Overemployed: The Trend of Working Two Remote Jobs

Ryan Purvis 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face and how they solve them. The years they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took, they will help you to get to grips with the digital workspace inner workings.

I was reading that article, again that you sent me. The one about the people working two jobs. Last offices thinking how do people have the time to do them? But I suppose I guess it's a maturity date. Sometimes you maybe need the money, maybe it's really mean it works. I don't know.

Heather Bicknell 0:52
Yeah, I'm pretty excited to talk about this today. Because I don't know. It just seems like a fascinating thing, a phenomenon that people are doing. And they say, so this was a wall street journal article that came out a few weeks ago talking about remote workers who are working two full time jobs. And they said, the people they talked to range from different industries, you know, finance, apparently, it's a big thing in tech. I mean, you know, no surprise, I think that people are like growth hacking. And, you know, what not, but essentially, people are finding to salary jobs. And a lot of them say they're not working more than 40 hours a week. And of course, their employers don't know about each other, or they're very people have to be very secretive, even with family and friends to not reveal the two jobs in case they get caught out. But yeah, I mean, it does sound exhausting, doesn't it?

Ryan Purvis 2:00
Well, I look, I could understand if you if these people are doing what the kind of work is, you know, I could never, I could never really work two jobs, because I'm involved in so many meetings, and so many face to face things that the only work I could do as a second row, because that's what I looked at, like, how would I ever do it. And I don't see the space, because you'd have to be working late nights and early mornings, and, and all that sort of thing. But here, if you're a knowledge worker, who an enemy we see these guys in various corporates, you know, they spend the whole day but they don't really do anything. The whole day, they, you know, they look like they're busy on an Excel spreadsheet, but at least he doesn't moved, you know, for three hours. Meanwhile, they're on Facebook, on their phones or something like that, or, you know, whatever, whatever the thing is, I can understand someone like that getting away with two jobs. And potentially the one job is the pays the bills, and the other job is the cream paid for whatever else they need. You know, there's a lot of those American movies where you have the single person who's running job two jobs job just to pay their bills. And they will continue jobs in their day. But they're not all eight hour, nine hour jobs. They are sort of shifts or part time roles that I could understand.

Heather Bicknell 3:21
Yeah. Go ahead.

Ryan Purvis 3:25
No, because I think I've sent you the 12 rules for work into Remote Jobs link afterwards. So go through that as well.

Heather Bicknell 3:34
Yeah, know for sure. And there's a there's that website. Yeah, overworked where someone is offering advice for how people can get away with doing this. But, you know, working two jobs, right, that is nothing new. I mean, I personally, when I was younger, I had a period where I was working three jobs. I think it amounted to like 60 hours a week, which was a lot to juggle, but that you know, when you're not a full time employee and whatnot, like people have to do that to pay the bills. But I think there's a certain I was kind of looking for reactions on this online because I was just curious to see what what the takes were out there. And I think there's a certain group of people who's sort of appalled by the lack of the loyalty or like the morality question in this but going back to the the overworked site, some of the things that they recommend doing. Back to your point about like pencil pushers are essentially being mediocre at your job not standing out. Because if you stand out, you might get more work or of course, you might get fired. So basically meeting the minimum expectations and not falling in love. Is your job not really getting too close with coworkers? And I think and then the other thing was needing to have a clear reason why you're doing it. And I, and I think that's kind of probably the key thing, right? If you don't have a clear, motivating factor of obviously, it's for money, but it's like, what are you using this money for? Why does this money matter to you? Why is it imperative, whether it's paying down debt, buying a house, whatever that is for you, but yeah, if you don't have that clear reason for yourself, then it is just a lot. A stressful, stressful and someone like, you know, it's like living a double double life, like a secret agent, where the two sides can't know about each other. And yeah, the zoom meeting thing, people being on two zooms at once and unmuting on one and, you know, hoping that they don't get called on in both meetings. And it's, it's very, yeah, high stress.

