Family-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We’ll talk about our children and how they think we work too much. Also covered is wasting food, specifically salad which we aren’t sure that they really like but think is healthy. Why is wasting food such a trigger for Kim as an adult?
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Transcript: Season 2, Episode 14
Welcome back to that talking thing. I’m Kim and Jason. This is episode 14, season two, and we are talking about our life. Yeah. Later on in the episode, we’re going to have a funny story about our daughter. Uh, but first we’ll start off with a question. Uh, do we work too much? And this was motivated by the fact that we had a list of ideas for this podcast.
And we had about eight business ideas and you’re like, we have no life ideas. And I was like, maybe that’s our first idea is why are we thinking about work so much? And we don’t have life questions. I want to talk about that, but I want to also say, and not in a cryptic way, but our kids are getting older and we are going through some interesting things with both of them.
But I think that they’re personal and I, as I don’t post photos of our kids on Facebook, I don’t judge you. If you do. We stopped doing that for their own privacy. Yeah. We advise them how to be safe online with their privacy. And I think if we exposed things that they were exploring in their lives and questions and things, we may have tiptoed a little bit around some things in the past, but the older they get, the more I want to protect.
Yeah, as preteens and teens, because I don’t not have things about our life that I want to talk to you about. I just don’t wanna talk to you about them. So I hope every parent can respect that. So I’ll talk all about us. So books, do we work too much?
I don’t know how so. Yeah, I guess you could, like, what does that mean? Like total time-wise is it spread out? Are we always thinking about work? All right. We look, I like our work, so it’s kind of, you know, I tried to put myself in the mindset of like a person on our team who isn’t tied to this business’s performance success outcomes as directly as we are.
And has as much influence on it as we do. And, and I think they still think about their job off hours, but I don’t think that they have unhealthy work habits logging on to early in the day, logging on too late at night, logging on, on weekends. Yeah. Is there a related question? Do you work way more than me?
And that’s 10. No, no. I used to think that you’ve been keeping a better schedule through this year. Yeah.
We work in separate places that helps. So you can like, you know, when I’m not working, you know, now the whole time I’m in the office, you think I’m here. I used to think that, um, when I worked at Accenture, I think you knew I was a good worker. Like you’d meet my coworkers and the really Jason’s a good worker.
And I would like get promoted and get paid. Well, Get stuff done. And then when we started working together, I guess it was rough. Cause it was the first time just working from home in general. But I think you realize like, oh, like Jason would like stop in the middle of the day and take breaks and get back.
And maybe he’s working like four hours out of a seven hour day. Um, and like the gaps in between were more noticeable. Uh, I’ve been noticing for myself that I, I work to scout. I don’t work at intentionally enough. And that was a comment you made about blocking eventually getting back to a place where you could say Friday was a work on the business time.
Right? I need time to write procedures and documentation and things like that. Instead of, I think we could both try some time boxing experiments. I know that it’s always a failure. It always, we always have. Something that comes up suddenly last minute, that distracts us, that changes like having a schedule helps.
So I think even if you’re gonna be breaking in, sometimes you have the intention. Like last week Isaac was home because he goes to school. His school is 30 minutes from our house and the doctor couldn’t make an appointment. His pediatrician couldn’t see him till right after lunch. So I wasn’t going to send him to school in the morning, driving 30 minutes there to get him 30 minutes to bring them to the.
And the afternoon, I just kept him home all day because it was, you know, that’s the trade-off we make where he goes to school. So at Workday was weird. That Workday was really weird. I had to pay that that morning and I feel like I take a decent break. I’m not, uh, I’m working more than four hours lately.
Cause I’m getting in earlier. We kinda figured out the morning. But I take like a decent, like two hour break, typically in the middle of the day. And I’m, I make it up. Usually I feel like we’re talking about work, which is also work after hours and on weekends I usually get a session. And so we get to like close to a 48.
We’re not, I don’t think it’s crazy. It’s weird. Like how you track time, like some of the hustlers and they’re like 80 hours a week and maybe that’s good. And for certain businesses it’s good. Would this be better? Like, definitely. I guess if I was physically capable of doing it, you know, like. Doing even 50% more in twice the time, or like whatever, you know, the ratio you would really get out of those extra hours.
I could find things to do with it, but I would, I would not like work as much. So, I don’t know. I feel good about our balance mean, I guess I worry. It’s hard to turn off. Maybe there’s a problem. And when you were away at the beach house, the lake house river house and a body of water house. Yeah. It was like a different environment.
And it was probably easier for you to not work. Yeah. I asked if you worked and you were like, yeah, a little bit something, something, I was like, oh, that stinks. But you were really talking about the house. Yeah. I didn’t bring my laptop and I didn’t work. I didn’t bring my laptop. So Puerto Rico, I didn’t bring my laptop that weekend.
