Learn and Work Smarter

125. Making Your Commute Productive and Leading When You're Unmotivated (Q&A)

• Katie Azevedo • Episode 125

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In this monthly Q&A episode, I answer two questions submitted by listeners of the show.

Question 1: How can I make my commute to and from work more productive?

Question 2: How can I be an effective leader when I’m burned out and unmotivated?


What You'll Learn:

  • A unique commute strategy that can clear your head, increase your clarity, and improve your productivity
  • A counterintuitive way to use your drive time to get ahead on work or school without touching your phone
  • Why curating your commute playlist isn't just "listening to music" — and how to do it with intention
  • The real reason your team loses motivation (hint: it has nothing to do with your own motivation level)
  • What effective leadership requires on low-motivation days — and what’s not a factor at all (most people mix up these two)


🔗 Resources Mentioned:


❤️ Connect:

Got your own burning question you'd like me to answer on a future episode? AWESOME! You can submit your questions via the form on my homepage right here.

Please follow the show and leave a review if what you hear is helpful. Doing so helps me more than you'll ever know. Thank you!!

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Well, hello and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. I'm Katie. This is episode 125, and today is one of our monthly Q&A episodes where I answer questions submitted by listeners of the show. Before we begin, if you are wondering where people are submitting these questions, it's really easy. You can just head to learnanworksmarter.com. Right there on the homepage, there is a very simple form to submit your questions, and then I will also leave that link in the show notes. Ask away, and I'll add your questions to the queue to be answered on a future episode. I have a little bit of a backload, backlog whatever, backlog of questions, but I promise I'll get to them. I'm gonna answer two questions today. Both are from working professionals. As always, my goal with these Q&A episodes is to frame my answers when possible in a broader context so that everybody listening can get some value from the conversation. I think that listening to other people's questions can sometimes make us realize that we had the same questions all along. If you are watching this on YouTube, make sure you subscribe over there. If you didn't know the show is on YouTube. Why? Yes, it is. And if you are listening in a podcast app, make sure you follow the show. Usually that's just a little plus button wherever you're listening. And then the last bit of housekeeping, please come find me over on Instagram at schoolhabits if you want to stay connected with tips and tricks and strategies throughout the week in between our weekly Thursday episodes. Okay, let's get into the meat of the show. Grab your pencils if you want to take notes, and let's begin. Now, as I said at the top of the episode, both questions today were submitted by working professionals, and I am gonna read our first question. They write, "Hi, Katie. Thanks for your work here. Much appreciated." Aw, you are welcome. I have a pretty straightforward question, which is this. I have a 45 minute commute to and from work four days a week. I work from home on Wednesdays. I'm looking to use this time in the car in a more constructive way than just listening to music. Any thoughts? Additional note, I'm driving to work so I can't obviously use my devices. I love this question and I definitely have some suggestions. My first job out of college was working for ... This is funny, but back then, we called it an online magazine. Today, we call that a website. And I was in editorial for this big tech company that's actually quite huge now. And my commute was 33 miles from home to my office. But get this, it would take me two hours every single morning and just about two hours, like an hour and 45 minutes, um, in the evening on my way home because of rush hour traffic. I live in Massachusetts and there is a disastrous road called Route 128. If you know, you know. That is notorious for becoming an absolute parking lot during rush hour, but hey, it was my first job. It was in a field I liked and I wanted it and I took it and I suck it up. And I honestly credit that job for a lot of the tech skills that were the foundation of the skills that I have now. So anyways, I shared this story just to say that I too used to have this massive commute that I would want to use productively. Now, this was over 20 years ago. We didn't have all of the options that we have today, but I used my time to listen to audiobooks, mostly. There was no Bluetooth, uh, there was no Spotify audiobook subscription. There was no Audible. I would go to the library, I would get my audio books on a CD and I would stick them in my CD player in the car and I'll listen for two hours, um, in the morning and then about two hours on the way home. And you can do the math, but I can't even tell you how many books I consumed that way. So there is always that option, audio books. Now with the options today, obviously you don't have to get a CD. Obviously, but nearly every possible book you could ever imagine is available as an audiobook. Um, could that be an option for you? yeah, I do also think audiobooks count as reading, especially when you're already an