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For Love of Team™ is THE podcast where Leaders Simplify Teamwork, helping you: SURROUND yourself with others doing work they LOVE. Business mentor and strategist, Winston Faircloth believes that it is your love of TEAM, and not just your love of products and customers that sets you apart in the marketplace.
I don't know about you, Winston, but I've never had a genius idea in my inbox or in an Excel spreadsheet. I have most certainly had one when I've been swimming or been for a run or been in the shower. And this is because our brain needs that mind wandering mode. And we just don't get enough of that because we now feel every moment of white space with a digital device.
Winston Faircloth:Hey there, it's Winston Faircloth, and this is for Love of Team, the podcast dedicated to helping you grow a team you love, multiplying your impact, income, and freedom in business and life. On today's episode, I'm going to bring you an interview with my friend Doctor. Kristy Goodwin. Having personally experienced how an always on digital culture is compromising people's well-being and is counter to an optimal and sustainable performance, award winning researcher and speaker Doctor. Kristy Goodwin is on a mission to promote employee well-being and bolster workplace productivity.
Winston Faircloth:What I love about this interview is she's going to share practical brain based techniques to tame tech habits and the latest evidence based strategies to decode the neurobiology of peak performance in the technological era. Kristy's bringing a lot of wisdom here, tons of practical experience, and I know you're going to enjoy this interview. Doctor. Kristy Goodwin, I'm so thankful that you're here on the For Love of Teen podcast. Welcome.
Kristy Goodwin:Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Winston Faircloth:Wonderful. So tell our audience a little bit about you, where you are, and the kind of work that you're doing today.
Kristy Goodwin:So literally speaking, I am in Australia, in Sydney. I am a digital well-being and peak performance researcher. And what I do is help to decode the neurobiology of peak performance in the digital age. Put simply, I help people to thrive online. I think we all accept that technology has become an integral part of our professional and our personal lives.
Kristy Goodwin:And we are recognising that it's having a huge impact on every facet of our lives. It's impacting our physical health. It's having an impact on our mental well-being. And we also know that it's having a very significant and pronounced impact on our productivity. So I study how our brain and body operates in this digital landscape.
Kristy Goodwin:And I take that research and science and translate it into practical realistic strategies so that people can use technology. I don't propose that we digitally amputate ourselves. But how can we leverage the digital technologies that have seeped into every crevice of our lives? But can how can we use them in ways that are aligned with our neurobiology? So I work with organizations, both big and small, to help their teams with digital well-being and with peak performance strategies in this digital landscape.
Winston Faircloth:And so much has changed with the pandemic. We were just talking about this before we hit record. February a year ago, it was a pretty standard work environment and we had a lot of digital distractions there, right? And now we've gone into remote work. Many parts of the globe are still working remotely and some are in hybrid.
Winston Faircloth:So what are what were the impacts that you saw happen with your clients in terms of digital distractions in teams?
Kristy Goodwin:Yes, the three big things I've seen that were thrust onto us because of remote work was that our number one, our digital load increased exponentially. And I'll go through each of these in a moment. The second thing that happened was that we started to work in ways that created what we call confused cognitive associations. When we started working from home, this posed significant challenges to our brains and our bodies as well. And the third thing that has really it's always been there.
Kristy Goodwin:It's been an undercurrent, but has certainly been perpetuated and amplified by the pandemic. That is our always on culture. So the first one, our digital load has increased. Research was conducted by Microsoft earlier this year and they examined over 30,000 Microsoft users digital habits and behaviors. What they found was that during the pandemic we have seen a 148% increase in meetings, most of which are now virtual.
Kristy Goodwin:They are around forty five minutes in duration most meetings. We have seen a 45% increase in Teams chats, 42% of which are occurring outside regular work hours. Most chats are now responded to within five minutes. So you get the ping of a notification and you are responsive. And I think the scariest statistic was that they have seen an increase.
Kristy Goodwin:In February 2021, 40,600,000,000 more emails were sent than in February 2020. So I think most of us intuitively experience our digital load has increased exponentially. And we are recognising that many people are experiencing digital burnout or digital fatigue. People who are physically and mentally depleted from being perpetually tethered to technology. So that leads into my second point that we're not because we were literally often just taking our laptops home and said see you later.
Kristy Goodwin:We will invite you back to the office when it is safe to do so. And so many of us started working remotely, often in our bedrooms, in the kitchen table. And what this did from a neurological perspective is it created these confused cognitive associations. Our brain is amazing and it is constantly scanning the environment even if we're unaware of it for what we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. This activates neural pathways in our brain to then determine the behaviours that we instigate.