So, but it is weird. I like, it’s good having this river house for a number of reasons, but like a change of scene. If you have an empty moment at home, besides the household chores. It’s kind of like my laptop is right there and you know, my phone told me that someone needs something and I really could spend 10 minutes working on it, you know, before dinner or whatever random.
Yeah. What’s a good strategy to like try deep focus. Try. I, I know people say like, shut off things that ping you probably don’t have your phone nearby. You were talking about when you consider writing a book using an old style laptop that you would write in the archaic desktop publishing programming, are those the hacks that we, that our brain and our body need to have intentional focus, work time?
Yeah. I, I think, I always think about actually there was this a Seth Rogan interview. Where he talked about writing in the same space. And there was like the writing room where he would smoke weed when he writes. But it was like, all we did in this room was smoke weed and right. Uh, cause he wrote comedies.
Um, and I guess that helps him be productive, but so weed is not the answer. I’m not saying for focus. Uh, Having setting the environment and you don’t have to have a separate building or a separate house if it’s a room or like a different laptop, or kind of like drawing to shades or closing the door or do something like your brain really has these triggers.
I don’t like switch. I used to do this. Like I have like different desktop backgrounds or like, you know, the left monitor and the right monitor would have like different kind of backgrounds and it switched to the other one. And it would like, you know, like, oh, I’m in programming mode. Um, so if he can switch the scenes, maybe you could do.
I can usually I’m in the office here. You’re up. If you’re like, this is my focus time for X, like come down to the office and I do the work that I can do the trade places I have done that I had to write when I wrote my hero press essay, I came down here to write it. Um, but I mean, children will always have.
You know, inflated perception of our work because we, we work together. So our conversations are work-focused that doesn’t feel like work to me, talking about work at seven o’clock with a glass of wine on the sofa, with the fireplace and a dog on my lap that doesn’t feel like work. It can be, I mean, I’m going to get some tense, like do kids to pay.
If the parents don’t work in the same company and are talking about work with the kids, call that work. At night, if we didn’t work at the same company, I was like, oh my boss, that’s the thing. We’re not just, chit-chatting like figuring stuff out and like using a part of our brain and kind of, and it’s stuff that if we were in an office we would have been doing in the office and then like, that was a good day.
We got together and we talked for an hour about a thing. I mean, made some decisions. Yeah. You know, like it’s work, but I used to brought up children and I thought you were going to go in the direction of like kids interrupting you. I know I had this problem where it’s sometimes there’s like something I have to do.
It’s going to take one or two hours or four hours. And I don’t even start it because I’m like, I know I don’t really have the time. Like I don’t work in the mornings like I do now. I try to like read, catch up on things and help out, like, because I could not get distracted and then mark, or, um, like I need to know like, Hey, for the next hour and, you know, limit the distractions.
I mean, yeah, that’s it, it’s kind of like find the place that your limit distractions, whether it’s kids or devices or notifications would home. Is there a, this is a really work-focused life conversation, but maybe you should put something, put something on my calendar next week. I’ll put something on your calendar to do that too.
Okay. And put something on my calendar to do. That’s like deep focus block the time for me, I’m going to block deep focus time and you’re going to set a fun thing. No, both. Both for me. And I’ll do both for you. Okay, cool. Okay. Then I get my pet project work done. Yeah. User fields. And then in my work, I’m going to give you permission.
Yeah. Go, go to the river and work on user fields. We do have another family topic that hopefully doesn’t get turned into a work discussion. Uh, we, we are talking comfortable talking about this with the kids. I think ma Marin, our daughter has, um, a couple of times taken like leftover salad from the dinner before I made a salad for lunch, but she doesn’t really eat salads.
Like she’ll, won’t finish it like too many to, you know, like maybe 10% or she’ll take a couple bites, but it’s not like a real. For like, if she actually ate it, it would be, but so a couple of times before, and then once this week she took us out to school. Yeah. And it was like, I got like unnecessarily angry because it takes me more time to help her make her salad.
Yeah. Yeah. And she was excited about it. She’s telling us she doesn’t want to eat all the animals. She’s choosing to only eat. Avian. I don’t know why shaking the chicken and I convinced her Turkey. We do the Turkey tacos chain and how intelligent they are. I feel like that’s a, I dunno if that’s okay with whatever she chooses.
I support it. I will cook chicken and I will cook Turkey. We don’t cook much else. We never really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have learned that. And so Isaac doesn’t really care, but he doesn’t and beef occasionally. Yeah. We’ll make beef. Not very often. Yeah. It’s even harder to make this out. You are really upset that you spent extra time in custody, made horrible legs in the morning for school, appealed them burning with my hands and that salad came home.
