115: A World Without Email by Cal Newport

Click any line to jump to that moment.

1. 00:00:00 I saw your video interview with Jeff Sheldon.
2. 00:00:03 That was pretty great.
3. 00:00:04 - That was a fun one.
4. 00:00:05 - You did a thing this week as we recorded on
5. 00:00:09 your life mission, which obviously is something
6. 00:00:11 I am very excited about.
7. 00:00:14 You've been on the homework podcast.
8. 00:00:16 I mean, you're all over the place.
9. 00:00:19 - It's kind of fun.
10. 00:00:20 And I'm trying to do a little more too.
11. 00:00:21 And actually before some of this,
12. 00:00:22 I did the automators thing too.
13. 00:00:23 So like there's a bunch of these
14. 00:00:26 that I'm kind of, yeah, pushing some stuff out.
15. 00:00:29 It's amazing what ADD meds will do.
16. 00:00:31 So.
17. 00:00:32 (laughing)
18. 00:00:34 So yeah, it's been fun.
19. 00:00:36 It's been a good one.
20. 00:00:37 Good couple of three weeks, I guess.
21. 00:00:39 - So I'm familiar with the automators podcast.
22. 00:00:41 That was great, even though I'm technically
23. 00:00:42 not an omni-focus user anymore.
24. 00:00:45 I have not had a chance to listen to the homework podcast.
25. 00:00:47 You wanna give a little plug for that one?
26. 00:00:50 - Yeah, so that one, the homework podcast is one that,
27. 00:00:54 I can't say I listen to religiously,
28. 00:00:58 but that is one that I used to,
29. 00:01:00 it's one of the very first podcasts I ever subscribed to,
30. 00:01:03 way back in the day.
31. 00:01:04 That was back when it was Dave,
32. 00:01:05 Kayla, and Aaron, Mankey, and T.
33. 00:01:07 - Me too, yep.
34. 00:01:08 - So that was one of the early, early podcasts and such
35. 00:01:12 that I was a part of.
36. 00:01:13 That was when it was a part of,
37. 00:01:16 what was five by five before it was five by five?
38. 00:01:19 What was it called?
39. 00:01:20 - Oh geez, I don't remember.
40. 00:01:22 - But it was a part of that network
41. 00:01:23 that became Dan Benjamin's five by five network
42. 00:01:26 when he renamed it and such.
43. 00:01:27 I can't remember what it was called though.
44. 00:01:29 So it was a part of that.
45. 00:01:31 So it was kind of a cool thing for me
46. 00:01:32 to be a part of that show,
47. 00:01:34 but we talked a lot about a number of things,
48. 00:01:36 like pen and paper systems, of course.
49. 00:01:39 Dave was fascinated that I'm still using an HPDA,
50. 00:01:43 Merlin Mann's index cards in the back pocket thing.
51. 00:01:46 So we got into that, but we talked a little bit
52. 00:01:49 about like notes structures.
53. 00:01:51 He asked about obsidian to a degree,
54. 00:01:53 goals and how you choose to set things up.
55. 00:01:56 Goals in the sense of like,
56. 00:01:58 how do you decide what tools to use?
57. 00:02:00 So it was kind of a cool, wide ranging conversation
58. 00:02:04 that went a whole bunch of different directions
59. 00:02:05 'cause you know, that's what I do.
60. 00:02:07 So the whole thing was, can they keep Joe on task?
61. 00:02:10 That was the goal.
62. 00:02:11 And I don't know that they succeeded.
63. 00:02:13 (laughs)
64. 00:02:15 It was fun though.
65. 00:02:16 - I have not formally met Dave's co-hosts that Harry Marks.
66. 00:02:21 - Harry Marks, yeah.
67. 00:02:22 - Yeah, but I think he does a great job
68. 00:02:25 on the podcast and I've known Dave for a while.
69. 00:02:28 He's good people.
70. 00:02:29 - Yeah, yeah.
71. 00:02:31 He's actually gonna be joining me on analog,
72. 00:02:32 Joe here before too long as well.
73. 00:02:34 So that'll be kind of fun.
74. 00:02:36 - Cool.
75. 00:02:37 Well, we've got a lot to talk about today.
76. 00:02:40 So maybe we should jump in here and hammer out this follow up
77. 00:02:44 which I only had two action items.
78. 00:02:47 - Yep.
79. 00:02:48 - And typical Mike fashion.
80. 00:02:50 I don't really have any way of reporting on these.
81. 00:02:52 (laughs)
82. 00:02:55 - They were don't share the outcomes
83. 00:02:57 and use and instead of but.
84. 00:02:59 I feel like that one I've made some progress with.
85. 00:03:02 I'm really hoping I don't embarrass myself
86. 00:03:04 and do that here on the podcast.
87. 00:03:08 Having said that, we will see how it goes.
88. 00:03:10 - Okay, here's hoping.
89. 00:03:12 - Here's hoping.
90. 00:03:13 Let's talk about email.
91. 00:03:14 - Okay, I'm game.
92. 00:03:17 - So this book is A World Without Email by Kael Newport.
93. 00:03:21 And this is his newest book.
94. 00:03:23 It actually is a record this.
95. 00:03:24 Came out about a week ago.
96. 00:03:26 - Yep.
97. 00:03:27 - So we cranked through this one in order to record this today
98. 00:03:31 because unfortunately we did not get sent advanced copies.
99. 00:03:35 Although if you are a New York Times bestselling author
100. 00:03:40 and would like to send us non-fiction books
101. 00:03:43 ahead of publication.
102. 00:03:45 - Non-fryllies.
103. 00:03:47 - Non-sci-fi.
104. 00:03:48 Non, like all these things.
105. 00:03:51 - We get those.
106. 00:03:52 - It's almost daily.
107. 00:03:53 You realize this.
108. 00:03:54 - It's almost daily, we get one of these.
