Focused - 109: Email Workflows

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

David & Mike revisit the topic of email and discuss their current workflows. They share how and when they process email, what they use to do it, and the strategies they use to break free from their inboxes long enough to do some actual work.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. How's it going? I'm doing great. How about you, Mike? I have been busy. I am doing okay. I've been working on a course, which we will talk a little bit more about throughout the course of this episode here. But before we get into that,

we've got a few things that we want to mention here at the beginning. The first is that when this episode publishes, it's going to be near the end of the month, but that does not mean it is too late to contribute to the St. Jude campaign that we are, and all of RelayFM are a part of. This is a cause that you and I both really believe in. Pretty proud of the work that's been able to be done through Relay in the last couple of years. This year, it looks like we're going to take it even further. And in terms of a cause, St. Jude is about as good as it comes. It's a research hospital that treats kids with cancer, and they don't charge the families that go there

for treatment a dime, which is pretty amazing when you think about it, especially right now with everything that's going on in the world. I can only imagine, you know, if one of my kids was diagnosed with cancer, having to figure out how to pay hospital bills on top of everything else that's going on, that would just be, you know, added pressure that you don't need right now. Yeah. And people don't realize St. Jude's is a world-renowned research hospital as well. I mean, when you donate to St. Jude's, you're helping cancer research, which is openly shared with the entire world. You're just helping everybody out. And it's a really easy thing to do. It just feels so great. I was just

telling a friend, I said, so much of what's going on in the world right now, I feel powerless about, but you know, one thing I do have power to do is throw a little money at St. Jude's and help make a difference that way. And if you can do it, if you've got some money that you can share with St. Jude's, that is money well spent. And thank you. Absolutely. And every little bit helps. So if you don't have a ton of money to contribute, that's okay. Whatever you can, we would ask, even if it's just a couple of bucks, that you would go to stjude.org slash relay and do what you can. Speaking of spending money, I want to talk about the membership program for the Focus podcast for a minute.

I want to talk about the membership program for the focus podcast for a minute. Mike and I have been talking about this show. We both really like making it to me. It's, it's almost a passion project and it has a sizable audience. Um, but we'd like to see it kind of go to the next level. And that's something both of us want to work on over the next year. And part of that is hopefully growing the membership

of the show. Now we, we tried doing a member call zoom call and we were, we're thinking about doing some more of them, but we've received a lot of email and contact from listeners saying, look, that's all well and great, but you know, that's a live thing. It requires me to be there at a specific time. I've got a job or whatever time you pick, I'm asleep. Or there's just a whole bunch of barriers to really making that an effective reward for our members. And we wanted to do something that everybody could enjoy. And Mike and I are going to be doing some deep dives.

We already have a list started and it's looking great for the people who don't want to subscribe or can't afford to subscribe, I get that. We are not reducing any content at all. This is just going to be the deep dive stuff and I can't wait to get started on it. And if you'd like to join us on the journey, you can sign up for membership right at the website. Go to relay.fm slash focused.

Did I miss anything, Mike? No, but I'll reiterate something that you just said, where you're not missing out if you don't join the membership feed necessarily, because we didn't want to take anything away from what focused already was. We just wanted a place to talk about the additional stuff, which I've, I think I've kind of strayed into that territory occasionally. And you've kind of reined me back in. We're like, well, it's not really what this show is all about. Some of the app stuff and the techie stuff and the workflow stuff, there are some people who are interested in that sort of thing, but not the general audience of Focused, I feel like. So we tried to take a more high-level approach for the main content of the show, but this would be the place where we can really get into the weeds. And so if that sounds like something that's interesting to

you, then we are connecting all the pipes and figuring out how to make that work. But like David, like you said, we've got lots of ideas and I'm excited to talk about that stuff and see how deep those rabbit holes go. So go sign up and please please check it out also please stay engaged over at the forum at talk.macpowerusers.com we we just love this audience and we want to give more and uh let us know what you would like to hear on the show and and what could help you be more engaged with the idea of focus as we move out of 2020 and hopefully into a brighter 2021. Absolutely. Speaking of feedback, there were a lot of people chiming in regarding episode 107 with Ryder Carroll, which I was happy to see. A couple of things I wanted to pull out here because I feel like these are important topics and maybe lead into some discussion here of what we're

currently doing. But Seller had mentioned that my digital inbox can quickly grow before I have time to process it. Those tasks get filed into the system before I know what my task manager is. AssessPool using pen and paper, again, helps with the temptation to capture everything. Bingo. I mean, that's the whole idea behind the bullet journal is that there's some additional friction there and that forces you to kind of slow down and cut things that really shouldn't be be put in there i know i've fallen into that that trap myself when i've used digital task managers it's easy to capture stuff but just because you capture

stuff then you still have to follow through and do those things yeah that that's the big problem with digital is that you get too much in your system and i so much like that theme of pruning that we talked with ian about i actually put it in the title of the show and i always want to remind myself of that i mean i just recently did my own pruning through my omni focus database and through a lot of projects overboard that just were not getting done we're never going to get done and hopefully allows me to focus more on what i need and i do think that using analog tools just you know the nature of the medium allows you to you know forces you to decide well what am i actually going to work on yep exactly and jay carucci kind of said along the same lines after a couple of times of

writing the same task using the bullet journal method i realize i'm just fooling myself i've never i'm never working on this thing and that's the end of it so in the past something like this would linger on my task list for months now that it makes takes effort to copy it down i'm more ruthless yeah i totally agree with this and uh he's that that particular example they're using a combination of bullet journal and things, which is a digital task manager, kind of like OmniFocus, where it's got start dates and all of the features that you would want to automatically filter everything you have to do and show you what you need to do at a specific time. But I thought this would be a cool place to check in and just see, David, are you currently doing anything with pen and paper? Yeah, I mean, I still am.

I've kind of really been analyzing a lot of my workflows. About six months ago, I started to feel like I didn't have a handle on a lot of things in my life. You know what I mean? It's just kind of like the underlying feeling like there's a lot of wheels that I'm grinding and a lot of controls that I need to have because I've got a law practice and I've got a kind of a publishing business. A global pandemic will do that to you. Yeah, but just in general, I just felt like the wheels were getting wobbly and things were happening without my intentionality being in there. I wasn't, you know, and I was trying to bring focus to bear, but things just weren't quite right. And I realized that part of the problem was a process problem. And as soon as I think in my head that I have a process problem, alarm bells go off because

I know my personality is I love process, right? It's like, Ooh, process problem. Let me solve a process problem rather than do my work, I can spend the next week figuring out the ideal process to process my process, right? You know, it's just like, so I have to put brakes on when I hear that. But in this case, like about six months ago, I realized, no, there really is a problem. There are things that just aren't happening, right? So I've been rethinking a lot of things. And part of the thing was I realized using a paper journal, I wasn't journaling enough of the things I needed. Like I want a journal that can serve me as a historical reference. And there were just some things coming out of the paper journal that just weren't there for me.

I wanted the ability to immediately search it. And so I started playing with day one and to a lesser extent Rome research. And I'm looking at different tools to kind of bring a digital element to my journal. But, and also I looked at good notes and some of the digital tools to hand journal. And the fact is, I think there's room in my my journal routine that I need to do digitally, but I also am doing it on paper. And one of the problems I was having on paper was that I was trying to do so much with paper that I was coming up with these really strange systems with using all the Levenger papers and tabs and everything. And what I've kind of reverted to is going back to my beloved Rodia web notebooks. And I just write, I have a running journal in there and I write things down. And on some days I write things down that I did. And then I also, when I'm trying to think through a problem, I sit down with the notebook and just start writing. I've talked on the blog and on the show about my distinction with maker, manager, consumer, and I'm logging some of that stuff in there, but very basically. And that was a really long answer to your very short question.

