Spaciousness – How to manage your attention, not your time

0:00Hi, I'm Sarah. And I'm Helen. And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, where every week we borrow some brilliance from a person, a place, sometimes even an object, and we try to turn that curiosity into useful action for you and your career. And today we are going to be talking, we're sort of borrowing brilliance from a person and I guess a topic is a bit of a report. A report, a report. Sounds very grown up, doesn't it? I'm just a big build up we're talking about spaciousness everybody which might be a new term it was to me when I heard about it I was actually at an event where somebody a previous podcast guest I'm a big fan of called Megan writes who has written a book called um speak truth to power um and she was talking about a new report that had been released called spaciousness and I thought how have I not read this like I follow your work I'm a big like I'm a fan of what Megan does how have I not read this report and I like you know I just kind of like like the word and I've talked to a few people about it and it's a word that seems to connect with people conceptually and so Sarah and I wanted to take the research that Megan has done around spaciousness and what it means to people and how we can develop it and turn it into something that's really useful for the Swigley Careers community and I guess as a bit of a heads up as well Megan is turning the report into a book so there is more work from Megan coming on this topic so I think if you if what we're talking about resonates with you today and feels like it's useful I would definitely recommend following Megan so that you are first in line for when that book comes out.

1:33One of the things that's interesting actually is when she talks about the research that she's done so far is that she says when you talk to people about spaciousness what everybody automatically does is starts with doing so they use being in doing mode as the default to then say well I know it's not this because this is what feels more familiar um you know we're all you know we're all busy people get distracted people feel like they're in too many meetings and the meetings they're in are too rushed and so her observation is we find it quite easy to describe doing mode and kind of what what our reality feels like but actually much harder probably partly because of the word and it's not a word that's used in work very often to imagine what spaciousness is and I think a really important distinction up front is that it's not about time management it's about attention management and I think that's that is a an important frame for everything we're going to we're going to talk about today.

2:36So should we do a little bit of a definition based on Megan's work of what spaciousness is and then we thought we'd kind of just talk about different types of spaciousness set a bit of context and before we go into well how how do we create more spaciousness in our work I am actually going to read out her kind of full definition and then tell you what I did with that which I can't work out if sometimes when I was preparing for this podcast I was like is this the opposite of spaciousness am I yeah am I in anti-spacious mode so she describes it as expansive and unhurried attention where we are neither grasping towards the next moment nor running away from the previous one we are aware of our interconnection with the world around us free from the expectation of how we need to be and what happens next curious and open to potential and I remember reading that and being like oh wow that's not super easy to make sense of so then I put it into Claude and I said oh can you describe spaciousness in one sentence and I I then did have a like is this really ironic is this the opposite of what I'm meant to be doing but I did like the short definition so spaciousness is being present and relaxed connected to the moment without worrying about what comes next or what just happened but I think the argument against that because I've I have read this report and actually I've read it again because it's I think Megan's a really good job here of like priming me to really understand this is that short definition does miss some of the nuances of things that are important you know the word curious and open it's neither of those words are in that definition and as we keep going through today's podcast you'll see both those things are actually really important and so I suppose sometimes our drive for speed simplicity and doing which we're all very used to can mean that you miss quality and critical insights um so it's just interesting like i would encourage you to do the activity that both helen and i have done which is almost like read the report in a new way and just see what you discover i think that in itself is a really good action one of the other things that i found useful as well as the definition and i agree with you that the longer definition does have some bits that are really important to be aware of the other thing that i found useful was the dimensions of spaciousness because i think another trap that you could potentially fall into is just thinking oh spaciousness is just having a clear head you know it's just having time to think time to think yeah that kind of vibe but actually what she says is there are four different dimensions of spaciousness and you'll you you kind of want to think quite holistically about them if you're trying to bring more of this into the way that you work and and you know might even go beyond work might be the way that you kind of live um so the four that she talks about are physical so this is kind of your home your work your your kind of the air um you know are you getting outside is your desk a mess have you got like space like your actual do you feel like the spaciousness in the physical environment that you are in and the second is cognitive which i think is probably the one that people go to as a default when they're thinking about this um but it's this one she talks about you know what do i notice about what i'm thinking what do i notice in the world around on me like not just the doing but that noticing we've actually done a podcast on noticing before if if you haven't haven't listened to that one the third is emotional sort of spaciousness with sitting with your feelings like if you're not doing that you're probably rushing on to the next thing because the thing that you're doing or thinking about feeling feels a bit uncomfortable but spaciousness is the ability to sort of process what you're feeling sit with those feelings for a bit longer and maybe be curious about why am I feeling that way why did that feedback make me feel so frustrated and the fourth one is spiritual was conscious of using the word spiritual because it means different things to different people but um she frames that as the spaces and rituals that you consider have meaning so i think that does allow you to personalize that that you know for for me like being outdoors in the forest that's quite you know that is quite spiritual those places have meaning for me they feel they feel like places i get quite grounded and myself in so spiritual can mean lots of different things but i thought it was interesting physical cognitive emotion spiritual these are the different dimensions of spaciousness and so then we've turned this into some from and tos to just try and bring this to life even more so these the froms are what this would look like what an activity or a task or a process might look like in doing mode and the two is what spaciousness might look and feel like um and this is some of our interpretations now I think is worth saying so we might be getting these right wrong or somewhere in between.