109. 00:03:55 - Yep.
110. 00:03:56 (laughs)
111. 00:03:57 - Yeah, so, but this was a quick read.
112. 00:04:01 Kael Newport is a great writer.
113. 00:04:04 This will be an interesting conversation, I am sure,
114. 00:04:06 because the arc of Kael Newport's writing
115. 00:04:10 has kind of gone all over the place in terms of
116. 00:04:13 like being very much in line with Joe's way of thinking
117. 00:04:15 and very much in line with my way of thinking,
118. 00:04:18 this one may or may not converge, we will see.
119. 00:04:20 (laughs)
120. 00:04:22 It was interesting, he mentioned, I think it was near the end,
121. 00:04:25 that he actually was working on this book
122. 00:04:29 as soon as he finished the manuscript for Deepwork.
123. 00:04:32 So it was kind of being developed alongside that one,
124. 00:04:36 which you can totally see,
125. 00:04:38 but then also digital minimalism came out in between there.
126. 00:04:42 And then if you go back even further,
127. 00:04:44 he kind of started off as like,
128. 00:04:46 how to get good grades as a college student
129. 00:04:48 and so good they can't ignore you,
130. 00:04:50 which at some point we're gonna have to cover that book
131. 00:04:52 'cause that book is--
132. 00:04:53 - Right, it's really good.
133. 00:04:54 - You have to go back in time for that one, yeah.
134. 00:04:56 - Yeah, but yeah, all that to say,
135. 00:04:59 this is the latest Kael Newport book.
136. 00:05:00 It looks awesome, just talking about like the physical book,
137. 00:05:04 this thing on the spine, this is genius, I love this.
138. 00:05:09 I've had a couple people who have looked at this
139. 00:05:13 and said specifically like, wow, that looks really neat.
140. 00:05:16 (laughs)
141. 00:05:17 - Yeah.
142. 00:05:18 - So very well designed, which is not kind of
143. 00:05:21 what I was expecting from a Kael Newport academic
144. 00:05:24 college professor type book.
145. 00:05:27 But yeah, let's jump into the contents here.
146. 00:05:30 There's a couple different sections,
147. 00:05:33 there's an introduction, which is pretty short,
148. 00:05:34 and then really two parts with a couple chapters each.
149. 00:05:37 So I have all the chapters listed in the outline here.
150. 00:05:40 We'll see if we hit all of these.
151. 00:05:41 I kind of think the conversation will happen
152. 00:05:43 based on the parts.
153. 00:05:44 - Right.
154. 00:05:45 - Part one is the case against email.
155. 00:05:46 Part two is principles for a world without email.
156. 00:05:49 And then our brief conclusion at the end,
157. 00:05:51 which is really his just commentary
158. 00:05:53 of a cool speech that somebody gave.
159. 00:05:55 (laughs)
160. 00:05:56 - Yeah, yeah.
161. 00:05:58 - But anything you wanna add about the book in general
162. 00:06:01 before we jump into the specifics here?
163. 00:06:03 - Well, I will say that the joke, right,
164. 00:06:07 was Joe has bad email practices.
165. 00:06:10 And the hope was that by us doing this,
166. 00:06:14 Mike is hoping to solve my email problems, I think.
167. 00:06:18 (laughs)
168. 00:06:19 'Cause I don't have good practices with email
169. 00:06:23 according to the broader productivity world.
170. 00:06:26 I would tend to argue with a lot of people over that.
171. 00:06:30 So going into this, we've talked about before,
172. 00:06:35 like what are your expectations when you go into this?
173. 00:06:37 And sometimes what you expect can kind of
174. 00:06:40 set the framework, I guess, that you view the book through,
175. 00:06:43 kind of set the lens, I guess,
176. 00:06:45 that you're looking at the book from.
177. 00:06:47 And I will point out that before I started reading this,
178. 00:06:52 I was coming at it very, very skeptical,
179. 00:06:56 which is backwards from the way I've normally come at
180. 00:07:00 Cal Newport's books, because you've heard all the hype
181. 00:07:03 about deep work and then we read deep work.
182. 00:07:05 And we was like, oh, well, this is supposedly
183. 00:07:07 a really good book, so we were excited about it.
184. 00:07:09 Digital minimalism, I had kind of the same viewpoint.
185. 00:07:13 So good, they can't ignore you.
186. 00:07:14 It's another that's we've heard a lot about.
187. 00:07:17 We haven't read that one,
188. 00:07:17 but I would expect good things about it.
189. 00:07:20 This one, a world without email,
190. 00:07:23 being somebody who works with people all over the place,
191. 00:07:29 email is very central to that.
192. 00:07:31 So I came at this, like, okay,
193. 00:07:35 I'm looking out at this book from a side-eye view.
194. 00:07:39 (laughs)
195. 00:07:40 - Yeah.
196. 00:07:41 - Instead of just diving in head-first with it.
197. 00:07:43 So I just wanna point that out, that I had that.
198. 00:07:46 On the onset before we jumped into reading this.
199. 00:07:51 So that said, having gone through it,
200. 00:07:56 I'll share my views as we go, of course,
201. 00:08:01 but I just wanna lay that foundation before we start
202. 00:08:04 driving through all the content here.
203. 00:08:06 - Yeah, I completely understand that because that is
204. 00:08:08 the exact same approach I had when we did the previous book
205. 00:08:12 Thinking in Bets.
206. 00:08:13 - Oh, sure, yeah.
207. 00:08:13 - I went into it.
208. 00:08:14 This is not gonna be for me, and I was pleasantly surprised.
209. 00:08:18 - Right.
210. 00:08:19 - So we'll see if you get there by the end.
211. 00:08:20 - Yep.
212. 00:08:21 (laughs)
213. 00:08:22 - By the end.
