The Minimalist Educator Podcast
A podcast about paring down to focus on the purpose and priorities in our roles.
The Minimalist Educator Podcast
Episode 079: How Film Industry Productivity Secrets Apply to Education with Steven Puri
Hollywood meets education in this eye-opening conversation with Steven Puri, founder and CEO of the Sukha Company. Drawing from his fascinating career journey—from digital visual effects on Academy Award-winning films to executive roles at major studios like DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox, Puri shares productivity strategies that work across industries.
What makes this episode particularly valuable is how Puri translates high-stakes film production techniques into practical tools for educators. He reveals how elite screenwriters create optimal environments for creativity and focus, explaining how our brains form powerful associations between specific places and types of work. Rather than suggesting educators need luxury writing retreats, he offers accessible ways to create mental triggers that ease the transition into deep work.
The discussion tackles common productivity roadblocks with refreshing honesty. Puri's solution to "the cold start problem"—that paralyzing moment when facing an overwhelming task list—is brilliantly simple yet effective. By limiting visible tasks to just three at a time, his company's users experienced a 77% improvement in completion rates. For educators juggling countless responsibilities, this approach offers immediate relief from the psychological overwhelm that often prevents starting anything at all.
Perhaps most compelling is Puri's emphasis on understanding your personal rhythms. He encourages identifying your "golden hour"—that time when you're naturally most focused and effective—and protecting it fiercely. "Guard it like gold," he advises, suggesting educators block this time in their calendars and dedicate it to deep, meaningful work rather than administrative tasks. This approach transforms productivity from a generalized system into a personalized practice aligned with your unique cognitive patterns.
Listen now and learn how film industry secrets can transform your teaching practice for greater focus, efficiency, and ultimately, more joy in your work.
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Welcome to the Minimalist Educator podcast, where the focus is on a less-is-more approach to education. Join your hosts, christine Arnold and Tammy Musiawski, authors of the Minimalist Teacher and your School Leadership. Edit a minimalist approach to rethinking your school ecosystem each week, as they explore practical ways to simplify your work, sharpen your focus and amplify what matters most so you can teach and lead with greater clarity, purpose and joy.
Speaker 2:On this week's episode we have a great conversation with Stephen Puri all about productivity. His Pair Down Pointer is all about finding the golden hour. Stephen Puri is the founder and CEO of the Suka Company. Stephen Puri is the founder and CEO of the Suka Company, bridging the worlds of film and technology. Stephen has studied the techniques to focus, do deep work and find healthy productivity. Find out more at thesukaco.
Speaker 3:Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the Minimalist Educator Podcast. This week, christine and I are super excited to be talking to Stephen Puri, who is someone that we weren't expecting to have on the show, but we're super excited to have him as a very special guest from out of the industry but to talk about things that we talk about in education. Welcome to the show, stephen.
Speaker 4:It is so nice to be here. I know that I'm a little afield from most of the things you talk about I was not mentioning in your book. I'm not hurt, I'm a little hurt, I'm okay. But I do hope that some of the things we talk about are super, super applicable if you're in education and you have work to do, which I believe is true, and maybe we can talk about some of the ways this is applicable through, like film stories and things are like kind of interesting, like oh, this is how that happens in entertainment.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I love that connection. Maybe do you want to just give us. I mean, obviously we have a bio of you at the start of the show.
Speaker 4:I'm happy to talk about who I am.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it'd be great to just hear a little bit about your background and um kind of where you are now, cause you own a company called the Suka company. Um, I had a peek at your, your app and the productivity tool that you have, so, um, just kind of give us a give us a rundown of your background and who you are.
Speaker 4:As we go into hour two of my background, you're going to regret. You asked, like Stephen, wrap it up, wrap it up, you're good. The short version is this is I was born to two engineers. My mom was a systems programmer at IBM. My dad was a hardware engineer designing CPUs. My mom came up she was a math teacher and science teacher in the Bronx and definitely had that bent of like education is important. Let me share. So when I was little, shocker coming, I learned how to code because mom knew how to code. So I'd go with her down to the computing center and do that and she'd be like here let me fix that mistake you made, which is pretty cool. I know parents teach a lot of different things to kids. This is my mom. She was very generous and both my parents came out of abject poverty, so they had a very deep respect for like work hard and do something. You know. Like we didn't inherit anything, we kind of like wondered where dinner was coming from. So do something with your life, you know, and that was very true in my brother's childhood. So that kind of launched me.
