 and welcome everybody. Nothing like some last minute technology issues. Always the way, always the way, but we are here and we are live. So thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the Women IT Pros APAC call for March 2022. My name is Sonya Cuff and if you don't know who I am, I am a cloud advocate within Microsoft with a long career as an IT pro both on-prem and in the cloud. And with me is my amazing co-host Jess Dodson. Say hi Jess. Hi Jess. So yes, I am Jess Dodson. I am a customer engineer with Microsoft Identity Security Focus, a recovering systems administrator. I look a lot online as girl gems. You will have seen me floating around probably and swearing at things. So between Sonya and I, we run this little group, I think. I'm not sure this community. We're a little bonding circle. Our monthly therapy sessions I think. Yes, that's a nice way of putting it. We aim to bring you a mix of topics. Sometimes we talk about really technical stuff. Sometimes it's not so technical. But this month Jess and I are going to talk about productivity and focus. Now I don't know about you Jess. My role here at Microsoft has been a work-from-home role even before the global pandemic. And I also ran a business from home for 15 years before that. So I'm used to a work-from-home environment. But the pandemic was different and now we're trying to figure out what work looks like with some people returning to the office and it's tough not only navigating how my peers and people in the community are working and how to fit in with all that. But the distractions of everyday life. We got locked down for three weeks here just in my family because of COVID cases. Daughter brought it home from school friends and then my husband got it and then I got it and finally the teenager got it. And all of that really just throws normal out of the window before we even get to talking about how many distractions are so easily available to us. Hello TikTok. Yes. Yes. YouTube, Twitch, the PS5 that sits downstairs. Yes. And I have to admit for me, so my role hasn't been work-from-home primarily. So when I first started here, wasn't work-from-home and prior to that, my job at N-1 was very much bug on seats in an office. So working from home in that shift to working from home 100% of the time was, I'd like to say it was hard but for me, I actually found it easier. I found it, for me at least, I'm able to get a lot more done when I'm at home. And I think that comes down to that blurring of lines between what is work and what is home. And for some people, that's a good thing. And for some, it's a bad thing. For me, it was kind of a good thing in that it meant that I could get more done. And as this new normal has maintained itself, it's become a bad thing. There's definitely hints of burnout. There's definitely more online at 10 o'clock at night, reading emails, checking teams, waking up in the middle of the night wondering whether I'd done something, getting up, going into my room, which is literally my office is like two paces from my bedroom. So it's that, where do you draw that line? Where do you stop working and start living when your work and your life are very much intertwined? We could do a whole session just on burnout and work-life balance, couldn't we, Jess? That's something that we talk about quite a bit. Yeah, absolutely. So I just want to say hi to everyone that's joining us on LinkedIn Live. I can see your comments. So hello, we'll be watching those and bringing up any points that you want to share with us because Jess and I have certain experiences that we've lived and we can give you some tips, but please feel free to chime in. If there's things that work for you or things that you tried that don't work for you, we'd love to see you sharing in the comments. For some reason, LinkedIn doesn't want to let me post a comment on the LinkedIn feed. I think I might be just like upsetting the matrix a little bit too much for the amount of technology that I've got going on here with different screens, but we certainly can see you. Hello to everybody. Jacinta, Kesty, Melina, Heidi, Pierre, hello. Thank you for joining us and of course, we're live on YouTube as well. So if you are watching us on YouTube Live, hi and welcome. So let's get stuck into some tips and I'm going to go first down the path about this work from home life because we have some people who are doing it now because their first experience with being able to work from home was because of the pandemic. We've got people who are choosing to continue to work from home even though some of their colleagues are going back to the workplace and then we've got people who might be doing a mix of a few days in the office and a few days at home or I think workplaces where they can be with the roles that people do are being a little bit more flexible about that, but we've spoken just about how that is a blessing and a curse sometimes. So what sort of tips do you have for how you run life things that make working from home easier? So for me, I think the big ones are around that making and it comes down very much to your employer as well. So I and I know that Sonya, you and I are very, very lucky. We have a very fantastic employer who is good with flexibility. They understand that life happens. They understand that you have a family, you have responsibilities outside of your job and they are very understanding of that. So being able to plan your work around your life is for me the biggest tip that I have. Some people your eight hours may not be eight straight hours. If your work allows you to split that up and do an hour or two in a morning prior to getting the kids up and getting them ready to go to school and doing that drop off and then come home, do another stretch, then do pick up and then do a little bit afterwards. That's fantastic and I'm really lucky that mine allows me to do that. At the same time, I think not everyone is in that lucky scenario and it's a matter of if you are working from home and particularly if you're working from home and you're in a caring role where you do have either young children or elderly parents or people that you have to look after at home. It can be a bit of a struggle of trying to do that balance and having a separate area that is designated as this is my work area is probably my big one. This is where I come to work. This is where I come to do work and if I'm here, I can't be interrupted. I'm doing something. I have seen a lot of people use like the productivity hack of using like a red-green counter that they have on their door to say green is yes, you can come in, you can disturb me, it's totally fine. Red means I'm in a meeting, I can't be disturbed, please don't come in and bother me. I think that's a really fantastic idea. If my four-year-old would pay attention to it, I would 100% use it. But I think yeah, it comes down to what works for you and your family life and I think when it comes to being the most productive you can be at work when you are at home and we'll kind of slide into that a little bit is around those distractions, removing those distractions so that you're not distracted by personal things that are going to come up or if you are you have the ability to