Finding the Balance Between Productivity and Grind Culture with Abha from The Werk Life

Ricardo Signes: Welcome back to the Digital Citizen Podcast. I’m Ricardo Signes at Fastmail, the email provider of choice for savvy digital citizens everywhere. Here with me is my colleague, Haley Hnatuk.

Haley Hnatuk: Hi, everyone. I’m Haley Hnatuk, Fastmail Senior Podcast Producer, Marketing Specialist and the Co-host of Digital Citizen. I wear a lot of hats at Fastmail, so staying organized is one of the keys to my productivity. That’s why I’m so excited for today’s guest. Rik, who are you going to be talking to today?

Ricardo Signes: I will be interviewing Abha Chiyedan, who is the founder of The Werk Life, which is a productivity brand focused around practicing healthy habits to help you better manage your time and find balance.

Haley Hnatuk: So we’re about halfway through the year right now. And it’s time to kind of retroactively start looking back at some of those resolutions we said at the beginning of 2024. Rik, what were some of your 2024 New Year’s resolutions?

Ricardo Signes: Oh, I mean, I finished them all. So I even go through them. No, my main resolution was digging up old projects that I have abandoned and finishing them. And I feel this maybe is a really ill-advised goal. I abandoned them once already. And maybe this time, if I abandon them, again, it’ll stick. But a lot of that for me boils down to getting a good handle on programming languages that I haven’t learned yet. One of which is Inform, which is a language for writing interactive fiction, because I have a couple projects that I started in that and would like to finish. So that’s underway and in a few more months, you can see if I have a exciting pieces of interactive fiction for you to quote unquote, enjoy. How’s your year going for goals?

Haley Hnatuk: Yeah, I mean, I feel like I set pretty standard goals. I always set a book reading goal every year, and this year, my goal is to read 10 books, which seems pretty achievable, because I just joined a book club. I have my first meeting at the beginning of next month. So hopefully, I can kind of catch up on my goal and get those 10 books read before the end of the year. Another goal of mine is to submit more poems. I’m in a poetry class that meets every other Thursday, so I write a lot of poetry, and then I do nothing with it. And when I have submitted it places, I’ve had generally positive results. So I’m trying to get more into the rhythm of submitting stuff that I write that I feel good about. And workwise I’m gonna be doing some leadership training coming up. So completing that is a big goal for 2024.

Ricardo Signes: Good luck.

Haley Hnatuk: What are you and Abha going to be talking about today?

Ricardo Signes: Well, we’re going to talk about different ways of staying productive, how to avoid procrastination, and how to create boundaries between your professional and personal life. And then at the end of the episode, and every other episode, this season, we will have some takeaways of things that you can actually do to become a better digital citizen. You can find those, also on our website at fastmail.com/digitalcitizen.

Ricardo Signes: So today we’re here with Abha Chiyedan. She’s from The Werk Life. Abha, could you tell us about yourself and what you do?

Abha Chiyedan: I’m a pretty multi-passionate person. I love to learn a lot of things, love to try new things, and I think that passion is kind of what led me to the career path I’m on right now. So I used to work in the corporate world for about seven years before I took The Werk Life full-time. It was my side hustle at the time and it has been very rewarding building it from scratch and bringing me to where I am now.

Ricardo Signes: What is The Werk Life’s mission?

Abha Chiyedan: I started it when I was first transitioning from university to the full-time working world. I found the transition to be difficult because now you are managing your work life and your personal life, hence The Werk Life, and so it started as a blog. It was really just a creative outlet, a way for me to very much share my own personal experiences with anyone that might be going through similar things. We’ve definitely evolved a lot since then because that was back in 2016. I would say over the past few years what we’ve done is really narrowed down our niche to be really focused on different techniques to better manage your time, better manage your wellness, whether it’s building a routine or doing something that works for you because you’re not a morning person. We’re trying to really adapt to anyone that struggles with the everyday notion of productivity.

Ricardo Signes: Yeah, we’ve talked about productivity a number of times in the podcast and I talk about productivity a lot. And I think the thing I’m most productive at is procrastinating. I don’t think of myself as a lazy person. I think I get a lot of stuff done, but I put a lot of stuff off until tomorrow that I could do today, and maybe you can tell me why do I keep doing that.

