183. Leading Smart: Harnessing Productivity with Dermot Crowley

💭 Ever wondered how productivity can be optimized in a hybrid work model?

Join us as Dermot Crowley, the visionary behind Adapt Productivity, unveils the journey from his humble beginnings in Ireland to becoming one of Australia's leading productivity experts. Discover how Dermot's passion for productivity, which began with simple paper diary systems and evolved alongside technological advancements like Microsoft Outlook, can help you overcome common productivity pitfalls and improve both personal and team efficiency.

Tune in to learn how intentional planning and execution, combined with strategic use of tools like Microsoft Teams, Jira, and Miro boards, can transform the way you and your team work—whether remotely or in the office.

Dermot shares actionable insights on differentiating between urgency and importance when prioritizing tasks, establishing effective planning routines, and managing time and communication within teams. He emphasizes the critical role of leadership in fostering a productive culture, ensuring clarity, alignment, and accountability across your organization.

Get ready to reclaim control over your workday as we tackle the challenges of disengagement and constant distractions in today's flexible work environments.

Learn how to manage incoming work, optimize your email and meeting cultures using principles like the Nash equilibrium, and foster a sense of agency and engagement among your team members. Dermot's journey, strategies, and favorite resources will leave you inspired and equipped to enhance productivity both personally and within your teams.

🌐 Connect with Dermot:
• Website: https://adaptproductivity.com.au/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dermotcrowley/

📚 You can purchase Dermot's books at Amazon:
• Smart Work: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1394189850/
• Smart Teams: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C6HD2XMW/
• Lead Smart: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1394188609/
• Urgent!: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08G1YGXY9/

C-Suite Strategies
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Chapters

• 0:00 Expert Insights on Productivity and Collaboration
• 10:37 Optimizing Productivity Through Alignment and Planning
• 16:38 [Ad] C-Suite Strategies
• 17:26 (Cont.) Optimizing Productivity Through Alignment and Planning
• 24:51 Effective Planning and Prioritization
• 28:35 Strategies for Effective Time Management
• 36:09 Taking Control of Personal Productivity
• 47:46 Improving Team Productivity Through Communication
• 58:45 Optimizing Leadership for Team Productivity
• 1:08:49 Navigating Team Productivity Challenges

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:00

What does it mean to work smarter, not harder? How does a leader lead smart and harness their own productivity and unlock the full productivity of their teams? In today's episode of The Leadership Project, we are joined by Dermot Crowley, one of the world's leading experts in productivity, we discuss how internal and external erosion and interference are preventing us from doing our very best work. Stay tuned to the end as Dermot shares very practical tips for taking back control of your own productivity and stop getting hijacked by emails, meetings and other people's priorities. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Dermot Crowley. Dermott is the director and founder of Adapt Productivity, and is one of Australia's leading experts in Productivity and the author of multiple books, including Urgent, Smart Work, Smart Teams and Lead Smart. And it's that trilogy of books, the Smart Work, Smart Teams and Lead Smart that we're going to delve into today. We all work in teams at some way or another. We all have to work on our own personal productivity, how we work together and collaboratively with others for maximum impact, and we know that this is one of the challenges that so many teams and so many businesses face. So I think there's going to be something in this for all of us today. So without any further ado at Dermot, I would love it if you would say hello to the audience, and I'd love to know what inspired you to specifically focus on this concept of Productivity.

Dermot Crowley: 1:45

Great stuff, Mick. Thank you and hello to everyone out there. Look, I've been involved in the Productivity training business for about 25 years. I originally came from Ireland. I arrived in Australia about 30 years ago as a pretty much a penniless backpacker, but I settled here in Australia. And a few years into it, I started working for a productivity training business back in the and this is back in the 90s where there was no computers, there was no email, there was no Microsoft Outlook or Gmail or anything like that, we tended to use paper diary systems to organize ourselves. And when I started helping people to be more organized using the paper diary that's kind of when I fell in love with productivity. But my real passion came out of the fact that email did come into the workplace. We did start using technology to organize ourselves, and the tools like Microsoft Outlook very quickly became the norm in most organizations, and that's where I saw a pathway for me, because I love technology, and I loved playing around with it and asking questions of it, and I love productivity, so I thought, well, you know, why not start a business where I focus on the theory of Productivity, but then show people how to actually implement that theory using the technology? And for the last 22 years, I've been running adapt with with that brief, and we work with a lot of organizations around Australia and indeed, around the world. And it's that sweet spot of productivity and technology that I think people find useful. Because, as you say, everyone needs to be more productive, and everyone's using the same technology pretty much to organize themselves, but they just need to learn to use it in a different way, I reckon.

Mick Spiers: 3:39

So, I can see those two worlds coming together. And I mean, technology is changing all the time, and we've got even more evolutions on our doorstop now with artificial intelligence, etc. But at the heart of all of that, even before technology, was this concept of Productivity, which for many people can be very frustrating. They no one turns up to work wanting to do a bad job, Dermot, they all want to turn up and have a great day and leave the workplace at the end of the day, whether it's virtual or physical, being proud of what they achieved, What gets in our road, Why is it so frustrating?

Dermot Crowley: 4:17

Yeah, look, I have a fundamental belief that most people are wanting to do a really great job. And, you know, I'm often asked about, you know, working from home, and the whole remote working debate, and have we lost our productivity because people are working in a more flexible way? And, and I truly believe the answer is no, because, because of the fact that most people want to do a great job, and they take pride in what they do, but there are things that get in the way. So when I think about the the capacity of an individual or even the capacity of a team to get work done, I reckon there's two types of A. Erosion that comes into play that actually erodes people's capacity to get stuff done. There's an internal erosion which eats away at their capacity, because people aren't well organized at a personal productivity level, so people don't have good systems in place around how they manage all of their activities and their priorities if they if they don't have a good way of managing things like email and incoming work, if they're not clear about their outcomes and and they don't plan and prioritize effectively to achieve those outcomes, then their capacity gets eroded. So that's an internal erosion. But, you know, I can teach people how to be personally more productive, and that's great, but the problem is if they then go back into a workplace that has unproductive cultures, that also erodes their capacity. So I think of that as an external erosion to our productivity and our capacity, and typically, most organizations have three productivity cultures that I would talk to. There's usually an email or a communication culture that can be healthy or unhealthy, and if it's unhealthy, then people are usually getting hundreds of email messages every day, and they're getting messages through Microsoft Teams and other platforms that they use, and they're just being bombarded by a lot of noise so that that can be very, very corrosive to productivity. There's usually a meeting culture at play. And again, that can be healthy or unhealthy. And I guess one of the common complaints I hear from people is I try my best to be productive, but I'm just expected to be in meeting after meeting after meeting, and I have no time to actually get anything worthwhile done outside of those meetings. So that's a cultural issue as well as a personal productivity issue. And then finally, I believe that we have a prioritization culture in organizations that is often driven by urgency rather than being driven by importance. And if people are constantly bombarded by urgent issues and they're expected to react constantly to today's latest crisis, then, of course, their productivity and their capacity is going to be eroded. So I reckon that we need to look at productivity from both perspectives, from the internal and the external, the personal productivity and the cultural productivity.