established reader, like you already know how to read. The point of a book, at this point in your life, isn't to teach you how to read, right? You're, you're past that. I think another option, um, probably one that you have already considered is podcasts. I am assuming you are a podcast listener considering you're listening to this show. And my number one podcast recommendation is, of course, the Learn and Work Smarter Podcast, but boy, do you have options? It is just an unbelievably rich space for consuming information, whether it's entertainment or just cool knowledge to have maybe podcasts based on your interests, maybe your work. You can listen to podcasts that are kind of adjacent to your field. I don't know what field you're in, but if you're in a field, um, that's related to marketing, right? There's management, there's leadership, there's some really cool, easily digestible psychology podcasts out there. There's one called like The Savvy Psychologist, I think is really neat. It's really bite size. I think I've been listening to that for years. Jefferson Fisher is an expert in communication. Uh, that's a great one. I think that no matter what industry you're in, I think communication is key. so maybe you expand your horizons for podcasts. But I definitely think podcast is a good use of your time. So so far I've given you two ideas that are not exactly earth shattering. In fact, they're probably ideas that you've thought of, but I want to throw them out there just in case. But let me go into a little bit of a different direction right now. How about voice memoing your thoughts as you drive? You can start a voice memo on your phone and just start talking. You can download your plans for the day, your plans for the week, maybe what you're worried about, what you're thinking about. Let it be kind of like the stream of consciousness download sort of thing. There is an established practice that was created by Julia Cameron called Morning Pages. I think it's like the Artist's Way is the book that Morning Pages came from. I don't do this morning pages, this whole thing, because my mornings are hectic with kids and things like that, but it's this concept of waking up and letting the first thing you do, being getting rid of all of the clutter and junk and nonsense thoughts that are kind of swirling around our brain so that we can really start our day, whether it's work or school or otherwise with total clarity and a, like a fresh psyche because you've cleaned out all that junky stuff in your written download. And you might think that just thinking these things to yourself has the same effect, but I don't think it does. Voice recording forces us to speak our thoughts out loud, which involves a different area of the brain. It forces us to articulate our thoughts, which is different than just thinking them, because when we think things, we don't often think them all the way through. We kind of jump from here to here to here and fill in the gaps, like, with our thoughts. But when you're speaking, you're more inclined to finish the thought. And even if you never go back to listen to any of your voice memos, they have still served a purpose. Also, this is, like, up leveled a little bit, but you could also grab the transcript of your voice memo when you arrive at the office. You can copy and paste it into AI if you wanted, and you can ask AI to extract anything meaningful from it. Say, "Hey, did I come up with any tasks or ideas in this voice memo?" You could have AI pull the most important ideas from it and give you, like, 10 bullet points that you would then review and say like, "Yes, this is important. No, this wasn't important." You can't just rely on AI's answers. You have to use your own brain there. But I think that could be a really neat use of AI, a responsible use of AI, especially if you're voice memoing for, like, 45 minutes. I mean, that's gonna produce a pretty long transcript that you're gonna have, you know, not have time to go through when you get to the office, of course. You could also use the voice memo strategy to work through a problem you're trying to solve at work, kinda like a brainstorm and mastermind with yourself. So I have an episode called How to Think. That is episode 110. Those are one of my favorites to record. In that episode, I talk about how thinking is often something that we need to do, that we need to intentionally set aside time for. And we don't do that as busy humans. So how do we do this? So we can tell ourselves, okay, during this morning commute, this is what I'm gonna think about, and this is the problem I'm gonna solve. And then we provide ourselves with that input, okay? So this is the problem that I'm gonna work on. That's the input. What is the problem that you're trying to solve or work through? And then you need to provide yourself the space, which in your case is your morning commute. So you get in your car, you buckle up, you put your cup of coffee in the center console, you load your issue you wanna work through or to solve up into your brain and when you drive, you focus all of your attention on this problem. And also on the road. But cognitively, on the problem. You talk through it. You go through, you know, a couple different directions. You see where it leads, you're gonna hit some dead ends. Don't get discouraged when that happens. That's what thinking looks like. You'd go down this way and then you hit a dead end, doesn't lead anywhere and you backtrack