Focused - 66: Putting Email in its Place

Episode Date: February 5, 2019

David and Mike navigate the minefield of email, sharing strategies and workflow tips to help you curb inbox addiction and reclaim your focus.

Welcome to Focused, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hello, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? Doing well. How about yourself? Good. It is time to talk about email on the Focused podcast. Yep, yep. The email problem. I think there's a rule that you can't have a podcast with me on it without it hitting email at some point or another.

That's true. You did write the book on it, didn't you? But this one is different. You know, we're on MacPowerUsers, we cover email or even automators with the kind of the technical side of email as the focus of that episode. You know, what's the better email apps, etc. We're not going to be talking about that today. Today, I'd like to focus on the way email gets in the way of you being focused and why email can be just such a big time suck for so many of us and maybe some ideas about how to prevent that from happening. Yeah, absolutely. I think to bring a different perspective to what you just said, a lot of places where you hear them talk about email,

they talk about it from an efficiency standpoint. How can you crank your email even faster? And that is beneficial. There's some great tools that are available. We'll talk about a couple of them. But really what we want to focus on is how you can deal with email more effectively. And that requires a totally different perspective, not just assuming that everything that lands in your inbox is actually something that you should be spending your time and attention, your energy on. Before we get into that, though, I do want to shout out real quick to Travis, who is somebody that I met at the Focus Course Live. I attended Sean Blanc's event last week as we record this in Kansas City and met Travis, who is another former free agents listener who

is not a free agent. So I got to talk to Travis for a little bit. He shared some stuff about the show, which I really encouraged. Yeah, I met quite a few of those at PodCon as well. A lot of free agents listeners that want free agents. Yep. So I guess maybe it's a selective, what's the term for that? There's a bias where you find things to verify the decisions that you made. But ever since we made the decision to rebrand free agents, I've been hearing from a lot of people like Travis. And I just wanted to call Travis out on the show and say thanks for the conversation. It was great to meet listeners. And because it was a small event, there were only about 30 people there and Sean capped it at that. I got to talk to Travis for quite a bit, which was pretty nice. Also want to say thanks to Chris Upchurch and Andre, who in the forum have given some very

detailed feedback on their own personal retreats. Chris wrote up a big long thing for his blog and then also shared it in the forum with a link to the blog. We'll put the link to that in the show notes so people can go check that out. He did a great job talking about what he did and kind of the clarity that came from it. And that reminds me, David, you said you were going to do a personal retreat. Have you scheduled these yet? Oh, Mike. Oh, Mike. me, David, you said you were going to do a personal retreat. Have you scheduled these yet? Oh, Mike. Oh, Mike. You know, the challenge of having two things, this is something that has been an ongoing thing for me is, you know, I have a law practice and I have the geek stuff I do. And then we had a

significant illness in the family late in 2018. And it just, it was a test of all of my productivity, power, prowess, you know, everything I could do to just kind of keep all the plates in the air and not having anything crash to the ground. So I'm still kind of digging out of that a little bit. And I know it sounds silly two months later to be still digging out, but, but I am, and I'm getting closer and I'm going to do a retreat. I've got a birthday coming up just actually a few days after this thing launches, this episode. And I'm definitely going to take that day for some time to myself and reflection. But I feel like what I really need is a couple days. Like I need like some space.

I need to go somewhere else. I need enough time to kind of decompress out of things so I can look at things objectively. And in my head, that's going to happen after I ship the next major video field guide, which I'm working on. So it's coming, but I'm going to do a small one very shortly, but I'm going to do a proper one, you know, following Chris and Andre and you probably in a month or two. All right. Well, no judgment here. I mean, this whole podcast is based on the idea of what do you do when you fall off the horse? Yeah. So I get it. But I do want to encourage people who

have toyed around with this idea. Chris and Andre, again, this is in the focused forum, big long right up here. And Chris had asked if anybody else had gone through and done their personal retreats. There's a lot of great ideas there about how you can implement this and kind of tweak things to fit your life. So the way I do it is not necessarily the right way to do it. The way you're going to do it, David, is going to be great for you, but probably not the way I would do it. And so what you get in this thread is a bunch of different ideas. And if you go through it, spend a couple minutes, you'll probably see something that jumps out to you and be like, aha, yeah, that's what I want to do. Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff happening in that focused forum. So if you're interested and want to talk to some fellow travelers, head over to talk.macpowerusers.com. And there's a forum

right there for the focused group. Cool. All right. So let's jump in here with the topic of email. And I kind of went nuts on this outline. So we can kind of go through this point by point or jump wherever you want, David. But once I started typing... Let's start with the problem because everybody, you know, anytime you talk about email, almost anybody you talk to is going to groan. When's the last time you talked to someone about email who's like, oh, yeah, I love email. That's great. So exciting. You know, nobody's excited about email these days. weirdly passionate about this topic. So I did some digging and I found a couple different studies that I wanted to call out. One is done by the Radikati Group. And this is kind of like a volume of email study where they tracked the number of emails that were sent and kind of charted the trends and projected this out a couple of years. So according to that study, which was done in 2017, it's estimated that 293

billion emails will be sent every day in 2019. So that's this year. And that adds up to about 74 trillion emails this year, which is a whole lot of emails. Yeah. Wow. And then if you break it down by an individual person, the average user receives 126 emails per day and sends 30. Now, an interesting trend that I saw from this study is that the number of emails that we receive per day keeps going up. But the number of emails that we send per day keeps going down. And to me, that kind of hints at we're getting more junk email or emails that we don't necessarily need to be receiving. And the core purpose of email is communication, but we're not communicating back as often in email just because we don't have enough time. Yeah. And you're right. I mean,

I do think that a lot of it is automatically created email and it's real you know it's a challenge i mean we we talked about you can go to mac power users you want to learn how to deal with spam and all that stuff but the um i i think that people are smarter now and they also are sending you a lot of relationship-based email i guess uh if you buy something somewhere if you sign up for a web service suddenly you're getting tons of notifications and emails in that regard, too. But the ones that really weigh on me are the emails written by humans. I mean, you can deal with a robot email easily enough. that puts the cognitive load on you in terms of trying to stay focused when you know other people are sending things to you, quite often expecting some kind of response.

Yeah, exactly. And that kind of leads into the findings for the next study, which is an Adobe Systems study, which shows that the average person spends 6.3 hours per day dealing with email, 3.2 dealing with work email, 3.1 dealing with personal email. And the interesting thing from this particular study to me is that the big problem is not the 6.3 hours per day, although that is a lot of time. The big problem is the lack of boundaries because 90% of people who responded said that they check personal email at work and 87% check work email outside of the office. And 80% look at email before going into the office, 30% even check it before getting out of bed. And unfortunately, for my generation, that goes up to 45%. So this, this to me is something that needs to be changed. This is the biggest enemy to focus your morning routine, starting your day right. I mean, if you're going straight to your inbox to

see what kind of fires you need to need to put out when you get there, even though you're not in the position most of the time to do anything about it, it's going to steal your train of thought. You're going to be thinking about those things, not able to do anything about them. And it's going to completely rob your, your the joy that it potentially has if you do the things like we talked about when we discussed the morning routines and you set yourself up for success. Checking your email is the quickest way to sabotage that. I have to admit, I have some questions concerning this Adobe study. I mean, 6.1 hours a day in email, is that an hour 6.3 as an average?

