PP 658: Learning to Control Our Calendar with Tim Campos
“Make your dreams happen by saving time for them.” – Tim Campos
Who controls your calendar? Do you? Or is your time at the mercy of other peoples’ needs and/or emergencies?
Today’s guest is Tim Campos, the co-founder and CEO of Woven. Woven is a scheduling system which helps subscribers spend time on the things that matter most. Listen as Tim and Kim Sutton dive deep into the ways our calendars can work for/against us, the need for time blocking, focus and connection.
Highlights:
02:30 What our calendars are good — and not good — for.
03:47 Time blocking
04:59 Reactive calendar statistics
08:20 Cal Newport Deep Work
09:14 Choosing to focus
11:10 Lessons from Facebook
19:51 The cost of task switching
20:13 How Woven came about
30:09 Kim’s podcast recording schedule
40:14 Connected, connection and community
44:52 Planning the day
Resources Mentioned:
Inspirational Quotes:
“Our calendars are really, really good at understanding the problem of “What am I doing next?” and “Where do I need to go?” because that’s what they are set up to do. But they don’t really help out with “How do things get on the calendar?” They don’t help out with “How do we get prepared for our events?” “How do we follow-up from those events?” – Tim Campos
“The challenge that we often have is that our calendars are very, very reactive.” – Tim Campos
“One of the key ingredients to innovation is white space. The ability to think and create and come up with something different. But when you don’t have white space — when you’re rushed, when you’re busy — you can’t really afford to experiment, to try something different.” – Tim Campos
“One of the best ways to connect with your children is just to sit down and eat dinner with them.” – Tim Campos
“As we have gotten more connected, we sort of lost the meaning of the connection.” – Tim Campos
“The community that actually is the one that is most meaningful for us is the community of people we spend time with.” – Tim Campos
“Make your dreams happen by saving time for them.” – Tim Campos
About Tim Campos:
Tim Campos is the Chief Executive Officer and a Co-Founder at Woven, a scheduling system which helps subscribers spend time on the things that matter most.
- Website: https://woven.com/
- LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothycampos/
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION: TIM CAMPOS
(Transcription not yet cleaned up, but thank you for checking it out!)
Welcome back to another episode of positive productive This is your host KIM SUTTON and today I am thrilled to introduce you to our guest, Tim Campos. Tim is the co founder and CEO of woven. And before we even jump into any more with Tim, Tim, I’m going to give you a proper chance to introduce yourself really well. But I, I was looking into it, and especially with the work that I do with a lot of my clients will try to schedule appointments. And I’ll get my scheduling link. And they’re like, Oh, what’s this and like, click on it. Find a time that works for you and we’ll get something scheduled. It’s the same way that we get scheduled podcast scheduled for recording on this podcast. There are so many people it Timmy I know you know this because of what wolven does, but I can’t believe how many people I say Okay, can you send over your scheduling link and they’re like, I don’t have one. And then we’ll go back and forth. 30 messages 30 emails to find a time that works because they they don’t understand how to click the link Sometimes, and I’m not trying to insult anybody This is positive productivity. But wolven is, from what I understand a scheduling link and you are helping people just the same as I try to work smarter instead of harder.
Yes, absolutely. Right. Yes. So woven, it’s really a system to help you spend time on the things that matter most. And that starts with teaching the system we use to manage our time, our calendars, how we spend our time, our calendars are really, really good at understanding the problem of what am I doing next? And where do I need to go? That’s what they’re they are set up to do. But they don’t really help out with how do things get on the calendar. They don’t help out with how do we get prepared for our events? And how do we follow up from those events. And so there’s a lot of things that are still yet to be built for the calendar to make it a lot more intelligent. And useful. So it’ll help us get accomplished the things that we want to in life. And that’s why we created woven. And it starts with, as you pointed out scheduling, because scheduling can be such an administrative drain on people’s lives. And if we can teach the calendar, how to schedule the events on its own, then we can start focusing more on the content of those events and what kinds of events we want to spend our time on. And really time allocation, which is the most important decision that any of us can can make. And so that’s what we’re doing.
