Podcasts about tidying up the japanese art

Part 1 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondō Summary"The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" by Marie Kondo presents a unique approach to decluttering and organizing living spaces. Kondo, a professional organizing consultant from Japan, introduces the KonMari Method, which emphasizes tidying by category rather than location and focuses on keeping only those items that “spark joy” in your life. Key Concepts:The Joy Check: At the core of Kondo's method is the idea that you should only keep items that bring you joy. This encourages individuals to create a more meaningful and joyful living environment.Tidying by Category: Kondo suggests decluttering by specific categories: clothes, books, papers, komono (miscellaneous items), and sentimental items. Each category should be tackled in this order to simplify the process and prevent overwhelm.The Right Mindset: Kondo stresses the importance of having the right mindset towards decluttering. This involves respecting your belongings and understanding why you want to tidy up to foster a sense of gratitude for the items in your life.The Importance of a `Tidying Up` Day: Instead of doing small tidying sessions over time, Kondo advocates for a one-time, thorough tidying event. This allows individuals to see a complete transformation in their space, therefore motivating them to maintain a tidy home.Organizing Things Properly: Once decluttering is complete, Kondo provides advice on how to organize what you choose to keep. This includes storing items in a manner that makes them easily accessible and visible, enhancing the efficiency and aesthetics of the space.Mental Clarity and Life Transformation: Kondo believes that tidying up does more than just clean your space; it can also lead to mental clarity and emotional well-being. The process often prompts individuals to reflect on their values and priorities in life. Conclusion:"The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" offers not only practical tips for decluttering but also a philosophy that encourages readers to lead a more intentional and joyful life. The book emphasizes the connection between our physical space and emotional state, making it a significant resource for anyone looking to simplify and enhance their personal environment.Part 2 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up AuthorMarie Kondo is a Japanese organizing consultant, author, and television show host, best known for her unique approach to decluttering and tidying up. Her most famous book, "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing," was first published in Japan in 2011 and later translated into English and released in 2014. Kondo's method, known as the "KonMari" method, emphasizes the importance of keeping only those items that "spark joy" and following a specific order in which to declutter. Other Books Written by Marie KondoMarie Kondo has authored several other books, including:"Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up" (2016) A follow-up to her first book, providing further insights and detailed illustrations of her tidying methods."The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up: A Magical Story" (2013) A graphic novel format illustrating her tidying philosophy."Kiki & Jax: The Life-Changing Magic of Friendship" (2019) A children's book featuring two cute characters, Kiki and Jax, emphasizing friendship and tidying up in a kid-friendly manner."Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life" (2020) Co-authored with Scott Sonenshein, this book applies the KonMari method to the workplace, aiming to help people find joy in their professional life."Marie Kondo's Kurashi at Home: How to Create a Life of Meaning and Joy" (2021) This book goes beyond tidying to explore how to create a fulfilling, joy-filled life at home. Best EditionsIn terms

This week we are re-releasing a classic episode from the Go Help Yourself archives! In this episode, originally released in 2019, Misty and Lisa review the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo!Are you curious about the Konmari method? Well, Misty and Lisa cover every aspect of tidying up in this Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up Book Review, including:Commit yourself to tidying upImagine your ideal lifestyleFinish discarding first (*hint: only keep things that SPARK JOY!)Tidy by category, not by locationFollow the right orderFigure out where to put everything you're keepingIf you'd like to read the book, you can buy it here. Marie's website can be found here. You can also catch Marie changing peoples' lives on her new show Tidying Up on Netflix!And don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review Go Help Yourself! It's the best way to help people find our show!Oh, and you can contact us! We'd love to hear from you. E-mail: gohelpyourselfpodcast@gmail.comTwitter: @GHYPodcastInstagram: @gohelpyourselfpodcastAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Growing up in a Bed & Breakfast, I've always had an appreciation for a neat and organized space. It's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about my conversation with Rebecca Jo-Rushdy, a KonMari® consultant who guides sensitive souls on transformational journeys by decluttering their homes, hearts, and minds into sanctuaries that spark joy and flow. As a fellow empath, Rebecca understands that the practice of decluttering your home is not about just freeing up the physical space. It's also an emotional experience woven with our cherished memories, relationships with our loved ones, and our own evolutions as human beings. From cultivating awareness to setting goals that don't upset your nervous system, you will walk away from this episode with newfound clarity and wisdom on creating a mindful environment that sets you up for success.   Topics   Decluttering 101 and how creating a mindful home environment can help you become the best version of yourself as an empath Conscious consumption: how to stop feeding into the scarcity mindset and start spending in a way that truly brings you joy Navigating different phases of life, such as welcoming a new baby or moving, without overspending on things you don't *actually* need The art of intentionality and how to sort through sentimental possessions, especially as a highly sensitive person How to start decluttering your space without overwhelming your nervous system   Episode Resources: Join us on Monday, July 15th at 12pm ET for our monthly Non-Networking Power Hour for Empathpreneurs with our UNBOUNDED Community for deep connections and meaningful support. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo The KonMari Method The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley The Go-Giver by Bob Burg The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Eger   Connect with Rebecca: Website Instagram: @ sparkjoyandflow LinkedIn Facebook   Connect with Catherine: Apply to join the free Unbounded community, a vibrant group of empathpreneurs who are passionate about supporting each other on our entrepreneurial journeys. Website LinkedIn Instagram YouTube Sign up to receive my weekly digest on empathic entrepreneurship and hear from voices committed to spreading this message, sent straight to your inbox every Friday since 2016, here .   Work with Catherine: Interested in working 1:1 with a certified coach on Catherine's team, or joining her in one of her premium mastermind programs? Schedule a low-pressure call to begin the conversation here .     The Prosperous Empath® Podcast is produced by Heart Centered Podcasting.

This week on the show, we tackle the daunting task of decluttering for those with ADHD. With our upcoming Declutter Challenge in July, we invite you to join a supportive community and gamify your decluttering process alongside us.As we dive into the episode, we share the importance of starting small and focusing on one space at a time to avoid feeling overwhelmed. We guide you through our four-step process of organizing any space: planning, sorting, organizing, and maintaining. We help you choose a space that would have the biggest impact on your daily life and offer practical tips on how to sort through your belongings efficiently.We also explore the emotional aspects of decluttering, recognizing when it's time to take a break and how to deal with feelings of guilt or obligation when letting go of items. We provide a list of questions for you to ask yourself during the sorting process to help you make those tough decisions.Remember: perfection is not the goal and that progress should be celebrated!If you're struggling with ADHD and the challenges of decluttering, this episode of Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast offers valuable insights and practical strategies to make the process more manageable and rewarding. Join us as we explore the upcoming Declutter Challenge and learn how to take the first steps towards a more organized life together.Links & NotesThe 2024 ADHD De-Clutter Challenge! — Take Control ADHDConquering Chronic Disorganization by Judith KolbergThe Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie KondoUnapologetically ADHD: A Step-by-Step Framework For Everyday Planning On Your Terms by Nikki Kinzer and Pete WrightDig into the podcast Shownotes Database (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast (02:30) - Support This Podcast: Become a Patron at https://patreon.com/theadhdpodcast (04:14) - The 2024 Declutter Challenge (09:14) - The Steps of Organizing ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

When chaos hits, most of us scramble, but not Michele Fuller. She paints a picture of resilience and focus as she recounts her journey toward her career's most impressive quarter despite staff turnover and a deluge of tasks. On this episode of Great Practice, Great Life, Steve's conversation with Michele, a seasoned attorney and entrepreneur, is a life vest for any professional grappling with their own disruptions, illustrating the profound difference between simply managing time and mastering focus management. Michele shares her tactical playbook on task prioritization, which can boost productivity and enrich life beyond the office walls. Have you ever wondered what it feels like to look a professional crisis in the eye and come out on top? Michele takes us through the eye of her storm, unpacking the mindset shifts and strategic decisions that are critical when “outworking the problem” just doesn't cut it. Maintaining cash flow, handling team dynamics, and safeguarding personal well-being are the pillars of her most financially rewarding period to date. The conversation offers practical wisdom for overcoming high-pressure scenarios with grace and emerging triumphant. We wrap up with Michele's insights on the power of reflection and strategic planning's role in ensuring a thriving practice that doesn't come at the cost of burning out. She credits coaching and support from Atticus in her journey, emphasizing the impact of the right tools and habits when managing chaos and striving for outstanding results. Michele's story is a masterclass in focus and balance, tailored to inspire lawyers and professionals alike towards achieving a rewarding career and life vitality. In this episode, you will hear: Michele Fuller's strategy for the most successful quarter despite staff shortages and challenges Emphasizing focus management over traditional time management Her approach to overcoming professional crises The importance of mindset, managing chaos, and maintaining steady cash flow while ensuring personal well-being How The My Great Life® Planner helps with daily and weekly planning, managing professional responsibilities, and safeguarding weekends for personal time Weekly reflection practices for personal and professional growth that lead to creating actionable items and improved future performance Prioritizing cash flow and top goals for a productive week Using tools like the Cash Flow Focuser and calendar blocking to hone in on valuable cases and manage time effectively The importance of self-care and time management to maintain balance in high-pressure careers Michele credits her success to coaching, support from Atticus, and the right tools and habits for managing chaos and achieving balance between a thriving legal career and a fulfilling personal life Follow and Review: We'd love for you to follow us if you haven't yet. Click that purple '+' in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. We'd love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast. Supporting Resources: Michele Fuller: Adjunct Practice Advisor & Attorney: atticusadvantage.com/our-team/michele-fuller My Great Life® Planner: atticusadvantage.com/product/my-great-life-planner Dominate Your Market: atticusadvantage.com/what-we-do/dominate-your-market Group Coaching Programs: atticusadvantage.com/what-we-do/coaching-growth-programs Great Practice. Great Life.® by Atticus® – 039: From the Kitchen Table to Representing the State of Michigan with Michele Fuller: atticusadvantage.com/episode039 Michigan Law Center PLLC: www.michiganlawcenter.com Administering the California Special Needs Trust: A Guide for Trustees and Those Who Advise Them by Kevin Urbatsch and Michele Fuller: a.co/d/jifEPQx Administering the Michigan Special Needs Trust: A Guide for Trustees and Those Who Advise Them by Kevin Urbatsch and Michele Fuller: a.co/d/7eRcEZ8 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo: a.co/d/j3EzM4K Episode Credits If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know we sent you.

Where does sentimental value come from? Why did Angela throw out her childhood journals? And would Mike wear Hitler's sweater?  SOURCES:Jeffrey Galak, professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University.John Irving, author.Marie Kondo, professional organizer and consultant.Paul Rozin, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.Yang Yang, research scientist at the Institute of Behavioral Research at Texas Christian University. RESOURCES:"Experiences Endure," by Angela Duckworth (Character Lab, 2022)."Study Finds That THESE Are the Most Valued Family Heirlooms," by SWNS Staff (SWNS, 2021)."Micro Wave: How 'Bout Dem Apple...Seeds," by Thomas Lu, Madeline K. Sofia, and Brit Hanson (Short Wave, 2021)."Sentimental Value and Its Influence on Hedonic Adaptation," by Yang Yang and Jeffrey Galak (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2015)The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by Marie Kondo (2010)."A Real-Life Version of the Hitler's Sweater Experiment," by David Berreby (Big Think, 2010)."The Makings of the Magical Mind: The Nature and Function of Sympathetic Magical Thinking," by Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin (Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific, and Religious Thinking in Children, 2000)."Operation of the Laws of Sympathetic Magic in Disgust and Other Domains," by Paul Rozin, Linda Millman, and Carol Nemeroff (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986). EXTRAS:"How Do You Connect With Someone You Just Met?" by No Stupid Questions (2023)."Do You Savor or Gobble?" by No Stupid Questions (2022)."Why Do We Hoard?" by No Stupid Questions (2020).The Twilight Saga, by Stephanie Meyer (2005-2020).A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving (1989).

Welcome back to "Parenting the Intensity!"Today on the podcast I welcome guest Rebeccas Jo Rushdy, Platinum Konmari Consultant and the Owner of Spark Joy & Flow where she guides fellow empaths to declutter and transform their hearts, minds and homes into sanctuaries that spark joy and flow!And that's what we talk about, decluttering to create a calmer and more peaceful space, but so much more too! We talk a lot on the relationship between clearing our house and parenting and how it help us, and our kids, learn so many great lessons. And don't worry, there's no space for shaming you if your house is a mess here! That's not what we are about at all!Key takeaways of this episode:1. The power of decluttering: We share our experience with decluttering and how it made a significant impact on our lives. We discuss the Konmari approche for decluttering, which incorporates positive psychology and gratitude to change our perspective on decluttering from fear to joy. It's all about learning the life skill of letting go and designing a peaceful life for ourselves and our families.2. Managing expectations: This means involving children in decision making and giving them agency, in decluttering but in so much more spaces in life too, which can help soften any shocks or surprises that may come their way.3. Connecting decluttering with parenting: We discuss how parents can involve their children in the decluttering process and create a sense of emotional readiness and safety for them to let go of things. And that doesn't just means stuff, but all sorts of things in life that we need to let go of."We have to actually design life in a way that's peaceful for every family member because it's stressful for kids to be rushed as well."Show notes and transcript of the episode over hereWhere to find Rebecca:Spark Joy & FlowInstagramInsight TimerResources referenced by Rebecca:Marie Kondo's Website'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing' by Marie KondoHighly Sensitive Parenthood WebsiteMake sure to subscribe to our podcast for future episodes and leave a rating and review, that helps us get in front of more parents. Don't forget to check out the resources mentioned on our website at www.parentingtheintensity.caJoin the "Parenting the Intensity Community" to find the right things that works for YOUR child and adapt them to YOUR reality.To be able to enjoy your life and kids, not always being afraid of the next outburst Take a deep breath, keep going, we're all in this together!Music by Oleksii Kaplunskyi from Pixabay

In this episode, I explore how decluttering your physical and mental spaces can be the key to unlocking clarity, focus, and true fulfillment in your life. Say goodbye to the pain of ineffective actions and embrace the power of decluttering for personal and professional growth. Resources: Get on the membership waitlist: https://sandrapossing.com/dream-life-academy/Marie Kondo - The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering & OrganizingRamit Sethi - I Will Teach You to Be RichConnect with me: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sandrapossing/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sandrapossinglifecoach/Website: https://sandrapossing.com/

Goody bag treasures, generous grandparent gifts in every shade of plastic, and inexplicably precious (to someone) “junk” – it's the stuff of motherhood! In this replay of Episode 35, Meagan and Sarah share our strategies for minimizing the intake of “all the stuff,” ideas for reasonable purging, and how to organize the things you decide to keep. Enjoy!All month long we're bringing back some beloved episodes from the early years of The Mom Hour – with fresh bonus conversations dropping every Friday on the same topic! Here's a playlist of some of our very favorite classic oldies – and here's a full list of every episode in chronological order.LINKS MENTIONED:Here's a link to the original episodeSarah's Neato robot vaccuum is still going strong – 7 years later! (Here's an affiliate link to an updated version)You can still read the Facebook thread Meagan talked about from 2016 about Marie Kondo's methodWe discussed the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (affiliate link)MORE HELPFUL LINKS:Visit our websiteCheck out deals from our partnersFollow us on InstagramJoin our private listener group on Facebook (be sure to answer the membership questions!)Sign up for our newsletterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week we look to what the seasons bring and sometimes the seasons brings us a bit of work that can have an unexpected hidden joy. Out of the work and at times struggles, we can find some diamonds, as  Maester Marie, teaches us, if we know what we are looking for. I share with you what I have learned from Maester Marie Kondo and I highly recommend that you purchase her book, the life-changing magic of tidying up.(The life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing', 2014)(Konmari.com, 2023)Let's go, let's get it done. Get more information at: http://projectweightloss.org

Marie Kondo's first book is "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing". It was published in 2011 and has become a best-seller. Kondo shares her unique KonMari method for decluttering and organizing in the book. The technique uses the idea that you should only keep items in your home that bring you joy and let go of things that do not. The book has inspired a decluttering movement and is the perfect way to start our Japan Series.INTROMarie Kondo introduces herself, and her focusOrganize the World (2m37)WHAT IS ITABC and Marie Kondo Reveal Simple Ways To Get OrganizedSave Time And Space (4m52) ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

In her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, Marie Kondo asks, "does this spark joy?" to help people decide what to keep and what to get rid of. I realized that this question could also be used to improve productivity too. How the ODAE Method Can Help You be Productive How Are Your Productivity Habits? Take a free assessment to see how you score with your productivity habits. When you know where you stand in productivity, you can begin to make changes. https://misterproductivity.com/quiz WHO IS MARK STRUCZEWSKI? Mark “Ski” Struczewski (also known as Mister Productivity) is a productivity expert that is obsessed with helping 100 million solopreneurs bust through overwhelm by 2032.

