Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:02:40: When to spot you're getting it wrong

00:03:53: When you spot you're getting it right

00:06:49: Perspective

00:07:27: Perspective levers

00:08:55: Perspective: ideas for action…

00:09:03: …1: go beyond

00:12:40: …2: time travel coach-yourself questions

00:16:23: …3: write a letter to your future self

00:18:29: …4: moving modes

00:23:38: Pace

00:24:02: Questions to slow you down vs statements to speed you up

00:28:32: Pace: ideas for action…

00:28:49: …1: speed setting

00:33:31: …2: challenge deadlines

00:39:35: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi, I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, where each week we share ideas for actions and tools to try out that we hope will help you, and us, to navigate your Squiggly Career with a bit more confidence, clarity and control.  And when I say, "Each week", it really is each week, and don't we know it!  It's been a hard week, and it's really early on in the week that we're filming this, and we've been doing this for over four years, over 300 episodes, so it really is each week, everybody. 

If you're listening to this for the first time, you've got some hours to catch up on! Probably the easiest way for you to catch up might be for you to look at some of our PodSheets first of all.  So, for the last 100 or so episodes, we've created a PodSheet summary of the episodes, coach-yourself questions, ideas for action, all in one place.  What we will do is make sure that in the show notes for this, easiest to find if you're listening on Apple, but on our website otherwise, we send the PodBook to you.  So, it is a collection of 100 PodSheets that we've pulled together.  So, whether you're a long-time listener, or it's your first time here, that might be a good resource for you, and then you can work out which episodes you want to listen to, rather than starting at number one and working your way through to here; in which case, we'll see you in about two weeks' of constant listening! So, what are we talking about today?

Sarah Ellis: So, today we're talking about how to change your pace and perspective.  Helen and I were reflecting a bit on what's helped us and what's hindered so far this year, and we were talking about that when things are going well, when you feel that you're working in a sustainable way in your Squiggly Career, I think you get your pace and your perspective right.  I think they're two different things and we are going to divide them up, but they're sort of interconnected.  Also, when things go wrong, when a week feels hard, or when things feel frustrating and perhaps you can't put your finger on why, often I think pace and perspective are two of the areas to go to to look at, "Is something not quite working for me at the moment?"

Helen Tupper: I was thinking about this last week because I was on holiday last week in a very lovely place, and I was like, "This pace is great, it's lovely!"

Sarah Ellis: I'm sure it was!

Helen Tupper: I got to read five books and I did exercise every day and I was like, "This is amazing!"  Sidenote: children weren't there, they were with their grandparents.  And I got quite a lot of perspective, quite a lot of thinking time to think about what's important and all that kind of stuff.  And I was like, "Surely, I can't just go on a holiday to feel like this".  I don't feel like going on holiday is the answer".  I feel like if you can find a way to manage your work, so that you've got more pace and perspective and you're not reliant on a holiday, then that is better.  So, it definitely got me thinking about the practicalities of pace and perspective, beyond a fancy holiday abroad.

Sarah Ellis: So, we were thinking, when can you spot that you're getting it wrong?  One of the things that I've noticed, and when I was thinking about the times where I definitely have got this wrong, is when there is no change in pace or perspective from week to week, so you feel like you've got a lot of sameness.  For example, in pace, maybe it feels like time is really dragging, so it just feels really slow, every week feels like it's taking a lifetime. 

Or, perhaps everything feels incredibly fast and almost like you're always one bit behind where you want to be, or maybe you're constantly firefighting or troubleshooting. With perspective, maybe it feels like you're always in a minutiae, you're always really in the detail and you never feel like you can escape that detail.  I think we've talked before about that's often described as tunnelling; you're stuck in a dark tunnel.  Or, maybe you feel like you're too abstract and you're dreaming and you're wandering and you're lacking the concrete clarity that you need to move forward in your job or in your career. So, I think if you feel like you're spending all of your time in any of those states, you can probably start to go, "That doesn't feel useful for me".

Helen Tupper: And the opposite really is how to spot when you're getting it right.  If Sarah's talked about, "Well, that's what it feels like when it's wrong", what does it feel like when you're getting it right?  We thought that with pace, it's when you're really comfortable with the rhythm of your work, but in that moment. 

So, you recognise that rhythm isn't the same every day, every week; but over that time, Monday might feel a bit full-on, but then you get a bit of time back on a Tuesday, you're working with lots of people on a Wednesday, on Thursday you get stuff done, on Friday you're able to reflect and plan ahead.  It's like every day's got a different rhythm, but overall that rhythm feels right, and I think that's when you're getting pace right, that's what it feels like. Then perspective, we were thinking this feels right when you're able to connect the dots of what you're doing on a day-to-day basis with some more things that are a bit further away.