I am absolutely in love with this whole topic, because this year and I’m not going to timestamp this because this could be relevant for you and my listener for any year that you are listening. But I started a couple years ago with time blocking and thought, okay, I can block half the day for this. And half the day for this and this year. I was like that is still insane. I’m going to block this whole day for this Whatever it is, I’ll just let you the listeners know that Mondays and Fridays are my content creation days, I do my very best not to have any client calls on those days. Tuesdays are podcast recording in Wednesdays and Thursdays are client days. So that’s when I get in and meet with clients. That’s not to say that the rest of the week I’m not working on client week, but when it comes to getting on the call and working with clients, I found that blocking that all together, keeps me from the multitasking. Tim, I was proud of multitasking when I started my business. I can’t believe I got any work because in my project proposals I actually put I’m a woman therefore I multitask.
Something that we should be proud of in my opinion.
I first off I applaud you for time blocking. I think it is one of the most effective techniques for helping people to spend time on what matters most to them. The challenge that we are often have is that our calendars are very, very reactive. I’ll give you a couple statistics, over 50% of all events that exist on our calendars. And this is just a global statistic. We’re scheduled within three days of that event happening. That means we’re extremely reactive. Most people have plans in life that go beyond three days, well beyond three days in terms of what they want to accomplish in their lives. But the time that they spend is determined within three days of them in spending that time, so we’re being very, very reactive. And here’s another step. On average 60% of the events that are on our calendars are scheduled by other people. They’re not scheduled by us. So what those two things mean is that we’re not being deliberate in general about how we want to spend our time. And one of the first ways one of the most effective ways that people can Take control of their lives is to time block. It’s to sit back, be strategic about what is it that I’m trying to accomplish? How do I want to spend my time and reserve that time, don’t give it to other people, reserve it for yourself, and that we are, in many respects, what we choose to spend time on. And as soon as you start making those changes, it’s amazing how that has an impact on all aspects of your life.
What was the first percentage that you gave it was 8080 something percent I scheduled 30 days, within three days. 3%
of all events are scheduled within three days of the event happening 70% are scheduled within one week. So
I have clients who well I guess a lot of my clients are phasing out of the the webinar launch funnel. A lot of them are phasing out of that system lately, but they would be wanting to market their webinar like a month before. And I started to see the trend of Wait a second now. We’re going to start talking about it two to three days before the actual webinar. And when I did webinars earlier this year, I did the same thing. I didn’t start talking about it till two or three days before because I realized that’s when most of the registrations were, were coming in, even myself, I I know just how true that number is because I do the same thing. I don’t I rarely scheduled something for a week out. I know what’s happening today, tomorrow in the next day, even though I have my calendar right in front of me, but I don’t know what emergency is going to pop up next week. I don’t like to live in emergency mode. But when I do funnels people like to break their tech all the time. I mean, I don’t mean to pick on you, Tim. But you’re you’re recording from your from your backup office right now. Because we never know what’s gonna happen in any given day.
Yeah, exactly. And even when we do sometimes we have to be adaptive. But, you know, the, you know, there’s a lot of research some a couple of great books. One is called Deep work by Cal Newport. And one of his core thesis of this book is that the people that achieve the greatest insights or have the greatest outcomes, really focus on those on their profession, like deeply focus, deeply focus, to the exclusion of everything else. And I’m not advocating that people should forget other parts of their lives and we all have to eat, we have families, those things are incredibly important for our well being in survival, but we’re in a hyper connected world where we are more connected to more people than we ever have been before. And what that has enabled is a universe of distraction. And that can be incredibly destructive to one’s mission. And the best way to recover that is to choose to focus and choose where you’re going to focus.
