283. How To Protect Your Priorities Before The Holidays Hit

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Joel: Holidays bring deadlines. I’m talking about kids concerts. I’m talking about office parties. I’m talking about cookie swaps. I’m talking about year end projects. Is it possible to enjoy the season without losing your focus? Or even your mind.

[00:00:22] Welcome to Focus on this, the most productive podcast on the internet. I’m Joel Miller.

[00:00:27] Marissa: And I’m Marissa Hyatt.

[00:00:28] Joel: And this is where we remind you of something you already know. It’s not about getting more things done, it’s about getting the right things done,

[00:00:36] Marissa: both at work and in life. And today we’re talking about protecting your priorities before the holidays hit.

[00:00:45] In case you haven’t looked at your calendar, they are right around the corner. So it is prime time to be talking about this. And I don’t know about you all, but these holidays are coming in like a freight train. Yeah. So we gotta get our priorities set and make sure that they’re protected before we get there.

[00:01:05] Joel: You know, I always think about. Seasons feel different, right? And I don’t know what the deal is exactly, but Spring to me always feels very open-ended, very, you know, fresh. I mean that’s obvious. It feels expansive. And then summer really feels expansive. It’s just like endless time, which of course is never true ’cause it’s over before you know it and you did a ton of stuff and you didn’t get a ton of other stuff done.

[00:01:30] But that’s not the way the holiday season feels. It feels like it’s chaos. It feels like a circus. And on top of that, you’re trying to work in the middle of it and it’s crazy making.

[00:01:43] Marissa: And not to mention, our days are shorter. Yes. So they literally, from a light standpoint, we’re not visually feeling like we have as much time as we do in the summer.

[00:01:57] So I feel like this time of year is really everything compresses Yes. Our time, our energy, our calendars, everything feels compressed and we wind up at this point in the year, like we’ve been spun around and we don’t know which way is up. Yeah. And if we’re not careful, that continues through the next couple of months and we.

[00:02:16] End up having this crash landing into the beginning of the year. That’s why most people, it’s like we’ve gotta hit the reset button at that point because we are just in a crazy yearend frenzy, overloaded feeling like everything is compressed.

[00:02:33] Joel: Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting way of saying it too.

[00:02:36] I hadn’t even thought about it that way, but. You lose these hours, so your daylight is compressed. And on top of that, you’ve got all this added stuff. You know, there’s like not only like year end projects and things like that for work and, and other things that just seem to mount. And that’s like so many industries report that there’s extra things to do in their, in their work before the end of the year.

[00:02:59] But then on top of that, there’s all the personal stuff. There’s the holiday parties, there’s all the stuff at the kids’ schools. And you know, I love my kids and I love my kids’ schools, but I don’t understand why they keep thinking that we need to attend all these things. Right. It’s insane.

[00:03:12] Marissa: And not to mention your to-do list ends up becoming a lot longer because yes, there’s the, uh, looming deadline of the end of the year or before vacation, and so all of a sudden everything you have to do has to be done now.

[00:03:27] Joel: Right.

[00:03:27] Marissa: And it’s grown because now you have things like, I’ve gotta go gift shopping, or I’ve gotta think about what gifts I wanna get. For the people in my life, you know, maybe you’re the one responsible for the meal, for the holiday, and so you’re planning that and you’ve got a grocery shop and you know, prep the all the things and decorate the house or clean the house or get ready for guests.

[00:03:47] I mean, traveling all the things, there’s all of a sudden it’s like double what we’re used to and yet everything is compressed at the same time.

[00:03:55] Joel: What could possibly go wrong?

[00:03:56] Marissa: Yeah, it sounds like. Totally fine from my book.

[00:04:00] Joel: Well, I think what we are both alluding to is that it is not totally fine, and we know that this is true.

[00:04:07] You know, like four in 10 workers report a decline in productivity during the holiday season. There’s just too many competing professional and personal demands. So we lose, we lose traction, we lose focus, we lose the ability to make progress on the stuff that we want to get done, and like half of employees.

[00:04:26] Report heightened holiday stress during this period, so. That makes sense. We’re just, we’re talking about doing more in less time. Of course we feel stressed.

[00:04:36] Marissa: I’m honestly shocked that that’s only half.

[00:04:38] Joel: That’s a good point. Right. Could be. It feels like it could be worse. It would

[00:04:40] Marissa: be the large majority, 75% or a hundred percent even feel this heightened stress at this time of year.

