A Simple Strategy For Eliminating Communication Overload

00:00:00.000 | Alright, so I promised it is to have it tune up for a new piece of advice.

00:00:03.520 | That if you work in an organization with other people, I said would be one of the

00:00:07.440 | single most effective things you could do to reduce emails in your inbox. So here it is, I call it

00:00:14.240 | docket clearing meetings. This is a phrase I'm stealing shamelessly from the judge John

00:00:25.600 | Hodgman podcast. They have the docket clearing episodes where they go through a bunch of cases.

00:00:30.400 | It's a judicial term where a judge has a bunch of cases on their docket that they want to get

00:00:36.080 | through real quick. Your team, whatever team you work with in your knowledge work office organization,

00:00:42.400 | consider once or twice a week having a regularly scheduled docket clearing meeting. Here is how

00:00:48.560 | this meeting works. At all times, there is a shared document accessible by everyone in your team.

00:00:56.160 | As tasks or questions come up that's relevant for the team, someone here needs to work on this. We

00:01:01.600 | need to look into updating the website. We have a client visit coming up. We need to start the

00:01:07.920 | process for getting our next quarterly reports running. Anything that comes up, here's a new

00:01:11.040 | obligation or question that someone or some subset of people on team have to work on,

00:01:16.640 | you put it on the shared doc. And when you get to the docket clearing meeting, you go through that

00:01:21.920 | shared doc all together. So you're all there in the same room or on the same Zoom conference,

00:01:25.920 | if it's a distributed remote company, and you go through the things one by one. Okay, this thing

00:01:30.960 | here. Is this important? Okay, who's going to do it? What do we need? Can we just do it right now?

00:01:36.000 | Is it quick? Someone just do it. Oh, you're going to handle it. So what information do you need from

00:01:39.440 | who? Okay. And when are they going to get that to you? What form? Let me just, let's write this down

00:01:42.960 | in the shared docs. We have a record of it. Great. Next, next, next. And you go through each of these

00:01:47.840 | things and you resolve the questions assigned to work, do the small things right away. And people

00:01:53.520 | come out of the docket clearing meeting, you've cleared a lot of this work off your team's plate,

00:01:56.480 | and the stuff that remains has been clarified. That discussion, a couple minutes of discussion

00:02:00.800 | that each task gets, gets rid of the need to have all these ambiguous back and forth emails,

00:02:07.600 | you're playing obligation hot potato for a while until it gets urgent, you're not quite sure what's

00:02:11.200 | going to happen. It allows you to just execute the work. If you have a docket clearing meeting for

00:02:17.360 | 30 minutes, twice a week, small footprint, 30 minutes, twice a week, same time, your whole team,

00:02:23.280 | you will reduce the number of emails each team member receives in their inbox by a factor of

00:02:30.160 | three or four. And not only will you reduce the number of emails by a big factor, but the type of

00:02:35.840 | email you're taking out of their inbox by having these meetings are the type that are the worst.

00:02:39.520 | The ambiguous back and forth, the conversations, the like, could you deal with this? You don't

00:02:45.040 | even know what that means. The stuff that really gives you the indigestion,

00:02:48.240 | the stuff that causes the anxiety. So it is an incredibly effective tool. If you work in any

00:02:53.920 | sort of team, you should have docket clearing meetings. So there is my new piece of advice.

00:03:01.440 | - I like it.

00:03:02.080 | - That's actually in a slow productivity. I'm working on the book and so I have these principles

00:03:08.960 | and then the principles underneath the principles are propositions, which are kind of where we get

00:03:13.440 | concrete, like do work on this, work on that, or just give some more concrete ideas.

00:03:18.480 | And so the propositions have, they come with some like actual pieces of advice. So some of the book

00:03:23.680 | is philosophical and manifesto style, some is idea writing, some is let's get concrete. And that came

00:03:30.480 | out of me working on a proposition about containing the small things. So the footprint stays small

00:03:36.480 | in your work life. And that's, I was just working out the docket clearing meeting idea.