Yeah, yeah. I find that really hard to swallow. I mean, I don't know. I'm sure there are people I know that spend that much time, but very few of the people I know would spend that much time. Yeah, well, I've worked in a semi-corporate environment before, so I kind of get it. And there

are other studies that kind of paint a bigger picture here. I didn't want to just share a whole bunch of stats. But really, the thing here is not that they're staring at their email client for 6.3 hours, but you look at your email, and then you go to write a report. And then 20 seconds later, you hear the ding, and you switch back to your email and now you're in there again and you're constantly switching context like that that's where the real cost to productivity or focus happens is the fact that it's always in the back of your mind you know and really what's what's happening is that we're becoming literally addicted to our our inboxes and so i i guess, you know, maybe you have to take those findings with a grain of salt. But I think even for the average person,

there is more than 6.3 hours during the day where at least at some point in there, you're not able to fully focus on what you're doing because the thought, oh, I better go check that inbox is going to be there. on what you're doing because the thought, oh, I better go check that inbox is going to be there. Yeah. And I do think that you're right. I mean, that's the people that use the inbox as a productivity system, you know, as their task list and a bunch of other things as well. And I think that is probably unhealthy, especially in terms of what we're talking about today, is keeping your focus and not getting lost in your email. Yep. And I know people who are in sales and they say, you know, I have to check my email because someone wants a proposal. And if I can turn it around in 15 minutes, I'm going to get

that order. And if I can't, it's going to go to somebody else. But I even I met somebody at the focus course who works with these big companies, does video for these big events, rock concerts, stuff like that. And he said, basically, I am a problem solver. When somebody needs something, they email me and I have to get it taken care of. And there isn't like a failure scenario. He can't say, no, I can't get this done. He just has to figure out a way to make it work.

So this guy's job is putting out fires and problem solving. But even he admitted that even though all of this communication happens during email, there are things that he can do and there are boundaries he can establish so that he can disconnect from it for a time. And this is really the core argument that I always have with people who say like, well, I can't disconnect from my email. I can't tell you or convince you that yes, you can. But I think it's an important mindset shift that has to happen. You have to come to the realization for yourself that even if you have to be responsive during certain times, there are places and periods where you can set up these boundaries and reclaim some sanity. You don't have to be connected to your inbox 24 hours a day. But for some people who are there right now,

it's hard to see a future where that isn't the case. Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think that everybody always talks about the exception when we get on the subject of staying focused and not letting email be the boss of you. But I think those exceptions are not as common as you think. And there's plenty of people that don't need to be available 24-7 for their customers to make their living who still put themselves in this email prison.

Yep. Whether you think you can or you can't, disconnect from your inbox. You're right. To paraphrase Henry Ford back in the day. Yeah, yeah, I agree. If you're looking for a way to create some space and some margin, it's there. But as long as you think that it isn't there, then that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're right. thing i think that um that the reason that we get hung up on email is because it's an easy drug i mean it's just email is in small pieces like if you have big things you're working on you know the the idea of focus and to to make you know the best things um that stuff is hard and it takes you know focus from your brain it It takes big blocks of time. And a great way to avoid getting into that stuff is to pretend you're being productive by spending your day in email.

Right, right. Busyness does not equal productivity. Effort doesn't equal work. You know, we kind of talked about that with Chris Bailey. Just because you're exhausted at the end of the day doesn't mean you got anything done. It probably means you were in your email all day. But the fascinating part to me about all of this is the fact that this is an addiction. And for people who have dealt with addictions in other areas of their life, they probably cringe when they hear that term. But I want to paint a picture here because

I've dug into some of the science behind this and just real high level. I want to talk about what happens in your brain when you hear those things. Because everybody kind of knows that, oh, I hear that thing and I go check my email and I probably shouldn't do that, but I got it all under control. Well, there's a good chance if you've been doing that for a while that you don't. Because if you leave your email open in the background, you hear that ding, you feel compelled to go check it because it might be important. It might be something that you should respond to right away. You don't know that it is, you don't know that it isn't. And that variable reward scenario creates that compulsion where you just have to see what that was. And the research shows that when you hear that ding, that variable reward scenario, you do that long enough and it causes

your brain to release dopamine. It's the pleasure chemical. And it happens automatically. It's the same chemical reaction that occurs when an alcoholic takes a drink or a drug addict takes a hit. And it's automatic. It's a physiological thing that you can't control if you've been doing this for a long time. It's like Pavlov's dog salivating when they heard the bell. So step one to reclaiming your focus is to recognize that this is happening. And then you can start to take small steps to move in the other direction. Yeah. James Cleary talked about in his Habits book how even some of the studies show that that dopamine hit comes not at the moment that you are reading, that you're taking the drug.

Yep. But it actually comes with the anticipation of receiving it. Exactly. And I think that applies to email even more than some of these other scenarios because it's just exactly, you hear the ding or you see the little notification flash across your screen or you see the badge on your icon. icon. And the idea of, you know, the solution to all your problems, or someone telling you how great you are, is just sitting there waiting for you. Yeah, exactly. I'm glad you called that out, because you're right, it is the anticipation, it's not the physical action. When you, when you, an alcoholic actually takes the drink, or the drug addict actually takes the hit, at that moment, there's a lot of other factors that are being played into. But right before that,

the thing that drives them to do that, that's the thing that is triggered by the dinger of the notification. Yeah. And while email is not, you know, something as, you know, at the level of something that's more serious addiction, it is much more frequent. And, you know, there's very few things that can constantly feed you that hit like an email notification if that's what does it for you, you know? Yep. It's death by a thousand paper cuts. Yeah. And so I do think that that's something that we all need to be aware of. And even the smart ones among us that have turned off notifications and turned off badges and turned off the ding, I have caught myself doing it. Sometimes just like there's something I need to do, something important I need to work on, and somehow my finger just goes to the mail app or my mouse clicks open the inbox and

without any explanation my brain just does it as an escape mechanism and it works because it allows me to stop the pain of working hard on something and then i fall into a time vacuum that usually lasts about 30 minutes you know and then i wake up and like, what just happened? Have you ever experienced that, Mike? Yeah, I mean, I'll tell them myself here. Like one of the points later on is to delete email from your phone, which I have done. And I've found myself,

even though I don't have an email app on my phone, including the stock mail app, I even deleted that one, going into Safari and logging into my web mail to see what's there. Now, obviously, there's more friction associated with that. And so that's the whole idea behind eliminating email on the phone for me is if there's enough friction, it will cause me to stay on the right path. But I still find myself gravitating there occasionally, and I have to reel it back in. Yeah, I do think it's an easy trap for us all to fall into. And it is the, you know, in that sense,

email is the enemy of focus. And that's the reason we're making this episode. We've got more to talk about it. But before we do that, I want to take a minute to talk about our first sponsor. And that's our friends over at Timing. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Timing, the app that tracks your time automatically instead of manually. So let's talk about why you should track your time. For anyone billing their hours, this is obvious. But even if you are employed or not billing per project, you need to estimate how long a specific task is going to take.

And time tracking helps you stay on track with those estimates to make sure you don't end up in the red with your projects and do a better job at estimating your time so you don't end the day being sad because you didn't get done what you wanted. And all that can help you make more accurate time estimates in the future because timing is going to be watching what you're doing while you're on your Mac and giving you accurate reporting. So that's what timing does. Instead of making you start and stop timers, timing automatically tracks how much time you spend

on each application, document, and website. It shows you exactly when you are working on what and when you slacked off and how productive you've been. Timing, Mike, would probably show you when you fell into email for 30 minutes because it's always watching. So you know how to you've been. Timing, Mike, would probably show you when you fell into email for 30 minutes because it's always watching. So you know how to improve your productivity. Timing's functionality is similar to iOS 12 screen time,

but for Mac, and honestly, it's better. It gives you more detail. And manual tracking and adjustments are still possible with Timing's automated approach. So you can always go in and assign time to a specific project or add something that you've done before. Like in my Timing application,

when I go do a workout, I report it in Timing by adding it as a manual entry when I get back to my Mac. Plus it has a gorgeous new dark mode. But you know, work doesn't just happen at your Mac. So that's why Timeline automatically makes suggestions for filling gaps in your time. And that way you'll never forget to enter a meeting. When you come back to your Mac, it just says, hey, you've been gone for an hour.

