Afford Anything - A World Without Email, with Cal Newport

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

#303: Can you imagine living in a world without email? Most of us can’t - how would we get work done? - but this is what Cal Newport advocates for in his newest book, A World Without Email. Cal cites a study that found the average knowledge worker checks various communication tools once every six minutes. At that rate, it’s a wonder we get any work done at all. Cal argues that modifying our habits (like checking email at designated times) isn’t enough. We need to look for solutions outside the inbox and seek to reduce back-and-forth communication at all costs. If you’re drained by your inbox, we chat about strategies, processes, and systems that can help streamline your work and communication flow. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode303  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything, just not everything. Every choice that you make carries a trade-off, and that applies not just to your money, but to your time, your energy, your focus, to anything in your life that's a scarce or limited resource. Your resources need to be managed, and that opens up two questions. First, what's most important? Second, how do you align your daily decision-making to reflect that? Answering those two questions is a lifetime practice, and that was what's what you. this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pant. I am the host of the Afford-Anything podcast,

and on the topic of managing the assets of your time, your energy, and your attention, we've invited Georgetown computer science professor and best-selling author Cal Newport to return to the show to discuss a world without email. Cal Newport is very much a proponent of deep work. He argues that focused work, such as writing or coding, the type of work that requires hours of concentration is the type of work that among knowledge workers produces some of the most important benefits to society. It produces some of the biggest productivity gains per hour. And yet, our ability to do deep work is becoming increasingly rare as we are plugged into this hyperactive hive mind of email and slack and communications.

He has been on this podcast twice before to discuss deep work as well as to discuss digital minimalism, getting rid of unnecessary apps and social media and notifications so that we can dedicate our brain space to focus on that which matters most. And so that we are more intentional about the tradeoffs and the direction in which we manage our time, our energy, our attention. Today he joins us to talk specifically about email and frequent messaging. How can we budget our email? How can we redirect our attention to that which matters most?

That's what we discussed in this upcoming interview. Three points that I'd like to make before we get into today's conversation. Number one, Cal Newport's philosophy of work has been instrumental in guiding our own internal organizational culture. Typically, I will end episodes by doing key takeaways in which I discuss what we've learned from the guest, and I discuss key takeaways in theory. So on a normal episode, I'll say, hey, here's an interesting idea that the guest put forth, and here are some ideas around how you can implement this in your own life. Today, for the key takeaways, I would like to pull back the curtain and show you in practice how we have actually implemented Cal Newport's philosophy inside of our own organization. And so for the key takeaways at the end of today's episode, you're going to hear how we have implemented the Cal Newport philosophy inside of Afford Anything.

Be prepared for that. That's number one. Number two, at the end of today's interview, we surprise a listener. We have a listener who called in with a question about Cal Newport's ideas, and you can guess what happens next. So I will leave it there at that cliffhanger, but at the end of this interview with Cal, we decide to answer this question by going straight to the source. And number three, I totally had some tech issues and I don't think it picked up my microphone when I was recording. So sorry about that.

Please don't hold it against me. All right, with those three notes out of the way, here is Georgetown professor and bestselling author, Cal Newport, to discuss a world without email. Hi, Cal. Hey Paula. Always a pleasure to talk with you. You too. I'm glad that you could be back. And I'm very impressed that you have written. I think this is your third book since in the time that I've been podcasting in the five years that I've been podcasting. Yeah. It's the only way I can have friends. I have to just keep writing books so I can talk to podcast host again and again. So that's my plan. Well, I'm glad that you do. So your latest book is about the very provocative title, A World Without Email. In it, you make the case that we, As a result of constantly living in our inboxes, and it doesn't just apply to email, it also applies to Slack or any other form of messaging, as a result of feeling the need to be constantly in hive mind and to be constantly reachable, we are being reachable at the expense of actually doing anything. Right. You mentioned the hive mind, and I think that's important because I like to coin terms. So the term I coined here was the hyperactive hive mind, which is my description for this way of working that so many people and so many teams and so many organizations have defaulted to in our current moment, which is just, look, we all have got an inbox. We all have a Slack account.

Let's just rock and roll. Back and forth, ad hoc, unstructured messaging, just back and forth. If I need something from you, I'll message you. If you need something for me, message me, we need to set this up and go back and forth. You need to talk to a client, just send them a message, have to check in with the vendor, shoot it over. We'll go back and forth. So it's this idea that we'll all just be chattering back and forth in an unstructured, unscheduled way using digital communication tools. I call that the hyperactive hive mind.

It's something that has risen the prominence in almost every knowledge work setting from, you know, solo entrepreneurs to giant Fortune 500 companies. And what you said, I think is absolutely right. This turns out, once you look a little closer, to be a terrible way to actually coordinate knowledge work. Why exactly is it so terrible? I mean, wouldn't it be the case that if a person had to wait for a response, if a given individual were to not be responsive and therefore bottleneck a conversation, wouldn't that slow things down? Well, so we have two different questions here. Question number one is if the hyperactive hive mind is how your organization coordinates themselves, that's how they actually, how you work. And in that context, you stop checking email as much or you stop using Slack as much.

Does that create a problem? Yes, it does. And in fact, I think this is actually why we have failed to make so much progress on these problems of email overload because we are focusing on the inbox. Oh, it's our behavior in the inbox, our relationship to the inbox, our habits for how we check it, our expectations about how quickly people should respond. We think that this is a problem to be solved in the inbox, but really it's only be solved underneath it. we have to replace this hyperactive hive mind with something that demands much less attention. Now, before I get into what that is, we could underscore a little bit about why the hyperactive hive mind by itself is a problem because it's worth acknowledging, for example, that there's a lot of things about the hive mind that's actually quite natural. Back and forth ad hoc unstructured, that's how you and I would be coordinating if it was 100,000 years ago.

And we were on like a savannah hunting a saber-toothed tiger or something like this. we would be using the hyperactive hive mind. You go there, I'll come here, just back and forth as we needed on-demand, unstructured communication. It's how humans naturally communicate in small groups. It's very flexible, right? Because just kind of figuring things out as they show up, it's very convenient because if you need something or question answered, you can get it right away. You don't have to think ahead too much. You don't have to plan too much.

And it's very cheap. All you need is email accounts and your company can rock and roll. You don't have to build out complex systems. So it has lots of advantages. So why is it a problem? Well, it turns out the flip side of the hive mind is that it requires by definition that you service all of these back and forth conversations. If you have 30 different ad hoc asynchronous back and forth interactions happening with various people with messages going back and forth, you can't be away from that too long because you have to respond to things to come in to keep all of these processes unfolding. Now, if you have to constantly tend to these conversations, if you have to check your inbox once every six minutes like the average American knowledge worker does,

which is about what you need to keep up with the hyperactive five minus scale. All of these checks, it turns out, creates this massive cost in your brain due to effects tied to context switching. When you switch your attention from the thing you're writing or the decision you're trying to make or the conversation you're having over to an inbox and you see all these messages, maybe you respond to one to two and you see a couple dozen you can't respond to and you try to bring your attention back to that primary work task, that leaves this cognitive resonance. from the switch that significantly reduces your capacity. It significantly reduces your ability to think. So the problem at the hive mind is it's simple and it's convenient and it's flexible, but it makes us dumber and it makes us much worse at actually doing work. The issue then, if I'm understanding that correctly, is the task switching residue that comes even from switching from one communication with one group of individuals around one topic to the next. So although you're not task switching from, say,

email to some other task, even the task switching, the conversation switching within your inbox creates attention residue. Yeah. Well, and both of these things are a problem, right? Exactly. So even glancing at an inbox is going to significantly reduce your capacity when you turn your attention back to something un-inbox related. But when you're in your inbox, and I think we're all familiar with this feeling, kind of jumping

