Zack Arnold

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The Myth of Work-Life Balance (And What to Strive For Instead) | with Apryl Schlueter

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About Episode

Work-life balance. It’s the unicorn we all strive for and hope to achieve someday, but if you were put on the spot right now, would you be able to clearly define what work-life balance means to you? And to be frank, is balance something that even sounds appealing? Frankly, I think balance sounds plain boring. And I say that valuing nothing else in life above my family, my wife, and my two children.

I’ll go even further and say that I believe work-life balance as we know it today is a myth, and if we stop perpetuating it and start striving for something else entirely, that’s when we’ll reach the sweet spot. The key is to start coveting presence over work-life balance. Have no idea what that means? Listen on and you will.

In today’s interview I chat with Apryl Schlueter who is the Chief Energy! Officer of The Cheerful Mind, Inc. She’s a happiness and productivity coach, speaker, and the author of Finding Success in Balance: My Journey to The Cheerful Mind. Now hold on a second…I know what you’re already thinking: “Ugh. A life coach? No!!!!!”

But Apryl is not any life coach. Her skillset ranges from being able to solder a digital circuit in her sleep (and engineer that same circuit from scratch thanks to her background in electrical engineering), compete at the highest level as a cheerleader AND trapeze artist, and she’s a total productivity and Trello nerd just like me. Needless to say, Apryl and I have a lot of strategies to share with you today about how to redefine your picture of what work-life balance really is, and more importantly, we provide several strategies to help get you there.

Transcript

Zach Arnold: I’m here today with Apryl Schlueter, who is known as the Chief Energy Officer. And by the way, I just want to make sure, since this is an audio show, you know that energy comes with an apostrophe. She is the Chief Energy Officer of the Cheerful Mind. And Apryl, it is a pleasure to have you on the show with me today.

Apryl Schlueter: Yay! It’s so awesome to be here. I love it. Thank you so much for having me.

Zack Arnold: I can already hear the apostrophe in the word energy and chief energy officer. I can already hear it in your first sentence, so I’m excited about that. Yeah. Well, you and I connected just because the universe decided that we needed to talk. We found each other through a live event that we went to a few months ago, and we kind of hit it off, and I think that’s actually rather interesting that we hit it off because, to be brutally honest, I’m definitely not in the camp of hanging out with life coaches that are all ebullient with energy and bouncy, and that’s just kind of not my style. I’m very reserved, very introverted. But the interesting thing about you is that being a life coach is something that’s a very very small part of your skill set. So very rarely do I get people on my show that are trapeze artists that have been teachers for universities such as Northwestern that can do something like life coaching that geek out on process efficiency and things like Trello, and on the side could probably solder a digital circuit in their sleep. So I’m really, really excited to pick your brain today.

Apryl Schlueter: Yes, I’m. I’m a big fat nerd, and I am proud of it. And yeah, people get really confused when they see me because I’m a. I’m just a, I like to say a hot mess, but a hot mess. Everything, so yeah, I’m super excited to share whatever you want to to hear about today.

Zack Arnold: Well, being a nerd, you are definitely amongst friends today because there are a lot of people in the creative community listening to this, especially those that do what I do for a living, which is film editing. We all live in front of computers and play with software and make stuff, and so we definitely understand the the nerdy creative mind, but before we kind of dive into the weas, I just want to help people understand a little bit more about you and your journey because it is so unique. So let’s kind of help pull some of the threads together so people understand how all of these things have become what you are.

Apryl Schlueter: Yeah, absolutely. Oh, where do I start? Okay, so I am of Filipino heritage. I am, you know, which comes with this whole Asian upbringing of you gotta work really, really hard. You have to be very, very smart. You gotta get good grades. You gotta get a good job to make a lot of money. And so I had very high pressure from very very early on. Not to mention that I’m the eldest of two, and so I, you know, immediately also already have the the first child qualities. And so I actually, as I was growing up, I had this really great love for being creative, but I also knew that I needed to make a lot of money. And what I was kind of taught is that you know it’s it’s hard to kind of make it in in in the creative spaces, especially if you know my passions were you know theater and arts and music and stuff like that. So as I was kind of growing up, I also had a really geeked-out passion on like math and science. So physics was physics and calculus are like my all-time favorite subjects. So I had this weird. I was kind of torn between these two different worlds and everything that I did growing up. My parents were really really supportive in making sure that I had all the experiences that I wanted, so I became very well rounded in so many different things. But when it got to college, I had to kind of choose a path, and with a career mindset, I said, “All right, I gotta go the math and science route. And my mom was drilling in from very early on that I needed to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer. So I chose the engineering route as it was closest to the the calculus and physics passions that I had, and I got a degree in electrical engineering. At the same time, I was a cheerleader in college, so there was that sporty aspect of me that got to kind of get lived out. in In all of my electives, I did things like I took a music technology class, photography. I took private voice lessons, so I was trying to, you know, still embed some of this varying personality of me and and just have that still and not completely let go of it. But as I was getting older, it was kind of shifting more to to the sciences, which was fine. So out of college, I did consulting. I worked for some really, really big name organizations and companies, doing IT data warehousing, that type of stuff. And then the nature of being a traveling consultant is obviously hard on your lifestyle. And so I decided to make a total shift and do something more predictable, like becoming a teacher. So I actually taught high school math for a few years, and while it was super rewarding, it was also emotionally and mentally draining. And it total. I have very workaholic ways, and so I consumed my life. And again, I didn’t really have this work-life balance that I that I wanted. Couldn’t really do my side passions, and then I shifted to working at the university that I went to school at, and it was more of an administrative role. But I was running academic departments, both in the engineering school and College of Arts and Sciences. And my last job was a doing finance, reporting, forecasting, budgeting, that type of stuff, which is you know coming back to the math, but I think in that time when I was working at the university, I had my two kids, and this whole concept of work-life balance was becoming even stronger. I was neglecting my health. My relationship was just kind of tired, and and I wouldn’t say suffering, but we were just kind of going through the motions, and I basically, in my last role, hit this point of burnout, and it started manifesting in my health. And it was a huge wake-up call for me to kind of change things. And I had absolutely no idea where to start. I felt like I worked my way up this career ladder, and I was about to throw it all away, you know. The HR department suggested that I take a medical leave, and I wasn’t sure how that was going to look to the outside community.

