41. The life-ruining power of routines

Brandon 0:05

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the operations room a podcast for coos. I am Brandon Mensing. I'm joined by my lovely co host, Bethany Ayers, how are things going, Bethany?

Bethany 0:16

Okay, say they're going well, I have lots of panic. But I'm really excited. I'm not quite sure if like all of the above,

Brandon 0:22

wow, a tremendous range of emotions going on here. So my

Bethany 0:27

oldest is going to boarding school, and my youngest is joining in September. And so we got the letter for the fees for next year. And they went up 6%, which is kind of standard, you painful. But in my mind, I had not noticed last year's increase. So in my mind, it's basically gone up by 10k times two. So it was one of those we're like, Oh, my God, shit, it focuses the mind, let's say, that comes September, I need to be properly earning more than I am today.

Brandon 1:06

Rice to offset life's increases. Yeah, to offset

Bethany 1:10

life's considerable increases. And so it's mainly me trying to think about like, what do I want to do, and I am still not wanting a full time job, life would be a lot easier with a full time job. But then life would be a lot less fun. And I'd have a lot less free time, I'm still holding out and looking at occasional CEO roles just because it might be interesting if I'm aligned with my values, because you know, I've learned when it's not aligned, not necessarily my values, but my interests, it's something that I don't want to do. So if there's one that does interest me, I'm not saying never, but I'm also not actively looking for it. So what I've decided to do to increase my income is secure one more board seat. So if anybody's looking for an amazing NACD, or board advisor, get in touch. And then the other thing is to finally embrace growing my coaching business, and starting to create some courses and workbooks pre planned content, you know how much I pre plan things? Oh, that's actually a great segue for today. And I didn't even realise it.

Brandon 2:19

Alright, so we have got a great topic today, which is the life ruining power of routines. We have the guests for this, the man that has read the article on this, the Financial Times, his name is Markham Hyde, and he will be our guest. So with his thesis and with his article that he wrote in the Financial Times, all around this idea of habits do not lead to personal optimization, they lead to suffering. And he really talked about this Truman effect in our lives where we're so habitual and routine and what we do that we have the same thoughts at the same time talking about the same things with the same people over and over again. And there's just this vague feeling that something is off, and that we're following scripts in our lives. And I think we all recognise and know that with routine comes an artefact alongside of that, which is all routine is forgettable. So I'll just pause there for a moment, and maybe just throw it to Bethany at the onset here. What do you make of all this?

Bethany 3:20

This one, really, the title caught my fancy, and I read it. And I loved it. Because I am just not a routine person. I'd say it made me feel less guilty for not being a routine person. And I was like, look, look, I'm not bad. I don't like atomic habits. Fuck all of your like, if you want to go to the gym, just wake up every day to start going to the gym, just do one sit up. And then before you know it, like I don't like that, like I'm either in it, or I'm out of it. And I really like spontaneity. And so I read this and it's just like he was speaking to my soul.

Brandon 3:54

It makes you think and rethink what you're actually doing. Because if you just reflect on the two of us as individuals, we're dramatically different, which is, I very much am a believer in routines to help build building blocks for productivity in my life, the things that I consider to be boring, that just need to get done that are like rinse and repeat. I want to package those things and have them like very habitual, very routine. So I don't need to spend my mental capacity, my creativity, my original thought on stuff that doesn't matter. I want to get it done out of the way and not think about it. So therefore becomes behaviour habitually that way, and that I saved my capacity as it were for things that are actually interesting to me, which tends to be in the daytime at least Monday through Friday business problems, which were fascinating and interesting, that you know, kind of stimulated a lot of new thoughts and so on. So that's the way that I've lived my life for a long time. And I think as you get older, you start to I don't know if it's just like age or being a parent or the combination of the two or your molecular structure of your mind changes or something but you know, I've definitely become one of those people now where Monday through Friday I have a I am up at 415, I am at the gym at just before five, just after six. I'm back home about quarter after I've got breakfast, I wake up the kids at 630. And I'm in bed by 8:30pm. So

Bethany 5:15

I'm also one who wants to outsource, automate, and mostly eliminate the things that are boring and mundane. And anything that takes a lot of mental load. And actually, this is one of the things I'd like to explore for the coaching and the courses and the content to share is can we automate a huge amount of women's mental load in the house? And I'd like to start to figure out ways of doing that. Because I feel like aI because it's all with men or not thinking about, can we automate the dental appointments? can we automate the remembering to buy shoes? Can we audit, you know, and there's just like a lot of boring shit that we could get rid of some way. But my response to that isn't to create a routine out of it, it's to eliminate it, if I can. Yeah,

Brandon 6:13

that's better.