214. 00:08:23 I also wanna clarify here at the beginning,
215. 00:08:25 because I feel like the book title maybe makes this seem
216. 00:08:30 as a tactical guide to spending less time in email.
217. 00:08:35 It's really not that.
218. 00:08:37 It's very Cal Newport-esque, and let's just blow up
219. 00:08:42 the system and figure out how to put it back together
220. 00:08:44 to accomplish the things that we want.
221. 00:08:46 And I understand that that is completely not doable
222. 00:08:51 for a large percentage of people who would read this.
223. 00:08:53 You're self-included.
224. 00:08:55 So while I review a little bit and say,
225. 00:08:57 oh, you got bad email habits, I do also understand
226. 00:09:00 that you're not the one making the decisions
227. 00:09:02 about how these conversations necessarily are taking place.
228. 00:09:05 - Right.
229. 00:09:06 - And that is also not to say that if you are in a position
230. 00:09:08 like Joe, where you do have to deal with email,
231. 00:09:12 just part of the deal, then there is still,
232. 00:09:17 I think things that you can take from this book.
233. 00:09:21 So it's not like a CEO level type read necessarily,
234. 00:09:26 but we'll get into the conversation here.
235. 00:09:29 Let's start with the introduction.
236. 00:09:31 He starts with a story about a person who started work
237. 00:09:37 with the government and then right after being hired
238. 00:09:42 to be the director of innovation and entrepreneurship,
239. 00:09:45 the whole network broke based on a cyber attack
240. 00:09:48 and they didn't bring it back up
241. 00:09:50 because they weren't sure exactly what was going on.
242. 00:09:53 So they just decided to burn it all to the ground
243. 00:09:55 and destroy everything in the office they had a chip in it,
244. 00:09:58 which is fascinating just in and of itself.
245. 00:10:01 I felt like that story could be unpacked
246. 00:10:04 and be 40 pages long and that would be really entertaining,
247. 00:10:06 but typical Cal style, he tells a brief part of that story
248. 00:10:11 and then moves on, but the big takeaway from that story
249. 00:10:14 is that there was no email for six weeks.
250. 00:10:16 In a position where they had relied on email
251. 00:10:20 and I feel this does a great job of setting the tone
252. 00:10:24 and maybe disarming an argument from somebody like you
253. 00:10:27 who would say, I can't do this
254. 00:10:31 because they were in a position
255. 00:10:32 where if you would ask them, they would have said,
256. 00:10:34 I can't do this and then they had to do this
257. 00:10:37 and surprise, surprise, they found that they actually
258. 00:10:40 started doing better on their job
259. 00:10:43 'cause they had more white space
260. 00:10:44 and they were disconnected from the email.
261. 00:10:46 So what was your impression,
262. 00:10:48 how did you react to this story in this introduction?
263. 00:10:52 - It made a lot of sense, right?
264. 00:10:53 So if your email system is down
265. 00:10:56 and I'll put another preface here,
266. 00:10:59 I've had this happen not to me on my entire email system,
267. 00:11:06 but I have had cases when I first took my IT director
268. 00:11:10 position at the church, their email structure
269. 00:11:12 that they were on had all sorts of crazy problems
270. 00:11:16 and it would regularly go down.
271. 00:11:18 So I knew the moment the email was busted
272. 00:11:22 because they would call me.
273. 00:11:23 It's like, yo, we have a problem.
274. 00:11:25 So like I've seen this happen
275. 00:11:27 and although my email at the time
276. 00:11:31 through the church, like that particular email address
277. 00:11:33 that I had was I barely got anything on it.
278. 00:11:36 So it was not a big deal to me.
279. 00:11:39 If you removed the two email addresses
280. 00:11:42 that I use regularly for all of my online stuff,
281. 00:11:45 that would be a different story.
282. 00:11:46 That would be very different.
283. 00:11:49 But a couple of things about this was that,
284. 00:11:52 okay, so the email structure went down, right?
285. 00:11:55 And she was forced to do things outside of email, right?
286. 00:12:01 So she's making phone calls, she's, you know,
287. 00:12:04 a lot of phone calls, doing a lot of in-person meetings
288. 00:12:08 and such.
289. 00:12:09 So she started doing a lot of those things in place of email.
290. 00:12:14 Totally on board with that.
291. 00:12:15 I totally get it.
292. 00:12:16 I don't know how many times I call people
293. 00:12:18 whenever emails are getting out of hand.
294. 00:12:20 So that is a thing I definitely would agree with.
295. 00:12:24 The trick is that she had an excuse for it.
296. 00:12:29 Like this is something he doesn't really talk about
297. 00:12:31 in that there was a reason,
298. 00:12:35 a very justified reason that she was off of email for,
299. 00:12:39 it was a long time.
300. 00:12:41 And that period, whenever she talked to people,
301. 00:12:44 why didn't you get back to my email?
302. 00:12:46 They shut my email server down.
303. 00:12:48 Like, that's a pretty solid excuse.
304. 00:12:52 So you have a justified reason.
305. 00:12:54 You couldn't do that on your own.
306. 00:12:57 Like you couldn't just run that experiment for yourself
307. 00:13:00 and say, I'm just not gonna use email at all for three months
308. 00:13:03 and then you're calling people and driving to people
309. 00:13:05 and doing all that.
310. 00:13:06 And they talk, why didn't you get back to my email?
311. 00:13:07 I just don't wanna use my email for three months.
312. 00:13:10 Yep, that's not gonna fly.
313. 00:13:11 So there's two sides of that coin.
314. 00:13:15 One, if forced, yes, you can be better at things
315. 00:13:17 and yes, you can get better at doing things without email.
316. 00:13:20 I think that's very solid.
317. 00:13:22 But if you don't have that forced upon you,
318. 00:13:26 you then have to use the rest of his book
319. 00:13:29 to understand how you can implement some of the benefits
320. 00:13:33 of what she was able to receive
321. 00:13:35 without the catastrophic server went down scenario.
