 Hi Taylor. Hello. How are you doing? Really good. Yeah. And thanks everybody for joining us. I'm really looking forward to jumping into Hex for Hybrid. Revisited in just a minute. But as I'm kind of like a non-usual presenter for this stream, I thought I'd just say hello and introduce myself. I'm Maaren Deepwell. And last year at this time, I co-presented the Hex for Hybrid Flex Course together with the one and only Lauren Hanks. And I'm so thrilled today to revisit that and share some of the really the best bits, the most useful bits, the thing that we have the most fun with as well. And Taylor, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I followed along with the Flex Course last year and I learned a lot and it was a really good self-amount of self-reflection too, I think, about habits for me. So I'm excited to be here for the revisit. Awesome. Well, just so you know, what's in store for Taylor this is in the morning. For me, I'm based in the UK. It's in the afternoon. And we are going to go and have a look at the best pieces from the course. And I'll share a little bit about some of the most popular Hex that we went through and unpack that a little bit. But we're also going to have a part where you can play along and hopefully have a little bit of fun along the way. As at the very end, we're going to have sort of maybe half an hour and like do a little quiz around different things that we are doing with hybrid working and you can use the chat or on Discord, use join into the conversation there. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. Before we jump in now, there are two other guests that I want to introduce to the stream. And the fresh one here is my dog Posey. You can see she is an avid hybrid worker and she has just laid down for an afternoon nap. And one of the things I'm going to be talking about as part of the stream today is what makes me take a break from work. And this is the number one helper to get me take a break from work. And I know Taylor, you've got someone in the background too. Yeah. Sorry, backwards cameras. Artemis is my cat here and she is a little bit cool out today. So she's found a cozy spot in the office that she tends to do. So nice. Well, if you're joining us here on the live stream and you feel like joining into the conversation, do post hello in the chat. Let us know where you're joining us from. Any home working buddies, full pause or otherwise that are joining you today. Let us know how your Friday is doing. But let's get our slides up. I've prepared some visuals to share a little bit and just kind of talk you through some of the highlights from this course. We're also going to give a big shout out to the next flex course that's in store. So at the very end, there is going to be a little bit of a glimpse of what's in store for next week's stream and the next flex course as well. But a year ago, we really started thinking about hybrid working a little bit more strategically kind of, I think many of the people in our community had to start working from home as part of the pandemic. And for many people, the experience was like, it's Wednesday, you'll get a laptop and the next day you're supporting 500 students and faculty from your kitchen table without any warning whatsoever. It was a really abrupt move to working from home, very necessary in those dark days, but not particularly conducive to long-term work-life balance. And one of the things we wanted to do last year is to really start thinking about, for many us in a higher ed, hybrid working seems to be here should stay. It's become very popular. It offers flexibility. It gives you an opportunity to kind of work somewhere and live somewhere, maybe cheaper or more convenient, something that are expected for you and your family or have other commitments around work. But it is also quite challenging and there is a specific skill set that we identified that is kind of conducive to building effective hybrid working. And the four different elements of the course that we discussed last year was to kind of first of all unpack hybrid working. How is it going? What's involved? What aspects of it are really working for you? What aspects of it are not working for you? Then in part two, we looked at tools and platforms and thought about the relationship we have with kind of digital tools and how they shape the way we work and how we live. And I think we talked a lot at the time about sort of work and life overlapping, you know, like if you have young kids at home, you know, they don't know that you're at work necessarily. They don't respect their kind of, you know, I'm live on air just now, you know, kind of sign and there's a whole lot of boundary setting happening between kind of work and life that we were talking about. Then in part three, and that is the one I'm going to focus on today, we shared loads of hacks for hybrid working. So we compiled tried and tested personal strategies, lessons learned from, you know, our organizations, we looked at case studies from all across the industry, sort of looking at best practice and the research into how you do team building, how you set up your workspace, how you, you know, disconnect all those sorts of things. So that is all the stuff that I'm going to be jumping in today. And then in part four, we thought about sort of setting intentions around hybrid working. If you had identified something you would want to change or just develop, what would that be? Now, Taylor, I know that you, we were just talking before the stream started and you've been sort of hybrid working or remote working for two years, at least, and obviously before as well. And what's your perspective? What has really changed for you from sort of, you know, the early days of, hey, I don't have the commute to the kind of reality of being home base day today? Yeah, you know, it's, it's, I think my, my perspective is a little bit unique just because I have, I'm like, you know, computers and computing and stuff like that is something I've been interested in my whole life, basically. So, so for some perspective, and not just in a work context too. So, so for one of the things that I remember talking to a lot of people about when, when everyone kind of had to shift abruptly to working from home was sort of their setup. And it's like, okay, I need this and I need that. And I was kind of like, for my personal computer at home, I have a couple of monitors because that's, that's what I'm interested in. That's part of my hobby. So I was able to kind of just be like, I made it so that I could plug my work laptop in, right? Like it wasn't, in that way, I kind of had some of the things that helped me feel productive were an overlap from hobbies I already had, right? So, so from that perspective, it was a little bit different because I've heard a lot of people say like, yeah, I didn't have, you know, like a good chair or I didn't have a desk at all or even a space to have a desk. And so I didn't really have that as much. But for me, it was more about like figuring out boundary setting, as you mentioned, and not just, not really, that hasn't been a problem