How to avoid digital overwhelm with Dr Kristy Goodwin, Neuro-Performance Scientist & Author

70% of us use phones for our work, yet we all know how much they distract us.  As productivity is crucial for any business I wanted to speak to an expert to help manage this necessary evil.

Dr Kristy Goodwin is a neuro-performance scientist & Australia’s leading expert on peak performance in the digital age. Her book Dear Digital, We Need To Talk enables individuals & organisations to enhance their performance & productivity in the digitally-intense world we live in & conquer tech distractions. 

Keep listening to hear Dr Kristy’s advice on how to use digital tools to help us and not hinder, how to work in tandem with your neurobiology to achieve your goals & why rest really is a super power.

Kristy's advice:

• Know your goals 
• Success must be sustainable
• Listen to your body; you cannot outperform it
• You will have 4 - 6 hours a day of best performance
• Remember that time spent not conspicuously working is often the most valuable productive time
• Focussing our eyes on a small screen or area triggers a stress response
• We are programmed to sigh, or exhale fully, every five minutes; however, staring at screens typically means we are holding our breath
• We are more successful if we can direct our focus and avoid distraction
• Leave margins - ie. blank spaces, unprogrammed gaps 
• It is NOT about the hours you put in - it’s about the outcomes
• Be clear to others about how you wish to be contacted
• Identify when you are at your most productive 
• You can bundle your notifications 
• Have a VIP list and block everyone else
• Sleep is vital; get to know your own sleep pattern and keep it regular
• As a founder, make sure you - and your team - enjoy not just the results of your work but the process itself
• Tech robs us of our time, our energy and our attention; be aware of this and take control
• Live by design, not default

FF&M enables you to own your own PR & produces podcasts.
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. 

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.

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

Transcript

 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.

 70% of us use phones for work, yet we all know how much they can distract us. As productivity is crucial for any business, I wanted to speak with an expert to help manage this necessary evil. Dr. Kristy Goodwin is a neuro performance scientist and Australia's leading expert on peak performance in the digital age, her book, Dear Digital, We Need to Talk, enables individuals and organisations to enhance the performance productivity in the digitally intense worlds that we live in and conquer tech distractions.[00:01:00] 

Keep listening to hear Dr. Kristy's advice on how to use digital tools to help and not hinder us. How to work in tandem with your neurobiology to achieve your goals and why rest is really a superpower.

 Okay. First question. How would you define peak performance?

 To me, peak performance is being able to achieve your goals to perform at and I think the key word here as a sustainably high level. I think a lot of people can give you hacks and tips to perform at a high level, but the real I think marker of ultimate success is sustainable success 

in its purest form is living in close proximity to your values. So if you are a high performer, you can meet your success metrics. You can achieve your goals, but can do so in a sustainable way. And the reason that I am just so passionate about this is because I have the privilege of working with a lot of high performers, entrepreneurs,leaders from the corporate world, people in [00:02:00] startups.

And what I see is that a lot of times people can achieve peak performance, but they cannot sustain it. Or if they do sustain it, they often pay what I call the success tax. The success tax is where we do achieve peak performance, but it's at the cost, it's at the expense, of impaired mental health, physical well being, or relationships, or the trifecta is all three.

And so to me, peak performance is performing at whatever sustainable success looks like for you. And I think clearly also articulating what are your success metrics? I work with a lot of people, we discuss what are your goals? And sometimes they realise they're climbing the wrong mountain.

They are halfway up a peak, not aware of what their measure of successes. And, for some high performers, success is having a manageable workload where they can, beat their caring and domestic responsibilities and fulfill their career aspirations. 

 And the way that we do that, is by living and [00:03:00] working in ways that are congruent, not in conflict with our human operating system. I think many of us are trying to, achieve peak performance, but we are not doing it in a way that is compatible with our neurobiology. And that is simply how we are designed to operate as humans.

And so this is why we're seeing stress, rates of burnout, exhaustion, increased distractibility, on the rise because we are living in ways that are completely incongruent with our HOS, our human operating system.

I love that because your human operating system should come before your laptop or your and all the other operating systems in our lives. How would you advise a founder even start to tackle that and find that out for themselves?

I often say we cannot outperform our biological blueprint as humans. Unfortunately, we have some biological constraints. This is where I love working with high performers who often, and I was there once, the reason I'm so passionate about this is because I pushed [00:04:00] myself, and ultimately almost paid what I call the ultimate success tax. For years,

I'd heard the whispers from my body to slow down, to work in a more sustainable pace, but I ignored those whispers until my body had no other option other than to shout at me. 

 So I'd heard those whispers, work in a more sustainable pace, but I adopted the codrill advice of the 1980s and I soldiered on. and so I was working and living, as somebody who had their own business.

I was also at the height of the pandemic, juggling, trying to resurrect a speaking career and simultaneously tasked with the impossible job of homeschooling three young boys. My husband conveniently had been deemed an essential worker. And so I was sacrificing my sleep. I wasn't prioritising recovery.

