Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 28: Habit Tune-Up: Multiplying Eureka Moments, My Capture Setup, and Reducing Mass Email Destruction

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

In this mini-episode, I answer audio questions from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.You can submit your own audio questions at speakpipe.com/calnewport.Here are the topics we cover: * Generating more eureka moments [3:59]* Working past shutdowns [8:08]* How I capture tasks [17:10]* Blocking distractions with music [23:22]* Solving excessive mass emails [27:18]As always, if you enjoy the podcast, please considering subscribing or leaving a rating/review.Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm on a crusade to get the Air Force rid of 90 to 95% of the emails that are sent. The only legit reason that I can think of for the other 5% to 10% of those emails is for asynchronous communication from one side of the world to the other. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions habit tune up mini episode. The idea here is simple. I take voice questions from listeners asking about how to tune up their productivity habits within the world of work, a setting that has become increasingly disrupted in recent times. Now, I should say as I record this today, this was the first day that I set out for my morning walk and put on a sweatshirt. which meant when I went back to the house to get that sweatshirt,

I also got a thermos of coffee to bring with me. And so for me, as a longtime productive meditator, as someone who likes to work while walking, and someone who likes to drink coffee, this is always a very important milestone for me, that first day where I can legitimately bring a hot drink with me as I do a thinking walk. Got to say, for me,

I don't think that serious thinking can really happen until it cools down. Deep work sometimes in the summer can feel like a stretch, a strain, something I have to push myself to do. But as soon as I hit that cool hair this morning, I was ready to ideate. So again, I don't know if it's, I just have an association from the school calendar. I was to college and grad school in New England. So I associate the beginning of the school year with cool weather and that's when you start thinking again. Or maybe it's just a fact that I can combine caffeine.

With ambulation, whatever it is, I'm in a good mood because we have a thinking climate back again. So that's exciting. But let's get into today's show. We've got a lot of good questions to answer. Among other things, I am going to solve the email problem in one of the world's largest organizational bureaucracies. So that should be fun. Before we get going with these questions, let's quickly do the review of the week. This is where I select a recent five-star review.

review from iTunes to read aloud. So the review I will read this week is from T.J.0.1345. And he or she writes, Cal Newport is a polymath who effortlessly synthesizes various disciplines into coherent frameworks he shares with his audience. His podcast provide practical advice to anyone searching for a more meaningful, focused, and effective life in a world where social media and other addictive by design distractions are so prevalent, plundering us of those precious moments of solitude

necessary for solving difficult problems. Well, TJ01345, I appreciate that review. Actually, that's very well written. I should use that as a blurb on a book at some point. That was very eloquent. But I appreciate that. As I appreciate all ratings and all reviews, it does help people find the podcast and decide to try it.

I do realize I probably shouldn't call this segment, the review of the week as I do two podcast episodes each week, and therefore I'm doing this segment twice each week. So I guess I have to come up with something more clever here. Review Spotlight. I don't know. I'll figure it out. Anyways, enough of that.

Remember if you want to submit your own voice question for the habit to an up mini episode, you can do so easily from your browser at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. So let's get rolling with this week's questions, and we'll begin with one about the moment of Eureka. Hi, Cal, my name is Andrew, and I have a question about Eureka moments, small and large. I'm talking about those great ideas that you have for a new book or a new article and how to get more of them. Now, I've long thought that it is nearly a matter of putting the right inputs in, doing lots of good reading, and listening to interesting things and those questions kind of come together and you've got a new

idea that is neither of the two previous things, but some unique combination of them. But I would like to have more of those Eurica moments and I can't really get more inputs. And I'm wondering if you have a production function for creating ideas, because you seem to have no problem coming up with a lot of them. Well, Andrew, I don't know if I would say I have no problem. I would say coming up with ideas is something I do for a living. So it's something I both spend a lot of time doing and have a lot of practice at. So the practice piece is worth starting with up front.