Kristy Goodwin:So if we see a coffee cup, it might instigate the thought that I'm going to smell coffee. We started working on our kitchen table or in our bed. And this created these muddled associations. Our brain saying hang on, my kitchen table is a place where I have rest, where I engage in dialogue, where I feel relaxed and all of a sudden you're expecting me to do data analysis in an Excel spreadsheet. So it was these conflicting cognitive associations.
Kristy Goodwin:And people then would walk past the laptop sitting on the lounge later that day or later in the evening. And it would be a psychological trigger. I'll just check my emails then. Which I think leads into the third point is we have really amplified this always on culture because we haven't. And what I'm doing with a lot of organisations at the moment in Australia and internationally is helping them establish their what I call digital guardrails.
Kristy Goodwin:Establishing the parameters, the norms, the digital behaviours that they want to embed at an organisational level so people aren't feeling obliged to reply to emails at midnight. People aren't getting in the shower and checking their smartwatch and and being responsive. And the reason that I think this always on culture has grown during the pandemic, I mean, I'm not denying it. I think it's been there for a long time, but it has certainly become more pronounced is because we now no longer have obvious tangible in office measures of productivity. When we used to congregate in the office, we could see who stayed really late.
Kristy Goodwin:We could see who was putting in the hours. Now with distributed teams, our markers of productivity are who's responding to the email, who's replied to that Slack message. Know, isn't it great that person's on every single virtual call. And so we're using those almost like a proxy for our productivity. And I think this has created what I call digital presenteeism, people who are always on.
Winston Faircloth:So much to unpack there. I've been a remote worker now for going on twenty years. And I know how difficult a challenge it was for me in terms of making that transition. But for a lot of organizations, the culture was not really prepared for this sudden change, this sudden pivot. So that also increased the load because people are feeling because they're asynchronous, now they have all these other tools at their disposal, right?
Kristy Goodwin:Absolutely. And I think it it was that instantaneous change that there was no no time for organizational preparation. There was no time to embed really good practices. Literally, many people, some of them didn't even take a laptop home. They got their desktop desktop computer and the office chair, threw it in the back of the car, and didn't come back for twelve, fifteen, eighteen months.
Kristy Goodwin:So I think it was that under preparedness. I also think we have seen really radical shifts. Microsoft CEO was recently reported saying that most organizations underwent two years of digital transformation in two months. Wow. So I think it's those two colliding factors that we weren't prepared and then we had to embrace a whole myriad of new technologies in a rather rapid way.
Kristy Goodwin:And again, perhaps have done it in ways that aren't aligned with our brain and body's best practices.
Winston Faircloth:You know, when you were talking about our associations in terms of the physical location and that was one of the big challenges when I started working remote was having a dedicated space for that so that I could associate work with that and leisure with other parts of the house. Many families they didn't have that luxury of pre planning that or having the room for it.
Kristy Goodwin:That's right. So one of the things I say to people if you don't have a space in an ideal sense, we would have a dedicated workspace, again, where we can create those cognitive associations that this is where I sit down and I do my mentally robust work. For many of us, we don't have a physical option. We're probably trying to also homeschool children simultaneously. So sitting in a room in isolation whilst it would be ideal for our productivity, probably not better for a safety measure.
Kristy Goodwin:So what I say to people is can you sit in the same position? We know our brain will recall more information when we work at a consistent space. It's called state dependent recall. And what it means is our brain has got those mental associations. It's almost mapped out neurologically what we're going to see, hear, smell, taste and touch in that particular context.
Kristy Goodwin:So even if it's sitting at the same spot in the dining room table, the other thing that I say to people is start to create some power up and power down rituals for your day. What this will do to you is what it will do to your brain is send clear signals that now is the time that we're going to start time to ramp up our energy. It could be as simple as having a particular beverage of choice. It could be listening to a playlist. It could be doing, I call it, the virtual commute instead of driving to work.
Kristy Goodwin:Could you walk around the block with the dog and then sit down at your spot? Equally at the end of the day, how are you going to signal to your brain that the day is done? And very important, if you're not in a position where you can physically work in a segregated spot away from your regular family or home life, please hide the laptop or the desktop computer. I know some people have got a permanent fix position, and it can be cumbersome and tiresome to, you know, put the whole desktop away. But even putting a sheet over the top of it can be a really clear signal that the day is done.
Kristy Goodwin:Many of us just keep working because we see our device, and it's a psychological trigger for us to reach for it.
Winston Faircloth:Can you go into the load factor? Because not only is it the amount of meetings and the number of messages, but it's the proliferation of multiple tools, I think, in many corporate teams that has been very confusing to people.
