Episode 71 - Productivity Alchemy LIVE with D. and Megan Rodriguez

**Podcast: Productivity Alchemy**

**File Name: PA-Episode71**

**File Length: 01:17:14**

**Transcription by Keffy**

Kevin:                                       [00:00:00] This podcast is created in a house with animals. There is a one-eyed gray cat behind me who may turn into a raging asshole at any moment.

Ursula:                                     [00:00:10] “Turn into…”

Kevin:                                       [00:00:12] That leads me to the next statement, which is that we swear a lot.

Ursula:                                     [00:00:18] Oh, do we.

Kevin:                                       [00:00:18] —and, we’ve already pulled that bandage off in the first, uh, looks like ten, fifteen seconds. So, we’re PG-13, so nothing explicit but iTunes and the rest don’t give us much of a choice between Clean and Explicit and we ain’t Clean.

Ursula:                                     [00:00:34] Truth.

Kevin:                                       [00:00:34] And our grammar occasionally slides right into the pit. Welcome to Productivity Alchemy episode 71. I’m actually really excited about the interview a little later on this episode because I did it live at Windycon. It was awesome. I had a great time. I had a wonderful time talking to everybody, especially the audience and Megan and D. who were the mother-daughter interview I did. Just, so much fun, and I am eternally grateful to both of them. Also, I want to congratulate D. as later that evening she was inducted into the Dorsai Irregulars, so she’s also our newest Dorsai Irregular.

Ursula:                                     [00:01:15] Woo-hoo!

Kevin:                                       [00:01:15] For those that don’t know, I work with the Dorsai Irregulars as a volunteer at many different fandom events. I’m on their board of directors. I am learning to keep them organized because the last time I was on the board of directors of a non-profit, it didn’t quite have the same amount of stuff to do.

Ursula:                                     [00:01:35] Yeah, but you also had a priest who called you and wanted to interview every day for like an hour.

Kevin:                                       [00:01:42] No, that was when I was an elder in a church, not—

Ursula:                                     [00:01:45] I thought that was the non-profit you worked on.

Kevin:                                       [00:01:46] Oh, no no no no. That was technically, I guess, the second non-profit I was in. The first non-profit I was the chair of the Triangle Linux Users Group.

Ursula:                                     [00:01:53] Oh…

Kevin:                                       [00:01:55] And they—I’m not gonna say they have their stuff together, but I kinda—I still had that thing going on where if you want something done, you do it yourself, even though you’ve got people you can delegate to.

Ursula:                                     [00:02:05] See also: why I did not accept an Art Director gig once upon a time.

Kevin:                                       [00:02:08] Right. And I’ve had to learn to get past those trust issues. And that’s something you’ve really got to work on if you’re going to be in any sort of leadership role is the ability to say, “You know what? I have all these things to do and while that looks fun, or I want to make sure this is done exactly right, to my exact specifications,” you can’t do it. You’ll spend far too much time on that and not get done the things you need to get done. Instead, you’ll spend all of your time on something that really, it’s better that you hand to someone else to take care of.

Ursula:                                     [00:02:38] And I will say: if you cannot do that, it is okay to step back.

Kevin:                                       [00:02:42] It is. It is.

Ursula:                                     [00:02:43] I—a friend of mine back in the day rose to his level of incompetence as it is called. He was good at a thing, so they made him the team lead and after about a year, he said, you have to make me not the team lead anymore. I am very good at this one thing I do. I am not good at overseeing people. And it’s very hard to step back from positions like that, and it’s—

Kevin:                                       [00:03:07] It really is.

Ursula:                                     [00:03:08] It’s frequently, you can only do it by leaving the company, and even so, you know, things often go bad, but…

Kevin:                                       [00:03:13] I actually knew several people at IBM who had done something similar. They’d been there for, you know, ten, fifteen years. They’d risen to second or third line manager, which is, you know, high up on the chain in an individual site, and they were just like, “I can’t—this is too much. I don’t need to be doing this.” And stepped back either all the way down to individual contributor roles. One guy I knew was a brilliant programmer and he had been a manager and didn’t want to be a manager anymore. And another, I think had gotten even higher up and went all the way back down to the level one, like the manager that talks to the individual contributors, like that very first layer. And it was, you know, interesting that IBM gave them that opportunity. You wouldn’t think IBM would give someone that opportunity, but after they’ve invested so much in a person, they don’t want to let them go if they’ve got skills they want.

Ursula:                                     [00:04:05] Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:04:06] And that’s usually a sign of a good workplace. My experience with IBM has been touch and go because it’s so big and there are so many different managers and different areas that—an adjacent group to yours might have an amazing manager and you’ve got the world’s crappiest manager.

Ursula:                                     [00:04:20] Yeah, that’s—lots of big companies are like that. See also: why I do not do anything like that, because I cannot delegate. I can’t even collaborate without intense physical pain, so.

Kevin:                                       [00:04:35] Yeah, and there is, if you’re working with a group, there is, I think a growth point where you have to make that transition from, “I’m the person who both is in charge and able to do everything, to I’m the person who’s in charge and I have other things I need to be doing” not this day-to-day minutiae. And that’s a really hard transition to make. Often times you end up—companies will end up hiring someone to be the founder’s boss because the founder isn’t good at that second stage. At that step away and let other people do what he’s been doing, or they’ve been doing, let’s be fair, they’ve been doing. And, it’s also very true in non-profits. It’s very true in fandom organizations. There is nothing more painful than to be at a convention where the staff loves it, they want things to continue but the chair, the founder, or someone who’s been there a really long time won’t let go or won’t let people go. And so, they’re stuck filling in the gaps. They’ve got their fingers in everything, or worse, they won’t fire someone who’s incompetent or has burned out and can’t do the job anymore. And that’s something you have to recognize as well. In order to be productive, in order to get your stuff done, you have to know when to let go and when to say no.

                                                     [00:06:03] I had a real problem with that at that very first non-profit. The priest in question had a real problem with that at the church plant I was involved in. It’s something I’ve had to learn. Even my direct manager at a prior job—not the first time—had a real problem with “You need to be focusing on manager and senior level stuff and letting the rest of us go about our business.” He eventually burned out and left, right? So, it’s really—it’s really something you have to be keenly aware of, is there will always be a point where you need to let go and let somebody else do stuff.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:41] Or, you can just arrange your life so that you don’t.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:43] Well, yeah. Or, you just arrange your life so that you’re never in that position of growth where you’re overseeing people.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:48] And I, for one, have done so.

Kevin:                                       [00:06:51] Yes, you have.

Ursula:                                     [00:06:54] I have realized that overseeing people gives me hives and I—it is a thing I could undoubtedly learn. So is emu ranching and deep sea diving. I do not need to learn every skill that I could possibly learn.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:08] It’s not like you have to fill out Heinlein’s Every Human Should Be Able To Do This list.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:14] I can fill out, like, you know, two thirds of it, so.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:18] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:18] Except delivering babies. You hire somebody else for that shit.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:21] I… could probably do it in a pinch.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:23] Certain much better than I could. You’ve been at deliveries.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:27] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:07:27] I’d just be like, “Oh, crap, uh well, uh yeah. Hmm. Uh, yeah. Uh, look at that, a baby wants to come out of you. I think you’re supposed to push but maybe you’re not supposed to push until the pushing? You know, I’m gonna go find somebody who knows what they’re doing.”

Kevin:                                       [00:07:42] What I will—what I will mention at this point is that human women have been having babies with or without medical assistance for hundreds of thousands of years…

Ursula:                                     [00:07:53] Yes, and they’ve been dying at shocking high birth mortality rates, too.

Kevin:                                       [00:07:57] They have… this is very true. But, in a pinch. Nature will… carry on, so.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:04] As long as everything is arranged properly and they don’t get any of the ten million problems that can arise.

Kevin:                                       [00:08:10] Or they get straight to emergency care as soon as possible, yeah. Anyway…

Ursula:                                     [00:08:16] The moral of this story is we will not be assisting with a live birth on Productivity Alchemy any time soon.