from message to message, answering some, saying this one's too hard, let me jump to another one. that context switching is creating a huge neuronal pile up that feels frustrating. It stresses us out. It makes us anxious. We can kind of feel our ability to think clearly reducing. These context shifts are something that we're not really wired to do so rapidly. And it's an accidental side effect of the hyperactive hide mind. But it's also absolutely unavoidable if that is the fundamental way you organize your work. If we have to organize our work with unstructured back and forth ad hoc messaging, I have to check this thing a lot. And if I have to check this thing a lot, I have to constantly be contact shifting. And that means I'm not going to be able to think clearly and I'm going to be anxious and I'm going to be unhappy with my work. Would a better alternative to be in meetings? I mean, aren't meetings

a frequent complaint of knowledge workers that they're in too many meetings? And the popular meme is, oh, this could have been an email? Yeah, meetings can be just as much of a problem for different reasons. But if we want to talk solutions, the key thing to keep in mind is

you have to replace the hive mind with other things. And it's a point I'll probably keep coming back to because I think we're used to stipulating that the hive mind is fundamental and then just talk about what habits can we put in place to try to mitigate the damage caused by the hype mind. We stipulate that, of course, we have to have all these back and forth conversations. How else will we coordinate with people? And therefore, all the focus is on how do we prevent that big inbox from having too much of a presence in our life? How can we batch things? How can we turn off notifications? And so what I keep coming back to is no, you have to replace the hive mind. You have to replace it with processes that

require less of this ad hoc back and forth communication. What do those processes look like? Well, it depends what we're talking about. And so, you know, I get into this in the book, but there's no one size fits all answer, like move from this tool to that tool, do everything in meetings or whatever. It's like actually what you need to do is start really identifying. These are the actual processes in my life, in my company, in my team, that we return to and have us work together to produce things that are valuable. Once we've named them, we can say,

how are we implementing these processes? And for most people in knowledge work, the answer is almost always more or less with the hyperactive hive mind. So you can start going process to process, how we answer client complaints, how we deal with incoming queries, how we coordinate to produce the weekly newsletter.

And process by process, you can start asking, is there a better way we can put in place here to execute this process that does not require lot of back and forth messages. And as you go through this, this exercise process by process, you find innovation after innovation that reduces back and forth messages. And pretty soon, the load in your inbox is such that you don't have to be checking it all the time. There's just not enough in there. Most of it's informational. Most of the actual back and forth collaboration and communication is happening in ways that are much more friendly to how the human

brain actually functions. It strikes me as I hear you talk that when you talk about processes, there are internal processes, which inside of a company or organization has a much greater degree of control over their own internal processes. But then there's also communication with outside vendors, outside clients, outside suppliers, new inquiries that are coming in. There's communication with essentially people who are outside of your team or organization. And creating processes can be a little bit more challenging in that arena. Well, it can be a little bit more challenging. but I also think that we overestimate the degree to which that's challenging. So a key principle that I think is relevant for thinking about having processes with better

communication habits when you're talking about people outside of your organization is that clarity trumps accessibility. We tell ourselves like, well, the reason these clients email us all the time and demand quick responses is because that's just they like that. That's what they want. But often what that really is a sign of is that there's not enough structure or clarity here. They don't trust that things are getting done. They don't know how else they are supposed to make sure that something happens. So they're just going to kind of keep bothering you. And they want an

answer right away because they don't trust otherwise that it's going to get done. And they don't want this to be stuck in their head. So they'd rather you just get right back. But if they have clarity, oh, here's the system by which we do this. And they trust it. Like, this is great. Now, I don't have to keep this in my head. I don't have to worry that the ball is being dropped. I don't have to demand quick responses because I feel like this is in my cognitive headspace until, you know, I get your response, when there is more structure, when there's more clarity, you can greatly diminish accessibility. So like one example I give in the book, it's a 12-person Ux design firm, and what they switched to with their clients, they were very worried about this. They're very nervous about this.

What they switched to was, we have a weekly phone call. It says, set time. We give you the update on the project. We answer your questions. We might have some questions for you. We will then record in black and white everything we committed to do during that call, and we will send that to you immediately after the call, so you have a written record, you know, this is what they're working on. Here's a summary of what we discussed. And that was fine for 90% of their clients. Whereas before, by the way, they had these clients communicating with them on Slack all the time. Hey, what about this?

What about that? What's going to happen with this? But again, the reason was is because there wasn't structure and a client has an idea of an issue. They're not super organized. So they ask you about it. I don't really, I'm not organized. I don't have like a Cal Newportian to do list system here.

So I just have to kind of keep this in my mind until you answer me. So you better answer me quick. But when they knew like, oh, we have this call and it's once a week and I trust it. And they record like what their obligations are. You know, okay, I'll just send it to them and they'll put it on the list for what we discuss. And suddenly you've cut the client communication by 99%. So clarity can often trump accessibility. How does that work for cases in which you are getting inquiries from people who are not yet clients?

And I'll just tell you, in our own organization, one thing that we found is that we can put loads and loads of information out there. We can have websites, pages on our website with FAQs. We can have all of it out there and organized, but people don't read it. Now, just to further draw off this example, are we talking about, like, potential clients? So these are people who you're trying to establish a relationship, or is this, like, listeners or readers who are asking questions that the answer lies elsewhere, like in an FAQ? Frankly, it's both. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, so, I mean, these are both good questions. So, like, one of the examples I talk about in the book is, let's say it's client inquiries, right, incoming client inquiries. And I go through these various examples. This is in this chapter called the protocol principle. I talk about the sample company that maybe where they used to just rock and roll when these would come in. Like, hey, like, Bob, did you see this? What about this? Can you get back to them?

Let's gather this. Do we have this information? I talked about how they could put in place instead a system where, like, Like these get gathered and there's this once a week meeting where they go through like, okay, what are our inquiries? Okay, what do we need? Who's going to get back to them? All right, good. And so there's no real back and forth that creates.

And then I talked about, well, what about the client not wanting to wait a week if they happen to reach out earlier and how you could mitigate that by your immediate response? Like, great, thank you for your inquiry. We're pulling together a packet. It'll be to you by Friday or something. Right. Like you just give them some expectation about what's going to happen. Like, great. And now you've saved a lot of back and forth emails that are ad hoc.

Now, when it comes to like, okay, clients or something, customers or readers where they really should just see the FAQ. You know, we don't need to really establish a relationship. Look, I'm a fan of like here, I call it cinder filters. Here's the email address right there next to it is kind of the expectations that should be used for this. If you have a question about this, here's how to answer it. And if someone ignores that, then someone ignores that. I was worried switching to that type of system because I thought people would be upset. Like, well, how dare you say that like you're not going to necessarily answer a message?

and like why won't you answer my message and who do you think you are. But again, clarity trump successability. People said, oh, okay, I get it. This is not an email address where I expect an answer. Fine. Then I'm not going to be upset. In other words, having those expectations to say I'm probably not going to answer. It actually makes people feel a lot better than not having those and just still not being able to answer. You talk in your book about something that's called the attention capital principle. Can you elaborate on what this is? So when I think about how do we do knowledge work effectively? I found it helpful to actually use some of this classic economic theory terminology. And in part, I hold in this terminology because my fear is that

business leaders or team leaders, people who actually have the power to really affect these positive changes might have a knee-jerk reaction of, this is about employees who want their life to be more convenient at the expense of us. Right. And so I said, No, no, no, you're seeing this all wrong. The right way to think about this is we have attention capital is your primary resource if you have a knowledge, work organization. That is the latent potential of the human brains you employ to concentrate on information and produce new information that has value. That's the main capital you employ. The whole game is how do we set up how work happens so that you get, A, the best return from that capital, but B, you set up an environment where the people to which that capital is connected are,

so they don't leave and go to other jobs and quit, et cetera. And what I argue then is if we see it through that framework, the hyperactive hive mind is a really inefficient way of trying to organize this capital and get returns. And to try to speak the CEO types, they say, look at the industrial sector. They already understand this. Their capital there is not humans. It's actually their machinery and factory equipment. And we've known since, you know, 200 years that the whole game there is to figure out more

efficient ways to use that stuff to build stuff. They're constantly reengineering their processes. They're constantly trying to figure out what's a better way to build a car. What's a better way to build a light bulb? We don't really do that in knowledge work. What we do in knowledge work is like, here's just some easy, convenient thing. Let's all just get on an inbox. We kind of just leave it there.