I was go, go, go in that hustle and grind culture. And I had ignored those whispers until my body shut me down. I ended up in a code red emergency ward at the height of the pandemic, hooked up to a ventilator, unable to breathe. and doctors were at a loss to explain [00:05:00] why was someone with no underlying health issues, a very fit, active woman in her early 40s, so adversely affected with COVID.

And the only medical explanation was that I was burnt out. Years and years of stress that I had ignored mounted in chronic stress and chronic unresolved stress leads to burnout and our bodies keep score. And so I lay in that hospital bed. Literally hooked up to a machine to keep me alive, breathing. And I was forced to confront the fact that we cannot outperform our biology.

We have to start living and working in ways that were compatible. And so I knew this, I used to speak about the research and science of our human operating system, but I actually thought I could find a hack or outperform it. And so it was that moment in time that forced me to recalibrate my values

and to start living in close proximity to them. And so I completely turned my life around, by better understanding our human operating system. How are our brains and bodies designed to [00:06:00] function? A really simple example is that the part of our brain, it's called, the prefrontal cortex.

So the part of our brain that does our mentally heavy lifting work. It solves problems, it hypothesises, I often say our prefrontal cortex is like the CEO of the brain. One of the constraints we have as humans is that our prefrontal cortex only has a four to six hour battery life per day. Now, some people hear this and misconstrue what I'm saying and say, Oh, I've heard people talk about the four day work week, but this lady called Kristy said, I should have four hour work day.

That is not what I am proposing. But for you, especially as an entrepreneur, as a leader, for you to do the mentally taxing work that you need to do data analysis, forecasting, writing a proposal, analysing Sales. Yes. Anything that requires some cognitive effort. You only have a four to six hour battery period per day.

Now, of course there are extenuating circumstances. That's the end of the [00:07:00] financial year. You're launching a new product. Sometimes you do have to put in some extra hours, but if you are consistently trying to pump out 12 and 14 hour days, you are simply working against your human operating system.

Another really simple example that determines how we should structure the contours and the cadence of our days is that as humans we have something called an ultradian rhythm. And our ultradian rhythm means that we naturally as humans have roughly a 90 minute period while we're awake, where we're quite focused and alert, we will then inevitably, whether we like it or not, hit roughly a 20 minute trough where our focus starts to wane, our energy starts to drop, we see an increase in what we call glucocorticoids,

we start to fatigue.

Now that is part of our neurobiology. Can we structure the rhythm and the contours and the architecture of our day so that it works in harmony with that, rather than in conflict with it? So can we work in what I call digital [00:08:00] dashes? Can we sprint and then recover? Sprint and then recover. And it's roughly 90 minutes, give or take.

20 minutes either side, but can we start to structure our day so we work and then we do something in that 20 minute trough. Now, don't again, misinterpret what I'm saying. I'm not saying you need to do 20 minutes on your yoga mat in the downward dog. because I know a lot of people would say I wouldn't get any work done if I sprinted for 90 minutes and then was upside down for 20.

What we are designed to do in that 20 minute trough is at least two to 10 minutes. It needs to be something restorative. The other proportion of that remaining sort of 20 minute trough where our energy is not at its peak. We're not in a work focused state, is we can start to do some less taxing, less cognitive demanding, more administrative types of work.

If you're familiar with Cal Newport's work, he talks about shallow work. So that's when you could tackle some of those tasks so that when you hit your next peak, you have given your brain the space and the time that it needs to replenish itself so that you [00:09:00] can perform at a high level. But what I see many people who are trying to achieve peak performance, they're under this misnomer that more is more.

And so they keep pushing and they work against, not with their human operating system.

Which ultimately then doesn't do anybody any favors. And I remember someone in the podcast said to me that you've got to look after yourself because you're not going to look after your business or your team if you don't put yourself first and that health and in fact, our health and wellness season was the highest performing season we've ever done.

 Every single nutrition, mobility, sleep, everyone said sleep is number one and then everything else is important underneath. But for the four to six hours, are you saying that if you then do the sprint of an hour and a half and then you do restorative 20 minutes, you then buy yourself more in that six or is it max six a day?

Exactly. So I say for really sustainable peak performance four absolutely most six of those 90 minutes sprints at an absolute maximum, I usually recommend four, four solid 90 [00:10:00] minutes sprints is a really robust amount of work that you could get done that is working with your human operating system

 per day. If you ignore that and you just keep going and going, it's what we call the law of diminishing returns. So we've all done that. We've all pumped out, a massive 14 hour day and we look at the quality, and the type of work we produce at the tail end of that day, and it is terrible.

And so we have to, I think, start to reconceptualise, especially in our modern world where we are predominantly knowledge workers, we are remunerated and generate our worth through our ideas. So it's all about outcomes, not hours. But I think many of us has still got an industrialised model of productivity where the number of hours I work equates to how productive I have been.

That is outdated, redundant. 

