Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 233: Escaping Your Tyrannical Inbox

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaToday’s Deep Question: How can I free myself from spending all day in my inbox? [8:24]- Why does Cal suggest having multiple email addresses? [43:27]- How do I convince my colleagues to actually read process-centric emails? [47:16]- How do I work with people who enjoy email check-ins? [52:16]- How do I get key information out of email an into a better system? [57:25]- How can I focus when my job demands an open door policy? [1:01:11]Something Interesting: Alex Haley wrote on a cargo ship [1:12:42]Links:affect.media.mit.edu/pdfs/16.Mark-CHI_Email.pdftim.blog/autoresponse/blog.rescuetime.com/communication-multitasking-switches/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/01/23/magazine/cal-newport-interview.html  alexhaley.com/2018/08/04/aboard-the-african-star-by-alex-haley/Thanks to our Sponsors:mintmobile.com/deephuel.com/questionshensonshaving.com/calblinkist.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. The show about living and working deeply in an increasingly distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ. I'm joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, a little bit nervous today. Why is that? Well, we're kind of under the timing gun because the restaurant that used to be below us, as we've talked about on the show closed, and a new restaurant's coming in, which is good.

And I know the owner, so that's all good. but they've started construction. And they've given us a little window today, one hour long, to record our podcast. They're going to, in theory, hold back on the ladder of the construction. So we are under the gun. We've got to nail this thing. One take. Keep it tight before whatever.

Power saws and hammers fill our ears. One take, Tony. One take, Tony. We've got to earn it today. I think, Jesse, we need to try harder to become regulars at this new place than we were at the old place. Yeah, I mean, you just have to walk down and stay. and walking the door, right? But we just got to do it.

I think from the beginning, like we need to instill ourselves as a fixture here. Like, I know the owner, I probably know some of the staff. We got to have like our booth, you know. Like I would love to go there.

Like our pre-recording or post-recording, whatever. We didn't do that with the last place. We only went there a couple times. So this new place, we got to be regulars. People got to know. And have fans come by?

Have fans come by. We'll just hold court. I want it to be like cheers. That'd be fun. You know what I mean? And like, we'll be like norm. The functional outcome.

alcoholic mailman who sat he just sat at the bar we'll just like tell quips as people come in we'll equip the people it'll be good it'll be fun I'm excited good for our productivity did you see the there's a interview with me in the New York Times magazine recently so on the mention briefly because it's going to set up what I want to talk about today for those who are watching on YouTube.com slash California port media I pulled up the article here it's a colorful picture of me The title of this interview was the digital workplace is designed to bring you down. Most of it is covering the type of ideas I talk about in a world without email. We discuss a little slow productivity.

Here's what's relevant to today, though. A reader wrote me and said, Cal, check out the comments. They're gold. And I don't normally read comments on things. You know, I've been in this business long enough to know not to do that. But so I was like, okay, I'll check it out. And I saw what he meant because in the comments. on this article, a lot of readers are sharing their stories.

And they're sharing stories about this is what my job used to be like. Now, after the age of email, followed by the age of Slack, this is what my job is like today. So you get all these case studies. It's a gold mine of case studies of the way that digital technologies entering the office really changed what work meant for a lot of people. So inspired by those comments, I thought what we should do today in the show is focus on at least something. It's a broad problem,

but at least one part of a solution to this problem that might make people who feel deluge to buy electronic communication and work make their working life a little bit better. So I wanted to choose a concrete goal that we could work on in today's show. And I wanted it to be a goal. Here's what I decided. I wanted to be a goal about checking inboxes or checking into chat channels less frequently.

Now, this is a critical issue. If we could just get that behavioral change, that single behavioral change into the average knowledge worker professional existence, I think it really would make a big difference. They emphasize how big of an issue this is. I'm actually loading up on the screen here, an article that I've actually cited quite a bit and I've actually talked to the data scientists who produced this data. This was all in a world without email. This is a blog post from the software company Rescue Time. Rescue Time has a software tool that tracks what you do on your computer and how long you spend doing it. Sort of like the screen time feature for iPhones, though it's been around much longer than that feature.

And the idea is you learn about what you're doing so you can adjust your habits. This gives them a huge corpus, however, of observational data. Tens of thousands of knowledge workers collecting this data. So they hired some data scientists to properly anonymize this data and analyze it. this was one of the first big findings the rescue time data scientists came up with, and I'm just going to scroll to the punchline here. The average knowledge worker checks in on email or instant messenger every six minutes. It's a crazy number.

And again, they got this by just literally watching exactly what tens of thousands of knowledge workers did over many, many days. They were running the software that tracked every program they used in how long they used it. I'll show you a chart here as well. For those who are watching, this is a histogram of average minutes between checking communication apps. That's the x-axis and the y-axis is how many of the observed users check that often. And you see, the median is six minutes, but there is the largest. So what would that be the max?

The time between email checks that the most users actually saturday. was I'm looking out of here one minute. So that is the most frequent interval observed between email checks was one minute. After the median of six, there's like just a long tail. So there's like a lot of users that, a small number of users for like these really long. And honestly, I bet this long tail, Jesse, where you have like one user who checked every 100 minutes, one user who checked every 125 minutes. I bet a lot of that is people that were, you know, away on a conference when the data was being collected. or forgot to turn on the app or something like that.

Anyways, here's the point. We check email not a lot, but constantly. Constantly. This is a huge issue because, as I emphasize in that article, as I emphasize in my book, a world without email, context switching is expensive for the human brain. It takes a lot of neuronal machinery, a lot of cognitive state change to shift our attention from one target to another. we're meant to be focused on one thing at a time. It's not easy to switch.

If you're checking your inbox once every six minutes, you're constantly instigating these context shifts. You never actually let your mind settle on one cognitive context, so you can't muster your full capabilities. There's another issue that happens. This is an idea I've been developing more recently. It's not in my book. I mentioned it briefly in this article,

but I think it's also critical. When you're looking at it, say, an email inbox, and you see on the screen 20 different emails that you'll need to respond to, each of them about something different, each of them requiring a different cognitive context to really think about and understand. When you're seeing those all at the same time, the standard experience looking at an inbox overwhelms and freezes your brain. And I think a lot of people have this experience. It's like, oh man, I got to clear up my inbox and you just freeze. you freeze like I don't even know how to get started you feel this resistance you feel this discomfort and you jump over to the web to look up baseball trade rumors or you jump pull out social media because

your mind doesn't even know what to do with it that's because you're literally giving your mind a problem it does not know how to solve you say load up the proper context for what we're doing next please and what are we doing next 15 different things they're each different context the mind can't load 15 contexts at a time so the inbox by itself is a disaster switching to the inbox once every six minutes is a disaster. We can't focus. We freeze. And it makes us subjectively experienced the work day as worse.

It's exhausting, frustrating, and misery making. So if we can accomplish this goal of reducing the amount of times you check in on these things, we'll be making a big difference. So that's what I want to work on in today's show. The actual deep question then that we'll tackle today, how can I free myself from spending all day in my inbox? And as we like to do, we'll start with a deep dive on that question. I'm going to get practical.

I'm going to give you practical advice. We're then going to turn our attention to reader questions. I have five questions from my readers and podcast listeners that all loosely relate to exactly this theme. So we can take our ideas and put them out and practice them on real people's issues. And then we'll switch gears to end with something interesting. All right. So let's deep dive on this question. How do I not spend all day in my inbox?