put them aside so that way you can say look I will deal with that after this or I have a set time where I can go and deal with that. I think that's one of the trickier parts of working from home because I know that I've found that the washing machine goes off. I hear the dishwasher stop, I hear the law-knowing man show up and I want to go down and have a chat to him about some of the things that I want him to do around the house. So it's hard to have that separation of work and home. So how do you go about doing it? Because you've been doing this now for a lot longer than I have. So I think I'm a little bit behind the April when it comes to a lot of things. One of the things about these tips is that people are going to find what works for them and so you and I very much sharing what we found works or doesn't work for us and I hope that people in the chat will share their experience as well but there is no one set of rules for this right. It's like parenting. There is no one rule book that's going to work for every family and for every child and so being able to experiment and figure out what works for you and what doesn't work for you is really important. I actually have found that I can get hyper focused on my work to the point where I haven't moved from my screen in a couple of hours and that is not great for my health. I started to get some back problems. I did upgrade my home office chair which has helped but what I've ended up doing is a couple of techniques to help break up my propensity to sit and do the work because when the kids are at school and there's nobody else in the house but me, if I get deep into a task I'm really enjoying I just won't move and you don't have those moments where somebody else in the office is coming up to you or they're walking to the you know the common area to get a coffee and you go and take a break or grab a glass of water or whatever. So what I tend to do is I use those household tasks as a forcing function to take a break from my screen. So I actually like the fact that I can get up after an hour or so and I can go and you know pick out a load of washing or I can load the dishwasher with the breakfast dishes and turn it on or or empty it. I actually use those as a bit of a break and when it's not something that's sort of on a time schedule like an appliance finishing I'm even doing things now like walking out to the back garden and watering some of the plants or you know trimming some of the some of the hedges just for five or 10 minutes to get me out in some fresh air and to get me in the sun and I've I found that that works really well. The other thing that I do is my Fitbit watch I've got a Fitbit Versa 2 and my Fitbit watch has these step goals. So mine is set for 250 steps an hour and at 10 minutes to the top of the hour it'll tell me how many steps I have left to reach my 250 step goal. When it gets to 10 minutes to the top of the hour and it's telling you you still have 250 steps to do in the hour you know you haven't moved and so I'm really going okay and rather than just like silencing that notification if I can I'm making more of a conscious effort to get up and move because I I just don't I really don't but it's really funny because I think that people have the expectation that if you work from home you have like this spotless house and everything is organised because like if you're at home all the time surely you're maintaining you know a spotless house at the same time because you're literally in that space right and like nothing is further from the truth so little things for me like just the schedule of when the laundry gets done mostly so I need to wash and do laundry on a Wednesday night and I also need to do that stuff on the weekend so we do that on the weekend as well and then on the weekend I also figure out what our meals are going to be our dinners are going to be for the week and my grocery shop to that list so in the morning when I get up I can go and take anything out of the freezer freezer that I need for dinner that night and then when it gets to 5 p.m. 5 30 and it's dinner time I already know what I'm cooking you know that the meat has been defrosting in the fridge and and I just rock into it or I seriously I would get distracted with work it would be 6 p.m. I'd walk into the kitchen and go what the heck we're going to have and those sort of household planning tasks for me because my husband is out working and so a lot of that stuff was to me because I'm home tends to make life work a little bit work work a little bit easier because I know that that life stuff is sorted and I find it I the whole you're going to have a spotless house if you're working from what it is from my perspective it is the complete opposite I don't know about anyone else but mine is a dumpster fire at the best of times I literally did a whip around the only reason that I've been able to get my house tidy today is because I'm actually on carers leave today so I'm joining you while I leave my small human has a lovely cough that we really don't feel like sharing the rest of the world so we're all hunkering down at the moment but it meant that I was able to whip around and do a little bit of the tidying that I wouldn't normally get so my kitchen bench there is actually a clean spot on it which is a very rare occurrence and things like that if you're working from home and particularly if you're working those ridiculous hours I find that my house actually gets worse it's not like when you're in the office and you come home because you have that turnoff you've left an office and you come back home and home is home and you end up doing those little tasks but if you are working in your home a lot of the time you're going to be you're having lunch in your home so it means that the dishes pile up I don't know about anyone else but my desk ends up covered in plates and bottles and cups and there's usually a whip around probably about once every two or three days to try and grab up all of the stuff that's collected around the office areas in our house so I always laugh when people are like but you work from home don't you have time to no I don't have time to tidy. Funnily enough it can get to a point for me where if there is mess in the house and my home office is across from our living room and it's all open plan so I can see straight into the living room literally from my camera here if that room is messy there is like a breaking point for me like it can be a certain amount of messy and I'm okay with it but once it starts to get to me too much I'm like no that is distracting me every time I walk past I see it and I just need to spend some time to get on top of that so that my brain can focus on my work because I find it distracting when things get too out of order I have there is a little tolerance level where I hit my tipping point and I go no I need I need to be working in a clean environment because it's just distracting me too much and and I 100% agree with that and I can see Kirsty's the same like if you've got no one coming around who cares what it looks like and I'm like I personally don't care I don't apologise when people come into my house and it looks like a dumpster fire because I have a small human that