Kevin:                                       [00:08:20] Nope. No, no. Nope. Mm-mm. Nope.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:22] I also have discovered that if you ever want to make a con chair swear and come very close to leaping over the table and attacking you, say innocently, “You know, you haven’t had anybody go into labor at your con yet.” This tempting fate—

Kevin:                                       [00:08:38] So much so.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:38] —in a way that uh…

Kevin:                                       [00:08:40] Makes them…

Ursula:                                     [00:08:41] They turn gray.

Kevin:                                       [00:08:42] It gives them the heebie-jeebies.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:43] It’s—it’s just, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

Kevin:                                       [00:08:45] Yeah. Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:48] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:08:49] Oh yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:49] Anyway, so, I—

Kevin:                                       [00:08:50] Borrowing trouble.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:50] —accomplished something this week.

Kevin:                                       [00:08:51] You did accomplish something this week.

Ursula:                                     [00:08:53] I had been working on a novella in my usual fashion of off-and-on for… what did I say? Since 2015?

Kevin:                                       [00:09:05] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:09:06] And so, it’s been three years. A little over three years now, and I finished it yesterday. And I was very proud of myself because it’s one of those stories that I would like to finish before I die kind of things.

Kevin:                                       [00:09:20] Okay.

Ursula:                                     [00:09:21] And, I have a buyer lined up for it. No, I don’t know when it’ll be coming out, but I’m proud of it. It’s—

Kevin:                                       [00:09:30] Oh, I think you have every right to be proud of it.

Ursula:                                     [00:09:32] And, it is—it is—

Kevin:                                       [00:09:36] We will warn you, it is a T. Kingfisher, it is not an Ursula Vernon, therefore, she gets to be dark and brooding and all of those things that we love her for except maybe—

Ursula:                                     [00:09:45] It’s not as funny as a lot of mine.

Kevin:                                       [00:09:47] There’s no—no, the humor is definitely much more subdued.

Ursula:                                     [00:09:51] This is more on the—more like the—oh crap, what was the one with the…

Kevin:                                       [00:10:00] Dark Birds?

Ursula:                                     [00:10:01] Dark Birds or the one with the dead pig.

Kevin:                                       [00:10:05] Uh, Rawhead. Not Rawhead, but—

Ursula:                                     [00:10:07] Razorback.

Kevin:                                       [00:10:07] Razorback, yes.

Ursula:                                     [00:10:12] I am hoping it makes some people cry. I don’t know. Not anyone in particular, I just occasionally like to turn on the waterworks.

Kevin:                                       [00:10:17] We’ll see. I’m currently reading it.

Ursula:                                     [00:10:18] Yes, but—I finished it, finally. And, I’m proud of that and I had a deadline on it because of said buyer on it and I got it done like a month early. And I wasn’t—I hit the point where I was like, I can get this done today if I sit here and work on it. And, and it was—you know, close to 3,000 words to finish off. But, once it is that close to being done it’s like, you might as well just power through.

Kevin:                                       [00:10:49] Right?

Ursula:                                     [00:10:51] And, so, today I, because I had a success, I got to take today off to work on a project that—what do you do for fun? I work on a project that no one’s paying me for! Dear, tell me honestly? Am I a workaholic?

Kevin:                                       [00:11:07] Maybe a little.

Ursula:                                     [00:11:07] Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:11:08] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:11:10] Uh, which is one I’ve been kicking around for a couple of years and I wanted to do it as a video game and I couldn’t because it turns out that’s a—it’s not so much that that’s hard. I could have handled all of the bits where I wrote the plot and programmed it. I could not handle the notion of being tech support for it for the rest of my life.

Kevin:                                       [00:11:28] Right.

Ursula:                                     [00:11:29] And… that’s honestly what keeps stopping me on doing any kind of game programming is I look at this and I go, I cannot be responsible for maintaining it. The thing I love most about books is once I’ve written them, I never have to write them again.

Kevin:                                       [00:11:44] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:11:45] And… yeah. I would have… I could see misery lurking in the future, so I took—I’m stripping out the bits that I really liked which was mostly the dialogue with the elderly sheep shaman. It’s about sheep shamans.

Kevin:                                       [00:12:04] It is.

Ursula:                                     [00:12:06] And the weird older one who’s always talking about his previous apprentices who all seem to have died horribly. And, I thought, okay. I could do this as a webcomic, and then my brain was like, “Or you could hit yourself in the face with a brick really hard over and over again until you realized never do that.”

Kevin:                                       [00:12:27] Correct.

Ursula:                                     [00:12:30] Kevin has orders to bury me in the backyard if I start another webcomic.

Kevin:                                       [00:12:33] Only if you start an epic. Now, if you start a webcomic and it turns into an epic, I think I have to apologize to the fans and bury you in the backyard.

Ursula:                                     [00:12:40] Yeah. But, I could… I could see this… I can see how this one ends. It is a more contained process but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily short. And, I figured out the format I kind of wanted to do it in. If you all are familiar with the book by Neil Gaiman, Fortunately, the Milk, which is this sort of heavily illustrated weird little book where they do fun things with text and whatnot. It’s—it’s not a comic but it’s also not standard prose on a page. I’m like… I could do something like that. That seems like a good sort of compromise between the two. So, I started scripting out how that would look and maybe later tonight as we watch some kind of TV show or other, I will try doodling a couple pages and see what happens.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:34] Yeah, we’ve gone through all of the Midsomer Murders that are available. We’re completely caught up on Father Brown. We watched The Haunting of Hill House. We’ll probably watch some more Lords and Ladles, which we haven’t watched a little bit of—

Ursula:                                     [00:13:43] Yeah, or The Great British Bake-off, I’m told everyone loves that show so much that I have the knee-jerk suspicion of it.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:52] It’s a cult.

Ursula:                                     [00:13:52] But maybe we should try it. I’m—you know, if you listen to me, everything’s a cult. I’m not a reliable narrator, people.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:58] I wanna—

Ursula:                                     [00:13:58] I see cults everywhere.

Kevin:                                       [00:13:59] I wanna do more of Lords and Ladles because some of the ancient recipes or the pre-modern-times recipes are fascinating. They use all—everything but the oink of pigs and the one—this may be a little graphic, just a little warning. The one where they were like boiling pig testicles. I was just like, this is fascinating. I didn’t know how you made those.

Ursula:                                     [00:14:23] Uh, I think it was lamb testicles, but yes.

Kevin:                                       [00:14:24] Oh, well, no, I think they had pig testicles in another one, but still. Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:14:28] There were a lot of testicles going on.

Kevin:                                       [00:14:30] Yeah.

Ursula:                                     [00:14:32] Yes. That would work, and then maybe we can watch some Bleach.

Kevin:                                       [00:14:36] She’s not gonna be satisfied until I watch Bleach.

Ursula:                                     [00:14:38] He said he didn’t like the soul society arc, people. And, like 20 of you just yelled at the radio or the headphones or whatever, “But that was the best one!” And you’re right. It was. That is why Kevin is wrong and his wrongness must be corrected and his nose rubbed in the wrong.

Kevin:                                       [00:15:00] Any time it feels like a story arc or a fight is being dragged out unnecessarily into multiple episodes—

Ursula:                                     [00:15:10] Oh, that was just Zaraki.

Kevin:                                       [00:15:12] And… that was where it lost me, because after Dragon Ball Z where you would have an epic fight but that epic fight was half the god damned season you’re just like, “I’m done now. I’m done.”

Ursula:                                     [00:15:25] Yeah, but see, now you can do it while playing video games so you only have to look up occasionally and see if anyone’s dead yet.

Kevin:                                       [00:15:31] That’s fair. We’ll see. I mean, I saw right up to about that point anyway, so we’ll see.

Ursula:                                     [00:15:36] I loved soul society. I—I loved the captain in pink whose name I should be able to remember since I’ve written fucking Bleach fanfic and it’s not coming out.

Kevin:                                       [00:15:49] So, how does Ursula reward herself when she has completed a goal or had a great success? She forces me to watch Bleach.

Ursula:                                     [00:16:01] Well, lucky for you there’s like 300 episodes or something, so I can reward myself for successes for years to come. And on that note, perhaps we should go to the interview.