7:18So let's talk about meetings. In doing mode you go to every meeting you're invited to and you also probably complete every task you get asked to do you know without challenging or questioning. When you're being more spacious you probably question whether you actually need to go to the meeting in the first place so you bring that kind of sense of inquiry to meetings and you would be asking yourself whether the tasks that you're doing are the right ones and actually Helen and I even had this conversation uh last week when we were together so we were reflecting on November and December and we were talking about the work that we were doing and how that felt for the team so back to emotional kind of curiosity um and people saying you know people feeling like you're quite overwhelmed and there was there was lots on but then there were some data points that we were kind of challenging ourselves on to say well actually potentially that should have there should have been more space in those months but it obviously didn't feel that way for people so that's it's not about necessarily always having exact answers but it's exploring those kind of questions you know rather than just I think often we you get busy um or things feel hard for a bit and we just accept it and move on you're just like okay yeah that was that was a difficult time but that was just a busy month right one to the next thing um i need to tell you it's a minor segue i'm saying minor because it is related to this point about kind of um should i be in that meeting or not um i've got an email from microsoft this morning i'm i mean i wasn't the only person i would imagine many millions of people yes okay okay okay so in this email it talks about like three prompts that satire and adela thinks we should all be using copilot yeah i read it i don't know whether it's his or not but the third one is a really good cut and paste prompt as long as you use Microsoft Teams it basically says something along the lines of look at my emails and meetings and I added Teams communications to my prompt and tell me what percentage of time I've spent on different projects over the last month and so you know like your time attention communications and it then puts it in so you can see so something like 35 of my time was on learn like a lobster uh which is our book that's coming out next month get involved everybody with the sprint if you are listening before the 19th of january um squiggly sprint.com and uh the next lot was something like 20 ish percent of my time was on podcast content and strategy but it's quite interesting you know if you kind of because you might be like oh i'm always in meetings or just go to meetings on autopilot but then actually having a little bit of data i think allows you to like reflect on well am i in the right places is that reflect how I want to spend my time all those sorts of questions I thought was good good prompt I've not tried that I read I did read the email though because I thought well this is useful Satya probably knows right yeah uh the next from is around emails so back to attention management emails get most of my attention so you know when you're thinking about like where you're putting your focus versus if you're being more spacious you would ask yourself like where do I want to give my attention or what do I want to give my attention to and you'd be asking yourself like what matters most so you don't give yourself that default of like well I'll do emails because I get the dopamine hit of like doing something um conversations if you're in doing mode conversations would always relate to tasks to do's you know super efficient you get through a checklist if you're in spacious mode it doesn't mean that those things don't have to happen it just means that you also have like exploratory conversations, curious conversations.

10:57You have space in maybe quite a busy conversation with lots of tasks, but to still ask questions. You know, it's still okay to ask a question. You can say the hard thing. It doesn't feel like there's no time to say the hard thing. Like you put attention, you know, you pay attention to what might be missing or what's not being said. So I think sometimes when I was reading this, there's a temptation to divide this and go, oh, either you're in doing mode or you're in spaciousness mode. But the more I was thinking about this, the more I was like, oh, I'm not sure that's always the reality. You know, there are some moments where you're like much more spacious and much more doing.