and you try again. Try out a new way to think about it could ask yourself, how would this person, and then come up with a different person, view this subject? That's a good framework for thinking. It's called reframing. might take you the whole 45 minutes, or you might work through or solve your problem in 10 minutes. You might not solve your problem at all, but I am telling you that dedicating 45 minutes to intentionally thinking about something that you want some kind of breakthrough on is gonna be a much more effective use of your time than just hoping a solution presents itself, has some random time in the future. Now, of course, you don't have to do the thinking session as a voice memo, but the reason why I suggest the voice memo is because if you do end up saying something that is worth remembering or coming back to, you'll at least have captured that somewhere.' Cause when you're driving, obviously you can't be writing things down. And then you could put that into AI and say, "Okay, what was the solution that I came up with?" Okay, so so far we have audiobooks, we have podcasts, we have voice memo thinking. Another thought could be to call somebody that old fashioned pick up the phone and call somebody. Now, depending on when your commute time is, it may not be the optimal time to call everybody because they might be rushing out the door in the morning on their way to work too. Like if someone called me in the morning like no chance. But if you can think of maybe like one to three people you could have on rotation, maybe people who are accessible during the time of your morning commute or in your evening commute, that might be more practical, I guess. Maybe you could give them a call once a week and if you have one to three people on rotation, you end up calling each person like every two to three weeks. And that can do a lot to maintain connections with people who are important to us. Now, another idea which at first might not sound like the constructive use of time you're looking for, but listening to music. Most of us know that music makes us feel a certain kind of way. And depending on the beat, the tempo, the lyrics, the artists, all the factors music can pump us up, it can mellow us out, it can make us feel every single emotion possible. So think about your morning commute. Where are you going? You're going to work. What's the mindset and the emotional state that you want to be in when you arrive at the office? Do you want to be pumped up and energetic and enthusiastic? Well then maybe you curate a morning commute playlist that's full of songs that make you feel pumped up for the day. Will that energy last all day or even past lunch? Probably not. But it could at least help make your first few hours or first few tasks at the office feel good. It could increase your productivity for your first set of morning projects and I'd say that's worth it. Then think about how you want to feel as you come home from work. Are you going straight home and you want to feel mellow and come after a wild and emotionally roller coastery day? Well then curate a playlist that's gonna settle you. Are you going straight from work to the gym? All right, well then maybe you have a different kind of pump up music that gets you psyched for the gym. Now one other strategy, I keep thinking that like I'm done, but one other strategy I want to mention before I share something that might be helpful for students too, but sticking with the professional angle here, you could use your morning commute to rehearse anything that needs rehearsing. So let's say that you have a presentation coming up or a meeting or a conversation that you're going to be having with a boss, maybe your annual review, maybe you're a manager and you're doing somebody else's review. If something's coming up that requires verbally communicating something to other people, perhaps something that you need to have rehearsed and, and memorize, like you're not presenting from slides, your commute time is a great moment to practice these things. The more we practice anything, the smoother it becomes. And especially when it comes to communicating more high stakes stuff like work presentations and reviews and hard conversations, things like that, this practice can become, uh, invaluable, I would say. And then like where else in your day or in your week, are you gonna have time to practice delivering something in total privacy, in total silence, for a good solid 45 minute chunk? Probably no other time at all. Now, you can mix these strategies up all week. You could have one week where you're trying to get through an audiobook, so every day you're listening to this audiobook, maybe you're going on a podcast binge, maybe you're going back and forth between listening to a podcast, throwing in some thinking time, um, and some problem solving time, and then you call a friend. That's like, you know, five different things to do on five different work days right there. Now, to any students listening who may also have a commute, which isn't likely to be 45 minutes, but let's say that you do have a car ride. It's not even to like school or campus necessarily, but you have a car ride that happens at a regular interval throughout the week, or you're a student who also has a job or an internship, so you're commuting, you know, to and from work or there or going to school at night, whatever it is. You could also use your car time for priming or review. Remember, we're not