In a crisis, we often discover that we can do things we’d never imaged we could.
In this pandemic, companies that have told staff for years that they can’t make working at home work have discovered that in fact, they can. Tony Crabbe discovered that he could write a book in 16 days, and Hachette discovered that they could publish a book three weeks after it was delivered.
In this week’s conversation Tony reflects on what he (and his family) discovered about working at that intensity, and shares some of the insights from the book about how to live and work more productively and with less stress in these extraordinary times.
We also talk about what really restores us, and how we can navigate our way out of crisis and into a new, better normal.
LINKS:
Tony’s site: https://tonycrabbe.com/
Tony on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tonycrabbe
Alison on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bookstothesky
PI-Q webinar The Upside of Downturns with Nick Suckley: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/114453734200
See all PI-Q webinars and replay links: https://practicalinspiration.com/pi-q
The EBBC Summer Reading List 2020: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/34626998-alison-jones?shelf=ebbc-summer-reading-list-2020
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Virtual Writing Retreat only: https://pi-q.learnworlds.com/course?courseid=virtual-writing-retreat-summer-2020
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Tony Crabbe, who is a business psychologist who works with companies, such as Microsoft, News Corporation and Salesforce around the world. As a psychologist, he focuses on how people think, feel, and behave at work. And his first book Busy: How to thrive in a world of too much, was an international bestseller and was cited as one of the top three leadership books of 2016 in a global book award.
In his most recent book, Busy@Home, Tony explores how to approach this pandemic period, positively, seeing it as a chance for a reset and an opportunity to reimagine how we live. Welcome to the show Tony, or should I say welcome back to the show?
Tony Crabbe: Ah, great to be here Alison.
Alison Jones: It’s lovely to have you, but you were actually one of my first guests. You were on episode 24, I was looking back, which was 2016 of course, when Busy came out.
Tony Crabbe: Yeah, well, it was such a good experience first time I thought it would be lovely to speak to you again.
Alison Jones: Three, four years have gone, it’s time… and it is really interesting. So I mean, this, the whole thing is just so fascinating. I’don’t know where to start, but just start by telling us how Busy@home came about and why it’s not quite your normal book.
Tony Crabbe: Yeah. Well, Look, I hadn’t intended to write it. I was actually working on what I thought was going to be the second book. And I was sort of elbow deep in that and a bunch of projects and the publisher got in touch with me and just said, look Tony, people are really struggling. And this is quite early days of the lockdown. People are really struggling and we think it would be, there’s a lot of stuff in Busy that could be really helpful. Would you be willing to do a, I guess a revision of it, for specifically for the lockdown. And my first response was ‘heck no’. we’re grappling with, you know, trying to figure out how school was going to work for the kids.
We’ve got three kids. We were, you know, there’s a whole bunch of things on, but
Alison Jones: Did you actually use the words I’m too busy?
Tony Crabbe: I don’t think I did. I don’t think I’m allowed to Alison having written a book called Busy. It’s kind of, you know, it’s one of those, it’s one of the common jokes that people put around me, but really, it would be a bit wrong of me to use the term. But you know, it felt my first response was no, but it just stayed with me all night and it was nagging away. I actually didn’t sleep that well that night, because it felt like, you know, as we, I think as all of us at the start of the lockdown and it was particularly severe in Spain, we’re kind of, we’re wrapped ourselves up in our, you know, behind our four walls and it felt like something I could do that would make a contribution beyond my little safe bubble as it were.
So, yeah, so I ended up choosing to do it, and it was an intense experience to put it together, but it was, it felt a good thing to do.
Alison Jones: And just give us a sense of the timescale.
Tony Crabbe: So from start to finish, it took me 16 days to write. And the, yeah, so from never having thought of doing the book at all, to finishing the book, I think it’s 200 pages long. It took me 16 days. And the other thing I would say is while the publishers initially pitched, a bit of a re wording and re editing, the minute I started, it just didn’t feel right to just edit. And so effectively, I just started from scratch and wrote a brand new book. Albeit I was leveraging, I wasn’t starting from scratch with the research. I had a bunch of research from Busy, but also I had to do quite a lot more research for this book. So, yeah, so it was an intense project.
Alison Jones: And then in terms of the publishing, so 16 days for you to deliver the manuscript and then what happened after that?
Tony Crabbe: Well, it was interesting because it was a real team effort.