You know, I have a habit of writing a blog post every week. I've been doing that since my 20s. I started that in 2007. I've written a lot of books. I write a lot of articles. Recently, I've been doing a lot of podcasts. So I spend a lot of time thinking. Trying to think up original ideas, ideas that are going to have some sort of hook or aspiration or sufficient level of interestingness for my audience.

So in some degree, I just have a lot of cognitive grooves that makes it maybe a little bit easier for me to come across now going forward an idea that I like. So that's one thing to keep in mind you will get better at it as you produce more. However, I'm not sure how big of an effect that is because I would emphasize that behind my ideation practice is a lot of time spent thinking. And this probably is more important than anything else I do is that I just give the process of coming up with an idea and then polishing that idea

lots and lots of time, hours and hours and hours. You see like, let's say, my books, and you look at that particular, by a bibliography. Oh, there's this idea, then this idea, and this idea, oh, those all seem like good ideas. And there's one after another. But what you don't see is the sometimes years I spend

actually trying to come up with and polish those ideas. Now, I have a new book coming out in March, and I have been thinking all summer long, if not longer, on the topic I want to write about next. And it was only actually this morning that I got to a place where I was actually even willing to make a tentative pitch about the rough idea to my literary agent. I've just been thinking about this a lot.

So part of this is just a numbers game, lots and lots of hours thinking. The other thing that's relevant here is what are the activities you are doing in which you're doing that thinking? And for me, walking is by far the best activity for coming up with ideas. So when I rack up all of these hours of thinking about ideas, 98% of them are on foot. Some people get inspiration in the shower,

some people get inspiration on the commute, some people get inspiration while doing the dishes. I get it while walking. This morning, I did an hour-long walk. That walk I talked about in the beginning of this episode, the walk in which I very happily had a cup of coffee with me, that entire walk was spent thinking about my potential next book idea. And so that's what the habit,

looks like, you know, again, to summarize, I think practice does make you better, but there's no escaping the fact that ideas is a numbers game, you have to put up the hours, and you have to put up the hours in an activity like for me walking that really optimizes big ideas. All right, that's a good question. Speaking of thinking, let's tackle a question now about having trouble stopping thinking. Hi, Carl, it's Amelia from Poland. Greetings. I really enjoy a show. Thank you for making it. It brings some sanity in this crazy world. I learned a time block and I have a habit for self-reflection and solitude. My biggest struggle is with the shutdown and getting enough fun and social activities.

When the time comes to call it a day and I know I haven't done all I wanted, I continue working and postpone the shutdown. it's not good for me. It probably also has to do with the fact that I'm still learning to time block. But anyway, would you have any tips for building which lately called aggressive community engagement? Well, first of all, Amelia, this is a good problem you have. I mean, it's better than the opposite, which is you're having a hard time actually doing work. So this fact that you're blowing past the end of your day, you're blowing past your shutdown to work some I think is a positive thing.

Right. It means you're getting after it. You've got a lot going on. So I'm going to have a few suggestions for you. Some combination of these hopefully will prove effective. So first I would say, get pretty strict, just within your time blocking discipline, get pretty strict about if you blow past your end of the day block that you have to stop and fix your schedule for the time it remains, that you cannot, you do not allow yourself

to just casually blow past. the last block of the day and just keep working. If you blow past that time, you have to stop and say, okay, I guess I feel like I'm not done. What do I still need to do? And how much time do I need for that? And I'm going to block out what I think is reasonable. Even that little bit of friction, that bit of forced intentionality,

I think that might help you be a little bit more conscientious about when you stop your day. The other issue here might be that you're just not giving yourself enough time. Maybe you really are just, you have more work that you need to get done. Your brain is correct about this. And it says, I know you scheduled this shutdown, but I don't trust it because, look, we're busy. And we got a left still to do.