And it's the industrial equivalent if we just put a bunch of workers in a car factory and said, guys, your objective is to build cars. I don't know how you do it, figure it out. Here's a motivating poster. Here's an OKR that says how many cars. We hope our goal is to produce. But you guys just figure out. the best way to build cars. That's not the way we do it. We actually say, well, what's the best way to

build cars? We don't have that mindset and knowledge work. So attention capital theory is my attempt to try to inject some of that thinking into more formal business theory. Can attention capital be measured? Yeah, it's interesting. It's hard to put a number on it, right? Like we have X dollars worth of attention capital. The result, however, the result of how much return you get on your attention capital can be measured because you can look at revenue. And you can look at expenses and you can see what the profit is. And this is one of the reasons why I'm optimistic about the hive mind becoming something that is going to be just a temporary moment during this early period of knowledge work in the digital age is because when you

replace the hive mind with other ways of collaborating and coordinating, it works better. And more is produced and it's better quality and your employees are happier. And that's bottom line dollar and cents, bottom line dollar and cents improvement. So it's a really good incentive aligned with this type of thinking, which is that it will make companies more profitable. And that is a very strong driving force, which is why I'm pretty optimistic that this age of 200 emails a day is not an age we're going to be stuck with. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient, they're also powered by the latest in payments technology built to evolve with your

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but you can sleep on it as a bed. It's got shelving. It's got drawers underneath for storage. But you can get whatever it is you want, no matter your style, no matter your budget. Wayfair has something for everyone. Plus, they have a loyalty program, 5% back on every item across Wayfair's family of brands. Free shipping, members-only sales, and more. Terms apply. Don't miss out on early Black Friday deals. Head to Wayfair.com now to shop Wayfair's Black Friday deals for up to 70% off. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Sale ends December 7th. One of the assumptions about knowledge work that you address fairly early on is an assumption that was born out of a famous essay written by venture capitalist Paul Graham, who made a distinction between makers and managers. Essentially, his essay was. premised on the idea that there are people who are engaged in creative work that requires deep thinking, such as writing or coding, and there are people who are managers. And a lot of thinking now is

around the idea that people who are in management or operations or logistics have to be in the hyperactive hive mind, while those who are creators need to be given space, autonomy, time to create. Your statement elaborates on that a little bit and makes a case as to why number one managers need some time to think. And you also introduce a third M as well. Can you talk about that for a bit? Yeah, it's an important point because this dismissal happens a lot where people say, well, yeah, this is a maker issue. I get it. Computer programmers and writers shouldn't be in the hyperactive hive mine. Like, Cal, I read deep work. I get it. Like they need to focus for long periods of time. But I'm a manager, the hive mind is my lifeblood. Or I'm a minder, which was my alliterative term for

logistical or administrative support, right? Like I'm an executive assistant or something like this. And being responsive is my life, right? And so this doesn't really apply to us. And the argument I make is that's not true. The hyperactive hive mind is a bad way to coordinate attention capital for all of these different types of positions. And the reason is, is that it requires this constant tending. And therefore, it still generates all these context shifts, which makes it very hard to, to do whatever it is you're doing well, be it writing a novel or really just trying to make a management decision or trying to resolve a problem that the person that you support in a support role has brought to your attention. We work best when we can do one thing at a time,

push that to a reasonable stopping point, and then move on to another thing. This is the rhythm in which we're going to make the best business decisions, the decision when we're going to deal with and resolve support problems most effectively. And if we punctuate that with, no, no, no, I also have to be constantly responding to emails or Slack while even trying to do that. It brings down the quality of your work just the same as you would with a minder. So like I quote research in the book, for example,

looking at managers. And it looks exactly at email and managers. And what it finds is that as you increase the amount of email a manager is facing, you see a real drop in what they call leadership-oriented activities. So activities focused on what's best for our team, how do we improve our team, what do my people need, where are the big problems up ahead that we need to start preparing to get around, you stop those activities and retreat to what they call a productivity mindset, which is just small fires in the moment. Like I'm trying to just answer things and make sure that emails don't sit too long in my inbox before they respond. Leadership diminishes, which in the long term is not a way to actually lead a team in a sustainable way or to success. same thing in support roles.

We learned this in IT. They figured this out, right? IT support figured out a while ago. If I'm just going to use the hive mind, this is not going to work. If anyone can just call me or email me when they're having a problem with their computer and just want to figure this out back and forth on email, I'm never actually going to be able to fix anything because people will answer my email. Come on, I have this problem.

I need a solution to the problem. Nothing's actually going to get fixed. So they invented in this minder role, they invented ticketing systems. where it's like, oh, this is an example of a process that is replacing the hive mind for solving this problem, where here is my issue, it goes into a ticketing system, you get a note back, okay, it's in the system, here's your number, you can check on it when you want, you'll hear a response as soon as we get to it. The IT support people then are much more sequential. They go to the ticketing system, they look at the tickets that are tagged for them, they choose one,

they work on it until they're done, they update the information around that ticket, and then they say, what's next. And it is a much more effective way for them to get IT support tasks done than if they each just had an inbox and we're doing hyperactive hive mind back and forth. And so the big point there is the hive mind corrupts basically all work activities. If you're in a job where you have to answer a lot of things like IT support, find a process for that that doesn't mean you have to do that in an ad hoc way. If you're a manager, there's various issues that arise. Fine, here's our system for dealing with those issues, which means I don't have to just constantly be in email, regardless of the role, if there's always an ongoing conversation that at any moment these things could be

moving forward and you need to be there to helping them, you are not going to do that role well. It sounds to me as though a lot of the solution to this keeps coming back to build processes, build systems. Every time that we have tried to do that, there are always people who try to, as I call it, unautomate the system or break the system. There are always people who come to us with a request, we'll say, here's the process, and they will say, I would actually like to go outside of your process for X, Y, Z reason. And it always, internally, we always have these meetings and discussions, so-and-so made a request, this would be an exception to our process, what do we do? And it sort of happens over and over and over again, all of these exceptions to the process,

exceptions to the rule, each one of which has its own unique set of justifications. Yeah. Well, this is the challenge. Processes are hard, and this is the challenge of processes. It's why I tell the story in the book I talk about using the industrial analogy, the shift from the craft method to the assembly line in car construction. And what I emphasize is that shift was a gigantic pain. It was like a huge pain. It didn't. They had to hire more people. They invest more money.

It had lots of hard edges. They couldn't get it to work. You know, the steering wheel people are going a little bit too fast. We're getting backed up before we get to the wheel installation people. And it was really inconvenient and it was a pain. but Ford pushed that through because inconvenient or not, or even if it generated four times a day, the line gets stuck,

it was still producing Model T's 100x faster. So, like, the first thing I say is, like, we have to lean into the fact that processes are a pain to get right. We're giving up convenience to make our life better and to produce things better. More specifically, though, when you're dealing with processes and people wanting to go around the processes, I mean, there's a few things that can help.

You know, one thing I talk about is putting in higher, friction escape valves. So, like, okay, this is the process. But if something comes up that doesn't fit into this process, like, fine, we have a backup, but the backup should have some friction. Like, yeah, here's the phone number. You can call me, you know, I'm available. You know, the phone lines are, you know, I'm available these two hours in the

afternoons or something that's like hard enough that even just a little bit of friction there, sometimes that pushes people back into like, you know, maybe I'll just stick within the process because it email's too easy. There's no friction. we will leave the process because the process has higher friction. So the escape valve has to have a little bit higher friction in just sticking with the actual process. Then there's other things you can do like trying to evolve the processes,

make the processes themselves more flexible and more general. I mean, they don't always have to be too strict. To me, the metric that you're trying to minimize is unscheduled back and forth messaging. And so you can have a lot of other flexibility in these processes so long as they're not dependent on lots of unscheduled back and forth messaging. It's not dependent on interaction occurring through asynchronous tools like email or synchronous digital tools like Slack. So there are three different views on that problem.