watching videos when we're driving. We are not writing anything when we're driving. We're not reading anything when we're driving. We're not doing anything that's like super cognitively intense because our main job is to drive. Okay? But there is so much content that professors assign that has an audio component. Even if it's a video, it's obviously an audio component as well. So let's start with priming. Priming is when you expose yourself to material before you dive more deeply into it. A simple example would be like Googling the author of a book and the time period that they lived in before reading one of their books so that you can better understand the context of the book as you read it. And commute time can be a great opportunity for priming yourself to the things that you're gonna be learning in class. So how do we do this? Let's say there's a video in your portal that hasn't been assigned yet it's still in there and you know it's gonna be, you know, an upcoming assignment. You could listen to that video like one time through, just like low key. You're not completely locked into it, but it's kind of just running and it's something that you're listening to kind of like a podcast, right? You can listen to that video one time through when you're driving. Not to comprehend every little piece of information, not any real depth or intensity, but to get the gist of the video, to expose yourself to the material. And when you're watching this video, for real, like, for an assignment later on that might come or maybe the assignment later on has questions or an essay with it, that second time that you watch the video for real, you're gonna get so much more out of it. It is gonna make so much more sense to you. The assignment that comes with that video is gonna be a bazillion times easier, and that's because priming is like applying paint primer before you paint the wall. You prime a wall with paint primer before you paint it so that the paint lasts longer and it sticks better. And if you do a quick listen of a lecture or a video before the real thing, it's gonna stick better and last longer. If there's no relevant video posted to your portal, but you know what your upcoming unit is on, you've got a test coming up, I don't know, let's just say art of the Byzantine Empire. I was actually just doing that with a, a private client the other day, so that is on my mind. You could absolutely find a YouTube video that teaches you something about the Byzantine, um, Byzantine Empire art. And again, we're not watching the video while we're driving, we're just listening to it. You're firing up the neurons. You're starting to think about words and the time period and establish essentially like a little, a little pocket in your brain for all the future information that you're gonna learn about the Byzantine Empire to land into. Now that was priming, but you can also use this time for review. So let's say that you are learning something about psychology, maybe schizophrenia in one of your psych courses. Okay, well find yourself a podcast episode or a YouTube video that gives you more information about schizophrenia, maybe a TED Talk about it, or someone with schizophrenia sharing their experience, or maybe another professor who's posted a video on YouTube of their lecture on schizophrenia, and you listen to that. This makes your own lecture materials so much richer and thicker, and you gonna learn it better, and you gotta remember it more, and you're gonna score better on tests, and you're getting smarter all the while. Remember, whether you're priming or you're reviewing, you're still in the car, so it's meant to just be like a listen through, nothing you're taking notes on. So I did just wanna throw that strategy out there for students who are listening, who may also be working and commuting. I hope that answered your question, and I hope it gave you some ideas. And then too remember, you don't have to have a plan for every commute. Like sometimes you just wanna zone out on the way home from work, and just think about nothing, or just like let pop into your head, whatever happens to pop into your head without an agenda. I'm a huge fan of doing that once in a while too, and sometimes that is exactly what we need after a bananas day at work. So I'm not saying like have an agenda for every single commute, but you asked for ideas, so there are some. All right, we are moving on to our second question also from a working professional. Let me read what they wrote."Hello, Madam. I love that. I've gotten a few madams. Hello, madam. My question is regarding emotional burnout at work. I'm in a leadership position where I need to maintain control and energy on my team while also keeping people motivated, but that's hard to do when I'm completely burned out and not motivated myself. I welcome your suggestions. Thank you."All right, do you motivate the people you're leading when you yourself are unmotivated and burned out? Now, I kind of heard two questions in this one question and I'm gonna do my best to answer both. heard you asking what do you do when you're burned out and losing motivation at work? And then I also hear," How do I maintain a leadership position and keep other people's motivation high when I'm not feeling that myself?"And I do think that these are different sides of the same coin. But first things first, my most popular episode by far, according to my Apple podcast metrics, my podcast hosting platform metrics,