Apryl Schlueter: What people were going to think that as some crazy person who had this mental breakdown, and I was really ashamed. And I went through this this period of kind of. Morning, everything that I had been working my butt off for my entire life, and just in that moment throwing it all away and having to start completely over, you know, I I felt the pressure of my mom looking at me, you know, what what are you doing with your life? But she also did see how much it had affected me emotionally and in my health, and so she for the first time, was like, you you got to do something different. So to get her blessing on that, it was it was really really great. So I basically started to kind of explore, you know, what’s my next option? What are these things that I’m good at? That you know, I’m I’m super organized. I geek out on, you know, productivity, which was something that I thought that you know I don’t know how I could make a profitable you know great career out of that that that had the same strategy and being able to be an influencer and making decisions and so I was really really torn and I kind of got to a point where I realized that I was super great at process efficiency it was one of the things that I did in every single one of my jobs, that no matter what it was, whether it be in IT or in teaching or just in finance, I was sitting there trying to look at the ways that things were running and trying to make them more efficient. And so I came up with this great crazy idea: What if I could just help people make their lives more efficient? How cool would that be? And everybody was saying, “You need to be a life coach. I think that that’s what that what they do. I had no idea what coaching was. I had I’m a super non woo woo, very logical person, and I was very resistant to this idea because I I don’t do this this fluffy thing. Like I need data to back things up. I need, you know, I need tangible things to be able to to create these processes. So after a few months of that, I decided, okay, let me just see what this coaching thing is. And I realized that there were elements of coaching that I could embed into just productivity in general, and and this whole concept, and so I went through certification. I was hesitant to go back to school because I thought, you know, what if I change my mind again? But it was the most eye-opening thing to really understand that my mindset was one of the things that was hampering my productivity, and I’m I’m a definitely productive person. I get things done. I commit to things, and I just go all out. But there were a lot of things that would hold me back from doing things more efficiently, like getting really frustrated and being afraid of what others would think or how they might judge my work, and you know, being this people pleaser and all of these things that that I never really thought would impact the actual processes. And so, when I went through the coaching, I realized that that the mindset is a part of the productivity plan. And so, basically, my business became this thing of how do you be your most productive self, understanding your tendencies and and the way that you think and how can you use that to your advantage to make yourself more productive, and so that’s kind of how the cheerful mind started. And I think you know I think everybody in their life wants to be happy, but it’s it’s such a non tangible thing.

Apryl Schlueter: And really understanding how coaching plays a role in that has really ramped up my my productivity in the my my business has only been around for three years and in that time I went through coach training and got certified I wrote a book and published it I what else did I do I have a thriving coaching practice right now I have 19 clients which is amazing like all of this happened because of the changes that I made, and so I work with people who tend to be super busy and have a lot of things on their plate. They they thrive with being busy, but they want it to be a productive busy, and they want to at least find time to enjoy the things outside of their hustles to make sure that they they feel like their life is fulfilling and and successful, so that’s a long story. But that’s that’s kind of where I’m at right now, and and how I got to where I where I am today.

Zack Arnold: So the two words that you brought up that make me super super super geeky excited, and both of my assistants that have worked with me are already laughing and they know what I’m going to say. But it’s process efficiency. I love to make processes more efficient. However, before we go there, I think it is much more important to talk a little bit deeper about this concept of work-life balance and what balance actually means, because this is a very similar journey that I’ve been on as well. Where when you think of balance. It’s a scale, and it’s 50-50, and everything is equally weighted. Which means, oh well, if I work 40 hours a week, that means that I must spend 40 hours a week with my family, or you know, something that’s this equal weight. And I was striving for that and failing miserably for years and years and years, and feeling guilty. And then I realized maybe it’s not about equal. Balance. Maybe it’s more about intentionally doing the things that I want to do and being present with whatever I’m doing. So I spend a lot of time at work and I’m present at work. But then when I’m with my family, work disappears. There’s no phone. There’s no emails. There’s no texts. I’m with family, and even though the mathematical balance is a lot less, I feel a lot more balanced and centered. And when I was reading your book, I’m thinking, “Oh my God, somebody else totally gets where I’m coming from. So I just want to chat a little bit about your definition of what balance actually is.

Apryl Schlueter: Absolutely. And as I mentioned in my book, that it’s a definition that really depends on the person. So I could be a workaholic, which I will probably say that I am. I I love my job. I love the work that I do, which I don’t necessarily. I I don’t know if I necessarily say I absolutely loved my work in in previous forms. I just I liked the challenge, but I actually love my work, and I can talk about it all day and all night. Even try to implement it in in my family, and so what’s really really important is that everybody’s different. So if somebody who is a workaholic likes to work, you know, 60 hour weeks, and there’s another person who is a I don’t know stay at home mom or you know has some sort of life where they’re just they’re always at the beach or they’re you know whatever, those are that might be balance to them, and so I really encourage people to to know that it’s it’s a very gray definition. There are so many people that I have met that say, you know, there’s balance creates this trigger for them because it just seems like it’s something that’s not attainable, achievable, and or people don’t want to even use the word balance because they’d prefer to use harmony or some sort of other definition, but we’re all actually talking about the same thing. It’s it’s this it’s it’s almost like a feeling, the feeling of feeling balanced and having the things that you want in your life, feeling happy and just doing the things and almost being at choice at how your life is being run, instead of letting life control you and dictate what you do. So for me, I mean, I think that my my balance definition changes, you know, every other day depending on what’s what’s going on. There’s some days that I really want to be productive, and there’s other days that I don’t want to be productive, and I don’t want to feel guilt about that, but I think at the end of the day, I want to be able to look at my life and say, did I do everything on my side of the street that I wanted to do instead of letting everybody else tell me what I need to do in order to be successful or look cool or whatever that is? And I want, and if I can say that I did everything that I wanted to do and that I was completely in control of my life, then I’m feeling balanced and I’m I’m feeling success. So that’s kind of where I’m at.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I can second all of that. Where for me, and I am very very open with my audience that I have been a workaholic my whole life, so there’s. I don’t want anybody thinking, “Oh, his life is so perfectly balanced that he’s got it figured out. It’s like, no, not even close to it. But I am obsessive about figuring it out, and not only for myself, but helping others figure it out as well, which is very similar to your journey. I love what you said, just as an aside for a second about how now the things that you learn, you can apply to your family because I’m sure when you were learning process efficiencies for doing budgets or doing digital circuitry, you can’t really bring that home to the kids. Yeah. But when you’re doing the kind of work that involves learning more about process efficiency and work-life balance, you can spend all day long taking an online course or reading about habit formation, whatever those things might be, but you can bring those home to your family. You can instill those values in your children, and that’s something that I find incredibly fulfilling. And I’m sure that it sounds like that’s something that you’ve experienced as well.

