The Friday Problem: Why Reflection Is the Work Scale Requires

The drift isn't a crisis. It's not a meltdown or a missed deadline. It's the steady, invisible movement of your week away from the shape you meant it to have. It's knowing you need to make a hiring decision and not making it. It's having three emails you started and never sent. It's watching a team member slowly disengage and not saying anything because you don't want the conversation.

Erin traces her own version of it back to her days overseeing a $1.8 million annual fund. Every Friday, she ran a full set of reports. Not because anyone asked her to, but because she needed to know where things actually stood. That ritual became the seed of what is now a fully systematized weekly reflection practice and eventually the foundation for her free workbook, The Drift.

"The drift is the invisible momentum that moves you away from what actually matters. It happens to all of us, all the time, because life is loud and busy and the thing that's loudest often gets the biggest space." — Erin Peshoff

The Four Domains

Erin's framework organizes weekly reflection into four domains, each designed to surface what's quietly slipping.

Decisions. What are you avoiding? This might be a software tool you're paying for and not using, a staffing change you keep putting off, or a vendor relationship that stopped serving you six months ago. Stalled decisions compound. They cost more the longer they sit.

Capacity. Where is your time actually going? Erin's go-to diagnostic is a meeting audit. She recalled visiting a client site where 16 people were in a meeting about event accommodations. The executive director knew it was unnecessary, but the meeting cadence had become its own kind of drift.

People. Who's warm, who's cooling, and who's quietly looking at the door? Erin isn't talking about performance reviews. She's talking about the team member who's still technically doing their job but whose energy has already left the room. "You can always tell," she said. "If you take a deep breath and look around, you know who's about to bolt."

Patterns. What problem comes back every quarter? What do you keep doing that you said you'd stop? The patterns domain is about noticing the recurring friction, the workaround that became permanent, the bad habit that calcified, and asking whether it still serves who you're trying to become.

Why Weekly

Daily was too much. Monthly wasn't enough. Weekly hits the right accountability interval: close enough to catch drift before it compounds, spaced out enough that it doesn't become another thing to dread.

Erin is clear that it takes time to build. "You wouldn't go to the gym and decide you were going to win the weightlifting competition on day one," she said. She started with one domain, added a second when the first felt stable, and kept iterating until the whole system ran automatically every Friday morning.

The payoff, she says, isn't just organizational clarity. It's permission. When leaders model the practice of slowing down to reflect, they signal to their teams that it's okay to do the same. The cultural shift starts at the top.

Bringing AI Into It

The part of Erin's framework that tends to surprise people is how central AI has become to making it actually work.

After spending time as VP of Customer Success at an AI company, Erin came into her consulting practice with a practical lens on what AI can and can't do. Her framing, borrowed from nonprofit leader and Substack writer Dan Kershaw, is that AI tools are minions. You are Gru. They do nothing useful without clear direction.

"If you don't tell it what you want, it's going to keep giving you the wrong answers," she said.

In practice, Erin uses Claude Cowork as the operational backbone of her Friday review. She has it connected to her meeting recordings, her CRM, her project management tool, and her calendar. Each Friday, an automated skill runs across her week and surfaces what she committed to, what she dropped, and what needs her attention before Monday. She also uses it to score prospective client fit, debrief calls, draft follow-up emails, and track whether she's showing up the way she intends to.

Her advice for nonprofit leaders who haven't started yet: pick the one thing driving you the most crazy. Not all four domains. One. Start there. Build the prompt around that one thing. Let it run for a month before you touch anything else.

"The first iteration is not going to be perfect," she said. "And that's fine. You have to give yourself permission to make mistakes. That's the only way the habit actually forms."

Operating by Rhythm, Not Reaction

One of the sharpest distinctions in Erin's framework is the shift from operating by reaction to operating by rhythm. For nonprofit leaders whose professional identity is often tied to being responsive to donors, to staff, to board members, this is uncomfortable at first.

"It feels icky," she said, without sugarcoating it. "But once you carve out that space, your team gets permission to do it too."

Erin also made a point that lands hard in the context of nonprofit burnout: most exit interview data points to exhaustion, not pay, as the driver of turnover. Leaders who model sustainable rhythms create organizations where people can stay.

One Thing to Take Away

At the close of the conversation, Leya asked Erin for the one thing listeners should walk away with. Her answer was characteristically direct: pick one thing to start with. Not a perfect system. Not all four domains. One thing, tried honestly, iterated on over a month.

Erin also announced that starting the following Wednesday, she'll be building out elements of her framework live on LinkedIn, with practical step-by-step walkthroughs using real nonprofit executive personas. Worth following.

Resources:

📋 Grab Erin's Free workbook: The Drift by Vivia Studios
🎙️ Follow Erin's LinkedIn Live series: The Edit

Transcript Recording:

Leya Simmons (00:01)
Hey everyone, welcome to today's ⁓ 501c drop. I'm Leah Simmons and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Better Unite. I love spending this time on Tuesdays with you all, but I have to say, I love it even more when I get to be joined by somebody that is just very dear to me. I've known for such a long time, although I've actually only hung out in person with one time, Erin. That's true if you actually really think about it.

Erin Peshoff (00:06)
No, it's a deal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Leya Simmons (00:26)
but

I just think of you as like a close friend and we communicate and chat all the time and text and anyway, Erin's the absolute best, Erin Peshoff here from Vivia Studios and she's going to be talking to us about the Friday problem and a concept that she has penned called the drift. This was so resonant for me personally. I can't even tell you just looking through my notes and making, know, creating questions for Erin. So I know this is going to be invaluable information for all of you.

I'm gonna let Erin introduce herself a little bit better here in a moment, but I've got two housekeeping notes. First is please ask us questions and write things in the chat. I've got to pause our uploads here. And all of that is going to come up. And if we have time, Erin and I are going to talk through some of those questions, but regardless, I will make sure that they get answered. So I'll send those over to Erin and she can answer questions that you might have. I suspect there will be a few.

And if you're watching the recording of this, then please email any questions that you have to support at betterunite.com. You should see that in the show notes. And speaking of show notes, we are now also a podcast. So you can find the 501 C drop on Spotify, like and follow. I've heard a million podcasters say that. It's the first time I've ever gotten to say that. So it's very exciting. Welcome. You were all here for it.

Erin Peshoff (01:43)
Hahaha

Leya Simmons (01:47)
⁓ But I'm very excited because frankly, a lot of times I don't want to listen to webinars or watch them, but I can listen to them, Erin. I don't know if you're the same, but I can listen when I'm walking my dog or working out or whatever. So two options now for seeing and getting all this great information on Tuesdays at 1.30 Central. Okay, so I just really want to get into this with Erin because as I was just telling her right before we went live, I find her coaching.

Erin Peshoff (01:54)
Yeah, all totally the same. Yep.

Leya Simmons (02:14)
Her guidance, her grounded approach to leadership is frankly comforting to me and it's so refreshing to get in the form of such a friendly, wonderful voice and with so much background, nonprofit experience. So Erin is a nonprofit consultant. Is that what you would call yourself, Erin? I'm sorry, I should really let you introduce yourself. There we go. That sounds exactly right.

Erin Peshoff (02:32)
I started calling myself, no, it's totally fine. And calling myself an operations consultant, so nonprofit ops. Whether it's fundraising

or general or whatever, I've really leaned into the operations side of things.

Leya Simmons (02:45)
Absolutely. So Erin, though, before that has close to 30 years now, I just read in your bio of nonprofit experience working with and around nonprofits has raised well over $100 million for various causes and missions. And Erin, I should really just let you do the rest of your introduction, but do tell us about Vivia Studios before you kick this off.

Erin Peshoff (03:05)
Yep.

