What's up, Toby?
We made it to another year, which is the first year that we've made it to in our podcast.
What a feeling.
I mean, if all success can be this easy or this hard, I'm not really sure.
Yeah, you know what, Chris?
You just make it look easy.
I'm not sure about that.
Not sure about that.
All right.
It's New Year's.
Episode 400 and...
12 or 11 or something.
12 or something.
Yeah.
We made it to the teens, so that's good.
Yeah, racing into the teens.
I know.
Today's topic is, it's New Year's.
Yeah.
New Year's resolutions.
Oh, man.
Let's see.
What is today?
Today is going to be the, I think it's the third?
Yeah.
I mean, most people have actually canceled their New Year's resolutions, but let's say
that we're going to move them forward.
So what I want to talk about is admin work.
It's a major process debt topic.
Good use of time over the last several holiday, non-holiday days for many.
Yeah.
Admin.
So you came back to work and what did you have?
A lot of emails.
It's like a golden goose that just keeps pooping out a golden egg.
Every morning I wake up more golden eggs, more treasures, more opportunities.
Yeah.
It's amazing how much email can just stack up.
Yeah.
I feel like for all of our technology, and shocking, a bit of a rant, our technology
gets in the way oftentimes of our human interactions.
You and I are mysteriously talking over hundreds of miles in real time, which is beautiful.
But if I want to order a pizza from the place around the corner, I've got to go through
10 minutes of press one, press seven, press 36.
So that's why I'm always happy to get all those emails.
So we could probably spend an entire episode just talking about tricks that people have
done or things that people have done.
My bad habit with emails is I just send one with basically a completely missing sentence
at the end.
Not even intentionally.
I just need to get better at proofreading, which is embarrassing, especially when you
send them to executives and then your friends send back, hey, they highlight it, they send
you a screenshot.
You're like, yep, just add that to my page, my top 10 email page.
I do remember back in the day, early 2000s, I was going back and forth in email because
I didn't have Slack yet just for friendly banter and bullshit with friends in the middle
of my work day.
Sort of my administrative list of things to do, like all good corporate citizens.
But I got my two email threads crossed and kind of like Ghostbusters, when it releases
all the demons, I thought, oh shit, what did I just send out in that last email that went
out to a female colleague instead of my male friend?
It was a rare moment where it was nowhere near as bad as it could be, but it was worthy
of an apology just to acknowledge that the thread itself was colorful and not wholly
inappropriate but definitely childlike and immature.
I was working at a marketing company.
It was actually fairly large.
It was a billionaire company.
They could send a CC all to the entire distro.
One day it was like something got sent to the all distro and then it became this Amish
virus.
We're like, that's not mine.
Please remain from this distribution list.
So funny.
Everybody kept saying, don't do this.
And then you have people saying, it's not mine.
It was the perfect version of a Trojan horse Amish email virus of like, oh my God, people
just, it was the funniest thing.
You're just grabbing popcorn.
You're like, this is the most terrible thing ever.
And you know that some of them were totally being genuine.
I don't know if anyone was snarky.
I wasn't.
I was just enjoying the back and forth.
I was like, I wonder if anybody's ever taken their server down by doing, I mean, you can't
do that anymore.
I've actually had like all it, you know, to send to the corporation and it's like, you
can't do that.
And you're like, oh gosh, thank you IT for one thing.
Anyway, back to our topic.
Leaving off the last sentence of emails, I'm really curious to see how many listeners share
their version of an Amish virus that that may be the first time I've thought about Amish
and computer virus in the same sentence.
So it was, it was so funny.
I mean, it was like back and forth and like it was somewhere like it was, you know, I'm
Boise.
It was like happened in Chicago, but it was, and I, and you know, it could have, it could
have been her, all right, could have been a Prince from somewhere as far as I know.
But it was just kept going back and forth and, and, and it just wouldn't end.
And everybody was just getting so frustrated because the ridiculousness would not stop.
Anyway, back to process that and oh right.
And New Year's resolutions we got, we got sidebarred half of our podcast.
We wanted to talk, I want to talk about admin as just a waste or what I would call as like
sad men, meaning I like that you have to do that doesn't necessarily have a perceived
value or is, is, or it's not clear.
It doesn't have a clear value.
How do we fix that?
So we're talking about in 2025.
I think so.
This is like the corporate version of folding clothes when you get them out of the wash.
Yeah.
It's you do it.
You were told you're supposed to do it.
You're trained to do it.
And to this day, I still don't know why we do it because it just seems like a colossal
waste of time.
I do it, but I then promptly unfold them every time I want to use something.
That is true.
That is very true.
Yeah.
What do we do about all this sad men tasks?
Cause they really are exactly that.
It's kind of weepy.
What's your, what's your least favorite sad man task that maybe you want to leave behind
in 24 and the one thing that I want to do, the biggest problem I have, I think in doing
admin tasks is I'm a bit of a perfectionist.
I think about process a lot.
So I'm, I'm a bit of like, let's make this 100% correct.
And I think the biggest thing that gets me wound around the axle is I spend a lot of
time perfecting in the draft stage.
And so even with emails or everything, we talked about my emails.
I'm just saying like with presentations or like those, those like ritual things that
the businesses do, whether it's quarterly business review or monthly business review.