Apryl Schlueter: Yeah, absolutely. I have this idea of multitasking, and I know that some people also get triggered by that word because you don’t want to be, you know, in your car driving and texting. It’s not that kind of multitasking. But I always take a look at the things that I do and try to figure out how can I weave in all of my priorities and get things done by just maybe doing one thing instead of separating them all. So little little things like this earlier this year, when my book came out, I did a book launch party, and I like throwing parties, but I don’t like throwing multiple parties, and I didn’t want to celebrate my book launch and then have to celebrate birthdays and whatnot. So I actually had my book launch party on my birthday, got all of my family and friends together, you know, to celebrate those things at the same time. My husband’s birthday is two days after me, so I got a cake with both of us, and so we basically celebrated our birthday while I, you know, had my family there and celebrated this huge milestone in my business. And so I was kind of weaving all of those things together, and then I was just done with it, and I could move on to the next thing. And so I always look for those types of opportunities. Even now, recently, I started doing weekly meetings with my family, where I take some of the things that I do with my clients, and we sit there and we reflect every week, talk about you know what went well, what were we most excited about, what do we want to do next week to make sure that it’s awesome. These are the types of things, the same questions that I ask my clients, and it gets us to really connect as a family and understand where everybody’s at and what they want to do. Like my kids say, I want to play the iPad more, something like that. But it really allows us to connect in a way, and that’s something that’s also really important to me. So we’re goal setting together as a family. We’re we’re connecting. We’re having fun, and those are all you know foundational things that are super important to the work that I do. And so, being able to see that the things that I do with my clients and being able to instill them with my kids at a very early age is is awesome because I don’t think that I didn’t really have that when I was growing up, and I don’t think people really think about you know setting plans and and thinking about gratitude and different you know mindset stuff.

Zack Arnold: Well, and and the mindset stuff to me is absolutely vital when it comes to becoming more efficient, becoming more productive, because the trap that people fall into, and I fell into it myself as well when I first started learning about productivity, is oh, I’m going to learn how to be more productive so I can get even more done and then you realize well that’s not really serving me because then you just burn out and burn out is something that I have talked about for years now and have experienced more times than I care to admit but every time I go through it I learn something more about what I’ve really wanted to define is what balance means, and once I’ve defined what balance looks like to me, then I can figure out how to be more efficient, but to achieve the end of finding more work-life balance, not of just getting more done. Like you said, for some people, getting more done is work-life balance because their life is their work, and they enjoy that, and that’s where they’re present and fulfilled. And for others, it’s not. And because I have kids now, I realize well, just getting more done during the day isn’t serving me if it means that I’m putting my children to bed via FaceTime every night. So for me, it was really all about establishing that mindset and realizing how important it was to understand what’s the picture of where I want to go first. Then let’s figure out the processes as opposed to man, my life is a mess. Can somebody tell me an app that’s going to help me get through my to-do list? Because that’s always the order that people come to me with. It’s just tell me the app, tell me the tool. Like I know you love Trello. Show me how to use Trello. Well, Trello is awesome, but you kind of need to do a little bit of work first before that.

Apryl Schlueter: Exactly.

Zack Arnold: So one thing that I wanted to hit on because this is, you said it was a trigger for people, and it’s definitely a trigger for me. And that’s the word multitasking. And I have dove and dived, whatever the word is, really deep into the science of productivity and multitasking. And basically, everybody will tell you that multitasking doesn’t exist because the human brain can’t process multiple tasks at once, and I want to mention where you said about this whole idea of like throwing multiple parties, which I think is brilliant because I don’t really like parties or social situations either. But I want to celebrate successes and celebrate it with people that I appreciate. That’s not multitasking. That’s officially bulk processing things so you can do them at once. It’s not multitasking, saying, “Well, I’m going to send an email and have a conversation with my wife and respond to a text and try and write a blog post all at the same time. So, to me, most people think, “Oh, yeah, I’m great at multitasking. I’m doing all these things at once. And it’s like, no, you’re really just switching from one task to another very, very quickly, which exhausts your brain and is the antithesis of work-life balance. So I just wanted to make sure to at least clarify what my thoughts were very briefly about multitasking. And from reading your book, it sounds like yours are similar.

Apryl Schlueter: Yeah, and I think it’s it’s more about taking the priorities and trying to figure out how to how to execute them at the same time. So definitely not at the task level. I definitely know that I get to a point where I have these squirrel moments still, even even though I’m really productive. But then I catch myself saying, “Oh, I’m writing this email, and it triggers this thought about I have to do this other thing, and I have to contact this other person. And oh, yeah, I didn’t do those bills that I was I I should have been doing the last you know five or six days that I had on my calendar, and then I I feel very very scattered, and that’s definitely not good productivity. But sometimes also it’s a good reminder that okay I need to get myself into some sort of process flow, so I’m not thinking about these things. I have, you know, I use Asana or you know people use Trello to just kind of remind you, okay, it’s Saturday, it’s time to do the dishes, the laundry, and all of those things, and I don’t have to think about it. You know, I get to a point where it’s I’m kind of on autopilot, but it’s also just good to have a reminder of the things that if I if I get distracted, that I need to come back to because that is the process that I know is the most efficient use. Of my time, so totally get that.