I think the place we have to start before we get specific with strategies is asking, why is this even a hard challenge in the first place? Why can't we just do what Tim Ferriss suggested? So again, for the people who are watching on YouTube, YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media, I'm loading up a blog post from Tim Ferriss's website. And what I've loaded up here is the email auto responder that in his 2007 book, a, what was it, the four-hour work week, Tim suggested that knowledge workers use. Let me read this auto-responder for you. So auto-responder, this is what, anyone who writes

you will automatically get this sent back to them. Greetings friends. Whoops. Email subscription. All right. Greetings friends. Due to high workload. I'm currently checking and responding to email twice daily at 12 p.m. Eastern and 4 p.m. Eastern. If you require urgent assistant, parentheses, please ensure it is urgent. That cannot wait until either 12 p.m. or 4 p.m., please contact me via phone at whatever phone number. Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you better. So why can't we just do that?

I don't want to spend all that in-box. I won't. I'll check it twice. And I'll have an auto responder, and that way people will know. So people won't be upset about it. this strategy of just deciding to batch your email was tractable back when email was new. And I think this is very important when we evaluate Tim's suggestion here. This came out in a book in 2007 that he wrote in 2005 to 2006 talking about his experiences in the workplace in 2003-2004.

2003-2004, that early 2000s that he's writing about, the motivation for his book, that was pretty early in the period of ubiquitous email, early in the period of email integrating itself into our workflows. You could get away with that. Oh, this is how I check my email. Now, I think a lot of people, there's a meme online of people sort of rejecting that autoresponder. Like, look, if I use this auto responder, I would get knives done at my eyes or whatever. That's just the wording thing. Yeah, there's a tone to it that some people say is disagreeable.

You could wordsmith that, whatever, make the tone very agreeable for your particular context. that used to work. Tim was right to suggest it when he was thinking about 2003, 2004. 2003, that would not work. And I think we all recognize if we just said, I'm going to check twice a day, it would be a disaster.

So why is that? Well, that's because as email became increasingly integrated into the workplace and Slack came later and other types of tools like teams, we developed a mode of collaboration that I call the hyperactive hive mind. Now we've talked about this on the show before,

so I won't go in too much detail. My whole book, World Without Emails about this, so I won't go in too much detail. But just as a refresher, the hyperactive hive mind is a mode of collaboration in which you work most things out on the fly with ad hoc back and forth messages, either an email or an instant messenger services.

So now if we're trying to figure something out, we will just start sending messages back and forth. When I see a message from you, I'll reply to it. You'll reply at some point. I'll see that. I'll reply to you. And we figured this thing out.

We just rock and roll. That is the hyperactive hive mind mode of collaboration. If you were using the hyperactive hive mind mode of collaboration, following Tim's suggestion of just declaring 12 and 4, that's it, is disastrous. Because the emails coming into your inbox are not these one-time requests that you have a couple days to respond to, a few hours to respond to. It's message three of seven that has. that has to bounce back and forth

so that a decision can be made before the end of business. You can't wait three hours for your next reply, because that's not enough time for the next reply to come back, and then you reply to that and then to reply to you, in time for the decision to be made. If we have to figure out what is our plan for picking up the client tomorrow from the airport, and it's noon today, and it's going to take five back and forth messages, I can't wait till four, check my inbox once, and then be done,

because we will not reach a decision, and that client won't get picked up. So the hyperactive hive mind makes batching difficult. Now, we can actually find this shift. We can find this reality in data. I'm going to load up one more thing on the tablet here. This is a academic paper. We're jumping ahead now to 2016.

We're going to look at an academic paper that was written by Gloria Mark from UC Irvine. 2016 paper, this was, I believe, published in Kai. So the computer human interaction, human computer interaction. Action Conference. It's a well-known human interaction conference venue. All right, so here is the paper. It's called email duration, batching, and self-interruption, patterns of email use on productivity and stress. And just right here in the abstract, we see they tested email batching. So telling people to just check email twice a day and no other times. And what they found, and I've highlighted this on the screen, batching email is associated with higher-rated productivity, but despite, widespread claims, we found no evidence that batching email leads to lower stress. If you actually dive into the paper, you find for groups of subjects that have certain personality traits that actually significantly increased stress. So it did not make people's lives less stressful to get out of their inbox.

Now, why is this? If we argued this inbox checking is a stressful thing, we freeze when we see all those messages. The context switching back and forth makes up subjective. feel worse. So if we get rid of all of that by batching, why is our overall stress levels stay high? It's because the hyperactive hive mind. If your office, like in this paper, runs on the hyperactive hive mind, you feel stressed because you know about all the things that are being stalled because you're not in your inbox. You know that you're screwing people, decisions aren't getting made, that you are a source of annoyance. That's highly stressful.

It's why they found when they dived into this research that people who are more conscientious about this type of thing, get even more stressed. So the more you worry about what other people think about you, the more stressed you are going to get deploying that particular strategy. So we can't just say check email less, check slack less. We have built our offices around the need that check this constantly. So if we're going to get to our goal, we're going to actually have to change some things. We're going to have to introduce new ideas and strategies if we're going to accomplish the goal

of checking email less. And otherwise, in other words, I should say, checking email less is the end result of a lot of other changes. That is a flip about how most other people think about it, where checking email less should just be the first change you make to make your life less stressful. That won't work. We have a lot of work to do. So what I want to suggest is three main strategies, we'll go through them, three main strategies to help transform your work sufficiently away from the hyperactive hive mind that you can check your email less. and then I'll have one fallback bonus strategy in case none of that works. All right, number one, piece of advice number one, write better emails.

All right, this is a technique that I actually first introduced in deep work, my 2016 book, Deep Work. I called it process-centric emailing. And the idea was you put more information in the emails you send about how you and the person you're talking to are going to collaborate to accomplish whatever goal you're writing about. So instead of just rock and rolling, I'll just send you something and just let's start a conversation going back and forth. You write off the bat, say, this is how I think we should collaborate about this. And you give a plan in that initial email that reduces the need for lots of unscheduled emails

going forward. Let me give you an example. Here is a standard email, a non-process-centric email, a bad email to send. Lisa asked us to present our merit simplification process. plan at the faculty meeting on Friday. What do you think we need to change in our old slide deck before we do that? That's a very standard email, but you have just initiated with that an open-ended back-and-forth message exchange, which by itself is going to require that you check email all the time. Here by contrast is a process-centric alternative response to that message.

Lisa asked us to present our merit simplification plan at the faculty meeting on Friday. Here is what I propose. I uploaded the latest draft of our slides to Google Drive. I'll look through them and add any updates or comments by close of business on Monday. Jesse, you then have the token until close a business Tuesday to review it. And then Caleb, you can take the token on Wednesday, put any changes you want before the close of business on Wednesday. Let's then meet on Thursday to discuss all of those notes and decide any changes we want

to make for the final version. I put three times below. Just reply all with which of any of those. work and I will see you then. Now that email is a pain to write. You can't just, uh, what do you think? Boom. And it's out of my inbox temporarily like we normally do.

You have to actually sit here and think this through. But this may have just saved you basically any other email exchange between now and when that presentation happens on Friday. You know what you're doing. They know what they're doing. They'll reply all with times. So you can see that and say, okay, here's a time we're doing it. And that's it.

