#195: Embracing Flexible Work Schedules with Engineering Principles and Psychology With Wendy Cocke

You and I know that making smart financial decisions can be challenging. But it's 21st century, financial freedom is no longer just for the 1% world. It is for you and me. The question is, how do we find time, avoid making painful mistakes, and find the best resources to help us reach our financial goals? Join me on my journey helping busy families figure out how they can gain financial confidence and clarity, get actionable tips and learn from the best experts on how to stop trading time for money. It is now the time you started living your best financial life. My name is Anna Sergunina. And welcome to the Money Boss podcast.

Hey, money bosses. Are you ready to get your financial life in order? Once and for all? As soon as possible? Are you tired of living paycheck to paycheck? Do you often lose track of how much money you have to spend? Do you want to get your financial life together? But I don't quite know how I am with you. I've been there. I've struggled through all of these. And I know you owe it to yourself. You owe it to yourself to get better. So why do you continue to struggle? I know you can get your own money in order. It took me years to figure out it took me years of pain, struggle, frustration, anger. But you don't have to go through all of that. You don't even have to get a financial planning degree like I did. In order to be successful. Allow me to present to you my money flow system, a free playbook of how you can automate your finances. Even if you hate budgeting. After you download this free playbook, you will never have to worry about budgeting and your likes that budgeting thing anyway, you will stop accumulating debt and create a bulletproof plan out of quickly paid off, you will be able to pinpoint exactly what your income and expenses are. You will never have to miss a single bill again. And you will always always have a solid idea of how much money is in each of your accounts. So head over to money dash slow system.com to download my free money flow playbook, a blueprint to streamline your finances and let's have all five weeks, guaranteed head over to money dash flow system.com. Everyone's talks about finding success in our professional life. But what if we redefine success on our own terms? Today we have a remarkable guest joining us on his show. Wendy Kok, an accomplished engineer and the author of the best selling book, making flex work, defining success on your own terms. With over two decades of experience, leading global teams and fortune 500 companies. When do you realize the importance of crafting and work life balance that truly resonated with her, especially as a working mom. About 10 years into her career she made a pivotal decision to pursue a flexible work arrangement, despite the concerns about stalling her career. But that decision provided transformation to everything. In this episode, Wendy will share and valuable insights on how you can reframe your professional life and thoughtfully customize your schedule to harmonize all aspects of your life. She'll guide us through her four step evaluation method. A powerful framework from her book and her view how it can significantly benefit readers like you will also explore how to proactively manage your presence to build a strong personal brand, creating opportunities for growth and success. If you ever wondered how to navigate the challenges of customizing your work schedule, and worried about about potential pushback from your employers or colleagues, Wendy will provide insightful advice to empower you on your journey so get ready to embrace fresh perspective on work in life as we dive into the wisdom shared by Wendy Cocke. Hey, money bosses. Welcome back to the Money Boss podcast. My name is Anna Sergunina And I'm your host. I'm excited for today's conversation. My guest is Wendy, welcome to the show.

Hi. It's nice to be here.

So awesome to be here. So we are talking about a non traditional work schedule. If we think back how the Internet and the new technologies have changed what we can do today, the gig economy is rising in the most recently the pandemic, all of all of where we do our work work completely shifted. So I'm excited to connect with our guests today and discuss this idea of how she found this new way of working and how she incorporated that into her life. So let's kick that. Kick this conversation off by maybe sharing just a few, you know a few tidbits about what you've done and how you, you know how you were able to evolve and change.

Absolutely. So my background is engineering. And I was working at a fortune 500 company doing all things that engineers were supposed to do when my oldest child was born. I'm now the mother of two, but at the time, I was a new parent. And I felt like I was failing at everything. I felt like I wasn't a good spouse, I wasn't a good enough mother, I wasn't being a good enough employee, right, I was being a terrible friend. And I knew there had to be a way to do this. And so I started using all those principles that I had learned in engineering school, about how to understand what I was doing a baseline or a current state or the types of words that we use in engineering. In non engineering words, you would use that as journaling. Or tracking your time I started doing that I started realizing that if I could be intentional with that time, I could piece it all together like a puzzle. And that by putting all those pieces together, I could be all the places I wanted to be, and be the kind of person I wanted to be when I was there. Because I knew that I could be 100% focused on what I was doing, when I was at work, because I knew I was going to get to do the thing at home. And when I was at home, I could be 100% focused on it home, because I knew there was a time block for the work to happen, instead of it all just blurring together. And technology is a blessing and a curse when it comes to this. Because these phone devices, they're just computers in our hand, we like to think of them as a phone, but it's just a very fancy laptop. And so work is in it all the time. It's constantly calling to us, when we're on our lives, doing our personal lives. And then when we're at work, that phone has all of our personal things in it. And it's constantly calling to us when we're there. So being able to really understand what do I need to be doing in the moment is really an important key.