Zack Arnold: And I love that you use the word autopilot because that to me was the biggest discovery in my entire journey of productivity was understanding how the brain works when it processes habitual behavior, and how you can save so much of your mental and your creative energy by just basically outsourcing all of these random behaviors and things that you need to do, just outsource them to the part of your brain that deals with habitual behavior, because it takes so much less thought. So, in a quick example, like you just brought up the whole thing on well, Asuna pops up, which is for anybody that doesn’t know, it’s another project management tool that’s very similar to Trello, but pops up and it says, “Oh, it’s Saturday morning. I need to do X, Y, and Z. And I have an entire like habit checklist that pops up for me on Saturday morning in Trello, and that’s when I do laundry and you know go through the pile of mail and sweep the floor in my office, like all the stuff that I hate to do that I never ever could do before, because for somebody that has adult attention issues that were diagnosed when I was, I think, in my mid to late 20s, I couldn’t figure out why am I almost in tears because I can’t get my laundry done. What in the world is wrong with me? I realized it’s because I was always consciously trying to figure out when should I be doing my laundry. Oh, I know I should really be doing my laundry. Why am I not doing my laundry? But once I outsourced it to a checklist and it became a habit, now I just wake up on Saturday morning. I’ve got fairly low energy because after a long 60-hour week of being in front of a computer, I’m pretty spent. But I’ve now batch processed all of my low-energy, brain-dead tasks that a zombie could do Saturday morning, and I just go through that checklist, and basically in two hours, I’m done with everything I have to do for the weekend, and then I can just chill and have work-life balance.

Apryl Schlueter: Yeah, exactly. And my, it’s funny because we do our laundry every every weekend as well, and it just doesn’t work when when I do it during the week. I I can’t. I always forget, and I leave it in the washing machine, and then it gets stinky, and I got to wash it again. And so, knowing that, I’ve I’ve kind of split it up with my husband, where I do the washing and I kind of bring all the clothes together, and then I throw it on the couch, and he basically can sit and watch TV while he’s folding, and then I sweep in and I just kind of take the folded clothes and I put them away. So we have this this crazy process for how we do our laundry, and then you know during the week there’s there’s no clean clothes that are sitting out, and it’s it’s just it it just seems very effortless, but it it allows us to do different things and and work together, but it it’s it’s such a streamlined process. I love it, and so that’s definitely something that took a while for us to get into a good scenario. But we don’t even think about doing laundry during the week.

Zack Arnold: It’s funny that you brought up the folding part because that was always the hardest part for me. That’s why I could never do my laundry. Like I could throw laundry in the wash and then put it in the dryer. That’s easy because I can be doing other things and I can get work done. But then you actively have to sit down, take time, and fold. So for years, I would always have really, really wrinkled, clean clothes because I would take them out of the dryer, put them in the basket, set them aside, and say, “Yep, I’m going to get to that. I’m going to fold them. And I never would, and I couldn’t figure out why. And it was because I hadn’t, like you said, created this streamlined process where if I just set aside those few minutes and I make it enjoyable, so now that I’m doing it during the weekend, I know my kids are home. I can fold while we’re watching a show together that they enjoy. So now that’s become family time that I look forward to, rather than oh god, I have to fold my clothes. I’ll get to it later. Like that streamlined process makes a lot of sense. And for somebody that’s listening right now, thinking, “Well, what does this have to do with film editing or writing a book or building a business? Like not folding my clothes was getting in the way of me being creative. Like that’s what this is really all about: is opening that space in your brain. Exactly. If I’m coming to you as a new client, what I want to understand more from you is what are some of the most common ways that this lack of work-life balance manifests itself, and then once we talk about that, I want to start getting more into the weeds about actual processes that people can institute to become a little bit more efficient.

Apryl Schlueter: For sure. So what’s really interesting is that when most people come to me for for help or just support. They have this feeling of all right. I’ve got this list of things to do. Most of the people that I work with are relatively organized already, but it’s there’s just so much going on, and they’re they’re being pulled every every which way, and what I’ve noticed in a lot of my current clients is that they might have nine to five jobs, or they might be entrepreneurs. But this whole idea of time management kind of gets into this place where, if they’re working a nine to five, they might have this passion that they really, really want to pursue. That they need to do outside of work time, and you know, obviously, when we are at work, we’re very structured. We know when we need to arrive-ish for for most people, when we need to start working and when we need to stop. And there’s something external that is nudging us to to get tasks done. But otherwise, when we do some of these things that we have to do and we have to instill our own self discipline, it sometimes isn’t there. And so, a lot of the times, it’s it’s really looking at how that person runs their life. I kind of run this very customized practice where I know that everybody does things differently. So it’s really looking at what’s worked for them before. What are the things that either incentivize them or trigger them to do certain tasks? So some people, I was just talking to a client this morning about how he feels that if there’s this time pressure and a shorter deadline, he will get it done way faster than if he just if there wasn’t any sort of time pressure sensitivity, he’ll just kind of put it off because it’s not important. And so it’s really understanding you know where things lie in the priority list and and what types of strategies that you need to employ to almost kind of mind trick yourself to getting things done because it’s something that you might know that you need to do like the laundry, but how do you incentivize yourself to do it, and how do you make it more fun so that it doesn’t seem like a daunting task? Because I think that, you know, I think John Acuff is he’s somebody that I follow, and he talks. He just had a book that came out called Finish, and it’s all about goal setting and and getting things done. And he talks about this concept of how people they they just look at goals and they think that they need to be painful, and I think that there’s a lot of that where it’s like I’m in the hustle. I’m going to do this. I’m going to I’m going to grind it. But how can you make it more fun? And that was that’s definitely something that I totally resonate with because I know that fun is a really important value to me. And if I am doing something and it’s not fun, but I have to do it. Then how do I make it fun so that I can actually be more efficient and actually have more fun doing what I’m doing? And then it doesn’t seem like such a daunting task. So coming back to your question, it’s it’s really I think everybody needs to know that there are so many different products productivity strategies out there. But what works best for you? And so I spend a lot of time kind of problem solving. You know what what are the things that you need to implement, or what are the types of things that you’re doing in the more structured things you do, and how can we deploy that to the things that you’re struggling with? Because I think everybody that I work with is super productive. They’re super busy, but they’re also looking at you know what what is sucking our time? I have a lot of people who love to give to others, and so a lot of times that takes away from the productive things that they want to do. And so I try to help them re-shift and refocus some of the energy that they’re giving to other people and other priorities to their own, so that they can feel more productive.