Bethany 6:15

And then also, so you go to the gym every month, not every morning,

Brandon 6:19

not every morning, Monday through Thursday, because Thursday is date night, which means that I can't get up that early on the Friday.

Bethany 6:26

Whereas as you know, I do my EMS, which is four hours of the gym in 20 minutes, once a week. And I walk because I'm in London, and I get dragged out for a run by my child once or twice a week whenever he can drag me out. And I'll do some embodiment movement whenever I feel like it. And at the end of the day, I lay on the ground for a while and help my back stretch. But I don't do the same thing every day ever. And then where this is not necessarily the same. But I find a lot of structure. And if I had to have structure ahead of time, like even just talking about it makes my stomach like tighten. And I feel slightly crushed. And I always thought I was a really structured person. But as I've gotten older, I've realised maybe that's why I'm so anti at now. And so allergic to structures, I spent so much of my life, trying to do routine and trying to have the structure and follow the rules and be a good girl, that now I'm just like, No,

Brandon 7:26

I've now been in London for quite some time. In this kind of family format for quite some time. Working in SAS companies for quite some time, there's been routine build for very specific purposes to enable my life as it were. And I think what I've recognised over time is that I've lived in different places for different jobs historically, in my mind, from like a novelty standpoint, or spontaneity standpoint, or kind of like an imprint of my psyche point of view. I categorise my life by the chunks of time I've spent in different countries with different jobs, and they're almost like, different lives that I've lived. Whereas now I've lived this particular life for quite some time. Previously, when I was young and single, you could just like, say, I need something different. Therefore I'm going to move now to I don't know, some random country get a new job and live a new life again, that's no longer possible. So I think the question that I'm asking, I think is that as an adult, with a family where that previous single death is no longer possible? What is it that we can do now to give ourselves a sense of that feeling that I had previously where you can create novelty within your life that you currently have in a way that is meaningful and satisfying? That answers this question that he's driving out here of not living a Truman esque life, but actually having richness and meaningfulness in your life that you've actually set up for yourself? What is the answer to that?

Bethany 8:46

Because we're in very different stages of our lives. So my kids are now in secondary school. I have freedom again, there is a certain element of needing that routine and kids like routine, and it makes them feel safe. And it is a season of your life. This season is one of routine and monotony. And it gets better. When I had a two months old and a two year old and had just started at new voice media and was totally exhausted. I was standing in the queue with a friend waiting for a coffee. And I was like, I just can't do this anymore. This can't be life. And she said that they've done research or looked at the happiness of women in the world. And the most unhappy women corrected for social economic reasons location were women who had children under the age of five, globally, that is just the absolutely unhappiest moment of your life is those five years and it gets better. So if

Brandon 9:54

you had to give a recommendation, forget about the family situation for myself in this case, but for or something like Markham, where there really is like a rich routine built into somebody's life. And they're feeling that midlife melancholy that there should be something more interesting out there. And clearly in his article, he's referencing very small changes that he's making. What would you tell that person, from your point of view,

Bethany: 10:17

all things, moderation is better than being on either spectrum. And I suspect I have more structure in my life than I realise. But what has really changed for me is following interest and energy and creating a life that is unstructured enough to be able to do what I want or create, when I'm inspired, rather than having the inspiration but not being able to do it, because it's gym time. And so it's about tapping in to your energy, your interest, your curiosity, and enabling the ability to act on it when you can, combined with sometimes needing a bit of structure. Because I don't want to make tic tock videos, I want to make tic tock videos, but I don't want to make tic tock videos because it scares me, I'm going to be stupid. It's ridiculous. But I really want to. And so I know that what I'm going to end up having to do is create a routine, where for the first month, I forced myself to make tic tock videos at a certain point every day without excuse so that I can't make up an excuse why I won't do it. But then, once I'm not afraid anymore, I don't need the routine to find the inspiration to then create. So