turns it into a dumpster fire um but at the same yeah at the same time there is as you said there's that tolerance level that you get to where you have to do something about it and you're right I think for me using that as a way to get up and be that more and I always feel a little bit more productive after I've been able to do something if it's cleaning a small area I've accomplished something and I can get back to what I was doing and I actually feel better for doing it um I call it what do they call it uh productive procrastination um which is procrastic clean yes procrastic cleaning very similar and it's where there's something that you don't want to do so you go and do something else but you're productive while doing it and it's that that cleaning or washing or whatever and that's exactly what I tend to do when there is something usually documentation that I don't want to do um and I love how Kirstie also mentioned jigsaw puzzles that's really cool and look at the weeds yeah weeding the garden is is is a good one my mum will stand and hand water her garden you know we have sprinklers and automatic systems and all that but she loves to go out and hand water her garden and she doesn't do it with a phone in her hand and I I've the meditation of actually doing that out in your garden doing something physical where your brain just has time to sort of wander and think without any other distractions I think is one of the secrets that she's got I'm also going to call out um that one of our viewers said here about making a clear boundary that work desk is for work only and turning off the work computer and trying not to sit at the work desk out of working hours now I do use my work desk for some of my personal admin of life but it's a very conscious decision perhaps on a weekend to go through and sort out some of the personal email accounts or the bills or whatever but I I don't tend to spend much time at my desk when I'm not working occasionally I'll play games on it if the other consoles are being used and we're doing some multiplayer gaming but it brings up another interesting point about boundaries and um someone's used the term before about work life integration and that they don't feel that they've got very clear this is work time this is home time but it's more of a mouth of the two things and that varies for me it varies for me depending on how demanding work is and what deadlines I've got on and what needs my focus or how demanding life is and you know whether or not there's a lot of stuff going around in the personal life that needs more focus and sometimes I can find that if I haven't been quite so stressed and full on focus during a week I might be happy to play a recording of a meeting that I missed on my phone while I'm in the kitchen preparing dinner and other times I'll get to the end of doing the work that I need to do for the day and I shut the computer down I like that's what I do not want to want to see anymore about this until until tomorrow morning so it's interesting trying to figure out you know which of those work for you because sometimes it changes depending on the priorities you've got in your life and and I think that boundary setting and and what we're likely sliding into some of the next topics around how do you set those boundaries and it's not I always find that it's not necessarily setting them with other people it's setting them with yourself and it's the hardest thing and I know that we've had this discussion before we can't say yes to everything I've actually committed to my boss to not say yes to things which is very very hard for me I am very much a people pleaser I am very much a I want to do the right thing by people I want to help where I can but at the same time I only have a certain amount of hours in my day where I can help other people I only have a certain amount of work hours that I can devote to doing that work and I can't say yes to everything so my my lovely boss came up with two fantastic sayings that he has made me use a little bit more which is yes if or no but so I know so yes if and the yes if is usually if something else can be shuffled off my plate or if someone else can take on something else and the no but is usually when I can hand that off to somebody else so no but I know someone who can help or no but I could do this at another time which I think I've found really really useful when I have been able to sort of set those boundaries for people and be able to push back a little bit and not say yes 100% to everything and look I think it's worth if anybody's tuned into this session just for that one little tip which has certainly been been worth joining to attend I love that approach and I often talk to people about a tendency to default to saying yes based on our capability so when someone asks if we can do something we automatically default to our mindset of yes I'm capable of doing that because I know that it's something that I can do as opposed to sitting down and looking at it from the perspective of capacity do I have room in my life and my work schedule to do it and so I'm a lot better now with experience about saying yes or no to things based on my capacity to do it rather than my capability to do it because sometimes you do have to say no to things that you are capable of doing because you just have other commitments and there are only so many hours in the day but I love that this kind of segues us into talking about how you plan your tasks things like saying no how do you keep on top of everything that you said yes to and where that's all at how do you manage that yes so for me mine is a combination I do use a lot of tech to be able to do it so I have a mixture between work and home so work very much focused around my outlook calendar and my outlook calendar has everything in it and that it does include any of my personal stuff that overlays with work hours so if it is inside of a work hour personal stuff has to go into my work calendar otherwise I will end up being double booked and I will disappoint someone so I want to make sure that that's covered I have a lot of one note my one note is absolutely massive so I have what is considered to be my primary work and there is a one note for that but I also have what's known as my side projects and I have a set area for all of my side projects and I think the big thing for me is setting how many side projects I can work on at any given time and what their deadlines are so for me the big one is making sure that all my side projects are not taking on more than 10 and within those that there's only two or so due each month otherwise I'm just not going to be able to focus I'm not going to be able to give them enough time and something is going to fall I call it the the balls juggling so when you're juggling balls you can only juggle so many balls at a time without some fall so how many balls can you keep in the air and for a lot of people that might be a lot for some people depending on what their life situation is that might only be a few and there's no shame in and no judgment and no guilt in however many balls you can keep in the air it's what works for you and your situation because you don't want to end up going down the burnout path so