Unusual Hobbies and Enjoying Life with Cindy Everett, CFO and Mother of 2

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hi.

00:00:03
Speaker 2: This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

00:00:08
Speaker 1: And this is Sarah Hartunger.

00:00:10
Speaker 3: 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.

00:00:17
Speaker 2: 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.

00:00:32
Speaker 1: Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura.

00:00:35
Speaker 2: In this episode, I am going to be interviewing Cindy Everett, who is a CFO and mom who also has a couple of really cool hobbies. And in case anyone is wondering, they are not running hobbies. We have been accused of late of having a lot of people who do serious running as their side thing on this.

00:00:53
Speaker 1: Podcast, which we plead guilty to.

00:00:55
Speaker 2: We love running and so we are always looking for people who are doing awesome things in that field. Well, we love to talk about it. Sarah's doing a lot of really cool running these days, but we wanted to talk with somebody who not only had a very intense job, but who also made time for other things.

00:01:10
Speaker 1: So Sindy's going to talk a little bit about.

00:01:13
Speaker 2: Being a docent who leads architectural tours in Chicago, and she also hosts a WWE podcast with her husband. So if you ponder whatever projects and time you might spend with your significant other, that is certainly one way to guarantee that you are going to have a lot of time together as you are attempting to get your episodes out frequently. I know Sarah and I spend a lot of time together.

00:01:42
Speaker 3: That's like a multifocal hobby too, because obviously she has to cultivate her WWE passion, and then there's the whole creation of the podcast and spending her time with her husband recording it. So that's a that's a really that's a lot of a hobby.

00:01:57
Speaker 1: It's a lot of a hobby. That hobby is doing a lot of things for her right now.

00:02:01
Speaker 2: So anyway, we think you will love hearing from Sandy about her life, because yeah, it really is cool to make time for something other than work and family responsibilities.

00:02:12
Speaker 1: And even if it does take.

00:02:13
Speaker 2: A reasonable amount of time, it's it's often it's not that much time, right, Like, you know, if I mean, Sarah, how many hours.

00:02:19
Speaker 1: Are do you think you are spending running per week?

00:02:22
Speaker 3: Now?

00:02:22
Speaker 4: Oh?

00:02:22
Speaker 3: I mean I know, for it's like eight hours a week.

00:02:24
Speaker 1: Eight hours.

00:02:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's eight which is a lot, but that is an hour and ten minutes a day, right, So if you consider that, there are twenty four hours in a day, and obviously she bolkes it a little bit more on some days, longer than others, but it's still not all your time. And I can say the same thing of singing. Like so during the school year, I have rehearsal from seven to nine on my choir practice nights on Thursday, and if my chamber choir's meeting will sing after that, so it might go to nine thirty. And during the you know, during the school year again I sing on Sunday mornings and I go at nine we rehearse again, we have the ten o'clock service. So you know we're talking, depending on how you're counting, it's four hours or a little bit more per week. With the time I then spend practicing four to five hours a week, and so it's not a small amount of time, but again it's it's less than an hour a day for something that's a pretty you know, it feels like a fairly large commitment. So I think it's important to keep those things in mind, that you can actually fit a lot into.

00:03:25
Speaker 3: A busy life, and you can get multiple things out of your hobby, like what you're singing, You're getting some social time, you're getting out of the house, you're practicing a craft, you're like and like, we think of these things as one thing, but actually they can. And I'm sure again with the WWE like it brings her many things.

00:03:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but was it wwe WW What is it?

00:03:46
Speaker 3: We're going to find out from Cindy, because you definitely don't want to find out it was.

00:03:50
Speaker 2: At WWF at some point, I forget. I feel like it changed, I mean a change. Yes, I think we talk about this too. All right, anyway, we'll hear all from Cindy about it. Here we go, great interview, let's go for it. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Cindy Everett to the program, who is a listener of Best of Both Worlds and so we're very excited to have her on. So, Cindy, can you introduce yourself to our listeners.

00:04:15
Speaker 4: Sure, thank you, Laura. My name is Cindy Everett and I am a mom, a CFO, and a podcaster along with my husband, and I'm very excited to be here today, so thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

00:04:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're really excited about it. And you have two young children, right.

00:04:32
Speaker 4: I do. I have two boys, ones five and a half and one is three, So it's basically like having a Genevieve and a Henry.