Kevin:                                       [00:16:10] Yeah, so, like I said… I got to sit down at Windycon in front of a live audience after some hiccups getting all of the stuff connected so that we could actually reward and the checks I’ve done—the recording’s absolutely fantastic. I talked to my friend D. Rodriguez and her daughter Megan. And, they—it’s very interesting because they have different ways of keeping themselves organized. D. has been a stay at home mom who does a lot of volunteer things. Megan is a med student and she’s almost done with her residency point of med student.

Ursula:                                     [00:16:44] Wow.

Kevin:                                       [00:16:45] Yeah, exactly. And so, they’re—it’s really different and it was fantastic to talk to them, so we’re going to do that right after this.

[00:16:51] [Productivity Alchemy segment change music plays. Jaunty, pleasant, jazzy piano with accompanying bass.]

Kevin:                                       [00:17:32] So. Hi folks, and I will warn you right now, one of our introductions is normally we do this in front of a live household full of pets. This is in front of a live convention audience. There’s not many of you, but I expect you to be enthusiastic. Can we be enthusiastic?

Audience:                             [00:17:46] WOO! [Cheering and clapping.]

Kevin:                                       [00:17:47] There we go. All right. So, hey—D. and—

Megan:                                   [00:17:57] Megan.

Kevin:                                       [00:17:57] —Megan. Who… I know your name it’s just not cemented in, yet. Can you guys introduce yourselves a little bit and tell me about what it is—just a little bit about what you do. So, Megan, you get to go first.

Megan:                                   [00:18:09] I get to go first.

Kevin:                                       [00:18:10] You get to go first.

Megan:                                   [00:18:11] Oh wow. Okay. Um, so, my name’s Megan. I am a medical student which means I don’t do very much at all. So, aside from doing all of my studying and being in a hospital for far more hours than I want to be there, also—just generally—a nerdy person, a crafty person, a gamer. So, that basically describes literally all of my waking hours.

D:                                                 [00:18:39] I think I know most of you. I’m D. Taylor Rodriguez. I am… mostly at home taking care of husband, her, household. Yes, I know you don’t live there anymore, and one of these days I will stop doing things. You’ll probably live in a different state by then. I am also the second-in-command in a 501C-7 organization department. He’s asleep. I am the second-in-engineering in your local Barfleet chapter, so, I hope to see you all there tonight.

Kevin:                                       [00:19:21] [inaudible] I love Barfleet. So, the big question that we ask every time—the first and most important question—how do you keep yourself organized? And Megan?

Megan:                                   [00:19:31] Me?

Kevin:                                       [00:19:30] Yeah, yeah.

Megan:                                   [00:19:32] This is a very fun question for medical students because the answer is, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” Medical school is a particular kind of hell where you’re doing a very structured study routine for the first two years and you forget how to organize yourself because you’re given all these things to do and then you’re dumped into a hospital for two more years, and then you have to schedule everything all by yourself and everything changes approximately every four weeks. So, you have a new schedule all the time. So, basically, I keep myself organized however’s appropriate for what I’m doing at the time. That said, I have a couple of things that are the absolute center of my life. I am a digital person. I literally have notes for this panel on my phone right now. I—anything that I need in my life has to come in digital form because in a hospital, in a clinic, you don’t always get to keep your stuff with you but you can almost always have your phone with you. So, I’ve had to learn to put everything there. That said, I have a little paper notebook full of—I need to do math now, or I need to write something down really quick and it’s in my purse when I’m allowed to have it.

                                                     [00:20:55] I use a combination of Google products, so, obviously, Google Calendar, which is wonderful because everyone can know where I am and that, please, please, stop texting me. I can’t answer the phone. I use a lot of other Google products. Google Drive is like—saves my butt all the time because I can access any file that I need from any computer, which, if you’ve ever done a lot of stuff in the hospital, you know that getting to your own laptop is almost impossible but there are computers everywhere. You can log in to anything. So, Google Drive like, saves my life all the time. But, I also use—I use Trello, and I use… I am a Habitica person.

Kevin:                                       [00:21:38] Yeah!

Megan:                                   [00:21:39] I am a like painfully forgetful person so Habitica, the ability not just to schedule things like every four days, but also be like, the third Saturday of the month it reminds me to do things. Oh my gosh, it’s the most wonderful thing.

Kevin:                                       [00:21:54] And for those of you who may not be regular listeners or don’t know, I’m a big fan of Habitica. Habitica is the habit RPG. So, if you go to Habitica.com, you get a little character and he starts at level one with no skills, or nothing, and as you add tasks or daily repeating things you want to make habits and you check them off, you gain experience. If you don’t complete everything in a day you get a health hit, so you take damage. As you evolve, you can go on quests. As you level up, you can join a party. You can earn—I’m currently earning mounts and pets, and that’s—I have to complete all of them and there are a lot of them in there. So, I’m completionist and grinding. But I love it because it’s fun and it—it’s just sort of like, you get a little dopamine hit. Oh, I’m checking off that I have recorded the podcast today. And, boom. Oh, look, I got a little experience and I got a little gold reward so now I can go buy better armor. That sort of thing.

Megan:                                   [00:22:49] Yeah, so aside from giving you wonderful little colorful dopamine hits, it also lets you keep track of things, like—I literally am terrible about forgetting things like, here’s my toothbrush. In three months, I need to replace it. I don’t forget now, because Habitica reminds me. It is wonderful. It’s a beautiful thing. I recommend it to everyone. Trying to think of anything else.

                                                     [00:23:16] Oh, I don’t know if anyone ever has a problem with this: you write something down, or you get a little pamphlet and it’s got really important information for you, and you’re like, where did it go, I can’t find it. The answer is, take a photo on your phone and you make a folder with all that stuff in it. Because then it’s on your phone and you never lose it. This is super important for people like me. Okay. I think that’s everything.

D:                                                 [00:23:43] Mine’s way shorter. Habitica, Google Calendar, Trello. Between those three, I’ve got everything.

Kevin:                                       [00:23:54] And, I see you have a planner. Is your planner part of your organizational system?

D:                                                 [00:24:02] And only sort of. This is—I’ve been carrying this since I read How to Think Like Leonardo daVinci about ten years ago, and it is the place that I always have paper to write things down. I always have graph paper to sketch things out because I wind up graphing out a lot more things than I ever thought I would. It is the place where I keep, like, I think I’m still sitting on the note from a car accident that was in the fall of 2016. So I don’t clean it out as often as I should, but it’s got all the things except it didn’t get notes for this panel because I’ve been too busy throwing parties.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:48] [inaudible]

Meg:                                         [00:24:46] I feel very [inaudible].

D:                                                 [00:24:49] You [inaudible] last night, too.

Megan:                                   [00:24:49] I did.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:50] You did, yeah.

D:                                                 [00:24:51] [inaudible] I didn’t have to do today?

Megan:                                   [00:24:54] Go to work.

Kevin:                                       [00:24:57] So… and if that didn’t get picked up on the microphone, I’m going to be very disappointed. Um. So, on top of all of that, what systems and habits are important to you. What—and we talked about Habitica. Is a system and it’s building habits. What else would you go into, Megan?

Megan:                                   [00:25:15] So, on a personal level, I’m very forgetful, so this one over here has trained me to write everything down. Even if it seems ridiculous and like maybe I’m totally going to remember this later. I’m one of those people who will be having a conversation, and be like, “Oh my God, this is such a great idea,” and talk and talk and talk about it and then five minutes later when we’ve started some other really interesting conversation, be like, “What were we just talking about?” It was important… I was gonna do something about that—and gone forever. So, write everything down.

                                                     [00:25:47] But, the number two habit that goes with that is look at your notes. Make a habit of looking at the stuff that you wrote down. That’s the hard one, because between those two things, you can generally adapt to any situation. That is the medical part of my life. Every situation you’re in probably has its own system, and that’s okay. It’s going to be frustrating, the learning curve is sharp. But, if you fail fast, find the systems that work for you, just be prepared to try stuff out and adapt to what’s around you because no matter where you are, you can still find a way to make things work, you just have to write things down and try out what’s around you.