Kristy Goodwin:Yes. I'm hearing this from many of my corporate clients. They're saying they're using or being expected to use a myriad of software platforms and applications, many of them that are duplicating tasks. I hear I was working with a team recently, and they said, look, they were having conversations on Teams. They were having conversations in a WhatsApp group, and there were conversations on emails.
Kristy Goodwin:And it was, for want of a better word, a dog's breakfast, a digital dog's breakfast. It was a real mess. And again, it contributed to that cognitive load, people feeling like they were perpetually distracted. Before the pandemic, research told us that most knowledge workers can do focused work for roughly six minutes before a digital distraction diverts their attention. There is unpublished research during the pandemic.
Kristy Goodwin:It's soon to be published, hopefully, that is saying that is now close to three minutes. Three to four minutes before there's the ping of an email, a Teams reminder, a social media notification. And this is really distracting to our brain. We know it takes the average adult twenty three minutes and fifteen seconds to reorient their attention after a distraction. So if we're doing deep focus work and our email pings to get back into that deep focus state roughly twenty three minutes.
Kristy Goodwin:That is hugely costly for our productivity and our well-being.
Winston Faircloth:How much of how much of these distractions are just us not having proper boundaries, not setting and taking our own agency in how we are interacting in the workplace. I know it's easy for a leader to say that, right? They seem to have a lot more autonomy and control. But even for folks who are not in the the C suite, how much control and agency and boundaries can we implement in our in our day to day work?
Kristy Goodwin:I think you're spot on there, Winston. I agree at an individual level, I think the onus really should be on individuals where possible. And obviously, alignment with their role. You know, if you're in customer service, being responsive is often a fundamental component of your tasks. So some of this depends on the type of function that you play within an organisation.
Kristy Goodwin:But I agree wholeheartedly that a lot of this comes down to individual, what I call borders and boundaries. Now with your own personal norms about I'm going to disable all alerts and notifications for the next hour and a half while I work on my report. So one of the pillars that I talk about of peak performance in a digital age is establishing those borders and boundaries. I also think, as you exemplified, that our leaders tend to have more autonomy and control over how they operate their day. So this is why I'm encouraging organisations come up with their digital guardrails.
Kristy Goodwin:I call it colloquially. I say this is how we manage our tech expectations. So we clearly articulate what are the how responsive do I need to be to an internal email? If something warrants my urgent attention, how will I be contacted rather than people feeling like they constantly need to be skimming everything so that they can keep on top of it. Some organisations we are now I'm now working with, we're creating what we call collaboration hours.
Kristy Goodwin:So we articulate a crossover period where everybody is available so that when you do need that instant information, when you need an update or some data or report, you've got that accessible. So there's no bottlenecks. One of the things we heard from hybrid work is that when people were working all sorts of hours, there often wasn't that crossover time. And this created bottlenecks in some projects. So I think establishing those personal borders and boundaries, and that is successful if it's underpinned by organisational guardrails and boundaries too.
Winston Faircloth:So important. I guess I learned this a little bit the hard way when I was working in my tech company because we had people in 10 different locations, four different time zones, and I was causing most of the chaos as the leader because I never would never considered the impact that these interruptions would have on others.
Kristy Goodwin:Yeah. And I think when you know I mean, I live by Mayor Angelo saying, when you know better, you do better. And the teams I work with when I run workshops and explain to them that the tangible research based costs of being distracted. I think we all instinctively know, like, we're living in that perpetual chaotic disrupted state that we're not productive, that we are stressed. But when you can show them, you know, I'm in some of my sessions show what's happening in our brain in terms of our stress levels when we go from one video meeting to the next to the next.
Kristy Goodwin:You can't argue with science. So I think when you understand the science that's underpinning the way we feel and way we behave, I think then that we're better placed to make decisions and make those changes that we do need to work in alignment. I mean, often say we're not machines. We are not designed to be plugged in 20. We have to map out our new ways of working to our neurobiology.
Kristy Goodwin:And that's just so important because the technology is here to stay. I think also hybrid work is going to be the new way forward and technology will underpin that. So we've got to get this right.
Winston Faircloth:It's so important to you're creating a digital culture in one I way, mean, it's we've had a physical culture in the way that we've grown up and worked together in a collaborative location. But now we're creating new digital norms that can really enhance our experience as team members.