What were you doing? You fill that in and Timeline's now got your time tracked for you. And with the automatic sync feature, your track time will magically appear across all of your Macs. So even when you work on the go with your MacBook, you'll have a full picture of your iMac once you get home. I've been using timing. I definitely get better data with timing than I do with other things where I have to throw a switch. In fact, I'm just kind of giving up on those because I never get them right. I always end up with entries of, you know, checking email for 15 hours because I started it and then went to

bed. So, you know, timing just solves that for you because it watches and actually gives you the exact applications, websites, and documents that you're working in. It's a great app. It's in your toolbar on your Mac, and it just works. Timing is so confident that you'll love their fuss-free approach. They offer a totally free trial. So download the 14-day trial today by going to timingapp.com slash focused and save 10% when you purchase. Once again, that's 10% off. Just go to timingapp.com slash focus. Stop guessing how you spend your time and instead focus on doing what you're good at. We thank Timing for all of their support. All right. So before the break, we were talking a lot about the problem with email. Let's give people some hope. Let's talk about some things

that you can do to reclaim your focus, even if you have to manage email, because this is something that everybody has to manage to a certain degree. But this is, I guess, kind of perspective tips for people who just feel completely overwhelmed. First thing you can do is you can recognize email as the potential focus pitfall that it is. One of my favorite quotes is by Sun Tzu, the military strategist. He says, if you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. Well, the war is for your attention and recognizing that the volume of email is going to go up and giving yourself permission to say no to a few things and set some boundaries and kind of change the terms regarding email and how

you deal with it, that can go a long way in helping you overcome the sense of overwhelm that it can create. Well, I think also one of the things that it really makes a difference is when you look at yourself at the end of the day, email is like almost eating junk food, you know, as opposed to eating healthy food. And you get to the end of the day, the topic of the show is focus. We want people to be able to focus on what's most important to them. And while email allows you to divert attention and go easier in your brain, at the end of the day, you don't accomplish anything through email. I mean, I know there's exceptions out there, but largely it's just, it's just busy work. Yeah. And to clarify that point a little bit further, what if you could identify

the emails that really do drive the work forward for the person who is arguing with you right now and saying, David, that's not true. I actually do get work done via email. Well, not all of the emails that you receive or deal with during the day are going to drive the work forward. So maybe you can figure out a way to bring the ones that really matter to the surface. There's different tools that you can use to do that. But just recognizing that the email that just landed in your inbox that caused that ding or that notification to go off, recognizing that that could actually be an enemy to your focus and to your productivity is an important first step. Yeah, I agree. Cal Newport talked about this in deep work about the cost of the true cost of email. I thought that was kind of an

interesting little exercise he did there. Yeah. So this is a story and I don't remember all the specifics because I've read this book a couple of times, but the last time I read it was a couple of years ago. And one of the things that he mentioned in there, though, was there was an organization that calculated the true cost of every email which was sent or received for that specific organization. And it was almost a dollar. If I remember right, I think it was 97 cents. And it was almost a dollar. If I remember right, I think it was 97 cents. So if you take that example totally understand this, if you get people who are responding to that email with reply all, and all they say is, I got it, the true cost of that message now is $121. So the bottom line right

here is that CC specifically is evil a lot of the time. But also just recognizing as you're writing that email and you're going to send it to these different people, who really needs to be addressed on this email? Who really needs this information? Yeah, I think that, you know, once again, it's kind of a, you know, how do you get to that number? But the but I think there's some truth to that, because when you start looking at the amount of email everybody's getting every day, this is why we all hate it so much. And getting through that to the one or two pieces of email you need and spending quality time on that and getting rid of the rest can make a big difference. But I also think we need to kind of change the way we just think about email in general. And I've talked about this before. I feel like for some reason, email has much higher priority for almost all of us than it really should. Does that make sense?

It does. If you ask me my personal opinion, I think that's because of the origins of email. In fact, I did a presentation at MaxDoc one year where I talked about email and I showed that clip from You've Got Mail where Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are sneaking through the hallways to check their email. That's the romantic view of email that's in a lot of people's heads still. That's the message that's waiting for me in my inbox. It's not the 120 ads for stuff that I don't need. I also think some of it has roots in our physical mailboxes.

If someone writes a card or a note to you, handwrites a note to you, that's a precious thing when you get it. You usually feel compelled to read you know, read it. Maybe you even share it with somebody. You write them a note back. And it's something that we take kind of more serious. As a social convention, it means more. But I feel like on the email side, a lot of us, maybe it's an age thing.

I don't know. But we take an email more serious. I don't know, but we take an email more seriously. We almost give it the gravity of someone handwriting a card on special paper and using their best pen and their best handwriting and mailing it to you. In some ways, it's easy for us to equate email as that because that's the nearest physical approximation. But then we give it this higher priority than I think it deserves. Yeah. So let's take that analogy a little bit further. Okay. So the average person gets 126 emails per day.

You're not, you've never received, I guarantee you, 126 handwritten notes in your physical mailbox in one day. But the other thing that kind of drives me crazy with the way that it's kind of like the default for a lot of people to deal with email is they'll see something in their email inbox and they'll leave it there. So you don't go to your physical mailbox, look at everything that you got, and then put all the junk back in and bring the good stuff in the house. But that's kind of what we've trained ourselves to do. Like, oh, I'll get to that later. And then that's where things kind of what we've trained ourselves to do like oh i'll get to that later and then that that's where things start to pile up because we're getting so much we just

can't stay on top of it and so really the the thing that we need to do is is fundamentally change the way that we we view this because just doing it the way we've always done it isn't gonna work yeah but i know for me it's just the idea that I'm giving it this higher preference than I should is the start of my problem with email. And recognizing that I'm doing that is very empowering, even though I seem to forget that quite often. You know, what is email really? Let's look at it. You know, let's step back from the objective of email is not a precious handwritten note lovingly sent. It's quite often a computer generated bit of text that spits out to another computer.