Mick Spiers: 7:35

There are three really interesting things there, Dermot that I want to unpack. I do want to unpack this kind of hybrid existence that we work on. Let's let's let's go to that one in a moment. I like this concept of erosion, and I've got a thought on that I'd like to share with you. And then this, this cultures around communication, collaboration, prioritization, I think that's going to be an interesting exploration as well. Let's start with hybrid. And I'd love to throw something at you as an expert to get your feedback on. And when I look at this, I really think about, well, what is someone's job? What is their job really? And depending on what their job is, might reshape and reframe the way that they intentionally plan their work. I think there's no doubt that hybrid or sorry, work from home introduced some new things to the world around the ability to deeply concentrate, do deep individual contributor work, right? And there were some things that we're able to do in that virtual world that we discovered we the world proved itself to be more resilient during the covid years than most of us ever gave it credit for. But then, when it comes to things like leading the next generation people entering the workforce right now, that trying to do it from home and not have that ability to collide with people in the workplace, to be mentored and to be a mentee, it's really difficult in a virtual world. So, so one of my things is to think about, well, what is your job, and how can you intentionally shape your work if you are in one of these hybrid roles where you might be two days at home, three days in the office, to be a bit more intentional and go right? Well, at those two days at home, that's when I'm going to do my deep work. And for those three days at work, I'm going to prioritize collaboration, mentoring. What do you think?

Dermot Crowley: 9:28

Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think the hybrid is probably the key. I think as we, as we work our way through what this future could look like for me, it's becoming clear that there is some need to come together. Now, you know it depends on the organization, it depends on the team, it depends on your role. That coming together could be twice a month where you get together as an intact team and you. So you gel and you brainstorm and you make decisions, and you collaborate. And for some organizations and some teams, it could be you're in the office two or three days a week, and the rest of the time you can work from home. So I think that mix is important, and I wouldn't put any constraints on what that looks like. I absolutely agree that it has to be designed with the role and the team and the work in mind. But then I think it is about being intentional. It's about being purposeful and really planning what what needs to be done and what are the best activities to do in the best location. So I think, you know, before, when we planned how we used their time, you know, for the most part, we just really planned what we needed to get done, and then the week was a an open book for how we were going to get that stuff done. If someone was really thinking about productivity. They they might consider their energy levels, and they might consider that, look, I do my best thinking early in the day, so I'm going to schedule or protect time for, you know, my big priorities early in the day, and then I'll do meetings later in the day where, you know, meetings are going to increase my, my ability to focus on on the topic, and naturally, because I'm in a group environment. So that might have been a dynamic that we thought about before the whole covid thing, you know, brought this conversation into focus. But now we've got a third dimension, which is location. So I now potentially need to plan my time around. Where is the best location or environment to do that piece of work. So it's definitely something that people need to think about. I would also suggest that this is very much a leadership issue, and leaders really need to think about, how do I get the best out of my people, for for the team in the organization, but also for them? How do we all perform in the most balanced and useful way, no matter what the environment is? So you know, if I've got people in the office five days a week, or I've only got people in the office one day a week, how do I best navigate that? And I think it comes down to two key things. One is alignment, and the second is accountability. So, you know, most leaders I talk to who are worried about this whole working from home thing, and you know, they'll say that it's dragging productivity down. I think that if we really looked at what was happening, we would find that there's a nervousness about not having line of sight over people, and feeling like, if I leave them to their own devices, they're a not going to work, which I don't think is true, because what we talked about, people will want to do a great job, but B they'll end up doing the wrong work, and I don't have as much control over that, so I think creating alignment across the team. And that goes back to what you were saying about we need to design all of this around the person's job. So when people get really clear about what is my job, what am I trying to achieve in my role, and how does my role fit in with the rest of the team, that clarity will bring real alignment to not just the individual, but to the team, and then there's the accountability piece. So how do we how do we keep people accountable to do what they say they're going to do and follow through on the things that we've agreed and for me, the thing that is critical to both alignment and to the accountability is visibility of the work, making the work visible so that whether we're together in a meeting room or we are in separate locations, we all can see what needs to be done and what the progress of that work is where the blockages might be and what still needs to be done, and that's where technology comes into play. We've got some great tools at our fingertips that can make work visible, whether that be, you know, a tool like Microsoft Outlook from a personal productivity point of view, or, you know, we've got plenty of tools out there that help teams to create project boards, or we've got collaboration platforms, and they could be anything from Microsoft teams to JIRA to Microsoft Planner. But these tools, if they're harnessed in the right way by teams, they make work very visible, and then it matters less whether. Where you're in Brisbane and I'm in Sydney, or we're both in the same room together, we've got the work in front of us, and therefore we can have meaningful conversations around it. Does that make sense?

Mick Spiers: 15:10

Yeah, it's really good Dermot. So I'm loving this alignment that can be missing, and the accountability so really thinking about what is someone's job and making those the clarity you spoke about, around what's expected of someone, and then this visibility as well. So alignment, accountability, visibility, and in that environment, then we can empower people and trust people get on with it. You know what you need to do, and you're good at your job. You want to do a good job. You're making it visible to others. We're not having a divergence of alignment, where people you discover a week later that people went in different directions because you got the visibility to go, Hey, let's, let's get back on the on the JIRA, or could be whatever collaboration tool you're using, a Miro board. It doesn't really matter to make sure that we haven't drifted and find out one or two weeks later that people turn left at Albuquerque and we didn't realize, but it's Yeah, I think there's definitely something in that. And then with what you're saying about the intentionality, because what you're touching on before people get stuck into a cycle of doing and the urgency of doing, but are they really taking the time to think and plan to make sure that they're making the most of their week, including time of day, location, all the things that you're you know, talking about? So I think there's something in there for all of us. What? What are your reflections on that?