I absolutely love that. Okay, so I already said I wasn’t going to timestamp this episode, but to go to I have to timestamp it now. We are recording on December 10. I’m going to leave the year open. But you are my you’re actually my last official podcast recording of this year, because with the time blocking that I set into place, I also realized I need one week, a month without any appointments. So I set up a few months ago that the third week of every month, I would not accept appointments. That’s not to say that people don’t flip in. But nobody can just use my scheduling link and go schedule themselves, which is incredible. And then I took the last two weeks off of the year, even though he will still be working full disclosure. I didn’t want to be interrupted during the holidays with appointments that I didn’t put in myself. So I don’t have any more podcasts that I’m recording for another four weeks, which is mind blowing. I’ve had this podcast for for three years, and I’ve never not recorded for four weeks. But I look forward to the next three weeks because as you were just saying, I mean, I’m from deep work. I mean, I am so excited about the potential that these three weeks have when I look at them and I see a whole bunch of empty which I have a feeling and I would love to know your insight on this. I have a feeling I should go actually probably tonight and lay out my own personal schedule, what I’m going to accomplish in that At time for myself in the next three weeks, because I don’t want it to fly by and not have accomplished anything with that. Yeah, emptiness,
a couple of other good nuggets. So one of the things, I spent almost seven years at Facebook and Facebook’s one of most innovative companies in the world, and you know, one of the things I learned working at Facebook is that innovation, one of the key ingredients to innovation is whitespace, the ability to think and create and come up with something different, there’s there’s other ingredients as well. But when you don’t have whitespace, when you’re rushed, when you’re busy, you can’t really afford to experiment to try something different. So our natural tendency as human beings is to fall back into the tried and true. And one of the greatest ways that you can get yourself whitespace is to do exactly what you’re talking about. Facebook called it a hack. A month where employees could take a month off from their job and go work in a completely different department or on a idea that they had been thinking about. And not everybody could do this, you had to have been company for a little bit of time. But the value of the hack of the month is that it really allowed for that sort of creative thought. And, you know, sometimes that’s maybe too much time for some people. So, another thing that we did at the company is we had no meaning Wednesdays, this is a simple thing, which is let’s preserve the uninterrupted time for people when they’re focusing on the present set of objectives. So they’re not interrupted by, you know, just the daily administrative coordination that’s necessary being in a corporation. And both these techniques were highly effective and helping to fuel Facebook’s innovative culture. And ability to come up with new and effective ideas.
You’ve got my brain spinning over here because even though I already told you all that I have monday and friday blocked off for content creation, especially these last few months, I’ve had a lot of appointments getting scheduled in this was my own doing because in order to schedule on Monday or Friday, you have to go through me and I’ve been put like the yesterday was insane. started at 10 and I was still on calls at six o’clock. But I think No, I don’t think I know. I’m going to implement no meeting Mondays and Wednesdays and Mondays. I’m just gonna color it black in my calendar. Right anyway red or something.
When you are a time blocker, one of the benefits of time blockers is they tend to honor what the Calendar says, and then now you can start using the calendar as a tool to manage your time. So you could set as you’re just describing a recurring meeting that just blocks out Monday. And now you’re scheduling links from wolven, or something else will not offer that time to other people. And it’s a simple thing would take two seconds for you to make that decision. And now your calendar is going to do the work for you. And this is another thing that that we’re really trying to accomplish it woven is to help people understand how to use the calendar as a tool to achieve your personal mission to help you focus on the things that matter most to you. By, you know, getting the calendar to be smart enough to do things for you. And to really understand how you want to allocate your time and it’s simple technique like what you just described. Okay, I’m going to block out my calendar. Market read so that I understand why it’s blocked out. And now I, if I’m using my calendar smart enough to be able to schedule the events for me, because I’m using scheduling links. Now I don’t have to think about it anymore. events will come onto my calendar and the site explicitly decided I’m going to do this for myself because of an emergency or something important that I decided.
Well, this is the thing I already have it blocked out on my calendar. I think the color was just too friendly, though. It was screaming, you can still you can still schedule over me. That’s not a problem. I mean, it’s well, but I think actually, I know that’s just not scary enough for my brain. I mean, if if my I use Google Calendar, it could literally reach out to the screaming slap my hand when I’m putting something over that purple. That would be amazing. Are you sure you want to do this Kim? No. really don’t. But I just need to make it a more intimidating color that screams at me Do not schedule here. Actually, I’ll just change it. Because right now it says working on the business, I actually just need to change the description on that time block on my Google Calendar. It says do not schedule here, Kim, at all costs do not schedule here.