Absolutely. So, Vivia Studios, I founded in the last year. I've been doing some work on ops across the board for a long, time, but I officially launched in November and we're focused on operations for scalability. So, whether you're a nonprofit growing, a consultant growing, an agency growing, how do we help you get over that hump where you've become the bottleneck to growth? ⁓ And so, that's really what Vivia has become about. It's been a lot of fun to get to work with different kinds of organizations and people and think about how do we edit before we add?

How do we look at what we're doing from an operations perspective and then grow in a way that actually is sustainable and creates the future for our organization?

Leya Simmons (03:43)
It's like again, as I said, as the CEO of a tech company that does deal with nonprofits, but regardless, I am a woman and a mother and a founder and all of these things. So much of Erin's work resonates with me if you're not following her and I don't have a slide I should have for this, but if you're not following her on LinkedIn, her posts are wonderful. anyway, Erin, that's, I can sing your praises all day long, but I really do want to get into talking about the drift. Okay.

Erin Peshoff (04:06)
friend?

I just want to find the theater. Awesome. Let's go.

Leya Simmons (04:12)
Let's go. I know, and actually we didn't talk about this before, but are you going to share the link to the Drift Free part? Okay, good.

Erin Peshoff (04:19)
I am, I have the link, clear the link.

I popped it in, think y'all have it for the show notes and if they don't, we can make sure we get it over. But yep, there's a whole workbook, something for you to follow along with at home, something for you to test out and try and ask lots of questions.

Leya Simmons (04:32)
Really, this is is fascinating stuff. But okay, let's talk about it So it's this we I keep mentioning it but you I'm gonna give you an opportunity to finally describe define what you mean by the drift and What I'd love to know as well in your description of it is like how did you first? Identify this like where where did you see it? Was it within you? Was it within a client? Like what was there like a really specific moment where this you know kind of light bulb? Clarity piece came to you or did it just come over time?

Erin Peshoff (05:01)
So I would say, and actually I was thinking about this last night when I was like thought thinking about my day to day and what we were going to talk about. It actually started when I was ⁓ director of annual giving and advancement services at an independent school. So I oversaw all of the annual fund, $1.8 million annual fund, all advancement services, campaigns, all that stuff. And ⁓ I would never know my numbers because we were working with parents and they would make a pledge. So I could tell when dollars were coming in the door. So I started something called my NPR. So every Friday,

I ran a whole set of reports on Razor's Edge back in the day, which is not nearly as good as Better Unite, as we know. And I would go through those reports and then I had an entire giant spreadsheets that would give me the data and show me where we were week to week. it's something I started doing a long time ago. I don't like Friday meetings. I like to use Friday to close your week, open your next week, if at all possible. I know it's not always possible. So it's something I've always done, but with the advent of AI.

And prior to this, I worked with an AI company. I was their VP of customer success. And so I kind of saw the growth of what AI could do. And so I started playing with it. And I was like, hey, what's happening with me and my clients at the end of every week that I'm not getting down on paper or I'm not finishing or I'm feeling exhausted. And then I'm working all day on Saturday or all day on Sunday. There's got to be a way to solve this. So that's what actually started it. It was my ⁓ Friday four.

was where I landed with this. ⁓ I did some cat in the hat drawings and things to talk about like the balancing act that we all play. And then it evolved into what does that actually mean? Like, okay, it's great that I have four things I could fix on a Friday, whatever those might be, the things that are plaguing me, but also why is it happening? Like I always want to understand what's the reason a nonprofit or a business owner or anybody is struggling with it. And how come we can't get our fingers under what we know we're supposed to be doing?

Leya Simmons (06:50)
So then describe very specifically what you, because you've had a couple of great lines in this document that we've shared with people about the drift. Like what is that for you?

Erin Peshoff (07:00)
For me, it's when you know what you need to do. Like, you know the most important parts. So whether that's your director of development and you need to make sure you're watching your major gift pipeline, whether you're an executive director and you're putting off a hiring decision or you've created something and never staffed it, whether you're ⁓ just a front-line fundraiser and you're not.

Leya Simmons (07:04)
Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (07:21)
consistently talking to your people or consistently thanking them. It's a drift away from what our missions actually are. So what started for me was that I would get to Friday and be like, my God, what didn't I do this week? Like, what did I promise the client? What did I promise someone? What did I say I would finish and I didn't finish? And so I record all of my calls, like just most of us do, you know, using some sort of Zoom recording. And some we don't, obviously they're confidential, but I actually started, I was like, okay, well, Claude can talk to my calls. Like I have a connector that says,

it can look at my transcripts. So I actually asked it one Friday. like, what did I not do that I was supposed to do? So that's actually what started the whole thing. This idea of what's the invisible momentum that moves you away from what actually matters? Because I was getting really distracted by things like, there's this, I should go take this course or I should go do this thing. When really what I needed to be doing was following up on something I promised a client or following up on something I promised a colleague or making sure I was setting myself up for success the next week. And

It was so simple. I was like, ⁓ I can just get a checklist. That's amazing. So like a lot of people are looking at AI as this thing that could take jobs or take creativity. The way I've started looking at it is how does it actually take away the things I don't feel like doing? Like who wants to read a transcript or retype all their notes, right? Like that's not fun. What I want to do is follow back up and be like, Hey, love talking to you. Here's the thing I promised. Like that's much more fun to me. So

The drift is that it's literally the drift away from what matters. And it happens to all of us all the time in all elements of our lives because life is loud and busy and the thing that's the loudest often gets the biggest space.

Leya Simmons (08:58)
It's so interesting too, just as you were saying this, it was occurring to me that I would argue that what is making our lives louder and noisier is a flood of content probably mostly built by AI that's coming at us. And the solution is the same exact tool that can also cut through its own noise and provide us with some clarity. That's great. Okay, so I mentioned that I loved some of your lines. I've got one here. There's a line in the drift that I wanted to...

read, the drift is not a crisis. This is Erin saying this and I'm reading it to Erin. The drift is not a crisis. It is the steady invisible movement of a week away from the shape you meant it to have. I really love that. And it, for me also reminded me just from my background with nonprofits of mission drift and you know, mission and here in development or ⁓ in software development world, we call it scope creep, right? Like we had a defined scope and now here we go over here because it's.

So easy to do this, shiny objects literally everywhere. for, let's, you know, coming back to our group here for an executive director who's like, you know, like as much as I think being the CEO of a software company is a lot of work. I remember and know for sure that as executive director, development director, people working with nonprofits are regularly routinely tasked with far more jobs than they could possibly do, far more tasks than they could possibly do that you've got.

Erin Peshoff (09:54)
Everywhere.

Leya Simmons (10:21)
five to eight to 10 to 12 bosses, if you're considering your board. So, end of the week, you're just exhausted. What does it look like when they're in the drift, but they don't know it? What is it, what I wrote down here, what are the feels around that one? Yeah. Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (10:39)
What does it feel like? It feels like heavy, like you are

ready to close down your laptop, whether you work from home or actually work out of the house or, you know, go to an office. I don't really understand that. But whether wherever you are, you feel like heavy closing down. You're like, I'm rushing out of here to get to my kids soccer practice or to go meet my friends or, you know, just to get to the workout. And there's paper all over my desk. For me, it's a pen theory. I have a pen theory. I have more than one pen on my desk.

It means that I haven't stopped long enough to close a I mean, like scattered, not in my cute little pen cup. ⁓ I haven't stopped long enough to close a task out. So it's that list of emails you started and never finished. It's, you know, the piles all over your desk or if you have file folders that travel around your office. And then you know that if you don't tackle these on Sunday afternoon, instead of taking care of yourself, they're going to be back to bite you on Monday. So it's that feeling that nothing is ever closed out and none of us are ever going to close everything.

Leya Simmons (11:29)
Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (11:35)
That doesn't happen. That's completely unrealistic, especially in the space where so much is competing for your attention, as you mentioned. But I think it's that feeling of dread, of like, my gosh, I can't go to yoga because I haven't finished everything I'm supposed to do. I'm going to get an F, right?