Dermot Crowley: 17:18

Yeah, look, one of the things you just mentioned there, I think, is one of the key things that's missing from a personal productivity view for a lot of people, and that's planning. So I see a lot of teams do planning at the big picture level. So you know, they have organizational level planning. They've got project plans, they've got team plans, they've got quarterly plans. But what's often missing is the personal planning that kind of creates the connection between what are we trying to achieve and what am I actually doing on a day to day basis. I remember when the NBN was being installed here in Australia, they talked about, Well, what I think they call the last mile. So when, if you've got NBN that comes to the exchange in your local neighborhood, but then it's just fiber from there to the house. The bandwidth is far lower than if you have NBN coming directly into your home, and that last mile is where it breaks down. Doesn't matter how good the NBN network is, it's going to be choked by the end connection, if you like. And that's what personal planning is for me. It's making sure that we've got good bandwidth all the way from our goals and objectives to what we're actually doing on day to day basis. But most people are too busy to stop and plan. But it's a false economy, because I think you're too busy not to plan, so you're going to end up working on the wrong things too much of the time, you're going to end up working reactively rather than proactively. You're going to end up being very busy, but not necessarily having the impact that you need to have. So I really think a good weekly planning process is is critical. And, you know, I often say to people, if there's one thing that you do out of, you know, all of this training that we've just done, it's please do the weekly planning, because that solves so many issues.

Mick Spiers: 19:28

Yeah, I love it Dermot, and I like this picture of asking ourselves the question of, where is the choke point in my productivity, and is that choke point my own lack of planning, my own lack of intentionality to understand. Like you said before, I'm most productive in the morning, or I do my best creative work in the morning, but I can do my emails in the afternoon, or whatever the case may be, what is the checkpoint that's holding back my personal productivity? Is it just myself, or is it other factors, etc? It's a really good question to ask ourselves, which probably leads me on to that point about erosion. I'm going to throw something to you. This is one of my favorite quotes at the moment. It's Timothy Galway, who's a I think he was Irish as well. He was a tennis coach. I think he was right. And his definition of performance was, performance is equal to potential minus interference. And when I hear you talk about erosion, to me, that's the interference. And we all start the day with the potential of 24 hours. Hopefully you're building some sleep in there, but you've got the potential of 24 hours. US, but your interference is these disruptions, this erosion that you speak about. How do we master that erosion so that it's not a subtraction, a subtraction at the end of every day?

Dermot Crowley: 20:53

Yeah, absolutely. Well again, you know, if we go back to the the idea of internal and external erosion. From an internal erosion point of view, I reckon that we need to just upgrade our own personal productivity skills and strategies and systems. I reckon that most of us are not fully utilizing the technology that is at our fingertips. You know you can you can create as many new apps as you like, but the truth of the matter is, when it comes to personal productivity, we've got the best productivity tools ever designed on our computer. So your listeners are going to be using either Microsoft, Outlook or Google Calendar and Gmail like they're the two platforms that are out there that have stood the test of time. Microsoft Outlook was introduced about 25 years ago, so when I started out, that's when outlook was beginning to make its way into the workplace. Most people use these tools every single day, but they don't actually learn to use them in a way that really supports their productivity. So there's, there's the first thing that I would suggest to people from a personal productivity point of view, and then they need to think about, I think that the three key habits that are crucial to personal productivity, what I call processing, planning and prioritizing. So how do you process incoming work and make decisions about everything that comes at you and whether it needs your time and attention or not? And the challenge that a lot of your listeners are going to be facing is they get a huge amount of noise every day. It is not unusual for me to be working with people who get, you know, over 200 emails a day, and then add on to that, all of the chat messages through Microsoft Teams or whatever platform they're using, and the interruptions and the phone calls and you know, there's so many different ways work comes at us, but email is usually kind of public enemy number one. So we need to make meaningful decisions about all that stuff. We need to get rid of the noise, and then we need to make sure that we are managing the things that truly need our time and attention in a timely and intentional way, and that means we need a good action management system in place to help us to manage all of that. When it comes to planning, we've just touched upon that I mentioned weekly planning has been one of the key pillars for productivity, but I also think that people need to have a daily planning routine and even a monthly planning routine in place as well. The daily planning routine is all about focus. So getting yourself really focused for what do I need to get done today? It doesn't need to take long, you know, literally 510, minutes, but it's a very important start to your day to just focus yourself on, okay, what are the critical things that I need to hit today? And then, for me, monthly planning is about stepping back and getting some perspective and getting myself out of the weeds and really thinking about over the next month. What are my big priorities? What? What are the things that I want to make sure I'm driving forward. And then for me, the weekly planning piece is a link between the two of those, if you like. And then finally, prioritization, the third key habit My experience is when I talk to people about prioritization, they often confuse urgency with importance. So, you know, someone will say to me, oh, but that's really important. And I'll say, why is that important? And they say, because it's due tomorrow, and I that doesn't make it important. That makes it urgent or time sensitive, but that doesn't make it important, and I fear that in a lot of organizations, urgency has become the default prioritization framework that people use, and they don't even realize they're doing it. So a large part of my crusade, if you like, is helping people to dial down the urgency just a bit and think about urgency as being a lens that we can look at our work through, but importance is another lens that we can look at our work through. And I believe that we need to look at our work through both lenses, and ideally we need to get the sequence right. I think when we're operating. At the very top level, we look at things always through the importance lens first, and then we look at things through the urgency lens, and that's a really healthy way of approaching work. But the reality is, most people are just looking at everything through the urgency lens, and they're working reactively.

Mick Spiers: 25:58

This is really powerful, Dermot. So the things I'm taking away, so we're processing, we're planning, we're prioritization, prioritizing, and then we've got this, this balance here between the the urgency and the importance. And I do think you're right. People worry about upcoming deadlines more than they worry about the importance. The two things I want to unpack here. Let's, let's talk about this processing, planning and prioritization. And I have this, you know, this picture of so many people, the first thing they do is they open their email and they just start doing, instead of taking the time to intentionally plan out their week, plan out their month, or even plan out their day, five minutes each day to think about, well, what do I need to prioritize today? You know, all of all of these things. The interesting thing I picked up there Derma is when we spoke about technology, and I did a teaser before saying, you know, it's always changing, this new AI, tools, etc. The tools you're talking about are ones that have been on our desktop for years, as you mentioned, Outlook and Google Calendar. What's your number one tip for how people should be just using let's use Outlook for us as an example. What's the number one tip that people could use to use outlook better than they do today?

