Hey, Kyle, Sean here. Hey, I really enjoyed your book, A World Without Email. Appreciate that. And really buying into the workflow concept, it's very powerful. I've got the calendaring piece down using Calendly. I've got the escalation workflow down. And just wondering if you could do an episode on-- or answer a question on what are the top 10 workflows that people should be focusing on to get people started.

I've got two down, and I'd love eight more. Thanks, Cal. Well, I will see your request for a count of workflows, and I will respond with a collection of categories for these workflows. Because I think it's a more interesting way and a more generative way of thinking about this.

So quick preamble for those who want to know what we're talking about here, for those who did not yet read my book, A World Without Email. In that book, I argue that the way we implement most of our work right now, most of the collaboration, coordination around our work right now in the office context, is through ad hoc back and forth unscheduled messages.

That's the hyperactive hive mind workflow. And it's a disaster because you have to keep checking these inboxes to keep up with all these back and forth conversations. That checking creates context shifts. Those context shifts are productivity poison. So the big idea in that book is if you want to fix the problems of email overload, it's not about having better advice for dealing with your inbox.

It's not about better norms or subject lines or batching. You have to actually take the things you do repeatedly in your work, what I call processes. And for each, say here is the new workflow we will use to implement this process. Here is our specific alternative to the hyperactive hive mind.

And when evaluating different alternatives for doing this collaboration, I think the metric you should be trying to minimize is the number of unscheduled messages that you will receive that requires your response. So if you were trying to measure two different ways of implementing a given process, let's say responding to client questions or producing a weekly white paper, if you're trying to measure and weigh against each other various ways you might achieve and implement this collaboration, the thing you want to measure for both is how many unscheduled messages will this require me to see and respond to.

And the one that generates less, that's the right option. OK, so that's what we mean by workflows. The question asker here is saying, what are 10 possible workflows you could use to replace the hyperactive hive mind for one of these processes? I'm going to instead give you three categories.

After that book came out and I've talked to a lot of people, I have found that most of the things I've encountered fall into one of three categories. Category number one is deferral workflows. So here the whole idea is you take what would normally in the hyperactive hive mind require a back and forth digital message conversation and you defer that conversation into another medium where it will not generate digital messages.

Office hours are an example of this. So if you have a quick question, instead of just shooting me an email and we start a back and forth exchange about this thing, you wait till my next office hours. You're deferring the conversation to another time where it will happen without unscheduled messages being generated that require responses.

Another example of deferral is what you already mentioned, which is calendar tools. So again, now you're taking what would have been a back and forth conversation about when are we going to meet tomorrow, and you defer it to a tool. So instead of going back and forth, you go to a tool and select a time on that calendar.

Right off the bat, I want to emphasize that we are trying to optimize how many unscheduled messages require responses. That's it. I don't care if an alternative workflow takes more time. I don't care if it's more of a pain. I don't care if it required a lot of overhead to get set up.

Those are not the metrics that I think you should be optimizing. What you should be optimizing is minimizing unscheduled messages that require you to respond. So yes, it is a pain that you now have to wait until tomorrow afternoon when my next office hours are to talk to me.

Yes, that's a pain, but I'm not trying to minimize pain. I'm trying to minimize unscheduled messages. And if you just started that conversation with emails, it's going to generate a lot of unscheduled messages. I know it's annoying when someone sends you to a Calendly link. You have that annoying hierarchical part of your social brain say, do they think they're better than me, and there's a little bit of bad social capital loss there.

I don't care. I'm not optimizing for that. I'm optimizing for not having to do seven back and forth messages about when we're going to meet. So I just want to use those first two examples to nail home this point. Unscheduled messages that require responses are the productivity poison. Be willing to do almost any other pain if it allows you to avoid that poison.

All right, category number two of these alternative workflows is automation. So this is where this thing we do has the same steps happening in the same orders again and again. If there's that much structure in a task, just figure out in advance your rules for how this thing executes so that we don't have to send each other messages.

The example I usually give is, here's a report that we have to produce every week. Here's how we're going to do it. Monday morning, I gather all the numbers out of the relevant dashboards. I write a draft of that report. I put it in a Google Docs in a shared folder that you know about.

It will be there by close of business Monday. That's what I agree to. You then have all day Tuesday in the morning to look at it, make additions, make changes. I have office hours at 2 o'clock on Tuesdays. So if there's any questions that are complicated, come to my office hours and we can figure it out together.

I then have told the designer that what he sees in that Google Doc at close of business Tuesday is our final version. He takes that at some point Wednesday, puts it into the nice PDF format, uploads it into the content management system so that it will show up where it needs to be by the end of day on Wednesday.

We make that agreement together. Once. It's a pain, it's annoying, takes an afternoon. But now that we've made that agreement, this report will be produced week after week with zero unscheduled messages that require response. And that's all I care about. All right, final category of these alternative workflows is what I think I usually call it externalization.

So you take the information and conversations about a project out of digital communication tools and put them somewhere else. Most of these examples use something like a task board, Trello, Asana, Flow, a lot of these things. But the task relevant to a given project or in a shared board where everyone can see it, they don't exist in chat transcripts in Slack, they don't exist spread out among random messages in your crowded inbox.

They're isolated and clear with all of the associated material attached to them. In some sort of system like a task board where it's clear and conversation about where are we, where do we need to go, who's working on what next and what do they need, you externalize that into let's say a well-structured status meeting that happens at certain times.

So those are three big categories that can each generate dozens of specific alternative workflows. But again, they all share that same property. How do we reduce the number of times I have to keep checking an inbox until I see an unscheduled message that requires my response? If you were minimizing that, you are maximizing how effective you're gonna be in almost any knowledge work job.

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