[00:04:49] Joel: I would love to hear from our listeners what their anticipated stress Yeah. Is on this season. Like do you imagine that you’ll feel it more? Or not, you know, I’d love to know. Yeah. I’m assuming that it’s higher too, but maybe it’s not. Maybe some people are like, nah, it’s easy peasy.

[00:05:03] Marissa: Yeah. We wanna talk to you.

[00:05:06] Yeah. If that’s the case for you, we wanna, we wanna bring you on the show.

[00:05:09] Joel: Yeah, totally. What do you do? Tell us your secrets. Also, this is not a big number, but this is like an ominous number. 22% in that survey said that their overall wellbeing declines during this period.

[00:05:23] Marissa: Yeah. That’s really bad. That’s not

[00:05:24] Joel: good.

[00:05:25] Marissa: Well, it, it makes sense when you think about if there’s so many things happening. We often are getting sick this time of year. This is when, mm-hmm. Because of the fact that we’re having less daylight, we’re spending more time indoors, our stress rate goes up, our immune system function goes down, or probably our mental health to some degree or another goes down.

[00:05:47] Obviously, the holidays can be a triggering time of year for a lot of people. Uh, can be really difficult to navigate with, uh, family or without family, or all kinds of number of factors that may go into this time of year. And it really doesn’t surprise me that 22% are saying that their wellbeing declines at this time of year.

[00:06:08] Again, I’m actually surprised that it’s not higher. I feel like, yeah, if we were to go and survey the people who are listening right now, uh, it may be higher and that wouldn’t surprise me because of all the factors that are kind of working against us at this time.

[00:06:25] Joel: One of the negatives on a survey like this is you don’t know necessarily the context in which it was conducted.

[00:06:29] If you asked people, you know, on December 22nd how their overall wellbeing was, I bet it would be a little lower. Yeah. Um, than what would be beforehand or after.

[00:06:39] Marissa: Well, I think the other thing that contributes to this. And probably has made it worse maybe since the pandemic is remote work or hybrid work.

[00:06:48] Joel: Totally.

[00:06:48] Marissa: Because then all of a sudden you don’t have clear lines between work and your life. We know that within the remote work world, we’re often expected to be on all the time. We’re available all the time, even when we’re six.

[00:07:04] Joel: I noticed in some of the surveys that. People talked about like answering email right through the holidays.

[00:07:10] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:07:10] Joel: Like they don’t feel like they can even get a break. You know?

[00:07:12] Marissa: How often, you know, has this happened where you get sick? You’re feeling the pressure of, well, I still have my laptop.

[00:07:22] Joel: Right. I have

[00:07:22] Marissa: some brain function, so I’m supposed to be working and long gone. It feels like are the days of being able to actually take time off from work to rest and to heal?

[00:07:34] Joel: Yeah.

[00:07:34] Marissa: Or to be with our families and be fully present with them at this time of year. Uh, if we’re traveling, we still feel the need to be working constantly. There’s all these factors that, these lines, these boundaries between work and home. Are really blurred, and it is only exasperated, I think at this time of year.

[00:07:52] There’s just too much happening and not enough boundaries, not enough anything to protect what actually needs to get done and what doesn’t.

[00:08:01] Joel: Well, it goes back to your metaphor of compression. If things are squeezed, then they’re gonna move into wherever there happens to be. Availability. Yeah. And so if we create avail availability, whether it’s through.

[00:08:13] Being online during a period of time that maybe we should have the device closed or whatever. Or you know, you’re laying in bed recuperating from the flu, but you have your laptop, there’s gonna be work showing up there. Totally. There’s gonna be things showing up in that time. ’cause you’ve made that time available.

[00:08:28] Marissa: Yes. So Joel. What do we do? Because this is besides just

[00:08:34] Joel: hang our heads and cry. I mean, yeah. I mean, we’re not painting a very

[00:08:36] Marissa: hopeful, uh, picture here of what people can do at this time of year. It feels just, honestly, Merry

[00:08:42] Joel: Christmas.

[00:08:42] Marissa: Daunting.

[00:08:44] Joel: Yeah. Well, okay. Let’s get practical. So let’s, we, everything is horrible, right?

[00:08:48] We know that. Let’s make everything amazing. How do we make everything amazing? The first thing I think we need to do is recognize that we are our own worst enemies sometimes here that. We are presuming that other people want to presume on our time, and then we’re letting them do it. And so part of what we need to do is we need to set boundaries.