Speaker 4:I went to USC in California, an institution of education, and I happened to be there in a dorm because USC has a great cinema TV school where a lot of my friends were aspiring Spielbergs and Lucases. It's like you go to USC often because you want to be in cinema television and you talk to them a lot. And it was the time in LA when film went digital. Suddenly computers were powerful enough to manipulate film and I spoke engineer and, thanks to my friends, I spoke creative too. So when you think about that Venn diagram, I happened to sit right in the middle of that and there were very few people that did. My career took off. So I started producing digital visual effects in film using the things that I knew Most. Everyone tries to make good movies. They're not all good Got super lucky, produced the digital visual effects on Independence Day.
Speaker 4:We won the Academy Award for that. It definitely helped my career, helped the career of a lot of my friends, the whole team on the movie, and set up a company with the director and producer. We'd become good friends and ran that company for four years. We sold that to a German conglomerate called Das Werk, which is like Liberty Media of Germany, and took two years off. I was like, oh my God, this is so easy Setting up companies and selling them later to learn right, cause you're in your twenties, you know everything, you're invincible Always.
Speaker 4:So, uh, sold the company and then thought, okay, what do I want to do? I don't want to wake up and be 30, 40 years old producing effects or someone else's movie. I wanted to get into film production. Actually, how do I help get a whole movie made and worked really hard to do that?
Speaker 4:My life is a series of lucky stuff that falls in my lap and me working really hard to make something of it. It is not by design. I did not say 35 years ago I hope I could be on the minimalist educator. Things happen. Who knew Right Exactly, who knew Lucky things happen. And then, hopefully, you work hard. So when the door opens you walk through, you don't look like an idiot, right? The verdict's still out for today, but we'll see. So, that said, I worked my way up.
Speaker 4:I was the executive vice president for Kurtzman University at DreamWorks, which is a live action thing. That was like the Transformers era, star Trek, like Eagle Eye those movies. I was a vice president of development and production at Fox, 20th Century Fox, so there I ran the Die Hard franchise, the Wolverine franchise, a bunch of stuff like that. I had another moment about 10 years later where I was like, wow, I'm going to wake up, be 40, 50 years old and be the guy making like Die Hard 9. Like, okay, kids, daddy's got a big Die Hard 9 to pay for your college. And it was not a very inspiring experience. So I decided I needed to do something where I have a little more agency. I'm not just the guy cranking out the soap at the factory which it is glamorous soap, but it is soap. Die Hard 5 did not get made because of me, let's be super true, die Hard 5 was going to get made. I was just the guy at the studio who had to do it. Right, okay, super cool.
Speaker 4:So I thought the thing I know how to do is engineering. And I was like let me go set up a company, let me find some problem I find interesting. And I set up two companies. Both failed. It was humiliating. It was very embarrassing.
Speaker 4:I had friends that you know knew I was a senior executive studio. I had left to go to this tech company thing. And then you bump into them at the dry cleaners or dinner. They're like Steven, how's that thing going? And you're like terribly, it's probably going to fail. Wish I didn't see you. And the lessons of those two companies, which I felt really bad. I raised about $3 million for each, and when you have to go back to your investors and say, I know I painted a picture of this is what success looks like. That picture is not going to become real, and you're going to lose your money. I lost about half a million of my own, and it really sucks. It really sucks. So the nice thing that came out of it, though, is watching how the world changed around through the pandemic when Zoom became a verb.
Speaker 4:That's right, yeah, I saw how applicable some of the lessons from film were to modern work, whether it's remote work, hybrid work, whatever you want to call it, distributed work, asynchronous, but it is. There is. You're sitting with other people in a room working together, and then there's other and you can do that other thing at your cubicle, at your home, at the beach, wherever you want. But that became a much more popular thing. It's normalizing and stabilizing now about what percentage do you do with no one else around, what percentage do you do with people? But I've learned a lot of things were applicable and that's a lot. What I share now is here's some productivity principles that help you if you have work to do solo work, and here's some interesting stories that'll help it kind of stick in your mind. So I was so happy to be invited on here. I'd love to share stuff and I hope it's entertaining.
Speaker 2:I hope anyone listening at the end of this is like, oh, that was worth the 30 minutes. Yeah, I'm sure it will be, stephen for sure. So you've talked about these different projects that you've been involved in, where you've got lots of different responsibilities and money and people and everything. There's a lot of parallels with education, with that getting a project from beginning to end. So what do you do personally and through your work that helps you stay focused and not get too overwhelmed.
