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045: Tracey Spicer on upskilling your kids to contribute at home
471 Plays4 years ago
We interview Tracey Spicer, longtime broadcaster and recent NSW Premier's Woman of the Year, on how she and her partner organise and share their home life and careers.
Tracey Spicer AM is a multiple Walkley Award-winning author, journalist and broadcaster who has anchored national programs and in 2018 was chosen as one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence . In 2019 she was named the NSW Premier’s Woman of the Year, accepted the Sydney Peace Prize alongside Tarana Burke for the Me Too movement, and won the national award for Excellence in Women’s Leadership through Women & Leadership Australia. Her first book, The Good Girl Stripped Bare, became a bestseller within weeks of publication, while her TEDx Talk, The Lady Stripped Bare, has attracted more than six million views worldwide.
What we talk about
During the interview, we chat with Tracey about:
- organising holiday care for children
- how Tracey enlisted her seven-year-old daughter to help her with tax receipts
- enlisting the children to assist with life admin, cooking and other household chores
- how she is determined to teach non-traditional gender roles to her children
- how her husband has taken control of house cleaning and comparison shopping in their household
- how habit, necessity and seeking advice has helped her take control of her taxes
- her approach to what she is happy to outsource
- the importance of having a conversation with your partner to reset expectations
- how her kids take responsibility for planning, shopping and cooking one meal each week
- investing the effort and time to upskill your children into contributing to your household life admin
- using a shared digital calendar to coordinate family logistics
- simplifying life to reduce the number of decisions she needs to make.
Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.
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Transcript
Introduction and Georgia Heart Institute
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Interview Insights with Diana Roe Roberts
00:00:30
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony. I'm Diana Roe Roberts, an operations manager who's about to have a fangirl moment interviewing someone that inspired me to make changes in my life. I'm Mia Northrop, a researcher and writer who needs to revisit insourcing tasks to the kids since their math skills and life mastery is now up to
Meeting Tracey Spicer: Leadership and Influence
00:00:59
Speaker
speed.
00:00:59
Speaker
In this episode, we interview journalist and woman of influence, Tracey Spicer. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks. Again, we have an episode for our How They Do It series where we're sneak peeking into how other people tackle life admin. We're definitely seeing some themes from these interviews. A lot of outsourcing going on.
00:01:19
Speaker
people making decisions about what makes sense for them and their household in terms of who's doing what and really not caring what other people think in terms of what they choose to outsource. Everyone needs to remember that other people really don't care about so much of what you choose in your life. Very true. Also themes around sharing tasks in households and what's possible and it's really expanded my imagination in terms of giving up things for partners or kids.
00:01:45
Speaker
And then the confirmation that people really do hate doing their taxes. I'm certainly not alone in that department. Yeah, I think I'm the only one who likes them.
Challenging Gender Roles at Home
00:01:54
Speaker
So in this episode, we talk to Tracy Spicer, who reveals the next level way she enlists her kids to help with household tasks, the rethink of gender roles in her family and the impact on who does what, and how radical simplification reduces her decisions and maximizes her headspace.
00:02:11
Speaker
Tracy Spicer AM is a multiple, Walkley Award-winning author, journalist and broadcaster who has anchored national programs for ABC TV and radio, Network 10 and Sky News. In 2019, she was named the New South Wales Premier's Woman of the Year, accepted the Sydney Peace Prize alongside Tarana Burke for the Me Too movement and won the National Award for Excellence in Women's Leadership through Women and Leadership Australia.
00:02:35
Speaker
In 2018, Tracy was chosen as one of the Australian Financial Review's 100 Women of Influence, winning the social enterprise and not-for-profit category. She was also named a gender setter of the year by the website Women's Agenda. And for 30 years of media and charity work, Tracy has been awarded the Order of Australia. Tracy, this podcast is 30 minutes long. And if I keep reading your bio, we're going to run out of time. It's incredible. I was just like, what hasn't she done?
00:03:02
Speaker
Let's just say you're very accomplished and utterly admirable and leave it there and we'll link the rest of it to the show in the show notes. Maybe we'll talk through some of it. But wow, you have done so much and been very busy and very directed in the things that you've been focusing on, especially, you know, in driving women's agendas.
00:03:22
Speaker
That is hilarious that you should say that because when you're reading out my bio, I thought, oh, it makes me sound like such a tosser, you know, because I'm such a bogan from the outskirts of Brisbane. And when I look at my bio, I go, oh, no, that makes me sound like I'm completely insufferable. But thank you for reading all that out nonetheless, because it is very lovely.