322. 00:13:40 Yes, I agree with you.
323. 00:13:42 This reminded me this story
324. 00:13:44 because it took place in the government
325. 00:13:46 of the story of the army using Scrum
326. 00:13:51 during the Battle of the Bulge in that book
327. 00:13:53 when we covered it because they basically needed
328. 00:13:56 to find an alternative 'cause what they were doing
329. 00:13:59 wasn't working and then the minute that they got things
330. 00:14:02 under control, they went back to the old way of doing things.
331. 00:14:05 Right, right.
332. 00:14:07 Which is very typical, I think.
333. 00:14:12 They had to figure out a way to work without this
334. 00:14:16 and then when it became available,
335. 00:14:18 I'm sure they don't still not do email.
336. 00:14:22 But it's also interesting because I feel a lot of what
337. 00:14:24 Cal does with his latest books is try to paint a picture
338. 00:14:28 of a different world and he's not necessarily trying to say
339. 00:14:32 like these are the steps to get their typical
340. 00:14:35 productivity system style.
341. 00:14:37 But he's trying to inspire you like,
342. 00:14:40 hey, think about this because you probably never even considered
343. 00:14:44 what this would look like or that this was even a possibility.
344. 00:14:47 And so I feel like at this point, he's just trying to help you
345. 00:14:50 to think that this is more than just a pie in the sky,
346. 00:14:54 pipe dream, maybe there's aspects of this that you could apply.
347. 00:14:59 He also introduces in this section the idea of the hyperactive
348. 00:15:02 hive mind which comes up over and over and over again.
349. 00:15:05 So let's define this real quick.
350. 00:15:07 He says, the hyperactive hive mind is a workflow centered
351. 00:15:10 around ongoing conversations fueled by unstructured
352. 00:15:13 and unscheduled messages delivered through digital
353. 00:15:15 communication tools like email and instant messenger services.
354. 00:15:19 And I think everybody can kind of relate to that definition
355. 00:15:22 and has felt the pain of that in some way, shape or form.
356. 00:15:25 The other thing he says here is that the future of work
357. 00:15:30 is increasingly cognitive.
358. 00:15:32 This is a theme from deep work.
359. 00:15:33 I 100% agree with that.
360. 00:15:36 We have to therefore understand how our brains work.
361. 00:15:40 And he's basically saying in this whole book that email
362. 00:15:44 is not in alignment with that.
363. 00:15:47 So I do believe he is 100% correct when he says that
364. 00:15:52 a world without email is not only possible but inevitable.
365. 00:15:56 And people look at me like I've got a third eye
366. 00:15:59 in the middle of my forehead when I say that.
367. 00:16:02 But it just seems so obvious to me that this is not going
368. 00:16:08 to be the thing who knows how far down the road.
369. 00:16:10 It's probably not five years, it's probably not 10 years,
370. 00:16:12 maybe 20 years, 30 years, whatever, but email's not great.
371. 00:16:17 There's got to be a better way.
372. 00:16:20 And eventually we will collectively stumble on this
373. 00:16:23 and say, yes, this is better.
374. 00:16:25 The problem I think though is that we take this path
375. 00:16:29 of least resistance, especially with our communication.
376. 00:16:32 He talks about this later on in the book.
377. 00:16:34 And we were talking about this before we hit record.
378. 00:16:36 People will send a one minute message with a question
379. 00:16:41 and then it requires an hour long response.
380. 00:16:43 Like the guy who emailed me and he's like,
381. 00:16:46 "Hey, what do I have to do to get a response?"
382. 00:16:47 I just asked a simple question.
383. 00:16:49 About troubleshooting his monitor setup.
384. 00:16:51 Like I don't know.
385. 00:16:53 It could be this, this or this.
386. 00:16:55 And I finally did reply with three or four paragraphs
387. 00:16:59 and the whole time I'm doing it
388. 00:16:59 and I'm like, this is exactly what Cal was talking about.
389. 00:17:02 - Yes, this is why, and I haven't been as good about this,
390. 00:17:09 but for a long time, my email was,
391. 00:17:12 I had a lot of emails like what you're talking about.
392. 00:17:15 If you write scripts and you do things
393. 00:17:17 to help people automate their systems,
394. 00:17:19 you get stuff like that.
395. 00:17:20 Like this is what you're talking about too.
396. 00:17:21 Like you get these things, right?
397. 00:17:23 I don't know how many emails I have in my inbox right now
398. 00:17:26 of, "Hey Joe, can you get this script to do X, Y, and Z?"
399. 00:17:30 And like if it's somebody who texts me,
400. 00:17:32 like we know each other well enough
401. 00:17:33 that you have my phone number,
402. 00:17:34 generally I say yes to those because I know
403. 00:17:36 that it is something that that person cannot do
404. 00:17:39 and usually they're a little afraid to ask
405. 00:17:41 by that point they've taken like three weeks
406. 00:17:43 to conjure up the courage to say,
407. 00:17:45 "Joe, will you help me with this?"
408. 00:17:46 Like I know that.
409. 00:17:48 Yes, one of them's right here.
410. 00:17:49 So yes, I'm aware of that.
411. 00:17:52 Those I generally say yes to.
412. 00:17:54 The ones in my email,
413. 00:17:56 if it's people I don't know, no offense,
414. 00:17:59 but I get so many of them it's impossible
415. 00:18:01 for me to do that for everyone.
416. 00:18:04 So what I've done historically is document the process,
417. 00:18:09 publish it on my blog,
418. 00:18:10 and when people ask I send them a link,
419. 00:18:13 it's like here, this is what you need.
420. 00:18:17 Go through this,
421. 00:18:18 or I find somebody else who's done it
422. 00:18:20 and send links to that and then just done.