No, I love it. You mentioned the Levenger stuff. I am still using my Levenger system. It's not actually a Levenger system. It's a hybrid system with a journal I bought from Ugmonk, which has a really nice leather cover and brass rings. And then I'm custom punching my own paper using a Levenger circa press. In fact, just last weekend, I spent about 45 minutes on a Saturday morning punching about 500 pieces of paper. So I am good now with paper for a very long time. But I continue to jot things down day to day inside my notebook and then use Rome Research for everything else. It's not as powerful as some of the other task managers that are out there, but I feel

it's good enough for me in the basic list stuff that I'm doing because I just need to see what I need to do today. Then I transfer that stuff to the notebook and I work off of the notebook. At the end of the day, everything that I've captured in the notebook goes back into Rome Research and around and around we go. One thing I really like about it, and this is not a big thing, but Rome is kind of the place for everything. So you had sent me something about CRM stuff inside of Rome. I like being able to tag a task following up with David for something with the page for David Sparks and then having all of the information that everything I want to attach basically to your record is right there in one place and being able to click through that. everything I want to attach basically to your record is right there in one place and being able to click through that. That's not a big deal. I mean, you could create that task in a task manager and then go into contacts or something when you want to look that stuff up. But I don't know, there's just something about having it all right there, all just a single click away. Same thing with like the writing tasks and things that I do with the URLs inside of Ulysses.

So I know that there are better individual tools to solve the specific things that I'm doing inside of Roam. But I feel like the fact that it's all kind of tied together in one application kind of trumps all of that. Plus, it's basically plain text, which is a big plus in my book. Yeah. And you know, this is exactly the kind of thing I want to do a deep dive on. I want to go and talk about what you're using room for and what i've tried it for i can tell you that one of my biggest concerns with rome is privacy i mean it's they don't have two-factor authentication i mean which is the most basic thing you expect they don't have end-to-end encryption if rome gets hacked and strangers get your email and password

they're going to have access to your entire Rome graph. And so there's, but I, that's the kind of thing I would love to go down a rabbit hole with you on. Awesome. But yeah, to answer the original question, you know, the key thing I think that makes that work is not Rome. It's the notebook. Yeah. That being the place where I capture things. And then Rome's a great dumping ground for all that stuff later. But mapping out my time block day, just a rough plan, and then picking up two, five tasks to work on, making a list of those things. And there have been times when it's like, oh, shoot, I have a sixth one that I want to add. Well, I better pick something I'm not going to do then. You know, those force constraints, I feel like that's been very important for me in terms of my mental and emotional state, especially when trying to crank out this course that we're working on.

It's very easy to just find something else to do. And when I limit the number of things that I do, I feel like that has a cumulative long-term positive effect on everything else. Yeah. And so my kind of takeaway right now is the journal is a place of reflection and small daily recordings um it's not the big journal for me and as we record this i think i'm really leaning towards rather than to try and get one app like rome to do everything to actually go and use the specialized apps and, you know, kind of split my life between those various things. Now, as the,

that's, as I record the show, as the show publishes, it could be completely different cause I'm crazy, but, uh, we'll, we'll talk about that at some point.

We'll keep you posted. Um, Mike, I want to talk to you briefly about something shiny and new. You sent me a link that you are buying this new keyboard. Yes, I have it in my possession. I'm using it right now. It is the Keychron K8. I have had many mechanical keyboards over the years. It started with a DOS keyboard that I picked up and switched out all the keycaps as a productivity experiment.

I put blank keycaps on there to see if I could force myself to become a touch typist and what effect that would have on my words per minute. Since then, I've bought several keyboards. I've got a Matthias Tactile Pro, I think it is, the Bluetooth one with the Mac keys. That one's really nice. I've got a code keyboard. when I saw this one I figured this is probably the and I say this now it's probably going to evolve from here but the goal is that this is the last keyboard I buy because it is hot swappable with the key switches so it comes with I believe they're Gateron Browns which are decent switches but if you want to upgrade them, you can actually pull out those switches and put in new ones without having to solder anything. I have no desire to solder my own

custom keyboard. That just kind of freaks me out. I feel like I could break it and I don't want to be responsible for that. But hot swapping the switches and the keycaps and things like that, that is appealing to me. So I actually have this keyboard that I'm using right now, but I have also already bought new switches for this keyboard. Okay. Now I want to walk through this with me. So to get to the end first, is this the last keyboard you're going to need? To get to the end first, is this the last keyboard you're going to need? I don't know.

That's the goal. I think with these new key switches that I got, I got the, they're called Holy Pandas. And I can put the link to the ones that I got from drop.com in the show notes. But these are custom switches. They are made, in the description it says, they are made with stems from Halo Clears or Halo Trues with the housing found on Inver Panda switches. They are made, in the description it says, they are made with stems from Halo Clears or Halo Trues with the housing found on Inver Panda switches. So they take parts from two different switches and put them together to create this custom switch, which sounds like a ton of work, but based on the research that I've done and the type of switches that I like, this is not a clicky switch, but it

is a tactile switch. So you can feel it, but it's not super loud. I feel like this could be the holy grail for me in terms of like the perfect switch, but obviously time will, will tell if that's the case. All right. So which Keychron KeyA did you get? There's a bunch of them you get the aluminum frame the plastic frame rgb what would give me your details i bought the aluminum frame with the rgb and the rgb is cool for about five minutes and then you kind of forget that you've got it uh there's a bunch of different patterns you can choose from and some of them do look kind of cool but this is a way bigger deal to my kids than it is to me okay uh the keycaps that are on here are i believe it's abs uh keycaps and they're double shot which means that part of them are translucent so like the letter symbols the legends on the keys themselves those are translucent so

the color of the led shines through i am not like, like I said, I'm not, I don't really care about that though, so I've got my eyes on another keycap set, which is going to be coming out in December. I've got a link to this too, we'll put in the show notes, but this is a different type of keycap. It's PBT, which from what I can understand, my limited understanding of this stuff, is a different type of keycap. It's PBT, which from what I can understand, my limited understanding of this stuff, is a higher quality plastic. So it feels a little bit chunkier, which is kind of what I like.

And then it's got the classic Mac stuff. A lot of these keycap sets that you would buy, they have these group buys. You commit, you pay, and then like six months later, they ship you the the key caps after they print them but almost every single one of them uses windows keys which drives me crazy i definitely want the option and the command buttons so this set is coming out shortly and the person who is behind this has done a bunch of other really cool key cap sets which

are currently not available uh so i've got my eye on this one, and this is probably going to be what I land on. Yeah, you've gone all the way, man. I am. I believe at that point, you know, when I've got the key caps that I really like, and I've got the switches that I really like, I'm probably good. Because this keyboard, I don't want a huge collection of keyboards either. The kind of the other thing I like about this is that it's Bluetooth enabled, so you can connect it with a couple different devices. And I have already been taking this back and forth between my MacBook Pro setup on my desk and grabbing my iPad, going upstairs and writing using this keyboard. And I really do enjoy that.

