How to manage productivity & people with Anant Sharma, Founder & CEO of Matter Of Form

The UK’s Chartered Management Institute has previously found that 41% of managers believe having direct reports increases their own productivity. So, I wanted to hear from someone who has built a strong team to help them achieve more. 

Anant Sharma is the Founder & CEO of Matter Of Form, a leading luxury brand and digital agency based in London. Having founded his company in 2009, Anant and his team work with some of the world’s leading brands including Aman, Belmond & Knight Frank. 

Keep listening to hear Anant’s advice on discovering your strengths & how to build a team around you to enhance your own productivity.

Anant’s advice

• Your business will evolve as you personally grow and change; you may have to let go of some initial ideas
• Prioritise what is important and what you should be doing; this may mean handing on to others the things you are experienced at
• Concentrate (without guilt!) on reflection / exploring opportunities / less quantifiable “work”
• Celebrate thinking time and allow space for it in your week
• There is no need to keep packing in information which is not always productive
• Be modest about your daily to-do list
• Have belief in where you want to go
• Know yourself and employ accordingly; you may require mirror personalities of yourself, or you may need strong support in those areas where you know yourself to be weak
• Know the value of meditation

FF&M recommends: 

• LastPass the password-keeping site that syncs between devices.
• Google Workspace is brilliant for small businesses
• Buzzsprout podcast 'how to' & hosting directory
• Canva has proved invaluable for creating all the social media assets and audio bites.

FF&M enables you to own your own PR. Recorded, edited & published by Juliet Fallowfield, 2023 MD & Founder of PR & Communications consultancy for startups Fallow, Field & Mason.  Email us at hello@fallowfieldmason.com or DM us on instagram @fallowfieldmason. 

MUSIC CREDIT Funk Game Loop by Kevin MacLeod.  Link &  Licence

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to season 11 of How To Start Up, the podcast helping you start and scale your business with advice from entrepreneurs on what to do now, next, or never. This season, we'll be hearing about all things productivity from amazing entrepreneurs sharing how they've hacked theirs. Hosted by me, Juliet Fallowfield, founder of the B Corp certified PR communications and podcasting consultancy, Fallow, Field & Mason. Our mission is to enable you to master your own storytelling, whether that be via PR or podcasting, all with a long term view.

 The UK's Chartered Management Institute has previously found that 41% of managers believe having direct reports increases their own productivity. So I wanted to hear from someone who's built a strong team to help them achieve more. Anant Sharma is the founder and CEO of Matter. formm, a leading luxury brand in digital agency based in London.

Having founded his business in 2009, Anna and his team work with some of the world's leading brands, including Amman, Belmond, and Knight Frank, keep listening to hear [00:01:00] announce advice on discovering your own strengths and how to build a team around you to enhance your productivity.

 Hi Anant. Thank you so much for joining how to start up today. It's wonderful to have you on the productivity season. Before we get into all things productivity, it'd be great if you could introduce yourself a bit about the business that you started.

Sure, well thanks for having me on. My name's Anant and I run a design consultancy called Matter of Form. And we we specialise in luxury branding, customer experience and innovation for brands that are largely in the hospitality sector, but we also do a lot in high end retail, a little bit in financial services, a little bit in health, and most of our clients are all over the world. In fact, very few of them are in the UK, which perhaps is a testament to who knows what. 

When did you start it

it started 14 years ago,

and how many people do you employ?

about 60 of us.

We've had many lives, many lives of business.[00:02:00] 

That's incredible. And also the fact that you're still doing it, cause I think I'm, I'm at year four and I meet a lot of people like, Oh, you're at that bit. I'm like, what do you mean by that bit? It's like, they're really tired. And is this ever going to change and get easier a bit?

But the fact that you're still in it and you're still enthused about it is amazing. 

feels like dog years, you know, it's every year feels, feels like seven at times, but it's it's interesting when you're a founder CEO because your own interests change over time as you age and as your perspective changes and as your insight into where your niche in your industry that you often accidentally develop a specialism is changes. And it's impossible not to slightly turn the business into becoming a reflection of your own interest in that moment.

 I mean there are some people in the agency world, you know, who together leave a big agency and set up shop on their own.

