Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So I've been really working on getting smart about AI. It just gives me a much better way to quickly pull all of my thoughts together. It's similar to if you think about investing money and letting your money work for you, there are tools that allow you to figure out how to help your money work for you to get return out of it.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Thanks for joining me. I'm really excited for this conversation here with Joe Amato. Joe's a mom living in the tech world. With three teenagers and a job in the technology sector, Joe is doing the daily balancing act as a tech executive. With 20 years of experience at companies including Microsoft, Teradata, and Ernst and Young, Jo has found numerous ways to maximize her time and energy while finding success in her career and home life.
Thanks for joining us, Jo.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks. Boy, when you read that, I sound fairly impressive. And then I just look at myself and go, well, I'm just a chick living in a tech world, right?
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's not funny. The difference between how you see yourself and how others see you. Jo and I met speaking at a conference, and I was drawn to your insights from the stage. I thought you were brilliant. And so I'm so excited that you'll share some of those with our listeners.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: That's great. Let's dive in. So, as we've established, you're busy, you're doing a balancing act, so there's a lot of demands on your time. How do you stay focused on the most important things?
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Firstly, I try and stay grounded, so it's very easy to get distracted with so many things going on.
Literally, you can be doing one thing and somebody's pulling your time for something else. Right. So the juggling act is real.
And so I've tried to find some ways to ground myself.
One of the things that I've picked up over the last six months, that actually was a recommendation from a colleague of mine that I met in this new role who's in India.
We were talking about yoga one day, and he's like, you know, I do this daily yoga practice, and we do it for grounding reasons and trying to get in touch with ourselves. I feel like in America, we do yoga for exercise, Right. And so I was talking with him and he's like, you know, even if you just did like, three, three sun salutations a day, it's an amazing benefit to grounding yourself and being back in touch with yourself, et cetera. And so I started doing that about Six months ago. And I can tell you I haven't missed a day.
And it starts my day so in tune with my own mind that even if distractions come up, I can really come back into focus.
And so that allows me to really handle the juggling in a much better way and feel like I have a bit more control when we all know a lot of times a lot of that stuff is totally out of our control.
So.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: So what does that look like? If you don't know what a sun salutation is, how would somebody do it?
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Sure. So it's.
If you've, if you've never done yoga before, I always start in child's pose, so you can look up. Child's pose. It's basically on the ground with your head, your third eye center on the ground, your arms stretched. And it's just a very nice waking up stretch for your shoulders and your back. And then you go up into a downward dog and then you move up. And a sun salutation is where you lift your arms over your head. Like basically you're saying good morning to the sun and then you come back down and do the same thing again. And so it's like a flow and it, it hits on so many parts of your body. As you're opening up your heart and your arms to the sun. That's just a welcoming thing. As you're putting your third eye center on the floor, you can massage it. That's a grounding mechanism. It's a, it's a very well known way to kind of come into balance. And so by doing that twice, you can spend some time in any of the positions that help you, you know, sort of get back into your center.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Amazing. Yeah, that's great. You had some interesting ideas about technology in time management and staying grounded too. Will you talk about that?
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Yeah. So I've been really working on getting smart about AI and specifically about using it to help me. And so some of the things that I used to do, for example, you know, you take notes in a meeting and then you're like, let me sit and summarize them all and put the actions together. I know that's a very basic one that people use AI for that. That's one that I've really leveraged in just trying to get through some admin tasks.
But then I've started doing things like asking it to help me, you know, outline my thoughts if I like, if I just talk at it and then have it regurgitate back to me my thoughts so that I can kind of look in the mirror a little bit and check myself before I either start writing a document or start writing an email or something like that. So taking in kind of all of these squirrely thoughts with all the things that are happening in my life and being able to like, put it into one place that then kind of holds up a mirror, but like in. In a effective way that I can then skip all of that.
You know, how we get lost in our heads and go back and forth and convince ourselves that that's not a. That's a silly thing to say, or don't write that. It just gives me a much better way to quickly pull all of my thoughts together and let go of the ones that don't serve what I'm trying to do.