It's so interesting to hear this. So I'd recruited in COVID in lockdown remotely, and I had suddenly this new found freedom that I could set up a work culture that I wanted to work for me, which meant I could travel. Two of my team members had never worked for anyone else. They came straight from [00:11:00] university.

They've always worked hybrid and remote. That in their two, three years of, career, but even they said, we like knowing the hours we owe you. So we know we've done a good enough job because we don't know what a good day at work looks like because we've never been in an office and the only way they could give themselves that boundary was with hours.

And I said, to be honest, I don't care how long it takes you as long as you're not working 60 hours a day. if you get the job done and it's at good standard, I'm thrilled and go to the gym at lunch and go for that long walk. We track our time with Toggl. So we've got a podcasting toggle, a reading toggle, a walking toggle.

And one of my team members came back to a team meeting, said, Oh, I think it's so annoying me. I couldn't get anywhere. I'll just put my laptop down. I went for a really long walk and I've got 10 ideas and five solutions. And I was like, I wish I'd followed my own advice because it's so lovely to see them work in this new way.

But for them, they didn't want the guilt of not doing their job or day job. And I think that I've had 20 years when I work for other people and I'd be 48 weeks of the year in an office [00:12:00] Monday to Friday before my boss turned up and then after my boss would leave, and that was a good day, but now output, what you said about output, it's everything when you start a business, but it's the hardest thing to quantify when you are starting a business.

Invariably, it is a new business. You haven't done it before. You don't know what good looks like. How do you manage that overwhelm? I think that's the part that I'm so interested in is that we want more focus, we want to be more productive, which is an awful word and everyone, said stay away from that.

 What does good look like for you? 

 I want to just circle back. I'm happy to answer that question, but you said something that I think is just so overlooked, but I want to share the science to encourage and this will inevitably help you dilute some of the overwhelm that you might be experiencing. I'm not sure if it was yourself or a colleague that went for a walk and all of these ideas germinated.

We are designed as humans. The fancy term that neuroscientists call is something called the default mode network. And it's a really unique function in our brain that is [00:13:00] activated when we are bored. When we are idle. And we know it is particularly amplified when we are walking, when we're in the shower, when we're on a plane or a train or a tram.

And what happens is when we create optic flow, so when things move past our eyes as they do when we're walking or in the shower, it quietens down part of our brain called the amygdala, which is often the worry centre. And it allows ideas to germinate. I often ask people in keynotes, where were you when your last genius solution to a problem that you spent months agonising over, where were you?

And what were you doing when that idea came? And I have never, of the tens of thousands I've spoken to, I have never had one person who've said to me, Oh, I'm a genius. In an Excel spreadsheet in my 

inbox, overwhelmingly, yes, it is when I'm in the shower is the most common form or going for a walk or on holidays with no Wi Fi.

And so we have to, I think more than ever, fiercely protect that time for germination, that [00:14:00] time for our minds to meander and see it as an absolutely integral part of our lives. I was coaching a client who was a CEO a couple of years ago, and we talked about this default mode network. And he acknowledged that he could see the merits in it, but he said, Kristy, my EA is going to think that I look very odd and very unprofessional if I write daydreaming in my calendar.

He said, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to protect that time. But I'm going to call it activation of default mode network time. He said, it makes me look fancier and everyone will be impressed. And I don't feel awkward about time blocking that in my calendar. He came back to me a couple of years ago and said, I had to move that time around.

 He said, sometimes it was me going for a surf. Sometimes it was me going for a walk, not listening to anything. sometimes it was me sitting in a cafe, just journaling or brainstorming ideas, he said, one of those times where I was bored or that activation of the default mode network, an idea came to me that generated my business 25 million dollars.[00:15:00] 

He said, I would never have come up with that idea if I'd always been going, if I'd never had that percolation time. And so I think for a lot of people, we have again, diluted the value. We've overlooked the importance of having mental white space. For our minds to meander.

I think the problem 

I found, and I love setting up the business because it was all new and exciting and I was problem solving and I was building a website and I was learning how to invoice people, it was all laptop based and it was all a screen and needed internet and it was, in lockdown, so I was in a good routine of getting up, went for a walk with my mum.

Then I did some exercise and we had breakfast together. She went off and wrote her book. I went off and did my work and that morning time with her, we both said we were so much better throughout the rest of our day because we'd had some time away from thinking about the actual problem. Our brains were relaxed and thinking about other things and talking about other things and sharing ideas about other things and being in dialogue [00:16:00] about stuff that was nothing to do with our day jobs.

But. I think it's I love what you said about being in motion because I've clocked that I love working from a train and I've recently had the opportunity to go on two epic cruises to the Arctic and Antarctic and being in motion. 

 And my brain has never been happier. I always just thought, Oh, maybe I'm just a transit person. I love travel, but brain's actually like having that stimulation. I 

Had no idea. 

Yeah. Yeah. And so there's rigorous science. That's what I try and say to people like we as humans, we can't outperform that human operating system. So we are designed and you said something then the fact that you used to have great ideas when you're on a cruise, one of the things that we know is that our digital habits and again, professionally and personally, and I think they've become enmeshed together.