Apryl Schlueter: And there can be a balance between you know, giving to others and and giving to yourself, but I think a lot of people forget about the goals that they want because they they want to please people and they want people other people around them to be happy. So I look at there’s so many different pieces that that I look at when I’m looking at somebody and and how to help make them more productive. But that’s a huge reason that people come to me in the first place, and it’s funny because I they they want the tool, like you were mentioning. They want some sort of tool. They want some sort of app. But then, it really comes down to what is what is the end goal that you’re trying to achieve in the first place, and you know what’s preventing you from getting that, and then trying to problem solve that instead of looking for the tool right away, and to say you know, because there’s just so many different things that that are out there. It’s just a matter of finding the right one for you.

Zack Arnold: Everybody wants the easy button.

Apryl Schlueter: Yes,

Zack Arnold: Just tell me the easy button. Which one do I press? I want to press the big red button and make everything go away, and my life gets easier. And it doesn’t work that way. No, you got it. You got to put in work, right? Yeah. But if you can make the work enjoyable, and you can make the process enjoyable. It actually becomes fun because one thing that you touched upon that I’ve always believed for years. I’m you talk a lot about spirituality, and we don’t need to go into that. But I’ve talked a little bit about how I’m driven mostly by Buddhist philosophy. So it’s I’m always posting quotes that are more along the lines of it’s all about the journey, and it’s not always focusing on the destination. And productivity is the same thing, where you have to pick a process that you’re going to enjoy on a daily basis. It can’t be, well, I have this goal in 90 days, and the next 90 days are going to suck. But then I’m going to get there, and I’m going to be happy. It just never works. It has to be about the process. The process is so so important, and I want to go back to a couple of things that you said in your last bit. The two that I want to touch on, which I think really, really kill people’s productivity, and I’m not going to go into tools or Trello or all these other things now, because again, I want to dig deeper before we get to the tools, and that’s number one, giving yourself to others too. And not being able to say no when you need to, because I think, like you said, people come to you and they say, “Oh, I’ve got so many things going on, but a lot of times people don’t realize. Oh, wait! If I really think of all the decisions that I’ve made, I’ve allowed all of these things to be going on at once without actually stepping in, prioritizing, and saying no where I need to. So I want to talk about that first, and then once we’ve touched on that a little bit, I want to talk about the time suckers, as you call them.

Apryl Schlueter: Yes,

Zack Arnold: But let’s talk first about the word no and how that can be one of the most powerful productivity tools.

Apryl Schlueter: Yeah, absolutely. And I was just talking with somebody else too about this concept of self care because that’s another you know thing that’s really important for for stress because I think it all boils down to trying to minimize the stress that you’ve got going on in your life. Because when you’re stressed, you really can’t see a full picture of what you’ve got going on, and it’s it’s actually slowing you down, and it’s it’s part of that mindset piece that that can hamper your productivity. But what I see very commonly with other people is that this whole concept of setting boundaries for yourself is so hard because you want everybody. You you get into this place where there’s just this judgment of if I don’t do this, then X Y Z judgment will will be bestowed upon me, and I’m going to feel guilty. And so we we kind of create our own guilt based on what we think the outside world looks the way that they view us, and so we do some we take certain things upon us because maybe that’s what society tells us this is this is the way that things should be, and so we spend a lot of time trying to please others while meanwhile we’re suffering at that expense because we can’t say no. Because oh my gosh, if somebody says no to me, how does that feel? And and I think it also comes back to when people say no to us. I’m sure it doesn’t feel great. Like I hate it, and it always puts me into this stressful situation of feeling like oh my gosh, people don’t like what I’m doing. I’m worthless. I’m not good enough. And so the word no activates this in our coaching program. We call it a gremlin, but it’s just basically the inner critic that’s saying, “Ha ha! See, you can’t do this, and we don’t like that feeling. And so we don’t tend to want to say no to others because we know how that feels at the receiving end. But I always tell my clients, and I also tell myself, I’m probably my toughest client, that saying no to something is your opportunity to say yes to other things. And so, this was a huge thing that I struggled with for so long. This has been a lifelong journey to be able to say no. I I want to do it this way instead and feel no guilt about it. But when I am in this place, when people ask me to do anything, I have to take a pause and say, “Let me check my calendar. That’s always my my trick to make sure that I have this space to say no. Because if I say yes, then I have to commit to it because that’s part of my personality. But being able to take a look at my priorities and say, okay, somebody asked me to go out to lunch. How does this fit in with the things that are most important to me, my family, the work that I’m doing, the tasks that are on my plate, the projects that I have going on? If I were to take this request on, what is that going to take me away from? And it might be, hey, I’ve been working really hard, so yes, I’ll go to lunch with you because I need a break and I need some time to connect with people because that’s also important. But if I’m going to lunch every single day and taking a 30-minute, 40-five-minute commute there and back, and this lunch that’s an hour and a half now becomes three hours. What could I? What am I saying no to? What am I bypassing in order to say yes to this? And so, it’s it is this whole checkpoint of priorities and trying to figure out is this something that I want to do? And yes, you want to do everything. We all want to do everything, but the reality is that we can’t. We might need to outsource things and delegate. We might need to just say no and and push it back. But we need to know what’s most important at that time, and then make that decision on saying yes or no.