But I underscore it all with the issue of, yeah, we should be clear about this. The hive mind is easy and everything else is harder. So we have to be ready psychologically for that. But the argument I try to make is that it's so immiserating and unproductive that it's worth the work. You use the phrase asynchronous and synchronous tools for people who are listening to this who aren't familiar. with those terms. Can you explain the difference between the two? Yeah, so asynchronous is where the sender and receiver don't have to be participating in the communication at the same time. So email is a part of the reason why it spreads so fast is that it solved this problem of fast, low friction,

asynchronous communication. So I could send you something without you having to be there at the time when I'm sending it. Before email, you could do this with like memos, like in our office memo. I can send that memo put in the mail cart. You don't have to be there when I'm doing this. It'll eventually make its way to your mailbox. You can come and get it. Voice mail was a more modern asynchronous tool, so I can now leave a message.

You don't have to be there. You can listen to it when you're ready to listen to it. So asynchronous is very useful for that reason. Voice mail is a pain. Mimos are a pain. Email was not a pain. That's why it was such a miracle invention. Synchronuses were both there at the same time.

So a phone call is a great example. you have to be on the other end of a phone for a phone call to actually work. Otherwise, I'm just talking into a dial tone. That's what synchronous communication is. Both of these things are useful when we're thinking about workplace coordination. Would you say that in the workplace over the last 50 years, there's been broadly a shift from synchronous to asynchronous? Yes. Yeah, there has been, we can measure this. I talked with a researcher, Gloria Mark, who was really an expert on these topics. And I had her walk me through it, and I put this data in the book. But she basically gathered what they call business or workplace ethnography. So these are studies where you send in scientists to observe people in an office, just like you might send in someone to observe, you know, baboons in the wild, right?

I imagine them wearing field hats. I don't think they actually do that. But you can imagine. But she found a bunch of these and she was correlating them over time and organizing them over time. And one of the big shifts that happens in the pre-email era to the post-email era is that time spent in synchronous-type things like meetings decreases and what is called desk work, which is very generic, but that captures all the time you're doing email. That really increased. And in fact, they kind of just swapped at some point. So pre-email, you were spending more time, like either on the phone or in meetings because that's kind of how you communicated with people.

post email, we switched over to much more asynchronous communication. And one of the arguments I make is that if we study that closely, and I actually wrote an article about this a couple of years ago in The New Yorker, so people can, if they don't have the book handy, they can find this book called this article, rather, called was email a mistake where I make this argument, which is also in the book. What I said was basically, when people switched from synchrony to asynchrony, from talking to people to let's do it over email, the mistake they made is, like, Like, these are equivalent.

So they were thinking like, yeah, I could call you up and talk to you for five minutes, or we could do this over email and it'll be equivalently easy. What they missed is that there's a ton of overhead to asynchronous communication. We underestimate how efficient it is to coordinate on something when we are both there at the same time, not necessarily physically. We could be on a phone or Zoom or whatever, but when we're able to go back and forth and hear each other and go back and forth, what about this, what about that? it's an incredibly efficient and compact exchange of information that when you try to take that

five-minute conversation and say, let's just do it on email, that can now change into a dozen back-and-forth emails. Now, that's a dozen back-and-forth emails that spread throughout a day, but because you're waiting for the next email to come back, that might translate into 40 email checks, 40 email checks plus a dozen emails to make that same coordination. That one conversation has now basically removed your ability in that entire workday to ever have a sort of

focused cognitive moment. It's added anxiety. It's added cognitive load reduction. And so it's one of the reasons why we got into this hyperactive hive mind problem is that when you then take a dozen different such interactions that we might have done quickly before in person

and move them all over to email, now we're getting a dozen times a dozen. And now there's 150 emails that have to happen today just to get those same conversations done. And that gets us to more or less where we actually are. That's basically what we send and receive in a typical day. And so there's a huge overhead to asynchrony that we missed. And we just thought like, yeah, we could chat. We could do over email. Email feels a little easier

because I don't have to call you. Let's just do that. We don't realize that actually you've just created a whole day's worth of problems versus the 45 seconds per the problems of, oh, I have to wait for you to pick up the phone. Right. Right. You mentioned though earlier that both synchronous and asynchronous communication do have their advantages and do have their place, would it be a mistake or would it be an oversimplification to approach designing an office or designing a workforce in a way that prioritized synchronous above asynchronous whenever possible? Right. So then the issue there, which I think you alluded to earlier in the interview, is that you could then lead into meeting explosion. And then you're no better off either.

You're no better up either. And this has happened to a lot of people who work in large, organizations during the pandemic that basically to compensate for the lack of these in-person sort of heuristic productivity hacks where I can just grab you and talk to you, meetings explode. And I keep hearing from people who say, okay, this is terrible. Like basically, I just do Zoom all day and then try to do work outside of that. So it's made things worse. And so what I typically advocate for is the way to manage these pros and cons and different ways of communication is to start with the process.

say what's the right way to do this process that minimizes back and forth communication? And then you have available synchronous strategies. You have available asynchronous strategies. There might be some mix. Your strategy for a particular type of like, let's say, podcast episode editing or something. There's like a whole asynchronous component of this will get uploaded. You know, the files get uploaded by this time on Thursdays. And the editor will take them from Dropbox.

And without you even have to interact, we'll go. through and do a rough edit by Wednesday and Thursday morning, you know, I'm messing up days here, but whatever, you know, you look at it and then there's a standing call, you know, from 10 to 1030 where there's like this highly efficient synchronous where you've looked at their things and you say, okay, but here's my thoughts on your cut this, not then this, and you kind of finalize what that's going to be, then the episode, they take it, they finish it, they post it or something. So now you've set up a process that's asynchronous for some key aspects. You know, I post this, you get it when you're ready, you put it over here by this point, but also synchronous and aspects

where that makes it really efficient. Like, okay, didn't we get together at this point always and just like boom, boom, boom, figure out all these edits, really dense communication. And the whole thing, the key thing in that particular example, no back and forth messages. Nothing about that process required you to check an inbox even once. In the example that you just described, you gave an example around the editing and production process of a podcast episode, which is something that we've been able to refine because we do this every week. How would you handle or try to design a process around a project that is

non-repetitive? Yeah, so this is a good distinction, and I have some terminology for that in the book. So a couple things are useful for, you can think of these as one-time projects. Like, okay, we are doing whatever. A marketing campaign for a new product. We've never had a We've never done a marketing campaign. We're not going to do another one soon. So it's a one-time project. Like, how do we do this? Again, the tendency might be, let's just hive-minded, right?

Let's just, we're on slack. Let's rock and roll. But let's say we're doing the Cal Newport thing. Okay, let's try to come with the process. When you're dealing with these type of one-time projects, a couple things that came up a lot in the case studies is a task transparency becomes critical. So maybe you're using a tool like Trello or flow or if you're more geeky like Asana, which all these things are kind of doing the same type of thing.

We're like, okay, here are tasks on a virtual task board that are organized in columns that correspond to their status. There's assignments of who's working on what. All of the relevant information and files, etc. Notes for each of these tasks can just be appended digitally right onto the card. So all the information is in the same space. And that borrowing an idea from software development, let's have these regularly scheduled fast stand-up status meetings where it's like,

Let's all look at the same board. All right. Who's working on what? How's that going? What happened to what you committed to before? What you need from someone else? Great. Here's some new things that came in.

Okay, you're done with that. Let's have you work on this. You're all assigned it to you on that board. Great. 20 minutes go. Everyone's on the same page. Everyone knows what they're supposed to work on. Everyone knows what they need from everyone else.