  So it's almost like, "This is what I'm planning to do today, but I understand the purpose of it, I understand what it's for, why I'm doing this", and when you can connect the dots, it helps you to zoom in and zoom out of what you're doing, why you're doing what you're doing.  So, that's what it feels like when you're getting it right. With that in mind, it's useful for you to reflect on how you're feeling about your pace and your perspective at the moment.  For example, on your pace, does it feel like it's too slow or too fast; or maybe it feels just right?  And then in terms of your perspective, do you feel like you're diving deep into the detail; or maybe you're working far out into the future; or do you feel like you're somewhere in the middle, you're getting that balance of perspective right?  So, Sarah, how are you feeling about those things right now?

Sarah Ellis: I am feeling like it's too fast and I feel like I am too in the detail.  How are you feeling?

Helen Tupper: I love our little therapy sessions!  I feel like this week, I'm back off holiday, I'm actually feeling like my pace is okay.  I've got half a day off on Friday, I can feel I'm doing learnings; I can feel like there's days of busyness, but then I've got some -- the pace feels all right.  Perspective, too much in the detail, I've got that kind of, whether it's true or not, but so much to do that I've got to do it today, and I think that that today orientation is getting in the way of my future consideration.  So, yeah, that's probably where I am.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and we actually had a conversation about this before we started the podcast.  I think the inclination is to perhaps think, "Everybody is finding it too fast and everybody is too in the detail", but we've really challenged ourselves to think about that, because I've done jobs definitely where I have been too zoomed out, and that has felt quite demotivating; and I've been in jobs at times where it's been too slow, and it's really hard.  You lose your mojo and motivation when things feel like that. So, when we go through the ideas for action, we're going to think about both of those areas, if you need to speed up or need to slow down, if you need to zoom out, if you need to zoom in, because I do think there are different moments in your Squiggly Career where you find yourself in those different states.

Helen Tupper: So, what we're going to do now is we're going to take perspective, and then we're going to take pace, and we're going to go through a few different ideas for action so that you can manage it; whatever it is you're needing right now, you've got some things that you can go and do about it. So, we'll start with perspective, and there's a nice quote from Stephen Hawking to kick us off which is that, "I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it.  It is a basic human desire and it also puts our worries in perspective", and I think it's such a good example of that zoom-out thing, particularly when you're in the detail every day, just seeing the world is bigger than what you're working on can be quite helpful.

Sarah Ellis: And I was doing some really interesting reading about psychology and anxiety, and they have this phrase called "perspective levers" that I'd not come across before.  And they were describing there's two main perspective levers, which I think are helpful in the context of careers. So, the first perspective lever is time, so how can you separate yourself, and we'll talk about what that means in a bit more detail, by doing a bit of mental time travel, which is something we have talked about before on this podcast, how looking into the past and fast-forwarding to the future can actually be really helpful for perspective; so, we'll talk a bit about that. Then, second perspective lever is thinking.  So, if you are somebody who is very much down in the detail, what does it look like to become more abstract.  If you are someone who is more abstract, how do you become more concrete? 

Helen and I were talking about our different natural perspectives, and I'm definitely somebody who, if you saw loads of trees, I would see the forest.  I'm a "why" person, so I'll see the big picture and I'll naturally see everything. We were saying what Helen would do is she would see the tree that matters, that one tree that matters right now, and then she would probably start asking some questions about, "How was this forest created?  Who planted this forest?  How do I create my forest?"

Helen Tupper: I'd be scanning the forest and I'd be like, "What are the trees here?  Which ones are the oldest ones?"  I'd be questioning every tree!

Sarah Ellis: I'd be like, "The forest is so beautiful"!

Helen Tupper: "Stop focusing on the roots, Helen"!

Sarah Ellis: So, for each of the ideas for action, we're going to talk about how you can do that mental time travel, how you can change perspective.

Helen Tupper: So, the first one goes back to that Stephen Hawking quote about looking at the world that is bigger than your work, and the idea for action is about going beyond.  What we're trying to get you to do here is, think about spending time with something every week that goes beyond where you spend most of your time. 

For example, I spend most of my time working with organisations on career development; that's the world of my work and it's a world that I love, but it is quite consuming. What I've done recently is I've re-signed up to The Economist, and I get it every week, and I find reading it particularly -- sometimes I don't have time to read the whole thing, I'll be really honest.  Im like, "When am I going to get time to read this whole magazine?"  But the first couple of pages are really good summaries.