00:04:38
Speaker 1: Running around pretty close. Actually, yeah, yes, it's your oldest in school yet.

00:04:44
Speaker 4: No, he's wrapping up pre K right now, so we'll be starting kindergarten in the fall.

00:04:49
Speaker 1: Yeah. And you live in the Chicago area. Have you been there long?

00:04:53
Speaker 4: Yes, I've lived in the city. I'm in the city proper, been here about fifteen years. Did the first seven years on the North side on them that my now husband, who was a born and raised on the South side of Chicago here, so we're still in the city limits. Chicago has a rule that if you work for the city, you have to live within the city of Chicago. So I'm my husband's a teacher. We our neighbors are all policemen, firemen, a lot of first responders.

00:05:17
Speaker 1: So, yeah, that's awesome.

00:05:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's kind of a probably a good thing to be living in the city you are serving. So yeah, we were excited to have you on because you I mean, obviously you have a great career, family and all this stuff, but you also have two really cool side projects, yes, that we wanted to talk with you about.

00:05:38
Speaker 1: So the first one architectural tours.

00:05:42
Speaker 2: So tell us all about what you do with that and how that came to be sure.

00:05:46
Speaker 4: Yeah, So for the past twelve years, I have been a volunteer docent with Chicago Architecture Center. So they are best known for their boat tours, but they actually offer over eighty five different tours around Chicago, either walking or on buses in addition to the boat tour, And I also have a tour that I do where we ride the elevated trains. So it's always been kind of a hobby of mine. And then when I moved to Chicago, you know, back fifteen some years ago, I did the boat tour, got interested, did more tours, did some of the bus tours, went to Oak Park and did the Frankwood Right tours, and just found more and more. It was, you know, an interest of mine, and at the time, I was working in public accounting for one of the Big Four, so long hours, a lot of you know, higher stress environment, and like Gretchen Drubin says that reading children's literature is hotel My tells I'd come home and want to look through my architecture books and look through my Chicago history books. So the same week in September of twenty twenty, sorry, twenty ten, where I put in my notice at public Accounting, I applied to become a docent for Chicago Architecture Center. So I felt like, you know, I'm also an obliger. I need that external accountability. It was something I was really interested in getting involved in, and I saw becoming a docent really a way to you know, learn all the history and learn everything that I was interested in.

00:07:03
Speaker 2: Which is a really involved process, right. I Mean people are like, oh, volunteer gig, I'll just go in, but you actually have to really learn a lot to lead expert tours.

00:07:12
Speaker 4: Yeah. Absolutely. So there was a written application, I had to do an in person interview with the panel. The program started in January of twenty eleven, and they basically the program has changed a bit since I went through it, but they essentially said it was the equivalent of an college level class in architecture. So we met, you know, for eight weeks every Saturday from nine to four for in classroom training, and then we also had assigned readings. Yeah, it was like a college class. We had a syllabus. Every week we would have to do three or four you know write ups of different buildings that were on the tours. So it would be write five hundred words about the Brookery, write five hundred words about the Banodnoc, read these articles about Chicago history. And of course i'mvolving all this because this is all what I was seeking out anyways, content wise, and obviously a lot about you know, crowd management, tour management, you know, public speaking, because we write our own tours. Every tour has a manual, but I don't have a script that says, first, I'm going to read sentence X, then Y and Z. We're given core topics, and then we have to write our own narratives and our own notes when we're leading those tours. So yeah, and then and then before I'm before I'm able to give tours to the public, I had to get certified from another dose, and so I just didn't take people out and tell them what I had for lunch today and kind of make up my backs along the way. And then every five years were required to be peer reviewed to make sure they're staying current.

00:08:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, so a lot of rigor to this, to this volunteer gig. Yeah, absolutely really want to do it. And so what sort of the tours that you lit, Like, what.

00:08:44
Speaker 2: What do you tell people about? Why don't you share some of the fun things that we would learn absolutely on tour.