11:40But I think probably the real value here is to go how can you introduce spaciousness into things like a meeting like what would that look like how do you introduce spaciousness into your team's ways of working like things you already do that's my own personal hypothesis um a few other ones um if you're in doing mode you do things based on what tech tells you to do so tech triggered responsiveness um respond you've not responded to this email or you need to do this thing and that's what you just do versus I decide how to use tech like to to help me so you're making some conscious decisions and then maybe thinking about from if you're in that kind of more more doing mode it's often more about like shoulds and other people's expectations other people's priorities um and maybe having a more narrow view of success versus something that's much more individual personal to you and you probably consciously let go of shoulds like almost you know what they are and you've you've decided whether that actually works for you whether it works for you or not another minor segue on that point um this is where i think and i feel like i've got to mention that i've got to i've got to say the word vision board i wouldn't feel like it wouldn't be me if i didn't say the word vision board but i think if you are it's january so i'll let you off january it's vision board she'll let me she'll let me talk about in january um but if you're trying to get to a more individual view of success like what is meaningful motivating um you know what does success mean to me effectively i do think vision boards are very helpful for that because um i sat down with a friend yesterday and like we talked through our vision boards and it it they're so different you know they're so different and i think it's a really helpful way of getting to that because i don't start with how can i get promoted and find a picture i i start with oh what does what's What's it going to feel like?

13:33What's it going to look like? What are the words that represent it? So, yeah, vision boards are useful for that one. What we've now done, we were like, we can't resist trying to make spaciousness practical. And we did have a debate, like, should we even do this? Is this the right thing to do? So what we have tried to do is take the different aspects of the definition, come up with a question and a spaciousness action. and you know Megan's work is still very work in progress here so this again is very much our interpretation but you know see what you all think. So the first area is about expansive and unhurried attention so essentially about being present.

14:14So a question to ask yourself is when do I feel most present not worrying about things that have happened or things that are going to happen and I think we can probably all think of moments in our day you know where you're not really in it with that person or even in it in terms of the work you're doing because I don't know you've got something coming up you're a bit nervous about um or something happened earlier in the day and it's hard to let go of those things so my thought here was try and think about like when you do this well at the moment and like what what helps you what would be that what would that look like for you helen yeah well i was actually thinking about sarah and i were together um a few days ago and it was very much like that for me like it was very we were in we shut out the outside world and i think you know what helped us to do that a a being together so and and there are certain people that that probably wouldn't work as well for so i think there's something about your brain is particularly like that so me spending time with you and your brain helps me to do that so think about who you're spending time with.

15:20And the second was we did it in a different place. So I do think back to the your physical environment, I do think that can affect this a little bit. So, you know, maybe you might have a meeting in a coffee shop rather than an office, for example, maybe that might help you to be a bit more present in the moment, not distracted by the doing that's around around you in your sort of default place. I think for me, it's also sometimes about um if I'm really motivated by doing something well so when we were preparing for today for example um there are lots of things that you and I could talk about and it's not that we don't but I really want to do a good job of this today and I think because this topic was thoughtful and like we were trying to put some structure around it so it would make sense I felt very present because you know like the content you know the content of the conversation or the content of the work I think when I'm very motivated by that oh I think it's going to be useful I have a good impact it helps me I think if I if I'm being honest if I'm like I don't really want to do this work or oh like that's a bit annoying it's not my favorite thing to do then I'm I'm a lot less present so I think sometimes I probably need to when the work feels more like that I need to attach myself to a why like why is this important like yesterday for example I was recording some videos which funnily enough I just don't like doing like I love talking funny enough it's not funny at all it's obvious that you wouldn't like okay um well I don't know I like I love talking on stages and I love delivering workshops but I don't like recording a video just sitting at my desk I find it very annoying and I don't want to do it basically and in those moments I'm really not present I'm thinking about all the other things I'd rather be doing what I want to be doing instead um other things that have happened in the day and I sort of get in my own way um and that's one of actually Megan's observations is that often spaciousness is something that we self-sabotage so yes there's lots of other reasons why we don't have spaciousness that some of which are outside of our control but there are definitely quite a long list of reasons where you're like that's kind of up to you um and I find that quite motivating because I'm like, well, I could probably, it is up to me when I do those videos, I've got to do them.