423. 00:18:23 And 'cause I'm not gonna take the time
424. 00:18:24 to write the three, four, five paragraphs it takes
425. 00:18:27 to try to debug your system over email
426. 00:18:30 'cause that is just what we call a mess.
427. 00:18:32 That's the exact reason I wrote that post
428. 00:18:36 about my DSLR camera setup.
429. 00:18:37 Yes, yes.
430. 00:18:38 Because I get asked that question all the time.
431. 00:18:42 Yep.
432. 00:18:43 And now I have a place I can send people
433. 00:18:45 with links to all the gear that I use.
434. 00:18:47 And it is needlessly complicated.
435. 00:18:50 We were talking about this before we hit record.
436. 00:18:52 I actually have OBS running on my computer
437. 00:18:56 so that I can flip the display and send it to my iPad,
438. 00:18:59 which I have connected via Sidecar.
439. 00:19:01 And yes, I know Luna display is supposed to work.
440. 00:19:03 It doesn't and there are other things
441. 00:19:05 that should work and they don't.
442. 00:19:06 This is the solution for the M1 Mac
443. 00:19:09 because I set it up with my teleprompter
444. 00:19:11 and I wanna be able to look right into the camera
445. 00:19:13 when we have conversations like this.
446. 00:19:14 I feel like the resulting communication ends up being
447. 00:19:18 a little bit better.
448. 00:19:19 So yeah, I totally understand where you're coming with that.
449. 00:19:23 But now that you've said this out loud,
450. 00:19:24 people are gonna wanna know how you did it
451. 00:19:27 and you're gonna get an email about it potentially.
452. 00:19:29 So. - Link in the show notes.
453. 00:19:31 (laughs)
454. 00:19:33 Oh, that's just how this stuff goes.
455. 00:19:35 - Yeah.
456. 00:19:36 So let's jump into part one, the case against email.
457. 00:19:40 And there are three chapters here.
458. 00:19:43 Do you wanna tackle these individually?
459. 00:19:46 I mean, there's only seven chapters in the entire book
460. 00:19:48 or should we just talk about the whole case against email?
461. 00:19:52 - Let's cover the whole case all in one shot.
462. 00:19:56 'Cause basically email stinks.
463. 00:20:00 All right, part two, let's move on.
464. 00:20:02 (laughs)
465. 00:20:04 - Well, there's three specific things
466. 00:20:05 and that's why there's three chapters.
467. 00:20:07 And I think these are very well defined.
468. 00:20:11 For someone who maybe knows they resent the fact
469. 00:20:15 that they have to spend a lot of time in email,
470. 00:20:17 but they haven't really articulated exactly why
471. 00:20:21 this is gonna resonate.
472. 00:20:24 So chapter one is email reduces productivity.
473. 00:20:27 That's kind of the one, Jan, I expected this from Cal.
474. 00:20:30 Number two, email makes us miserable.
475. 00:20:34 And that one kind of caught me off guard when I read that.
476. 00:20:37 I'm like, oh, well, yes, I agree,
477. 00:20:39 but that seems like a strong statement.
478. 00:20:42 - Right, right.
479. 00:20:44 - And then number three, email has a mind of its own.
480. 00:20:46 So they feel very different.
481. 00:20:49 This does not feel like your typical listicle style article
482. 00:20:54 you would find on the web of three reasons why email is bad.
483. 00:20:59 - Yes.
484. 00:21:00 - And it feels more comprehensive to me.
485. 00:21:03 So I don't know, where do you wanna start?
486. 00:21:05 Email reduces productivity is probably
487. 00:21:07 the logical place to start,
488. 00:21:09 but it's also the place we've probably talked the most
489. 00:21:12 about previously.
490. 00:21:13 So should we just cover this real quick?
491. 00:21:15 - There's a whole bunch here, right?
492. 00:21:17 So I feel like the bulk of what we need to cover is part two.
493. 00:21:20 So part one, the case against email,
494. 00:21:24 it can kind of be summarized in that our use of a tool
495. 00:21:29 that is supposed to make things better
496. 00:21:32 is making things significantly worse.
497. 00:21:36 It has a lot of unintended consequences.
498. 00:21:41 Even though, if you look, 'cause there's all sorts
499. 00:21:43 of stories here, right?
500. 00:21:44 Some of which are about, some of the ones
501. 00:21:47 that were most interesting to me is like the origin stories
502. 00:21:50 to email, right?
503. 00:21:51 How it came about, how they used it when it first came about.
504. 00:21:55 One of the stories I think was most impactful
505. 00:21:57 from a lot of this was that the IBM story,
506. 00:22:01 where they hired a person to study how much communication
507. 00:22:06 was happening in the office.
508. 00:22:08 Because what they wanted to do is put in a mainframe
509. 00:22:10 to be able to handle email, right?
510. 00:22:13 That way they could figure out how much they needed
511. 00:22:15 to spend in order to have a system that would actually
512. 00:22:17 allow them to do the same amount of communication
513. 00:22:20 once they brought the system in.
514. 00:22:22 They're million dollar machines, like they're expensive.
515. 00:22:26 So to do that meant that they wanted to be exactly sure
516. 00:22:30 what they needed before they brought it
517. 00:22:32 so they didn't spend too much.
518. 00:22:34 They brought it in, they moved all of the stuff over,
519. 00:22:37 they had calculated how many memos are sent,
520. 00:22:39 how many voicemails are sent, how many people run up
521. 00:22:41 and down the stairs, like they calculated all of this.
522. 00:22:45 So they could figure out the exact number of messages
523. 00:22:47 that are being sent on a daily basis.
524. 00:22:49 Brought in a server that could handle that load
525. 00:22:51 and it crashed in what, three days?
526. 00:22:54 Because of the overload?
527. 00:22:55 - Yes, 'cause they had five to six times as many messages.