00:08:50
Speaker 4: So the one that I do three tours right now. One is a walking tour of downtown Chicago, specifically on the skyscrapers that were completed eight up through the early nineteen hundreds. So this is a time of great growth in Chicago. And one thing that's really interesting about that tour that I always toeut is it's not like DC where it's government buildings. It's not like Europe where it's churches. A lot of the buildings that we talk about on that tour are actually commercial office buildings. So yeah, it's interesting. It's many of them are still functional office buildings. So you think about when you want to make a building profitable, something rentable, in the eighteen nineties. What does that need? So you have really small light bulbs, right, electricity in the only eighteen hundreds is not the greatest, So you want buildings with big plate glass windows. You want Chicago, it's very common for buildings to be designed around a light court. So I'll say a square donut and you'll have either a window that is out to the street or into that light court to get that natural light. There is also these buildings were mainly expeculative, where it would be a group of investors coming together to invest in these buildings and they want them to be rentable, beautiful, manageable. So there's one quote I use that say, you know, a building must be ready with its cost, or there'll be no investors to pay for it. And I always joke that, Okay, if you have a building that's very beautiful but not making money, it's not going to be around for very long. If you have a building that's very functional, not beautiful, it's not going to be featured on an architecture tour at a one hundred years. So that walking tour is really great to get the both of those those beach I almost said best of both worlds.

00:10:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it is, it is.

00:10:25
Speaker 2: You have to have the beauty and the functionality. It is truly the best of both worlds in the architecture son.

00:10:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then you go into some of these lobbies which they wanted to be the show stoppers. And there's some beautiful lobbies in downtown Chicago. If you're in town and get a chance to go in the Rookery building on LaSalle, or the Marquette over on Dearborn or one point thirty five less to the Seal is a great Art Deco lobby. It's really cool and something that you know, you walk by those buildings maybe every day on the way to work, and you don't realize that there's these beautiful Tiffany mosaics ten feet away from where you're walking.

00:10:56
Speaker 1: So that's why you got to go on a tour, exactly, exactly.

00:10:59
Speaker 4: Yes, it's great for people from out of town, and even when people from Chicago take the tour, it's really fun to share those little hidden gems with them.

00:11:06
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And you know, so when on earth do you do this? I mean you're supposed to be giving a certain number of tours regularly as part of maintaining your knowledge and your practice with it, and here you are a CFO and mom of two young kids, so where does.

00:11:22
Speaker 4: This fit in? Yeah, to your life. So I feel like with my tours, it's more maintenance phase right now, thankfully. So I'll get to the other tours that I learned, but one of them is about ten minutes from my house, so that is in the summer. That's a neighborhood tour that runs May through October. So I leaned heavily on the Beverly Tour getting my tour hours. Were required to do ten tours per year, every tour that you're certified, and you need to lead at least once, so I always try and get a good mix of that historic Walking Tour is telling you about. I always try and get in three or four of the elevated tours, and then in the summer, I'll always do the Beverly Walking Tour. So yeah, it's very It's like anything else, you have to plan, you have to be intentional about when you're doing this. I have my planning sessions with my husband on Sunday, and that's always something we're thinking about, is when we're going to record our podcast, when we're going to I'll go into that moord later when we're going to watch our matches and also when I'm going to be out of pocket doing tours. So it was a little tricky around pregnancies, right. So my first was born in October of twenty seventeen, so that in that case I did have enough time to get ready and I didn't have any kids, so I'd go every weekend and give tours. You know, I had no problem getting my ten second baby was born in April twenty twenty, which ended up being a whole other kind of direction we went in. But the plan originally was to get you know, four tours done before I by March of twenty twenty, before I got too big to be uncomfortably walking around downtown Chicago for an hour and a half, and then the idea was then to pick that up in the fall. However, that ten tour requirement was waived for twenty twenty. Thankful.

00:12:56
Speaker 1: I could imagine if you are tourists in general, taim.

00:12:59
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, I will say in twenty twenty one, on my neighborhood tour, we saw pretty good, good numbers that summer, I think because a lot of other opportunities weren't opened yet.

00:13:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, but if you're walking around outside mostly I mean with a lot of this sort of exterior stuff exactly, it would have been something that people could more safely do.

00:13:16
Speaker 4: So that's right cool, right, Yeah, we left, We weren't allowed to go into the lobbies for a period of time, but thankfully we're allowed to get back in the lobbies, which is great because I love talking about those lobbies on that historic tour.

00:13:27
Speaker 2: Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and I will be right back with Cindy Evrett. All right, Well, we are back with Cindy Everett talking about architecture in Chicago right now. So Cindy, you have a few more fun facts from your tour that you want to share with us that we're all going to learn something new here today that we can share with our spouses tonight.