Everyone has been held accountable for what they said they're going to do before. So there's no sort of, you know, I call it CC bloviating, where you kind of get out of doing work. I'll just send a lot of emails about it. So at least it looks like I'm busy. And then everyone goes. and works. And I talk about a company in the book, Sean's company, the UX design company, where they switched to this mode. They were so in the hive mind that they lost to engineers eventually to burnout, like, I'm done. And the founder of this company said, okay, we're getting rid of the

hive mind. And if we go out of business, we go out of business. But this is miserable. So let's just try it. And what they went to is a system like that. They had a morning check-in. They used base camp as their tool, but they had a morning check-in. They could seek transparently who was working on what, what they needed, what happened to what they were doing the day before. We all good, great, execute. And then they just worked. And then as they worked, they updated the information in these systems and stuff like that. So it was all transparent. And then they checked in again the afternoon. All right, how did it go? What do we need? What's going to go on? Great. And then they worked a little bit more. And that was the end of the day. They didn't use email

internally, except for like a stand-in for regular mail. Like, oh, yeah, I need to send you your pay stub. You know, I need to announce, like they use it exactly like you would use. of mailbox, which is to deliver information in files not to interact. They got slack out of there. So, like, really, they interacted largely in these twice a day synchronous meetings within their teams, which they did virtually. It was pre-pandemic, but they were based in London, but they had people not all in the city, so they just did it with video chat.

And they mainly just worked, you know? So that type of model works for the, we don't know how this task, we don't know how to do this project. We have to coordinate. You can still have a process. of like, here's how we handle it. We store things here. We look at them here.

We assign things this way. We have these standing meetings to figure out who's working on what. We have emergency protocols, usually phone base. There's a little bit of friction. So if something pops up that's an emergency, you have a way of getting people's attention. And then you execute. And again, you've avoided the thing that we're trying to avoid, which is I have to keep checking an inbox or messenger to service back and forth conversations.

What do you think would be an appropriate amount of checking various messaging system? whether it's email, Slack. Would it be once a day, twice a day? Is it context-dependent? Yeah, so generally speaking, I think in a company or team that has moved past the hive mind, and instead of replaced it with systems to try to minimize back and forth, email should be more or less like your mailbox that the company used to be. Like, you'll probably check it most days because there could be things in there people are

sending you that you need, but it does not play a large role in how you organize or coordinate your work. This is, for example, what it was like at that UX design firm I just talked about. In fact, I made the CEO, I had him on the phone. I said, I'm putting you on the spot. Open your email inbox. I want you to go through here and read me everything that was in it. None of it was conversational. It was invoice from their accountant, a ticket response from their hosting service.

It was hosting some of their projects. It was like a file that someone was sending them. It was like you would use a mailbox. And he's like, yeah, I check this most days, but not every day, which I just thought was amazing. Now, the complicated piece of this puzzle is Slack because people will sometimes, and this is completely appropriate, they will use Slack for synchronous communication in a structured way. So it's like, okay, we get together. There's, you know, at this time every day, I have like a Slack office hours where people

like jump on and can ask me questions about my subject level expertise. And so during those periods, you might be doing a lot of slack. But that was structured, right? It wasn't unstructured use where it's, I don't know when stuff's going to come in, so I have to keep checking it. So I think in an ideal workplace, you look at an email inbox maybe once a day and other types of communication tools are essentially never used or almost never used in an unscheduled manner. That is, this is not a set time I normally do this. This is not I have a meeting schedule. This is not I have a conversation schedule.

this is not my office hours. I'm just checking it just in case. That should more or less go away. Office hours is an excellent analogy because those are confined pre-scheduled times in which if a group of people has a question, they don't get to access you around the clock, but if they have a question or if they want to discuss something, there are pre-scheduled time slots once or twice a week in which they can come to you with said questions. It's a fantastic strategy. And it's more popular than people might imagine. Like the case I talked about in the book was Basecamp. So Jason Freed's company that does base camp.

It used to be called 37 signals. But they started doing this because they had technical subject masters, right? So it's a software development firm. And you have these specialties in those firms. Like I'm the Ruby on Rails guys. Well, they invented Ruby on Rails there. So probably they're all Ruby. Whatever.

Like I know about Ajax. I know about this particular technical stuff. And everyone was getting bombarded with questions. all the time because, oh, you know, Paul is the person who knows about this tech within our company. And they just put this office hour things in place. You know, yeah, Mondays during these, this 90 minutes is when you can ask me questions about this technical thing. And he said, it worked fine. People were completely fine with the fact that, oh, I have a question, but you're not available for another four days. Like, yeah, whatever, you know, I'll get to it. Like, for the

most part, it was fine is what he said. I think this strategy should be way broader because nothing simplifies getting rid of back and forth messages quicker than just when someone has an issue to be able to be like, yeah, that sounds important. Grab me at whatever of my next office hours is open. And I got to say, this is how I work with students at Georgetown who aren't in my classes. And it's been great because I want to be, as a professor at my university, I want to be a source of advice and counsel for any student at my university, right? And a lot of students want to talk to me. They want to talk about tech. They want to talk about my books. They want to talk about having a writing career.

And I just have this very simple strategy, and it works great. I have these office hours I've scheduled. And I just can write away, if someone writes me, like, that's great. I love talking to Georgetown students. These are my office hours. Show up any time you want. Always happy to talk to students. No back and forth conversation, none of this, like asynchronous back and forth.

And they can when they want, if they really, you know, find one that makes sense and they'll show up. And I get to talk to a lot of students and it's very rewarding and it requires no back and forth messaging. Whereas if I tried to set up a meeting or talk to the students over email, just those interactions alone would force me to be in my inbox all day long. And that's just this one-off type of interaction that's not even directly related to the core of my job. So office hours are fantastic. And I think almost everyone should have them.

So we implemented, inside of Afford Anything, we implemented office hours. I teach an online course on real estate investing. I implemented an office hour system for any student who wanted to get on a Zoom call with me to ask any question that they want. want. A couple of issues that we've encountered with it. One was that when we had office hours roughly going every other week, they were infrequent enough at a pace of every other week that they became overloaded with people. We would get 50 people on a call. And so we got the complaint that there are too many people on this call. I don't have a chance to get my question in. We also got the complaint from people who said, hey, I'm an introvert and asking a question

on a Zoom call in front of 50 other people is my worst nightmare. Yeah. So we then went to a system where we had office hours twice a week, plus an additional thing that we call introvert hours once a week, where people can have a limited window of time in which they can submit questions. Then we kind of went to the opposite problem, where some of our office hours calls had as little as two people on them, and this thing that was supposed to be group coaching turned into almost one-on-one.

So nailing down that process for us, we've been working on this for two years, but we keep oscillating between the Goldilocks too much too little, too much too little. Is this continually a work in progress? Well, calibrating office hours is definitely a thing. So professors know about this, right? Because we have traditionally office hours for classes. So one of the things we figure out over time is how to calibrate office hours for different size and types of classes.

So, like, when I teach, like, I taught algorithms in the fall, algorithms to undergrads, maybe about 40 students, 40 students in their class. Like, what I found to experience that, like, okay, here's what I need there. I can do once a week for 90 minutes if I also have my two TAs, each on their own doing a separate hour on different days because the TAs can actually handle, I have questions about the problem set, which is 80% of what the questions are. And that filters out to bigger, deeper questions that need to come to the professor, and those fit very well with good spacing into, like, roughly a 90-minute office hours. But that took, like, a while to figure out. Multimedia office hours is also useful. Like, you're talking with introvert hour of like, yeah, I'm on Slack and available in the Zoom room. Or here's an email address for office hours that, like, basically, it's only turned on, quote, unquote, during the time.

So you can shoot emails there. I will see them when they come in and I'll get right back to you, right? So it doesn't have to be synchronous. But then the other issue is I think here there's a tension between group coaching and office hours. So you actually want to create a coaching experience that's good for everyone involved. So that I think is a little trickier. And as you found, it sounds like you're kind of honing in on the right solution. But probably for that, you have to err towards having too many people and then a curation system for choosing the questions that you answer.

There's a good audience. So that is trickier. But if it's really just, I want to make sure that if people need me, they can talk to me, and it's not with a lot of back and forth. It's not usually erring on the site of having maybe a little bit too much is okay because it's time you can be doing other things. It's just like a time in which you're committed to, I have that window open and I'll be keeping an eye on it. And if that's the case, you can double book these things. Then typically it's having twice a week instead of once or something is okay because it's like, that's fine. Like if no one comes or it's not the very many people, that's a win because that's kind of.

kind of protect the time I can use for something else, and that works fine. So outside of the group coaching context, having a little over-provisioning and just double-booking the time and using multiple medias during that time, I'll look at email during that time, I'll be on Zoom or, you know, your office is open. I'll be in my office. You can stop by. Like having all those options and then having it enough that like people typically can just get in and find you, that tends to be a sweet spot. I think the broader issue may be. All of these types of processes in which as an alternative to email or as an alternative to slack, you have standing meetings, as you talked about earlier, or standing office hours. Calibrating all of these based on demand can be tricky when that level of demand is in flux.

