Hello, and welcome to another episode of Beyond Busy, the show where we talk productivity, work life balance, and how people define happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, I'm talking to Lucy Clayton and Steve Haines. They are the authors of a book called How To Go To Work, the honest advice no one ever tells you at the start of your career. So before we get into that, a couple of things I want to talk about. The first is Black Lives Matter. So if you are not yet on my mailing list, if you go to GrahamAllcott.com you can sign up there each week. I'm basically sending out this thing called Rev up for the week, and it's basically one positive or interesting idea to just help get you set for the week ahead. So it comes out on a Sunday evening. If you want, you can read it Monday morning on your commute, remember those. And the idea is just kind of share something usually productivity or kind of leadership he related. But yeah, a couple of weeks ago, I did a thing on Black Lives Matter on there. And I want to just kind of share a couple of responses to it. So the first thing is, I was quite prepared to get quite a big percentage of unsubscribes because it's kind of seen as like a political thing. And, you know, as someone who just talks about productivity, should I really be dabbling in politics and whatever? Those of you who know me well will know that, you know, that really stops me used to be very gobby on Twitter and decided to pack that in. And guess what, zero unsubscribes like zero, and also just some really nice messages back with people saying it helped them to articulate their own thoughts on it, and People just, you know, really recognising for the first time where they might have had some biases or weren't aware of certain things. So that was really great. And I just wanted to I guess I just wanted to say that it it's really struck me over the last week that hang on, like this change is really happening this time. I'm someone who gets quite cynical about these things. I, you know, I find I found the whole black tile, social media thing, that blackout Tuesday thing, just really problematic. It's like, do we have to turn something that's really serious into this kind of shallow participators social media thing? You know, and really, the real work is what goes on in real life in real conversations and, you know, challenging policies in your workplace, thinking about your own biases, thinking about, you know, your own decisions or treatment of people or whatever, you know, and I think is for the same reason I'm really anti stuff like children in need and quite relief and telephones in general all that stuff because it feels to me like it puts in a neat Tupperware box the idea that people need to care. So people do they're like, you know, they do their sponsored event or whatever, one, you know, watch children need one Friday every year, and then it kind of feels like for the rest of the time, oh, well, that's taken care of I did my bit. And, you know, I get that sometimes in life, we need ceremony and stuff. But I think it's more interesting just how we behave and the choices that we make just all the rest of the time when there isn't a spotlight on us. And when we're not seemingly all under pressure to walk out of the kind of virtual houses outside of our house and deliver the kind of virtual on the steps of 10 Downing Street statements to our virtual audience. You know, I just find this really bizarre that it's like every brand and every person needs to come out and kind of make a video kind of serious personal statement, you know, that basically is cut like, cut and pasted from everyday everybody else's statements. I just don't think that is the best way to make change. But I think the last week or so, there's been a couple of things where I've really thought Ah, hang on this is this is happening this is great. One was the the toppling of the statue of Colston into the into the harbour in Bristol. That just felt like a really historic moment. I love the fact that the I think was the mayor of Bristol said this happening this throwing the statue into the sea. This is now part of part of its history. Right and I just think that's just just so amazing to witness that. The other one was cycling down to the seafront last Saturday, with my son Roscoe on the back of the bike expecting to see about 1000 people for a demonstration that was happening in Brighton for Black Lives Matter And I don't know how many people were there 10,000 15,000 something like that. It was huge. And you know, Brighton can be Britain's very white place but it can be a very politicised you know, open to politics kind of place. And just to see, just the sheer volume of people there just made me think, Wow, this this feels different and that's really promising. So, I guess, you know, the reason for saying this is my, my cynicism for blackout Tuesday and putting up a black tile on social media is that you know, we need to prolong the conversation and it needs to keep going. And it Brittany's to keep going longer than most people are. Like, willing to do it before they get tired, right? Like we kind of have to get tired of this sprint to actually start to make a difference. So So I guess the main point of this is to say let's keep this conversation going even more longer than it feels comfortable to and then we might be on with a shot so it's probably saying it's a really interesting time and yeah really promising to to see what what might come next. So if you want to check out the blog by the way that I did that was part of the rabbit for the week about Black Lives Matter we put that on my blog, So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. getbeyondbusy.com, we'll put links to everything in there as per usual go check that out. Also lovely to see that Aston Villa have resumed action lovely also to see both teams doing the Get down on one knee thing. Just as the game kicked off it just the the choreography of that and the moment of that was just something to behold so you know, really good to see really exciting and, you know, in a weird way exciting to see a really boring nil nil draw, because that's obviously inevitably what the villa game tended to and it's like the spotlights on us to be like the first Premier League game back. It had to be awful, didn't it? But, you know, wouldn't be there if it wasn't awful. So yeah, hey, so speaking about getting back to some level of normality. So this episode is with Lucy Clayton and Steve Haines. It was recorded just before locked down at the offices of penguin on the strand in London, and I'm offering this one up now as a little bubble of normality. So we talk in here about loads of really, just really well observed little things that happen in offices and organisations. The book is basically a career guide for people at the start of their career. And it's like the manual of how to go to work and what to do in jobs and how to deal with office politics and all that sort of stuff. So, as you can imagine, I pick out a lot of the more sort of nitty gritty slightly to boot Kind of subjects about office life work life. So if you're pining for the office a little bit pining for normality, a little bit pining to get on the train or in the car on the tube, go to a desk, meet with your colleagues and all that kind of stuff, then I hope this is a nice bubble of normality little escape. And let's get into it. This is Lucy Clayton, Steve Haines and me in the offices of penguin in London, just before lockdown. Let's do it. I'm here at penguin. I'm with Lucy Clayton, Steve Haines. Hello, hello. So you've just written this book, which we're going to talk about a bit later, but it's about you guys first. Okay. The book is how to go to work. Yeah. So I just wanted to start with, let's just paint the picture of the work that you guys do yourselves before we get into the book itself.

