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What's up, Toby?

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We made it to another year, which is the first year that we've made it to in our podcast.

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What a feeling.

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I mean, if all success can be this easy or this hard, I'm not really sure.

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Yeah, you know what, Chris?

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You just make it look easy.

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I'm not sure about that.

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Not sure about that.

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All right.

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It's New Year's.

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Episode 400 and...

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12 or 11 or something.

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12 or something.

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Yeah.

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We made it to the teens, so that's good.

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Yeah, racing into the teens.

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I know.

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Today's topic is, it's New Year's.

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Yeah.

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New Year's resolutions.

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Oh, man.

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Let's see.

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What is today?

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Today is going to be the, I think it's the third?

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Yeah.

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I mean, most people have actually canceled their New Year's resolutions, but let's say

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that we're going to move them forward.

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So what I want to talk about is admin work.

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It's a major process debt topic.

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Good use of time over the last several holiday, non-holiday days for many.

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Yeah.

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Admin.

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So you came back to work and what did you have?

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A lot of emails.

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It's like a golden goose that just keeps pooping out a golden egg.

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Every morning I wake up more golden eggs, more treasures, more opportunities.

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Yeah.

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It's amazing how much email can just stack up.

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Yeah.

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I feel like for all of our technology, and shocking, a bit of a rant, our technology

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gets in the way oftentimes of our human interactions.

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You and I are mysteriously talking over hundreds of miles in real time, which is beautiful.

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But if I want to order a pizza from the place around the corner, I've got to go through

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10 minutes of press one, press seven, press 36.

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So that's why I'm always happy to get all those emails.

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So we could probably spend an entire episode just talking about tricks that people have

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done or things that people have done.

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My bad habit with emails is I just send one with basically a completely missing sentence

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at the end.

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Not even intentionally.

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I just need to get better at proofreading, which is embarrassing, especially when you

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send them to executives and then your friends send back, hey, they highlight it, they send

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you a screenshot.

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You're like, yep, just add that to my page, my top 10 email page.

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I do remember back in the day, early 2000s, I was going back and forth in email because

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I didn't have Slack yet just for friendly banter and bullshit with friends in the middle

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of my work day.

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Sort of my administrative list of things to do, like all good corporate citizens.

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But I got my two email threads crossed and kind of like Ghostbusters, when it releases

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all the demons, I thought, oh shit, what did I just send out in that last email that went

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out to a female colleague instead of my male friend?

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It was a rare moment where it was nowhere near as bad as it could be, but it was worthy

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of an apology just to acknowledge that the thread itself was colorful and not wholly

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inappropriate but definitely childlike and immature.

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I was working at a marketing company.

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It was actually fairly large.

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It was a billionaire company.

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They could send a CC all to the entire distro.

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One day it was like something got sent to the all distro and then it became this Amish

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virus.

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We're like, that's not mine.

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Please remain from this distribution list.

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So funny.

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Everybody kept saying, don't do this.

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And then you have people saying, it's not mine.

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It was the perfect version of a Trojan horse Amish email virus of like, oh my God, people

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just, it was the funniest thing.

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You're just grabbing popcorn.

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You're like, this is the most terrible thing ever.

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And you know that some of them were totally being genuine.

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I don't know if anyone was snarky.

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I wasn't.

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I was just enjoying the back and forth.

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I was like, I wonder if anybody's ever taken their server down by doing, I mean, you can't

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do that anymore.

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I've actually had like all it, you know, to send to the corporation and it's like, you

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can't do that.

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And you're like, oh gosh, thank you IT for one thing.

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Anyway, back to our topic.

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Leaving off the last sentence of emails, I'm really curious to see how many listeners share

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their version of an Amish virus that that may be the first time I've thought about Amish

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and computer virus in the same sentence.

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So it was, it was so funny.

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I mean, it was like back and forth and like it was somewhere like it was, you know, I'm

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Boise.

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It was like happened in Chicago, but it was, and I, and you know, it could have, it could

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have been her, all right, could have been a Prince from somewhere as far as I know.

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But it was just kept going back and forth and, and, and it just wouldn't end.

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And everybody was just getting so frustrated because the ridiculousness would not stop.

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Anyway, back to process that and oh right.

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And New Year's resolutions we got, we got sidebarred half of our podcast.

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We wanted to talk, I want to talk about admin as just a waste or what I would call as like

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sad men, meaning I like that you have to do that doesn't necessarily have a perceived

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value or is, is, or it's not clear.

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It doesn't have a clear value.

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How do we fix that?

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So we're talking about in 2025.

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I think so.

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This is like the corporate version of folding clothes when you get them out of the wash.

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Yeah.

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It's you do it.

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You were told you're supposed to do it.

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You're trained to do it.

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And to this day, I still don't know why we do it because it just seems like a colossal

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waste of time.

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I do it, but I then promptly unfold them every time I want to use something.

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That is true.

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That is very true.

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Yeah.

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What do we do about all this sad men tasks?

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Cause they really are exactly that.

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It's kind of weepy.

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What's your, what's your least favorite sad man task that maybe you want to leave behind

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in 24 and the one thing that I want to do, the biggest problem I have, I think in doing

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admin tasks is I'm a bit of a perfectionist.

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I think about process a lot.

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So I'm, I'm a bit of like, let's make this 100% correct.

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And I think the biggest thing that gets me wound around the axle is I spend a lot of

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time perfecting in the draft stage.

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And so even with emails or everything, we talked about my emails.

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I'm just saying like with presentations or like those, those like ritual things that

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the businesses do, whether it's quarterly business review or monthly business review.

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Yeah.