It's hard todraw lines of demarcation between this is my professional and my personal use. But because we are spending hours and hours a day on our screens, our laptops, our desktops, our smartphones, our tablets, what happens is our eyes have to converge on a relatively small surface [00:17:00] area. As humans, we are neurobiologically designed for our eyes to dilate, to look in the distance.

The reasons that we know, and often I say to people, I believe we have a silent stress epidemic. The World Health Organisation says that our next epidemic is stress. We are seeing

global rates of stress and burnout on the increase. And I think our tech habits are one of the chief.

There's certainly not the only reason, but our digital habits often are invisible, subtle digital habits are contributing. And what's happening is when we are spending hours a day with our eyes converged on a relatively small surface area, like our laptops or our screens. It triggers the stress

response.

Because we are designed as humans for our eyes to dilate, to look in the distance, to stare at objects in the distance. And so that's why we tend to feel much more relaxed when we're in nature. That's why going for a walk, sitting on a cruise liner, looking at things in the distance, calms down our brains.

It drops our stress [00:18:00] response. Another thing that is often happening and again very invisible but pervasive way that technology is elevating our stress

is that as humans, we are neurobiologically designed to sigh every five minutes while we're awake. It's a natural biological mechanism that regulates our stress response.

We regulate our oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. So it should be two inhalations through our nose. And we exhale through our mouth, and it's not the exaggerated hand on the hip, eye roll, I'm very exasperated sigh, it is just a natural thing we should do every five minutes. However, again, when our eyes converge on that small surface area, it triggers the stress response. We do not sigh anywhere near as much when we're looking at our screen. And so this means we are literally holding our breath. There has been a condition study called email apnea where people go into their

inboxes, literally hold

their breath, dump a whole lot of cortisol, pupils accelerate, pupils dilate.

They [00:19:00] have that physiological response.

So, I think part of our overwhelm is coming from our unquestioned digital habits. And you mentioned before what a beautiful morning routine you had during the, height of the. pandemic with your mum. I often encourage people, especially if you know the demands of your day are going to be intense, start the, day upright.

One of the problems is many of us wake up. And research suggests that most of us pick up our phone before we talk to our partners in the, morning. And so what we do, we often pick up our phones, we check emails, we check social media, we check news reports, we check the, weather. We elevate our stress response.

We actually activate a part of our brain called the, beta brain state, which is the, busy brain state. And we haven't had a cup of tea our feet haven't touched the ground. And so what we've done also is raise our baseline levels of dopamine. We get the quick fix from the DMs that we see, we triage our inbox, we get some quick [00:20:00] hits of dopamine from something funny we see on social media. So what we're doing is raising our level of dopamine, and at the same time, elevating our cortisol response. And this is a recipe for disaster for modulating a calm, controlled presence. What do we do? We slip into overwhelm. And so we get to the office and then we're triaging teams messages or teams chats.

we go from back to back virtual 

meetings.

 It's all reactive, nothing's proactive. 

And so Microsoft coined this fabulous term to describe a phenomenon that I think many people are stuck in, and that is digital debt. People are in this perpetual state of digital debt, like it's a digital deluge. And so this clouds our judgment and this further perpetuates this cycle of overwhelm.

Microsoft usage data, so not self reporting, but global usage data says that 57% of knowledge workers days today is spent doing work about work. [00:21:00] I call

that the three M's. Meetings, messages, and mail, email. Then a mere 43% of our day is actually doing the work that we're supposed to be doing.

 And when we don't get the work that we'resupposed to

have got done that day, that perpetuates our

to do list and the overwhelm. And yes, we know this is why many people, again, when we have unresolved daytime stress, it leads to really poor sleep. If you are waking up 

repeatedly between 2 and 3am in the morning, it is a clear sign that you have often got unresolved daytime stress. Because what we know is 2 to 3am is where our cortisol naturally just starts to increase, so that when we hit the early hours of the morning and we want to wake up, we've got a nice peak in that cortisol.

But if our cortisol is already high because we've got all this unresolved stress, I didn't triage my inbox. I know there's a whole lot of messages. I've got a back to back series of virtual meetings tomorrow. When [00:22:00] we've got that chronic elevated stress already, when we get a hit at 2am and 3am of more cortisol, it overflows. So we can't then fall back asleep. And then poor sleep, as I know you've heard in other

podcasts, contributes and exacerbates overwhelm. And so we're trapped almost in this vicious, and I often say people are living today where they are always on.

They are rarely focused, never recovered, always on really focused and never recovered.

And one of the reasons is because we are living in ways and working in ways that are totally incongruent with our human operating system. And this is something 

we cannot ignore. You will burn out. 

 I'm typically very proactive and organised and getting lots of shit done.

But in communications and podcasting, it's a very proactively behaved industry. So you can never do enough. And this friend of mine is the ultimate social butterfly. She's incredibly wonderful at doing lots of lovely things, lots of lovely people. 