In Part One, I explained my reasons for designing my current work schedule, based around the concept of 3 C’s: Create, Collaborate and Chill.

I’ve been keeping this schedule pretty constantly for a couple of months now, so in this post I’m going to go into each phase in more detail and give some reflections on how productive it’s been so far. First, here’s a visual reminder of how it works for me:

Returning to work after a long absence is an interesting experience. In discussing it with friends, I’ve often heard stories of women returning to work after having a baby feeling much less confident before, and in my own sabbatical period, I certainly noticed my own confidence ebb away in the absence of the daily drip-feed of tiny wins.

Having seen that my company not only survives but actually grows when I’m not there, my need to return isn’t necessarily a financial one (although “more money” and growth are on my priority list!) and having spent a lot of time in recent years working from home and not part of a team in an office, my return was perhaps unusual in that I had significant control over my own destiny in terms of daily and weekly routines. So it’s been a kind of blank canvas. Most of us have some degree of control or autonomy over how we set up our working lives, but the power within us to actually use it often gets lost in the day-to-day.

Graham Allcott 0:05 Hello, and welcome to another episode of Beyond Busy. The show where we talk productivity, work life balance and defining happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, I'm talking to Laurence and Carlos, the founders of the Happy Startup School. So welcome to 2018 - hope is treating you well. I've been back in the groove for like a week and a half. And I'm now going away. I'm going to go for a couple of weeks to get my annual kind of winter, vitamin D and sun fix and scheming and planning kind of fix and all of that. So taking about massive stack of books, massive stack of paperwork, and I'm just going to be asking the sea on a few things. It's just always what I do at this time of year is sometime in the winter, try and ask to see what I want for the year ahead. And the sea always knows the answers. So yeah, I hope that doesn't sound too hippy, but that's that's how it rolls for me. This episode is long as and Carlos really love this one, this was probably certainly one of my favourite conversations to have. And we get into so many different topics here. So we talk about their role as founders, how they work together, some of their views on stuff like networking, and building community. And a really interesting conversation about the whole notion of lifestyle businesses and whether lifestyle businesses are a good thing or a bad thing and some of the sort of negative connotations with a lot of the stuff that goes on in the kind of an entrepreneur business space. So really, really interesting two guys who I think have totally, certainly got well mapped out views on work life balance and happiness and what makes that stuff tick and just have a really good orientation around their lives of like, what they what they want to achieve and how they set about doing that. So really brilliant. conversation to guys who are very present very open and really inspiring. So I'm really hoping you're gonna get loads from this because I really love doing it and so much so that I'm actually going to be taking part in their Altitude's full week immersion thing in June of this year. So really looking forward to spending a lot more time with them as well. So let's get into it. So here's lots of cars we are in platform nine which is a new co working space in Brighton very fancy and also coincidently where think productive my business are moving to in March, April time. This year, we're actually ditching our, we have our own space at the moment in home, and we're ditching that to be in the co-working vibe and have shared office desks and all that stuff. So I say we, I'm never there like I'm at home