And this whole thing gets done. and it gets done well, and you have not had to keep checking your inbox to have endless back and force. Like, I don't know. What about this? Yeah, I was looking at this slide. What do you think about these changes? And now that old way means you're constantly going back and forth.

You're constantly checking emails. So yes, what a pain to write this. This took probably three minutes to think of and write when the initial response would have taken 30 seconds. However, this probably saved 15 emails that you would have had to keep checking your inbox and seen and replied to. 15 emails, each of which is creating, let's say, 10 minutes of a cognitive context shift-induced overload in which you can't focus and feel exhausted. That's 150 minutes of reduced capacity in exchange for three minutes of thinking through an email.

So that's process-centric emailing. We actually have a good question about that, about process-centric emailing, being deployed in the wild and some issues someone's having coming up in the show. So stay tuned for the question block. All right, piece of advice number two for reducing the time you spend in your inbox. Defer back and forth interactions to synchronous settings. Defer back and forth interactions to synchronous settings. There's two things being captured in this description of the advice. One is that we're deferring back and forth interaction.

So implicit in that is a value judgment about what email is good. for and what it's not. And it's important that we get this out in the open right now so that we're all on the same page. Email is great for delivering information to people. If I need a file from you, email is a fantastic technology. You can attach that and send it to me. Email is also great for broadcasting information or reminders. Is there a talk coming up this week that I might want to know about? Send an email so I can see that. Is there a reminder that the parking garage is going to be closed early on Friday. Email is fantastic. You can send that information to everyone parking in that parking garage with the press of one button. It's fantastic for broadcasting information. It's fantastic for

sending files. It's also good for questions that can be responded to with a short answer. So maybe you heard the parking garage is going to be closed, but you don't remember if it was Friday or next Friday. You can email me and say, hey, Cal, is the parking garage closed this Friday or next Friday? I can respond to that quickly. Yes, no, it's next Friday. when I get a chance I can see that respond to it. That's a fantastic use of the technology. It's easy for me to respond to. It's not particularly urgent.

You get the information you need. Neither of us has to spend much cognitive overhead. The place where email drags us down, as we've now been elaborating, is when we have to do back and forth interaction. There's going to be many emails back and forth to resolve something. This is specifically where we need a better solution. Process-centric emailing helps. This piece of advice gives another suggestion, which is move. the back and forth out of the inbox and into a synchronous setting. And that's the second

piece I want to highlight about this piece of advice. Synchronous means a place where we're going back and forth in real time. So we're actually talking with each other in the same room or on the same phone line or in the same conference, but we're going back and forth in real time. That could even be, and this confuses people, but that could even be over a tool like Slack. you and I having a back and forth conversation, we're both there on Slack at the same time, is a perfectly reasonable use of Slack. The key is we're not being,

we're going back and forth, we've agreed when we're going to talk, and we figure it all out right there. So we can get the 15 back and forth messages or chats can happen right there in 15 seconds. All right, so how do you do this? Three tactics I'd like to suggest. One is my favorite, which is office hours.

I have been preaching this since 2016. I think 2016 I wrote a Harvard Business Review article about this. And I've been talking about it ever since. All professions that work in office buildings, you should have office hours. This days, on these times, I'm available. My office is open. My phone is on. I have a Zoom conference activated.

Defer back and forth conversations to these office hours. The email comes in, hey, what should we do about the merit thing we're presenting on Friday, you say, like, yeah, great question. Let's figure that out. I have some questions. Just stop by one of my upcoming office hours. We'll work it out. And you can push so many things into those office hours. Yeah, let's talk about, hey, when you get a chance, come to one of my upcoming office hours or give me a call during my office hours. We'll figure that out. And it is so much more efficient to just give five minutes back and forth in time you've already set aside than to initiate those back and forth emails. The phone call deferral is another very effective tactic.

say, oh, it's a good point. Call me when you get a chance. Yeah, let's discuss this on the phone. Just give me a call. I'm usually, you know, usually you can catch me whatever in the afternoons. The phone deferral tactic works for two reasons. One, 50% of the things coming towards you will disappear.

And if it's someone from Generation Z trying to get in touch with you, let's revise that to 95% of interactions. Because they don't want to call. I don't want to do that. It's not really that important. I'm just, you know um internet internet phone TikTok TikTok TikTok TikTok and then they do like a synchronized dance and uh put on their oculus goggles and uh ironically watch cartoons I don't know what Generation Z does

Jesse is synchronized dance is that what you do on TikTok? I think so according to TikTok like most people I don't know what TikTok about through you then you know nothing about TikTok whatever coming from the guy who wrote a whole New Yorker piece on TikTok something about dancing is it kids are dancing and I don't know they're all hopped up on marijuana when I was young

we had to kill this is true we had to kill a German soldier on our walk to school up a pill every day and there was a war going on anyways the point being

call me some percentage of the things go away the things that remain are now dispatched much more effectively I know it's a pain when that phone rings, you're like, oh, I have to answer this. But honestly, if you answer that and in two

minutes you figure something out, you've saved yourself maybe five to ten emails, each requiring five to ten email checks. The overall amount of stress is much less. And so anyways, I work with some people. I have at least one person in mind who uses this all the time, and I appreciate it. The office says, just call me, just call me. Because we have complicated things to work out. And we work it out on the phone and usually takes five minutes. And an email it would have been, And in some of these case, it's impossible. It's nuanced, it's complicated. So defer to the phone.

Finally, you can maintain your own internal two discuss list, T.O. Discuss list. So if there's individuals you do a lot of business with, colleagues that you talk to a lot, a manager, a department chair, someone who's on a committee with you, and you talk to them a lot. Just maintain a list. I do this in Trello of, oh, here's something I want to talk to them about.

Let me just put it on the list. Oh, here's something else that comes up later. Let me put this on the two discuss list. And then next time you talk to them, you say, great, I have like five things I want to go through. And if you don't have something on the books, but you see this list is getting big, you just email them and say, hey, I'm going to call you. I'll just warn you. I have a lot of things to go through. I'm just going to call you.

Unless I hear otherwise, I'm going to call you at like three and then like keep trying every half hour or something. I have a lot to discuss. And then you get through a lot of things at once. So aggregated on your end, things to discuss with the same person and then going through all of them at once. I do this all the time as well, especially my administrative rules at Georgetown. All right. So defer back and forth interactions to some sort of synchronous setting. Short questions, announcements, broadcast.

Email is great. Don't complain about it. And I got to say, Jesse, like one of the things that I'm always, it doesn't upset me, but that happens a lot when I'm talking about email is people, when someone comes back and says like, yeah, I'm telling you, man, I grew through emails out of control. I get all of these, I get all of these email, advertising emails. or get all these promotional emails or people like BCC, me on too many announcements,

that's not a problem. I am not stressed out by having a lot of LLB in emails or campaign email. It's annoying. You delete them or filter them. That's not stressful. What's stressful is having a lot of emails

that require you to respond. So that's what I'm focusing on. All right. Final piece of advice here. Deploy processes. All right. So we've process-centric email. That's process lightweight.

defer things to synchronous settings, that's process lightweight. For what remains, you might consider actually putting it in place hardcore, actually specified. We've written it down. All the stakeholders agree on it. Collaboration processes that are customized to the specific thing that you are doing. This is the big idea from my book, A World Without Email, is that ultimately the things you do again and again, the collaborative things you do again and again in a professional setting, should have clearly defined processes for how that work unfolds.