Zack Arnold: Well, and and just to go a little bit further into that, or to to kind of recap what I think is the most important point is you can’t decide whether yes or no is the right answer until you’ve taken the first step that we already talked about, which is deciding what do my priorities actually look like. How do I define work-life balance? Because if you’re just living in reactionary mode and you’re saying, “Oh, well, this sounds like a good opportunity, well, yes, of course I should do it. But and I love that you say that saying no means it’s an opportunity to say yes to other things, but you don’t know what things you should say yes or no to until you’ve defined yourself. What do I actually want? What’s important to me? And for some, it might be working 80 hours a week and building a business because you’re single and you don’t have kids. That’s fine. Does how does the yes or no factor? Versus, I’ve got like for me personally, I’ve got an eight-year-old and an almost six-year-old at home. So my yes and no’s are very different because my number one priority is I want to be a present dad, and I not only want to just be a father figure, I want to be a friend to my kids. So if somebody says, “Hey, we’ve got this cool party on Saturday night, everybody’s like, “You have to be there. It’s so cool. Like for example, I was at. They had a wrap party for the TV show that I’m on. All the stars were going to be there, but my son said to me, he’s like, “Daddy, I don’t want you to go to the party. I’m like, “Well, why? Like you’re going to be asleep. The party was like 9o’clock to two a.m. or something. And he said to me, “Well, because then you’re going to be out really late, and tomorrow you won’t have any energy, and you’ll be really tired. And when we’re making cookies together for the holidays, it’s just not going to be any fun. And I was like, “Well, now I can’t go to the party now. Like you know, after my eight-year-old says that to me, almost in tears, like that’s more important to me than going to a party and seeing a bunch of Hollywood celebrities. So I didn’t go, but like that’s because I very clearly have written over and over and over for years that my children are going to be my number one priority over anything work related. So it made the decision easy, yeah, rather than just fighting forever and ever. What what what am I supposed to do? You know.

Apryl Schlueter: Yeah, exactly. And and I think one of the things that I do with all of my clients when I start, is is really dig into what’s really important to you. What what do you value? Because some of the things that trigger us in our life are the things that are probably extremely important to us, and we want to make sure that we embed those priorities and values into and have them at the forefront. So I know I know for a fact that my top values are fun, accomplishment, connection, authenticity, and so if I’m doing anything that goes against those four things, then it makes my decision a lot easier. And so a lot of these people who get into this analysis paralysis, oh my God, I don’t know which one to decide. If you can go back to your values or your priorities, use that as your decision maker. It makes the decision way much easier, and then you’re more productive because you’re not spending so much time trying to decide. I mean, I think a lot of people waste time, like, oh, I don’t know, there’s so many options, but that you’re actually spending time doing something that takes away from the things that you really want to do. So doing that intro work first to really understand what’s most important. Again, same thing with me. My my kids are my number one priority, and you know the days that they want to you know play on technology that might be like okay, well maybe I can spend we can we can all just do that for 30 minutes, and I can do some work, and they can play a little bit, but then it has to come back to the connection time, and we can’t just sit, you know, alongside each other just on our phones and tablets and stuff like that. So, really coming back to making sure that the decisions are aligned with your priorities and values is is so key.

Zack Arnold: Well, speaking of phones and tablets, that’s the perfect segue into time suckers. Yes. So let’s let’s talk about some of the things that are stealing our time away from us during the day.

Apryl Schlueter: I mean, I think one of the things that most of my clients have been talking about lately is social media, and especially for some of my clients who are entrepreneurs and leverage social media as part of their business, it can be really really easy to get sucked into everybody else’s stories and posts and and things like that, and being able to cut out those distractions. But there’s also it can be so many different things. I think you know there’s the tactical stuff like just getting distracted by over you know amounts of email and all of that, and how you might sit there and you could probably just get on the phone and and talk to them for a quick five minutes to clarify these these tough issues, and and then move on. But there there could also be just mindset things that that slow you down, like feeling in a funk and feeling like you know the holidays can be a time suck too, and or just feeling like you’re not good enough, or allowing your mindset to to suck that time away is is a huge mental mental time suck. Commutes long long commutes. I know that you’re in California, so that the drive can be crazy. I have a two almost two and a half hour commute into the city for a weekly improv class, and so I try to think about how can I leverage that time to make sure that I’m doing other priorities. But really, looking at the things that piss you off, make you angry, make you feel inefficient, those are all of your time sucks. And trying to figure out how can you either repurpose them so that they feel a little bit more productive, or how do you eliminate them altogether so that they don’t become something that takes you away from the things that are really important? So that’s always something that I, when my clients come up to me and tell me, “Oh my gosh, this thing happened today. I I felt like I did nothing for me. It’s such a great awareness to be able to say. Okay, so this is something that’s sucking time away from the things that you want to do. So how can we change this up? How can we create different rules so that you don’t go fall into that trap again? And we can try on that rule and see what works, and continue to refine it until it feels like it’s a humming machine. That’s that’s basically the way that I work with people. Is you know what are all these things that make you angry? Let’s let’s get let’s get rid of them or figure out a different way to look at them so that they don’t feel like they’re weighing you down.

Zack Arnold: Exactly, and these are all the things that I’m really really honing in on in this brand new program that I’m building called Focus Yourself, where again I’m going to be teaching things like Trello and OmniFocus and like all the tasks and the tools and the to-do lists and process efficiency, but before that, it’s all about eliminating all these things that are sucking your time. And I love that you talk about not only the time sucks like social media and email, and much of that can be drastically reduced or eliminated through a few simple steps. But I really like this idea of how can I take a time suck that just is, and I can’t do anything about it, but make it more efficient and get something more out of it. And I think the commute is the perfect example for me. I’ve spent I don’t know at least the last 10 years commuting to different movie studios all throughout town, depending on the the show that I’m on, and it used to just drive me absolutely crazy because I don’t really like listening to music. Like just getting in the car and listening to music is not terribly enjoyable unless I’m like driving down a country road at 70 miles an hour. But there’s not a lot of 70 miles an hour in Los Angeles. It’s more seven miles an hour, and listening to fun, relaxing music when you’re stuck in traffic is just not my thing. So I used to just sit in the car and just stew and be like, “Oh, why am I in the car? I hate Los Angeles. I hate driving. And then I realized, what if I stopped complaining and I did something with this time? And that’s when I discovered podcasts. And once I discovered podcasts, I started discovering influencers and I started reading books. And then all of a sudden, this entirely new world opened up to me, and now I actually look forward to my commute every day because I planned out in advance what am I learning right now? Who’s who am I following? Have I purchased an audio course that I’m going to listen to? Do I want to go on Audible and listen to a book? And when I’m on hiatus from TV shows working from home, I miss my commute. I’m like, oh my god! I almost kind of want to find somewhere to drive to, so I can listen to a book right now.