You know how Google has been testing services where they can have auto responders and email responds to other email automatically. And you know, it's just a question of time before the 72 trillion emails get turned into 720 trillion emails, because computers just endlessly start writing each other back and forth. Yeah. And kind of to that point, that makes the things that we do receive from another human seem more important than maybe they really are. That's kind of the third thing that I had listed here in the outline is to shift the expectations around email because email is a one-way communication medium. There's no dialogue as you're reading the things in your inbox. And if you get a message from a coworker, oftentimes you feel like you need to respond immediately or you feel like you need to take care of this thing right away. And maybe you don't. I mean, your coworker emails

you and asks you for something a lot of times. And I've done this myself. You feel like I just need to get this done, clear it off the decks, and then I don't have to think about it anymore. But when you do that, you're taking away your time and your attention, your energy from the thing that you were doing previously. So essentially what you're saying is your thing is more important than my thing. And maybe it is more important, but maybe it's not. And I guess I'm kind of arguing that we shouldn't just assume that because someone asked us to do something, that it is automatically worth dropping everything and dealing with that. Yeah. And I think maybe that's a piece of what we're trying

to get at with this podcast is that if you have a focus, if you know what your big rocks are, it gives you something to put those email commitments against, not only the content of email commitments, but email itself. Yeah, exactly. So kind of going back to that example, I want to unpack this because if you think it through, I think that kind of clarifies it for a lot of people. So we're often scared to let other people down and we'd rather let ourselves down, which is why we get stuck doing things that other people are saying we need to be doing rather than taking care of the things that we know are important to us. We neglect the golden goose and eventually we stop getting the golden eggs. But I want to unpack this when someone sends you one of these

emails and asks you to do something, because I think this is very freeing. And I had a conversation with somebody at the Focus Course Live about this. And they said they fell into this trap where they just automatically prioritize things. And they started responding and saying, you know, I don't think I can do this right away. And is that okay? this right away? And is that that okay? All right. So when you push back a little bit, and you challenge the assumption, which oftentimes we create that ourselves, no one even says, I need you to do this by four o'clock today. Sometimes they do, you know, and then that actually clarifies it. And then you can make a decision about what you're going to do. But a lot of times we project that. Okay. So when you push back and you say, I can do this for you, but I won't get to it till the end of the week. You know, what's going to happen? We're scared to do that, but what's the

worst thing that can happen? Well, the best thing that can happen is that the person says that's fine. And now we have more margin to get the thing done. But the scary side of this is if the person says they really need it right away. Again, we've got a couple different options. We can say, I'm probably not the best person for this then, and you don't have to do it. Or you can recognize it as something that is truly urgent instead of projecting the artificial urgency. That's the key there, because then you can feel okay with setting things aside to complete that task. Yeah, I deal with this all the time in the legal practice, because in some ways, my day job, I'm a fireman. You know, people will send me something and say, hey, we just got this contract and, you know, we need your comments on it. And I, one of my

initial reactions to the client always with an email is, okay, I can add this to my list, you know, and I usually suggest a time. There's two ways you could handle it. You could write back and say, hey, when do you need this by? And you know what the answer is always going to be? As soon as possible. Exactly, exactly. So what I'll say is, I say, okay, I'm booked up for the next couple days.

I'm going to get this to you, you know, I'll say I'm ready on Monday. I say I'll get this to you on Wednesday afternoon. Does that work? You know, or, or I even say, if that's a problem, let me know. And sometimes they will tell me it's a problem because they've got some, some rush going on. And in that case, I'll make changes. But then, uh, I've had some clients that, that take advantage of that. And every time you tell them, uh, you know, I'll get it to you in two or three days and they say, I need it today. If that's all that, the only way they work is to give you something at the last minute. I usually just end up telling them they need to get a new lawyer

because I just can't. I'm not, I'm serious. I mean, I'm getting so brutal about this lately because it's like, look, I'm not set up in a way where I can be at your beck and call every day. Right. Right. And, and if that's what you need, you need to go somewhere where they charge you a bunch more money and they've got like 15 people and somebody can always make time for you. But that's not me.

So let's just, you know, wrap it up, you know. But it all starts with an email. And I even have a snippet that I send through when someone sends me a piece of work to do. And, you know, using, you know, this is getting the Mac priorities, but using date math and text expander, my default answer is three days. I want three days on everything someone sends me via email. And sometimes I get it and sometimes I don't.

Yeah. And that's, that's okay. I mean, if, especially if you find yourself in a position right now where you are not able to say no. That's the next point, by the way, is to learn to say no. Because eventually you are going to have to say no. Like you said, maybe it's saying no, I'm not the right person to be helping you with this thing. Maybe you're not the right client for me because our work styles are so different and I'm not willing to work that way.

But even before you have to get to that point, you can say no on a smaller scale. And that is okay. If people really need that sort of thing, then that's fine. Like you said, you can refer them to another firm where there's somebody who's always on call for that. And in a lot of sales, and it sounds like I don't know a whole lot about the legal field, but it sounds like in there too, there's a lot of value that comes from putting out those fires for people. So if you're okay with making that exchange because you're going to provide that value to somebody else, then okay. But just recognize that that's what you're signing up for.

And I would argue that at some point, you do have to say no to somebody or something because email is a to-do list that other people can write on. So maybe it's not in the work context, but somewhere you are going to have to create boundaries at some point. And it's better to do that before you get to the meltdown rather than in the middle of it and i feel like we're kind of like circling around two concepts here and the first is how do you keep your priorities and your focus when email keeps trying to insert new things

in the way you know when it's throwing new projects and tasks at you. But also on a more meta level, we're talking about the idea of just the concept of email, just checking email, having email, making sure email has come, you know, looking for new email and organizing and sorting through your inbox. Things like that also are a separate type of interruption that get in your way of doing what you would love. Yep. And you're not going to be able to do what you love or do what's most important all the time exactly the way that you want it to, exactly the way that you want it to play out. Yeah. But you can regain control in some areas. And that's kind of the next point is to control what you can control.

If you're in a corporate environment, you probably can't tell your boss no if they insist on emailing you all the time. It is what it is. But that doesn't mean that you have to check it all the time when you're home with your family. I mean, I have not met somebody who works in a corporate environment where their boss would explicitly say, yes, I expect you to respond within an hour, even if I email you at home or on the weekends. But we kind of assume that responsibility and that burden because we want to be the person who's always responsive. We don't want to let people down. But I want to kind of encourage people to look for the things where they can make the small adjustments. One of the things that Cal Newport shared in that book, Deep Work, is they had somebody who had a boss like this who insisted on emailing all the time and wanted an instant response.

And she formulated like a plan and brought it to him and said, OK, so where do you think I add the most value to the business? Doing X, Y, Z, and the other thing. Okay, so wouldn't it be great if I could have more time to do those things that bring value to the business? Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, well, I'm proposing then that you don't email me from eight to noon. You know, at first he's like, well, why? Well, because, and she had the numbers, like when I get an email, I have to stop what I'm

doing. And this is my actual output because I'm dealing with all of these emails. And what the boss quickly realized was that he didn't need to be emailing this lady, he could be emailing somebody else. And they could be dealing with these things. And so they agreed that from eight to eight to noon, or whatever the timeframe was, that's when you're going to be able to be doing the things that are most important to you and most important to the company or the organization. I think that, you know, going back to where I was talking at the beginning, how you kind of equate email to something more precious than it actually is. I think another way you can deal with email is think seriously about your identification of your relationship

with email. Like, I know for a long time, I self-identified as the guy who responded to all email, like within a day, like any email that comes to me, I will have a reply out within 24 hours. And I was very proud of that, you know, because I knew people that, that didn't do that and they would leave, you know, teams and companies hanging while they were waiting to get a reply. And, and that was an identity thing for me. And it took me a long time to realize that is a bad identity. You know, you know, when I choose to say I'm the email guy that responds to everything in 24 hours, I'm also choosing not to focus on stuff that actually makes money.

I'm also choosing not to focus on things that actually bring me joy. You know, it's like, you know, it's a big commitment. You know, if I'm going to pull that train, it means there's not going to be much room left for other things. And changing that identity was a big deal for me. Yeah. Identity based habits, you know, going back to the discussion we had about James Clear and Atomic Habits. But I think that if you were to say, I want to be the email responder guy, that would be okay. But you have to recognize, and this is really the point that you were driving at, is the cost of doing that. Because generally, you do not get compensated according to the actual cost of being the email responder guy.