my Spotify metrics is episode four:

What to do when you're overwhelmed. Like, we are talking nearly 10X numbers on that one episode, so I think it really does make sense to direct you to the strategies I share over there. It's really a deep dive. I did record it a long time ago, like two years ago. It was one of my first episodes, like I said, episode four. So if you do watch it on YouTube, I hope you would agree that the recording skills and my presence on camera hopefully have improved since then. Whatever. It's the content that matters. But with that said, I think that we can only fake it for so long. it to you and make it doesn't totally apply to your situation when you're fully burned out. It sounds like you've already been doing that for a while. So while I do think that it's important a leader to be the employee, they want to lead and to demonstrate work ethic and behaviors that you expect from the people you lead, you can't really fake motivation for that long, truly. So I think that your primary goal, I strongly suggest, is to do your inner work first, take care of yourself first. That's gonna make it so much easier to lead the way you wanna lead because you won't be faking it. It's gonna be real. So overwhelm can come from so many places. It can come from having legitimately too much work to do, it can come from perceived pressures, it can come from real pressures. Those are different. It can come from high risk jobs, of course, surgery, investing other people's money, right? Like something goes wrong there. The risk is kinda high and goes like beyond basic customer's dissatisfaction. Believe it or not, overwhelm can come from being bored. It can often feel the same in our body and in our mind, not being stimulated enough. In most cases though, overwhelm comes from an imbalance of time to tasks complicated by a lack of clarity. Now that's not every case, but in most cases, that's what's up. Too many tasks, not enough time, complicated by a lack of clarity. And that lack of clarity could be about the tasks themselves, about your project objectives, your goals for yourself, the trajectory of your career. When you don't know what you actually wanna do in the next five years, stay at your company, leave, that can make even tasks that are really doable and not that overwhelming, feel overwhelming, because they don't seem pertinent or relevant, or you don't know if they are. Like why invest yourself into a giant company initiative when you don't even know if you're gonna be there in two years, right? And so you're not motivated to do the thing. That makes sense. It's like when I'm talking to students and they're taking, let's say, like, a calculus course and they have no intention of going into mathematics or physics or STEM at all and they're like, " I'm never gonna use this math again in my life."And I'm like, " Yeah, you're probably 100% right." Like, I don't argue with them. They don't see the relevance, so it makes the content harder. Now in those situations, I always make the case that it's not about the math at all. It's about learning the process. For learning something that's hard, it's about developing a process for yourself when you're asked to do things that aren't your favorite thing, and it's about building that endurance. That's in a student context, but it can kind of work that way, professionally speaking as well. So let's start by trying to figure out where your overwhelm is coming from. Is it coming from too many tasks, not enough time, perceived pressure, actual pressure, a high risk job, boredom, lack of clarity? We can't solve for a problem if we don't know what variable we're solving for. That's just basic, um, scientific theory, right? And you might be listening to those factors and saying," Well, heck, like, I think it's all of those." Okay, cool, but we can't solve for more than one variable at a time. So the rule is always just pick one variable to start, you make some tweaks there, see what happens, play with the equation. What happens if you reduce the tasks on your plate? What happens if you don't reduce the tasks on your plate, but you reduce the effort that you put into them? Could you try that without it being perceivable by anybody around you? Probably because high achievers experience this all the time. They give 3000% to everything and nobody notices. And of course they burn out. And when they drop down to 1,000%, which is still, like, way beyond excellent, nobody notices. But they're like, " Whoa, like this whole time I was doing so much extra and it didn't even matter."I suggest you do a time and task inventory. That can help with a lot of these factors. It can help with a lack of clarity. It can help with the imbalance of the time and task equation. What are you actually responsible for in a week? Not imagined, okay? Not in some outlier anomaly week, but in a typical week, what are you expected to do? How much time are you spending on your things? How much time are you spending on meetings? So that