Abha Chiyedan: I think one of the biggest reasons we all procrastinate is just instant gratification. So, I always use the example of like doing dishes, and it’s like sometimes after a long day of work, you made dinner, you’ve got some dishes to do. It might just be like one or two, but you’re so tired at that point and you’re like, “Oh, do we really want to do this now? I’ll just do it tomorrow,” because I’d rather enjoy the benefit right now of relaxing on the couch and just unplugging, unwinding. Whereas the next day when you do it, it ends up being there’s like another four dishes, whatever it is, it ends up being way harder.

Ricardo Signes: That’s a very real problem for me. I finish my work day, and I know I’ve got a lot of other things to do. But instead I open up my phone and I scroll through something forever. And at the end, I don’t feel any gratification. So, what can I do to replace that bad habit with something more productive?

Abha Chiyedan: To your point, I don’t think anyone actually spends an hour scrolling on their phone and they’re like, “Oh, I feel so alive, I feel like, you know, rejuvenated and great.” Most people feel pretty crappy afterwards. I think it’s just knowing how that happened in the first place. I think having the self-awareness of knowing, okay, I do this and then what can I do as an alternative? What can I consciously do, whether it’s very tactical, like putting your phone in a completely different room so you don’t go to grab it or locking your phone up so you can’t access it. I just think you have to get down to those tactical methods.

Ricardo Signes: The other extreme that I swing to personally is spending way too much time on planning. Sometimes I feel like I spend 100% of my time getting ready and I end up leaving 0% to actually do the thing. What other advice do you have for people who struggle with over planning?

Abha Chiyedan: You do not want to get stuck in planning. I think planning is so important. It is your blueprint for what you’re going to do. But if you are just spending all your time planning, you’re never getting anything done. One of the things that I always say is you should really be spending 10% of your time planning, 90% executing. So if you’re looking at those plans and you are constantly revising them, changing them, and you can go back and say, “How many of these things have I actioned?”, and you haven’t actioned any, that’s when it’s time to actually get to work. And I think how you action it is you have to like put in that time-blocked work. And we always talk about the Pomodoro Technique, deep work, just ways to actually remove yourself from all distractions. When you say, I’m working on this one thing on my to-do list for 25 minutes, taking a five-minute break, 25 minutes, five-minute break, and just using techniques like that where you have no other choice but to do it.

Ricardo Signes: I’d be curious to hear more about that. I have a Pomodoro timer and I have used it and I feel like I’ve never really gotten to use it correctly. I use it for things like reading my email. If I have 61 pieces of email since Friday, I set a timer, and I read email until it dings. That seems great and it gets me through my email, but what do you do if you want to take these time blocks and apply them to some larger plan?

Abha Chiyedan: I think a lot of the time, we don’t realize how much time we’ve been doing something. So whether it’s scrolling on our phone, we think it’s been five minutes, but it’s actually been like an hour and a half or we’re sitting at our desk getting ready to write a big proposal and we think it’s been 30 minutes, but it’s actually only been three minutes. So I think having that awareness of time is where the timers and things like that help because you know you’ve actually spent that amount of time on it. But yes, I think getting into the work and getting your mindset and your headspace ready for the deep work is the hard part. I think people have to obviously remove all distractions.

Ricardo Signes: To get rid of distractions where I am, sometimes I just change my physical location. So for example, I— I go sit outside with my laptop after a really long planning session. Do you thing switching up location is important for productivity?

Abha Chiyedan: I mean, I think it’s good to change up your environment. I think whether you’re trying to do work, your day-to-day living lifestyle, I’m a huge believer that you should switch up your environment because I think it’s good to have change and I think as humans, we should adapt to changing environments, right? So whether that means switching up your furniture in your room or working outside for a bit, I think that’s a good idea. I always do that myself. I just think you need to know what type of work is suited for what kind of environment, and I think sometimes you have like really deep work you need to do and maybe go in a cafe where there’s a bunch of people talking around you and it’s distracting, you’re probably not going to get it done. But, opposing thought, maybe if you’re just checking email, it’s something more admin-focused, you could do that in that type of environment.