What does it have multiple Bluetooth radios or you have to repair it every time? Nope. There's three different Bluetooth radios and it's really easy to switch between them. So it's yeah, it's perfect. Oh, man. See, that's what I love about my Logitech is the three radios. I haven't tried a mechanical mirror in a long time. So did you get the Keychron optical hot swappable or the Gateron hot swappable?

I got the Gateron hot swappable. I'm not positive the optical switches were hot swappable or the Gatoron hot swappable? I got the Gatoron hot swappable. I'm not positive the optical switches were hot swappable. Optical switches tend to be a little bit faster, which is important for gamers. I'm not a gamer. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I think the hot swappable option was only available with the Gatorons,

but it'll take supposedly any Cherry-style switch. Nice, nice. So it sounds take supposedly any Cherry-style switch. Nice. So it sounds like you're pretty happy with it. So you currently go red, blue, or brown with the one you bought? I've got browns, which I like because I also have, as a desk toy, this Cherry switch tester, which has six different switches. Looks like green, clear brown blue and brown was always the one that i liked the best on that that switch tester which again is like a tactile switch

but not a clicky switch you can still feel it when you press it down it still has you can you can feel the point where the the action is activated it's not just smooth all the way down but it's not super clicky it's not super loud well mike good luck with your keyboard i hope this is your last one for a little while i hope so too i think you have to get like the cool like if you're gonna like go this route you got to get like the really cool keycaps with like different color schemes and everything and like have a holiday theme and a you know like, like 4th of July red, white, and blue keyboard for a few months. Yeah. There's, there's a lot of options. That's, that's for sure. Uh, I like this, this Mac key set because some of the accent keys are colored, but I know what you're talking about.

There are people who will create like visual, uh, montages on their keyboards based based on the different colors and how they arrange them so it looks like a sunset and all that type of stuff. And at the moment I say this, this could change. I have no interest in that sort of thing. It's only a question of time. Yeah, probably. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Ahrefs. Do you work for a big brand? Or maybe you run your own small business? Or even if you're a freelancer, the struggle is the same. Getting traffic to your website can be a real challenge. There is a lot of competition out there. But Ahrefs is the all-in-one SEO toolset that solves that problem, helps you get noticed,

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Our thanks to Ahrefs for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. So, Mike, the reason we joined today is to talk about focus and email, which I think is a subject that really needs attention because focus is perhaps most difficult when you're dealing with email. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I know that you actually have an NPU episode that published not too long ago, which is a great look at some of the different email applications that are out there. But I wanted to kind of dive into some of the workflow stuff, the perspective, how you handle email type stuff, regardless of the applications that you use. But maybe a good place to start here would be to talk

about our current email workflows. Yeah, that could go for a while. Yeah, yours is pretty, pretty in depth. You know, I was looking, I went back and listen to that show. And I'd recommend listening to that MPU episode if you haven't, in terms of kind of getting a foundation of what's the current state of apps and foundational technologies for email, but just, you know, how do you stay focused and get your email done? This is something I've struggled with over the years. And I feel like I'm in a better place with it now than I've been in a while. That was part of my, you know, kind of six month project of putting the wheels on straight.

The email, I have three sources of email. I have a personal email account and the Mac Sparky stuff and the legal stuff, and they both have different kind of levels and need. But one of the things that kind of came out of my exploration in email has been turning my Mac into what I call my EPU. And that's my fancy word for email processing unit, right? Where do I do the email? Because one of the problems I had before was I was trying to find the right combination of apps where I could do all email on any device. And I felt like I was spending more time trying to get that compatibility across platforms was getting in the way of actually being more efficient with email and so when I decided to

give up on being as efficient on mobile that solved a lot of problems for me because like for a while I was every year I was going through all these email apps and just having my heart broken by all of them and now I'm less likely to do that maybe we should start there Mike where are you with respect to what's your EPU well my EPU is my Mac and I say this as we record this I recently just published an article on the suite setup for what we consider to be the best iOS email client for iPhone and iPad. I have been testing just about every app I could get my hands on for the last several months on iOS, and it just confirms to me that I really don't want to handle email on my iOS devices. I want to keep my iPad for creating. And the Mac is great for all the admin type stuff.

And so that like you, I love that term email processing unit. I think I may have to adopt that. But the Mac is my email processing unit too. And one of the ways that I force constraints for myself on the Mac is by using Mailmate, which is an absolutely ugly application, but that's kind of the point. It's only plain text and those constraints

force me to be more focused when I'm in email so I can just get it done and then get on with other things. Yeah, so my app of choice is Apple Mail. And it's not because of love for Apple Mail, but just that it works. There's a bunch of third-party apps. Which one did you guys pick as the one to choose?

Well, that's the hard part because everybody has different needs when it comes to email too. Sure, there isn't a simple one answer. Yeah, so the best one for most people we picked was Spark because... I was going to predict that, yeah. Yeah, I mean from our perspective at The Suite Setup, we want to help people be more focused, more productive, more creative. And so Spark, I feel like with the smart inbox, it does a good job of trying to identify to identify what things are important it gives you all of the integrations that you need like send things to task managers and stuff like that but

even if you just saved an email as a pdf frequently it's going to be so much simpler than apple mail it's probably worth the switch yeah um and the um it's the right combination of features plus stability you know a lot of the apps that promise a combination of features plus stability. You know, a lot of the apps that promise a lot of features aren't that stable. Spark is a stable app. But yeah, I get that. But I just don't do, like I said, that was the trap I kept finding myself in is I want to do all these things on my iPad.

So I've got to get the email system that works. And a hold up for me on Spark, just to go down that rabbit hole for a second was the sharing link you know i like to share off links to emails all the time so i can go back and find them later and if you do it in spark they put their own spark email sharing link not just a generic and i hate that because now i'm stuck now i'm on my mac and i want to look it up do i have to install spark on my mac too and you suddenly just fall down this rabbit hole yeah i i agree but there is no option for that on ios anymore dispatch was the last app that did that poor one out for dispatch yeah long live dispatch yeah but we we didn't really want to get into the app so much but just kind of just kind of the idea now for uh for me, I have not entirely given up on

email on mobile. I'm a lawyer. Sometimes people will call me and say, I just sent you an email. It's very important. You read it right away. I can't just like not have email with me in my pocket. That's not very often, but I do need to have it when it's there. I can't be so precious to say to a client, Oh, but I'm very special. I don't have email on my mobile because I'm very focused. You know, that's not going to work. Um, so I have it in there. It's in, you know, with the new system in iOS 14, it's in the stack of all the other apps. It's not like somewhere I see it. And when I need to send an email and I'm on mobile, I 90% of the time write it in drafts. And so I have,

and I just keep Apple mail because it's on the other one. And then on the flip side on the Mac that I've looked at mailmate and I, I get where you're coming from. I like the simplicity of it. I like the plain text element of it, but I Apple script the heck out of app of, out of Apple mail and Apple mail is actually very good at Apple script. And like I've written scripts that can export emails

and I've done all these cool things and Apple Script is kind of the platform. And I take the Apple Mail app and then I plug onto that when it's working, the small cubed mail suite that gives me a whole bunch of tools I can add to it. I have SaneBox that adds a whole bunch of tools to it. So I've kind of turned Apple Mail into something that's workable for me.

