Sticky Learning Lunches #5: Finding Your Own Space and Stop Working From the Kitchen Table

Find out what space you need to create when you work from home, to avoid working from the kitchen table. Use your time working from home to become the very best version of yourself. This is a Virtual Classroom of 20-minutes, followed by a 10-minute Q&A.

You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Wonderful. So welcome everybody to the first of the Sticky Learning lunches. Thanks very much for coming on. I'm gonna get myself so I can just share my video with you guys. Hello everybody. Let's stop sharing that screen. It says bear with me for two seconds.

Nathan Simmonds:

Let's get that full screen. So guys, um, you can see me, I would love to be able to see you as well. So please go over to the right hand side where it says you can you share webcam. Please do absolutely vital. In this day and age right now in the current situation, that we can see people that we can connect even by doing this via video link, we still get the same or certain level of those chemical reactions we get from actually seeing people face to face.

Nathan Simmonds:

So I would love to see you guys in the webcams over here. So please, right hand side, click on the share webcam so we can see who's on here. And also see your smiling faces 'cause that will help me in these trying times, give people a couple more minutes to get on. Please make sure you've got a drink with you. Staying hydrated. Super important. Alright.

Working from the kitchen table

 

Nathan Simmonds:

Just checking time 1 0 1. Good. A couple more people arriving. This is a fairly new experience, especially to me doing this. And gonna move my chat box up to the other side so I can see what chats are coming in. If you have any questions, there will be a q and A at the end, but please write them down, share them in the box, put 'em in the questions box so we can pick them up at the end.

Nathan Simmonds:

Good, it's 1 0 2. Let's start with this. So guys, welcome to the first of the Sticky Learning lunches. Fantastic to be here. Fantastic to share with you guys, especially in this day and age. Right now with our experiences, we are making business matter MBM and we are the Homer Sticky Learning and we're also the soft skills provider to the UK retail and grocery industry.

Nathan Simmonds:

So excited for this opportunity to share this stuff with you guys. And like I say, it's vitally important that we do this, that we get these moments to learn and we get these moments to expand our thinking while we've got time to, while we're at home, home, um, while we're working in these different dynamics and different environments. Super important. So before I get into introductions about me, I wanna make sure we're setting you guys up for success.

Nathan Simmonds:

So the first thing we're gonna do, get your phones. If you're not watching this on your phone and you're watching this on your laptop, get your phones out. Let's make sure we're getting absolute attention on what we are doing. First and foremost, get your phones, get 'em onto flight mode. I'm just gonna check my make sure mine is on. Yeah, flight mode. We wanna zero out those distractions and we're gonna talk about that again a little bit later on in this session.

Nathan Simmonds:

The next thing you wanna do is if you've got your email open, if you've got Facebook open LinkedIn, close them. The moment you get a ping, a beep, a buzz, your distraction, your attention is gonna go to there rather than actually learning anything here. So we're gonna do this for 30 to 40 minutes maximum. So I'm full attention to what we're doing here so that I can help give you some ideas that's gonna push your thinking, that's gonna help you get more focused on what you're doing.

Nathan Simmonds:

And expand your capabilities to work even better in a home working environment in these new environments that we find ourselves in. So kill the distractions before they kill you. Next thing you want to do pens and paper. Let's make sure you've got a pad and some fresh paper available. You've got pens, paper, whatever it is you wanna write with.

Nathan Simmonds:

Give yourself a nice blank sheet. You wanna make sure you remove it from any of your other notes so it doesn't get lost in those. Okay? That way when you go back and read it, you can actually go back with it or you don't, uh, put it out and throw it away with the actions that you've already done, but you keep it there as a fresh reminder to keep this thinking fresh, upfront and moving forward. Good, that's a little bit of the housekeeping.

Nathan Simmonds:

Who am I? Well, my name's Nathan Simmons, I'm senior coach, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM. Um, I've got 20 over 20 years of leadership experience. Been working from home now on and off for quite some time. So I've got some, um, already real life experience of doing this. We also opted to homeschool as well. So for you guys out there that have got your children at home at the moment, we've been doing that for a while as well.

