Make Life Work

Make Life Work is a conversation podcast built on a problem its host lives with himself. Si Jobling introduces himself as an engineering manager by day and a parent of two who still tries to find time for side projects, and he invites guests to share how they manage the same balance. The guest list leans personal. Andy Clarke and Dan Davies are old friends from the early web days, and Adrian Lansdown is a friend of many years who also works alongside him. Others come through social media: Ian Lurie after an exchange on Mastodon, and Montserrat Cano after a mutual acquaintance, Simon Cox, boosted one of Si's posts. What sets the show apart is how specific the talk gets. Adrian describes a task app with a today view and an evening slot for when the kids have gone to bed. He also keeps a home automation list split into broken fixes, improvements and bigger projects, and he thinks the bigger ones through when he is tired. Ian, a former marketing agency CEO who became an individual contributor after selling the business, treats fitness as his benchmark. If the workouts stop, he takes it as a sign that the routine has to change. Si keeps a habit tracker on his phone and laptop to hold himself to a small daily goal. Montserrat, an SEO and digital marketing expert from Spain, is frank about the costs. She wants to get back to writing articles, says nothing in her work ever takes five minutes, and admits to anxiety over opportunities that slipped past while she was busy producing. Her counterweight is variety: rotating through different kinds of tasks during the day keeps her from overthinking. The episode with Andy Clarke and Dan Davies turns to craft. It covers how to stay excited about design once ideas that used to get kicked around in banter pass through Figma comments and Slack channels, and once fast-paced e-commerce work and time budgets leave less room to be creative. It also includes a blunt productivity tip about moving social media apps off the phone's home screen to avoid doom scrolling, along with a confessed weakness for inbox zero. The reunion with Sam Hardacre and Mike Street, both from the On The Side Slack community, is looser. They catch up on two years, look ahead to goals for 2023, and take a detour into how time seems to dilate, especially once there are children. The register is friendly and informal, with plenty of joking when old friends are in the room. For concrete systems, start with 'Home automation & lists of things with Adrian Lansdown'. For a guest who went from running an agency to working as an individual contributor, try 'From CEO to individual contributor with Ian Lurie'.