Alright, so I promised it is to have it tune up for a new piece of advice. That if you work in an organization with other people, I said would be one of the single most effective things you could do to reduce emails in your inbox. So here it is, I call it docket clearing meetings.

This is a phrase I'm stealing shamelessly from the judge John Hodgman podcast. They have the docket clearing episodes where they go through a bunch of cases. It's a judicial term where a judge has a bunch of cases on their docket that they want to get through real quick. Your team, whatever team you work with in your knowledge work office organization, consider once or twice a week having a regularly scheduled docket clearing meeting.

Here is how this meeting works. At all times, there is a shared document accessible by everyone in your team. As tasks or questions come up that's relevant for the team, someone here needs to work on this. We need to look into updating the website. We have a client visit coming up.

We need to start the process for getting our next quarterly reports running. Anything that comes up, here's a new obligation or question that someone or some subset of people on team have to work on, you put it on the shared doc. And when you get to the docket clearing meeting, you go through that shared doc all together.

So you're all there in the same room or on the same Zoom conference, if it's a distributed remote company, and you go through the things one by one. Okay, this thing here. Is this important? Okay, who's going to do it? What do we need? Can we just do it right now?

Is it quick? Someone just do it. Oh, you're going to handle it. So what information do you need from who? Okay. And when are they going to get that to you? What form? Let me just, let's write this down in the shared docs. We have a record of it.

Great. Next, next, next. And you go through each of these things and you resolve the questions assigned to work, do the small things right away. And people come out of the docket clearing meeting, you've cleared a lot of this work off your team's plate, and the stuff that remains has been clarified.

That discussion, a couple minutes of discussion that each task gets, gets rid of the need to have all these ambiguous back and forth emails, you're playing obligation hot potato for a while until it gets urgent, you're not quite sure what's going to happen. It allows you to just execute the work.

If you have a docket clearing meeting for 30 minutes, twice a week, small footprint, 30 minutes, twice a week, same time, your whole team, you will reduce the number of emails each team member receives in their inbox by a factor of three or four. And not only will you reduce the number of emails by a big factor, but the type of email you're taking out of their inbox by having these meetings are the type that are the worst.

The ambiguous back and forth, the conversations, the like, could you deal with this? You don't even know what that means. The stuff that really gives you the indigestion, the stuff that causes the anxiety. So it is an incredibly effective tool. If you work in any sort of team, you should have docket clearing meetings.

So there is my new piece of advice. - I like it. - That's actually in a slow productivity. I'm working on the book and so I have these principles and then the principles underneath the principles are propositions, which are kind of where we get concrete, like do work on this, work on that, or just give some more concrete ideas.

And so the propositions have, they come with some like actual pieces of advice. So some of the book is philosophical and manifesto style, some is idea writing, some is let's get concrete. And that came out of me working on a proposition about containing the small things. So the footprint stays small in your work life.

And that's, I was just working out the docket clearing meeting idea. It's the, I presented that in the book as the team counterpart to office hours for the individual. So as you know, I'm a huge believer of you should have office hours three times a week. Everyone knows when they are.

Almost anything smaller conversational or back and forth conversation requiring you to say, great, grab me at my office hours, grab me at my office hours. You're just defending people off. We have your shield of your office hours. You're just defending yourself as all these ambiguous obligation hand grenades come near you.

You just knock them all away and just make everyone come every day. There's 30 minutes. They can always come and find you. And that's a huge inbox saver, but team stuff requires his own type of strategy. So there we go. Docket clearing meetings. I've been thinking about slow bar activity a lot.

Yeah. Just on different things I work on, whether it's like work or even getting better at sports. I think about it all the time. I finished the chapter. Well, the first draft of the chapter on doing fewer things. Principle one, it was a beast. It was 25,000 words. I got it down to 18,000 words out of my hands.

My editor has it took me a long time. So I was trying to figure out the voice. I think I found the voice for the book, but we'll knock on wood. We'll see. So I've started now I'm working on a part one chapter. So part one is more like ideas.

So part one chapter that's I'm not going to give too many details because it might also be a New Yorker piece. So I like to keep that kind of secret and I'm beginning the background research for the next principle, which is work at a natural pace. And, you know, this, this idea of constant, like you just work, you know, five days a week, eight hours straight, just again and again and again, just going after getting after it, just intense.

It's very unnatural. It doesn't really match the way that really interesting stuff is produced. I'm just getting the weeds there. And I won't give too many details yet, but, but yesterday I was spending a lot of time reading about the timelines of famous scientists from the early Renaissance period.

And let's just say the pace at which they developed and published their ideas is anything but fast. Like a year will go by that's not working on it. And then like the summer they work on it and then they have to send a letter and it's 15, 57, 67.

So it's going to take, you know, three months before they hear back. It's a slower pace. They're very productive because they invented, you know, gravity. That's coming along. All right. Speaking of, I'm going to make this transition land. Got a lot of really good analogies today. Yeah. I'm trying to transition to sponsors.

I'm still thinking about the dragon going over the wall. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be better if I knew the name of that character from game of Thrones. I wish I knew it too. It's not Cersei Lannister is the person in power, the wife of the Joffrey. They're the people in power, the queen of the dragons.

I don't know. I don't know the show. The only thing I know about the show is someone sent me a clip, which I really enjoy. I guess there was an episode in the last season where it's this dragon woman and they're in a tavern and it's, I don't know, dwarves and swords and stuff.

And someone left the Starbucks cup in there and it made it into the show. And it's, it's, it's fantastic. They're in this tavern and they're all in there and there's just a Starbucks cup sitting on the table. I appreciated that.