- All right, next question is from Rochelle. I've been increasingly hardcore about implementing your advice recently, but I've encountered an unexpected side effect. Some coworkers tell me that they actually prefer having many email check-ins and get angry when I jump the gun and start executing tasks. How can I stay productive and sane without stepping on toes?

- I know what you're talking about, Rochelle. And I actually have a little bit of empathy for them. Like, I understand their complaint. Like, there's two things going on here. They have maybe more of a hyperactive, hive-mind approach to collaboration. We'll just sort of figure things out back and forth with email, a slower approach.

And you're thinking like, let's just roll. We're doing a meeting. Let me just order the food, get the caterer going. I get that, but they also probably feel as if they're being cut out of a process or if mistakes are gonna be made because they haven't had a chance to talk to you.

And you ordered all the food, but you didn't talk to them first and they could have told you that the guest who's coming to speak is vegetarian. And so we need to order from this other place over there. So they have legitimate reasons to want to actually have a chance to talk about things before action is taken.

So what we have to do is thread this needle, give people a chance to actually interact with you, let these things unfold at a pace that they will follow as well without you being beholden to an inbox, without you having to just sort of like always be sending emails and kind of doing things ad hoc like most people do.

So one thing I'm gonna suggest and the first part won't be that surprising, you figure out upfront, okay, what are my responsibilities in this thing we're working on? And figure out some sort of, and this word's not gonna surprise you, process by which you're gonna get that work done.

You kind of bring them up to speed. Okay, here's what I'm gonna do. I'll take care of the food for this meeting. I'll take care of the conference room. I'll take care of getting the promotional materials out. Here is how I'm gonna do that. And so you bring them up to speed right off the bat about when and how you're gonna do things so that they know the plan upfront, you're moving it out of, we'll just sort of rock and roll on the fly.

Two, when you send out this process for whatever collaborative project you're working on, lean towards what I call feedback options versus feedback checkpoints. So a feedback checkpoint is before I order the food, we can talk to make sure we're satisfying whatever, dietary needs or see what you think would be the best food to order.

That's a choke point or a checkpoint I mean. Everyone has to come together and gather before you can make progress going forward. We all have to wait and gather at this checkpoint and then we can keep moving forward. A feedback option gives people the option to provide you feedback, but even if they don't, you can still move forward.

So here we might say, if you have any thoughts about the food or what food should be ordered, I'm gonna order on Wednesday before the event in the afternoon, send me any like issues or dietary restrictions or whatever by that point, or I have a document that we're planning the product in, this is the space for it, put that all in there before the time I listed, because that's what I'm actually gonna go in and make the food order.

You can even set up a reminder about that to send automatically, the morning of, hey, by the way, remember, if you have any thoughts on the food or feedback, I'm ordering tonight. Feedback options work great because people feel included. If there's something important that they do want you to know they will then make sure they get you that information, but it allows you to actually move forward without being beholden to just going with back and forth emails, waiting for replies, being stuck inside your inbox.

90% of the time, people don't actually have feedback on these things they wanna give you. It's just the idea that they might, that upsets them. I don't like that you ordered this food without talking to us because what if we were inviting gremlins and it's after nine, if they get water, they're gonna turn into monsters, right?

That's not what's happening, but it could have. So, I'm upset you didn't talk to us ahead of time. With a feedback option, you take that concern away. Like, oh, I could have told you, hey, by the way, no water, it's gremlins. You told me how to say that. You told me when you're ordering it.

You gave me a place to tell you that information. So, I'm not upset about it. So, you wanna have a process, especially for logistical type gatherings like this. And I should say, by the way, I keep using this food example because in the elaboration of this question, Rochelle gave a particular example about ordering food and her colleagues got mad at her for ordering it right away.

So, that's why I'm using that example. But use feedback options instead of feedback choke points. Tell people ahead of time this is how I'm doing it. People will be happy. In the rare cases where you need feedback, you'll get it. And now you can still execute without having to be stuck waiting for random emails to come back, waiting for random email replies to make it back to you.

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