Episode 77: Why Changing Your Environment Might Be the Fresh Start You Need

Sometimes, we get so used to the way things are that we don’t stop to question if they could be better. Whether it’s how we work, run a business, manage our home, or structure our routines, it’s easy to accept things as they’ve always been—until something pushes us to rethink them.

In this episode of Babies and Business, we’re sharing how a simple change completely transformed our daily life, business, and productivity. We’ll talk about the power of reassessing old decisions, why changing your environment can make a huge impact, and how you can apply this mindset to your own work, business, and family life.

 

Show Notes

Key Highlights from this Episode:

• Avram and Rachel share how a simple home office change transformed their productivity and work-life balance.

• The common trap of sticking to past decisions without questioning if they still serve you.

• Why small changes in your environment can lead to major improvements in focus and efficiency.

• The challenges of working from home with kids and how they overcame distractions.

• How their room swap led to clearer thinking, better workflow, and even a faster business launch.

• How making small adjustments in your space can improve mental clarity and reduce stress

• The impact of better time management and prioritization when you remove unnecessary distractions

Episode Transcription

Avram: Oh baby, we are riding the high right now of an incredible week here at the Gonzales residence. What happened, Rachel?

Rachel: Well, a little bit of chaos on Sunday led to this wonderful week. I think we should talk about that chaos a little bit here.

Avram: Yeah, I mean, the reason we’re recording today is just because, well, first of all, like, we’re so excited about the effect of this, and I think that maybe you’ll feel some of this. And you can have this effect in your life too. And, uh, it was just so simple, but so profound, and where it started versus where it ended is just

Rachel: Yeah, so let me, let me paint this a little bit for you. So, August was born, he is almost nine months old. I’m a little bit baffled by that because, whoa. Uh, on the 22nd, he will be 40 weeks old. So, he will, he will be as old outside of my womb as he was inside when he was born. So that’s pretty awesome.

I love those kinds of things. So, for nine months, we’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking about, Okay, so eventually, in our three bedroom house, we are going to have to combine our babies’ rooms, have them sleep in the same room, how is that going to work

Avram: How is it going to work? And

Rachel: And I’ve been asking that a lot.

Avram: We might actually, like, grab a floor plan of our house to share with you, so you can understand and geek out on it if you’d like. So if you go to babiesandbiz.com/77, I think, or whichever episode number we’re on, you can see the floor plan. You can, we’ll show you what it was and where it is now.

We could not figure out where are we going to put a second crib, second bed to combine the boys.

Rachel: Yeah, I mean, in the one room, you’ll see there’s a big closet. It takes up the entire wall. In the other room, there’s a very small closet but it’s a big door that’s there. It has lights.

Avram: Multiple walls that you can use

Rachel: There’s lots of windows in that door. Just a lot of different things. It’s right next to the front room, the living room.

You’d hear stuff from the kitchen. So, lots of different obstacles. But what we did was, you know, I came to you and I said, Okay. So here’s my thought. I think we switch Lincoln’s room and the office, switch them out, because we don’t need that much space for our office and this desk could totally fit and it would take up this much space and then I think that Lincoln would really like the space in there.

Avram: Yes, we started talking about, well, what if the reason that we didn’t set it up that way in the beginning. What if that didn’t matter, what are some of the amazing things that could come out of changing it up? And so we just ended up with this big list of like, he might really like this.

And then, well actually, our office productivity might also be better by putting us towards the back of the house. It was like, huh.

Rachel: You’ll get to see the layout of the house, too. So we have the garage, then we have the office, which is where it is now. Then we have the guest bath, then we have our bedroom, all down one hall.

Avram: Which is where the baby sleeps during the day.

Rachel: Correct. So, I would be able to do all of my activities during the day and not interrupt Lincoln with the nanny that takes care of Lincoln here at the house.

So really, all the different things, you know, sound was a thing before as an obstacle, and the light, and not being able to black it out, and all these things.

But, with August, we blacked out the office so that he could sleep in there. So, we’re already blacking out that room, that’s possible.

Avram: We were like, kind of racking our brains like, there was a good reason why we did it this way before, right?

Rachel: Right, and then racking our

Avram: The answer was sound. It was like the dog would go off at the front door and then it would definitely wake Lincoln if he was sleeping. So there were some of these reasons that we had in place that made us not even consider the possibility of swapping these rooms.

Rachel: Right. But then when we were looking at all of the upside versus that, we saw that the upside was far over overly and above the better thing to look at. And that there were so many things that were at the upside as opposed to those little tiny things that at this point kind of didn’t matter.