Sarah Ellis: The precis.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, the precis is the best, because it has The World in Review, and it is really useful!

Sarah Ellis: I love the fact that you've managed to find the efficient way of going beyond; it's very Helen!

Helen Tupper: So, I can kind of read everything that's going on in politics and business and all of this kind of stuff in the first three pages, and then you can dive in, because you take the bit on, whatever; Indian Microfinance is what I was reading about this week, and you can go to that bit of it. 

But I find it's just such a good way of zooming out, of taking my brain to a different place, because I'm so zoomed in most of the time that it's just the most helpful way of me -- actually, it was yesterday morning that I read it, and I just sat there, it didn't take me that long. Honest, I got up about half an hour earlier than I normally would, and I sat downstairs on my own and read it, and I just felt better for it.  I knew more that was different and I had just, I don't know, that my challenges and issues were quite small in perspective of some stuff that was going on, and I don't think that is a bad thing sometimes to think about.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think the opposite of that, so if that helps Helen to zoom out, I don't have very much problem zooming out; that's my natural way of looking at the world.  And I think a lot of things that I read are actually in fake world, because it's fiction.  So already, every single day, I go way beyond my world, because that is my life, that's how I live my life. 

So for me, the opposite is about the nuts and bolts; so sometimes, choosing something in your work, where maybe you don't know the nuts and buts of how it works. Even today, and everyone might be like, "Oh, wow, how does she not already know how to do this?" but someone in our team gave me a little lesson about some ins and outs of some Teams functionality for some breakout rooms for some workshops that we're doing.  That's something that I don't already do often; maybe our organisations we're working with are sorting that, or there's somebody supporting me to do it, and I don't naturally have that inclination to look at those nuts and bolts, or to spend time figuring that out, that's not the lens that I look at our work through. 

So sometimes just identifying, "Where is there something in my work where I'm going to dive in very intentionally; I'm going to understand the nuts and bolts of how this works?" because it gives you a different perspective. It gave me a completely different perspective on how I might run that workshop and what other people around me are doing.  It probably gives you more empathy, because you're seeing often something that somebody else does to make that happen.  And again, we're not saying you do this all the time, but that practice of knowing how to change perspective; like I know I can pick something, and there's very few things where I'm in the nuts and bolts of what we do, so there's quite a long list of stuff I could choose.  Just choose something on that list and go, "Right, I'm going to dive in, I'm going to get someone to help me to do that and to really understand it".

So, our idea for action two is five time travel coach-yourself questions.  So, this is that ability to separate yourself from the here and now in a way that is really useful to give you perspective.  We all tend to be quite present-focused.  Whether you are like me and you naturally have big perspective, or you're like Helen and you're in the day-to-day, we're all often very present and we're focused on what's in our diaries, what's in our to-do lists, and this will take you away from that. So, just four questions to have a think about: one, "When was I at my best in the first five years of my career?" 

Depending on how long you've been working for, you might want to change that number, but I found that a really interesting question to reflect on, "In the first five years of my career, when was I at my best?"  My first response was, "Not very often!" though it has been a long day.  But then I did get to some answers that I was like, "That's interesting", and if I'd thought about some of that a bit sooner, I wonder if maybe I'd made some different decisions. 

Anyway, it definitely got me reflecting, and it definitely took me out of the day that I was going through. Question two, "What helped me overcome the first big obstacle I experienced at work?" which I also found interesting, I was like, "What was the first really big obstacle?" and what helped you in that moment and do you still use those things, or have you forgotten about some of those skills?  Question three, "What three words do I want to use to describe my career in three years' time?" so three in three; three words in three years' time.  So, we're fast-forwarding to the future, not too far that it feels unrealistic. 

Maybe they're words that you use today, maybe one of those words is the same, maybe they're all really different. Then, question four, "I'm 90, sitting on a park bench, what do I want to be true about how I've spent my time?" so that's a really big future question and a very big, philosophical, "Have I spent my time well in my life?"  But again, what's really useful about all of those questions is, we are distancing ourselves from our day-to-day, and that distance gives us a different kind of data.  It helps us to often be more objective, to think more like an observer, to be more of a fly on a wall. One of the things I was reading about mental time travel is, if we do mental time travel and it's quite short, so if I think about yesterday or last week, we're actually often not very accurate about our reflections, and we see them in quite a subjective, almost very first-person experience way, because we can feel them; they're very real and feel very relevant.  But actually, it's not that helpful. So just practising, maybe you ask one of those every week on a Friday, because Fridays somehow just feel a bit more reflective, and start your day, do a little mind map.  Pick one of those questions, do a mind map for five minutes on a Friday, and I guarantee that will change your perspective of probably the week that you've had.