It shouldn't just be, we'll figure it out with emails and send each other random Zoom invites. You should figure out, here's how we do this work. And as long as you're being clear about here's how we do this work, you can engineer those processes

to not require a lot of unscheduled messages that have to be received and responded to. So for example, our ad agency, Jesse, right? Our ad agency built what I think is a very nice process for interacting with us about the ads we do.

There's a lot of back and forth that has to happen, right? Can you tell me when this ad aired, what were the numbers? Here's the scripts. They built a very nice process based around Notion, where every ad read has its own database entry that can show up in a calendar or can show up in a list of everything that that client, every ad read we've done for that client.

All of the relevant information is attached. After each episode, there's a process where you go through, and you add the timestamps, there's a process for when and where you add the upload numbers. In theory, we can run this podcast with complicated advertiser demands without ever sending an email to our ad agency. There's a process, which is great, because I don't want us to be sending back and forth a lot of emails.

Feedback documents, this is just, I'm just throwing out a few examples of processes here. Feedback documents are another big one. So let's say you have a proposal and your team, needs to weigh in on it. Do you have any feedback on this before I submit it, etc.? Just having a shared document. You've announced to people.

The shared document, go on in there, type your name, type your feedback whenever you have it. This is when I'm going to take everything in there and review it. Again, it seems, why not just have people email you because it's clearer and it doesn't require back and forth messages? Daily standups can be part of a process. Hey, we're a computer programming team. By having daily stand-ups in 10 minutes, we can figure out who's working on what, what do they need, who needs something new.

We've saved back and forth emails to figure that out. So 10 minutes, well-structured every day, can reduce 10 not-so-structured emails. So might have to happen during the day. That adds up, you know, that can have a really big difference. So there's a lot of different things you can do here. But the key is moving your collaboration methods away from unscheduled messages and towards something that is structured enough that I don't have to keep checking an inbox. These type of strategies are the type of things that will aggregate to actually relieving

the pressure of your inbox of your chat channels. If you're process-centric emailing, if you're deferring back and forth out of your inbox, if you have hardcore well-structured processes for the things you do again and again that don't require unscheduled messaging, you are freeing yourself from the clutches of the hyperactive hive mind. Therefore, the number of messages in your inbox at any one time that is the in the middle of a fast moving back and forth conversation is drastically reduced. Most of the messages in your inbox, your chat channels are now announcing things or sending you information or questions that need an answer when you get around to it. It's not urgent.

If that's the reality of your inbox, it's not an empty inbox, but it's an inbox you could check twice a day and no one would care. There would be no problems because the stuff that requires actual quick collaboration is happening elsewhere. So those are my three pieces of advice. So here's my bonus fourth thing. Let's say none of that works. Consider re-engineering your job. Consider changing what it is you do, your specific requirements, who you work with, the teams you're on.

Consider trying to change those so that you can leave the setting in which hyperactive hive mine is inescapable. And the point I want to make here is that there's a pretty standardized list that people agree on of attributes of a job that means a change has to happen. I mean, in my book, so good they can't ignore you, I had a list of these things. You don't like the people you work with. What you're doing doesn't align with your values. The job you have does not offer you a way forward to increasingly autonomous or interesting configurations. It's like highly constrictive or you have a high ceiling on you. I listed those three attributes and so good they can't ignore you as reasons

you might want to switch your job, either to a different job or really change what you. you're doing within your company. We should add this on the list. Being beholden to the hyperactive hive mind is a misery-making machine. Having to constantly check an inbox or chat channel once every six minutes to suffer from cognitive context freezing when you see 15 emails and all need responses and you don't know how to do them and your mind can't handle 15 contexts to never be able to actually do anything close to your full potential because your mind is constantly muddled

from a proximate context shift caused by this hyperactive hive mind back and forth. That is a really negative. That is a really distressing work environment. I don't think that is something that we should see as being completely different in terms of its degree of difficulty than an office that is too hot all the time. Or that you have an atmosphere of toxicity where you really just dislike the people you're around. I think we should put it on the same level as those type of issues. It is that subjectively negative. It is that distressing.

And if your current job, your current team requires the hyperactive hive mine and you can't get out of it, no matter how much you try to reengineer, put that on your list of things that makes you say, well, let me do something different. And maybe I'll shift to something else in this company. Maybe I'll trade accountability for autonomy. Hold me responsible for my numbers, but leave me alone to do my work, or maybe I'm going to leave and go take another job. But this should be in the way you think about evaluating how good work is. It's one of the biggest sources of negativity that exist in the knowledge work sector. and it's one that no one actually directly measures or thinks of as a standalone reason for for making a change.

So that's my fourth idea there. If nothing else works, consider making the change. And that's what I got, Jesse. Good advice. I love it. We could talk forever about email. So I always just focus in on one thing at a time. I mean, actually, this was almost like a frustration after that New York Times piece came out,

like a minor good problem to have type of frustration. So a lot of people wrote me, a lot of people read the times. I'm like, man, these ideas are great. Yeah, like I've been thinking, this is true for my office, and I haven't thought about that before. And there's a lot of good responses like that. The frustration was, I wrote a whole book about this. You know, I wrote a whole book about this.

Because what happened is this book I wrote, a world without email, which I think is really innovative. I mean, it really introduces this way of this cognitive-centric understanding of the knowledge, work, workplace, and how to get around it came out during the pandemic. And people were not in the mindset to think about work processes, right? Because on the coast, when this came out, on the coast, people were still and their schools were closed. And it was like they were having nightmares about like unvaccinated people, breaking into their house and spreading diseases or whatever.

And in the other parts of the country, they were all up in arms about how crazy they thought the people on the coast were being. So they were sort of, and so there's like political wars. going on about COVID. And there was a presidential election that just happened. And January 6th that happened. Come on. This is not the time to be like, excuse me. How often are you checking your email inbox?

I have some sage advice, some pragmatic suggestions about your collaboration protocols. Like that would have been a great book for 2003. You know, people like, yeah. Like generally we feel good and we're kind of optimistic and we want to kind of make our lives better. The early spring of 2021, it was, you know, people were like, I'm either going to be dead or we're going to be in Civil War or, you know, whatever, way down the list. So it's kind of frustrated that people I know well who should know, I wrote a, you know, they should know about. Yeah. I mean, I write a lot of books.

I can't really blame them. But they're like, hey, this is cool. I've never thought about this. It's like, you didn't read my book. So do you find any difference between work email accounts and personal email accounts? Or is it just all the same? Yeah. I mean, the thing with personal email accounts, the same issues apply, but the pressure of the hyperactive hive mind is really diluted.

Because people understand you might not be able to do personal email during work. So you could look at how people deal with personal email. I think people actually naturally drift towards these anti-hivemind tactics in personal email because the hyperactive mind just doesn't work. Like if I'm talking to a friend and we have to work something out that's going to take 15 back and forth messages, that's probably not going to work in email because him and I might not check personal email except for in the evenings. Like a lot of people do that because they're so busy during the day. We can't take 10 different evenings of back and forth.

So I think in personal email, people are much more likely to be like, I just got to call you. or text. I think a lot of people use text for the personal interactions. Like, can I just ask you this question? And they'll say, get on the phone. So we're used to it in a personal email.