Brandon: 11:33

then, how do you put yourself in a position where you can recognise how you feel about what's inspiring you What gives you joy, because oftentimes, you're kind of caught up in your day to day life in your day to day routine. So you almost like this has to get done that has to get done. I've been inspired by something I've seen. But whatever I need to move on and do x of this case, how do you pause, take advantage of that. And put that routine to the side for a moment and actually take advantage of something that you've experienced or felt. One

Bethany: 11:58

is get into your body. So go listen to our emotional literacy podcasts and talk about you sensing in your bodies. You even know that you're having those responses. And you notice that you're interested or there's curiosity. There's lifeforce. And then the other part is, are you busy? Because it feels good and as a distraction? Or are you busy? Because it's actually necessary? And I suspect a lot of time, it's busy because it feels good and is a distraction. But is it important? Is it urgent? Or can you eliminate it or delay it to create space to do the thing that you actually want to do?

Brandon: 12:41

So we have this conversation around routine, and spontaneity? How does this relate to the business context?

Bethany: 12:49

I think this is always the recurring meetings versus not recurring meetings. So there are in that cadence, and I do think there is the point of recurring meetings, particularly for the leadership team, you need to bond you need to have trust, you need to have those hard conversations. And you only do that through time and commitment and showing up regularly communicating with the business. Again, it's important have your all hands, your monthly team meetings, your quarterly team meetings, and those are structures that are required, because you need to share information and you need to bond as teams. But then there are so many other meetings that sneak in is recurring meetings. And often those are maybe they should really be recurring meeting for four weeks while you're doing a project and then it's done. Or you need to solve a problem. And then it's done. But yet, they just end up being there. And I think they become the I'm busy and it feels good. And I don't have to think about what I should do next, because I have to go to the fortnightly pre sales meeting. But really, it's not necessary. So it's about going back and figuring out which of the recurring meetings matter and which ones just feel good. Oftentimes,

Brandon: 14:03

in companies, you have to structure things because you need to coordinate a 200 person company around particular objectives that need to get solved for the business or challenges that you're having. On the flip side of it. At a company I used to work for we used to have an entire week set aside every six months, where the entire company would get together and sell formulated teams to do innovative things as it were. So it's called Innovation week. And it could be anything, it could be like knitting a bear or it could be like something company wise in terms of a product variation or something like that. And what came out of this innovation weeks was fascinating. Like you had very smart people doing very interesting things. It was just a really a phenomenal way to kind of tap into original creative thought. We had one individual where he decided by himself literally to solve the problem of languages that are going extinct. inked using our software where he would try to capture whatever language had been put on paper related to that particular language, capture it, pull it into a machine learning algorithm and produce a language model as part of our software that effectively preserved their language forever. He did it, because he wanted to did it because it was spontaneous, he did it because he felt it was a purpose behind it made me reflect on that company, that culture, that put that person in a position where they felt that they, they had the time and capacity to do something that was pretty awesome.

Bethany: 15:32

I'd love the idea of an innovation week, because so often you have the the last four hours on a Friday afternoon is your time to explore and learn and be innovative on your own. And that just doesn't work. Because people are tired, it's Friday. And you also just can't to my earlier point, like inspiration strikes when it strikes, chances are it's not going to strike between three and five on a Friday afternoon. Versus like giving a whole week and a lot of space to it. And everybody being involved. Sounds awesome. We used to do one at newvoicemedia was like ship it days. And I think it was either, I think it was quarterly. And it was two days a quarter where the dev team would build stuff. But it was still quite structured, it was still around like tech debt, or product features versus just the innovation of doing anything for a week. And it sounds like it'd be tremendous amounts of fun. It's interesting that it didn't work in any other company, I'm guessing it CEOs who didn't buy into it

Brandon: 16:38

completely. This was driven by that original company by the CTO, the who was a founder. So he believed in it passionately. And therefore the company believed, as an operations professional, I tried to replicate it, and other companies that I could not pull it off. Like we had some variants that were reasonably successful, I guess, but nowhere near on the same scale and level that we had, that I saw that company, you can't mandate creativity and innovation to be a company that doesn't make any sense.

Bethany: 17:02

Yeah, I want to be that company. I want to be this innovation days. It sounds amazing. Okay,

Brandon: 17:06

so let's go on a quick break. And when we come back, we have our conversation with Markham Hyde.

Bethany: 17:15

And we're back, I am delighted to welcome Marco Hyde to the podcast. So for anybody who hasn't read the essay yet, rather than me paraphrase it, would you like to explain what your central thesis is?