But just in general, kind of starting at the top level, the EPU on the Mac is a great way to stay focused with email because then you're much less likely to get lost in email on your phone. And you're much more likely to draw boxes around it. And I guess that's another piece of email that I think we should mention is time blocking goes with email like peanut butter and chocolate. Like, you know, I talk about time blocking or hyper-scheduling all the time. And the general way I talk about it

is in terms of open pastures, right? There's something I want to do. There's something I want to do. There's something I want to make or create or some big client project that I want to dedicate time. So I create a pasture where I can roam and do that work. But it can also serve as a fence. There's something that takes too much of my time and I need to stop spending so much time on it. So I'm going to use time blocking or hyper scheduling to put a fence around that and say, okay, email gets this much time and no more. So I think that is also a key element to staying focused with email for me. Do you use time blocking with your email?

Do you use time blocking with your email? I do. I don't set a time block for email specifically, but usually it's an admin block and it's on my time block plan for my day, typically at the end of the day. My email checks usually happen at the beginning and then at the end. And I have, you mentioned SaneBox and AppleScript in kind of hacking Apple Mail to be a functional email client. And I think that's the right approach to take. SaneBox in particular is so easy to use that I would recommend anybody take a look at it. They're not sponsoring this show, but I've been using it and paying for it for years. And it's a quality service that keeps

getting new features. One of the ones that I just started playing around with is Sane Do Not Disturb. You can actually schedule times either on the weekend, so certain days, or during the weekdays. And that's what I have it set up for. So from 9am until 3pm, even if I open my email client, I'm not going to find anything in it because SaneBox is not going to allow messages to be delivered between 9 and 3. And you can do the thing where you send the automated message saying, oh, I'm sorry, I only checked my email at 3 p.m. I'm at the point where people don't need to know that. Maybe everybody just assumes that I'm kind of bad at email, but I feel like if people email me, they know I'm not going to get back to them right away. And so I'll check it at three. I'll usually clear things at that

point before I shut down for the day. And then I feel like when I come back in the next morning, I can deal with the stuff that's urgent and then move on from there. And again, I'm going through the inbox at that point, not all the other stuff, the same later stuff that sandbox is a great job of like this is really isn't that important you can check that later and i'll go through that like once a week it's it seems a little precious to me when you do the auto responder like i do not process email until this day i don't know i just like yeah people don't want to hear that you know right right i kind of get it too how complicated is it to turn that on in SaneBox? I've never explored having SaneBox just turn my email off for me for periods of the day. do not disturb for click the button you get the pop-up and then you just select either and you can do multiples so you could say don't deliver me email to this email address during the on the

weekends but also during the weekdays and you can pick that the times that it's going to be going to be quiet basically yeah and it works it just nothing shows up and uh that is enough because i completely lack self-control when it comes to email. Apparently, that's enough for me to just my brain to disconnect and do whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing instead without feeling the compulsion to go see what's there. All right. And that kind of raises the next email focus topic is when do you email? And for me, this is another thing that's kind of progressed over time. I've

mentioned this on the show at least once before, so some listeners may have heard it, but for the longest time I thought, well, in the morning I'll do my big email sweep. And, you know, and originally I w I was looking at email all day, you know, cause emails always coming in and I was letting myself get distracted by it. But then when I decided to bring some discipline, I'm like, all right, I'll give email an hour in the morning and then I'll look at it at the end of the day. And I realized, well, that's crazy. The morning is when I get my best work done. I'm not going to spend an hour of precious morning time on email. So my email times are what I call the morning check and the afternoon audit. And I chose those words very carefully because in the morning I check email.

I don't audit and respond to it a lot. And so much for this is where I put like constraints on myself. I go through the accounts and I only go through the Mac Sparky and Sparks law accounts. I don't even look at the personal account until the afternoon. And I just kind of ask a question with each one. This is kind of David Allen derived, but you know, is this an email that actually requires immediate action? And it's very rare that that's the case, but occasionally a client sends me an email with the problem that I've got to deal with that at that morning. Right. So if it's a short thing, I stop and address it right there, which is against my

better nature for email. I don't really want to be working out of the email app, but if it's short, I'll deal with it. Otherwise, I immediately assign it an OmniFocus task with a due date, like in the next couple hours, and it just goes into the mix for the day. With OmniFocus, it's very easy to add an email to a task. And that kind of gets me back to that whole linking thing. Because in OmniFocus, it uses the generic link, and I can go straight back into the mail app. And then the next question, if it's not an immediate rush, which like I said, maybe I get two or three of those a week that I have to do that with, you know, usually what it is, is what I call a process email. You know, if it's something

that, oh yeah, this is something I want to deal with. Maybe somebody asked me to guest on a show or customer has a question or something like that. And I have a folder in both those accounts called process. And I'm going to crowdsource this to the listeners of focused. I don't like that name process. It feels too blah to me, but you know, I want to do something better with that name, but basically it's a, it's a folder of email that I'm going to look at later and deal with. So process seems like the right word, but I just don't like it that much. And then if it's not something that needs to be processed later in the day, then it's one of three things, archive, delete, or black hole. And archive is just what it sounds like. Okay, great. I see that somebody sent me this note. That was nice. Archive it or delete. Wow, this is something I never need to see again,

but it's from somebody that I don't want to black hole, so I delete it. And then the third is the SaneBox feature where you can stick an email in there and you don't ever see email from that person again. And that's kind of nice too. Yeah, and that feature alone might make same box worthwhile if you get a lot of junk from people that you didn't sign up for their list in the first place i mean you can always go

command f and find unsubscribe in the emails and unsubscribe from lists but that doesn't always work and so or if you get something from a sketchy looking sender you know clicking unsubscribe from list but that doesn't always work and so or if you get something from a sketchy looking sender you know clicking unsubscribe may actually just tell them you're an actual human who cares about their email so you're going to get a bunch of bunch more viagra ads and offers from ethiopian princes uh so the safer way to deal with a lot of that stuff is just tell SaneBox, hey, I don't ever want to see anything from this sender again and drag it into the Sane black hole. And I can tell you from experience that that little bit of effort, essentially what you're doing at that point is creating an email rule.

But that pays dividends over time. I've been in the place where you just hit delete, hit delete, hit delete. And you kind of have that moment after you hit like, Oh, I'm probably going to get another one from this person. I know big deal. It just takes a couple of seconds, but you do that enough and you deleted hundreds of messages every single day. And that adds up quick. And not too long ago, I went through and spent a considerable amount of time training all those things into the same black hole. And it cut the number of emails that I got probably in half. And it just it feels like a much smaller mental burden you have to lift when you go into your email client and you see a number that's half as big as it used to be. a number that's half as big as it used to be. You are so right. I think that, I mean, hitting the unsubscribe button from reputable people that send you email and unsubscribing,

it just takes a moment. And if it's a company that I know of, or maybe I bought something from, I just don't want them sending me email. I don't mind taking the extra moment to go and properly unsubscribe. I think it's good for them to know. And I, as someone who has a mailing list, it's extremely expensive. I don't want to people, I would rather have people unsubscribe than just black hole me because I'm still paying for them. So I try to be good about that. But if it's somebody that I don't trust or just seems sketchy immediately in the black hole, it gets, and there's a mental weight to opening your email app and seeing so many unread emails that makes you not want to open the email app.