the other one that I use quite a lot for home I have a subscription to something called Todoist I am not a partner I am not I don't partner with them or anything like that I just love them I think they're fantastic I have it on my phone I have it on pretty much everything it ties into my outlook as well and I put my tasks into my Todoist the big one there as well as that it will alert you so it will tell you things and for me it's little things like have you taken your medication this morning by the way it's midday have you had lunch so it's the little things that will for me prompt me to remember to do things and they're the big hacks for me I need that push I need something to tell me that I need to do something that's really great I'm another person who lives with my calendar as keeping track of the things and obviously calendars are good for things when you've got a meeting or an online meeting that you've got to attend right but I use it for putting in reminders for things if I think of something that I need to do next week I'll go and put it in my calendar so that when I'm looking at my calendar for Monday for example it's there as a reminder to call somebody or to do something even if it's not a meeting per se but I do one of the things that a lot of productivity experts will tell you not to do and that is I use my inbox as a to-do list and I know that that goes against the grain of some of the productivity advice but I am fanatical about popping emails on the head when they come in or at least once a day so when I start my day I will go through my inbox and I will either read and delete something read and file it send a quick reply if it's something that I can action there and then and it gets it done or if it's going to take a little bit more thought and planning I'll leave that in my inbox and then I move on to the focus tab so of course in outlook we have this if you use the focus feature in outlook the stuff that is other so that might be notifications from systems or it might be news that is or whatever it is the stuff that the system is learning isn't quite as important or urgent to me then I'll go and tackle that and quite often honestly it's just skim reading down that list of emails on their subjects and then deleting them it's very rare that anything that lands in my other tab actually needs me to click into the email and look at it and I do have the reading preview up so that I can glance through things but it's really quick to sort of triage that stuff and it means that it's not getting stuck in with my important things but my inbox at the moment is sitting at around about 31 emails and that's sort of the level of the stuff that I'm working on I know that if I'm super busy or if I've been away but even if I get busy and I don't have time to go through that triaging process my inbox will start to head towards the 100 mark and if I've got 100 emails in my inbox I know that I'm not functioning as I normally do with how organized and in control I take of my inbox so I'm sitting around the 30 mark which is about right for the different things that I'm managing with different things that I'm doing at work aside from the inbox we also use azure DevOps so we have a board in azure DevOps where we create an item for the different things we're working on and that gives me a really big picture view of all of the different things that I've said yes to when their due dates are and I can go up there and put little comments and make notes in those individual items to go you know meeting plan for next week about this like this one I'm waiting for an answer back from the product group and so that azure DevOps board gives me that bigger picture of all the things that I'm going that are going on that might not necessarily be an email or that I want to keep a bit of a history of tracking of where the task is at and the great thing is that that gives visibility to the rest of my team and to my manager about what I've got on my plate as well so so that we can all see it in addition to that so it's kind of like using to do a spun on on a team scale and in addition to that I use got old fashioned paper so I've got on my desk at the moment a Kiki K weekly planner and in the Kiki K weekly planner I will sit down in the morning and I will write the two or three things that I need to get done that day so out of all of the things I suggest to and that I'm working on what if I looked at this list and I ticked it off would I be happy at 5 p.m. of going you said did the things today that needed to get done today and sometimes it's like today there isn't a lot of meetings so I want to work on this particular document and I'll write that down and if it doesn't get finished that day that's okay like I can move it over to tomorrow that's not the end of the world but it helps narrow down my focus to what really are my big rocks out of everything that I could do that I need to focus on doing first today that are my priorities so yeah sometimes good old fashioned paper or post-it notes is a good compliment to technology and and I I have to admit I love being able to use paper my only drama with paper I am a shocker for losing it and I'm a shocker for buying tons of them I've gotta admit I'm a stationary addict I think stationary is amazing Kiki K I'm not allowed to go in there by myself um and I've had them and I've used them before my drama is is that I tend to find that it's the same tasks that are appearing and I can see that Christy Kirstie has actually mentioned that anything that is three months or older she gets rid of and I've got to admit I've been in the position where I've had tasks that have been sitting there for three months or more that I just haven't got to and I'm like these are never going to get done I don't know why I put them on this list so trying to manage that and I if you write it down I have to admit you're more likely to want to get the joy of crossing it off I've found like if there's a task that I really don't want to do if I've written it down on a list of things I have to do that that there is a very big satisfaction in getting to cross that off um and and I think that's always really really good but for me I just end up with lots of pieces of paper with stuff written on I don't know which one is the most recent and I'm like did I did I do that I thought I did that um I I am blown away by anyone who can use their inbox for their task management I can't I can't do it I personally cannot handle it I have to have inbox zero at all times otherwise it stresses me the hell out I clean up my my email at least twice a day so that I am at inbox zero I use the to-do function inside of outlook because I have it tied to my to-do is so anything that I add to to do gets pushed into my to-do list um and set deadlines that way but yeah I cannot I cannot keep my inbox with with anything in that it will drive me I don't know I don't know why it's just like I think it's all about how our brains work uniquely right so if you're not familiar with it the inbox one methodology is basically the fact that your inbox is only ever a temporary triage spot um it's it's not somewhere that you should be actively working out of and there's a process for what happens