How do you facilitate work weekends with your sex educator peers?

With Cathy Vartuli from http://www.TheIntimacyDojo.com and Reid Mihalko from http://www.ReidAboutSex.com.

Cathy: So someone wrote in and said, I heard about these works weekends, I’ve been running some and another people get to or people get together and crank out work. It’s lot more fun sometimes and they’re wanting to know how to facilitate it where people are not chatting too much and people is still balancing and having some break time and some more plan. So, this is Reid Mihalko from http://www.ReidAboutSex.com/.

Reid: Cathy Vartuli from http://www.TheIntimacyDojo.com/ and one of the sex geek, the summer camp shirt is on, that means were talking business for sex educator and sex geek facilitator and the like.

Cathy: And you can find that more in http://www.SexGeekSummerCamp.com/ which is a blast. We will both be there. You have to be.

Reid: I’m bias if I made it happen and Cathy organizes it so, ask other people what’s their thought maybe we’re not the right people to trust on opinions.

Cathy: People are coming back in the third time so, either they got as a punishment or something.

Reid: We’re doing something right so, go.

Cathy: So, I did this, I find it really easy to get a lot of done, if I have friends sitting around and were encouraging each other, asking questions occasionally and taking breaks together. It’s a lot of harder when I hit the rough spot and when I’m doing to, I’m gonna play Facebook or watch a TV a little while coz they’re gonna know so it’s kinda encouraging and it’s fun, the energy of other people getting stuff done is really cool. But there can be problems sometimes when other people start chit chatting about other things or when you’re on really a cool sex geeks, we’re doing cool stuff, you wanted to balance productivity with sharing and connecting. So that can be hard, I usually like to establish granules in the beginning and I actually the safer.

Reid: What’s the safe word for work desk?

Cathy: Get back to work. It works, people remember it.

Reid: Mine would be with doing Dwayne “the rock” does in the gym which he screams “focus!” Like when people taking picture of stuff and then they scream “focus”!

Cathy: So we agree, anyone of us can say, Hey, I need a break. I like to have in my safe, there’s a place where people can go and take a break by themselves if they want we usually have breaks every hour or so just to get up stretch and stuff.

Reid: Brendon Sher is one of the people that we like in informational world. He runs a high performance academy on weekends and a lot of productivity hacks that people like Brandon or Tim Perez or Dave Asprey, a lot info marketer will talk about productivity and how to leverage it, the design principals that would work well in work day would be every 45 minutes, there’s like a quick break to do a whole like shegan exercise like Brandon talks about. And what we’re doing is, were leveraging what we know about most people’s brains and physiologies and where you start to lose productivity but more importantly over a 4 or 5 hour a day things that you do in the first couples of hours help you in the long run. So, take a break every 45 minutes to get up and shake and let out some sounds, make sure that people is staying hydrated well and create a culture where people can hold themselves accountable and make sure you take meal breaks and things like that so people can go outside and get a walk and get some food. And then create a structure where people can refocus on what they’re gonna do often times you can be very specific about what are you going to be working on so that people working on similar things and set people up to win. The last piece I’m gonna say is you’re gonna hold work days, you hold work days for the stuff you need to work on. Do not hold the work days for the things everybody else needs to work on. Be selfish and be focused and then train everybody else how to run their work days for themselves with their being selfish and everyone can be focused. And then you’ll have some diversity so you also don’t end up the only person running work days which eventually feel like a burden, you’ll burned out and the whole team falls apart. That’s my advice.

Cathy: I’ve done work days where everybody else is working with the same thing and I’ve also done where other people do very different things. One thing that I found that I really like is for everybody to do and set an intention for the next hour on what am I gonna work on. And at the end of 45 minutes or an hour they celebrate what they’ve got done coz that feels really good and that kind of motivating like “yeah, I did get that dime”. Having a witness is can be really fun and making sure they’re really juicy things and not just works, having a hot tub peer, we’re ordering a nice sludge, we take to have some connective time too. And that makes it really juicy and fun and people like, wow that’s a fun day I don’t, I work hard and also I have a play time with my fun friends.

Reid: Last distinction, work days where you’re implanting versus work days where you’re brain storming, two very different things where you are like setting up a website or writing copy versus, hey I wanna talk about how should I be approaching this launch or this projects so that I can figure out my copy later.  Brain storming versus implementations, we’re gonna spend the work date emptying our inboxes very different than discussing what we gonna do for the next year when it comes to blogging like you’re in an editorial calendar.

Cathy: You have something eventually that where we have done that too, working on something we might be on the block sand so for writing copy or writing website or something, I’ve actually done this to people who raise their hands and then people can finish what they’re doing and they’re like “yes, I’m stuck on this or what would you do here, and we try to keep feel like 2 minutes like we don’t wanna have a 20 minutes crowd sourcing opinion. But it really can help when you’re stuck and you wanna go forward just having someone say oh, A sounds so much better than B, how about this, like you just move forwards and its really exciting.

Reid: And that kind of stuff is helpful because people who are showing up in the brainstorm that’s a gonna be a very different energy than people who are showing up to do task and then you’re gonna have conflicting energies in the room, and people like why are they so quite? I need to do work this out loud with everybody that’s why I would make those distinctions just probably 3 or 4 other distinctions but we’re done.

Cathy: Let us know what you think, if you have any idea just address to..

Reid: And invite us to your work day’s people we’re alone here. Come on. Why is it it’s always up to us? We must probably on Mars, nobody is interesting.