Helen Tupper: Sarah, I am going to put those questions that you have come up with, the time travel coach-yourself questions, into the 2023 Squiggly Career calendar that we are creating.

Sarah Ellis: That we've not done yet?!

Helen Tupper: Yeah, so this is a work-in-progress, everybody!

Sarah Ellis: Oh, well now you've said it out loud, you have to do it!

Helen Tupper: I know, I've agreed to do it!  So, we're creating.  Sidenote everyone: we are creating a Squiggly Career calendar for next year, where you are going to be able to automatically add the actions to your diary.  So each month, they'll be a set of actions that you can do to hold you accountable.  But this could be a good one.  You could have a month about time travel, and each week there could be one of these on a Friday reflection day, as you've now named it, that people could take a bit of time to answer.  I like it; I will take that action away.

Sarah Ellis: And I'm sure some of you might have heard of this idea before, but if you've never tried writing a letter to your future self, it is a really helpful exercise.  We've done it before at the end of workshop programmes, I've done it in learning programmes that I've been on; it never fails to be useful.  It might feel a bit cheesy, or a bit cliché, and you might think, "When am I ever going to read this?"  But it's less about, "What am I going to do with it in the future?"  It's the process of writing that letter that I think will help you to reveal new insights. It often just does remind you of what's most important to you, what matters to you, and just stops you just sometimes getting bogged down in the detail, or caring about things that feel really important, and we want everyone to care about their work.  But again, if you sometimes feel like you've spent too long in that tunnelling and feel like you can't see the wood for the trees, letters to future self always help.

Helen Tupper: And just to be really practical about that, you can use a website called futureme.org, where you can write a letter to yourself, answering maybe some of the questions that Sarah said, or just reflecting on what you might want your life to look like in 12 months' time.  Then you can time-send it, so you can say, "I want that to come to me literally in 12 months' time", and it will send you the email on that date. Or, the other thing that I do is every New Year's Day, I write a letter about what I want to achieve; I call it hopes, dreams and achievements over the next 12 months, and I write it down, a letter to myself, and then I open it on New Year's Day.  I've done that for over the last ten years, and I've got all of them.

Sarah Ellis: Can you remember what you wrote this year?

Helen Tupper: No, I can't really remember it, so it's always a bit of a surprise.

Sarah Ellis: So, you've not even got it in your mind?

Helen Tupper: No, I don't take a photo of it, because it's not supposed to be like that, do you know what I mean?  It's not a plan; it's hopes, dreams and wishes.  And then I really like looking back on it and seeing almost what has happened naturally, because it's been important to me; and then what stuff I'm like, "You were never going to do that!"  So, sometimes I laugh at myself and I'm like, "As if you were ever going to do that!  Why did you put that on the list?"  But it's quite a fun thing to read.

Sarah Ellis: I'm excited to see what yours is this year.

Helen Tupper: Yeah.

Sarah Ellis: Then, our final idea for action on perspective, before we move onto pace, is how to move modes from your natural level of perspective.  So, if you're like me, if you're more of a "why" person and you zoom out, how to move from why to how; and if you're more like Helen who's very practical, very much about the "how", how can she move more to the why. The best way to do this, and we've actually done this today twice in two different ways, is take a day, so really specifically take a day that you've just had, and you are going to reflect on that day, but in a way that probably doesn't feel natural to you.  So for me, my job would be to describe the detail of my day, so the ins and outs of exactly what happened, when it happened, what I did. 

That doesn't sound like something I would ever do, and it also doesn't sound very motivating to me, it's not my natural style.  But it helps you to move from being more of an abstract thinker to being very concrete; very concrete, very specific.  And if you're Helen, Helen would look back on her day, and she'd be painting a picture of her day in really broad strokes, probably more about feelings and outcomes and achievements.  I wouldn't learn about what she had spent her time doing that day. So, just to bring that to life, if I was even doing a very small bit of the start of my day, it would sound like, "I got up at 6.45am, I had a shower and I used my little boy, Max's, shower gel.  I got myself a coffee, got him some Bran Flakes.  He was also allowed to have one of his Halloween sweets from yesterday".

Helen Tupper: At breakfast?