So I mean, I obviously couldn’t have done it on my own. And so my wife was much more involved than she was even in the first book. So she was madly researching stories about COVID, you know, evidence, studies that would be relevant. And then she would be doing first edits of everything, before I sent everything over and we had both my UK or international publishers in the UK. And then, my Dutch publishers who were editing as things came in. So I was actually, as I was writing chapters, I was also having things sent back to me to respond to, to keep the kind of wheels in motion, especially as we wanted to publish in English and Dutch at the same time, because I’ve got a big following in the Netherlands.
And so we wanted to give the translators time to publish and it took, interestingly, it actually ended up the Dutch publishers published. I think about 10 days after I finished writing and in the UK, it came out and actually, it came out about three weeks after. So it was a pretty quick project.
Alison Jones: It’s insane Absolutely. It’s incredibly fast. And the book trade is, it doesn’t turn things around fast. You know, the whole book supply chain is predicated on sort of six month lead times for book, but the whole, everything changed, didn’t it? Because the bookshops weren’t open anyway. So there was no point working to that shchedule.
Tony Crabbe: No, I think Alison look it’s not just a publishing industry thing. I noticed it, you know, you mentioned some of the clients I’ve worked with, but one of the big experiences they had at Microsoft is how unprecedented levels of agility come in, in a period like this, where people are just some of the rules and some of the given assumptions get thrown out of the, out of the, whatever, out of whatever you throw something out of.
Alison Jones: That’s usually a window, but yeah, that’s the one,
Tony Crabbe: So, yeah, and I think that was the way in the publishing industry. They just said, look this is a unique time. We want to, you know, it feels, I think we all felt it was a bit of a strange project to do, because to write a book that probably only had a shelf life of about three months, maybe four months was a kind of crazy thing to do anyway. but yeah, but we all chose to do it and, and everyone, you know, the publishers, both in the UK and the Netherlands were phenomenal.
Alison Jones: So tell me about what it was like to write in that kind of white heat. And what did you discover about yourself, about writing?
Tony Crabbe: Yeah. Well, I know, I knew from Busy that I write best in a kind of monk-like way. So I don’t, I think some, some journalists or some writers rather can kind of do this an hour a day, two hours a day thing. It doesn’t work for me really. I’m kind of almost best locking myself away and almost not washing for three days.
But you know what I mean? I kind of, I mean, I wrote the first book in a garden shed and I kind of would lock it.
Alison Jones: I was just remembering that, that was your tip, wasn’t it? Find your shed?
Tony Crabbe: Yeah. And you know, I would be in there for three days and I’d at the end, you know, before I’d go in there, I would have planned all the chapter, and, you know, had my research at my fingertips, but then I would just literally lock myself away for three days and write it and then I’d come out and kind of catch breath. Of course, this was a little different because I didn’t have time to catch breath. And it sounds terrible. And I shouldn’t say this story cause it just sound terrible. But one of the things that I’d find is, you know, I’d be writing and then I’d come downstairs and then there’d be a good news story about, Oh, fewer people have died, and I’ve kind of think, Oh, I better start writing again because there was this kind of massive urgency to kind of get the book to market while it was still relevant.
But the, I think the thing that really, cause it was really, I was working 13 hours a day of solid writing. I mean, I was at my desk at seven in the morning and I was writing through till, you know, whatever, nine o’clock at night with breaks through the day. And, it was, I’ve never, never done anything like it before.
I probably will never do anything like it again. But it was ,the thing I think I learned was because I was so clear, I felt more of a purpose to this because I think in the early days of the lockdown, particularly, there was so much anxiety and fear. There was so much going on for people that, and I really felt it was my contribution that.
That the energy didn’t lag in the way you would expect it to lag, because I just felt, it actually is interesting. There’s a lot of research even from, Carol Dweck, who’s one of the leading psychological researchers at the moment. What we use to think of willpower as being this sort of limited thing that would run out.
What she’s found is that actually, when people have a real clear goal and strong purpose that actually they’re able to, to achieve, you know, the normal sort of drop in attention span that happens through the day for a lot of us can keep going longer than expected. So it was, so that was, you know, that was the big learning. I think the kind of combination of building on the monk-likeness of the first thing, that kind of real clarity of purpose and the real strength of purpose made a huge difference and of course my whiteboard helped. I was kind of constantly, editing. It was like building a plane while flying it.