Leya Simmons (11:51)
Yeah. This thing is like so heavy in my brain. I have to say a couple of weekends ago I was just done and I was like, okay, I am not going to have any more input into my brain. I'm not looking at the news. I'm not opening any socials. I'm going to take a weekend off. And the weekend was like, it was really truly Saturday and Sunday were great, but I could not sleep all Sunday night because of exactly what you're talking about. All of the things like, like I had, I had done a very good job of putting them away and then

They sat in my brain and I didn't sleep at all Sunday night, got up early and worked on my, so I think that's why this all resonated for me so, so much because I just had this experience. Okay, so I would love for you to reveal for us the four domains that you have identified and like, yeah, tell us about them.

Erin Peshoff (12:33)
So

it's decisions, which what are my decisions that I need to be making in some way, or form? What's the capacity? Like how big or small is that? What does the capacity actually look like of what I need to decide, what I need to do, what I need to think through, ⁓ what got fed, what got starved, that capacity of how do we take care of those things? People, who's warm, who's cooling, who's moving, do we know? Do I know who I need to be talking to? Am I just answering the loudest person in the room?

You know, when I was a chief development officer at the Alpha K omega foundation, we had a foundation board member who regularly called the office. Now we can all talk about why that shouldn't happen, but she did. She called at least twice a week to complain about something and she would get the most oxygen. Yeah, she was a major donor and there were lots of reasons for that, but by constantly feeding her, we were actually ignoring other board members. So that's the example of, you know, people and who's warm and how does that get fed and then patterns. What am I doing over and over again that I said I would stop like

Mine is I eat at my desk. I do not get up and have lunch. It's a terrible pattern, but I have, my husband does it. I don't know how he does it. He works from home. He's like in there on YouTube. I'm like, why are you not working? I don't understand. But that pattern of what do I keep doing that I don't, that's not who I want to be in the world anymore.

Leya Simmons (13:34)
Interesting.

That's great. That's actually something, and we were just talking about, I'm in long-term recovery, and something that I told my teenagers when they were, my older sons when they were teenagers, was guidance that I got, which was watch your patterns. And so just even when we're looking at things that can be very harmful for you, just noticing the patterns is so powerful. Okay, so now I wanna go through each one. So.

Erin Peshoff (14:14)
Alright.

Leya Simmons (14:15)
Art, talk to me about decisions for like, you know, our nonprofit people here on the call. What does the stalled out decision look like?

Erin Peshoff (14:25)
Here's a good example. What software am I paying for and not using? So what do I not want to deal with? Because I already sunk the cost in. I already have everybody on some sort of project management system. It's not working for us. I know it's not working, but I cannot make another decision. I can't go through another RFP. I can't go through another onboarding. So what decision am I avoiding that's actually costing us? And so it's about that measurement, right? Like if something's taking us five hours to do every week.

The compound of that is how much is that costing our organization? And as stewards of that number, as EDs or even as development directors or development teams, we're stewards of those dollars. So what is this decision that is kind of in my way? Another one that comes up a lot is staffing. What hiring decision do I not want to make and why? Why don't I want to make that hiring decision? So that will often be one in that, in kind of that decision piece. Or who do I need to move on from? ⁓ Which none of us want to do, but sometimes we have to help folks get into the right.

Leya Simmons (15:02)
Right.

Erin Peshoff (15:22)
seat on the bus, as they say.

Leya Simmons (15:24)
So you mean like a decision you're putting off, essentially. Okay, yeah. Okay, so now capacity. Talk to me about that one. This is the one that for me feels like I probably hide from this the most. And I would imagine non-profit folks are the same.

Erin Peshoff (15:26)
Yeah.

Yeah,

it's a meeting. The meetings are always the capacity question. How much time of your week are you spending in meetings? Like what's the percentage of time? What does that look like? Do you need to be there? Are we having repetitious meetings? Are we having meetings just to have meetings? I was at a client site and they run a ton of events. I was helping them implement their project management system.

Leya Simmons (15:42)
Mm-hmm.

Erin Peshoff (15:59)
I couldn't get talking to people about how they actually want to implement it because they were all in these meetings. I'm like, what are you guys doing in there? Like, is there a big annual report happening? They're like, no, we were all talking about, you know, what the accommodations were going to be for for the entertainment at the annual meeting. I'm like, you needed 16 people in that conversation. Like the ED knew it. She knew it. She was on board. But getting people out of that meeting cadence and like that capacity piece, where are you actually like, where do you have to be?

Leya Simmons (16:07)
You

Erin Peshoff (16:28)
And a meeting audit is one of my favorite things to do. So I know it's awful, but I do love a good meeting audit.

Leya Simmons (16:34)
That's great, that's great. I just even like the sound of that, frankly. meetings are not my favorite. Meetings that don't accomplish things are not my favorite. I love a good meeting that gets something done, but leaving a meeting without having completed it, you can ask my team here, always like, so where did we get with this? Give me some action items from this meeting, because I cannot take that so much.

Erin Peshoff (16:43)
and

Leya Simmons (16:57)
And there's, yeah, I have to admit there's more than I, there should be, so I need to do some capacity consulting. All right, people. Talk to me about people.

Erin Peshoff (17:06)
Yeah, this is the hardest one. you know, let's just, my favorite one is, and this is in the book, it's who on the team is quietly looking at the door. So my team is quiet quit. They're still producing, like they're still gonna do okay on their reviews. It's still there, but who has like left the room? And I don't know about any of you who love to figure out humans, but you can always tell. Like if you really take a deep breath and look around those meetings and like just look, you know who's like,

Leya Simmons (17:15)
home.

Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (17:35)
about to bolt and you can feel it in their energy shift and the way they talk. They still might be doing their job on paper, but that is a big one with people like what's happening to my humans? What did I expect from them? You know, and some people love reviews, some people hate them. I go either way. And I think it's about like, your people feeling the cared for that they need to be able to be there? Because this is really hard work, like really hard work.

Leya Simmons (17:43)
Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (17:59)
Either if you're on the program side, it's what's happening. know, what if we can't do this? What does that look like? know, and if you're on whatever side you're on, there's a lot of hard stuff that happens and we care a lot. And a lot of folks in nonprofits could make a lot more money elsewhere. We know all of those things to be true. But when someone starts to like slowly drift, that's where it's the hardest part because you don't want to necessarily bring it up because you want to have that icky hard conversation or what happens if they do leave?

Leya Simmons (18:03)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (18:29)
or what happens if they do? Are they corrupting other people? Like what do all those places look like?

Leya Simmons (18:29)
Yeah, right. And that's the whole, yeah.

Okay, so just this is, well, we're gonna get to guidance on each one of these. So I'm not gonna jump ahead. So now we're at patterns. Tell me about.

Erin Peshoff (18:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

So what problems come up, the problem comes up every quarter. What do I notice every single quarter? Right? So here's a great example. I was ⁓ in charge of a campaign amount and there was a gift that someone had made that hadn't gotten entered into the database properly. So what they had done is they put it under this micro campaign that came between two, right? And then every time I'd run the report for the campaign to give to the board or the CEO or whatever, it would be like missing

$1.545 million. I still remember the number to this day. This was like 20 years ago, right? It wasn't, but they were like, well, we can't attribute it to this campaign because it doesn't actually go to this campaign, but we're counting it in our public total. So was like this stupid thing that came up every month. you know what we did? We built a dummy record and put the gift in it so that the number wouldn't, right? So what is the like tiny thing that if you just slowed down and stopped, because we'd be like, why is the, why are the numbers off? Like what, what we close?

Leya Simmons (19:13)
⁓ It's not a small number.