While the ladies of FTBW are busy life-ing today, enjoy this Sunday Replay. Have you ever felt that wonderful feeling when you have finally cleaned and organized your space? The sense of accomplishment you feel after taking in a deep breath and observing your work accompanied with a smile and both hands on your hips. It feels great, right? When we are unfocused or in a bad place emotionally, our environment usually reflects it. When we're stressed, we tend to solely focus on the problem in our minds. Clearing clutter is therapeutic because you are finally directing some of that energy into something concrete with tons of benefits. Today we are going to discuss how clearing the clutter can actually clear your mind.**The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo.**MERCH IS HERE!! MERCH IS HERE!!  Shop at www.fulltimeblackwoman.com for our latest available merch!Check out our YouTube channel and remember to subscribe!!Catch up on some of our many articles on our Blog !!  Like and follow our page on Facebook, “Full-Time Black Woman” Follow us on Instagram @fulltimeblackwomanFollow us on Twitter @FTblackwoman***********************************************************************************************************BUZZSPROUT LINK:fulltimeblackwoman.com/buzzsprout/***********************************************************************************************************INSTACART LINK:fulltimeblackwoman.com/instacart/

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODEGifts for the…Organization loverThe Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie KondoOrganizing Solutions for People with ADHD, 2nd Edition-Revised and Updated: Tips and Tools to Help You Take Charge of Your Life and Get Organized by Susan PinskyHow ADHD Affects Home Organization: Understanding the Role of the 8 Key Executive Functions of the Mind by Lisa K WoodruffThe Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter by Margareta MagnussonLearn more about Tidy Revival services and our private communityCoffee loverDriftaway CoffeeTiferet CoffeeGoal-getterThe Kachet Life - Branding Strategist & Content CreatorTami Hackbarth - 100% Guilt-free Self-Care CoachDenise Duffield-Thomas - Money Mindset CoachMusic loverHalswell Music - lessons with Jazz Artist Halley ElwellPlayground Session - online piano lessonsCozy home galFish & Chip Craft Co.Sackcloth & AshesBombas SocksTOMS shoesTravelerAirBnb gift cardChevron or Shell gas gift cardCA State Parks PassesNon-profit supporterAging UPWomen's EmpowermentNorCal Bully Breed RescuePet loverWilderdog Gal on the goFood delivery gift cards: Grubhub & PostmatesGardener/houseplant loverBurpeePropagate SacGreen AcresFashionistaMissy from Simplified WardrobeMersy HoganCabine MondeKiddo giftsClass Keeper App - a Tidy Revival FAV!Ambitious Girl by Meena HarrisLittle Leaders & Little Dreamers books by Vashti HarrisonNational Geographic Kids MagazineMagna-TilesSacramento Zoo & Children's MuseumPractical gift cards & cashAmazon TargetCostcoVenmoPayPalWant to learn more about the Clutter-Free Home Process course community? Check out all the details here.Are we friends on social media yet? Whether your jam is Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest or Facebook - follow us @tidyrevival Snag your FREE printable decluttering guide to give you inspiration on where to start at home.

Join Kylee and me this week as she brings up the subject of "micro-anxieties." These things annoy you and you waste emotional energy caring about them. They are a brain drain, and not worth the space they take. There is science behind the idea that this stuff stifles creativity, decreases productivity, and makes you miserable. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing Atomic Habits

How organized are you?  Let's talk about how taking back control in your own space can change the energy and relieve anxiety, so you can have more happiness.  Connect to our community via Social Media: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and LinkedIn  For more information about Wicked Relaxed Mind, Body & Soul or to subscribe to the monthly newsletter, please go to wickedrelaxedmindbodyandsoul.com  Order Lisa Dooley's book: MORE SPACE. MORE TIME. MORE JOY! Organizing Your Best Life Order Marie Kondo's book: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing Get to know Clea Shearer, from Home Edit As always, keep moving forward on your path to happiness, keep shining your light to light the way for others and always remember to go within.   --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Have you ever driven down a highway and gotten a whole bunch of bugs sadly splattered on your windshield? Eventually, there are so many that you can't see the road in front of you.  The same thing can happen with little bits of time clutter throughout your week. No one is a big deal, but in total they obstruct foresight and forward motion. Today I'm sharing how to identify the ways you may be creating time clutter and how to start reducing it. With only a few tidbits about the science of bug splatters. Special shout out to Shelley Hitz—thank you for the podcast review! I'd love to know: what has been your biggest aha from these first 100+ episodes? Leave a review and let me know!

This week's episode is an interview with Tiffany Sorya, the founder and CEO of Novel Education Group which offers home school programs to children K-12 with the best homeschool teacher. She is a renowned influencer and thought leader in the education industry, widely recognized for spearheading a fundamental change in the way young people engage with education in the digital age. She's worked with high-profile clients, including Kendall and Kylie Jenner. In the interview, Tiffany shares the motivation behind her motto, "Making smart stylish again." We discuss the challenges of encouraging the youth to pursue basic education in a social media-driven world, and how it starts with making them feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable and admit when they don't understand. Tiffany also talks about what led to her business decisions, and why she didn't focus on the “what-ifs” when starting on her path. Tiffany's Book Recommendation: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondō: https://amzn.to/39xGQiM   To learn more about Tiffany Sorya and Novel Education, visit the links below: Website: https://noveleducationgroup.com/about/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tiffanysorya/?hl=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffanysorya/   Keynote Speaker: Are you looking for a keynote speaker to teach you how to advocate for your ideas, for change, for your product and for sales? I would love to come and speak to your team and show them how to advocate to win in their business. Please fill out the form below and I will contact you with more details. https://form.jotform.com/221107324351139   To learn more about my services and to stay connected, visit me at: Website: Advocate to Win Instagram: @imheatherhansen Sign up for your consultation: https://calendly.com/advocatetowin/introduction-call Don't forget to Subscribe to the Advocate with Elegance FREE private podcast here: https://view.flodesk.com/pages/613921e87accb4c0210201c5 Would you like to ask me a question? Please leave me a message by calling (856) 390-4831. Don't forget to let me know if we can use your call on the show.  

Today I'm speaking with my friend Stacy Anderson about organization and clutter! Stacy is a psychologist with 35 years experience helping adults with anxiety, depression and trauma recovery who can help reframe your thinking for a more peaceful life. Here are some books that Stacy recommends. What Your Clutter Is Trying to Tell You: Uncover the Message in the Mess and Reclaim Your Life The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff: Declutter, Downsize, and Move Forward with Your Life Looking for tips on how to get things done? Check out this one too! Get it Done: 51 Habits, Routines, Tips, and Tools to Organize Your Life. Hey, are you enjoying the podcast? If so, new episodes are released each Friday, so please follow Coffee with Kim, leave a review, and share with your friends!

Contact: https://heavymetal.money Heavy Metal Money on Facebook Heavy Metal Money on Twitter Heavy Metal Money on Instagram Heavy Metal Money on YouTube Heavy Metal Money on TikTok Email Me Can I Retire by age 55? https://heavymetal.money/can-i-retire-by-age-55/ Downsizing and Decluttering https://heavymetal.money/decluttering/ 40 BAGS IN 40 DAYS DECLUTTERING CHALLENGE https://www.whitehouseblackshutters.com/40-bags-in-40-days/ Books Referenced Here: The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/the-minimalist-home-a-room-by-room-guide-to/id1444932484 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/the-life-changing-magic-of-tidying-up-the/id1424474611 Making Space: Creating a Home Meditation Practice https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/making-space-creating-a-home-meditation-practice/id1420685347 Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/essentialism-the-disciplined-pursuit-of-less-unabridged/id1417770295 Decluttering at the Speed of Life https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/decluttering-at-the-speed-of-life/id1441465447 How to scan documents on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210336 I had started a plan to have the option to retire by the age of 55. For the past year or so, I've been slowly decluttering, organizing, and becoming more of a minimalist. I just cringe at the thought of moving and transporting all the belongings that had to overflow from my closets, drawers, and shelves. Another reason to trim down is there will be a time when I do leave this earth, let's be real. We all do die at some point. I remember when my father passed away, I worked for weeks going through his home. It was an emotional time, but also very stressful with figuring out what to keep, what to toss, donate or sell. Then, years after his passing I still had bins and boxes of things I kept and put in my own garage. Now I'm challenged with going through all this stuff again. I'd like to not leave these experiences for my children. I'm going to do what I can to simplify my life and my belongings to ease any burden left on my kids and family when I pass away. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/heavymetalmoney/support

Jules, Rachel, and Stephanie discuss goal setting and planning for their art and art business. Key talking points:  Understand what you envision your life to be and then define your goals to drive towards your dream.  Jule's JMA Planner enables you to define your goals and vision on a larger purpose.  Check her planner out here. Create SOPs (Standard Operating Procedure) to create the step-by-step processes Take the time to plan. Don't multi-task, it actually degrades your effectiveness to complete a single task. Put time estimates into each of the tasks.  Choose what works for you: batch or task or another way that you prefer to work - experiment with what works best for you and the environment that you live.  What do you do to stay motivated working from home?  Email us at hello@artistssoar.com  Rise with us! On Artists Soar! Resources Mentioned Clickup (affiliate link) is software that helps Stephanie keep her checklists. "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing" (Amazon affiliate link) Jules Planner - JMA Planner.  Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover (Amazon affiliate link) Art Business Membership Program - Get More Time In Your Studio To Create Course Etsy Bootcamp Our Websites and Shops Stephanie:  https://www.stephanieweaverartist.com/ https://www.etsy.com/shop/artfurpaws   Julie:  https://www.juliemstudios.com/ https://www.etsy.com/shop/peacockblueart   Rachel:  https://bubblybibbly.com/  https://www.etsy.com/shop/BBStudioShop  https://www.etsy.com/shop/mothersrecipes   Got a Listener Question?  Email us at: hello@artistssoar.com  

Hello So Deep Peeps!  Welcome to That's So Deep.  This is the podcast where we try to root out loneliness one conversation at a time.  This is a first in a series where we explore our complicated relationship to our stuff.  Today we are talking about why we hold on to stuff and why it is so hard to let it go. Some deep things we cover:Our Stuff Represents Memories: A loved one passing, a childhood memory, a time when you were happy.Our Stuff Represents A Past Identity or a Future Self: Someone you once were or someone you hope to be.Love Language of Gift Giving: Buying things for people is how you show and receive love. If you don't accept or keep the gifts then it shows disrespect and lack of gratitude.Culture of Consumption: We are immersed in stuff and it is hard to avoid.Money and Time: It is hard to face the money and time wasted on the things we bought.Regret and Failure: Each time we see an item we no longer use, we see our own failures and poor decision making.Not Wanting To Be Wasteful: Sometimes the things we have are perfectly usable even if they have been sitting on a shelf for 7 years so it feels wasteful to get rid of them.Decision Fatigue and Overwhelm: Our ability to make good decisions can deteriorate over time because there is just so much to sift through.  It is easier to just shove items back in the closet than to continue. Take-aways:Understand the Deeper WHY: We aren't asking you to get rid of the items that you are holding on to but we are asking you to ask the deeper why.  Why are you holding on to these things?  Are you holding on to a past identity? Do the items represent a fantasy self or a future self?  Do your things hold your hopes and dreams?  Are you not wanting to be wasteful?  Is it hard for you to face the time and money that you have spent on these items and you can't quite stomach the failure?  Understanding the deeper why is the first step in figuring out how to let things go.  Once you understand the deeper why, then you can begin asking yourself if holding on to these things align with your Core Values.  If the items don't fit into the life you are wanting to create for yourself, then maybe it is time to graciously let them go and make space for the abundance that awaits you. We want to have a conversation with you!The whole point of this podcast is to facilitate and encourage deeper conversations and we want to hear from you!  Here is how you can reach us:Voicemail: 805-288-0884Email: sodeeppeeps@gmail.comIf you liked this podcast, you can FOLLOW, SUBSCRIBE or SHARE with a friend and if you don't want to miss an episode, click that BELL so you can be notified right away when the next episode releases.  We love you and we can't wait for our next deep conversation!Yours in Becoming, Phyllis & JulieResources and articles we referenced in the episode:Simply and Fiercely: https://www.simplyfiercely.com/blog/Mari Kondo: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up) Maxwell Ryan: Apartment Therapy - Sample

Inspired by Heather Moorefield-Lang's session at AASL '21 in Salt Lake City titled "Clearing Out Our Digital Closets." Also, mentioned in this podcast: Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing; from James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) "3, 2, 1 Thursday" newsletter dated 12/30/21 that includes a quote from The Journals of May Sarton Volume One: Journal of a Solitude, Plant Dreaming Deep, and Recovering --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/valerie-dilorenzo/message

With the average American home containing over 300,000 items, it's no wonder why so many of us struggle with clutter. Despite what advertisers and marketers tell us, our lives are more than what we buy or the stuff we own. This week, we chat with Rosey Williams about living mindfully, voting with our dollars, and the business case for diverting our waste streams away from landfills.---Rosey's relevant resourcesConnect with Rosey on LinkedInLearn about Rosey's employer, Link International Inc.Meet environmental activist and blogger of the zero-waste movement Lauren SingerWatch How to Fit Two Years of Trash in a Mason Jar with Lauren Singer on YouTubeLearn more about the field of international studiesLearn about China's Sword Policy on YaleEnvironment360Join San Diego Leaders 2020Check out the Equinox Project's Quality of Life DashboardVisit Joshua Tree National ParkLearn about the San Diego County Taxpayers AssociationExplore zero-waste lifestyles on YouTubeRead about eco-minimalismLearn about PreZero USVisit Solana Center for Environmental Innovation and become a Master ComposterSupport the Indigenous Environmental NetworkRead Indigenous peoples are the original environmentalists. It is time we start treating them that wayRead Indigenous people and the nature they protectJoin a Buy Nothing Facebook GroupWatch the Story of Stuff on YouTubeRead The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie KondoSign up for our newsletter: feelanthrope.org/subscribeWe'll send you easy actions you can do, resources to get your nerd on, and cool stuff every week when we put out an episode.Send us pictures of you reveling in creativity or listening to the episode on Instagram (@feelanthrope) and Twitter (@feelanthropod).A special thank you to Rosey Williams. Feelanthrope is produced by Ally Celones Senturk. Our audio engineer and composer is Kory Hilpmann, with original music by Danny Nguyen. Our designer is Kait Kolsky.