Speaker 4:Okay, so again there's the rule of three. There are probably six or seven things that I could share. Let's choose three that are interesting and who knows, maybe down the road we do another episode with another three or something. But let's choose three right now and I will tell you this anything I share that sounds smart probably is from someone else, and I'm just gonna be super blunt about that, because when I had these realizations of like, oh, wow, the thing we're doing now actually is very much like this thing in film, where it's been done for a hundred years, I went and read the books by the smart people, cause I know these are not unique problems.
Speaker 4:We did not invent work in the 1970s. You know, it's like when you read flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. You know where he named flow states and he said, wow, high achievers seem to have this state they get into. And you know Michael Jordan, remember, called it the zone, where he was like when I'm in zone, it's me and the ball, like I don't even see defenders, I don't see the stands, like it's just. That is the state I'm in and, by the way, I might be the greatest you know basketball player of all time. Right, and you find parallels with, like Picasso. You know we had that.
Speaker 4:Um, I was up all night, I think I forgot to pee and I didn't eat or drink. But hey, guernica, what do you think? Do you like it? It's like that sort of thing where you go and it's found in so many places. You read Flo, you read James Clear, you read Cal Newport's deep work, you read Nir's work. There's so many people written. So, in reading about the top 12 of those, a lot of what I'm going to share is there's a lot of commonality and they use different words and different frameworks to sell you their book for $24.95, but they're very similar ideas, okay. So all I wanted to do is make those really accessible to people and, as you mentioned, I built it into a little website where you can kind of use this for 30 cents a day and it gives you kind of all this.
Speaker 4:So here's one idea which I noticed and I noticed this in film there is a strong association. Your brain, and maybe your spirit, starts to draw between places and the kind of work that you do, and I'll give you a really fun example, which is back when I was working with Roland and Dean. They wrote at this villa that they rented down in Puerto Vallarta I've never been there, apparently, it's like a $3 million white marble overlooking the thing, whatever. And they talked about how there was this room where in the morning the light came in over the pool and it just inspired them and they've written like Stargate there. They've written other things there and I'll tell you a funny thing is so. This was so important to them. When Roland told Joey, his old assistant said Joey, rent the villa, we need to go down. Right, joey came back that Friday. It was like it's rented. Someone else is there Around the office. This was a bad situation. It was like someone had died. Roland called John Diemer, his entertainment attorney, who's a fantastic attorney, and said John, you must buy the house by Monday. Roland owned that villa. I don't know where the people renting it went, but I'm sure they were paid nicely to go move to some other villa in Margarita and they went down there to write in that room where they felt inspired and they wrote the third highest grossing movie in the history of film at that point. But it doesn't have to be that luxury.
Speaker 4:When I was working with Alex and Bob Alex Kurtz and Bob Worsey great guys Actually. Bob just died recently, which is kind of sad. But they were both wonderful guys and they had membership in that $2 million writers club. They wrote Transformers 1 and 2 and Star Trek 11 and 12, the big movies you see in the summer. They met back in college. They had a very different story coming up from Roland and Dean, like the big movies you see in the summer, right, they met back in college. They had a very different story coming up from. Roland and Dean, right, who are both like Dean's dad produced Jack Nicholson's movies. Roland's family is like the John Deere of Germany, right. So they, when they had to write, they had their assistant rent a room over at the Universal Hilton, which I'm just going to say is not a luxury property, we'll leave it at that. But I think for them, when they had to buckle down, it evoked the dorm room kind of feel of like Alex on the edge of the bed with his laptop and Bob at the desk and that for them is their way of saying, like we associate this with when we're just like creating the next thing, and that is how they wrote these million-dollar paycheck scripts. So that was really interesting.
Speaker 4:So understanding place, whether you are working as an educator and you have I'm going to make this up but you have to do administrative tasks or tasks related to your students or something, and you start to say I'm not going to just do this randomly anywhere. Wander through my house, wander through the. This is actually a space where I dream up lessons plans. This is a place where I grade. It's interesting how, once you do that for a couple of weeks, you enter that space and your brain sort of settles immediately into oh right, we're going to bang that thing out, and it helps you to focus in that way. So that's, I hope, an interesting story and also kind of like how it applies. I'll tell you there's a corollary to that about time. It's not just place, place. I found like I used to do the mistake of working all over my house in the afternoon sit on the sofa downstairs, or breakfast. I'd be in the kitchen, so I'd work at the kitchen table for a while and it was disjointed. So now I really try to be rigorous about working here.