528. 00:22:59 - Right, and what they hadn't counted on,
529. 00:23:02 there was one major piece that attributed to it,
530. 00:23:05 the wonderful CC line where you can just copy people on,
531. 00:23:09 I can send one message and send it to 15 people.
532. 00:23:12 They realized that very quickly and thought,
533. 00:23:14 huh, well, I'll just do that.
534. 00:23:16 Well, on the server side, it's not one message, it's now 15.
535. 00:23:20 So it becomes a bit bigger than they intended.
536. 00:23:25 So then the whole thing comes down.
537. 00:23:27 Basically, the point is that email is supposed
538. 00:23:30 to help us communicate quickly, asynchronously,
539. 00:23:35 but because it's so easy to do,
540. 00:23:41 it comes with all of these other ramifications
541. 00:23:44 like we're talking about here,
542. 00:23:45 reducing productivity because of the time
543. 00:23:47 and the fragmentedness of it.
544. 00:23:49 It's making us miserable because we're spending so much time
545. 00:23:52 on it, taking it home, not putting good boundaries around it,
546. 00:23:55 has a mind of its own because the more you check things,
547. 00:23:58 the more you send responses,
548. 00:23:59 people realize you're available,
549. 00:24:00 thus they'll send more at those times
550. 00:24:02 and it just creates this big vicious cycle.
551. 00:24:05 - Yeah, well, I do think there's a couple of things
552. 00:24:07 we should unpack here.
553. 00:24:08 Starting on page 19, where he directly addresses your concern,
554. 00:24:13 he says, "Joebulic, no, many people acknowledge
555. 00:24:19 that some jobs might benefit from significantly less interruption,
556. 00:24:22 but not theirs."
557. 00:24:23 - Yes, yes.
558. 00:24:26 - And that is a quote pulled out of context kind of
559. 00:24:29 because I think you would agree with just that quote
560. 00:24:32 that your job would benefit from less interruption,
561. 00:24:35 but the larger point he's making is like,
562. 00:24:37 well, that would be great
563. 00:24:39 and I'm sure some people can do this, but not me.
564. 00:24:42 - I would put a caveat on that in that parts of my job need it.
565. 00:24:47 - Sure.
566. 00:24:50 - And a fair amount of my job doesn't.
567. 00:24:52 And the people who work in the office with me know this
568. 00:24:56 because there are times when I'm not anywhere near my email
569. 00:24:59 and you can't get ahold of me.
570. 00:25:00 So like that does happen.
571. 00:25:02 So yes, I think email is very vital to some aspects,
572. 00:25:07 but yes, I'll agree with him basically 100% on that.
573. 00:25:13 - Yeah, 'cause that section, the header for that section
574. 00:25:16 is email is not a job.
575. 00:25:18 And that sounds a little bit controversial.
576. 00:25:20 Well, what about customer support?
577. 00:25:21 What about sales?
578. 00:25:22 Those are the two that people always push back on me with
579. 00:25:25 when I say email is not a job.
580. 00:25:28 And I think what he is saying is that the job
581. 00:25:31 is that you have to respond to people quickly.
582. 00:25:34 And the default for many, many, many years has been,
583. 00:25:38 email is the way to do this.
584. 00:25:41 But I think it's important to disconnect those two,
585. 00:25:43 even if you are not in a position of power
586. 00:25:45 to shift the way that the communication happens,
587. 00:25:48 recognize that email in and of itself
588. 00:25:52 is not necessarily the job.
589. 00:25:55 Maybe communication is the job.
590. 00:25:56 And at that point, we can start to look for
591. 00:25:59 maybe better ways to do that.
592. 00:26:02 One of the stories that he told in that section
593. 00:26:06 was George Marshall, the US five-star general,
594. 00:26:08 which I thought was pretty great.
595. 00:26:10 He frames this story as this is the guy
596. 00:26:12 who was really responsible for winning World War II,
597. 00:26:15 was it Dwight Eisenhower, the Eisenhower Matrix?
598. 00:26:18 He's the one who gets a lot of credit
599. 00:26:19 for the important versus urgent stuff.
600. 00:26:21 But this is the guy who really implemented it.
601. 00:26:23 (laughs)
602. 00:26:25 'Cause he had a structure for every single interaction
603. 00:26:28 that he had.
604. 00:26:29 In fact, he's a five-star general, right?
605. 00:26:31 So you-- - He was the very first
606. 00:26:32 five-star general, I think, right?
607. 00:26:34 - Could be that I don't know.
608. 00:26:37 But basically, he's the one who said,
609. 00:26:39 "Don't salute me when you come into my office
610. 00:26:41 "in order to save time."
611. 00:26:43 And then right away, you're supposed to begin your brief
612. 00:26:47 and he will ask for recommendation
613. 00:26:50 and then he will delegate the action.
614. 00:26:51 That is the formula.
615. 00:26:53 And I thought that was really interesting
616. 00:26:56 that we talked earlier about there's government and policies
617. 00:27:01 and we talked about Scrum, we talked about the six-week
618. 00:27:03 email shutdown.
619. 00:27:04 This is an example of somebody who is working
620. 00:27:07 in government, but it's counterintuitive to that.
621. 00:27:10 It's not falling into that trap or that formula
622. 00:27:13 that we typically think of.
623. 00:27:15 He's saying, "No, this is the way that we're going to do this."
624. 00:27:18 And it feels very contradictory
625. 00:27:20 to the standard protocol that people are supposed to follow.
626. 00:27:25 So I found that really interesting.
627. 00:27:27 The other thing I found really interesting in here,
628. 00:27:29 which we could have probably a whole big conversation
629. 00:27:32 about this, is he makes a statement that GTD rose
630. 00:27:36 in popularity as email began to take off.
631. 00:27:40 I kinda think he's right on with this
632. 00:27:43 and I feel like he articulated something I have felt
633. 00:27:48 about GTD that has bothered me for years
634. 00:27:51 because I have not really implemented GTD for a long time.