I love this a lot, because there's definitely a correlation, you know, to, to the financial planning or to the numbers, right? Because money is such a, it's such an interesting topic. And a lot of people struggle with it right from all kinds of angles. And so but when you look at the data and use an engineer, like when I looked at how all of this could be put in a system, that completely right shifted your your view of it right, there was no more struggle. So I this is like one of those things that I you know, bring to clients and all of the listeners here on the podcast is like, numbers don't lie, right? You You can tell yourself all kinds of stories and come up with all kinds of excuses. But when you actually sit down and you analyze, and you come up with a plan, then things can start to shift. So let's talk a little bit I know you have a book on this topic, and we're happy to share Yes, making flex work. And I'll include a show link in the show notes too. But let's talk a little bit about that system. Because I think it would be really helpful for our listeners who are just made me intrigued by this topic, but they're thinking, this is not for me, you know this, I work at a big company, and there's no way you know, I can I can have this in my life. So let's just break some of these myths for them.

Absolutely. So I have in the book, a system that I call the evaluation method. It's a four step method, e V, A and L. You're going to evaluate what you are doing. E is every hour counts. This is about writing down where you are currently spending your time. This is the reason that weightwatchers works. It's the reason your financial planning works. Knowing where your money goes, your time goes, your calories go it's all the same. So spending time writing down where you are spending your time looking at your actual starting and stopping times. One of my favorite stories in the book is from one of my friends Sarah, who came to me exhausted she's a mother of two she has a middle schooler and an elementary schooler and she was drowning and she wanted me to tell her it was okay to quit her job. And she works at a big fortune 100 company. And I told her she wasn't allowed to quit her job because she was the problem and that was the most kind thing I could possibly tell her. That's because she was getting up in the morning around five 530 And she was on that phone immediately. Work started before her feet hit the floor. She would get things done in the quiet time before the boys were up, then she would quickly make them breakfast, get them out the door and then get right back on the computer, she realized that she had not eaten a real meal in several days. Because she was literally just grabbing food as she passed through her kitchen, back and forth between things. Even after she got the boys to bed at night, she would grab that phone and do one more thing clear one more email. And for those people that work in global companies, those emails don't stop. Those 10 messages come in from regions that are waking up when you're going to bed. Of course, she was exhausted. She was really working the entire time she was awake. Now. Would she stop and go to the baseball game? Yes. Would she stop and go to carpool? Yes. Would she stop and deal with homework? Yes, but work was constantly there. So she literally never got past the E in the evaluation method before she solved her problem. Right? Sometimes just writing it down was enough. The second letter in evaluation is is V. And that is value optimized work. This is where if you look around to your peers at work, and they seem to be doing things faster than you. Or if you know, there's some things you do that you struggle at, ask for help. I was a people leader for over a decade in big companies. And every year I had to set performance and development objectives for my team. Right? development objectives are hard if you don't know what the person is struggling with. So if as an employee, you come to your manager and you say, Hey, I think I could be faster, more efficient or better at this thing. If you gave me this development, you've now done their job for them. Not only will they say yes, but you've made them look good in the process. The third letter is a assessing the expectations. Often the reason we feel like we're drowning at work is from things that are not actually related to our job. They're the little things that we have picked up along the way that made sense at the time, and maybe don't make sense for us anymore. Just because you can be doing something doesn't mean you're the right person to be doing it. Is it something you've picked up when you were a junior employee that you're still doing? Well give it to another junior employee, you let them have that opportunity to do it? Is it something that you did in a previous role, but you are still in the company in a different job, will give it back to that role? Is it something that brings you joy, and yet sucks a lot of your time, okay, find joy somewhere else, understand where it brings you value and where it brings the company value. And then L is an engineering concept. I use it to say leverage small changes the engineering concept is this idea of a Kaizen if you want a really fancy word for it, it just means do a little, and then check and then do a little bit more. This is the idea of you sort of play with your schedule, see if stopping or starting 30 minutes, either either direction, makes you feel more imbalance. See if adding 15 minutes here or there, changes things. See if Oh, well, maybe once a week, I'm going to work out during the day instead of when I'm also trying to get the kids ready for bed. By doing small things, if they work, you can do more of them. And if they don't work, you can undo them. And most people won't notice. The other thing is by doing it small enough, you don't have to ask for permission, every time you do something little, you can start to recondition your organization, to what makes sense for you in a way that they don't feel like they're missing out, you can not rip the band aid on changing your time people will notice and then your performance will be impacted.