Markham: 17:30

I mean, it was really a description of what I had been feeling in my own life for a while. I'm a freelance journalist. And I've been doing this for 12 years. So I've been working remotely for 12 years and have total control to shape my day, however I want to, and I noticed over time, I've really become habitual and everything I do, all my habits, I would say are good habits. I eat well, I exercise a lot. I do things that are all supportive, being productive and being healthy. But I do a lot of the same things over and over again, like every day is pretty much the same day for me. And over time, I find that it's really started to wear on me in some subtle ways that are becoming not so subtle, like just the way I'm feeling the way I'm thinking. I just feel restricted and closed minded in some ways that I didn't use to feel. And I think that this is sort of a byproduct of too much routine, too much habit in my life. So the reason

Bethany: 18:25

why I loved your article is one I love a contrarian thinker. And so everybody is all about habits, habits, habits and more habits. And then we also are Clos. And so we think routine standardisation and getting everything in our lives as predictable as possible is the end goal. But fundamentally, I hate habits. I'm completely a spontaneous person. And a routine drives me crazy. And so I think I read this article, and I was just like, I'm not a bad person. Look, there are reasons why I can have joy in my life and love my life and not be a slave to routine. And so I think we're probably looking at you might have a tendency towards routine, and I have a tendency for no routine. And obviously, we need to be somewhere in the middle. But I would just love to understand how you realised you could think in a different way. It's

Markham: 19:22

about balance. It's not like your life should be chaos, and every day should be a wild new adventure and you're not doing anything the same way twice. I don't think that's true at all. But I think if you go to it, like a super extreme example, like if you ate the same meal every day, even if it was the greatest thing in the world, if it was your dream meal, you get tired of that pretty quickly. And I think that can happen sort of writ large, like habits and routines are inherently unstimulating. They're what you're accustomed to and they feel safe and comfortable. And if your goal is to be productive in certain ways, that's a great way to be more efficient and ensure that you're going to be productive in those ways. You're trying to be produced But if you're trying to be productive and maybe unconventional ways, like if you need to be creative if you need to think of something in a new way, habits I don't think are supportive of that, I think you need to have some variety mixed in to sort of open your mind up, open your life up to these different choices, opportunities, ways of thinking about things. I mean, we all have the experience of going on vacation or visiting a new place. And suddenly, it's like, we have a new perspective on some problem we had or something we were trying to work through. Personally, I found like, every morning, I'd be making coffee, and I'd have sort of the same thoughts pop into my head. And some of these were emotions, like, I'd be annoyed about something. And I realised I was getting annoyed about the same thing every day, it really felt like a habit like I was just the cues that I was putting myself through the environmental stuff was the same every day in my brain was sort of having the same thoughts, the same feelings in the same context every day, those patterns of repetitive thinking precede a lot of mental health problems. First, you have the negative thoughts over and over and over again every day. And then depression or anxiety sort of forms around that or becomes the byproduct, it sort of felt like maybe I was building up this infrastructure of habit that was couldn't be supportive of negative thought patterns, like I need to shake things up so that I don't have these same thoughts every day and same feelings every day in the same places.

Brandon: 21:21

How should we think about this in terms of like, we need routine and structure to be productive? Fundamentally, that's why we do all these things, right, especially as parents and adults and working in companies and so on. But how do we get the right balance between that? And really like the freshness, the creativity, the instinctual? How do you get there,

Markham: 21:40

it's going to depend on your life and where you are in life, how old you are, what you've got going on, in every facet, I don't have a recipe for how to how to make your life have just the right balance of novelty or excitement or adventure, I think it's going to depend on the person and what they're comfortable with, and also what they're feeling where they are in life. I think kids, there's some tension there between being sort of parent aged and having a career where you may have been doing the same thing for 10 or 15 years. And that can get a little bit stagnant. But your kids need a lot of routine, like I think they need structure and routine. That's a super important part about childhood because everything is new to them and novel and they're exploring every day. But that also works both ways. Like you have a lot of structure built into your life, when you have kids,