So there are times when they're standing meetings, even if it's internal to your company, when you need more than the allotted 30 minutes. and there are other times when you've got a 30-minute standing meeting and you just don't need one that week. Yeah. Yeah, but it's a great point. I mean, so especially in smaller teams or organizations because there's a lot of variety into what's going on. Like, oh, we're doing a push right now to get this new thing out

is a very different circumstance than we're in a steady state and just, you know, producing like podcast episodes in a way we know how to do. So I think having some sort of time frame, that you're thinking ahead to. I kind of lean towards quarterly usually works. Sometimes this might need to be monthly, but somewhere in that range where it's like, okay, monthly or quarterly,

we kind of have to step back and say, what's our game plan for this quarter? What's our game plan for this month? Oh, we have this new big project. Great. So let's look at our processes around this or get one in place. And I think we're going to need this many meetings for it. Okay, what about, oh, we're not doing this anymore.

So forget that. And what about what's not working? What's becoming a pain? Oh, the office hours are overboarded. Okay, let's rethink that. What you're putting your finger on, which is very important is that unless you're a, some organizations are incredibly steady state.

And I profile a company called Optimize in the book just like this. It's like a clockwork machine. We produce these things each week and they have it down. I love their automated system where it's all driven by these shared spreadsheets where you change the status in one of the cells. and then the next person involved in the chain sees the status has changed, and then they take on control of the thing, and they do their stuff,

and then they update the spreadsheet when they're done, and it's all moving between Dropbox folders, and I love that type of stuff, but that's not a lot of small organization. So my answer there is a mindset of we're revisiting and making game plans for relatively finite amounts of time in the future. Most of your processes might just stay because they work well, but there's going to be three or four that are drastically changing.

That's great. That is the rhythm. I think of doing very effective knowledge work is you're constantly stepping back to say, okay, here's what we need to do and how do we want to do this? You know, if we leave off the how question, we end up leaving a lot on the table and making everyone miserable as a side effect. In other words, part of the value that you bring to the company is continually re-evaluating those processes.

Yeah. I think in knowledge work in particular, especially with small and agile teams and organizations or small companies, that's the right way to do it. It's where we're constantly asking what do we need to do and how do we need to do it. Okay, the answer to the first question has changed. We have to change the answer to the second. It feels like it's a little bit of extra overhead. But do we really want to spend the time to figure it out and then the time required to kind of adjust it on the fly?

But that overhead is drastically dwarfed by the lost productivity if you don't do it. And if you just say, let's just hive mind it. It feels like a pain in the moment, but in the long term, it's incredibly more efficient. We'll come back to the show in just a second, but first We are approaching the end of our time, so I want to close this out by addressing a question that came in from an audience member. We have an audience member, a woman by the name of Annalise, who about three months ago called and left us a voicemail, in which she asked a question about the Cal Newport School of Thought versus the Gary Vaynerchuk School of Thought. And let's play this right now.

Hi, Paula, Annalise here. Which school of thought are you in? One, Gary Vaynerchuk or two, Cal Newport. Gary Vaynerchuk believes that you should broadcast your life 24-7 on social media, develop a following, and that you can't afford to live without one, or be successful without one, and why would you ever pass up that opportunity of our modern time? Versus Cal Newport, who seems to say the opposite. You can't afford to be on social media if you want to have a successful,

career and instead should be focusing on deep creative work and your quality of work and that social media only gets in the way. So somebody with a really successful following and somebody who I really admire for creating such brilliant work, I would be really curious to say what you have to think about it and how you keep that balance. So, Cal, I was thinking, I'd like to offer my thoughts on this question and then I would love to hear your take on my take. I love it. Okay. Let's do it. All right. First of all, the premise of her question is fascinating. So her premise pits you and Gary Vee in opposition to one another as though you occupy two sides of a spectrum, essentially pro-social media versus anti-social media. I fundamentally disagree with that premise. You may at first blush appear to be on opposite sides of the spectrum, but I think that when you zoom out, that spectrum is part of a much longer line. And from that zoomed out perspective, your positions are closer to one another than may appear at first glance. And the reason that I think that is let's take a closer look at the context of your work versus Gary's work.

Now, Gary Vaynerchuk originally had a wine business that had three attributes that made it very social media friendly. Number one, he was selling directly to consumers. So it was a B to C business model. Number two, he was selling a discretionary item, wine. And number three, it's a high volume business model where he has to sell a lot of wine. in order to be profitable. You, by contrast, are a professor at Georgetown, and from my understanding, they don't let just anyone be on the faculty there. You need to do research, and you are judged in part based on the quantity of papers that you publish, the prestige of the journals in which

those articles are published, and the number of, and prestige of citations that your papers receive. And so stated simply, the tenure committee doesn't care about your Instagram following. And so, based on the type of work that you and Gary Vee each respectively do, it makes sense that for one person's career model, social media would be a big part of it. For another person's career model, it would not. But if a person is in the type of career or the type of business in which social media would be important, then the approach would be to approach social media as a form of deep work. So, content creation, photography, props, costuming, lighting. All of it is a theatrical presentation of photography, videography, the writing that's associated with captioning. All of that is the

deep work of putting together excellent social media. And that should be approached like any other focused work. So that's my take on it. What's your take on my take? Well, I think that is right in line. That's right in line with the way I think about these things. This is basically the philosophy from digital minimalism, which is the way tech should be used is deployed for intentional reasons in intentional ways in your personal life and your business life. I have a wine company, okay, reaching a lot of people about my wine company as something that is like very valuable to my company. It looks like tech could give me ways to do that. That without tech, I couldn't do it as well, great.

Let me look at the tech available and find ones I think is going to work best and then figure out how to deploy it to solve that problem. That's the right ways to use tech. And as you say, if you're a, if you're a professor, then it's kind of clear, you're like, oh, I should steer very far from that. If you are trying to run like an online large scale location agnostic B2C business, then tech channels are probably going to play a really big role. And then there's a lot of places in between where it's actually gets a little harder to

decide, like, what if you're a writer? And that gets into some interesting ground. But here's the two key things I'll emphasize about what you said and what I'm agreeing with, is that A, you have to be careful about accurately answering the question. What's the best way to use tech? Once you've identified, this is what I care about and what I want to do and what's important to me. You have to be careful about answering that question. What's the best way to use tech to support this, right? And I would say, look for evidence, right? Look at the counterfactuals, look at other examples. If I use this type of tech, in this type of way, do I really have a good sense that this is going to increase my business? Do I see that's happen for people?

Make sure it's not the cart in front of the horse. Like, well, they had a big business and that's why people follow them. You know, if I started going on Twitter right now, I probably have a fair number of followers because I have a large audience. But it would be false to say that like a Twitter audience in that case is why followers is why I have a big audience, right? It would be cart before the horse. So be sure that is it true that this is the right tech to use? Like if I'm trying to start a wine company, is TikTok the right thing I should be on?

And let's think about it. Probably not. Like maybe YouTube is better, right? And then two, this is what people often miss is one of the huge advantages of knowing why you were deploying tech is that you can optimize your use. And this is what you meant by, I'm assuming by saying you kind of do it deeply. You can now optimize your use because you know why you're using it. And this is where all of the huge advantages come into play.

So you can be Instagram post and YouTube videos are a big part of a strategy that you really believe is key for your B to C business. And I can completely believe that's going to be the case in some businesses. But when you know that's why you're using these tools, you can say, okay, so let me put rules or optimize how I use these tools to maximize that benefit. And when you're thinking like that, you're like, well, I'm not going to have this stuff on my phone. And I'm not going to be on Twitter arguing with people.