Avram: The stop and pause moment here is there are a lot of things that we have decided in our heads are not possible

Rachel: Yeah. And we just don’t revisit them

Avram: and we never revisit them. So we’re taking, this is a personal lesson, which is like, Those things in our lives beg for questions.

Rachel: Yes, absolutely, and revisiting them

Avram: and revisiting them

Rachel: You know, maybe there are some things in your life that you just see as maybe off limits in some way

Avram: You just don’t want to deal with it at all. And there’s a
lot of reasons for that. You can maybe ask what are the reasons again? Are those reasons still valid?

Rachel: Yeah. So I think it’s really, an awesome thing. We opened this podcast up this episode with, you know, we had a really great week. Let’s talk about that.

Avram: Mm hmm.

Rachel: I’m really excited talk about that.

Avram: Yeah, so as you can expect we switch the rooms.

Rachel: Yeah. Oh, and then, and the crazy time on Sunday was us getting our office stuff, our space. So we have a desk that has a shelf on top of it.

Pretty heavy. It’s a heavy desk. It’s very well made. It was custom made for your parents’ house that they have for their space. Anyway, really heavy desk. Lots of screws that put things together. Lots of moves. Okay, so it literally took us all day. All day long.

Avram: It would’ve taken us two hours

Rachel: Correct. Without children?

Avram: Without children. Holy crap.

Rachel: But I had to stop. Of course we had to stop to feed everybody multiple times a day. And then I have a breastfeeding baby still. So I had to feed him. And then I had to nap him. And then we had Lincoln. And then we needed to stop and play. And I think we had the marker out for a bit on the wall. I’m pretty sure at one point.

I mean there were chaotic moments in that day. And I remember looking at you at one point and we’re like, how are we going to bring this to a conclusion?

Avram: And it was also like We have to move now

Rachel: And we’re approaching bedtime for both of our kids. And we’re like, okay, we’re going to do our last nap in our bedroom for August so that we can finish up the office.

Then we’re going to put Lincoln down and we’ll finish this. So we prioritized what we needed to get out and what we needed to get in. We got Lincoln’s bedroom set up to the bare minimum, you know, crib, and then maybe the chair, some other things that we wanted to move in there. It was quite the juggle towards the end, but it was a real stressful day there.

Avram: Oh, man. Yeah, my aura ring was like, you’re stressed. Do you want to relax for a little while? I was like, no, shut up. We’re finishing this. So, it was worth going through that. And, uh, I was joking with Rachel. I was like, hey babe, so it took us eight hours to do this.

Rachel: You’re going to love this math he says

Avram: I was like, you’re gonna love this math.

Will you, like, indulge me? She’s like, yeah, of course. And I said, so, if we get back just 15 minutes of productivity a day by making this change, we will get a return on our time. And I forget, I already figure what it was. It was

Rachel: I don’t know.

Avram: Oh, within two months we we’ll get back all eight hours at that time that we invested.

And then we’ll be on the plus

Rachel: I can tell you we made back our time this week.

Avram: Way fast. So yeah, it’s like, I can certainly estimated how fast we would get our stuff back. I think within two weeks we will have already got a return on our time invested because

Rachel: I feel like it was already way more productive for me

Avram: We face way less noise. So we’re working from home and then we’ll have the nanny here with Lincoln. And it can be pretty noisy because we’re doing kid stuff.

And so now the room is not bordering all of that. The office is not bordering that. So now we don’t have the noise

Rachel: Also, if we have to leave to get a drink or the bathroom, whatever that look, whatever that is, we have to go right past his space where he’s at. It is so disruptive.

Avram: Sometimes he can feel very agitated that we’re not coming out to play and hang out and now we’re going back to work. So we save all of that and all that drama. It’s easier to go pick up the baby and put him back down because again we’re not going

Rachel: All in the same hall.

Avram: thru the middle of the house anymore. Uh, this morning we came out to record the podcast.

Rachel: He didn’t even know we left.

Avram: He had no idea that we left and went out into the garage. So, all these things add up to more time and less distraction means that you’re not having to refocus and refocus and refocus and that I think has been the big deal this week.

Rachel: Well, for me, you know, I’m project managing all these things with our team. I need to take this one thing. If we’re writing a piece of content. It has to go through write, review, we’re getting it to our team to put up on the website, then we’re going to review it again. There are so many steps, I think it might be a five step process

Avram: It’s like six to

Rachel: at the least.

