How To Tame Email? | DEEP DIVE

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:04.880 | In today's deep dive, I want to tackle the question,

00:00:08.080 | how do I tame email? Now, this continues the trend I started last week of trying to do more

00:00:17.200 | practical topics in the deep dive. I want to get my hands dirty with actual advice that you can put

00:00:23.920 | into action and help your life today. This doesn't mean I'm not going to get back to my more

00:00:28.320 | philosophical rants or cultural critiques, but let's do a few of these deep dives that are more

00:00:35.280 | practical. All right, so here's the question. You hate your inbox, let's say. You open it,

00:00:40.800 | it's full of stuff. It stresses you out. Why does it stress you out and what can we do about it?

00:00:46.960 | To answer this question, I think it is really important to look at all of that junk sitting

00:00:52.320 | there in your inbox and divide it up into categories. This is a key thing that's often

00:00:58.160 | missing when we give advice about email is that the different types of messages merit different

00:01:05.120 | responses. So roughly speaking, I can divide the messages you see in that stress inducing inbox

00:01:10.800 | into three categories. Number one, broadcast, information being broadcast to you that does

00:01:17.440 | not require a response. It may or may not be interesting to you. So this could be newsletters

00:01:23.280 | like my newsletter, which of course you should subscribe to account newport.com. It could be

00:01:27.680 | announcements from the HR department and your organization or it could be those annoying

00:01:31.600 | sales emails that any store that you've ever given your email address to for any reason bombard you

00:01:38.080 | with as if what really matters to you right now is that the 15% sale at Levi's is going to end

00:01:43.840 | next week. So those are broadcast messages. Then you have questions. This is my term for emails

00:01:52.320 | that have something that require a response to you, but probably just one response.

00:01:56.160 | Hey, Cal, can you let me know what my grade is in the class right now? Can you remind me again

00:02:02.240 | of when our next meeting is? What do you think? Who do you think we should nominate for the

00:02:11.280 | steering committee that we're putting together? So you know, someone needs information from you.

00:02:15.440 | You can give that information in an email response was probably just going to be one response.

00:02:20.640 | The third category messages are conversational. These are messages that are part of a longer

00:02:27.280 | back and forth conversation. So now maybe you're trying to figure out when you are going to meet

00:02:32.000 | with a client tomorrow. And you're going back and forth. Hey, what about in the afternoon? They say

00:02:36.400 | no, you're like, Okay, I can do the morning, but probably not nine. And like, well, how close to

00:02:39.360 | nine, you know what I mean, back and forth. So it's a message that's part of many messages that

00:02:42.560 | are going back and forth, that sort of haphazard unscheduled manner. So the gap between each

00:02:48.480 | message in the next is unpredictable as part of an ongoing conversation. So when you look at your

00:02:52.880 | inbox, and you feel that stress, you're seeing a mix of all three different types of messages in

00:02:57.760 | there. Now having these three types is useful because the response to each is different. Let's

00:03:03.440 | start with the low hanging fruit, which are broadcast. You hear a lot of advice, especially

00:03:09.200 | from more tech oriented individuals who like having tool based solutions surrounding broadcast,

00:03:15.440 | oh my god, I get too many of these emails, I wish I could tame it. This is not a major problem.

00:03:20.800 | It's annoying. If you have a bunch of broadcast messages in there that most of them you don't

00:03:26.880 | care about, because it's visual clutter, and you have to get around them. But it's not super

00:03:31.120 | stress inducing. A you can ignore them or B, you can just quickly delete or archive them,

00:03:36.000 | which honestly is actually kind of fulfilling. Is there anything better that when you see a really

00:03:39.600 | full inbox to be able to make progress get 50% of those messages out of there in just two minutes

00:03:43.920 | by just deleting lots of things. That being said, there are any number of ways you can tame broadcast.

00:03:50.640 | The best feature right now is probably what you'll see in a product like Gmail or Gmail has

00:03:55.680 | really good AI powered filters. It's very good at figuring out what are promotional messages.

00:04:01.280 | I basically never see promotional messages from retailers at all anymore, because it all gets

00:04:06.720 | pushed into a promotional folder. From what I understand, I don't use social media. But from

00:04:11.280 | what I understand, those Gmail AI based filters are very good at social media notifications of

00:04:16.160 | putting them in another folder. So you don't have to see them if you don't want to. Beyond that,

00:04:21.520 | obviously, unsubscribe. You know, every time you're about to archive a message, or delete a

00:04:27.520 | message from a newsletter, some other type of news source that once again, you're not going to read

00:04:32.080 | and have it read in a while, take five extra seconds to try to unsubscribe. Gmail has a feature

00:04:36.560 | now you can click it'll try to do that for you automatically. One caveat. If you try to unsubscribe

00:04:42.480 | from cal newport.com, you and your family will be struck with bad luck for three generations. So

00:04:48.640 | don't do that. But any other one, unsubscribe, liberally, that really can help. You might also

00:04:55.920 | try having a dedicated email address for just this type of information. This is more possible

00:05:02.320 | if you're a freelancer and individual. So you're not getting messages from your employer. But you

00:05:06.720 | can have a signup address, sign up at whatever.com that you give when everyone needs an email address

00:05:14.480 | when the retailer needs an email address when the person at the store wants you to give an email

00:05:18.800 | address and you have some address signup at cal newport.com. You create some address, you know,

00:05:24.000 | it could be a gmail, sign up, dot your original gmail name at gmail.com. Just make a new account,

00:05:29.680 | whatever, and just use that. Right? That's one thing you can do. And then you have a different

00:05:34.320 | account and go check this occasionally for my newsletters or what have you. So there's strategies

00:05:39.520 | here, but I'm not worried about broadcast. All right, let's talk about question emails. Now,

00:05:44.400 | here's the thing about question emails. If you take an individual question email in isolation,

00:05:50.640 | and bring it to me and say, Oh, Cal, thank you for coming. I have this thing I need you to answer.

00:05:57.120 | Here you go. It's usually no sweat. It's like, Oh, that's interesting question. Yeah, who should

00:06:02.960 | we nominate for this committee? Let me think about that for a minute. Yeah, it should be,

00:06:07.920 | you know, Bob, that makes a good idea. Or when is that meeting? Oh, let me just check. Yeah,

00:06:13.280 | it's Thursday, Thursday at four, boom, you give the answer. So in isolation, a question email is

00:06:17.200 | not bad. It's why when someone sends a question email to you, they don't feel guilty about it.

00:06:22.000 | Like this is a question. It's valid won't take them long to answer. The real pain point generated

00:06:28.800 | by question emails is in the context switching. This is what I talked about last week when I did

00:06:35.200 | the deep dive on the productive pause. I got into this a little bit more detail. But the real pain

00:06:40.160 | is switching your context so rapidly. So when you go from an email on when a meeting is to an email

00:06:47.760 | on who should be on the steering committee to an email on remind me again, what we thought we were

00:06:51.360 | gonna do for this client to an email for what do you want me to do next on this project. It's the

00:06:55.840 | context shift from one to the other. That is incredibly fatiguing. So when you have 20 emails

00:07:02.400 | in a row that are largely questions like let me just go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, it's not so

00:07:06.000 | easy. Because your mind has to completely switch context again and again. But it doesn't have time

00:07:10.960 | to do that because that can take five to 15 minutes. We've talked about that before. So what

00:07:14.800 | do you end up with is like a huge literal headache. And it's why the the friction builds to resistant

00:07:20.720 | grows like I'm done with this, I got to get out of this inbox. It's the context switching cost.

00:07:24.720 | So what do we do about question emails? Well, like I talked about in my productive pause,

00:07:31.520 | deep dive, one thing you can do is get these things out of your inbox, write them down in a text file,

00:07:35.840 | you're transcribing them into a text file, line after line after line, sort them by category.

00:07:43.440 | By category, I mean shares a similar context, scheduling things, this project, I'm working on

00:07:51.440 | things, etc. Then tackle each group by itself with a non trivial pause in between so that you take

00:07:59.040 | the time to get the context loaded for those questions, then you can go through really easily,

00:08:02.720 | the frictions gone, then walk away and do something else. Then come back and give yourself time to

00:08:08.000 | open up a new context for the new category and tackle those. So you're trying to really avoid

00:08:11.520 | the friction of the the record scratch, screeching tires on pavement, 90 degree turn from one topic

00:08:19.600 | to another that really is going to strain your mind. Big picture, however, you want to reduce

00:08:25.360 | the question emails to the extent possible. So really pay attention. What are these emails I'm

00:08:33.200 | seeing? How can I get this information to the person who needs it without having to actually

00:08:39.680 | on my own initiate a context shift to the context relevant to this question and give it an answer.

00:08:43.840 | That's gonna be a lot of different things depending on what you do. I mean, I can tell

00:08:48.320 | you, for example, as a professor, I really think through my process for how problem sets are written

00:08:53.520 | and assigned and graded and handed back and how students are kept up to speed on what their grade

00:08:58.560 | is in the course and how we graded the things that we graded. And I actually put in a lot of time,

00:09:02.560 | there's a lot of overhead in my systems. But you know what all of those systems are geared towards

00:09:06.320 | is preventing the students from having to just all the time send ad hoc questions, which they don't

00:09:11.120 | like. Because now they have to think of it, they have to remember it, they have to talk to the

00:09:14.960 | professor, they have to wait for the answer. And it prevents me from having a nonstop incoming

00:09:20.640 | stream of questions that are require a lot of context shifts. You can do this in almost any

00:09:23.920 | other area in your life. If you're a freelancer, there might be sender filters like I talked about

00:09:28.960 | in deep work where you direct people, okay, if you want to know about this, here's the answer.

00:09:33.360 | If you want to do a meeting with me, go right here and set it up automatically. If you want a quote,

00:09:39.120 | here are the 10 projects I do in the quote types, right? Like you up front, you put in the work,

00:09:43.920 | they get enough information to that person that the question doesn't have to arrive

00:09:49.200 | ambiguously sitting there pregnant on your doorstep for you to have to deliver an answer.

00:09:55.520 | So I'm a big believer in whatever processes, FAQs, or systems you can put in place

00:10:00.400 | to minimize the number of question emails to better because again, in isolation, they look

00:10:05.680 | innocent. What's the big deal about answering this question? The question is not the problem,

00:10:10.560 | it is switching my context to the context of that question. And it's one of 15 questions in a row I

00:10:15.200 | have to answer, each of which needs to switch. That's where you get the cognitive resistance.

00:10:19.920 | That's where email becomes a burden. All right, let's get to the final type of email you're going

00:10:25.840 | to see in that inbox, which is conversational. This is one of the core arguments in my recent book,

00:10:32.080 | A World Without Email, you need to read that book if you use email, slack, or any other communication

00:10:37.520 | tool in your work, it's critical issue. But one of the big points I make in that book

00:10:43.280 | is that knowledge work is being strangled by the extent to which we are using back and forth ad hoc

00:10:49.040 | unscheduled messaging to have conversations unfold. It makes a lot of sense in the moment.

00:10:56.080 | Because the overhead in the moment could not possibly be lowered if I could just say,

00:11:01.360 | "Hey, Cal, should we get together about the Johnson memo?" Send, boom, I'm done, seven seconds,

00:11:09.920 | out of here. So in the moment, it seems like the easiest thing to do. But what have you just

00:11:15.520 | kicked off there? You may have just kicked off 10 back and forth messages. These messages are going

00:11:21.920 | to arrive at unpredictable times, but must be serviced quickly because we need to figure out

00:11:27.840 | what to do about the Johnson memo by tomorrow. Because Johnson himself is coming to the office,

00:11:33.680 | and we got to have that figured out. So if we're going to get through 10 messages back and forth

00:11:37.600 | today, we're going to have to have a minimal latency between each message and its response.

00:11:44.640 | Now, because I don't know when you're going to see the message and get back to me, I better keep

00:11:48.800 | checking my inbox to see, okay, did I hear back about the Johnson memo? Did I hear back about the

00:11:54.720 | Johnson memo? Now, let's say on average, I check the inbox about 10 times for each of the messages

00:12:00.240 | that comes in. Because I got to make sure I get it back, Johnson's coming. All right, well, those

00:12:05.920 | 10 back and forth messages have just generated 100 context shifts. Each one of those context

00:12:12.320 | shifts has a cognitive tax, creates fatigue, reduces your capacity. That's one conversation.

00:12:19.840 | Now, let's say there's seven different conversations this week that I have going

00:12:24.080 | back and forth with various people. 700 context shifts have just been generated by that. Again,

00:12:29.760 | in the moment, you say seven seconds, "Hey, what about the Johnson memo? Should we meet

00:12:34.080 | send?" Boom, this is great. But this is part of what could be hundreds and hundreds of mind

00:12:39.280 | sapping context shifts that you have just accidentally initiated. So one of the big

00:12:44.320 | ideas in a world without email is that you need other ways of having these coordinating

00:12:50.880 | conversations happen that does not require unscheduled messages that need response.

00:12:55.920 | You should be willing, you should be willing to have a large amount of overhead and annoyance

00:13:03.600 | and upfront time invested if that gets rid of unscheduled messages that require response.

00:13:09.440 | It is worth it. I don't care if we have this setup where here's how it works. If we need to

00:13:16.560 | meet about memos, you have to go to the roof of my office building, and that access door is shut.

00:13:22.960 | So you have to get the ladder off the balcony on the third floor and scale three more floors on the

00:13:27.520 | outside of the building and get to the roof. And there on the roof, you need to start a fire and

00:13:32.880 | the smoke from that fire, I will see and that's how I will know to also get on that ladder on the

00:13:37.040 | third floor balcony, climb up to that roof and come find you so we can figure out there together

00:13:41.840 | when we're going to meet about the Johnson menu. That overhead is worth it. I would rather spend

00:13:47.440 | an hour doing that than do 100 context shifts spread out evenly over the next few days.

00:13:52.240 | Now I'm being a little bit facetious there, but I'm trying to hit the point.

00:13:56.880 | Time in the moment I could care less about what I care about is context shifts. How often do I have

00:14:03.520 | to check an inbox to keep this conversation going, and I will pay very large prices to make that

00:14:09.360 | number be very, very small. Now I get all into this in a world without email. There's three

00:14:15.520 | major types of different ways you can get these conversations out of back and forth conversations,

00:14:20.880 | I'll just tease them. There's deferring those conversations using things like scheduling tools

00:14:26.080 | or office hours. There's automating those conversations by taking repeatable processes

00:14:30.400 | and figuring out a set system for how they get done so I don't have to wait to hear from you to

00:14:34.080 | do things. And there's externalizing. Information goes to set places like task boards, discussions

00:14:39.840 | happen in set times with set formats like status meetings, etc, etc. Point being, conversations

00:14:48.560 | are killers. It seems innocent, it's not. Go to the roof and start a fire if you can, it's still

00:14:54.320 | much better than having to keep clicking there, waiting, waiting, waiting till you finally get

00:14:58.480 | the message that says now Wednesday is no good. How about Thursday? Come on. Alright, so if we're

00:15:03.680 | in tame email, let me just quickly summarize, you got to know what you're taming. It's a collection

00:15:07.600 | of broadcast questions and conversational messages. Each of these requires a different response,

00:15:14.400 | you should be working on responses to all three of these things. If you want to reduce that heavy,

00:15:20.560 | annoying, cognitively demanding footprint of email on your professional life.

How To Tame Email? | DEEP DIVE | Episode 149

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