Sarah Ellis: After breakfast.  He had to eat his breakfast first, and then he was allowed to have one Halloween sweet.  Don't you judge my parenting on the podcast!  Oh my God, imagine if we did a parenting podcast how awful it would be?

Helen Tupper: It would be horrendous!

Sarah Ellis: And then I would go on to say, "And my first meeting was at 9.00am, and it was with [this person]", and so it's really like the Devil is in the detail.  You're not talking about what you achieved in that meeting, or how you felt about that meeting; you are literally just describing the detail of your day.

Helen Tupper: Now, that would feel really natural for me, that definitely wouldn't be where Sarah's brain would go to, so that would be quite hard for her.  But I would look at that and go, "Yeah, I do that all the time and I'm always like, 'What were the three actions from each meeting?'".  So for me, if I'm going to paint in in more broad strokes, it's about coming out of the detail of what I've done and what needs to be actioned, and more about, "How did that day make me feel?  What was good and why?"

For example, I had a meeting today with an organisation that works on finances.  But rather than describing the detail of that, I'd be thinking, "Well, that meeting was great, because it made me feel excited about our financial future".  Now, that is a very different way for me to think about that meeting.  Normally, my immediate thing is, I literally have a note to do, "Follow-up", I want to write the detail of that meeting down, because that's what I would do. So for me, thinking about, "How did that meeting make me feel; and how did that meeting take me forward?" are very different questions than I would naturally go to.  But when you're trying to get perspective, it's useful I think to almost try a different approach, because the more you're able to flex, the more you're going to be able to manage your perspective.  If you can't flex, you're going to feel a bit stuck, and so that's what we're trying to do here; we're trying to help you to flex from where you might normally start from.

Sarah Ellis: And it was interesting, when we were having a go at this exercise to make sure it worked, we both found it quite uncomfortable.  We could do the other one because we were like, "Well, that's what we normally do"; but we were like, "How would that even sound; how would I even do that?"  It's like, "How do you process your day?" and we definitely figured out that we process our days in really different ways, but it is very useful to try doing it in a new way, because you will get a new perspective. I was talking to Helen before we started this and I was like, "It's been a tough day", and the way I described that tough day.  And then Helen was reflecting on my day for me, and she reflected on that day in a completely opposite way, and this was before we'd even looked at this exercise.  But it just shows you how we all get stuck, I think, in similar thinking patterns, and that stops us from having perspective. So actually, Helen almost doing that job for me made me go, "That has given me a new perspective", but we can't always rely on someone else being there at the end of the day to do that for us.

Helen Tupper: But it is interesting, isn't it, about whether you could have a perspective partner?  So ideally, you do want to do this for yourself, you want to be able to flex your perspective so that you can support yourself.  But if you had somebody, somebody that you worked with, a friend or a colleague, you maybe have that kind of closeness to that has a different perspective, it is actually quite useful, if you have had a hard day, or if you are feeling stuck, running it by them.  They will have a different way of looking at it from you, so they might help you find that perspective when you might be struggling to do it for yourself.

Sarah Ellis: Yes, and thank you, it did do that!

Helen Tupper: No problems, I'm already feeling better about my day too!  So, let's move swiftly on, did you get the point; did you like it?!

Sarah Ellis: Brilliant!

Helen Tupper: From perspective to pace.  However, I should have a quote here that should manage our expectations here which is, "There is more to life than increasing its speed", said by the wise Mahatma Gandhi.  So, it's not always about moving swiftly on, everybody, it is about managing our pace proactively, whether that is speeding up or slowing down.

Sarah Ellis: And I think you do different things, depending on what you're aiming for here, and just before we get into our first idea for action, one of the things that I often talk to leaders about in workshops about pace is, questions that can help to slow you down and statements that help to speed you up, whether it's you, or whether it's also as a team, you're perhaps noticing as a team, "We need to accelerate", or as a team, "We actually need to slow down". I think often, as a leader, you're probably better at facilitating one of those things to happen than the other.  So again, this is about how you can be adaptable.  Questions that will always help to slow you down are ones that are about exploring.  So, anything that starts with, "How might we…?"  So, "How might we do this differently?  How might we explore different options?  What would a really ambitious option look like here?  What would happen if we wanted to do twice as much of this thing?" so they're essentially prompts and provocations that get you to come up with multiple answers.  It's sort of mind-mapping and brainstorming type techniques.  But as soon as you ask something like, "How might we…?" it will slow everybody down, because you're in generative mode; you're in, "What about this…?  How about this…?  It could be this…?" Helen is just looking at me just laughing at me, and also just looking like this is something where she's like, "I never ever want to do this, because I don't want to be slowed down"!