when an email comes in whether it does get actioned or deleted or moved into a folder or or what you do with it I tend I unfortunately my brain does this whole out of sight out of mind thing though and that if it's not in my inbox even if it's in a folder called not my inbox just having it in a subfolder I know just having it in a subfolder for some reason just just makes it less important to me and my brain goes oh look the inbox is empty we must have everything to do today but I cannot deal with a very high number of unread emails and I think you know when I see people that have over 2 000 emails in their inbox or even when I get a high unread count like no it just stresses me out yeah it drives it drives me insane and and I think that's one of the other big productivity hacks that a lot of people don't seem to get on top of I think email is probably one of the biggest things is that as soon as an email comes in people will immediately gravitate to the email client and I think getting that time away from it and literally shutting it down for periods of time during the day can really help your productivity because otherwise every time a new email comes in or it pings like you want to go and see what that is and see if it's important see if it's something you have to do and that can really blow your focus so that's a nice little segue into our next section which is talking about focus and I think this whole topic of removing distractions really is important like you if there is something in particular that I really need to focus on and concentrate on to get it done I will shut down teams and I will shut down Outlook and I will shut down any other browser tabs that I had open that aren't relevant to the tasks that I'm working on and I need to force myself to get rid of those the challenges it's really easy to hit the new tab and go back to Twitter again and so you know but when when you do get into that flow of that focus task it you know that the time flies and it really is worth doing but I'm like you I like to to literally shut down any of my other applications including emails now I don't know whether or not it's a feature because he's probably one of the people who could tell us but there was a feature that I saw it might have been an add-in for Outlook it might have been boomerang I think it was boomerang that hadn't where you could pause your inbox so that no new emails would come into it for a period of time and it was basically just stopping the client from refreshing with the server and bringing in the new data but that meant that if you needed to have email open because it had information in it that you needed to work on a task you weren't getting any new emails coming into it you could still do that yeah it was a great little feature I don't tend to I don't tend to yeah I don't tend to need a lot of emails open when I'm working on a focus task because I've usually sort of got the information in my head and I'm working in you know docs or word or checkpoint or PowerPoint and usually a lot of websites so it's it's not very email based but certainly shutting down a lot of those other applications to focus on the one thing that you're working on is really useful have you got any other tips for how to maintain that focus on the tasks that you need to be working on um I've always found for me at least I need background noise um and I think working from home has made it really really hard I need something even if it's and and I think it comes from working in open plan offices for all of my working life until now um and not having some form of background noise um I find it quite distracting which is bizarre and I didn't realize it until about midway through pandemics it's sort of around beginning of last year and I'm like why why am I not getting as much why do I keep getting distracted what is it that is causing me to keep breaking from what I'm doing and lose my focus and I found that it was because I didn't have background noise so I tend to run a Spotify playlist be it um instrumental music so that I'm not listening to the words or trying to follow along with the words or the other thing that I do is I run a youtube playlist of just comedy so random comedy um uh stuff mixture of things like qi and nine out of ten cats and just snippets from those kind of things that run in the background it's that mixture of talking and laughter that for me that's what allows me to concentrate and keep going which I found really bizarre so this is fascinating because I'm the exact opposite if I've got noise I can't concentrate and it's worse for me when it's either songs that I know the lyrics to or it is conversations my husband's favorite TV shows are sitcoms and my brain can't deal with the constant laugh tracks in those shows like I do enjoy sitting down and watching the sitcom sometimes when I need a laugh and you know we've watched shows as comedies and stuff and they're good when I'm in that mood but when I'm working I that would that would be way too distracting for me and I can listen to music that I that I know and that I'm familiar with if I'm doing light tasks so if I'm doing like organizing tasks or whatever there are certain tasks that I can do with music that I'm familiar with but if I'm trying to especially if I'm creating if I'm trying to plan steps or write words my brain is singing the lyrics right I find it really hard however I like your suggestion about sort of the different playlists you use we should maybe create a chat in the women IT pros group sharing people's favorite playlists or work by but I I've got a few different ones that I like on YouTube that are focus music so if you just go to YouTube or Spotify and you just search for things like focus music or study music or even lo-fi there's a lot of good stuff in there that's really nice to put on in the background the other one that I found that I'm going to put up as a banner is one called brain FM now brain FM is one that I discovered that has sounds in it that are sort of tuned to your brain waves and works best with headphones on so you can go to brain dot FM and you can try it out for free before you go and buy a subscription and there are a bunch of different styles of music so there's cinematic and there's like rain sounds and there's like classical piano and there's all sort of different styles of music and they have a low medium and high intensity to design to help your brain focus on tasks and it's a little bit of playing around to find which ones work for you I find that some of them work better for me in terms of some of them do just become like elevator music where I stop hearing it even though it's playing but it really does help me focus whereas other ones I find too distracting sometimes it's playing around with the volume bevels but sometimes it's just the instruments or the or the beats or whatever so brain dot FM is one of my new favorites in terms of having sound behind me another thing that I want to bring up I don't know whether you use it I've I've tried it with limited success but my daughters love it and that's the pomodoro technique so if you haven't heard of that the pomodoro technique is about breaking into time sections what you're working on and so um