Erin Peshoff (19:38)
Like we would all forget it was like collective amnesia. And it was so frustrating because I would eventually be like, ⁓ we forgot that gift, you know?

Leya Simmons (19:45)
Yeah. It's also that those are those things too, where like if you were to have left or a couple of key people left, then the organization would truly have not known what was going on like that. gap. Okay, so now I want to like kind of go through your solutions for the problems that you've just identified. So I think that that's fascinating that you identified just even as you were thinking of this, that you did a weekly

Erin Peshoff (19:56)
Right, no idea.

Leya Simmons (20:13)
a Friday afternoon, which I've never really heard that, to not have meetings on Friday afternoon. I know that because I know people are wanting to leave and as an entrepreneur, I kind of work all the time, so I'm always like, I'm not gonna bother them on Friday, but.

I've never thought of it for myself because I'm in there working. ⁓ But I have heard like, you know, don't schedule meetings before 10 a.m. so you can ease in and all of these things. I'm not going to putting up those boundaries, but you do a weekly practice. It's not monthly, it's not daily, it's weekly. What made, I mean, I know you told us the story, but you continue it here in the Drift. So that's your guidance. Why weekly?

Erin Peshoff (20:38)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Weekly because it's enough accountability that it, and I also have a couple of monthly rituals and other things, but this is about weekly. It's enough accountability that I can like stay on track and pay attention to my goals, but it's not every day. Every day was too much. Every month wasn't enough because the world's moving really fast right now. I mean, we've said that for decades, but I mean, I've never seen a piece like this. And so it's like, okay, what happens next? Like, hold on tight, tight, tight, tight.

Leya Simmons (21:07)
It sped up for sure.

Erin Peshoff (21:14)
you know, what's happening with our kids and what's happening with social media, what's happening everywhere. so weekly became like a comfortable place because I like structure to my time. I'm an incredibly structured person. I always have been even when I was a little, little kid. Like if I'm having a bad day, I'm cleaning out a closet. Like that is what I'm doing. And so more rearranging furniture or something like that. My husband's like, what are you doing? But Fridays felt like a good time to like take a deep breath. So, and you know, you can't always block Fridays. I get it. But if you can take Fridays to actually like

close out, reset, get ready for the next week, the rest of your week is so much better. So I started doing this like about two months ago is when this whole idea started. And I started to think about like, what can I use to help because clearly I am missing things. And what really started it is that I'd had two really big engagements that I was working on, wonderful clients that were so cool and doing such good things. And I was working like 60 hours a week and I was getting nothing else done.

So I stopped talking to people, I stopped being creative, I stopped working on things, and then both of those projects were over and I was like, what just happened? right? And there's those seasons and time and that's totally fine, but by holding this time, even when things get busy, which they have been the last few weeks, I've had a lot of cool stuff going on, I was like, okay, I still have my time. ⁓ And by automating them, which we'll get to, that's like, it's just right there. It's like I had a little minion that helped me think about it. And that's been hugely helpful too.

Leya Simmons (22:17)
What now?

Yeah.

I and that is the promise of AI at its finest. think actually I love how you're you're leveraging that. we're we're gonna get there. But I do wonder like though and I also acknowledge that the Friday problem would have solved my Sunday night problem that I had a couple of weeks ago when I tried to take a weekend off. But you know you are or a lot of folks are pretty you know spent by Friday afternoon just exhausted from the week. Do you like if that were the case for somebody would you say maybe do this on Monday to kick your week off or

Or is it always Friday? You're structured.

Erin Peshoff (23:11)
I mean, for me, it's Friday and

I think it's also because you have to ease in. So don't, you're not gonna do everything at once. Like I started with one and then I added two and then I added three. It's like you wouldn't go to the gym and decide that you were gonna join the weightlifting competition or like I'm gonna win at the spin bike game. Like, no, that's not how it works. Like when you start to change your behaviors and there's also, I don't know if anybody's read Atomic Habits, but when you're changing your habits, this is about habit. This is about like, no one needs to tell me to brush my teeth. I just do that, right?

Leya Simmons (23:19)
Interesting. Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (23:40)
So for this, it's I want to be the kind of person who's growing, helping my clients grow, helping my partners grow. That's who I want to be in the world. Like that's how I would define my identity. So that means my habits need to support my identity. And when habits support your identity, they change the way you show up in them. That's the theory, right?

Leya Simmons (23:59)
That's incredible.

And you know, I can also see where once this became a habit on a Friday, even if you were exhausted, you get that kind of boost of energy because you're going to do something that you know is valuable that you appreciate that you probably enjoy, frankly. And so that's great. Okay. So you also in the, the drift, you distinguish between operating by reaction and operating by rhythm. know this is very important for you too. And I, and I love this because I can be quite reactive. So this is important for me as

Erin Peshoff (24:11)
Yes.

So, you know, Yeah, I need to see what you're saying.

Leya Simmons (24:29)
well, before a nonprofit leader whose, you their whole identity is often wrapped up in being responsive to staff, to donors, to everybody else that, you know, they're bored. What does that shift feel like at the beginning in the first, say, month?

Erin Peshoff (24:48)
super uncomfortable. You're going hate it. You're going to be why am I

doing this? I don't like it. Icky, icky, icky. It's like if anybody's ever run, like tried to become a runner, done couch to 5K or whatever, those first miles are atrocious, right? But then if you ever become a half marathoner or a longer distance runner, you're like, I just ran five miles. I'm good. You know, it's all about that muscle. I also think the thing that happens when leaders start to do these things is you give permission to your team to do them. So

Leya Simmons (24:57)
Yeah. ⁓ horrible.

Hmm.

Erin Peshoff (25:14)
If you carve out the time, if you are slower on your reactions, if you give that space, then guess what? Your team's like, ⁓ I can do that too. I can slow down. I can be the best version of myself. ⁓ And there's always a crisis. So, but unless you're literally working for like the Red Cross or doing crisis delivery, we always, what do we always say? You know, we're not, it's not rocket science. It's not this. It's incredibly important work, but like you get to decide how you want to show up. And which is a really big mental shift because we're told like,

Leya Simmons (25:42)
Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (25:43)
This is how a good nonprofit leader behaves. This is how a good development. These are the rules. Well, do the rules really work for you? Are they actually serving your organization and you? Those are really big questions that starting there is probably a better spot than like, what's the action step I have to take, you know? So.

Leya Simmons (25:59)
Yeah.

And that's so

true to, or I can see the impact and we all see the impact of it on our, ⁓ the turnover, you know, employee turnover rate with nonprofits within nonprofits is because I so often exit interviews say that it's, it's just sheer exhaust exhaustion. They are, they feel run down underappreciated and like have had, have just been tasked with too much. So if we could make that shift from the leadership place, like the spokes on the wheel, you turn one and all the rest of them start turning too.

of that too. ⁓ So you've mentioned AI a couple times and now you're going to tell us how you're going to leverage it because I, you know, I've talked a lot just being a technologist, being in tech and around ⁓ nonprofits, there's a healthy dose of fear of AI. And I mean, and there's plenty of headlines that support that fear, right? It's taking jobs, it's, you know, changing the world that we live in, it's going to reshape economies and all of these things. So how do you ⁓

Erin Peshoff (26:45)
No.

Leya Simmons (26:59)
You know, how do you approach that and how do you talk about AI to people that might be very AI hesitant to use a mild term?

Erin Peshoff (27:09)
And you are alone. So first things first, like everybody has permission to attack this new thing, however they want to. So I think the first is if you're not comfortable, it's okay. Because a lot of other people aren't comfortable. I was just talking to a friend who had been at Icon and she was saying there was so much about AI, but no one was actually showing anybody. Like, what do I actually do? Like give me a thing to do, right? Go in and do it. so here's the framing that I'm going to give you. And Dan Kershaw, he's a CEO out of Canada. He runs something called the Furniture Bank. He has a substack.