Yeah.
Like those, those are the items that like, I think I spend too much time getting to perfect.
And then, and then what's interesting, this is what I do, but I spend too much time getting
to perfect.
I'm really semi proud of it.
But then as a boss person or bringing presenting that to the community, the community is always
going to have feedback and the closer you are to perfecting it, the more pissed off
you get when you get the feedback.
And so, yeah, I think for 2025, what I would like to do is just get the, get my drafts
out into the community faster.
I like that idea a lot, Chris.
I think you make a, you make a point and I think a lot of us are guilty of that and it's,
we want to be able to, to demonstrate that we've thought it through.
We've run scenarios.
We want to be able to like address concerns as we start to share it.
But if we go too far down the path, you know, it begins to feel like this beautiful marble
sculpture and we've already removed all the flaws that we can see.
Then you end up with an armless Venus de Milo, you know.
Or your boss says you want, they want it in steel and you're like, ah, yeah.
Butter what?
Who can afford that much butter?
I wanted a wax statue.
That's the other thing that happens too is like when you don't get that, when you don't
get that clarification, there is that extra work where sometimes, sometimes they're like,
oh, I just wanted like 180 words or 180 characters.
You're like, I've got a six pager over here brewing and it's a good one.
It is excellent.
And I can't get it from here back to 180 characters.
I'm sorry.
We're going to shrink it.
We're stuck.
This is what you get.
And that doesn't go very well.
And I think some of this is like some of this is just really hard with, you know, everybody
if you have to answer to someone, right, even if you're the CEO, you're answering to the
board or your share your stakeholders.
But if you do have a boss, like sometimes that that that quick sink can save a lot of
sad men of like, hey, what are we talking about here?
Like and I think, you know, we haven't we haven't really delved into homes that much
on like homes for where work should go.
Now, I think we did in one of our first podcasts, we talked about something discoverable and,
you know, transferable, right, which is like, oh, it has to have a home.
And I think that's one of the challenges, right?
Like sometimes our work lives in SharePoint, which I've said before, you know, it's hard
to share and I don't understand the point.
It could be in Confluence.
It could be in PowerPoint.
It could be in a spreadsheet.
It could be in.
Yep.
One drive box teams all over.
Yeah.
There's a lot of good places to hide valuable property.
Yeah.
It's a yeah, it's a security through obfuscation, I think is the strategy there.
The most corporations abide by.
Yeah.
Chris, I think as I go into 2025, you know, one of those easy things is simply to push
back on meeting invites that have no agenda.
Oh, yeah.
You know, in any given year, about 50% of my invites show up like that.
Yeah.
So if I haven't deleted it outright, I'm going to show up not knowing what's expected of
me, what success looks like, or if I should have taken a nap and pretended I was double
booked.
Yeah, for sure.
Well, I think that that's the hardest part is like the person that's showing up and scheduling
the meeting sometimes has a clear idea, but they don't outline it.
Right.
And so typically, you know, standard means like, hey, how's everybody's weekend?
Right.
And you're like, oh, this is a social thing.
And so then you end up on the social down that social track and you don't get to any
of your agenda items if you had any.
And then you're just you're you're stuck.
Well, if you take the first half hour of an hour meeting that could have been a five minute
hallway conversation and use that for recounting last weekend, the next half hour can be used
for, hey, what are you doing this weekend?
I know.
Yeah.
So it's interesting.
Like I think that no matter how long the meeting is, and I don't care if it's eight hours,
if it's 15 minutes, five minutes or an hour, like we have human beings will figure a way
to fill the time, not with valuable items, but to fill the time.
One hundred percent.
So maybe the number one thing that we could do for to help reduce process debt in 2025
is shrink meeting times.
I think to your point, forcing people to have an agenda.
And I think I think what's interesting is I think if you can have a culture of like,
look, we are going to do our best work and we know that our best work requires relationship
and it also requires us like holding each other accountable in ways.
I think if we could, I think if you can balance kind of those two things, some exciting stuff
can happen.
I love that thought though.
Yeah.
And if you don't, like you just end up, you can end up wasting a lot of time for sure.
You can waste probably 15 minutes without, I mean, almost 15 minutes.
I meant to say happy new year, my friend.
Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, man.
Well, you an awesome 25.
Yeah, let's start cutting meetings in half and sending out agendas, God forbid.
Yeah.
Or like the other thing I've thought about, like just recently is like whoever, like if
you have tasks, everybody has a task management system.
It could be to do it.
Sure.
I mean, pick your poison.
But if you had the person that assigned the task and person who owned the task, if you
just simply required those two items on every single task, it would be shocking how clear
those tasks would be.
And how like, you know what I mean?
Like sometimes you're like, was that a comment?
Am I supposed to pick that up and run with it?
What am I supposed to do?
Like just having that like, you know, almost like the maker checker piece, but we are way
over time.
This might be our longest podcast ever.
I hope that, you know, we got to keep these nice and crisp.
We got to keep them nice and crisp.
All right.
So well done last year.
We got our podcasts in.
You know, we got this is the first one.
Awesome.
We're off to the races.
It is it is great to be on the journey with you.
I'm loving it.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Thank you.
Don't forget about a.