And often that type of proposition is just a direct reflection of what they were doing, but with the, with the people they most enjoyed working with. But I think if you're a founder CEO and you start and you grow a business and [00:03:00] it develops and, and, you know, you go on a journey and that journey often involves a lot of change.

 it's by allowing that change that you don't get bored.

 Well, someone else said in season one, as long as you're okay with the business that you run in five years being nothing like the business you're trying to start right now, you'll be fine. I was like, okay. And fair enough. We're now doing podcast production. We've brought in other services I would never have dreamt of doing at the beginning, but you kind of have to be receptive to that feedback from your market and from your clients, which if you're

okay, to bend and flex, then I think you're in the right job. But if you're vehemently adamant, you're going to stick to one thing, then it's probably not for you.

 I think the really important part of that, by the way, is, is letting go of things that you used to do that might, in some cases represent easy or practice revenue, but aren't the best way of achieving the type of revenue you do want to deliver. And in an agency model, which is sort of buffeted by the wind of revenue, it is very hard to let go sometimes of the things that you once did and ending up in a place where you're not doing enough of the satisfying or the intellectually [00:04:00] satisfying work or the creatively satisfying work that you believe represents tomorrow because you're being asphyxiated by old revenue.

And saying no to the wrong revenue, leaving space for the right revenue. And for me, I still am yet to write my own job description, but with the thought of seeing in my day, the bits of the work that I really want to do. And I enjoy doing the bits that I really don't and admitting that and it's fine because you wear many hats.

 Being really honest about the bits you're good at and that you want to do. And you have this opportunity to create that and then bring in other people to do the bits you don't want to do that they might love, but given the size of your business well actually, before I ask you about that, how do you define productivity?

Because it is so crucial to run a productive team and business when you're a founder. What does productivity mean to you?

Understanding what's important. I honestly think it's as simple as that. I think it's so easy to keep yourself busy especially as a founder, because you feel that everything is your responsibility. And it's very, very easy to make yourself [00:05:00] busy enough to quench your own guilt and taking a step back and understanding what's important and what's not things that you've done enough times to be able to codify and and pass that responsibility on to others to enable you to do what you're best at which is often exploring opportunity, giving definition to grey areas or complex scopes or things that aren't that obvious and turning those into things that others can execute on.

I think that is often accompanied by a high level of guilt.

Hmm.

You're not doing enough or you're not busy enough.

Yeah, I think this stuff's really personal, and it's different for everyone, but, often just thinking, exploring opportunities and doing stuff that doesn't in the moment feel in inverted commas like hard work is often where the strengths of a founder lie. But it's less quantifiable.

You know, you might find yourself writing less documents or doing more of the process stuff or it doesn't matter. It [00:06:00] varies for everyone, but the things that come naturally to you tend to not feel like hard work. And when you start and run a business it tends to come naturally because it doesn't feel like hard work is a path of least resistance, but for others that's a path of high friction.

So I think there's a lot of guilt involved. 

Well, enjoying it. I think that's, you've hit a real nerve for me because when you're running at pace and trying to grow a business in the early days, you have no idea what you're really doing, you're testing and learning everything. As long as you've got cash flow to keep you afloat, you just keep going and iterate and try things.

And you hit a groove at some point where you're like, okay. This person's doing that, this client we're doing this for, and you work it out. But you're right. It's the guilt when you're doing something new and you're exploring something that you haven't done before, but you're curious about it. And you're like, well, this is quite fun.

This doesn't feel like work. And then I feel a bit guilty. I should be going back to the finance side of the business or connecting with people on LinkedIn or writing more copy or whatever it might be. But the guilt, oh, it's so true. So do you think just let go of the guilt and then lean [00:07:00] into it?

Totally. I think the complacency of the human condition is to assume everyone's quite similar to you and they're not, you know, and people really enjoy different types of challenges. They enjoy different types of accomplishments on a day to day basis they are driven by different things and they're not the same as what you're driven by.

And I think that's particularly pronounced when you're a founder and you open yourself up to the general shit show that is running a business, you know, the appetite for risk, the HR issues, the anxiety of where your next piece of business comes from. The worry, not just of redundancy, but of becoming obsolete as a proposition.

You know, I mean, all of these things drive all of us to move forwards. They're not everyone's cup of tea.