means that's not time available for you to actually work on your work. Are you spending way more time than you thought in your inbox doing, um, admin tasks? If you work off site and you need to drive places, how many hours are you actually in the car each week commuting? You subtract that from the equation of how much time you actually have to work on your things. We have to make time visible. I am saying this all of the time. We can't manage what we can't see, so that's the first step. Well, I guess it's actually your second step, because number one is to figure out where that overwhelm is coming from. And then number two is solve for that variable, and in most cases, it's a time and task imbalance, and you solve for that by doing a time task inventory. Okay, so after you've done the time and task inventory, you gotta make some strategic changes. That means a few different things, depending on the results of your inventories, and of course, your job. So first, what can you remove from your plate? And I know this question sometimes gets eye rolls. I'm one of the people who would roll an eye or all of my eyes at the suggestion, but I'm serious. Overwhelm can be really tough to come back from if you don't manage it properly in the beginning. It's not just about systems and efficiency. Overwhelm can become emotional and psychological and f- like, we can feel it physically too if we don't address it. And one of the most direct ways to address overwhelm is to do fewer things. So what can you remove from your plate at least temporarily, maybe for a week, maybe for two weeks, maybe for a month, maybe for a quarter, maybe for the season? I don't know the answer to that question. Only you do. Next, what can you delegate? You said you're in a leadership position, so that means that you have the ability to delegate and good leaders do that. Um, so who on your team could handle a task just as well as you can? I'm sure there's gotta be somebody, and that could actually be a good opportunity for them to demonstrate that they are capable. And then maybe that's a task that they keep, or again, maybe it's temporary. I always find that when I'm about to make a change like this that feels scary, because I'm not one that really likes a lot of change, I add for a little while at the end of it. So you're gonna remove your tasks from the plate for a little while. You may ask someone on your team to take a task or two from you for For a little while, right? It kind of just softens the significance of doing the thing. And then third, I mentioned this briefly, but what can you just lower the effort on without there being a significant consequence? So instead of doing something at 3,000%, can you do it 1,000%? Instead of doing something at 100%, could you do it at 80% and still produce what's expected? Could you do 80% and then have someone else on your team do the final 20%? So maybe you're writing the report and you're doing the analytics, but then you're handing the report off to your team member to maybe make the slide deck and present those analytics. Are there any tasks that you do on your daily or weekly schedule that are really just for you that aren't necessarily deliverables, but let's say email? Instead of checking email all day long, could you reduce the amount of times that you check email to maybe three times a week? So that's what I mean by lowering the effort. It's either lowering, lowering the frequency or the effort. Chances are like nobody's gonna notice. Now, I do want this point to be fully understood. We cannot out system true burnout. We just can't. we have to look at capacity and not just workload and tasks. So in order to protect our capacity so we don't crash all together, we have to be sleeping. We have to be doing some restful activities, taking legitimate breaks from our work. So at the office, instead of working through lunch, get away from your desk and go for a walk. Maybe try breaking your day up into two hour chunks separated by half hour breaks in betweens. Nobody is gonna notice those breaks. But that's when you get up from your chair, you get away from your desk or from wherever your working environment is. Go outside if you can. Don't take your phone with you unless you're using it to maybe call a friend or listen to music. We're not checking email during these breaks. Sometimes too, I tell people that feeling overwhelmed at work is not always about work, but it's about feeling overwhelmed in other parts of life. So do you have a million different things going on at home? Maybe it's family stuff, house projects, relationship drama, friend drama, unfinished personal projects. Could that be a source of your overwhelm and it's just compounding with your regular work stuff? I tell this to students as well who come in and they're so overwhelmed and their first thought is, "Well, I'm overwhelmed with school." But if we look at the actual things that they have to do for school, it's a reasonable amount, but they've got a lot of other