This episode we're discussing Piranesi by Susanna Clarke! Major spoiler warning for this episode as we talk about a lot of various plot points! (Though we don't reveal everything.) There's an extra spoiler siren immediately before we start diving into the plot in depth. You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast delivery system. Check out the transcript of this episode! In this episode Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | RJ Edwards Media We Mentioned Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (buy it from our store) Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV series) (Wikipedia) The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern SCP-3008 (Ikea) SCP-087 (stairs that go down forever) SCP Foundation (Wikipedia) BLAME! Vol. 1 by Tsutomu Nihei Resilience Is Futile: The Life and Death and Life of Julie Lalonde by Julie S. Lalonde God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Links, Articles, and Things Book Talk Live with McArthur Public Library (featuring Matthew!) It's not up on podcast places yet, but we'll let you know! Episode 130 - Battle of the Books 2021 Episode 107 - Pet by Akwaeke Emezi Episode 083 - The Fifth Season Episode 058 - The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making Italian Emergency Alert System (YouTube) Censor Beep Cornice (Wikipedia) Walking simulators (Wikipedia) Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Wikipedia) Imaginary Prisons (Wikipedia) 15 Self Help books by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) Authors Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers' Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors to help our listeners diversify their readers' advisory. All of the lists can be found here. Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual by Luvvie Ajayi Jones Walking In Your Power: Lessons from the Grandmothers by Barbara Derrick Get Over 'I Got It': How to Stop Playing Superwoman, Get Support, and Remember That Having It All Doesn't Mean Doing It All Alone by Elayne Fluker Writing into the Wound: Understanding trauma, truth, and language by Roxane Gay It's About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated Into Your Greatest Advantage by Arlan Hamilton Good Vibes, Good Life: How Self-Love Is the Key to Unlocking Your Greatness by Vex King The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondō Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla F. Saad Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day by Jay Shetty How to Be a Bawse: A Guide to Conquering Life by Lilly Singh Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance by Jessamyn Stanley The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations by Richard Wagamese Navigate Your Stars by Jesmyn Ward Welcome Home: A Guide to Building a Home for Your Soul by Najwa Zebian Give us feedback! Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read! Check out our Tumblr, follow us on Twitter or Instagram, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email! Join us again on Tuesday, October 5th we'll be discussing the genre of Erotica! Then on Tuesday, October 19th we'll be playing a spooky role-playing game!

IN THIS EPISODE we sit down with Jessy Smith, dancer and owner of MinimizingNYC, to dive deep into the transformational world of minimizing and organizing, and her personal story of stepping into her intuitive power. We get to explore what often lies beneath all the material and emotional clutter that can take over our spaces thus blocking our road to self actualization and living a life of joy and purpose. We also get to unpack the distinct connection between Jessy's influences as an immersive theater artist, and her intuitive practice of guiding people as they discover the agency they have in their ability to transform their space and personal narratives in ways they never imagined. We also delve into navigating the balance between creative careers and running a business and the ways in which pursuing multiple passions can influence and support one another. Episode Transcript ABOUT JESSY SMITH: In 2017, a friend introduced her to the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. She had been living in Downtown Brooklyn for almost 10 years at that point, with a career as a professional dancer, choreographer, immersive theater artist, teacher, rehearsal director, (see more about that here), after-school art teacher, micro B&B host and gardener. Needless to say, she had accumulated some clutter. She did a complete overhaul on her place, went through every item that she owned, purged and then decided to take an improv comedy class at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Now, somehow, she failed that class. She guesses improv was not the magic that she was after... What she did discover is that she really like cleaning, organizing and letting go of stuff. She also loves helping people sweep the clutter aside to uncover the full potential of their space and their life. So, she started with one client and began developing her own method of minimizing. Listening, observing, and positive affirmations are all an integral part of what she practices with her clients, as well as continued research and mindfulness. With each new project, she finds herself more fully realizing her own potential as a minimizing maven. She currently resides on the top floor of a beautiful sun-drenched brownstone in Bed-stuy, Brooklyn. Connect with Jessy and Minimizing NYC on IG @minmizingnyc and her website minmizingnyc.com In this episode we mention: Marie Kondo's Inspirational Book - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing' Then She Fell, the groundbreaking immersive theater experience by Third Rail Projects in which we both performed for several years before it closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Many of you have competing priorities, personal and work obligations, and it can become challenging to focus on your goals.  Some of you may be taking on so many projects or may be presented with great opportunities that you feel you cannot pass up, but at some point you may be losing sight of your purpose. If you are feeling overwhelmed and trying to reclaim your energy to focus on your goals,  this episode is for you.Episode topics include:Focusing on your mission and your visionWhat is your personal brand?Don't be afraid to say "no"Regain control of your scheduleIdentify your distractionsLinks to resources:Personal Values AssessmentEssentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of LessThe Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing Connect with me:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizherrera1/Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/Website:  https://www.lizcareercoaching.net/Email: lizcareercoaching@gmail.comMusic: https://www.purple-planet.comArtwork: Joseph Valenzuela DesignSupport the show (https://bit.ly/lizcareerpod)

Today I am very excited to have Dr. Leidy Klotz on the show to talk about how we humans have an instinct for adding things. We want more and often don't even think about taking things away. But why is that? Why do we have adding instincts? Why are we so averse to less, and how could we see the value in it?  That is a little of what we talk about today in this conversation which centers around Leidy's new book, Subtract. It's really fascinating and more than mere minimalism. As Leidy says in the conversation, he isn't advocating that less is always better, that you never should want more. Instead, this is more focused on thinking about it; considering the benefit of less before making a choice. Plus, you get to learn about his possibly surprising first career before getting into academia!  Show Notes: [00:06] In today's episode I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Leidy Klotz, author of the new book, Subtract. [03:30] Leidy shares about himself, his background, and how he has gotten to behavioral science.  [05:44] There is a way that people should go and then what they will actually do.   [06:34] Engineering is the creative application of science. There is a huge overlap between engineering, architecture, and behavioral science.  [08:05] People have been doing choice architecture for a long time, it has just been called marketing.  [08:44] Leidy was a professional soccer player and he wrote a book about sustainability through soccer. Soccer is a very systems-oriented sport.  [10:39] He learned a lot of things by playing soccer.   [13:32] He shares what inspired him to write his book, Subtract.  [15:04] When we encounter systems that we can improve in multiple ways, why is our first instinct to add? [16:52] When people try to improve something their first thought is to think about what can we add to this situation to make it better.  [19:01] More often than not, we don't even think about getting rid of something.  [20:52] Instead of a longer list of to-dos, we need a list of “stop doings.”  [23:07] As humans, we want to display our competence.  [25:28] We can also show competence by subtracting, we just have to do more of it for it to be noticeable.  [28:30] You can be a minimalist by not acquiring stuff, but that is not subtracting.  [29:39] Left to our own devices, we are not going to think of taking away.  [30:40] A good lesson is to subtract first. If you subtract first you are more likely to think about it in later situations.   [32:53] Less is not a loss. Less is an improvement. [34:33] We tend to think of add and subtract as opposites. They are not opposites, they are complementary ways to make a change.  [37:06] When you are arguing for subtraction or trying to get people to think of subtraction, help them think about the thing they added elsewhere.  [37:52] When we add something, we are left with the original situation plus whatever we have added. When we take something away, we are left with an improved original situation plus that thing we took away which we can use somewhere else.  [40:22] When you have written something, taking it out is a really hard thing. Leidy and Melina share some about their book writing processes.  [42:22] Melina shares her closing thoughts. [45:15] Melina's award-winning first book, What Your Customer Wants and Can't Tell You is available on Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, and Booktopia.  Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Android. If you like what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes and share what you liked about the show.  I hope you love everything recommended via The Brainy Business! Everything was independently reviewed and selected by me, Melina Palmer. So you know, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. That means if you decide to shop from the links on this page (via Amazon or others), The Brainy Business may collect a share of sales or other compensation. Let's connect: Melina@TheBrainyBusiness.com The Brainy Business® on Facebook The Brainy Business on Twitter The Brainy Business on Instagram The Brainy Business on LinkedIn Melina on LinkedIn The Brainy Business on Youtube Join the BE Thoughtful Revolution – our free behavioral economics community, and keep the conversation going! More from The Brainy Business:

01:35 - Eli's Superpower: Germinating Seeds & Gardening 03:03 - Accessibility in Tech * Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chronic-fatigue-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20360490) * Remote Work 09:16 - Having Conversations with Leadership/Management * Trust & Honesty * Communication * Shame & Guilt; Managing Expectations 18:26 - Team Culture and Support * Setting Good Examples * Reducing Stigma * Removing Onus 20:09 - Human Performance & Safety * People are the source of your success * Pretending Out of Fear and Rejection * Context-Switching 29:09 - Being Who You Are – Sexuality in the Workplace * Battling Thoughts of Deception * “I am allowed to change at any time.” * I Am Me by Virginia Satir (http://www.doallthegood.com/new%20pdfs/I%20AM%20ME.pdf) * Discarding Things That No Longer Fit * The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondō (https://www.amazon.com/Life-Changing-Magic-Tidying-Decluttering-Organizing/dp/1607747308) 37:33 - Sobriety & Drinking Culture Reflections: John: Your marginalizations are not problems to be managed. They're just who you are. Mandy: “I own me and therefore I can engineer me.” (http://www.doallthegood.com/new%20pdfs/I%20AM%20ME.pdf) – Virginia Satir Rein: “I own everything about me, My body including everything it does; My mind including all its thoughts and ideas; My eyes including the images of all they behold; My feelings whatever they may be… anger, joy, frustration, love, disappointment, excitement My Mouth and all the words that come out of it polite, sweet or rough, correct or incorrect; My Voice loud or soft. And all my actions, whether they be to others or to myself.” (http://www.doallthegood.com/new%20pdfs/I%20AM%20ME.pdf) – Virginia Satir Eli: How complicated and complex but beautiful it is to be a person. Make space. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 239. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, John! And I'm here with my friend and a very special co-host, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Thanks, Rein. Hi, everyone! Today, we're here with Eli Holderness. Eli has been in tech for 5 years since graduating in 2016 and has become disabled with CFS a few months into their career, which has really affected how they view the industry and what jobs they've been able to take. They're also genderqueer, bi, ADHD, and Jewish, and they're excited to talk about finally having a job where they can bring their whole self to work. They're quite an extrovert and have been blessed with a strong queer support network since university, and are keen to break down the barriers into tech that shut out other marginalized folk who aren't so lucky as Eli has been. Welcome to the show, Eli. ELI: Hi! Yeah, I'm super excited to be here and really honored to be here for Mandy's first in on the panel. I don't really have a thesis statement for what I want to talk about today, other than I guess, general topics around accessibility and tech, and an interesting aspect of that is things that have changed over the last year with the recent horribleness. MANDY: That sounds great. But first, we have to ask you the question we always ask everyone and that is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? ELI: So my superpower is, if you give me a seed, like a plant seed, I can probably germinate it and it's a double-edged sword. Recently, I saw my parents. I was lucky enough to see my parents early in the year and my mom was making a tie out with Seville oranges and she said, “I've got all these Seville orange seeds. Do you want them?” And long story short, now I have a whole crop of orange seedlings on my windowsill because I just cannot stop myself. I'm not really sure how I acquired it. I think I might have inherited it from my grandmother who grows tomatoes and is a really keen gardener, but my bedroom is slowly being taken over by plants. It's kind of a problem. MANDY: I know the feeling. Ever since the pandemic, I ended up buying 2 plants and now I think I have 15 plants? Yeah, they just keep multiplying, but I'm enjoying having them around. So that's a great superpower to have because I'm either a hit, or miss when it comes to either plants thriving, or plants die. ELI: I've had really bad luck with succulents actually, which is supposed to be the typical you couldn't kill it if you tried, but apparently, maybe I've just got reversed superpowers when it comes to part like it's opposite day every day with me. But no, some of my oranges are doing quite well, so maybe you're manage to keep them alive. That'll be nice. So one of the things I wanted to talk about is just experiences of accessibility and tech. I work 4-day weeks and I have done for a couple of years now. That's about what I can handle with my CFS, which is chronic fatigue syndrome. It basically means my body just sucks. My body is an extended practical joke that God is playing on me. And how various things I hope will change after the pandemic, or we will hopefully see some of the changes in our working patterns maybe persist in ways that they've been helpful to people for accessibility, like being able to work from home obviously is a huge one. But I think there's also been maybe a change in attitudes to meetings, how we schedule our time, and deliberately blocking off time just to work in your calendar so that you're not interruptible and various like, how those things actually can be super necessary for some people, even though we're only now coming around to them as norms in the industry. I don't know if you folks have experiences of how your work has changed and if that's made your work easier, or more difficult. JOHN: My work actually didn't change much as far as the pandemic. My team has been remote for the last decade. ELI: Oh, wow. JOHN: So it didn't change things for that. Although, the rest of the company outside of technology all went remote. So we've been using that opportunity to try and help the rest of the company get up to speed on things you can do to keep the team together while they're working remotely, because we've been building that expertise for a while. That was nice to be able to help other people, get up to speed on what that was when it all happened on such short notice for everyone. And I think I've heard so many people talk, much like you, about hoping that the remote work situation continues afterwards because we've all just had this huge example of work can get done just fine without an office so why are you insisting on an office? Yeah, I think a lot of people are really hoping that sticks. MANDY: Yeah. For me, I feel the same. I've always worked from home. It's funny, my daughter's going to be 12 so I always base the number of years I've worked from home on her age because it was literally when she was born. So it's been 12 years that I've done this. But I will say that over the pandemic, a lot of other people are now coming around to knowing that working from home, while it is a privilege, it's not exactly easy. I've had to put a lot of boundaries in place with my clients and take a lot more self-care because I feel like the pandemic has been a very unique situation. For me, at least, it's not the same as it used to be working from home. Working from home, I had more schedule and regimen and stuff, but now, as I said, my daughter, she's doing remote schooling this year. So there's that, I also, for my mental health, need to work out every day and I just do that when I feel like right now is a good time where I should take a break. I need to get up and do that kind of thing. Back before I used to be like, “Okay, 3 o'clock is the time where I go and work out.” Now it's like, whenever I need a minute, or I'm feeling overwhelmed, or I need a brief break, I go and do it. So I've kind of had to put more boundaries in place and a lot of people are now a lot better about that. I'm not getting excessive pings on my phone, or text messages, “Where are you? Where are you?” I stress to my clients asynchronous like, “I'll be back. I promise, I promise you I will be back, but please don't call me saying, ‘Where are you? Where are you?' [laughs] because I need some time away from the screen.” I find myself much more productive when I sit down and do an hour, or two and then go do something, like the dishes, or the laundry, and then come back for an hour, or two, and then go prepare dinner, or do a doctor's appointment, and then come back for an hour, or two and break up my day in that way. So I think that the pandemic has allowed us to be a lot more accessible in that way and a lot of companies are being much more like you don't have to have butts in chairs from 9:00 to 5:00, or 8:00 to 4:00, or whatever hours those are. ELI: It's interesting for me because one of the things that I lost when we went to work from home because I've always been in an office until this past year, but I, with my ADHD, really benefit from externally imposed structure. I actually gave a talk at a conference back in March, Python web conference, about working from home with ADHD. Having to be work from home and not have the structure of an office has really made me confront a lot of the ways that I was coasting based on that external structure and not really addressing maladaptive behaviors I had. So when we started working from home, I found myself just really procrastinating until I was able to put in place things like, “Okay, don't contact me at this time because I'm going to be head down on a piece of code,” and if I get distracted by something, somebody coming in with a support ticket that needs to be done, I will be thrown off kilter for the entire rest of the day and broke my flow, like break my hyper-focus. So that was something where actually my chronic fatigue was less of a factor in my ability to work over this past year than my ADHD had been, which it flown under the radar for almost my entire life. But one of the things that's been really nice as well as that, the place that I'm at now at the moment, I can just say, “Oh, my brain is full of BS today. I'm not going to be very productive.” A huge part of being able to work as well as I do at the moment is having people who are willing to work with me in the ways that I need, which is really nice and letting me have a 4-day week, which is surprisingly uncommon. I have been turned down from a lot of job interviews and whatnot for needing a 4-day week and that's something I hope we see less off going forward as our industry accepts that a more flexible working pattern can still be useful, productive, and valuable. MANDY: Yeah, I agree. So how do you bring up conversations with people you work with, or your bosses, or management team? What do you say? How do you tell them what your individual needs are and what are their reactions? ELI: So the place I'm working at the moment, Anvil, it's a really small team. There's 8 of us and it's pretty flat structure as well. While I have the two co-founders, Meredydd and Ian, they run things as it were, but it's not a traditional, I guess, management. I don't feel beholden to them in the same way that I would to like, they're not my boss exactly, but they do pay my salary, but they're not my bosses in that sense. So if I say to them, “Look, I'm not going to be able to get this thing done because I just can't focus today,” or multiple times I said, “Oh, my brain is full of BS. My brain is too full of sludge today. I'm going to take a nap.” I did that today. The trust is there for them to say, “Okay, go do that and you'll get your work done when you get your work done.” So when I bring things up, like we have regular check-ins, or whatever, I might say, “Oh, I've been in a rut lately and I think I really need to change what I'm working on,” or how I'm working on it. This thing isn't working, that thing isn't working and whether, or not it's because of one of the weird ways that my brain, or my body is, they just handle it as if it were a need. There's no fuss just because it's a rising from a way that I am outside the norm, which I think is the ideal way to handle it because obviously, every person is unique and what we define as norms, or any vague clusterings of behaviors and traits that we see in people. It's just the most common way for a person to be, but everybody is going to differ from it in some way. I have had experiences in the past when the trust hasn't been there and I've said “Something's not working,” or “I'm struggling,” and a manager has just not, I guess, believed that I was being genuine, thought I was skiving, and that has been some of the worst experiences. I think that's where some of the dark side of inaccessibility and it's not just in tech. That could be in any workplace is when there isn't trust between you and the person that you serve, the person you're working for, the person who's representing your employer to you. When I say my views on accessibility have really shaped the way that I view the industry and what jobs I've taken, that's one of the key things that has to be there is my managers have to trust that I'm being honest about my abilities and my needs. And that's true for anyone, but I think it becomes particularly weighty when you're talking about things that arise from marginalizations. JOHN: And do you find that that's trust that you have to build up in relationship with those managers, or it has to be there from the beginning, because from the beginning, you're going to need some way to work with them and build some flexibility into your working relationship? ELI: So the relationships I'm thinking of where that trust has been present, and they've been really fruitful and positive relationships, it has been there just from the start, or given on faith, as it were. As I say, I became disabled fairly early on, it was three months out of university—fantastic, right—and I had just had a new manager. There has just been a shakeup in the management chain and the manager who I was then placed with had never known me not being ill and I was dealing with suddenly being ill, not knowing what was happening to me, and so on. I think it would have been a very different experience had he trusted me that I was being honest and not just trying to skive and get away with being in a cushy software job without doing any work, which is very much how that situation did play out. I think if the trust isn't there from the start, it's going to be very hard to earn and I think that part of hiring somebody and expecting them to work with you, if you don't trust them to be able to do that and manage their needs, expectations, and abilities, you have no business hiring them, in my opinion. JOHN: It struck me like, as you were saying that, that if the person is coming to that situation as, “Oh, you've got to always keep an eye on people because they're always trying to get one over on you and find ways to not work very hard,” or whatever. That person is never going to have a fantastic relationship with their rapports and then once you add in the other marginalizations on top of that, it just goes down and he'll leave him faster. ELI: And that's something that I think we've seen over the last year with reluctance, or resistance to moving to work from home, where if somebody who is managing has been very used to being able to walk around and see what's on everyone's screens and have this sense that they are keeping an eye on. They're making sure nobody is secretly playing Minecraft for 8 hours a day, or whatever. But moving to work from home requires that trust and it reminds me of there's some advice I've had about having a long-distance romantic relationship where you've got to be really, really good at trust and communication. Those are two things that you should have in any serious relationship whether romantic, or not. I think that maybe working from home over the last year has exposed, in some relationships, but I think about work relationships where those things haven't been present. But it's not that working from home created them as that it exposed them and the companies, I think that are doing the best now at maintaining and building those relationships between co-workers in their management structure are ones that probably already had that and probably has set themselves up for success by just having a healthy environment to begin with. MANDY: So I have a tendency when I start with a new client—I'm an independent contractor; I work for several companies—my tendency is to always under promise and over deliver and then I do that and I'm really good at doing that. But then things inevitably come up, I get sick, and then I feel like I'm letting them down because it's like well, they expect the bar to be here and now it's down here. And then I'm disappointing them and they're like, “Well, where's the Mandy that we hired?” and it's like, well, you did hire that Mandy, but that Mandy is not here today. Do you have those feelings, first of all, and if you do, how do you deal with them? ELI: Yeah, the guilt. Whenever I have to take a day off sick, my goodness and it has definitely been compounded by the experiences that I've had of not being trusted. If I say that I need to take a day off sick and people go, “Oh, well, couldn't you come in anyway?” I've been very fortunate in the last couple of jobs that I've had where I've had really, really supportive relationships with managers that were full of trust. So I'm slowly starting to creep back from that a little bit. One of the ways that I think I got to that point, though, or one of the things that really helped me was upfront managing expectations. So I take days off now when I get sick, as opposed to having overdone it with fatigue and it's got to a point in my fatigue where I need to take days off just to rest by cutting back to 4 days a week. That's one of the things where I say actually, I'm going to factor in that Eli isn't here today, that Eli won't be here one day a week. So don't hire me on that day and that was a choice I made because I wanted to stay in work, essentially. That was the only way I could consistently, in good faith, promise to be able to deliver a consistent amount of at the time being in the office. That's the big thing that I've done. I think there's a lot of shame that comes with having a chronic illness, not being at your best 100% as well. I think that in the tech industry, in particular, there's this mentality of you've got to hustle. The rockstar developer and admitting that you can't be that. I even said the word admitting as if it was a failure, but stating that that's not possible for you can be seen as and can certainly feel like it being a failure and that's not fun, but at the same time for me, it's certainly true. I'm never going to be a rockstar developer putting in 70-hour weeks and cranking out loads of code. That's just not me. So tackling that head on and just admitting it and saying, “If this is a problem, then it's not going to work out.” I have had a lot of places that I have been pinged by recruiters and then I say, “I can do a 4-day week. These are the terms that I can work on,” and they don't want it and that's their call to make. I hope that that will change. I hope that will change soon as a result of the recognition that flexible working [chuckles] is good actually for parents, for people with disabilities, for all kinds of people. But that's one of the big ways that I've managed those feelings and cut down on the situations where there's feelings of rise, but it's definitely it's something I massively relate to. I still do struggle to take time off and I'm really lucky at the moment to have. I had my checkup with Ian this week and one of the first things he said was, “When you're going to take some time off soon?” because I've been working a lot recently and that was really lovely. So having supportive coworkers and they lead by example as well, they take time off just whatever, and it's great and it doesn't make us less productive, or I think it makes us healthier as a team and it certainly helps me navigate all the issues that I have surrounding it, which are myriad. JOHN: You touched on an interesting point right there at the end there about how not only is it useful for you to have obviously management buy-in with working and the flexibility that you need, but having the team culture of everybody around you, also them taking the time that they need and working on the flexes that they need to flex is an incredibly important part of supporting you in feeling like it's okay for you to do those things. ELI: Yeah. It reminds me of, I guess, the push to put pronouns in your bio, or your screenname regardless of whether, or not you are somebody who people get your pronouns wrong. Because there's this phenomenon where strictly speaking, something is allowed, but if it's outside the norm, you still feel odd. You might feel ashamed of doing it. So even if you are allowed to take mental health days at your place of work, if nobody else does, you're still not allowed. Socially, you're not allowed almost. So setting healthy norms opens doors for everybody, including those who need the doors open for them, as it were. Like me. [laughs] I don't always have the energy to advocate for myself because of the reasons that I need to advocate for myself. Leading by example on the part of the people that I work with and the people who have the clout organizationally, even though we have quite a flat structure at Anvil. That's one of the things my manager at my last place as well, was really, really fantastic about was setting good examples. Definitely reducing the stigma around taking care of yourself, removing the onus from the person who will have the hardest time advocating for themselves. REIN: Well, I think there's a pretty general statement here, which is that managers that don't trust their employees are bad managers. ELI: I think it's very hard to be a good manager if you don't trust your employees. I'm thinking of, it's not in tech, but I did work a retail job and I think across that industry, that's just it. That's not a thing; you're not trusted by your manager if you work in retail just as a default. The places where you are a unicorn land rare. I think I would agree with that general statement. I hesitate to make sweeping statements just in general because humans are so fast, complex, and complicated that there will almost always be a counterexample to whatever sweeping statement. But I think trust has to be the basis of any healthy relationship. If you're working together towards some shared goal as a relationship is whether, or not that's to have fun hanging out, or to get some work done, you have to trust that you're both committed to that, I suppose and lacking that trust for why you hired that person, why they're working for you, I suppose. REIN: In human factors on safety science, there's an old view of human performance, which is that people are a problem to be managed. People make mistakes; they have to be trained, they have to be watched, they have to be supervised. They can't be trusted to make decisions. People are a problem to be managed. The way you get a safer workplace is by dealing with problem employees and making sure that they don't screw up. The new view of human performance and safety is that people are the source of your success. ELI: Thinking about humans as problems and eventually, by eliminating any aspect of humanity that causes problems, you're just going to end up with nothing. It reminds me of that bot that was trained to debug code basis and it just deleted the code base. It was like, “There's no bugs because there's no code!” And there'll be no problems with us no humans, but there'll be no success either. REIN: So I think that managers who look at people like they're a problem to be managed are the source of a lot of these issues. ELI: Yeah, that definitely resonates with me in the sense that that's how I felt in my negative experiences, especially when it comes to managing my ability to work and viewing my marginalizations as problems to be managed instead of just ways that I am. REIN: Yeah. ELI: Which is a difficult one to navigate with chronic fatigue. I didn't always have this disability and it has limited my life, but it's also, I think made me think very deeply about things that I wouldn't have otherwise. So in my case, I think there's been a silver lining and now it is a part of the way that I am and you can take it, or leave it, but it's a package deal with me working for you, or me being friends with you, or me being part of your D&D group and it has to be accepted and can't be managed away. I think that's been the case as well with my other marginalizations Mandy rattled rattling off the whole litany of various things that I am and I have definitely had instances. So for example, with my Jewishness, where I have been expected not to bring it to work almost. Of course, in the UK, we don't actually have separation of church and state, we are actually a Christian country. Everyone does Christmas and you've got all the loads of the bank holidays and what not, Easter. Whenever I would make a remark that I did not fall into this norm, and actually I would be celebrating Passover instead of Easter and it was a slightly different time, it was viewed as like I was causing problems for being different almost even though it was just an aspect of the way that I am. So I think that's an attitude that definitely pervades and it's definitely harmful on more axes than just disability and ability to work. MANDY: I actually think that that's an attitude that that needs to go. I've worked for people where I've totally been afraid to be my best self because I'm afraid they'll fire me. Like, I pretended to be a conservative for a very long time with a client and boy, was that stressful! [laughs] For me, a lot of it is fear and being rejected and then all of a sudden, I don't have a job and then all of a sudden, I can't pay my bills and then it just spirals from there. So it leads to a lot of almost pretending to be someone that I'm not for fear of looking good, or looking a certain way, or being perceived as a certain person and it becomes really, really stressful. ELI: The way that I handled being genderqueer is I just based on vibes whether, or not I'm going to come out and at what stage. So at my current place, on my first day, I was like, “By the way, I use they/them pronouns. I'm genderqueer,” and absolutely plain sailing. It was totally fine. A couple of jobs ago, I decided not to and let everyone just assume that I was a woman, which is how I present essentially, or that's what most people assume by looking at me. Part of the reason for that was that the CTO was a Trump supporter who, it was one of the people who had jokes for everybody in the office. He had little funny jabs that he would make. “Funny jabs” and his funny jab for me was that I drank instant coffee and it was not real coffee. I just thought if he is going to make fun of me every morning for not drinking real coffee, what kind of fun is he going to make of me for not having a real gender and I thought, you know what, safer probably just to not bring it up. It is stressful and I felt dishonest and I'm not sure if I were in the same situation now, I'd be looking for another job, but I'm not. [chuckles] But being able to bring your whole self to work, I definitely tried before and been rebuffed and this is the first time that I think it's sticking with my current place, which is such a joy, honestly. I cannot overstate it and part of it is an intentional effort on the people creating and it's enshrining the culture to allow that. I think there's probably some truth to the idea that with norms the way that they are and with norms that don't allow you to be your whole self and that will punish you for being certain ways, it does require an active effort on people creating culture to go against that, which is a shame because if you're trying to get a business up and running, that might not be your highest priority, but as soon as you let it slip even a little bit, it's just going to spiral. JOHN: Yeah. You're right that it takes intentional effort that a culture like that does not happen by accident, or just falls into that. [laughs] One of the things I'm curious about is were are you able to suss out that aspect of the culture before you started this job, or did you get there and then realize that you'd locked into it? ELI: One of the things that was funny about what I was interviewing for this job was that I'd actually met one of the founders. We met at a social event in Cambridge briefly and I think not caught his name, not followed up, but we met, talked briefly, really vibed. And then when I went to this interview for oh, it's a developer advocate job, that sounds great. The company looks nice. The product is cool. And I went into the interview and I was like, “Oh, it's you!” Somebody that I'd met briefly, really got along with. One of the things that Anvil did and that Meredydd and Ian did was, very deliberately, make sure that they were trying to be gender inclusive in their hiring from a very early stage. So even when I interviewed, there were four people and one of the core platform developers was a woman. I say was as if she's not with the company anymore; she is. [chuckles] Very early on in me working at Anvil, one of the things that one of them said to me was we were very conscious that if we got to a stage where it was 10 men and we're trying to hire our first woman, that woman being interviewed is not going to be inclined to take the job and be the only woman in the room with 10 guys. I guess, I got lucky in the sense that they found the woman candidate, Bridget, who was incredible and that they didn't happen to end up finding that the best candidate every single time was a guy. But they're certainly intentional and it's something that we send her when we're trying to find new people as well because it's done us well so far! It's something that I have looked for in the past as well is when I've said, thinking about which jobs I'm able to take, trust with the managers and the ability to be myself, because it's so exhausting when you have to create and impersonate a whole other person. MANDY: There is a lot of context switching. ELI: Oh, yes. I'm trying to remember who's out where. My fiancé is genderqueer as well and there was a time when we were each out at each other's jobs, but we weren't out at our own jobs. So we were each being read as a cisgender at our own jobs, but with a genderqueer partner and it was just so confusing. I barely got enough brain to handle my day job, [laughs] let alone being two, or three different people in different places. MANDY: Now, I'm curious about that, if I can ask. So I'm actually going through that right now. I'm bisexual and not a lot of people know that and it's like, “Do I need to make a grand announcement?” ELI: I just like to pepper into conversation that I think Lucy Lou is really hot, or something. I don't know. It's a hard one. That's how I came out to my parents is that I was just loudly interested in women in front of them and never really said anything, but it's too much to my memory. I got very lucky with my parents as well because my younger brother is transgender as well. He actually came out before me and paved the way and so, when it came time to come out to them as genderqueer, I just gave him a phone call. I said, “By the way, I'm genderqueer. My friends are using they pronouns for me. You can, if you want,” and just left it. No, that is a difficult thing. Coming out, it's hard at any stage because that I've always felt is that I fear I've deceived people, but actually it's not me. It's the norms and assumptions that are being made completely in good faith by people that's not necessarily the people are being malicious when they assume me to be a woman, or assume me to be straight, but that I have to inform them that they're wrong and that's scary. I don't like conflict and oh, there's a potential for conflict here because I have to tell them that they're wrong and nobody likes to be wrong. Nobody likes to have made an incorrect assumption. It's difficult every time and I think the way that I get through it these days is just by being obnoxiously confident of people. Just saying, “Oh, if you were taking it back. I'm sorry, get over it.” [laughs] MANDY: Yeah, I've just been slowly peppering it into the people I trust and it's like I do feel that level of deceit. I'm like these people have known me as a straight woman for—I'm not going to disclose my age—this many years and now all of a sudden, she's not? Like, is this a phase, is this a – you have those people and then to me, people who have been queer, or bi, am I gay enough? Am I – you know? [laughs] So it's like there's this whole spectrum of I don't know where I am, somebody please help me! [laughs] ELI: Oh, that am I gay enough? I still have that. So I'm genderqueer and I've had top surgery. I wanted to have a flat chest and I was able to do that and sometimes, I still go, “But I'm not trans enough to have done that.” [laughs] The level to which you can absorb that kind of rhetoric, it's really quite impressive actually. Am I gay enough? Gay enough of what? Yeah, and the thing about is it a phase, “Everything's a phase, mum, show me the permanent state of the self, there's no such thing.” MANDY: One of my favorite affirmations is I am allowed to change at any time. I like to look at myself in the mirror and if I decide I'm with a woman and then all of a sudden, it doesn't work out and I want to go back to being with a man and I'm stringing. Again, I am allowed to change any time. I don't owe anybody that and I'm working on that. It's taken a lot of therapy for me to get to that stage, [chuckles] but all I owe is to myself. ELI: I have a friend who had been going through a crisis of identity and basically to me, it seemed very clear that they were much, much happier in one label than the other and so, to me, that's what automated the decision. But obviously, it's not so clear when you're in the middle of it and one thing I said to them that I helped was, “Even if you turned around tomorrow and said, ‘Oh no, I'm actually this other thing.' If you lose any friends for that and somebody says, ‘Oh, you are fraud. You were lying to me all this time.' That wasn't your friend to start with. It will be okay.” You are allowed to change. You are allowed to decide where and how and what label makes you comfortable and which behaviors in yourself you want to celebrate, or accentuate. MANDY: Yeah. I feel like that's very important to hear. As I've been navigating this, this past few years, I've realized I'm not alone. So I think some of the listeners out there, if you are going through new identity crisis, or I'm not going to call it an identity crisis, but if you're struggling with who you are, I think everybody is to one extent, or another. Even as a person, not just a gay person, or not just as a straight person, or not just as a political person, I think everyone out there is just struggling; who am I and right now, especially. ELI: Yeah, that's something that with this friend I was discussing is the idea of an objective truth about yourself and whether, or not that exists. Would I be a ciswoman if this thing of my past was different, or I'd had a different balance of hormones while I was in the womb, or any of those ways that people try to find causes, or pathologize, or rationalize the ways in which humans are complex, different, and unique. I think I found comfort and peace in the idea that there isn't necessarily an objective truth buried at the heart of me underneath layers of experience, or whatever. I am who I am at this moment; that is broadly continuous one moment to the next, but it might change. At some point, I will have found that I've crossed a boundary over time maybe. I used to identify as a woman and then I don't think anything about myself abruptly changed, but one day, I was like, “No, actually I'm not. Yeah, women are great, but I'm not one. I'm not one of them.” That's not dishonest and it's not disingenuous to change over time, or to find that your surroundings have changed around you and that you relate to them differently. So for example, going back to the oh, what if the objective truth about myself, if I had grown up in a culture where being a woman looks different than it does now, or than it has in my life, I might have thought differently about my gender over time. But that doesn't mean that the way that I am is not real. REIN: This gives me the opportunity I've been looking for to name drop Virginia Satir. [chuckles] ELI: Ooh. REIN: She wrote a poem that I really love called I Am Me and I'll just read a little bit of it. It says, “However I look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me. If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought, and felt turned out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest and invent something new for that which I discarded.” And later it says, “I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me.” ELI: As someone with a customized body, I love that. [laughs] MANDY: I love that. ELI: I love that as a way to approach therapy as well. I'm somewhere for whom, I'm very lucky in the what is recommended as the basic bitch first line therapy here in the UK, cognitive behavioral therapy, works well for me. And that is very much, I am objective looking at my thoughts and trying to encourage the ones that I agree with and discourage the ones I don't; engineering debug my brain. REIN: It might not surprise you that she was a family therapist. ELI: I like that. More therapists should be poets, [chuckles] in my opinion. I've had therapists that have said some incredibly profound things. I like the idea of as well, the imagery of discarding things which no longer fit you whether that's labels, or behaviors, or friendship groups, or political alignments, or whatever in the same way that you would with clothes. This is something where I've recently read Marie Kondo's incredible book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, and really loved the idea of everything you own which sparks joy and that you can look at something which no longer fits you and say, “Thank you for the role you've played in my life. It's over now,” and put it away and donate to charity, or whatever. I think applying that same method to non-physical aspects of our lives that we've outgrown that need to be put away, I think it certainly helped me to avoid the sense of shame, or guilt, or feeling disingenuous that comes with growing and changing as a person. MANDY: I feel the same applies to sobriety, which is also a thing that I struggle with. Like, drinking alcohol? It was fun while it lasted. We had some good times. We had some not so good times, but it no longer serves me so we're not going to do that anymore. [chuckles] ELI: Yeah. That's another axis on which I want to circle back to accessibility and tech because here in the UK, we have a really strong drinking culture and from my understanding, it varies across the States and but here in the UK, it is very much we are getting drunk at house parties from our early teens. The first place I worked had a very strong drinking culture. All of your work relationships were to be strengthened down the pub over a pint. Every work party was drink-y. I have a friend who is teetotal not due to, as far as I know, any religious, just a completely personal choice and actually that was one of the factors in them leaving that role at that company was because they were not allowed to be their whole self at work because being at work meant drinking to a certain extent, if you want it to be successful, popular, get the good projects and obviously, that locks so many people out. People who are sober for whatever reason. People who might not be drinking because they might be pregnant. People who just don't like to drink. [overtalk] MANDY: [inaudible] drinking. ELI: Yeah. People for religious reasons, or health reasons. It's one that I think again, sing the praises of my current place, when we hang out COVID safe ways we dislike lunchtime picnics and stuff and we've got new parents at our company who we want to be able to include in social gatherings and make sure that it's not predicated on drinking and being out late to be able to socialize with your coworkers, if you choose that that's something that you want. I think it's probably another thing where you have to take an active stance on it. So it's not to just absorb paradigms from the greatest society that you're embedded in. MANDY: I'm not going to say I'm not nervous for running conferences on Zoom because conferences do have a very big drinking culture and that's a socializing thing and I'm very nervous about how I'm going to navigate that. It just seems like it's everywhere, but I've come to the place where I'm just going to say no and I have some fancy mocktails I like so that's what I'll be doing. [chuckles] ELI: Yeah. Something I really liked recently was—I do drink and I do like to drink—but I was at Python web conference and after the day it was done of talks and things, there was fun social event afterwards and it was all virtual because it's March and it was somebody making cocktails in their kitchen and showing us all of his fancy cocktail gear and the virgin ones, the non-alcoholic ones were given equal parity, like time and attention were paid to them. It was just presented as completely not noteworthy at all that somebody might not drink alcohol and I think that was a really nice way of framing it. It was just, here is the alcoholic question and here is non-alcoholic version and there's no value judgment being made about the two. I think that was also an active choice on behalf of the person doing that presentation and the people organizing the conference. But so many different ways that not paying attention to these things can lock people out of the industry and contribute to that good old leaky pipeline that we all know and love. JOHN: When we come to the end of every show, we like to do what we call reflections, which is to talk about the things that struck us about the conversations, or the ideas that we're going to be thinking about later. For me, something you said Eli, just recently was that your marginalizations are not problems to be managed rather they're just the way you are, they're just who you are is such a powerful statement about identity and how it should be thought about and treated that I really didn't like the phrasing of it is something that can be just repeated to drill it into everybody's head. MANDY: For me, I really liked the Virginia Satir poem that Rein shared, especially the last bit of “I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me.” I think that is so relevant and such a good way for everyone to keep in mind. I really believe that people shouldn't be afraid of change. No, let me say that again because I think you can be afraid of change, but it's going to be okay and you are allowed to be afraid of change and it can be overwhelming and it can be scary, but you can get through it and I'm going to get through it. Thank you for allowing me to tell a little bit of my truth for the first time and in the tech world and on this podcast! JOHN: It's really great to have you on the show, finally. Your show. REIN: Yeah, you know in Lincoln, the welcome to your house scene? This is like the welcome to your podcast scene. MANDY: It's not just my podcast. It's all of ours. ELI: Bugs Bunny meme. Oh, podcast. REIN: I thought I might close this out by reading another part of that poem. She says, “I own everything about me. My body including everything it does. My mind including all its thoughts and ideas. My eyes including the images of all they behold. My feelings, whatever they may be—anger, joy, frustration, disappointment, excitement. My mouth and all of the words that come out of it—rude, or polite, sweet, or rough, correct, or incorrect. My voice loud, or soft. And all of my actions, whether they be to others, or to myself.” MANDY: I love that. Thank you. Eli, how about you? ELI: I guess I'm just thinking about all the different ways that people can be and how complicated, complex, beautiful, different, and diverse it is to be a person, the same person over time even. If space isn't made for that, including, or not including things that we understand to be marginalizations in our current model, it harms people and the places that put effort into making space for people to be people in all the messy, complex, weird ways that they are. I've got to do better! That's well deserved. REIN: Yeah, it turns out that that's good business, but it's also the right thing to do. ELI: Fully agreed, yeah. MANDY: Well, again, thank you so much for coming on the show, Eli. It has been absolutely wonderful having you and I'm so glad it's been you here to be on my first episode as a panelist of Greater Than Code and for listeners out there, I hope you like what you've heard and maybe you'll see a little bit of me in the future. But if you would also like to talk to the rest of the panel, we do have a Patreon at patreon.com/greaterthancode. You can join it for as little as a dollar and if you cannot support it, or you don't want to support it, just get in contact with me and I will let you in anyway. Thank you for much for listening and hopefully, I will talk to you very soon. Special Guest: Eli Holderness.