like with my family. Like I have a four year old at the time she was, oh man, at the time she was six months old. But and, and of course, my wife understood too. But, but for me it was more about myself and like my workspace is like, hey, here's a space where I usually used my own computer to like play games and tinker with projects and things. And now it's a space that I go to to work. And that's very different. And so for me it was about how do I like get in the zone, the mindset in this space that I use for something else before. So that was the thing for me and kind of learning how to help me set those boundaries. And some of that was tool based. Some of it is like how I spend my time, like, because before I would go to work, come home, and then maybe I'd be tinkering in the office. Well, I don't want to spend literally my entire day in my office, right? So it's kind of thinking about when I do those hobbies and how they work and that kind of separation has been more of a mindset thing and in somewhat of a tool thing, but that's that. That's so interesting. And I really, I really hear you. Like, I have a real desire to leave the room where I work every day. Like, even though I also use it for other things throughout the week. I am, yeah, changing, like just changing a change of scenery is so important. And, you know, ideally I try and get outside. But at this time of year, that's not always possible. But at least leaving the room is so important. And I'm so laughing at what you're saying about all the screens because I originally started blogging about hybrid working and remote working in 2017, 2018, with my former colleague, Martin Hoekse, because the organization we were running at the time, we moved to a fully remote model. And I caught up with him last week. We recorded a podcast about hybrid working, kind of checking in. Now we both have new jobs and we're like, oh, you know, we'll revisit that. And it was so interesting because the one thing he started talking about was all the screens. He's just like, you know, yeah, so this is so fun to hear. I think I'm one of the few people in my life that I know who only has one screen and prefers to work in a small real estate. Well, and it shifts for me like it depends on the work I'm doing. If I have to do really focused writing that I'm not referencing other stuff, it's like, no, no, no, like I just need to write something from my head. Then I frequently undock my laptop and I go do that someplace else because it's, I don't know, just sometimes it's a change of scenery. But sometimes it's, no, I'm not going to be distracted by other literal other things on my peripheral vision. So yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, so you get a flavor for the kinds of things we talked about on the course. And now I want to share some hacks with you. So we're going to look at all different aspects starting with your homeworking environment. And one of the challenges we set the participants in the course is to do a little thought experiment and consider how you could make your workspace just 1% more comfortable. What would be a small tweak that you could make pretty easily to just increase that fit between you and your workspace a little bit. So some of the things we talked about that I had around at that time were like books and this is a picture of my actual bookshelf next to my desk. Also, I have a really nostalgic mouse mat, which has got like a picture of a skateboard with the famed tech hashtag on it. So I printed that from the famed tech network and being involved in that. Also, coasters, like so much in my life that has artwork, it's all designed with Brian Mothers and I have a Guster coaster. And talking of Guster always makes me think of Tom Farrelly, the one and only Irishman who is the king of Gusters, five minute short talks. And I think that reminds me, Taylor, it's the submission deadline for OER 24 this weekend. So if you haven't written your proposal yet, this is the time to do it. Lots of open goodies in store there. And also pictures or art. And so the prompt here was to really think about what would make a difference to your workspace and what would fit within your space. So another hack that we talked about that was really fun was the randomized coffee trials. So this is actually a piece of research that is, I think, a really great prompt. And Taylor, I'm not sure if you've done something similar within the Reclaim team, but basically the idea is that people meet up from within the same organization to have an impromptu chat over coffee or tea or something else virtually and that the way in which they are matched up is random. And I've included a link there. If you want to have a look, there's a nice piece of research that goes behind it, but there's also a template with a spreadsheet if you want to try and, you know, randomly assign people in your organization to each other to have a catch up. And the whole purpose of this was to have a water cooler moment, right? To have that kind of, you know, impromptu conversation that you would maybe have if you were in a co-located office space. So Taylor, I'm curious, like, I have tried this kind of stuff in different organizations where we did like, you know, we did meet up sometimes for coffee or we had like a random coffee kind of chat once a week. And we also tried to do water cooler moments kind of online. What about you? Have you tried that sort of approach? We haven't done in this format exactly, but I'm interested in that. I think that would be a really good idea because what we've done mostly is sort of, you know, hey, informal or sort of planned like, hey, let's all meet up and chat about this. But it's kind of everyone at the team can come if they want to. And most people do, which is good. I think that kind of thing is also good. But I like the idea of kind of partnering folks a little bit more specifically because that also doesn't, you know, use up the entire time of the week. It's really easy to like, I think when you're planning something, it's like, oh, the whole team should arrive. Well, now it's kind of like an event. And if we're feeling tired or anybody feeling tired, it's a different time commitment, you know, for the company in our case. So yeah, I think that's interesting. I think it would also be interesting to, you know, literally like, what if we took this slightly literally and sent everyone the same bag of coffee and or tea, you know, and said, maybe you make the tea for your chat or not, you don't have to. But I think that would be kind of fun. And especially we did it over like a week or a month and said, Hey, everyone gets this this week. You know, could they talk about that during their chat? Maybe. Or maybe it's just an informal conversation that's happening in Slack. How does everyone like this, this coffee, this month's coffee? I don't know, it'd be kind of fun. I love that. I think also we both have lots of experience like working in higher ed. And I think in a larger institution, you know, where you kind of stick within your group or in your department or in your faculty, I think these kinds of