And we got time. And I think we should still work. Now, that's definitely a possibility to entertain. So in that case, you might want to think about actually blocking off more time, extending later in your day when your shutdown occurs. All right. So now, assuming you've done those two things, you've put in this enforced intentionality,

of extending your time block schedule when you pass your shutdown and that maybe you're giving yourself more time from the very beginning. I think the other thing you pointed out, which is focusing on what you do outside of work, what you do after your shutdown, focusing on those activities might really help you here. Because you do point out this dynamic that you think that maybe not having the right things to do after your shutdown is what helps implicitly push you to keep working. I think you might be on the right track there. And so a useful thing to do here is to increase the quality of the activities that you have put aside for yourself after you're done with your workday. So that you see that as something that's very satisfying and fulfilling that you look

forward to. Now it'll be easier for you to shut down the one phase of your day, the professional phase and move on then to the second phase, which is more of the personal self-development phase. So what should you do? Well, just to give you some suggestions, exercise and fitness, fresh air, right? Getting outside, being outside, going to scenic places. You can combine those two things, obviously, that you go for a run to a certain park where you do a certain exercise. Community connection, I think you're absolutely right.

That is crucial. the more you can actually be interacting with people and the more that you can be doing this in person, I think is really good. So having some sort of evening activities where you can actually be around other people doing things with them that are interesting or productive, I think that's great.

All of my typical, you know, obviously COVID caveats apply as we joke about in previous episodes. Don't go down to the underground rave held in the abandoned warehouse down by the docks. but there's any number of things you can do safely with other people that you probably should. So I think that's good. Join things, sign up for things, set up things with people you already know. Be aggressive about this.

If you need to time block time during your workday to arrange social activities for outside of your workday. It sounds like you're a great time blocker. So might as well leverage that discipline to actually increase the quality of what you're doing once your workday is actually over. And then finally, I would say, make sure that you're cultivating quality leisure activities. Now, I talk about these a lot in my book, Digital Minimalism. There is a nearly unlimited number of options

for quality leisure, basically things that actually require energy and sacrifice on your part, but give you a deeper satisfaction than say simply the superficial, boredom busting of binging on Netflix or scrolling, God forbid, through social media, allowing it to play your amygdala like a harpsichord. So something better than that. Now, this could be going to serve.

Service is great. Is there a place where you can help, a neighbor you can help, a relative you can help, somewhere where you can be volunteering or being useful? This can be anything craft related. I mean this in the general sense of craft of developing and applying a skill to the production of some sort of concrete artifact in the world that shows your intentions made manifest physically, if you want a technical definition. So anything like that where you're doing skilled work is really interesting.

Intellectual development. Intellectual development is a great high-quality leisure activity, especially if this development is structured. In the full Deep Questions podcast episode from earlier this week, I talked a little about this. I was actually giving advice to a young man who wanted to lay a better foundation of philosophical, political, and ethical ideas and stances in his life. And I said, yeah, here's what you have to do. You have to encounter long form content, so very smart books, are really good interviews, on these ideas. And then if you find an idea that resonates, you think you might

want to integrate into your worldview, you need to then go find the best alternative and the best critique and let all these things collide. And in that dialectical collision, deeper roots will be sprung and they'll grow down. You'll get a lot more intellectual confidence. You'll get a lot more deeper understanding about what you believe in why. The sort of structured self-education on political, philosophical, and ethical stances is a great other high-quality analog leisure activity. So that's my vision for you, Amelia, that we have time block fixes. We're trying to make your time blocking more productive and more effective. So this is where again, you force yourself to fix the schedule if you blow past your shutdown.