How I love this a lot. And I was like every every letter that you explained, I sort of see the parallel as to what we'll do, you know, in creating someone's financial plan, because these are the exact steps right until you start looking at all. Yes, small things and then making some small changes, you're going to start to see the big impact. What I'm also thinking is how, how something like this, right with this, this framework, these these steps can be applied to someone who is not in a corporate setting, right? Someone who already has maybe a business owner, right or entrepreneur who has the flexibility, you know, in having more time during the day, for example to be with their kids, right? So like when there's already this flexibility present, but yet they're still struggling because even so, and I you know, I walked the talk because I have a flexible schedule that I can you know, at any time, you know, just leave the work and go do whatever I need to do. But then But then there's work at the end of the day. So like how could this be applied for someone In those circumstances?

That's an excellent question. Over the last two years, I've actually made a transition out of a big company, and into running my own consulting business, my own speaking business. And I've joined the faculty at Georgia Tech teaching in biomedical engineering. So I have a ton of flexibility and control over my life. And yet these steps still work. It helps me to find balance to make sure I'm working on the right things. So as I look at what I'm doing during the day, am I wasting time on things that aren't bringing my business value? Am I working efficiently? Or is this something I should go find someone else to do for me in the business? Is it something that I really want to invest learning the skill, right? So when you think about that optimized work piece, you can start to say, is this a skill I want as an entrepreneur? Or is this a skill I don't want to build as an entrepreneur, when you're thinking about the expectations, so the A assessing the expectations? For me, this is about making, I make a monthly plan of the things that I need done during the month in the business. And that I can track towards are these things that are bringing value? Or are they not things that are bringing value? Is? Does it make sense from a financial standpoint on my business to go in and check my books every day? Or does it make sense to check them on Fridays? Or does it make sense to check them at the end of the month? Well, it's the same amount of time, every time I go in and reconcile my business. What's the what makes sense for me? Am I doing it to waste time? Am I doing it because I'm nervous? Am I doing it because it's actually adding value to the business. And then that leveraging small changes. It's amazing with my children, I have a middle schooler and an elementary schooler and they notice these little tweaks and changes they notice. They notice if I am cooking dinner, and I'm scrolling on my phone, because I'm trying to respond to LinkedIn messages. They notice when I'm not they noticed when I'm going to run upstairs and get on the computer here in this loft to just do one more thing before bed. And they notice when I close it and just deal with bedtime, right? So but there are also things they don't notice, like they don't notice that I wrote most of making flex work while I was in the carpool line. They when they go to school, they don't they don't know what happens. It's just invisible to them. And so you know, being able to play with things from a time standpoint. It only matters what they see.

Yeah, I can relate to that. I have a four year old son Liam. And so he he says it's not fair when he sees that we have the phones in our hand, right? And he's like, Well, why can I get my iPad? It's not there. I'm like, it's very true. True. Yes, you're absolutely right. So what can you suggest to someone who is liking this idea and, you know, wants to start implementing, but they're afraid of maybe getting pushback from family, friends, co workers, it's it's kind of like, you know, these first initial steps where you're like, ah, is it scary to do it?

Yeah, just starting is scary. So I have a ton of free resources on my website, makingflexwork.com. You can get a free downloadable journal, you can get some template emails to get you started on how to talk to your boss about it. You can get some quick surveys that you may want to give if you're a leader, or you're a part of a team and that you think you may be impacting them. If you start to make changes. I've got some tools that you can talk with them and how to explain how the business is still getting what they need. I have a what I refer to as the business case, for your flexibility. The important part about flexibility is understanding that business isn't emotional. People in business are emotional, but the business itself is not sort of like money. Money doesn't have feelings, and the business needs results. They've already committed to things as a business. How are you going to ensure they still get what they need, the business moves forward, and you get what you need, so that you can move forward. Helping them understand here is my plan is a really good way to get started. And even if it's just printing out the plan, and doing it on your own, or with your spouse, or with a friend. It gets the gears turning in your brain, right. All of those resources are available, like I said for free on making Flex work.com. If they email me or connect with me on social media, I can sell them a hardcopy. I have it a hardcopy journal. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't like to spiral bind, which I really like so you can't buy this on Amazon because it's by We're all bound. They can also by making flex work on Amazon, and they can get it delivered to their Amazon Prime in two days. I would love to connect. So if anybody wants to grab me on social media, I give lots of tips, and try to make it fun and enjoyable as people are on this adventure.

Awesome. Thank you so much. We will include this in the show notes for sure. And I am very excited to check out all of the resources you shared not only personally because I'm always looking for ideas and and you know, tips and tricks what I personally can do better but also professionally because I do have a team and even though there's flexibility, you're right, there's we've got to remove that emotional part. And really look at like, their sister business. This is your work, but then also here's your life. So I'm, I'm very excited for our today's conversation. Thank you so much, Wendy.

I'm so glad to have been here and thank you so much.

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