Apryl Schlueter: Yeah.

Zack Arnold: So it’s all about it’s, and this would be my my version of multitasking. This is multitasking in a good way. Is that you’re doing a really low energy, low focus, habitual task, which is driving, and you’re coupling it with a high focus task, which is listening and processing new information. Yeah. And this was a game changer for me. It was just discovering this one thing alone, turning my commute into a productive, enjoyable time in my day has changed my entire life.

Apryl Schlueter: Yeah, absolutely. And I do the same thing. You know, I try to listen to either podcasts or audio books and and whatnot. But there’s also for me because I I value connection. I will call friends and talk to them, or I will. I like to sing, so I do like music, and I don’t get to necessarily listen to it all the time when I’m on client calls and stuff like that. So just being able to blast my radio with my windows up and just you know belt out songs all day long-that’s that’s my place to do that, and it’s it’s really relaxing and freeing for me to do that on a drive that is a daunting two-hour drive that should actually only be 35 minutes. So it makes that time more enjoyable, and you know, even the destination where I’m going to take improv classes is such a huge, fun release for me that it’s it’s absolutely worth it to to make that commute for the two hours during rush hour, just to get to my class, you know, it could be seen as a time sucker for some other people. But the reason that I’m doing it really is something that’s important to me. And as long as I can figure out ways to make my commute more fun, it really doesn’t matter. It’s it’s still two hours of my day, and I’ll usually use it as as relaxation time because most of the time when I’m at home I’m super super focused on work and diving into my emails and I hate sitting but I know that I have to sit when I’m in the car so what else can I do that is hilarious and fun or you know do I idea generate what is what is it that I do so totally important

Zack Arnold: Yeah and that’s actually two additional things that I think make the commute so useful for me now. One you already touched upon, which is connection. I now use that to schedule time at least once or twice a week to call my parents, to catch up with friends. Like I will actually schedule calls with important people during my commute. And I now actually, since I’ve started my own coaching practice, I don’t like to do coaching over the phone. I want to do it face to face via video chat. But the one person that I’m now coaching via the phone during my commute every week is my dad, and because of that, we have established a much much stronger bond, and just it makes that Monday morning commute something I really look forward to because I think oh I get to call my dad. Today and see how he’s doing and check in and make sure he’s you know doing all the activities that we’re talking about to make him healthier and more vibrant and get the things done that he wants to. So again, it’s it’s taking this just god awful, boring, horrible thing that I’ve hated for 15 years living in Los Angeles that I now look forward to by as you you’ve said process efficiency, and it’s something that I know I should be doing. Calling my dad, that I’m always saying, “Oh well, I just don’t have the time. I’m too busy. But I have no excuse. I’m sitting in a car. It’s the one place where I have to sit. I can’t move. I’m stuck in this little tiny sardine can for 60 minutes at a time, and it’s it makes it more productive. But the other thing that has made it so productive that you alluded to very briefly is idea generation. Depending on the level of energy that I have or where I am in a project, I can use my commute for actual brainstorming and outlining and writing. And obviously, I’m not writing physically, but I can dictate. So I’ve dictated entire blog posts or lessons in a course, or emails, just while driving, because I’m just in this hyper focused mode. Because driving is a very habitual behavior. So as long as I’m not actually looking at my phone and I just have it set aside and I hit the record button, I can just dictate my thoughts and have them there recorded, and later get them transcribed. And I’ve gotten so much worked on by literally doing almost nothing.

Apryl Schlueter: Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s amazing how that works. It’s it’s so crazy, so I love it.

Zack Arnold: Now before I lose you, because I know that you’re I could go for hours about process efficiency and we barely barely scratched the surface. Does barely, but I’m wondering before we go, is there one specific cool tip or trick, whether it’s Trello, whatever it is, where it’s like this is one of my my secret sauces, one of my secret formulas for people to be more productive. Do you have one little thing that you can share with our audience today?

Apryl Schlueter: I feel like, and and this might be a more overarching planning type of of tool, but my husband says that he it’s it’s his favorite part of my book, and I’ve heard from a lot of other people that they think it’s really really great too, is and I’ve just been talking about planning for this coming year for the last few months. But what I usually like to do every year is go through a process of annual planning, and that could seem daunting to people, but it really doesn’t need to be. And basically, putting yourself in this visioning spot of you know December. So right now, you know, looking at the forward year, looking at december 31 Let’s say you’re you’re going to a party and you’re seeing a friend that you haven’t seen in a really really long time, and they’re they’re basically saying, “I haven’t seen you all year. Where you know what have you been up to? What what’s going on? And almost allowing yourself to record that conversation that you have with this this friend, and putting yourself in that place of a year from now, and saying you know all of these things have happened. Oh my God, we went to all these places, and I launched this program, or I finished this project, or just allowing yourself to envision what that would be like a year from now, and then taking this reverse plan scenario where you take a look at all the things that you said that you wanted to accomplish, and then kind of backtracking your way into the the tasks that you need to do, then basically getting to this this point of all right, what do I need to do this week to make sure that it’s aligned with that end goal that I that I want to accomplish. You don’t want to get too far into the nitty gritty of like I need to, you know, publish X Y Z number of blog posts or or whatnot. But just to say, you know, by this time I need to accomplish X, and at the six month mark. But then you know, for the three month mark, in order to get that done, I need to do X, Y, Z or A, B, C, and backtracking it all the way to the week, so it gives you this sense of basically aligning the actual tasks that you’re doing with this this vision of what you want to accomplish in that year. And so that’s just a process that is is kind of overarching. I encourage everybody to do it at least once a year, and then kind of do quarterly checkpoints to make sure that you’re still on task, and and but kind of also keeping open because you can have a plan, but if it’s too rigid and then you don’t fulfill it, it can cause a lot of frustration and overwhelm. So not necessarily thinking about the exact process of how you’re getting there, but it at least gives you a direction on where you’re going to go, so that you don’t feel like you’re running wildly and just letting life pass you by, or just letting life happen. But you’re being a little bit more intentional with your time. If that’s a good tool to share, I hope that that that works. But I think it it gives you this flexibility to to know what direction you’re going, but it also doesn’t give you too much detail, and it gives you the flexibility to to see you know what path you’ll take to get there.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I love that you brought this up because funny enough, that was the part that I bookmarked in your book as well. Awesome. I’ve actually I’ve done a similar process for the last three or four years where I write this long journal entry where it is written present tense for a year in the future, so I. Start it by saying, you know, I am 38 years old, but I wrote it when I was actually 37, and go through all these these different things that I’m hoping will have happened. But you have a lot of really good specific prompts that I’m totally going to steal, and I’m going to add to the the yearly review that I do. But this is just just to bring this up super briefly for my audience that may or may not already know. But I have a kind of a mini course on goal setting that uses the Go Far framework, which I learned from Christopher Rush with the documentary that I did about his life, Go Far: The Christopher Rush story. And of those five steps, everybody always assumes that the G, which stands for goals, well, goals is the most important step. And I always say, no, no, no, no, no. The most important step is R, which is review, because you can set amazing goals, but if you don’t take the time on a regular basis to review whether or not you’re reaching the goals that you’ve set for yourself, there’s no point. And that’s exactly what you’re speaking to right now: is this bigger picture yearly review, and then breaking it down into more sizeable chunks on a regular basis to make sure you’re actually making progress.

