In today's deep dive, I want to tackle the question, how do I tame email? Now, this continues the trend I started last week of trying to do more practical topics in the deep dive. I want to get my hands dirty with actual advice that you can put into action and help your life today.

This doesn't mean I'm not going to get back to my more philosophical rants or cultural critiques, but let's do a few of these deep dives that are more practical. All right, so here's the question. You hate your inbox, let's say. You open it, it's full of stuff. It stresses you out.

Why does it stress you out and what can we do about it? To answer this question, I think it is really important to look at all of that junk sitting there in your inbox and divide it up into categories. This is a key thing that's often missing when we give advice about email is that the different types of messages merit different responses.

So roughly speaking, I can divide the messages you see in that stress inducing inbox into three categories. Number one, broadcast, information being broadcast to you that does not require a response. It may or may not be interesting to you. So this could be newsletters like my newsletter, which of course you should subscribe to account newport.com.

It could be announcements from the HR department and your organization or it could be those annoying sales emails that any store that you've ever given your email address to for any reason bombard you with as if what really matters to you right now is that the 15% sale at Levi's is going to end next week.

So those are broadcast messages. Then you have questions. This is my term for emails that have something that require a response to you, but probably just one response. Hey, Cal, can you let me know what my grade is in the class right now? Can you remind me again of when our next meeting is?

What do you think? Who do you think we should nominate for the steering committee that we're putting together? So you know, someone needs information from you. You can give that information in an email response was probably just going to be one response. The third category messages are conversational. These are messages that are part of a longer back and forth conversation.

So now maybe you're trying to figure out when you are going to meet with a client tomorrow. And you're going back and forth. Hey, what about in the afternoon? They say no, you're like, Okay, I can do the morning, but probably not nine. And like, well, how close to nine, you know what I mean, back and forth.

So it's a message that's part of many messages that are going back and forth, that sort of haphazard unscheduled manner. So the gap between each message in the next is unpredictable as part of an ongoing conversation. So when you look at your inbox, and you feel that stress, you're seeing a mix of all three different types of messages in there.

Now having these three types is useful because the response to each is different. Let's start with the low hanging fruit, which are broadcast. You hear a lot of advice, especially from more tech oriented individuals who like having tool based solutions surrounding broadcast, oh my god, I get too many of these emails, I wish I could tame it.

This is not a major problem. It's annoying. If you have a bunch of broadcast messages in there that most of them you don't care about, because it's visual clutter, and you have to get around them. But it's not super stress inducing. A you can ignore them or B, you can just quickly delete or archive them, which honestly is actually kind of fulfilling.

Is there anything better that when you see a really full inbox to be able to make progress get 50% of those messages out of there in just two minutes by just deleting lots of things. That being said, there are any number of ways you can tame broadcast. The best feature right now is probably what you'll see in a product like Gmail or Gmail has really good AI powered filters.

It's very good at figuring out what are promotional messages. I basically never see promotional messages from retailers at all anymore, because it all gets pushed into a promotional folder. From what I understand, I don't use social media. But from what I understand, those Gmail AI based filters are very good at social media notifications of putting them in another folder.

So you don't have to see them if you don't want to. Beyond that, obviously, unsubscribe. You know, every time you're about to archive a message, or delete a message from a newsletter, some other type of news source that once again, you're not going to read and have it read in a while, take five extra seconds to try to unsubscribe.

Gmail has a feature now you can click it'll try to do that for you automatically. One caveat. If you try to unsubscribe from cal newport.com, you and your family will be struck with bad luck for three generations. So don't do that. But any other one, unsubscribe, liberally, that really can help.

You might also try having a dedicated email address for just this type of information. This is more possible if you're a freelancer and individual. So you're not getting messages from your employer. But you can have a signup address, sign up at whatever.com that you give when everyone needs an email address when the retailer needs an email address when the person at the store wants you to give an email address and you have some address signup at cal newport.com.

You create some address, you know, it could be a gmail, sign up, dot your original gmail name at gmail.com. Just make a new account, whatever, and just use that. Right? That's one thing you can do. And then you have a different account and go check this occasionally for my newsletters or what have you.

So there's strategies here, but I'm not worried about broadcast. All right, let's talk about question emails. Now, here's the thing about question emails. If you take an individual question email in isolation, and bring it to me and say, Oh, Cal, thank you for coming. I have this thing I need you to answer.

Here you go. It's usually no sweat. It's like, Oh, that's interesting question. Yeah, who should we nominate for this committee? Let me think about that for a minute. Yeah, it should be, you know, Bob, that makes a good idea. Or when is that meeting? Oh, let me just check.

Yeah, it's Thursday, Thursday at four, boom, you give the answer. So in isolation, a question email is not bad. It's why when someone sends a question email to you, they don't feel guilty about it. Like this is a question. It's valid won't take them long to answer. The real pain point generated by question emails is in the context switching.

This is what I talked about last week when I did the deep dive on the productive pause. I got into this a little bit more detail. But the real pain is switching your context so rapidly. So when you go from an email on when a meeting is to an email on who should be on the steering committee to an email on remind me again, what we thought we were gonna do for this client to an email for what do you want me to do next on this project.

It's the context shift from one to the other. That is incredibly fatiguing. So when you have 20 emails in a row that are largely questions like let me just go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, it's not so easy. Because your mind has to completely switch context again and again.

But it doesn't have time to do that because that can take five to 15 minutes. We've talked about that before. So what do you end up with is like a huge literal headache. And it's why the the friction builds to resistant grows like I'm done with this, I got to get out of this inbox.

It's the context switching cost. So what do we do about question emails? Well, like I talked about in my productive pause, deep dive, one thing you can do is get these things out of your inbox, write them down in a text file, you're transcribing them into a text file, line after line after line, sort them by category.