Don't expect me to be on this all the time. The problem with work is that it's plausible that you can be checking it once every six minutes all day long. Yeah. Because it's plausible, then everyone's like, yeah, it's like,

let's just do that then. It's plausible. Yeah. All right. Well, we have a collection of questions that all roughly deal with this issue. Before we get to those questions, though,

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I think the primary market might have been older people. Yeah. I like it, though. Keep it simple. I also want to talk briefly about another one of our newer sponsors, and that is Hewle, H-U-E-L. In particular, I want to talk about Hewle Black Edition, which is a, a high protein nutritionally complete meal that you can consume in a convenient shake. It means everything your body needs and just two scoops, including 27 essential vitamins and

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So that's huel.com slash questions. All right, Jesse, let us do some, let's do some questions from our listeners. All right. Sounds great. First questions from Sharon. Why do you recommend setting up different email accounts as opposed to setting up filters to auto-sort emails in the respective roles? Yes, as longtime listeners know, I'm a big fan. of having completely separate email accounts for separate roles.

Let me think how many email accounts I have right now. I have a personal account at Gmail. I have a Calnewport.com account. I have a Georgetown account and I have a New Yorker account. So, yeah, I have four accounts. All different. In fact, I have a separate Google Chrome context for each of those. most of these actually require me to do two-factor authentication.

So it's not easy to log in. Why do I do that? Because it's not easy to log in. If what you do instead is just say, let me have all these different emails for different roles come into the same inbox and I'll just filter it into folders. Or if I'm using Gmail, I can filter it into labels. And then I just have one inbox, but I've separated things into different folders or labels. I used to do this. The problem with it is if I am logged into one email inbox and I have these five different filters or five different folders, I'm going to click, click, click, click, click, click.

I used to call it the wheel of checks. It's psychologically almost impossible when you've logged into an email inbox not to just click, click, click, click, click, click, and see what's coming to those other ones too. It's too easy. It takes too much willpower to not just click once and see if there's any work-related emails coming in. So my attempts to try to filter emails in a single inbox into separate bins did not actually have the desired effect of me separating these into completely separate context. I would check them all at the same time. Now that I literally do use separate inboxes with separate sign-ins and for some of these two-factor authentication, I can't easily check one from the other. If I go to check this one email, it's not easy for me to check the other.

I'm going to have to get a password. I'm going to have to type something in. I'm going to have to get my phone. I'm going to have to press something. This is really important because it keeps context sacrosanct. When I'm working on Georgetown stuff, I'm just in my Georgetown email. So my overarching cognitive context is Georgetown related. And that's good.

And I want to stay in that context. And while I'm working on stuff in that context, I don't want to also see a deep questions-related question while I'm in the Georgetown context. I don't also want to see an email from my uncle while I'm into Georgetown context. and that allows me to actually accomplish things when I'm working on it faster and with higher quality and with less subjective disease because I'm stuck in there, I'm staying within the same context. So if you have different roles, if you can separate email inboxes, do so. If it's a pain, good. You want that friction to be high. I mean, I don't know if this happens for you, Jesse, but for me, for our Calnewport.com account, it's constantly requiring me to, like, retype in the password.

It happens to me It happens to me too Yeah like once a week It'll be like we want to make sure it's still you Like it doesn't want you to We must have a setting which I think is good It doesn't want you to be logged in too long And I have a really complicated password

And so I have to go and find it And I have to type it in And I think that's all great actually So now I've learned It's no casual thing to just let me just jump over to Calnewport.com And check my emails Like I might have to go find this stupid password And do all this stuff

So I wait to do it until like I'm you know I'm prepping the show or doing something specific for the show. And contacts are kept clean. So I like that. I mean, someone should invent like a Gmail plug-in where you have to do,

you know, 15 push-ups before to log in or something like this. People get way better at email. All right, what do we got next, Jesse? All right, next question is from Marsha

and analyst from Minnesota. When I try to use process-centric emails, I often get feedback like it was too long to read or I skipped the rest after the first line. How do I get people to actually read my emails? I think you got to lecture them more, Marsha. Like, you fools.

My emails are gold. How dare you defile my brilliance? It's a good question. So we talked about process-centric emails earlier in this episode, where you lay out in your email to someone, the whole process by which the collaboration being initiated by that message will unfold. Marshall, what you're noting here happens often. For people who are completely up to their eyeballs in the hyperactive hive mind collaboration method,

they're just typing emails out as fast as their keys can hit those keys. It's all obligation hot potato. They just like, I got to get this out of here. I'll just, you know, me, no like thoughts question mark, send, right? Just whatever gets the email out of their box temporarily and get that little bit of relief they're just doing, you know? I mean, some emails, it's just, they just smash the keyboard. just random characters. Like,

just send, whatever. They could probably do anagram and find a question in there. For someone who's in that attitude, a process-centric email message is going to be like a slap to the face. Like, am I going to read,

what, what? I just want to be, you know, me, no think, Friday Zoom, Teams, teams,

teams, send. What, I'm not going to read three paragraphs. I can't do that, right? So it is difficult because they're not used to that. They're used to everything as part of a long,

back and forth conversation, you want to get out there as quick as possible. So you have two things you can do here. One, and this is simple, but it really is effective. Break the process part away from the colloquial code of communication part. So up top, real quick, yeah, I agree. We've got to get into this. Hey, I put below how I think we can get this done. See you tomorrow or whatever.

Thumbs up your name. So you have like a colloquial message they're comfortable with at top. And then you can put, you know, use equal signs and make like a horizontal line. And it's down below. And then the whole process is listed below. So it almost feels like an attachment. Psychologically, that's easier for people. Oh, there's like a quick message.

Like, yeah, let's do it. I put a process. We'll follow. It's attached. See you tomorrow. And they're like, okay, I get this. That looks familiar. Oh, and then down here is something separate.

It's like a multi-step, five-step process. I'll have to, you know, at some point go through there and read that. The second thing you can do is actually put it in a separate dot, get it out of email. Yeah, I agree. We probably should have a plan for how to do this. I came up with one. Here's the link. It's in Google Drive.

Feel free to edit it. But otherwise, I'm going to start executing it. So they can't even see it in the email. So they can just like, okay, you know, me like and press send or whatever they do, right? But the information has been delivered. And then when they go and read it, they're in a different context. They're in a Google doc to read the process. And they're used to Google Docs being long.

And so psychologically in that frame, it's easier to take. So separate out the process you're giving people from the message. Great. Let's try this. see you tomorrow. And then down below, you can have the thing. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to look at this until close the business this day.

You have these days to do it. Add your comment straight in there. And then let's have a call on Thursday to discuss it. Here's the time I suggest. If that doesn't work, here's three backups. Just reply with the right one bolder or just write it at the top of the dog. Whatever it is, right? It's separated from your message.

You're treating it like an attachment, like a document, like a report. It's the same information. Different frame. People might be more likely to read it. And the final thing I'll say is don't give up. So you're like, I don't know, now let's just, like they're kind of just ignoring it and trying to send messages back. Be nice. But be like, yeah, well, just let's follow this process.