Apryl Schlueter: Yeah, absolutely. You know, self awareness and reflection are some of the things that I say are the most fundamental things that you need to practice in your life because we don’t do that a lot of times. It’s like, oh my God, where did the day go? Like so many people say that, and with the clients that I work with, I almost get them into this habitual practice of reflecting daily. I ask them to set intentions in the morning and say, you know, what are the what are the three things that are your high level focus today? And they could be specific, minute tasks like I need to do the laundry, or they could just say I need to, you know, make sure that I monitor my stress levels throughout the day, depending on where you’re at. But then being able to reflect on it at the end of the day, or you know, if if a day is too short, then doing this on a weekly basis, whatever interval feels right for you. But to just allow yourself to take a look at what has happened and say, all right, if I didn’t like this part about what I did this past week. Then how can I do it differently? Because if you don’t, if you’re not aware to what needs to change, it’s not going to change. So it is getting into this proactive place, and sometimes you’re just not even aware that it’s happening. And time passes by, and then all of a sudden, you know, oh my God, what did I do? And you know, you just can’t even get into this place of feeling how accomplished you have been because you’re just not giving yourself that time, and so I think it’s something that we all struggle with because it seems unnecessary. But I can tell you, with like the the 45 clients that I worked with over the course of the last few months in this program that I’ve been piloting, they all have said just being able to kind of dump my my thoughts and reflections has given me the opportunity to make a different choice, and I think that sometimes we feel like we’re locked into our rules. And so I really encourage people to set rules, but when they’re not serving you anymore, then change them because the rules that you’re creating are the rules that you’ve created yourself, and nobody else is is telling you these rules other than yourself. So giving yourself that opportunity to reflect and say, “Am I still on path, or do I want to take a different direction? and not tying yourself to that that end goal so much because there might be other things that come up as you start to introduce new goals. Everything in your life might shift. I mean, you know as well as I do. When when you have kids, your priorities of how work comes up does-it’s just different, and you can’t you can’t predict that. But you have to change your priorities, and so it’s always important to go back to your list of priorities and values and say, is this still the same, or does something need to change? And then make those changes and use that to to guide any decisions or actions that you take, and then you’ll feel this concept of work life balance or or more fulfillment if that’s what’s important to you.

Zack Arnold: I couldn’t have said it any better. And speaking of priorities, it is always a priority of mine to get people off the call on time. And I’ve broken that rule. We’re a few minutes late, but it was completely and totally worth it because I’ve learned a ton myself on this call. I hope that everybody else has learned a lot as well, and this has inspired them to dig a little bit deeper into some of the things that they want out of their life, as opposed to just thinking I need to find the next coolest to-do list app. But if people wanted to learn even more about your work, they want to read your book, they want to work with you. Where can they find more information about you?

Apryl Schlueter: Yeah, great. So my website is www.thecheerfulmind.com. I’m pretty much on all social media channels, so you can reach out if whichever one you prefer. And also, my book is called Finding Success in Balance: My Journey to the Cheerful Mind, and that’s available on Amazon and other bookstores nationwide. So you can just kind of Google it, and it’ll be there. And I’m always very responsive. So if you ever have any questions and want to reach out, my email address is Apryl at the Cheerful mind.com

Zack Arnold: Fantastic! And if anybody wants to avoid the Google search, you did send me a private link to your book, which is not something. You can like actually read out loud. So what I’ll do is I’ll just make something super simple for people, so they can just go to optimizeyourself.me/cheerfulmind and they can find a direct link to your book, so they can get right there and not have to go through the whole horrendous, arduous process of doing a Google search and finding the right link. There’s the process

Apryl Schlueter: There’s the process efficiency right there. Right, process

Zack Arnold: Efficiency. I want it to be as few steps and clicks as possible. So we’re going to get everybody there in one URL. So again, it’s optimizeyourself.me/cheerfulmind. I’ll also put links to other things we talk about in the show, including my mini course using the GoFar framework to set your goals. But on that note, I want to thank you so much for your time and saying yes to this interview instead of saying no, that means a lot to me.

Apryl Schlueter: Yes, absolutely. This was so much fun, and I love collaborating and having conversations with other people who geek out on productivity. So this was a no-brainer.

Zack Arnold: Sweet. All right. Well, you have a wonderful day.

Apryl Schlueter: All right. You too. Thank you.

Zack Arnold

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The Myth of Work-Life Balance (And What to Strive For Instead) | with Apryl Schlueter

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