Helen Tupper: No, it's so funny, because Sarah does this naturally.  I'll be like, "Okay, we've got this thing that we're doing, I'm moving it forward" and then Sarah will take a pause and I know what's coming; I know it's one of these questions!  And I don't think she's thinking, "How can I slow you down?"; that's not what Sarah's thinking.  It's just her brain is naturally, "How can we look at this from a different perspective?"  Then I'm, "No, no, I just want to get it done!" The thing is, I know that Sarah's questions will make it better; but as a naturally pacey person, and by that I mean tends to work quite fast, these questions can feel quite hard to hear when you're in that moment.  So, just don't be too fixed about it, I guess, is what I'm saying, because I do feel it's hard, but I try not to be too fixed, because I know that these questions will ultimately get you further.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I mean you are the paciest person I know, you're the paciest person I've ever worked with.  Your expectations of how quickly something can be done… I think I'm quite pacey generally, but I don't even put myself in the same, I don't know, ballpark as you just in terms of how quickly you can get stuff done!

Helen Tupper: We are probably a nightmare to work for, with Sarah's high-quality bar and my speed bar; oh dear!

Sarah Ellis: I do wonder that.  At one point, people are definitely not going to work with us, and we're probably not going to want to work with each other.  It will be a tense podcast episode that week, right?

Helen Tupper: That can follow the parenting one!

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, maybe that will be the one that breaks us, like the break-up episode of the podcast; Squiggly Career Breakups!  That was bleak, come on, let's move on to the next one.  So, we've also got statements that help you to speed up.  So, if you are more like me, there are times when you're like, "Okay, we've got to inject some pace, we've got to accelerate, something isn't moving quickly enough", and that can often be because there are obstacles; maybe people are struggling with priorities; it feels like there's too much to do, not enough time.  That's when you need the laserlike focus that is Helen Tupper on your side. What Helen is so good at is going, "If this is important, we can do this if we…"  So, "We can, if…" is a really helpful statement. 

You don't want to be asking a question here, because open questions generate possibilities; statements prompt actions.  So, I might say, "I'm really struggling to write this article, Helen", and she might say, "Okay, well we can create time for you to write that article if we don't do this [or] stop this [or] if we think about this differently [or] if we ask someone to help us with this thing over here", and suddenly we can do it and it's created the pace.  Helen's literally nodding at the other end of the screen here.

Helen Tupper: "Yes, we can!"

Sarah Ellis: "We can do it!"  Sometimes I'm like, "Can we?" and you're like, "No, we can!"  So, just think about what's useful for you.  Are you in, "How might we….?"; or are you in, "We can if…" and just practise using those questions and statements, because that has practically helped me so many times.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, and me too.  I was joking about finding it hard, but I know that it is so useful.  But I think I probably am too reliant on you doing it though, and I think it's being able to do this for yourself that is the really important thing. So, we've got two ideas for action now all about managing your pace.  And what we've done is assumed that some people want to speed up and some people want to slow down.  So, for each of these ideas for action, there's sort of an A and a B, depending of which one of those is right for you.  Sarah do you want to kick us of with some speed-setting?

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.  So, first idea for action we're calling speed setting.  So, if you want to speed up, we really like the idea of mini sprints.  So, I was reading about how you can create pace, and it's really helpful for our brains and I think our motivation to say, "By this time, I want to have achieved X".  So, "By 4.00pm tomorrow, I want to have got this project done [or] the first version of this proposal finished and ready to share with someone".  So, mini sprints work well when they are short, when they are focused, and really specific. It could be literally, "By 11.00am", so what's a mini sprint of 2 hours, 90 minutes; or, it could be a mini sprint of a week; or, it could be a mini sprint over a couple of weeks or a month.  I personally do use this.  It helps you to break down tasks in terms of, where you've realised where you're trying to get to, you then go, "Okay, what do I need to do to get there?"  Then, I often do use Post-it Notes.  We've perhaps talked about this before in terms of just one action per Post-it Note, and I will literally move the Post-it Note from "to-do" to "done" as I'm going. 