approaches can really help kind of stop those institutional silos and give people a chance to kind of meet informally in a way that they wouldn't normally meet someone. You know, and I think one of the joys of having a small organization is that usually you all get to meet each other, you know, relatively easily. But as you say, you know, even small teams get super busy. And there isn't always time for everybody to meet up. But yeah, I am just on your idea of sending everybody coffee. So one of the things I did with a former team of mine once is that we actually took it one step further and did like a postal baking kit. So basically, we all got like a little postal delivery with ingredients to make, I think it was lemon cupcakes or something like that. And so we all tried to do that and then kind of shared pictures in our messaging channel to kind of see how that was going. And it was actually a hilarious experience. And, you know, it was really funny to kind of do something in real time together, or, you know, in the same afternoon, but not be on a video call. Yeah. And that's one of the things I love about that idea of sending people things is that, you know, you don't you kind of get to connect, but maybe not staring at a video screen. Yeah. Jason, who's in the discord and is our newest member at Reclaim mentioned it. He's he worked at a company that would send out non-alcoholic cocktail kits, Oh, nice. and shake food rebords for a similar kind of thing is that people loved it. I think that's awesome. Oh, that's a great idea, Jason. Thank you for sharing that with us. Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing. It could be even be interesting to sorry. It could even be interesting to like have a opt in kind of thing because, you know, I know we've got some coffee people here at Reclaim. Yeah. I think we have more potentially more non-coffee people. I am, coffee is like one of my favorite things in the world. But, but I think we have some tea drinkers and I think we have some people who are like more like energy drink or or none of the above people. So it could be kind of interesting to have a few different options. You know, I agree. And I think that having a shared experience of something, you know, whether it's like something to eat or drink or even just something physical, I think it's the having something that you can share and talk about that isn't digital, I think makes makes a huge difference. And I think it's also nice to get something other than a bill in the post. I'm a huge fan of getting actual mail. And, you know, that is always nice. Yeah. So, um, okay, talking about workspace is a little bit more. So one of the things we looked at, and I think you mentioned at the beginning was, you know, during the pandemic in particular, many of us really struggled to actually find space to work at home, make this a dedicated space, you know, a lot of it was kind of an emergency response. But now, um, you know, I think it's a good time to kind of revisit what might have been kind of like an interim quick fix solution and kind of really look at, you know, how the workspace is set up. And I think when, you know, you work within a co-located office, there's kind of like a little bit of revolving responsibility for your setup to, you know, the estates people, if you're working in the university, or maybe you just don't have choice, there is a work station all set up. But when you're working from home, you're kind of more responsible for that kind of space and thinking about, you know, how long term it affects your physical health, your mental health, and what would work. So some of the really easy things that we talked about, like a glare protector maybe, or just having different lights for different seasons. Like I was mentioning earlier, when I was talking to Martin Hoekse, he had this genius seasonal hack for his workstation, where he has a sad lamp, you know, one of those lamps that simulates sunlight in the darker parts, and he lives in Scotland. So there was a lot of dark days in the weather. And I thought that was a genius seasonal hack. So, you know, I myself am a big fan of wrist support and having like spongy things to put my arms on. So yeah, that's definitely one of the key things to look at. And this is one of my favorite slides because this is one that Lauren designed for us. And this was all about, you know, the clutter on your virtual workspace. So if you are following this along, I'm really curious to hear whether you are a minimal tab person, or a maximal tab person, right, because Taylor, you're already laughing. I am very curious, I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you in a minute. But I am always amazed at how different people's desktops are. You know, we're all staring at the same screen, same software, but it looks so different. So yeah, I remember this slide very quickly because I saw this. And Lauren was talking about the suggestion of using the wallpaper itself as an organizing tool for files and things. And I, well, I will say I'm not a desktop clutter person in the sense that I don't have a lot of files on my desktop. But that's mostly a learned thing because when I used to do that, I just couldn't find anything. So it's just like as a manner of, you know, existential threat, I don't put anything on my desktop because I won't find it again, but eventually. But in terms of like windows and, you know, tabs and that like applications, yeah, I've got a ton open at any given time. And it'll be over days, right? Like they'll be like, that's the window with all the stuff I need in Firefox to get back to this one person that I didn't get back to at the end of the day yesterday. And stuff like that. And I'm not really great about it works for me in that like, I don't have, I'm not one of the people that has like hundreds of browser tabs at any given time. But, but I'm very specific about spatially where things are like that's where it's different for me in terms of, while there may be any number of things in any open, like, I always like to have and this goes back to monitors, like, I always have Slack, in which is like, the tool for us at reclaim, it's how we primarily communicate as a team, you know, most of the week. It's always in the upper right over here on my monitor, like that's that's where it lives. And if it's not there, something's weird and wrong, or like, maybe I'm on a stream right now, like, but even now I have it open. So, so I'm more picky about kind of, I guess, spatially where where my apps live. It's kind of weird. But it's not, but it's a different kind of problem I'm trying to solve if that makes sense. So, yeah, I don't know. But, but this is an interesting idea and one that I could see working for people, I don't think this particular wallpaper thing would work for me. But I do think it's a really good idea. And I like the idea of, I do really believe in the idea of being intentional about your digital workspace, just like you are your physical one, I think that's something that one needs to do. I agree. And I can see quite a few people in Discord, like sharing their own