Dermot Crowley: 27:14

I mentioned a few minutes ago the idea of processing incoming work and making decisions, getting rid of the noise, but managing the actions that come into your inbox or into your world however they've arrived in an intentional way, and that means you need a good action management system in place. So the big I won't call it a mistake, the challenge that people face when it comes to managing actions using a tool like Microsoft Outlook is that it's set up out of the box, so that, number one, it opens up into the inbox when you open up Outlook, rather than the calendar. So one of the setting changes I get people to make an outlook is, if you go into options, the options menu, you can actually tell Outlook to open up into your calendar rather than your inbox, and that helps to avoid the, you know, just getting sucked straight into email first thing in the morning. Now, of course, I check my email early, you know, like everyone does, but the first thing I look at every day is, what are my meetings for the day? And then added to that, not only do I have my calendar open, I have my task list set up next to my calendar. So again, tools like Outlook have a really good task management system built in. The problem is that it's closed by default and it's gotten hidden. It's hidden from us. So again, if you go into the settings and go into the views in your calendar, you can actually turn on your task list, so it opens up by default next to your calendar, and then you begin to see your work more holistically. Because whether it's a meeting or whether it's a priority that you need to deal with, both of those things need time. And if you want to manage your time effectively, it makes sense to have a time management system that shows you everything that you need to do in the one place. And you know, people are very used to putting all of their meetings into their calendar, and they don't even think about that. That's a no brainer. So my suggestion is, well, put all of your tasks into the electronic task list that sits next to your calendar, and then you truly have a consolidated action management system that shows you everything you need to get done, and you can start making more meaningful decisions about, how am I going to use my time today or this week to get all this stuff done? So that that idea of centralizing all of your work into that one central tool, and whether you're using Outlook or using Gmail, they can both do this. It's just a matter of setting it up in the right way and then being a bit more intentional about how you use the tool. So don't just, you know, be a slave to your inbox. If you think about it, your inbox if that's what you open up to first thing in the morning, and that's where you live most of the day, your inbox is basically an organizing system for everyone else's priorities. Your calendar and your task list is an organizing system for your priorities, and that's what should have more focus when you're at your computer, I reckon. Now, of course, you need to go and check your email regularly, but you shouldn't live in your inbox like most people live.

Mick Spiers: 30:40

These are great tips, Dermot. I can see what you're looking at here is to try to get the technology to work for us instead of against us. So instead of the technology being that distraction that takes you off on a tangent, you're actually using the technology to refocus your day and to make sure that there's a balance there between other people's priorities versus your own priorities, and making sure that you got the two in the right balance.

Dermot Crowley: 31:08

Yeah, exactly right.

Mick Spiers: 31:09

Yeah. Really like this.

Dermot Crowley: 31:10

And I would say that balance is one of the really key words that I use when it comes to personal productivity. There's a number of balances that we need to get in place. I'm often asked to talk about work life balance, but my belief is before you can achieve work life balance, you need to achieve work work balance. And there are different elements that you need to get in balance, and when you do, it gets a lot easier to have a life outside of work. The key balances for me are the balance between time and meetings versus time protected for other priorities, and you can only really achieve that balance when you make all of your work visible in one central tool so you can begin to make decisions about protecting time and not just giving all of your time away to meetings, which is what a lot of senior executives tend to do. So that's one balance. There's a balance between the inputs and the outcomes. So, you know, I can teach people to get the rim box on the control and even to get the rim box all the way down to zero, which is one of the things that I like to do, and that's great, but if that's all you're doing, then you're going to be driving, you know, a certain amount of work into your task list or your calendar from your inbox, but that's not necessarily going to help you to achieve your goals and objectives. You also need to balance the balance the inputs with the outcomes. So you need to think about the bigger picture. You need to think about your goals and objectives. You need to think about your projects, and you need to ask yourself the question, what are the next step actions that I need to drive into my own organizing system so that I'm going to achieve the outcomes I need to achieve, and that comes through planning. If we're not doing the planning, then the chances are we're going to be serving the inputs more than we're serving the outcomes. So that's the second balance. The third balance is between the reactive and the proactive. So you know, a part of our role is always going to be inherently reacting or responding to the needs of the business and our team and our clients, but we need to balance that up by working proactively on the other work that we need to drive forward. So I reckon when we can start thinking about our work in a balanced way, then everything gets a lot easier, and things slow down a bit, but we actually get more of the right work done.

Mick Spiers: 33:39

I think we're really touching quite deeply now on some of the frustrations I was speaking about earlier Dermot that when those things are out of balance and you don't have this work work balance that you speak of, that's when you're going home at the end of the day, whether virtually or physically frustrated, feeling like you didn't get anything done. So I like this visibility and the intentional planning that you're bringing up and thinking about, Well, where is my time going? Is it I just went from meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting all day? Or did I intentionally putting some time blocks to work on some of those things in the Action List. Or was I in reaction mode all day and all that? All I did was play ping pong, I just hit the ball back over the net all day. Or did I actually carve out some time for some proactive work that was better for the future? Not not about today's priority, but about setting myself up for future success? How does that sit with you?

Dermot Crowley: 34:40

Yeah, look, I had a conversation with a client recently about, again, we were talking about the whole flexible working situation, and they were suggesting that the real problem was disengagement. People were not necessarily, you know, working from home and not working, but they were becoming more disengaged with work. And I think there's an element of truth in that for some people. And I think one of the things that's going to make us disengaged is that frustration that I'm trying to do this great work. I've got a lot, a lot of, capability to bring to the table, but every day is just another churn of 200 emails and 10 meetings and a lot of pointless reactivity. And I know I'm kind of being dragged down below the line, and I'm not able to get up above the line, and I guess that. That then leads to a sense of being a victim, and I want to be really careful in the language here. I don't use that in a blaming way, but I do often hear people, you know, use the language you know, if they talk about their email and they say, Well, you know, people keep sending me all this rubbish, and, you know, they copy me in on everything, and I'm in all these reply all conversations. My inbox is overflowing and there's nothing I can do about it. Or they'll say, you know, this is great. Derma, love your ideas around planning and prioritizing, but the truth is that I'm just in meetings back to back all week. There's nothing I can do about it. So there's a certain victim mentality that that can creep in, and that makes us feel very disempowered and very potentially disengaged. So I reckon that a lot of us need to really think about this, and we need to take back our agency, and we need to realize that we all have some agency around how we manage our inbox and how we deal with that noise, and we all have some agency around our schedule and have some ability to protect time in our schedule, and We also have some agency around the urgency, and, you know, we have the ability to properly prioritize and dial down the urgency that's been thrown at us. So I think when people feel they've got control and they've got some agency, again, they become incredibly engaged because they realize that they're now in the driving seat, and they are in a position to be able to at least have some control over the day of the week. They don't have to control everything, but they just want some modem of control.