Kevin:                                       [00:26:37] [inaudible]

D:                                                 [00:26:39] And I taught her to write things down because it annoyed the living daylights out of me that she couldn’t remember anything.

Kevin:                                       [00:26:45] [inaudible] the podcast, it’s cool.

D:                                                 [00:26:47] I know, but I don’t… I mean, I do, but I don’t. If—um. Well, and I do, but—there’s a microphone in my hand, therefore I, like, automatically self-censor. When the first time you had a microphone in your hand, you were five years old, you learn to self-censor really quick because somebody’s always paying attention to what you’re saying. I am one of those people that I freely admit everybody probably hates because I have a really exceptional memory so I do not develop the kinds of systems that other people do because I will remember. Okay, I get up. What?

Megan:                                   [00:27:24] You have migraines.

D:                                                 [00:27:24] I do have migraines now and that’s been problematic because I never developed systems, so, I do write things down but other than that it’s the—I just—my system for a lot of things is I know what I have to do next because I remember it.

Megan:                                   [00:27:42] Or you write it all down in your book.

D:                                                 [00:27:43] I do write things down. Not as many as you think.

Kevin:                                       [00:27:46] Yeah.

Megan:                                   [00:27:48] Which is the one thing I’ll say. As a person who writes lots of things down. Don’t write them down in a lot of different places. Write them down all in the same place. Have one notebook, as much as you can. Because I’m a person who loves notebooks and so, I have a bunch of them and I spent a decent chunk of time being like, “This one’s pretty, I’ll use it for this thing.” And then never knowing where it was, so try to find one. Curb the impulse to buy all the shiny notebooks and just have one.

Kevin:                                       [00:28:21] The struggle is real.

Megan:                                   [00:28:22] It’s so real.

Kevin:                                       [00:28:25] But both of them, actually. So. How do you decide on a given day what to do first? Start with her this time? Yeah, okay.

D:                                                 [00:28:35] Okay, point A is do I have a deadline. Because if I have a deadline, that’s gonna be at the top of the list. I don’t have a lot of deadlines, thankfully. Everybody has the time to pay bills this month deadline. Most of us have events deadlines and beyond that, my time is pretty freeform. So, beyond that it becomes what am I interested in doing today. I have an ungodly number of boards on my Trello board. And, a lot of times it’s okay. I haven’t worked on anything like this in a while. I haven’t pulled up photos that need editing in, oh, six months. I should probably do that for a couple weeks. But, it’s really just…

Megan:                                   [00:29:24] So, I had her go first because I have a sort of long if-then tree that is how I do my life. Because one, do I have a rotation? If so, first thing in the morning is suffer through the CTA to get to the hospital and then do whatever they tell me to do. This is a very simple part of my life. This is the easy part of the tree. If they don’t have anything for me to do, then do I have an assignment? Do my assignment. If I don’t have that, then everything starts to get messy because I am one of those people who, I have too many things that I like to do. The ability to produce ideas far faster than I could physically get them done and no time to get anything done.

[00:30:14] So, I tend to try to structure myself. Obviously, with deadlines in mind. I kind of create a reverse timeline based on all my deadlines, which one is next. How long does it actually take to get that done. Okay. That will only take two days and it’s seven days away, so for the next five days, I can do whatever I want. But then, I also am really bad about. I’ve got these five different projects I want to work on. I mean, conceptionally, I want to work on them, but today I don’t really want to do any of them. Oh, look, this new project. I’m going to do that one!

[00:30:56] I use a lot of what people are making me do to structure the majority of my days, and other than that, I tend to do what is the thing that is going to make me feel happy today.

Kevin:                                       [00:31:11] And doing the thing that makes you feel happy today is an underrated way to decide it. Everybody—I mean, you may be one of the first people I’ve talked to, who’ve said, what will make me happy today and that’s what I’m doing. Because, overall, we tend to think of things like, I need to get this done and that done because they need to be done, but it doesn’t fall into the sort of the self-care of what will make me happy. And I think that’s an important thing to kind of emphasize out there.

Megan:                                   [00:31:42] Yeah, so, I’m gonna tangent a little bit for a moment. Just prepare yourselves. So, I—actually one of my favorite podcasts that I’ve found is Happier by Gretchen Reuben and she’s got this whole framework for how you do habits and blah blah blah. I’m a rebel, so… basically, what that means is I do what I want even if I told myself I’m not gonna do the thing, if today I want to do the thing, I do the thing. So, this is one of my problems with my life. But, because of some of that, because of how I’ve seen other people react, I’ve also developed one of my overall life things, is that people don’t take care of themselves. They make sure that they’re paid. They make sure that they’re fed, but they don’t make sure that they’re well. And there are many facets to wellness. And occasionally accepting that, you know, maybe I need to mow the grass, but also, I want to read a book. That’s okay. The grass will wait. The grass doesn’t care if you mow it. Your brain cares, if you abuse it, because the brain is delicate and we all thing of ourselves as resistant to all these things and I can tough through it and I will be fine. And, I can tell you from both psychological and neurobiological aspects, that’s a lie.

                                                     [00:33:09] Your brain—your brain will up and decide it’s not gonna work right anymore if you don’t give it enough of what it wants. So, take  this as a semi-medical opinion that it’s okay to take care of yourself and your brain. And—read a book if that’s what you want to do and you have the time to do it.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:38] Awesome. I love that. So, that actually sort of leads into what is the best advice or feedback you’ve been given? Do you have another list?

Megan:                                   [00:33:48] I have a giant list of—

D:                                                 [00:33:48] She actually took time to make a list of [inaudible]

Kevin:                                       [00:33:50] Should I?

Megan:                                   [00:33:50] My biggest—this is my biggest category. I couldn’t narrow it down.

Kevin:                                       [00:33:54] That’s fine. What I’m gonna do then, is I’m gonna give it to D. first. I’m gonna give it to your mom, and then we’ll give it to you.

D:                                                 [00:34:02] Because I have short answers. So, the most useful thing anyone ever told me, and this is going to sound horrible as I explain it, and I suppose in ways it is… When I was about five years old my grandmother was staying with us, and I was a horrible child. I learned to read too young, learned to do a lot of things very young, and I would get bored very easily. And I wasn’t yet to the point where I was good at learning to entertain myself. So, I’m bored. Grandma’s sitting, reading a book, and man, interrupting Grandma when she was reading a book was a bad plan. I was five and… anyway.

                                                     [00:34:41] I said, “Grandma, I’m bored! I need something to do.” She looked at me dead in the face, and said, “You’re not bored, you’re boring.”

Audience:                             [00:34:47] Oooohhhhh…

D:                                                 [00:34:50] I do not have a cousin who has not received this same statement. We’ve compared notes. But, Grandma says I’m boring. So… maybe I should do something about that because boring is a bad thing to be. And I think I went to my room and read a book because, I, like I said, learned to read too young. But it has served me very well. If I get bored. I find something to do and it keeps me from—sometimes it keeps me out of trouble. Sometimes it gets me ratted out by one of my own cousins. And, beyond that, there’s a Winston Churchill quote that is just the thing that always keeps us going. It’s, “If you’re going through Hell, keep going.”

Kevin:                                       [00:35:35] Okay.

Megan:                                   [00:35:36] That is beautiful and succinct and I can never keep myself that succinct. I’m a rambler, so.

Kevin:                                       [00:35:43] I gotta ask: do you have bad penmanship. Do they teach you bad penmanship for doctoring?

Megan:                                   [00:35:48] They don’t teach it. It’s just one of the preferred aspects when you apply.

D:                                                 [00:35:56] She already had it.

Megan:                                   [00:35:56] Yeah, I already had it. I was good there. I am actively working to improve my handwriting. It’s not really working, but I’m trying. So, sort of like I was saying before, take care of yourself, because you can’t pour from an empty cup. That’s a phrase I have heard many times and I love, and I think it’s a beautiful way to remind people that if you can’t give yourself ten minutes, you can’t give anybody else any time. You’re gonna run out. And, that’s okay. Take care of yourself.