00:13:58
Speaker 4: Yeah. Sure. So My first fun fact is that after the Chicago fire in eighteen seventy one, most of a lot of that debris from the fire was actually pushed out into Lake Michigan, and that forms what is today known as Grant Park. So it's basically, push all your landfill into the lake and now we have this beautiful park that we get to enjoy.

00:14:17
Speaker 1: Hey, that's a good outcome, I guess absolutely.

00:14:19
Speaker 4: And as you know, also on that same theme that the whole Chicago Lakefront is public property from the northern boundary to the southern boundary. There's Oprah's building, old Building. Lakeshore East is east of Lakeshore Drive, But other than that, all of Lakeshore Drive is open for people to run and bike and it's a great place to plan to play in the summer.

00:14:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really is. Anyone who's gone along there, it's really beautiful. I mean, Chicago can be very cold and windy.

00:14:44
Speaker 1: There's a big chants of the air.

00:14:46
Speaker 2: And I noticed that she was not necessarily doing so many architecture tours in January.

00:14:50
Speaker 1: I guess too.

00:14:50
Speaker 4: But you would be surprised when people are coming from literally all around the world. If they bought tickets to a ten am architecture tour, they are going to go on the ten am architecture.

00:14:59
Speaker 1: Tour bundled up, bundle us.

00:15:01
Speaker 4: So I've had to give in tour and all sorts of weather.

00:15:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, sorry, there was one other the tour you were mentioning, Yeah, oh yeah.

00:15:08
Speaker 4: And then by other fact, well, I guess a couple other facts from my other tours, So my neighborhood tour, I really love Beverly the tour on the south Side, so I recommend everybody to come take that if you're in town. And that is actually the highest natural point in Chicago. Chicago's very flat, but when you're in the Beverly neighborhood, you have hills. You have this beautiful ridge where a lot of the movers and shakers of their time built their mansions, and one person actually built a replica of a Irish castle, so we have, yes, at the corner of one hundred and third Longwood, we have Chicago's only castle in our neighborhood. And then the last tour that I lead is the Elevated Tour, which is a lot of fun to actually go up on the trains get a really unique perspective of the buildings of downtown. We talk a lot about the history of the Elevated. One thing, how fun of the fact this is, but the Elevated was actually started as four different companies, all privately owned. Yeah, and they weren't actually taken over by the City of Chicago until after World War Two, so all throughout the they's all started in the late eighteen nineties and they were privately owned up until nineteen forty five.

00:16:11
Speaker 2: It's funny thinking about you know, somebody would be advertising their line versus something else.

00:16:15
Speaker 1: Like don't take his line, lie.

00:16:17
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. So if you see some of those old maps, like from the nineteen twenties and thirties, there's elevated stops like literally every eighth or a quarter of a mile because they wanted you to take the elevated and not a bus and not a street car. So they had yeah, so level of service. Yeah, well, very slow level of service. So yeah, after yeah, in nineteen forty six, that's when the Chicago Transit Authority was formed, so they took over those buses, street cars at the time, and the elevated lines, and they really streamlined that into one system that would work together, not and not competing, right, so you didn't have a stop every every five minutes.

00:16:51
Speaker 1: I think is transit a natural monopoly or is it not?

00:16:54
Speaker 2: I don't know.

00:16:54
Speaker 1: It's a tough question.

00:16:57
Speaker 2: But getting to your entirely differ for an other cool hobby, let's talk wwe yes, so tell us about this one.

00:17:08
Speaker 4: Sure, so I'd say is much as I am passionate about Chicago architecture and history, my husband is equally as passionate about WWE or you know, World Wrestling Entertainment, World Wrestling Federation through the nineties, so that's something that he grew up on. Was really always interested in watching those matches, and ever since we've been together and it's always been a fixture in our house that he's been watching wrestling in some way, shape or form. So in the late nineties early two thousands, he would post on you know, the internet message boards, as we all want to do. There was one called Place to Be Nation that eventually turned into a website, and he started contributing there, kind of doing weekly write ups of different shows and reviews. He would guessed on a lot of their tribute shows and podcasts. And then in twenty nineteen, they were running you know, just Uphole about the best greatest Wrestler of all time, and they were doing lots of advertising and the lasts for that, and so he proposed to them a podcast where he is the deep kind of as the incident insider is very like acknowledgeable perspective, and then with me, who has is the novice and has no perspective or appreciation for what's going on at all. So that's how we pitched it. They said, great, come aboard, and so every we produced monthly. So we've done about forty five episodes since the fall of twenty nineteen. And what's it called? What's the podcast is called? With this Ring? Which is our play.