635. 00:27:56 Even though when I read that book the first time,
636. 00:27:59 I was like, "Ah, this is great. I found the answer."
637. 00:28:02 I had the same response that probably everybody else does.
638. 00:28:04 And as I think about like,
639. 00:28:05 why did that resonate with me back then?
640. 00:28:07 It's because I was overwhelmed.
641. 00:28:09 I had too many inputs and I was trying to become
642. 00:28:12 just a little bit more efficient to squeeze out some time
643. 00:28:14 for the things that were important to me.
644. 00:28:16 And my working situation has changed to the point now
645. 00:28:19 where I can be more intentional and be more focused.
646. 00:28:22 And so now I think about GTD and that standard process.
647. 00:28:25 And if it takes us in two minutes, just do it.
648. 00:28:27 And I'm like, "No, I don't wanna do anything
649. 00:28:31 that takes me less than two minutes to do."
650. 00:28:33 'Cause it's probably not worth a while doing.
651. 00:28:34 Like I would prefer to,
652. 00:28:37 I'm gonna write this big article
653. 00:28:38 and I'm gonna focus on that one article all day.
654. 00:28:41 And I'm gonna write that article.
655. 00:28:43 And there'd be different aspects of that.
656. 00:28:45 You know, mind mapping the article,
657. 00:28:47 maybe doing some keyword research,
658. 00:28:49 actually writing the article,
659. 00:28:50 getting the screenshots or images that are required for it.
660. 00:28:54 Maybe even recording a video,
661. 00:28:56 but I would lump that all under like that big task
662. 00:28:59 and you could make the argument,
663. 00:29:00 well, that should be a project.
664. 00:29:01 You should break it down piece by piece.
665. 00:29:03 But when you have the time and the space
666. 00:29:05 to work on something in a deep way,
667. 00:29:07 like that the question you're left with is why?
668. 00:29:10 Because David Allen told me to,
669. 00:29:11 because I'm constantly running back and forth
670. 00:29:13 between different things,
671. 00:29:14 because I'm constantly getting interrupted by email, maybe.
672. 00:29:18 - I think one of the things that's interesting,
673. 00:29:22 because I don't know that this is wrong, what are you saying?
674. 00:29:26 Like GTD and email rising at the same time,
675. 00:29:28 'cause they did come to full popularity
676. 00:29:32 at about the same time.
677. 00:29:34 And I wonder because, you know,
678. 00:29:37 I've kept up with David Allen and his whole
679. 00:29:39 getting things done culture and the stuff
680. 00:29:42 he's continued to put out,
681. 00:29:44 because I think a lot of what he says is solid.
682. 00:29:47 And there's a thing that I've noticed,
683. 00:29:50 there's like an undertone that he has been alluding to,
684. 00:29:55 at least within the last couple of years
685. 00:29:59 that I've noticed.
686. 00:30:00 And that is that if your system can't handle
687. 00:30:03 what you're throwing at it,
688. 00:30:04 you need to back off what you're putting into it.
689. 00:30:06 - Correct.
690. 00:30:07 - And I kinda wish that was more of a core tenant
691. 00:30:12 to what he pushes,
692. 00:30:15 because a lot of what Cal Newport is saying here
693. 00:30:18 has to do with eliminating inputs, right?
694. 00:30:22 - It feels like a concession to me, honestly,
695. 00:30:24 that statement,
696. 00:30:25 because email has grown and grown and grown,
697. 00:30:28 email is a mind of its own, right?
698. 00:30:29 It's gonna evolve.
699. 00:30:31 And if you look at any of the videos,
700. 00:30:36 talks that he gives, whatever.
701. 00:30:37 - David Allen or Cal.
702. 00:30:39 - Sorry, David Allen.
703. 00:30:40 - Okay.
704. 00:30:41 - If you look at the people who are in the audience,
705. 00:30:43 it's business guy,
706. 00:30:45 - Right, right.
707. 00:30:46 - Busy executive.
708. 00:30:47 And those are the people who would also argue,
709. 00:30:50 "Well, I can't break away from my email.
710. 00:30:52 "There is no way that I can do that."
711. 00:30:54 So Cal basically saying,
712. 00:30:56 "Maybe there's a connection here."
713. 00:30:58 And I think that kinda is.
714. 00:31:00 He says a little bit more strongly.
715. 00:31:01 He says email is responsible
716. 00:31:03 for our frenetic pace of activity.
717. 00:31:06 And he also says,
718. 00:31:07 "And this I agree with GTD gave people a way
719. 00:31:09 "to deal with an increase in volume."
720. 00:31:11 But at some point,
721. 00:31:13 efficiency is not the answer.
722. 00:31:15 - Right, and I think that's some
723. 00:31:17 of what I'm getting at here, right?
724. 00:31:18 So I'm not saying GTD is the answer to everything here.
725. 00:31:22 I'm just saying that GTD can help with,
726. 00:31:27 'cause I still use that system to a degree.
727. 00:31:30 Whenever I stop and look at what I'm doing,
728. 00:31:33 it basically is that.
729. 00:31:35 The difference is that the broader GTD community
730. 00:31:40 generally thinks of GTD as a way
731. 00:31:43 to handle the huge influx of things
732. 00:31:46 that are inevitable, quote unquote,
733. 00:31:49 to come into my inboxes, right?
734. 00:31:53 So Facebook and social media can be a bank of inboxes.
735. 00:31:57 Email, of course, is a big inbox.
736. 00:31:59 There are a lot of these things
737. 00:32:01 to use some of David Allen's terminology inboxes, right?
738. 00:32:05 But I think what Cal is telling us is
739. 00:32:08 that you wouldn't need something like GTD
740. 00:32:12 if you didn't allow all these huge influxes of inputs
741. 00:32:17 to hit you in the face.
