What Are Your Top 10 Workflows?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:03.360 | Hey, Kyle, Sean here.

00:00:07.480 | Hey, I really enjoyed your book, A World Without Email.

00:00:11.080 | Appreciate that.

00:00:11.800 | And really buying into the workflow concept,

00:00:16.000 | it's very powerful.

00:00:17.880 | I've got the calendaring piece down using Calendly.

00:00:22.380 | I've got the escalation workflow down.

00:00:24.720 | And just wondering if you could do an episode on--

00:00:27.280 | or answer a question on what are the top 10 workflows

00:00:31.520 | that people should be focusing on to get people started.

00:00:34.960 | I've got two down, and I'd love eight more.

00:00:37.600 | Thanks, Cal.

00:00:39.520 | Well, I will see your request for a count of workflows,

00:00:43.760 | and I will respond with a collection of categories

00:00:47.080 | for these workflows.

00:00:47.880 | Because I think it's a more interesting way

00:00:49.720 | and a more generative way of thinking about this.

00:00:52.400 | So quick preamble for those who want

00:00:54.640 | to know what we're talking about here, for those who did not yet

00:00:57.240 | read my book, A World Without Email.

00:00:59.880 | In that book, I argue that the way we implement most

00:01:03.920 | of our work right now, most of the collaboration, coordination

00:01:06.440 | around our work right now in the office context,

00:01:08.480 | is through ad hoc back and forth unscheduled messages.

00:01:12.160 | That's the hyperactive hive mind workflow.

00:01:14.360 | And it's a disaster because you have

00:01:15.860 | to keep checking these inboxes to keep up

00:01:18.280 | with all these back and forth conversations.

00:01:20.080 | That checking creates context shifts.

00:01:21.740 | Those context shifts are productivity poison.

00:01:25.680 | So the big idea in that book is if you

00:01:27.800 | want to fix the problems of email overload,

00:01:30.320 | it's not about having better advice

00:01:32.280 | for dealing with your inbox.

00:01:33.480 | It's not about better norms or subject lines or batching.

00:01:36.320 | You have to actually take the things

00:01:39.280 | you do repeatedly in your work, what I call processes.

00:01:43.400 | And for each, say here is the new workflow

00:01:46.720 | we will use to implement this process.

00:01:48.700 | Here is our specific alternative to the hyperactive hive mind.

00:01:53.080 | And when evaluating different alternatives

00:01:55.720 | for doing this collaboration, I think

00:01:57.480 | the metric you should be trying to minimize

00:01:59.400 | is the number of unscheduled messages

00:02:03.200 | that you will receive that requires your response.

00:02:05.760 | So if you were trying to measure two different ways

00:02:09.320 | of implementing a given process, let's say

00:02:11.920 | responding to client questions or producing a weekly white

00:02:14.400 | paper, if you're trying to measure and weigh

00:02:16.720 | against each other various ways you might achieve and implement

00:02:19.920 | this collaboration, the thing you want to measure for both

00:02:23.480 | is how many unscheduled messages will this require

00:02:25.960 | me to see and respond to.

00:02:27.040 | And the one that generates less, that's the right option.

00:02:30.360 | OK, so that's what we mean by workflows.

00:02:32.760 | The question asker here is saying,

00:02:35.000 | what are 10 possible workflows you

00:02:36.680 | could use to replace the hyperactive hive

00:02:38.920 | mind for one of these processes?

00:02:40.680 | I'm going to instead give you three categories.

00:02:43.360 | After that book came out and I've talked to a lot of people,

00:02:45.820 | I have found that most of the things I've encountered

00:02:48.320 | fall into one of three categories.

00:02:51.000 | Category number one is deferral workflows.

00:02:55.320 | So here the whole idea is you take

00:02:57.080 | what would normally in the hyperactive hive mind

00:02:59.640 | require a back and forth digital message conversation

00:03:04.000 | and you defer that conversation into another medium

00:03:07.640 | where it will not generate digital messages.

00:03:10.320 | Office hours are an example of this.

00:03:12.600 | So if you have a quick question, instead of just shooting me

00:03:15.040 | an email and we start a back and forth exchange

00:03:17.160 | about this thing, you wait till my next office hours.

00:03:20.000 | You're deferring the conversation to another time

00:03:23.000 | where it will happen without unscheduled messages being

00:03:25.520 | generated that require responses.

00:03:28.400 | Another example of deferral is what you already mentioned,

00:03:31.440 | which is calendar tools.

00:03:33.080 | So again, now you're taking what would have been a back

00:03:35.320 | and forth conversation about when

00:03:38.200 | are we going to meet tomorrow, and you defer it to a tool.

00:03:41.380 | So instead of going back and forth, you go to a tool

00:03:43.540 | and select a time on that calendar.

00:03:46.600 | Right off the bat, I want to emphasize

00:03:48.480 | that we are trying to optimize how many unscheduled messages

00:03:53.920 | require responses.

00:03:54.760 | That's it.

00:03:55.520 | I don't care if an alternative workflow takes more time.

00:03:59.680 | I don't care if it's more of a pain.

00:04:01.720 | I don't care if it required a lot of overhead to get set up.

00:04:04.240 | Those are not the metrics that I think you should be optimizing.