What I would be doing is I’ll be writing, but then of course because I was, I hadn’t intended to write. I would suddenly come across some great research or a great insight or Dulcie and I would have a conversation that kind of gave us a new perspective on what was going on that would need to be fed through.
And so there was a degree to which it was, it was constantly re jiggling while writing. So yeah, it was fun. I have to say there were a few tears shed once I went around to my inlaws, at the point that I finished literally within an hour of finishing, and my mother-in-law showed particular.
You know what, acknowledgment of what I’ve done and interest in how I was feeling and that kind of triggered a few tears, out of exhaustion, but it was, yeah, it was a good thing to do.
Alison Jones: Yes. It’s only when you stop doing something like that, that your body sort of realizes it needs to just collapse for a little while, doesn’t it.
Tony Crabbe: Yeah, that was, that was very much, yeah, that was very much the case.
Alison Jones: Amazing. And I mean, I can’t help thinking, as well about the kind of the irony in here is that one of the things about lockdown is so many of us have such fractured experiences and, you know, in a sense, you’re very lucky to be able to go and lock yourself away and work in that sustained period of time. You know, what was the kind of family dynamic around that because you talk and what I loved about the book actually is you bring your family into it so much. We very much get the sense that we’re kind of in there with you when you’re talking about, you know, things that you’re doing as a family and stuff. So, I mean, there’s a sort of inherent tension there, isn’t there between making that experience as good as it can be for your family and simultaneously locking yourself away for 13 hours a day.
Tony Crabbe: So yeah, the irony is not lost on me. I mean, to, you know, while I’m not allowed to say busy, but to have done the, kind of the crazy amount of work and the cutting myself away, you know, isn’t in line with pure kind of generic busy, busy thinking, but the,
So, yeah, so there were sacrifices made, you know, when I’m working that amount of time, I wasn’t able to do as much support for the kids over their education. We kind of, the house got kind of chaotic . You know, we lived on pizza again and tuna pasta, you know, so we made sacrifices, because it wasn’t even just me, Dulcie was pretty heavily involved in the project as well. And look, the kids were terribly proud of, and one of the things they did after the first book came out, they came to see me at some, big talk they’re terribly proud of the first book that they were very supportive and understood what I was doing. But still, but one of the, it was interesting.
One of the things that I found that I could do is of course I need breaks and the kids were just phenomenal at just turning my breaks into play times. So we’d kind of, I wrote one of the sections about kind of take a break, build a lightsaber, and from a psychological perspective, taking a break, just to go and sit and have a cup of tea or coffee actually makes us more tired over time. Sedentary, caffeine breaks don’t really rejuvenate us. And naturally, because I wanted to kind of try and get this balance, we would go down and start doing, you know, I remember kind of writing some terribly serious part of the book. The next minute I’m outside on the terraces being dressed up as a Darth Sith Lord, as a Sith Lord, having to kind of slick my hair back and speak in a very scary voice and actually looking rather creepy, if I’m really honest, because Ben and Sarah were making a video of a movie about Star Wars and that kind of, those transitions, were super helpful. And so, yeah there were certainly sacrifices and we got sloppy.
And one of the things that I encourage people to do through busyness is about the philosophy of busyness isn’t around relaxing on a beach, or isn’t around having everything perfectly smooth or being on top of everything. It’s actually the reverse, it’s to say, to actually really achieve in things that really matter to us, whether it’s the people that we love, you know, being with the people we love most or the career or whatever it is, we do have to accept sloppiness is going to enter part of our lives and I do I talk about this a bit in the book. And so our lives got terrifically sloppy. and I wasn’t the most perfect father in that time. And quite frankly, the kids got a bit less attention than we that we would like, but we talked about it and we all agreed. it was a good thing. So, yeah,
Alison Jones: I did love the phrase, you used that wonderful phrase in the book, butterfly moments as well, which really resonated with me. Do you want to tell that little story? That’s beautiful.