And I'm going to have a content production schedule for my Instagram. And I'll probably actually have someone else do that posting for me. And I don't, I'm going to get a better camera than my phone has anyways. And we actually have studio time. I mean, this is when we do those pictures, and that's better, and it's on a schedule, and that gets posted. And then for YouTube, I have this editor. And when you actually are using tech, you know, why you're using it, you can optimize it in such a way that you just sidesteped most of the problems. And so, like, a lot of issues from, you know, Gary V followers might accidentally have is they just jump from, like, oh, social media is important to, like, now I'm not going to think any more about it and just unrestricted use a bunch of social media.

Right. And then you're doom scrolling on Twitter and yelling at people on Instagram and boycotting people on Ravelry or whatever. I don't know the platforms very well. And you've completely undermined the whole point of like, well, the reason I was going to use this was actually to promote this thing that I'm building that's hard. And now I'm not doing hard things anymore because I'm just all the time in this space. So that's my only caveat is like if you're a writer, is social media really important? Like that's hazy. If you're running a certain type of company, it's obvious.

If you're a professor, it's obvious. So make sure you know is this important. And then two, once you know why you're using it, optimize your use, optimize your use. And the social media companies hate this. They want it to be binary. Either you're in our ecosystem and using it without restriction or you're some weird Cal Newport, Luddite that thinks that all technology is bad. And we can easily refute that. So like, here's your choices, the cabin in the woods or you're on Instagram all the time.

And they really hate when people say, like, well, I do Instagram is useful, but it's not on my phone. It's on my computer. And I never see Instagram comments. I never check my feed and I have someone who posts my photos and we have studio times because you were making no money for them because you're never spending any time on it. And it has no real footprint in your cognitive space, but you're still getting a lot of value from it. So I love when people sort of hack that cost benefit ratio and extract value from those companies without those companies getting value in return. Perfect. Perfect. Well, we will end it there to the most Luddite computer science professor I know. Yeah. Yeah, I got to get back to my cabin. Come on. All right, Henry David Thoreau. Thank you for joining us.

Yeah, well, thank you, Paula. I enjoyed it. I'll have to write another book soon so we can talk again. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you, Cal. What are the key takeaways that we have learned from Cal? In this interview, he's talked about getting away from email and getting away from

that hyperactive hive mind, you know, whether that's in the form of email or Slack, getting away from constant messaging. And if you listen to our previous two interviews, you know, you're going to you. You know, that his themes are really around digital minimalism so that you can do deep work. Eliminate distractions and eliminate constant chatter so that you have the ability to do work that is rare and valuable, the type of work that requires hours of concentration. So instead of doing traditional key takeaways in the way that we typically do, I thought that perhaps it would be interesting for you to see behind the scenes how we as a an organization internally have implemented a lot of Cow Newport's teachings in the way that we internally operate across all of our platforms. We have to manage, of course, the website, the newsletter,

the podcast, the real estate course, new product development, social media, of course, there's quite a bit to manage. And so how does our team minimize this hyperactive hive mind? How does our team, and our internal structure facilitate a culture of deep work, and how have we implemented Cal's ideas into our own organization? So here to join me in this discussion is the chief sanity officer of afford anything, Aaron Millard. Hi, Aaron. Hey, Paula.

Erin, you and I have not emailed each other about this very recording. No, we haven't. Do you want to describe how you and I talk to each other these days on a day-to-day basis? Yeah, we just use a Google Doc. We are that low tech. At the start of every day, whichever one of us checks in first, we just put the date on the document and then we write some bullet points of what's going on to fill each other in if we need answers from each other, questions, concerns. And then at least two or three times every day, we check in and we leave comments to each other and that's about it. Yeah, it's as simple as that. One thing that I love

about the Google Doc system is that I don't get distracted by the other emails in my inbox. You and I were talking about this the other day where if you go into your email to check an email from, like if I wanted to check an email from you, Aaron, I might go into my inbox just to see what you sent me, but then I see something that somebody else sent me and it's a distraction and it pulls me away. It's similar to what we've done with our community, putting it on mighty networks instead of Facebook so that, you know, when you go on Facebook, there's so many distractions on Facebook. And I love Facebook and we have a great Facebook group as well. And that's fantastic for the people who who love Facebook and who are on it every day. But we also wanted to

create an option for people who don't want that distraction. Yeah, I think we mentioned it was intentional. Like every time we go to the Google Doc, we have an intent on what we're doing there. We're checking in with each other and seeing if there's anything that needs to be addressed. And the same thing with Mighty Networks. When you go to that community platform, your intent is to communicate with other like-minded individuals who love nerding out about financial independence. So it's much more streamlined and you can focus on one thing at a time rather than getting pulled in 50 million different directions. Right. Exactly. With the two of us, I mean, it became simple enough. But as, and you and I have been working together for what, five or six

years now. As this team has grown and is continuing to grow and we've added more people, one thing that I think we've both tried to do is figure out how to facilitate a culture of deep work as we've continued to expand. So when we brought in our developer, Zach, you know, he was really trying to push us to use Slack. And he saw Slack as an alternative to email, whereas I saw it. And I imagine, I don't know, I don't know what your views were, Aaron, but I saw Slack as just one more thing to check. And so what we did was precisely what Cal Newport recommended. I just have a standing meeting with Zach every week.

Erin, you and I have talked a lot about the North Star that guides our decision-making, and ours is to serve our audience, to serve the most number of people in the best way possible, and that comes from researching and creating really good content. What I've experienced is that there can often be distractions that inhibit the creation of that content, since creating great content. content, really researching it and going deep and creating something that is not a rehashed, parroted, same old, generic, same old, same old, like creating that level of insight and clarity of communication, it takes time. And that time can't exist when we get pulled into

an onslaught of emails and distractions. You've created quite a number of videos. for the course. And I know that's taken a lot of deep work from you. Yeah, there's always the time right before YFRP launches where we're like, man, I wish we could just go into a writing cave and a video editing cave for a week and just get, you know, knock out a number of different things so that we can make the course even more amazing. But there's always limiting factors there. There's always emails to be answered. There's people that we need to get back to you. How do we facilitate a workspace where that isn't what we're doing all the time? And I think that's something we're still actively working towards. But I think having that mindset alone helps a ton because you really have to be

laser focused on every single time you sit down to answer an email, what are you giving up? What are you trading off? And for me, that's often, you know, providing support at the cost of making content sometimes. And that's why we're focusing on scaling eventually, hopefully, growing. Those are the growing pains of any business, really. And I'm sure that a lot of people in the audience have experienced something similar. But I still think having that mindset of like, okay, what are my big tasks today? Getting those done first and then going to the more minute things of like or mundane tasks of answering email, I guess. Right. Well, a couple of things that you've done. So you're implementing, you're building out Help Scout right now. Yeah.

Can you talk about what is Help Scout and how is that one of the many tactics that we're using to reduce or eliminate some of our email load? Yeah. Help Scout at a base is just kind of a FAQ headquarters, I guess. So eventually, when it's up and running, it'll be great for the students of the course because if they have questions about their account management or what's inside the course or what course support structures are there, they can just go to Help Scout and we'll have a list of categories and frequently asked questions that break down everything that I normally tell students. So essentially, if students reach out to me and I'm responding to them, it's an individual one-on-one connection. No one else benefits from that knowledge, unfortunately. And then we have a support

page on the course, but I think it's just so much information that, you know, it's hard to take in all at once. So I think Help Scout will help break down all of those individual questions and you can search. So it's very easy to find exactly what you're looking for within that. So essentially, it'll be a tool that students can use whenever. Like if they have a question at like midnight on a Wednesday, then they can go to Help Scout instead of waiting on me for an answer. Right. So it helps serve both parties better. Exactly, exactly. And yet we have an FAQ page, but we've, you know, nobody was reading it. It was too long. It was too dense. So we found we needed tools to manage all of that. You've done the same with more robust organization and tagging of all of the information that we

have on the website so that a lot of the questions that we receive from our listeners, now, thanks to what you did in 2020, they have a much easier time of finding. the answer to their question. Can you talk about that project? Yeah, I mean, the end goal was just to make sure that all of our content is easily searchable and findable on the site because we have 10 years' worth, which is hard to believe, but true, 10 years' worth of content is a lot to get through. And I know that search functions on other sites aren't the most amazing. So I really wanted to make sure that ours was able to serve everybody who visits and wants to find an answer. We archive some of the older posts that maybe no longer serve the office.

audience as well because we developed better content around it. I categorized everything appropriately within a framework that we spent hours thinking about. And then I went a step further. Besides the categories, we also tagged everything by topic, especially I find this handy for the Ask Paul episodes because you and Joe cover so much. There's so many different topics. It's like, okay, it's personal finance at its basics, but what is actually covered within that episode? So if somebody has a specific question about what do I do with a 401k? Should I roll it over? What about a RothRA or, you know, real estate investing, financial independence strategy? So I've tagged every episode with the appropriate topic so that if anybody wants to find it, we have a page that Zach developed with us.