Leya Simmons (27:13)
Yeah.

know, tell me the steps.

Erin Peshoff (27:39)
Follow him. The other person to keep an eye on is ⁓ Tim Lockey, who runs the Human Stack. Those two folks are really talking about the human components of it and giving really cool practical examples. So if you're curious, there are two people to go check out. And Dan actually, his writing actually helped my thinking. So I learned a lot in reading his stuff. He talks about treating AI as your minions. You are Gru. So anybody who doesn't have children, just do a quick Wikipedia search and see what Gru is in charge of.

Leya Simmons (28:07)
Honestly, it's worth watching the

movie. Like just the first one is really good.

Erin Peshoff (28:09)
It is really fun.

the Minions movie, the Minions have no leader for a while. They're just out in the outer, out wherever they are. They're in like a cave. And someone will come along like Napoleon and they'll like go follow Napoleon along and bomb things, right? Or they'll do something crazy. You are the leader of the Minions. You need to tell these Minions what to do. And so the idea isn't to say, right, like this. That's a way to do it.

For me, it's become a what don't I like to do in my weeks and how do I find a little army of little minions that's gonna help me think it through. Now granted, am I sharing probably more than I, some people would be uncomfortable, absolutely. Am I doing everything perfectly? Nope. Are there ethical implications? Yes. So when Dan said, think about the measure of minions, I was like, okay, that will help me. So the first problem I needed to solve was my weekly tasks, my weekly meetings. Like what was I dropping?

What wasn't I doing? What wasn't I taking care of? And so I set up Claude Cowork, which is a little bit more fancy than the rest of Claude, but I set up Cowork and I attached it to my meetings. And I said, I need for you to write me a weekly meeting summary. It needs to include X, Y, Z, and I need you to do it this way. So I had to give it like intern level instructions. I also don't trust that exactly what comes back is true. So you're allowed to argue with Claude and you're allowed to say, Hey, that didn't work for me. So that's a bigger answer, but like,

Leya Simmons (29:26)
Right.

Erin Peshoff (29:33)
It's your they're your minions and you get to tell them how you want to work. And I think when that thinking started for me, especially with looking at, you know, all the ethical pieces, I've the books, I know what they are. My sister and I have environmental impact conversations all the time. She's a teacher. She hates this. We look at the leadership. All of those things are true, but I don't think it's going anywhere. And so you have a choice. You can decide that. No.

I'm having nothing to do with this. Or you can decide these are my ethical boundaries, regardless of what your organization's AI policy says, which is important and we need to follow those. like, what do I want to do and how do I want to use it? What works for me and what doesn't work for

Leya Simmons (30:13)
That's great. you know, I love that you, how to say, Erin, I don't know that I've ever heard anybody else say, look, it's okay, you're allowed not to use it. Like, it's just such a, you know, and again, you and I are both in technology spaces, so we may be more comfortable with these things and have been exposed to it for maybe a little bit longer. But you know, I understand that.

that kind of existential fear that exists. But I also like, I don't know what to do with it, you know, at the same time. But I love the permission. I think that that's actually a very good approach. And two, they're in my brain now. All my little agents are minions and that is going to forever make me happy. Okay, when you're talking about your decisions and you give some prompts, so again,

Erin Peshoff (30:53)
You

Leya Simmons (31:00)
Highlight to the link that we've got in the notes and in the chat. There's lots of AI prompts in here as well from Erin. And one of the ones your decisions prompt ends with keep it short, direct, no pep talk. The goal is closure, not reflection. I think that is probably the opposite of how most people approach whatever AI tool they're using or how they prompt. And, you know, it's funny because like,

Erin Peshoff (31:22)
Yeah.

Leya Simmons (31:26)
I do think like we've there's been these jokes now about that that you know, your your Claude or your chat GPT is your greatest cheerleader. It's just going to continue to validate it. But I have to think at some point we as humans are probably asking for that too, because it feels so good to get valid. It's the problem we have with social media and know silos and all of that. so you I love this prompt because it kind of breaks through some of that. But talk to me about that.

Erin Peshoff (31:43)
We do.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so you have to tell it what you want. Like if this is what you need, these are the things I don't want it to be bulleted. Literally, it doesn't know that, right? So AI streams in lots of different ways. I'm not going to go down that pathway because I'm not an AI expert. What I am is someone who cares about how systems talk to each other. So for me, if we're not direct and we're not telling people, then we're not going to get the output we're expecting. So think about it. Like if you've ever had an intern on your team, so I have, and

Leya Simmons (31:59)
Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (32:19)
The first time I did it, I had no idea what I was doing because I thought, well, they're of course gonna know that you don't show up for this meeting in a sweatshirt. Like, how would they not know that? You have to tell them you can't show up for the meeting in a sweatshirt. Like, you have to tell them, right? Like, fonts matter. Like, there are things we train people on when we're doing this work about, you know, I remember my, this was my very first ⁓ fundraising role. I was at the College of William & Mary and I was a graduate assistant paying my tuition and,

Leya Simmons (32:27)
like audibly

Erin Peshoff (32:46)
I was very distracted by the shiny objects. I was like, oh, there's this one thing on campus. Oh, this is fun. So I was running the class agent program. And for those of you who have never heard of a class agent program, I don't even know if they do them anymore. each class has an agent. And that person's job is to write the letter, the appeal letter to their class. Some classes want to write the letter and had it be very long and flowery. Other people wanted my template and just throw my signature on there. The theory was, so it's like 50 something classes. And I was in charge of getting this thing out.

Leya Simmons (32:57)
I wouldn't know that.

Erin Peshoff (33:15)
there was this really cool event happening for the big development staff on the Friday afternoon. was the same day my letters were to. And my boss sat me down. She's like, you can't go. And I was like, what? It's fun. I want to go. It doesn't matter. It'll get out on Monday. She's like, no. This office, we have a deadline. You set the deadline. You're going to sit here and get them out the door. I hated her for a really long time after that. But that's what discipline is. It's saying, these are the guidelines of my office. This is the way I want things done. And this is my expectation.

Leya Simmons (33:38)
Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (33:45)
I will often say to Claude, like, no, you're wrong, or you're being too this, or you're being too that. Sometimes it gets really snarky and I'm like, you need to be nicer to me because that's not okay. You have to teach it these things. That's not just going to note, regardless of what it was trained on. ⁓ I think part of using Claude, and they have some great trainings by Anthropic that are free that show you how to actually use it. Whether you're ChachiBT or Claude, I lean towards Claude just because I like the functionality.

Leya Simmons (33:55)
⁓

Erin Peshoff (34:13)
you have to tell it what to do. And if you don't slow down and tell it what to do, it is going to continue to give you the wrong answers.

Leya Simmons (34:20)
Do you think, I have, and maybe this is me and again, maybe I'm doing some component of it wrong, but like I find that I have to, those kind of boundaries or strictures that I put in, I have to continually reiterate them because they'll like creep back in at certain points. anyway, I don't know.

Erin Peshoff (34:36)
Yeah, are you using,

so no, we'll diagnose you later, but like, think setting it up from the get-go correctly, the memory, the projects, all of that indexing, it seems like annoying and like, shouldn't it just know? Doing that first actually has a huge impact on what you're gonna get back at.

Leya Simmons (34:45)
Yeah.

which I totally have not done

yet. So there we go, identified problem. Okay, so for somebody that's listening to us, those that are maybe not AI averse, but just, know, I haven't done it yet. I know it's out there. It's another, you know, Friday list thing to do. And I'd love to sit down and do this. Haven't had time, whatever. They've never used Claude or ChatGPT or any of those as that, you know.

I'm trying to use the word coworker because there's Claude cowork, that, you know, thought partner, I guess let's maybe that better word. What minion, there you go. It's my minion. ⁓ what is your very first Friday with your minions look like? Like, how does it go?