Ryan Purvis 6:07
Yeah, I think I mean, depending on your situation, you may have multiple devices. I mean, what you know, if I look at my work machine, which in my lab machine, and I have my personal machine, and I use the same machine, now everything's on one. But there's times when I mix up my podcast stuff with the highlights, for example. So I use in Canada, liters to book stuff in my diary. And usually that it looks at in my Halo diary, books in all my diaries, actually. But the team's details from my Halo account. But sometimes I change them because I'm given a link for for certain meeting that I want to use my personal one for. And then I forget, why don't change it back. And then the next 10 meetings in a book to my diary from if I were doing recruitment, or whatever it is, they use the my personal account that I end up with 10 meetings in my personal calendar, but it's all synchronizes every. So I haven't lost the time. But it's those sorts of things where you're trying to juggle between almost different personas of who you are. And if you look at the sort of way the tools work, nowadays, you'll have like that, because the digital workspace works is an exchange on Office 365. You know, we have a OneDrive for that we have a OneDrive for high level OneDrive in my personal capacity. So now I have three storage locations that are connected to my machine, through email profiles, through teams profiles. Sometimes I think it's easy to use zoom, and have just one zoom. Because that doesn't, that doesn't really look like it's anything different. And you can just join the calls, regardless of which organization is right. totally understand, I mean, sometimes you send email from the wrong account, for example, and you should be sending a work email, but they used to post email and you know, when you're in a big corporate, where they've got rules and regulations and stuff, that stuff is very difficult to do because they own the device. But as things have progressed, more and more companies are allowed, allowed allowed new IoT devices. So So how do you manage that if you're a security person, you got to worry about what's on that device? And I think the biggest thing to be worried about with someone working two jobs is, are they stealing information from one job to use any other job? it is fine to have other activities. I'm not saying you shouldn't have. But maybe, you know, if you'd like, you know, this is a hobby for us do the podcast that doesn't conflict with our day jobs, per se. I mean, we talk about stuff that's related to it. But we only work on stuff that's in the public domain. We don't we don't share any secrets or anything like that. So I think there's an ethical consideration if you could argue to do two gigs.

Heather Bicknell 8:50
Definitely, I mean, that's one of the questions that came up, you know, is this is this even legal? And, you know, if you're working two jobs, chances are for a lot of folks that it could be for competitors, right, or, you know, you're working in and sort of the same realm. So you're running into conflicts of interest there. But yeah, I think people mentioned as well that, you know, they might buy a second device or have two devices to manage it. I do feel like having it all on one device would be probably the hardest scenario to keep track of. And some of the folks did describe it as just the management of having two jobs was like a third job. Keeping it all straight, as well. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 9:45
Yeah. I mean, I know people that that I've heard as well Jim, my younger days. You know, your developer, you're writing code during the day, and then someone comes to your friend or someone on the phone. I mean to say this once you build me, or can you help me build this app, and then those days it was mobile apps, it was, you know, a website or something like that. And you're able to help. And you might, you might make some money out of it, you might not. But, you know, in those times, it might be an extra couple grand, which in Red Tails wasn't a lot, but at least gets you, you know, that extra bit of money to say the cream. But I think you've got to figure in, where's your downtime? If you're going to do all these other activities? When do you have a break? And then if you start over committing, and then I think this is the point about mediocrity, you can't be better than mediocre? Because you can only do as much as you could do today.

Heather Bicknell 10:47
Yeah, yeah, I think you have to just in order to be successful with it, sort of give up that derive to make work, the meet like a meaningful part of your life. And, you know, to the overwork thing, one of the tips is to take vacation from one employer to tie up a big project for the other employers. So it's like they probably don't really get so in a situation where you're going to get like two PTO, potentially, maybe could overlap them with both employers. Do you think one of the questions that kept coming? To my mind you think, you know, stories like this are going to concern companies who have gone the full remote route? Is this something people should be concerned about their employees doing?

Ryan Purvis 11:45
Well, yes, or no. I mean, we I've been in organizations we were founded, we knew for a fact, there was a supplier that I'm not going to say where they are, but people probably guess, where we had, you know, one guy pretending to be three guys, and he would log he would literally walk from computer to computer logging in, and then move the mouse. And, you know, do applications and stuff. So. So, you know, we've seen a really and that's, that's in a in a managed environment, with with people, watching everyone and stuff. So I think it's always a risk, I mean, if but if you don't trust your people in here and hire good people, it doesn't matter where they are or what they want within the Office or not. You always have that risk. But if you look after people and you generate loyalty, then I don't think you have a problem. And if the work they're doing is fulfilling, then again, you another problem. If you pay them well, then again, you won't have that problem. I would love to know who was doing this, because it's one thing to do a little bit of moonlighting on the side, where as I say, an opportunity, a little bit of consulting pops up and someone needs some, some help for four to three days, and you do it over a week or weekend, we take some time off, you know, that's, that's fine. But if you're working two full jobs, then you know, 16 hours a day, then that's a significant red flag. And if some, there's a big issue there. But I'd also say in the same token that I would say the tools and the technology, I do allow you to do sort of micro work. So you could quite easily do everything about you can reply to an email, and you could do some support work. And there's a lot of that sort of stuff in the gig economy where you could log into a site and do some testing today and get paid 30 $40 for an hour, at that studio, your lunch break. That's not a full job. And that's also not interacting with other people, you're just doing a little bit of work, to get something done and using the technology so I can see that becoming a thing. And I think also, if you look at it from my wife's point of view, our kids now we're fortunate in South Africa, we got a lot of help. If you go back to the UK, she can't really work a full time job until the kids are old enough to go to school. So for her being able to do small jobs and lots of small jobs in three days or four days a week and all the kids own nursery and stuff. Yeah, that's that's feasible, and she might work two or three jobs with a small Day One day we think. I think those are those are realistic.