Ricardo Signes: Yeah, going back to our timers, we talk a lot about tools. Do you think there’s a right tool that most people could just use?

Abha Chiyedan: When it comes to your planning, your productivity tools, I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all. How you might condense and simplify your information might be very different than me. And some people might prefer a pure digital approach, some people might prefer pen to paper. I do think you want to do a trial and error and test out different things that work for you. I’ve tried out so many different things, and like 90% of them I wasn’t consistent with because the system just didn’t work for me. So I think once you are able to find the thing that truly works for you, I don’t think you will want to deviate from it because it actually is giving you the results.

Ricardo Signes: Are there tools that survive novelty, or do we always end up moving from one thing to another to keep ourselves engaged?

Abha Chiyedan: I think it is just finding that right fit. And I think a lot of times we kind of dabble in a bunch of things and we might use it for a week because it’s great and it’s exciting, but clearly the methodology, the technique, it doesn’t resonate with our planning style or our productivity needs. Like, everyone has different things that they’re working on, too, right? Like, some people have weekly planning, some people know what they’re doing every single day for the week. Other people, their days are so dynamic, it changes hour by hour, and I think getting really clear around what your priorities are and how you want to plan on what your style is is what’s key. Because I think to your point, we’ve all done it. We’ve tried every single new hot productivity tool that comes out. But then if you’re not sticking to it, it’s kind of like the tool isn’t meant to drive your life at the end of the day, it’s meant to be something to help you. But if we end up relying on it completely, that’s also probably a little bit of a break in the system. Like, it is on us at the end of the day. Your job is to basically communicate with yourself and simplify all the things you need to do. Organize that information and be able to execute on it. And that’s actually not an easy task to do because you have to learn how to communicate with yourself.

Ricardo Signes: So it sounds like there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to productivity planning. When somebody tries out a tool that doesn’t work for them, what question should they be asking themselves when they analyze what isn’t working?

Abha Chiyedan: I think, “Why not?” I think anything in life, if you’re going to ditch it and move on, I think it’s fair to just say give yourself some closure as to why. Like, what didn’t work about it because then you can just … I think you can learn a bit more about yourself as well as the next thing that you’re looking for. So 100%, I think understanding, okay, how consistent was I with it? Like, was I using it daily, hourly, weekly? How often did I need to use it? So what if I was using it daily but I actually should have been looking on it every hour? I think are you getting the results you want from that tool is very important too.

Abha Chiyedan: So even if you’re using, let’s say a planning tool very religiously, but you’re not getting results but the things that you put down on your to-do list isn’t getting done or whatever it is, right? You’re writing things down, nothing’s happening. Like, that’s not effective either.

Ricardo Signes: When you’re putting together material to help show someone how to use a tool or planner to make it useful, can you just think about what’s going to make it useful for them, or do you have to spend time on the cases where they are going to misuse it in some way?

Abha Chiyedan: 100%. And that’s why a majority of our planners are guided, right? Like unlike other planners you see on market where it’s really blank pages, like, they’re really blank pages that are dated and you kind of create your own format. That’s the approach we’re doing differently. It’s very much, “We’re going to structure this and guide you through it,” and that structure that we’ve created, it’s not for everyone. But for the people that want to plan their meals, their exercise, time-block their day, if they know these are things that are important to them or their priorities in their life, we’ve created the structure for you, you just kind of fill it in as you go.

Abha Chiyedan: We’ve gotten so much feedback on that and one of the things that I heard the most was, “Okay, am I going to be consistent with this planner?”, because I usually use a planner for two weeks and then I never use it again. And that was, it was so fascinating to hear this because last year, we launched … We did a pilot test of paper planners, and I got so many messages from people being like, “It’s crazy because every year I buy a planner at the beginning of the year and I use it like twice, and I never use it again except for this planner. It’s been 10 months, eight months, whatever, September and I’m still using it.” So I’m like, “Okay, that’s interesting because that’s like a good fit.” Right? Like, that person clearly resonates with the structure we have. I think it’s finding your system.