in my shed, being a hermit but like the rest of the team will be there and that's where I'll end up going for meetings and stuff like that. So looking forward to that. So we're in platform nine, we're in the Brighton platform nine as opposed The whole one on in a nice kind of, sort of canopy read sort of meeting table kind of space. But there is a bit of background noise at times here. There's like a few people walking past and stuff like that. But hopefully that just kind of adds to the kind of CO working atmosphere that you hear in the background. So let's get into it. Here's Lawrence and Carlos from the happy startup school. Right so we're here at platform nine. I'm with Lawrence and Carlos, the founders of the Happy Start Up Schoo school, how you doing?

One of the things about pandemics is that whilst we're all weathering the same storm, our boats are different shapes and sizes.

We're certainly not "all in the same boat". For some people, the answer to "How's lockdown treating you" is sunny and straightforward: "I'm sitting in my garden on furlough, learning crochet/violin/philosophy/delete as appropriate for the level of smugness of your friend" while for others, the answer is more like "arrrrgggghhhhhhhh".

I've found myself in that latter category. It's tough.

Graham Allcott 0:04 Hello, and welcome to another episode of Beyond Busy, the show where we talk productivity, work life balance, and how people define happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, I'm talking to Alex Pang. He's the author of a couple of books, one called Rest and one called Shorter. And we're gonna be talking a lot about the four day week, which feels like it's one of those ideas that has gone from fringe to a bit more mainstream, particularly in recent times people talking about this of post COVID economy and ways to rebuild and all this kind of stuff and I'm kind of seeing a lot more coverage and credible coverage around the four day week. It kind of feels like it's, it's growing as an idea. And as you may or may not know, my company, Think Productive. We've been doing it for a week for eight years. So we talked about that a little bit in the episodes and I think Alex is pretty surprised he hadn't heard of us doing that. And then, you know, not deliberately but we'd been kind of keeping a bit of a low profile with our four day week stuff. Just we didn't really think it was that remarkable. So we weren't really telling the story. And weirdly, we'd told a couple of PR agencies and much more marketing savvy companies about it. They'd started doing for the week, and then started going, Hey, we're doing a 4 day week and getting loads of coverage about it. So you were talking about that in this episode, and how the idea might grow. And we recorded this before the lockdown. So I thought that might be quite a nice thing for this week, because we start the episode talking about the West End shows that Alex is going to see while he's over here from the States. So that's how we start the episodes and it kind of feels like a different world. Listening back to it now, but hope you'll find that you know, entertaining and kind of interesting And kind of a little bit of escapism, maybe, as well. So yeah, we're gonna get straight into episode in a second with Alex.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the concept of "Toxic Productivity". I think it's an important topic to address.

I'm the Productivity Ninja guy, so a lot of people assume that I'm here to defend the idea of productivity; that what I care about most is simply maximising output, at pretty much any cost. How to be a Productivity Ninja was published back in 2014, and my company, Think Productive has been running productivity workshops, getting peoples' inboxes to zero and many other helpful things since way back in 2009. I'm certainly a fan of the transformative effect that addressing your own productivity in a conscious and deliberate way can have. Clarity breeds momentum breeds more clarity.