                                                     [00:36:29] I’m trying to figure out if there’s, like, best. There’s best, categorically. So, in general, there’s two pieces of advice that—this one, mostly taught me that I think are wonderful. One, there’s no perfect anything. Everything has flaws. Something is better for you, it might be worse for someone else. That’s fine. Everything comes in positives and negatives. Just work with it. It’s fine. Doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. But even as you improve something, it develops new flaws. That’s okay. Also, everything is a spectrum. Stuff doesn’t have to be the worst and then the best. Stuff can be okay.

                                                     [00:37:20] That’s okay. If you’re working on something and you’re, you know, working on a skill, you don’t go from terrible, I don’t know how to hold a pencil to drawing beautiful masterpieces. You work your way up that spectrum, and that’s okay. You’re gonna have moments when you look at something and you’re like, “This is kind of okay.” That’s cool. That’s the step from terrible to really good. It’s one of those steps, you’ve got to get there.

                                                     [00:37:50] Which, also, on the crafty side of things. If you don’t know how to do something, learn. Literally everything in human history was done by someone who didn’t know how at first. So, never ever feel like you can’t do something because everything that has been done was done by someone who didn’t know how and learned. So.

Kevin:                                       [00:38:16] And just as an aside, because I’m a smart-ass. Somewhere out there, you’ve got to remember, is the guy who figured out how to open up and eat lobsters. And… that guy is like probably one of the bravest, most unsung heroes of history. Because that had to be terrifying and he had to be terrible at it the first couple tries.

Megan:                                   [00:38:37] That is… I would agree with you more if I liked lobster.

D:                                                 [00:38:42] Crab.

Kevin:                                       [00:38:44] Crab. That same thing happened to [crosstalk.]

Megan:                                   [00:38:44] That’s true. Crab. Crab, I do love crab. I do seriously question the sanity of the first person who ate the first artichoke. I appreciate them but also question them a little bit. Like, were they starving? Is that all that happened? I don’t know…

D:                                                 [00:38:59] Probably…

Megan:                                   [00:39:03] Let’s see. Where else was I on my list. I seriously have a long list. I’m trying to paraphrase it for you people. I will go—the next thing is if you’re in a group trying to make things happen. Make the thing you want the default setting where humans don’t have to add energy to the system. Like voter registration, right? Instead of being the thing where you want people to vote so you make people register, automatically register everyone so that all they have to do is exist and then they do the thing that you want. Because people tend to default to their lowest energy state. So make that lowest energy state the one you want them to be in, just an organizational tip that totally has never been a problem for me in the past.

                                                     [00:39:57] And then, I will throw my general one—learn to enjoy your own company. This—my great-grandmother here being the inspiration for this one. Life is full of really boring moments where, you know, you’re commuting or waiting in line or doing all these things. You’re the only person who’s going to be there for you all the time, always, for the rest of your life. Learn to like yourself. If you have things about yourself that you don’t like, that doesn’t mean they’re bad. Maybe you just need to forgive yourself for them and make a peace with yourself. That’s okay. I mean, maybe you feel like, I eat too many chocolate chip cookies and I really need to stop. Maybe that’s okay to stop, but I also really love chocolate chip cookies so maybe just don’t feel bad about eating chocolate chip cookies, you know?

                                                     [00:40:50] Learn to love who you are and enjoy your own company because that’s the easiest way to be happy on a given day. And then, from a medical perspective, because I have a microphone and the power: learn your body. Learn your brain. Because as a medical person, I can tell you that I will ask you questions. I will ask you, how are you feeling? Have you felt more fatigued or any of these things. All of these questions are relative to your default normal state. So, if you don’t know what your default normal state is, I can’t help you. Because I don’t know if maybe you’re not sleeping a lot, but you don’t normally sleep a lot. And so, you’re actually fine. Or that thing that I think is a symptom of a really concerning disease is nothing. Or, that thing that I’m thinking, oh, this person’s blood pressure’s totally normal! But this is a person who actually runs really low and I should actually be really really worried about why your blood pressure is now at 130. I won’t know. So learn how your body works. Learn your normal, and learning your brain is really hard. I will say there is an amount that the brain is like a puppy and an amount that it’s like a computer.

                                                     [00:42:15] You can train it. Neuroplasticity is a beautiful thing. You can train yourself into certain stuff, but the brain is a biological thing. It has default programs that it runs, so there are parts of your brain you can’t change and that’s okay. That’s how brains work. But there are parts of your brain that you can learn, maybe I do this particular thing because I have this reaction every time I see something. And, you can slowly train yourself out of having that reaction. So, learn how your brain works. Working with the brain you actually have is far better for you than trying to work based on a system that isn’t the one you’re working with. That is gonna make you so unhappy.

                                                     [00:43:04] So. Learn your body. Learn your brain.

Kevin:                                       [00:43:07] Oh my God, that was heavy. I love it. No, nonono. I mean, it’s taken me years to figure out learning my body and my brain and even then after learning my brain and learning how broken it was—better living through chemistry, you know. So, I will live and die, now, by my SSRI, so. Yeah.

                                                     [00:43:29] So, now the the thing is, I’m starting to give people a choice on the last two questions, okay? Because I used to do it first the happy but difficult one and then the sad but easy one. And this is after 70-some episodes, this is the feedback I’ve gotten, is there’s the happy but difficult and the sad but easy. Which one do you want first?

                                                     [00:43:52] Then I will—then we will end on a high note. I will start by asking the sad question. But usually the easy answer: how do you deal with failure or when you miss a goal? And… for background, I’m a big proponent of Howard Tayler’s Maxim 70 from Schlock Mercenary, which is of course, “Failure is not an option, it is mandatory. What is optional is what you do after.” And I’m paraphrasing some. I have the challenge coin with the whole quote on it. But, that’s why I ask about failure, because it’s important. Everybody fails and there’s no avoiding it.

                                                     [00:44:27] So, what do you do? Uh-oh.

D:                                                 [00:44:32] See? She’s learned.

Kevin:                                       [00:44:34] [inaudible]

D:                                                 [00:44:35] Perhaps.

                                                     [00:44:39] So, the short pithy answer is I go to Disney World. When I am at the, “Everything has gone wrong, I’m done now,” I go to Disney World. And that is a privilege that I have and sometimes I feel like I go too often. Beyond that, I just get back up and keep going because you know, some of that is the way I grew up. I have a largely Germanic family, and you don’t dwell on it. You just keep going. And that’s not always the healthiest thing you can do, but, it’s the way I was raised and sometimes, it’s just, “Okay, I’m done.” I failed the thing. Can I repeat the thing? The thing is over. This is done? Okay. That’s done. I’m going to take some time and take care of what I do next, how I get there, and keep going.

Megan:                                   [00:45:35] I will totally agree with that. Our family has some very German attitudes about things. I love them all. So, my answer kind of comes down to two things, because failure/goals, those are subjective terms. So, when I do something and it didn’t have the effect I wanted, and I feel like, embarrassed about it. Because I have anxiety, I ruminate. Oh my God. There are moments in my past that I will die remembering with perfect clarity of how I said just the wrong thing. So, yeah.

                                                     [00:46:21] So, there are things where I feel like I’m not qualified to help people answer this. Like, oh, this embarrassing thing happened to me in a social situation, what do I do? I don’t know! I love would love that answer, too. So, on that level, I mean, as a person who has studied mental health, there’s no real good answer. But, sometimes the answer is just you have to learn how to forgive yourself. I’m not good at that, yet. But, you have to forgive yourself for failing and when I didn’t have an emotional reaction to something, which is the majority of my life, which is for the best, I try to always learn from whatever happened.

                                                     [00:47:07] I was raised with the philosophy that I didn’t have a word for until I really appreciate the kaizen model. Nothing is perfect. Everything can be improved, which means that everything that happens to you is an opportunity to make it—either the bad thing not happen again, or to improve something that you didn’t know was broken. So, I try to always take those missteps and look for why did they happen? You know, was I like really really hungry and I was not paying attention to something I needed to? Okay, cool. Eat earlier in the day. Sometimes the answer to failure is really simple, but sometimes the answer is really, really complicated. I sort of run these—we use the PDSA cycles in hospitals so I sort of do that in my brain over stuff. Don’t always have an opportunity in a hospital to try again, but—

Kevin:                                       [00:48:12] PDSA? What does that stand for?

