Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Becoming sustainably human at work isn't a small undertaking. It often means letting go of systems and behaviors that don't serve us individually or collectively.
So what do we do? As individuals, as groups of folks, as leaders? How do we carve out space for our humanity while making sure we're not the only ones? How do we thrive in the workplace while not imagining we must be superhuman? How do we cultivate spaces that are generative and healing, creative and extraordinary?
I don't have the answers to those questions. And, to be fair, I don't believe one human can EVER have all the answers to those questions. I'm working through those questions every day.
This podcast curates for you a set of folks with an opinion worth listening to and sharing. So join me as I ask people I admire to share their wisdom with you in accessible doses.
Join me on my quest to become sustainably human at work.
Liz Wiltsie: Becoming Sustainably Human
At Work isn’t a small undertaking.
It often means letting go of
systems and behaviors that
don’t serve us individually or collectively.
So what do we do as individuals,
as groups of folks, as leaders?
How do we carve out space for
our humanity while making
sure we’re not the only ones?
How do we thrive in the workplace
while not imagining we have
to be superhuman?
How do we cultivate spaces
that are generative and healing,
creative and extraordinary?
I don’t have the answers to those questions,
and to be fair
I don’t believe one human can
ever have all the answers to those questions.
I’m working through them every day.
This podcast is an invitation,
an invitation for you to join me on my quest.
I’ve asked my teachers to share their
wisdom with you, and here we are.
This is Sustainably Human At Work,
and I’m Liz Wiltsie.
Welcome, everyone, to the podcast today!
I get to welcome my friend Marie Poulin
who is someone who works
deeply with systems for your business
and your life to make sure
you’re getting what you want out of it.
Her tool of choice at this moment is Notion,
and she’s my Notion Fairy Godmother, personally.
She runs a fantastic course called
Notion Mastery, and I’ve really
invited her today to talk about
what that looks like for people.
So Marie, thank you for being here!
Marie Poulin: Thanks for having me.
I’m excited!
Liz Wiltsie: So one of the things
that I love about your program
is that it’s really about how
do you find what works for you
and the tools that you can use.
So how did you start realizing
what you needed via Notion?
Marie Poulin:
Yeah, I think trying to be
effective in our lives is often
exploring different tools and
ways of doing that,
and then if you’re collaborating
with other people and then other
people have different ways of
also tracking that and as a
team how do you make sure
everybody’s got the same information?
I think a lot of us have at
least been in that point where
we’re trying to figure out,
like, ahh, I’m trying to get
things done,
and the to-do list is feeling
like it’s growing and growing
and we’re not really being
effective and we’re kinda
spread across a number of
different tools.
For me, that’s what I noticed.
I felt like we’re all kind of
exploring lots of tools all the time,
right?
We’ve got our different things
to manage our calendar and
our time and our to-dos,
and then often we’re switching tools.
You’re like I like Todoist
better or whatever, right?
So any of us are kind of —
the places where I was trying
to get things done day-to-day
(like in a sauna or something
like that) was very separate
from the places I was doing
creative thinking or strategic planning,
and I felt really puled across
a number of different pieces of tech.
So I felt like I wasn’t really
being effective.
I was checking things off the list,
but I sort of felt really
scattered and my attention was
pulled in a lot of different ways.
I was like surely there’s gotta be
some better way of doing this.
How do you make sure that your day-to-day
actions are really moving you
toward your longterm legacy work,
body of work stuff.
For me, when I discovered Notion,
I was so excited to have
this place that I could have a
mix of the really messy thinking
and the stuff that’s —
strategic planning is messy.
It’s not so linear —
and a place where I could
also track that day-to-day.
For me, Notion was that creative tool
that kind of helped me
start to pull those things together.
It felt like it just calmed my brain.
I was like, “Oh, I’m not a total scattered mess.”
I just hadn’t found a tool that
reflected the way it felt
like my brain worked.