The death of George Floyd has shocked everybody. Suddenly every company and organisation seems to be releasing statements about how they support the Black Lives Matter movement and I worry that their motivation for this is often more about good PR and image than it is about genuinely resolving to see and do things differently. Some of those organisations posting black tiles this week included NFL teams that hounded out Colin Kaepernick because he peacefully took a knee in protest not that long ago, and a few organisations that I know from personal experience have all-white boards or all-white leadership teams. Talk is cheap! I hope they back it up.

Graham Allcott 0:04

Good morning lockdown campus. We're back with another episode of Beyond Busy The show where we talk productivity, work life balance and how people find happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. On this episode I'm talking to Sarah Ellis. She is one half of Amazing If and one half of the author team behind the book, The Squiggly Career just come out so we get to talk a little bit about the book. And also we talked about a load of really interesting stuff in this episode. So we talked about personal manifestos. We talk about her six year transition from employed to gain elite self employed. We talk, she used to work for Sainsbury's in head of corporate responsibility in society. So we talked about how changes have been dealing with the current crisis. The loo roll shortage and all that stuff. And just a whole lot more. So I think you're gonna really enjoy this conversation. So let's get pretty much straight into it. This is another one of these ones recorded down the line during lockdown, so a little bit of COVID chat, but not too much. Let's get straight into it. Here's our episode with Sarah Ellis.

I'm with Sarah Ellis, how are you?

I really enjoyed speaking to Katz Kiely recently for my Beyond Busy podcast. She's doing amazing work helping to get PPE to the frontline. If you know anyone working in a hospital, care home or other setting, please make them aware of this website and the fact that they can tweet three hashtags and have people delivering PPE to the door of their workplace.

But aside from just wanting to get that message out last week as quickly as possible, I really loved her thoughts on her purpose - to prove that looking after your people helps generate the best innovation, productivity and collaboration. It ultimately all boils down to the feeling of 'psychological safety' and being in a 'reward' state (where you can chase good things) as opposed to being in a 'threat state' where you feel the need to react and kick back. I've been thinking about this a lot this week, as the current situation has definitely thrown me more regularly into the threat state recently. Perhaps you're feeling that too?

Graham Allcott 0:05 Hello, and welcome to another episode of Beyond Busy The show where we talk productivity, work life balance and defining happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, it's another COVID special. And we are talking working from home. This is actually the audio from the first Think Productive webinar, which was myself and Grace Marshall on the Productivity Ninjas guide to working from home. So we recorded this about a month ago, we've been running these as live webinars. Most days at the moment, it's kind of once or twice a week and you can find out the dates at thinkproductive/wfh. They're also on there. There's a load of info about how we can help your team, your organisation, your company, with a whole variety of stuff that's either specific to what's going on With COVID, so working from home leading remote teams, and how to supercharge your virtual meetings, but also all of our regular stuff as well. So how to be a Productivity Ninja, how to get your inbox to zero, all that sort of normal productivity stuff that we do. So we're going to talk in this special webinar for an hour. It's myself and Grace Marshall. We'll talk about a few of the key challenges of working from home, we'll talk about how to solve them. And we just thought, let's use the audio and get this out there and, you know, make this a podcast episode as well. So let's get straight into it. Here is our live webinar in audio form with myself and Grace Marshall. Let's do it.