And actually, one of the things that we do is woven, it’s the way that woven works, it doesn’t replace your calendar, it envelops it your Google Calendar, Microsoft Office calendar is still the underlying system that the that your counter data goes into. But, but wolven will teach counter how to be a little bit more intelligent in your case. If you’re trying to schedule time, and you’ve got an all day event that says I’m blocking this day off, we’re going to tell you, Hey, wait a minute. You’re busy. Well, I’m leaving, you can have the application, give you a notification. It says Hey, don’t do this. And, for me, I like to keep my calendar clean, I have a very small set of conflicts, maybe on any given month, less than 5% of my time, maybe 3% of my time is in conflict. And in those cases, it’s truly a scenario where I have a conflict and I just haven’t made the decision yet of, am I going to meeting one or am I going to meeting too, but I try to keep it very clean. Therefore, I can honor when the calendar saying hey, we’ve got a problem here. And it in some respects, like if you have an executive system or somebody else who’s managing your account, if you’re going to go through the exact same mechanic, and what it comes down to is the choices that we make. Do we choose to be in conflict? Do we choose to be overbooked? Or do we choose to just be deliberate about our time and be clean and consistent Send about it so that we can make sure that those goals that might be more important but not urgent, still get the priority of our time and don’t fall victim to the witch Stephen Covey call it the tyranny of the urgent.
That was like a punch to my gut, which was so needed. Thank you.
By the way, Google Calendar, you can’t schedule a blog or you can’t color a block of black. I had to just try so I could tell you, but it’s not gray. And it says do not schedule here. Absolutely forbidden. I will make it work because I love how you said that. I mean, it’s our choice. I can choose and I’m like I had the realization and this year that I say yes, way too much. And I had to I’ve had to learn to love the word No. I actually another podcast guest who I had done some work with last year, who was Trying to get on my schedule to schedule her her recording of her podcast. And she saw that the podcast that scheduling like was putting her out about nine months. So she went through her emails and she found my half hour scheduling link that I’d given her a year ago. And she booked two back to back half our calls. And I saw and I shook my head. And then I sent her a very nice email back, I said, I love your resourcefulness. However, I only scheduled podcast recordings on Tuesday so that I can respect the time of, you know, my clients and my business. So she rescheduled and then promptly unsubscribe from my list. Like, you know, I had I had to do that because when we I found that for me, and I would love to know what it’s like for you. But seriously, that task switching I believe that for me, it takes longer than 20 minutes to get back into whatever I was. Working on before, if I remember what I was working on before, and I don’t want 35 tabs open in my browser to remind myself what I was working on before a call.
Yes.
So how did the idea for Wilbon come about what was the need? Or what was the big aha that brought you here?
Well, I started in my last two roles. I was CIO, Facebook. And before that I was a CIO of another company. And I found as I got, you know, more and more responsibility that my time was less in my control. I felt like a slave to my calendar. And it was depressing. I would feel like there was so many things I wanted to do, but I couldn’t because I didn’t have the time to do it. And why didn’t I have the time to do because my time is being allocated in ways that I just didn’t appreciate until I started to work with mine. executive assistants on what I like to call portfolio management time portfolio management, I gave them a portfolio of how I wanted to spend time, I want to spend 20% of my time with my my team and my staff, I want to spend 40% of my time with my customers, people outside of my organization, I I need to have at least two hours a day of uninterrupted desk time so that I can just follow up from all of my meetings, and so on and so forth. And I gave them this, and I wanted to start tracking it, how often did I hit my time portfolio. And I realized this is really hard, like there’s not an easy mechanism to report. And I worked with my staff to see if we could come up with some fancy mechanism to pull the data out of Microsoft Outlook and do the report and I was just horrified by how difficult this was in parallel eyes. had a ton of issues, particularly Facebook, when I got there, where my customers, the largely the executives of the company would complain to me about how unstable their calendars were how meetings would get would fall off the calendar or they would have a meeting on their calendar and somebody else wouldn’t. And to resolve these issues really had to dig deeply into how the calendar is built, and why is it the way things are. And then that led to a few insights that were pretty fundamental and ultimately motivated, my co founder and I to let’s go solve this problem by creating a company whose mission it is to rethink how the calendar is built. The first insight is that calendars as we know and love them are actually you know, they’ve almost always ever since Microsoft built Microsoft Exchange, they have been a feature of a larger Sweet and they have been very much tied to email systems. In fact, they’re built on top of email. They are not databases, they’re they’re just special special emails, you can’t have a calendar invite without sending an email to somebody. And that means that they follow all the bad behavior of email email is it’s got a lot of issues. It’s very spammy. But more importantly, I don’t, I can’t. Once I send an email out, I can’t make a change to it. It’s not like you know, if I post publish a website, I can always change the website. People don’t have to know what the new URL to the website is and just go there or, you know, if there’s a typo or something in your podcast, right, you can, you can fix that after it has been published. But that’s not the case for email once you send an email it’s sent and counter events are kind of the same way. And what that has created is that we don’t use our calendars for anything other than tracking when You know, where we should go next? You know, how busy Am I going to be on this particular day, they’re not decisioning engines, they’re not scheduling engines. Even though we might think we use the calendar to schedule, we actually do it ourselves. The calendar is just a mechanism that gives us information but we make all the decisions counters and make all those decisions. And so all this led me to the conclusion that if we’re going to fix this, we’re going to have to really change how the thing is built. And that’s basically the magic behind woven woven allows the counter to be woven together. It’s why we chose that name with a lot of different information because it is built with modern software modern technology. We is very much inspired by how social graphs are built, whether you’re talking about Facebook or Twitter because that’s what a calendar is. It’s a social graph. It is a connection between people location Ns content, meeting objectives, decisions that need to be made, follow up action items. And so what we’re really doing with Logan is providing a mechanism to be able to connect those things so that we can graph them and make them actionable for people.