So it's just been. Been a really interesting way to use AI to bring a little bit of focus into a very, very busy life and try and leverage that time saving maybe to do something else. Right? Because we're talking about finding pockets of time to do other things that are beneficial.
And if you're able to find, find almost like create time because you're using a tool that gives you time back, that's what I've been really loving about it because it gives me time and space to then think about other things that I wouldn't have had time for. Right?
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Yeah, there's so much there. The two things I really want to hit on and follow up on is the letting go of things that don't serve you. I think a lot of us are really excited about the power of AI, its applications now, its potential. But figuring out what to focus on, what to prompt, really is still a challenge and requires a lot of that critical thinking. When you said letting go of the thoughts that don't serve what you're trying to do, how do you figure out which ones those are?
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Well, I think when you can put it into something that is unemotional and it sort of mirrors back to you, it's easy to kind of see the thing that doesn't fit with what you're trying to do. And I think in our brains, it's much harder because we kind of sort of volley them back and forth in our brains and. And it's harder to discern what's really working, what's not.
And I feel like when you get it in front of you on a computer screen, sort of like a mirror, and your thoughts are the things that are being mirrored back to you, you can kind of go like, yeah, that. That doesn't align either with how I'M feeling about this topic or what I really want to go for. So it's easy to, to let it go and be unemotional about it. Just be like, yeah, that doesn't serve me. So off it goes.
I, I feel like that's for me been a big benefit in, in AI is just helping me clarify where I can or save that idea for later or whatever. But it isn't helping me right now. So don't spend energy on it.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: Yeah, the helping me right now and the benefit of reflection is an interesting paradox that's coming up for me of what feels like is often missing in my weeks is time for reflection. There's a lot of doing going immediate productivity, but the long term productivity is so much stronger when there is enough time for reflection built in. And so I tend to find when I do my weekly check ins that I ask the three questions, what's working? What's not working? What do I want more of so I know which micro moment activities to do the next week? What do I want more of is very often more reflection time. Hmm, it sounds like you've found a way to build that into a more recurring cadence than maybe I have.
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I think I am just trying to manufacture time in a way by using a tool that gets me out of my own head, which is where it's I, I'm not using that time in reflection. I'm using that time in debate with myself. Almost like debating what to say or debating what to do next or whatever. And if I can get it out on a page and then I can discern how to move that away from each other. It's like I've just bought myself 10 or 15 minutes and then I could potentially spend that time reflecting on, you know, whether it's this is the most productive thing to be doing right now because I've got a list of things I want to do or because I have a list of things I want to do. Can I leave that for now and maybe spend this energy and time, you know, trying to solve a problem that I didn't think I had time to solve. And so I guess what I'm saying is I love the use of AI to then find these like gold gems of time that I didn't think I had.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: Yeah, our time is finite. Right. But you're talking about investing it in a way that actually compounds of putting it in the right places. Using the tools at our disposal to find time that not only did we not know we had, but we can then use in different ways. So I really love that. The idea that there's this power for AI to actually help us invest that limited time and energy.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Well, and it's, it's similar to if you think about investing money and letting your money work for you. Right. There are tools that allow you to figure out how to help your money work for you to get, you know, to get a return out of it. And so I think that this is a way that I have found that has. If I invest a few minutes in working with this AI and getting the right prompts and doing the right things, I can sort of compact the time that I need to spend on something and open up time for something else. And yeah, so it is a bit of a compounding effect that you don't. I'm just starting to recognize the fruits of that.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Those compounding benefits aren't always clear right away.
I love this. Something that comes up a lot when I tell people about the concept behind time billionaires. And what I'm working on is sort of this implicit expectation that it means no tech or I'm expecting a digital detox or I'm somehow anti social media, anti scrolling and I actually am not. I just think all of that should be used intentionally, that when we go on social media, when we scroll our emails, it should be with a goal in mind. We want to connect with people we know. Part two of this two part episode is coming to you next week.