17:37I could either do them with attention and being present and it'd probably be a more enjoyable experience or I could do it, you know, complaining, being distracted, putting my attention elsewhere, et cetera, not very helpful. And so the action here is to work on one action or task or process uninterrupted for a minimum of 45 minutes. Now, for some of you, you might be listening and be like, no sweat. Like I do this all the time. But her research showed that 60 % of people can't remember the last time they spent 30 minutes or more on anything, you know, because people are kind of switching so much.

18:16And I tested myself on this yesterday. And I did work on one thing for 30 minutes, but nothing for longer than 30 minutes. So actually, I think 45 minutes is that sort of stretching tipping point um and by uninterrupted it means like you can't check your messages you can't check your email you've got to stick like with that task um I think it's a good good thing for everyone to try out yeah I do too and then and then go kind of into the feelings part of it like why does it feel uncomfortable is that sort of second second thought thought process um so the second area that we are focusing on it goes back to the definition that Sarah shared at the start is this idea of kind of interconnection so when we are operating with kind of a spacious mindset we are aware of how our work might connect with the people what's happening around us that could affect our work it sort of gets into the territory really of like systems thinking but if you've not done anything on that don't don't worry too much just think about it as in interconnection what what affects me and my work beyond the immediate and the obvious perhaps and so a question that we think is useful here in the context of your career not just kind of the work that you do on a day-to-day basis is who influences my career that I have no control over because there are potential there are some obvious answers you might who influences my career my manager my manager's manager the company policy something like that there's some obvious answers but when you get into the that that have I have no control over you start I think to think a bit bigger and broader so Sarah and I were asking ourselves that that question and we got to like oh well it's it's well I went to government I went to UK government Sarah went to US economy we were like all these all these like things that are happening in the wider world that are way bigger than us that actually still could affect our career in running Amazing If and in trying to make squiggly careers better for everybody these are kind of less obvious but no less significant perhaps even more significant influences that we don't have direct control over and i think it just helps you to zoom out a little bit when you're thinking about you and your work and what impacts it and the action that we have got here is to do a bit of mapping i've done this i've done this before but i haven't really done it with a spaciousness like lens on on doing it so it could be an interesting thing to do it again and it's something you could do individually or as a team so this is literally you put yourself in the middle or you could put your team in the middle and you're thinking who does my work go to and it could be a person it could be a team and also I would do the arrows back like who comes to me for work for insight for decisions and you really start to see the flows of work that go around you and the sort of system that you are operating in and I think it does get even more useful I think when you do this as a team because you can start to see like oh actually there's 10 people in my team and lots of us are going to the same person or lots of us are dependent on the same thing and it just gives you a view of the interconnected nature of your work that I don't think you could do without creating that map to do it.

21:23One of the things that we often hear from the organisations we work with is you know a tendency to get stuck in silos and everyone it's it happens in small companies it happens in our company and so I think this helps you with that it also helps you with that skill which I think can feel a bit elusive when people say oh you know we need to get better at connecting the dots you know we need to go beyond just our team and that can feel quite hard to do or make happen I think if you do that exercise that Helen just described about like where does my work go to where does my work come from um it just it does it just helps you that it's like it's big picture it's zoom out it's the kind of bird's eye view so it's quite a useful career skill generally I think to kind of have a have a go at that um so the next one is free I'm like oh free freedom um which actually is one of helen's values so i was like oh this one should feel very motivating to helen um and the question here is around those shoulds again so what are three shoulds or like i shoulds that are getting in my way and just um i suppose it's sort of holding a mirror up to yourself to be like kind of what am i still holding on to that perhaps isn't actually that motivating for me It comes from someone else.