Mick Spiers: 37:33

You're bringing up some really interesting things here, and I am thinking like the victim mindset versus creator mindset and and the victim mindset would be at the end of the day, so I wasn't my fault. I wasn't productive day. It was my boss's fault. It was my customer's fault or his emails fault. A creative mindset would take control and would intentionally plan out the day and go, Well, no, no, I'm I'm the master of my time, and I'm going to do both. I'm going, I'm going to be able to block time for reactive work, but I'm going to also schedule time for proactive work that that starts getting some of the things off my own priority list. So I'm not just governed by other people's priorities. I think you can take back control and be more productive because you did so like so there's going to be a multiplication effect when you're able to do this that you're not reactive anymore. It doesn't mean that you will ignore those sorry to say it urgent things that pop up from time to time, urgent reactive things, but you've carved out time to make sure that that's not all that you did every day. Got one question about this balance between urgency and importance, and I really love it, by the way, Dermot one of the ones that I fall into the trap of a lot around urgency is this thought that I'm unlocking someone else's productivity. So I do have something that's sitting in my queue, and by doing it and getting it done by, let's say, lunchtime today, it's going to unblock someone else's productivity. Is that a trap that I'm then falling into that? No, now I'm I'm governed by other people's priorities and not my own or is that a good virtue?

Dermot Crowley: 39:16

I reckon it's a good virtue when it's used again, we keep coming back to this word intentionality when it's used in an intentional and purposeful way. So the first thing I would say is there's a massive gap between being responsive and being reactive. They're different things. So reactivity is, it's like a, you know, a knee jerk reaction when, when, you know, a doctor hits your knee with a hammer and your knee flies up, and that's called the knee jerk reaction. And what happens in that case, when the hammer hits your knee, your knee doesn't send the message to your brain and say, hey, something's just hit me. What should I do? And then your brain thinks about and then your brain then your brain sends a message back and goes, Well, why don't you lift up? And let's see what happens. It completely bypasses the brain. That is an instinctive reaction that happens naturally in the body. And I reckon that the same is true when it comes to how reactive we can be. Personally, quite often, we just react to things without thinking and without properly prioritizing. And you know, email is such a great example of this. People who've got email alerts turned on so that every time an email comes in, it goes Bing or Bong or slides across the screen or whatever you. That has sucked us into a way of working where we just end up reacting to all of these things, and we're actually making the emails urgent, even though they might not be urgent. So if you drop what you're doing and you go and deal with that email, and you can tell yourself the story that, oh, look, I'm just going to move it on so that other people can do their work. But you know, all the research around this shows that even though it might take you a minute to deal with that email, it can take you up to 20 minutes to mentally refocus back on task if you allow that to happen. So that's just being reactive. Now, being responsive is a more thought through process so I don't have email alerts turned on. I go and check my email regularly as I go through the day. And generally speaking, my routine would be I check my email about once an hour. So you know, I might go to a meeting. I'll come out of the meeting, I'll check my email. I might do a piece of work, and when I finish that, I'll go and check my email. That means that I'm seeing things in a reasonably timely way. And I've also set up a team agreement with my team that if something is truly urgent, don't send me an email, or at least don't let an email be the only communication method. So my expectation is, if it's that urgent, if you need me to see it in less time than an hour, pick up the phone and call me or send me a text message, because we've agreed that's the our cut through strategy, but don't send me an email now, I will potentially see your email when I'm checking my email, and then I might make a decision that, look, I want to get that to you before lunch so that you can keep progressing your work. But that's me making a priority decision, and that's me being responsive to the work without being reactive to the work. Such a fundamental mind shift for a lot of people and a lot of teams, I tend to find that the truth is that most urgency is either fake or unreasonable. So there is some urgency which is totally reasonable, and that is the, you know, there's always going to be some things that they absolutely need instant attention because of the nature, and we couldn't have planned for them. We couldn't have anticipated them. So in order to make urgency to be a totally bad thing, we need urgency to get our work done. But if everything's urgent, that's the problem. But a lot of that urgency is either fake urgency, where? Where either other people are making it seem urgent when it's actually not, or even worse, we're making it seem urgent although it's actually not on the email alert is a good example of that. So we need to try and avoid the fake urgency. And then the unreasonable urgency are all the things that are urgent, but they're only urgent because there's a deadline, and somebody else left it in their inbox or in their list of things to do until it drifted so close to the deadline that we can't leave it anymore and now we have to react to it. Or even worse, you left it in your inbox and you let it drift until now someone's chasing you up, and you have to react to it. So that's the urgency that I want to try and minimize in the workplace. It's the fake and the unreasonable urgency, and that puts us in a better position to be responsive or to be reactive when something is truly urgent.

Mick Spiers: 44:16

This has been really powerful, so I've had domino I want to summarize a little bit of where we're at with personal productivity, and then move into some of the team stuff. So a lot of what we've been covering so far is in your book around smart work, and it's it's about getting more intentional with our processing, our planning, our prioritization, understanding the difference between urgency and importance, and then being able to be responsive instead of reactive all the time. And yeah, if urgent and important both collide, of course, it needs your attention, but we get more intentional about it, so really loving it. And you know, in doing so, where we're processing much better, where we're consolidating our work better, we're planning better. We're focusing our day better, we're able to be personally more productive if we then shift to smart teams. And this comes back to one of the things that we tease the audience with at the very start of this conversation was about communication meetings and how we prioritize as a team now. So this concept of communicate, congregate, collaborate, right? So, how are we using things like email to communicate effectively, or are we making it worse the way that we communicate with each other? How are we making our meetings more productive, and how are we collaborating so that the team have. Uh, alignment of prioritizations and how it's all going to come together. And this is really coming from your book smart teams. But let's, let's start with communicating more effectively. So we said, we've already said that email is one of our biggest challenges here, but we're also keyboard warriors ourselves. We're sending you these emails as well, where we're not just the receivers. We're also doing it the other way. So, how do we get better at email communication as an example?