And it just like, it takes away from the actual thing you're supposed to do in email, which is get your work done and communicate with people. So do start taking the time to mindfully unsubscribe and black hole people. And it really will change your relationship to email, I think. Yeah. You know, one of the things that we talk about in the course that we've been building over at the suite setup is this question, whenever you see something in your inbox is, do I want to see this? And I like the framing of that because I think there's an unspoken

expectation that when something lands in your inbox, you are supposed to do something with it. When you ask yourself, do I really want this to be in here? It's kind of like giving yourself power and ability to take back control over what appears in your inbox. The moment that you start thinking that way, you don't feel so bad about putting things in the black hole because email essentially is a to-do list that other people can write on. And if you just continually take in all the inputs and try to become more efficient, that'll work to a point, but email is going to keep growing and it doesn't matter how efficient you get, eventually, you're going to be spending your entire day dealing with email, unless you figure out some systems to create some rules and auto classify these things. And,

and really, like the biggest quality of life improvement you can make in your focused work is to figure out a way to create a little bit more calm in your inbox, which is one of the reasons, by the way, that the Hey app is so great, in my opinion. I know you were experimenting with this. I'm experimenting with it as well. I am currently forwarding all of my personal email into Hey because it's really easy to do that. I've paid for it. So I've got my name as the address. That was one of do that i've paid for it so i've got the the my my name as the the address you know that was one of the things if you paid for a year then you got to keep the address even if you decided you didn't want it anymore and i feel like hey you can accomplish

the same sort of stuff using same box and any other email client but you got to create the rules and you got to train things and hey just forces you to make those decisions like the screener you have to answer do i want to get stuff from this person or not? So it's not just going to appear by default until you do something about it. It's almost like an opt-in approach to email instead of choosing to hide the things that you don't want to see. Yeah. I am also a hey subscriber and I'm running my personal email from it through it it it will not work for my my business accounts but it'll work for my personal stuff fine and the thing about hey that's interesting is like mike was saying it in essence puts the same black hole in the front of the

process the first time you get an email from somebody you decide hey uh do i want to ever get email from this thing you know yeah and you get to decide up front and if not if you press the no button you just saved yourself a bunch of time going forward you want to just take a minute to talk about our experiences with hey i have more to talk about with the workflow but maybe since we're there sure Sure. What are, would you recommend Hey to people listening that want to get more focused with their email? I would. I think if you only need one account and it's not a specific type like Gmail or Office 365, because you do have to use a proprietary Hey.com email address and you do not currently have a workflow where you send things to a task manager or something like that it's a great reimagining of of email and they're able to do that because it's a

proprietary account type and it's not just trying to use standard imap and stack some stuff on top of it which is part of the problem with a lot of those i iOS email apps is they try to hack standard IMAP and it doesn't really work sometimes. But Hayes is great. I mean, the screener itself, what it does, and it's really genius in its design, is it forces you to make those decisions up front. And by forcing you to do that, it doesn't feel like a big mental burden. But by not showing you anything until you've allowed things explicitly to show up, you go into Hey and you're like, oh, this is only the stuff I want to see. It completely changes the feel and the perspective of dealing with email. It almost feels like it's trying to make email fun again.

And I feel like it does a pretty good job of getting there. Yeah. I mean, it just it takes all the work out of it. Like if you, if email is really hard for you and you just want to pay a hundred bucks and have the problem solved for you, I think it's good for that. It's, I don't think it's really in a state where you could consider it

for your business accounts. But, you know, but, and also it's a good thing, even if you don't think you may want to pay a hundred bucks and get it, maybe just sign up for it for the two-week trial just to see if there are things that happen in Hay that you'd like to incorporate into your own system. I mean, virtually all those features are kind of doable with a SaneBox account, too. Yep. There are a couple things that are really cool about it, though, that you can't do in SaneBox.

I feel like the clips feature, for example, it's kind of like Kindle highlights for your email so you can find stuff easily. Have you played with that at all? Yeah, I mean, I'm aware of it. I haven't used it much because I'm using it with my personal account and there's not a lot real exciting stuff going on there. Well, basically clips, I mean, let's say you get a really long email and it takes you 10 minutes to read through the whole thing. And there's one or two sentences near the bottom that you want to be able to reference later. You highlight that. And then you, the little pop-up appears, you save it to clips, and then you can easily from the Hey menu, go to your clips and you see just that highlight. And then if you click on the little card where that highlight is,

it takes you to that email message. Yeah. So the best analogy I can come up with is like Kindle highlights for your email. But until you start doing that, you don't really realize how much time that can save. So, yeah, you can search and you can find stuff. But if you're trying to find things in a long email, it's still kind of limited in a lot of email clients, like how quickly you can get to that. I feel like Clips really helps a lot. I also really like the focus and reply feature where they kind of stack everything up and then you can crank through a bunch of emails together. Instead of like saying later, you have all the unimportant messages in a big folder. Well, Hey basically takes all of those unimportant messages

and turns it into a feed, kind of like a social media feed, which is kind of genius in my opinion and forces you not to become an email completionist, where if you don't get to the bottom of the feed, it's no big deal. I mean, a lot of little things like that force you to change your perspective on how you deal with email. And the way that it does it provides a lot of calm to your inbox, in my opinion. Yeah. And one of the things they do is they don't have an archive button. I mean, the first time I tried it, I'm like, well, where do I go to archive it? Well, you don't archive. You've either viewed it or you have it, and then that's that,

which is kind of the way I treat archive, but it saves me the trouble of having to push a button to do it. Yep. And yeah, I think there's a lot to like about it as well. So it's an interesting app. I mean, if they came out and they're, they've already said publicly,

they're going to come out where you can have your own hosted email through their service. So I could have David at max Sparky run through. Hey, I don't think I would though, because I've got my custom role for what I do with that and Apple mail rules. And I've got all these things that I've built over the years that are probably better than Hay for what I'm doing.

But there was a not insubstantial amount of effort put into building that. If you could magically move your work accounts into Hay, would you? Good question. I think there's a case to be made for that. On a page on their website where it talks about the business features that are coming, obviously the big thing is custom domains. And I feel like once you do that, then a certain percentage of people would be able to move it. I'm not sure that would be enough for me yet. But on the roadmap, it sounds like our team email features kind of like what Spark gives you. That is interesting to me. I think that if I was a team using Spark for Teams,

I would definitely look at Hayes' implementation of it just based on the experience with the app so far. I'm sure that the team features are going to be extremely well done. And that would eliminate the potentially the need for like help desk software, like Zendesk or help scout or something like that. Yeah. And so at that point, it becomes a lot more justifiable to throw some money at the problem. And I would definitely have to consider it. Yeah, I get it. I get it. All right. So that was a little diversion. I'd like to kind of go back to kind of the workflow and focus for email, however. And so we talked about the blocks when we look at it. One of the things I do is I kind of, I call it the button rule. So I've got this stream deck and we'll put a image in the show notes. But basically, on my Stream Deck, the Stream Deck has the ability to run Keyboard Maestro scripts.