there are people who will explain it better than me but you basically aim to do your work in sections and then take a five minute break and then do another section of work and then take a five minute break and then do a third section of work and then take a longer break like a 15 minute break and those sort of enforce breaks if you go and search on the internet for pomodoro technique or pomodoro timers there are a lot of applications that are free that act as that timer for your your work in your breaks there's a lot of websites that are just online um that you can just run in your browser for that as well so that's an interesting technique that my daughters use when they're doing their homework or their study and I love I I see that we've had um sin come in and say that she hates background noise I've got to admit for me as well like I hate wearing my headphones all the time it drives me insane so I actually do have speakers attached to my machine so I can switch between where I'm getting my sound from so particularly if I am listening to someone and I'm still at my machine I will do it coming from my speakers rather than from my headphones because I do agree like there is after a time the pressure feeling of wearing headphones for 10 plus hours a day it does get a bit too much and I do want the the release of not having to wear them all the time um but it's just it's just a just a sound and I've got to admit I love the pomodoro I've used that before particularly for things where it's a task where I don't want to get done um it's something that I'm I'm like I want to do this I'm over it um and I have I admit I have quite a few of those but I also end up with a hyper focus as well so I found that the pomodoro can help with that because it's that enforced break you have to take a break you have to step away even if you're in the middle of something you need to stop and that can really help particularly if you are I always find that if I'm sitting for long periods of time and when I get that hyper focus you actually end up quite stiff you end up quite tensed up and needing to take that break and step away is really important otherwise you can do yourself some interesting injuries. Yeah so Kirstie mentioned that you can use the Outlook feature to set Outlook to work offline so it's not doing that send receive so that would pause your inbox like I mentioned before so yeah good tip I I hadn't thought of using them that way of course I've used work offline before when I'm literally wanting to work offline if I'm on an aeroplane what are those things I can't remember but those things we used to fly on um but yeah actually being able to use it to tell Outlook to work disconnected for a period of time is is also really good um and I love how you mentioned about those tasks that you don't want to do right I would like to win an award for the procrastination I do about hard doing the hard things and I normally find that the procrastination about it is worse than actually knuckling down and getting the damn thing done because once I get into the flow and then once it's done I'm like okay that actually wasn't a big deal I don't mind it was making it out to be actually sometimes I think my little human nature brain needs the reward of what we're going to do afterwards right it's it's like eat your vegetables and then you can have dinner I need to turn around and go look just get this thing done and then you don't have to worry about it again like what is my reward for getting this thing done so it's interesting because I was reading some time management stuff um actually on my LinkedIn feed I shared something today with productivity tips from some experts talking about hybrid work and someone was mentioning about how doing hard things is out of our comfort zone and our brain keeps on wanting to go back to the thing that is less horrible and less awkward and so we're constantly being pulled to go to the distractions that take us out of that feeling of unpleasantness um and you know we we just have to push through it because it's not necessarily that the work that we're doing is horrible it's just usually that it means that it needs more focus or we have to we are we have to create rather than consume and it takes a lot more sort of energy for our brains to go and do that that thing that we say is harder um because it does require more effort so uh I love that it's creating bloody documentation all this documentation like I don't want to do it oh that's awesome so we started talking about some technology tips do you have any other tips for how you use technology or things you do with your tech um for me um the big ones for me and I I've got to admit I know that Malina mentioned that whole separation from this is my work and this is not work I'm shocking for that so I actually do use my home office as both work and personal I mean as you can tell by my background it is very much a mixture of work and play um but at the same time there is a very big difference so I have browser a browser that I use for work that is signed in with my work account my email client is purely for work my teams is purely for work I have work programs so one note and all of those that are purely work related come the end of the work day all of that gets turned off um probably one of the big ones and for android users is if your work can implement work profiles look at doing it so for me I found that to be an absolute blessing when that came in for our work so it's the ability to literally hit a button that turns your work profile off so once your work profile turns off all of your work apps email teams authenticator everything like I literally cannot log in because my authenticator is turned off on my phone which is almost an enforced you are out of work hours don't do work um which I've found to be really beneficial because if I turn my work profile off that's it I'm not working I don't receive any of the notifications I'm not interested in seeing it at the same time there is that push to want to turn it on like on a Sunday afternoon just to see what Monday is going to bring so I'm I'm getting better at not doing that and only turning it on on Monday um but that's probably a a trickier work life balance thing that I haven't quite got yet um other than that I think it's making that distinct separation because otherwise it can and I I'm totally fine with the idea of a work life blend but I think once it blends too much you never really turn off and that's when it's just going to become too much of a drag I think that's that's that does lead to that burnout yeah good point so um I have an iOS phone Apple phone and so with my iPhone I have moved all of my work apps to the very last page of icons on my phone so I can pick up my phone on the weekend and go into maps or go into social media or do whatever else I want to do on my phone and I don't see outlook and teams staring at me as that little icon that attempts me to go in and have a look and that doesn't mean that it's a black and white rule for me like I said sometimes I do like to jump into teams on a Saturday morning because my team is a global team and so it's Friday afternoon in the US um you know it's Friday for Europe and sometimes