Dermot Crowley: 46:06

So I reckon the mindset that we need to bring to our work, when it comes to team productivity, is really well summed up in the concepts that sit behind game theory. So, you know, most people will be familiar with Russell Crowe playing Dr John Nash in the movie A Beautiful Mind. And John Nash was a real character in the 1950s he he didn't come up with the the concept of game theory, but that was a pre existing concept. But he did. He did come up with a very important pillar in the game theory field of thinking, which is called the Nash equilibrium. And the Nash equilibrium states that the best work comes from everyone doing what is best for themselves and for the group at the same time. And quite often that's called kind of win win scenario. And I love that idea when it comes to productivity, because I believe when we're working in a team environment, we need to work in a way that is productive for ourselves and for the group at the same time, and that's when everyone will do their their best work. That's when everyone in the team will be most productive. But the truth is that a lot of the time, we don't work in a way that is good for us and good for the group at the same time. We often work in a way that actually drags other people's productivity down. And we don't mean to do this. We don't do this intentionally, but every time we send them an email, there's a chance that we're just going to add another piece of noise to somebody's inbox, and I reckon we need to be more purposeful around you know, first of all, do I need to send this email? Is email even the best mode of communication for this topic. Do I need to copy this person in on the email? Do I if I'm in a reply all conversation, should I send a reply all to the whole group, or should I just respond to the originator? Because they're the only one who really needs to know my piece of input. This requires us to actually slow down a little bit and to think more purposefully and more intentionally around what are we trying to achieve with the communication? And if everyone in the team did this, then we would reduce the amount of noise that we are actually creating for other people. And the good thing is, if the other people in our team operated in a similar way they would reduce the amount of noise that they are creating for us. So I think there's a mindset piece that we need to think about. I also think that there's a cultural element to this. So most organizations have an email culture, and as I said earlier on, it can be healthy, or it can be unhealthy. If it's unhealthy, then it's going to be an email heavy organization where people just overuse email, and there's no restraints put around the use of email in in each of the teams. So and this is where I think leaders need to really think about. If this is an issue for my team, what do I do as a leader to help to create a more productive culture around email or around emails or around urgency? So, I reckon there's two places to explore again It comes back to that personal piece and the team piece as well.

Mick Spiers: 50:05

So the one I want to unpack a little bit here is a challenge for me personally. I got to admit, I struggle with this one I'm going to build in the email culture and the meeting culture in one here, and you spoke about how many people you put in copy, etc, etc, the challenge I always have, Dermot, and hopefully the audience will help from this question, as will get help from this question as well, is adding that extra person on CC is going to add to their clutter? But if I don't include them, and later on, they go, Well, why didn't you include me? They get offended. Same thing with a meeting. You look at a meeting and go, well, to have 25 people in this meeting, it's going to be super unproductive, but you get these people that get offended if they're not involved and not in invited to the meeting. How do you balance this kind of inclusiveness, to make sure everyone feels informed, engaged, included, but not to the point where the whole thing grinds to a halt, because now you got 25 people in a meeting that should have been a four people meeting.

Dermot Crowley: 51:13

Yeah. So again, it comes back to just getting people to be a little more purposeful around the use of something like the CC function, if you really think about it, and if you really talk about it, I think that that's the absolute key. I reckon teams need to sit down and have a talk as a group around how are we going to use CC in what situations, generally should we be copying people in on stuff, and in what situations is that? Maybe not necessarily, and that's a useful conversation to have to set some general parameters, but I would also have some specific conversations as well. So when I work with leaders, because they're often the ones who are drowning in emails because they get copied in on so much stuff, I say to them, like every time you delegate a piece of work to somebody, you should have a conversation around what are the expectations about looping me in on the progress of this work, and in some cases, I might delegate something to one of my team, and I'll say, look, there's no need to copy me in on any of the emails to the client, so I don't need to be looped in on that. Obviously loop me in if there's something critical that you think I need to be aware of, because if I go into a meeting with the client. If I'm not aware of that, it might be problematic for me, but generally speaking, you don't need to copy me in or I could give them some clear direction. Copy me in this situation, but Don't copy me in that. That takes a moment, but it just gives people the permission to either include you or not include you with more certainty, because this is the problem. Most people aren't actually sure, because they've never talked about this stuff, so they err on the side of what I'm going to include Mick anyway, just in case he wants to be across it. And the problem for you is your inbox is filling up, and you're kind of going, I can't deal with all of this noise, and if it's one or two people, it's not a big deal. But you know, you've got a leader who's got 17 people in their team, and they're being copied in on everything, plus all the stuff from other teams and other peers and other leaders, and that's where the the noise really begins to kill us. So simple conversation. Set some some ground rules, and of course, it's never going to be perfect. People are going to copy you in on stuff that you kind of might go, yeah, probably didn't need to be looped in on that, but it's going to happen a lot less than it might be happening at the moment.

Mick Spiers: 53:55

Yeah, really good. So we're having a clear conversation. We're going to communicate about expectations. We're going to have clarity about what to include me in, what not to include me in, and then I think we can have a better explanation, the same kind of thing, maybe in reverse. Around that meeting, invite you going to have a conversation. Go look, team, we're having these meetings. It's not that you're not needed or you're not important for this one, we're going to have a working meeting. Six people are going to get together around a whiteboard, and we'll communicate with you the results at the end. We appreciate your inputs. What? Having that dialog instead of just going around on autopilot, see, seeing everyone on every, every single thing, otherwise it's just going to grind the business and the team to a halt. I think that's,

Dermot Crowley: 54:41

Yeah.

Mick Spiers: 54:42

Yeah. Really, cool.

Dermot Crowley: 54:43

When it comes to meetings, I reckon that there are participants, there are spectators, and there are interested parties. So I reckon the biggest group is that middle group, the spectators. So what I often see happen is you've got a meeting with eight people in it, and three people are doing all the talking. That says to me that you've got three participants and you've got five spectators. And for me, meetings are a participation sport, not a spectator sport, so we, especially leaders, need to think about this. We need to either pull people into the meeting and help them move from being a spectator to being a participant, or we need to pull them out of the meeting and allow them to be an interested. Party, rather than someone who has to sit through the meeting as a spectator. And what I mean by an interested party is we could have a meeting on a topic that might be of relevance to you, but I might decide, look, Mick, you're probably not needed there, but you might be interested in the decisions that we made and the actions that have come out of this meeting. So what we'll do is we'll we'll put a post on Microsoft Teams channel outlining what the actions and the decisions were, and we'll send you a link to that. So if you want to go and update yourself, you can do that in your own team at your own time, but you don't actually have to attend the meeting. That's a far more productive use of group time than having everyone in every meeting so that everyone is looped in on everything that is happening. It just requires us to be a bit more thoughtful and a bit more purposeful about how group time is used.