Resources mentioned in this podcast: Matthew Dicks' Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling; Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing; Brad Gustafson's Reclaiming Our Calling: Hold on to the Heart, Mind, and Hope of Education; click to register your class for nErDcampCT Jr or please share nErDcampCT Jr with students you know who are in grades K - 12 (Sessions for students occur on Friday, June 11th and Saturday, June 12, 2021; link to the nErDcampCT Jr. schedule) Click here to register for nErDcampCT (the adult program for teachers and librarians on Saturday, June 12, 2021) --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/valerie-dilorenzo/message

This episode is all about when life feels entirely out of control. Previous episodes have focused on learning to live life through the lens of "discovery." The problem is that when life feels upside down, "life as discovery" is meaningless. What first needs to happen is to stop drowning! This episode is all about how to patch the gaping holes of life so we can get our boat afloat again.Please consider supporting this podcast:Give monthly (as little as $5 a month) on our Patreon Page - https://www.patreon.com/ltrGive a one time gift through Venmo at @mattboettgerGive a one time gift through PayPal here - https://paypal.me/mattboettgerThings Discussed In Episode (some links may be affiliate links where I receive a small commission for the recommendation) :Boundaries Updated and Expanded Edition: When to Say Yes, How to Say No To Take Control of Your Life by Henry Cloud and John TownsendDecisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work by Chip and Dan HeathThe Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry SchartzThe Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie KondoLiving the Real, Episode 9: Making Molehills out of MountainsFinancial Peace University by Dave RamseyThe ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary KellerSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/ltr)

Whether or not you've had the opportunity to go full Marie Kondo on your home just yet (I'm right there with you), there's still so much to learn from “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”. Today's episode takes a look at the teachings of Marie Kondo through the Tiffany Han lens in what I consider to be more of a decluttering of the soul. Get ready to zoom up and out of that one drawer you've been fixating on, may it be a literal kitchen drawer or more of a metaphorical mental cabinet, and dive into the life-changing magic that you know we love to throw around here on the Tiffany Han Show. Resources mentioned:  Marie Kondo Marie Kondo's book: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing' The Tim Ferriss Show #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb Tiffany's Radical Delight Kickstart Follow Tiffany on Instagram! For detailed show notes head to www.tiffanyhan.com/blog/episode365  

Whether or not you’ve had the opportunity to go full Marie Kondo on your home just yet (I’m right there with you), there’s still so much to learn from “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”. Today’s episode takes a look at the teachings of Marie Kondo through the Tiffany Han lens in what I consider to be more of a decluttering of the soul. Get ready to zoom up and out of that one drawer you’ve been fixating on, may it be a literal kitchen drawer or more of a metaphorical mental cabinet, and dive into the life-changing magic that you know we love to throw around here on the Tiffany Han Show. Resources mentioned:  Marie Kondo Marie Kondo’s book: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing' The Tim Ferriss Show #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb Tiffany’s Radical Delight Kickstart Follow Tiffany on Instagram! For detailed show notes head to www.tiffanyhan.com/blog/episode365  

In this week's episode, Sammie and Michelle discuss minimalism.   They talk about how they have become increasingly minimalist over the years and give tips on how to reduce consumption.  Show NotesBiggerPockets Money Podcast 186: Finance Friday: Using Student Loan Forgiveness to Catapult FI w/ SammieThese Are The 6 Types of Minimalists. Which One Are You? by TARYN WILLIFORDThe Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie KondōGood Use website to help get rid of thingsNow and Then timetracking appInstagram: @statuspostadultingGmail: statuspostadulting@gmail.comBuzzsprout website: https://statuspostadulting.buzzsprout.com/

Today I want to talk about another book that has been changing my life. I was unaware, but it is a widely known book called the Artist's Way. I would not classify myself as an artist. I mean, when I hear the world artist, I think of one who paints for a living, or someone who is creating actual art work and that is their job and they hang out at street fairs to sell their work. However, I have learned that really, we are all artists! We are artists of our lives! Learn how to go on a journey to self discovery where you will find more creativity, happiness and energy! ---------------------------------- Helpful Resources in this Episode: ---------------------------------- * This post contains affiliate links which means I can make a small profit at no cost to you. * Continue the declutter journey from my last episode! Need a jumpstart? Get this book: The The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1607747308/ref=as_li_tl?camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1607747308&ie=UTF8&linkCode=as2&linkId=2d4a0e4f3169679816f63069716dec01&tag=wrinkles7475-20 ) * Get on a spiritual path to higher creativity and so much more with the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. ( https://amzn.to/3uAq5cv ) * This Erin Condren journal with dot paper ( https://amzn.to/2PifSkP ) will definitely be my next purchase! Click on the link and see a ton of her beautiful journals. Getting a brand new journal really motivated me to do the morning pages. I just picked up a random one at Target, but had I known how much I would love Morning Pages, I would have purchased an Erin Condren! * Click here ( https://amzn.to/3qTj3NL ) to get the hippy stickers that I bought for my journal and absolutely LOVE!!! * I also bought these monthly journaling stickers ( https://amzn.to/3pYXgCQ ) too! * These Happy Planner stickers ( https://amzn.to/3svGoFM ) are the ones I use to motivate myself! When I finish a task, I get to mark it off with one of these stickers! * Getting new pens is also super motivating! Check out these colorful ones ( https://amzn.to/37Pgbdc ) that I purchased on Amazon! Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Episode Notes:Now is a great time to re-evaluate how you’re using the space in your home or office. Decluttering and donating those items that don’t fit your current lifestyle can make room for new ideas, experiences, and things to enter in the coming months.May this episode free yourself from any chaos that has crept in around you and live the vibrant life that you truly want.Resources:Connect to your purpose and elevate your wellness:**Get My NEW 15-minute Self-Care Guided Meditation** for $3.95 CAD.FREE Guide: Streamline Your Self-CareOnline Wellness ProgramsInstagram: @sheilaabotelhoResources Mentioned:The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by Marie KondoRate, Review & Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:“I love Sheila’s insights on The Connect Podcast.”