kind of thoughts on here, like Jason was saying about the standing desk. Then someone else really interested about the satellite units as well, which, you know, I so agree. Paddy was saying about, I think, a second, yeah, a second monitor. So, yeah, I'm really glad you guys are joining in. Tom is saying here he gives my browser by account and by window classes of tabs. That sounds super organized. Yeah. And, and I, you know, I think this is a really one of the things we talked about when we did the course that Lauren mentioned that was a game changer for me was she was like, clean up your browser bookmarks and logging links. And I was like, oh my gosh. It's like, I have so many things that I've saved. And when you click on it and redirect, so then you have to do the new login and whatever else, because I never update all these shortcuts when things change. And it saves so much time. And when I changed jobs a few months ago, it just, it just ground everything ground to a halt because I had no saved any things. And I was just like having to like make up everything from the start. I was just like, but on the other hand, now I don't have any legacy stuff either. So I think, you know, it's really liberating, but it's also really, really difficult. So yeah, that you guys are joining in discord. We're seeing your chapter bookmarks that that I am really picky about. Like I have a very specific set of that stuff. And one of the things that I love to as like an efficiency or time saver thing is you can even, I don't know if Chrome can do this, but but in Firefox, you can even have like keywords on bookmarks so that you can type out a single word and hit enter and it will load whatever that entire bookmark is. So like, you can have something named like reclaim calendar, but I can type C A L enter and it'll go to that. Yeah. And so there's a lot of little things like that that I think if you critically look at like, what am I doing a lot in a day? You know, maybe it's not that particular thing, but maybe it's making sure this file is accessible or whatever. There's a lot of things you can apply to that. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and there's so many small hacks like that that I think were really eye opening, even if you do think about this stuff a lot. And, you know, I really, I really think there is a kind of a wider kind of beyond the screen angle to this as well about kind of thinking like what you just said around, you know, what do you do a lot of. And, you know, we introduced our pets at the start and I'm thrilled that some of the people in this court have also started to do that and kind of showing us who is who else is listening along. But I think my dog really has improved my hybrid working habits because I managed to now take a break far more often. And, you know, if the stream goes for the full hour, we're definitely going to meet Posey before the hour is up because she'll be like, Hey, it is absolutely time to go outside now. And, and yeah, it's been, you know, really interesting to just think about, you know, kind of being more intentional about your day and trying from the beginning to kind of, you know, build some good habits and routines into it. But one of the things we haven't talked much about and I'm really excited to talk about on the back of our Halloween radio fun is to kind of really connect with people. And I, you know, I'm curious to have your kind of take on this because you work at a fully remote team, you know, you guys don't see each other in person all that much. And I have a lot of experience with that. But I'm definitely interested in how we can connect and particularly, you know, how you can connect without being in a synchronous video call. So some of the ideas here like having music Mondays, having virtual hangouts, or starting meetings with five to 10 minutes of saying hello, like particularly if it's your first full team meeting of the week. We talked a little bit about snack boxes and virtual birthday cards and things like that. But I wonder what makes a difference to you kind of personally, you know, how do you feel more connected to the people you work with? Yeah, I think the five to 10 minutes of in beginning of meetings for saying hello is like a powerful one. I kind of think about that a lot because it's really easy. Sometimes when we're really busy, it's easy to be like, okay, well, we have all these things to get through today, you know, but like on the other hand, you have to recognize the fact that people I think people need that, you know, and on the other side of that, too, I find myself excited to attend meetings because of that, right? Right? Yeah, check in, see how everyone's doing, right? Maybe I'm not specifically thinking about that. But when I reflect on my week, yeah, those are things that stand out to me. So yeah, I think that's really important to recognize the utility of because that stuff happens in an office kind of all the time. And so meetings are not for that, right? But yeah, I think that's a shift. Yeah, well, maybe they are. No, sorry, I mean, I mean, person meetings in an in-person office, right? And non-hybrid thing. But yeah, I feel like that's really particularly important. I also like the radio stuff. And I'm excited that because we did Halloween, because we organized Halloween radio, we've had more people comfortable doing that here at Reclaim. So I'm kind of hoping we can, you know, do this more often. Yes, definitely. Look out for festive radio fun, which we have already started planning. But I think that the thing that I often consider is, you know, how do we make memories about work? And when I think back to being based in an office, the kind of days that I remember the most are like, I used to work in this really miserable office in a higher ed institution. And it was like on the crappy part of campus, you know, like in the semi-disused building on the top floor where the cafe that was on the ground floor was always shut. And you kind of have to go and walk like 15 minutes to another site in order to actually get a coffee. And I used to hate that office, but it's really memorable to me, partly because I was the only person who lived within walking distance of this building. And so on snow days, or when any emergency hit, I was basically the only person who went into the office and everybody else called in and said, I'm sorry, it's a snow day. I can't get in. I was like, great, I can walk to the office. But I really remember those days. And similarly, that office had no air conditioning. And so in the summer, it was just brutally hot. And I remember we used to have this agreement that unless anybody was on a call or video call, like this was before the days of back to back zoom meetings, we would just like have the most black stress code and just come in like basically tank tops in the summer. And it was a really fun kind of, you know, they're really fun memories. But if I have back to back zoom meetings all week, I don't remember any of these meetings afterwards. Like I might remember some work stuff, but I don't remember the meeting. So things like the