You, You have me thinking on so many different levels, and I think I say that multiple times in every single episode. I mean, first, I want to commend you, listeners, I just recently switched how I record podcast episodes. And the tool I was using, which will remain unnamed right now. The recorder wasn’t working. So I needed to reach out to Tim to let them know. But then I realized oh my gosh, like his name’s not on the invite. And I don’t know if that was intentional because and I would have to think based upon he just said it is because then I’m not in you. your inbox. I’m not, I’m not bothering you. And I’m not distracting you during your day. So you have me just thinking about. Yeah, it takes up so much time. I mean, every time somebody schedules, I get the notification of them scheduling, I get the notification of them accepting and then they reschedule and I get that notification in my inbox again. And then they accept the reschedule. Think how many times is this one appointment gonna wind up in my inbox?
Well, here’s another example. Imagine, you know, in today’s day and age, we don’t use email for everything anymore. We use technologies like slack or text messaging. Oh, yeah. If you’re coordinating with somebody over text messaging, hey, let’s get together for coffee. First off, the back and forth is even greater, with time words, so on and so forth. But second, you can’t complete that scheduling action on text messaging. Ultimately, somebody’s going to have to go into their calendar and create a an invite and Get this is such a common action. And so it’s a small way that we have helped move the world forward towards our business. We built a texting interface for calendaring so that first off, when I get a text message, it says, Hey, can we get together for coffee, I can respond by pressing a button, and it will send them a specialized scheduling link that either offers them all of the times that I have reserved for coffee, or allows me to specifically choose those times for this person if I need to. Either way, what they get is something where they just see the options that I’m making available to them in a little little web browser, and they can press a button and the event gets scheduled and there’s no email involved in here at all.
And
do you really have time reserved for
I don’t reserve the time for coffee but for me, all of my events are designed to occur in a specific window. So costs I’m not going to do coffee at 6pm at night. So I don’t want to tell my calendar, you know, offer all of my time for this particular event, when I’m trying to have coffee with somebody, I want my counter be smart enough to say, I only do coffee in the mornings, you know, between 10 and 10. And maybe to be the latest time that I would do coffee. Lunch is another example, this 12 the one or dinners or in the evenings, better. You know, even for podcasts, I have a special template for podcasts. There’s a specific set of days of the week that I reserved to do those things. And so woven knows, for any kind of event I’m trying to schedule when it can look for those times. And it’s not restricted just to work hours or just when I’m free. It’s restricted to the the way that it knows that event needs to needs to be scheduled and that can be you know, certain things I might only do on a Friday, Saturday and a Sunday that It would be like date night with my wife. And so, you know, I wanted to offer my personal time when Stan and I are trying to figure out you know, when when can we do dinner? So that’s when I say I’m offering times I’ve reserved for coffee. What I really mean is I have I have taught woven, when do I want to do coffee? And when I want it to offer those times to other people, it only offers the times that ours that I have taught it to offer.