We've got a GREAT episode of The BibRave Podcast for you this week! Tim and Jess talk with Cassidy Nasello, founder of FELT: a coaching and organization-focused consultancy.  Cassidy is certified in the KonMari Method™ of decluttering (as discussed on Episode 120 of The BibRave Podcast) and shares her perspective on leveraging various tools and frameworks to improve our (running, personal, professional) lives. As runners, we're all motivated to get better and healthier, and Cassidy's insight is super helpful in framing how we can make small adjustments to unlock significant gains.  For a deeper podcast dive, check out this week's show notes

Debt can weigh you down mentally and that's why I brought in Financial coach, Katy Almstrom. Katy lives in NH with her husband and two young kids. She is a financial coach who's particularly skilled at helping women improve their money habits and behaviors, including learning how to pay off debt and get excited about their money plan! In this episode we cover: How Katy got herself out of debt Is there such a thing as “good debt” How not having a budget is like not having a shopping list. How to handle money during the pandemic Steps for getting out of debt Katy's Book Recommendations: Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey Playing Big: Find Your Voice, Your Vision and Make Things Happen by Tara Mohr The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Condo Atomic Habits by James Clear Katy's favorite budgeting app: https://www.everydollar.com/ Her Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thesimplifiedbudget That it! Continue the More than a Single Mom Conversation here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/singlemompodcast

Spiraling emotions. You likely know the feeling. Everything inside you is firing. Your heart is pounding, and your head is spinning. You feel those spiraling emotions, and you feel as if you are drowning. No? Anybody? I've talked to enough women out there to know I am not alone in this battle. So what is your plan? What will you do the next time you feel those spiraling emotions? I do believe that internal peace is possible, because Jesus promised He has already given it to us! But I also know Scripture tells us we must hold and maintain our peace (Proverbs 17:28, Matthew 5:9), and we must be constantly renewed in our minds. (Ephesians 4:23) So yes we have peace! But we also have some work to do. So in this episode I lay out a plan for proactively resetting my mind and holding my peace when in the midst of spiraling emotions. Find all Scripture references from this episode at http://jennyzentz.com/podcast-spiraling-emotions *Resources mentioned in this episode: Kelly Minter The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, Marie Kondo The Perfect You: A Blueprint for Identity, Dr. Caroline Leaf The Next Right Thing Podcast with Emily P. Freeman Lavender Essential Oil Wild Orange Essential Oil Chill Pill Roll-on Essential Oil And please don't forget to subscribe and share. Together we can help more women discover practical ways to apply the power of God's Word to our everyday stuff! Follow Jenny on FB and IG @JennyZentz *Please note any resource links are affiliate links. I will receive a small percentage from purchases made through them to help compensate for the time, effort and cost of content creation. Happy Shopping!

Does it bring you joy?  Have you ever asked yourself this question?  If you have heard of Marie Kondo you know that is her main question.  Marie Kondo is famous for her book 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing'.  This week I talk about my experience with the “KonMari” method and what it has done for me.  Why do you allow things in your life if they don't bring you joy? Instead of ignoring all the stuff around you, noticing whether something brings you joy or takes away from your joy will help you create a happier you!  The more things you have around you that bring you joy, the more little happy moments you get in your day.  When something doesn't bring you joy then you need to figure out how to reconfigure it and make it work for you…or figure out how to let it go.  Re-purpose it or donate it and let it bring someone else Joy! Through this exercise you become more aware of what's around you and you become proactive in creating  a positive environment for yourself.  If something is in your life but it doesn't bring you joy or serve you, then why are you letting it stay?  I found that noticing what brings me joy every day makes me grateful for all I have.  The more proactive you are in creating your happy life, the more empowered you feel. 

Minimalist practices drastically changed my life three years ago. Tune in to learn how minimalism can help you create more space in your home, in your mind and on your calendar. Mentions (affiliate links included): -The Year of Less by Cait Flanders -Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix -The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing -ThredUp Clean Out Kit Let's connect: Develop Your Dream on Instagram - http://instagram.com/developyourdreampodcast Develop Your Dream on Twitter - http://twitter.com/devyourdream --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/developyourdream/support

For the first full season episode of the @Peace Warriors Podcast, we begin by exploring the most important first step of the "9 Pillars of Self-Care" (taking care of ourselves) which is getting our environment or Home in order. I utilize the work of Japanese organizing consultant, Marie Kondo, and her bestselling book, "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing," to go deeper on the concept of organizing and decluttering home. Next, we delve into being grateful for being alive and all that means to be alive as a human that we can meet with gratitude. After that, we go into warrior mode and read excerpts from Chogyam Trunpa's "Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior," while exploring the idea of basic human wisdom and non-religous/sectarian guiding knowledge for society. Lastly, I talk about two upcoming events this Saturday (11/17/18) in Hartford: "A Little Bit of Death Part 3" created by Zulynette Morales and the 8th Annual Knox Harvest Market. Hit me up on Instagram @poshgibson and @peacewarriorspodcast with your thoughts and feelings on these topics. www.instagram.com/poshgibson www.instagram.com/peacewarriorspodcast Also, please check out my badass writing, cards, & books at: www.ChrisPressley.art Thanks for listening! You are Love & You are Loved! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/at-peace-warriors/support

    Hailing from Olympia, WA, Erica Van Lierop has owned and operated Vans Burger since it's inception 18 years ago. After a long career in restaurants and hotels, Van Lierop decided to settle down and open an old fashioned drive through concept. The consistency in quality and freshness that results from this business model has propelled Van's Burger to the top of the Washington Burger Scene, despite being known as the burger place that is never open Show notes… Favorite Success Quote or Mantra. "Tomorrows happiness starts today." In this episode with Erica Van Leirop, we discuss: How Erica's first "restaurant boss" treated her like family, how that made her felt, and how she is different today because of it.   Establishing a culture of service. Not letting others be in charge of your destiny.  In a drive-up business model, positioning the intercom a set car length away so when the food finishes the car is just rolling up. Responding and pivoting to market demand and needs.  Tracking guest request to know how to pivot and adapt to the market.  How Erica makes the most of her highway reader sign. The power of doing few things really well. Using good communication to focus on the guest you already and growing that loyalty. Being active in your community. Advice on how to respond to guest reviews. Using daily events and occurrences as social media opportunities to bring the public in on the behind the scenes of your business.  Why it is so importance to learn your guest's names. Being mindful of the words you use i.e. instead of saying, "You're welcome." say, "Thank you." Today's Sponsor   Soundtrackyourbrand.com Soundtrack Business lets you play 250 music channels guaranteed to fit any type of business. An easy-to-use dashboard lets you find great music, control all your locations and schedule your sound. BarRestaurantSuccess.com Discover How To Get New Customers In Your DoorsAt A Profit In 48 Hours Or Less, Without Spending A Penny On Advertising Using The "VOP" Strategy! For a limited time receive a 15 minute case study video that reveals how 4 different bar and restaurant owners from around the country brought in between $5,213 to nearly $15,000 in sales using the all new "VOP" strategy! Best part is, this takes zero marketing dollars Knowledge bombs Which "it factor" habit, trait, or characteristic you believe most contributes to your success? Attention to detail. What is your biggest weakness? tendency to procrastinate the big stuff. What's one question you ask or thing you look for during an interview? Is this typically what you look like? What's a current challenge? How are you dealing with it? Suppliers not having what they ordered. Share one code of conduct or behavior you teach your team. Be Grateful. Great your guest right away. What is one uncommon standard of service you teach your staff? using appropriate verbiage. What's one book we must read to become a better person or restaurant owner? GET THIS BOOK FOR FREE AT AUDIBLE.COM  The Life Changing Habit of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.  Share an online resource or tool. Restaurant Unstoppable What's one piece of technology you've adopted in your restaurant and how has it influence operations? Big Arrow Sign. Square. If you got the news that you'd be leaving this world tomorrow and all memories of you, your work, and your restaurants would be lost with your departure with the exception of 3 pieces of wisdom you could leave behind for the good of humanity, what would they be?  Be Kind. Be generous. Have fun. Contact Info Vansburger@comcast.com Vansburger.com @vansburger2000 Thanks for Listening! Thanks so much for joining today! Have some feedback you'd like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below! If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the top of the post. Also, please leave an honest review for the Restaurant Unstoppable Podcast on iTunes! Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and I read each and every one of them. And finally, don't forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes to get automatic updates. Huge thanks to Erica Van Lierop for joining me for another awesome episode. Until next time!   Restaurant Unstoppable is a free podcast. One of the ways I'm able to make it free is by earning a commission when sharing certain products with you. I've made it a core value to only share tools, resources, and services my guest mentors have recommend, first. If you're finding value in my podcast, please use my links!

Cal Fussman was the Editor at Large at Esquire for years where he got to interview Muhammad Ali, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Robert DeNiro and hundreds more. So he's really known as an all star interviewer. He asks big questions. And now he's interviewing me, which is also live on his podcast "Big Questions." He named the episode "James Altucher on Reaching For Your Future and Letting Go of Your Past." So, I guess that's what this episode is about. He said, "I'd like to go to the start and see the arch of your life." And I hope you let this episode be an invitation for you to explore your own story arch, too. Links and Resources Why Self-Help Guru James Altucher Only Owns 15 Things by Alex Williams The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo Esquire Amblin Partners - Steven Spielberg's Production Company  Seamless Melanie Whelan - CEO of SoulCycle Guiness Book of World Records My interview with Wolfgang Puck      I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltucher.com/podcast.   Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify   Follow me on Social Media: Twitter Facebook Linkedin Instagram ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn

Hiring is RISKY business... But Grimsmo's gotten super lucky so far! Saunders points out that Skye might just have been Grimsmo's riskiest hire, but so far it's all good! How long should it take before hiring = more product produced? First it's necessary to get a system set up! Grimsmo is in the midst of switching from temporary solutions to permanent solutions. Looks like it's time to talk ERP SYSTEMS! How to sketch a pen without a pen to sketch? The Johns talk about Grimsmo's process for designing and making pen parts on the ever slow Fusion.   Also, if you didn't document the process, did you even make the pen? Grimsmo feels bad about not making progress videos for the pen. BACK TO BASICS Sometimes the best improvement you can make to a shop is getting rid of everything that doesn't make your product. Saunders would tell you BE BRUTAL ABOUT IT! Go for the purge. On a softer note, you can read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Grimsmo mentions this book as a method of organizing your life. It's nice when things take a while. Okay, this maybe isn't the case if you're waiting for Fusion to load, but if you're learning something new or making a decision, the Johns agree that rushing doesn't equal results.   “Everything of value comes after much hard work” - Grimsmo   Are you in the Chicago or Hartford, Connecticut, area? Do you want to meet Saunders and the Saunders Machine Works team? Now's your chance! Wednesday May 8th Saunders will be in Chicago for the DMG Mori Innovation Days Tuesday May 15th Saunders will be in Hartford, Connecticut, for Matsuura's Open House. Both events are free, and the Johns are always thrilled to meet listeners!

In this episode of the #HowDoesSheDoIt podcast, host Jessica Harlow shares her tips and practical advice for managing time and getting things done. She also talks about the value of "decluttering your life - inside & out." **For Jessica Harlow's Haircare Tips + Secrets, simply rate & review this podcast, screenshot your review, and send it in an email to hellogorgeous@jessicaharlow.com & you will be added to the mailing list. & Yes, it's 100% FREE! * Mentioned: "Minimalism" Documentary; now streaming on Netflix. * Mentioned: "Reminders" APP (comes free on iPhone) * Recommended Reading: "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing ": https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1607747308/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1607747308&linkCode=as2&tag=jessi076-20&linkId=69394be2fe1385ec36d93ec45ba10fe2

In this episode Allie and Duane share so of the lessons they have learned from elite military personnel. Books Discussed: Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing Leadership Lessons of the Navy SEALS: Battle-Tested Strategies for Creating Successful Organizations and Inspiring Extraordinary Results