[00:09:08] We need to be able to say, for instance, I’m not gonna be checking email over the weekends, or I’m not gonna be checking email in the evenings. We need to be able to communicate those boundaries. Mm-hmm. To other people too. Whether that is on the personal side or the professional side, we need to say like what our availability really looks like, what we actually have capacity for.

[00:09:30] I know for instance, around. If you’re thinking about like family stuff, there can always be this pressure to, like, whoever seems to be the more high functioning person ends up getting a lot of stuff right to handle. There needs to be the ability to say, no, I, I can’t do that. I can do these three things or whatever, but otherwise other people are gonna have to step up Yep.

[00:09:49] Uh, in order to help make this work. And I think that’s just part of honoring yourself and honoring those other people. When it comes to honoring yourself, we need to be able to say like. I’m capable of doing X. I’m not really capable of doing more than that. I have all these other responsibilities. I would be disserving everybody I know if I were to like try to do more than

[00:10:13] Marissa: that.

[00:10:13] Yeah. Well, and if you haven’t listened to the episode that we had last week, I wanna encourage you to do that now because. We talk in that episode practically about how to get clear on your daily big three, the three most important things you need to do each day. And that can really help define what you need to focus on, what you want to be committed to in any given day.

[00:10:40] And the truth is, we know our focus, our energy is finite. We don’t have an endless supply of these things. So we’ve got to be mindful of how much time we have, how much energy we have, all of the other commitments at this time of year start coming in. And we wanna make sure that we’re very clear on what those things are, and we know that on the front end.

[00:11:01] And then like you’re talking about, Joel, that we communicate those things. To the people that we’re working with, or you know, our spouse or whomever may be influenced by what we’re doing, right? ’cause then they can help support us. So this is really, really practical and really simple. But one of the best things that you can do is.

[00:11:22] If you have, if you use a software like Slack or something like that, communicate that, or on your email signature, communicate the days that you’re gonna be out for the holidays, like my next vacation time is X, Y, and Z. So that people know whether that’s your colleagues, your clients, they know what to expect in terms of your availability.

[00:11:42] If you need to make sure that you’re communicating that your response time is, uh, gonna increase at this time of year, make sure to communicate that, yeah, you can expect a response from me within 72 hours versus 24 because all of a sudden I have more going on and I need to allow space for that to happen.

[00:12:01] Joel: I can never remember who exactly said this phrase, but I have latched hold of it as something that I just regard as. A very meaningful and important idea, and that is that you need to be militantly on your own side about certain things like this. Like when it comes to boundaries. Wow. Because it’s, I think there’s a tendency for us to forget that we have to advocate for ourselves.

[00:12:24] Yeah. And if we don’t, other people don’t even know what we want or need.

[00:12:28] Marissa: Nobody is thinking about you as much as you’re thinking about you.

[00:12:32] Joel: Yeah.

[00:12:32] Marissa: And therefore we’ve got to advocate for ourselves. You matter. Percent your priorities matter. What you want to do matters. What you have said that you would do matters.

[00:12:44] Nobody is gonna protect that better than you will, but you’ve gotta be the one to stand up and say, Hey, this matters. I’m already committed. You know, unfortunately I won’t be able to commit to that. Or here’s the timeline. It’s actually gonna take me based on the other commitments that I already have.

[00:12:59] Joel: Yeah,

[00:12:59] Marissa: and I think that’s really just a underline that, circle it, highlight it, that you have got to care about yourself more. Probably now this time of year than any other time,

[00:13:13] Joel: let’s actually just address the way you might respond to a request. So like, how do you say no gracefully to a year end request that you don’t have capacity for?

[00:13:23] I

[00:13:23] Marissa: think this is a tricky one for a lot of people because it feels like we’re letting people down or somehow we’re gonna be judged for not saying yes to everything. What’s interesting is that I have found, whenever I say no. Usually the response is somebody comes back and says, wow, I really respect your boundaries.

[00:13:43] Joel: Hmm.

[00:13:43] Marissa: I’m impressed that you were able to say no to that thing gracefully. And I think there’s a level of permission that we give somebody else when we do this. So if you’re struggling to say no to something, first of all, realize that this may enable that person to feel confident saying no to something in their life that they’re getting asked to do, uh, that they actually can’t commit to either.

[00:14:04] Joel: Yeah. So

[00:14:05] Marissa: usually this looks like a, a little bit of a sandwich where we wanna affirm the person and what they’re requesting. You know, hey, I totally can see that this is a priority for you, or that this, you know, project is important or that this event or function is exciting. And unfortunately, and you can keep it as simple as this, unfortunately I won’t be able to commit to this at this time based on what else I’ve already committed to.