Erin Peshoff (35:20)
Yeah. Minion, Leah. Minion. Minion.

What's the thing that bothers you the most? So I have four. Mine were that I didn't know what the meeting said. It was, I was not measuring right fit for my clients. So I wasn't giving a good enough like ICP score for myself. So ICP is ideal client profile for you. it, this is an ideal donor, whoever you are, it doesn't matter. That was, I started there and then I started to look at how I was spending my time. So I was doing a time audit. So I have cloud connected to lots and lots of things like my calendar, like

Leya Simmons (35:30)
So.

Mm-hmm.

Erin Peshoff (35:57)
granola like my CRM, all of those things it can look at. Am I doing those things? And then I was also having it measure how I was doing on calls. So I had set for myself a set of goals around how I want calls to go, how I want to show up, what are my words, what do they look like? And I was actually having it measure for me, was I showing up the way I wanted it to. But I started with the weekly look at my granola transcripts. And then I added on, hey, let's do this ICP thing. I call it my generous funnel.

I have this wonderful client named Jen, and I built it around how I like working with her. And it has a score on a scale of one to 35 that tells me how did this work. So then I just kept adding on, and then I keep shifting it around. What does it look like? What does it feel like? Is it a call debrief? What happens after each of my calls? And I have a skill that says, debrief this phone call for me. Tell me what I have to do. Draft me an email. Don't create it for me.

Leya Simmons (36:47)
Hmm.

Erin Peshoff (36:51)
put whatever I need to put in my CRM and update my tasks in my project management system. And so I think it's what thing is driving you the most crazy, which is why the workbook, although has a lot of silly questions in it, it's not really silly because that's kind of how I got there. Like I had it reverse engineer, all right, you built me this scale, how do we do it? And that's where the book came from. But the workbook came from, but it's this really of like,

Let's do this and let's do this and let's do this. Let's find the first pain point that's really making me insane. So Leo, I would ask you, like, what's the thing at the end of the day after you've read through this? Like, what's the thing that makes you crazy?

Leya Simmons (37:26)
today or any day.

Erin Peshoff (37:28)
It's a stick one.

Leya Simmons (37:28)
You know what, honestly, my pick would be my to-do list. I have this terrible habit that's just left over from my analog days. And it's not a terrible habit, it's my habit. I like it. I have a very long list and it's combined my personal life, my professional life, and it's all these things that I need to get done. And it can be as small as, you know, ⁓ like write my kids calendar, know, school calendar onto my calendar, which I did have Claude do, and that was glorious because it was thing checked off.

Erin Peshoff (37:32)
Thank

Leya Simmons (37:57)
or up to make sure that I have this conversation with this developer about this upcoming module. And I think it's because I still like checking things off. Even though they disappear now, I don't actually still see them. But I would love to have that assessed. And I would love for Claude to come in and say, here's how I could help you with all of these outstanding tasks.

Erin Peshoff (38:23)
So I'm going to tell you exactly what I would put in if that were my issue. So the first thing I do is if it's pictures, if it's in a project management tool, if it's in your email, wherever it is, decide if you want to export it and pop it in the cloud or decide if you want to connect it. So is it a connectable tool? So whatever that might be. One. Two.

Leya Simmons (38:26)
Okay.

Not right

now. I could put it in Notion and make it a connectable tool.

Erin Peshoff (38:47)
Okay, well, that's an option, but don't let that slow you down. Don't let perfect do the enemy a good like.

Leya Simmons (38:50)
Right? That was

another part of my question is like where is somebody going to get stuck? And you're right, I might have gotten stuck right there. Like how am going to get this in there? Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (38:55)
You would have gotten stuck. So don't let that get you stuck. That's not the end goal.

Take pictures of it. mean, I'll sometimes take, I don't, right? Take pictures, put it in. Say, okay, take this. Tell me how long it should take a person. What's the time estimate that this should take a normal human being? This is what it normally takes me. These are my priorities and what I care about. Help me prioritize this list and organize it. And if you do connect it to Notion, you can actually then say, hey, put this into Notion and create me a working document.

Leya Simmons (39:00)
That's great. Yeah.

Yeah, that sounds exciting already. Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (39:25)
So, and then if you don't like what I came up with, I don't like that. This is what

I don't like about it. ⁓ I'll also say if a conversation starts getting like way too long. So if you're working on this and you're iterating forever, say, please give me a truncated version of this conversation and restart the discussion.

Leya Simmons (39:37)
Mm-hmm.

⁓ and then you're feeding Claude into a new chat that gets owned. ⁓ interesting. Wait, are you doing that piece in chat or in co-work?

Erin Peshoff (39:44)
Yeah. So that's more helpful.

I use cowork a lot. So here's how I have differentiated them in my head. chat has become more of a thought partner. Definitely that idea of going back and forth. Coworker are my minions, all of them. So when I look at my skills, I actually combined recently all four skills into one because I was finding there was repetition. But I needed to build all four so I could understand how they worked for me.

Leya Simmons (39:56)
Mm-hmm.

Erin Peshoff (40:11)
It's like those building blocks, right? So if the thing that's right now, the thing that would help is the tasks. You've got to know your first iteration, not going to be perfect. So even if I came in and built it for you and I'm like, I've done this, I'm not in your head. I don't know. I mean, I have no idea. I can give you guardrails. I can show you how to do things. But I can't necessarily say, like, this is going to work for you. So you have to give yourself that permission to say, again, we have a lot of permission slips today. Maybe that should be the name of the book.

Leya Simmons (40:19)
Right.

I think that's actually, frankly, maybe you should write up a permission slip that you attach to the workbook and then everybody gets one signed by Erin.

Erin Peshoff (40:47)
Yeah. You have permission. The only thing you're burning is credits. So as long as you're OK with whatever that budget is, and I'm not going to talk about my co-work budget. I think my husband can hear me. But it can get intense really quick. So that's why I say pick one thing so you can perfect it.

Leya Simmons (40:59)
It can get intense quick.

Hmm.

Okay, I love that. And I also love the consistent reminders that you've got of like, that this is not going to be exactly what you want the very first time. And I mean, honestly, that kind of, I don't know why, but that weirdly makes me feel a little bit better about AI that it's not perfect. Like, you know, that I guess it should make me feel concerned because I do think that there's probably too many people that rely on it too heavily. And, but that's why we see LinkedIn get so boring because, you know, the content all looks the same and people aren't taking the time to go through and, you know, do something about that.

that,

like we all have that ability, but not everybody's doing it. when I see those imperfections, it reminds me that there will always be a human in the mix, that our work as fundraisers never goes away, that there's the relationships that will always be required and everything else as well, because it's just not, AI is not a person. That's just a fact.

Erin Peshoff (42:00)
No, I was

thinking about that too. I was thinking about perfectionism in relation to this and why that's such a blocker for people. Like getting it wrong is really hard. And as a recovering perfectionist, totally get it. Like grew up with all of that stuff. And I was thinking about it in relation to why we get trained that way. So I remember I was, those were my first consulting assignments as a brand new consultant. was the youngest consultant at the firm for a long time. And I was given an independent school and I needed to work on their annual fund. And I was like kind of,

Leya Simmons (42:04)
Yeah.

It's scary.

Erin Peshoff (42:30)
overarching DOD interim. So I'm in there, I'm helping them, whatever. And I didn't see the last pass of the letters in the merch because it wasn't my day to be on site. I trusted that the people who had been doing this were going to do it right. Guess what? The mailing to 5,000 people went out with the wrong name and address. Right? I not only thought I was going to get fired from the firm, I thought the firm was going to get fired from the client. Like I was so upset and so stressed out because what we were taught is you have to be perfect.

Leya Simmons (42:46)
Brutal.