Bethany: 22:28

the vast majority of people want to be told how to live a happy life,

Markham: 22:31

I have a problem with the word happy. Because every study that looks at people seeking happiness, like the more you prioritise happiness, the more miserable you tend to be. And I think we're figuring that out with a lot of mental health stuff. Now, the messaging we get telling people, you know, this is your goal, trying to attain it, I think that can really get us into trouble when we're paying a lot of attention to how we feel, and deciding ahead of time that certain emotions are good, and some others are bad, and we need to avoid them or do something to make them go away. I think that everything we're feeling is just a way to guide our behaviour, you know, that's sort of its evolutionary purpose is to sort of steer us into modes of living that are going to be better for us. So I think happiness is just a byproduct of what you're doing. And I also think that it's not the point of life. Like if you're really immersed in something, which I think is sort of an aspect of doing something new that's challenging for you. If you're into that, I don't think you care if you're happy or not. You're not wondering Oh, am I happy right now. It's just not. Whenever we've been, at least whenever I've been really engaged with something it happiness sort of fell away. And it wasn't about being happier, not I was immersed in my life at that moment. I'm not wondering, Am I happy? I'm not, I don't think I would call myself happy. I'm just living, I'm alive. And I'm focused on what's around me. It's sort of like a form of mindfulness. You know, when you're doing something new, you're not paying attention to what's going on inside your head, you're paying attention to the new thing that you're engaged with. And I think that's a wonderful thing that we need. And that routine doesn't give us

Bethany: 24:04

I think what routine gives us and why it's so appealing is it gives us a sense of control over our lives. And I think that's what people are looking for. And why you tend towards habit is that you do feel like you're under in control. And so one of the first questions would be like, what are the habits that you can let go of?

Markham: 24:26

I don't think it's like habits are bad and we need to get them out of our lives. It's more how do we balance this or see ways where we can vary our habits that are going to be more stimulating more interesting to us. We don't assess whether they're, we even feel good doing these things they become like compulsions after a while, we just do them automatically. And I see people more and more data on like media multitasking where people are doing looking at their phone while they're watching TV and they're listening to a podcast. I think if you find yourself becoming bored, where you're having to do things like this to stay engaged, that's the saying that maybe your brain is asking for something new, like it wants something more interesting, more engaging, more novel going on, not just more of the same.

Brandon: 25:08

You talk about for yourself, personally, you've taken a couple of steps in this direction, it can be described that so this is not these prescriptive elements being suitable for everyone. But obviously, you've thought about this quite a bit. And personally, you've started to address this. So what are some of the things that you've done, and you've thought about?

Markham: 25:22

Yeah, these are not super radical changes in my life, I'm trying to meet up with friends more for lunch and try different lunch places, I'm going to different cafes to work, I'm really trying to break up the times of day when I work, because I'm so rigid about now, I'm going to work from these hours to this hour to this hour. And there are times when that's not the most productive way for me to work, like my job involves some creativity. And I try to go for walks a lot more during my work day, because I find when I take a 15 minute break, I come back and then I'm, I've just had newer insights much more like creative thinking and how to tackle what I'm working on. I downloaded like a voice transcription app where I can go for a walk in the woods, and I can talk and it will record what I'm saying. So I can almost speak out loud what I'm going to be working on and get some like initial notes down. And generally, I'm just trying to not do anything two days in a row. I mentioned in the piece, I'm working on a screenplay, I think the odds of that turning into anything are almost zero, but it's fun. And it's getting me involved in something I have an interest in, and I haven't ever tried. It's not like when I'm working on it, I'm happy. But when I've looked at my life, like when I think about my life, the fact that that's in there now makes me feel happier about everything. I

Bethany: 26:38

have one value, and my one value is fun. And this isn't something that I used to have. I had a massive career and I was super stressed and I forced routine or fell into routine. And my number one value was, am Bishan probably or achieving, and have felt wildly unfulfilled from that life and realise that building businesses is not actually something that I get much fulfilment from. So a year ago, I left my job and have done a year of exploring. I'm calling it fun, for shorthand, it could be joy, or it could be really that understanding of the life force, and what are those things that I want to do. But in order to do that mindfulness and an understanding of what you want is such an important part of it. Because if you can't feel what brings you joy, you can't do that thing. And I feel as though a lot of routine numbs, you think