Yeah, here I attach the process. So here's the link to what I think we should do. And just keep coming back to it. Like, don't be a pain about it. Just be like, yeah, here's, I came with the process. Here's what I think we should do. I'm, I did the first step, you know. And at first, they might not do it and be like,

okay, hey look, I see you didn't do this. I'm going to assume you didn't have any, you didn't have any feedback here or something like this. So I just went ahead and did it. Or we had to, I told the boss like we didn't have this done because you didn't get this done. Right. So they see there was like some sort of consequence run. Again, you're being nice.

You're not being a jerk about it. But you just kind of keep going back. Like, this is how I work. Like I figure out like what's our steps for doing this. And then I try to follow the steps. And if you ignore the steps or skip the steps, it's not like it just goes away. It's like, okay, either you get taken out of the project or the boss has to here that we didn't get it done and eventually

you want people to kind of turn around, but don't give up and just like, I guess I'll just go back and hive mind everything, right? It's not your problem that other people are hive minding. Don't be a jerk about it but don't give up on it either. But again, I'm telling you, dash, dash, dash, and you put the steps below your message, it seems so stupid

but it can often make a huge difference. All right, Jesse, where we got? All right, next question is from Rochelle. I've been increasingly hardcore about implementing your advice recently, but I've encountered an unexpected side effect. Some co-workers tell me that they actually prefer having many email check-ins and get angry when I jump the gun and start executing tasks.

How can I stay productive and sane without stepping on toes? I know what you're talking about, Rochelle, and I actually have a little bit of empathy for them. Like, I understand their complaint. There's two things going on here. they have maybe more of a hyperactive hive mind approach to collaboration. We'll just sort of figure things out back and forth with email, a slower approach. And you're thinking like, let's just roll.

We're doing a meeting. Let me just order the food, get the caterer going. I get that. But they also probably feel as if they're being cut out of a process or if mistakes are going to be made because they haven't had a chance to talk to you. And you ordered all the food, but you didn't talk to them first. And they could have told you that the guest who's coming to speak is vegetarian. And so we need to order from this other place over there, right? So they have legitimate reasons to want to actually have a chance to talk about things before action is taken.

So what we have to do is thread this needle. Give people a chance to actually interact with you, let these things unfold at a pace that they will follow as well, without you being beholden to an inbox, without you having to just sort of like always be sending the emails and kind of doing things ad hoc like most people do. So one thing I'm going to suggest, and the first part won't be that surprising, you figure out up front, okay, what are my responsibilities in this thing we're working on, and figure out some sort of, in this word, it's not going to surprise you, process by which you're going to get that work done. You kind of bring them up the speed. Okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'll take care of the food for this meeting. I'll take care of the conference room. I'll take care of getting the promotional materials out.

Here is how I'm going to do that. And so you bring them up to speed right off the bat about when and how you're going to do things so that they know the plan up front. You're moving it out of we'll just sort of rock and roll on the fly. Two, when you send out this process for whatever collaborative project you're working on, lean towards what I call feedback options versus feedback checkpoints. So a feedback checkpoint is before I order the food, we can talk to make sure we're satisfying whatever, dietary needs or see what you think would be the best food to order. That's a choke point or a checkpoint, I mean. Everyone has to come together and gather before you can make progress going forward. We all have to wait and gather at this checkpoint and then we can keep moving forward.

A feedback option gives people the option to provide you feedback, but even if they don't, you can still move forward. So here we might say, if you have any thoughts about the food or what food should be ordered, I'm going to order on Wednesday before the event in the afternoon. Send me any issues or dietary restrictions or whatever by that point. Or I have a document that we're planning the product in. This is the space for it. Put that all in there before the time I listed because that's what I'm actually going to go in and make the food order.

You can even set up a reminder about that to send automatically, you know, the morning of, hey, by the way, remember, if you have any thoughts on the food or feedback, I'm ordering, I'm ordering tonight. Feedback options work great because people feel included. If there's something important that they do want you to know, they will then make sure they get you that information. But it allows you to actually move forward without being beholden to just going with back and forth emails, waiting for replies, being stuck inside your inbox. 90% of the time, people don't actually have feedback on these things they want to give you. It's just the idea that they might that upsets them. I don't like that you ordered this food without talking to us because what if we were inviting Grimlins and it's after nine.

If they get water, they're going to turn into monsters, right? That's not what's happening, but it could have. So, you know, I'm upset you didn't talk to us ahead of time. With a feedback option, you take that concern away. Like, oh, I could have told you, hey, by the way, no water, it's Grimlins. You told me how to say that. you told me when you're ordering it. You gave me a place to tell you that information.

So I'm not upset about it. So you want to have a process, especially for logistical type gatherings like this. And I should say, by the way, I keep using this food example because in the elaboration in this question, Rochelle gave a particular example about like ordering food and her colleagues got mad at her for ordering it right away. So that's why I'm using that example. But use feedback options instead of feedback choke points. Tell people ahead of time this is how I'm doing it.

people will be happy. In the rare cases or you need feedback, you'll get it, and now you can still execute without having to be stuck waiting for random emails to come back,

waiting for random email replies to make it back to you. All right, these are nice and practical, Jesse. I like these. It's really in the trenches, type of issues.

All right, who do we got next? All right, next questions from Rippey and a board, an aberrist from Minneapolis. What do you do when you started a correspondence over email,

transfer to all relevant information to another system like Trello and yet must continue to correspond over email with your client. Do you invite them to a shared Trello board or keep manually transferring information back and forth? You manually transfer information back and forth. So yes, I advise your inbox is not a knowledge management system. All the information relevant to understand everything you're doing and the status should all be in

other types of systems. Your email inbox is just an interface to which information. comes in and out. And so it gets transferred out of there. You know, so, I mean, a client writes you and whatever has some notes for, uh, when we update our contract, I want to, we should worry about, so he's an arborist, something about tree ideas here. Oh, we should worry about the black elm or something like that. And you go to, you have a Trello board, uh, for your clients and you have a column for that particular client, you know, uh, maybe it's things to discuss the next contract. You throw in a card and you copy that stuff out of the email and you throw it in that card.

and now it's there and you can archive that email. So you're transferring stuff from email to Trello, then you're looking at your Trello board when you're doing your weekly plan and you see I'll have to send a contract to this client and I have all the information in there, and so I'll have to pull all that information out of Trello and write up the contract

and email it to my client. That's just what you do. You go back and forth. And it's high friction, but I don't mind. So what? I don't want email to be super low friction. And this is the biggest issue we have with the fact that our primary technologies by which we organize ourselves as human in the workplace

come from engineers from a setting where the most important thing is efficiency. I want my processor to tick faster. I want the predictive pipeline to be longer. I want the microseconds per operation to be even smaller, right? I mean, when you're an engineer, especially in digital engineering, everything, you're looking for speed and efficiency. How can I pack more bits of data into the given frequency bandwidth that I have? More and less efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. And so we think, oh, how do we make humans who are working together using the tools that we're programming more productive?

We've got to make things more efficient. Like our issue is we're not efficient enough. Maybe we could have an artificial intelligence agent that could automatically pull the information out of our email and move it to a Trello card, and it saves us from having to do that. And that's a minute that it otherwise would take. That's not our problem. We are not computer processors that need to take 20% off our average operation time so that we can charge a premium compared to our competitor. We're humans working with other humans to focus our mind and add value to information through cognition. So our issue is not, I'm in email mode, let me take this information and transfer the trell of see what's going on.

In fact, we want that to take a little bit of time. We're in that context. We want to be deliberate. We want to have a good sense of what's going on. And then when we work on something, we just work on that thing. We get that done. We come back and forth. So forget this friction stuff.