00:04:07.480 | What you should be optimizing is minimizing

00:04:09.360 | unscheduled messages that require you to respond.

00:04:11.720 | So yes, it is a pain that you now

00:04:13.400 | have to wait until tomorrow afternoon when my next office

00:04:16.400 | hours are to talk to me.

00:04:17.400 | Yes, that's a pain, but I'm not trying to minimize pain.

00:04:19.920 | I'm trying to minimize unscheduled messages.

00:04:21.760 | And if you just started that conversation with emails,

00:04:24.120 | it's going to generate a lot of unscheduled messages.

00:04:26.320 | I know it's annoying when someone sends you

00:04:28.400 | to a Calendly link.

00:04:29.400 | You have that annoying hierarchical part

00:04:32.360 | of your social brain say, do they think they're better than me,

00:04:34.640 | and there's a little bit of bad social capital loss there.

00:04:37.060 | I don't care.

00:04:38.080 | I'm not optimizing for that.

00:04:39.720 | I'm optimizing for not having to do seven back and forth

00:04:42.280 | messages about when we're going to meet.

00:04:44.480 | So I just want to use those first two examples

00:04:47.200 | to nail home this point.

00:04:49.800 | Unscheduled messages that require responses

00:04:51.600 | are the productivity poison.

00:04:52.960 | Be willing to do almost any other pain if it allows

00:04:57.040 | you to avoid that poison.

00:04:58.400 | All right, category number two of these alternative workflows

00:05:01.920 | is automation.

00:05:04.360 | So this is where this thing we do

00:05:08.520 | has the same steps happening in the same orders

00:05:11.120 | again and again.

00:05:12.080 | If there's that much structure in a task,

00:05:13.760 | just figure out in advance your rules

00:05:15.800 | for how this thing executes so that we don't have

00:05:17.880 | to send each other messages.

00:05:19.760 | The example I usually give is, here's

00:05:22.320 | a report that we have to produce every week.

00:05:25.240 | Here's how we're going to do it.

00:05:27.560 | Monday morning, I gather all the numbers out

00:05:29.600 | of the relevant dashboards.

00:05:31.040 | I write a draft of that report.

00:05:33.160 | I put it in a Google Docs in a shared folder

00:05:36.160 | that you know about.

00:05:37.480 | It will be there by close of business Monday.

00:05:39.320 | That's what I agree to.

00:05:41.040 | You then have all day Tuesday in the morning

00:05:43.640 | to look at it, make additions, make changes.

00:05:46.680 | I have office hours at 2 o'clock on Tuesdays.

00:05:49.320 | So if there's any questions that are complicated,

00:05:51.400 | come to my office hours and we can figure it out together.

00:05:55.000 | I then have told the designer that what

00:05:56.600 | he sees in that Google Doc at close of business Tuesday

00:05:59.880 | is our final version.

00:06:01.600 | He takes that at some point Wednesday,

00:06:03.400 | puts it into the nice PDF format,

00:06:05.240 | uploads it into the content management system

00:06:08.120 | so that it will show up where it needs to be

00:06:10.000 | by the end of day on Wednesday.

00:06:11.520 | We make that agreement together.

00:06:13.440 | Once.

00:06:14.360 | It's a pain, it's annoying, takes an afternoon.

00:06:17.000 | But now that we've made that agreement,

00:06:18.780 | this report will be produced week after week

00:06:21.060 | with zero unscheduled messages that require response.

00:06:24.160 | And that's all I care about.

00:06:25.520 | All right, final category of these alternative workflows

00:06:27.920 | is what I think I usually call it externalization.

00:06:31.880 | So you take the information and conversations

00:06:33.820 | about a project out of digital communication tools

00:06:36.520 | and put them somewhere else.

00:06:38.320 | Most of these examples use something like a task board,

00:06:43.080 | Trello, Asana, Flow, a lot of these things.

00:06:46.600 | But the task relevant to a given project

00:06:49.640 | or in a shared board where everyone can see it,

00:06:51.520 | they don't exist in chat transcripts in Slack,

00:06:53.840 | they don't exist spread out among random messages

00:06:56.600 | in your crowded inbox.

00:06:57.880 | They're isolated and clear with all of the associated

00:07:00.240 | material attached to them.

00:07:02.280 | In some sort of system like a task board where it's clear

00:07:05.160 | and conversation about where are we,

00:07:07.320 | where do we need to go, who's working on what next

00:07:09.560 | and what do they need, you externalize that

00:07:12.440 | into let's say a well-structured status meeting

00:07:14.660 | that happens at certain times.

00:07:16.840 | So those are three big categories that can each generate

00:07:19.480 | dozens of specific alternative workflows.

00:07:22.020 | But again, they all share that same property.

00:07:25.920 | How do we reduce the number of times

00:07:27.640 | I have to keep checking an inbox until I see

00:07:29.940 | an unscheduled message that requires my response?

00:07:31.940 | If you were minimizing that, you are maximizing

00:07:34.240 | how effective you're gonna be

00:07:35.520 | in almost any knowledge work job.

00:07:38.560 | (upbeat music)

00:07:41.140 | (upbeat music)

00:07:43.720 | (upbeat music)

What Are Your Top 10 Workflows?

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