Tony Crabbe: Yeah. So there’s look, it was a few years ago. It was actually, well, it was around the time I wrote the first book and at the time Sarah, my daughter, who’s now 10 would have been five, probably five or six. I can’t remember how old she was, but I came down from the office and I’d been, I was working on something. I can’t remember what it was, but I was feeling terribly busy and she wanted my attention and I was in the middle of saying, wait a minute, Sarah. And as I rushed off in my busy and importance, or busy self-importance, and I caught myself in the act of pausing my daughter rather than pausing my busy-ness and I stopped. And actually what she wanted, is she wanted to dance and so we danced and quite frankly, we danced probably for 30 seconds. And then she was done as a four/five-year-old /six year old. She would, you know, 30 seconds of dancing with daddy is quite enough thank you very much. And she skipped off happily, but it was one of those… it was a beautiful butterfly moment that kind of, for all, it was only, it was brief. It was just a moment, a sort of a beautiful shaft of joy and, and it stayed with us. And actually, funnily enough, she now. because I’ve told the story a few times, she’s heard me tell the story a few times.
She now calls herself the butterfly girl. we’ve even actually we had as a present, a local, sculptor actually, funnily enough, made us, a friend of ours, made us a butterfly that we now have hanging proudly up after the story. But it’s one of the things that we know about happiness is happiness has two components effectively. There’s the stuff that we, pursue, that we achieve, that we, when we look at our lives and assess our lives and ask ourselves how good is our life. That’s, you know, that’s about the things that we achieve, the things that we have accomplished, which is about relationships, longterm relationships, and, you know, and the house where we live, all that kind of stuff.
But there’s also the second part of happiness, which is those moments, the sort of three-second window that is our present moment. and you know, and butterfly moments and identifying and getting better at capturing and noticing those is an important part of happiness as well.
So, yeah, so the butterfly moments and I put, I actually kind of, one of the things that we talked about in the family and we sort of developed. Then an earlier version that made it into the book is what I call the Covid Compass, which is just an encouragement for people to think about what they want or what they want to get from the kind of the Corona crisis as a Compass if you like, and the North star is the stuff you want to achieve both in work, you know, and West is work stuff. East is life stuff. And so the North stuff is the stuff that you want to work towards, the goals, the positive ways you want to move those relationships forward, et cetera.
But the Southern Pole is just, what are the experiences you want? What are the butterfly moments? What are the joyful experiences that you would hope to achieve or hope to experience through this period, and that tends to take you into more into a kind of playful mode? so yeah, that’s part of the butterfly story.
Alison Jones: It’s lovely. And it’s so true that actually so much of happiness, but also just productiveness is about being in the moment and being. You know that guilt. I think that you’ve, I’m thinking most working mothers feel it all the time. And I think working fathers are feeling it more and more these days as well because of the lack of separation.
But actually it can be mitigated to a huge extent if you are fully doing what you’re doing in any moment. So even if you can’t be with your kids as often as you’d like to be, if you’re fully with them when you are and not checking your phone or whatever, that goes a long way, doesn’t it? Because as you say, kids particularly don’t want it for that long.
They just want all of you while they want you.
Tony Crabbe: Yeah, they absolutely do. They want all of you there, you know, and they will understand, you know, periods where you have to be away, but they do want all of you, but you touched on an important point though? It’s funny. I was in a, post-writing the book I was in a conversation on a project I was doing with Microsoft and there were some folk, some people from PepsiCo there and they were doing some analysis, about who the crisis is affecting most. And they were saying the people that are experienced in most stress are a lot of their female leaders and I think one of the things that I touch on, but one of my kind of the things I’ve become more and more aware of, is the disproportionate effect that the crisis can have on different communities.
Like, you know, and working mothers being a particular one, especially during the time when those, and one of the things they were saying is they were finding a lot of those leaders had sort of made the balance work that enabled their kind of high flying career with children. because they could hire support in the house at a cost that wasn’t available through COVID-19 and all of a sudden, they were in this kind of crunch where there was massive pressure from work, but also this kind of massive sense of guilt that was coming from the kind of not being able to be on top of some of the, stuff that they would expect to be on top of at home if you like. yeah. So it’s, I think quite frankly…
Alison Jones: It’s the whole thing about being the default parent. Yes. I mean, there’s another whole podcast episode here isn’t there,
Tony Crabbe: There really is, and it’s kind of, it is one of the things that I think organizations are going to have to grapple with as we move more beyond COVID but into our kind of sustained hybrid reality, is that there are disproportionate effects. There are, you know, and we’re already, we’ve already seen a drop of 27% in investment in diversity and inclusion kind of practices in many organizations, as people, as organizations kind of get into this sort of crisis management piece, some of the longer term stuff isn’t happening, but of course especially, you know, even stuff that’s going on in the States at the moment, but also just with the more kind of gender based stuff.
There’s… It needs attention. It needs attention organizationally.