And they keep you up at night if you let them. 

 I sleep very well. I let go. I let go worrying too much about any of that stuff a while 

ago.

Well, you're all tried and tested, you've got years under the belt where you know you'll find a way, but that wasting time on worry, where it doesn't actually get you anywhere. And there's a sweet spot between the worry and the fear factor and the adrenaline and the [00:08:00] rush. So the pro and the con and the push forwards, and it's okay to go towards something that you're sort of exploring and that is work.

And someone else said to me once that You're never going to not be thinking about it. Like you'd go for a run and you'd be thinking about it, that, that counts, but doing something like listening to a podcast and running that to me is a real treat, but I need to listen to that podcast for my business. So it does 

redefine what work looks like. It's not just showing up at nine o'clock, sitting at a desk and leaving and taking on your leave allowance. It's a whole different way of working. How have you managed your own productivity over the years?

I say a couple of things to this. The first is I, I sort of just celebrate having thinking time. Luxury. I just think it's really important to just think about things. Do you have to proactively book that in your calendar or just force it to happen?

I like, I make a point of having times in the day or days, you know, on Wednesdays, for example, I try and have a day just of thinking and allowing my brain to rest and process the thoughts that have happened over Monday and Tuesday, prepare myself for [00:09:00] whatever happens on Thursday and Friday, that type of thing.

Just a little break in the middle of the week to think about things, have less meetings. I try not to bombard myself with content and podcasts and business books. And I go through phases and I tend to read quite thematically or listen to things around themes and I get quite obsessive about them. But I always make a point as well of just giving myself a bit of a break and not trying to pack in information, which it's very, very easy to assume that that information is the silver bullet to all of your woes. And I try and make a point of just walking and having a think and not having headphones in my ears.

Yeah.

Just turning things over and staring into space sometimes. I travel quite a lot. So I also try and make a point of just giving myself a problem or something I'm uncertain about, or like a big sort of hairy sort of, you know, obstacle that stands before us, just setting myself intentionally, that topic is something to think about as I travel or have time to myself basically. For me, that's really [00:10:00] important. I did at one point become quite obsessed with productivity. And, you know, I read books like Getting Things Done, which is an 80s classic. It's a system for organisation that was written in the 80s and involves lots of filing cabinets and you know, sticky labels and it's an entire cult almost of productivity that's since been updated through various apps and it's been rewritten by people who've adopted it as a, general life philosophy.

And I found I was spending more time designing the system than I was really doing anything in the system. And really that resulted in a couple of years of all sorts of different ways of organising my thinking and my to do lists. And the one thing I learned is that when I'm fed up enough of the things that have sat on my to do list for long enough and not been accomplished, I just changed the app and I don't even have a to do list now.

Yeah.

I literally just put in my diary time to think about the [00:11:00] things I need to think about, to do the things I think I need to do. You know, I have a sense of my values and my long term goals as an individual, and I know what my strategy is for the business. And most of this stuff just lives in my head. I write on a large A3 pad of paper that sits in front of my computer what I need to do for the day. I'm modest about the things I believe I can accomplish, and I rip that piece of paper off my desk pad the next morning, carry forward the one or two things I haven't managed to achieve the day before, and that's how I, that's how I basically do things now.

It gives you a sense of satisfaction as well. I think I'm very envious of the amount of years that you've gone under your belt because you've gone through various iterations of you and how important is knowing yourself when you start a business.

I think I've got ADD and I've got a track record of not getting on with authority, you know, I got kicked out of several schools.My brother 

actually, he's [00:12:00] like, I'm self employed cause I, you know, I love the remote working. It's like, but you told me off the record you're self employed cause you got fired from every job that you had. And he's like, well, that too. And I just prefer being my own boss and you know, but that's knowing yourself, right?

That's knowing that you work in a certain way and being your own boss is the best way for you to work well. And how with ADD has that impacted your work do you think? 