Ricardo Signes: Just like people use planners to achieve different goals, people also have different ways of emailing. What do you look for in an email system to let you make sense of all these kinds of requests that are ending up in front of you?

Abha Chiyedan: Yeah, so for me, I think email is a very big deal for me as well. Like, I take it very, very seriously in the sense I’m very meticulous with it. Like if you go into my inbox, like everything, there’s folders. It’s very organized and filed. So for me, the biggest thing is, like, when I get an email and we get a lot of them in a day, I need to very quickly and efficiently be able to take action on that email. And generally, if I get an email, I am either deleting the email right away, I’m reading it and deleting it, I’m reading and actioning it and after I action it, I’m filing it for recall. And so any way that I could quickly do those actions is, like, super helpful for me. So for example, if I’m on my phone and I can just swipe and delete, if I can just drag and drop to file, like it makes it so much easier for, like, your compound against like 100 emails having to click four times to file an email or it’s this very simple thing, but I think it actually adds so much efficiency because it makes it so much faster.

Ricardo Signes: Yeah. However, having a phone in your pocket and your notifications always on can lead to a different problem, a lack of work-life balance. How do you create boundaries between your personal and professional life?

Abha Chiyedan: I think sometimes, you know, people force, like, turnoff from work and I— I’m not saying, like, you have to work 24/7. But if you like what you’re doing, like, if it’s enjoyable and it’s challenging in the right ways and you’re not stressed by it and if it’s not having a negative impact on your mental health, then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with, “Maybe my days are a bit longer now,” but there’s also a lot of freedom in there. If I want to take a 30-minute break and go for a walk, I don’t have to worry about checking messages to make sure no one’s like, “Can you send this report to me within 30 minutes?”, type of thing. So there’s a lot of freedom that comes with it, too. And I think as much as it’s okay, you now have this thing that you did it in your free time, now you do it all the time, your free time kind of gets dabbled into it. But I think I’m now just like, “Okay, the next thing, the next,” I’ve just liked that. So, I think it just gives more time for creativity and room for new projects and everything like that.

Ricardo Signes: To state the obvious, there’s a lot of stuff on the internet, a lot of content, and even just limiting things way down to talk about productivity content, it’s still a lot. So, what did you have to do to break through the rest of the signal and get attention paid to what you wanted to communicate?

Abha Chiyedan: There is a lot. You know, you’re totally right. And I think where I was lucky was with TikTok. I started TikTok in 2021, so that was pretty early, and I think we were like one of the first to start sharing productivity tips on TikTok. I’m not saying we were the very first, there was already stuff on there-

Ricardo Signes: Sure.

Abha Chiyedan: But it wasn’t as saturated as it is now where there’s tons and millions and millions of views on every activity hashtag. It’s not like that. I think we had a very unique voice and the way that content is presented, like, on The Werk Life isn’t always so typical and I think a lot of times people say, okay, like, follow trends, put in the trending music, do what everyone else is doing. And I think that works to an extent, but like you said, there’s so much on it. You just start to see the same thing over and over again. A big thing for The Werk Life that really, I would say, made things take off was the whole pen to paper thing. And so things like that, just taking a different approach to what you see as you’re scrolling, what’s going to make you stop and be like, this is interesting, let me learn more, is what I think really worked for us.

Ricardo Signes: While presumably you’re still successful on TikTok. Have you taken those lessons and applied them everywhere else, or have you had to learn how the different media you work in want different things?

Abha Chiyedan: There’s definitely some overlap. Like generally a video that does well on TikTok, will do decent on other ones, but it’s not necessarily always going to do the same. Like, you can’t guarantee that one performs great and it performs everywhere, but it really has opened up just a lot of opportunity to connect with, like, The Werk Life audience more. So a big thing for us that we also have, we have a lot of planners and stuff like that. We have a lot of free resources, so if you go to the werklife.com/free, we have a bunch of different templates, just daily planners, weekly planners, all of that that people can just download, print off, use on their iPad, whatever, and it’s just our way of being like, here’s a free resource, help you stay organized. We’ve had over 35,000 people download those, and that was like a huge impact just from a couple of videos that we did that went viral. People saying, “Okay, do you have any tools?” “It’s linked in our bio.” So yeah, to your point, does everything perform across different channels? Not necessarily, but you take those learnings and I think you have to take it a bit further because social media is not the whole business, right? Like, it’s an avenue. It’s a channel to talk to people, but you want to funnel them in and actually have a one-on-one conversation. And we do that through our newsletter and through other forms of media as well.