In this episode, Sarah Mei, founder of RailsBridge, Director of Ruby Central, and Chief Consultant of DevMynd Software, talks about the way we write software: What's right? What's wrong? How can we do better? The conversation examines changing code and reassessing needs. i.e.: "Does it bring me joy? Should I get rid of this thing? Do I understand this code?" She also talks about what these needs mean for others on a team. Sarah Mei: @sarahmei Links: Sarah Mei: How We Make Software: A New Theory of Teams @ Brighton Ruby 2016 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo Transcript: CHARLES: Welcome to the Frontside Podcast. I am Charles Lowell and with me is Robert DeLuca. We have a very special guest this week. One that I'm really excited about because the things she says and the ideas that she has - open eyes and minds all over the place, in all different types of areas that are so pertinent to the way we do our jobs. So, we'll get to it. Our guest today is Sarah Mei. SARAH: Hi. Thanks for having me. CHARLES: Like I said, we are super excited to have you here. Before we get started talking about some of the things that you've been thinking about recently, why don't you just give like a very brief introduction of how you got started with development, where you've been, and how has that brought you to where you're going right now? SARAH: You know, I actually was not one of these people that got started with it real early. I came to programming in college. I was an Engineering major. I wanted to build bridges. I wanted to be a Structural Engineer. I want to build things. I had a weird schedule the first couple of quarters of college, so I ended up taking an elective earlier than most people take it. It was a programming class in Fortran that was required for the structural engineering program. I took my class and I was like, "This is really cool." CHARLES: Wait, Fortran is what set the hook? SARAH: Yeah, and the professor of the class was like, "Well, if you think Fortran is cool. I've got some other stuff that you might like." I mean, the language and whatever doesn't really matter. What I liked about it was the fact that I could build something. I can get that same feeling of building something that you get if you build a bridge but you can do more than like one or two in your career, like you do if you're a structural engineer. I like the constant feeling of building. That's what I liked about it. So I ended up switching my major and graduating with the CS degree and coming out and doing a bunch of different things, mostly like starting in a large company and sort of doing smaller and smaller companies over time. CHARLES: Yeah, there's a lot of people in the industry who are career switchers, where they started out in something else and moved into Computer Science but I actually feel that a lot of people, like myself included, I have the degree in CS too, but that was not what I set out to do at all. It totally derailed, like the course of my life in a good way. But in that way, it's like a career switch within a career switch. ROBERT: I'm a little odd in that aspect. I came out of high school like ready to go in software. It worries me a little bit for the later half of my life. I'm like, "Oh, am I going to do software for the entire time?" CHARLES: Probably not. SARAH: That might be a good thing. You'll never know. ROBERT: Yeah. CHARLES: Yeah, seriously, what lies ahead? ROBERT: Who knows? SARAH: I feel like in a lot of places that are like, for example, in public policy and in other places where we need more people that understand tech so if we can send you out into other parts of the world knowing a whole lot about programming, that can only be good. CHARLES: Yeah. ROBERT: Yeah, this is actually kind of funny. I was telling CHARLES about this the other days, like I'm starting to view programming more as a tool to do the things that I really want to do and less as like the thing that I'm going to be doing forever. I wanted to augment and make things that I have a passion about easier. SARAH: Yeah, absolutely. CHARLES: Yeah, it's like software is eating the world so what you're doing now is just learning how to chew. ROBERT: That's a great way to put it. SARAH: You should tweet that. [Laughter] CHARLES: All right. Please continue. I'll ignore the typing sounds. SARAH: [Laughs] Switching careers is a really interesting thing because you end up with a bunch of experience that you wouldn't have had otherwise. I'm really excited actually about the next five years as we have all these folks that switched into programming from something else who are all becoming mid to senior level because they're bringing just such amazing experience from other parts of the world. CHARLES: Yeah, I know, right? It's like, "Where've you guys been my whole career?" SARAH: Right. CHARLES: It's like you understand these things, just almost like it's second nature of these things that are opaque and completely inaccessible to me. So anyhow... SARAH: That's how I got here. CHARLES: So then, after you kind of switched in college, you went out and did you just start working in programming immediately thereafter? SARAH: Yeah, I worked in a bunch of different product companies. I built products for a while. My first job actually out of college was at Microsoft up in Redmond and then I have worked at smaller and smaller and smaller companies. Then I spent about 10 years doing product stuff and then about 10 years ago, I switched into doing consulting mostly because I realized that I have a fairly short attention span for projects. And that working on a product, there wasn't anything wrong with me exactly but what would happen is when I was working with a product, I would get six months to a year into it and I'm starting to get antsy. I started to get bored and decided that I should just embrace that. And I switch to something where I am going to be on a new project every three to six months. I've been a lot happier since then. ROBERT: That's interesting. I wonder if that comes with seniority in software development and knowing your way around because consulting for me is I've gotten the experience of, "Oh, wow, I'm just finally getting a hang of this person's product or this client's product or app or whatever we're building," and it's, "All right. It's time to rotate off." It's like you just get in there and understanding everything. SARAH: There is that aspect of it for sure but even when I was much less experienced, even with my first couple of jobs, I noticed this tendency in myself to just get bored after six months on the same code base. For a long time, I thought it was because I'm not cut out for software or maybe I'm not very good at it or something. Eventually, I just realized now actually, it's just that I just need to switch projects. I'm just one of those people. That's how my brain works. I get a lot out of switching projects because the one that I switch on to, I see an entirely different way of doing things like code bases are so different. Even if you look at a hundred different Rails apps or a hundred different Ember apps, they're all so different. So switching on to somebody else's app, I learned a ton just out of that switching process. CHARLES: It sounds like the actual kind of studying the meta-level of the software is what really engages you and kind of understanding how the software came to be the way it is and not some other way. One of the factors that gave rise to that and kind of 'that's the problem' that really sunk its teeth in you, as opposed to individual business problem. Is that fair to say? SARAH: It has certainly been interesting to see different business problems and to understand different parts of industries and so on. That's definitely part of it for me but what really gets me interested is the different ways that people organize their code and by how they make the decisions that they make. ROBERT: Yeah, you get to see different problems that they've maybe put themselves into because of the way they structured something, which you wouldn't see if you wrote yourself but somebody else did and get to see, "Oh, I understand this pattern now." That's kind of been my experience out of it. I don't want to speak for you, but yeah, that's kind of how I've seen other client projects like, "Oh, this is really cool. I didn't think of a way to do this," and you get to experience many different things in many different ways. SARAH: You get to see a lot of the tradeoffs. Like a lot of times in a single code base, what would happen is I'd make a decision or we'd make a design decision of some kind. Then I'd see how it turned out. But there's no way for me to see how it would have turned out if I did it the other way. The nice thing about switching projects for me is just being able to see all of those tradeoffs, like the tradeoffs that you make tend to be pretty similar. You can see very similar situations where people do different things and how does it turn out for them. ROBERT: Right, and like one of my favorite things is where you go into a project that is totally against something, like for me it was object-oriented CSS and then you go in and you actually see it in practice, and you're like, "Oh, wow. This is turning a whole new light on it. I like this in this case." SARAH: Microservices are like that for me, where it's generally I am anti the microservice bandwagon. But then I went on one project where I was like, "Wow, they actually figured it out. This works really well. I can see why people like it," because I've seen so many work that was horribly executed. When you go on to the one where it's good and you're like, "Oh, this is why people do that. Okay." ROBERT: Yeah, it's like that light-bulb click, "Oh, yep. There's another side of this." CHARLES: Once you actually see it done right, it helps you avoid every other situation where it was done wrong and you can say, "Oh, this this was the one differentiator that made it all go right." I mean, sometimes it doesn't always boil down to that. But there's these one, two, three things that we could have done. But they were just completely and totally hidden from you because you didn't have that context. I would love to talk to you about microservices because I've certainly never seen it done right. I've heard it talked about and I've seen this beautiful world, picture-painted that looks so fantastic on the whiteboard. But I see -- SARAH: Oh, it's so beautiful, isn't it? It's like an object-oriented design diagram. I'm like, "Look at all the boxes and lines. They all line up." CHARLES: "They're beautiful." SARAH: "I can do this in Visio," and they're all like, the line, they are on the same shape. It was great. CHARLES: "And when I move this one over there, it just tells me that these two are exactly the same distance apart from that other one." Ah, so satisfying. SARAH: Yeah, and then you try and do it, is the problem. ROBERT: Then you build it and you cross your errors and everything. CHARLES: Which actually I think that brings us, recently -- we're talking on Twitter. I think that's actually very recently about kind of the difference between when we talk about software and the meta conversations we have around it. When we do talk about these abstract and perfect worlds of boxes and lines versus the actual code bases, which is the things that you've kind of been observing many, many, many since you've started consulting, and kind of the vibe between those and you know what that means. I think a lot of people aren't even aware like I certainly, before kind of reading that, wasn't really aware that that is a very, very distinct difference, like these are two very different modes for software. One that exists and one that is kind of perfect world. ROBERT: Kind of academia versus the real world, I guess. SARAH: In some ways, yeah. I remember when I was in college, we had a software design class as part of our degree program. We studied how you define objects and you write a little bit of [inaudible], like we did all this stuff. When I got out and I got into the real world and I had a job, I found it very difficult to actually apply that stuff successfully, to be able to draw a diagram and then turn it into code and have it work out the way that the diagram said it was supposed to work out. I initially thought that was because I was just not experienced enough to figure it out. But eventually, what I realized is that it doesn't work because it doesn't work. It really doesn't work to design things ahead of time and then just do them. I think there might be a certain type of person that can do that. I am not that type of person and most people aren't. I think that it takes a very unusual type of brain to be able to just draw a diagram that has already taken into account all of the things you're going to encounter once you start making it. CHARLES: Yeah, I would even go so far as to say there's probably a brain that solved that problem many, many times, that just could skip a bunch of steps. SARAH: Right, and they're not aware they're skipping them necessarily. Unless you have an entire team full of that type of brain, it's probably not a good idea in general, for the software that you're building as a group. I feel like I've been trying to talk about that concept between the difference of how we talked about software in books, in blogs, and in conference talks and then how we build the software we actually build. I feel like I've been trying to articulate that for 20 years, like since I have my [inaudible] and I was like, "This doesn't work. Why can't I make a diagram and then make it into code?" Like two days ago, I feel like I finally found a way to articulate it that captures everything that I've been trying to communicate and it was a really strange feeling. I'm like, "Wow, I finally kind of got it." One of the reasons that I came up with that, I think, is because I haven't really been thinking about it for a couple of months. I've been off and not really thinking about software stuff for a while. Oddly enough, I've been thinking about organizing my house for the last three months. All of my free time outside of my job has been thinking about like, "I've been learning how to cook, so how can I organize my kitchen so that the things I actually use every day, I don't have to dig through a drawer every single time to find them?" There's actually some interesting problems there like, "How do I make sure that all of the stuff that I need is at hand that I use all the time? All stuff that I need occasionally is still around and accessible, and then things that I don't use, I should probably just get rid of." I have this problem that I think probably a lot of people have which is that I have trouble getting rid of stuff once I have it. I live in a small apartment in San Francisco and that's not a good thing to be able to unable to get rid of things because in an apartment this size, I can let it go for a week or two maybe, but like I got to be very vigilant about it because otherwise, it just overwhelms the space. CHARLES: Yeah, there's a bunch of research that the people estimate vastly different the cost of acquisition versus the cost of loss, and they've [inaudible] way too much, like irrationally unbalanced like not wanting to lose something that they already have. SARAH: Even if I bought it for a need that I don't have any more or the need has changed or shifted. I don't buy things I don't need. There are some people that have that problem, that they buy a bunch of stuff that they don't have any particular plans for it. I don't have that problem, thankfully. I've had people in my family that have that problem which I think is why I have avoided that. But the problem I have is that once something is here, I find it very difficult to get rid of it. I look at it and I'm like, "I can think of all these reasons why I shouldn't get rid of it." Oh, that was expensive so the sunk cost fallacy of like, "Oh, I paid a lot of money for that even if it's not useful and I don't like it, I shouldn't get rid of it." Or, there'll be like a dress in my closet that I haven't worn for two years and I'm like, "Ah, maybe I should get rid of it," and I take it out and I'm like, "Oh, my God. But it looks really good on me. I like it. I should wear this. I should really wear this." So I'm going to keep it even though I haven't worn in for two years for some reason, but I should keep it anyway because it looks good. I have all these stories. I tell myself about why I can't get rid of things. A couple of weeks ago, I read a part of a book, to be totally honest with you, called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It's written by this woman from Japan who's a professional organizer. Her name is Marie Kondo and her method is called KonMari. Basically, what it does is when you're trying to figure out whether you should get rid of something, you don't ask yourself, "Should I keep it?" What you ask yourself is, "Does this thing bring me joy? And if it brings me joy, then I keep it. If it doesn't, then I'm going to get rid of it." So that made it really easy, going back to the dress example. I'm like, "Does this dress give me joy?" And I thought about it, I was like, "No, the reason I don't wear it is because I went out to dinner and I had a bad experience at dinner so every time I look at that dress, it reminds me of that experience." And so it looks good and everything but I'm not going to wear it because it doesn't make me happy. So that was just like, "Okay, fine. I'm just going to give it away." And changing that question that I ask away from 'should I keep it' towards 'how does that make me feel' was a huge change for me because it's like, that's really easy to answer, where 'should I keep it' is a much harder question. There's these bunch of sort of ifs and maybes or what-ifs and what happens. I feel like that applying this KonMari question to stuff has changed the way that I calculate what stays and what goes in a very positive way. CHARLES: Yeah, boy, I need to get this book for several family members who will go [inaudible]. SARAH: Well, you know, I've got two kids and so there's a constant flow of stuff coming into the house. Because of the amount of space I have, there has to be a constant stuff going out. So this is something I just need to be very vigilant about and this has made it so that it takes up a lot less of my time and a lot less of my brain space, which is really awesome. It feels like it's moving my house in the right direction. I've been thinking about that sort of in various ways, on and off, for a couple of months and I haven't been thinking about software. I have this fear that like, maybe that means I'm never going to think about software again. I go through these phases where I've got like, "Oh, I'm going to come up with a bunch of new ideas," where I'm coming up with new ideas for some whatever reason. Maybe I'm making new conference talks, I'm doing stuff, and I'm thinking about software a lot. Then I go through these phases where I don't do that, like I sort of retrench and maybe... I don't know. I think about other stuff for a while. So it's been home organization for several months now. I was like this, "I'm never going to think about software again," because it's just that -- [Laughter] CHARLES: Career change. ROBERT: Oh, man. This sounds so much like my life since I moved down to Austin. SARAH: You know, I live in San Francisco and I'm not 25, I'm 40. A lot of it is like maybe I'm just too old for software now. I should just give up and live out the rest of my career doing quiet, maintenance work -- [Laughter] SARAH: Somewhere. I don't know. Then suddenly, this thing happened on Monday, where I was just like, "Oh, code, an organization." And boom! There it was. I realized, I was like, "I basically just had to give my brain some time off," like my conscious brain needs some time off from software and it wasn't that it had disappeared because what I came up with on Monday was really just how home organization applies to code because I realized that the feelings that I get when I'm trying to figure out what I should do with code are very similar to the feelings that I get what I'm trying to figure out whether I should get rid of a thing. I look at this piece of code and I'm like, "Should I change this? Should I get rid of this? Should I refactor it?" You know, why I can't get rid of that? We just spent two weeks refactoring it so I can't change it again. [Laughter] SARAH: We just put in a story for refactoring this and we spent three days and I can't go back to the [inaudible] people and tell them, "I need to change it more." Or, "I really like this code because I wrote it with someone that I really liked." CHARLES: So I don't want to get rid of it. SARAH: I don't want to get rid of it because then I would lose the memory of working with, you know. CHARLES: I actually can say that I have experienced that. SARAH: Yeah, there's a lot of reasons why you don't want to change code. What I was thinking about, like maybe I was asking the wrong question, in the same way that 'should I keep this' is the wrong question when you're talking about stuff. Maybe 'should I change this' is the wrong question when you're talking about code. Maybe it's sort of leading you in the same way with stuff that leads you down this conversation of reasons that don't really have anything to do with the essential quality of why the code is there or why the thing is there. We need something that helps us reassess our needs. So if our needs have changed, maybe you don't need that thing anymore because your needs have changed. Same way with code. If your needs have changed, maybe you don't need that code anymore, at least not in the form that it's at now. I think that question for code that, "Does it bring me joy," because joy is not something that I think is concrete enough when we're talking about code. I think the question for code is do I understand this? Do I understand what it's doing? Not just understand it like a very surface level of like, "Can I figure out what this syntax means?" But understand it more like the grok level of like, I understand this at a very deep level. I understand why it's here. I understand what problem it's solving. I understand why this abstraction is necessary. I understand how it got here. CHARLES: Yeah, how it fits into the bigger picture. SARAH: How it fits into the bigger picture, exactly, like the application. CHARLES: How it fits in with like our conventions that are just purely stylistic. SARAH: How does it fit in with the other stuff that we've been doing? How does it fit in with the product needs and the features we're trying to build and the business goals and all of that stuff, all of these different levels of understanding of why this code is here and what it does? CHARLES: Do other team members' understanding factor into that? Like, "Do I understand the way that other people understand it," so to speak? SARAH: I think that it can. But I think the important thing is whether you personally understand it. CHARLES: Okay, like it's a very personal decision. SARAH: I think it is. Hopefully, what you do is you want different people looking at the same code. You don't want just one person on a piece of code that no one else ever sees, whether it's pairing or code review or whether it's something else. It need to be really clear to someone is coming in and looking at that code what it does, what it means, and why it's there? CHARLES: Right. I guess the reason I asked the question is because a lot of times when I look at a piece of code, I try and really step outside of myself and say, "What will someone else think who has never been on this project before?" Or, "Who is on this project and they see this code, will they understand it?" SARAH: Absolutely. It's definitely a part of it when you're on a team. CHARLES: Yeah, so I'm just trying to figure out how that question factors into this framework. SARAH: I think that it depends a lot on how you distribute tasks. For example, if you work in a shop where you're pair programming most of the time, so there's always two people looking at a piece of code, 'do I understand this' is a reasonable question just for the two of you to consider, both from the fact that you can pool your knowledge but also from the fact that 'are there pieces of this that you understand that I don't understand' and vice versa. On the other hand, if you work in a shop where it's more like, "Here's the piece of code that you work on like you own this section of code." Then I think it's more important for you to be able to step outside and be like, "Okay, do I understand this? Would other people on my team understand this?" That can be a very difficult thing to assess and that's where I think it's very helpful to do things like code reviews, call people in and be like, "Hey, can I run some stuff by you. I'm trying to figure out if this is good or not," because what you want is you want a code base that is comfortable and understandable for you and for your team. Just like the thing that makes the KonMari Method powerful for stuff is that it doesn't tell you what you're going to end up with. It doesn't tell you what level of clutter versus cleanliness is good for you. It doesn't tell you. You either end up like something in one of these simple living magazines or end up something like Quarters, the TV show. There's a bunch of places in the middle, they're all fine. Everyone's going to fall somewhere differently along that line. So I've managed now that I've thought about this a lot to set up my kitchen in a way that is very comfortable for me, like I know where things are, I can find them really easily, things that I use are at hand. But other people come in, they're just like, "I have no idea where everything is," like it's very personal. The organizational system you end up with [inaudible] that you have is a very personal thing and that's why, if you look at something like staged houses, so you're selling your house, you hire someone to put in rugs and furniture and stuff and make it look like somebody lives there so that people can walk in and sort of imagine themselves in this space, they don't put any of that clutter into the stage. They don't put any books on the coffee table except the big picture books. They don't leave the remote controls on the couch. There's no plunger by the toilet. There's no like -- CHARLES: There's no Legos on the floor. ROBERT: Everything that looks good. SARAH: Everything that makes it more personal, they leave out because it looks like somebody else's mess. You go into something like that and you're like, "This is not my mess. This is somebody else's mess. It can't possibly be my house and I'm not going to buy it. ROBERT: Oh, do we do this for software in conference talks and posts? SARAH: Absolutely, we do. That's sounds very similar when you get someone new onto a project, especially if they're more senior and they'll walk in and be like this, I can't live like this. [Laughter] SARAH: This is somebody else's mess and clearly we need to make some changes. But that's the reason why they leave it out of the staged houses is because you want people to be able to imagine their own level of clutter and disorganization that superimposed on the skeleton. But real life is not that. Real life is somewhere between that and hoarders. There's a very interesting parallel there with code, which is like when we look at code, if we look at the object-oriented design textbooks, you look at conference talks, you look at blog post, sample code, it's all very staged house. It's very uncomplicated. It has no clutter in it and that's because you're supposed to be able to look at that. CHARLES: I mean, that clutter can distract the sales process so to speak. SARAH: Exactly, like they have an idea they're trying to get across and the clutter would distract people from the idea. But the problem there is the same with the staged house which it's very difficult to tell what it will be like once you move in. It's very difficult to take some of these ideas that you see demonstrated in these staged environments and take them and apply them to your code base which is probably closer to a hoarded house than to a staged house especially if it's a code base that existed for a while over time, that has been worked on by lots of different people. This is the problem that I've noticed with a lot like there's some really amazing books about software design that have come out in the last couple of years. Of course, Sandi Metz's book is at the top of my list. But the thing that people have trouble with, like they love the book. They love the book. I love the book. But then they find it very difficult to apply those principles when they sit down in front of a code base that has already been worked on for six or seven years, in some cases by maybe 50 different people, who knows, over time. How do you take those principles and start applying them in a way that moves you in the right direction? That's where people are just like, "I can't do this. I can't do this and I'm not going to do this." And it's very similar to a problem where you've got a very dirty house and you don't know where to start in order to move it towards something from the Simple Living magazines or are more like a staged house, you don't know how to start to get it in that direction and so you just kind of give up. The powerful thing about KonMari is that it doesn't give you like, "Here's what you're going to end up with it," but it gives you a way to get started on something that gives you a very easy question to answer. It moves you in the right direction. It moves your house in the right direction without being overly prescriptive about what you'll end up with. CHARLES: Yeah, what that direction even is. SARAH: What you'll end up with is personal for you, anyway. I think the question about 'do I understand this code' is similarly helpful and that it moves you and your code base in the right direction without necessarily giving you a lot of prescription about how you do it or where it goes or even where it's going to end up. It just gives you a question to ask that it tells you whether or not this code needs to change and a question is, "Do I understand it?" If I don't, it should probably change, and if I do, okay, we can just kind of leave it for now. CHARLES: So now, if you're working on a team where you have two different people, maybe different skill levels, maybe just a different temperament or different set of preferences, what do you do when the answer to that question is two different things for two different people? SARAH: Well, sort of like when you move in with someone. This is the hard part about living with somebody else, is that you have to mutually agree upon a method of keeping your house that is agreeable to both of you. Sometimes, when they say that working through a startup is like being married to someone, there's some elements of that because you basically have to figure out like, "Okay, we're going to live in this code together. If we're going to live in this code together, we better both be happy with it. How can we both be happy with it?" It involves usually, some compromise, like I really hate doing the dishes but I don't mind cooking and vice versa. You have to figure out. It really bothers me when there's socks on the floor but I don't care if you leave dirty dishes in the sink or whatever it is. You just have to have these conversations about, "What is going to make the code livable for you?" You basically want to end up with a code base that's understandable where all parts of it are understandable to everyone on the team. Now that's like an ideal. You're not going to get there. But that's kind of what you're going for. If you have two people in the code and you have disagreements about what is the right way to go, sometimes it can help to just be like, "Hey, I don't really understand this," versus, "I don't think this is the right decision and here's why I don't understand this." Sometimes, reframing the question in that way can prompt them to communicate reasons that they have for doing this that they maybe weren't able to articulate before, for example. Just like when you move in with someone, you need to have sort of this commitment to finding a level of housekeeping that you're both happy with. When you're working on the team, you do have to have sort of a mutual commitment to having a code base that everyone can live in. CHARLES: Right. I like that because having like, "I just don't understand this and here's the reason why," that being a completely totally valid answer because sometimes in a code base, where someone's brand new or maybe they're at a more junior level, they don't quite have the tools to understand it or there's a lot of steps that haven't yet taken. It's like understanding is not going to be accessible to them immediately. SARAH: And maybe that means that's the wrong decision for that code base, is that right? CHARLES: Right. SARAH: Because if something is abstracting to the point that a lot of people on the team don't get it, then it's probably not the right abstraction for that code base. That abstraction might be totally appropriate in a code base in which you've got folks that are more experienced who understand why it's there, who have the scars from previous times when they didn't do it, et cetera, et cetera, and they understand why it's there. There is sort of like intellectual understanding of like, "Yes, object-oriented design is a good thing," and then there's, I would call it almost emotional understanding of like, "Oh, yeah, there's this time that we didn't do that and that worked out badly for us." I think that folks that don't have the sort of experiential understanding, sometimes they just need to have that. They need to get that. Sometimes, what that means is you want to let them see what happens to a certain extent. Let them see what happens when you don't do that. CHARLES: Right. This reminds me actually, I've got three kids and the way our house is now versus the way it was seven years ago is wildly different -- the way that we live. You know, with our first child, I'm ashamed to admit it, like our strategy was just to kind of put safety locks all over everything: every cabinet, on the oven, not on the refrigerator, but just kind of 'childproof' the house so that we wouldn't have to change the way that we lived but it made the house really uncomfortable for our children. And kind of having observed that over the course of having the second and the third, there's not anything that we childproof really. We put the dangerous chemicals way up high, where only we can get them. It's a little bit more inconvenient if we need to access the bleach but that level of discomfort is something that we live with. We've always got cups that are set out on a cabinet that sits below the counter so we've got water cups set out so that the children can get water and stuff anytime that we want, and we try, for things that they're going to need, make sure that it's accessible if you happen to be four feet shorter. That's just a condition of who you are. So it means that the actual configuration of our house, even though it's the same house, is just radically different and it is more optimized or it's optimized as a compromise for the fact that there are people living in this house now that haven't learned how to operate everything but they just need to learn that the oven is hot and you don't go there rather than slapping a lock on it. SARAH: Your house is probably more comfortable for you as a group, right? CHARLES: Yes. SARAH: And what that means is that as the 'senior' in the house, it's slightly less comfortable for you in some ways but it's worth it. It's worth being less comfortable for you in order to increase comfort across the board for everyone in the household. CHARLES: Right, because it means that if the child needs water, I don't have to stop what I'm doing to get a cup out of the cabinet and fill it for them. SARAH: And they feel [inaudible] over the stuff in their house. They feel like they live there, like the house is for them. CHARLES: Yes. ROBERT: That builds comfort and confidence. SARAH: Yeah, I think that's a very good analogy. Anytime you have a group of people living together, everyone makes compromises in order for the house to be set up in the way that's optimized for the group. CHARLES: Yeah. "So man, how are we going to apply this to software? What's the next step? What are the concrete steps?" I guess it's just asking those questions, like asking, "Did I understand it?" SARAH: It is asking those questions and it's also, if you are one of the more experienced folks on the team, it's your job to elicit the answers to that from other people that are less experienced. They're not going to tell you. A lot of times, sometimes, they may or may not feel comfortable saying that they don't understand something. So it's your job to really try and figure out like, "Do they get this at a level that is acceptable? Do they understand why this abstraction is here at an intellectual level or at an experiential level, at an emotional level? Do they get it?" Which is not something you can really just ask. In many cases, it's your job to -- CHARLES: To just observe it. SARAH: To observe and to see how it works. If people are having a hard time understanding where things are in the code base, it could be because everything is so cluttered that you can't see anything or it could be that everything is so hidden that you can't see anything. It's sort of the staged house equivalent where everything is too abstracted, or is it the hoarded house equivalent where everything is just obscure and under piles of junk. Either way, no matter which direction you need to move towards the middle, the question is always, "Do I understand this?" ROBERT: I like this a lot. I keep on coming to the analogy of if you put a chef in a different kitchen where everything is just totally rearranged and they don't know where their knives are, where their measuring cups are and stuff, I think that plays perfectly in a software of like you put somebody into a code base that they don't know, "All right, I'll figure it out." It's not their home. It's not what they're comfortable with or used to. Yeah, I think this is making my brain work on how I can apply this. SARAH: Or if they're moving in like when you hire somebody and they 'move into your house', you need to be ready for things to change. And this is one of the reasons why I've been saying for many years in ways that I think maybe didn't quite connect as well as they could have, that really the team is the code and vice versa. Every time you add someone to the team or someone leaves the team, teams are not mutable. You get a completely new team. So, it's not like you can just sort of carry on like you did before. Every time you get someone new onto the team, everything gets reimagined, every breakdown of responsibility, every decision. You look at it in a new way when you have someone new come on to the team. If they're going to stay, like in your chef example, if this person is moving in and this is going to be their kitchen and they're sharing it with other people, then what you're going to end up with is probably something in between what it is when they get there and what they had before. They're going to bring in some ideas, you're going to keep some of your ideas and you're going to end up with something in the middle. The same thing has to happen with your code when you bring someone new onto the team. CHARLES: I really like the way that this just focuses the discussion and I know that you've talked about this a lot before, whether it's a kitchen or a house, this idea of the code not being so much the shrink-wrapped product. It's a structure, yes. It is definitely that but it's a structure that you, as people, inhabit. It protects you from certain things and it provides you certain things that you need to live. When people ask us why is a continuous delivery pipeline so important in automating all these things for deploying your software it's because the idea is this is going to be a living thing that your team will actually be living in. And every member of that team will be living in from the time they start with the company or start with the project until the time that they exit and the time that they leave. It's the actual living process that you want to make comfortable and pleasant. SARAH: And what comfortable and pleasant means will be different depending on who's on that team? It's not something that you can have like a -- CHARLES: It's not. SARAH: Right. This is why all of these things are like, "Here's how you design things." It always seemed to fall flat. I think it would be better titled like, "Here's how I did one thing once." [Laughter] SARAH: Or, "Here's what works for me." I feel like every conference talk that is about design could be, "Here's what works for me. I did this one thing once." CHARLES: You might want to try it. SARAH: You could try it. It might work for you, it might not, right? CHARLES: Right. SARAH: A lot of times where conference talks fall flat and blog post and everything else was why they're more like, "This is how you do it. This is the right way to do it." You're like, "Well, it certainly works for you." [Laughter] ROBERT: The one time I gave a conference talk, the night before I went through every slide and scrutinized it as much as I thought somebody out in the public would do it. And I think that might be where we go through in a 'stage our code'. It's like we're trying to make it perfect for somebody that might come through and scrutinize it or criticize. Because I know when I was going up to put those slides up, I wanted to make sure it was the best foot I could possibly put forward. CHARLES: Right, we don't want to be wrong but I think that's where it actually, thinking of it as 'this is what worked for me' and this is an example from my house that worked. This is a way that I organize my code and my space. That'll not take a lot of pressure off of not having like, "I am right and I'm an authority at saying that this is the right way." That's a lot of pressure. SARAH: I don't even like that. I try and frame a lot of the things that I talk about as like, "Here's the thing that works for me really well. Maybe it'll work for you too. Let me know." CHARLES: Yeah. ROBERT: Yeah, that's how I give it. CHARLES: Up until really about two years ago, I felt like that was the expectation that was put on people is to say the right thing. SARAH: That's true. And I think that there's a lot of teams where that is an unspoken requirement and that's something that we should examine. Because even within a team like 'here's a thing that works for me or here's a thing that worked on my last project' isn't very different from saying something like, "Well, industry best practice --" [Laughter] SARAH: And I think that like you get to a certain level of experience and people expect you to say things like that. In my experience, the best way to do it is 'blah'. I mean, it's not actually a super useful statement because your past experience may or may not be directly applicable to the thing you're looking at right now, no matter how experienced you are. I think that it's much more friendly to have a range of experience levels to say things like, "Well, this worked for me on this project. Let's talk about whether it could work here." CHARLES: Right, yeah. ROBERT: I really like that. CHARLES: I do. It's so hard because your human nature is to try and boil things down into a simple binary. SARAH: People would love to have a list of rules, I'll tell you that. This is a problem. This is one of the reasons why I think it's important for us to come up with these questions that you can ask that will move you in the right direction without giving you rules, that will move you in the direction of finding the rules that work for you. Because rules themselves, people really, really, really want them. But they're always misused. They're always misunderstood and what you really need are the questions that led you to those rules in the first place. That's what people really want, although maybe that's not what they are asked. ROBERT: Ah, the Steve Jobs approach. SARAH: [Inaudible] to start wearing black turtlenecks. I hate turtlenecks. ROBERT: And New Balance shoes and the jeans. [Laughter] SARAH: But yeah. I think it's one of those things where people are very hungry for guidance. But we've been giving them the wrong kind of guidance. We've been trying to give them rules. When what we really need to do is give them questions to help them develop their own judgment. ROBERT: Right. Like when I was coming up, I thought, in everything, there was a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. I've been slowly, sadly figuring out that it's not all black and white and it's not all just logic. I've always treated programming as like, "Well, they wrote this and it's just logic so I should be able to understand this." It's been a long road to come to this conclusion that kind of like what you're talking about and this has been enlightening for me. Like you are going to solve your problems your own way, your own person, and you'll think about things differently. I really like the analogy of 'this is your house and this is how you work and live in your house'. SARAH: Right, and no one would tell you in order to be a proper human being, you have to set up your house this way. ROBERT: Exactly. SARAH: We feel comfortable telling people, in order to be a professional developer, you need to set up your code this way. I think that those are very similar statements and we should really examine a lot of these 'should' statements that are all over the place when you're talking about software. Think about whether or not they're actually serving us in our mission of doing more things with tech. Like overall, my mission here is for people to be more effective with code so that we can do more interesting things with it. I live in the TV show, Silicon Valley, essentially so I'm surrounded by these companies that are solving these little tiny problems and I'm tired of it. I want us to solve bigger ones. In order to do that, we need to get better at coding. We need to get better at managing code over time and that's what I'm trying to do. CHARLES: Because it's not going to scale, otherwise. We're out of time. We're going to have to have you on the podcast again because I don't think we've got to... what? About 15% of the things that we want to talk about? SARAH: Oh, we are overtime, aren't we? CHARLES: Yeah. But thank you so much, Sarah, for coming on and talking with everybody. You drop real quick your Twitter handle so that if people want to have follow on discussion, they can reach out to you that way, or your other preferred means of contact. SARAH: Yeah, Twitter is probably the best. My Twitter is @sarahmei, and that's mostly where I am. CHARLES: All right. Well, fantastic. As always, feel free to reach out to us too. I'm @cowboyd on Twitter. And what are you, Rob? ROBERT: @robdel12. CHARLES: All right. It's a wrap. Thank you so much, Sarah, and we'll see you in Ether and hopefully we'll have you on the podcast again sometime.