Halloween day we had, you know, I know I'm going to remember that for a really long time, because it's a very different kind of scenario. And I engage with it with like music and chat. And I'm watching it. And it's much more engaging, like, you know, all of all across kind of my senses. So I think that's a really interesting, like space that I'm really excited about. Yeah, I would agree too. Well, as I say, Festive Radio is happening. There is one idea that we have to try out for yourself. And we tried this out this week in Team Reclaim, where we tried to out a tool saying open a window. It's www.windowswap.com. And it's a really interesting little tool where you basically just click on a new window and open up a window to anyone in the world. You can also take part and upload pictures and videos of your own window. And Taylor, you also shared another one, which is Drive and Listen. Yeah, I really like this one. It basically is like a site that lets you, it's like dash cam footage from folks driving through various cities across the world. And when you do that, you can also listen to local radio stations from that place. And it's great. I love it. It's, I will say, it seems like it's a project run by like maybe one person, or a very small team of people. So I've had times where I try to go there and it's just down. But it's, I think, really cool resource. Are you saying they need better hosting? Are you saying they need better hosting? Yeah. If they had this on cloud, they would have a free HTTPS certificate and great support. That's all I'm saying. Absolutely. I hear you. So if you work for open window, or if this is your hobby and you want some help, you know where to find the best people for it. Cool. Okay. Well, one of my pet projects that I included in the course last year, because I absolutely love it. And you're just fortunate that you live in the US and I don't have your address, otherwise this would have happened to you by now, is that I designed like a creative comments template for basically sending positive feedback by post with a custom stamp that I made as a sticker to give to people. And the idea is really, I've been reading a lot of research about how we take critical feedback much more to heart than positive feedback. So if you're having a conversation with someone and you say one thing that's positive about what they've done, and one thing that's negative, they are much more likely to take away the critical feedback or the thing that they could do better than the positive feedback every time. I don't know about you, but I can still remember every piece of very negative feedback that I've ever had, but I probably can't remember even a third of the praise I've ever had. But when people like, you know, have negative feedback at jobs. So the idea is that in a work context, every now and then, you get some positive feedback without any buts, without any negative feedback, without any areas for development, you could do this better next time. No, none of that. Just positivity. And write like a very short, authentic statement. And then put it on a postcard and send it to someone so that when they open their postbox one morning, they get a little bit of your ace in the post. And I've done this quite often with teams in the past and colleagues, and it's so much fun. Yeah, plus, plus you get that physical, you know, it's going to like, like you were just saying, it's going to stand out more because you it's different and physical, maybe you pin it up on a corkboard or something. And yeah, I love this idea. And, you know, I would even add to like the, the like, I don't know, traditional managementy things you hear about like a compliment sandwich that I don't think those in my experience are that effective, because people kind of see through that, right? And also, when you get negative feedback, I mean, depending on what it is and how what what area you are to in your mind space to receive it, you may literally not hear the positive feedback after it, sorry, not literally, but you may not process it, right? So I think I think it's even more important in a hybrid context, or in a remote context, because you also, if this says on a video call, and you jump off the call after, that's it, it's done, you don't get to see that person the rest of the day, probably. So you don't know, are they down, not feeling great today? It's harder to check in, you know. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And it is, you know, and it also like, often when everything is online, these things don't stay with you, like, you know, particularly the positives don't stay with you, because the chances are that someone says something really good to you. And then you have a two hour meeting, or you have to answer tickets, or something else happens, and you're super busy, and there's no time to reflect or no time to take that with you. Whilst, if you get something physical, that's just positive. And Jason and a few others were just commenting that, you know, a postal mail is still a positive thing. It does stay with you longer. So I have a few of these postcards. I also have a lot of these stickers. So maybe we'll see if we can make some posts happen for the holidays. But I love doing this. And it's so simple. There's nothing kind of magical around it. But it's just a really powerful and fun hack. Okay, we're coming nearly to the end of our hacks that we're going to share. And these are all ideas to try for your team if you have little or no budget for this. So music moments is basically playing a tune between agenda items on a meeting. I've done this many times, particularly when the mood is low. And it breaks up a meeting beautifully and really injects a bit of fun. You do have to be a little bit careful about your song choices. But I think it is one of those things that I really, I really think is fun. Similarly, if you do have a kind of check in at the start of the moment, at the start of the meeting, and you want to do in a bit of an icebreaker, getting people to invent an emoji scale that they can tell us how they're doing today is really fun as well. It tells you so much about people as well, and what sort of relationship they have to using that kind of thing. And one last one that sounds a little bit corny, but it's also super effective is send someone a compliment day. You have one person in your team, you send them one compliment, done. Everybody gets one, gets you off to a great start. That's awesome. We haven't done the music breaking up a meeting, but that that feels like that could particularly work here. I guess, especially as I was kind of talking about like, I don't know, I really believe in a remote context like the meetings, like sometimes you're not going to get through absolutely everything you wanted to get to. And that's probably an indication that you needed that space or time, right? Yeah. So this is maybe another way to kind of make that when when folks need it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's particularly nice when, you know, you have a team like very digitally literate and you play a tune like let's say three