Heather Bicknell 14:28
Yeah, I think the situation is unique because of the overlap, right of both jobs or, you know, most likely some sort of nine to five scenario and happening at the same time. Because definitely, you know, the pandemic has been hard on a lot of people financially so I don't think anyone was shocked by say like, you know, a teacher Then doing, you know, instacart, or some delivery or like, you know, doing, you know, Uber or whatever a few. Like that's that's sort of the Uber model, right is not necessarily people being full time drivers, but supplementing their income. So that's nothing new. It's just, there's something new about the is it? Okay. And I think this is an interesting question too, you know, if you're someone who can only can do your job in 20 hours a week, and then meet the expectations that were set for you, you know, and your employer feels fine with the, with, you know, the work that you're doing, because you're not stretching that workout over 40 hours a week? Is that a bad thing? Should you be expected to sort of find ways to then double the amount of work that you're doing, even though you're not getting necessarily compensated in any way for doubling the work?

Ryan Purvis 16:03
Well, I mean, some people would say that if you get your work done in less time, you should be looking for more work to do. That would be the sort of simple answer. But you know, I've never had that experience in the organization, I would, that I can get all my work done in this time. It almost be sitting around going, Oh, I feel like probably the first week on any job is the only time I really have that problem, because then you're not involved in anything. And you're still trying to learn and you're kind of doing stuff, but the pressures not on. But once pressure kicks in, and you you're involved in everything, and you've got your fingers on everything, and you end up you're a contributor, and you're accountable. There's no time, in my mind, so so it's very difficult to see that sort of stuff. But yeah, let's say you're a data capture. And you want to capture 100 lines a day, to kanatal and 500. And you your first topic and you've you've really optimized your system, and you can do all of that in two days. And then yeah, I would say that the management team either needs to figure out a way to keep you busy, give me more work to do. Or, yeah, that should be the incentive, get the stuff done in two days, when you get it done in two days or four days. You can go and that's really the results orientated mentality that I think we all need to get to is that when you take on the work, how you get it done, and when you get it done, is not important to me. But as long as you meet the deadline we've agreed on all before, then that's the limit. And then I think that's where I mean, I definitely see that happening for some businesses, where they're really trusting their staff and saying, look, you know, as long as you are in touch at the right times and getting your work done, already carry where you do it from or or with your line all day you are getting it you might be a morning person. I know personally, some mornings I get up like this morning, got really early, and work six, seven hours worth of stuff in three hours. To now we're not set on the phone the whole day. I don't feel that pressure, which, which I usually feel that I've done six hours of course today, I still have three hours of work to do. Which is eloquent. I think overworked is something I used to tweet Oracle haven't read it yet. I do think that we rightly or wrongly, work too much. Because there's because we're so connected.

Heather Bicknell 18:36
Yeah, there was that. I don't know if you had a chance to read the other article I sent you from the New Yorker. But that was basically talking about the sort of chronic issue in knowledge work have always taken an extra 20% on and basically never being able to, you know, catch up and always being in that frantic state of overworking because there's like this need to always say yes to like, just enough to be extra, like overly booked right to be too busy. I think, you know, everyone are very accustomed to right, like everyone is moving a million miles a minute to catch up. People are, you know, routinely working more time. And that's just the I think that's become the norm, you know, not the exception.