00:03:42.720 | It's the, I presented that in the book as the team counterpart to office hours for the individual. So

00:03:50.160 | as you know, I'm a huge believer of you should have office hours three times a week. Everyone

00:03:54.560 | knows when they are. Almost anything smaller conversational or back and forth conversation

00:03:58.960 | requiring you to say, great, grab me at my office hours, grab me at my office hours. You're just

00:04:02.560 | defending people off. We have your shield of your office hours. You're just defending yourself as

00:04:06.800 | all these ambiguous obligation hand grenades come near you. You just knock them all away and just

00:04:10.560 | make everyone come every day. There's 30 minutes. They can always come and find you. And that's a

00:04:15.120 | huge inbox saver, but team stuff requires his own type of strategy. So there we go.

00:04:20.640 | Docket clearing meetings. I've been thinking about slow bar activity a lot. Yeah. Just

00:04:25.200 | on different things I work on, whether it's like work or even getting better at sports. I think

00:04:30.960 | about it all the time. I finished the chapter. Well, the first draft of the chapter on doing

00:04:36.400 | fewer things. Principle one, it was a beast. It was 25,000 words. I got it down to 18,000 words

00:04:41.840 | out of my hands. My editor has it took me a long time. So I was trying to figure out the voice.

00:04:46.400 | I think I found the voice for the book, but we'll knock on wood. We'll see.

00:04:50.000 | So I've started now I'm working on a part one chapter. So part one is more like ideas.

00:04:56.320 | So part one chapter that's I'm not going to give too many details because it might also be a New

00:05:00.800 | Yorker piece. So I like to keep that kind of secret and I'm beginning the background research

00:05:04.880 | for the next principle, which is work at a natural pace. And, you know, this, this idea of

00:05:12.080 | constant, like you just work, you know, five days a week, eight hours straight, just again and again

00:05:17.920 | and again, just going after getting after it, just intense. It's very unnatural. It doesn't

00:05:24.000 | really match the way that really interesting stuff is produced. I'm just getting the weeds there.

00:05:27.520 | And I won't give too many details yet, but, but yesterday I was spending a lot of time reading

00:05:32.080 | about the timelines of famous scientists from the early Renaissance period. And let's just say the

00:05:41.600 | pace at which they developed and published their ideas is anything but fast. Like a year will go by

00:05:48.800 | that's not working on it. And then like the summer they work on it and then they have to send a

00:05:53.200 | letter and it's 15, 57, 67. So it's going to take, you know, three months before they hear back.

00:05:58.960 | It's a slower pace. They're very productive because they invented, you know, gravity.

00:06:04.080 | That's coming along. All right. Speaking of, I'm going to make this transition land.

00:06:14.800 | Got a lot of really good analogies today.

00:06:17.840 | Yeah. I'm trying to transition to sponsors.

00:06:19.920 | I'm still thinking about the dragon going over the wall.

00:06:22.000 | Yeah. Yeah. It'd be better if I knew the name of that character from game of Thrones.

00:06:26.720 | I wish I knew it too.

00:06:27.680 | It's not Cersei Lannister is the person in power, the wife of the Joffrey. They're the people in

00:06:35.760 | power, the queen of the dragons. I don't know. I don't know the show. The only thing I know

00:06:40.320 | about the show is someone sent me a clip, which I really enjoy. I guess there was an episode in

00:06:44.320 | the last season where it's this dragon woman and they're in a tavern and it's, I don't know,

00:06:49.280 | dwarves and swords and stuff. And someone left the Starbucks cup in there and it made it into the

00:06:53.760 | show. And it's, it's, it's fantastic. They're in this tavern and they're all in there and there's

00:06:57.920 | just a Starbucks cup sitting on the table. I appreciated that.

A Simple Strategy For Eliminating Communication Overload | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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