Kristy Goodwin:Absolutely. I mean, one of the things I'm working with organizations at the moment is to say, look, for knowledge workers, the silver lining of the pandemic, I truly believe is that we no longer have nine to five schedule. I think we are no longer bound by that schedule. And let's be honest, very few people ever worked nine to five. But what we do have now that we are not constrained to being in the office at particular times of the day is we've got an opportunity.
Kristy Goodwin:There's a lot of discussion around flexible work arrangements. I don't deny that is a benefit of the pandemic. But what I truly believe is the silver lining is that we've now got the opportunity to create productive work arrangements. And one of the key things that I get teams to do is to get individuals in that team to identify what we call their chronotype. And your chronotype is your biological predisposition to be focused and alert at certain times of the day.
Kristy Goodwin:And it also dictates when you naturally want to fall asleep. Now if you know your chronotype, you fall into one of three categories. You're either a luck like I am, Fire on all cylinders early in the morning. You're the person that's sending out the 8AM invitation for a meeting. At the other end of the spectrum, we've got our OWLs.
Kristy Goodwin:These are people that fire on all cylinders at night. They receive your 8AM calendar invite and they panic. They think I'm normally asleep still at 8AM. Most of us, statistically speaking, fit into the middle bird category. So our energy tends to peak between 10AM and roughly 1PM.
Kristy Goodwin:The idea of the benefit I believe of doing your chronotype is now you can structure your day within reason. So you're doing your deep productive work at your chronotype's peak performance window. So those middle birds would be getting the crux, their deep work done during that time of the day. That is when I say to people, you have to build a fortress around your focus. It is that time of the day where you have to disable as many digital distractions as possible.
Kristy Goodwin:It is that window of the day where you don't want to be booking in virtual meetings or calls that would be better off placed when your prime time isn't at its peak. That's why we shouldn't be nibble. Say to people, one of the worst things we can do for our productivity and performance is to nibble on our inbox throughout the day. It puts a huge dent in it. What we're better off doing is doing our emails when our energy is waning.
Kristy Goodwin:Because for most of us, it's not our deep critical thinking task, and it should be pushed to some of the parameters of our day.
Winston Faircloth:We need to have you in every company that I work with because this is this is the kind of culture that I think really builds winning teams. When you understand the differences in people and what they bring to the the team and also what really promotes collaboration within the team.
Kristy Goodwin:It really does. And it's such a simple thing. I often say to people when working with our brain and body when we work and map our workday to our chronotype, we are we flow downstream. Before the pandemic, it was suggested that eighty percent of adults had work schedules that conflicted with their chronotype. Eighty percent of us.
Kristy Goodwin:Very few of us fire on all cylinders between those nine to five parameters. Yet that was the expected norm. So I really truly believe that that knowing this makes a huge difference not only to your productivity, not so we can squash more into our days, but so we can get the right work done at the right time and have more margin, more time in our life to do the things we really want to do. So it's a win win situation.
Winston Faircloth:Well I know you've spent a lot of time documenting your four pillars of peak performance in the digital world. So I know we've covered a few of these, but would you like to recap those and go into some depth? I'd love to.
Kristy Goodwin:Based on research, I started to look at what is it that underpins really successful teams, those teams that are really thriving. And this was done pre pandemic, and thankfully it has held up the framework of hybrid and remote work. But I really started to look at what science and also practice was showing me in terms of what are those teams that are thriving in this predominantly digital landscape? What are they doing? And again, this can be applied at an organisational level.
Kristy Goodwin:But it also can be applied at a micro individual level. So the first pillar that we have spoken about is establishing your digital borders and boundaries. Clearly articulating how, when, where, with whom you'll use technology. So you've got those parameters and expectations delineated. This is really important because we are seeing technology have a significant impact on our physical health.
Kristy Goodwin:Everything from our vision, our hearing and our muscular skeletal health and sedentary behaviour are being shaped by our digital habits and practices. So we need to have those borders and boundaries. We also need to have those borders and boundaries to optimise our mental well-being. We know one of the key things that is eroding people's mental health in general has been shaped by the pandemic. I think there's very few of us who would acknowledge that it hasn't had some sort of impact on our mental well-being.
Kristy Goodwin:But a key component of our screen habits is that our screen habits and behaviours are sabotaging our sleep. Many of us are not getting good quality and quantity of sleep because of our blue light exposure. So borders and boundaries is our first one. The second pillar is that we need to apply what I call neuro productivity tactics. We need to apply our knowledge of how the brain works to the digital landscape.
Kristy Goodwin:So an example here is that the chronotype one we just spoke about mapping our workday to our chronotype. Another one I often share with organisations is that our brain is designed to work in I call them digital dashes. We are designed to work in sprints, not marathons. I share with people that we have an ultradian rhythm which determines that our energy will peak and trough roughly every 90 minutes. That that is how we are hardwired, pardon the pun.