00:18:30
Speaker 1: With this ring?

00:18:31
Speaker 2: Yes, with a married couple, Yeah, exactly, of course, get a little honey and having a little puney.

00:18:37
Speaker 3: Yes.

00:18:37
Speaker 4: And we are hosted on Places to Be Wrestling Network, so we don't have our own feed. They just have one feed of all their different podcasts and shows and we put into there. I am very passive. I was telling you like, I'm not my cousin's the one said in our recording schedule and our content. So we've done it. It's been, like I said, a lot of stuff I'd never been exposed before. So I know all about you know, Steve Austin, I know about the Montreal screw Job. I know about out a lot of people and events that was not a part of my psyche growing up. I never really watched wrestling, to be quite honest, I didn't really really realize when I was a kid that it was it's fake. Yes, they're really punching and kicking each other, but the intention is not to seriously injure each other. It's it's like improv and stage fighting. And that's the other thing I didn't quite realize is I thought it was all very scripted, and some wrestlers do really kind of know beat by beat what's going to happen, but a lot of it is improv. They know who's going to win, they know what the big moments they're going to be, but they're not really choreographing it move or move. So I think once I understood that, I had a better appreciation for what they're doing and how to be that athletic and to run around the whole ring, the whole arena and basically be improvy with your partner.

00:19:43
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well it's definitely a different art form.

00:19:47
Speaker 4: Than I it is.

00:19:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so you've obviously had to watch a lot of it then, though, to hold your own in this podcast with your husband.

00:19:58
Speaker 4: Yes, I think I pretty much keep it to the basic I can talk about. I liked this combination. I liked the way that they were developing this storyline, and then Ryan can come and be like, oh, well, actually it's because of X Y Z or this is the way it was kind of set up behind the scenes. And you know, owen Hart never wants to know Steve Austin refuses to wrestle owen Hart because owen Hart broke his neck once accidentally with the pile driver.

00:20:17
Speaker 1: So well, there you go.

00:20:18
Speaker 4: They are no longer I want to wrestle.

00:20:20
Speaker 2: I wouldn't want to wrestle them either, exactly. So what's it like to do a project like that with your spouse? Because I'm sure a lot of our listeners are like, well, I'm not into WWE, but the idea of doing some project other than cleaning your kitchen with your spouse is kind of right to think about. So I mean, like, do you think this brings you closer? Does it give you other things to talk about? Like, well, well, how does it go? Yeah, it definitely has brought us closer. I've learned a lot about him because a lot of times, like he's you watched a lot of these matches when they happen, I can be like, well, what was it like when you saw this when you were twelve in nineteen ninety whatever, And I'll hear about what he was doing and what he was thinking at the time.

00:20:55
Speaker 4: So that's been really good. Logistically, I'm more of a planner, but this is his his passion, and he will, all, you know, give us the recording schedule. We'll always know what's baked into our Sunday kind of planning for the week. He'll tell us we're going to watch these matches on these days. This is typically happening post eight pm, once kids are in bed. So it hasn't really caused a lot of friction in our marriage, if anything, yet, I think it's brought us closer. We've gone to a couple of shows here in Chicago. You know, when we travel, He'll find the wrestling or the sports events, and I'll find the architecture tours for us to go to. So, yeah, you.

00:21:30
Speaker 2: Both have your things you're really into. Now that sounds like a really cool project to do together.

00:21:33
Speaker 4: Thank you.

00:21:34
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to take.

00:21:35
Speaker 2: One more quick ad break and then we'll be back to hear more about how you make life in general work. You're your various strategies for making life more manageable. Absolutely all right, So I am back with Cindy Everett who has shared it all about leading tours in Chicago of the architecture, her husband and her doing this WWE podcast together. Fun way to have a closer relationship with your spouse. If you do a project together, gives you at least a reason that you have to talk right really frequently.

00:22:19
Speaker 4: You always top of the conversation.

00:22:21
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, record your conversations and share them with the world.

00:22:25
Speaker 2: So Siddy, you've got a couple, you know, just tips of things you do that make life more manageable.

00:22:30
Speaker 1: So first, your your dinner schedule.