I've just got a long track record of not doing everything that I've promised either myself or others to do and I've been forced to reconcile myself with that truth. I'm very good at doing the things i'm passionate about and over indexing on the time and effort and love that goes into those things, and I'm absolutely appalling at doing some other things. And so, because it's so extreme, I've had to build teams around me who can help me do and finish what we begin. And I've also been very honest, not just with myself, but with those around me, to the point [00:13:00] of self deprecation that I think at times maybe does actually have an impact on my own self esteem around my ability to just sort of do things that to others might seem quite basic. I need support, basically. I need support on very obvious day to day things. I'm good at turning complex problems into very simple solutions. I'm also very good at turning quite simple day to day things into highly complex, unnecessary mountains that have to be grappled with. So it's so extreme with me like every day I go to the wrong drawer to get my fork out and turn the bath tap on instead of the shower tap in my shower every morning.

It's like these things just for some reason they don't come that instinctively to me. Maybe my head's just a bit in the clouds. Maybe I just believe that the shower tap should be where the bath tap is and it's designed badly. But. You know, because of that, I have been reliant on others and I've met a lot of other [00:14:00] founders and CEOs who are very like me and also have ADD and all of the aspects of having attention deficit disorder that make you oddly quite good at business because you're driven to find out what's around the next corner. You're forced to learn how to delegate. You are often creative and able to see things a slightly different way. I don't think necessarily that conducive to living a wholesome life of equanimity and I offset that by meditating a lot and I do a one week silent retreat every yearand I believe that it's really life changing and I offer it to my team actually, and it, you know, we pay for it, it doesn't come out of the holiday, you know, it's a real gift that I think is a lovely thing to give people

because if you're an employee, I think, not the obvious way to spend your days off but it's a really nice thing to do.

And also gives them a level of understanding what you're going through as well. I think that empathy is important within a team and with that on people bringing people into your company. Have you [00:15:00] deliberately looked for people who are opposites to you to support you and mirror you because I know a friend who's ADHD, she works with someone on mirroring, so they sit together and it's accountability buddy with her to do list in terms of the minutia, but big sky thinking creativity, she's

fantastic at, but she's worked out who she is and how she works at work and then brought in people to compliment that. Was it obvious from the beginning what you needed in terms of a team around you given now that you've got such a big team?

 There are two types of business owner I find, or like entrepreneurial business owner. One hires mirrors of themselves and seeks to do more of what they already do through people who serve as their minions. Or those who can be trained into doing exactly what the individual does, and then those who build complementary skill sets around them because they tend to not be that T shaped and be sort of very good at certain things and highly incompetent at other things. I'm the latter. I'm good at some [00:16:00] things. I struggle to recognise what those things are sometimes, but I try and remind myself occasionally. We have naturally built a team that's quite balanced and everyone complements everyone else. So, it's definitely the latter. We're also a very multi disciplined business We have designers, engineers, user experience architects, analysts, strategists, consultants ranging from the business and and you know into the creative and then into the design and build of brand experiences and so we are quite codependent anyway as a practitioning team and so there are lots of different personality types and you know we make a real effort to try and hire those who will act as a complement and create one unit that feels 360 rather than just hiring mirror images and that is just true across departments as it is for those around me. 

With, I mean, people for most service based businesses is the biggest overhead. [00:17:00] Do you have any advice for founders to, when to kind of know when is the right time to bring somebody in? Is it before you need them? Is it when you've got the client to service them? Is it before the client comes in? At what point do you know, right, we've got budget for this next hire?

 It's hard to answer that question. You've got to have a brazen belief in what you're doing and where you want to get to and when you have that sort of sense of where you need to get to, I think it becomes quite obvious the support you need to get there. It is like really hard, do you know what I mean?

I've spent so much of the last 15 years hiring prematurely. That causes you to bring on the wrong type of business to feed mouths. That then creates, you know, effectively toxic revenue, which misrepresents the health of the business, and leads you to grow in a way that is, a house of cards, you know, it's incorrect.

It's doesn't align with your spirit and you end up with clients [00:18:00] or project types that you have just taken on because you need to meet payroll. It's much easier as you grow because your own momentum as a business becomes more self sustaining and your projects become bigger and you tend to have more lead time a greater sense of how to grow and when to grow. But it was very hard at the beginning, especially when we're exploring new disciplines and new skill sets. And like I said, we've got many departments. So some of those departments, you know, went before they existed. It was a real gamble. It was almost like starting a new business within the business. And I made lots and lots of mistakes around that. My big piece of advice would be perhaps an odd one, but don't be afraid to hire a really good executive assistant or PA or assistant and don't assume that it's a complacency to have someone in that role because it unlocks so much of your valuable thinking time and doing time and it's not an arrogance. It's, it's [00:19:00] really, really important. And someone who's brilliant in that role goes beyond just assisting you. They operationalise your thinking. They help manage your energy. They design your week, and they hold you accountable to the things that you're supposed to be doing on that weekly basis.