You become more realistic about how much time you put aside of the evening. And then we have the leisure life fix where you try to make what's going on in your life outside of work so meaningful and so fulfilling and so enriched with quality that you look forward to shutting down and shifting over to that. that you have that great ying and yang balance where you're getting after it in your work and you're disciplined and you're honing your professional craft and then after that you're crafting a life outside of work that is fulfilling and deep and resilient and entertaining and interesting that yin and the yin balance back and forth is self-reinforcing it's energizing it's life-affirming It means the allure of the superficial,

the allure that's coming from that glowing screen with those bright icons and that promise that statistical algorithms have selected some content for you to look at this, just going to make you feel something in the moment or numb you to the things that you don't want to confront, that allure is going to diminish. So it's a great question because I think it applies to a lot of people. And I think you're on the right track. Again, it's a good problem to have.

you're working too hard. I can't tell you how many people have the opposite problem. The opposite problem is much harder to fix. So I'm proud you're getting after it. Hopefully this helps you get after it even harder. And thanks for that question. All right, so let's shift gears here and go from something maybe a little bit lofty

to something technical and geeky. Hi, Carl. I'm Antonino freelance personal trainer here in Luxembourg. And you say about capturing I was wondering which tool do you use to capture your stuff that they're going on in your life? Just notebook or also other kind of stuff like apps or whatever? Well, when it comes to capture tools, I follow David Allen's lead and I focus on trying to minimize friction.

It has to be dead simple to capture obligations that you need to deal with later. It has to be so simple to do it that you're not going to skip the step out of frustration or annoyance. As soon as you have to turn on the phone, tap on an app, click on like today,

click on the plus sign to create new task or whatever, and then hand type in your task. as soon as you have like that much friction, you're going to stop doing it, or you're not going to do it all the time. So if there's any place in your productivity system that you have a minimum amount of friction, it needs to be in capture. So for me, that means I have two tools used for this particular operation. My primary capture device is my notebook.

I time block plan in a notebook. I lay it flat. On the right-hand side is my time-block plan. On the page facing it on the left-hand side, that is where I primarily collect ideas, obligations, and tasks. Now, this is so important that in my time-block planner, the actual planner product that's being released on, I think it's November 10th, in case you're wondering,

I have the capture page. For every day, you have two pages. A time-block grid for time-block plan. and a capture page. And it's literally just like a lined page. There's almost nothing on it. But it's just so important to me that I have this notebook that can come with me anywhere,

and that's where I capture. Now, it's important to me that this is analog because I don't always have my computer on. I don't always have it near me, or I don't always want to use it. If I'm in the middle of a deep work block, I don't want to go to my computer. So I have a notebook right there.

I can't tell you how to do that. how many times I have an idea just as I'm getting into bed, something I'm forgetting, and to be able to just walk over and just jot it down in my notebook, is so much superior than walking downstairs and firing up my laptop. Oftentimes I am on a walk. I'm thinking in the woods. I'm at a coffee shop. I'm in a place where my computer is not with me.

I can easily have the notebook. That battery is never going to die. That boot up time is instantaneous. and I could write pretty fast, capture, capture, capture. So my time block plan containing notebook is also my primary capture tool. Simplest technology I can think of.

Paper, pen. The other tool I will sometimes use is a blank text file on my computer. Now, I use this when I am sorting through a lot of information, have a lot of things to capture. The two main instances of this being going through email

or if I'm in a meeting, let's say like a Zoom call, and a lot of obligations or ideas are being generated. In those cases, I might be coming across so many items that need to be captured that my handwriting or handwriting speed is not sufficiently fast to capture at all. I can type much faster than I write. So I'll just freehand type this in. to a blank text document. On my desktop, I have a text document called working memory.

.text that I use for any of this type of stuff. And so if I'm in a meeting or going through my inbox, I'm just throwing stuff in there. I can type very fast because I'm a professional writer. So I can quickly elaborate, put a bunch of bullet points under it, whatever I need to do. And I'll capture it temporarily in that text file. But I do not think of working memory. text as a permanent repository. It's not a permanent capture tool.