Oh, wow. Hey there, my friend. I hope you’re enjoying this episode of the positive productivity podcast. I wanted to take a quick moment to invite you to join the work smarter, not harder challenge over the course of 30 days these free Yes, free short videos will teach you a few the systems and strategies I set up in my business so I can get away from my computer and back to the people I love. I invite you to sign up now at work. smarter, not harder. challenge.com. Again, you can sign up at work smarter, not harder. challenge.com I just realized a couple weeks ago that I really love doing podcasts in the morning, but I am Eastern Time Zone. And so many of my guests are on the west coast of the US. So while I would love to do it at 1011 my time it I can’t necessarily expect guests from the west coast to get up at eight or to be I mean, especially those with kids. As a mom of five I know what eight o’clock in the morning can be like, it’s insane. So I did take out the majority of my afternoon slots, and I think I left open 12 or one o’clock, but only one. So going into the new year. I have two slots on Tuesdays. That’s it and that was it. Change to because I used to just leave the whole day of Tuesday open? How would How would woven have worked with me on that?
Well, it’s it’s similar to some of the things that we have already been talking about then what wolven A is if we were going to spend time on what matters most we have to define what what, what does matter most. And those things in woven get codified as we call them templates. These are sort of your defining upfront what are what are the different ways that you want to spend your time and you’re describing those kinds of events so that they can be scheduled and coordinated on their own but you’re also doing something else. When you do that you make it possible to run a report after the fact so you can take a look at did I spend the time the way that I wanted to so that you can then refine your decisions. It’s kinda like
that work, Tim, how does it know? And I’m sorry for asking these little details, but I’m not sorry, at the same time. Because I’ve been looking, I want a way to track what I’m doing. And I have tools that I could use. I mean, I have project management tools that I can actually turn on a timer and they watch what I’m doing. But at the same time, I realize I could have 18 gazillion tools running all the time, but I’m gonna actually get to look at the report. So I’m so intrigued by this.
Yeah. So this is one of the things that we do for counter events as we make them extensible. So you can describe them in richer ways. And it’s possible to do in either Google or Microsoft with with Google, you could color the event. But that’s it. You can only get one color to an event event can have two or three colors. woven as a tagging system, you can tag your events. And they can be pre tagged if you create an A when I do coffee as an example or when I’m doing an interview. use templates to create those events. And so they and the template has the event already tagged. So I say that I want to keep track of all the how much time I’m spending on recruiting. So I have a recruiting tag that’s associated with any event that that is scheduled for recruiting because I use the template to schedule the recruiting events. I don’t have to do the work I don’t have to think about it it just happens. I also like to color my events on my calendar I want to see the recruiting events in a different color than my time blocking my desk time. I want to see my personal time with my my wife is a separate color from all of those things that has been visually see these things but it doesn’t help me account for them. The tags helped me account for them. A nice little reporting system that is built into the product and even on my mobile phones press a button I can see for this week, how busy am I and how did I spend my time and it’s a hugely valuable tool to understand whether anonymously spending time on the things that I want to
just because I’m nosy. What color is your wife?
She was orange.
No, why? My wife is a wonderful person.
I guess. You know, oranges. It’s kind of like the, you know, the feeling of warmth and affection for me and my wife, I
guess that is a good explanation because I was thinking about the wrath. If you did not put time in that direction.
She says she’s a high priority for me, my children, priority for me because at the end of the day, at least, this is the choices that I’ve made. I’m not I’m not here on this planet. You know, independent of my, my family and my friends and families. Some of the most important thing. Why do I want to work so hard? So that I can, you know, have resources if I can’t spend them with anybody, and my, my family or the people that I want to spend it on. So those are the choices I made. I live my life by them.