They remove things from your diary before they even become a question to grapple with, and they politely remove distractions when distractions need to be removed in a way that strips the emotion out of the correspondence, or at least your own emotion out of the correspondence. They become a gatekeeper, and a confidant, and alsoprovide, you know, a point of weekly review that serves as a point of reflection.

That sounds amazing to have. How do you just hit the jackpot when you brought your first one on? Or is it trial and error? How would you find the right person? Because obviously when you're working that closely with [00:20:00] someone it is very personal. Have you got any advice of how to interview for someone like that?

My first EA she's gone on to a very high powered job now. She's very, very, very good. And the person who works with me right now is exceptional, you know, and we've had a couple of blips in the meantime.How do you hire a good EA?

It's got to be someone who almost understands how to manage your personal life first, even though it's an executive assistant function. And I think at that early age, you've got to treat it as a PA as much as an EA. And because it's not about the business, it's about you and your link to the business, especially in those early stages.

So I wouldn't be afraid to treat it like a PA role first.

and an EA role second. If you try and hire someone who's too professional in their approach or you offset in a way the guilt of feeling that you have someone to assist you in your personal life, it's one almost drives the other basically is what it's the point I'm trying to make quite badly.

But

No, I think I [00:21:00] completely get it because I think until I became self employed I, I didn't realise there is not a strong boundary between your personal life and your professional life. And I tried to make it by going to an office and keeping office hours and all of that. But as I said, you can go on a run on a weekend and you'll be thinking about a client problem just because it's top of mind and having someone in your team that's got your back, but you are at the beginning, everything, you're wearing lots of hats.

And if you can take some of those hats and give it to someone else to manage, It sounds dreamy, sounds amazing. And what you said about the pride is really interesting. Cause I've always been, I know I'm a super efficient person. I'm really organised. I'm probably the opposite of you. I'm very good at the admin and the detail and all of that stuff.

And it, I need to make more time for the creative thinking and the big ticket stuff, and I was like, well, I'm not going to spend money on an EA, but actually the amount of hours that would be saved. By someone doing something with grim determination on my inbox and my calendar that would free me up to, to face that big sky thinking and that go for [00:22:00] that walk for two hours.

I mean, we use Toggl track our time and I say to my team, please read newspapers, please listen to podcasts and go for walks or just don't take your phone out and go for a two hour walk and just think. They do it and they come back and I've had this great idea and I've problem solved that and I was like, I should be doing this and I'm not because I'm buried in my inbox.

 It's that old adage that's like in business, you know, laying your clothes out the night before or the Steve Jobs wearing the same Izumiaki black polo neck every day, or whatever it is, you know, it's like, that's all based on reducing the level of decisions that you have to make because there's only so many decisions you can make in a day. And before you sort of burn your capacity to make good ones. And that's really the role that a good EA plays. They make these decisions in a depersonalised context on your behalf. And it's very valuable.

And the flow is there.

In terms of your company culture, given that [00:23:00] you're the size that you are, not everyone would have a direct line to you, I hope. And you need people to live and breathe beyond you. And it was Katharine Pooley I interviewed recently who said it's like an octopus. I have a really strong senior high and they're the octopus legs and it filters through the whole company.

 We all talk at the top and it all comes through, but all connected to each other. And I thought that was quite a nice way of looking at it. How do you disseminate the culture that you've created and how do you sort of bring your team members on that productivity? 

 It's somewhat ironic that I'm on a productivity podcast because I'm not that productive. I'm actually quite disorganised.

You run a successful business, so there has to be something in there somewhere.