Speaker 4:But there's another one about time, and the first time I encountered this in film was Ron Bass is a famous screenwriter my best friend's wedding and I'm only a whole bunch of stuff and he wrote roles that you would get stars in. Some are movies. You often it's like the visual effects of the star, but he wrote the movies. It's like, oh, you know what Brad wants to be in this? Robert Redford wants to star in this, right.
Speaker 4:And what he knew was this he was an attorney turned screenwriter, by the way. He knew that his mental space was early in the morning and he would get up and he would not talk to his kids. He had young kids. He had a wife Would not talk to them and then afterwards would engage once he'd written. And what he said to them was this he said, when I talked to you in the morning, even if it's his pedestrian is like hey, what do you want for a cereal? Did you get your homework? Okay, don't miss the bus. He's like as soon as I do that with you, I can't hear my characters in my head. I can't write dialogue because I don't hear their voices anymore. I hear yours and his family respected that. They're like hey, dad's writing a movie for Julia Roberts, Let him have 5 am to 9 am to do his thing. But he developed that awareness and then his family was like we got you. We're cool and that is how you write the rules. When a Julia Roberts type goes, I want to say these words yes, of all the 50 movies that have a million dollar offer on the front, this one right.
Speaker 4:So it doesn't have to be five to 9 am, but you might find that thing about yourself called your chronotype, and there's some great writing about this. Anyone who's curious about any of the things we mentioned in this short podcast, they're welcome to email me. I'll send them a link to some blog post or some book or something. That's where I live. But your chronotype. The more you become sensitive to that, the more you're like oh, you know what Like in this window of time. I'm good at this or I suck at. This is the wrong time to try to grade or dream up creative lessons, but this is when I should be some road activity, cause my brain's kind of like off Right. Just another thought. Yeah, it's long speech. I hear you guys are like do we get to talk? Yes, you get to speak. I'll be quiet.
Speaker 3:I mean that's why we have guests, right, because we want to hear you guys talking. But just lots of connections made about you know the chronotype, you know Dan Pink's book when is super interesting.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:One of our friends, ali, wrote a professional learning book for educators that includes some of the chronotypes and, just like through some of our own work around writing and teaching and leading, like we've figured out, like when we can do things and when we can't, and what works and what doesn't, we always tweaking the way we do things. One of my favorite ones, though, just thinking about little stories, was report writing season. When we used to teach together in Singapore, we would go to Bali for the weekend and write the reports in a pool. So that was when you know like just there was four of us.
Speaker 4:That didn't suck, did it?
Speaker 3:It did not suck and we got stuff done. You know, we just had to choose the right ambiance, be in the right spot, be with the right people.
Speaker 4:I'm with you. You're playing right in my story. I love this. Keep going Like. Thank you for corroborating.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, but I mean with that you run into challenges, right? So what are some of those biggest obstacles that when you get into those flow states that sometimes you can't avoid them. What do you do about that?
Speaker 4:Does everyone, do all your listeners know what a flow state is? Should we take a moment to talk about that, or are they kind of like they know?
Speaker 3:Just yeah, maybe give us a quick definition.
Speaker 4:Okay, so just very briefly. And the seminal book on this is called Flow. He named it Mihaly, hungarian guy, and his thesis, his observation, was that people who are high achievers can get into this highly concentrated state and sometimes the velocity with which you move forward is beyond just your own paddling. It's almost like the river is carrying you forward as you paddle. And for that reason, he said, I want to call it flow, because I like that metaphor and that's where this term flow state comes from is when you get into that.
Speaker 4:I had it the very first time I was on an American flight from Texas to San Francisco and the wifi was out and I had to do some like Figma designs for my team, sort of illustrate this idea. And I remember we took off and we landed. I was like, oh my God, something's wrong with the plane. We just took off and I looked down and two hours and 40 minutes had gone by. I had no conception of it. I don't even know if the drink cart came by. I didn't go pee, nothing. I was just like the plane is broken, we're landing somewhere in Texas, it's been 10 minutes we've been in the air, and that loss of sense of time and that way to block that distraction. That is the beauty of being in flow state and for me it was great because when I landed, there's a great New England lobster roll place. That's right by SFO and I had time to go there because I didn't have to rush to my hotel and try and finish my designs. They were done.