So I've written Keyboard Maestro scripts to do everything I want with email. And for a long time, I had been running them through the keypad. My keyboard has a keypad on it. So I know in my head, one does this, one moves this to action. So I've got all these things in my head, one does this, you know, one moves this to action to, you know, so I've got all these kind of like things in my head, but then I would forget and then I'd stop using it because, you know, I'm not really sure. But with the stream deck, I can put icons on each button and stream deck can put up a different set of tasks based on the app you're in. So when I open Apple mail, my stream deck lights up with the image we've got in the show notes and blue is max sparky

and red is legal. And, um, I like to think about my morning email as a time when my hands are on the stream deck, not on the keyboard. And that's the whole idea of getting through quickly doing the email check, you know, so I can move messages with this to all of the important inboxes, you know, the, the later or the focused or the process or whatever I'm going to call it box. You know, I can put in the archive, I can put in the trash, I can put it in the black hole for the Mac Sparky stuff. I sometimes get customer support requests, you know, somebody's credit card didn't get charged right, or they have some kind of problem with their account. And that immediately goes into

customer support, which has to get handled. That's like one of those things that jumps the line. But I can do all of this just hitting buttons on the Stream Deck. And a good morning email check for me is one where my hands don't really leave the stream deck i like this a lot so basically you're using this for like email triage correct yes cool and actually maybe that's uh got something in the outline here regarding triage which is something i came across when researching this course so you mind if i share this quick? Yeah, let's talk about email triage. All right. I thought this was kind of brilliant. So the term triage, based on my research, that comes from the Napoleonic War. And it was a medical term that they used to identify which soldiers that were wounded they should prioritize care to. So they split them into buckets,

basically. Those who were likely to live regardless of the urgent care they received, those who were likely to die regardless of the urgent care they received, and those for which the urgent medical treatment would mean the difference between life and death. So as it pertains to email, and this is where I think mobile actually has a place in an email workflow is for triage using swipe gestures. If you can quickly put email into the right buckets, then that's great. And if you absolutely need to respond to something, because this is an email for which a timely response is going to make the difference, then you have the ability to do that. But you're not going in on your mobile device saying, okay, I'm going to read and reply to every single message that is in here. I think that's a recipe for disaster.

And the thing that was fascinating to me as I was doing this research is Napoleon's approach to his physical mail. And I wrote about this over at the suite setup along the lines of what we can learn from Napoleon Bonaparte in terms of email. But basically, there was a paper that someone had done, I'll find the link and put it in the show notes, where they were talking about Napoleon's life and kind of the systems that he had created. And he directed his assistant basically to leave all letters that he received unopened for three weeks. And then he would open them and he would kind of chuckle to himself and be satisfied with what a large percentage of those correspondences had resolved themselves and no longer required his attention. And I feel like you can definitely

take the same approach here with email. You basically believe that if you wait long enough before looking at it, then the majority of the non-important stuff is going to take care of itself. Yeah. I mean, that's one way to do it. Handle email, just don't answer it. Don't read it. Yeah. For me, like some of the stuff I do, it is important. Customer support is important to me. You know, some client email is important, but, you know, if I looked at that as an overall percentage, it's pretty small, you know, compared to the other stuff. Right. Right. I, uh, I used to, uh, I wrote a book about email, uh, a field guide about email several years ago. I'm going to probably update that at some point,

but the, one of the historical references I made into it was to E.B. White, the guy who wrote Charlotte's Web. And he wrote Charlotte's Web, and at the time, public libraries were taking off. And all the kids would go to the library. Charlotte's Web was a very popular book, and all the librarians had the same idea. To encourage the kids to read, they'd say, why don't you write a letter to the author after you read the book? So E.B. White's mailbox started getting bombed with emails from every kid in America, and he was writing each one of them back. And at one point, a kid wrote and said, how come you haven't written another book to follow up Charlotte's Web? And he wrote the kid back and said i'd like to

but i can't because i'm too busy answering your letters and the uh and he wrote them back and then the library and the kid gives the librarian the parent the librarian wrote him a nasty letter saying you shouldn't you know put this on these kids and don't make them feel bad you know what's wrong with you and he wrote back and he said well well, you know, I was telling him the truth. And he ends the letter to the librarian saying the morning mail is my enemy. And I just feel like that is just so true with email. And that is something that if you don't have like a focused workflow on email, it will take over. Yeah. I would, I would say that that can be true. And by default, it probably is true, but it doesn't have to be true. And that's where you got to stick up for yourself a little bit and

figure out what sort of systems and automations you can apply so that you don't dread going into your email, but it doesn't have to be a negative place like what would happen if you looked forward to every single email you you received it that used to be the case you know that movie you've got mail with tom hanks and meg ryan back in the day yeah people would look forward to to hearing those words no one looks forward to that anymore and kind of my thought is like well what what changed and it's the fact that we never reconsidered, I think, the terms of engagement. We're just like, oh, we can do this, so we will. And the defaults can lead you to a place where you don't want to be. So I want to go back, though, regarding the actions that you take

with the email messages themselves. You talked about the stream deck and you also mentioned sending tasks to OmniFocus to follow up with later. And one of the things that I've been thinking about lately is that there are a couple different types of email tasks. There are the ones where I need to do something and then attach that to an email and send it to somebody. And for that type of task, then sending it to a task manager is great. And I've got my own nerdy version of this. I shared it with you. I created a keyboard maestro macro for Mailmate, which has basic AppleScript support, basically lifts the URL of the message and the subject line, runs a regular expression to eliminate the line breaks, and formats it into a markdown formatted link that I can paste inside of Roam Research. But the problem with that approach is that your task manager doesn't know

whether the person that you sent the email to got back to you. And so if you use that for communication type tasks, then this can get out of hand, where you're getting all these reminders to follow up with somebody, even though they got back to you. And this is where again, sandbox is a feature that this alone is probably worth money, in my opinion, where when you reply, you just include something like oneweekatsamebox.com in the BCC field. What that does is it creates a reminder to follow up in a week with that person. So if I'm sending you an email about the next outline that we're working on for the show, I need some feedback from you and I don't get it within a week, then that email

pops back in my inbox as a reminder, oh, you got to follow up with David. But the beauty of the Sane Reminders is that if you do follow up, then that reminder disappears, which is great because I don't need my focus to be interrupted anymore. But your task manager, there's no way it's going to know that. So if you schedule it, it's going to show up no matter what, unless you manually go back in there and delete it when the person gets back to you. So I feel like this just is one of those little things that makes the system and the friction associated with it a lot less. emergency, you know, like something that literally gets a deadline in OmniFocus within hours of the time I process it. And the reason I send it out of OmniFocus is because I don't want to be working out of email. I think that's a huge mistake. We can put a pin in that. We'll come back and talk about that in a minute. But for a lot of stuff, you are absolutely right. Emails, you should not

be sending emails willy nilly into your task system because then all you're doing is creating subroutines for you that you do not need to run right you know you put a thing in there like oh i wrote so and so on such a day did he write me back the sane box um service that i i mean i if that's the only feature sane box had and the price didn't change, I would still gladly pay it because I use that probably between five and 20 times a day. Yeah, that's great. And they also have a thing called the SaneNoReply box. They actually have a box you can add that creates a mailbox that shows you emails you've sent that you never got a reply from. And that has saved my bacon as a lawyer so many times. So, I mean, they really do have a system for tracking from. And that has saved my bacon as a lawyer so many times. So, I mean,

they really do have a system for tracking this. And like, that's something I'm not really sure that, that Hay really tries to solve. Yep. Agreed. But this, uh, when you're working with email, this is so beneficial to be able to have basically an email tracking system without you having to be the one doing the tracking. Yep, exactly. And the beautiful part about it, not to beat the sandbox drum too much, is that this is like an add-on service that you can apply to IMAP, Gmail, whatever. So it works in whatever email client you decide to use. It's essentially a bunch of server-side email rules that you can use before email gets into any client that you decide to use. It's essentially a bunch of server side email rules that you can use before email gets into any client that you decide to use. Crazy powerful. Yep. And so just to kind of, so the morning check, this is how we got down this rabbit hole, Mike. So the morning check,