00:03:47
Speaker
The words tosser and insufferable did not come to mind. I was just thinking, impressive, admirable, on a mission. Anyway, thank you for coming on the show. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for asking me.
The Impact of Time on Grooming and Productivity
00:04:00
Speaker
It is so exciting to have you here. When we decided to interview guests for the fourth season of our podcast, you were right on the top of my list, your TEDx video, The Lady Stripped Bear. I think it's had more than 6 million views now. It had a huge influence on me and it's added years back to my life. So I'm having a bit of a fangirl moment here at the moment.
00:04:21
Speaker
And for listeners who haven't seen it yet, we'll link to it in the show notes, but Tracy's TEDx talk talks about the time women spend on grooming and the effect it has on our productivity. And you share stats about men's grooming habits. It's about a third of the time that women spend on it. And you think about those lost hours, you know, you could be doing an MBA, you could be becoming fluent in another language or
00:04:42
Speaker
mastering the flute. And then you share research about how grooming and housework negatively impact earnings for women. And when I was watching it, I couldn't help but think about, well, life admin and its impact on earnings too. And at the end of that talk, he challenged the audience to take note of how much time is spent on grooming and think about the other things you could do, decide what you could reduce or live without. And I just sort of thought there's really strong corollaries here with life admin and what you could be doing with that time.
Unpaid Labor and Traditional Roles Discussion
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah, there really are because women historically have been responsible for the caring roles in society for children and aging parents. And we know a lot about the sandwich generation. And we also know that women still predominantly do the overwhelming majority of the
00:05:28
Speaker
physical housework and also the mental load in the house. So I guess there is a really strong link with my
Pandemic Dynamics and Gender Roles
00:05:37
Speaker
TEDx talk where, particularly in this era, someone said to me the other day, we're over-zoomed and under-groomed, which is hilarious.
00:05:44
Speaker
that a lot of people are embracing not spending that time getting dressed up to go to the office because they're doing Zoom at home. But because women are working more at home now and men because of the coronavirus pandemic, women are still doing more stuff around the house
00:06:01
Speaker
at home, even though they're working from home. So this whole idea of flexibility, if women could work more from home and it'd be much better in the workplace, we'd be paid more. Men would be flexible as well. That hasn't happened. In fact, it's pushed women more back towards the kitchen and doing more of those household chores.
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah, and you mentioned then the mental load. I guess one of the other inspirations for our work is that French cartoon, you know, that Emma cartoon. Have you seen it? And I guess I'd be interested to know how heavy is your mental load in your household.
00:06:35
Speaker
I love that cartoon. It was a real light bulb moment for me, along with a lot of people around the world. I hesitate to say that I'm really fortunate, but I am really fortunate. My husband was brought up with a single mother and had to fend for himself at a very young age. So he's always taken on 50-50 in the household.
00:06:56
Speaker
I do a lot of the cooking. He does a lot of the cleaning. In fact, all the cleaning because that's his jam. He actually finds it really relaxing. I dare to say people will hate me for saying that, but that's just the way it developed with him growing up. However, when I saw that cartoon,
00:07:12
Speaker
it made me realize the little things that you don't often think of. For example, when the kids were little, I was always the one who would organize the holiday care, for example. So when holidays were coming up to the holidays after I'd read the cartoon, and I said, rightio, you can organize the holiday care this time. And he found it immensely frustrating and infuriating, as you do, you know, trying to find somewhere to put the bloody kids when you're both working. But it opened up important conversations in our households as well as many others.
00:07:42
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think our audience for this show has a significant female skew, which says a lot in itself in terms of people looking for tips and hints and hacks and ways to optimize life admin and work out how to share it, how to delegate it, how to have those conversations. So yeah, let's help everyone listening with some insights into how it plays out in
Teaching Kids Essential Skills Through Life Admin
00:08:05
Speaker
your world. We're curious about when you first became life admin aware and realized this was a thing
00:08:11
Speaker
that wasn't going to go away and had to be reckoned with. I, by nature, a pretty disorganized person. I became more organized when we had kids because you just have to, right? Yeah. But when they got a little bit older, like old enough to be able to help us out, Hubby and I immediately put life admin tasks onto them because particularly when you're in a household where both parents are working,
00:08:37
Speaker
Everyone needs to pitch in. Everyone gets the benefits of the house. Why shouldn't everyone do the admin? So my friends used to laugh at me because I've run my own business for 12 years. I've done my own books and BAS and GST and all of that rubbish. I got our daughter to help me out with that for when she was seven years of age. Because I thought, well, she really liked maths. And I thought, you know what?