[00:14:30] Right. I think my dad has a very succinct way of saying this, and I wish I could remember it off the top of my head. It’s something to the effect of, based on my other prior commitments, yeah, I won’t be able to. Accept this request or some version of that.

[00:14:46] Joel: That’s in free to focus, by the way. Yes.

[00:14:49] Marissa: Yes. It’s

[00:14:50] Joel: So if anyone wants to go grab that, that will give you a great angle on how to handle that.

[00:14:55] Marissa: Yeah. And then you usually wanna round out by reaffirming what they’re trying to do. If you’re able to offer a different resource or a different option in terms of like a timeline, you could say, Hey, I’m not able to commit to that right now. However, I’d love to revisit this at the beginning of the year.

[00:15:13] Or, Hey, I’m not able to commit to this right now. However, I’d like to connect you to this other person or to this other resource that I think might be just as beneficial for you.

[00:15:23] Joel: Yeah. I think what’s what’s great is you’re not leaving them high and dry in that instance.

[00:15:28] Marissa: Right. I had a a, an experience of this recently where somebody was asking me for something and it happened to be my time.

[00:15:35] Mm-hmm. And this time of year is just too challenging for me to just be giving my time away freely.

[00:15:42] Joel: Yeah.

[00:15:43] Marissa: And so I really tried to honor that person and the requests that they were making and. Ultimately tell them I’m not able to, this time of year is just too much for me to be able to take on other commitments.

[00:15:55] And you know, I pointed them back actually to a resource that they already had access to and said, Hey, I think this is actually gonna help you better than me and my time.

[00:16:05] Joel: Yeah, that’s great. And so I

[00:16:06] Marissa: really affirmed them and what they were, the outcome they were trying to accomplish. ’cause the truth is people are just looking for a specific outcome.

[00:16:13] And that’s what you are want to affirm, and that’s what you wanna help ultimately try to solve for. If you, if you’re able to.

[00:16:32] Joel, I think one thing that’s really helpful here that a lot of people kind of miss mm-hmm. Is talking about how to protect our time blocks. At this time of year. So thinking about, you know, we talk about our daily rituals Yep. And how that’s really an important part of your energy and your focus throughout the day.

[00:16:53] So we have your morning and evening rituals that are really critical for managing your energy specifically, and then your Workday startup and shutdown down rituals. And I feel like if you have struggled to maintain these, or if somehow these have kind of fallen to the back burner. Now is a great time of year to implement those.

[00:17:11] Again, you can just block off a 30 minute window at the start of your workday and at the end of your workday, which will help you tie up the the bow at the end of the day for your workday so that you’re not having that continually bleed into the rest of your evening. That, to me, the work workday. Shut down.

[00:17:28] Ritual to me is arguably the most important thing to protect right now, because that will enable you to unplug and be able to go live the rest of your life.

[00:17:37] Joel: I feel like this is a bit of an intervention because I’m, I’m poor at that at the moment, like I’m, I’m not keeping up with that and I feel it. As a result,

[00:17:46] Marissa: we do feel it, and this is.

[00:17:48] Your invitation, Joel and everybody listening, that now is a really good time to recommit to doing that, and all that looks like is usually about a 30 minute block where you’re able to review your email or slack messages. You kind of tie up those loose ends. You look through your task list, okay, what didn’t get done?

[00:18:07] What do I need to move to tomorrow? What do I just need to like not worry about? That’s just carrying over and adding more stress. And so actually, I don’t even wanna think about that right now. I’m gonna put that totally on the back burner or just like forget about it and just delete it indefinitely.

[00:18:20] Yeah.

[00:18:20] Joel: Yeah,

[00:18:21] Marissa: just delete it. You have permission to do that. And then making sure that there’s no unanswered questions or things that you need to tie up at the end of the day. And usually what that enables you to do is go into your evening. Fully present.

[00:18:34] Joel: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:35] Marissa: You’re not asking the question or having these unfinished tasks in your mind or loops in your mind that are just gonna continually creep into your evening.

[00:18:44] And then usually that has a ripple effect. You’re not sleeping great because you’re stressed, because you didn’t tie up those loose ends, and you have all these things and then. You’re just right back where you started. So really encouraging to get your rituals, your daily rituals, especially that workday shutdown ritual locked in at this time of year.

[00:19:02] That can really help protect your energy and your ability to be present in all areas of your life.