I feel very nervous when information is in there because I only want there to be one place I think about when I think about processing what I've captured and shifted into my systems. And that's my notebook. So when I use working memory. Dot text, my text file on my computer, as soon as I'm done checking my inbox, as soon as the meeting has ended, I process everything in that text file. So I'll process it right away. Now, this might just be, I don't know, psychological productivity, purism at play. But having even two unrelated collection systems to think about

seems like one too many. I really love the simplicity of the only permanent collection system, the thing that I process at the end of each day during shutdown, is just my notebook. And if I use a high-speed collection system like a text file, It's just temporary. It's like an extension of my brain, which is why I call it working memory. Dot text where I can capture things at the speed of typing.

And then as soon as I can step back and catch my breath, I clear it out of that working memory and into more long-term memory. All right. So those are the two tools I use. You can, of course, customize this, but just keep in mind the underlying key point. Friction, friction, friction. The faster and easier you can capture this information, the more likely you are to actually stick with this discipline.

All right. So as long as we are wallowing in some productivity geekery here, let's do another one of these In the Weeds productivity tool questions. Hi, Cal. My name's Tom. I live in London. I'm 28 and I work in finance within the telecommunications industry. So my question is around music and concentration.

I know in the past I've heard you say that you shouldn't really use music because it can be distracting, but my question is, if you work in somewhere that's a noisy area where there's lots going on, like dogs barking and people working outside, is it okay to use some like noise cancelling headphones to sort of and just put some sort of like relaxing music on? Well, Tom, I think that's fine. So to add some nuance to my treatment of music in terms of concentration and productive work, I don't think that music is by default distracting. I think music is initially distracting. So essentially what I have found is that you can train yourself to tune out a particular

genre of music, which will then allow you to use that music when played through headphones as a particularly effective way of blocking out distracting noises. But it does take practice because at first, especially if the music is lyrical, your mind is not going to know where it needs to put its attention. And you'll have some aspect of your mind saying, huh, that's interesting. I'm listening to this music. I'm into it. I like the words. What's going on there?

Even with like classical music, if you're not used to working with music at all, even classical music can divide your attention at first. But people get used to it. And then once you're used to it, it's just kind of in the background there. just like if you work at a store that plays the same musac loop you know again and again you eventually don't even realize that it's going on so eventually you get used to it and then you get the benefit of the music actually blocking out other sound

so that's what I would say is sure I think if you're working in a distracting open office putting music through really good headphones could be a really good way to create some sort of auditory isolation but just expect that at first it might not work so well. And if you start with non-liarical music, you'll have an easier time than if you're using lyrical music. The example I often give of this going to the extreme is years ago, I profiled, I don't know if I ever published this anywhere, but I interviewed years ago

a writer who wrote a lot of words, who was a novelist, and he had a bunch of kids and they were noisy, and he worked from home, and he worked in a home office, like in his bedroom where it was not successful, we shall say, in blocking the sound of his kids. And so he got NASCAR headphones. So the things you wear when you're at a NASCAR race, they're really heavy earphones that you can play the play-by-play announcement through them. So you can plug in like a radio. But they're really soundproof because those cars are really loud.

So he got those and he would blare Metallica into them. And if you're blaring Metallica through NASCAR style noise blocking headphones, you're not hearing anything else, no matter how loud those kids scream. Now, Tom, if you tried that tomorrow, I think you would have a very hard time doing anything deep. But if you tried it tomorrow and then the next day and the next day, after not too long,

you would be writing really smart things or thinking really deep thoughts or I guess you're in finance. So making really sophisticated financial transactions while Inter Sandman. lulls you into a state of concentration. So music is fine. Just expect it. It might take you a little bit of practice to get used to it, at which point it will no longer be a distraction. All right, let's do one more question.

We can hit on one of my favorite topics, which is email and the discontent that it generates. Hi, Cal. My name is Ryan, and I'm in the active duty Air Force. I'm on a crusade to get the Air Force rid of 90 to 95% of the emails that are sent. The only legit reason that I can think of for the other 5% to 10% of those emails is for asynchronous communication from one side of the world to the other.