Alison Jones: Well, this leads on beautifully actually to another question I was going to ask you, which is post-pandemic. And we were still very much in it. We’re not in those uncertain, intense, early days . We’re sort of grinding, lurching forward into coming out and going back in again.
And there’s a different sort of uncertainty and it’s a much muddier, murkier sort of uncertainty. What are your predictions for how we work as we come out of this and in the future.
Tony Crabbe: Well, look, I’ve got a few thoughts. I think first is I think everyone’s talking at the moment about how much everything’s going to change.
My biggest fear is very little changes, which might sound strange for someone that’s written a book like I’ve written. I think, this could be a once in a lifetime. Please god, it’s a once in a lifetime kind of thing. and one of the things that we know is super valuable for perspective giving, for creativity is distance, psychological distance from things.
So even just leaning back, for example, in your chair helps you solve problems better, even just raising the height of a ceiling, makes you more creative and more strategic thinking. And we’ve all been given a degree of distance from our lives or at least our working lives as we sort of, we sit back at home and sort of look on and I really worry, and so many people tell me so confidently at the moment, Oh, everything’s going to be different. You know, meaning about their personal habits, when they say, Oh, we spent all this time with our family through the crisis, you know, it’s lovely. Those habits are going to change and I’m not going to go back to my busy way of life and everything in psychology tells us that’s unlikely to happen, even though they feel really robust that have developed through the lockdown, if you like. Will, you know, habits are very context dependent and likely it is, we’re going to snap back to those. Unless we take the moment to really reflect on, you know, what was.
Before all this kicked off, what was working really well and what wasn’t, and then compare it. So booking.com do this AB test and they’re constantly comparing, you know, two things, you know, we were in this perfect AB test, so having a chance to reflect. Is going to be, but that only happens if we’re intentional about reflecting, comparing, and contrasting and therefore creating a life afterwards.
The second thing is I actually, funnily enough, you know, I’ve talked about the hybrid reality. So the digital acceleration, if you like that, we’ve been in for many years, they reckon accelerated five years in the first eight weeks of lockdown. So we are going to be in a world where we work more from home, that’s just for many of us, that’s going to be the reality, partly because economically it just makes such sense. The kind of the, again, the watch out for me is that we apply the lens of attention to the way that happens. If all we do, if organizations, all they do is see it as there’s a kind of practical way of keeping fewer people in the office, for virus or even to save costs then we’re really missing out on, because on the opportunity, because quite frankly, there are certain things we do really, really well from the quiet space of being at home, if you like, and we know productivity on the whole from home is higher, when it is individually, but there’s so much stuff that we’ve got to do collaboratively and being really, so creating a new way of talking and thinking about the kind of things we do in the office of outside and being much more conscious of the contextual nature of cognition is going to be really important.
Alison Jones: Yeah. I’d like to think that when we get together, we do so more purposefully because there’s an awful lot of being together time that’s just default time and sort of pointless meetings and so on. It’d be nice to think that we did come together, but we did it with real purpose. And, you know, for the things that being together really works for like creative collaboration and team building, that kind of stuff.
Tony Crabbe: Or even purposelessness, useful purposelessness. I don’t think that’s a word, but anyway, but so Bank of America famously synchronized coffee breaks, just because they realized that people were getting so purposeful, that they squeezed out all of the, kind of the smalltalk, all of the, the chit-chat about the weekend, et cetera.
And what they found is when they just synchronized those kind of, you know, meaningless social interactions that ended up being the, kind of the lifeblood of informal communication in organizations, their profits rose by 15 million. and so, you know, there’s a degree to which when we go back to the office, part of it should be, cause work has a social function as well as that is super important for the bonding, for inclusion, but also for connection to a sense of meaning to work and so I think, seeing the office as both, a place for collaboration, purposeful collaboration and kind of creativity, but also see it as a social hub for where I just connect to the sense I have a meaning in my work, is going to be super important and then allowing people to dive deep into the individual productivity that many of us have been missing over the last sort of decade when we’re out of work is going to be important.
I also, by the way, as an aside, I predict a really ill- conceived, unsensible consumer boom. You know, we all know a recession’s coming, but what psychology tells us is something called risk homeostasis, which, you know, that kind of when you reduce risk in a certain area, you tend to take more risks in other areas. I think we’re so focused on mitigating risk in so many aspects of our lives.