Yeah, I'm really, I don't even have a list anymore, but I mean, I have explored every productivity technique and, you know, I believe in mindfulness and, the power of values and sort of turning. business and to a

bunch of disparate individuals into one cohesive whole and all of these [00:24:00] things, you know, I think are important and they're a form of productivity. I suppose they're a form of management and leadership, but I'm definitely not really productive. 

But every person I've interviewed so far in the season is like, careful what you wish for. Productivity is a bit of a nasty word and it puts a lot of guilt and sort of pressure on people. And actually Nnenna, who I think was last week's episode, was talking about how she manages her energy, not her productivity.

And actually leave productivity alone. Like it puts too much stress on you. If you know who you are and how you manage your energy and you get at that workflow and that flow state, and you find when you're in that state and what's got you there, that is way more helpful for the overall productivity of a business than actually tracking your hours.

So things like that, I found really interesting that it's actually a bit of a, where I thought it was a bit of a buzzword. It really isn't. There's a lot of like, Ooh, no, don't, don't say the P word,

I mean, I think the notion of productivity is under some inspection at the moment because of the backdrop of AI and automation [00:25:00] and you know, the light being cast on the widget factory of a world we're creating. I always think, you know, it must be so weird to go and work in the eighties, right?

Like to, to like go in without a computer and to just like go and read a bunch of things in a ring binder. 

 Write a few letters or briefing notes. Have someone with a mail cart come around and send them off and then ideally to get a nice long lunch with a couple of scotches, and now we're just we just like moving stuff around on the screen from one context to another quite a lot of the time you know or reorganising or refactoring a message from one place from slack or teams into an email waiting for a response, you know I mean it I think we're living in in a real sort of we're the guinea pigs of a world pre automation where the various contexts through which we assimilate information only to refactor them plus our own opinion into another format is about to change as we develop a more semantic relationship with technology. I know there was something Elon Musk said he was talking about the Neuralink on a Joe [00:26:00] Rogan podcast, it was years ago, and he said the greatest bandwidth problem we have that prevents us from accessing infinite information is like our thumb, basically, you know, like that's basically the, weakest link between us and the internet and how quickly we can type our thoughts into Google to get an answer back.

And it's kind of a stupid thing to say in a way, but it always struck me as all of this stuff is about to change and what value is, why we value the things we value. Why we pay a price premium for some things over others and what what really the value of human beings is and our role as an agent of creativity or agents of creativity rather than agents of organisation.

Do you know what I mean

or analysis or like we're not analysis But like data crunching or do you know what I mean? 

The magic bit of the creativity that is valuable to people. And what you said about moving things around different screens. I was chatting to someone saying, well, from Canva to da, da, da. I was like, Oh [00:27:00] God, we're just like playing this game of content and it's not satisfying.

Whereas a rich conversation with somebody that, will stay in my memory that I can think about later. And I've learned something from it has value to me. And that's obviously where my business has pivoted into podcasting because it means we can do it more. And I think a lot of people, especially in the creative industries are fearful of AI, but the writers that I know, I'm like, get ahead of it.

Just work with it, embrace it. It's coming with you like it or not. And that knock on effect to productivity that a lot of the stuff that we do will just be automated. We won't even touch it. And I think the thing I'm proudest of most in the business is that, I was like, well, you're on teams or were you on Slack?

I was like, nope, we use phone calls and we use email. And that is it. We don't WhatsApp each other. We don't use anything else because I don't want people to be bombarded by so many different applications all the time. Like less is more. And it really matters to me that people aren't anxious that they're present online on Slack and Zoom at the same time and things like that.

But I think. All of these, like Asana, [00:28:00] Trello, all of these things coming through, you can see them changing like every day. Our podcast editing software updates because of the new version of the AI for the transcript. It's fascinating to watch, frightening as hell, but also we're, we're in it whether we like it or not.

So you kind of have to embrace it.

 We train AI models in a matter of form to well, I won't go into all the examples, but one of them is that we've actually deconstructed the voice of our strategy director and turned it to an AI model. So when we're delivering vision videos or evangelising the future of a brand or the future of a customer experience, we can sort of speak through his voice. And quickly put scripts together that bring to life a manifesto or you know a guest experience or a guest journey or a customer journey you can do some pretty amazing things We've got a presentation called harnessing AI for human creativity and it's absolutely fascinating. I mean if there are any companies interested in hearing that presentation.