Megan:                                   [00:48:14] Uh, it’s—Plan, Do, I always forget the S. Act… Study, Act, that’s right. This is the problem with hospitals. You use so many acronyms sometimes you forget what they stand for. You remember the thing but the actual acronym, you’re like, “Uh… it’s the thing where this and the…” yeah. So that’s basically whenever you have a situation in the hospital. Something happened. Someone got the wrong medication, or took too long for them to get their medication. There’s a complicated process of figuring out where the system broke down. Who ultimately knows where the problem was asking everyone involved trying to come up with a new system that might work better. Trying it out, looking at if that new system actually worked, redesigning the system, trying that one out. It’s kind of a circular thing.

Kevin:                                       [00:49:11] Iterative design.

Megan:                                   [00:49:11] Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin:                                       [00:49:13] Design and continual improvement. Yeah. Absolutely.

Megan:                                   [00:49:15] Yeah, and that’s kind of just how I try to look at everything because I’m—in some ways that’s my life philosophy. Like I said, nothing is perfect. Everything can be improved in some aspect or maybe, you know, what I need to do is accept that this particular aspect of failure is just okay with me and I’m gonna let that go and not ruminate. Rumination is the devil I try to avoid.

Kevin:                                       [00:49:42] Yeah, only cows and goats should ruminate.

Megan:                                   [00:49:45] Exactly.

Kevin:                                       [00:49:45] And—for those listening at home. No goats. There will be no goats at my house.

Megan:                                   [00:49:53] I mean, if a goat showed up though.

Kevin:                                       [00:49:54] There’s a long explanation around that and we’re running a little short on time.

Megan:                                   [00:49:57] The chickens showed up [inaudible].

Kevin:                                       [00:49:59] Yes, but then the chickens were a special circumstance. So, all right. For our final question, often the one people find the hardest to answer. Do you celebrate your successes and if so, how? And 90% of the people I talk to, their answer is, I’m terrible at this. So, let’s find out. D? Do you go to Disney World?

D:                                                 [00:50:26] Well, sometimes I go to Disney World when we’ve succeeded, too. I spend a lot of time at Disney World if I can. I am only mediocre at this. The small successes it’s just—it was the thing you expected to happen and you keep going. And I’m trying to get better about the big things. I’m trying to treat that more as a, okay, I’ll keep myself a little list of when I hit a milestone about something, I can buy the nifty new pen or spend an hour with my Levenger catalogue and actually buy something this time. Or… you know, take a trip somewhere I haven’t been.

But, it’s taken me a long time to get there, but it—I was raised to believe success was the thing that happened. So, it wasn’t a thing you celebrated because it was what happened. You hit the milestone, you kept going. And that was a thing that really annoyed me about the way I was raised versus the way my younger sister was raised, which would seem odd because we grew up in the same house.

Megan:                                   [00:51:39] It seems odd for everyone who doesn’t know my grandfather.

D:                                                 [00:51:41] May he rest in peace. Um. I was the kid you all hated in school. I was a straight A student. My test scores were phenomenal. It was—the foregone conclusion was that I would keep doing that. I brought home a B once. Once. And my father just about went through the roof. My sister brought home straight Cs that semester and that was fine. We were treated as if we had accomplished the same thing. And, it kind of warped how I deal with success, which, I hope I did better with my own kids.

                                                     But, that’s really it. I’m getting better at it. I will celebrate the big things, at least.

Megan:                                   [00:52:35] So, as one of said kids, I can say you definitely did better. I loved my grandfather so much but he was a difficult man to please. But also, being my grandfather, he did have an impact on us a little bit, so. I am not miraculously better at this than you.

                                                     [00:52:53] As one of those kids who had high expectations that I just kept meeting I sort of just—that was just what you do. You did do a good job, though, of trying to always make there be something that I got when I met a goal. It wasn’t always big. Sometimes it was just, you know, it was just ice cream. I am a person easily motivated by ice cream so that sounds like—it sounds like a small benefit but for me it was huge. So, I have—I have a little trouble where little successes… Sometimes, you know, do a little dance and I got this question right and I feel good and inside of my head it’s a little party with fireworks and streamers. But on the outside nothing’s happening.

[00:53:48] But, I tend to try to celebrate milestones a little more than successes. When I hit bigger goals or things that are all steps along a greater path. So, when I was a first-year medical student. We had a lot of exams. Like, so many exams. I have a desktop monitor that I don’t use anymore but I’m not sure when I will ever be emotionally prepared to part with it because every time I passed an exam, I put a sticker on it. And it’s one of those sort of square ones. It’s like—yeah, it’s a square 24-inch monitor so the sides of that monitor were pretty big, and the stickers I was using were not huge, but both of the vertical sides of that monitor are covered in little gold stickers. Because over the course of two years, I took 45-50 exams. A lot of them, I took in two-week spurts where I took eight exams. Yeah.

[00:55:00] Whenever people talk about, oh, I want to be a doctor. It’s a wonderful privilege, it is a beautiful thing to be able to do. But it is the best-worst thing I have ever done to myself. So, I have learned when stuff is rough to give myself something. Some little thing. Little stickers. To try to celebrate the milestones. We do a lot of food.

D:                                                 [00:55:25] We do.

Megan:                                   [00:55:26] Like, when I have a big test like the MCAT we went out for fondue. It was wonderful. I mean, we probably eat fondue more than the normal person, but it felt more special than regular fondue.

Kevin:                                       [00:55:44] We say it’s the meat boss, and I mean the Brazilian steak house for the big ones, because you know, we have to have an excuse to eat that much food in one sitting.

Megan:                                   [00:55:54] Yeah, so. Aside from food, I mean, also obviously, my mother will occasionally buy herself a thing. I wonder where I learned that habit. But, you know, I just gotta, you know, you find something based on what you’re doing. Sometimes there’s a thing you want, and you’ve had a really rough time and you’ve gotten through two weeks of eight exams and so you buy yourself the thing.

D:                                                 [00:56:27] And the celebration next May when she graduates is gonna be epic.

Kevin:                                       [00:56:33] You’re goin’ to Disney World.

Megan:                                   [00:56:35] I am.

Kevin:                                       [00:56:39] So—

D:                                                 [00:56:39] I actually already have [inaudible].

Kevin:                                       [00:56:43] So, that is the end of the interview portion and in order to get the scheduling for the actual, the rest of the event going on around us back on track since we started a little late, we’ve got about two minutes before we technically end. Is there someone in the room after us?

                                                     [00:57:03] Oh? Well, then if we go long, we go long.

Megan:                                   [00:57:07] So, what you’re saying is…

Kevin:                                       [00:57:06] Yeah, yeah, yeah, go check. Huh?

Megan:                                   [00:57:08] What you’re saying is I could have rambled.

Kevin:                                       [00:57:11] Well, I don’t want to be—

Audience:                             [00:57:15] [inaudible].

Kevin:                                       [00:57:15] Yeah.

Audience:                             [00:57:16] Oooooh.

Megan:                                   [00:57:20] …really bad.

Audience:                             [00:57:21] There’s an hour [inaudible].

Kevin:                                       [00:57:21] There’s an hour gap, great! Well, in that case we have time to say, hey, do you guys have any questions for me, for our panelists, for my lovely guests Megan and D? You know, do you guys want to talk about, take a chance and say, hey, what you do to keep yourself productive. If there are no takers, then I’m gonna. Oh! See, I’m gonna walk out with the microphone because I love doing this. I love doing this. This is my favorite part of doing these live is coming out. All right, so, you are and…

Audience:                             [00:57:54] As, like—how do you know how long it will take you to do something? Because that’s something I always have trouble with.

Kevin:                                       [00:58:06] See, now. So that’s actually really a tough one. Well, there are a couple answers. One, yeah, Agile has an answer for that if you do programming in Agile then there are several methods for determining. I, frankly, if I’m gonna be doing it more than once, if I’m gonna do it, like, five times, or if I know I’m gonna have to repeat whatever it is I’m doing, I’ll do it once and I’ll sort of measure it. Right? Now, I know that time is gonna get shorter over time as I do it. But, there are a couple things.