[00:19:08] Joel: I love that solution. I hadn’t quite even connected the dots on that one, but that, that makes total sense because what we’re really seeing here is, and if you think about the stress level that we’re feeling, it’s because all this stuff is unresolved, right?

[00:19:21] If it’s resolved by living on a list and living in a ritual, for instance, where you can like address it and knock it off and get it done, you’re resolving it, which means the stress is gonna go down.

[00:19:32] Marissa: Totally. The other biggest thing at this time of year is communication. So whether that’s you’re communicating up to your manager, communicating down to your team, depending on where you sit in an organization, communicating to your spouse, to your friends, to your other colleagues.

[00:19:50] Communication is so important, and the more that you’re able to do this and do it early. So before they come asking about that thing or before they come, asking for more commitments, sharing your priorities and what you’re remaining committed to now will really help them to support you in that.

[00:20:08] Joel: Yeah,

[00:20:09] Marissa: and I think we forget this, that nobody else is living in our heads.

[00:20:14] They don’t know what we have swirling around in our heads, and we’ve gotta be able to communicate that.

[00:20:19] Joel: I totally. Resonate with that point. The reality is as, I mean, you said it a few minutes ago, nobody’s thinking about you as much as you’re thinking about you. Yeah. Nobody can read your mind, and we have to be able to communicate what it is we want, and if we can’t, we can’t respect or expect that anybody else is going to get it for us.

[00:20:39] They’re not going to.

[00:20:40] Marissa: I wanna address something that I get asked a lot from our clients, which is. If you’re not in a senior leadership position and your senior leadership comes to you with a request, it can often feel really difficult to say no to that. And I wanna shift this way of thinking that you don’t have to say no.

[00:21:01] To your boss or to anybody who’s, you know, higher up than you who’s making a request, but you can ask them to help you set your priorities.

[00:21:11] Joel: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:12] Marissa: Based on that request. So if somebody comes to you and says, Hey, you know, Joel, you know, if Megan comes to you and is like, Hey, I need you to create this.

[00:21:20] Financial model for our cost of product or something like that. And let’s say you’re totally jammed you, there’s no ability to do that based on your other commitments. You could go to her and say, Hey, I’d love to do that in the timeline that you’re requesting this. However, here are my other commitments that I have on my plate right now.

[00:21:39] Which of these should I sideline for this specific priority to make room for this? So you’re reaffirming that you want to be in alignment with their priorities. You’re committed to that, so you’re not showing that you’re not committed or you’re just, you know, kind of devaluing what their priorities are, but you’re also asking for their help to say, which of these things on my list is less important to you?

[00:22:03] And how can I make room to accommodate what you’re asking me? And sometimes we’ve talked about this I think before on the show, but this to me, when my team does this to me, first of all, it often is like a little bit of a, a soft, it’s not a hard but soft gut punch. Mm-hmm. Where I’m like, oh yeah, you do have other things going on than just my own agenda, which as a leader can be easy to forget at times.

[00:22:27] And then it’s an invitation for me. To determine what are the priorities?

[00:22:31] Joel: Yeah. What I love about it is that very point that you are allowing that person then to step into the solution, right? Rather than simply having to come up with it all on your own. And so if you invite that person into the solution, the chances are that you’ll be aligned on that solution a heck of a lot better than if you just decide to knuckle under and like figure out how to do it all, you know, on this preview existing timeline.

[00:22:55] That doesn’t make any sense given the new situation.

[00:22:59] Marissa: It’s really true. So feel the freedom to do this if you are getting requests from somebody who you feel like, I can’t quite say no, but I’m not sure how to make it all fit. Yeah, the default doesn’t just have to be, yes, I’ll do that and just cram it in with everything else on my plate.

[00:23:15] You can offload some of that prioritizing to the person making the request, and that can be a really helpful strategy for both people and usually invites a good conversation. I know. When my team members have done this with me, I usually am able to have a really good conversation with them about their priorities, about the other projects they’re working on.

[00:23:34] And if I ever hear from them where they come to me with their overwhelm and stress, it’s a great opportunity for me as a leader to help coach them and go through these exercises together to say, let’s look at your task list. What are you spending the time on? You know, where are you getting hung up?

[00:23:49] What’s really important and what’s not? And sometimes it takes. An outside perspective to help you determine that sometimes it, it can feel too much or too overwhelming by yourself.

[00:23:59] Joel: One other tool that I think we should talk about as a way of helping to protect our priorities in a crazy season is the ideal week.

