All right, so we have another question here from Mel. Mel says, "How do I get out of the urgent quadrant for long enough to hire or outsource work and implement productivity systems?" All right, so she elaborates, "I manage my husband's medical practice. I am burnt out and cognitively depleted by the volume, time sensitivity, and unrelenting nature of incoming work.

I spend all my time in the urgent quadrant and in hyperactive hive mind. I don't have the option to leave the job. I can hire and outsource to some extent when I'm able to make time for it, but how do I get out of the urgent quadrant for long enough to recruit and train staff and to implement sustainable productivity systems?" Mel, I talk about exactly this problem in my book, A World Without Email.

It is, I describe as an insidious negative feedback loop. And here's what happens, and here's what's happening to you, but it's very common. When you become too hyperactive with the hyperactive hive mind, so that the sheer quantity of work that you're trying to organize in this very inefficient way with ad hoc, unscheduled back and forth messaging, when that gets to a certain point, you have so little breathing room, just trying to keep up with all these unscheduled back and forth messages, that there's no free time or energy to actually put in place the alternative systems that could reduce all of these unscheduled messages, these unscheduled ad hoc messages.

So when it gets too bad, you strip yourself of the time and energy required to make it better. So it's an insidious negative feedback cycle. And Mel, that's what you're in right now. So what's the solution here? You have to temporarily but drastically give yourself some breathing room by dramatically reducing the amount of things that you're trying to coordinate in this inefficient manner.

So you do these drastic emergency reductions of what's on your plate. That gives you breathing room to look at what remains and figure out sustainable systems that don't require you just constantly being on email, constantly being on Slack, constantly checking your phone. And then once these systems are in place, then your breathing room gets much bigger because the things that remain have now been, from a cognitive perspective, made much more tractable.

You're able to add stuff back because now the systems are there, but you have to pull things away and it's going to feel painful. It's going to feel weird. It's going to feel like you're leaving money on the table. You have to do that. And then things come back once you have the actual systems in place.

Now the added benefit of this approach is when you add things back, you maybe don't add back everything. Maybe when you're trying to add things back, you say this one type of business we do is not easily tamable by systems to get rid of unscheduled messages. It's this particular client or type of work that requires and demands this berating constant communication.

And now it's really clear, well, that type of work is not compatible with the type of way we want to work. Let's not add it back. Let's get rid of that type of business. So it also gives you a chance to clean house as you're thinking about all the different type of business you do.

So what this means for your husband's medical practice, for example, is cut back on clients, cut back on surgeries. Like there's going to be a period where you say we're cutting back. You're not stepping away from existing things, but you're going to put a hold on bringing on new things for a while.

You're going to have a six month period where you fall back towards a baseline and make less money and miss out opportunities, but allows you to actually build in better systems, hire new staff, train that staff, figure out how to make sure that you are not context shifting every two to three minutes, that you're not constantly email, that you're not constantly on text messaging.

And here's the thing, who cares about six months worth of money? What's the point? That's a miserable existence you're talking about. And your husband's probably burnt out too, because it bleeds over. He has too much work. It bleeds over to his practice. That's the way you have to do it.

You have to make a dramatic temporary reduction if you're going to get the breathing room required to build up systems that will be sustainable going forward. The money will come back, but with much less stress once those systems are in place. So that's what I recommend. It's time, Mel, to do something radical.