we think about the constituent steps in any process and how long each of those steps takes. Sometimes I build in a buffer and wind up comically early to things. Less of that now I think in life than I once did, but it does exist. The time is not zero. But the good news is once you have an awareness of this, if you do, in fact know how long the transitions in your life take, then you can construct a schedule that reasonably accounts for them and allows you to sort of take a rational perspective on what is possible and what you can get done in the course of the day even with those transitions, and you might be surprised one way or the other. You might be forced to reckon with the reality that you can't do twenty six hours of activities in a twenty four hour day. That's not a matter of your motivation or will powered physics. But you might also be able to say that, oh well, if I do have an hour between calls, I could, you know, if I have my workout gear handy, do a strength workout, or go for a walk or call a friend with that time. And you know, even if I'm telling her like I just wanted to check in with you for a little bit, so you know, it's not endless. You could do those things in that amount of time. Yeah, I love it both sides of the transition coin. So life transitions. We were trying to come up with some life transitions and we had trouble. Although I could to talk a little bit about my current career transition, well, I would say yeah, because when we're like, oh, let's do an episode on transitions, like okay, well we'll talk about it as a personality framework, we're talking about ways to make quicker transitions, and like, and let's talk about life transitions, and like, well, I don't really have any big life transitions. I'm kind of doing the exact same thing I was for a while. Nothing's really changed that much. But Sarah has made a big change in her life about four or five months ago now, right, So I want to hear first how that's going, and then I want to hear more about bil p love well. I mean, that's part of it, right. So I went to part time officially at my clinical role on October the first of twenty twenty two. There have been many months of kind of preparation for that, but since I was still doing my other leadership role, like I really couldn't do anything official until that point. My schedule became three days of clinical and two days of not working for the institution where I work for. At least that's how we have it set up. It's a little bit different when on call, et cetera, and and I have pretty much filled those days very rapidly. I think initially I was like, oh, I'm just gonna, you know, find myself and figure out what I want to do. But turns out I want to do a lot. Turns out I like creating things. Turns out I think I had a lot of pent up creational creational that's not a word, but whatever creative energy, yes, that I needed to release or wanted to release. So I quickly thought about creating Best Like Plans Academy and gave myself a fairly tight timeline to come up with all the materials and launch. That ended up working out really really well. It turns out, you know, for myself, I'm very motivated by like having someone i'm working with where I need to have certain deadlines. So I ended up hiring a designer, which really really helped me get my stuff together because I needed to get it to her, you know. And then I also launched, so I basically told people I'm going to be doing this course series and it's going to start in January and so you know, sign up now. And this was like in November, and so that was Round one of what I called Besley Plans Academy, and it's taken up a lot of time. In addition, of course to lots of podcast stuff and blog stuff, et cetera. I did Round two for the spring, which is already full and it's going to start in late March and go towards May. And then, because apparently I just didn't feel like that was enough work, I decided that I wanted to do a live version just because I kind of have Bet Laureno's like I've kind of nudged her. I've been interested in the idea of doing some kind of live retreat for a long time just because I feel like, oh my gosh, we can like meet people face to face and talk to them, and how valuable will that be. Plus I just feel like, as someone who's kind of shocked for retreats like that for myself before, there's not that many options. There's like some, you know, retreats centered around running. There's some like extremely pricey like physician coaching type retreats. There are some out there, but there's there's not a ton. And I loved doing like planning retreats with my husband, and I thought, you know what I want to do like a live planning retreat with people who love to plan and people who want to spend some time relaxing, thinking through things really methodically about what they want to do for the coming year, really kind of dreaming big and with a sprinkling of kind of reinforcing some of the planning techniques that I love to teach about. So yeah, Best Laid Plans Live is going to be November second through the fourth and Ford Lauderdale. We are actually there right now in the hotel where I think it's going to be. This is not finalized yet, but if you are interested in this, and I did not mean to turn this into a solicitation necessarily, although I think that a lot of best of Both Worlds listeners would find this really fun. You can go to the shoebox dot com slash BLPA or just go to the BLPA tab at the top of my page and you can find out information about how you could register and join me and maybe and maybe me. Yeah, no, I want to go. I totally want to go. I want to I want to plan my twenty twenty four because if it's in November, we'll be thinking about the upcoming year, right, so it can have your full marching orders for twenty twenty four to make it the best year ever. I think that's going to be really cool. But yeah, I was laughing about your transitions. You you know, immediately transitioned into lots and lots of stuff. She was going to find herself, and she found herself in the first three minutes, so that was yeah. I think I just I think I knew in the back of my head I wanted to do a lot more than I was doing just kind of like, you know, this, this work and these thought processes that have taken many many years to grow, I'm like, I need to share them. And then I finally had this space to do so, so we grew very quickly. I am not planning on making