Ricardo Signes: So I’ve looked at the planners, and they look good. But also they reminded me of a time very early in my productivity journey, my first job. I was the guy who was walking around the office, this like half-sized clipboard and this little daily planner printed on it. And I did everything on paper. Do you do your own work on paper, or on your ipad, or electronically or what?

Abha Chiyedan: I still need certain things, but day-to-day life planning, I’ve been using The Werk Life’s 2023 planner in paper format. But there are certain things that, like for example, that you wouldn’t necessarily plan every day, but you have resources of, like, our nutrition planner where I have just stock of all of the recipes. Whenever I want to recall a recipe, I just go onto my iPad and I see it there. So it’s like very organized information for different niches in your life, and I think it’s knowing where everything is that’s really important because you don’t want to get overwhelmed.

Ricardo Signes: The nice thing about sticky notes for me is that they don’t follow me home. So is it harder for you to balance productivity at work with time for yourself when both of those things are happening in the same space?

Abha Chiyedan: I do think a big part of it is like to get very deep, but also very not deep at the end of the day is like we’re all human, we’re not here for long. All we can do is do our best, but that’s not all we are, right? And I’m— I’ve always known that, like, since I was a child that it’s do your best, do what you can, but nothing truly defines you. Like, you have to know who you are beyond the work that you’re doing, beyond what’s trending.

Ricardo Signes: Yeah, I agree. We’ve talked about how productivity is personally satisfying to both of us. But many people work jobs where they have like corporate expectations of productivity being forced on them, and that can lead to feeling less, rather than more, satisfied with their work. So, what view do you think people can take to feel more empower at work and less bogged down by corporate expectation?

Abha Chiyedan: That’s really hard because it is very dependent on your environment, right? And when you are in a position where you have a leader that’s kind of forcing that down your throat, telling you you have to act a certain way, it’s like it’s obviously not the right fit. And I know that not everyone has the luxury of, I don’t like my job, I’m going to quit it and move on. So I wouldn’t preach that because I actually don’t … I’ve been in that position where you can’t do that. So I don’t think that’s the solution. I think having a real sense of self is really important and not getting so caught up in what other people are telling you to do. And what I mean is I think it’s very easy to go down the corporate rabbit hole of, “Okay, this is like so important. Everyone, work all weekend, do this thing,” when really it ends up getting dismissed, no one ends up working on it.

Abha Chiyedan: I’ve experienced that so many times where people put so much emphasis on something, it doesn’t even end up being that big of a deal. So I think creating boundaries is very important. And when it’s times like that, if you start to sense that, I think don’t wait too long. Maybe start seeing what other career opportunities you have. So I’m not saying quit your job and go do whatever you want, but if you’re aware that there’s not a fit and it’s not working for you, how can you be proactive to understand what do I want to do next and how am I going to get there.

Ricardo Signes: Yeah, for sure. But there’s one last question we usually ask everyone who’s on, and it’s about digital citizenship. What do you think is the actual advice you would give individuals on how to be better digital citizens and have a healthy online life?

Abha Chiyedan: I think what comes with the internet, you have to take the good and like filter out the bad. There’s so much that happens and it’s very easy to go down a rabbit hole of like negativity and bad things. Whereas I think if you instead focus your energy on content that you consume that is actually helpful or educational or whatever it is, like, you will probably feel better as a human. So I think you have to be very conscious about what you consume and make sure you’re doing things that feel good to you and are right for you because the last thing you want is to, like, destroy your mental health as a result of the things you see. And I think that actually happens a lot more than we realize for people.