Yeah, six to eight, from the very beginning to the end. And I have to see that thing all the way through, otherwise it’s not going to get all the way delegated. And then it gets lost in project management. So, making sure that all these pieces go together. And I’m able to have those clear thoughts. It’s incredible.

Otherwise I would get super agitated because I just didn’t have enough time blocks together to actually make that happen.

Avram: without distraction

Rachel: So for me, I made my time back up from this week as opposed to weeks previous. I probably tripled it what I normally get

Avram: Yeah, and then we were able to put together an entire Um new sales funnel for our business. We’re launching a new offer. We’re

Rachel: within this week

Avram: Yeah, within, within a week. So normally this kind of thing would have taken us weeks to get going and write the scripts, record the videos, put the pages together.

Rachel: Just to like scrap things together because we’re trying to do it on the tail end of a day or at night or, you know, all these different creative ways of getting time.

Avram: So it’s like, man, what an incredible week. Uh, you know, who knows what next week will hold. But, uh,

Rachel: But you know what? Something came to me when I, you know we’re here in this new office and I just had the thought we really didn’t know what kind of a rut we had been in in previous in the other office because there’s so many different things that just became normal or there were frustrations or it’s always going to be this way or whatever those thoughts and feelings are but it was a rut and we didn’t realize we were in it until we moved.

Avram: wow.

Rachel: a lot of different things came from the move and one of that was, was that.

Avram: Well, okay, wow, that, that hit me in a different way because I think about like our fitness journey too. We’ve been sharing a lot about that. Yeah. It’s like once we started going to the gym and losing the weight, building the muscle, getting our energy back, you didn’t realize how much of a rut you were in until you’re out of it.

Rachel: Yeah. Well, and then me being in so much pain physically, you know, you thought I was just being a wimp

Avram: Yeah, I did.

Rachel: you’re like, why can’t she hack this? And I was just in a lot of pain, low level p
ain, but you don’t know what a hundred percent is until you lose it and then you get, you know, you get it back.

Avram: Until you get it back.

Rachel: and then you get it back. You’re like, whoa, this is what 100 percent is. I also thought for the room, you know, Well, just to give you a little bit of kind of inside look into what it was in the previous room. So Lincoln knew what was in that room. He knew that there were a lot of interesting things.

He knew there were drawers where there were things. He knew, oh my gosh, there was a monster in there.

Avram: There was a monster.

Rachel: He loved feeding this monster. The monster loved markers, crayons, pens, whatever that was. It was our printer. He knew that it lived in there, and he knew that it was plugged in, and he could give it energy by turning it on.

So, this was a game. He loved it. And the office door was open at any point. I mean, heaven forbid we should forget to lock it. And he’s right in there. So, super frustrating. Things coming out of there. Just the organization. Just that. I don’t know if you can feel that, but that was part of the thing about that other room.

And in with this room, we have the boundary of he just doesn’t go in there. He’s just not allowed in there. He doesn’t know what’s in there. I, I don’t try to multitask with him on my lap. That had been the case with the other one. Um, and just breaking that clear cut.

Avram: When you see the layout of the house, you’ll realize why he was constantly slipping into the room.

Rachel: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And now he can slip into the room freely because it’s his

Avram: it’s his

Rachel: room.

Avram: It has been cool too, seeing him go into his room, which is right there off of the main area of the home. Go in there and play. Or go in there and grab things and bring them out to the main room.

And they just really opened some things up. Yeah. So, if you go to babiesandbiz.com/77. I think that’s what this episode is. Whatever it is, whatever it is. We didn’t look at the numbers before we started. Um, we got a community question there for you. Which is What is frustrating you about your environment right now?

Could be at home or at work. So the question is like, what’s one thing you’re gonna change this week to help relieve your frustration? So

Rachel: Yeah, change your environment in some

Avram: Change your environment in some way, because when you change your environment, it affects your whole mental, emotional state of being.

Rachel: You can have different expectations for yourself, yourself, your space, all that stuff.

Avram: And you never know what kind of like cool things will show up when you create that new space for you. So that’s the magic that we invite you to hear. So man,

Rachel: So what are you going to change up?

Avram: what are you going to change up? You don’t know what 100 percent looks like until you get it back.

Rachel: Right. And that’s true in fitness and in your business and all the things. Ooh,

Avram: that’s so juicy. I’m going to think about that. All right. Well, we appreciate you for tuning in. If you haven’t already rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever it is you’re listening, those reviews help us bring in new listeners to help enjoy the show,

Rachel: Share with your friends.

Avram: Appreciate you for being here.

Rachel: Bye for now.