But I said [00:23:00] to her, I worry that you're not giving yourself time to think things through, you're busying your diary so much to the point that you've never got any time on your own, that you can never actually just sit and digest the coffee you just had with somebody, the mental conversation rather than the caffeine, and think it through to the end.

And that expression, and especially in business where you actually have to spend quite a lot of time just thinking things through to get to the end. And my analogy at the moment, given I've moved house is, I'm at that point of unpacked all the boxes. I fixed all the things I can fix, but now I just have to sit and think and work out reconfigurating rooms or anything like that because I need to think about it.

And thinking time is a luxury, but I think it's something that from what you're saying about looking out to the distance, going for the walk, that's actually really good restorative time for our brains and we 

need it. 

Yes. 

Yes. 

it 

So I want to say two things here. again, we often see rest as frivolous or it's something we'll do when we finally take the holiday that we never take. or I'll do

it on Sunday [00:24:00] afternoon or I wait till I collapse and I'm in hospital to actually say, Hey, I should probably rest.

Gartner research tells us that, and this was based on a significant, population size.

So, If we take proactive rest, we are 26% more productive. 

So it's not just a wellbeing nice to have, it's actually a performance lever. And so I often get people, especially high performers, I talk about rest and recovery being what I call a peak performance pit stop.

We, in 2024, I don't drive race cars, but, my understanding is that they are so, technically and mechanically sophisticated that they no longer need to pull in to take a pit stop. They could finish the entire race without ever pulling in and changing tires or changing and replacing oil, or drivers.

But the reason that they do still take pit stops is that they want that race car finishing that race in an optimal state. They do not want it crawling to the finish line. And so I think as [00:25:00] high performers, we have to reframe this dialogue. Rest is a right and it's a responsibility. It's not a reward.

If it makes you more productive and you're better at your job and your output is better, every founder is now going to do it. I think that's the thing is every founder is clawing to find more time, more efficiencies, more process, more productivity, And I interviewed the founder of Klyk who upcycles tech and he said, it's fine.

I can go to a CFO and I can tell him I'm saving money. It doesn't even matter to him about the environment, but I know I'm saving the environment by doing what I'm doing. If you give someone a better reason that you're speaking their language.

 It's huge. And so again, it's about working with rather than against our human operating system. So part of this is pushing back against the dominant paradigm, that productivity, outdated metrics of productivity, that more is more. Sometimes we have to slow down so that we can speed up. And again, it's antithetical to the way we've been conditioned. but if we want to not only just achieve peak performance, but if we want to sustain it and not pay the success tax. [00:26:00] We have to start living and working in ways that are compatible with this HOS. 

So the 26% we actually find these efficiencies and it's better for us. And we've talked a lot about the damage we can do if we don't listen to our human operating system. If you had a magic wand for anyone in business, what would you suggest they do with their day to, to be looking after themselves?

I love this question. So I often, talk about, I believe for sustainable peak performance, there are three core pillars. The first pillar is that we have to, reframe recovery. We have to stop seeing recovery as frivolous and recovery includes sleep, it also includes rest. The second pillar of sustainable peak performance is that we have to optimise what I believe is the super skill of the 21st century for years.

We were told that a person's IQ predicted their lifelong success. And then in more recent times, we said, no, their EQ, their emotional intelligence was a predictor of their success, [00:27:00] the new super skill I believe that trumps a person's IQ and EQ is their FQ. And I have to be careful how I say that one, your focus quotient.

 Your capacity to orient, control, and direct your attention and focus in a digitally demanding world that has been engineered, deliberately engineered to be distracting and disruptive is just such a potent super skill. And the third skill, is all around how do we build our stress tolerance and resilience given that we are living in a world that is increasingly more stressful? How can we develop our capacity to hold more stress? And to be resilient to stress so that when we do tackle, a challenging situation that we can respond rather than react. And so I think if we can start to master those three pillars, we can achieve sustainable peak performance. And so it's about giving people, what I call a menu of micro habits. What are the small little things that we can do, to drive our performance. There was, and I hope you [00:28:00] don't mind me circling.

I was trying to think of something you said before and the idea has just come back.

So you were talking before about how people often have, back to back meetings and, really demanding days. I shared something recently that really

resonated with people about how we need more margins in our days.

And I had a friend who used to say to me, we need to allow margins for the magic. And so we need to make sure we have white space in our days, calendars, weeks, where the ideas can percolate. We've got time for that thinking. You said before, seeing an idea through to completion or having a full thought process. The other part I say to people, and again, this is where I think people often elevate their stress is because not only do they not have margins in their days for magic, they also don't have margins in their days to clean up the mess.

So that when a meeting goes longer than expected, when you get an angry email from a client or a customer, if you have already got a very [00:29:00] time compressed calendar, I often say, if moving a meeting then looks like playing a game of Tetris, your calendar has no margins.

 I've changed that saying that we need to allow margins for the magic and the mess.