Ryan Purvis 19:39
Yeah, well, I mean, I was sitting with my boss about today. He was in London last week and he's flown to India this week. And we're having a one to one and he sort of asked me like what you know, how you get headspace and I said, Well, I'm lucky timezone wise I'm one hour ahead of the UK, so I get one hour extra day before meeting start. And I mean, even though most likely in India, they respect the time because I will tell them, I know that I'm available. And I go and do my job. And I go for my walks and all that kind of stuff. And I think, and I listen to podcasts and whatever, so I get a chance to, to let my brain work through things. Whereas he gets up and up to just go straight to the desk. And because he's been in the UK, and most of the team is already online, you know, he just go straight into work. But now that he's been in India, a couple days, it's like, geez, man, I can't believe how much time I get to think that up because everyone's asleep. And yes, he could talk to it, he doesn't need to, because they're not, they're not, he doesn't need to be involved in their stuff. So for now, it's getting two or three hours of brain time, before his day starts clearing out his email, that kind of stuff, things that you struggle with, when you really, when you read the opposite, you know, but he does keep piling up. And you just feel you could see, like his moods change, he's a lot more thing. He's going to gym in the morning now. So he's, you know, it's definitely working better, because he said the freedom which I think makes the work day less stressful, which also means you don't have to put the extra time because when you tackle that day, and there's a very good book, which I think I've talked about for making time, which is to only have really one goal for the day. Because if you get that done, then it's almost your happiness factor or your joy factor or your urgency factor. That's where that's how you measure that goal. Everything else will happen, then you'll have other things that need to happen anyway. But you need to have that one thing that when when the day is done, you look back and go, Okay, today, I wanted to send that document off on X, Y, Zed, and I've sent it off now. So I'm, I'm relaxed, I can relax now. Whereas if you didn't get to that one thing, then you always feel stressed. And you always feel like there's more work you need to do. So that you can switch over. And I think that's the main wellness thing that we all going to have to learn as we blend out home with our work.

Heather Bicknell 22:00
Absolutely. Yeah, I think having being able to meet those micro targets is so important for job satisfaction. And I think the times where I, you know, it can get really frustrating is when you feel like you're not able to finish everything, whether there's a lot of meetings, just a ton of emails, whatever, you're stuck in a reactive state where you're not outputting anything, I think it's really hard to you know, I think some of this comes back to like, just human instincts, human needs. And I think the act of creation, right? Like, I feel most satisfied when I have finished something and there's some output and I, you know, I can, you know, see it, read it, whatever. But that's where, you know, you get that little like, dopamine rush in your brain that like, yes, I did something. This had a meaning, you know, otherwise, it's just like why you're kind of stuck in this quagmire of why am I doing this?

Ryan Purvis 23:13
Well, that's it, you don't know, you don't ever have that closure that you need. And, you know, simple things like the idea because you work from home, there are days where your home life interferes in your work life. So you have a lot, a lot of calls in a day. So there might be days where I want to hop on the phone, six hours out of eight. And the only other things that I need to get done that I really want to get done is fitness stuff, or my own sort of studying or whatever it is, but you don't hit those things. because something's happened in the house, you need to go pick up someone who's like, my wife's had lots of contrast, I'm going to take it to the shops. So now you're using your time do something else. So having something that you can take off, just to say the day hasn't been a wash is just a psychologically important thing.

Heather Bicknell 24:07
Totally, yeah. And I think they're still Yeah, and I think even coming back to the other things, right, like, I think, to be the most happy with your work life, I think you have to be able to find the time for the other, you know, to take care of yourself in the other ways. And I think that's still a challenge for a lot of people and can be very pervasive with remote work. I mean, you know, different people manage it differently. Right. Like there's I think there's a lot of stories that are, you know, concerning to companies about employees, you know, doing whatever during the day because, you know, they can and I think obviously I think there's different lines about you know, is it acceptable to throw a load of laundry in because that takes 30 seconds, but if he went out and you know, had like three Our lunch in the middle of the day, I think most people would say, maybe that's not okay. Obviously, you could not get away with that in an office environment? Or maybe you could I mean, if it was with your team Well,

Ryan Purvis 25:13
no, I mean, I've worked in, in organizations where going going for lunch Monday is totally acceptable to be a two, three hour exercise. And I'm not even talking about clients. I'm saying, you know, just culturally, there's no, I mean, I remember moving from from one organization to the other organization I was at, you know, even going to even like get approved to go to gym was considered like, like, what the fuck moment? Like, what are you doing, you should be working, or going outside to get lunch, like, you know, you got to go get your lunch, come back. And so there's destiny that you can't go and enjoy the, you know, that was just the culture of who was around me and all that kind of stuff. And he goes into this other organization. You know, I got in my first day at seven o'clock in the morning, and people rocked up at 10 o'clock. And I was like, What's going on here? This is different. And lunchtime at lunch was two hours and lunch was everyone going together, sitting in having a burger, talking about other stuff, and then going to run the errands. And I remember saying to my friend who bought into the scissors normally goes, Yeah, pretty much apples like this every day. Like what does it work. But you can already see the projects took longer, the the amount of things that got delivered was less. And I'm not saying the first organization was better than the second organization that when I remember going to a job in the first organization walking out and 25 minutes phone calls. Because my someone needed to get something and they couldn't wait one hour. And it wasn't important. It really wasn't. So so you know, I don't think it matters whether you're in an office or not, I think it comes down to culture.