Abha Chiyedan: I mean, I think when you have your own business, whether it’s online or not, I think in the online space, it’s important to just learn as much as you can. I think what sets people apart is your skillset. And I think whether you want to be a content creator, a video editor, a writer, there’s so many options to have a business online nowadays, and I think that’s amazing. But I think you need to understand what type of work it is that you’re the best at. And I think you learn that by trying a bunch of different things. So I would say if you’ve always been curious about it, but you’re hesitant, just try. You really have nothing to lose because there are millions and millions of people doing things and, like, no one really caress what people are doing. So just do your best, learn new skills, hone in on the skill that you feel like you’re the best at, and then just go full force with it because I think it’s just going to continue to grow, like everything in the online space.

Ricardo Signes: Great. I’m always down with advice, that’s “learn more stuff.” That’s my mantra. I hope you learn something new about productivity, or were inspired to try a new way of staying organized.

Haley Hnatuk: Yeah, another great conversation, Rik. I’m interested to hear more about the productivity tools that you use in your life.

Ricardo Signes: Yeah, for me productivity tools come and go, which I talk about a lot things that have stuck are pieces of software that I’ve written myself, which is hard to recommend to other people. But a lot of those are built on top of Remember The Milk, which is I mean, it’s another to do list application. It’s the one that has never offended me so much that I stopped using it. And that is high praise. I’ve been using it for 10,15, a long time. And Notion, which I have been using Notion more and more. And.…

Haley Hnatuk: Shoutout to Notion.

Ricardo Signes: Yeah.

Haley Hnatuk: We love Notion.

Ricardo Signes: … It’s terrific. We use it at work. And I have been using it to organize my last few trips for fun and just movie marathons at the house. It’s just it gets out of my way and helped me get stuff done. I feel pretty good about it. I don’t know if it’s going to last. But so far, I’m still using it. What about you?

Haley Hnatuk: Yeah, I mean, a thread and all of that and the conversation you had with Abha is finding what works best for you. I talked in another episode this season, about the way that I use labels to organize my emails. I’m somebody who color really matters to me and my productivity practice. And I’m somebody with a very color coded calendar, so many labels in my Linear, which is the task management system that we use at Fastmail, and labels in my inbox. I also do use a paper calendar and a paper meal prep calendar as well for to-do’s, but for bigger projects and things that have a lot of moving parts. I also love Notion. I use Notion in my personal life and in my professional life. Moving back to what you talked about with Abha today, what do you think the key productivity takeaways were of your conversation with her?

Ricardo Signes: Sure, well, first one goes back to what we were just talking about, right? This, you got to accept there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to productivity. If something doesn’t work for you, just be honest with yourself and try something else. You can’t look at one tool and say, “This is the tool that’s gonna work for me because it works for somebody else.” All this stuff is about who you are and what works for you. Accept that, right? Find the tool is going to work for you. Secondly, don’t get bogged down in planning. This is another thing that’s come up a few times this season. Planning is great. It’s nice to have a plan that you can execute. But the point of a plan is executing it. It’s not the plan itself. Sometimes you have to say this plan is good enough, and then get to work even if the plan could be better. Because what you want to do is be done with a plan and throw it away. And finally, on the internet, you don’t need to eat everything that gets put in front of you. If the content that you’re taking in makes you feel bad, it’s okay to stop. Alright, and that content can be anything. It can be the news. It can be people telling you how to be more productive when that makes you feel bad. Anything, right? The stuff that you are taking in, it’s okay to feel bad about some things, but don’t just consume everything no matter how it makes you feel.

Haley Hnatuk: Well, we hope that you can take these actionable steps towards being a better digital citizen.

Ricardo Signes: We’re gonna see again in two weeks for conversation about another exciting topic.

Ricardo Signes: Thanks for listening to Digital Citizen. Digital Citizen is produced by Fastmail, the email provider of choice for savvy digital citizens everywhere. Our show is produced by Haley Hnatuk. Special thanks to the incredible team of people behind Fastmail. Digital Citizen is hosted by me, Ricardo Signes. You can subscribe to our show on your favorite podcast player and for a free one month trial of Fastmail, you can go to fastmail.com/podcast. And for more episodes, transcripts and my takeaways, you can go to digitalcitizenshow.com