as I go through, I try if at all possible to push stream deck buttons alone and have the morning email process. So if something came in, it's on fire, I'm going to be able to take care of it. Usually it's not. And it's push off to the afternoon. And then I get back to the important work of the day and it feels great. Now I don't have a sane box rule to like stop email at that point, but I have a trick. This is a power tip. Okay. Everybody quit the app i quit mail i mean you know i mean i don't need to keep mail open all day you're right you know it's not asynchronous communication for me i've done the morning check so if something was on fire now if something else

is on fire between now and like four or five o'clock when i'm going to reopen it that's okay you know so i i just quit the app. That's my trick. Yeah. An instant boost to your productivity command queue. Yeah. Uh, and then in the afternoon I do a separate, I do the email audit and that's where I give it 45 minutes. I literally have a timer I press and I say 45 minutes and that's for all the email for legal and Max Sparky. And I try and get through as much of it as I can. And, um, I was in the past, I would let it accumulate. And now by the end of the weekend, cause I will give it another hour over the weekend. If, if, uh, I will

just not answer a bunch of stuff if I can't get through it. But I like to start Monday with everything empty again. Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. I don't have my, the reason I don't have just email as my time blocks and I have admin is that I kind of combine email processing with the other communication stuff that we use at Blancmedia. And I know that my situation is a little bit different than a lot of other people, especially in corporate, where we don't have to be connected all the time. We're not constantly in Slack, for example. And if someone mentions you, it's expected that you get back to them within 10 minutes. I'll go in there at the beginning and at

the end of the day to reply to things. And that's where email is going to be a source of stuff that I need to do. And so is Basecamp or Notion. We're experimenting with that at the moment. But those notifications in Notion currently, that's going to be typically things that I can do to help get somebody else

unstuck. So there's two places basically that that stuff would come from. But then once I've resolved those things and I know everybody's good, then I can disconnect and go create. And that's typically what I do from 9am till 3pm every single day. Maybe I'll pop back in around lunchtime to see if somebody needs something. But for the most part, I'm working on my own and I don't have to check in with the team during that period. It's very different than a lot of other ways that I have worked and definitely is my favorite. Well, at the end of the day, have a whole process you know we talk about shutdown and email is the most time-consuming part of my shutdown routine it's the first thing i do and i like that's why i have to put a box around it because if i let email go it'll take the entire shutdown

period and then i won't actually get shut down but in addition to email i clear out my base camps and i clear out the you know the slacks i'm in and I check on Twitter, you know, I do all of that stuff during that process, but email and 45 minutes for me is the outside time. A lot of days I'm done with it like 30, but it just depends. Um, one of the things I think is important from a focus perspective with email is when you're doing these sessions with email, and I've mentioned this already in the show a little bit, you should avoid working out of email. You know, if you have a client that asks you to do something, I will process that into a task for the client to do the thing. I will not leave email open and go work on that and then come back and, you know, to email in 20 minutes to finish

processing email. I think that lies the road to madness. You know, when you keep email up and you start working out of email, like an inbox, it's a, it's a bad idea. Yes, I completely agree. One of the quotes that I came across when we were working on this course that Robert Louis Stevenson, who said something along the lines of inboxes are good enough in their own right, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for work. And I feel like a lot of people, if you just accept the defaults around email, it can feel like you are working out of your inbox. But when you measure what you are actually able to produce at the end of the day or create at the end of the day, for me, like that's kind of my,

my metric to how productive I was, how effective I was. Then, uh, there's a direct correlation between the time I spend in email and the lack of things that I was able to get done. Yes. Agreed. I like when I do time tracking, the label for email is process email. It's not just email. And you know, it. And we have all these little hacks we do to ourselves, but every day I look at that. Process email. It's not email. I'm not going to spend the next time on email. I'm going to spend the time processing email. So sometimes processing means writing a reply, but often it just means figuring out what to do with it and getting out of the email application. And that has made

a big difference for me. That's the goal. And that's the perspective that can feel a little bit weird, I think, is determining that the real work does not get done inside the inbox. And so you want to get out of there as quickly as you can so you can do the things that are really important. as you can so you can do the things that are really important. I've got a similar process, I guess, where I'm going to go through and I'm going to take care of everything, cross all the T's, get my inbox completely cleared out as part of my shutdown routine at the end of the day. The thing that's not going to get completely processed, though, is everything in the say and later folder. Typically, my day for going through say and later, because this only happens about once a week, it's usually Friday afternoons. And so if I were to have the unread badge show up on my say and later folder, it would continue

to climb throughout the week. And then before the weekend, that's typically when I want to go through all that stuff. Usually there's nothing in there that really requires me to do anything with it. Occasionally there is, and I've got to apologize. Hey, sorry, didn't get your email. But that's a trade-off I'm willing to make. I'm willing to be bad at email so that I can be good at other things. Yeah. When I put stuff into that process folder, that's not all my email. You know, the processing that gets done with my shutdown are the things that I've specifically put in the process folder, uh, the same later. And I actually have more than just saying later,

I have several same boxes. Uh, those get dealt at a later time. I don't check them once a week. I probably check them a couple of times a week, but that is not in my daily routine. And that's why I'm able to kind of keep that box around email and generally take care of the stuff that's most important. Right. And one other thing I'll add here is that don't overlook the importance of email rules, because if all you're doing is pushing things off to a different mailbox to process later, then you're kind of in a way kicking the can down the road. You're borrowing time from future you.

So if you know that this newsletter, for example, I want to read this every time it comes in, but I don't want to have to manually forward this to something like an Instapaper queue. One of the things that I've done is I use Feedbin for my RSS. And Feedbin has an email address, kind of like Instapaper, where you can forward things to. And I used to do that. I used to forward newsletters to Feedbin, and then those things show up in my RSS feed alongside all the other RSS feeds that I subscribe to. But one of the things that makes that even simpler and eliminates even more friction is when I sign up for those email newsletters, I just give them

that address. And now it never even shows up in my inbox. I don't have to create a separate rule for it. It just automatically appears inside of NetNewsWire where I can read it whenever I have time, which is kind of an additional thing I used to do is forward those things. And that was, you know, going back to the original approach to email, okay, all this stuff comes in and I got to decide where this stuff goes. I realized that I don't need to just accept all these things into my inbox all the time. This really never needs to show up here since I always just forward this to this other place and able to go into that website, enter that address. And now those things just show up in the proper place. And that creates just a little bit more peace of mind, a little bit more calm

in my inbox, but you do that enough and it adds up considerably. Yeah, agreed. I mean, all those little things help. I mean, one of the things I like about Apple Mail is the rule system is amazing if you're willing to run it off of Mac. Yeah. But email rules can be your friend in this process. You know, and the idea of getting the process of email managed, but then getting out of the email app. I also have come over the years to really like a workflow I use where I use the drafts app to write most of my email. And drafts is an app that, you know, we've talked about on basically every podcast I've ever made, but it's a very simple text app, but they have a really easy, you know, export this to email.