Heather Bicknell 26:52
Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, there are some offices, where there's a gym at the office, or you get a gym pass or health credit. And you know, that's encouraged. And then yeah, some offices where, you know, if you're away from your desk for more than three minutes to use the bathroom or get a drink that, you know, it's like, what are you doing? standing around.

Ryan Purvis 27:21
Sorry, there was actually a company that tried that. And I remember talking to a friend of mine, here, and he was telling me that she had to tell us, she had to write a log of every five minute break she took. And every time he went to the bathroom, and all that kind of stuff, I was like, This is madness, like, that is trusted. And there's no productivity and the

Heather Bicknell 27:43
I think it comes back to something we talked about, quite often as well as just being treated as and, you know, a autonomous adult to with a certain level of trust. And I think, you know, stuff like that, it's like, well, you lose that relationship of it with your employer, right of, you know, they respect me and trust me to, you know, to use a five minute break how I need to and not catalogue that. And yeah, it just kind of is it's not very empowering,

Ryan Purvis 28:19
as an employee. Two point about, you know, sort of going out sets, but the washing, I mean, we were lucky here that I have a housekeeper, little metal side, frickin thing. Yeah, the domestic worker, and you have their big house, you have a garden, and you pay them and you go up to them. So I don't have to worry about that kind of stuff. But if we're in the UK, I have a cleaning service that comes in once a week for four hours. Anything else needs to get done in house, I've got to do it. So you know, if I, if I have a break five minutes between this call and the next call, I feel nothing to shoot down, make yourself a cup of coffee to change the washing over from the washer to the dryer, and come back up again. And again. And my wife's out or whatever, I might just hang the washer, because at least it gets me outside. I mean, if it's not raining, of course, because we're coming to the UK. But it's it keeps you you know, you got to keep everything going. It's really the point. And I do think people should go for for a nice social lunch or whatever with a mate and all that because it gets you it does refresh to you. But you shouldn't do it, you know, to the point that you're doing more time having social occasions and less time doing the work that you'll be paid to work.

Heather Bicknell 29:33
Absolutely. I think we can probably all agree there. So why don't we talk about that third article that you'd sent about? people feeling weird about seeing themselves on zoom a personal

Ryan Purvis 29:48
blog? Yeah, the zoom. We're going to do dystopia. No, that's the right word dysmorphia. dysmorphia. Yeah. So that's an interesting thing, and I mean, I guess it's a summarized into two things. One, I think in going to work, the effort people put into getting dressed for work is different to the effort they put into getting ready for a bunch of goals. And I'm very guilty of this at the moment, because I will, I'll get up, I'll go do a workout. And I will probably go join my first call while I'm still in my sweaty gym clothes. Because I've run out of time, and I'd rather do the extra state or the extra thing, then go and have a shower quickly. And I'll spend the whole day because I usually I get a break to lead on. Because I won't see people face to face a lot you worried about. And also, now the thing that we're putting on the article is that people have noticed themselves because the cameras and been affected by how they look. So skin blemishes, bag in the eyes, whatever it is, unfortunately, if I stand far enough away from the camera that I can't see any of that stuff. It doesn't really bug me. But I will I'm conscious of it with other people, I've noticed how some people have reacted to being on the gun cameras. In fact, I had to make it a rule of my team to turn the cameras on. Because it was very easy to hide behind cameras or especially when there was a heated conversation. So so it's in Donegal. It doesn't surprise me at all.