Speaker 4:I could just go have a Connecticut style lobster roll, which they do very well. I should mention their name. It'd be free lobster roll. I'll say, um anyway. So just to set the table, flow States super awesome If you can do it. By the way, you can't do it in 15 minutes. It is something where it takes you 15 to 25 minutes to drop in and if you get distracted it's another 15, 25 minutes just to get back from distraction. So you kind of have to be uh, jealously guard your time, treat the time as sacred going. You know what? Here's an hour or two where I'm going to do really meaningful work and not I get distracted. That's really my app that I built is a flow state app is to help you get into a flow state and just do that thing where, like in two hours, you're like I'm done for the day, like I did all the stuff.
Speaker 2:I thought it'd take four unfortunately, sometimes in schools we don't necessarily always have like ownership over how we spend our time right, like, even if you do like kind of dedicate a block of time to a particular task, you know someone will hurt their knee at playtime, or you know someone will have an emergency or something or other, and they, you know they come in and they need you. So if we, if we do have these days where like nothing has gone to plan, that we're nowhere near a flow state like, what is your message to us? To like pick it up the next day and try again and not be too disheartened by it all okay, okay.
Speaker 4:So I love you picked up the disheartened thing because I'm going to tell you a lot of how I built. What I built was working backwards from problems I have and pain that I feel. So we're going to shoehorn into this episode two bits of pain and I'll tell you how I understood them, how I dug down to go, what really is causing this pain. And maybe we can do that within the bounds of this time. I'll try and be succinct. So one of the problems was when I agreed with myself this is the block I actually do have which may be after school in some worlds. For me it was usually in the morning. It's like I'm going to get going at 9, 8.30, 9.30, whatever, but I would find myself at that time doing something that wasn't exactly on task. I should go through my emails, let me get that done. Oh, I should quickly just check Twitter or something and make sure I'm up on the news or something. I'll only read the news if I'm at home. Let me throw in a load of laundry, so it's going while I'm working or I'm multitasking. When I dug down on that which I call the cold start problem and I wasn't actually starting on time it really boiled down to two kinds of overwhelm and I've talked to now hundreds of members in my community in the SUCA and it is super common these two things. Which is, it's overwhelmed when you look at a task list and you're like all this stuff needs to get done, but there are like 17 things on there. It's just overwhelming. It's paralysis from like how is that all going to get done? So less gets done, right? So I dug down to that. I was like, okay, so it's really not about I can't get all these things done, but just being confronted with it is really hard. So it's going to sound so silly, but I'll tell you what I did and it helps me is when I start my session. The website we have is very simple. It's a play button, hit, play, focus. Music plays. We have like a thousand hours of different kinds of upbeat, down-tempo, whatever. There's a smart assistant that greets you and says, hey, let's start our day.
Speaker 4:I looked at your task list, stephen. You have like 17 things. Let's choose three. These three seem like they're important. Are these the right three? Oh yeah, they are, or no? Actually, swap this one out for something else. Okay, great, we're going to take these three. It seems like this is how long you need, based upon other tasks you've done. Let's get going. And I can only see those three while I work. Can I tell you, since we started this, say, let's just watch these three things.
Speaker 4:Our members, including me, have a 77% better chance of finishing all three than when you could see the whole list. Same tasks, same amount of time. But it's just the thing. Like you see three, you go. I could totally do that and you do, as opposed to 17, where you're like people would get two tasks done in the exact same amount of time. Nothing changed other than let's just make this human, let's not be intimidated.
Speaker 4:And the other part of the overwhelm is sometimes there's a task on there where you're like write my book. I'm not going to do that in two hours. I'm not going to write my book. I don't know if you guys like write my lesson plan for the semester or whatever. It's not going to happen to me now in my 11 am Zoom or my 8 am class or something. So when your smart assistant sees that again he or she, what kind of gender voice you want I'll be like you know what? That's awesome, that's a goal. Write your book, steven. What if, today, we just outline chapter three, how about we make that the task? And it seems like from chapters one and two, you need about 35 minutes for that, and then that suddenly feels like, oh, when I was driving yesterday, I did have that idea for chapter three. I could totally yeah, I could jot that down 35 minutes, and it just gets going, and that momentum of like oh, I'm getting stuff done, it just builds. It feels great when you start hitting that complete button and tasks start disappearing. I'm even thinking, by the way, maybe by the time someone hears this of when you click complete, there might be a little confetti or something. It'd just be like congratulations, you got that done. So those are the kind of things.