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Like those, those are the items that like, I think I spend too much time getting to perfect.

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And then, and then what's interesting, this is what I do, but I spend too much time getting

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to perfect.

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I'm really semi proud of it.

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But then as a boss person or bringing presenting that to the community, the community is always

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going to have feedback and the closer you are to perfecting it, the more pissed off

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you get when you get the feedback.

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And so, yeah, I think for 2025, what I would like to do is just get the, get my drafts

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out into the community faster.

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I like that idea a lot, Chris.

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I think you make a, you make a point and I think a lot of us are guilty of that and it's,

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we want to be able to, to demonstrate that we've thought it through.

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We've run scenarios.

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We want to be able to like address concerns as we start to share it.

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But if we go too far down the path, you know, it begins to feel like this beautiful marble

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sculpture and we've already removed all the flaws that we can see.

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Then you end up with an armless Venus de Milo, you know.

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Or your boss says you want, they want it in steel and you're like, ah, yeah.

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Butter what?

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Who can afford that much butter?

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I wanted a wax statue.

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That's the other thing that happens too is like when you don't get that, when you don't

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get that clarification, there is that extra work where sometimes, sometimes they're like,

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oh, I just wanted like 180 words or 180 characters.

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You're like, I've got a six pager over here brewing and it's a good one.

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It is excellent.

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And I can't get it from here back to 180 characters.

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I'm sorry.

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We're going to shrink it.

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We're stuck.

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This is what you get.

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And that doesn't go very well.

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And I think some of this is like some of this is just really hard with, you know, everybody

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if you have to answer to someone, right, even if you're the CEO, you're answering to the

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board or your share your stakeholders.

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But if you do have a boss, like sometimes that that that quick sink can save a lot of

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sad men of like, hey, what are we talking about here?

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Like and I think, you know, we haven't we haven't really delved into homes that much

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on like homes for where work should go.

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Now, I think we did in one of our first podcasts, we talked about something discoverable and,

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you know, transferable, right, which is like, oh, it has to have a home.

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And I think that's one of the challenges, right?

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Like sometimes our work lives in SharePoint, which I've said before, you know, it's hard

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to share and I don't understand the point.

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It could be in Confluence.

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It could be in PowerPoint.

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It could be in a spreadsheet.

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It could be in.

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Yep.

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One drive box teams all over.

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Yeah.

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There's a lot of good places to hide valuable property.

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Yeah.

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It's a yeah, it's a security through obfuscation, I think is the strategy there.

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The most corporations abide by.

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Yeah.

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Chris, I think as I go into 2025, you know, one of those easy things is simply to push

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back on meeting invites that have no agenda.

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Oh, yeah.

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You know, in any given year, about 50% of my invites show up like that.

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Yeah.

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So if I haven't deleted it outright, I'm going to show up not knowing what's expected of

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me, what success looks like, or if I should have taken a nap and pretended I was double

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booked.

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Yeah, for sure.

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Well, I think that that's the hardest part is like the person that's showing up and scheduling

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the meeting sometimes has a clear idea, but they don't outline it.

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Right.

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And so typically, you know, standard means like, hey, how's everybody's weekend?

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Right.

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And you're like, oh, this is a social thing.

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And so then you end up on the social down that social track and you don't get to any

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of your agenda items if you had any.

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And then you're just you're you're stuck.

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Well, if you take the first half hour of an hour meeting that could have been a five minute

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hallway conversation and use that for recounting last weekend, the next half hour can be used

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for, hey, what are you doing this weekend?

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I know.

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Yeah.

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So it's interesting.

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Like I think that no matter how long the meeting is, and I don't care if it's eight hours,

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if it's 15 minutes, five minutes or an hour, like we have human beings will figure a way

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to fill the time, not with valuable items, but to fill the time.

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One hundred percent.

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So maybe the number one thing that we could do for to help reduce process debt in 2025

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is shrink meeting times.

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I think to your point, forcing people to have an agenda.

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And I think I think what's interesting is I think if you can have a culture of like,

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look, we are going to do our best work and we know that our best work requires relationship

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and it also requires us like holding each other accountable in ways.

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I think if we could, I think if you can balance kind of those two things, some exciting stuff

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can happen.

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I love that thought though.

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Yeah.

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And if you don't, like you just end up, you can end up wasting a lot of time for sure.

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You can waste probably 15 minutes without, I mean, almost 15 minutes.

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I meant to say happy new year, my friend.

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Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, man.

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Well, you an awesome 25.

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Yeah, let's start cutting meetings in half and sending out agendas, God forbid.

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Yeah.

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Or like the other thing I've thought about, like just recently is like whoever, like if

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you have tasks, everybody has a task management system.

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It could be to do it.

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Sure.

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I mean, pick your poison.

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But if you had the person that assigned the task and person who owned the task, if you

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just simply required those two items on every single task, it would be shocking how clear

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those tasks would be.

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And how like, you know what I mean?

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Like sometimes you're like, was that a comment?

245
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Am I supposed to pick that up and run with it?

246
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What am I supposed to do?

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00:14:48,120 --> 00:14:53,080
Like just having that like, you know, almost like the maker checker piece, but we are way

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over time.

249
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This might be our longest podcast ever.

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I hope that, you know, we got to keep these nice and crisp.

251
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We got to keep them nice and crisp.

252
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All right.

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So well done last year.

254
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We got our podcasts in.

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You know, we got this is the first one.

256
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Awesome.

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We're off to the races.

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It is it is great to be on the journey with you.

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I'm loving it.

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All right.

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Thanks, man.

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00:15:16,760 --> 00:15:17,760
Thank you.

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Don't forget about a.