I like to do like to check in and say hi I don't make a habit of it every weekend um but it's not a hard and fast rule for me but just having those icons on that last page means I have to make a conscious decision to scroll back and find them or to swipe down and type it in the search to bring that up they're not staring me in the face when I want to go and use those other things I love how you mentioned notifications Alexandra has just mentioned about using quiet hours in teams to not receive notifications that's a really good tip I generally don't have notifications set on for anything the only reason I want my phone to get my attention is if someone has called me or they've sent me a text message and that's it so I don't have any other apps on my phone pinging me to say that there's been new activity and my friends and family know that we can chat generally in Facebook Messenger for example just about random things and how you how's your day going and what are you doing on the weekend and that kind of stuff and it's fine but if they need to me to answer something that is time critical if they want to know are you home so we can come around and visit or whatever they need to call me or send me an SMS because I don't get glued to Facebook Messenger popping up and telling me that there are a message in there I check it when I'm ready to check it and it's the same for my work apps on my phone and so we talked about that sort of blend between when you're working at a computer versus when you're working at a phone even when I'm using my phone for work things because I'm not at my PC I still don't have outlook or teams pinging me now the only exception to that is when we've been away for work and we've been together with a group of people we primarily use teams chats as a way of keeping in touch so who's going down for breakfast what time are we meeting for dinner like that kind of stuff and so I will turn notifications on for those particular occasions but honestly if I'm away from my desk and someone pings me on teams I'm away from my desk and it can wait until I get back and the team the team kind of knows that I do use my phone to check in with my work things in the morning before I get to my computer so I'll get up in the morning have my shower get the kids ready for school and sit down and have breakfast and if they are under control or if they have left the house and I haven't made it to my desk yet especially while I'm having my breakfast or my morning coffee I will use my phone to check in on the teams messages that have come in overnight and go through and triage my emails see whether there was anything that came through last night that is going to need my priority attention today or not quite often it's not but I do like that little quick burst of check in about what has gone on in the world overnight while I've been sleeping especially because I work in a global team that kind of sets me up for the day before I even get to my desk so I'm kind of knowing what to expect but as general rule don't love notifications my other technology tips ignore conversation oh my gosh if you have not discovered that an outlook that is one of my favorite things and we were having a giggle the other day because um Microsoft being a big company is infamous at some of the reply all storms that you get when someone starts discussing something on a very big distribution list and a bunch of people want to be removed from the conversation right click ignore conversation will send any reply to that email that has the same subject line in it directly to your deleted items folder and you will not see it which is wonderful I particularly love it for um announcements of things like people who are leaving so if you email and say that you're leaving the team I will absolutely reply to you wish you luck say it was great working with you and then I will hit right click and ignore the five thousand other people who are going to reply to everybody to wish you good luck because that's just makes time for me email triaging and there is a whole nother conversation we could have about how part of the problem of having too many emails is because we send too many emails and so we are you know it's like you're not in traffic you are traffic we kind of create this thing that sort of snowball so I love right click ignore conversation if I do decide that I want to jump back into it I can go into my deleted items right click again and find one of those and unignore it so that it starts to come through again but tell you what ignore conversation is just a lifesaver I did for those big conversations definitely it's uh and I don't think that we are alone so I don't think Microsoft is alone in that I've seen that in other organizations particularly when you do have people who use the true line rather than the bcc um and again we could do a whole other topic around how to manage email and all that kind of stuff um but I think being able to carve out time for yourself and what you're going to focus on and making sure that what you're focusing on is in important for you and using the technology to do that is where you can get those productivity bumps from because if you're just using it purely is that absorbing and getting everything out of it all that's going to end up happening is you're just going to become overwhelmed because you're torn in so many different directions so using it as you need it absolutely um two other quick little uh windows 11 tips that I will throw in that I use quite a bit one is snap grids so snap grids um easily makes you able to put different windows in different places in the in screens if you're working with a much bigger screen and you want to have four applications or you want to side by side your applications it's been around for a little while as an add-on capability in a toolkit called power toys which you can download for free but we built the capability into windows 11 so that you can um shrink down one of your windows and you can move it to like the top left hand corner or the far right hand side and it will give you a few different layout options and ask you which apps you want in the other spots so the snap grids in windows 11 are really useful and there's also one that I find that people don't know much about which is clipboard history so holding down the windows key and pressing v just like you would do a control v to paste something the windows key in v and windows 10 will bring up the history of things that you have copied into your clipboard so if it's only a couple of copies back again you can go and steal that from your clipboard history so that one's a cool little tip as well interesting to see the interesting to see how many people have like just passwords actually be looking to see how they how they come up if they just text and that's just the text and your clipboard history but the clipboard history would clear out when you restart your PC as well mind you how many people don't restart their PCs and just leave them in sleep or hibernation don't even get restarted don't get restarted because that means they're not applying windows updates yeah I do all right we are almost at time so I'm gonna leave you with a few resources that I like and then