Erin Peshoff (42:58)
do the things, have the systems, do the stuff. So it's really hard, I think, as nonprofit people to break that. To break that, maybe I can try something and fail. It's very difficult to be allowed to fail.

Leya Simmons (43:10)
You're so right that we are as, you know, as technologists, we are very allowed and encouraged to fail forward, right? Like that is just something that, you know, I know, but I, I know that that when I first, my dev team crazy because I was terrified and I did that. I, Leah was one of, know, when it was really just me and two others with BetterUnite, I sent out an email that had just, I don't remember what was wrong with it, but it was horribly wrong. And I couldn't even do the cool thing of like, our intern made this mistake. Like it was the C, it was me. Like I did it.

Erin Peshoff (43:15)
Yeah

Leya Simmons (43:40)
It was 100%, me, I reread it, I sent it out, I made the mistake. And I was just mortified, but like, you know, my dev team was like, yeah, you know, got it wrong. And keep, you know, keep going, send another one or don't even bother. Like, that's okay. They, you know, the people that noticed, noticed and moved on. And it's just a very different relationship that I'm grateful to have both perspectives now. And I think it's also like nonprofits, there's so much weight to a lot of what we do too. Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (43:52)
You're going.

Yeah. And it's a muscle too. Yes. Yes.

So start with something tiny. Start with a little thing. Like your task list is not a big thing. It is a big thing to you because it rules your day, but that's not a thing that like impacts tons of people, right? Like what impacts you? So if you can start there and like build the little muscle of like, I made a mistake. I can try it again. what happens? Like it starts to get easier over time.

Leya Simmons (44:16)
True.

So I'm going off completely. This is nothing. are not a question that I sent to you in any way, shape or form, but I'm just now it's occurring to me curious. Like is there or have you encountered maybe even within yourself or other people that you've implemented these kinds of operational structures for? Is there any kind of like holding on that you find people doing to that long task? Like I feel like that I might miss my long.

taskless when it's gone, you know, or when it's dealt with because that's like a part of I've said this so many times like, I'm a mom and I'm an entrepreneur and all that means is that I'm very comfortable with a really long taskless. Like that sentence has come out of my mouth as a joke multiple times. And if it were just gone because I had minions dealing with it, I might feel a little sad. It's just occurring to me.

Erin Peshoff (45:10)
⁓

It's like something disappeared. Well, I see that all the time when people are implementing new databases because that means like, I no longer hold that in my head. So I was at a, forever ago, they were switching from something that doesn't even exist to Salesforce. And ⁓ my job wasn't the Salesforce implementation. It was like the thinking around it. And so I was at this organization and one woman was so rude. Every time I went into a meeting, she hated me. And it wasn't my fault. She didn't hate me. She hated the project and I get it. I was representing the project.

Leya Simmons (45:16)
Thank

Mm-hmm.

Erin Peshoff (45:40)
⁓ lots of therapy to figure all that out, but what about me? well, I went in one day early because I knew she got there really early and the rest of the team wasn't there for another hour. And I sat down at her desk and she like, gives me this look like, what are you, why are you in my space with the coffee? And I was like, we need to chat. We need to hear the grievances. Like we need to talk about what's happening. And what she said by the end, what I realized is that she was close to retirement and she felt like if she didn't have all this knowledge, she didn't have safety.

Leya Simmons (45:42)
I exactly, definitely decouple. ⁓

Hmm.

Erin Peshoff (46:07)
It's a

bigger question than like, am I letting go of this? It has to do with that idea of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like your base hierarchy isn't food and shelter. Your base hierarchy is employment and in this, in a capitalist society, do I have enough money to pay my bills? And so if something's going to rip that away from me, if it's going to, I know this works, you're taking it away. It's a very difficult thing to let go of. So don't start with the hardest thing either, you know, like.

Leya Simmons (46:12)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Erin Peshoff (46:32)
If that's the thing that's like, it's part of who I am as a person. I I used to be a diligent note taker. I had like beautiful notes, but I very nice handwriting. So was very proud of my notebooks and they were lovely. And I had a system. I now record all my calls and I don't take notes anymore. I write down the most salient points so nothing gets lost. But like my gorgeous notebooks, I had a whole ritual. Like once every couple of months I wrote it. Yeah, right. Because they were a thing. Like I loved my notebooks. My notebooks made me feel really happy and safe. But

Leya Simmons (46:38)
Mm.

Right in there. Yep.

still have some sacks back behind me that I just won't throw away. I don't know why. Yeah. Yeah.

Erin Peshoff (47:02)
The reality is they were slowing me down because then I was having to type notes, right? Same thing with, you know, when we started letting things go into our calendars or calendars being scheduled or, you know, all that stuff. Like I was a paper calendar girl for a long time, until I had too much and it wasn't serving me. So I think the question is, is it serving the you today or did it serve the you before? And so if it's not in service to where you are and growing your company and growing Berry Night and

Leya Simmons (47:11)
That's true.

Hmm.

Erin Peshoff (47:28)
serving all these nonprofits and throwing out new modules. If it doesn't serve them anymore, then you need to take a look at it.

Leya Simmons (47:34)
Absolutely. No, I love it. And frankly, I will say I would be fine with that task list going away. I'm just saying I could see that there could be, and there's probably something else that I can't think of right now in my world that I would absolutely feel ⁓ nostalgia, maybe that's the word for, or yeah, exactly. Like I don't, I don't, I think like losing an arm in some places, you know, like I don't have this thing that I'm very comfortable with that I've always used as a tool. The note taking is interesting. I find myself, I still hold my pen. I have not taken a note in a year or two years or

Erin Peshoff (47:49)
Yeah.

Hey, no.

Leya Simmons (48:04)
whenever we started all this, but I still have my pin right here ready for whatever. I don't know, I even write checks. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with this pin.

Erin Peshoff (48:09)
I know. One of the groups I'm

in, ⁓ one of the mentorship groups I'm in, is they don't let you have note takers. So they have requested that none of us have note takers because it's a safe space. And so that one's been hard because my handwriting will get messy. like, what is happening right now?

Leya Simmons (48:25)
I used to do this all

the time. So funny. I don't know what I would do if I had to do, if I had to like manually take notes right now. I used to have a great system. Okay, so I have, I want to give, I've got two more questions that I want to get to, so and we're getting close.

You gave a clear instruction. said pick a single domain one, not all four, like just, just the single one. And you even went more granular than that and said just one thing in within that domain. ⁓ for, for those of us that are completionists, like, you know, I really need to like tick off my task. I need that done right. why is picking just one so important? Why, why, why can't we just dive in or jump in, jump in with both feet?

Erin Peshoff (49:09)
Well,

you can't. So if you wanna do that, again, or permission slips, you have that permission. What I'll say is what I've watched with people is that they get really frustrated. And so if you don't start with the one thing you can do, you're less likely to go back. We can't strip off, it's like when someone decides to try a new diet or whatever. You can't go all in all at once. There's a reason why people can't quit smoking. There's a reason why we have programs for other addictions. can't, turkey without any support is really, really hard. With the same thing with that,

Leya Simmons (49:11)
That's right, permission slips.

Mm. Yeah.

Yeah. No, yeah, you can't remove tools

without giving another one, so.

Erin Peshoff (49:40)
Right.

you've got to like, and busy doesn't mean like then replace all that busy with like becoming best friends with cowork. Like that's not right. My cowork actually tells me to stop sometimes. So if that tells you how much it's like, stop working. And I was like, stop telling me what to do, you know, close the laptop. And I'm like, you're not allowed to use that phrase anymore. But, you know, like if you're a person with a lot of ideas, you can also create a parking lot. So if you brainstorm this and you're like, I could do 856 of these. Awesome. Why don't you do one today?

Leya Simmons (49:51)
Ooh.