minutes. It's really nice informal time for people to just connect via chat. And they're like, Hey, I love this tune. Yeah, I love the two. I went on some holiday and we played it there. Oh, where did you go? And like, and hence the conversation starts, you know, and you basically create a little pocket of connection outside of, okay, business as usual, here we just go. And, you know, obviously you can do too much, you know, but sometimes having those little moments where you step out of kind of, you know, whatever it is that you're working on, that can be really powerful. So we've been chatting quite happily and I'm aware we've only got sort of like 15 minutes left. So I do want to get to the play along section. But I also wanted to just go back to the Hex for Hybrid course, because if any of this has inspired you here are some prompts to kind of make that happen and start putting one of the ideas that we've shared with you today into action. So whether it's to make yourself 1% more comfortable, improving your workspace, maybe something to try with your team, or something that could immediately improve your day, if you want to get a postcard, you know where to find me. But now, now comes the play along part and Taylor, you're going to be my default buddy for this, but I hope everybody in Discord can play along. And we are going to post the questions into Discord as well. And Taylor, I might ask you if you can do that, if that's okay, just so that everybody can read those. And then we're going to see if we go through them one by one. So I asked these questions on my podcast about hybrid working. And I always think it's fascinating to see what people come up with. They're not very serious. But it is a good conversation starter. So once, first of all, what's your hybrid working platform of choice? So for me, I am definitely a Google workspace girl. That's the interface that I'm most familiar with. That's what I've used the most, you know, without shared documents. I don't think I'd be very productive. And I really enjoy having that kind of space. There are lots of other tools that I use a lot as well, but this is definitely home base for me. How about you, Taylor, what's your kind of home base for hybrid working? Yeah, you know, I think Google workspace would be up there for me too. I've now I think of it, I've literally never used, I've never worked at a company or place that didn't where I didn't use Gmail as my mail. And I've been able to carry over so many things because not not literal messages, right? But like, like, I do a lot of filtering because I kind of hate email. So I want to like, only focus on the email that matters, right? So that's kind of one example, I would definitely agree in terms of like shared documents too. I think another one for me is like, I really, this has been something I've started doing over the last year actually since kind of in response to last, when the flux course ran a year ago, is I really have been making a practice of daily notes. I use obsidian, but you could use any tool that lets you save text file really the Google doc would work fine. But what I'd like to do is have a place where I know I can write down ideas and then deal with them later. And maybe they go in a shared doc that I have when I'm working with folks, or maybe they go in Asana for task management, or it's an email. And I like to have a place to start text basically and write it and draft it. And then maybe it goes someplace else. And then on top of that, I also like to prefill it out. So I like, I'm not perfect at this, something I want to get better at, but it is great when I do it is I'll put in little headings for my meetings of the day. So I kind of feel it's it's a way to force me to like take stock of the day instead of just like jump in at 8am, you know. And I find I feel so much more prepared because it primes my brain, right? Like I'm thinking ahead of time about Oh, yeah, I do have that that's back to back, you know, stuff. And then it serves dual purpose of like, Oh, and I have a place to dump thoughts because I am constantly on the type of like, as soon as I like the creative meetings, right, or creative processes, whatever. But as soon as the idea leaves my head, and it's not coming back. And so I need a place where I can kind of put those things. And it makes me feel more comfortable, right and more prepared. I hear you. I think I'm also quite an obsessive list maker and no taker, which I think quite a few of us listening to this are, but one of the I just saw in discord, Mark posting at the definitely not office 365 is definitely not the tool of choice. And I must admit, I am, I so share your frustration. And I guess this is kind of a neat segue to our next question. So I personally can't live with shared drive on office. I can never access anything. But what's one piece of kit that you can't live without? So one that you actually like. And I have to say for me, like, I'm not that much of a techie person. But I really, I have a love hate relationship with headphones. I think it's partly because I wear glasses, and I don't like over your headphones. But like, I cycle through headphones, rapidly. And then like, I think, Oh, I found a perfect ones. And then like a year later, I'm like, No, I hate them. I need different ones. And so I'm probably on like pair 10. And I'm still struggling. So what's the one piece of kit you can't live without Taylor? I have mentioned it a couple of times. But at this point, for especially technical work, when I'm like troubleshooting something, yeah, it's it's some kind of external monitor. I don't I wouldn't have to work with the crazy weird setup I have now, although I do like it. But having more space to, you know, put documents side by side and compare text. Could I work without it? Yes. But I would, I think in most cases, for the way I think and work feel less productive because of it. I'll say I am kind of the opposite. I love headphones. And if the next time you want to buy headphones, let's chat. I have I am a weird headphone connoisseur. The ones I'm wearing right now I wear because they're the most comfortable headphones ever worn. I don't wear glasses. So I get that. I'd love to have advice. But yeah, it's like it like any other ear headphones. And I've spent more money than I want to admit to here on trying to find the right pair. You know, I've gone into shops tried them on and they all give me a headache because they're basically pushed a frame of my glasses into my head. And it gives me a headache after about half an hour and I just can't do it. But yeah, so I can if I can help my wife find headphones that work for her, I think I can. So you are on you are absolutely on. So one of the next questions then is something non technical. So there's my challenge some of our audience here. But let's think of something non tech that's important for your hybrid working setup. So I'm going to jump in with my my thing here, which is I definitely love office plants and over the last couple of years have gone slightly obsessed. And I love having plants in my office. They really cheer me up. They help