It's quite an Agile methodology style way of working, but I think these mini sprints, they get you started. I think often what I find hard, when I'm naturally a bit slower; or maybe less about being slow, I think it's when I'm stalling, it's because I don't know how to get started; it's always the getting started bit.  Once I'm under way, I'm okay.  And I think what happens, why I find this useful is if I go, "Okay, well by 10.00am tomorrow, I'm going to have got back to this person on our team on what I think on that document", suddenly I'm like, "I need to do that by 10.00am.  Okay, to do that, I've got to read it, fine; then probably give myself a bit of time to think about what I think about it; then I've got to write that feedback.  Right, I'll do that, I'll do this", and I mentally can get there.  I've worked out then how to get started and then the sequence of what happens after I get started.  But it's the starting bit that's always the hardest for me.

Helen Tupper: I think mini sprints are useful for me, not because of getting started; I don't ever have a problem of getting started --

Sarah Ellis: Obviously!

Helen Tupper: Yeah, obviously!  But it's almost because it's the energy of getting it finished.  If it was a really long project, I'd really struggle with it; but something about the sprints, I'm like, "I can achieve that this week", and then it's probably more about that that makes it work for me.

Sarah Ellis: Well, you like your quick wins along the way.

Helen Tupper: I do.  It's one of my values, everybody, in terms of achievements.  So, the second part of this with speed settings, so Sarah talked about how you can speed up; the second part of it is how you can slow down, and it's really about finding a slow flow.  I think part of the problem sometimes is we go straight into speed; we go straight into our emails, we go straight into our meetings and before you know it, it's like someone or something else is in control of your time and the pace that you're working up.  But if you start your day with something slow, it can often help you to feel more in control of what follows. It might be reading first thing in the morning.  I think reading feels like quite a slow task.  You kind of have to absorb those words; it's not a pacey, productive thing.  Reading is quite personal.

Sarah Ellis: If I did that, I would do nothing else.

Helen Tupper: What, you'd just get stuck in your book?

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, obviously.  I'm like, "I'm not going to do anything else".  If I just start reading, I'm like, "This is just what I want to do".

Helen Tupper: That's so funny!

Sarah Ellis: I actually read recently Daisy Buchannan's new book, which is called Burn Before Reading, and she does this.  So, she reads at the start of every day with a coffee in bed, and she was like, "I know people will get angry with me if you're parents, or you just couldn't do this", and she was a writer and she was like, "I get I can make this happen", but she does it for exactly that reason.  But I think, yeah, for me, I would then struggle with the motivation to then do anything else.

Helen Tupper: Well, that's why you need a mini sprint.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I need the mini sprints way more than I do the reading!

Helen Tupper: I'm on the slow flow.

Sarah Ellis: Maybe that's why you get up so early because you're like, "It's the only way to slow myself down".

Helen Tupper: Well, I get up early because no one else can interrupt me in the thing I want to do.

Sarah Ellis: With your slow flow.

Helen Tupper: Yeah.  I can read, maybe it's meditation for you.  This is a really random "find your slow flow" thing that I have found useful in the past: making tea and coffee slowly.  So, what I mean about that is --

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I get that.

Helen Tupper: -- rather than going to instant coffee, a cafetiere takes a while, or tea pot, loose tea.  I know this is weird, but you know those mindful moments?  I feel like because you could just stick a bag in it and go, but if you brew tea longer, I don't know, I've got little glass jars at home with loose tea in and there's something about that it takes a little bit of time, that it feels like it just slows me down in the middle of a day.  It mainly works when I'm working from home, to be honest, because I don't go around with loose tea and a cafetiere in my bag, but at home it's quite useful. So, idea for action two, if you need to slow down, is all about challenging deadlines. 

So, very often at work, we can feel the pressure of pace, because a lot of the deadlines that we feel like we're working towards all feel important and all feel urgent.  So Sarah's like, "It would be good if we could write this article" and I'm like, "Yeah, sure, I'll get it done this week", and Sarah's thinking, "In the next month", but I've maybe assumed that it needs to be done this week.  Or Sarah's said, "Maybe it would be good if we could get this done this week" and I've heard, "It would be good if we could" as, "It needs to be done by…"  So, we often assume or interpret deadlines as more immediate than they often are, and you can potentially slow down your work by challenging some of those deadlines. So, instead of assuming, you could ask, "When does this need to be done by?", and "need" is a really important word because it's not just, "When would it be nice?" it's, "When would it actually need to be done by?"  And the more that you could ask that, if somebody says, "It needs to be done on Friday", you could even go, "Okay, why does this need to be done on Friday?  If we did it next week, what would the impact be?"  Some of those questions around challenging deadlines might help you to move some of them back; stops you assuming when they need to be done by; and it can help you take more control over the pace that you're working in, particularly if it's feeling overwhelmingly fast at the moment.