http://frontline.live/

Graham Allcott 0:04

Hello and welcome to another episode of beyond busy The show where we talk productivity, work life balance and defining happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, I'm talking to Katz Kiely. It's a special episode. It's in our usual off week, but it's all about how to get PPE protective equipment to the frontline NHS and other workers. So we just thought we'd put it out as soon as we could. And stay tuned for how you can help. Before we get into that directly, a couple of things for me So firstly, I've just started this new mailing list. So if you go to GrahamAllcott.com then fairly high up on the homepage there and actually at the bottom of all the pages is a little form that you can fill in to be part of my mailing list. It's the first time ever I've had my own mailing list, Think Productive have had one for years, giving out productivity tips and useful stuff from the business but this is the first time that I've done my own. And the idea is that every Sunday night I'll be sending out some kind of upbeat, interesting thought for the week ahead. That's the the general kind of theme of it. really designed to get conversation going and get a bit of debate going and also for me to connect in with kwith you and what you're doing. I'm going to probably try and put questions in most weeks so that it just encourages people to reply and get some dialogue going. That's the general idea. So if you want to be part of that, if you want to be on the inside track and know what I'm doing then just go to Graham Allcott comm and sign up for the mailing list love to have you there. Also think productive is still doing our work from home webinars. So think productive comm forward slash w f h. The first ones all just booked out and they were all full, had some really great feedback on it. And it has led to a few new clients within productive as well. So just goes to show as you'll hear in this episode with cats, you know when you put good stuff out there And just focus on how you could help, then the money usually follows. So that's been good because it's kind of kept us afloat really over the last few weeks. Obviously, a lot of our regular clients have been cancelling the face to face sessions that we were doing, and we've moved some of them to zoom, but not all of them. So that's been a real lifeline for us. But we've we've now got to the point where there's still demand for the web webinars where I'm working from home, but they're not filling up. So chances are, if you've tried to get on one before and you couldn't get on one, you'll be able to get on one now. So think writer.com, forward slash w f. h, if you want to find out more about that. So let's get straight into this episodes. We're recording this on a Saturday morning, middle of the COVID situation, obviously. And yeah, just shows the cats is someone who is certainly busy, but also full of purpose and doing great stuff and just has so many great insights to share as well as some really important information about how you can help with this whole PPE. So, let's get straight into the episode. Here's my conversation with cats. Kelly. We are rolling. We've turned off all of the devices and other distraction points. You're fully present in the room. Well, how you doing?

Graham Allcott 0:04

Hello, and welcome to another episode of The temporarily badly titled beyond busy podcast, the show where we talk productivity, work life balance and finding happiness and success in a world where nobody's rushing around being busy, although you might be busy at home. My name is Graham Allcott, I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, I'm talking to the amazing Louai Al Roumani. Blue, I was the head of planning for one of the biggest banks in Syria during the war there and has written a book. It's called lessons from a warzone how to be a resilient leader in times of crisis. And really, some of the stories in the book are just so fascinating and insightful. And not that we can belittle what happened in Syria by even comparing it to what's going on right now. Where our main job is to just stay in our houses and you don't have ISIS 20 minutes down the road likely I did. But I think there is some real lessons that you can transfer from one crisis to another. And there's just so much value in the book. And do I shares a lot of that in this episode, so that you're going to really get a lot from this conversation. We're usually on a two week cycle, as you probably know. And I just thought, as we recorded this last week, I just thought we just need to get this out quickly. So this is out pretty much as soon as we could, as soon as we have a little break in the schedule. And the idea is that it helps people right now with things that you're dealing with right now. Either in your business and your personal life home. Yeah, we're obviously living through times, which just makes us think about some of those much more fundamental questions in life. You know, what our purposes what we're doing one question Success Factors in all of that and just a lot of stuff that you're going to get into here during this episode so let's get straight into it. I'll talk to you at the end but let's get straight into the conversation with who I am I'm here with Lou I'll Romani and we are recording this virtually via Zen caster. Lou How you doing?

Graham Allcott 0:04

Hello and welcome to another episode of beyond busy.