things going on, like friend drama and sports and a million activities. So the overwhelm is outside of school, but because they spend so much time in school, they're just naturally assuming that the, the source of the problem is school. You have to look at the holistic picture of where are you spending your time? Where could the overwhelm be coming from? And then maybe look at some of those areas and see if we can insert some peace there. Those are just questions I want you to ask yourself. Again, I don't know the particulars, but the core message there is that sometimes when we're overwhelmed at work or at school, that overwhelm is actually coming from other places. But just because we spend so much time at work and in school, our default was to assume that school and work is the problem. Now moving on to the second question that was buried in your primary question, how do you continue to lead and to motivate your team when you're not feeling motivated yourself? And I think it's a misunderstanding here because we don't need to feel highly motivated to be an effective leader. Just like you don't need to be in the best shape of your life to be an incredible coach to an Olympic athlete. You have to know the mechanics and the mindset, but you don't have to be the fastest sprinter in the world to coach the fastest sprinter in the world. Your team doesn't need you to be locked in and fully motivated at all times. In fact, that's humanly impossible. Your team doesn't need you to feel or be the motivation master. They need clarity from you. They need consistency from you. They need stability from you. They don't need ultra high energy performance at all times. So I encourage you to change the way that you're thinking about this. Instead of how can I show up fully motivated for my team, think, okay, how can I make sure that I'm delivering clear priorities for my team so they can do what they need to do?'Cause I say this a lot, but a key factor in low to motivation is lack of clarity. So you can motivate your teammates or improve their motivation for their work by making sure that they have total clarity on what's expected of them. Clear and calm communication is more important from a leader than that leader being motivated themselves. So are you communicating clearly in all your email correspondence, in your meetings, in your memos? If your team feels like you're not communicating clearly, then they're not gonna be motivated to execute. But you can feel unmotivated and burned out and still write a clear email or give clear instructions, right? Motivated, motivation doesn't even play a role in that at all. You can improve your team's motivation or maintain it by showing up consistently at work yourself. When other people know what to expect from us and when we're consistent in our responses and our behaviors, they feel seen and heard and cared for and calm and they don't feel uncertain about things. And then therefore, they feel good about their job and when they feel good about their job, they're motivated to do it. Honestly, you can totally lead well even on low energy days or weeks. Leadership, I don't think, you know, is about energy at all times, but it's definitely about emotional regulation. So if your overwhelm is leading you to, you know, lash out or have a short fuse, that's gonna do some damage on your team. But that falls under the category of calm, clear communication that I already covered. All right, so quick little recap here. Start with trying to identify the source of your overwhelm. In most cases, it's a task, time imbalance, with a dose of lack of clarity. Are you clear on what you need to do? Are you clear on what your own priorities are? Are you clear on what's expected of you each day, each week, and each quarter? Do you know exactly what your deliverables are? Do you know how much time you have? How much time you don't have? How much time you spend in meetings and time that you spend commuting? Once you have that data, you adjust to the system that's connected to that data. Or actually, I just thought of this now. If you don't have a lot of joy going on outside the office, that could be, you know, the issue too. If it's all work and no play, that makes Johnny a sad boy. Is that ... What's the saying? That's from something. I don't think it ... All work and no play makes Johnny as sad. I forget, but maybe work is fine, but you're just not experiencing joy outside of work. Where can you add joy? You're not a bad leader because you feel burnt out, not at all. That just means you're a normal human being, but don't ignore the signal. All right, my friends, that's what I have for you today. Remember, if you have a question that you want me to answer in a future Q&A, head to learnandworksmarter.com and submit it there. Keep showing up, keep doing the hard work. Keep asking the hard questions and never stop learning.

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Katie Azevedo

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