improve the air. There are something to do in between meetings, like watering them or spraying them with little water or something. I really love having them. So they definitely important to my setup. For me, it's probably my my desk, like in that I have a sit stand desk. And I really, really like the ability to move between both. And I don't know, maybe saying I can't live without it. I'm one of those people who over things questions is maybe is maybe I suppose this is non tech that's important to my setup. But you know, I could I can and certainly have worked without things like that. But it makes such a big difference for me. And it's kind of similar to what I mentioned with the beginning with trying to create uh, separations for me. Like I'm sitting right now and I usually sit during meetings, but when I am not on a meeting and I'm working and especially if I'm writing, I'm probably standing and it's just it kind of helps me get in the zone a little bit. I have a white board right over there and that's where long term it's kind of similar to my daily notes thing, but a little bit different because I like it that's always over there, right? Like, right. And so I have been really enjoying having a whiteboard to just jot down quick reminders and usually I've got a list of like right now, six draft blog posts that I want to write. So it's a mixture of ways I use that. But I really enjoyed adding a whiteboard to my space. So it's the teacher and you. I think, um, yeah, that sounds awesome. Okay. Um, we have had some cool answers in this chord. Um, really fun. I think, um, dual monitors and Jason saying guitar playing a quick tune to give a good mental break or helps process complex ideas. That is an awesome idea. Um, okay. So we're halfway through. Thank you all for playing along. Next question is what makes you step away from the screen for a break? Now, I've already shared my number one helper here is my dog. Um, but I'm not going to say her name because she will just jump up and try and have that break right now. And she's been doing so well so far already got eight minutes and you know, she's made it through the hour so far. But the other thing I think is my partner. We both work from home and we often get motivated to have a break when we hear the other person get up, go downstairs to get a hot drink. And I love kind of checking in with him like how his morning's been going. And we have like little chats in the kitchen about what meeting we just had. So what about you? What makes you step away from the screen for a break? Yeah, sometimes my dog, she's not in here right now. Um, but I mean, obviously I'm letting her out and petting her a little bit between, I would say it's weird for me because in the summer, both my wife and daughter are home because my wife's a teacher. And so it's really easy in there that when I have like five minutes of downtime to just like open up the office door and go out and just see what they're doing and hang out for a little bit. And then I kind of, you know, return and close the door and close the door means, okay, it's work time again. Right now. And for most of the year, I'm just home alone right now except for the animals. So office door is open, whatever. And um, yeah, sometimes I think I need, I think this is maybe something I need to work on. Like it's not like I don't take breaks, but um, yeah, I don't know. I think animals definitely help with that. Um, I saw, um, Mark mentioned coffee, maybe I love coffee. I could switch to more complicated coffee methods and make a habit of like, all right, I'm going to do my, my pour over instead of just, you know, potting coffee. I don't know. I think, I think I may need to brainstorm that a little bit. Well, I must say, um, so I've tried to get a bit more movement into my days. And one of the things I've started using that sort of sounds a little bit weird, but I'm finding it really effective is that I have several, I've tried several apps that have sort of like five minutes stretching or five minute mindfulness or five minutes of, you know, like, I don't know, core strength, you know, and, and so when I'm having a really heavy meeting day, I really try and spend like, you know, two, five minute blocks where I'm kind of doing stretching or like, you know, just trying to kind of breathe in and out with the sound of rivers. Um, and whilst I don't always do exactly what the app says I should be doing, I find it incredibly helpful to have a voice telling me what to do for five minutes and just kind of say, like, you know, reach up, move down, like whatever it is. And I don't think I could motivate myself to do that in between, you know, a busy day. So that is one of the ones that I love as well. Yeah. Someone in this course mentioning chair yoga, that's definitely on my radar as well. That's a cool one. Yeah. Cool. So, um, we've already talked a bit about the next question sort of what's your current habit working blend? Like, do you commute or do you go to the office? I know neither one of us commutes and we don't go to an office, but we do travel sometimes and, and go to events. Yeah. Is that an important, important part of, of like working remotely for you? I, I mean, I find it really energizing to go to conferences and stuff like that. Um, it's, you know, I think it's, I think it's vital to people feeling, I don't know if fulfilled is quite the right word. Yeah. I guess energized. I'll go back to that. Right. Um, and so I really like that a lot. Um, I'm also just kind of a fan of, and this is maybe something that, that I should do more, um, that I haven't really done a lot in the last two years of just like a change of pace. Like, hey, if you have two hours and just have something, you don't have any video calls or anything like what go work from the library, maybe like, I haven't done that in a while and I'm maybe should return to that because I think that can be kind of healthy too. Um, but, uh, yeah, I love, I do, do definitely get energy out of going to conferences and stuff like that. Yeah, I agree. Um, and it's so interesting to hear it like different perspectives and discord as well. I'm so thrilled that we're having so many people join into the chat. So please keep it going. We have two more questions for you. Um, so this one, um, is would you go back to being co-located in an office working full time? And I've had a lot of opportunities in the last few years like job offers where I could have gone back to an office working full time. And I have not even been like, I've not thought about it for one single second of like ever. I was just like, no straight. No, I am, I am not against offices at all. I think loads of people love having that interaction. And there's definitely been times in my life when I've worked from home where I found it really tough. Like when I was getting divorced, for example, like when you live with someone you are in the process of divorcing, you do not want to work there for eight hours a day. You know, like sometimes life happens at home and you're like, I would love to escape to an office eight hours a day. Thank you very much. But