00:22:32
Speaker 4: I mean, let's let's talk about yeah. Yeah, so very similar to Laura. We have a very set dinner, set schedule that doesn't vary that much. Takes out a lot of that mental load. You know, Monday is just big chicken breast taco. Tuesday Wednesday my kids call it kid dinner, which is you know, chicken nuggets and those store bought Toortolini's. And I will admit I will cut up my chicken nuggets and eat them over spinach. So I feel like that counts.

00:22:56
Speaker 1: That gets more virtuous.

00:22:57
Speaker 4: Exactly, not even that. I just you know, to get those extra fruits and vegetables and you know, everything's very customized. Well write with this stage of life, everything's all acart in terms of meals. So Thursdays usually either spaghetti and meatballs or breakfast for dinner. Friday's pizza. Saturday is if we didn't usually the breakfast dinner or spaghetti if we didn't do that on Thursday, and Sunday is burgers And that's pretty much it.

00:23:24
Speaker 1: And everyone is fed and everyone is everyone's sad.

00:23:26
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's usually on Tuesday enough taco meat leftover for leftovers, so yeah, I don't have as strong as a strategy for lunch and dinner. Typically Sunday, I'll, you know, cook a bunch of quinoa and I can eat the taco meat over that or whatever protein we have leftover from the night before, so really works.

00:23:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you are a planning on Friday person.

00:23:48
Speaker 4: I had to see. I had to shout out your throat TBT rule for planning on Friday. It's just what I've noticed to my organization is everyone's burned out by Friday afternoon. I'm usually relatively light meeting while on Fridays, so I'll usually block out half hour to just go through my calendar for the next week, make sure the meetings that I want to be a part of are work with my schedule. And I also will make sure now that I have a team of four direct reports, if there's anybody that also needs to be in those meetings, or if I can delegate any of those that also gets added. And then I think what's really helpful is I always plug up. If I have, you know, three meetings in little half hour windows of daylight in between them, I'll usually block those off as little buffer times to make sure I'm not going back to back to back in too many situations.

00:24:32
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, but it's good to be able to see that ahead of time. I mean, that's the upside of the rights planning is you're not like all of a sudden in that day and trying to figure out how to optimize a schedule like that exactly.

00:24:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you.

00:24:46
Speaker 2: Have a routine of doing a little bit of housework, yeah, after your kids go to daycare.

00:24:51
Speaker 1: How does that work?

00:24:52
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it's almost like same thing, less mental load. I have the set meal schedule. I also try and give myself a little set to our schedule, so I work from home when I'm not traveling out to our different sites. So most of the time I'm in our laundry room slash home office, so I drop them off at daycare, and my kind of transition routine before I start to work is yeah, depending on the day of the week, I have a chorist sign, So Monday is running the room book, cleaning up all the crumbs from the weekend. Tuesday is yeah, wiping down the bathrooms. It's also nice because I have my iPhone set up. At between eight am and eleven thirty am, I have all my apps go dark, which hopes with productivity, but I know if I'm cleaning, and when my podcast stops, I'm usually listening to Best of Both Worlds or something similar. When that stops, I know, okay, time to go to work. Yeah. Wednesday is clean out my car, either the interior exterior. Thursdays is sheets and towels, and then Friday is general cleanup. And we have an area of our kitchen that you and I'm looking at it right now that me and my husband called trash Mountain. That's where it's not like trash Mountain, it's like recyclables Mountain. Yeah, you don't keep the trash, the recycles they build up the cur I get the chip war that needs to get broken down, the milk, I just knocked that all out at once, and you know it doesn't I mean, our house is not cleaned by any means. But then at least mentally, I feel like it's stemming some of the issues before they come bigger issues. Along with those, the maintenance items that have to be done, especially with potty training, the bathroom clean up shuppaly get upped a little bit.

00:26:17
Speaker 1: Slightly more frequent. Yeah, we're in that stage ourselves.

00:26:20
Speaker 2: But yeah, no, it's you know, having the routine means it never feels quite so overwhelming anyway. You also have some pretty good habits in terms of you have a happy weekday habits list, so I do so about.

00:26:33
Speaker 4: This, Yeah, that's posted on the bolton board above my desk. I mean most of these are our Neil brainers, but still kind of good reminders. So exercise every day, meditate for five minutes every day. I have a reminder on my iPhone at twelve thirty pm to go go meditate, So I like doing that mid day. I think Sarah is hers in the morning, but for me, midday, at that point the stress of the day is sufficiently piled on, and that's always a good reminder to take a break in, step away from the monitor for a little bit. Same with journaling. I journal at night. I have an eight thirty pm reminder, go off and say, okay, put your phone down, pull out your journal, write half the page, just once again, centering. And I don't do every single one of these every day, but it's of notice that days where I do most of them are usually are usually good days.