For example, if somebody in Korea wants to communicate with somebody in D.C. The problem that I see is mass emails. And by mass emails, I mean one person, usually somebody in a position of authority, emailing dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people at once. So my suggestion, or my question for you, is what do you suggest as replacement for those mass emails when somebody wants to communicate with so many people at one time? Well, Ryan, mass emails are definitely a large problem

within the large constellation of problems caused by this technology we call email. It's something I've thought some about. There are some potential solutions here that could make things easier. So the first thing that comes to mind is on the receiver end, you could make their life easier if you move over to a more advanced mailing list style service. like for example, Google groups. These are like mailing lists. You can send email to a certain list.

But it gives extra features to the users. For example, the ability to digest messages incoming to a certain list. You can just look at them, let's say, weekly or daily, however you want to do it, but you're not getting them on demand. You're not getting them one by one in your inbox as they arrive. So this is an easy thing to do is you have. have these different predetermined list for different types of announcements and then receivers can choose how they want to receive the information. If the list is not that important to them,

they might want to get it delivered as a weekly digest. They can quickly skim, especially if most of the stuff there won't really pertain to them. If a list is super important, they might actually say, I want to get each of those emails delivered to me individually. But now you're giving some control to the user. You're also starting to channelize the communication. So if I'm the I have to choose which of these Google groups or lists I want to send to. So I have to actually kind of choose and do a little bit of filtering on behalf of the receiver. Now, that seems subtle, but that's also pretty important. In general with email, the more undifferentiated the channels, the more problems we get into.

It's why I don't like the idea of having one inbox associated with an individual that everything comes into. Similarly, I would not like the idea, let's say, in the Air Force, of whatever the relevant unit is here in which communication is happening. So I don't know the lingo, but you know what I mean? Is it a division, a regiment, a squad, or whatever? They just have a generic email list for just all the people in this unit, where the email list is associated just with people, and then anyone can use that list when they want to talk to those people.

That's a lot less effective than say, no, no, there are many topic-specific list. Base announcements, regulation changes, notification, notifications, request for action, whatever. Now you're putting a little bit of effort on the cinder to actually pre-filter their communication. And again, it seems simple, but it makes a big deal for the receiver

to be able to categorize what's coming in and not just have it all be just directed to them as a person. That filtering saves some cognitive energy. It helps you deal with it better, and especially when coupled with a tool like Google Groups where you can then have different digest delivery options for each type of channel. Now you're starting to gain a little bit of traction

against a problem of mass emails overloading your inbox. Now, if you want to get more advanced, you can add even more friction to the sender to make the receiver's lives easier. And let me say as an aside, I think this is in general a good strategy. Here's the problem with mass emails.

For the individual or the individual unit that is sending out a mass email, they're just thinking about what do we need? You're like, well, we've been working on this new parking regulation for a while. We finally got it approved. We need people to know about it. We need people to answer back some questions about it so we can finish this task. And there's a little bit of CYA going on here. Maybe we want to make sure that we documented these changes or whatever. So great, let's send out an email. That makes our life really easy. That solves our problem. The issue is there's 75 other

units that have similar problems. And when each of them try to solve their own problems, now me, the enlisted guy who's just trying to get my job done has 75 different emails that are all hard to understand, all demanding my attention, all arriving sporadically in an ad hoc manner, completely fracturing my attention and overwhelming me with a seemingly never-ending deluge of underspecified request. So putting friction on the cinder makes the cinder's lives a little bit easier, a little bit harder rather, but makes the receiver's lives much better, right? Because this is completely asymmetric. If we had just one cinder and one receiver,

you know, you make the cinder's life a little harder. It makes the receiver's life a little easier. And it's a fair trade. And you could say, well, it could go either way. But if you have 75 cinders and one receiver, you have 75 people making their life a little bit harder, but you have one receiver getting 75 times that benefit. So it's very asymmetric. So just as an aside before we get the specifics, adding friction to cinders in an asymmetric communication scenarios such as mass emails can be a huge win.