00:08:59
Speaker
I can show her that maths is relevant in the real world by helping me do it. And she'd go through my receipts and circle all the expenses and that kind of stuff. This could be the answer to my tax issues. The fact that I take so long to do my tax. Why haven't I thought of this earlier? Honestly, roping the children to do everything we gave them. That's right. We gave them
00:09:22
Speaker
particularly because we want to teach our boy to cook as much as our girl, of course. And so we gave him a knife at a very young age, a massive big knife when he was about four and taught him how to cut. And part of that's because I'm a little bit lazy and I don't want to do those boring things like going through my receipts and cutting vegetables. So why not enlist the children early to do that stuff? That's what I say.
00:09:47
Speaker
Well, that's really interesting because a lot of our guests have spoken about outsourcing, but I'm also a big believer in insourcing, like use the resources in your household before you pay someone else to do it.
00:09:57
Speaker
Well, that's right. And in all seriousness, a lot of my friends with older kids, I'm fortunate to have a lot of older friends whose kids are a couple of years older than ours who I turned to for advice. A lot of them have turned around in recent years and said, you know what? I wish I had taught the kids earlier to look after themselves around the house because now they're moving out and there's basic stuff they just can't do. So it really is teaching life admin skills to your kids as well as helping you out.
00:10:24
Speaker
Yeah. And you're not the first person to also deal with cutting vegetables. That seems to be a real sticking point with people. There's a lot of vegetables to cut for small children. It's infuriating. You don't want to spend the money and have the wasted packaging on buying the pre-cut vegetables. So I've got the stage where I'll cut anything, but I refuse to cut potatoes. I'm like, if you kids want to have potatoes, you can cut them yourself. I'm done.
00:10:48
Speaker
one vegetable too much. When it comes to life admin, what is most important for you? Peace of mind, saving money, saving time or household harmony? That is a really interesting conversation because I'm a very strange person. It's more important to me to teach those
00:11:10
Speaker
non-traditional gender roles to the kids than any of that stuff. And it drives some berserk. Our kids are now 14 and 16. And our daughter leaned across the dinner table last night and said, Mum, don't make everything a teachable moment, please. It's killing me.
00:11:29
Speaker
So I try to, more than all of that, Hubby and I do spend a lot of time, cause our son's 16 now. So he's been influenced by a whole bunch of awful stuff he sees online. We spend an awful lot of time trying to get him to do traditional female tasks. So cooking.
00:11:47
Speaker
trying to get him to sow, getting him out into the garden, all that kind of stuff, and trying to get our daughter to do more of that male stuff, you know, take the rubbish out, take the food out to the worm farm. So to me, it's more important to get if you've got kids of different genders.
00:12:05
Speaker
to get that kind of balance right, rather than harmony. I can tell you it causes a lot of conflict in the household, but I'm determined that, you know, they need to learn this kind of stuff young, so they don't get set in those real pink and blue roles when they're older. Yeah, you're playing the long game there. I'm trying, I don't know whether or not. So when it comes to life admin, are there some areas of life admin that are like your pet peeves, like cutting potatoes, or some life admin tasks that you actually enjoy doing?
00:12:34
Speaker
Oh, when we got a dog for the kids, I said straight up, I'm not picking up the poo in the backyard. I always grew up with cats and I found the picking up the poo to do with dogs disgusting. So that is the one life admin task I will not do. It's our daughter's dog. We told her she had to do it, but often my husband ends up doing it with her. So that's a no go area.
00:12:57
Speaker
And is there some areas of life admin that you actually like enjoy or look forward to? I had a really close relationship with my mum and she died prematurely. One of the things we did together, again, traditional female kind of role, but we did it with joy in our hearts. We loved cooking when people came over.
00:13:17
Speaker
for dinner or whatever. So I really like when people come over for lunch or whatever to spend or dinner to spend the whole day cooking. I find that very relaxing. If I can just do that with the music on and no one bothering me, I'm pretty happy to do it.
00:13:32
Speaker
It does feel like people fall into the camp of love cooking or hate cooking. So it's great to, I'm also a big lover of the cooking and feel like that's actually the part of life admin that I enjoy the most. Oh, that's great. What's your signature dish? What do you love to cook the most?