And so I think we, again, need to come back and start to question,even the concept of a 40 hour week. I mean, no person who owns their own business probably ever has worked a 40 week, but we have to, I think, question, that, that really dominant framework.

We are so attached to the hours worked rather than the outcomes that we're achieving.

And it needs to be mapped into the business plan lots of people have great ideas and a lot of businesses fail because they don't have cash flow, but people think they can just outwork the problem. And actually,if you're going to give yourself burnout, your business model is not sustainable.

So don't do it. But I don't want to discourage people from starting the business and what I love about this podcast, it's encouraging people to do it, but in a really realistic way. And a lot of people said there will be a weight of responsibility. You have to [00:30:00] be okay with that. There will be a lot of pressure, but you learn how to manage that.

And you have to be very honest with how you cope with stressful situations and support yourself. And for me, it would be waking up, meditating, doing some exercise before I even opened a screen. Do I do that? No. And I am my own worst enemy, but I know that about myself and this conversation. In fact, every single podcast episode has been a bit of an awakening for me of just follow these experts advice and you'll be okay.

And that comfort in that you can still do this and you can enjoy it. So I think that leaving the margin is so interesting because you enjoy your job more because you have time to actually relish that problem you want to solve. 

Yeah, or when you do have to clean up the mess, let's face it, that's not a fun part, but if there is so much time pressure that you're not going to be able to do that, the due diligence you need to do to respond appropriately, then again, it elevates our stress. And so we are, I think, stuck in this vicious cycle where we are not, I often talk about how we need to work smarter [00:31:00] so we can work harder. And I think there's been a lot of people saying, you don't need to work hard, vision board your way to success or manifest your way

to the ideal. Yes. No, my philosophy is, and this is where the science comes in. Let's work smarter so that you can work harder and not burn out in the process.

Let's work smarter so you can work harder and enjoy the ride as you go. Let's work smarter so you can work harder so that you can reap the rewards without, having a toll on your body or your brain or your relationships. And so that to me is exciting.

I was going to ask you, so before you answer the question, I'm going to say what we do in our team and then you're going to tell me it's either good or bad, 

No pressure. 

A lot of clients want to get me on their Slack and I'm like, nope, we use email and phone calls. We don't use WhatsApp.

We don't use Instagram. We don't have any notifications. If you want me, and it's urgent, phone me, otherwise I'll wait for your email. And then I, oh, and I [00:32:00] was like, I'm sorry, I'm not giving my team any more overwhelm than we already have. And the notification thing, I can't stand them. They make me feel anxious and itchy, so I have no notifications on.

And again, if somebody wants me, they can phone me. They have my number. Is that a good idea or should we actually be on lots of different platforms? 

No gold gold star for both of those. So the first thing you were talking about, and I am so passionate about this particular topic, we need businesses, small businesses, large businesses to articulate what I call the digital guardrails. The colloquial term I use is your tech expectations. We need to articulate internally and to our external stakeholders, particularly our clients and customers.

What are our tech expectations? What are the digital norms, practices and principles? And rather than just assume that people will know, having those clear digital borders and boundaries. In many countries throughout the world, there is now legislation around the right to disconnect irrespective of whether the country where you work from has [00:33:00] that legislation.

I firmly believe companies need digital guardrails. People also

need their own personal digital guardrails. So absolutely gold star for that one. The second thing you talked about with notifications is that I often say we have ancient Paleolithic brains. If we go back to our human operating system, our brains are biologically designed to go and forage, hunt and get information at a time at a cadence and at a volume that suited us. But in our

always on digitally demanding world, what is happening now is unsolicited information is constantly being thrust at us. Our brain cannot physiologically, it can psychologically, but at a physiological level, our brain cannot differentiate between a teams notification pinging us and a tiger chasing us.

It says potential stressor or danger. This was unsolicited. It came to me and it usually by default came in a red bubble. Red we [00:34:00] associate with danger, urgency, importance, the fact

that there's a damn metric. Yes, and that

metric, we have something as humans called the completion bias. So we don't want to see we've got 47 unread teams chats. So I will triage my team's chat so I can get that down to a respectable number, preferably a zero.

 The more you send, the more you like, you're throwing the monkey on someone else's back. You're pinging someone else. And it's the sand rock pebble analogy in the sense that a lot of junior members don't think or don't know yet what rock work is So they're just constantly doing sand and ping, and they think that's work and it, and the actual do, the output, and when you're saying about meetings and minutes and everything like that.

No one's actually doing the actual work. So going back to that magic wand in a perfect day, what would you recommend people do? 

Magic Wand. First and foremost, I encourage people to, and I think this is the biggest silver lining of the pandemic, particularly for knowledge workers. I acknowledge it's a privilege not afforded often to frontline workers, but identify when [00:35:00] you are most productive. This is biologically determined by something called your chronotype. And so your chronotype dictates what time or times of the day you are naturally most focused and alert. I call them your power zone hours. And so we, and this is determined by a gene, your PR three gene. and so your chronotype dictates, are you the early bird? Are you the person that fires on all cylinders early in the morning?