22:37It comes from expectations of what good looks like for a job or a career or society. Maybe it's still what your parents think you should do, you know, all those kind of things. Are there any shoulds, Helen, that you can think of that you think, oh, I still sometimes fall into that trap? A should trap? I probably more about like I should always be driving the business, you know, like we we run our business um I it's a growing business I want to keep growing and so I think I've got I should always be working in order for the business to always be growing and I actually think that's not it's not very helpful it's really not very helpful because I actually think well you kind of you kind of really want it to grow without it always needing you to drive it and but I feel that should I feel that should I feel that should when I could do something else And I think, well, I know I shouldn't do that because I should.

23:32I should do this. And so I talk myself out. I talk, you know, back to the sabotage thing that you said earlier. I think I sabotage my spaciousness. That's quite hard to say. Because of the shoulds, like particularly that one. Well, I could do the interconnected map and I could ask myself some of these questions, but I should be getting that thing done. I you know that's I constantly and I and it put it's like a magnet for my mind that I would have to I would have to try and you know take some of the magnetic power away um so that I could be more attracted to the spaciousness yeah I think some of my should my shoulds are always very different to yours but my shoulds are sometimes quite comparison led I should be more like that person because I always find comparison quite hard to let go of and you know you know objectively it's not it's not useful but yeah I will just see other people or other companies I'll be like oh we should be more like that I should be more like that um and then I think we are getting better together you're you're what's useful is because our shoulds are different we help each other so if I ever would say oh maybe we should be more like this then I think you'll be like oh well why would we or like what would be in it for us you would ask those kind of challenging questions and then it makes it it's it helps me to figure out whether there's actually some like decent reasoning there or actually is it really ego shiny object stuff and i think the same with yours where you're like well i i should and i'm like well no like why why should it i think my question too often you is like why should it be you i've put a walk in my diary today and i know you model it because you model it and so i'm like but sarah does the same job as me and this helps her to be better therefore my the way that i'm thinking may not be the way that i have to work so yeah it's really helpful maybe and this is not in the report but part of spaciousness is also thinking about you know the how we can help each other being to be spacious because i expect we all do parts of this well already but then just listening to this one in particular around like free free um you and i probably help each other to be free of the shoulds and the expectations and the action here which is um a reflective action really is i think now is a good moment to consider what do you want to feel proud of by the end of the year and actually helen even messaged me yesterday and i was like well i'll store that ready for the podcast um she messaged me she was working somewhere different that she has worked before but not more recently and she'd obviously just had a really good day she sounded so upbeat and energetic but also calm because you don't always sound calm um you you did you did sound you sounded calm and energetic at the same time and you were like oh I've just like loved like I loved loved my day and so one of the things I said back to you was I was like oh well maybe you could aim to have maybe you could feel proud of having six days like you've had today by the end of the year because it's not something you can do all the time and obviously you want to try and be realistic but I was like oh I wonder like would you is that something that you think you could feel proud of doing six of those days?

26:44I would say. I feel like I've had an amazing start to the year. I just feel like I've like, I don't know. Is it all those vitamin drinks you're drinking? I've got my balance right. Honestly, I'm like, I keep you at the thing where you go, yeah, but it's going to go wrong any minute now. I want that voice to go away because the happy voice, I feel like, oh, I've got my balance right. I feel like I've done some good stuff and had some new ideas and I've listened to podcasts and I've been hopefully like positive in meetings with people and all that kind of stuff I'm like please keep this going please keep going yes I would be very proud if I got my my day there you go there's a good example should we do the last one yeah our last one it's interesting you know we're just saying about the power that people can help you I was thinking this last one's about being curious and open and how that can help us to stay in spaciousness mode and I was thinking about oh who do I spend time with that helps me stay curious and open and obviously I mean you you are the obvious answer to lots of these things but other than you um Ian Sanders Ian Sanders who actually wrote a book on curiosity Mr.

27:51Curious a Mr. Curious and is a journalist by background but I spend time with Ian and both his brain and where we spend time back to environment we will often meet we'll just walk around a gallery we're like we won't even meet beforehand we'll meet in the gallery and we'll catch up whilst looking at things and our conversations meander and then come back to whatever the priority is. But it's very like that. And so the question, if you're trying to bring a bit more curiosity and openness into your thinking, is what's something that I don't think will work, but I'm going to be open to experimenting with?