00:13:48
Speaker
I'm really big into the Ottolenghi recipe books at the moment. So I've been loving creating the whole feast that he describes in those books. So that's really good fun to have a bunch of people over. And now that the COVID restrictions, because we're here in Melbourne, I felt like we sort of had this sort of starvation of not being able to have people over to share a meal. So I'm sort of making up for lost time at the moment. Oh, you must be loving it. His cookbooks are the best.
00:14:14
Speaker
I'm chuckling over here because I have an otter leggy cookbook. There is one thing that I wanted to make for about two years. On multiple occasions, it's these cauliflower fritters that sound amazing. They look amazing. I have bought all the ingredients. They've sat in the fridge. I open up the thing. I look at how many steps, how much frigging chopping and vegetables there are. And I'm like, it ain't going to happen. And I watch the ingredients die in the back of the fridge and I put the cookbook back on the shelf.
00:14:42
Speaker
Oh, we're all different, aren't we? We're all different. So I'm interested, Tracey, how under control is your life ahead of me when it comes to things like comparison shopping for the internet plan and you realize your mobile is out of contract or it's tax time and you've got to pull things together. Are all those things humming in your household? And if so, how did you get there?
00:15:08
Speaker
Oh, look, my husband's father left the family very early when he was one year old, but he was an accountant by trade. So Hubby is really good and it does all of that kind of bill stuff. He actually finds that relaxing and enjoys it. He loves comparing the internet plans and all of that. So fortunately, I don't have to worry about that. When it comes to the tax,
00:15:37
Speaker
I do most of that myself. I've got an accountant because I've got my own company. But because I've had my own company for quite some time now, I actually, I used to hate it at the start, but I don't mind that tax stuff now, particularly
00:15:52
Speaker
With coronavirus, we lost all of our work last year because we're both freelancers. So just looking at all the numbers and thinking, oh my gosh, are we going to have to pull the kids out of school? Are we going to have to sell the car? I was going through my cupboard working out. What frocks can I sell online?
00:16:09
Speaker
Yeah. And is that just a sort of a matter of time and developing mastery so that you're comfortable with those tasks and so that they, you know, you can perform them easily or is it a sort of a mindset thing for you? What got you to that level where there was that level of comfort and there's not, you know, because some people have, you know, there's a lot of stress around this, a lot of
00:16:31
Speaker
stressing out. How did you get to such a comfortable place with it? I'll put only habit and necessity. Honestly, when I started doing my own bass and GST, Jason, my husband pointed out, he said, do you realize that you drink half a bottle of wine when you do your GST every quarter? And it was true. I'd sit there at the table with receipts all over and I'd grab a bottle of wine. I'd sit there and smash it out.
00:16:56
Speaker
I'd go through the receipts and almost cry by the end. It was when he made that point, I thought, this is probably not very good for my health. So that's what I thought. I just have to get used to it. I have to get some advice externally. I did a few courses on it to understand it better, so it didn't stress me out so much, and so I didn't become an alcoholic.
00:17:18
Speaker
Yeah, whatever gets you through. There's a theme here with outsourcing and some people are quite uncomfortable with outsourcing tasks that they feel for whatever reason that they should be doing themselves. What other things do you outsource? I mean, apart from the things that you give your kids.
00:17:35
Speaker
I really love gardening. I find it very, very relaxing, but I'm terrible at
Gardening as a Personal Joy
00:17:40
Speaker
it. I've got a black thumb. So when we renovated our house a couple of years ago, the one thing I wanted was for someone to come in and do a garden design and do the initial planting so I could then maintain it. I've maintained it ever since and loved it every day. I'm out there murdering stink bugs and
00:18:02
Speaker
you know, grabbing caterpillars off plants with great joy, watering and pruning and weeding and all that kind of stuff. I love that. I find it very relaxing, the repetitive task, but just to get someone in externally to set it up properly, because it does give me great joy. So I'm happy for stuff like that. If I know that ongoing, I can contribute to it and it gives me great joy. But I do understand why people don't want to outsource stuff and want to learn to do it themselves.
00:18:28
Speaker
You talked before a bit about when the time that you asked your husband to organize the school holiday care and that I guess in some parts of your life admin, it naturally falls to one person or the other. But have you got an approach to having the conversations about some of those
00:18:44
Speaker
other tasks that don't necessarily fall naturally to one person or the other and how to better share them or any systems in place to better share the mental load. We developed some better systems when we realized that we had a gender pay gap in our household with our children when it came to household chores.
00:19:03
Speaker
because Taj being the boy and seeing around him men doing traditionally male jobs was more drawn to taking the rubbish out and Grace was more drawn to the inside housework stuff because that's what she saw in American TV shows that women were doing, right? Because you can never underestimate the impact of mass media on children's developing brains.