Forget this going as fast as possible stuff. Don't live in your inbox. Move that information to a system. It's deliberate, be deliberate. And if you find there's so much information going back and forth that it's like you're spending all day going in Trello, that's a hyperactive hive, my problem. You've got to re-engineer your client communication, your client processes, so you don't just have emails back and forth all day.

That's a separate problem. But I am not worried about the fact that you, stuff in your inbox has to get manually transferred somewhere else and then manually transferred from there back into your inbox. A little bit of friction is not that bad of a thing. Arborist. All right. Let's do one more, Jesse. Let's do one more question. Sounds good. Next question is from Walter G. An attorney from Arizona. My office

promoted me to a supervisor position as an assistant federal public defender. The transition has been difficult because management expects me to be open to calls and office stop-byes from supervisors between 8 and 5 p.m. How can I find time to work deeply without interruption? Well, I mean, Walter, there's two options here. You either seed the responsibilities to require deep work. So you make the role purely supervisory. I supervise people and answer questions. Or you change the policy. There's not a world in which the expectations can be

There's things you need to do for us that are cognitively demanding, like writing briefs or preparing cases, but also your door always has to be open. Your phone always has to be on. Right. I mean, to me, that's like I'm a baseball player and, you know, the manager says, look, you got to wear these blacked out goggles. And I say, but I can't see when I have them on. And they say, yeah, but they're a sponsor. It's important that you wear them. And you say, well, I can't play baseball and wear blacked out goggles.

So we're going to have to figure out something else. Maybe I'll put them on in the dugout when the camera's on us and when I'm in the outfield, they'll take them off, right? But it's just untenable, something would have to give. That's how I feel about this situation. Now, a lot of times in these situations, you have the conversation with your boss in your mind. And in your mind, you transform your boss into some sort of fire breathing distraction gargoyle. Like in your mind, you're like, the boss is going to be like, no, you know, I always must reach you.

and then they breathe fire and they melt your computer. And you build it all up in your head. And then the reality is if you talk to your boss, you do it positively. You say, hey, look, here's what deep work is.

Here's what shallow work is. You know, I have to supervise. It's very important. I need to be accessible. I also have to write briefs and prepare cases. And, you know,

that's impossible if I get phone calls during it. You know, it triples the time and the quality is lower. How can we figure out a way that we can do both? Right. So we can do both. I want to write better cases. I want to be a better supervisor.

and it's such an easy problem to solve and they'll be like okay fine and this is a real solution so this is something that a reader actually told me about an agreement he worked out with his his boss two hours in the mid-morning two hours in the afternoon goes our close-door hours and you're preparing briefs and the other time you're available or they say we'll just tell the supervisees starting at noon they can expect that you're accessible like these are like easy solutions and you know what 9.5 times out of 10 if you come at this positively not um Hey, idiot, with your stupid distraction policies, it's impossible to work here. Stop bothering me.

Nothing's going to happen from that. But if you come at it positively, supervising is really important. I want to do it really well. Preparing these cases is really important. I want to do that really well. It doesn't work if the supervise hours are the full time because then I can't do the cases. So let's just figure out a way we can do both. And there's 9.5 times out of 10.

Boss is like, that makes complete sense. And there's like 90 reasonable solutions. And I have a lot of other things going on in my life. And this is not that important to me. And like, yes, you could Tuesday, Thursdays or not supervisor days. You supervise hour starts at two. Whatever. The solution falls out.

It takes you 15 minutes. Like, why did I never do this before? Right. So those are my two point, Walter. I agree. Non-trivial deep work and nine to five open office hour policies do not work together. You're an outfielder with darked out glasses. But number two, if you have a reasonable positive conversation focused on how you can be even more effective for your organization, you will be surprised by how easy it is to fix that.

It's true, Jesse. People get really worried about when you imagine your boss in your mind. Yeah. They become like one of history's worst monsters. The in your mind, you know what I mean? They're like, you're like I, maybe I could have like an hour where I'm not available for email because I'm working on something. And that they're going to be like, you know what I mean? Like you're fired.

Yeah. And also we should like genocide redheads. You know, like their history is worst monster. You know. And usually they're like, yeah, whatever. I'm busy. Like, I have a lot of things going on. Yeah, it sounds good.

I'm going to switch gears to do something interesting. First, let me mention another sponsor that makes a show possible. Just let me ask you a quiz. How many people today on my walk from my house in Tacoma Park to our studio here in Tacoma Park, how many people do you think stop me to comment positively on my shade? three 17 people three car crashes because people were like oh my god your shave and you know crashed into the telephone pole and you know how i got this shave with my hinson razor all right long time listers know this is a sponsor i really like because here is the story it's a it's a razor right

and it's beautiful and it's metal and it's built with these precision scene mills because this is a company that was building parts for the aerospace industry, so they have the equipment to build things super precise. And they built this beautiful aluminum razor. And the way it works is you take a standard 10 cent safety razor blade. Nothing fancy. Not one of these cartridges with 19 blades that vibrates and has like an artificial intelligent chat GPT agent that decides how to deflect each blade as it drives over your face like a rover.

Just a single 10 cent standard. blade like your grandfather would use and you put it in this beautiful aluminum razor and because it's so precisely manufactured you tighten it in there and you have just the the smallest little bit of blade edge coming across each edge and it's just a little bit so you don't get the diving board effect which is what causes nix which is what causes uh whatever you call it the on your face the cuts it's nice and stable and this one 10 cent blade when put into this fancy razor gives you a great shave. And so I love really well-designed products that look great and last forever, and in the long run are way cheaper to use than disposable cartridge-page projects. So I love my

hinson shaver. I use it every day. And we have a good deal for you that if you use my promo code to buy one of these beautiful razors, they'll give you two years worth of blades for free. So you wouldn't even have to think about purchasing anything shaving related right for two years. I think it's a pretty good deal. So it's time to say no to subscriptions and there's overcomplicated plastical disposable razors and instead get one that will last you a lifetime. Visit hinsonshaving.com slash cow to pick a razor for you and use that code Cal and you will get two years worth of blades for free.

And the way that works is add the two-year supply of blades to your cart and then use use the promo code cow when you check out, and it will reduce the price to zero. So that's Hinsonshaving.com slash cow. That's 100 free blades when you head to H-E-N-S-O-N-S-H-A-V-I-N-G. dot com slash Cal and use that code Cal. I always feel so sophisticated when I use my Hinson razor. It's like metal and nice.

And the only thing I'm missing now, I want one of those brushes. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like the pressure and airmen would like put the, use it to like lather their face. I think I need one of those. I also want to talk about one of the longest standing sponsor of this show and for good reason,

and that's our good friends at Blinkist. Blinkist gives you 15 minute or less summaries of over 5,500 nonfiction books and podcast. You can read these summaries or you can listen to them. And it is, in my opinion, the easiest way to figure out what's going on with, the best new nonfiction books out there. I'll tell you the way I use it. And then we can ask Jesse the way he uses it because I think he has a cool strategy. The way I use it is when I want to figure out whether or not to buy a book I hear about,

I always blinkest it first. Where's the blink? 15 minutes. I put in the audio. I'm doing the dishes. Get the main ideas. And now I can make an informed decision. Either, ooh, I want to buy and read this whole thing.