Liz Wiltsie: Yeah, and
one of the stories that
you’ve told in the past is —
so Marie’s got a journal that
— she actually does sell her
Notion journal setup which
I will link to you as well,
and it is deep and exciting.
But in it, there’s a place
for three words about your day.
You’ve told a story about that
shifting for you and some of your work.
Can you tell us about that?
Marie Poulin: Yeah. So
I’ve been keeping a daily journal,
which I was never able
to do before Notion.
I think that’s part of the
reason I get so excited about
the tool is it’s allowed me
to just get more visibility
into what do my days look like?
When am I feeling in flow?
How happy am I?
How effective am I?
What does it all mean, right?
A lot of existential tracking,
basically, that happens inside my journal.
But it’s really fun!
I just think these tools have
the potential to be used well
if we use them with intention.
So I was just paying attention to —
I would give every day three words
that kind of describe how I feel,
and I was noticing in my, you know,
weekly agenda, my daily journal
“overwhelmed,” “overwhelmed.”
I kept noticing key words
that kept popping up,
and at some point as I
was doing these weekly reviews,
I’m looking at how I felt about
my day and I was continuing
to notice overwhelm was the
word that kept popping up a ton.
I was like this is silly.
I run my own business.
I decide how I spend my time,
so what is happening here that
I’m continuing to make choices
and to add projects onto my list
that contribute to that overwhelm.
I think Notion was that first tool
for me that kinda had way more
visibility into how,
“Hey Marie, if you’re saying
you feel overwhelmed and yet
you just added three new
projects to your board this week,
what are you doing there and why?”
So it really forced me to look at
how much work in progress I had,
and a lot of us, I think,
have a ton of projects in progress
that we don’t really realize they’re
a project because they’re just kind
of things we’ve committed to
but haven’t really all put
in one place,
And so, when you have a
space to actually look at
every single project you’ve said
yes to — anything with, you know,
more than one step or more
then one task is a project.
Well, we have a lot of those that
I think we don’t always name,
and put down on paper or
whatever it is.
I was like oh,
I am continuing to overcommit
over and over again because
things kind of get lost in the ether.
And so, this was a tool that was like,
“Hey now, don’t add another
thing until you’ve addressed
the thing that’s causing you this
overwhelm.”
So for me, it felt like a
tool that I was really
starting to see the real
picture of what I was committing
to and what I put on my plate.
So I was like oh, now I can,
hopefully, start to make some
better decisions about that.
Liz Wiltsie: Yeah. Well,
and that feels like a thing
that people — you know,
if you use Notion,
you can wire it into a journal.
If you don’t use Notion,
you can write it in a journal.
You can write it in an actual journal.
Marie Poulin: Absolutely.
It’s like it doesn’t matter
what tool you’re using but be
conscious about it.
Liz Wiltsie: And three words, right?
It’s not I’m gonna track my heartbeat
across the whole day and I’m gonna do whatever.
It’s like what are the three words
at the end of the day.
That’s it.
Marie Poulin: Take a pulse.
How are you feeling, right?
Something in the morning,
something in the afternoon,
in the evening —
just what were three words
that kind of encapsulate how
you felt about the day.
I do track flow.
Flow is a thing that’s really
important to me.
If I want to optimize my business for —
the more time I’m spending in
flow in a way that’s really
aligned with the work I should
be doing, that’s ultimately what I want.
That I’m playing to my strengths,
that I’m doing work that has impact,
that I feel really good and happy
about what I’m doing and the
impact that I’m having.
And so, if I’m not paying attention
to that, you know,
I think it’s just easy to get
caught up in those urgent tasks
and things that just kind of pop up.
So flow is a thing that I track.
Am I in the zone? Am I aligned?
Is this what I want to be doing?
If not, well, what decisions
need to change?
What things am I putting on my
plate and why am I doing that
and yeah, maybe some things
need to change to start accommodating
for how you want to feel at the end
of the week.
Burnt to a crisp is not one of those
things that I want to
keep feeling over and over again, right?
