Family-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We'll talk about our children and how they think we work too much. Also covered is wasting food, specifically salad which we aren't sure that they really like but think is healthy. Why is wasting food such a trigger for Kim as an adult?

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Transcript: Season 2, Episode 14

Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim and Jason. This is episode 14, season two, and we are talking about our life. Yeah. Later on in the episode, we're going to have a funny story about our daughter. Uh, but first we'll start off with a question. Uh, do we work too much? And this was motivated by the fact that we had a list of ideas for this podcast.

And we had about eight business ideas and you're like, we have no life ideas. And I was like, maybe that's our first idea is why are we thinking about work so much? And we don't have life questions. I want to talk about that, but I want to also say, and not in a cryptic way, but our kids are getting older and we are going through some interesting things with both of them.

But I think that they're personal and I, as I don't post photos of our kids on Facebook, I don't judge you. If you do. We stopped doing that for their own privacy. Yeah. We advise them how to be safe online with their privacy. And I think if we exposed things that they were exploring in their lives and questions and things, we may have tiptoed a little bit around some things in the past, but the older they get, the more I want to protect.

Yeah, as preteens and teens, because I don't not have things about our life that I want to talk to you about. I just don't wanna talk to you about them. So I hope every parent can respect that. So I'll talk all about us. So books, do we work too much?

I don't know how so. Yeah, I guess you could, like, what does that mean? Like total time-wise is it spread out? Are we always thinking about work? All right. We look, I like our work, so it's kind of, you know, I tried to put myself in the mindset of like a person on our team who isn't tied to this business's performance success outcomes as directly as we are.

And has as much influence on it as we do. And, and I think they still think about their job off hours, but I don't think that they have unhealthy work habits logging on to early in the day, logging on too late at night, logging on, on weekends. Yeah. Is there a related question? Do you work way more than me?

And that's 10. No, no. I used to think that you've been keeping a better schedule through this year. Yeah.

We work in separate places that helps. So you can like, you know, when I'm not working, you know, now the whole time I'm in the office, you think I'm here. I used to think that, um, when I worked at Accenture, I think you knew I was a good worker. Like you'd meet my coworkers and the really Jason's a good worker.

And I would like get promoted and get paid. Well, Get stuff done. And then when we started working together, I guess it was rough. Cause it was the first time just working from home in general. But I think you realize like, oh, like Jason would like stop in the middle of the day and take breaks and get back.

And maybe he's working like four hours out of a seven hour day. Um, and like the gaps in between were more noticeable. Uh, I've been noticing for myself that I, I work to scout. I don't work at intentionally enough. And that was a comment you made about blocking eventually getting back to a place where you could say Friday was a work on the business time.

Right? I need time to write procedures and documentation and things like that. Instead of, I think we could both try some time boxing experiments. I know that it's always a failure. It always, we always have. Something that comes up suddenly last minute, that distracts us, that changes like having a schedule helps.

So I think even if you're gonna be breaking in, sometimes you have the intention. Like last week Isaac was home because he goes to school. His school is 30 minutes from our house and the doctor couldn't make an appointment. His pediatrician couldn't see him till right after lunch. So I wasn't going to send him to school in the morning, driving 30 minutes there to get him 30 minutes to bring them to the.

And the afternoon, I just kept him home all day because it was, you know, that's the trade-off we make where he goes to school. So at Workday was weird. That Workday was really weird. I had to pay that that morning and I feel like I take a decent break. I'm not, uh, I'm working more than four hours lately.

Cause I'm getting in earlier. We kinda figured out the morning. But I take like a decent, like two hour break, typically in the middle of the day. And I'm, I make it up. Usually I feel like we're talking about work, which is also work after hours and on weekends I usually get a session. And so we get to like close to a 48.

We're not, I don't think it's crazy. It's weird. Like how you track time, like some of the hustlers and they're like 80 hours a week and maybe that's good. And for certain businesses it's good. Would this be better? Like, definitely. I guess if I was physically capable of doing it, you know, like. Doing even 50% more in twice the time, or like whatever, you know, the ratio you would really get out of those extra hours.

I could find things to do with it, but I would, I would not like work as much. So, I don't know. I feel good about our balance mean, I guess I worry. It's hard to turn off. Maybe there's a problem. And when you were away at the beach house, the lake house river house and a body of water house. Yeah. It was like a different environment.

And it was probably easier for you to not work. Yeah. I asked if you worked and you were like, yeah, a little bit something, something, I was like, oh, that stinks. But you were really talking about the house. Yeah. I didn't bring my laptop and I didn't work. I didn't bring my laptop. So Puerto Rico, I didn't bring my laptop that weekend.

So, but it is weird. I like, it's good having this river house for a number of reasons, but like a change of scene. If you have an empty moment at home, besides the household chores. It's kind of like my laptop is right there and you know, my phone told me that someone needs something and I really could spend 10 minutes working on it, you know, before dinner or whatever random.

Yeah. What's a good strategy to like try deep focus. Try. I, I know people say like, shut off things that ping you probably don't have your phone nearby. You were talking about when you consider writing a book using an old style laptop that you would write in the archaic desktop publishing programming, are those the hacks that we, that our brain and our body need to have intentional focus, work time?

Yeah. I, I think, I always think about actually there was this a Seth Rogan interview. Where he talked about writing in the same space. And there was like the writing room where he would smoke weed when he writes. But it was like, all we did in this room was smoke weed and right. Uh, cause he wrote comedies.

Um, and I guess that helps him be productive, but so weed is not the answer. I'm not saying for focus. Uh, Having setting the environment and you don't have to have a separate building or a separate house if it's a room or like a different laptop, or kind of like drawing to shades or closing the door or do something like your brain really has these triggers.

I don't like switch. I used to do this. Like I have like different desktop backgrounds or like, you know, the left monitor and the right monitor would have like different kind of backgrounds and it switched to the other one. And it would like, you know, like, oh, I'm in programming mode. Um, so if he can switch the scenes, maybe you could do.

I can usually I'm in the office here. You're up. If you're like, this is my focus time for X, like come down to the office and I do the work that I can do the trade places I have done that I had to write when I wrote my hero press essay, I came down here to write it. Um, but I mean, children will always have.

You know, inflated perception of our work because we, we work together. So our conversations are work-focused that doesn't feel like work to me, talking about work at seven o'clock with a glass of wine on the sofa, with the fireplace and a dog on my lap that doesn't feel like work. It can be, I mean, I'm going to get some tense, like do kids to pay.

If the parents don't work in the same company and are talking about work with the kids, call that work. At night, if we didn't work at the same company, I was like, oh my boss, that's the thing. We're not just, chit-chatting like figuring stuff out and like using a part of our brain and kind of, and it's stuff that if we were in an office we would have been doing in the office and then like, that was a good day.

We got together and we talked for an hour about a thing. I mean, made some decisions. Yeah. You know, like it's work, but I used to brought up children and I thought you were going to go in the direction of like kids interrupting you. I know I had this problem where it's sometimes there's like something I have to do.

It's going to take one or two hours or four hours. And I don't even start it because I'm like, I know I don't really have the time. Like I don't work in the mornings like I do now. I try to like read, catch up on things and help out, like, because I could not get distracted and then mark, or, um, like I need to know like, H