Speaker 4:Let me touch on the second thing, though, which is you brought up that feeling of being disheartened, and this is one that I felt, which is, at the end of the day, that, ah, poof, you know what? I'll get up early tomorrow. This is a lie. I would tell myself. I'll get up early tomorrow, and before I start the work on tomorrow's things that I have to, I'll do this, you know, by I'll skip the gym, or I'll skip it, or I'll do it during breakfast or whatever, right? And it is a lie, because then tomorrow dominoes into Wednesday and the next day dominoes into Thursday. And it is just a lie, right. And I'll tell you. This is actually how I named my company the weird ass name it has, I'll just tell you.
Speaker 4:So I met Laura in yoga in Manhattan. When my second company failed, I was so embarrassed I left LA, moved to Manhattan and just hung out for two years in Manhattan. I was just like I don't want to bump into anybody, right? So I'm doing yoga, very therapeutic. She was on the left, to my left. We've been together 10 years. As you guys know, she's pregnant right now. We're in a baby. It's awesome.
Speaker 4:So when we were getting married a couple of years ago, I needed a name for this company. We had a working title. We'd had some early users. We're tuning it and we're going off to Bali, which I'm very grateful. We're a place where we can go to Bali and spend 10 days there for our honeymoon.
Speaker 4:All the way, I was like you know what, laura, this is maybe a gift from the universe. No one's going to bug me for 10 days. They're like Stephen's on his honeymoon. Don't ask him to approve the purchase order, right. I was like wait. I was like maybe my unconscious mind will bubble up like a cool name, because all the names I've been doing my brainstorming notepad on are like flow, state, focus, distraction, app 14. I mean just like awful stuff, right, okay.
Speaker 4:So she's like okay, great, you know, let's make that intention for this 10 days. You have a great day for this. So I was like cool, it's like something that might help. Me is the first day. Would you mind if I spoke to maybe three, two or three of our early users and just ask them, like, what they like about it? And that might just be good seeds that'll bubble. Something will grow out of those over the next 10 days. She's like I'll be at the pool, have fun, I'll see you at dinner. So I did those. I said post some group chat. Who wants to chat? So three people say yes and I said I just want 10 minutes. I asked them what's your favorite feature? Do you love the music? Do you love the Pomodoro timer? Do you love the smart assistant? Like, what do you love? And the third one is just about done. Going to the wrap up, you're like oh Tammy, thank you so much. It's been eight minutes. I promised 10. So we have a great day.
Speaker 4:And the guy said to me he's still a member, by the way, I see him in there sometimes. He said to me, stephen, you should ask me why I pay you. Okay, well, it's 30 cents a day, so it didn't seem like the biggest thing. But why do you pay me? And he said so. At three o'clock I can be playing with my kids. They're two and four years old or at six o'clock I can be down myself and be like where the hell did the day go? So the difference is do I open your app in the morning? My kids are not going to be two and four forever and I pay you for those memories. I was like whoa, okay.
Speaker 3:That's profound.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you, you you won that round. So I go to dinner with Laura. I'm like, oh my God, I spoke to this guy who's more articulate about my own company than I am. Right, this is what he said. She's like well, that's good. So we're brushing our teeth, going to bed and Laura looks at me. She goes.
Speaker 4:You know, in yoga we hear all these Sanskrit terms. You know karma and dharma and satya right, she's like the universe just spoke to you. You wanted this, it came to you. The universe spoke to you through this dude you don't know. And he's describing sukha. He's describing that feeling of happiness when you're self-fulfilled, when you're doing something you're good at you know you're good at it and you feel like an ease in your life. She said you got what you wanted. And from bed that night in Bali, in our hotel room, I looked up the website the Sukha company, the happiness company and it was available and I bought it and named the company and that was it. And that is ultimately what I do is the tools we offer are just the path, and I was focused on the tools or the goal. The goal is happiness.
Speaker 3:That's an amazing story just to find because it is so hard coming up with names and like finding the right thing to describe.
Speaker 4:I had every bad name.
Speaker 3:Right and it's just like that. Just sounds like everybody else's thing and you know so. Like that, it's a name that sticks with you and it describes exactly.