you know, those fortunately have been fairly brief periods and I just absolutely love working from home and having that independence. It suits me really well. What is your thought? Um, obviously, you know, you can't leave free claim because everybody loves you here. So hypothetically, as a thought experiment alone, would you ever return to an office? I, I mean, if I, I could return to an office, right? But I don't want to. I really don't want to. I feel so much more, um, so much more productive is not even really the right word. Like I guess healthy productive, right? Like the thing that work from home lets me do other than, like you said, the independence of like, I really like being able to pick my space and how I want to set things up. But, but for me, it's also kind of let, let's me ride the down times and up times of my brain. I feel like, like, I don't know if everyone's like this, but I feel very strongly for me that there are times the day where I'm in a certain type of, you know, where I'm going to be creative and productive in a different way. And there are other times of day where I'd be better suited just answering like an email that's easy to answer in that moment. And I like that work from home lets me do that a little bit better. Not that you can't do that in office, but it's, it's easier for me to look at a day, look at here's my meetings and kind of make for myself, look at all the time I have other than that and kind of plan it out and stick to that. Whereas in an office it's easier for folks to walk up to you. And, and like, it's great to chat with folks too. But it's so easy to get your flow broken, you know, like, so that's one thing. So I find myself at the end of a day on a work from home day on average, feeling like I did a better job most of the time, which is good for my mental health, I think. And then, yeah, like having the breaks, having, you know, like the ability to, I mean, I really don't miss the commute. Like I love walking out of my office for the day and just like cooking dinner. And it's like a decent time. And, you know, I remember getting really, especially when you have like a new kid, and like, I would go drop her off at daycare, go to work, come leave work, pick her up from daycare and we're home and it's like six o'clock and it's like, okay, I had to put you to bed in like two hours or an hour and a half, like in some cases. And felt like I lost a lot of time to that. So it would be hard for me to go back. Well, there's all sorts of chat going on in Discord. But our last question, and I'm aware we're running out of time is a bit of a funny one, but I've included it anyway. Because I thought, why not at the end of the stream? It's Friday. Let's have some fun. So if you had a hybrid working superpower, what would it be? Hmm, that is hard. I think the ability to, like if it if we're truly talking a hybrid working superpower, it would be the ability to instantly gather teleportation, instantly gather folks for a 30 minute meeting and basically eliminate video calls for my life. And I don't hate video calls to be clear. But it is really revealing to me like when we did our like team retreat last year, like, you know, bouncing ideas off people, like in things like that in person is so different than over a video call. And you hear from different people, right? Like as well, like you get ideas and from people that don't normally speak up in meetings because some people are more susceptible to the lag difference or are just like more considerate and don't want to talk over other people, which is a great thing to do. But like, sometimes that's just not how that works in a video call. So that would be my superpower is, I guess, teleportation. But again, like, I don't want to return to office. So yeah, well, I have a similar one, which is that I would really love to, like, one of the things I find the hardest about distributed working is that I can never really imagine what someone else's set up is like, like, you know, we're looking at each other. You know, I see you often on video calls, but I have no idea what you're like, what the reality of sitting in your chair and being Taylor for the day is. Well, I think when I work in an office, I had a much better idea of how people's days were going. And I would love to just be able to, like, put myself in someone else's shoes for 10 seconds and just get a feel for, you know, what their, what their reality was like. I think that would make that would make it really fun for me. But I can see loads of people playing along in Discord. And thank you so much for joining us. We are slightly out of time now. So Taylor, what's in store for next week's stream? And do we want to give a big shout out to the next flex course that's coming up on our schedule? Well, I should say for next next week's stream, and I'm pulling up our schedule here, where we're going to be so it's the 17th, we're going to be getting ready for talking about our upcoming flex course. So it's the end of the month is the flex course November 28 is when it starts called open publishing ecosystems. So next week's stream, we're going to talk about that get it ready. We're going to be. Yeah, we're going to be talking about how this how the flex course is going to go what we're excited about. We're going to probably cover hedge doc a little bit, which reminds me I need to fix some things on an upcoming installer that I'm hoping to premiere. I'm hoping that I can say, hey, everybody that that installer we started is now available. So that's that's going to be I'm going to just commit to that it will be ready for next week. And yeah, so I'm really excited in case people haven't heard about it at all, go to our event calendar events that reclaim hosting.com. But, you know, we're going to be talking about alternative, all hostable tools that are all open source that you can run yourself and would enable start to finish collaborative open publishing. So hedge doc is a tool where you can write together kind of like Google Docs, but with Markdown. And then we'll be talking about three other tools that can take that Markdown and do something with it. And they all work in different ways. We're talking about manifold stocks, five this and hacks. And frankly, I don't know that we could have picked three more different web publishing tools, which is kind of the point. And so I'm really excited. We're also going to have guests in for those three for manifold docs by this and hacks and talking about, you know, what they're good at and why you might want to consider using them. So that sounds really awesome. Thank you so much for giving us a little preview. And thanks to everybody in discord and who's been watching on reclaim TV and on YouTube. It's been so much fun to have you on the stream with you today. And Taylor, thank you so much for having me to talk a little bit about hybrid working hacks. I'm always happy to come back. So maybe we can continue the conversation sometime in 2024. But for today, I think we're ready to wrap it up. Yeah, thanks for thanks for coming on. This is great. It's great. We'll see everybody next week.