Liz Wiltsie: .
Yeah, I say run over by a truck.
Same idea!
Marie Poulin: Yeah, same idea!
Yeah. .
Burnt to a crisp and then
run over by a truck.
That’s kind of what — .
Liz Wiltsie: .
Yes, yes, and I think,
you know, there’s a lot of
discussion when someone works
for someone else of, like,
how much control they have,
but I think there’re a
lot more ways you can push back.
But what you said in terms
of I run my own business.
I make my own schedule.
Why do I feel burnt to a crisp
and run over by a truck
at the end, right?
I can do that for someone else.
I can do that for someone else
and not have the
risk I have in my life.
Marie Poulin: Yeah,
I think we can be guilty of just —
because it’s our own business
and we just work 10x harder,
and maybe because we
love what we do,
we just work 10x harder.
It’s like ah, there’s —
we have to put our own
limits around that because
we’ve previously had someone
else put those limits on.
Okay, if you’re working
nine to five or whatever
your hours look like,
but to have to put that
in place for yourself —
and I think we forget
there’re so many activities
that we do as an entrepreneur
that aren’t billable or
you don’t maybe see the
results of for five years,
potentially, like marketing
activities.
So we don’t really
factor that into our pricing,
and so we overcommit because
we’re like oh,
I gotta get that thing done.
That’s the stuff that pays
the bills, but these other
things — so I think it can be hard
to put those boundaries on
our own work for sure.
I’m guilty of that too, right?
It’s like, “Oh, but I love
my work and so it’s not really work.”
You know, it’s work on the weekend.
So I think we all can be
guilty of that, and
especially in a pandemic world
it’s that feeling of being
tired and oh,
I wasn’t really effective today
so I guess I’ll just try and
do it tonight.
It can be really hard to
know when work stops, right,
and put those containers and
boundaries around things.
Liz Wiltsie: Yeah.
So Marie, my other question
that I like to ask folks in
what are you grappling with?
Marie Poulin: Currently, the
big grapple for me is I feel
like there is some bigger
legacy work emerging that is
fuzzy, and I don’t know what
it looks like, and it
might be a framework,
it might be a book,
but it’s looking at
how pulling principles
of permaculture and applying
them to business design and
giving that shape.
I’m figuring out what that looks like.
Liz Wiltsie: So I learned
the term permaculture from you.
So explain to people who
don’t know what permaculture
is what permaculture is.
Marie Poulin: Yeah, it’s like a toolkit,
framework for designing
systems that support
humans and thinking longterm
like designing for sustainability.
Yeah, it’s closed-loop systems.
It’s designing for collective wellbeing,
planetary wellbeing,
personal wellbeing.
That might involve designing
systems in nature,
but it also might be designing
how do we think about how we
approach the design of our
own communities.
So it can mean a lot of
different things.
It’s sort of a bigger
concept that I think is not
just about designing effective gardens,
but it’s designing
effective human systems.
Learning about it,
I think you can’t help
but think about how that
influences business,
how we think about the design of communities.
I think a lot of things
are just the way they are.
We haven’t really considered
the thoughtful design that
should have happened underneath it.
Why didn’t we think about these things
longterm and what the
impact of that was gonna be?
It’s something I'm really curious
about just thinking
how do we approach the
design of our collective wellbeing?
Liz Wiltsie: Yes, we’re gonna end
right there.
Thank you, Marie.
Thank you for being with me.
Marie Poulin:
Thanks so much for having me!
Liz Wiltsie: Full show notes
for this and every episode,
are available at
www.futureproofskillslab.com/podcast
You’ll find a transcript there,
as well as links
to everything we talked about,
plus links to all the ways
to connect with Marie.
Since we recorded this episode,
Marie has released the newest version
of Notion Mastery.
As I’ve said,
I’m a part of that community,
and I’m excited about the ways
Marie helps folks use Notion
to improve their life
and work systems.
You can find all the details
at notionmastery.com.