I was so upset because I think it’s a vanity. That’s what we’re guessing. So we need to like ask her questions because yeah, I think like when I was a kid and how cool you felt to have like a certain, like a new lip gloss or like be the kid at school with such and such like the kids who got Lunchables or, you know, expensive things.
So I feel like she might be bringing the salad for that reason, which just makes me feel scared that, that she’s like at 10. Presenting a person to the world that she doesn’t love salad, but she feels cooler presenting as a person that eats salad. Okay. Like either a teacher or friends, or like, I’m really proud of eating salad, that’s healthy or something like that kind of conversation is going on and motivating her to show off her food instead of like actually picking things she likes to eat.
But is that also maybe the first step is kind of like she, maybe she really feels that’s health and she’s like, it’s good that she has the motivation to be healthy. Yes. And it’s made me motivated. Partially or more by like impressing people, but it’s good that there’s motivation deep. She thinks eating salads is healthy, so that’s good, but it’s not like the kill it and be like, I don’t know.
I also think they’re all talking at lunch. Very talkative salad is a hard thing to eat quickly when, and to eat when you’re also having a conversation. It’s like, you have to fork it, find it. You have to. To it in a way that you’re not dropping food out of your mouth or looking gross, it’s not the same as a peanut butter and jelly.
That’s also very sweet and delicious and quick to just get down. Yeah. I don’t want her to be hungry and be hangry. And she’s found her. Yeah, she seemed okay about like knocking hungry. Some of the days there was also a daily, like she made her own lunch and I didn’t inspect it before she went out. And then I forget there was not enough food.
It’s terrible. Sometimes it’s not enough food, but it’s also like all processed, packaged crap food. And I’m trying, that’s the balance of like letting her do it herself, but also, so I usually let her do it herself. And then you like. Uh, but it hadn’t been packaged, processed foods so fast and easy for her.
Our son gets lunch, bought at school, but for her, she has to pack a lunch and it’s easy to throw packaged food into your lunchbox. I don’t buy it. They say there’s nothing to eat. If I don’t buy even individually packaged or just crunchy snacks that. Then a lot of people though, like you cook a lot and you have, and I like to cook some that we eat out, you know, a few times a week, but we make a lot of meals, like by hand, by scratch.
We’ve never had GrubHub delivered to our home. We’ve never had what’s the other one. Uber eats. Yeah. I’ve never used any of these services.
I’ve never used any of these services. So I have no idea they don’t deliver to us. I wouldn’t do it anyway. Like I wouldn’t, she wanted something in her lunch and I was like, we can make that homemade. Yeah. So we, oh, we kind of like a minute. Um, I thought I said, when you start talking about it, I was like, Ooh, let’s talk about it.
Is, can we still talk about it at a meeting on Sunday? Or like, what are the questions or give examples from our own lives? That’s always like the trick is kind of talk about it as like, I remember when I was little, I have a memory of being little. I was at home, I think eating. Eating Kraft, macaroni cheese, but pretending it was a salad in my mind.
Cause it was like, like you said, it kind of elegant to eat a salad or something. I was like, oh yeah, yeah. I was like, maybe. And I think my mom was like, maybe watching it, like the equivalent of food network back then, like Graham Kerr or healthy something. But I was eating like macaroni and cheese to, yeah.
I don’t know. It is it’s good to try new stuff. I think if she wants some salad in her lunch, we will make her a small side salad. It will not be her entree. She’s finishing it, then build it up. She also put an entire container of dressing on it. Oh, I think she makes her gross. Like she made the fish is getting better at that.
She did that at dinner. The other night she put sour cream on her, like taco burrito bowl, but it was covered in sauce. Oh, well, it’s getting better. She used to be really well. Can I put chocolate sauce on my taco and you’re like, I know it’s not going to taste. Like, it seems like a good idea, but it’s not.
But if you, the more you act like it’s gross, the more that she’ll eat it, that’s the thing you have to say. Like that looks disgusting, then she’ll eat it. Reverse psychology works well on her. We’ll figure it out. Yeah. I guess there’s parents out there listening who say my kid won’t touch. Take one bite of salad.
So we’re, we’re. You know, complaining about something that is probably okay. Just not the biggest deal, but it was something I got triggered in that moment. I don’t like wasting food. You really know you have a hard time with that’s frustrating to me too. Yeah. Our kids will not have that problem. They’re completely comfortable wasting food.
It’s interesting. That’s another one of those things where like I hear my dad in my head, like we heard the children are starving speech, every single meal. And we had those commercials on television. We had the dollar a day commercials. Our kids don’t see those commercials growing up that vivid opposite problem where like with the eat, the food do not waste it.
We’re overweight and eat all of our food. I’m there. Drive salad for dinner. Um, not having dinner today. Fasting day. Sorry we talked about self for lunch, then it was good. Yeah. All right. Thanks.