I would predict that kind of pent up lack of, or pent-up risklessness is going to get expressed in kind of a bit of a dumb, albeit dumb consumer boom. So I would expect to see, as people start coming out, that we’re going to see people going out and spending money that they don’t really have and will probably pay for it in six months.
So I would, I would caution everyone against that.
Alison Jones: Yeah, depressing, but sadly, yeah, really, really realistic way that things could pan out. You can see it already, really can’t you, people, just sort of going out and spending or sitting at home and spending in fact, because they feel like they’re compensating for not going out.
Tony Crabbe: I mean, we even saw it in toilet rolls. That kind of thing. You know, the time that toilet rolls became all the rage and became radio prize or radio station prizes, and there were knife fights around the world around toilet rolls. But part of that was, again, you know, it’s something I feel I can do, it’s something I’ve got control over and so to hell with the risk, I’m going to go out and buy that new TV. So anyway, I think that that’s something we should slightly guard ourselves against because I think there will be inevitably economic shock in six months or a year.
Alison Jones: Yes. And the interest rates aren’t gonna stay this low forever. So hauling it back to writing for a minute, Tony, I always ask people what their best tip is for a first time writer. Now, when I asked you this last time, it was, you talked about the shed, which I remember very clearly ‘find your shed’ but given the experience you’ve had now, are there any tips you’d like to pass on from the experience of writing Busy@Home?
Tony Crabbe: There is, and I was thinking about this and obviously the shed, I would still hold true. But I think, you know, again, one of the joys of, as you’ll know very well, one of the joys of having written a book or whatever, is people often come to you and say, well, how do you write that book?
You know? So you get into conversations with people. One of the things that I’ve realized is quite important, is getting super clear of your audience. and when I write, I personify the person I’m writing for. So I get really clear of the person, because I think, you know, writing should start with empathy with deep empathy for the person and the problems you’re trying to address, and it’s difficult to write with empathy unless you really, really connect with who it is you’re writing for. So my kind of, and it came to even to the, you know, to this book, I mentioned that we talked about doing an edit. but when I actually really said, okay, I agree, I’m going to do it.
And I really kind of got clear on who I was writing for. It became clear that a small edit wasn’t going to do that. And when I started really talking and I talked to Dulcie a lot about this, so what is the experience like of that person, if you like, or that couple? and what are some of the things going on for them? And, you know, obviously connecting it to what some of the things we’re experiencing, some of the things that we imagined people are going to experience, that made it super clear. I had to restructure everything and effectively start from scratch. So, so yeah, so start with empathy, start with empathy by being really clear who you’re writing for.
Alison Jones: Brilliant, that’s such a good tip and also, do you have a book that you would recommend that we, I mean, quite a lot of people are reading more than they ever have. And that’s one of the upsides of lockdown. So is there a business book or any book really, that you’d say take the opportunity to, to read now?
Tony Crabbe: Well, you know, it’s not that helpful, because it’s not been released yet, but there’s a book that did really well in the Netherlands that I’ve been asked to review that I’m reading at the moment called Grip. Actually the name of the author escapes me at the moment. but it will be coming, be launching in the next sort of three to six months, which is super useful and effectively is around how would you get a grip on some of the goals that you want in life and get practical about building habits that are going to help you to achieve those. So, that’s going to be a great book when it comes out, but apologies, it’s not a very useful recommendation given it’s not in the market yet.
Alison Jones: Not a great lockdown recommendation… is the Dutch version out?
Tony Crabbe: The Dutch version is out. Yes. And it’s been a best seller over there.
Alison Jones: So if you speak Dutch, you’re fine. Good. All right. Well, that’s actually semi-useful. Thanks Tony. That’s brilliant. And Tony, if people want to find out more about you, more about both Busy and Busy@Home. Where should they go
Tony Crabbe: So probably the best place to start is just at the website. So tonycrabbe.com and then there’s information there about the book and how to get ahold of it and the stuff that I do.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. That’s nice and simple. And I obviously I’ll put that link up on the show notes at extraordinarybusinessbooks.com along with the full transcript of today.
Just such a brilliant story. I love that that agility is happening in publishing as well, as much as anything else. And it’s just fascinating to hear how, you know, that experience, which is so different to how anybody that I have spoken to on the podcast really has written their book has come about. So thank you for sharing it with us.
Tony Crabbe: No, absolute pleasure Alison, really great to speak to you.