28:26And Sarah and I's thinking here was, well, if you're not being curious and open, you're probably being critical and closed. Like that's the other side of that coin. And so if you are thinking, well, that's not going to work, you're probably being quite critical and closed. But we want to flip you into, you're allowed to think it's not going to work, you're allowed to be cynical or whatever, or you might have some actually, you know, very evidential data that is leading to you that thought, but it's that willingness to stay open. And it's the willingness to say, well, OK, based on my past experience, I'm not that confident this is going to work.

29:02However, I am genuinely happy to give it a go. And I put the genuine thing in there because it's not like, well, give it a go. I'll watch you flail and we'll see who's right. It's not that it's genuinely going, OK, well, I can see that there could be some opportunity in this and it might not have worked before, but maybe it might work now. Maybe this is a different situation and different times. And I'm open to giving that a go. I'm open to experimenting and exploring and seeing what might happen. I think, and we've all got things that we're critical and cynical and a bit closed about at work because it's kind of human nature.

29:35So I think finding that thing and then saying, like, how can I stay open to experimenting and doing something different with it? That's the question we want you to consider. And the action here is thinking about measurement. So one of the things that Megan talks about in the report quite a lot is one of the things that keeps us in doing mode is, you know, you measure what matters or what you measure gets done, all those kind of things. and it's not that those outcomes are not important but sometimes those metrics I think can perhaps get in the way particularly around when you are trying to be curious and open because the point of experimenting is you don't know the answer you're exploring unknowns so we were thinking actually a new kind of metric or question here could be really helpful so it also gets you out of like know it all well I'm just going to prove that I'm right by letting you get it wrong mindset which I think we probably all have maybe some of the time I maybe I maybe recognize that and if you um if you change your metric from well kind of did it work or not in a sort of more um I suppose like cold hard data way to actually a question which is well what will we learn from doing this or what have we learned from doing this then I suppose you get back to the only experiment that fails is the one where you fail to learn and it's a very different way of approaching experiments and we've been doing lots more experimenting at amazing if and i see that it is useful i think motivating for everybody and actually i think we have moved to this kind of learning mindset with our experiments so we're less attached to well do a thousand new people now read our newsletter because of an experiment as an example and we are much more attached to okay we did the experiment so what did we learn we definitely want to know the learning and it um it just really helps me I think to I'm naturally curious but I don't think I'm always naturally as open because I'm quite decisive and I make decisions and I've got that kind of I suppose energy that I would bring to things and you would be the same you'd be like well we know this works so let's just do more of that and so I think actually between us sometimes we might both be a bit more closed because we feel like we know what's best um you know maybe maybe we do actually yeah i mean join amazing if we know what's best awful what we want you to do um but which i but i think it you know our if our team was saying the hard thing which i'm not they're all very supportive so i can't imagine them saying the things that we say to each other but i think that is probably sometimes true but actually doing it this way it just primes everybody to behave in a way that's much more encouraging and much more curious and open so i think especially you know if you're listening to this as a manager as a leader it's something that you can do um especially on those things where it's like obviously if it's really high risk it's slightly different but most of the time things have low risk and we probably can just try and see what we learn.

32:35I think if you are a manager, you could ask these questions, your team don't even need to know that you're on sort of like a spaciousness drive, you could ask your team some of these, some of these questions, like add them into your admin to your one to ones. And then I think just create then the space for them to reply. So I think if you're asking the question, you then being a brilliant listener, and creating that environment where they can share without judgment from you, you know, and you're not immediately going, well, let's put that meeting in, like, it's not about that. But I think adding some of these questions into one to ones could be really useful to make this easier for you to ask yourself these questions to add them into one-to-ones we'll put them all in the pod sheet so the pod sheet is a one-page summary of the episode um conscious that maybe some people listening that have never been on part of the podcast before so we create these one-page summaries called pod sheets you can get them the link in will be in the show notes it's also on our website which is amazing if.com go to the podcast page find the podcast that you're interested in and the pod sheet will always be there for you and if you ever can't find anything you can email us Helen and Sarah at squiggly clears.com and we will send you the link that you need but that's everything for this week thank you so much for listening I'm back with you again soon bye for now bye everybody