I love that. And that’s what time blocking has allowed me to do as well. I mean, the last calendar year, not this one. But the last calendar year, I realized at the end of the year that I’d eaten dinner with my family seven times. Wow. And that included Christmas, thanksgiving and birthdays. Okay, maybe eight. I have five kids. So there would have to be a little bit more in there, but there are twins so they share a birthday. But that that’s just sad. Because my calendar was so full and I wasn’t putting priorities where they needed to go and I was saying yes too much in you know, had no order to my day. I had only allowed myself the ability to have it and I know there’s responsibility on my side that goes along with that. But having dinner with my family Night Out of 365 is embarrassing. Yeah. So that has not been the case this year. I have times that I wish it were the case because they drive me crazy. Sometimes. It was not the case,
although similar, similar challenges in the past, and my wife and I, a few years ago, we read an article that, you know, one of the best ways to connect with your children is just to sit down and eat dinner with them. No screens at the table, and then television, and just conversation. And it seemed like such a trite thing, but it was also something that felt true. We sort of experienced this, you know, with with with our paths, and so we made a conscious decision then. You know, instead of doing what we had been doing, I had been letting work sort of bleed its way into my evenings and even into my weekends and that was taking time away from my family. We would say okay, at least four nights a week, we’re going to have dinner together. And dinner would be at 630. And we pretty much stick to that. The only deviation children sports I think has not caught on to this idea. So
Katie kidding my
kid soccer in water polo and made it difficult to do that at 630. We do it later. But
yeah, I have the the traveling soccer team, kid. And then just this year, I now have a Girl Scout. And I’m co leading the Girl Scouts and that that adds a little bit of complexity as well. Because soccer, especially at this age, those practices have to come first. I didn’t realize that college recruiters start checking out kids around here in eighth grade. is insane to me is incredible. And even if that’s not your goal, you’re it’s still like You play club soccer in any type of sport. It’s very competitive and people get really, really into it and it sort of creates a an ambient pressure for you to take it seriously and put the time to it.
Down. I’ve been sort of amazed at how much energy just soccer in sports.
Well, I’m in Ohio, where I was amazed when I moved out here that the parents know the names of the high school players, like people back in New York know the names of the players of the professional teams. I mean, I had no idea who was on my high school football team, except for when they were their jerseys to school and had their name on the back.
So a small town or a larger town, I’m
I’m in a medium sized town, but I mean, the town that I was working in was even smaller than mine in the parents would literally tailgate yes with beer. I accidentally Did myself in the middle with beer and grills at the high school football games,
why they they bought
that team like the mothers would make? Cuz I didn’t know what a beer cozy was until I moved to Ohio. I just need to put it out there. I had no idea that these things existed. But there was a mom responsible for making the beer cozies for by school, kids parents, and if for those who don’t know what beer cozies are, I mean, they might have other names around in other parts of the country, but they’re foam insulated. Things cups basically that go outside the beer can and keep the beer cold inside the camp. And I’ve never had as a cozy.
Well, I lived in Central Illinois for several years. And one of my experiences about that part of the country very much mirrors what you’re talking about with Ohio. Everybody knew each other when a real sense of community. I lived in a small town.
And I’m sure that that’s part of it.
At least as much as the state and a part of the country. But one of the things that I learned from that is, you know, it’s, as we have gotten more connected, we sort of lost the meaning of the connection. You know, when you live in a really, really big city like New York or San Francisco, and you don’t have the ability to even know everybody that’s around you. Then you stop you trying to make those connections as there’s emotional connections with people. And yet that’s a big part of who we are as, as human beings and it can, it can feel lonely, it can feel overwhelming. And I think in the digital world, we are starting to uncover the same challenges, but the community that actually is the one that is most meaningful for us, is the community of people that we spend time with, even if they’re not actually physically in front of us. And you and I are different states at this point, but we’re spending time together. And that that is actually a, it’s a great insights and to understand that you know, who you spend time with and how you spend time with them, is a way of fulfilling that meeting that we have for for connection. And whether that’s professional or personal, is sort of up to people. But that is one of the ways to achieve performance in life is decide where you want to spend your time.
Oh, absolutely. Most, most of my entrepreneurial friends are also podcasters. And unlike me, most of them are in California, but we have that text, that group text, you know, where we all support each other. But what I don’t I don’t think Well, thank goodness they don’t listen to my podcasts. But my second child, I don’t think he realizes that the parents in his circle of friends now have their own group text as well. So we know what’s going on even if the kids don’t tell us what’s going on. It’s amazing. I love it. Heaven forbid my mother had had that I would have been grounded just about every single day of high school. So pluses of technology, but also the minuses. I mean, that no screens at the table for that kid especially, that’s still a challenge. But at least I’m back at the table and I can tell him to take a screen off the table. You know, I do have to take some blame for that because when mom’s not there and dad’s busy with the other kids, then the screens more, you know, it was easier for the screens. I would love to note him What is your most productive time of the day if you do have a most productive time of your day?