If you are, then that's fine. You can make that choice. But don't just assume like, I'm going to be doing this because it will end up causing you a lot of frustration. That's going to be the default scenario, I think, for a lot of people if they try to do that. Yeah. And you can get around that. I mean, later in the outline, I've got some ideas. But I mean, you can be the email responder guy to certain types of emails. Yes, exactly. You don't have to be the email responder guy to all emails.

Right, right. So let's get into the recommended workflow. But before we do that, let's thank our second sponsor, which is FreshBooks. Everyone likes to save time. It's especially important when you are a freelancer, or I would argue, as we're talking about email, if you want to eliminate a lot of the time that you spend in email, then FreshBooks is going to be a great tool for you. In fact, our friends at FreshBooks can save you up to 192 hours with their super simple

cloud accounting software. By simplifying tasks like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online, FreshBooks has drastically reduced the time it takes for over 10 million people to deal with their paperwork and cut down a lot of that email. I'd be interesting to see how many emails FreshBooks could specifically eliminate you. But there's a couple of reasons that I talk very highly about FreshBooks. I use it myself. One of the things is that FreshBooks automates late payment email reminders. So you don't have to spend time chasing those payments, going back and forth, asking where the check is, and you can spend more time working your magic. Also, when you email a client an

invoice, you don't have to follow up to make sure that they saw it. FreshBooks can show you whether they've seen it, which puts an end to all of the guessing games. Now, if you're listening to this and you're not using FreshBooks yet, now is the time to try it. FreshBooks is offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial for listeners of this show. No credit card required. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com slash focused and enter focused, that's focused with one S, in the how did you hear about us section. So once again, that's freshbooks.com slash focused and enter focused in the how did you hear about us section. We thank FreshBooks for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, Mike, I want to talk about ways to stay focused while you have email in your life.

And the starting point for me, and one of the most useful things that I've done with email, is putting a box around the time I give it. You know, going back to the top of the show, you said some people spend six hours in email, which is completely bananas to me. But I did catch myself going into email longer than I thought. And this all kind of started with my startup routine. I have blocked time to do a startup routine every day, and part of that includes going through email. And I found myself spending not only the entire block of time allotted to startup routine on email, but often going 30 minutes beyond that. And I just decided at one point, I'm not going to let email take, you know, two hours a day out of my life. And so I just give it

a limited amount of time. And because I've got two kind of different businesses, I give Max Barkey 45 minutes, I give a legal thing 30 minutes, and that's it. And I split it up between the morning and the afternoon. And when I get to the end of that time, I've always dealt with the most urgent and most recent within that time. But there's some stuff in the backlog that just doesn't get handled. Yeah, I think that just doesn't get handled. Yeah, I think that's a really good approach. I think it was Sean Blanc originally that I saw say in an autoresponder that when you sent him an email, you got an autoresponder. It says something like, I only spend 30 minutes per day with email. So if I don't get to yours, I'm sorry. Something like that. And I think that that's really important.

Going back to something Chris Bailey said with Parkinson's law, you know, work expands to fill the time that you give it. Well, with email specifically, it will expand to fill whatever time you give it. And we tend to continue to make more time for it, which is how you can quickly find yourself at 6.3 hours per day, I would argue. Yeah. And I know this isn't going to work for everybody. I know. I mean, there's different types of jobs. But try putting an artificial boundary. If email is a problem for you, try and put a box around it in terms of the amount of time you give it and just see how that works. Yep. Force constraints. I think that that helps a lot. Another thing I would say when it comes to dealing with email is that you should have a goal to touch each email in your inbox only once. So that means that it comes in and you do it or you do something else with it and then you get it out of your inbox. And there's a lot of different

systems out there that explain like the different options, the different flow charts, the different actions you can take with an email. The one that I heard recently that I think I like the best is known as the four D's. And so I wanted to share this real quickly. So the first D is for delete it. And I would say at this point that you should not be afraid to delete something. I think a lot of people hold on to emails. And you could throw it in your archive folder if you really want to hang on to it. But it's very rarely that I have deleted an email and then needed to go back and find it later. Wished I hadn't deleted it.

You have any experience with this? Yeah, I archive everything, almost everything, except clearly deletable marketing nonsense like that. But if it comes from a human, I archive it, and I never go find it. I can't think of the last time I searched my email archive. Right, right. But that's the safeguard, I guess, is in the archive. And the search tools are so good that you can find it quickly. That actually gets into some stuff that we'll talk about a little bit later with some different tips and things. So going back to the four Ds, first D is delete it. Second D would be

to do it. And if you're familiar with the getting things done or GTD methodology, the standard rule that everybody throws out here is that if you can complete it in two minutes or less, then go ahead and take care of it. I don't really like that as a hard, fast rule, because I think if you get something in your email, and even if it takes a long time to do, if it is extremely important, I would say go ahead and deal with it but i don't know like that's kind of a line that you have to define for your yourself it's a slippery slope honestly it's like where do you decide what's extremely important um the way i deal with those when they come in and it's it's got a kind of a sense of urgency to it i still want to be done with email. So, so one of the things I do is when I finish getting through my inboxes, I close out the email application. I just don't leave it running all day.

So I need to kind of get through it before I even deal with those urgent things. So what I will do in that case is I'll just create a task and OmniFocus and I'll give it a due date in like three hours. And, and rarely do I have something that's so urgent that it can't wait a couple hours. And, um, and then I, then as soon as I've closed the email app, then that's right on the top of my list and I deal with it. But, um, so, you know, choose your own poison there. But, but like I said, it's easy when you say, well, I am going to perform actions out of the inbox to suddenly spend your whole day, find yourself spending your whole day in the inbox. Yes, yes, exactly. So that actually, for a little further down, we talk about defer it. Let's unpack that right now, though, because that's exactly what you were talking

about. You know, if you don't want to respond to this thing right away, another thing you can do is you can put it into your task manager to do it later. But the secret sauce to making this a system that gives you peace of mind, in my opinion, is that you then still get it out of your inbox because your inbox is not your task manager. And this is something that I see people do all the time that just kind of drives me crazy. You know, you have all these emails in your inbox. And if you're going in there to take action on something, even if it is something that you legitimately have to do, how do you find that thing in an email inbox? You can sort by date, maybe you can find the person's name. But it doesn't have the filtering tools and the due date ability that you just mentioned,

like a task manager does. That's where something like OmniFocus really shines, is you can let the computer sort through all thousands of things that you have to do and bubble up to the top only the ones that you really should be thinking about right now. Yeah, I agreed. And putting something while we're on the subject of defer, you know, what does that mean? Like for the longest time, I used to put everything into OmniFocus, which happens to be my task manager of choice. But over the years, I've got even more, I've got more subtle about the way I do that as well. Because creating a task out of something, like if a client needs me to help them with a legal thing, that certainly earns itself as task and OmniFocus. But there are other things that aren't quite as critical. And then I don't want to create an OmniFocus task, which is a whole nother thing that I need to

track and manage. So there are ways to defer things that don't necessarily require that level of involvement. You could, you could deferringring it could be as simple as having a folder saying customer support questions in your email system and just drop the email in there. So now it's out of your inbox. And then you just kind of have a contract with yourself that you go through that box, that customer support questions, maybe you block time for it and just deal with those at a different time from that box. Another way you could do it is if you've got an ability to literally defer email.

Some of these systems, like I use SaneBox, allows me to send an email out and then have it come back to me in hours, days, or weeks, and then it shows up in my inbox again. But the problem with that is you have to be careful, because if you do a lot of that, then suddenly you just become, you know, like this, you know, this hockey goalie just throwing the puck back into the field to have it come back at you again. So if you catch yourself doing that frequently, then you need to, you know, then you need to go to the next level. Yeah, the thing I have against that as a system or an approach is I kind of feel like with the volume of email continuing to rise, you will get to a point where you're not able to handle all of the deferred things either. Yeah.

