Why NonToxic Productivity Is So Important
“And you may ask yourself, How did I get here?” - Once in a Lifetime by the Talking Heads
Every female entrepreneur, like every hero, has an origin story. I’m in a number of networking groups for women business owners, and very few of us started off after college as entrepreneurs. Though some did, I find that more of the community is made up of women who were in corporate America and who left to do their own thing.
That was certainly the case for me. My last corporate America gig was a really bad cultural fit. I was a financial planner, and I started to get interested in behavioral finance.
OK, that’s not right. I had always been interested in behavioral finance, even before it was a recognized Thing. I got my MBA part-time while I worked at a private bank right around the turn of the century (!)
You may also recognize that was the time of the dot-com boom and bust. The hilarious thing to me was that I went to NYU Stern, right in the heart of New York (though no longer on Wall Street itself) and none of my classes mentioned behavioral finance.
They were all about rational economic man, assuming that people behaved rationally when it came to money. Even during the time when investors were buying literally any dot-com stock as long as there was a dot com in the name. I kept telling clients to diversify out of tech, diversify, diversify.
No one was listening, and then the bust came, which apparently surprised so many people. Even though I and others had been warning about what would happen for months and months.
But none of that irrational behavior made it into my MBA classes. I mean, my professors and fellow students were reading the WSJ just as much I was! (Now there are programs that discuss behavioral finance. Finally.)
My interest intensified when I worked as a financial planner. I had clients who called up and talked to me and never, ever took my advice. I made sure I documented all our conversations in our CRM, like in all caps I TOLD THEM NOT TO DO THIS.
At one point I asked a client why they paid our fees since they never accepted my recommendations. They basically said they just wanted an objective opinion. Which is a good reason to have a financial professional, but if you’re hiring someone to be the expert maybe you should listen to them every once in a while.
I began learning about the brain in the course of trying to understand why some clients didn’t do what we’d recommended and they’d agreed to do. A lot of “bad” financial decisions are based on emotions, and I wanted to know the mental processes better in the hopes of helping my clients do the right things.
When the bad fit job ended, I decided to hang out my shingle as a certified divorce financial analyst, because I had the CDFA credential in addition to my CFP. It was a bit of a rocky start business-wise (I’m still working on improving my marketing & sales skills), but once I got in front of the local family law section I had plenty of clients.
And I discovered that I didn’t have passion for the work.
I started it because I knew the nonfinancial spouse (often the wife in hetero couples) needed help during divorce, and I also knew I could help them. And make some money at the same time, which seemed like the ideal business.
But I’ve never been divorced. My parents were together until death did them part, so I didn’t have the passion. Most of the active CDFA professionals either saw how bad the divorce hit a parent financially, or they themselves were in a messy divorce and wanted to help others avoid the ordeal they’d experienced.
I’ve always been a writer, so I spent some time writing articles and books. I ended up doing more neuroscience research for some of the books. I’ve written on the dark triad of psychology, leadership, and project management among other topics.
And as I read more of the research, I discovered why I personally have always been really productive. I’ve always been able to focus, which means I can get work done in a shorter amount of time than everyone else.
I also (probably because I’m on the autistic spectrum) really, really hate being interrupted when I’m working on something. It’s upsetting to me. I read that neurotypicals think of interruptions as welcome breaks during the day, which blows my mind.
But it does partially explain why I have always set up my environment to minimize distractions and interruptions, and why these things come naturally to me and not necessarily to my clients.
Unlike me, they may not get freaked out when they’re trying to focus and they get interrupted. So they don’t spend as much time upfront minimizing interruptions.
I joke that I had IM for about ten seconds in 2001. The first few notifications were so upsetting to my work that I deleted the app and flatly refused to have any other messengers. (I do have Slack since my clients work in it, but I’ve turned off all notifications. Same for email.)
I didn’t really think I’d do anything with the knowledge, though. This was pre-pandemic, and it just explained to me certain facts about the way I worked that was different from other people.
Even though I had really started being disenchanted with working in corporate America for my last two jobs there.
In one of my earliest positions, I worked in Weehawken New Jersey as the result of a corporate acquisition while I lived in NYC. I usually took the ferry over, which was kind of fun, but I hated the new office.
Instead of doing interesting and ad-hoc analyses for wealthy clients, I was now doing data entry on a spreadsheet for employee stock options day in and day out. The work was boring and none of us from the old office liked the people there either. (Pretty sure the feeling was mutual, at least in my case.)
I left at 5:00 on the dot every day, eager to get the ferry back home. My work was done, and due to the ferry schedule, I was usually in a few minutes early. But somehow that didn’t count.
One of my bosses told me I should be staying later because leaving on time didn’t look good. (!!) I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually say the words “what the fuck”, but I’m also pretty sure my face said it for me.
In other words, they thought I should hang around the office for a while for no purpose other than face time. You’ll be shocked, shocked, to discover that I busted my butt getting out of that job. I hate that managerial philosophy, but at the time I thought I’d solve it with another corporate job.
As I grew older, I questioned why I should be spending so much time at work when it wasn’t necessary for me. More recently, my dad had died and my mom was sick, and it just seemed like work wasn’t where I should be spending so much of my time.
But until the pandemic, it didn’t seem like anyone agreed with me. There were a few people like Arianna Huffington talking about burnout, but no one took that so seriously. Everyone else seemed to be perfectly fine working 12-14 hour days, 5-7 days a week. That was just what everyone was expected to do.
That’s why it wasn’t really until the pandemic that I thought there was any room for (my version of) productivity as a service. As should be clear by now, I’m not into cramming more busywork into every minute of every day. Or getting up at the buttcrack of dawn.
During the pandemic, people started to recognize how much they enjoyed being able to spend more time with their kids. Even as their kids were driving them crazy. Or how fun it was to pick up a hobby they hadn’t done in 20 years because they’d been so busy working.
You may have read some of the articles about people at the end of their lives talking about their regrets. No one, but no one, as far as I can tell wished they’d spent more time working.
It seems as a result of the pandemic that more people questioned how much of their lives they really wanted to devote to work, and how much they wanted to do other things with their families and friends.
At that point I thought, well, I know how to construct an environment that allows people to focus. I know how to help people be more productive during their working hours, so they can go home at a reasonable time and not lose any profits because they’re not working fewer hours.
At some point during the day, the law of diminishing returns kicks in, where more time does not equal more goals accomplished. No point in sticking around or demanding face time.
I’m also a skeptic and versed enough in tech to know that there are a lot of apps and ideas. But they’re all just tools, and problems created by tech (such as lack of focus) are not necessarily solved by tech.
I know how the brain works, which translates into how to get important tasks accomplished during the day so that my clients’ businesses thrive with fewer hours worked.
I have several offers designed to work with professional service clients at different stages of their journey to becoming more effective at work:
½ day workshop (which can also be a series of brown-bag lunches) to help the owner and/or team implement the basics of productivity
VIP Day designed for business owners to get hands-on implementation of best practices, with two accountability calls afterward to keep them “on the wagon”
Consulting engagement that lasts six weeks and is designed to uncork any productivity bottlenecks in the 5 client-facing processes which allows profitability to flow
If you want to reclaim your time and attention to enjoy your life outside your business, schedule a call for a free consultation.