Hello, this is Emma Ganon, and thank you for listening to this podcast. I just wanted to let you know that my new book, The Success Myth, Letting Go of Having It All, is out on May the 18th.

I think it's my best book yet, so I'm excited for it to come out. And the book unpicks the eight success myths from happiness to money, to productivity, to celebrity, to the idea of finally arriving, and how chasing a version of success that doesn't align with your values can really take you off track, and this book is about getting back to yourself.

Breaking free, finding a new way forward, and it's available on May the 18th. If you love this podcast, you'll love the book, and it's available soon from all good book shops, so you can order yours now. I hope you like it.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Control Lot Delete. This is a replay of an episode with the amazing Natalie Lou from June 2021.

This was part of a mini series that I did in partnership with Lenovo, and I'll leave a link to all the other episodes we did as part of the series because I absolutely loved every episode I did with Natalie.

She's one of my favorite writers and coaches on boundaries, and she has a book coming out in January 2023 with HarperCollins called The Joy of Saying No, a simple plan to stop people pleasing, reclaim your boundaries, and say yes to the life you want.

She really is amazing, and I think you're going to love her book when it comes out. So in the meantime, enjoy this episode and go and preorder her new book. Hope you enjoy.

So in this episode, we're going to talk about how we get stuff done. I recently read an article by Oliver Bergman. He kind of changed my life because I was going through a phase where I just felt really overwhelmed. Everything was chaos.

I felt like I was trying to write this book and I had emails and I had little bits of Adam in and I had to do, you know, just life, and I don't even have kids, so I don't even have that excuse, but like a lot of lots of bits, and I need to do some deep work.

And he wrote an article recently called Three or Four Hours, it's called, and he basically says that for us to really seriously focus all we need is three hours really in a block of time, three or four hours in a block of time.

And basically if you sit down and do as much as you can in those hours, you can basically faff around for the rest of the day, because that's actually the only amount of time where things can get done.

And so I would put in my diary like three hours, no one could email me, no one could talk to me, everything was switched off, got my work done. And then the rest of the day was chaos, but I just felt like I'd started the day from a good place.

How does that ring any bells with you about how you work, like how do you structure the deep work?

That totally chimes with what I've come to understand about what I need out of work, because I found that's one of the reasons why I got into doing what I'm doing is I loved like having creative control.

Flying by the seat of my pants and one of the reasons why I got really stressed in what I was doing is because I had creative control and I was flying by the seat of my pants.

Everything has a trade-off, there's light and shade to things.

And so I have found it's not a perfect solution because sometimes stuff is going to happen, but I tend in the mornings to not schedule like zooms as it would be these days, meetings, whatever.

I don't have this whole thing of like, because again, it's that sort of corporate capitalist thing of, oh, you have to be at your desk at nine.

And it's more about like sometimes actually I might be sat down, actually at eight, because I just happened to have got myself together and sometimes I don't actually get to sit down until 11.

But I found that like you, I come up with a name with a principle, it's where time expanse or is it the task expanse to fit the amount of time you give to it or something like that.

And so what I found is like you that I needed to have that totally focused time.

And then I'm happy to just me and, but if I haven't had that focused time, I find that I'm quite stressy and I find it difficult to sort of relax because on the back of my mind, I'm sort of going, oh, but you haven't done this and you haven't done that.

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