Nathan Simmonds:

So I'm happy to take questions from that at a later date just to help you move through that. Again, it's a new experience for a lot of you just wanna say though, you're doing a great job and you are very capable of doing this, okay? So keep hold of that thought and keep doing what you're doing. Be curious and help those kids learn and that's the best thing you can do for yourself and for them. What else?

Nathan Simmonds:

I also qualified as a leadership coach over almost eight years ago now. I've been focusing on leadership development for the last night. Absolutely vital that we learn these skills. So there's not many people out there teaching this stuff to us. And what I teach and how I teach, it's uncommon skills, taught in uncommon ways that are gonna help you to be the best version of yourself.

Nathan Simmonds:

Okay, today what we're gonna do is we're gonna start breaking down a, a pneumonic, an acronym for helping you to work better at home. And we're gonna do that over the next two weeks. And we're gonna do one session every day, um, for the next working days over the next two weeks 'cause you've got Easter right in the middle. So the first thing we're gonna be talking about from the mindset model is to manage to manage yourself.

Nathan Simmonds:

In this session we're gonna cover four key areas of things you can do to help manage your focus, help manage your time and help manage your actions so you can get the best possible results and increase your productivity by maximizing your focus on that. So what's the first thing we want to cover in our manage model? The first thing we want to cover is our to-do list. Uh, sorry, apologies is the routine. Routine is absolutely vital. There's so many people at the moment. There's over 10,000 searches a month done on Google for time management

Nathan Simmonds:

And there's a demand out there for people wanting to find out how they can manage their time better. But the truth is you can't actually manage your time 'cause time's infinite. It's not something you can grab hold of and deal with. The only thing that you can actually manage is how you focus your attention inside that space to make sure you're getting the outcome that you want at the end of that space.

Nathan Simmonds:

So routine is absolutely vital. The first thing that we can do when we're dealing with our routine is we want to book three different times into our day. The first one of those times is our start time. We want to know when we're actually gonna be doing our work. 'cause it's easy to get up in the morning and think, oh, I've gotta work with this email. Oh, I've gotta take this action.

Nathan Simmonds:

And the first thing that we do at 6 37 o'clock, whatever time is it, we jump straight into our social media or we jump straight into a work email and we don't actually structure out how we're gonna get there. And next thing we know it's already 10, 11 o'clock and we, and we found that those actions have run away with us. So the first thing we wanna do is book a start time. That way we know when we're going to commence our day and we've got time before that to prepare ourselves mentally for the day ahead.

Nathan Simmonds:

Breakfast time with family, clearing your head whether you do meditation or journaling in the morning or exercise, making sure you are creating a window for those things before you actually go into your work workspace office. The second space, the second time we want a book is our lunchtime. And it's absolutely critical that we stop and that we make sure that we are energizing ourselves physically, but also mentally taking ourselves out of whatever work we were doing wherever we were working.

Nathan Simmonds:

And taking that time to have a break, digest, reflect rehydrate, and then come back to that space ready to do even more work and more focus for that afternoon rather than just going through and just knocking actions off that to-do list. The third time is when you're actually gonna stop. 'cause it's easy. And I've done this recently with some of our clients. I've sent an email in the evening at 9 30, 10 o'clock at night, not expecting to get a response until the next morning and I'll get a response five minutes later.

Nathan Simmonds:

Why? Because they're sitting at home with their work phone or their laptop nearby. 'cause they haven't actually got the, uh, the framework of what sort of day they wanna be working. So instead they just keep it on because they think they need to be on call constantly when they're working from home. But actually it's super healthy to make sure you're stopping a a a point in the day so you know when you are working too. 'cause we have Parkinson's law, we may talk about that a little bit more in a second, but work will fill the time that's been allotted to it.

Nathan Simmonds: