Why The Modern World Make No Sense - Take Back Control Of Your Time & Focus

00:00:00.000 | So today I want to talk about one of the most controversial and complicated topics in our

00:00:05.600 | broader discussion of cultivating depth in a world of digital distractions, and that

00:00:09.760 | is our good friend and longtime foe, email.

00:00:15.480 | I want to do something a little bit different today.

00:00:17.400 | Instead of looking at our current relationship with this tool, I want to instead look into

00:00:21.620 | its distant past to help identify some creative new ideas for how we might fix our relationship

00:00:28.780 | with email in the future.

00:00:31.120 | This is a fascinating journey.

00:00:32.420 | I've been rabbit-holing on the story of the history of email.

00:00:37.240 | This is a story that's going to bring us back to a time when the word "internet" was not

00:00:41.360 | even in wide circulation yet, and when electronic communication was still a novelty.

00:00:46.440 | All right, but to set up this whole discussion, this sort of looking back at the history of

00:00:50.020 | email to get new ideas about how to be more focused in the future, I want to go back much

00:00:54.680 | farther than the introduction of digital networks.

00:00:58.920 | Believe it or not, Jesse, I want to go all the way back to the time of the dinosaurs.

00:01:04.280 | So I don't know, you're probably not a dinosaur guy, Jesse, but if you are, we'll find out

00:01:08.360 | soon.

00:01:09.360 | Have you ever heard of the K-T boundary?

00:01:10.840 | No.

00:01:11.840 | All right, this is sort of dinosaur geekdom.

00:01:15.480 | I think it's cool though.

00:01:16.680 | The K-T boundary, and I believe this represents the boundary between the Cretaceous and the

00:01:21.360 | tertiary geological periods, was this dividing line in the fossil record.

00:01:29.560 | You can look as you dig down deeper through the surface of the earth, you see these different

00:01:34.240 | geological eras the deeper you go.

00:01:37.000 | There's this dividing line between the Cretaceous and the tertiary period, and please, I know

00:01:41.320 | we don't use the word "tertiary" anymore, they call it the Paleogene, and they now call

00:01:45.880 | this the K-Pg layer, but I'm going to call it the K-T boundary, just like I insist on

00:01:50.260 | calling X Twitter.

00:01:52.320 | There's this dividing line, below it, dinosaurs, above it, no dinosaurs.

00:01:58.120 | So we have all these fossils of dinosaurs, 100 million years, and then suddenly no fossils

00:02:03.000 | of dinosaurs, and that boundary they call the K-T boundary.

00:02:07.400 | So this is what led paleontologists to suspect maybe something happened to the dinosaurs,

00:02:12.320 | right?

00:02:13.320 | Like they're here and then they're gone.

00:02:15.440 | They got a lot more evidence for what that was when we got better tools and realized,

00:02:19.040 | "Hey, wait a second, between these two parts of the fossil record, at this K-T boundary,

00:02:24.880 | we can find wherever we dig around the world, this really thin, like the thickness of a

00:02:29.480 | pencil layer of ash that's full of iridium, which is the stuff that gets blown into the

00:02:36.200 | atmosphere when a giant asteroid would hit the earth."

00:02:39.120 | And then we looked around and said, "Hey, guess what?

00:02:40.860 | Over by the Yucatan Peninsula, there's a giant asteroid crater."

00:02:44.800 | And we sort of figured out like, "Oh, probably an asteroid fell and killed the dinosaurs."

00:02:49.080 | The thing is, we didn't know much about that actual event.

00:02:53.060 | We see dinosaurs before it.

00:02:55.360 | We see no dinosaurs after it.

00:02:56.880 | It's an age of small mammals that evolved with the humans.

00:02:59.520 | We didn't know much about the actual event until this really interesting find happened

00:03:05.360 | around 2013.

00:03:07.320 | And this whole story, I mean, look, I'm not a dinosaur guy, but this whole story caught

00:03:10.780 | my attention.

00:03:11.780 | I'm even going to bring this article that told the story up on the screen here.

00:03:15.280 | It's a 2019 Douglas Preston article from the New Yorker.

00:03:19.680 | Douglas Preston is a novelist, a thriller writer, who also is a scientist, and he writes

00:03:24.360 | about science sometimes with the New Yorker.

00:03:26.560 | It's just like out of his books what happened here.

00:03:30.840 | And I mean that literally, because Preston wrote this book called Tyrannosaur Canyon,

00:03:36.040 | which I read and enjoyed years ago.

00:03:38.680 | And it was about finding a fossil of a tyrannosaur from the asteroid impact at the K-T boundary.

00:03:46.400 | So a tyrannosaur dying from the asteroid impact got fossilized.

00:03:50.160 | The whole book was about that.

00:03:51.240 | So anyways, Douglas Preston, 2013, gets a call.

00:03:56.720 | It's from a, well, I guess an email, but it sounds better if it's a call, from a graduate

00:04:00.760 | student named Robert De Palma.

00:04:02.880 | De Palma said basically, "I read Tyrannosaur Canyon.

00:04:06.160 | We found that."

00:04:08.240 | Over in the Hell Creek Formation, "I think we just found fossilized dinosaurs from the

00:04:12.140 | day the asteroid hit."

00:04:16.200 | This became the seismic, if you'll excuse the double use of the term here, a seismic

00:04:21.880 | discovery.

00:04:22.880 | Here's the actual paper.

00:04:23.880 | I'll load that on the screen here.

00:04:25.480 | It was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

00:04:29.680 | Its name was slightly less catchy than Tyrannosaur Canyon.

00:04:32.800 | It was instead, "A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the K-Pg boundary, North

00:04:39.760 | Dakota."

00:04:41.620 | Not that exciting, but a fantastically important paper.

00:04:44.760 | And they talked about finding fossils from the day the asteroid hit.

00:04:49.620 | And by studying these fossils, they actually came up with some really interesting insights

00:04:53.440 | into what this transition was like, this abrupt transition from dinosaurs to no dinosaurs.

00:04:59.080 | One of the things they figured out, for example, by looking at the spherical ejecta in the

00:05:05.880 | stomach and lungs of fossilized fish from this day that they found on this site, is

00:05:11.280 | that the asteroid created something called, I'm going to pronounce this wrong, Seiche.

00:05:20.760 | So if you think about a tsunami as being bad, a Seiche is where a giant body of water, like

00:05:26.480 | in a bathtub, just keeps going up and down, right?

00:05:30.140 | So the asteroid hits and the ocean basically must have been going vroom, vroom, vroom.

00:05:34.280 | So just tsunami after tsunami after tsunami.

00:05:36.640 | So they learned a lot about this event, like what actually happened at the K-T boundary.

00:05:41.680 | All right.

00:05:42.680 | So what does this have to do with email?

00:05:44.720 | Well, I feel like I recently came across an artifact in the technological history of the

00:05:54.360 | office that is not unlike that discovery of the Hellkeek Formation that captured that

00:05:59.040 | sort of moment when the dinosaurs went extinct and a new type of life emerged, right?

00:06:06.360 | So we know there's this boundary in technological history.

00:06:09.640 | We have a K-T boundary.

00:06:11.080 | There's no email.

00:06:12.080 | There's no email.

00:06:13.080 | There's no email.

00:06:14.080 | Oh my God, everyone has email, right?

00:06:15.160 | So we have this boundary in our digital artifact record, but what about that moment where this

00:06:22.120 | change happened?

00:06:23.120 | What can we learn by looking at the very first moments at which email actually entered life?

00:06:27.480 | And I found a really cool technological equivalent of a Tyrannosaur that was fossilized at the

00:06:34.540 | day the asteroid hit.

00:06:36.440 | That is an article from the New Yorker.

00:06:37.840 | I'm going to bring this on the page here, remarkable article from the New Yorker.

00:06:42.680 | It's sort of famous among New Yorker people, from John Seabrook from 1993, and it's called

00:06:49.720 | Email from Bill, Bill Gates' Vision for the Future, all right?

00:06:54.880 | A classic profile from 1993 that's going to be our look into this digital equivalent of

00:07:00.140 | the asteroid hitting the office.

00:07:03.800 | So here's the point about this article.

00:07:05.660 | It's long.

00:07:06.660 | This is essentially the New Yorker's introduction of Bill Gates to its readership.

00:07:11.600 | I mean, Bill Gates was certainly known in 1993, but young enough, he was 38 then, that

00:07:17.760 | the New Yorker hadn't yet done its sort of big profile that gets into, here's where he

00:07:21.440 | was born, and here's where he came from, and here was his first company, and here's what

00:07:24.920 | Microsoft is doing, and here's Microsoft's plans.

00:07:27.720 | This wasn't yet something everyone knew.

00:07:30.020 | The New Yorker was introducing him to the world.

00:07:33.940 | Interesting side note, Jesse.

00:07:34.940 | I've actually, I don't think he knows this.

00:07:37.080 | I've been to John Seabrook's loft, somewhere in lower Manhattan.

00:07:43.900 | My uncle, he was throwing a book launch party for my uncle when I was in high school.

00:07:50.220 | My uncle invited my dad, and I was really into writing, so my dad said, "Oh, you should

00:07:54.020 | come along.

00:07:55.020 | This will be cool to see."

00:07:56.020 | So I don't think John knows it, but-

00:07:57.640 | The writing loft or where he lives?

00:07:59.160 | No, just where he lives.

00:08:00.160 | Yeah.

00:08:01.160 | Yeah.

00:08:02.160 | So there we go.

00:08:03.160 | I've been to his apartment.

00:08:04.160 | Around this time, well, a little bit after this time, but kind of around this time.

00:08:06.160 | All right.

00:08:07.160 | So it's a fantastic, amazing look into this period where the New Yorker was introducing

00:08:10.880 | the world.

00:08:12.040 | Here is Bill Gates.

00:08:13.260 | So Bill Gates had just hit number one the year before on Forbes' most wealthy American

00:08:18.120 | list, and then dropped to number two this year to Buffett.

00:08:21.120 | His fortune was about 6.1 billion.

00:08:23.160 | He's 38 years old.

00:08:25.680 | Here is the description of Gates and Microsoft from early in this article.

00:08:29.560 | I'm just setting the context of what was going on in the world at the time.

00:08:33.200 | Gates controls the computer industry to an extent matched by no other person in any other

00:08:36.960 | major industry.

00:08:38.420 | The Justice Department is currently trying to determine whether his control constitutes

00:08:42.200 | a monopoly.

00:08:43.940 | Microsoft now supplies 80% of all the personal computer operating system software in the

00:08:49.480 | world and 50% of all of the application software.

00:08:53.840 | Can you believe that?

00:08:54.840 | 80% of the operating systems, 50% of all the software running on computers.

00:09:00.640 | This one 38-year-old's company supplied it.

00:09:03.500 | Yeah.

00:09:04.500 | Yeah.

00:09:05.500 | He ruled the world.

00:09:06.500 | Right.

00:09:07.500 | This was the company.

00:09:08.500 | This was the tech company.

00:09:09.500 | A couple other things I noticed before we get into the key observation from this article,

00:09:13.960 | no internet.

00:09:15.880 | So John Seabrook makes the editorial decision throughout this article to keep referring

00:09:21.860 | to the quote information superhighway.

00:09:25.380 | The word internet is never used.

00:09:27.060 | Right.

00:09:28.060 | So this is this time the internet was not yet something that the public was very aware

00:09:31.180 | of.

00:09:32.180 | So if you looked up the timeline, actually, the mosaic web browser had been introduced

00:09:37.780 | that year.

00:09:39.540 | So this was the first web browser coming out of the University of Illinois Supercomputing

00:09:43.380 | Center.

00:09:44.380 | Hey there, I want to take a quick moment to tell you about my new book, Slow Productivity,

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00:10:41.220 | Everything you need, you can find there.

00:10:43.000 | All right, thanks.

00:10:44.000 | Let's get back to it.

00:10:45.280 | Worked on by a young graduate student at Illinois, University of Illinois, worked in the supercomputer

00:10:50.920 | center named Mark Engreson.

00:10:54.820 | The next year Netscape would come out, which was the first version of this that was aimed

00:10:58.900 | for the average person to use.

00:11:01.000 | So we didn't really have the web used yet.

00:11:03.560 | The internet was around, but it was mainly being used by academic and research institutions.

00:11:08.000 | So we don't even use that word yet.

00:11:10.760 | You'll notice Seabrook will use the same term, information superhighway, for referring to

00:11:17.520 | what we would now think of internet communications.

00:11:19.720 | He also uses it for thinking about internal digital communications within an organization.

00:11:25.860 | All of this was sort of mysterious back then.

00:11:27.900 | It was, I don't know, there's just these roads that are made of information and messages

00:11:33.540 | drive on them.

00:11:34.960 | So clearly it wasn't something we really understood.

00:11:37.140 | And I'm emphasizing this, so all the things we take for granted about digital communication

00:11:43.340 | and how that works, none of this was known back then.

00:11:45.380 | That's what I'm talking about.

00:11:46.380 | I'm really trying to hone in at exactly this period where email emerges.

00:11:51.060 | Another interesting vision of the future from this article, I mean, I love rabbit holing

00:11:56.140 | back to these past periods.

00:11:58.460 | The vision Seabrook documents, the vision Gates had for the internet was clearly this

00:12:06.980 | is going to be controlled through TVs.

00:12:10.080 | That was the vision in 1993.

00:12:12.260 | Let me read from the article here.

00:12:14.980 | The new machine that they're working on will be a communication device that connects people

00:12:18.660 | to the information highway.

00:12:20.580 | It will penetrate far beyond the 15% of American households that now own a computer and it

00:12:26.500 | will control or absorb other communication machines now in people's homes, the phone,

00:12:32.220 | the fax, the television.

00:12:34.660 | It will sit in the living room, not in the study.

00:12:37.720 | The problem of getting people to feel comfortable with such a powerful machine will be partly

00:12:41.260 | solved by putting it inside of one of the most unobtrusive objects in the house, the

00:12:45.700 | set top converter, which is a featureless black box on top of a cable connected TV set.

00:12:52.300 | They could not imagine a world in which yet just most people had computers, laptops, regular

00:12:58.380 | computers or smartphones and connected to the internet through those machines.

00:13:02.340 | They were still thinking we're going to have a cable box that can send faxes.

00:13:06.940 | And again, I'm trying to set the scene in '93.

00:13:09.980 | If we're going to use our analogy to paleontology, dinosaurs are still everywhere, right?

00:13:15.620 | No one was thinking about mammals, think about mammals yet.

00:13:19.060 | All right.

00:13:20.340 | So why is this interesting?

00:13:22.440 | Because what is the, the core behavior that Seabrook uses to try to capture what's so

00:13:27.900 | new and interesting and different about Bill Gates and Microsoft?

00:13:30.700 | Like what's his, they say in like editorial circles at the New Yorker, your acute way

00:13:34.860 | in to the subject, right?

00:13:37.140 | I just learned this from my editor the other day, the word profile, which was probably

00:13:42.220 | coined by Harold Ross, the founding editor of the New Yorker.

00:13:45.400 | It's actually referring to, when you look at someone in the profile of someone, you're

00:13:48.620 | looking at them from the sides, you're kind of getting at someone from the side.

00:13:52.180 | What was the thing, the weird eccentric attention catching thing about Bill Gates that John

00:13:56.040 | Seabrook uses as entrance into this article?

00:13:59.160 | The fact that he used email.

00:14:02.460 | So email had just arrived at Microsoft at the time that John Seabrook was writing this

00:14:09.380 | really epic profile of Bill Gates.

00:14:13.320 | So the article opens with John Seabrook, emailing Bill Gates on a whim, BillG@Microsoft.com.

00:14:20.220 | Gates answers, Seabrook and Gates begin sending emails back and forth about three or four

00:14:26.240 | times a week.

00:14:27.240 | Here's some quotes John Seabrook describing using email, which was clearly pretty new

00:14:32.180 | to him.

00:14:33.560 | You can do a little sleuthing in this article because he actually shows for some reason,

00:14:37.400 | because this was also novel, Seabrook actually shows the headers of one of these email messages,

00:14:41.680 | the routing headers.

00:14:42.680 | So you can find out that Seabrook was using CompuServe at the time.

00:14:46.660 | Here's some quotes from the article about email at this early period.

00:14:50.440 | We were intimate in a curious way, in the sense of being wired into each other's minds,

00:14:55.400 | but our contact was elaborately stylized, like ballroom dancing.

00:14:59.220 | In some ways, my email relationship with Bill was like an ongoing month-long conversation,

00:15:03.960 | except for there was a pause after each response to think.

00:15:07.040 | Here's another quote from the article.

00:15:09.320 | Another advantage Bill Gates has is that he already lives on the information highway.

00:15:14.800 | I love this use of information highway.

00:15:17.400 | The thing, and I have empathy for John Seabrook about this, he was probably like six months

00:15:22.360 | away, just in our cultural timeline, from the internet just becoming like a really common

00:15:26.680 | term.

00:15:27.680 | So probably like as this article was being fact-checked, he was like, "Oh no, there's

00:15:31.760 | another term, internet, oh God."

00:15:35.200 | Anyways.

00:15:36.200 | New employees at Microsoft are likely to encounter Bill Gates electronically long before they

00:15:42.680 | meet him in person.

00:15:44.880 | Some get to thinking of him by his email handle, which is Bill G, rather than by his real name.

00:15:51.000 | They'll be chatting with a Microsoft employee in the employee's office.

00:15:54.840 | The computer will make a little belch or squeak, indicating an incoming piece of electronic

00:15:59.200 | mail, and it will be an email from Bill.

00:16:02.380 | It's not unusual to hear a young employee say, "Hey, that's a good idea.

00:16:06.400 | I'm going to email Bill about that."

00:16:09.400 | Here's another observation about email at Microsoft.

00:16:12.720 | Gates spends at least two hours a day at his desk, staring into his monitor, reading and

00:16:17.840 | writing email.

00:16:19.640 | Email allows Gates to run the company in his head, in a sense.

00:16:24.480 | I want to pause there for a moment.

00:16:27.080 | This is really important.

00:16:30.400 | This is this Hell Creek Formation analogy in the digital world.

00:16:34.960 | Email arrives in this super fast-moving, super high-tech, king of the tech companies, tech

00:16:40.600 | just emerging in the '90s as the sector.

00:16:43.200 | They get email, and how is it deployed?

00:16:46.760 | Well, it's a reflection of Bill Gates, hyper-smart, rocking, keeping a hundred things in his head

00:16:53.400 | all at one point.

00:16:55.120 | It's a reflection, almost an immediate reflection, of his cognitive reality.

00:17:00.600 | Email becomes, "Let's just rock and roll.

00:17:02.940 | It's an intimate relationship.

00:17:04.080 | I'm running the company in my head.

00:17:05.480 | Anyone can talk to me at any time.

00:17:06.880 | I get a sense of what's going on."

00:17:08.640 | This became a well-known idea for a few years, this idea that you could just email Bill Gates

00:17:14.320 | and he would write you back.

00:17:16.720 | This tool is introduced into this company, and immediately its usage becomes a reflection

00:17:23.120 | of the personality of the most important person in the tech industry, which is Bill Gates.

00:17:27.640 | Now, what's important to emphasize is this is very specific to what's happening at Microsoft.

00:17:33.240 | There's this key passage where Seabrook says, "Look, most companies aren't like this."

00:17:37.920 | This is what I'm talking about.

00:17:38.920 | We're at that boundary, the no-email-email boundary.

00:17:42.120 | Seabrook looks to another company just as a comparison that is in Seattle.

00:17:47.760 | It's Macaw Cellular Communications, another high-tech company nearby.

00:17:53.000 | Here's how Seabrook describes it.

00:17:55.440 | Over at Macaw Cellular Communications, another prominent high-tech company whose headquarters

00:18:00.500 | is a few miles from Microsoft's, phones ring all the time and everyone wears a beeper.

00:18:06.920 | Seabrook is capturing, like Microsoft is ground zero right now of this email revolution.

00:18:13.240 | And immediately we get this sort of hyperactive hive mind.

00:18:16.520 | We're all connected to each other.

00:18:18.760 | Let's just send messages back and forth.

00:18:20.840 | Here's Seabrook giving a number.

00:18:22.800 | As in all the Microsoft offices, one rarely hears the sound of a ringing phone.

00:18:26.880 | The employees send a total of 200 million email messages to each other every month.

00:18:33.880 | Now I will point out there's no way that number is correct.

00:18:37.480 | Because I'm a nerd, Jesse, I went and did some research on this.

00:18:39.840 | I looked up the, from SEC filings, the total employees at Microsoft in 1993.

00:18:47.560 | If you divide 200 million emails by the total number of employees, it works out to about

00:18:52.240 | 13,000 emails per employee per month.

00:18:55.400 | I think he has an extra zero.

00:18:58.240 | In fact he-

00:18:59.240 | That's so good.

00:19:00.240 | I think he, I think he meant 20 million, but look, I know a lot about email usage statistics.

00:19:06.440 | That would be great.

00:19:07.440 | If there's 13,000 a month, I mean, if you do the math, I mean, it's like hundreds and

00:19:11.320 | hundreds of emails a day.

00:19:12.320 | I mean, it's possible, but whatever.

00:19:13.600 | They were using a lot of it.

00:19:14.960 | Other high-tech companies weren't.

00:19:15.960 | So this is ground zero of this happening.

00:19:17.960 | I want to give one more quote before we analyze this deeper.

00:19:23.320 | So I'm arguing that in part, this hyperactive, let's all just get this ongoing conversation

00:19:29.900 | going.

00:19:31.160 | Usage of emails in part, a reflection of Bill Gates.

00:19:34.000 | Seabrook argues it's also in part a reflection of the industry itself, right?

00:19:38.840 | So he says the platonic nature of software, it is invisible, weightless and odorless.

00:19:45.840 | It doesn't exist in the physical world, determines much of the culture that surrounds it.

00:19:52.120 | At Microsoft workers often describe each other as smart or super smart, or one of the smartest

00:19:56.520 | people you'll meet around here.

00:19:58.120 | All right.

00:19:59.120 | So we have this culture where it's all abstraction.

00:20:02.160 | It's digital bits that exist somewhere.

00:20:04.620 | And what matters is cognition, manipulating bits with your mind and how good are you doing

00:20:10.040 | that?

00:20:11.040 | So it's just natural if that's the environment in which this otherwise pretty bland tool,

00:20:16.640 | it's a protocol for sending ASCII text characters through some sort of common MIME formatting

00:20:21.480 | scheme back and forth between computers and storing it asynchronously.

00:20:24.520 | If that's the environment in which this bland tool emerges, we're going to be like, yeah,

00:20:29.680 | it's a hive mind.

00:20:30.680 | Let's, let's go.

00:20:31.680 | Everyone connect to everyone.

00:20:32.680 | Let's move information around as fast as we can.

00:20:34.760 | It's going to make us smarter.

00:20:36.200 | It's all about smarts and speed, and it's all abstract and digital anyways.

00:20:40.240 | And now our communication exists in this digital weightless, odorless ether, just like the

00:20:44.600 | bits of which we're programming.

00:20:46.320 | Let's just meld it all together.

00:20:47.700 | And Bill Gates wants to be at the center of this hive mind, almost just intuitively knowing

00:20:52.480 | everything that's going on and pushing it.

00:20:54.160 | He was a control, you know, a control addict.

00:20:57.480 | He wanted to have his hands in all parts of Microsoft.

00:20:59.800 | He was a leader, a completely hands-on leader.

00:21:03.320 | So it really makes sense that this would be the way in Microsoft that email spread.

00:21:11.120 | So here's what happened.

00:21:13.760 | This became how everyone else started using email too.

00:21:16.620 | So we get these early adopters in the tech industry like Microsoft, and we have this

00:21:20.040 | remarkable snapshot of what it was like when it comes there.

00:21:22.920 | And they immediately start using this as an extension of their brilliant brains and the

00:21:26.760 | hive mind, everyone together, and they love speed and moving quick.

00:21:30.360 | And this is a big part of that metaphorical approach to business.

00:21:35.240 | So then when this tool spreads, it's not just the technology spreading, it's the culture

00:21:39.640 | that spreads as well.

00:21:41.000 | Hey, here's this cool tool being used at places like Microsoft.

00:21:44.400 | Here's how they use it.

00:21:45.400 | We want to be like Microsoft.

00:21:46.400 | We're going to do this too.

00:21:49.320 | Just like how Silicon Valley companies in the 2010s began shifting over to open office

00:21:54.320 | formats for reasons that were very specific to Silicon Valley, they were signaling disruption

00:21:59.080 | to investors and potential employees.

00:22:01.920 | And later in the 2010s, you get companies that had no business having open offices doing

00:22:06.640 | the same thing.

00:22:09.080 | It's the culture and the physical change would spread.

00:22:13.080 | I remember doing a talk right before the pandemic at a big, I think a healthcare company.

00:22:19.220 | There's no reason for them to have these big open offices and all the people I talked to

00:22:22.000 | really hated it, but it just, the culture spreads with the tool.

00:22:26.680 | And that's how we ended up where we are now.

00:22:28.800 | And where we ended up almost immediately by the end of the 90s, email is about supporting

00:22:33.360 | a digital hive mind, quick, low friction communication.

00:22:37.220 | More is better than less because more information is better than less information.

00:22:40.780 | It lets us move faster.

00:22:42.060 | Faster is good.

00:22:43.060 | It makes us smarter.

00:22:44.060 | Smart is good.

00:22:45.060 | Sin, sin, sin, sin, sin.

00:22:47.500 | And so that was the evolution of this tool.

00:22:50.640 | After we got past our digital KT boundary, of course, the problem with this is it doesn't

00:22:55.840 | scale.

00:22:56.840 | Yes.

00:22:57.840 | In 1993, Bill Gates was emailing all of his employees.

00:23:00.580 | You could email him, get an answer.

00:23:01.800 | You're a reporter.

00:23:02.800 | You could email them.

00:23:03.800 | He would answer back.

00:23:04.800 | Spoiler alert.

00:23:05.800 | What would happen if I emailed billg@microsoft.com right now?

00:23:08.560 | Of course, he's not going to answer.

00:23:10.680 | Of course, when he was the CEO later in the nineties and into the early two thousands,

00:23:16.500 | you couldn't just easily email Bill Gates.

00:23:18.660 | It doesn't scale.

00:23:19.900 | It's too much communication.

00:23:21.140 | He was already spending two hours a day just trying to manage it when the tool was new

00:23:24.700 | and most people weren't still using it.

00:23:27.600 | And of course, by today, that's just way too many messages.

00:23:30.660 | And what ends up happening, and this is a core argument I've made many times on the

00:23:33.780 | show, I've written a whole book about this called the world without email.

00:23:36.980 | What ends up happening is if you're going to have a hive mind, you're going to have

00:23:40.200 | a lot of ongoing communication threads.

00:23:43.580 | Those communication threads are going to require back and forth information and it's asynchronous.

00:23:47.620 | You don't know when the next message in this thread is going to arrive, but when it does,

00:23:51.220 | you have to answer pretty quickly because you have to keep this back and forth going

00:23:54.540 | if you're going to reach any sort of conclusion in a reasonable amount of time.

00:23:58.060 | So what does this require?

00:23:59.700 | Constantly checking your inboxes.

00:24:02.300 | We could probably capture that best.

00:24:03.700 | I always go back to the same chart.

00:24:05.140 | I'm going to load it on the screen here for people who are watching.

00:24:08.900 | This chart on the screen shows exactly where we end up.

00:24:12.060 | When you start scaling up the hive mind, this is the histogram from the rescue time data

00:24:16.260 | set of the average time between checking email or instant messaging services.

00:24:20.860 | That medium average gap between checking email among the tens of thousands of people studied

00:24:25.580 | here was six minutes.

00:24:27.720 | The most common, if we look at this histogram, the most common gap between checking email

00:24:32.740 | of the tens of thousands of people studied, one minute.

00:24:36.700 | That's what happens when you want to maintain a constant ongoing conversation with a lot

00:24:40.820 | of different people is you have to service those conversations.

00:24:44.060 | If you don't, things get bottlenecked and slow down and there's problems.

00:24:48.880 | And so now we have to be constantly checking these things.

00:24:51.540 | Unfortunately, our brain cannot constantly check email or chat channels where every single

00:24:56.180 | message is from a completely different context than the message before.

00:24:59.920 | And also suspect to write good computer code or also expect to make good management decisions

00:25:04.380 | or also expect to be making research breakthroughs or to write a report in a way that's sensical

00:25:09.580 | and smart.

00:25:10.580 | We can't do both.

00:25:12.460 | So we're overloaded.

00:25:13.460 | We're burnt out and we're miserable.

00:25:15.780 | All of that goes back to this moment when this tool was introduced and Bill Gates said,

00:25:21.140 | this is great.

00:25:22.620 | I want to talk to people as fast as possible.

00:25:26.300 | So there's alternative timelines here, right?

00:25:28.140 | Like, I mean, let's imagine just like people say, let's rewind the clock to the asteroid

00:25:31.500 | hitting at the Cretaceous tertiary boundary.

00:25:34.340 | The first time it happened, mammals made their move.

00:25:37.220 | But you know, if we rerun the clock, we might've seen different outcomes.

00:25:40.020 | I think the same is true with email.

00:25:42.540 | Imagine for example, if for some reason, McCraw Communications, the place with all the beepers,

00:25:48.140 | what if they were the first to get email and not this, you know, super darling of the high

00:25:51.420 | tech industry like Microsoft led by such an iconic class like Bill Gates, it might've

00:25:55.500 | been different.

00:25:56.500 | Here are different ways that email might've been integrated as a tool in an alternative

00:26:00.580 | timeline of this transition.

00:26:03.220 | It might've first emerged for example, as a digital fax machine.

00:26:07.020 | Yeah, your email addresses are like fax machine numbers.

00:26:10.900 | Each team in the office has it.

00:26:13.020 | You use it to deliver documents and files.

00:26:15.180 | This is great.

00:26:16.180 | We don't have to fax it.

00:26:17.180 | We can just email the memo to the fax machine address for the marketing department.

00:26:22.820 | That is a completely sensical use of this asynchronous messaging format.

00:26:28.600 | Just happens not to be the one that first emerged.

00:26:31.180 | Here's another one, digital mailboxes.

00:26:34.740 | So another way that email could have been integrated into work cultures is it could

00:26:38.340 | have been a digital equivalent of the mail room.

00:26:42.300 | Like yeah, we have a digital mailbox and maybe you check once a day, like a real email box,

00:26:49.560 | like a real actual physical mailbox.

00:26:51.180 | Maybe there's like a special machine you go to.

00:26:53.460 | Like let me see what's in my mailbox.

00:26:55.340 | And it's digital.

00:26:56.340 | So like it saves having to have people transfer papers around.

00:26:59.300 | Right.

00:27:00.300 | So you could have had a whole culture emerge around this that says this is a digital version

00:27:03.340 | of our mailbox.

00:27:04.340 | I want you to check that.

00:27:05.660 | You check your physical mailbox once a day anyways, in the office, it'll be about the

00:27:08.660 | same.

00:27:09.660 | In fact, maybe you could imagine alternative timeline where there is a computer in the

00:27:12.700 | mail room.

00:27:14.240 | Let me check my physical mailbox and let me see if anyone sent me any digital mail and

00:27:18.300 | hey, there's a printer here and I can print anything I think I need to print.

00:27:23.500 | A completely sensical application of these underlying protocols, but it's not how it

00:27:26.940 | happened.

00:27:29.220 | Another timeline could have been imagined instead, email first emerged in a place that

00:27:34.660 | was more hierarchical.

00:27:36.600 | So not the sort of, hey, Bill Gates, everyone knows me, I'm talking to everyone, it's all

00:27:41.220 | about smarts.

00:27:42.220 | But let's say it arose in an old conservative blue chip firm that was very hierarchical.

00:27:47.800 | You could have easily imagined there that these protocols say, great, this is a tool

00:27:51.140 | for assistance.

00:27:54.340 | Students can use this in the background as part of how they help execute whatever it

00:27:59.860 | is to support they're trying to provide.

00:28:01.540 | So now they have another tool just like they might have, for example, at this period, the

00:28:06.740 | variable speed dictation machines.

00:28:09.380 | Kids don't know about these, but before there was computers, most people couldn't type.

00:28:15.020 | You had dedicated typers.

00:28:17.040 | You would write things by hand or record it.

00:28:20.220 | And then other people would type it for you, professional typers who are much faster.

00:28:25.100 | And if you recorded it, so a lot of people were recording memos and reports, talking

00:28:29.660 | into a microphone, the typers would play back these recordings and type along and they had

00:28:35.380 | a foot pedal and you could use the foot pedal to control the speed of the playback.

00:28:41.780 | So you could kind of slow it down and then speed it up and slow it down, like slow it

00:28:45.420 | down when you're saying something really precise.

00:28:47.020 | So you could have imagined an alternative timeline, the email arising in one of these

00:28:51.700 | hierarchical places that really depends on support staff.

00:28:54.260 | They'd be like, great, this is like the foot pedal for dictation.

00:28:57.260 | Another tool the support staff has, but the person like doing the financials or writing

00:29:01.580 | the report or coming up with the marketing campaigns, well, why would they need to know

00:29:04.500 | about that?

00:29:06.780 | All sorts of different alternative timelines.

00:29:09.660 | We fixate on the one that happened, but it doesn't mean it was inevitable.

00:29:12.380 | All right, so what's the general theory at play here?

00:29:16.040 | We need to separate the pure functionality of a new technology from how that functionality

00:29:22.040 | is applied.

00:29:23.040 | It's an important nuance in how we look at technology.

00:29:29.060 | We can get pretty deterministic about this.

00:29:31.500 | Yes, email means checking every five minutes and we talk about everything, it's all back

00:29:37.020 | and forth.

00:29:38.020 | That must just be somehow inevitable in the tool.

00:29:42.780 | So this is sort of a pure, what's called techno-determinist perspective.

00:29:47.120 | There was no other choice.

00:29:48.900 | That was what's going to happen when you introduce this tool.

00:29:52.840 | But often, no, it's more complicated than that.

00:29:55.480 | The tool has an abstract functionality, like email can deliver messages asynchronously

00:29:59.380 | over network and store them until someone's ready to read them.

00:30:02.560 | And then you have the culture surrounding the tool.

00:30:07.460 | How do we actually use that tool?

00:30:10.720 | It's not set in stone.

00:30:13.320 | Now here is where, and I don't want to get to tech theory here, there's an even more

00:30:19.160 | nuanced way to slice this.

00:30:20.640 | The techno-determinists say the tool just dictates exactly how it's going to be used.

00:30:26.440 | You have another group, Scott, the social construction of technology crowd that says,

00:30:30.880 | no, no, it's all the culture surrounding the tool, the people in the environment in which

00:30:37.880 | the tool is deployed, they determine how it's used.

00:30:41.400 | But the Scott folks tend to give a lot of agency to those people.

00:30:47.320 | So if email is used this way, there's these alternative timelines.

00:30:50.480 | But if it's used this way, it's because the people involved in controlling how email was

00:30:55.940 | first deployed wanted it to be used that way.

00:30:59.800 | I think the reality is in between those two things.

00:31:02.960 | So the usage of a tool like email is not built into its digital DNA.

00:31:07.120 | There's a lot of alternative timelines.

00:31:09.520 | The culture around the tool itself does dictate how that tool is deployed.

00:31:15.460 | But I often think that that cultural impact is often unintentional and dynamical.

00:31:22.060 | So it comes into Microsoft, Bill Gates doesn't make a decision.

00:31:26.840 | This is how I want email to use.

00:31:28.160 | It just sort of emerges from other realities of that culture and how this tool interacts

00:31:32.340 | with it.

00:31:33.340 | There's a lot of pseudo determinism.

00:31:35.780 | Often in these cases, these new tools come around and how they impact us is hard to predict

00:31:39.700 | and not intentional, but it's also not ingrained into the tool itself.

00:31:44.020 | There are alternatives.

00:31:45.940 | And so what does this mean for us?

00:31:48.600 | This means we should not take as a unavoidable given how a tool is affecting our lives or

00:31:53.980 | organizations or communities.

00:31:56.780 | It might be hard to steer this at first.

00:31:59.240 | These tools show up and have unpredictable interactions with where they arrive and they

00:32:02.660 | shoot off in some direction.

00:32:05.340 | And now Microsoft, according to John Seabrook is everyone's sending 13,000 emails a month

00:32:09.300 | or whatever, but we can still change that.

00:32:13.240 | It's hard to predict and it's hard to control where technology first takes us because of

00:32:17.260 | the pseudo determinism, but we can still change it because the tool itself is not deterministic.

00:32:23.180 | We can look back, see the impact and say, okay, let's push this on another timeline.

00:32:28.380 | Now that we've seen which way this went, now we can come back and more systematically say,

00:32:34.700 | is there a better way to deploy this tool?

00:32:37.140 | Now that we've seen the good and the bad that it reeks when we let it just sort of rock

00:32:41.180 | and roll.

00:32:43.220 | This is this philosophy that I call techno selectionism, where you can't predict in advance

00:32:48.300 | what things are going to do, but you can, after the fact, come back and try to re-steer

00:32:51.940 | them.

00:32:52.940 | And I think we can do that with email.

00:32:56.260 | So this hyperactive hive mind, Bill Gates approach does not have to be how we use this

00:33:00.460 | underlying tool.

00:33:02.680 | We can look at and say, given 30 years of experience, what's useful, what's not useful.

00:33:07.520 | How do we want to redirect it?

00:33:09.500 | The dinosaurs can't do this.

00:33:11.220 | Mammals can't do this.

00:33:12.220 | We can't rewind the clock and say, let's try evolution all over again.

00:33:16.240 | After the asteroid hit, we can do this with technology, which is what's exciting.

00:33:22.120 | So for example, as we're looking now at email, we might say, Bill Gates was wrong about this

00:33:27.060 | hive mind approach.

00:33:28.820 | It made sense in the moment, it was exciting, but you know what?

00:33:31.380 | It fries our brain.

00:33:32.380 | It doesn't scale.

00:33:33.380 | We can't get anything else done.

00:33:34.380 | We're all burning out.

00:33:35.380 | All right, let's stop doing that.

00:33:37.660 | What if we said instead, email should be for delivering information that doesn't require

00:33:42.980 | a reply.

00:33:44.200 | So like an old fashioned mailbox and for non-time sensitive questions that could be answered

00:33:48.540 | with a single message.

00:33:51.140 | Like that is a really efficient way to use email.

00:33:53.820 | Here's a memo.

00:33:54.820 | I don't want to print it.

00:33:55.820 | Great.

00:33:56.820 | I'm glad it's in my email inbox.

00:33:57.820 | I'll read it when I get a chance.

00:33:59.440 | Here's a question.

00:34:00.440 | What time are you leaving tomorrow?

00:34:01.520 | I don't need to know right away.

00:34:04.300 | When you get around to it, you can come back and answer it.

00:34:06.340 | That one message, it's done.

00:34:08.580 | But we could say, okay, for back and forth communication, we should not have a hive mind

00:34:12.580 | over digital because it's the asynchronous, it just means we have to check these things

00:34:16.320 | all the time.

00:34:17.320 | And this leads us to the type of things that I've pitched before.

00:34:19.900 | Like in my book, A World Without Email, have protocols for particular styles of work.

00:34:25.020 | Here's how we collaborate on this so it's not just messages going back and forth.

00:34:28.540 | Have office hours.

00:34:30.600 | You have a one-off question that's going to require a discussion.

00:34:33.820 | Come to my next office hours.

00:34:34.940 | We'll do it real time.

00:34:36.660 | Have things like docket clearing meetings.

00:34:39.140 | Here's something our team needs to work on you just thought of.

00:34:41.460 | Don't email it to us.

00:34:43.340 | Put it on our docket, a shared document that at our two or three time a week docket clearing

00:34:47.580 | meetings, we will see as we go through everything together and deal with them one by one.

00:34:53.300 | We can rewind the clock and rerun digital evolution.

00:34:56.860 | That's what's cool about this particular subject versus other types of evolutions that we face.

00:35:03.020 | So email, I mean, it's a cool story, right?

00:35:05.100 | I mean, it emerged in this unique company, like unique in the world with this unique

00:35:10.360 | person leading it.

00:35:11.860 | And he set the stage for this is how email should be used.

00:35:14.220 | And the same thing happened in technology companies all across Silicon Valley.

00:35:18.580 | And it changed the whole way we thought about this tool.

00:35:22.500 | But this way that we thought about the tool turned out to be an evolutionary dead end.

00:35:25.420 | It's making us miserable.

00:35:26.660 | It's really almost melting down the knowledge sector in a way we don't quite acknowledge

00:35:30.340 | yet.

00:35:31.340 | So let's just rewind the clock.

00:35:32.620 | We can do that.

00:35:33.620 | We can't predict when the asteroid is going to come, but we can keep going back and changing

00:35:39.380 | based on our own values and humanity, what happens after the impact occurs.

00:35:43.180 | So that's a broad point.

00:35:45.100 | But email gives us a specific example of that point in action.

00:35:50.660 | So there we go.

00:35:51.660 | 1993.

00:35:52.660 | Internet.

00:35:53.660 | I like that story.

00:35:54.660 | That was great.

00:35:55.660 | Information highway.

00:35:56.660 | I'm going to use that.

00:35:57.660 | Also email capitalized.

00:35:58.660 | Yeah.

00:35:59.660 | They still hyphenated.

00:36:00.660 | I don't know if they still capitalize email.

00:36:04.380 | Yeah.

00:36:05.380 | But in that article, it was email.

00:36:07.860 | Cool point.

00:36:08.860 | That's how the web was around.

00:36:10.980 | People didn't know what the internet was, and then suddenly they knew what the internet

00:36:13.660 | was.

00:36:14.660 | It was interesting.

00:36:16.580 | The guy who invented the internet, not the internet, the web, which is the part of the

00:36:20.780 | internet most people are familiar with, Tim Berners-Lee, he worked on the same floor that

00:36:25.980 | I did at MIT.

00:36:26.980 | So I'd often take the elevator with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet.

00:36:32.180 | And you know what the name of that building was?

00:36:34.220 | The William H. Gates, it was the Bill Gates Research Tower.

00:36:37.460 | So see, it all connects, Jesse.

00:36:39.140 | It all connects.

00:36:40.140 | Oh my.

00:36:41.140 | All right.

00:36:42.140 | So anyways, we've got a bunch of questions about these type of things, how to use email

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00:40:36.260 | They are the easiest way to sell things.

00:40:40.460 | They also have now an AI-powered tool called Shopify Magic to really help you convert more.

00:40:47.060 | In fact, they're one of the internet's best converting checkout platforms.

00:40:50.760 | Their checkout for e-commerce has 36% better on average conversion compared to other leading

00:40:58.520 | e-commerce platforms.

00:40:59.880 | 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. is powered by Shopify.

00:41:05.280 | They also have award-winning support.

00:41:06.520 | If you're selling things, Shopify is who you use.

00:41:10.120 | It's a shorthand.

00:41:11.120 | When Jesse and I talk about all of our ideas for what we want to sell, and I don't think

00:41:14.600 | we have our killer idea yet.

00:41:16.520 | We've had a lot of ideas.

00:41:18.460 | It's like the generic verb we use, like, "Yeah, so we could just Shopify that."

00:41:22.020 | Yeah.

00:41:23.020 | Clearly, that's what we're going to.

00:41:24.020 | In fact, don't we even have, waiting to go, a Shopify account?

00:41:28.800 | We set it up for the thing we were thinking about, so we even have it waiting for us just

00:41:32.400 | to get the right product.

00:41:33.400 | Yes, we do.

00:41:34.400 | That is how obvious it is to us that if and when we have our great product to sell, of

00:41:38.740 | course, we're going to use Shopify.

00:41:40.380 | It just makes everything easier.

00:41:43.020 | Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep, and make sure you spell

00:41:49.440 | that all lowercase.

00:41:51.780 | Go to shopify.com/deep now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.

00:41:56.300 | That's shopify.com/deep.

00:41:57.300 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:42:03.500 | Sounds good.

00:42:04.500 | All right.

00:42:05.500 | We've got a bunch of email, hyperactive hive mind, core questions, nerd questions.

00:42:11.340 | I love it.

00:42:12.340 | And to your mosh read, whenever I hear Costco now, I think of that Acquired episode on Costco,

00:42:17.180 | and then you wrote that piece on Acquired in your newsletter last week.

00:42:22.100 | Yes.

00:42:23.100 | And then I heard from one of my students that I taught this summer at Dartmouth when I was

00:42:26.700 | teaching that writing class, grad student who took my writing about technology class,

00:42:30.460 | and he was like, "I'm great friends with those guys.

00:42:32.700 | They met at my apartment."

00:42:34.660 | Very small world.

00:42:35.660 | Wow.

00:42:36.660 | Yeah.

00:42:37.660 | Everyone knows everyone.

00:42:38.660 | It's a small world.

00:42:39.660 | I think people of roughly a similar age who podcast are right.

00:42:43.500 | I mean, how many of us are there?

00:42:45.060 | All right.

00:42:46.060 | All right.

00:42:47.060 | First question's from Rachel.

00:42:48.060 | "How can I manage the hyperactive hive mind inside a big government agency?

00:42:53.100 | I've attempted to employ your strategies, but it's not working.

00:42:56.020 | Should I give up and move back to the private sector?"

00:42:58.220 | Well, I hope you don't think that's hyperbole, Rachel, but I think the right answer here

00:43:02.340 | is coup de tas.

00:43:04.900 | Just overthrow the government, and then you can determine how to be your number one.

00:43:11.420 | Mussolini made the trains run on time.

00:43:14.060 | You are going to cut down on unscheduled email messages that have to be responded to.

00:43:18.900 | Honestly, you probably could overthrow a country on that, a country's government on that particular

00:43:24.100 | platform.

00:43:25.100 | You know, Rachel, in my book, World Without Email, I open at the intro as an interesting

00:43:30.120 | case study that you will appreciate about the world of government and email.

00:43:35.000 | And what it profiled was someone, his name was Nish, and he was hired by the Obama administration.

00:43:42.020 | This was like in 2000, I think second term, second term Obama.

00:43:47.300 | And I forgot exactly what he was hired to do.

00:43:49.540 | It was under one of the cabinet secretaries, some sort of business innovation.

00:43:53.540 | It was probably under commerce or something like this, but like a typical, here's your

00:43:57.340 | team, here's your office, you're in charge of innovation strategy for the department

00:44:03.260 | of the treasury or something.

00:44:05.380 | And there's this natural experiment that happened where Nisha arrives in DC to take this job

00:44:11.900 | and some virus, like a digital virus, hits the computers.

00:44:15.980 | And it feels like it's compromised and the security forces come in and say, we got to

00:44:19.660 | take all your computers basically, because we don't know how far this virus has spread

00:44:23.540 | and there's security stuff going on.

00:44:25.900 | So we're going to take these.

00:44:27.020 | And so you have no way of emailing people and not for like a day.

00:44:32.340 | This was six weeks.

00:44:33.980 | So he shows up and almost immediately as a natural experiment, they turn off their email

00:44:38.820 | and say, do your jobs.

00:44:39.820 | You can't have email.

00:44:42.100 | And the cool thing about this is Nisha, yeah, there was like some, a bunch of annoying stuff.

00:44:45.260 | Like the main annoying thing was the, the Obama white house had this sort of daily email

00:44:50.620 | list about like what was going on and they felt out of the loop, but without the ability

00:44:55.180 | to send emails, Nisha's like, well, what am I going to do instead?

00:44:58.460 | Well, I'm going to go visit these various stakeholders relevant to our program.

00:45:02.500 | I'll just go to their offices and we'll, we'll have these like long meetings and just talk

00:45:07.540 | and think.

00:45:08.540 | And so he just met people, learned and thought like the way that a government task force

00:45:13.020 | like this would have been run at any point up until 1995.

00:45:17.980 | And it was super productive.

00:45:19.820 | And in those six weeks he came up with all of the insights that they executed, all the

00:45:25.500 | project ideas they executed for the rest of his time in government service.

00:45:29.540 | So I feel your pain, this a constant emailing and back and forth.

00:45:35.140 | It makes the small things convenient, but makes the large things that matter very hard.

00:45:42.140 | So what can you do in this cliche of an organization that of course you can't change, you can't

00:45:47.940 | change government bureaucracy.

00:45:50.900 | Change the metric you're focusing on.

00:45:53.140 | Be more specific.

00:45:54.140 | You're going to have more success.

00:45:56.440 | So what you're looking at is not really email reduction.

00:46:00.520 | What you're working at is not, I want less emails in my inbox.

00:46:04.900 | What you're looking at is not, I want better habits around my inbox.

00:46:09.980 | I want people to be okay with me checking once every three hours.

00:46:16.220 | That's not it either.

00:46:17.220 | None of these are what you're looking for.

00:46:19.220 | What you're actually looking for, the thing that if you counted would give you the number

00:46:23.900 | you want to make as small as possible is number of unscheduled messages that you have to reply

00:46:29.540 | to in a given day.

00:46:31.660 | That is the actual killer, not email, not norms.

00:46:35.660 | It is messages that arrive unscheduled.

00:46:38.060 | So it's not like you're anticipating like at this point, this message is coming.

00:46:41.220 | That requires a reply from you.

00:46:43.360 | When that number is high, you have to constantly check your inbox because you're probably never

00:46:48.420 | far from a message that may have just arrived that you probably need to respond to.

00:46:52.220 | Because again, this is part of a back and forth chain.

00:46:53.980 | And if you don't keep that chain pulling, you're not going to get to a decision before

00:46:57.420 | the end of the day.

00:46:58.420 | And it's a problem.

00:46:59.820 | Unscheduled messages that require replies.

00:47:01.900 | That's the killer.

00:47:02.900 | So now you start thinking, how do I reduce those?

00:47:06.860 | And it's not just reducing email and it's not just changing your habits.

00:47:09.560 | Now it is collaboration systems.

00:47:12.980 | Oh, I'm collaborating with this person on this.

00:47:16.700 | The way we're implicitly collaborating now is she just sends things as she thinks of

00:47:21.740 | them and we have these conversations in email.

00:47:24.720 | That's raising my unscheduled messages that require a reply metric.

00:47:28.020 | That number is going up because of this collaboration.

00:47:30.740 | Why don't I think about this particular collaboration?

00:47:33.800 | How do we reduce the unscheduled messages?

00:47:36.100 | I don't need to talk to the other person about that like this.

00:47:38.580 | I don't need to tell them about Cal and the hyperactive hive mind and Bill Gates and the

00:47:43.020 | KT boundary.

00:47:44.020 | I'm just going to put in place an alternative that brings that down.

00:47:48.380 | It's like, okay, Hey, here's what we're going to do.

00:47:50.700 | I'll stop by your office every Thursday.

00:47:52.800 | In the meantime, as like questions come up, just throw them in here and that way we won't

00:47:56.580 | forget them.

00:47:57.580 | Whatever it is without making a big deal about it, you've moved this collaboration approach

00:48:04.200 | away from unscheduled messages towards something else.

00:48:06.800 | And then just repeat for all of the different collaborations that are going on.

00:48:12.620 | Think how do I reduce unscheduled messages?

00:48:16.180 | Now here's an advanced tip here.

00:48:18.080 | Sometimes the answer is not in what the other person does.

00:48:20.500 | We love the idea of everyone else is wrong.

00:48:22.700 | And so like, Hey, don't, instead of emailing me, like come to my office hours, all that

00:48:26.100 | type of stuff.

00:48:27.660 | Sometimes it comes down to what you're doing.

00:48:30.120 | And now this, now we're talking about things that are really in your control buried in

00:48:33.500 | my book, deep work is a really powerful idea called process oriented emailing.

00:48:39.740 | And it says, think about an email before you press send, right?

00:48:44.360 | Our instinct is usually what's the quickest path between right now and having the thing

00:48:49.660 | I'm emailing about off of my plate.

00:48:51.540 | So I don't have to stress about it.

00:48:53.420 | And so we're just hammering on that keyboard project.

00:48:56.700 | No good.

00:48:57.700 | Me want you do fire bad scent, right?

00:49:00.020 | I mean, it's like, let's just get this thing out of here.

00:49:03.260 | But the right way to think about that is not how quickly can I get this off my plate, but

00:49:06.860 | how many unscheduled messages and replies is going to create.

00:49:10.560 | And actually, I would rather spend more time right now crafting this message if it reduced

00:49:14.460 | multiple replies in the future.

00:49:17.760 | So process centric email is where you say, instead of just me, good project, do fire

00:49:21.420 | badge, you say, all right, so we have this project we need to work on.

00:49:25.820 | It's like, what needs to happen here?

00:49:27.660 | Well, here's what I'm thinking.

00:49:28.660 | And you kind of spell out like how, not just what's going to happen, but how you guys are

00:49:32.660 | going to collaborate about it.

00:49:34.660 | Why don't you take a first look at this, put any thoughts you have into the Google Drive

00:49:41.700 | folder we already have for this project.

00:49:44.140 | I have just put on my calendar a block of time Thursday afternoon to take a look at

00:49:50.460 | that.

00:49:51.540 | So just whenever you get to it, get to it.

00:49:53.140 | I'll take a look at it.

00:49:54.260 | Then we already have this meeting scheduled for Friday.

00:49:58.940 | Let's just make sure we take the last 15 minutes then to coordinate on this.

00:50:02.140 | I'll have already seen your thoughts.

00:50:03.940 | You'll have written them down.

00:50:04.940 | I'll have looked at them.

00:50:05.940 | The final 15 minutes of that meeting, we can then coordinate on where we're a little unclear

00:50:09.740 | how we want to go forward.

00:50:11.340 | That's a long email.

00:50:12.580 | Yes.

00:50:13.580 | That takes longer than just hitting your keyboards as fast as you can and slamming sends with

00:50:20.180 | your mutton leg like a caveman.

00:50:21.780 | Yes, it takes longer, but you have just saved any unscheduled messages in this particular

00:50:27.540 | collaboration that you have to sit there and wait for and reply to.

00:50:30.940 | You spell out in the message, "Here is how we're going to collaborate on this."

00:50:34.980 | The way you spell out does not involve a lot of unscheduled messages that have to be replied

00:50:39.220 | to.

00:50:40.220 | There's a lot of different things you can do here, but it's collaboration by collaboration

00:50:43.540 | steering the implicit strategy for each collaboration towards things that aren't the fastest or

00:50:49.460 | the most convenient, but that reduce unscheduled messages that you have to reply to.

00:50:53.580 | I really wish we could just have a big flashing number above everyone's computer in these

00:50:58.020 | type of jobs.

00:50:59.020 | Like this is your average unscheduled messages you're replying to per day, and as that number

00:51:02.980 | goes down, people come in and congratulate you.

00:51:05.500 | "Hey, way to go.

00:51:06.500 | You got that down to half."

00:51:08.660 | That would make a huge difference.

00:51:09.660 | So we look at the wrong metrics.

00:51:10.660 | We want to blame people.

00:51:11.700 | We want to say norms are bad.

00:51:13.460 | We want to just try to reduce email.

00:51:14.740 | I mean, nothing, not that it frustrates me, but it kind of frustrates me when people find

00:51:20.460 | out like, "Oh, you've written a book about email and like reducing the impact of email."

00:51:25.300 | Like, "Yeah, I'm with you, man.

00:51:26.740 | I get so many of these newsletters in my inbox."

00:51:29.500 | Who cares?

00:51:32.060 | You don't have to respond to those, right?

00:51:34.840 | Does it matter that you have 20 newsletters?

00:51:38.140 | Just worst case scenario, you don't read them.

00:51:40.980 | That's not the problem.

00:51:42.460 | The problem is not the newsletter.

00:51:43.800 | It's like message seven of 17 from Steve that you're going to have to answer today because

00:51:49.980 | you guys are trying to figure out who's going to buy the cake for the birthday party tomorrow.

00:51:53.700 | And so now you're in your inbox all day waiting for the next message and bouncing it back

00:51:56.900 | and forth.

00:51:57.900 | It's not your newsletters.

00:52:00.660 | Unscheduled messages that require a reply, right?

00:52:03.860 | So if you know what you're fixing, you can fix it more.

00:52:06.100 | All right.

00:52:07.100 | Who do we got next?

00:52:08.220 | The whole time you were doing your example of typing on the keyboard, I was thinking

00:52:11.620 | of your keyboard that you bought.

00:52:13.340 | Oh, yes.

00:52:14.340 | My clicking.

00:52:15.340 | How's that doing?

00:52:16.340 | I love it.

00:52:17.340 | Okay.

00:52:18.340 | Yeah.

00:52:19.340 | I love it.

00:52:20.340 | By the way, when I said we did crazy or deep on my keyboard.

00:52:21.340 | So for people who don't know, Jess and I do this segment called crazy or deep where I

00:52:24.660 | like, Hey, is this crazy that I like spent so much money on this?

00:52:27.700 | And he tells me if it's crazy or deep.

00:52:29.140 | So I bought this hundred fifty dollar, $5 keyboard or whatever.

00:52:33.660 | I heard from people that said, oh, you don't know how deep the mechanical keyboard rabbit

00:52:40.140 | hole goes.

00:52:41.140 | Like that is nothing.

00:52:43.020 | You can spend real money in that world.

00:52:45.560 | So I feel better.

00:52:47.180 | All right.

00:52:48.500 | Next question is from a guy who hates Scrum.

00:52:51.420 | How do I handle a hyperactive hive mind workplace situation when I'm quitting?

00:52:55.500 | When quitting my current job isn't an option for now, I'm a web developer at a company

00:52:59.900 | where I must stay connected to a group video meeting during business hours and reply to

00:53:04.500 | all email and slack messages within 10 minutes, no matter what, or I'll get yelled at for

00:53:09.900 | slacking off.

00:53:12.540 | People don't realize this, but I make Jesse seven days a week, always be logged into a

00:53:16.980 | zoom room just in case I have something I want to ask them about.

00:53:21.860 | That's terrible.

00:53:23.120 | That's a terrible work environment.

00:53:24.620 | Right.

00:53:25.620 | So, yeah, short term, buy him a copy of my book.

00:53:29.700 | So they can just see how terrible of a work environment that is.

00:53:32.420 | I mean, this sounds like if I, instead of Milton, wrote Dante's Inferno, this would

00:53:39.260 | be one of the circles of hell, I would add.

00:53:42.280 | You have to be in a video meeting all day long just to make sure that people can just

00:53:45.260 | see you at all moments, interrupt you as soon as they need it.

00:53:48.740 | Here's my bigger point I want to make, and this is not what this guy wants to hear, but

00:53:52.580 | I think it's important for other people to hear.

00:53:55.980 | How your work environment deals with collaboration is a really big deal.

00:53:59.780 | It really matters, and it's something you have to take as seriously as like the location

00:54:04.220 | of where the work is, like where you would have to live or what the commute is like,

00:54:07.980 | what the people are like, do you like them or really hate them, and your sort of moral

00:54:11.860 | assessment of the work itself.

00:54:14.300 | This is just as important as that.

00:54:15.980 | And when evaluating a job, it's got to be one of the key things.

00:54:19.140 | How do you collaborate?

00:54:21.060 | Is it hyperactive hive mind or is it more structured?

00:54:24.980 | And I would like to see a world in which people take that into account much more often.

00:54:29.260 | Oh, we're in a video all day.

00:54:32.140 | Yeah, that's not work.

00:54:33.380 | That's terrible.

00:54:34.380 | You know, that's you.

00:54:35.380 | You might as well told me we work next to the pork rendering plant and you know, it's

00:54:39.780 | it smells like awful all day, right?

00:54:41.500 | Like that's a bad thing.

00:54:43.460 | I think the more people take that into account and ask about it and even make career decisions

00:54:47.780 | around that, we get an interesting market signal that'll push more of these companies

00:54:52.140 | towards more sensical and psychologically sustainable ways of working.

00:54:56.700 | So I want to be so quick to say quitting my current job isn't an option.

00:55:01.220 | It might not be for now, but you need to think about this like you just discovered that,

00:55:04.780 | hey, wait a second.

00:55:05.780 | I'm at Enron, you know, in like 2000, I don't like what's going on here.

00:55:10.700 | I think I might want to get out of this ship.

00:55:13.380 | Do not, we should not take lightly collaboration style.

00:55:17.420 | That should be one of our tier one concerns we have when evaluating companies and we should

00:55:20.620 | be vocal about it.

00:55:21.620 | And if you do end up leaving this place, make it clear to them.

00:55:24.780 | That's a big reason why they'll bluster and you know, but the signal there is important.

00:55:30.580 | Like this is no way to take human brains and have them work together to produce value is

00:55:34.660 | a terrible way to run something.

00:55:36.260 | All right, what do we got next?

00:55:39.460 | Next question from Jack, how can I work deeply at writing code when this often necessitates

00:55:44.340 | having ready access to a web browser for stack overflow reference or other users without

00:55:49.940 | getting distracted?

00:55:51.140 | I have the unhooked YouTube extension and that does a lot of good, but I still find

00:55:55.460 | myself checking email.

00:55:56.820 | All right, well, I have three suggestions that are going to go in order of you disliking

00:56:02.660 | most to disliking least.

00:56:04.460 | All right, so my first suggestion, which you'll dislike most is to grow up, right?

00:56:09.540 | It's your job.

00:56:10.660 | Don't look at other stuff on your web browser when you're coding.

00:56:13.460 | Don't check email.

00:56:14.460 | Don't go on YouTube.

00:56:16.180 | You know, just you have to grow up a little bit.

00:56:18.700 | This is my job.

00:56:19.740 | When I code, I code, I don't do these other things.

00:56:22.340 | If I need to go to stack overflow to look up an algorithm analysis or a library, whatever,

00:56:27.620 | I will just go there and just make the rule really clear and don't break the road.

00:56:31.960 | Don't break that rule because you're growing up in a job that they're paying you to do.

00:56:36.860 | Don't fall completely into this victim mindset of like, what can I do?

00:56:40.900 | The internet is so compelling and I can't control myself.

00:56:44.100 | Look, I'm on board with that argument for a lot of ways the internet is in our life.

00:56:49.460 | But when you're at your job and working and working on something very specific like coding,

00:56:52.780 | just have a rule and follow the rule because that's, you know, work in general is corralling

00:57:00.220 | your attention on one thing despite other things your mind would rather do.

00:57:02.940 | All right.

00:57:03.940 | So that's the answer you're not going to like.

00:57:05.560 | The answer you'll maybe kind of like.

00:57:07.900 | Time blocking helps what I just said.

00:57:09.820 | So you time block, here's what I'm doing for this 90 minutes.

00:57:13.340 | Here's what I'm doing for this 30 minutes.

00:57:15.020 | It's much easier to follow that advice to grow up and do your work when you're working

00:57:20.140 | and don't get distracted by other things because now you can say, I'm in a programming block.

00:57:24.440 | It's on my time block planner.

00:57:26.380 | It's 90 minutes long and then I have an email check block.

00:57:29.700 | I'm still in the middle of that programming block.

00:57:31.420 | I don't check email during the programming block.

00:57:32.940 | I check it.

00:57:33.940 | It's coming up.

00:57:35.980 | That's actually a lot easier than when you don't time block because when you don't time

00:57:38.860 | block, here's what your mind says.

00:57:39.860 | We're going to have to check email at some point.

00:57:43.740 | Why not now?

00:57:44.740 | And you're like, well, I'm coding.

00:57:45.740 | And then it's like, well, why not now?

00:57:47.140 | Why not now?

00:57:48.140 | Why not now?

00:57:49.140 | Why not now?

00:57:50.140 | Like you're constantly having to have this debate with your mind about like, hey, we're

00:57:51.460 | going to have to take a break at some point.

00:57:52.680 | Why not look at YouTube now?

00:57:54.140 | So time blocking is going to make that first thing much easier because you're saying, yeah,

00:57:58.340 | this is when we're taking a break.

00:57:59.540 | This is when we're checking email.

00:58:00.580 | This is a good plan.

00:58:01.580 | I'm a grownup.

00:58:02.580 | I can follow a plan.

00:58:03.580 | Come on.

00:58:04.580 | All right.

00:58:05.580 | The one you'll probably like best as a coder is a high-tech solution.

00:58:09.740 | Consider using GitHub's AI-powered copilot feature.

00:58:14.620 | So the GitHub copilot is based off of, I think, GPT-4.

00:58:20.420 | It's integrated straight into your IDE.

00:58:22.580 | So the integrated development environment in which you code, it replaces a lot of stack

00:58:26.360 | overflow googling.

00:58:28.140 | This is in the weeds, so like other people can kind of glaze over here.

00:58:31.180 | But it's basically a tool where if you're a programmer, it uses a generative AI model

00:58:36.620 | to help you do things like, what's the name of this library?

00:58:40.140 | I don't know how this call goes.

00:58:41.460 | It figures out what you're, oh, I know what you're looking for.

00:58:44.620 | Here's it.

00:58:45.620 | Here's how this goes.

00:58:46.620 | Or you can say, could you write out some quick sample code that uses these functions?

00:58:51.800 | And it gives you the code, and then you can modify it.

00:58:55.040 | If you're not a programmer, what you need to know is like, these are things right now

00:58:57.540 | that people solve by googling.

00:58:59.900 | There's a couple of websites, like he mentioned, Stack Overflow, which is like a Reddit-style

00:59:03.220 | bulletin board.

00:59:04.880 | And right now, a lot of programmers, what you do is you google Stack Overflow for examples,

00:59:10.300 | and it's humans have posted examples.

00:59:13.260 | This integration of AI into the IDE can handle about 50% of that Google searching, but you

00:59:21.460 | don't actually have to google.

00:59:22.460 | All right, so that, there you go.

00:59:23.500 | So I gave you an array of answers here from, will make you mad, to like, okay, to like,

00:59:28.220 | yes.

00:59:29.220 | Because tech people, Jesse, love the like, here's a tool.

00:59:32.420 | Here's the secret is like, you got to harness a large language model with a trillion parameters.

00:59:37.340 | That's more sexy than, come on, man, grow up.

00:59:39.820 | All right, let's do one more question and then a call, and then we'll jump on to the

00:59:45.380 | third.

00:59:46.380 | >> Okay.

00:59:47.380 | Next question is from Michael.

00:59:48.380 | Cal, I recently began doing morning work sessions without my phone to produce my productivity.

00:59:54.540 | I own my own business and have employees and clients.

00:59:57.100 | A couple hours into my work, however, I begin getting stressed that I could be missing important

01:00:01.420 | emails.

01:00:02.420 | How can I solve this?

01:00:03.420 | >> Right.

01:00:04.420 | So, you know, Michael, in his elaboration, was talking about he spends a couple hours

01:00:09.300 | every morning just locked in before he checks his email and he's stressed.

01:00:15.260 | Try it.

01:00:16.980 | Try it for two weeks.

01:00:19.260 | And your goal here is not, does anyone ever get mad at me?

01:00:22.640 | Your goal is, is the amount that the magnitude of the issues tolerable?

01:00:28.280 | And I think you'll find it is.

01:00:29.820 | That, yes, there are a lot of emails waiting in the morning, but often the emails waiting

01:00:33.820 | in the morning are people who are clearing out their email inboxes the night before or

01:00:38.300 | who are waking up early to try to get ahead of their email before meetings start.

01:00:41.900 | They don't even want you to respond right away.

01:00:43.840 | They just went through a huge push to clear out their inbox.

01:00:47.220 | They want a little bit of peace before these replies start coming back in.

01:00:50.820 | So I think you'll find if you just test it, okay, I wait till 10 a.m. before I see my

01:00:55.540 | email inbox, that your clients and stuff are fine.

01:00:57.740 | They're getting emails at 10 versus nine.

01:01:00.140 | It's going to be fine.

01:01:01.140 | And if it's a problem, then you can come up with an alternative for those clients that

01:01:04.340 | if they definitely need to hear from you in that hour.

01:01:06.980 | There's a story about this in a world without email of a company that was just dying in

01:01:13.020 | email.

01:01:14.020 | They were just drowning in email.

01:01:15.020 | It was a UX design company, internally and externally.

01:01:18.580 | And so they switched over to this completely email-free, when I say essentially email-free,

01:01:25.180 | they still used email to deliver files and invoices and stuff, but they essentially moved

01:01:30.460 | away from digital communication as a way of structuring their work.

01:01:34.140 | Instead, they had these two check-ins at the beginning of the morning, at the beginning

01:01:36.860 | of the afternoon, and, "Hey, what are you working on?

01:01:39.340 | What are the obstacles?

01:01:40.340 | What do you need?"

01:01:41.340 | And it was great, right?

01:01:42.340 | They got away from just being on Slack and email all day.

01:01:45.140 | They did the same with their clients.

01:01:47.500 | And the way they decided to do this was when you sign a contract with us as a client, there

01:01:54.380 | is going to be an addendum to that contract called our communication policy.

01:01:58.820 | And you are going to sign off on this is how we are going to communicate, how you're going

01:02:02.100 | to ask questions, when we're going to talk to you.

01:02:03.780 | And they had a really good system.

01:02:05.020 | It was like weekly conference calls, where at the end of the conference call, a written

01:02:08.860 | record of every question or obligation or commitment made during the call was then sent

01:02:12.660 | to the client, so they have a written record and whatever.

01:02:15.100 | They had a whole system.

01:02:16.420 | Two partners in this company.

01:02:18.020 | One of the partners was the client-facing guy.

01:02:19.740 | One of the partners was the tech guy.

01:02:20.980 | The client-facing guy was terrified, right?

01:02:23.460 | He said, "Michael, this is much worse than what you're doing."

01:02:25.860 | This was like, "You're going to have to sign a contract that says you can't email us."

01:02:30.460 | He was like, "We are going to lose all of our clients."

01:02:34.460 | And guess what?

01:02:35.460 | No one cared.

01:02:36.460 | Because it turns out, it's not the accessibility that people really care about that you answer

01:02:42.060 | me all the time.

01:02:43.060 | It is clarity.

01:02:44.620 | If I have an issue that you are required to resolve, I want it to be crystal clear to

01:02:49.960 | me how that gets resolved.

01:02:52.140 | I do not want to keep track of this in my head, because that's a source of stress.

01:02:57.860 | If you have no alternative way or clarity system to do this, then yes, they're going

01:03:01.860 | to want you to answer right away, because they can't take this out of their head until

01:03:05.620 | you answer it.

01:03:07.300 | But if there is alternative ways to do this that also lets them take it out of their head,

01:03:10.660 | they're just as happy.

01:03:11.660 | And that's what this company did in a world without email.

01:03:14.860 | You could just write down, you knew this call was coming up, and the clients had their list

01:03:18.260 | of things to talk about, and they got the written record, so they knew nothing was going

01:03:21.080 | to be dropped, and it was fine, and they didn't have to worry about these things in between

01:03:24.220 | the calls.

01:03:25.220 | Michael, if there's a couple of clients that are upset that you don't do email in the morning,

01:03:29.500 | there'll be a very similar system.

01:03:31.420 | In fact, you can even have an office hour, 30 minutes at 10 a.m., you know, this is my

01:03:36.740 | beginning of the day, open doors, right, or here's a shared document, just throw all of

01:03:40.460 | your issues into here, or you know you're going to hear from me between 10 and 11.

01:03:45.020 | Just that clarity is what's going to matter, not the accessibility.

01:03:48.520 | All right.

01:03:49.520 | Do we have a call?

01:03:50.520 | >> Yes, we do.

01:03:51.520 | >> All right.

01:03:52.520 | Let's get a call in here.

01:03:54.140 | >> Hey, Kyle.

01:03:55.940 | My name is Jose.

01:03:56.940 | I'm a doctoral student with ambitions to land a tenure-track faculty position in the next

01:04:01.220 | four years.

01:04:02.700 | If I remember correctly, in a recent episode, you mentioned that in your 30s, you were quite

01:04:07.180 | busy with your professional life, and that you've now shifted to a more human lifestyle.

01:04:12.180 | With this in mind, my question is, would you still recommend slow productivity practices

01:04:16.940 | to someone in the beginning of their career, particularly to those with academic ambitions?

01:04:22.140 | It seems to me that there's a tension between the publish or perish culture and slow productivity.

01:04:27.660 | I would also very much appreciate any wisdom or tips you can share on landing an academic

01:04:32.060 | position.

01:04:33.060 | Thanks.

01:04:34.060 | >> Well, it's a good question.

01:04:35.060 | The intersection of slow productivity and academia, which I got to say, I won't name names, but

01:04:43.660 | I've been doing a lot of podcasts, and there's been two podcasters who I did their show who

01:04:49.820 | unsolicited said like, "Hey, this is my favorite thing of yours you've ever ... Slow productivity

01:04:54.020 | is my favorite thing of yours you've ever written.

01:04:57.420 | It's like either this or deep work, and it might be this."

01:05:00.300 | Both of those people are academics.

01:05:02.140 | So I think there's something in this book that clearly, because I'm an academic, I'm

01:05:06.380 | sort of implicitly, even without realizing it, preaching to the choir a little bit.

01:05:11.940 | Is slow productivity incompatible with publish or perish?

01:05:15.100 | I don't think so.

01:05:16.100 | I don't think so.

01:05:17.660 | There's a lot of academics that are profiled in this book.

01:05:21.460 | Publish or perish, we think of it colloquially as a fast activity, but my God, it is so much

01:05:28.320 | slower than the type of fast productivity that I'm really pushing back on.

01:05:34.020 | Publish or perish is I'm writing three papers this year, right?

01:05:40.040 | So actually, slow productivity is really well fitted for an academic lifestyle because what

01:05:48.400 | it tells you is, okay, what matters is your papers, and just focus on beautiful papers,

01:05:53.740 | really smart papers.

01:05:54.800 | Give that time.

01:05:56.460 | Give it a lot of your time.

01:05:58.100 | Keep coming back to it.

01:05:59.100 | Take your time.

01:06:00.100 | Produce great stuff.

01:06:01.100 | That's how you get tenure, right?

01:06:02.420 | It's all based on letters.

01:06:04.020 | How good is this person's scholarship?

01:06:05.460 | How influential is it in the world?

01:06:07.100 | There is no games.

01:06:08.320 | There is no politics.

01:06:09.820 | People who don't understand academia think it's all just these weird, subtle things,

01:06:14.300 | and no, it's confidential letters.

01:06:17.260 | How influential and smart is this person's work?

01:06:19.160 | That's it.

01:06:20.160 | That's a slow productivity game, but slow productivity also tells you, make sure you

01:06:23.640 | don't have a lot of other stuff on your plate at the same time.

01:06:26.320 | Now, most research institutions try to help with this pre-tenure.

01:06:29.680 | They want to keep your obligations low, your teaching load easy, your administrative obligations

01:06:35.240 | light.

01:06:36.240 | Now, I understand before I get the letters, this is, I'm talking here like tier one, Carnegie

01:06:40.520 | one, R1 research institutions.

01:06:42.520 | I know most professors, because there's a lot of colleges, most professors don't care

01:06:47.160 | that much about, they don't give, they're not giving that latitude, right?

01:06:50.060 | If you're not at a tier one research institution, I get it.

01:06:52.520 | They're like, "We care about research.

01:06:54.400 | Here's your six courses.

01:06:55.400 | Teach."

01:06:56.400 | And I also recognize it's very different for adjunct or non-tenure line faculty.

01:07:00.120 | But the person asking a question here is interested.

01:07:02.720 | It sounds like it's a tier one research academia.

01:07:06.400 | That's a slow productivity game.

01:07:09.460 | Coming back to again and again, great research, making progress, publishing things, not getting

01:07:14.760 | caught up in the small, not getting caught up in the busy, not having too many things

01:07:18.520 | going on at the same time.

01:07:20.860 | Just this like relentless return to thinking.

01:07:24.520 | So why was my thirties difficult?

01:07:28.600 | And again, it's all relative, right?

01:07:29.600 | I mean, I still largely worked nine to five and et cetera, because I was doing multiple

01:07:34.680 | jobs.

01:07:35.680 | All right.

01:07:36.680 | So maybe don't write books, you know, unrelated to your academic career at the same time you're

01:07:42.160 | trying to get tenure.

01:07:43.480 | Don't do that.

01:07:44.480 | And I think you'll be okay.

01:07:45.480 | See, I was running two jobs as an author and an academic and had all of our kids were had

01:07:49.800 | during that, my thirties as well.

01:07:51.160 | So there's a lot going on.

01:07:52.880 | So just pick two out of those three and you'll be okay.

01:07:56.640 | Embrace slow productivity, pick two out of those three things, and I think you'll be

01:08:00.920 | okay.

01:08:01.920 | All right.

01:08:04.560 | So we're coming up to our third and final segment.

01:08:08.200 | This is where we are going to, I'm going to talk about my New York Times op-ed, I'm going

01:08:11.360 | to read comments, which again is either a great or terrible idea, but first let's take

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01:12:37.320 | With ZocDoc, you've got more options than you know.

01:12:40.640 | ZocDoc is one of these things that I think just makes a lot of sense, right?

01:12:47.200 | All those sorts of things in our life, movies we want to see, clothing we want to buy, a

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01:12:54.000 | Hey, what do people recommend?

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01:13:14.520 | Do they take my insurance?

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01:13:26.320 | Do I ask a friend?

01:13:27.320 | ZocDoc takes this thing we do all the time, getting healthcare appointments, and it makes

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01:14:52.900 | All right, Jesse, time for our final segment.

01:14:59.260 | I want to talk about this op-ed I wrote for the New York Times as part of the publicity

01:15:04.100 | for my new book, Slow Productivity.

01:15:05.740 | I'll bring it up here on the screen for people who are watching.

01:15:09.740 | The op-ed was called To Cure Burnout, Embrace Seasonality.

01:15:16.620 | So seasonality was one of the big ideas that was in my book, Slow Productivity, in particular

01:15:22.140 | in the chapter on working at a natural pace.

01:15:24.660 | I won't go through the whole article.

01:15:26.100 | I'll just give you the short summary so you can understand what's going to come next in

01:15:31.540 | this segment.

01:15:32.780 | The short summary here is that working at full intensity all day long, every day, all

01:15:38.740 | year round is something that is not natural.

01:15:44.220 | So I argue that when knowledge work arose as a major economic sector, we took on this

01:15:49.500 | idea because we saw factories doing it, and that's what was big in the economy at the

01:15:54.060 | time.

01:15:55.060 | But it doesn't necessarily make sense as a way to do cognitive work.

01:15:58.220 | So let me read a little bit from my own article here.

01:16:02.140 | Those buildings became virtual factories, with members of this growing class of workers

01:16:06.500 | metaphorically clocking in for 8-hour shifts week after week, month after month, attempting

01:16:11.340 | to transform their mental capacities into valuable output with the same regularity as

01:16:16.100 | an assembly line worker churning out automobiles.

01:16:19.500 | In recent years, I've come to believe that the decision to treat the pacing of cognitive

01:16:23.260 | jobs like manufacturing jobs was a mistake.

01:16:27.220 | We seem to have forgotten that life in the mills and factories was miserable.

01:16:31.580 | The unrelenting pace of those jobs eventually required the formation of labor unions and

01:16:36.420 | regulatory innovations, like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which introduced a

01:16:41.760 | mandated work week and overtime pay, all of which emphasized the artificiality of forcing

01:16:47.000 | our efforts into such an unvarying and demanding rhythm.

01:16:50.420 | And yet, as more of us shifted into the comparable comfort of office buildings, we carried over

01:16:54.920 | the same flawed model forged onto factory floor.

01:16:59.260 | I go on to argue that when it comes to doing cognitive work, much more variation intensity

01:17:03.300 | is better.

01:17:05.300 | Having a refractory period after intense thinking helps you reset and reflect.

01:17:10.720 | Over time, you produce more results.

01:17:13.020 | I give a lot of examples from my book of people like Georgia O'Keefe or Lin-Manuel Miranda,

01:17:18.940 | Marie Curie, all of whom had much more wildly varying intensities and that led to better

01:17:24.300 | work than just trying to do work hard all day long.

01:17:27.440 | And then I gave a bunch of advice about, okay, how might you actually implement something

01:17:30.560 | like seasonality in your company, or if you work for someone else who doesn't want you

01:17:35.000 | to do it, what are ideas for making this practical?

01:17:38.260 | That's the article, right?

01:17:39.260 | It's a kind of classic adapted essay from a book op-ed.

01:17:42.020 | So I thought it would be either a good idea or a terrible idea, Jesse, to read some of

01:17:48.020 | the comments from New York Times readers to this audience, I mean, to this piece.

01:17:53.860 | Why I think this is useful to do is it gives us a sense about at least how a certain segment

01:17:59.480 | of society is grappling with these issues.

01:18:02.160 | So how does a typical New York Times reader grapple with these type of issues?

01:18:05.900 | What I'm going to do here is I'm going to start with a critical comment, because I would

01:18:10.860 | say it's the most common critical comment I am hearing from this sector.

01:18:14.900 | And then before I respond to it, I'm going to read the reply of another New York Times

01:18:19.040 | reader to this comment, because I think the reply gets this exactly right.

01:18:24.040 | Then I'm going to read a positive comment, and then another one that just introduces

01:18:28.120 | an interesting extra idea I didn't even think about.

01:18:30.560 | All right.

01:18:32.000 | The negative comment, this came from a user, a New York Times reader named WTS.

01:18:37.940 | I'll do this in my best sarcastic voice, okay, because I think this is supposed to be sarcastic.

01:18:42.720 | Great idea.

01:18:43.720 | Cure burnout by spending summers at your country farm, like Georgia O'Keeffe.

01:18:48.360 | I'm going to share this suggestion with my friends who are baristas, farm techs, and

01:18:52.440 | nurse assistants.

01:18:53.840 | All right.

01:18:55.160 | That's an accurate rendering of the voice of WTS.

01:19:01.360 | I get this similar comments I've heard multiple times in my publicity tour so far.

01:19:07.080 | I call it the what about comment.

01:19:10.880 | What about so-and-so?

01:19:11.880 | What about so-and-so?

01:19:12.880 | All right.

01:19:13.880 | I'm not going to respond to this directly.