There’s a piece of paper called the Emergent Task Planner. Right, and if you’ve got tasks that you’re doing a lot of, or repeating, it has little blocks where you can mark off, like, 15 or 20 minute time blocks as you’re doing it. So at the end, you can say, oh, yes. I had to, you know, I had to write a report for finance. Or, you know, I had to do a thing for my chemistry class or something like that. That took me 25 minutes. Okay, so I know it’s gonna take me probably 25 minutes to do this report next time. I’ve got—or a similar report.

[00:59:14] I’ve got—I’m gonna mow the lawn. Okay, let’s go mow the lawn. Let’s go mark off—it’s a little harder to mark off on the paper when you’re mowing the lawn, but you get the idea. Oh, that takes two hours. So I’ll just have to put two hours aside for it. And that’s really handy if you’re doing a lot of repetitive tasks. If it’s something you’ve never done before, frankly, I research the living crap out of it, right?

[00:59:37] I recently got an Instant Pot. I love my Instant Pot. The timing on the Instant Pot is not perfect when they look at the recipes. Yes, this should take two minutes, or ten minutes to naturally release. No, it takes 40 minutes for the pressure to drop and for it to release naturally. But, the initial estimates in the recipes are really good. They’re like, yes, this should take you about 15 minutes to prepare, and then 15 minutes under pressure, and it’ll—it should take you about 45 minutes to cook, right? They’re usually pretty good at that. So I look at things that either other people have done before or similar tasks and I base sort of my time estimates on that and I usually, because I’m in IT and been a contractor, double it. Right?

[01:00:20] Because it will always take longer than you think it will. Which is why the emergent task thing is really useful, because if you think it’s gonna take 20 minutes and you mark it off and it turns out it took 45, oh hey. Now I know next time, right? Do you guys have any thoughts on that?

D:                                                 [01:00:37] To double it. However long you think it’s gonna take the first time, double it. It’s probably still not enough time. I am horrible about… I will sit down and believe I can make a thing in an hour. And there are a lot of things I can do in an hour. But, time kind of becomes wibbly wobbly in there and I think it was gonna take me an hour and it’s an hour and a half, two hours later, and I’m done. But.

Megan:                                   [01:01:06] I also suffer from this particular inability to gauge my own time, which personally comes from my absolute lack of a sense of time. So, I will do a thing and I’ll be like, oh, that totally took me half an hour. No. No. Megan, that took you two and a half hours, you just weren’t looking at the clock during any of that time. But, as a crafty person, I will say, I have sort of—the general rule of double however long you think it’s gonna take is a beautiful rule. Use it all the time. But as a crafty person, the first time you’re doing something, right, the first time, like, I started knitting a lace pattern, for example. You want to give yourself more than double the time because the main brain problem that humans have is we go, oh, this will take an hour because if everything goes correctly it will take an hour. But your brain doesn’t default to everything is gonna go to Hell.

                                                     [01:02:10] And, as a crafty person? Pretty much every project at some point looks like you’re gonna need to light it on fire, so just give yourself more than double the time. If you need to, like, triple or quadruple. Do not be afraid to just assume something’s gonna go wrong. You’re gonna have to undo it or start over. That’s okay. That’s how crafting works. But please don’t light things on fire. This is how people get burned and end up in the ER.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:41] And you know a lot about burns in the ER, it’s not a pleasant thing. Yes. Oh, oh.

Audience:                             [01:02:45] Adding on.

Kevin:                                       [01:02:46] Adding on to this, okay, here you go.

Audience:                             [01:02:51] Doubling your estimate. Not a bad way to start. Track what the actual is. Especially if it is something you are going to do again. If you don’t track it and you don’t measure it, you can’t change it, and that’s absolutely critical to getting good estimates.

Kevin:                                       [01:03:12] Uh oh.

Megan:                                   [01:03:14] Interception. I would say that if you are dealing with a longer project you haven’t done before, that you should try to set up some milestones in there. Try to see if you can figure out what would be maybe a quarter done, or I would have to do this five times. And figure out how long that part is taking you and compare that to what you think it will take over all to get a better sense of how you are estimating. So you can’t—you don’t have to have finished something to be able to use that. You can finish a portion of it to be able to then apply that to the rest.

Kevin:                                       [01:03:57] Cool. Okay. Doot-doot-doo-doo-doo-doo-doot [continues singing.] Yes?

Audience:                             [01:04:03] This isn’t so much a question as listening to the podcast, I tried out the emergent task planner for work and that works really well. I’m an accountant and I work in a company, and so all of my work comes from somebody else and so being able to track how I’m spending my time and what the most important things are to do really helps. Personal life, it’s bullet journal with lots of stickers.

Kevin:                                       [01:04:28] Show them your bullet journal. Bullet journals are actually really awesome for this, because one of the things they have is they have a couple tips on how to, like, measure and keep track of how long things take. Yeah.

Audience:                             [01:04:42] [Inaudible.]

Kevin:                                       [01:04:43] Having—oh, sorry. Yeah. Yep. So, yeah, bullet journals are awesome for that, yeah.

Audience:                             [01:04:52] [Inaudible.] Something, the diversion of—

Kevin:                                       [01:04:56] So how do you fight the, “Ooh shiny object” or in Up, it was always, “Squirrel? Squirrel?” Yeah.

                                                     [01:05:07] That’s actually, for me since I don’t have it as bad, I do keep a list of what I need to do and sort of keep referring back to it to make sure that if I go off on that tangent that I can pull myself back in. I have alarms on my phone to help me do that. So, and the question is of course, how do you deal with the, “Ooh, shiny object” problem. Um, D?

D:                                                 [01:05:37] Far, far too frequently, I follow the shiny object. But this is why I have four million Trello boards. I have—and a considerable number of boards on Pinterest. I will take the idea, put it there. It doesn’t get away from me. I can come back to it and work on it when I have time.

Megan:                                   [01:06:00] I will say the context of my answer is significant. Because when I’m in a hospital, I very much have to be, like I had this great idea but there are people watching me and I can’t just dive into my phone right now, so I take tiny little notes. Super short notes. Write something down, bookmark it. Whatever is your preferred method based on where the shiny object came from. Because, you know. The context really matters. But, honestly, if I’m at home, I don’t. I let the shiny objects have their way. Sometimes the shiny object is your brain saying, “Take a break.” And it’s okay to take a break.

Kevin:                                       [01:06:47] And I was reminded of a story that the author of Eat, Pray, Love had. I can’t remember her name to save my life right now. Elizabeth Gilbert. Yes. But she tells this story in her TED talk about Tom Waits. So, this is apparently a Tom Waits story, really. And Tom Waits, being a creative person has these ideas hitting him, just like, constantly, constantly, constantly. And what he did, as he was like, on the freeway, and he had an idea for a song and what he basically did was he said to his brain or the universe at large, he says, “Okay, this is great. I don’t have time for this right now. Come back later. Come back later. We’ll talk about this when I’m not on the freeway and I can write it down or whatever. Or maybe somebody else needs to sing this song and not me. Maybe you can go see that.” And apparently that’s the strategy that works for her, and the strategy that works for Tom Waits, is write down really what the shiny is so you can go back to it later, and then go back to what you were doing.

                                                     [01:07:49] And which, I can admit. If you’re on the LA freeway driving, you really just need to pause it because you don’t want to—I mean, they’re already pretty bad driver—yeah, voice memo on your phone is also a good thing. Oh look, here’s—yep, no, go look this up later. You know? Uh oh.

Megan:                                   [01:08:05] Or, I will say, as a person who is not—I don’t like driving so whenever I’m driving I try not to do anything involving my phone whatsoever, but a lot of people, their cars will let you do things like call someone. So, have a designated note-taker. Have someone who you call when you can’t take the notes because you’re driving, and they take notes for you.

D:                                                 [01:08:33] Or someone to ride shotgun and take your notes. I did actually used to keep a Phillips voice recorder in my car for this.