Net net, a huge win in terms of the impact this behavior has on the cognitive, we could say, state, or the cognitive production capability of your organization. So what type of friction can we add? Well, I think moderation is important. Maybe you don't just have lists, but you have moderators for these lists. You can say, huh, yeah, I'm not so sure about that. You need to clarify that. That's not a really simple ask.

Can you summarize what this is? I don't think that's really important enough to make it to the list. Maybe I'll combine it with something else. Like now you're putting some friction that's demanding clarity. It could make a big difference for the receiver. You could go even farther, even farther in moderation and say, actually, most of the content coming in mass email should not exist in an inbox. There's other places for it.

There's internal websites. There's internal directories. There's internal project management tools. Whatever IT you use. But here's where this information lives. Here's where that information lives. You have a new parking regulation. Okay, we have a place where we keep regulations on the base.

And the regulations, the updated regulations have been posted there. Right. It needs to live somewhere else permanent. email is only used to actually notify people about changes. And these notifications are now going to happen in digest that are manually edited. So now imagine you're a receiver. You work for this Air Force base. And instead of getting 75 messages, you get one email.

Okay, here's our weekly roundup, moderated and edited by someone. All right, here are the things that require your action in the near future. There's this new regulation. You're going to have to send in these four. The forms are here. If you have any questions, ask this person. All right, here's something else that's going on here. We have changed our procedure for submitting our requisitions for, I don't know, jet fuel. Obviously, I know a lot about the Air Force here.

The new procedures, they're described here. You can go here to sign up for a training. We're going to be holding trainings. Here's the person to ask if you have questions. Okay, now here's a collection of announcements that don't require action, but might be relevant of a short summer. of a short summary of each description of where to find the bigger details. And then here is some, I don't know, changes to the event calendar, whatever it is.

It's in a digest that's very easy to grok. All the information is right there. You only get one a week. It's heavily edited and moderated by one person who's in charge of the communication that goes to whatever the relevant unit is here. Maybe you have one of these for each of the different areas. There could be communication. So again, like base related news.

and then like whatever your specialty is related news and events and whatever, whatever, right? So maybe you have a small number of heavily edited digest that come in are easy to peruse. Now again, you've added more friction to the cinders. You've added the friction of having an editor that also costs more resources, but it's asymmetric because you have a lot of different people, a lot of different people trying to grab the time and attention of your team, of your unit of your organization. and that cost scales.

So if you could reduce that cost, that reduction scales. So none of these, Tom or Ryan, I should say, none of these are a magic solution, but I think you get the sense of the type of things I'm talking about here. You need to get away from a world in which it's just an undifferentiated inbox.

Anyone can access your time at any point with no control and very little channelizing. You want to instead head for a direction where information comes in channels. There's hopefully friction that the cinder has to go through, and it's very easy to grok the information. It doesn't come in too often. It's condensed.

It's batched. All of these type of principles make a really big difference. And you get the same information across, but with a much smaller negative footprint. So, Ryan, I think you're asking the same questions. I don't know what position you are in to actually affect change. I'm really hoping that when I look your name up after this, I find out that you're on the Joint Chief of Staffs

or something like this so that you could actually change this for all the Air Force. But I think for anyone listening, I think this is useful. We cannot just be informal or ad hoc or spontaneous about how we use communication tools. There is a cognitive cost to these tools. They should not just be undifferentiated.

They should not be friction-free. They should not just be open for anyone to use for any purpose at any time. That is a dangerous way to play with valuable cognitive resources. So you got to think about how do we net net maximize what we're able to still produce, maximize the mental state of our workers while still getting key information across, be willing to innovate. I think these type of changes make a big difference. All right. So that's all the time we have for this week's habit tune up mini episode. If you want to submit your own voice questions, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash cow. As always, I appreciate

ratings and reviews. If you give a review, I may read it in a future episode of the show. We should be back early next week with the next full-length edition of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.