All right, well, why don't we get technical? We haven't done a good old fashioned habit tune up in a while. For those who don't remember the habit tune up segment is one where I take a piece of advice that I have given before, and we just get into the weeds a little bit.

So let's get into the weeds, get a little bit technical about some specific productivity advice. I have an email related habit to talk about in today's segment. It's an idea that I first introduced in my book, Deep Work, where I gave it the incredibly compelling and sexy name of process centric email.

So what is process centric email? Let me step back first, my preamble to getting to the tactic here is pushing for a little bit more clarity on the question of what is it about email that we dislike? This is something I think a lot of people get wrong. I get a lot of messages from people that say, "Yeah, I love this idea of like digital minimalism because I hate how when I go into my email inbox, there's all of these newsletters.

And I'm gonna simplify and unsubscribe from a lot of newsletters." All right, that's fine if you wanna do it. Too many newsletters is not your problem with email. Other people say, "Yeah, I have all of these announcements and notices and promotional emails from every company that I've ever bought something for.

My employer sends out 17 announcements a day, new parking things, new programs. There's all these announcement emails they clutter up my inbox." Yeah, it's annoying, it's not the problem with email. Some people say, "Yeah, everyone is always shooting me these questions. Hey, what time is that meeting tomorrow? What about this?

And that's annoying. Like, can't we just talk next time we see each other?" But short questions that can be answered, you know, two o'clock. The client's name is this, here's the link. That's also not the problem with email. If all of email was a combination of newsletters, announcements and promotions, and short questions that could be answered, we would have no problem with our inboxes.

It really doesn't stress us out that much to see too many newsletters. You can just archive. It doesn't stress us out that much to see too many promotional announcements, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right? You just delete and archive them. It's actually kind of fulfilling. It's easy to do.

It feels like you're making progress. We don't get stressed out by questions we can answer immediately with a short response. It's very productive. Let me give you the answer to this. Let me give you the answer to this. Let me give you the answer to this. If that's all email was, 20 minutes twice a day would be on top of it.

There'd be a little burst of productivity. It would be something that'd be positive. The real productivity poison that's frothing around in that email inbox is messages that initiate back and forth interaction. That is above all else, the source of almost every piece of cognitive distress that we feel from email.

Not a newsletter, not an announcement, not what time is the meeting tomorrow. It's the email that says, "We should probably make a plan "for the client coming tomorrow." Or, "What are we gonna do to get this thing ready "for next Monday?" The message that is gonna begin back and forth, back and forth, like, "Well, when should we do that?

"And what about next week? "Oh, next week doesn't work. "Let me CC in Jesse and ask him if he remembers "when this has..." Back and forth, back and forth. Unscheduled, ad hoc, back and forth, interactive conversation delivered through emails, working towards trying to figure out something or achieve some goal.

That is the main productivity poison in our inboxes. Why? It brings with it two demands. One, that's more than anything else what keeps you coming back to your inbox again and again and again, because you have to service these back and forth conversations. If five messages have to get back and forth before we can get a resolution, and we need that resolution by the end of the day, I can't wait three hours for message number two, 'cause we have to fit in all five messages.

So back and forth conversations require much more frequent inbox checking. 'Cause I gotta see when the latest message comes in so I can bounce it back. And you gotta see when that comes in so you can bounce it back to me. And I have to see that pretty soon after and bounce it back.

We check our inboxes all the time, not because we know there's new newsletters in there, not because there's promotions from Levi's we wanna see, it's because we have back and forth conversations we have to service. The second reason why these are productivity poison is that these are the conversations that bring with it the dreaded ambiguity.

I don't know how to answer this. It's where you get the, can you figure out how to fix this issue we have with the budget? And you're like, I don't know how to do that. And now I guess I can afford this as someone else or I'll do obligation hot potato and shoot off a question to someone else just to get it off my plate and wait for it to come back.

I have to like talk to different people and see what they tell me. You've created, they create these major open loops in terms of our obligation storage systems. And it's a real source of stress and distress. If you feel anxious checking your inbox, going through your inbox, these are the type of messages that create that anxiety.

They're like, oh my God, I don't know. I don't know how to fix the budget. I don't really know how this works. I don't even really know who I should talk to about this. Oh, I guess I'm gonna have to start sending messages and like kind of letting this thing unfold and keep checking this throughout the day.

So those are the productivity poison. So if you wanna make your experience with your inbox better, it is these back and forth interactive ambiguous conversations that you have to tame. That is what process centric emailing is all about. The idea is simple. When you see a message arrive, that is initiating one of these long back and forths, your first entrance into this conversation, your first message into this conversation should include in it a proposal for the process by which this whole collaboration ending in the goal being achieved in this conversation is going to happen.

You say how it's gonna happen. So it doesn't just default to like, let's just keep going back and forth. You declare this is how I think this should happen. Oh, we have to figure out what to do about this client. Okay, well, here's what I suggest. We have this meeting coming up on Wednesday.

Let's add time to talk to that. I'm gonna, before we get to that meeting, talk to Susan to make sure that we understand the full whatever, the full process for what we need to do to onboard the client. We'll talk about this in the last five minutes of the meeting and make a plan going forward.

Or you say, okay, here's what we need to do. You're right. We have to figure out when we're gonna meet. Here's what we'll do. I have listed here, whatever, 15 times. Jesse, you then highlight the times that work for you and then you forward it onto the third person and you select one of those that works and put that just into an invite and send it to all of us.

And we don't even have to discuss anymore. What I'm talking about here is processes that gets the thing done. The thing that this conversation is gonna lead towards gets you to done without ambiguity and without having to just wait for messages to arrive and respond to them and go back and forth.

Process-centric emailing is a little bit stilted. It's not very casual. So typically the people who use this will have a casual message with emoticons and all the other stuff, but then have the pretty detailed thing below. You can blame it on me. So sorry for the formality. I've been listening to much Cal Newport, but it works.

And it takes a little bit more time up front because you have to figure out, what's the right way to get to done? What's the right way to get the done here? And you gotta think it through and you gotta explain it to people and you might have some extra work to do to set it up.

Here's the Google doc, here's the doodle, here's how it's gonna unfold. I've set up an office hours. It takes more work, but it is almost always worth spending 10 or 15 more minutes at the beginning of an exchange than it is to have 10 or 15 messages you have to respond to.

10 or 15 minutes right now takes away 10 or 15 minutes from your day, but 10 to 15 messages, each of which is requiring five inbox checks while you wait for it, that's gonna be 50 to 75 inbox checks over the next few days which is way more damaging than you adding 10 minutes right now to what you're doing.

So I'm a big believer in process-centric emailing. And of course, if you find yourself, it's a bonus, proposing the same process again and again because the same type of work happens again and again, then you can just codify that. You know what? We do this client onboarding all the time.

Why don't we all just agree this is how we do it? And so you don't even have to write out the whole process every time. So it's also a good way to unearth or make legible repeated work and get good processes in place so just remember that. Ongoing interactive conversations, that is the thing that kills us in our inbox.

That's the thing you should care about. That is the thing you should be willing to do almost anything to vanquish. It really is productivity poison. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)