Megan:                                   [01:08:41] Yeah, I have sent many an email from me to my mother with a note that was the thing she wanted to remember because neither of us had paper at the time, we were in a car.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:53] Yay. Comment or question?

Audience:                             [01:08:56] Uh, alternative perspective.

Kevin:                                       [01:08:57] Okay.

Audience:                             [01:08:58] Which is, I have like, way more—I write a little, and I have way more story ideas than I have time to get to. For a while, I started trying to keep track of them, which was like, oh, this is a cool idea. I just give up on it. I have so many ideas, I’ll have more, so I just sort of accept that you know, if it’s really important it’ll come back to me again. And if it doesn’t, then I probably didn’t need it, so. You know.

Kevin:                                       [01:09:28] Okay. Any more questions or tributes or volunteers? No?

Audience:                             [01:09:35] [inaudible]

Kevin:                                       [01:09:35] What’s that?

Audience:                             [01:09:38] [inaudible]

Kevin:                                       [01:09:41] Have I ever heard of two second lean? No, tell us about two second lean.

Audience:                             [01:09:44] It’s a program that’s—it was gentleman who works with Fast Cap was the name of the company and he was looking at try to break things down and simplify it. So, you look at the process and what extra parts in there or can get things together so when you’re processing things. He did simple things, like in the kitchen when he’s trying to make his coffee. Okay, well, if I’m gonna make the coffee, I need the cream and the sugar, so he put them together so he would try to remove a step to try and simple things. But I believe it’s on the web and it’s all free and such. But, Two Second Lean and Fast Cap is the company he worked for. They’ve been trying to crunch things down.

Kevin:                                       [01:10:25] So, I’m definitely going to add a link to that in the episode notes and I’ll be adding all sorts of links in the episode notes. So, we’re gonna close things out with a thank you very much. If—for those of you who are present. If you want to claim an Open Badge for having seen me in person. We issue Open Badges as part of the podcast. So, you can log onto the website, you can enter a little code and you can get the badge related to the episode based on the code you put in. And I issue this for everyone. I have a special badge for people who have seen me or met me in person that I’m gonna offer you guys up after I stop recording, because for those of you who are listening at home, now, you’re missing out on getting the badge. For D and Megan, I have another badge which is specifically the, “I was interviewed” badge. I’m gonna give them that code separate from everything else.

                                                     [01:11:20] First off, thank you D and Megan for coming out.

Audience:                             [01:11:24] [Applause.]

Kevin:                                       [01:11:24] I want to thank everybody who’s in the audience here. Thank you, this was awesome, and I had a great time. And for those of you listening at home, we’ll be right back.

[01:11:31] [Productivity Alchemy segment change music plays. Jaunty, pleasant, jazzy piano with accompanying bass.]

Kevin:                                       [01:12:12] And we are back in the studios. I gotta say, first off, thank you to Windycon for accepting my submission of recording Productivity Alchemy live at your event, it was a lot of fun. Thank you to D and Megan. I had an amazing time talking to you and I can’t wait to see you both at the next event we’re all at. Again, congratulations to D for becoming a member of the Dorsai Irregulars. And, I think that’s all of the thank yous I can possibly give out without just abasing myself on the floor and groveling.

Ursula:                                     [01:12:43] And that makes for terrible radio.

Kevin:                                       [01:12:44] It really does. It really does. Although I’m always remembered whenever somebody says it, of the original Danger Mouse, Quark had a robot, right Quark the alien had a robot, and the robot’s name was Grovel and every time he said Grovel, it would fall on its face, rolling on the ground, going, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Master.” And there was this whole thing kind of like a who’s on first, excerpt he would be like, “Grovel!” Clunk. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Master.” “Get up. Now, Grovel, I want you to…” “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Master.” “Look, when I say Grovel, don’t—” “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Master.” It was—it’s absolutely hysterical because there’s also this thick Scottish brogue for Quark as well, which I’m not gonna try to replicate because my friend Fox Amoore had very bad things to say about my attempts at a brogue.

Ursula:                                     [01:13:27] And rightly so.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:29] And rightly so. Okay. So, our badge code for this week is LIVESHOW. And for those who are listening for the first time or have forgotten. And if you’re a regular listener, you haven’t forgotten so you might just fuzz out for a minute or two.

Ursula:                                     [01:13:47] It’s okay.

Kevin:                                       [01:13:49] Yeah. We issue Mozilla Open Badges here at Productivity Alchemy which are images with embedded meta data that explain how you earned said badge and you can copy it around to other sites and backpacks and things like that. And, you go to ProductivityAlchemy.com. There is a spot at the bottom of the page for accessing the badge and you just type in LIVESHOW and you will get the episode 71 badge, and it’s pretty awesome.

                                                     [01:14:18] You can support us if you so choose—

Ursula:                                     [01:14:21] On Patreon at at UrsulaV.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:24] You can buy me a coffee at Kofi.com/KSonney.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:29] Patreon subscribers will get a free ebook this month as Swordheart is coming out.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:35] It is. And contrary to everything she has said we are not getting goats at particular sales goals.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:43] The she in this case is not me.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:45] No, it is Andrea, Neolithic Sheep.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:48] Our dear friend—

Kevin:                                       [01:14:48] Our dear friend.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:48] —who is claiming to all and sundry that if I sell 10,000 copies, I will get goats. This is a foul lie.

Kevin:                                       [01:14:54] Horrible, terrible lie. Not gonna happen.

Ursula:                                     [01:14:56] The very most that might happen next on the livestock front is miniature turkeys and not for a while.

Kevin:                                       [01:15:02] Correct. And also, the heritage endangered breed of chicken I want to start raising.

Ursula:                                     [01:15:09] Yes.

Kevin:                                       [01:15:09] But that’s gonna be a while because there are logistics around that that just aren’t going to happen any time soon.

And so that brings us to the end of another episode. Thank you all for listening. Please feel free to share with your friends. You can email me through the contact form at—on ProductivityAlchemy.com. I am saving up letters for the December letters show which is closer than I thought it was going to be, and don’t forget that next week we have a drawing.

Ursula:                                     [01:15:39] Go us!

Kevin:                                       [01:15:40] Next week we are giving away a pair of Story Clock notebooks and you have to go back and comment on, was it episode 69? Episode 68?

Ursula:                                     [01:15:50] I don’t know.

Kevin:                                       [01:15:50] I don’t remember. It’s—that’s a problem. I should have written it down.

Ursula:                                     [01:15:53] If it was 71, then I think 69 is as far away as it could have been.

Kevin:                                       [01:15:58] Yes. Okay. Yeah, because I was gonna say yeah, but then live show, blah blah blah. So, go back and you can comment on episode 69 with, “Hey, I want the Story Clock notebook.” And we’ll be making a drawing for that next week.

Ursula:                                     [01:16:12] Also next week is Thanksgiving.

Kevin:                                       [01:16:13] It is! So, hopefully…

Ursula:                                     [01:16:15] Jesus, the end of the year is just careening towards us like a truck that has crossed the median.

Kevin:                                       [01:16:20] Sergei, please don’t help with the microphone. I realize that. It’s been a very eventful year in many, many ways, so. To paraphrase Warren Ellis at the end of his weekly newsletter, it’s just gonna keep moving faster and hold on tight, kids, because it’s gonna be one hell of a ride. But we can do this, we’ve done it before, and we just keep going. So, what I say to that—

Ursula:                                     [01:16:50] When Warren Ellis said it, he said fuck a lot more times, didn’t he?

Kevin:                                       [01:16:53] No, he didn’t.

Ursula:                                     [01:16:53] Oh, really?

Kevin:                                       [01:16:53] He actually didn’t. No. It was surprising. So… that’s all there is this week, folks.

Ursula:                                     [01:17:00] And Sergei’s trying to cuddle with the microphone so we should probably stop.

Kevin:                                       [01:17:02] I’m trying. You keep interrupting me.

Ursula:                                     [01:17:05] Sorry.

Kevin:                                       [01:17:06] So, that’s it for this week folks. We will see you next time and until then, stay productive.

Ursula:                                     [01:17:12] Woo! Sergei…