Well, for me, it’s absolutely the morning.
The and this was another insight that I gained getting into the calendaring space. Because we started to look at when do people scheduled meetings, and I was kind of shocked. In statistics, he had this concept of the bell curve, right. So when you look at the distribution of anything, it tends to follow what’s called a normal distribution on the shape of a bell where, you know, things happen at the the the average and the things that lead up to the average, they look like this interesting shapes. I kind of expected that the calendar would look the same way that you know, there would be a peak meeting time, that’d be like 11 or 12 o’clock and then early morning in the late afternoon, there’d be less less time spent on meetings, but it actually doesn’t look that way. The time that people are least likely to schedule meetings are before nine And
now 876 certainly more six is almost empty.
Now, the reverse is not true. People, a lot of people will spend time in the evenings to have meetings and events in the evenings. And so when I saw this it very much reinforced something that I have already experienced, which is I am most productive in the mornings I like mornings. They are the time that I am least likely to be interrupted by somebody else. They are the time that I’m freshest because I just woke up. Hopefully I’ve had a chance to have my cup of coffee. And you know, I wake up and I try to be very deliberate. What am I going to do today? And the best time for me to make that decision reality is right then and there. You know, as I’m just finishing up my planning for the day, great. Let me get started on the most important thing.
Can I tell you how much you just relieved me to know that you plan in the morning Because the last thing that my brain is able to handle last thing in the evening is planning the next day so that’s when I plan as well what do I need to get done today? I might write down some notes as I remember them the night before. But as far as really solidifying my schedule I am fuzzy brained by five o’clock that’s the best way I could say it. And I have also noticed the first thing first thing in the morning is my best time. I love to get up get showered, as I’ve recently as of the date of this recording, been getting or Ben going live on whatever platform I feel like going live on that day. And I’ve noticed that my productivity and my focus and my ability to be like, really well I’m gonna say it again productive
directly correlates with
with the length of time since my shower. I mean, the fresher I look in the morning, the more productive I am and as the day goes on. And you can see like the showers wearing off, the productivity is wearing off as well. So my husband’s like, Well, okay, into your facebook live in the afternoon, like, Well, no, because I don’t look as fresh and I don’t feel so fresh and people are gonna feel the energy. So no. Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing again. Where can people find out about obon? And I do just have one more question about it because I was looking and I have a lot of clients who are podcasters and wanted to work with their CRM. Does it work with the can it integrate with CRM yet? Or do you see that coming in the future, I do see that coming in the future. We have a lot of podcasters that we have been able to move over and this is very popular request
is to connect it’s it’s very easy for us to do actually, to be able to connect certain types of events with the CRM so that information can be shared between the calendar and this year and keep track but you’ve booked and scheduled and you can also get in Availability data into the into the CRM. So that’s something that we’ve heard a lot of and you can expect that we’ll do something like that in 20 in the next few months, maybe even by the time this podcast is
published, amazing the
for people who want to learn more about woven they can find us at woven comm or on the app store’s for Windows, Mac and iOS. And if you search for woven and we should show up on the top of those lists, and check us out
amazing Thank you so much. I will put that in the show notes listeners. So if you are driving, don’t want to fall off the elliptical and don’t want to cook dinner or don’t want to burn dinner. I don’t want to cook dinner I certainly don’t want to burn it though. When I do. Check out the show notes and leave a comment down below. I’d love to hear what uh, how’s he received added to these episodes, and you can find the show notes at KIM SUTTON. dot com. forward slash p p 658. Tim, I want to thank you so much for being a guest today. I mean, seriously, just graying out my Mondays, no meeting Mondays, that’s going to be huge for me in 2020. So thank you so much. And that was just one of many. I would love to know one last parting piece of advice that you would have for listeners.
Well, I think one of the other great things that people can do to help achieve their life goals is to take the time when we’re getting people come sometimes this near the New Year’s sometimes people do this around the birthdays. I personally find it is a good practice to do this. Each quarter to sit down and write down your life goals. What do you want to accomplish in life and once you have that, take that and put that time in your Calendar in some way, shape or form, make your dreams happen by saving time for them in your calendar.