When you do that, what you're really doing is you're borrowing time from future you. And the argument I would make is when you're looking at this email, that is for the first time, that is the time that you should make the decision of when and where you want to deal with this, if you can. And again, maybe you do have to just block the pucks and get it back into play. That's okay. But you are, it's going to be coming back and it's going to be coming back along with a whole bunch of other emails that you're going to have to deal with. And I think if you can figure out how to create a structure, which doesn't have to be complicated. I mean, these four Ds, I think that this is a great simple framework of something comes into

your view. What are the options that you have with this? You can very quickly decide on something to do with this. And then it's in the right place at the right time. And when it comes back into your field of view. Yeah, like an example for me is yesterday I had a board of director meeting for a client. And as I'm preparing for that, I went through the email in the morning and I saw there were several things on the legal inbox that were not critical. And I just didn't have time to manage them properly. You know what I mean? They weren't emails that I could delete or hand off to someone. I had to deal with them.

So I knew yesterday wasn't the day that I was going to be able to do that. So I deferred those for one day. And this morning they ran through, they came back and I dealt with them properly. And yesterday they were out of my mind. So that's a good example of using email defer. Email defer, like a bad example is there's a website I follow that talks about jazz that I really like. And they send me newsletters, I don't know, every couple of weeks that summarize things going on on their website. And I don't read the website every day. So it's kind of like a treat for me sometimes in the evening to go read some pages. And I started deferring all those newsletters because I wanted to read them.

And I caught myself deferring them for a week repeatedly. And then on Monday of this week, there were 18 newsletters in there all from one website. And I'm like, okay, this is crazy, David. So I deleted all the – I archived all the emails and I just added an OmniFocus task. Go in and read the website. Why am I doing this to myself? So you can – there's definitely a slippery slope there, but deferring can help.

But I feel like that is the least attractive option when it comes to trying to deal with email. Yeah, it's a short-term tactic, not a long-term strategy. Yeah. The other option, the fourth D, is to delegate it. And this is something that a lot of people, myself included, have trouble with. But if you're not the right person for the email, say so. Try to introduce the right person into the conversation who can take care of it instead of just signing for the

package. So that's one thing that I will call out with delegation. But the other thing that I want to call out, and this is the other thing that I think a lot of people, again, myself included, struggle with is that once you delegate something, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are not responsible to make sure that something gets done. So if you are organizing a project for your team or your organization, it's fine to delegate the work to other people. But if you're the one who's in

charge of organizing the project, you probably will need to follow up with people to make sure that they are doing the work that was delegated to them. Not because you can't trust them, but because that's your job as the delegator. And I have found that SaneBox and SaneReminders are actually a much better use of following up with people you've delegated work to than creating the tasks in OmniFocus and having them go off. Because with SaneReminders, what you do is you like BCC one week at SaneBox.com. Let's say I'm sending you an email, David, about the next topic for the next show. Okay. And I send you an email. What are you thinking for the next content episode? And I put one week at samebox.com in the BCC field. If you reply to me, then the reminder goes away. But if you don't, if you don't reply to me, then the reminder kicks off and then it shows up in my inbox again. Whereas if I had

put that into OmniFocus, regardless of whether you responded, that reminder is going to go off. Yeah, that's a killer feature for SaneBox. And tracking delegated, I think that's a great way to do it. But I just want to stop and talk about delegation in general. Something that I've done in the last year I've got better at is delegating. And I've hired someone to kind of assist me with things. And one of the things I do send to her is a lot of customer support email. And it's great because they have a question, they need a receipt or whatever. It's something that doesn't take me long, but it takes me even less time to just forward it to her and have her deal with it. It takes me even less time to just forward it to her and have her deal with it.

And it costs me money, and we all have to deal with that. But it's a great way to make email less onerous for me. And I'm actually looking for ways to do more of that now. I mean, I'm actually considering giving her even more access to some of the mailboxes and finding ways to let her be the point of contact on some of these things so I don't even have to be the gatekeeper. And delegation is, if it's something that you've always been nervous about doing and email is a problem for you, this is something you should spend some time figuring out because there is something you can delegate and every one that you delegate is less time for you doing that work and more time for you to make the things you love. Yeah, that's a really good point. Every single

email that you have to deal with yourself is taking you some set amount of time. And so if you can figure out a way to offload a bunch of that, then that's definitely going to win you back some time and that's going to have value for you based on the value of your time. Another thing kind of along the same lines there, kind of an optional fifth D that I found is to distribute. Okay, so if someone is emailing you, but it's not the right medium or channel for that communication, redirecting that and putting it in the right medium or channel for that communication, redirecting that and putting it in the right place can be another way to deal with email. So for example, if you have a boss that is emailing you about a project, and really the place for that conversation to be taking place

is on something like Slack. So the whole team can can see what's going on and you don't have to get everybody else up to speed and you're not using CC because we warned you that it's that it's evil. I've done that before where I'll say I'm going to I'm going to take that. that I have, I've received your, your email, but I'm going to answer it over in this other place because this is actually the right place and kind of redirect it to the appropriate place for that, that conversation to happen. Yeah. I mean, something that, um, Mike and I almost something, Mike and I almost never email each other. You know, we make the show together. We're friends. We do a whole bunch of stuff together. We almost never email each other because that's really not the right context for most of our communications. True.

I mean, we do most of our business-y talk in Slack, which is set up around the podcast, and we talk about other stuff, fun stuff usually, and messages. So giving some thought to that can really decrease the amount of the flood that you're dealing with in your inbox. And depending on what kind of company you are and what kind of business relationships you have, you may find that as a huge game changer for you. Yeah, definitely. I want to call out a couple of other categories that stuff can fall into because we've talked a lot about the action oriented emails, emails that require you to do something or somebody to do something. But not every email falls into that category. So there are going to be emails which are just going to be things that you might need someday. I guess the GTD term for this would be reference material. And that sounds really formal, really just anything that I might want to go back

and look at later. That's what I would classify as reference material. And for that, I'm going to put that into something like Devon Think. Maybe this is where we start to get into some of our workflows. But Evernote would be something like this too. You don't want to have to comb through all of your emails to find this needle in a hay stack. If it really is important, then put it somewhere that shows that it's important. And then another category that you kind of touched on a little bit earlier, David, but it's something that I've seen a lot of people deal with is things that they want to read. Okay, so where do you put something that you want to read? You don't want to leave it in your inbox. You probably don't want to throw it into reference material either. That's kind of like long-term cold storage, kind of how I view that. I have worked, I've used a couple different

read it later services. And I recommend that that's the place that you put stuff. Yes, it is technically another inbox that you have to go read through if you want to go through these things. But for me, I tend to throw things into Instapaper. And then when I go into Instapaper, some of the things I'll want to read, some of the things I'll decide I don't really want to read that anymore. And I'll just archive them right away. I kind of go through the whole triage process again with stuff in there. But the real thing, the value here is like you're not going into your inbox and seeing these things over and over and over again and having to make the decisions over and over and over again about what to do with them.