Mick Spiers: 56:38

I think that's been the underpinning message in everything that we've said so far, is being a bit more purposeful and intent, having intentionality in everything we do, whether it's our personal productivity or our team productivity. So I want to bring us towards lead smart then Dermot. So so far, what we've covered, we've covered a lot on personal productivity, around smart work, we've touched on smart teams and the thought of working better together, and how we communicate, how we congregate, how we collaborate, all of these things. What does it mean from the leader like what so from the lead smart point of view, when you're trying to get your team to do these things individually and collectively? What does it mean from the latest lens?

Dermot Crowley: 57:22

Could I answer that by just telling you about how I came to write this series of books, what my thinking was so when I wrote Smart Work, which was my first book, probably about 10 years ago, now, I I was very much focused on personal productivity, and that's what I've been, kind of training people on for 10 years up to that point. And really that was, that was my world. I never really thought about Productivity beyond how we manage our own actions, how we manage our own inputs, how we manage our own outcomes. And then when I when I published Smart Work, that process of going really deep on a topic and thinking very, very deeply about how this worked for people, actually expanded my horizon so I could now stand on that body of work and realize there was another horizon, and that other horizon was the cultural element. And the frustration I was having was people were loving the book. They were loving the training that were running around the book, and they were saying, This is life changing. This is great, but there was always a risk that they will go back into their workplace and the unproductive cultures that existed would just make it really hard for them to implement the personal productivity strategies they wanted to so they usually got a short term gain, but they weren't able to sustain that gain over a period of time. So I realized that the next horizon needed to be helping teams to work on their productivity cultures, and that led to me writing smart teams. I kind of thought that was it. But then, of course, I was able to stand on that body of work and realized there was yet another horizon, and the third horizon was the leadership level. So my realization was for team cultures to truly change, the leaders needed to be leading this from the front, and leaders needed to make productivity a core topic of conversation within their teams. And I wasn't seeing this happening. One of my frustrations when I work in large organizations is that leaders will often send their team on productivity training, but they're often too busy to attend themselves because of the nature of their role, which I think, again, is a false economy. But I also found that if we were talking about productive cultures, often it was the leaders who were demonstrating poor behaviors within those cultures. And my belief is the culture is just a group set of beliefs and behaviors, and if the leaders aren't actually demonstrating those behaviors, or don't hold these beliefs, then you were never going to create a cultural change within the team. So I got to thinking about not only a leader's personal productivity, and what they needed to do to level up their game, because the truth is that my experience is most leaders. Is their productivity is a is at a reasonable level it has to be for them to operate at that very high level in the organization. But it's not as high as it needs to be. And leaders need to work on this just like everyone else. So there's a certain amount of of content that I talk about in the book lead smart around productivity at the leadership level, and the specific issues that leaders are often facing when it comes to their productivity. So a leader is likely to be the one who is in meetings 90% of the time, and that's throwing everything out of balance. So you know, that's something that I focus in heavily for leaders, but I also need to think about, how does a leader then work productively with their team? So we need to think about the interface between a leader and their team. So every time a leader delegates a piece of work, every time a leader has a one on one meeting with one of their team. Every time a leader is trying to create alignment and accountability, there's an interface that happens. And if that's not a productive interface, well then the leader could be dragging the team's productivity down, or the team could be dragging the leader's productivity down. So we need to think about that. And then finally, leaders need to be the ones who are leading the productivity cultures within their team. So there's certain things that leaders should do to give their team the greatest chance of maintaining their full capacity, and that means that they need to have conversations, drive the conversations around the email culture, around the meeting culture, around the prioritization culture. So that's a it's a piece of work that excites me a lot. I spend most of my time working with leadership teams now. So my my team will run a lot of our general training on smart work and that within organizations, but my niche is working with the leadership team on how to do all of this. And it also excites me that I've got a body of work that is truly integrated and quite holistic in nature. So I touch upon you know, everything from how you manage your inbox through to the mindsets that you need to have around prioritization. It's a very wide body of work, but it goes very deep as well.

Mick Spiers: 1:03:08

So, let me play back to you what I'm taking away from that is really great, Dermot, I really loved it. So leading smart, starting with leading yourself. Are you doing your own personal productivity, leading the team, making sure that the team are collaborating effectively together and leading the culture. And that leading the culture, I think, starts with role modeling the behaviors of self setting the expectations of the behaviors that you want to see in the team. And then I'm going to say, hold people to account to those behaviors to address when you see it becoming misaligned, or people are starting to drift away from the collaborative behaviors that you discussed and being that,

Dermot Crowley: 1:03:46

Yeah, and I would, I would say also giving the team permission to hold each other to account,

Mick Spiers: 1:03:53

Yeah, nice.

Dermot Crowley: 1:03:54

and even hold you to account as a leader.

Mick Spiers: 1:03:56

Oh, I love that a lot. Okay, so now we've got this element of everyone agreeing. This is how we're going to collaborate together. This is how we're going to communicate. This is how we're going to do meetings. This is how we're going to be prioritized and be responsive, not reactive, having all of these clarifications of expectations and then having an air of accountability where everyone holds each other to that charter to say, Yes, this is how we work as a team. There's one more thing then is quite often the leader is also then the conduit outside the team. So we might be very collaborative and work together well inside the team, but most teams don't live in a bubble. They usually live with an outside world, whether it's customers or other departments of the same business. What about the collaboration outside our team, even if we have got our team to a well oiled machine?