Markham: 27:37

can numb you, and also sort of take you out of contact with what you actually are feeling like what you actually want to do. And the experience of like, okay, now I'm gonna have a glass of wine or watch Netflix, and it's like, Do I even want to do this? Or am I just doing it? Because I'm so used to doing it? It's like a compulsion. It's like an itch I have to scratch. I don't, you know, I'm uncomfortable. But do I really want to do this right now, if you have too much of this going on in your life, you can really lose all contact with what is actually enjoyable for you what is making your life satisfying or fulfilling, like, there's room to move around and explore that. It's not all about becoming successful and productive. Like those are great goals. And those are fine. But I would say we need to balance that. And I found the stat after I worked on the piece, the average American worker now spend something like seven hours a day on email, just email, I don't think our lives at any point in history, were ever that sort of tedious, where it was the same task for that much of your day, every day for most people. About

Bethany: 28:34

eight, nine years ago, I realised that if you don't respond to emails, you don't get emails back. And so I basically stopped responding to emails except for the absolute bare minimum that I had to because if you respond to emails, they reply, and there's very few things that actually need responses. So that's just like a top tip for anybody who wants to do less email in their life. The more I'm speaking with you, I'm kind of coming up with some different ideas of like, habit is the straw man or the thing that you noticed was where you were not getting joy. And it was, you know, from the fact of lots of habits and things that might come from, it's supposed to give us happiness, it's supposed to be the unlock that will help us achieve those things that we want to achieve. And if we follow the rules will feel good. And so if we follow the rules for habits, good things will happen. If we follow the expectations of our families and our education's good things will happen. If we follow the rules and society good things will happen. You're a bit younger than me but I feel so like for mine was definitely some sort of midlife, not crisis, but awakening because it's suddenly life isn't that long. I'm still healthy and relatively young. I want to experience things and it's caused me to question so much in my life. It almost seems like having this conversation with you now, that habits was the thing that forced you to question your life but it's not actually to have But to themselves, it's the idea of living a regimented life or the life of rules and the life that you should lead that you don't have to think about, versus having to live a life you think about is actually where the fulfilment comes from. Do you think that's a fair interpretation,

Markham: 30:17

I go back to the sort of the stimulation component, like I think it's fundamentally boring for your brain to do the same things all the time, in the same context. It can be productive and comfortable, and the results are reliable, but you're just not living. When you're doing the same things. Your brain is not making nearly as many memories, it's just not as active. And that in retrospect makes time feel like it was super flat, like nothing went on. If you go for a long weekend to like a new place, you get back and you feel like you were gone for two weeks, you know, it feels like a lot of time has gone by because your brain was engaged with a lot of new stuff.

Brandon: 30:52

And I've always had this mindset of do remember Tim Ferriss from ages ago, his first book, The Four Hour Workweek, I will outsource anything that I don't want to do, that's routine, I'm making more money now. So it's just like, I need to get rid of these low value tasks, I will outsource all that as much as I possibly can. And I've held true to that my entire life from reading his book. So the routine serves a purpose. Now I open myself up to high value activities that I want to do that I want to spend time on. And I have more time to do that conceptually to make that happen. It doesn't always work out as I wanted to, because of the relentlessness of life, I end up just like taking on more stuff into the routine buckets and end up doing more routine things. And by the time I finished my workweek, I feel like I've done 80% routine in some ways, as opposed to the reverse of like having 80% of high value stuff.

Markham: 31:45

I think a lot of us are sort of trained by culture to have that mindset. And a lot of us do what you described where once we've been more efficient and sort of created with routine space to do other things, we tend to fill that with more super productive or self improvement type activities. Okay, I've got an extra four hours a week, I'm going to spend that going to these two gym classes, and that's going to make me healthier, so and then that becomes a new routine. So it's like, instead of having more freedom in our life to sort of explore and try new things, we're just filling that extra time we're gaining from being productive or efficient with other productive and efficient habits or healthy habits. A lot of this language we're using, and a lot of these concepts are sort of, you can really map them on to like entrepreneurial, like business minded culture in the US, we're all being pushed to be productive in very specific ways. If you can measure it in terms of money, and success, these are wonderful.

Brandon: 32:40

We've been brainwashed by people we don't even know that are out there in the world that are somehow forcing us to be as economically viable, productive units of work that we can be.