Zach's our developer. Yeah. He just listed out, it's a nice, neat little table that lists out all of the topics that exist on the website. So you can just go there and see what's on the site. And if you have a specific thing, you can always control F or command F, search the page for that word. So it makes everything much easier. And then internally, if we get questions from listeners who are like, I'm interested in real estate investing, but I don't know where to start, it's like, boom, here's a link. Like, this is all of our real estate content on the website. So it makes it, again, it's a win-win for everybody. Right. Exactly. Ultimately, I think our goal is just to empower everybody to be able to search the site and use the tools that we have much more easily. Yeah, precisely.

What I'm hearing from both of those examples, both the example of Help Scout, implementing a Help Scout system within the course, as well as the example of performing a deep content audit on the website and working with our developer so that our search functionality is drastically improved. Both of those examples do more than just eliminate email and eliminate the hyperactive hive mind back and forth. beyond merely doing that, they create a better product. And so it blends Cal Newport's ideas together well, I think, where asking, you know, how do we eliminate email naturally leads to the question of how do we create better systems, how do we create a better product, how do we create a website that has enhanced search functionality, you know, how do we create like office hours in the course? I host this previous cohort, I hosted office hours with the students twice a week every week for the 10 weeks of the course.

And we also did introvert hours once a week. So that was three times a week that I was present for the students with the course. You know, one of the other things that we did was that we took those office hour snippets. And Alyssa did this, really. She was instrumental in this, chopped them up, you know, found snippets, and then organized them. within the course underneath the lesson that they pertained to. So if somebody came to office hours and asked a question about building a team, she would take a snippet of that and put it directly into the lesson on team building so that that lesson then became more robust. Yeah, we had a

catalog, a collection of office hours and introvert hours. And we were like, okay, how do we make this more valuable to the students if they don't have a full hour or sometimes two hours to listen through an entire recording. So we made a gigantic spreadsheet, listed out every single module, every single lesson, and then went through the office hours searching for relevant terms, because we do list everything out by timestamps. I looked at what she put in there. I made the snippets, and then we put them in the course. And according to our statistics, a lot of people are listening to them now. So it's just an easier way to get information and answers. Right. And so again, it's like the act of trying to eliminate email is fundamentally inseparable from the act. And

of serving more people and creating better products and systems. Yeah. And in terms of what's next, so it strikes me that, you know, this conversation that you and I have been having has been about some of the public-facing work that we do. But internally, as our team continues to grow, many of the systems that we're implementing are starting to revolve around, as Cal Newport suggested in our interview, standing weekly calls rather than constant emailing. So Zach and Alyssa are now much bigger parts of the team. Aaron, you meet with Alyssa every Friday. Can you tell us a little bit about the way that you

to communicate and how you eliminate email or reduce email? Yeah, I mean, for the most part, we email sometimes throughout the week, but most of it is reserved for Friday. If it's not urgent, it can be tackled on Friday. And that's kind of the philosophy I take with all of my meetings. Similarly with you, if someone is asking, hey, what is Paul? think about this. If it's not urgent, I just let them know, hey, thanks for reaching out. I'll talk to Paula about this on our Monday meeting. Like I said that expectation as Cal was talking about in the interview. I mean, no one's had a problem with that. As long as they know, like, hey, it's, it's acknowledged. It was received. And I'll hear back from this person like soon. Then they're usually totally fine with it.

I think often we build it up in our heads much more of like, oh, this person is looking for an email response immediately. I need to get back to them. And a lot of that causes the back and forth. there's a sense of urgency. And if you just eliminate that sense of urgency by laying out the clear expectations, as Cal was alluding to in the interview, most people are totally fine with that. So the same thing goes with Alyssa and I. She knows that if she has any questions that need to be tackled immediately, then she emails them to me. But otherwise, we save everything for Friday. And we just kind of have a weekly overview of like, all right, what did we accomplish this last week? What's next? What do you need my help with? And we go from there.

Right. And you and I meet, we meet twice a week to check in. And then with Zach also, Zach and I are we're working on building a tool right now that allows real estate investors. It's called Your Next Rental City. It's a working title. And it allows out-of-state rental investors to learn about different cities and towns because one of the questions that we were hearing from students in the course is, hey, I'm investing out of state, but I don't know where to invest. if I live in California or New York or Boston, how do I even begin to pick a place? And we've heard that question come from so many students that we thought, all right, let's build a tool that allows this to happen. Let's build a tool that enables out-of-state investors to deeply learn about different cities that would be great rental cities.

you know, that allows an investor in California to learn about various cities in the Midwest. And so that project has been quite a bit more complicated than I realized it would be. But rather than consistent back and forth, Zach and I have a standing weekly meeting where we go over everything, then have our deliverables. And then we check in at the next meeting one week later to, you know, see how that has all unfolded. Yeah, and if anyone is wondering, like, well, what if something important comes up or what if something urgent comes up, then we just text each other. Right. So easily solved. I think moving forward, something that we've been discussing, especially as we prepare for the next launch of YFRP, is Asana.

Getting a task management tool into the business, I think will really help us. Sometimes there's tasks that come up in the Google Doc. And I use Asana for myself, or I also use Notion to keep track of notes and things like that. And sometimes I just have a regular old sticky pad next to me where I'll just jot things down. But I think having a centralized base where we are all on the same page will really help, especially when you're dealing with something as big as a course launch, being able to look at a glance, what are my tasks for the day, when are they do, what progress was made on this other thing, you know, at least it's still intentional

because if you go to a sauna, you're going literally for checking in on the status of a project. But it just adds another element to the Google Doc. Right. Exactly. Exactly. The Google Doc is good for like day-to-day, you know, the small communications. Like, you know, hey, so-and-so shipped a given book to you in advance of a guest coming on the podcast. Their publicist has just asked me if you've received it. Have you received it yet?

Can you confirm? Yeah. You know, the Google Doc is like really good for those types of small, frankly, unimportant communications. Whereas, yeah, a tool like Asanas is much better for task management. The thing I was pretty adamant about avoiding with Slack, since I saw that as just another messaging app, just another thing to check. Yeah, it's email on steroids. Exactly, exactly.

So, yeah, we've very much tried to cultivate a work culture of minimal email, minimal slack, just minimal back and forth communication, and a internal work culture that enables long periods of deep work. All right. Well, thank you for joining us, Erin. Thanks for having me for this little behind the scenes. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I know it was different from what we normally do, different from our normal format. But hopefully it was enjoyable and educational. I hope you learned some things or got some insight that you can take into your jobs, your side hustle, whatever it is that you do that is productive and creates value for the world. I hope that this enhanced. some insight that you have that you can bring to that. Thank you again for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with a friend or a family member. That's the single most important way that you can spread this message, the message of financial independence and living life with intention.

It's a single most important way that you can spread that message. So share it with a friend or a family member. Make sure that you hit subscribe or follow in whatever app you're using to listen to this show. While you're there, please leave us a review. And if you would like to discuss today's episode with members of our community in a setting that is distraction-free, you can go to afford-anything.com slash community. Thanks again for tuning in. My name is Paula Pat. This is the Afford- Anything podcast, and I will catch you in the next episode.