So you write text in drafts and the first line is the subject line and this is starting with the second line, it's the body line. So I can write emails if I got client issues or whatever. Often I dictate them in the draft. Sometimes I type them. At the end of the day, I push a button and it opens up my email app and composes an email using that text that I've put in there. And the benefit of this is number one, I can spend time writing email without being in email, which avoids the temptation and just general morass of email. And the second thing is I just never get caught up with the inbox. I never see it. Yeah, exactly. I was talking to Sean Blanc about this today. He's got something similar where when he goes into Apple Mail to create a message, it takes

him to a separate folder, not his inbox, which is empty so that he never even sees any of those messages because his goal when he goes in there is to create the email and to send it off. And it's when you get distracted by this email from this person, your brain starts thinking, oh, I should be doing this thing instead of what you had decided at the beginning of the day was the most important thing for you to do. That's when you get off track and you end up doing things that really aren't moving the needle.

Drafts is a great way to do that, too. If you had an application, which essentially is how you're using drafts, where you could only compose and not receive, then that is going to be a force constraint that's going to help you focus on the task at hand yeah it's it's great and i strongly recommend it because one of the things i do is i'll open up at a certain time in the day when i'm working through my list and omni focus i'll just have omni focus on the left side of drafts on the right side. And often I'll use this dictation for this, but I can also type. And I'll just go through my OmniFocus list for the day, anything that involved writing an email. And I'll just write them all at once

in drafts and then send them off as a group. And this isn't in my block of time for processing email this is during my work day you know and those emails just go out and it feels great i can get through you know 10 of them in 15 minutes you know and then they're gone and i actually never actually look at the mail app in the process yeah that's that's genius don't even open the door to distraction. Yeah. But I feel like writing email is different than processing email. And that's partly because of the job I have. The email I write sometimes takes a lot of considered thought. And sitting in an email app while the inbox counter keeps ticking up is not, you know, it's like asking someone to read a good book while a bomb is ticking down sitting next to them. It's not that easy. I've been there where you're composing a message and then you hear the ding in the background and you're still composing and you

hear another ding and you hear another ding and you just keep thinking I'm falling further and further behind. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that is also, I think a huge part of this is the mindset of email. For too long, I had the mindset is that I'm the guy who answers all his email and I want to be known as the guy who answers email. If you take the time to write me, I will take the time to write you back. And then I realized a bunch of people will write you forever and you get in an infinite loop if you do that. And you just have to accept that if you do that. And you just

have to accept that you can't answer all the email. Yeah. And it's not just email. I mean, that's the most common source, I think, for a lot of people. But it's all of the inboxes in your life. So email, social media, text messages. You could be the guy who needs to reply to every message or mention on Twitter. If your family has a group text message thread, always be the person who chimes in right away. If you reconsider the rules regarding the inboxes in your life, and you try to establish the rules in your favor. You know, this is what I want this inbox to look like. This is what I want the interactions that happen here to look like. Just the fact that you're considering that a lot of times is enough to create the change that you're looking to see. All right, Mike. Lightning round. let's talk some email tips all right some of these we've kind of talked about

a little bit already but uh first one i'll just reiterate because it's so important get out of your inbox whenever possible don't just accept the the default rules regarding inbox management and specifically email yeah uh you mentioned earlier the ding i mean turn the ding off turn the notifications off email is not accepting everybody repeat after me email is not asynchronous communication you know just because someone emails you doesn't mean you stop and reply and um and there's no reason to have notifications on email i know there's people listening that have to have it because they have a crazy boss,

but I would really argue with your boss that that's a mistake. They're trying to turn your email into asynchronous communication if they want you to be a productive employee. So there's a lot of internet articles on it. Go find them, share them with your boss. If worse comes to worse,

tell them that Max Barkey said so, that they can't do that to you anymore. Yeah, and if you still can't convince them, share them with your boss. If worse comes to worse, tell them that Max Sparky said so, that they can't do that to you anymore. Yeah. And if you still can't convince them, look for an email client that allows you to use VIPs and then not just set those people as VIPs, but set your notifications so that you only receive them from VIP senders. And no matter what else you do, absolutely turn that stupid unread badge off. Yeah. Amen. Think about what are you doing with email?

I mentioned earlier that email is not your inbox. It's not your task manager. Be mindful about that. That's an easy trap to fall into. Are you leaving email in your inbox or like my process folder? Am I treating that as a glorified task manager it's not for me the way i treat it is okay i'm putting it here so i know it's there until the end of the day but by the end of the day it's going to be turned into a task or answered or deleted or whatever but you can't if you're using that those those delay boxes for more than a day or two, then you are asking for trouble.

Yep. Those are essentially additional inboxes. And that's fine to have additional inboxes. Your task manager is another inbox. For me, my paper notebook is another inbox. But the more inboxes you add to your system the more complexity you have and I firmly believe that your system should be as complicated as it needs to be but no more complicated than that

so make it as simple as possible if you need five different inboxes and you need to check them all every day that's fine

but don't add a sixth one just because David Allen said so or it's part of the GTD tree you know that's something I've been thinking about

with the reference file I don't send stuff to like an Evernote type app anymore. For a long time, that was firmly a part of my workflow. I got to have Evernote because I got to have a place for all this reference file stuff. I just leave it in my archive folder. I can find it later when I need it. And if it's important for a project or something, then it'll go into a specific app for that. You're a Rome research guy.

I mean, that is reference. I mean, I think digital tools have eliminated that need that David Allen covered. I feel like, you know, technology has overtaken him. True. And the, uh, the daily notes are kind of the digital tickler file, but that's another topic for another day. Another tip, uh, mentioned this already, but schedule your email checks. Put constraints around the time that you're going to be spending on email. Put it on your calendar, set it for an hour. If you get done early, great, then feel free to close it and move on to something else, but don't go beyond that. Amen. Mike said earlier, do I really want to see this? And I think that's a mandate for you as you're going to take email on. Do not just press delete.

Look at each email comes in, you know, turn yourself into your own screener. Like we were talking about with the hay service where you can go through and start unsubscribing where it makes sense or using the same box black hole or something like it to make sure that you don't get hit with a bunch of this stuff. And when you can slow down the influx of mail coming at you, which is really another feature of SaneBox too, it really makes the process of email something that you can conquer as opposed to be conquered by. Yeah, stem the email tide. That's the goal.

And I have one more tip for you. Um, go, I just started watching it, the sweet setup.com slash focused. It's a great course on email and, uh, our friend and yours, Michael Schmitz has been spending a lot of time putting this together, you know, as his friend and talking to him. I know you've been working on this for months. And then the idea behind it is to, to really give people a way to get better at email. And I'm really glad you guys made that course and you can get a discount as a focus listener. Yes. So, uh, if you use that URL, the suite setup.com slash focused, that will save you 10%. And that is on top of the launch week discount so if you follow suite setup at all you know we typically have things like 20% off for the the first week so you can actually use

the focused coupon code to get 10% off of that price and if it's after the launch week and the 20% is off then it'll get you still get you a discount at 10% off the full price. And you're right. This has been my baby now for the last several months at this point. I am really excited. We're getting close to launching it. It's as we, this episode is released, it's available today. So go check it out. If you need a little bit more help creating some calm in your inbox. All right. Well, there we go. We are the Focus Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Please give some money to St. Jude if you can. We'd really appreciate it. Thank you to our sponsor today, HRFs, and we will see you in a couple of weeks.