any further transitions, so this is at least for you know, a long long time. So this is kind of I'm going to grow into this I don't know, breakdown of my life. I love it. I love it well. It brings us to the question section of this is okay, So this question it comes from a listener who is also talking about transitions. That was a nice juxtaposition here, Sarah. Sarah always finds some questions and this one actually really deals with it very well in terms of kid transitions. So this listener has a child in daycare. They started daycare when the kid was a toddler, so she was home for about the first year, mostly doing just a little freelance consulting on the side. Then decided that she wanted to go back to work, so put her child in daycare when she was a toddler. So that you know, it's for people who've been in it since they were more of the infant age, it's somewhat less of a transition, but obviously toddlers have a little bit more challenge with transitions people who have been through that age. So anyway, she says, how do you deal with the transition of dropping the kid off at daycare when the child is sad? So that, as many people have experienced, there's some separation anxiety at that age, and her her daughter is crying when she drops her off, and so it makes her very upset. She doesn't think that staying home is the right thing for either of this then long term, but she does feel guilty when her child is crying when she leaves, so how should she deal with that? So when I read this question, I immediately thought of doctor Becky, who does the work at Good Inside. And I'm not like a member of her community officially, but I followed a lot of what she said and her podcast has some useful tips, and this is something that I feel like I can hear her voice in the back of my head of how she would handle this, and it's very similar to how I've handled it, which is validating the feelings and also you know, not allowing it to derail what you need to do so, saying something like, I see you're sad, and I get it. You want to be with me, and I love you so much, and it's still important that mommy go to work, and when I come pick you up, it'll be so great to hear all about your day. So you're acknowledging them, you're validating them. They are allowed to be mad, and you are going to work because you have to go to work, and this is the way that it's going to allow you to do that. And I also will say from personal experience that you know, I've had some kids be less thrilled about going to various places, but usually I think with the firm and kind of keeping things as brief as possible. Unless there's something terribly unpleasant about the environment, usually there's like an extinction that happens, like eventually they just get used to it. Or even if there is a little sad period in the beginning, you can get reassurance from the teacher that, like they'll send you a picture twenty minutes in that they're happily fingerpainting or doing whatever with friends, because school is fun for most of these kids. If they're miserable in the place where they're going then it. You know. Of course, there might be times you hope and see if there are alternatives, because for the most part, I think childcare institutions do a great job of making it a place where they're enjoying their time. Yeah, I mean they're playing with Plato with friends. I mean, what's not to love about it. So yeah, I would check in with the teachers and see if this is something that lasts beyond when you walk out the door, the tears are largely for you, and then once you leave she is happy, because I think that's what happens with a ton of toddlers. I would also say if given that it's hard on you, maybe you don't need to be the one doing drop off every day. And I realize that you have a mental pattern here that this listener was home with her daughter for the first year or so and had thought that maybe that would be kind of the long term pattern. So I suspect that she and her partner may have gotten into this mindset that they put the kid in childcare because she got a job and therefore it is her doing it. But you both are working, the childcare is now there for both of you, and so maybe you come up with a schedule that involves you not doing one hundred percent of the drop offs, so at least some days you are not the one getting the clinging there at the end, and that would allow you to start your work day in kind of a different headspace than if you are dealing with that kind of emotional situation day after day. Even if you know that five minutes later she's perfectly happy, it can still be hard to deal with the tears at the time. So I would think that maybe you want to reorganize that. And you know, who knows your child may not react the same way with your partner. They might, but they might not too. So you'll find out different audience. Different audience behaves different every time. So our love of the week, I'm going to say the ocean because I'm here Fort Lauderdale and I don't live anywhere near the beach I mean to do. It's like ninety minutes away from where we are, but I have positive associations of the beach. For me, it's often vacation or that I've traveled somewhere. You know, a work conference that's at a place on the beach. You know, it's just generally good time. So when I'm at the beach and so I love being here. I walked on the sand yesterday in the afternoon and really enjoyed it. So that's my love of the week. Well, I love social runs, which is something I did many many years ago and then didn't do for so long. And this week I ran with France. Yesterday I ran with Laura's day and I forgot how fun it is to chat with someone while you're running in a lovely setting, and it's just so much fun. She ran four fits of it with me. Today. I kind of petered out at the end. Well, it wasn't so bad, so we ran four miles together, two and a half out, then the one and a half back. I stopped because I needed to walk for a little bit. The heat was getting to me and Sarah kept running, but I walked for about two three minutes and then I was able to run slowly the rest of the way. I saw, Yeah, yeah, that heat is a an acquired taste or never acquired taste, but dealt with I guess the way it is. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Well this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking about transitions. We'll be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.