00:27:18
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

00:27:19
Speaker 2: And one of those things is trying to learn something new every day. Yes, So how does that go about?

00:27:24
Speaker 4: Like, yeah, it's always usually something little by being in finance, I love Microsoft Excel and usually I subscribe to different newsletters. I'm learning the shortcuts like F twelve if i'm learning X look up learning functions and power query a lot of a lot of data oriented things or architecture. Yes, F twelve do Oh if you're in Excel and you hit F twelve, that brings up the same as men you write away. Yeah, but it probably works some word too. I'm not really a word person, but.

00:27:51
Speaker 1: Well who knew? Now we know exactly all sorts of good stuff of this architecture wrestling an f Yeah, all.

00:27:58
Speaker 4: All my interests come into together. I love it. Yeah, drink water, read for fun, you know, cup talk with family friends. I was trying to make a point to be silly with my kids, right, I think sometimes you can get into kind of the barking orders and just more the tactical. So I really try every day to you know, play a game, be silly, do pictionary, play charades, just do something that's not a tactical put your shoes on, sit on the body, yeah, type conversation and say with my husband too. Yeah.

00:28:26
Speaker 2: Well, And I love that you set the alarms, I mean because if it, you know, it'd be like, oh, I'm going to meditate at some point, well what does that even mean? Or you know, like you have to bring it to the conscious part of your mind. And obviously, if twelve thirty happens and your boss is sitting right there, you're you're not going to have to set me I've got to go meditate.

00:28:45
Speaker 1: But at least it, you know, forces a decision like am I going to do it? Am I not?

00:28:49
Speaker 2: Right?

00:28:49
Speaker 4: And you know that I have an iPhone so that the reminder stays there until you clear it or that's how my phone set up anyway, So if it doesn't happen at twelve thirty, then at one o'clock through thirty whenever I get in the break break of the action, and I can go do it.

00:29:01
Speaker 2: Well, Sindy, this is awesome. We always end, as you know, with a love of the week.

00:29:07
Speaker 1: I can go first.

00:29:08
Speaker 2: I guess I was going my love of the week, although I was. I was joking with Sandy earlier. It's a love hate of the week.

00:29:14
Speaker 1: Costco.

00:29:15
Speaker 2: I went to Costco over sort of lunch today, in between calls. I had just enough time to get there and get home and get the frozen stuff and the freezer.

00:29:25
Speaker 1: Everything else was left on the counter. I had to get on the phone again.

00:29:29
Speaker 2: But it's the place you can get forty batteries for fourteen dollars, and it's just really hard to pull that off anywhere else. So we've gotten better about it, Like we make a Costco list now and I try not to get distracted by the fact of like, oh, I could get I could get twenty four packs of Kleenex too here.

00:29:47
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm sure we'd use them at some point. I'm like, no, no, no, I am here, yes for batteries and cheerings.

00:29:52
Speaker 4: And a CFL and we has to say you don't want to tie up your cash and inventory, right, you don't? Y's true?

00:29:57
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I guess sometimes I feel better with having lots of inventory.

00:30:02
Speaker 1: I guess it's a different optimization problem.

00:30:04
Speaker 4: But right, that could be another episode.

00:30:07
Speaker 2: It's a totally different episode of whether we are optimizing cash or not.

00:30:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, Costco gets a lot of it. I'm so Sindy.

00:30:14
Speaker 4: How about you?

00:30:14
Speaker 1: What's your love of the week?

00:30:16
Speaker 4: Sure? So, I'm sure you've heard of wordle, right, the very popular game. My sister in law recently told me about worldal which has been Yeah, been very fun. It shows you that it's an app. It's not as sophisticated as wordle, but world will basically show you the outline of the country and you have to guess what country that is, so and you get six tries, much like wordle. So it'll show you let's say Canada, and let's say your first guess is Mexico. It'll tell you or you're off by two thousand kilometers to the north, and then you get to keep guessing and guessing. So it's actually been a lot of fun. And my older son got an at list for Christmas. So we'll pull up up World all together and we'll find the country and then you'll do the capital and the state flag the country flag. So it's been a really fun way to get a good refresher on on world geography.