01:19:14.880 | I want to read the response of a user named Jay, a New York Times reader named Jay @WTS.

01:19:23.080 | This is not a barista or nurse assistant issue.

01:19:25.920 | You'll find that in other articles.

01:19:28.000 | The article is about knowledge workers who cannot produce creative focus thought on demand

01:19:32.480 | on a uniform schedule day in and day out like a cog in a factory machine because creative

01:19:36.040 | focus thought doesn't work that way.

01:19:37.920 | All right, Jay, I think you got that exactly right.

01:19:41.800 | The whole premise of the book is this particular sector had a very specific dynamic.

01:19:46.720 | It was very autonomous.

01:19:48.320 | This type of creative knowledge work had very autonomous organizational dictates.

01:19:52.960 | You figure out how you want to organize your own work, but it was also coupled with this

01:19:57.120 | implicit heuristic called pseudo productivity, which meant visible activity will be our proxy

01:20:01.720 | for useful effort.

01:20:02.720 | Then these two things very specifically combined with the digital front office revolution,

01:20:07.200 | which is specific to this sector with email and portable computing laptops, etc.

01:20:12.440 | All these things mixed together to create a very specific but very intense problem that

01:20:16.880 | affects probably 20 or 30% of the U.S. economy, and this book is about how to fix it.

01:20:23.520 | So yes, it's not a book about other sectors of the economy, but I do get asked this a

01:20:27.520 | lot of times.

01:20:28.960 | I always think about this as you write the book about running, like how do you train

01:20:34.880 | for running, etc., and then you get the response, "Yeah, but how is this going to help someone

01:20:41.000 | with no legs or something, right?"

01:20:42.600 | Like, "Well, they probably aren't interested in that book because it's about runners."

01:20:45.960 | Or, "What about people who hate running?

01:20:47.720 | How is your book about running going to help them?"

01:20:49.440 | It's like, "Well, the book is not written for people who hate running."

01:20:52.280 | So, all right.

01:20:53.280 | There you go, Jay.

01:20:54.280 | So there's my answer.

01:20:55.280 | This book is about knowledge workers.

01:20:57.840 | It's a large but certainly not entire economy.

01:21:00.920 | All right.

01:21:01.920 | Let's go to a positive comment here.

01:21:03.920 | This one came from Robin.

01:21:05.400 | "I have been saying this for years, that I would thrive at my job, which is leadership

01:21:11.440 | at a tech company, if it operated more like college semesters.

01:21:14.800 | I often think sometimes I just need a week to stare at the ceiling after an intense period

01:21:18.800 | of work.

01:21:19.800 | Instead, we use our limited time off to travel, which is its own kind of stress."

01:21:23.600 | And there's a couple of good responses to this as well.

01:21:28.120 | One reader wrote in in response to Robin and said, "In my experience, tech work used to

01:21:32.640 | follow such an ebb and flow.

01:21:34.560 | In the 1980s and 90s, release OS releases were every 18 or 24 months.

01:21:39.640 | Work was intense just before release, and then slacked off after release.

01:21:43.160 | Then the pace picked up considerably."

01:21:46.080 | Someone else said, responding particularly to Robin's comment about traveling for vacation,

01:21:51.880 | "It just fills your only time off with more stress," and said, "This is why I've learned

01:21:56.700 | to love staycations, and not just because there's a great deal of satisfaction in finally

01:22:01.240 | having a stretch of time I can dedicate to all those things that pile up in the house

01:22:04.720 | and need to be done without feeling like I'm wasting my weekend.

01:22:07.960 | It's more zen where you can just stretch out."

01:22:09.520 | All right, that's interesting, right?

01:22:12.940 | This is a cool comment because there's a couple extra bits of information there that's new.

01:22:18.520 | So here's someone saying, "Hey, in the 80s and 90s, the tech industry used to be more

01:22:22.520 | cyclical.

01:22:23.520 | You'd have intense periods and non-intense periods, and now it all seems to be intense.

01:22:28.760 | What's the difference between the 80s and 90s?"

01:22:31.240 | Well, it rhymes with shmeemail, I hope that helps you.

01:22:35.960 | It's a big argument in my book.

01:22:37.560 | Is portable computing and digital networks and digital communication tools got rid of

01:22:42.160 | any sort of natural cyclicality and created this like there's always work to be done,

01:22:46.640 | there's always back pressure, so you always need to be pulling things in, and you're always

01:22:49.680 | being watched.

01:22:50.680 | It's really an issue.

01:22:51.680 | And I do like that point.

01:22:52.960 | If we only get two weeks off a year, and we do stressful travel during those two weeks,

01:22:56.960 | we really get no time off each year.

01:22:58.720 | So that's a good comment.

01:23:00.840 | Here's another negative comment.

01:23:01.840 | I like to go back and forth.

01:23:03.260 | Here's the other type of comment I get, which is just less interesting.

01:23:08.660 | So there's a whole revival right now of sort of like traditional left-wing anti-capitalist

01:23:13.620 | labor politics.

01:23:15.800 | And again, we've talked about it.

01:23:16.800 | It's kind of weird because the traditional left-wing anti-capitalist labor politics are

01:23:20.760 | actually at odds with identity-based postmodern critical theory left-wing progressive politics.

01:23:27.480 | These are two different visions of left-wing philosophy that don't actually play well together.

01:23:31.760 | So it's sort of interesting that the anti-capitalist crowd is gaining ground again online because

01:23:37.500 | they're actually in opposition to the more of, and you would use like the label woke

01:23:42.240 | for this, but more of the identity-based postmodern.

01:23:44.680 | These are in oppositions, like the hardcore socialist at like the Jacobin magazine don't

01:23:51.560 | like the hardcore critical theorist.

01:23:54.200 | And because these are different visions of left-wing worlds, but whatever.

01:23:59.120 | There's a big anti-capitalist strain.

01:24:00.960 | So I wanted to give that its representation here in these comments.

01:24:04.080 | This is from Josh.

01:24:05.960 | In the modern economy, we don't get to feel like ourselves.

01:24:08.840 | There's never enough time to just be.

01:24:11.080 | Two weeks vacation in the U.S. is a miserably 10 days off or 261 days at the job.

01:24:15.760 | On weekends, it's about how to keep the household running, complete chores, run errands and

01:24:19.720 | support children or manage other things to fall by the wayside while trying to squeeze

01:24:23.680 | in some enjoyment.

01:24:24.680 | Europeans have 20 or more days off a year.

01:24:26.040 | That would be a good start.

01:24:27.040 | Actually, this is not a super anti-capitalist one really.

01:24:28.980 | This is just a European one.

01:24:32.240 | Some of the comments were much more just like we have to overthrow capitalism, which makes

01:24:38.000 | for a good comment, but doesn't really help the person who's overloaded with their inbox

01:24:42.300 | because they're probably not overthrowing capitalism this week.

01:24:45.160 | And they have all these projects this week.

01:24:46.800 | This is more of a European response, which I appreciate, which is just you guys care

01:24:50.680 | too much about work.

01:24:51.680 | Take more time off.

01:24:52.680 | This is where quiet quitting got wrong.

01:24:55.520 | Quiet quitting went too far.

01:24:57.000 | And we're like, we'll always do the bare minimum and we're going to declare it and we're going

01:25:01.520 | to put it up.

01:25:02.520 | The Europeans have this more dialed in.

01:25:04.240 | Like we're all kind of implicitly on the same page here.

01:25:06.920 | It's like we're going to work, but we're also going to drink a little wine at lunch, if

01:25:10.800 | you know what I mean.

01:25:11.800 | It's a little bit more wink wink implicit, more cultural.

01:25:15.920 | One more comment here.

01:25:16.920 | This one came from Jimerson.

01:25:19.400 | Our minds and bodies run on cycles from circadian to the seasonal.

01:25:23.560 | When I was a Northern adolescent, I habitually retreated to my attic room for long periods

01:25:27.840 | in the winter, prompting my father to express his disapproval.

01:25:30.160 | Oh, he's hibernating again.

01:25:32.360 | I now embrace seasonal hibernation in my adulthood.

01:25:35.440 | I lived in Los Angeles for nearly a decade and the lack of vivid seasonal variation,

01:25:40.240 | it could be 86 degrees and sunny on any given day of the year and often was made me feel

01:25:44.240 | time feel unreal to me, like progress itself had stalled.

01:25:47.040 | So I thought it was a cool point.

01:25:48.640 | This idea that maybe we're just cyclical beings, just as humans.

01:25:54.000 | We're used to and want cycles and we should have the same in our work as well.

01:25:59.320 | When you were talking to Ferris in the interview, you explained to him the quiet quitting concept

01:26:03.760 | as well.

01:26:04.760 | Do you have a kick out of that?

01:26:05.760 | Yeah.

01:26:06.760 | Well, Ferris' crowd is probably not a big quiet quitting crowd.

01:26:09.840 | Yeah.

01:26:10.840 | Well, you're saying most of them are probably self-employed.

01:26:12.920 | Yeah.

01:26:13.920 | Yeah, that's true.

01:26:16.100 | And that is a big difference in reaction to slow productivity.

01:26:21.320 | People who are from that more entrepreneurial, self-employed crowd see these concepts differently

01:26:27.120 | because they're in control of what they do.

01:26:28.880 | So it's all about ideas for how they might reshape their work, where people who work

01:26:34.080 | in big organizations have a completely different feel.

01:26:36.360 | You feel a lot less control and it's about how can I change this without my boss really

01:26:41.320 | getting mad at me.

01:26:42.320 | There's a lot of interesting dynamics.

01:26:44.480 | Workplace dynamics are interesting.

01:26:45.760 | I also really liked how you explained to him your two word concepts for a lot of the things

01:26:51.560 | that you write about.

01:26:52.560 | It's my whole career.

01:26:53.560 | Yeah.

01:26:54.560 | I love that.

01:26:55.560 | Come up with two words that describe something everyone already knows.

01:26:57.880 | Deep work, digital minimalism, slow productivity.

01:27:01.360 | The whole thing about my books is I know it's successful if people do, and they've done

01:27:04.800 | this for all these books, confidently been like, "I'm a big fan of this idea," and then

01:27:09.720 | just give a completely unrelated description.

01:27:13.560 | That means you've built a term that people feel like, "I know exactly what that means."

01:27:17.080 | Even if they don't.

01:27:18.080 | Yeah.

01:27:19.080 | Yeah.

01:27:20.080 | It's like, "Yeah, man, I am on board with slow productivity.

01:27:22.800 | We need to move at a slower pace in the office because we're wearing out our shoes."

01:27:27.280 | It'll be completely different, but they're like, "I'm just so on board."

01:27:30.360 | That's how you know you have a good title, is that people are like, "Yeah, I'm on board

01:27:34.520 | with that."

01:27:35.520 | All right.

01:27:36.520 | Well, anyways, speaking of being on board, that's all the time I have.

01:27:37.840 | I'm actually, interestingly enough, about to head over to People's Book, the bookstore

01:27:42.440 | here in Tacoma Park, through which you can order signed pre-orders of my book, Slow Productivity.

01:27:48.760 | I have about 300 books to sign here in my near future, so wish me luck on that.

01:27:52.920 | Otherwise, I'll be back next week from the road, special book launch edition of the Deep

01:27:58.000 | Questions Podcast, celebrating the launch of Slow Productivity.

01:28:00.800 | I'll join you from the road, probably LA, maybe Austin.

01:28:03.280 | We'll see where I am when I get around to recording, so I'll see you soon.

01:28:08.380 | But until then, as always, stay deep.

01:28:13.920 | If you liked today's discussion about the history of email, I think you'll also like

01:28:17.800 | episode 233, which is titled Escaping Your Tyrannical Inbox.

01:28:23.640 | It has a lot of concrete advice for taming the role of email in your career.

01:28:29.080 | I think you'll like it.

Why The Modern World Make No Sense - Take Back Control Of Your Time & Focus | Cal Newport

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