Speaker 4:Hopefully true, I'll tell you. A funny thing is what you said. I looked up some of my bad names and they were taken. I was like these big projects that you're working on and you know takes a lot of commitment and time and energy and focus.
Speaker 2:What do you say? The role of rest is in being able to maintain that productivity on a task, on a project, because I think there's a lot of very tired teachers out in the world.
Speaker 4:My mom was one. Yes, there are two parts of my answer. One part is when you're working, there are smart people who've written about, like, what is a healthy rhythm for work? So, as you know, italian guy came up with this Pomodoro technique, which was like 25 and five for a certain number of cycles and it just gives that five minutes to stand up, maybe scratch, get a glass of water, do whatever. We built that into the Sukha. Like, when you work, there is a Pomodoro timer. You can adjust it if you want, like I actually do 55 and five because it feels better to me.
Speaker 4:But on your break, when we're building this in your score, you will get points if you take your break. If you're like I'm going to take these five minutes, I'm going to go walk around the block, you can click. I walked around the block, get 15 points, I got a glass of water. We offer desk stretching If you just want to stand up, my hamstrings get tight after sitting. I was like we should have some videos. It was just like hey, for 60 seconds or two minutes, just want to stretch.
Speaker 4:So that's, I think, really important in the bounds of this is my work time, but I still need to have some recharge and sometimes it's just breathing. Just close your eyes and breathe for two minutes. It really helps. And then I think the larger answer to your question is you need to be sensitive to how am I spending my day? Parts, because if you don't get enough rest, which is whatever level is appropriate for you like Laura needs more rest than I do If you don't get enough rest it affects everything and then things take longer. So if you are like I am, which is I'm like a six to six and a half hour sleep guy, laura is like a seven and a half hour sleep girl, know that. And if there are rhythms you start to see in your life where it's like man, my mental clarity from like six to 8 am is amazing, but like 6 pm is terrible.
Speaker 3:You know what?
Speaker 4:See if you can work a half hour nap in. Sometimes a little disco nap helps, so it is kind of respecting your rhythms. But you have to start measuring them because without data, unlike what you do, I think why Oura rings are so popular and Apple watches, and it's just like once you you start to measure something, you can start to see a pattern and go oh my god, you know what it is. I'm always tired on the days that I don't go for a walk. It just energizes me, you know, and you start to see a pattern. Then you can do something and it's actionable that's so cool.
Speaker 2:I like how so many things that you've said today is about really like thinking about who you are and what works for you, because sometimes when you read all of these productivity things it's kind of cookie cutter, isn't it? It's like this will work for everybody. But you're really talking to that. Know yourself, figure out what works for you and then use the tools that are going to help you. Yeah, that's very good.
Speaker 4:Thank you for hearing that. That is very true. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:So, stephen, at the end of our podcast episodes, we like to ask our guests for a pare-down pointer, something that's going to be a really nice reminder for our guests. It could be something that you've already talked about, or building on something else, if you want to.
Speaker 4:Okay, I will tell you one thing, if nothing in this episode sticks with whomever's listening at this point, but this, I will simply say this which is when you figure out when your golden hour is mine is in the morning before, like 10, before when you find your golden time, guard it like gold, block it in your calendar. If you are part of an organization where people can book time with you, block it in such a way. People are like he's in a meeting With whom With himself. She's not available right now. What's she doing? She's doing deep work, the actual work that moves your life forward or your organization forward, not the hey. I wrote the TPS report, I filed the thing. I returned the emails. They don't move your company forward, your school forward, your life forward. Find that time, lock it, start it like it's gold.
Speaker 2:Love it. That's great. Thank you so much for joining us today, Stephen.
Speaker 4:Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's all in English all in color, as promised?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we'd love to invite you back sometime for another chat as well.
Speaker 4:Let me know when.
Speaker 2:All righty, thank you so much. Okay, bye everybody. This episode was brought to you by the Suka Company, the focus app that actually helps you get your work done.
Speaker 1:Find out more at wwwpasukaco. Thank you for listening to the Minimalist Educator podcast. Join Christine and Tammy and guests again next time for more conversations about how to simplify and clarify the responsibilities and tasks in your role. If today's episode helped you rethink, reimagine, reduce or realign something in your practice, share it in a comment or with a colleague. For resources and updates, visit planzeducationcom and subscribe to receive weekly emails. Until next time, keep it simple and stay intentional.