You put them in the right place and then you archive and get them out of your inbox. Yeah. One way I've been trying to get rid of the inbox on my legal side is I've been getting serious about using Basecamp with some of my clients. And I'm actually not that, it's not working that well because clients want email, you know, even though when I set up Basecamp, ideally, if you can set up like web-based project management

or something where everybody works within some dedicated space, that's one more way to keep email out of your life. Right. Hey, before we continue, I want to talk about our last sponsor today, and that's our friends over at Squarespace. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next idea

with a unique domain, award-winning templates, and more. So maybe you want to create an online store or a portfolio, or maybe even a blog. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that lets you do just that. There's nothing to install, no patches to worry about, no upgrades needed. You don't have to worry about any of that stuff. Squarespace has got it all covered. They have award-winning 24-7 customer support if you need any help. They let you quickly and easily grab a unique domain name. And all of those award-winning templates are beautifully designed for you to show off your great ideas. I use Squarespace for basically everything I do on the internet. My law practice, Max Barkey, they're all on Squarespace.

And I can really test for that 24-7 support. They respond very quickly anytime you have a question. And I do really appreciate that. Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month, but you can start a trial with no credit card required by going to squarespace.com slash focused. When you decide to sign up, use the offer code focused, that's with one S, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain and to show your support for the show. Once again, that's squarespace.com slash focused and

offer code focused to get 10% off your first purchase. Get yourself set up with a website today. Go to squarespace.com. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. Hey, Mike, I thought it'd be fun. I know we're not doing an MPU episode on this, but let's talk a little bit about how we're putting some of this into practice with the ways that we use to stay focused and not let email take over. Sure. Why don't you go first? All right. The email app that I use, and I have a very specific reason for using this, which fits in perfectly with this episode, is Mailmate.

And I use Mailmate because it is a Markdown-based plain text email editor. When I first started using it, I actually hated it. But what I found was that because the application itself is fairly ugly, I spend less time with my email there and it gives me all the tools that I need to respond to it as efficiently as I can. I use Markdown all the time. I write everything in Ulysses. I even do some presentations using Dexite, which is a Markdown presentation editor. So Markdown is kind of like a second language to me, but it's very approachable. So if you've never used Markdown, but you're interested in the idea, you've got a field guide on it even, David.

It's pretty approachable. It doesn't take too long to get the hang of it. But that allows me to... It applies constraints to the way that I respond to emails. I can include attachments and things, but because it's all plain text, I'm not putting in images and embedding videos and all that other crazy stuff that some of the some of the email clients that are out there will will use. I also use SaneBox, which we've mentioned a couple times in this episode, to only put the things that are really important in my inbox. And so what that allows me

to do is check my email. Typically, I do it twice a day. In the morning, I'll clear out the inbox with the things that are important. And then later in the day, I'll do the inbox again, but also go through the Sane Later folder. So kind of high level, what SaneBox does is it looks at the senders that send you email, the subject lines. It doesn't look at the content, but it looks at what you do with it. And it recognizes that if you always delete the LinkedIn notifications that someone viewed your profile, that's not important to you. And it's going to stop putting those into

your inbox. So what ends up happening over time is that when you go into your inbox, you see only the things that are really important. And in my opinion, Sandbox is a really great job of selecting that stuff. I don't know, honestly, how they do it so well. And then the other thing that I'll call out here is that when I respond to emails, I look for patterns. I look for things that I end up saying frequently. And I have what I call the three times rule, where if I notice that I've done this at least

three times, that's my cue to stop writing it and to create a text expander snippet, which is going to allow me to trigger it with just a couple of key strokes. And if you apply text expander to your email, you will save a ton of time. You start to recognize the things that you send over and over and over again. I did this when I was working with the family business and I was sending out these big long emails, which were custom after I did like a webinar presentation and put together proposals. And it would pull in the link to the proposal. I could put in the person's first name, optional selections for all the different things they would need. And the end result is that you get this big, long, fancy email. Looks like it took you an

hour to craft, but I did it in 30 seconds because of TextExpander. And I knew because I created the template that there were no misspellings or anything like that either. And, you know, for me, just kind of holistically, setting time boundaries on email was a game changer. And I'm lucky enough that I can pull it off. Obviously, those aren't hard and fast times in a sense, you know, I don't just set a timer and at 30 minutes, just stop. If there's still an urgent email that needs to be dealt with, I deal with it. But I try to largely stick to those times, and I'm generally able to do so. And that's really great. And one of the things that it lets me do is allot time towards email that's not necessarily my most focused time.

And as soon as I started getting my head around the fact that, yes, I will make time for email, it allowed me to move when I deal with email. So usually it's about 10 o'clock before I actually open email. And with the way my businesses are run, that's usually just fine because I also do a check around 4.30., once in the morning, once in the evening is just fine. And getting myself around those limits really unlocked a lot of time for me to work on more important focus tasks. So I love to get up in the morning and work on things that will make me feel good about myself at the end of the day before I even open email. So that's one of my, I guess, what we call workflows.

Which email application I use really depends on the day of the week anymore. But right now I'm back in Apple Mail. I think on the Mac it's very powerful, especially with Apple Script support. And I've published on Mac Sparky some cool Apple Scripts over the years that I use and ways I use Apple Mail to get a lot of work done. I'm not as happy with it on iOS for a lot of reasons. But, you know, I'm starting to also think about a workflow towards email that doesn't include a lot of time dealing with email on iOS. I haven't deleted the app from my phone. I doubt I ever will because I do kind of, when I check in on it,

I want to see what's there. But I usually use the iPhone email application way more as a triage device than I do as a thing that I actually answer email from. And I'll delete a bunch from there, maybe even archive some. I rarely respond to email from the phone. A lot of times, one way I can set an email as important for me to deal with when I get to back to my Mac. It's just set a simple flag on it. You can flag emails and that really helps, you know? So then you just go and then you clear out your flags when you get back to your Mac and you've got things like, you know, text, you know, proper text expander support and all the automation stuff Mike was talking about. I think SaneBox is another great way to kind of manage focus around email because it does sort everything out for you so well. And, you know, that folder that SaneBox does where it puts all the newsletters and things like that, I look at that like once a week.

And the way I look at it is I go on my Mac, I select them all, and then I just kind of scroll through the titles and unselect anything I want to keep, and then I press delete at the end. So it's like you have to earn your way on the list. Does that make sense? Yeah, I like that. And, you know, for me, the biggest thing I did for workflow, you know, with restricted email is accept the fact that I'm not the email responder guy. And that just took me a long time to get over. And I feel like I still am the email responder guy. If you like buy one of my video field guides and you have a problem or if you're a client and you need help on something, but for a lot of other stuff, I'm not going to be the 24 hour guy and, and re, you know, casting my life in a way that accepts that is really good.

And, and frankly, I don't answer every email that gets sent to me. Not only do I not do it within 24 hours, some of them just, I never get to, I try, but you know, I need to make things. That's what makes me feel good at the end of the day. Answering email, it doesn't make me feel as good as making things does. So I've tried to rethink my habits around those ideas. Yeah, I think that's really important. And you can insert for yourself whatever the thing is that is most important to you. Maybe it's not making things, but chances are that it's probably not responding to email either. So clarifying what is truly important or brings value to the organization that you work for, or even yourself personally, if you're a free agent,

you know, then there's a lot of value in doing that and establishing the boundaries. I will tell you, I mentioned earlier, I did eliminate email completely on my phone. And occasionally I will find myself going into Safari and logging into Gmail. But that is a habit that I am working on breaking. I don't want to say I've conquered it completely, but I want to introduce as much friction as possible on my mobile device because I don't think the mobile device is a great place to deal with email. I like that you mentioned, David, you use it primarily for triage.