we're gonna cover off a couple of upcoming events that are going through first one is adopt and embrace microsoft teams so this is a book if you search for adopt and embrace microsoft teams you will find an amazing book that the team at adopt and embrace wrote about how to use teams effectively really good for managers that manage a team but also good for anybody that wants to look at microsoft teams from a productivity and use perspective as opposed to the the technical under the hood which is the way that you know my IT pros like to think about technology so adopt and embrace have a really great book that they've written on using microsoft teams from that perspective the next one that I want to mention is a book called deep work by Cal Newport so deep work is about getting into the flow getting into this really deep focused headspace for the work that you that you need to smash out that's going to need a bit more effort so deep work has got some really interesting brain science and tips in that one so deep work by Cal Newport and then the other one that I want to mention is one called the one thing by Gary Keller and we talked a little bit about how to say yes and no and when to say no and what things to say no to the one thing talks about how to make a decision about what to do next based on all of the different choices that you've got on things that you need to be doing or what the next steps are how do you choose what that what that next thing is and so the one thing by Gary Keller is a really good read as well I enjoyed that one have you got anything to add just I don't I don't have any major tips all of mine have just been trial and error through finding what works for me and what doesn't work for me so it's been a long a long road of just working no but no better to be in your podcast right oh yeah one day when I end up starting that up as well I'm put too much in your plate and finally just before we go let's talk about some things that are coming up so as you may or may not know we have this call on the last Thursday at Midday Australian Eastern Standard Time from Brisbane so our next one will be I haven't even brought up my calendar to see whatever the last Thursday in April is here we go I'm so organized today whatever the last Thursday in April is she says bringing up the calendar on her task by that'll be 28 28th of April we are hoping to get some people on to talk about LinkedIn and how to use linked and effectively for both what you should be including in your profile and how you should be using it on a regular basis and building your network and connections to so we had a few people ask about using that I think especially because it sometimes gets a reputation of being the place you go when you're looking for a job as opposed to the place that you can actually use to showcase your work and your thought leadership as you do it to set you up in an amazing place for when you maybe are you know looking for another job or someone thinks of you for an opportunity or you're angling for a promotion but it's very interesting to use it to connect with other people in the the industries and the networks that you work in even if you're not looking for career stuff just to find other like-minded people who do the same kinds of work you do so that's what we're hoping for Thursday the 28th of April speakers to be announced when we lock a couple of those in I don't have any other community events on my radar for April if you do know of some please pop them in the comments but we also have the global asia event so that is on the 5th to the 7th of May now time zones are hard so if you are in a pack it might be the 6th to the 8th of May by the time we figure out which time zone it's in but the global asia conference is run by the community for the community so you can go and visit global asia.net get some more information you can even put in a request to be a speaker if you've got something you would like to share they have the option of either presenting it live or doing it as a pre-recorded session so if you're not quite so comfortable presenting live to camera you could do something pre-recorded and they would air it so you can sit in the chat mod while that is so that's an amazing community initiative go and check out global asia.net and put their agenda on your radar and then last but not least we have microsoft build who have just announced their conference dates for the 24th to the 26th of May again maybe the 25th to the 27th because we had to take that good old international date line into consideration but that is coming up at the end of May and Jess and I like to do summaries when we have big events like this so it's very likely that our May women IT pros event may be what IT pros need to know that happened at build and we understand that build has a very heavy developer focus but it also is the place where new features get announced by the product groups and it's not all developer type features and initiatives as well so we will probably do a wrap up then it's all online and virtual so you can register for free build your session and agenda and pick up any recordings of any sessions you're interested in that might be airing it to AM in Australia so yeah certainly want to look out for that's the Microsoft's next big flagship event will be build at the end of May oh and we've got a few others that are popping up so I can see Kirsty's given us a couple of cool resources so true books smart work and smart teams and there is Heidi has put in one the business applications launch event on the 6th of April so that's next week next Wednesday thanks Heidi I just put that URL up for the business applications launch event on the 6th of April there so go and check out that URL from Heidi if you are interested and the two books that Kirsty recommended as well by Dermot Crowley Crowley sorry Dermot I don't know how you pronounce your last name but it's there on the screen for people to go and search for you with their favorite search engine so that is us we are at time Jess thank you so much I'm actually amazed that we cran this into an hour because I know that is the topic we could have talked for a considerable amount of time on but um I want to thank you and I want to thank also the people that joined in the conversations thank you very much we appreciate your contribution and your viewership and um yeah we will see you next month I'm just looking at Kirsty's last Kirsty has productivity tips oh on YouTube awesome so go and find Kirsty McGrath's YouTube channel as well and she also has some great productivity tips thank you so much for sharing Kirsty you are a legend in the technology adoption and use space and we're so glad you could turn on today and join us awesome anything else to finish up with Jess nothing for me just want to say thank you to everyone who's come um and who's shared their own tips hopefully it has been useful and hopefully you'll be able to take away at least one thing be it the yes if no but or capability versus capacity um and and fingers crossed it'll it'll help you just a little bit in being a little bit more productive absolutely fantastic thank you everybody um have a great month and we'll see you at the end of April bye