By category, I mean shares a similar context, scheduling things, this project, I'm working on things, etc. Then tackle each group by itself with a non trivial pause in between so that you take the time to get the context loaded for those questions, then you can go through really easily, the frictions gone, then walk away and do something else.

Then come back and give yourself time to open up a new context for the new category and tackle those. So you're trying to really avoid the friction of the the record scratch, screeching tires on pavement, 90 degree turn from one topic to another that really is going to strain your mind.

Big picture, however, you want to reduce the question emails to the extent possible. So really pay attention. What are these emails I'm seeing? How can I get this information to the person who needs it without having to actually on my own initiate a context shift to the context relevant to this question and give it an answer.

That's gonna be a lot of different things depending on what you do. I mean, I can tell you, for example, as a professor, I really think through my process for how problem sets are written and assigned and graded and handed back and how students are kept up to speed on what their grade is in the course and how we graded the things that we graded.

And I actually put in a lot of time, there's a lot of overhead in my systems. But you know what all of those systems are geared towards is preventing the students from having to just all the time send ad hoc questions, which they don't like. Because now they have to think of it, they have to remember it, they have to talk to the professor, they have to wait for the answer.

And it prevents me from having a nonstop incoming stream of questions that are require a lot of context shifts. You can do this in almost any other area in your life. If you're a freelancer, there might be sender filters like I talked about in deep work where you direct people, okay, if you want to know about this, here's the answer.

If you want to do a meeting with me, go right here and set it up automatically. If you want a quote, here are the 10 projects I do in the quote types, right? Like you up front, you put in the work, they get enough information to that person that the question doesn't have to arrive ambiguously sitting there pregnant on your doorstep for you to have to deliver an answer.

So I'm a big believer in whatever processes, FAQs, or systems you can put in place to minimize the number of question emails to better because again, in isolation, they look innocent. What's the big deal about answering this question? The question is not the problem, it is switching my context to the context of that question.

And it's one of 15 questions in a row I have to answer, each of which needs to switch. That's where you get the cognitive resistance. That's where email becomes a burden. All right, let's get to the final type of email you're going to see in that inbox, which is conversational.

This is one of the core arguments in my recent book, A World Without Email, you need to read that book if you use email, slack, or any other communication tool in your work, it's critical issue. But one of the big points I make in that book is that knowledge work is being strangled by the extent to which we are using back and forth ad hoc unscheduled messaging to have conversations unfold.

It makes a lot of sense in the moment. Because the overhead in the moment could not possibly be lowered if I could just say, "Hey, Cal, should we get together about the Johnson memo?" Send, boom, I'm done, seven seconds, out of here. So in the moment, it seems like the easiest thing to do.

But what have you just kicked off there? You may have just kicked off 10 back and forth messages. These messages are going to arrive at unpredictable times, but must be serviced quickly because we need to figure out what to do about the Johnson memo by tomorrow. Because Johnson himself is coming to the office, and we got to have that figured out.

So if we're going to get through 10 messages back and forth today, we're going to have to have a minimal latency between each message and its response. Now, because I don't know when you're going to see the message and get back to me, I better keep checking my inbox to see, okay, did I hear back about the Johnson memo?

Did I hear back about the Johnson memo? Now, let's say on average, I check the inbox about 10 times for each of the messages that comes in. Because I got to make sure I get it back, Johnson's coming. All right, well, those 10 back and forth messages have just generated 100 context shifts.

Each one of those context shifts has a cognitive tax, creates fatigue, reduces your capacity. That's one conversation. Now, let's say there's seven different conversations this week that I have going back and forth with various people. 700 context shifts have just been generated by that. Again, in the moment, you say seven seconds, "Hey, what about the Johnson memo?

Should we meet send?" Boom, this is great. But this is part of what could be hundreds and hundreds of mind sapping context shifts that you have just accidentally initiated. So one of the big ideas in a world without email is that you need other ways of having these coordinating conversations happen that does not require unscheduled messages that need response.

You should be willing, you should be willing to have a large amount of overhead and annoyance and upfront time invested if that gets rid of unscheduled messages that require response. It is worth it. I don't care if we have this setup where here's how it works. If we need to meet about memos, you have to go to the roof of my office building, and that access door is shut.

So you have to get the ladder off the balcony on the third floor and scale three more floors on the outside of the building and get to the roof. And there on the roof, you need to start a fire and the smoke from that fire, I will see and that's how I will know to also get on that ladder on the third floor balcony, climb up to that roof and come find you so we can figure out there together when we're going to meet about the Johnson menu.

That overhead is worth it. I would rather spend an hour doing that than do 100 context shifts spread out evenly over the next few days. Now I'm being a little bit facetious there, but I'm trying to hit the point. Time in the moment I could care less about what I care about is context shifts.

How often do I have to check an inbox to keep this conversation going, and I will pay very large prices to make that number be very, very small. Now I get all into this in a world without email. There's three major types of different ways you can get these conversations out of back and forth conversations, I'll just tease them.

There's deferring those conversations using things like scheduling tools or office hours. There's automating those conversations by taking repeatable processes and figuring out a set system for how they get done so I don't have to wait to hear from you to do things. And there's externalizing. Information goes to set places like task boards, discussions happen in set times with set formats like status meetings, etc, etc.

Point being, conversations are killers. It seems innocent, it's not. Go to the roof and start a fire if you can, it's still much better than having to keep clicking there, waiting, waiting, waiting till you finally get the message that says now Wednesday is no good. How about Thursday? Come on.

Alright, so if we're in tame email, let me just quickly summarize, you got to know what you're taming. It's a collection of broadcast questions and conversational messages. Each of these requires a different response, you should be working on responses to all three of these things. If you want to reduce that heavy, annoying, cognitively demanding footprint of email on your professional life.