00:19:25
Speaker
Oh, we'd done this hastily drawn up list on the fridge that said this chore is worth this much and that chore is worth that much. And because of our own unconscious bias, we had weighted the physical chores outside more heavily than the lighthouse work inside. So that was our own unconscious bias.
00:19:44
Speaker
We changed that systematically so it was fair regardless of who was doing the task. It was very similar to how bricklayers are paid more by the hour than hairdressers comparing male and female dominated industries. But there are a lot of things, there are a lot of intangible things around the household that you don't have systems for and often it takes
00:20:06
Speaker
frustration for that to come out. And let me give you a really tangible example of this. I'm quite embarrassed about it. I was really exhausted the other day for whatever reason. And we always have dinner at the table and try to be proper about that and have a conversation with the children. Sometimes it's really frustrating to get anything out of them because they're teenagers, right? They clam up.
00:20:26
Speaker
And I said to my husband after, I said, look, I don't want to be rude, but I'm a bit exhausted and I'm finding it very mentally draining to be the one who always has to start and moderate and manage the conversation around the dinner table, even when I'm tired after a big day of talking and speaking and working and training.
00:20:48
Speaker
He looked a bit annoyed at the time, but the next night he moderated the conversation more around the dinner table. Sometimes it just takes you to get to that point where you think, oh God, I'm just bloody sick of doing this and I want someone else to take the load. Yeah. I think we all fall into that trap of sometimes thinking people can read our minds. You might be sitting there thinking,
Household Chores and Gender Role Implications
00:21:10
Speaker
Can't you tell that I'm kind of a bit sick of doing this and hope that they will jump in? But yeah, voicing your needs and sort of resetting expectations about that is a lot more productive and skillful way to go. Yeah, that's really wise, just having the conversation. But I do understand that it's a difficult conversation for people to have because
00:21:30
Speaker
It can cause conflict. It can cause confusion. It can change things in a way that you don't expect. For example, power shifts within the relationship. It's a really nuanced thing. And I think there's also that challenge people face. If you're in a relationship and you're not both working or you're working very different amounts, then there becomes this interesting expectation of who does what around the house.
00:21:57
Speaker
And it can feel really unfair if the person who's not working or working less is the sole person responsible for all of this sort of household management and the thinking around life admin, when really running the lives of multiple people is a huge job. Definitely. It's like that research that showed that regardless of how much women work, whether it's part time or full time, they still do the bulk of the physical housework and
00:22:23
Speaker
And I would suggest they also do the bulk of the life admin tasks, particularly if they do work part-time, because there is that unspoken expectation that they will then take over all of that, often the unappreciated, invisible work around the house.
00:22:39
Speaker
So Tracy, can you give us a life admin success story? What's absolutely sorted for you right now, something that maybe in the past wasn't? Oh, I don't want to bang on about this too much, but it has worked a treat. Although it started from a very low base. When we started getting the kids to cook one night a week each to take a bit of the load off, even though I love cooking, I don't want to do it every night.
00:23:04
Speaker
They were, this was about five years ago, and Taj and Grace both cooked these dreadful meals at the start. Taj's was the most memorable because he cooked this paella and it was really salty. Grace and I were going, oh darling, this is nice, but it's very salty. What did you put in it? He said, yeah, I didn't understand it when they said one and a half cups of chicken stock. So he's put in one and a half cups of chicken stock powder.
00:23:34
Speaker
Oh, that's chickeny. Honestly, we looked like these puckered up old women afterwards. Jace was working that night, so Grace and I were walking around dehydrated like we'd been in the desert, you know. It was just dreadful. So you've really got to suck up some terrible meals when you teach the kids to cook independently and leave them to their own devices. But
00:23:58
Speaker
Now, two nights a week, they cook really, really decent meals that an adult would be able to cook, and it takes such pressure off us because they go to the shops, they get the groceries, so it's teaching them that life admin stuff. This is what you need to do to keep a household running. Again, it's that short-term hideous pain and dehydration for a long-term gain.
00:24:22
Speaker
It's great. They decide what they're going to cook for their night of the week, and they're responsible for going to the supermarket and getting the ingredients as well. Yeah, they do. Gracie, she was choosing between playa, because that's one of our favorites, and chicken schnitty last night. So she went to the Woolworths and got the chicken schnitty and got all the salad ingredients and made two nice salads to go with it. So it really is worth persisting with your kids, even though it drives you crazy at the time, because long term it pays off.