Here's like a weird thing to say when no one's busy running around right now. This is the show where we talk productivity, work life balance, and how people define happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And this week, I'm talking to Mark Leruste. Mark was the country director for Movember, the charity campaign and he is now a speaker a podcast has a lot to say on living your values, living your authentic self and is really great thinker. So we talked about his journey with Movember. We talked about Instagram and marketing and putting yourself out there lots of stuff like that and I think this is a really good one for right now because it's I just I love the way mark thinks very top line strategic thoughtful and yeah, I think This is gonna be a really good one I think you'll get a lot out of it. So just before we get into the episode couple things I want to say firstly think productive are still running free webinars to help people who are struggling working from home so think productive comm forward slash w f h if you want to hear about that. We're also running all of our regular workshops still and we're running them all on zoom and actually on zoom and also whatever other tech you use in your business if it's not zoom, so you can find more about that I think productive calm. We've obviously seen a drop off in our own work. It's you know, month by month, it's it's actually been surprisingly steady up till now. But really, you know, starting to drop off at the moment. So yeah, if you are interested in productivity and helping your team then we can definitely help and we are poised to help so it's impressive calm if you want to find out more about that. Also, since the last one, I released this blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It's called Tales from Holland, autism, Corona and all of us. And it's just a set of thoughts around how my son who has autism has found the last few weeks, very soothing, and a really nice environment for growth actually, like really seeing his conversational skills coming on a lot. He seems really happy and relaxed and, you know, free of a lot of the usual anxiety or there are definitely obviously some anxieties. There's a lot of stuff that he can't do that he would normally do. But yeah, I had a huge response. Well, I posted on LinkedIn also on medium. And yeah, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. But I'd love you to check that out. Let me know what you think. It's just called Tales from Holland, autism, Corona and all of us and I'll put the link to that in the show notes. You can also find on medium and LinkedIn. Yeah, go check that out. I'd really love to hear your thoughts on it. And the other thing is, I've finally launched the new grammar. caught.com so you can go and find that Grandma katako. And one of the things that's part of that is, for the first time ever, I'm going to be doing a personalised weekly newsletter, which is going to go out on a Sunday, the idea of it is it's like the blues buster, Sunday night email. So it just has some positive thoughts for the week ahead. And just hopefully, is just me kind of sharing ideas and just having a bit of dialogue with people. So if you want to sign up for that, just go to grandma got calm. We'll put the link to that in the show notes. We might even try and put in a little widget to sign up to the mailing lists on get beyond busy.com as well. I'll talk to mark about that. But yeah, if you want to sign up for that, the idea is that I'll just be doing a kind of weekly email out I'll let you know what I'm up to. And also just share some some thoughts for the week ahead. I'd love to get some signups for it's brand new literally just launched it last week with the new grammarly.com site. So check that out. So let's get into the episodes. This was myself and Mark actually recorded our old lives back in January in Camden. And it just, it was a really great conversation. I really enjoyed the conversation. It feels like such a long time ago now. It's just it's a weird thing how time seems to just be moving at a very different pace in this current COVID world. So, yeah, it just feels like a lifetime ago but really pleased to get this one out. So you join us in Camden, we black to meeting room, here's my conversation with Mark the roost.

I have a complicated relationship with Holland. The complication is not the fault of Amsterdam, Rotterdam or The Hague. I’m lucky to have friends in all those places and for the opportunities I’ve had to travel there over the years. I’ve never lived in Holland. Yet, because of my son, I reside there for parts of most days.

I don’t leave my values at the door when I go to work. There are four key principles that guide what I do - and more importantly, why I do it:

Kindness & Empathy

I believe in doing business in a way that treats people with respect. My motto within Think Productive for years has been “People first, work second. Always”. When you work in a way that puts people first, you build trust, loyalty, empathy and with it,the right team spirit. Screwing people over, or working in a transactional way is short-termist.

One of my big goals for 2020 was to get much better at marketing. It’s April and so far I’ve shifted from my flashy and slightly pretentious old website into this new one, set up my first ever personal mailing list (I know!) and started to think a bit harder about things like Instagram and vain notions of what “my audience” might want from “my content”.

I should start by saying I hate marketing, which is probably already obvious.

I’ve been really interested in nutrition for a few years now. Anyone who knows me will know I’m not a massive ‘foodie’ and fine dining is largely wasted on me, but there’s something obvious yet profound about the fact that our brains perform better when they’re well-fuelled.

I guess it hit home for me around three years ago, when I suffered a really nasty bout of depression. I have terrible genes when it comes to mental health, but this was my first time being medicated for it. Save for a few afternoons in bed that no one really knew about, I carried on running the business and nobody really knew what was going on in my brain (I was CEO at the time, and although I wasn’t doing a great job, I managed to just about keep the show on the road). Once the fog cleared and I decided to come off the happy pills, I wanted to give my brain the best chance of being clear, sane and energised.