Or are you the night owl? Do you work better in the late afternoon,

or are you the middle of the day person? The trick is to identify your chronotype and then as best you can depending on the role you have, depending on any caring and domestic responsibilities that might limit your schedule flexibility, your job is to then build a fortress around your focus. So that during that prime time, that mental prime time, you are not getting distracted. Research tells us that whether it's the ping of an email, whether it's chatty Kathy coming up to your desk, if you're back in the office or talkative Tom, whether it's a ruminating thought, the [00:36:00] average adult after we have been distracted takes around 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back into their deep focus state. It's called the resumption lag. So we have to ring fence those most productive hours as best we can. I have three golden rules with what notifications.

Number one, disable non essential notifications. Unless you're in sales, customer service, or IT support, I don't believe anyone needs email notifications. 

 They're built to tell you and you'll always have another email. You don't need to know how many there are . If you go to inbox proactively, there'll be an email for you. I, yes, with you on that one.

Yep. So disable non essential. The second tip that a lot of people don't know how to do is you can now bundle or batch your notifications to come to you at a set time. So let's say I'm using Teams or I'm on

Slack and I don't want them dribbling in.

 And the third rule with notifications is to create a VIP list. So that when you activate, do not disturb or focus mode on whatever platform on Slack, on Teams, on your email, [00:37:00] everybody gets blocked apart from those people who might be on your VIP list.

Whether you've got aging parents, children in childcare or school, a client or a colleague where you're working on a time sensitive project and you may need to be distracted, but everybody else gets blocked. The next thing I would say to founders, if you really want to thrive in this digitally demanding world, and, I know we talked about this earlier, and you've heard on previous podcasts, the super skill is to master your sleep, both quality and quantity of sleep.

I often say your sleep does not impact your performance. It dictates your performance. If you are not getting good quality and quantity of sleep, you cannot focus, you cannot perform at a high level, you are primed to make more mistakes. Your prefrontal cortex, that thinking part of the brain, cannot work when you are fatigued.

 It will reprioritise your cognitive resources elsewhere because it hasn't had the sleep. Now, we often talk about getting [00:38:00] enough sleep. New research actually tells us that we now think having a predictable sleep and wait time may be more important than the volume of sleep you are getting in terms of the impact on your mortality.

So that's some good news because I think we often get tricked into thinking, I've got to have to constantly be getting eight hours. If we are more consistent with when we sleep and wake up, that can be a really positive thing. 

So we are biologically designed for effort and recovery. So we need to try as best we can to structure our day so that we've got that cadence and rhythm built in. And the fifth one that we spent a fair bit of time today talking about is prioritising that default mode network that idle time really seeing it as a key time in your calendar to fiercely protect so that you do have time for ideation for ideas to percolate.

 So they'd be my top tips. 

 It feels so counterintuitive when you're working for yourself. You always feel like there's more that [00:39:00] you can do and that you should be doing more. And there's obviously a lot of pressure that you put on yourself, but social media, it's a vicious circle will tell you that other people are doing more and doing things better than you are and that you need to keep going.

So actually that doom scrolling is awful for you in so many ways, but yes, the counter intuitiveness of be bored, go for walks, don't look at your emails, do everything that everything is telling you not to do because these systems being built for us to become addicted.That strictness that you're telling us to learn about ourselves to protect ourselves. I think will give us so much more joy with our work going forwards. And actually when you're rested and happier and less stressed, of course, you're then going to enjoy it more and be then more creative and enthusiastic and positive and who wouldn't want that in their working life.

And I think that's a lot of thing founders forget is that we have this luxury to create a working culture that works for us and our teams, which you don't get when you work for someone else. And that to [00:40:00] me is the biggest part of starting a business. It's, yes, I can travel with it.

Yes, I can work with good clients and good people, but I have the autonomy to set out my work day in a way that works for me and all of our stakeholders. But I don't think I've prioritised that enough. 

And what you said about the, is it breathing apnea? sorry, email. Yeah. Yeah. It really resonated because the only thing I need to do my job well is have a voice. And when my voice goes, it stresses me out. But what you said about people holding their breath when they get to their inbox, I do that and I, my shoulders go up like a cat. 

 What you're saying today, which I find is so powerful is you cannot ignore it. Whether you want to or not, it's coming for you be aware and you've got the autonomy to set yourself up for success, which I think is so exciting. And all of those tips that you shared is so useful.

What would be the one thing you'd like listeners to take away from today?

 I live by the mantra, prioritise the potent. My [00:41:00] mum used to say it to me when I was growing up and I never really, if I'm honest, really understood what it meant, let alone the impact of such a statement. But I think again we're in a world now where we literally can do just about anything and everything the conscious choice to make judicious intentional decisions about where we spend our time.

I think if we're not in control of technology, technology can rob us of our three most important human resources. Our time,

our energy and our attention. 