Heather Bicknell 31:30
No, and I think it came a lot came up a lot in remote education as well. With a lot of young people who and teens, sort of at vulnerable times for body image, just constantly seeing themselves on the screen. And I think, you know, I think some of the apps I'd have to I am curious now, like where which ones allow you to hide yourself? Because I think there's a lot of teams. Yeah, I know. And I wish, you know, it's like I was imagining yesterday, like sitting in a conference room and you have someone across from you. And then there's like a little mirror next to them, where you can always see yourself like how distracting would that be, but that's essentially what we have going on here. And it is it can be just, I think it can be distracting. And then, you know, it makes you worry about your appearance or what's going on in your background or whatever, in a way that you'd never would have to confront in that same degree in the office because you're not constantly staring at yourself. And one thing they point out in the article made me think of my own sort of buying an external webcam was that you know, one thing people are struggling with is that I think a lot of lenses have like a fishbowl effect or like maybe you know how you appear on the different you know, zoom or whatever, you know, your nose looks bigger than it does in real life or whatever it is like people it warps your perception of yourself. I mean, just as if you were like staring into a bit of a funhouse mirror all day but something I did not too far in two remote working was get an external webcam because the one of my laptop first of all to the bottom of the screen, so it's firstly impossible to get a flattering angle. And then the quality was bad. And with being on all of these video calls, I just found it honestly embarrassing that the like the angle and the quality and I was always like stacking it on top of a million books to try to get like a normal level angle with my face. And yeah, I mean that kind of stuff. It does affect you.

Ryan Purvis 33:54
Yeah, so as I find with with teams, you can turn your camera off if you share the screen that doesn't show you or any shows you're talking to but if you expand the people on the on the screen on the other screen, if you go to screens, then you still see yourself in the bottom right hand corner, zoom, you can turn yourself off, which I think is correct. In fact, the only option that teams gives you the ability to spotlight yourself so then you could only look at you're talking to yourself which I think is just madness. But I think you're right so I I typically use everything's elevated for me anyway so the camera is on the laptop it's on. It's almost I level back home with my with my Sony Yes, I've actually got the camera on a on an arm. So I can move it right to the middle. So it looks like I can actually look like almost eye to eye with you to what's on the screen. So you know there's something that I always thought was quite important that in light having the light on your face as well, which I don't have here but I don't think I need it yet. But it does make me think that we've had this book called, called the future of work. I was written, I'll have to read what it's called. But it's what advertise, and how you can have an avatar attend your meeting for you. And this is sort of a rvr sort of thing. And you could be in your pajamas, and basically be joining in your business suit as the avatar. And all your facial recognition stuff could be done. I mean, I don't know how far away We are from that. It's probably within the next decade. Depends on the cost of the units. But I could see that happening.

Heather Bicknell 35:39
We're certainly at the level right of of AR avatars that are sort of cartoonish. But I think, you know, it would be interesting to get to that point of like, the, the performance, the performative you know, that you could be wearing whatever and show up, however, and like, how does that affect you? and other people's perceptions of you? And that I yeah, I think some of that would be, would be nice. And I guess something we didn't cover was, I think it's zoom that has, like face filters, right? I mean, this came up with, there was that funny example of someone who logged in to their daughter's Zoomer What? I'd like a cat face. But that's part of it, too, is just, I think, you know, using filters and how that affects your self perception.

Ryan Purvis 36:41
Yeah, I was I was someone who was an article yesterday, there's a cricketer who's talking to his son from Sri Lanka. And they use I think it's Google duo. Because they can make funny faces. And his son's about six years old. So you know, it's just the way of my son, he would FaceTime you could do it as well. You could put funny, there's all the emoticons you can put on your face. If you feel the apple animojis Yeah, yeah, to give you the dragon or whatever he goes, metrics, he said, when we start a month from the UK, here to say, he used to get a kick out of just being a mouse talking to a dragon or something like that, you know, it's just because that's, that actually works really well. And it's, I think it's if it's done in a quirky funny way, and not meant to be serious, I think it's a good thing. But I'm still gonna be old school, and unfortunately, maybe even 20 years time, I'll still be old school. So you should be authentic to what you are. So if you're dressed in pajamas, or during the meeting, look like unit pajamas, attending a meeting. There's no need for the facade.

Heather Bicknell 37:49
Yeah, I think you know, and, you know, that's something that came up really early in this whole remote work thing is just the people found it nice right to see people in their more authentic environment, you know, dealing with real life. So I hope we don't necessarily lose that.

Ryan Purvis 38:06
No, that's the thing is we don't read books. And it's very easy to get caught up in, in being robotic. So. Yeah, I mean, it's, I think it's been a good as most people have suffered through COVID. It's been a good exercise to it's really leveled some of the things up.

Heather Bicknell 38:26
Definitely. Well, I think that's probably a good note to end on.

Ryan Purvis 38:33
Thanks, it was good to catch up. Thank you for listening. Today's episode of The Big Nose our producer, editor. Thank you, Heather. for your hard work for this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW w podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website, www dot digital workspace that works. Please also visit our website www dot digital workspace works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.

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