Kristy Goodwin:But we can't outperform that. So we need to work in shorter bursts and have more regular break. The third pillar of digital well-being is to disable digital distractions, Not for the whole day. And I mentioned before, I don't suggest that you digitally amputate yourselves. But at critical periods of the day, try to eliminate the distractions and diversions that are coming your way.
Kristy Goodwin:Can you disable non essential notifications? You now with most platforms and apps and tools you can bundle or batch your notifications to come through at a set time. Can you create a VIP list of notifications so that critical client or family member can still reach you? Putting your phone somewhere where you can't see it. A study from the University of Texas told us that just seeing our phone even if it is facedown and on silent if it is in our line of sight it reduces our cognitive performance by 10% just seeing it.
Kristy Goodwin:So pop it in another drawer. It's really quite fascinating. And the fourth pillar of digital well-being is digital disconnection. We have to digitally disconnect. We have to unplug.
Kristy Goodwin:And I don't know about you, Winston, but I've never had a genius idea in my inbox or in an Excel spreadsheet. I have most certainly had one when I've been swimming or been for a run or been in the shower. And this is because our brain needs that mind wandering mode. And we just don't get enough of that because we now feel every moment of white space with a digital device.
Winston Faircloth:Yeah, I mean, about just my ritual of doing morning walks, One of the things that one of my spiritual directors asked me to do was to consider not having not listening to podcasts. Now heaven forbid, we're on a podcast here. We want people to listen but the invitation was I would get inspiration by not having earbuds for my morning walk. Give it a try for a few days and see what happens. And it did.
Winston Faircloth:The inspiration for the name of the podcast came on one of those walks when I did not have earbuds in one morning.
Kristy Goodwin:Yeah. And it's so true. And it's I say to teens, like, being unplugged and creating a culture where rest is revered. It's not seen as a reward. It's almost seen as a responsibility, a personal responsibility.
Kristy Goodwin:We have created a culture of busyness and a culture of always being on. And we are not machines. We need unplugged time for our physical health. We need it for our mental well-being. But we also need it, as you've indicated, for our ideation and problem solving and creativity.
Kristy Goodwin:And that just will not take place if we are tethered to technology.
Winston Faircloth:Well, I know that you've devoted your career not only to helping corporations but families and young children as well. So what do you what do you see as some of the best practices staying with companies for in teams for a moment? What are some of the best practices in terms of fostering teamwork and community without undermining our digital well-being today?
Kristy Goodwin:I think the really critical thing that has to take place and ironically for many distributed teams, takes place online. But it is having open dialogue about how we best embed digital practices in our organisation. I think coming together as a group and having these robust challenging conversations so that we have buy in from our key stakeholders about how we best embed the technologies. Look for the things that aren't working. Look for the tools that we're doubling up on and eradicate those.
Kristy Goodwin:But I think that open dialogue is really critical to coming up, as you said before, at establishing that digital culture that we want to underpin our team or our organisational culture culture as well. Technology is embedded in everything. So I think that we need to look at that within that broader context too.
Winston Faircloth:Well, you've given us a lot to think about today. I hope that folks were taking great notes. But Kristy, if folks want to connect with you, what are the best ways for people to connect with Doctor. Kristy?
Kristy Goodwin:So I do have some digital places where we can connect ironically. So one of the best places is via my website. I try and keep a regular blog. We're also ironically launching a podcast later this year just so we can give people what I call bite sized neuro productivity tactics so you can be out enjoying your walk and get some ideas there. I'm also most active on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Kristy Goodwin:So there's ways that I try to disseminate information. I have got a ebook that I'll share with you Winston afterwards called the five essential digital productivity hacks. So just five ways that you can use technology, but use it in ways that will support your well-being. So I'm more than happy to share that as well.
Winston Faircloth:Well, we'll include all of these links in the show notes. Doctor. Kristy Goodwin, thank you so much. You've given us great things to think about and let's be intentional about our digital culture. That is a real takeaway and an important aspect to digital well-being.
Winston Faircloth:So thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
Kristy Goodwin:It's a pleasure. Thank you.
Winston Faircloth:Hey, so did you get some great notes out of this interview today? I sure did. It certainly inspired me to be more mindful and more intentional about digital distraction. So think about it. A business you love supported by a team you love.
Winston Faircloth:What could be better than that? Your love of team is a leading indicator of your future success, multiplying your impact, income and freedom both in business and in life. Be blessed friends. I'll catch you on the next episode.