And so if we have got this privilege of being a founder of creating a business and a life that we love, I want us to not only enjoy the benefits that we get from doing so, be they financial flexibility, whatever your success metrics are, but I also think it's important to enjoy the journey. 

And so to me, true success is achieving whatever your success metrics look like for you, enjoying the process and not paying a tax along the way, you obviously have to do pay your [00:42:00] financial taxes, please don't get me in trouble. that one's for sure, but yeah, yes, the success tax. don't pay the success tax.

 I, in my keynotes now talk about this concept, Oliver Burkeman has written a great book called 4000 weeks and it's a book about productivity, but it's around this premise that as humans, our time on earth is finite. If we are lucky, if we have a healthy lifespan, we will have an average of 80 years, which equates to roughly 4 000 weeks in our lifetime.

That means if you're one of the lucky ones, you will have 4 000 Saturdays in your entire life. 

I think so many of us don't enjoy the 2000, 1500 Saturdays that we do have available because we are low res. Powered down depleted versions of ourselves. And so I think the onus is on us to say yes. There are things happening in our world. Technology has been engineered to be distracting and disruptive.

What [00:43:00] can I do to structure my days, to set myself up for success, to enjoy the process as much as the final outcome that we get to. And, no one's coming to save us. The onus is on us as founders to create that life that we love. And so I often talk to people about that. live a life by design, not by default.

Particularly as entrepreneurs, have defaulted back to outdated industrialised models of success and productivity. Yeah. And do more. And I love that you're talking about this 80 years. So what we do is a question from our previous guest has a question for our next guest. And his question is fast forward to your 80th birthday, you've created a great life and a business.

 You are full of wisdom from the journey you have been on. What advice would this person give you today that would help you with your current business challenges? Which I think is so apt. Oh, what a good question. Yeah. Isn't it?

And that was not set up in any way. Not at all. You didn't even know that was coming. [00:44:00] And I recorded it six weeks ago and I thought at the time, God, that's really interesting. My 80 year old self, what would they tell me now that would help me with my business today? But you were just saying we have, if we're lucky, 80 years.

So if Dr. Kristy Goodwin, on your 80th birthday, what would you want your 80 year old self to tell you today to help you in your business today? Oh, what would she tell me? I hope. Congratulations. Well done. You've done an amazing thing. I hope she could say that. Yeah. I think so many for me being an entrepreneur, the roadblocks have felt at times like mountains to climb over and it is felt arduous and it has been relentless at times.

 I think it's about, persevering, not necessarily pushing through, but that persevering and having that grit, but doing so in a way that is sustainable,Yeah. As I said, enjoying the process as much as the product, because that's it! So many successful entrepreneurs go, I got there and then I got even further there and I can't take this money with me.

It's actually the [00:45:00] process of how I got here that I should have enjoyed more. And that was a real lesson of, what is the end goal? Oh, there isn't. The end goal is actually in the now and enjoying the now. And that's why when you do your own job, you need to love it. Yes. And not being that depleted, burnt out, powered down, low res version of yourself.

And if you are, I want to give you, the belief that things can be different. You can turn this ship around. I often say when I work with coaching clients, it's not about doing a radical overhaul. It's about embedding small little micro habits into your days, that mean you are working in harmony, not in conflict with your human operating system.

And so it's not convoluted. It's not complicated. It's just about making those small little one degree changes, those 1 percent differences that will have a profound impact on your life. I love this because it's so embracive and encouraging. It's all is not lost. It can get better. And what would your question be for our next guest?

I would love to know what is it that you [00:46:00] have found powers you up and sustains you as a founder or an entrepreneur? What are the habits, the practices, the protocols, the, the everyday things, because I think we often, again, we compare and despair what we're not doing on social media.

I love hearing what works, but I also love hearing from people what doesn't work. That whole Harvard fail fast, and share your failings premise, I think is really powerful. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that's the podcast where it all came on. Cause I started a business and I was like, I have no idea what I'm doing.

 It's not going to be perfect. And that is absolutely fine because the more you fail, the more you learn and the more you're comfortable with failure, the better you'll be. And I was like, Oh, great. 

 I think we dived into it today when we talked about, you've got to know what your success metrics are. Like, adopting somebody else's or popularised notions of success looks like will set you up for failure.

Whereas if you say this is what success and be really tangible, that really concrete about what that looks like, that makes sure that, [00:47:00] you, as I said before, you're climbing the right mountain. I get work with so many people when we do some goal reprioritisation and they say. Oh dear. I'm not meant to be on this mountain.

I'm pursuing a measure of success that is not congruent with my values. and that's where people end up failing. Exactly. Thank you, Kristy, so much. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Absolute joy. I've learned so much and I feel really reassured in some of the things we're doing, but also some of the things that we can now change 

 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.

If you could rate and review or share this podcast, because it really does help other people discover it. To incentivise this a little, I would very happily offer you one of our PR guides on how to share editorial coverage legally. Just DM us or send us an email, hello@fallowfieldmason.com with review in the title and we'll share it on.

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