[00:24:09] Why don’t you, if you want, yeah. Go ahead and describe what this magical tool is. Yes. And how it might be helpful.

[00:24:16] Marissa: Yeah. The ideal week is such an amazing tool if you’ve never used it or if you’ve only kind of briefly used it, and this is such a good time to revisit your ideal week if you already have one, because usually our life looks pretty different.

[00:24:28] Right now than it does, let’s say three months ago. So essentially what the ideal week is, is it’s a way to plan out your energy and your time and your focus for any given week. So you create one of these that would essentially be a template for your weeks. You can almost think of this as like a budget for your time.

[00:24:48] Mm-hmm. So just like with your financial budget, you’re planning how you’re going to spend your money before you spend your money. It’s a great analogy. It’s the same idea. Yeah. Same idea with your ideal week. Figuring out how you wanna spend your time before you spend your time. So you will plot out each day what that looks like, where your energy is going, where your focus is going, where your time is going, and it’s kind of a form of time blocking, but it’s a little bit more sophisticated than that and can be really helpful.

[00:25:17] Kind of going back to the rituals that I talked about earlier, this can be a really great way to make sure you’ve got time planned in your day. For this. So if you’re a full focus planner user, you have this at the front of your planner, you can flip back. Uh, you may have skipped over that, which is totally fine, but it may be a good time for you to kind of plot out.

[00:25:35] If I had an ideal week, if I was able to have 100% control over my time, over my energy and over my focus, how would I choose to spend that time? Plot that out. And again, be mindful that you are not just talking about work here. We’re talking about all hours in your day. So we’re thinking about when you wanna sleep, when you wanna see your friends and family, you know, when you wanna do things like prioritizing exercise or getting outside any hobbies or activities you like to participate, volunteering, anything of that nature.

[00:26:05] Make sure you’re plotting that out. And then within your work hours, how are you choosing to spend your time if you don’t have the full focus planner? You can go to full focus.co/ideal week for a free download. Uh, you just have to give us your email address and you’ll be able to download this and you can print this out.

[00:26:26] Uh, you can put this on your fridge as kind of your guiding compass, your North star of where you’re trying to go. And let me say this, your ideal week is ideal.

[00:26:36] Joel: Wait, you mean. You mean? It’s not like Exactly for real.

[00:26:41] Marissa: Right? This is ideal. So this is if you had 100% control, we know that we don’t. Mm-hmm. We never do.

[00:26:50] And so life will happen and it’s important for us to exercise flexibility in our day-to-day lives. And just think about if you were to have an ideal week. Say now through the end of the year, how would you structure it? And that’s what I want you to do in this exercise. Yeah. Don’t think about how you might be living in January or how you might be living in July of next year.

[00:27:09] Really focus just on the right now and what this holiday season looks like for you. You know, making sure you’re creating those hard edges with your rituals.

[00:27:19] Joel: I love it.

[00:27:21] Marissa: All right, Joel, what are your final thoughts

[00:27:24] Joel: in keeping with the spirit of the season and these holidays that we’re getting ready to celebrate?

[00:27:30] The easiest way to say it is you should be gentle to yourself. You should be gracious with yourself. You should be, and others. This is gonna be a time where there’s a lot of. Added stress just because of the way we’ve chosen to, to do things. And we need to just be kind to each other, kind to ourselves, kind to other people because everybody’s walking around with the same level of stress, if not worse.

[00:27:55] And there’s nothing better than to cut people some slack and during a season where they are definitely, you know, like if you feel it, you can just assume other people feel it. And. If you can cut them some slack, you know, show some magnanimity in this period. I think it goes so far. Not only does it help them, but it helps you.

[00:28:17] You feel better for having done that for other people.

[00:28:19] Marissa: Totally. Well, and if all else fails, my encouragement is take a deep breath. It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna get done what you need to get done. You’re gonna attend the things you need to do, and as much as possible, slow it down. Take a few deep breaths, get outside when you can, get some fresh air, and then get back to whatever it is that you need to do.

[00:28:41] And usually you’re gonna feel just fine after that.

[00:28:49] Thanks for joining us on Focus On This.

[00:28:52] Joel: This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so please share it with your friends and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts or at focus on this podcast.com.

[00:29:03] Marissa: And we’re gonna be here next week talking about the things that are stealing your focus, all of those things that maybe you are spending too much time on, wasting time on.

[00:29:14] That are stealing your focus and really what to do about them.

[00:29:17] Joel: Until then, stay focused.