Or I don't think I need to own this. But you know what? I know the main ideas. And I can file that away. and use that if I need it. Jesse, you used to Blinkist. You have a list, right? That's how you keep track of your books that you hear.

Yeah, because you hear about book suggestions all the time on email list, newspapers, magazines, stuff like that. So I go get that list, go to Blinkist, read up. And then if I want to pursue it further, kind of like you do the same, get the book. So you have like a cue. You add things. You have kind of like a queue of books you're curious about. And then there's other times you're like, oh, I'm bored or whatever.

let me just start reading some blinks or listening to some blinks. You kind of work your way through that queue. Yep. Yeah. It's a great product. I mean, look, you got to read. That's the source of ideas. How do you know what to read?

There's only two ways to do this. Two rules. Only two rules you need to know. Number one, read or listen to the blink. Number two, if it's written by me, you need to read it and you need to buy five copies. Unless it's a world without email, in which case you need to pretend like it doesn't exist and then come up to me a

year later and be like, why have you never talked about this before? I heard this in this interview. This is the best idea. I would have bought thousands of copies of a book that would have talked about this, but you uphold these ideas secret until just now. No one knew I wrote that book. You could read a blink of the book, too. I think all my books have good blinks on them.

All right. So anyways, Blink is a no-brainer for us. There is, though, a special offer. This is one of the things I wanted to mention. actually two special offers. Well, Blinkis is really bringing it in the new year. Okay, the first thing is a new feature called Blinkus Connect that is going to allow you to share a subscription with a friend.

You get two for the price of one. So I think that is quite nice. And they also, I think, have raised their discount. So between now and February 28th, coming up, Blinkis has a very special offer for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your seven-day free trial, you will get 40% off a Blinkus premium membership. So after your free trial, if you decide to go ahead with your premium membership,

if you signed up at Blinkis.com slash deep, you'll get 40% off. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkus.com slash deep to get 40% off and a seven-day free trial. That's Blinkis.com slash deep. But that offer, that 40% is only good through February 28th, so time is running short. And as mentioned, for a limited time, they also have this Blinkist Connect feature, which will allow you to share your premium account with a friend.

You'll get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. All right. Blinkist is bringing it, Jesse. It's a time to do it, man. New Year's. Everyone wants to start reading more. Yeah. And Blinkist is like, it makes you a better reader.

So I'm a big fan of that. All right, in the show for our final segment, I always like to change gears. and we're going to do something interesting. And what I mean by that is I like to pull something that someone sent me to interesting at calnewport.com. This is my catch-all address where my readers and listeners have long sent me things. They think I'll find to be interesting.

And I do like to share examples from that. So I have a particular example I want to share today. It is an article that a reader sent to me. If you're watching at YouTube.com slash CalNuport Media, you'll see this on the screen, but I'll also read it. The article was titled Abord the African Star by Alex Haley, the novelist Alex Haley, who wrote among other things,

Roots, the book Roots. The logline here is July 2020. That's just when this was reposted. I'm going to scroll to the bottom here. This has the actual attribution. So this was edited from a talk, and it came out in Reader's Digest in 1991, four months before Alex Haley's death.

So this Alex Haley wrote this in the early 90s before he died. Anyways, here's what was interesting about this. Haley has a interesting habit to find deep work settings. Settings conducive the deep work when he wants to work on one of his novels. I'm just going to read this to you from the article. I love how casually, by the way, he is about this. Usually I go out on freight ships, cargo ships. I want to get caught on a liner.

How can you write with 800 people dancing? But freight ships carry a maximum of 12 people, and they tend to be very quiet people. I work my principal hours from about 10.30 at night until daybreak. The world is yours at that point. Most all the passengers are asleep. So Alex Haley, to find a space conducive to deep work, looked around his options. He said, okay, I could build a special deep work office in my backyard, maybe convert a shed like David McCola,

not deep enough. I could go rent an office somewhere like Peter Benchley did at the furnace factory in Payton, New Jersey, to get away from my house, and that's where we're going to go to write, not deep enough. He could go rent hotel rooms and take all the paintings off the wall so that it's just a white box. So he can write without this traction like Maya Angelou did, but he said,

not deep enough. He could go out on a fishing boat like John Steinbeck and balance a notepad on his knees out in a harbor to write. And Haley said not deep enough. He said, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to become a passenger on a cargo freight liner crossing the ocean. And not only am I going to sequester myself on a cargo freight liner, I'm going to wait until the nighttime. When the 12 people on this massive boat are asleep and at the nighttime on a cargo freight liner in the middle of the ocean, that's where I get my writing done.

So I think we just got to clap at some point for someone who really pushed. deep work forward. The funny thing is where this reference came from. It's actually John McPhee wrote a book about these ships where John McPhee actually traveled on some of these cargo freight liners and wrote a book about it. And he just

mentions very casually, oh, by the way, Alex Haley liked to write on these boats. And that's what sent me down the rabbit hole. Like, really? That's a big claim. And he was right. He writes at night on a cargo freight liner. So there we go.

Jesse, we're going to get the typical complaint email here. I can just read it now. That's good for him. But how am I going to write in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, on a cargo freight liner when I have kids? We're definitely going to get that email. My response is, screw them, get on the freight liner. Anyways, I think that's cool.

So as I like to do sometimes in these interesting segments is when people go over the top with depth, I just find it fun. We can't do it, but it's aspirational. to see what they're doing. I feel like I would get stir crazy. I don't know. I'd get worried. Like, what if you were really bored?

Put a row right there, man. Pull behind it. Row behind it. You could get on the ocean. You could probably get in beastly shape. That would be interesting. If you're, like, stuck on your eye, I'm one of 12 passengers on a cargo liner,

like going around the horn of Africa or something like that. Yeah, I'm just going to bring on, like, weights and a laptop. And healthy foods. And healthy foods. Yeah. I think we could sell that. If we called it, like, the deep work transit lines and, like, got some really cool advertising materials and people like, this is great. I'm going to be in this secluded or whatever.

And they have to show up at, like, the port of Baltimore. And it's just this, like, terrible rusty. Give a t-shirt. Give a t-shirt. Like, here you go. Thanks for your $12,000. But anyways, Alex Haley, we tip, we tip our hats. Tip our hats to you.

I actually just watched, you know, I watched a lot of movies. I rewatch Captain Phillips Oh, that was good This week. Doesn't make you like really eager to follow Alex Haley's model though. So a movie about pirates

taking over a cargo liner does not make you want to just casually go out on cargo liars. That was a good movie though. Yeah. I went down a rabbit hole and listened to an interview

with one of the members of SEAL Team 6 that was deployed onto the Bain Bridge the rescue captain. Phillip. So it's interesting to hear about it from their point of view. Actually, the movie got it pretty right, except for they left out how gross it actually was inside that lifeboat, which... Oh, really?

There's a detail I didn't need to know, but the SEAL Team 6 member was like, you have to recognize that for three days that lifeboat had been used as a toilet. Yeah. And in the African sun. So there you go. Very important information for listeners out there. I don't know what I'm thinking about it. But whatever. Anyways, I love interesting stuff.

Interesting at Cal Newport.com. If you want to send me things you think I would like. All right, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening. You could watch the episode or clips at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. To submit your own questions, there is a link in the show notes. We'll be back next week as normal. And until then, as always, stay deep.

Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter. which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week.

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