00:24:52
Speaker
I love interviewing people and finding out what's possible. Like this is the whole people behind the kimono because, you know, that's really, I mean, it's a fantastic thing to do and it's not, it's not common, but they're capable of it. I think we underestimate what our kids are capable of doing.
00:25:08
Speaker
Yeah, we totally underestimate them. I mean, I'd like to get them to do more of the big heavy physical housework around the house. And we have been negligent with that. We just get them to do things like washing and cooking, a little cleaning. We haven't gotten to do the big stuff yet, you know, the whipper snipper-ing and the big vacuuming and all that. But we'll definitely get onto it.
00:25:28
Speaker
So, Tracy, thinking back, what's one other life admin life hack you wish someone had told you earlier in your life? Oh, let me think. I'm a little bit like what they used to say about goldfish because I've worked in 24 hour news for so long. I tend to remember things that happened in the last week, more so than things that happened 10 years ago. What's really front of mind for me is that we have had a cockroach plague lately, which I know is incredibly glamorous and disgusting.
00:25:56
Speaker
So every night, because I go to bed before my husband goes to bed, every night I've gone into the bedroom with my thong to murder the cockroaches because I don't like using too many chemicals, nasty chemicals around the house and all of that kind of stuff. Anyway, then I went to Melbourne a couple of days ago for work and Gracie called me
00:26:19
Speaker
in hysterics, in terrible fear, going, Mum, the cockroaches have taken over the backyard. Apparently, because we could work out where they're coming from, they live under the grass, like some kind of horror movie, right? She went out in the backyard and they're cockroaches. She sent me a video. We're just teeming all over the backyard.
00:26:40
Speaker
So I wish someone had told me how to control bugs in the household because that is stuck in my mind like I'm living in a horror movie with this cockroach arming in the backyard waiting to come in at any time. I'm roaming the house with a thog in my hand constantly. If someone could have told me earlier how to manage the bugs because I find them completely disgusting, that would have been great.
00:27:03
Speaker
That's awesome. I love a cockroach story. We actually got some in our house at the moment, so I'm going to have to do some more research on cockroach control.
Balancing Schedules with Family Diaries
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah. Ants in my house with the ants are winning.
00:27:17
Speaker
Oh, they're so clever ants too. There's just so many of them. It's creepy. This is a total non-secretary. You are incredibly busy. You write books. You produce documentaries. You are ambassador for a whole bunch of different not-for-profits. You're regularly speaking. I imagine that you have a very full diary. How do you manage your schedule and balance
00:27:43
Speaker
where the kids are at, what your partner's doing and stay on top of your to-dos and stay on top of your appointments. Oh, one good tip is having a shared diary for the family. That's where it is handy when your kids get old enough where they've got phones because then everyone knows what everyone's doing at any particular time. So technology has actually helped us out with that massively. The other thing is to simplify everything that you do.
00:28:11
Speaker
So even though, under usual non-COVID circumstances, I'm away a lot traveling, I simplified as much as possible. I only have three outfits that I wear and that I rotate. That's it when I'm working. And they're like my uniform. There's a lot to be said for uniforms because it simplifies things. I don't have to iron them. I can roll them up in my bag.
00:28:34
Speaker
I wear the same pair of shoes always until they wear out, then I chuck them out and get another pair of shoes. Just anything that you can simplify like that rather than, because I think that reduces the mental load, the whole idea of what am I going to wear today? What shoes am I going to wear? What handbag am I going to grab? All of that rubbish stuff that we're told we need to care about. If you simplify those little things,
00:28:59
Speaker
freeze up brain space for, okay, now it's easier for me to think about the juggle and where everyone else in the family is gonna be at any one time, because you don't sweat the small stuff. Yeah, that's incredibly wise. I think in terms of decluttering what's around you and your home, decluttering your wardrobe so you're not having to make choice the whole time and get into decision fatigue, freeze up that head space to think about things that really matter. You've articulated that so beautifully, that's exactly right.
00:29:29
Speaker
Because we're told we should care about all this kind of stuff that really doesn't matter at the end of the day. I think that's a beautiful place to finish. So lovely talking to you both. You're very wise women. Tracy, thanks so much for sharing your experience and ideas with us today. It was such a pleasure. We really loved the conversation.
00:29:49
Speaker
Where can our listeners find you if they want to hear more? My website is tracyspicer.com.au and I'm all across social media because I do love it. I'm like a 17 year old in a 53 year old body.
00:30:07
Speaker
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00:30:39
Speaker
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