00:31:01
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:31:01
Speaker 2: I was gonna say some are probably easy. It's like Italy, you got that one pretty easily.

00:31:05
Speaker 1: But then it's like Gabonne.

00:31:06
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, so many are African countries, South American countries. Absolutely, Yeah, I gotta brush up on that.

00:31:13
Speaker 1: Yep. All right, Well, Sindy, thank you so much for joining us. This has been great.

00:31:16
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

00:31:19
Speaker 2: All right, So that was awesome hearing from Sindy about her very cool life being a CFO and having amazing hobbies as well. So today's question is a listener who has been offered a job at a really awesome, prestigious company. The one caveat here is that she would be the only remote employee. So not that everybody is in the office, you know, five days a week, nine to five, but they are all in the same place, and so people are coming in and out of the office, and some people are working from home occasionally. But it's they're there and she would be in an entirely different location, different time zone. Should she the job so or you know whether she should take it or not? You know what are things she should consider? So, Sarah, what are your thoughts.

00:32:06
Speaker 1: On this one?

00:32:07
Speaker 3: So? I feel like the time zone is a really really big deal. So I think understanding exactly what that would mean for your working hours is really really important because let's say this was a job like in Asia and there's like a twelve hour time difference, Well, are you expected to be at your desk and available for slack channel messages from six pm to six am? Like obviously that would be a complete deal breaker. I think in most cases it wouldn't be asking that, but you'd want to specifically know, okay, like when am I specifically expected to be at work? Or is this all project based and I'm doing it completely on my own time except for two meetings a month where I have to be synchronous or something like that. I think you'd really really want to define what this means for your hours. And then I do think I want to point out the idea that like if very few people are just you are remote and everybody isn't that's a really different culture than if everybody in the come and is remote, Because if everybody's remote, then probably they're going to do things to like maybe have fun meetings in cool locations every once in a while so people can see each other, or do some virtual things that bring people closer together, or just at least everyone's on the kind of the same playing field. But there is something I think you'd want to be careful of if everybody else's kind of intimate and knows each other is an insane place and you're like this other, I think that could be just a little bit psychologically difficult and it would be something you'd really want to delve into. Well, how can I actually feel part of this team? Are there any plans to kind of integrate me into this team? And would it bother me if I felt kind of separate? So those are my two thoughts right off the bat.

00:33:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the time zone one can be fine. It's just going to require a lot of planning. I mean, again, it's a different if you are Asia versus something that's maybe less time zones apart, Like I think, you know, if you're in California and everyone's in New York. That's slightly more doable than if you're in California and everyone's in Spain. Like, that's just a very different set of hours, because as long as you have some overlapping hours of the business day, you should be okay, because people just need to plan to have their synchronous conversations with you from say nine to noon, and then understanding that things will have to be set for when you go offline at that point that then other people are still working. I think there's also the consideration are you just going to be out there on your own forever or you know, sometimes like the question is are you being brought in.

00:34:29
Speaker 1: To build a team?

00:34:30
Speaker 2: Right like it's this like an early stage company or something, And if you are building out a functional area, that's entirely different, like because then you'd build it with you right like you could you know, have it in your area and hire people that you could then see and lead that team. Even again, if people are working remotely, if you were all within an hour of each other, you could decide to get together once a week or so, and that would be a very different experience versus you being that satellite forever from the mothership and that would be something to consider. If you were really serious about taking this job, you might want to get yourself to the headquarters fairly frequently, at least in the beginning. So that's the question of are you willing to do that? Like, are you willing to go to this place for a week at a time every month for at least the first six months or so, and then at that point you probably will have built a lot of those relationships and it might be more doable. But I think you would really need to invest that time upfront to make it happen. And so asking yourself, well, yes, this is a remote job, but would I be willing to be sort of not so remote for a little bit until I feel fully integrated into the community.

00:35:39
Speaker 1: So yeah, those are some things we'd consider.

00:35:43
Speaker 3: Feel free to let us know if you have a job that fits this description, if that has worked for you, if it didn't work for you, considerations you thought about when you decided to take it, et cetera.

00:35:53
Speaker 1: All right, well, this has.

00:35:55
Speaker 2: Then another episode of Best of Both Worlds. I've been interviewing Cindy Everett about finding work and life being a CFO and having some pretty awesome hobbies she's doing as well. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.

00:36:10
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you.

00:36:18
Speaker 2: 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.