Dermot Crowley: 1:04:50

Yeah, great point. So I really believe that the only thing that you can control is your actions and your behaviors and how you manage your own work, and that's the personal productivity piece and the agency that I talked about earlier on as a leader. You can control how you manage your inbox. You can control how you manage your schedule and your priorities and your outcomes. Then when it comes to our team that we're directly responsible for, we can lead their behaviors and their beliefs and we can have the right conversations to create those healthy productivity cultures that I talked about. Then outside of your team, with your peers and and what other teams that you interface with on a regular basis, you can influence how they work with you. And I think this is really, really key to the productivity of your team, because, as you say, we can do a whole lot of work on how we work together in our little bubble, but that bubble is going to be burst the minute we interact with other parts of the organization, or with clients, or whatever it might be. Steven Scott Johnson is a friend of mine based in Melbourne, who wrote a book on culture a few years ago called emergent, and one of the ideas that he talked about was that true cultural change comes from a beginning at the team level, and then that team creating a cultural shift, and then they create ripples that start to influence the other teams around them. And this is how social change happens. And he says that this is how we truly create a cultural change across the organization. We don't try and change the whole organization at once. We begin with a team or a few teams, and get them to start to create ripples. And that's what I reckon leaders need to do. They need to try and get it right in their own team, but then create ripples that will start to positively influence the other teams, or at least say, Look, this is the way we work as a team, and this is the best way to interact with us if you know, if you want to maintain our productivity, but if you want to be more productive as well, this is a two way street. So you know that's, that's, that's not always easy, because other teams are too busy to listen. And you know, this is all great until people get stressed and people get busy and people get under pressure, and then it all can fall apart very easily. But I, I've seen this happen time and time again in organizations where you do have some some good leaders on the ground who really believe in this stuff, and they put in the work. They don't just, they don't just try and solve it with a, you know, a three hour master class. They actually see this as an ongoing journey and an ongoing conversation. And they they become champions for this way of working within their organization. In fact, later today, I'm going to be working with a team on their meeting agreements, and this is a team that I've worked with on several occasions in the past, and their leader is an absolute champion for productivity across their whole organization. And I'm talking about a global organization with the head office in Switzerland. And it's the it's the Australian leadership team that are kind of taking this to the rest of the world and their organization and saying, Hey, we all need to work differently because we could be better at this.

Mick Spiers: 1:08:49

I love it Dermot, and that's really good to see that external impact that's having, because it's going to be mutually beneficial when that is achieved as well. This has been a wonderful conversation. I've absolutely adored this dermat And there's going to be so many things here for everyone, whether they're looking at their personal productivity, smart work, their team productivity, smart teams, or if in that leadership role where you want to set the expectations, set the culture, and develop a high performance team that collaborates together internally and externally, to the maximum extent there's so many nuggets of gold in this conversation for everyone. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. Like to go now to our Rapid Round. These are the same four questions we ask all of our guests. So firstly, what's the one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you were 20?

Dermot Crowley: 1:09:42

How to manage money. I was, I was a financial disaster, until I probably hit the age of about 27, 28 and I began to get my head around how to just save money or not, spend everything that I earned the minute I earned it. I was a complete financial disaster, and I didn't realize how much stress that it brought to my life. I actually I often tell the story of coming to Australia as a backpacker. I spent the first six months traveling from Perth across the Nullarbor, ended up in Sydney after six months, and I literally had $20 in my wallet and had a plane ticket back to Ireland, and that was it. And it was a terrible, terrible place to be. And luckily, I've made that $20 stretch quite far over the last 25, 30 years, but yeah, I wish I'd known that back then, how I'm now able to just make money, not a big deal in my life, but I'm able to manage in a way that doesn't cause me or my family stress.

Mick Spiers: 1:10:51

Oh, well done. Well done. It's a good one for all of us. What's your favorite book?

Dermot Crowley: 1:10:56

Now, two answers to that. My favorite, favorite book is Lord of the Rings. That is a book that I read as a teenager, and I probably read it a dozen times since then. And of course, it's a it's a trilogy. It's quite a big piece of work. Love, love, the book and the movie, but from a business point of view, there's a book I read just a couple of years ago which has always really stayed with me, called the 15 commitments of conscious leadership. Now think commitments constantly. Can't remember the authors of three authors, but I found that a very practical guide to leadership. One particular idea I borrow from it all the time, the idea of working above the line and not getting dragged down below the line. I thought that was such a simple framework to help people to think about whether they're really adding value or they're just really, really busy so.

Mick Spiers: 1:12:01

Yeah, good one. The book doesn't ring a bell with me, but above the line, below the line, is a concept that I believe in as well. Really good. All right, that's probably where I've got it from, but I just didn't know it came from that book. Finally, what's sorry, not. Finally, what's your favorite quote?

Dermot Crowley: 1:12:16

My favorite quote, I'm going to give you a quote from Steve Jobs. It is very meeting focused, but it sums up what we have talked about so much again and again and again today, you should never go to a meeting or make a telephone call without a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve. And I love that. It's such a practical, you know, throw away thing at one level, but it talks to intentionality. It talks to purpose. And I really do believe that they're the key to personal productivity. They're the key to productive cultures. So, yeah, that sums it up for me.

Mick Spiers: 1:13:00

Spot on. Love it. Okay, And finally, Dermot, there's going to be a lot of people listening to this that are blown away thinking about, yeah, I'm one of those frustrated ones that is the master. They're the they're the slave of their inbox and all of these things. And want to do something either about their personal productivity, their team productivity, or they want to lead smart. How do people find you if they'd like to know more and take advantage of your programs?

Dermot Crowley: 1:13:26

Absolutely? Well, look from a book point of view, if anyone's interested in the books and they're available on, you know, all the usual platforms. I'd say Amazon and booktopia are probably the two online platforms where you definitely find them and then go to DIMMs or the airport bookstores. You might not see all of my books on the shelf, and they tend to stock the most recent ones, but they are certainly available in paperback form from a contact to me point of view. The name of my business is Adapt Productivity. So if you go to adaptproductivity.com.au, you'll find, you know information on all of our different programs, and my contact details are on there. So if anyone has any questions and that they want to run by me, just send me an email through the website, and I will certainly get it. And I will be very responsive to it. I might not be reactive to it, though.

Mick Spiers: 1:14:22

Well done. Nice little reminder there at the end, there as well do it. Thank you so much. This has been such a wonderful conversation. I feel richer from this. I want to thank you for your gift of your time and for sharing your wisdom with our audience today, Thank you.

Dermot Crowley: 1:14:37

My absolute pleasure, and thank you.

Mick Spiers: 1:14:40

You've been listening to The Leadership Project. In the next episode, we'll be joined by Holly Smith, another productivity expert, this time with a focus on how you can convert your productivity into a happy and meaningful life. Please don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you live stream shows and video podcasts every week. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo And my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. If. Now in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.