Show Notes for Episode 000 Introductions Dave grew up as a military dependent works as a software developer and as a software development manager active in boy scouts and church, a member of the library board in their city Enjoys indoor activities and a couple sports (soccer and basketball) Amy Grew up in the same town all her life Stay at home mom On school community council Runs an sports program for women in our area Enjoys outdoor activities Us We met in college, married for almost 20 years. Five children. Red, Blue, Green, Yellow and Purple (That's episode 5) We're both organized Why did we start the podcast? People kept asking how we do it Visitors impressed or ask questions when they come over Get request to teach classes on organization Reach a broader audience with some of our ideas Goal for podcast Share what we know It's not just moms that need to be involved, but dads too. You cannot be successful as a couple or a family unless both parents are involved. You can have different focus' but you are a team Why do we think organization is important? Saves time Helps reduce tension Provides for a place where people can be more creative and productive All episodes will be in one of four categories Personal Kids Home Finances Frequency: Once a week Length: We're shooting for about 20 minutes The quote “Organization saves time” came from the movie “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”. The name of the book about tidying up is “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing”

This week we're talking about the scrapbooking products we really want... The Panelists Stacy Julian Wilna Furstenberg Noell Hyman Sponsors The Paperclipping Membership Picks of the Week The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing Glass Door Cabinet Things Task Management App Maggie Holmes Sequins (Affiliate links wherever possible.) Feedback and Reviews Please take a moment to leave us feedback on the iTunes directory here. How to subscribe... Want to make sure you never miss a new installment of the Paperclipping Roundtable? Subscribe in iTunes (it's free!) and you'll automatically download the newest installment when it's released. Click on this link: Subscribe in iTunes Or you can always manually subscribe to the Paperclipping Roundtable RSS Feed.