Erin Peshoff (50:09)
And then if that works for you, learn from it and then do the next one. So take your 856 ideas. You can actually pop them into cowork and say, which or into cloud or chat or chat, whatever, and say, which of these would have the biggest impact on my work? You know, so you can have a bazillion ideas and that's great. What I've seen though for myself and for others is that you tend to then sort of get frustrated and you don't do it correctly. So choices, choices, but like.

Leya Simmons (50:23)
⁓ Yeah

Erin Peshoff (50:37)
one at a time seems to be a better way to attack.

Leya Simmons (50:40)
And you know, I don't, I mean, I don't know about you, but my task these days, it's like, okay, here's my defined task. And I go and I take the first step in that task and that step opens five other new tasks. And then that new, each one of those opens another five. And so having that organization in some external tool that's like, you know, there's those that are my minions there to serve sounds just really wonderful. And I mean, again, I've admittedly used enough to know that this does work and that I can do those things. So I really do love that piece.

Erin Peshoff (51:06)
No.

Leya Simmons (51:10)
Okay, so now you've like described, okay, know, just like, like I loved your analogies to a diet or working out, you can't jump right into the deep end, you have to take, let's go step by step. But what is, you know, what do you expect to see on week four, if we've, you know, taken our appropriate progressive steps?

Erin Peshoff (51:29)
that it's time then to take a look at it and see if it's actually doing what you wanted it to do in week one. So when you get to week four, is this what you were hoping for? Has this taken the pressure off? Has it released some of that valve? Or has it become another like crutch to get in the way? I think that happened to me. was, you know, I had to sort of say like, I love ideas. Like if I could be a professional brainstormer, it doesn't exist. I looked it up. I totally would. Like,

Leya Simmons (51:33)
I also assess.

Hmm.

Do you see that happening a lot? really? ⁓

Erin Peshoff (51:57)
I would love to just sit with people and be like, okay, you have an idea, let's figure out how to do the idea. So I actually this morning did an audit on myself because I'd had so many cool ideas and so many things I want to do and ways I think like Vivian could serve the space and like, how can I help people with this stuff? I'm so excited. I actually went through and had it take my project management software and it didn't audit on it for me. And it was like, this is no longer matching what you were trying to do. So what you said you wanted to build the firm around, you are diverting. So is the diversion and...

Leya Simmons (52:21)
Hmm.

Erin Peshoff (52:27)
appropriate choice or is it not? when I built out the weeklies and I did them for a month, that's when I kind of condensed them into one, because I saw the repetition. Like this task was telling me the same thing as this task. So I was like, okay, now it needs to be one thing that runs every Friday. And I liked the morning better. I was running them in the afternoon, but then it gave me the rest of day to sort of reflect on them. So that's what I mean. Like you have to just make yourself like, you can't treat it like a set and go until you've kind of gone through the

I mean, for you, would be like QA on software, right? Like have I gone through the QA process on my software and have I done it?

Leya Simmons (53:02)
I'm very excited about this, This is just like, I have taken so much from all of this personally, me, Leah. don't know, this was not intended, this five-o-one-ton drop was not intended to be the Leah Simmons therapy show, but it feels like that in my head.

Erin Peshoff (53:12)
You

Leya Simmons (53:18)
But okay, so everybody else listening, if there is one thing, this is always my favorite last question, one small thing and one step maybe that they take today to move forward. Everybody's in a different place, I know, so I have no idea how you answer this, but if they were to take one thing away from today, what all we've talked about, what would that one thing be?

Erin Peshoff (53:36)
Pick the one thing you want to try with. Pick one thing to start with. Don't try to do everything. Don't try to feel like you have to have a perfect coworker, perfect quad, or perfect gem night. Just pick one thing and try it and test it and figure it out. actually, and I didn't tell you this, but decided this morning in my audit, I'm going to every Wednesday from now for the next two months, I'm going to take an element of these questions and I'm actually going to build it on LinkedIn Live. So I'm going to go on and I'm going to explain to people, is, have, I've been setting up some like accounts so everything stays private.

Leya Simmons (53:59)
⁓

Erin Peshoff (54:05)
but I am going to every Wednesday. Now I'm committing to it, so I have to do it. I'm gonna go and build out, this is a pattern. Like I'm a nonprofit executive director. I have two characters. They're both named after For Good from Wicked. So wait to see them. But once, you know, and I'm gonna build, actually, these are the steps that I would take to do this. These are the outputs. So I'll do that. I'm gonna start recording them so people can start to see like practical uses of these tools without them being outsized and really focused on our community and on our nonprofits. So that starts next week.

Leya Simmons (54:09)
Yes, that's how it happened.

There you go.

Erin Peshoff (54:34)
I will share that with you as well, but I think that will, let's start to talk about what's working for us and what isn't. Like, let's be okay with the fact that this, we're gonna make mistakes along the way.

Leya Simmons (54:44)
That's right. And to your point about AFP icon, the, you know, and I've been to plenty of conferences myself as well, where we hear these beautiful thinkers, they're wonderful thinkers, they're the people that are building out a lot of these things. And there's like a lot of esoteric talk about AI, but very little very practical.

⁓ you know, step-by-step guidance that, you know, filters to what I'm doing exactly. So I really love this idea, Erin. Okay, we will put in the show notes not only the link to the Drift, but also to your LinkedIn, since that is going to be important and we all need to be watching that as well. I love it. it's gonna be amazing. I'm 100 % sure.

Erin Peshoff (55:19)
Yeah, I will see how it goes. a little nervous, but I think it'll be fun. And if anybody has anything

that they really would like to see built, I have my ideas to let me know. Do you have anything? Yeah, let's figure this out together. Like community is a big, important piece of this. We're all in it together and it doesn't need to be isolating. We're allowed to share ideas, you know?

Leya Simmons (55:28)
I will be joining myself, so I can report back.

It really is.

That and too, like I really do hope, my deep belief and my strong hope is that this new technology has come along to be our minions, to give us more time for community so that we get to do the other stuff that none of us have, we've all been too busy to do. I really hope we land there. I feel like there will be bumps. I'm 100 % sure of that too. But I'm very, very hopeful that that's where we land.

Erin Peshoff (56:02)
yeah.

Leya Simmons (56:05)
Erin, thank you so much for today. I cannot appreciate you anymore. I just shared, if you're watching ⁓ Erin's information, if you've got questions for her, go ahead and send those to Erin at viviestudios.com. We've got the, the show notes, we're gonna have the her, Erin's LinkedIn, which you definitely need to follow. And we will, and you also mentioned to other people that I will make sure that gets in there too, that I can't think of right now, but there was something about cabinetry.

Erin Peshoff (56:07)
Thank you.

I'll

get it to you.

Leya Simmons (56:34)
Thank you.

It's going to be in the notes. Don't listen to what I'm saying. also, but if you also are, would like to, or maybe you're listening to a podcast support at betterunite.com, can always email your questions there. We'll make sure that Erin gets those back to you. And next week, if you are joining me again, we are going to have Ryan Waraneky from Feather. Erin, you know Ryan, don't you?

Erin Peshoff (56:58)
and I was just like,

he's one of my favorite people. What a great guy. Love him. Yeah.

Leya Simmons (57:00)
He's such a sweetheart and such a bright guy and now is at

Feather, ⁓ a marketing group and he is going to be talking about how you can grow your event attendance with revenue and revenue, the event attendance and revenue with digital ads, well-placed, intelligently placed digital ads. So that happens next Tuesday, May 19th at 1.30 Central as always here on Riverside. So you've got a QR code here that you can scan. That's also in the show notes. And if you heard Erin talking about Better Unite and it piqued your interest, we would love to show

you around so scan that QR code or email us at betterunite.com and learn more about Better Unite. Erin, thank you so much again for joining us. I really appreciate it. Everybody else go have an incredible rest of your day and let's all go do some good. Bye bye.

Erin Peshoff (57:38)
Thank you.