It's worth getting in touch. It's really fascinating

I'm, like bowled over by it every time it's redone. It's done by our design team. 

 As a creative [00:29:00] agency, you're working with it and you're learning ahead and you're embracing it, which is super exciting. Something that we do with the podcast is that the guest from the previous episode has a question for the next guest. And it was actually Emily Austen, who runs another PR company.

And I won't lie, we chatted for about two hours and it should have been 40 minutes, but two people paid to talk, we'll talk, but her question, she's just written a book about everything she's learned from her clients around productivity, and she said. If you had an extra hour in your day, what would you do with it?

Meditate

I mean, I mean if I had an extra I mean, you know, that's like the thing you never have time for right? the

But 

you always should.

You know the thing that gives you time. Yeah, I'd probably try and meditate I do this vipassana like I said every year. So it's sort of 10 days of silence and I meditate very very rigorously, aggressively, aggressive meditation. I meditate, you know, like every morning for like three months, for an hour, and [00:30:00] then, and then go on a bender, and then, and then just don't.

There's a thing, I know meditation works. I have proven, even to my mother, who's like, it's a bit woo wee, and I did it for six months, she's like, I've seen such a difference in you. If a 75 year old woman can see me and see the change in me, I know it helps, but I don't let myself do it. I'm like, no, I've got to send an email, da da da da da.

But in that 20 minute meditation I was meant to do in the morning and the afternoon, I problem solve, I, solution find I come out of it better, clearer, more efficient slash, probably more productive. But for some reason I think my time is better spent in my inbox and it is meditation. So when you said aggressively meditate, I know what you mean.

It's like, I'm going to do this.

is that a really competitive, competitive approach to meditation?

Yes, but it works. And to the point where I used to use running as a, another form of stress management and I would now give up running over meditation if I had to choose between the two and I never thought I just hear myself say that but yet when you're very busy and it got stressful week you let these things slide like [00:31:00] so for you, you have time in your diary already for meditation but would you add more in the more you do the better it is.

Well I'd just do it to begin with.

I mean, I haven't meditated in months, you know, I, I, I, like I said, you know, I'm, I'm quite extreme, you know, so I, I have I get like really into stuff.

I, I'm into all the, phases and crazes all the,

fads. 

Well, the good news is I think meditation is so ancient that it's not a fad. And interestingly, every person I've interviewed on this podcast, 120 now, they've all said something like that, you like, take time for yourself, learn how you tick, know what makes you function, and, old colleagues when I was at Chanel were like, you haven't been to the gym today.

And I was like, how can you tell? It's like, well, you can tell. It's like, Oh God, I need to do it for them. Not me. It's like, yeah. Can you go a bit more often, please? I 

was like, is it that obvious? They're like, mm hmm. Shit. Sorry. So yeah, meditation, exercise, we did a whole wellness season. It was like nutrition, mobility, water, sleep.

But everyone I spoke [00:32:00] to in nutrition and mobility, they said sleep and brain function first, and then all the other stuff second, because if you're not looking after your mental health, the rest of it doesn't stand a chance. So an hour in your day, you do kick off your meditation again. I will, if you will, 

we can hold each other accountable. 

yeah.

What would your question be for the next guest? Could be anything around starting a scaling business

Or productivity? 

Let me see, what if you could start one entirely different business that scratches an itch that you've always had, what industry would it be in?

I like it. Yeah. Because this is the problem. Jo Fairley founded Green and Black. She's like, I give my ideas away now. I'm done. I've done four or five businesses. I don't need to do another. I'm just going to let other people have my ideas because you're going to get addicted to like, well, I did that.

I can, what else can I do? And it's that kind of press the button, like, oops, done it again. It's quite exciting. But you keep coming up with other ideas and someone said, you've got to really sense check it before you put all your blood, sweat and [00:33:00] tears into another project, because it does take up time, obviously.

 Thank you so much for your time and your insights. It's fascinating. You've clearly learned a lot in your time setting up Matter of Form and congratulations on the business because it's obviously doing wonders out there.

Thanks, thank you for having me.

 I really hope you've enjoyed this conversation, you can find a recap of all the advice so kindly shared by guests in the show notes, along with our contact details, we'd love it.

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