Sarah Ellis: It's the point, isn't it, as well that you can end up working to someone else's urgent and someone else's to-do list versus actually what's most important in your role and based on your objectives and your outcomes. 

And I think it's just getting used to challenging deadlines in a way that feels okay for you, because I appreciate this is hard to do, particularly I think for people in positions of power, where you just feel like you have to be, "Yes, I will do this" versus I think just feeling like you could have an adult-to-adult conversation where you say, "My priority for this week is X, so does it work if I come back to you by next Tuesday or next Wednesday?" I think I've found the way that this works for me is being really clear on my own priorities and then being proactive about offering when I can do it by, because I don't think I would be brave enough necessarily always to say to someone, "More important in my mind" or, "I'm really sorry, I can't because I've got to do this thing", and almost getting into overexplaining and excuses.

Helen Tupper: Apologising and explaining, yeah.

Sarah Ellis: Whereas, I think if you've got the clarity of, "This is my priority and then I'm actually offering to you, I'm telling you, I can do it by that point; does that work?" you're sort of, in a nice way, leading the witness.  You're leading them, because then someone has to come back to you and say no.  And if they do I'm like, "Okay, fair enough, I can reprioritise".  If you're confident enough to come back and say no, then fine. Whereas, I would say nine times out of ten, every time you say, "And, would next Tuesday work [or] would next Friday work?" and if you've done a good job of planning and prioritising, most time people go, "Yeah, great", and it's absolutely fine.  I think maybe just figure out what does that sound like to you. So, what do you do as well if you've got a deadline that isn't urgent? 

So, sometimes you'll be working on long-term projects and it can feel really hard to get the urgency to speed up, to get the pace you need to make progress.  That's when we can procrastinate, and then we beat ourselves up, because then you're right at that moment and you're like, "But I've had all this time and I've wasted it", and we've probably all been there, I'm sure, with some sort of project where there just hasn't been that urgency.  Usually, they're over a longer period of time. 

So, you've got to create that urgency. The thing that we have both used that has really helped us here when we've been working on long-term things is having a deadline dashboard.  I think you've got to create something visual that shows your deadlines that means you almost have the wins along the way and you can see those really visually.  For example, when we were writing You Coach You, you have pretty long deadlines for books really; you also have a lot to do, which is why you need the long deadlines. 

But we literally went very old-school.  We had a white flipchart, a whiteboard, I wrote down all the chapters, we colour-coded everything red, amber, green; we could see where we were, where we were going.  And if we'd have just gone, "Our deadline is in six months' time to have written a first draft of this book", that's where you don't write anything for three months, four months, five months, and then go, "I've literally got to spend a month killing myself writing this". So, in some ways, like Helen and I were saying before the podcast, you're having to create a bit of fakeness; you're almost having to bring things forward and create these deadlines to give yourself that sense of urgency.  And I do think if you can, first of all, definitely anything you can do to visualise; brilliant, and anything you can do to share them with someone else I think does make your life easier, because if you can share work-in-progress deadlines, especially if that means giving something to someone, one of the other things that actually really helped us when we were doing our book was, there was someone I was giving chapters to, and I was committing to him, "You'll get this chapter on Monday", and that was irrelevant. 

He wasn't sitting there on a Monday being like, "Where is it?"  But for me, I was like, "I've created that deadline, so by Monday we need to have that ready to send, because that's the deadline".  I think you're just tricking yourself into creating the pace that you need to make progress, and you'll definitely do better work that way. The final thing we were both saying has been helpful for us on creating urgency is, just be clear about the payoff.  So, if you finish that project two weeks earlier, what does that mean for you?  Does that mean holiday; does that mean getting to finish work a bit earlier; does that mean doing something to do with your development that you've been waiting to do; does that mean that you can go and do that course or that learning that you've been really motivated by?  I do think having a payoff for having your deadline dashboard, just that reward mechanism, when we need the carrots along the way to just be like, "If I can get that done, it means I've got something to look forward to", so it's a practical thing.  But we were saying we both found that helpful in the past.

Helen Tupper: So, we've covered quite a lot today on pace and perspective, because sometimes they almost feel quite separate issues, but we do think they are connected; we do think it's how a lot of people might benefit from managing their work.  But what we'll do to simplify it is put it all in the PodSheet, so the ideas for action, some of the questions that we've asked, they'll all go into that document.  You can download that from the show notes; you can also get it from our website, and it might be a good way to talk about this with other people, because you can take those things and answer some of those questions together after today.

Sarah Ellis: So, thank you so much for listening and we'll be back with you again soon.  Bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye everyone.