Bethany: 32:51

So putting together what Brendan just said, plus what you said previously around, we don't remember the activities and the routine, because we're just not storing those memories that you end up with 80% of your life that you have no memory of. And I'm reminded of these, I had these little cards with questions on them when I was younger. So one of them was if you could go and have the most amazing holiday in Bali and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, and like palm trees and pina coladas and not remember any of it. Would you still do it? is a question of like, what is your life? Is your life the experience? Or is your life the series of experiences that you remember,

Markham: 33:36

we can all imagine being at and being asked, What do you look back on? And really, what are you really happy you did? And I don't think it's I glued myself to a computer for 30 years and made a lot of money. I don't think most people would mentioned that. They talked about places they went relationships they had with other people. But

Bethany: 33:55

it's not only that we're living with it. Other things matter more. We're also living it in such a routine and boring way that we're not going to remember it either. So we're not actually like living for long term life to reflect upon, which is I'm finding this very scary concept at the moment. But the time travel that is your life,

Markham: 34:12

or edging into like the midlife crisis conversation to your WHY do we Why do so many of us feel that? And what is that? Exactly? There's a lot of different hypotheses about it. But I think part of it might be this realisation Yeah, we're getting older, we're gonna die. And are we spending our time in the right ways? And a lot of us see that the last two decades have been dominated by work and you feel like okay, is that all about? Or should I be doing other things with my time?

Bethany: 34:37

I have to be fair to younger people who are struggling with these. And the struggles that I had is I'm only in a position to try and figure out what I want to do with my life because of how hard I've worked previously. So I think there are lots of choices to be made. And basically we all have to figure out what those choices are back to the original point of why your book won't tell people. These are the three steps that you have to follow. To have a happy life. There's just

Markham: 34:59

seems To be an imbalance these days between how we prioritise like the work part and the spicier kind of variety side of life and the explorative side of life and trying new things to see if maybe that's a better way to do it, or that's something that I'm more interested in exploring.

Brandon: 35:16

This takes me back to a previous podcasts we had done with another guest, his name was caffeinated, we talked about two pretty simple concepts, one of which is enterprise businesses, organisations are out there where it's really just like a transaction as an employee with the employer, which is you do work and you get paid for it. And that's the deal. And that's what it is. And then there's kind of the evolving modern progressive companies where he asked a really astute question at the end of his talk, which is, is the employee better off for having worked for me? Is their life better off essentially, just thinking about this conversation right now? It makes me start thinking wild thoughts in a way around, what can an organisation possibly due to take Gethins comment of what could a company possibly do to set the right conditions to allow them to have the richest fullest life they could possibly have, and make that happen? You

Markham: 36:07

see some trends toward like more company retreats, like more sort of extracurricular get togethers are trying to mix up the ways people work are giving them flexibility to work in different ways, nap rooms, things like this, I think there's a recognition that you need to give people more freedom to sort of move around within their job, sometimes actually getting up and moving around, but more flexibility to do things in unconventional ways where you're not just you're not working unless you're sitting at your desk, answering emails, immediately answering the phone immediately if you have to. I think it would certainly benefit companies and their employees if they were aware of the tedium that might be involved in the tasks they're asking their employees to do and how they can help them break that up and even coach them on how important it is to break that up into try to you know, have like creativity workshops, where you're helping your people understand, it's good to have some variety in how you approach your job and how you think about your work and how you execute your tasks. I think that doesn't have to be anything huge. But little changes can make a big difference. And

Bethany: 37:12

give him permission to not have to be at your desk the whole time. Like there's one thing to say it's a good idea to go and do it. And then another thing to be like and where were you were gone for the last hour.

Brandon: 37:23

Even your example that you gave of walking in the forest and transcribing some notes, that's just a wonderful example of doing exactly that. Walking away from the desk, taking a long walk having fresh thoughts. And it's actually directly related to writing a phenomenal article.

Markham: 37:38

I think everyone has had the experience is like having to go to the bathroom or get a glass of water or whatever coming back and say, Oh, this approach would have been much better or I wish I'd said this or Oh, good. I can change it and incorporate this. We need those breaks to give our brains time to put pieces together. So I think there's a lot of different ways to be productive, that we don't always appreciate. If

Bethany: 38:00

our listeners could only take one thing away from our chat today. What would that be?

Markham: 38:06

I would think about what parts of your life really matter and what do you look back on and take the most gratification from joy, satisfaction, whatever you want to call it. And think about what was really going on there and how you can bring that forward into the moment now because I would say it's not going to be something you did every day for five years. It's going to be something that was outside of your routine or your habit that made it special.

Brandon: 38:31

Lovely. So thank you, Mark and for joining us on the operations room. If you like what you hear, please subscribe or leave us a comment and we will see you next week.