Triage, by the way, when you think about it from an email stance, you think of like putting it in the right bucket. But the term triage, have you ever studied this out? I can't remember if you talk about this in your book or not. I know it's from medical, like it's when people are injured, you have to decide who gets killed, who gets operated on, or actually no, who doesn't get killed, who you let go, who gets operated on with the priorities. Yeah, exactly. And so if you think about it as like the people who are going to live regardless of intervention, the people who are going to die regardless of intervention.

So you want to focus your efforts on the people where the intervention can really make the difference. If that's the approach that you take to triage, I would argue that still a mobile device isn't the right place to do it. Because what happens if you look at something on your mobile device and you feel that this is important and you need to respond to it right away? Thumbing out a message on your keyboard is probably not the right approach. And autocorrect can kill you in that instance. So I just try to stay away from that as much as I can. And I've found that at first it is difficult to shift some expectations for people when you say, well, I can't respond to email because I'm not at my computer. Well, don't you have it on your phone? No, I took it off. Oh, okay. That's weird. Why'd you do that? But after a while, people begin to accept it. And that kind of leads to another tip that I try to implement in my own email workflow is not to respond immediately for a couple of reasons. Number one, if somebody emails me and we have not communicated previously before and I respond within 10 minutes, I've now set the expectations for all future interactions with this person. So if I can wait a day, I'm

going to buy myself a whole lot more space and communicate the terms of engagement kind of implicitly. I don't have to be explicit. So, you know, just so you know, I'm not going to respond within 24 hours, but I've set the expectations going forward. And now the interaction is going to be a lot less stressful for me. But also the obvious reason for this is if you're going to send off an emotionally charged email, you should definitely think about it overnight before you send it. Oh, yeah. I've written plenty of emails that I saved and then ended up deleting. That's probably a whole other story. But I agree. I mean, one of the problems, one of the benefits of the Max Barkey thing is I get a lot of email from people that want to talk about geeky stuff, and that's fun.

But if I were to answer 100 of those emails, the next day I'd have 90 new emails because everybody would want to continue the conversation. And it is fun, but it just doesn't scale. I mean, if you do that that stuff then that can't make any more podcasts or anything so it's it's you just got to figure it out it also not responding immediately allows you to have a little space to you know to make sure you didn't make any mistakes this is more of a geeky tip but get an email plug-in that allows you to delay send on emails i do that on all my legal stuff because you always know you remember something you did that was silly the moment you hit the send button. True. Yeah, that's another thing I like about Mailmate. It's got that built in. Yeah. Another thing which I want to call out

for people who maybe you have a bunch of junk or spam and you can't remember how you signed up for these things. You're getting emails from gas stations and stuff like that. Most of them, the legitimate ones, are going to have an unsubscribe link. So if you go into your email inbox and search for unsubscribe, you'll get a whole bunch of things that you can quickly unsubscribe from. The way I do this, I actually don't click those links because if you're not sure who the vendor is and they have less than noble intentions, the fact that you click on subscribe just verifies that you're a human who cares about your email. You might increase the number of spam messages that you get. So same black hole is a great feature, again, with the same box subscription where you just identify a message you don't want to receive anymore, drag it over to same black hole. You're never going to get anything from that sender ever again. That's kind of a safer way

to do it if you have a same box subscription. But even if you don't, going through and culling this from time to time by unsubscribing from some things can definitely reduce the number of emails that you have to go through on a regular basis. Agreed, agreed. Using some sort of text expansion makes a huge difference if you have common email responses. Mike's already talked about that, but you should have some system for that. I'm a big fan of TextExpander,

their longtime sponsor of Mac Power Users, but take it as you will. But I think that's the best solution because it does things like allows me to put date math in it to say I will respond. I'll get something back to you on three days from now. And it puts the actual date in. But even just having a text file with your common responses and blocking and copying is better than retyping it every time. Yep, definitely. We've got a bunch more tips here. I'll just call it a

couple of them. I know we're going a little bit long here, but I want to make sure we mention that archive and search for a message that you might need in the future in about 99% of cases is going to be more efficient than storing things in folders. I think it was the productivity project by Chris Bailey

where I first came across this IBM study where they took people who absolutely swore they were more efficient putting things in folders. And they had them take a message, put it into a folder, and then find it again later, as opposed to just dumping it all into an archive folder and then using the search functionality to find it. And what they found is that even the people who they have taught themselves to do this, they knew exactly where everything was, they could find it immediately. They were all faster using the one big archive folder and just searching for things when they needed it. So I think there's a lot of people who are kind of on the fences to which one is faster. Maybe you've built up this

elaborate folder structure over time, and I'm not going to be able to convince you that you don't need all of that. But for the person who doesn't really know the right way to do it, I would just say just archive things. For one, when you're in an email client, there's a button which is going to allow you keyboard shortcut most of the time that will move things to the archive folder. And that's going to eliminate a lot of the friction when you process your email inbox every day, because now you don't have to decide what folder you're going to be putting things in. You just press the key. It's out of your field of view. You can move on to the next thing. Yeah. Another point I would make is integrate your buckets. And by that, I mean,

if you can, having a link to your emails from other applications is super useful. I've got a cool Apple script. In fact, I'm going to publish it probably by the time this episode airs, where I can be in any application on my Mac and just type E-L-I-N-K, and then it gets the link of the topmost message in my Apple Mail and pastes it wherever I'm at. So if I'm in a Notes app, if I'm in OmniFocus, wherever I'm at, I can make reference to something, and it just creates a link to that email address.

And then OmniFocus does that as well when you create a Clipatron link to an email. But having the ability to just push a button and have it go straight to that email, you know, when you deal with it in a week or two is super useful. And it also allows you to avoid going to your inbox, which is always a distraction. Yeah, exactly. And this, I think, is kind of an underrated thing that people really need to understand why this is better before they really run with this. But just about every task manager productivity tool out there will allow you to forward an email somewhere and then you get the contents of the email and it puts it in whatever bucket you want.

Evernote, OmniFocus, things, whatever. But the problem with that from action-based emails is that you may have the contents of the thing that you need to do, but to reply to that message, you have to go back into your email inbox and find it. Which again, search tools make that better than it was in the past. But the absolute best way to do this is to include that link that you just mentioned, David, to the original message. So when I'm in OmniFocus and I see that I need to respond to something, and I actually have an email context or tag set up in OmniFocus. So when it's time to crank through email and I want to put some time and some thought into my responses, I'll just tag it with email. Then I'll go through and I'll clear out that tag. And right there, I've got the link to go straight to the message. It opens it up. I can

respond. I can hit send. And then I check off the task and OmniFocus. I don't have to jump back and forth between a bunch of different things because that link allows me to go straight there. Yeah. And every time you open your email and you see that inbox, boy, you are in a minefield every time. Yeah. So be careful with that. Well, Mike, I think we've kind of covered it. The important thing about, I feel like, email in terms of someone who wants to be focused and deliberate about getting their work done is you need to put email in its place. And for everybody, that might be a little bit of a different place, but there is a place for it. And I think for most of us, we haven't been as intentional about it as we

could. And hopefully a few things we talked about today will help you do that. Yeah, absolutely. So if there's one big takeaway, it's think about how you can apply intentionality to the way that you deal with email and set up some boundaries that will help you do just that. And we have a forum. So share your thoughts. I bet you've got some ideas we might've missed. We'd love to hear them. Yep, absolutely.

So there'll be links to all of that stuff in the show notes. You can find us online. I'm at bobblehead Joe on Twitter. You're at max Sparky. The show is at underscore focused FM. The website for the show is relay.fm slash focused. Thank you to our sponsors for this episode, Timing, FreshBooks, and Squarespace.

And we'll talk to you all in a couple of weeks.