742. 00:32:18 Like it wouldn't be that necessary.
743. 00:32:20 So although I think GT could be a good thing,
744. 00:32:25 I think the reason it took off is a bad thing.
745. 00:32:31 Exactly.
746. 00:32:32 The problem that it's solving intentionally or unintentionally,
747. 00:32:36 I don't think is as altruistic as it first appears
748. 00:32:40 when you come to it.
749. 00:32:41 Right, yeah.
750. 00:32:42 Because it's kind of a symptom, not disease solution.
751. 00:32:47 That's kind of the revelation I got from thinking about GTD
752. 00:32:52 prior to this.
753. 00:32:54 I've kind of been brewing on this for a while,
754. 00:32:57 but I didn't have a good way to articulate
755. 00:33:00 the tension and the friction that I felt about it
756. 00:33:04 until I read this book.
757. 00:33:06 And then when he made the connection
758. 00:33:08 between email being a driver of the frenetic pace of activity
759. 00:33:12 and GTD being a way to deal with the frenetic pace of activity,
760. 00:33:16 I was like, aha, that makes total sense.
761. 00:33:19 And it's not just email, it's Slack,
762. 00:33:22 it's a bunch of other things,
763. 00:33:24 but that hyperactive hive mind,
764. 00:33:26 that's the thing that he keeps coming back to,
765. 00:33:29 hyperactive hive mind doesn't resonate as much
766. 00:33:32 as a world without email.
767. 00:33:34 That's why he does a title.
768. 00:33:36 But ultimately that is what he is addressing here.
769. 00:33:40 The tools you use for this may change,
770. 00:33:43 and in fact, in chapter three,
771. 00:33:44 kind of talks about the three drivers
772. 00:33:46 of the hive mind at the office,
773. 00:33:47 the hidden cost of a synchrony,
774. 00:33:50 the cycle of responsiveness
775. 00:33:51 and the caveman at the computer screen.
776. 00:33:53 The hidden cost of a synchrony,
777. 00:33:55 this has a couple different aspects.
778. 00:34:00 It's easier to just throw out an email
779. 00:34:04 that it is to pick up the phone and call someone
780. 00:34:05 or set up a meeting and actually talk to them.
781. 00:34:08 That's good in some senses, bad in other senses.
782. 00:34:11 We already talked about how you can ask a question
783. 00:34:13 and it doesn't take you very long
784. 00:34:15 but then the person responding has to spend an hour crafting
785. 00:34:18 and response.
786. 00:34:19 And I feel like the asynchronous piece,
787. 00:34:21 what it allows you to do is completely disconnect
788. 00:34:24 from the true cost of the interaction
789. 00:34:26 because you're not there watching the other person
790. 00:34:29 and waiting for them to respond,
791. 00:34:31 even though you probably are just hitting refresh
792. 00:34:33 on your computer every couple of minutes
793. 00:34:36 or every time you get a ding going and looking
794. 00:34:38 and seeing if the answer that you need is there.
795. 00:34:41 But we need to recognize the true cost of the interaction
796. 00:34:46 and if that's all we did,
797. 00:34:48 regardless of whether we use email or not,
798. 00:34:51 communication would be a lot more effective.
799. 00:34:53 But asynchronous email specifically makes it easy
800. 00:34:57 to gloss over and not recognize those true costs.
801. 00:35:00 - This plays into, we've talked about digital minimalism
802. 00:35:04 and some of the books we've talked about,
803. 00:35:06 the science behind social media
804. 00:35:11 and the notification system, the like system
805. 00:35:15 that comes with that, right?
806. 00:35:16 So what they do in a lot of those cases
807. 00:35:19 is split up the time
808. 00:35:23 so that you don't know when a notification is coming.
809. 00:35:26 Like if you don't know when something's coming,
810. 00:35:29 you'll have a tendency to spend more time on it
811. 00:35:31 and check that thing, that app, that system more often.
812. 00:35:36 Email is exactly that.
813. 00:35:38 Like this is by accident built to be addictive.
814. 00:35:43 That is the addiction cycle, right?
815. 00:35:48 So, or one of, there's a bunch of those actually.
816. 00:35:51 So it's one of those.
817. 00:35:53 So you have to be very careful
818. 00:35:55 and it's easy to fall into some of that trap, I think,
819. 00:36:00 just because of the nature of the beast here
820. 00:36:04 that we're talking about.
821. 00:36:05 So I don't think anyone's gonna argue with us
822. 00:36:09 that email has some downsides.
823. 00:36:13 A lot of the science and stuff that he shares here is like,
824. 00:36:17 you had me at the beginning of the first chapter,
825. 00:36:20 like we got three chapters of this.
826. 00:36:22 I'm with you, like I get it, it kills productivity
827. 00:36:27 'cause you're checking it all the time.
828. 00:36:28 I really don't like dealing with it.
829. 00:36:31 Like they're saying in the chat,
830. 00:36:32 if you get a really small question in your email,
831. 00:36:35 it's easy to have to deal with the big long response
832. 00:36:38 'cause if I don't take the time to craft something,
833. 00:36:41 like my question well, that person responding to it
834. 00:36:45 has to put a whole lot of work into doing this.
835. 00:36:48 Even like the support structures
836. 00:36:50 for apps and systems and services, right?
837. 00:36:53 Like how many of these,
838. 00:36:54 you see like the little chat box in the bottom right.
839. 00:36:56 You see that where you go to the system
840. 00:36:59 and it's got the little thing in the bottom right.
841. 00:37:01 And if you have a support question,
842. 00:37:02 you can just tick that, ask a question
843. 00:37:05 and somebody gets back to you within a few minutes
844. 00:37:07 and it's like, okay, think about the mass number of people
845. 00:37:11 and the structure that's gotta be in place
846. 00:37:13 so that someone can get that from anyone anytime a day
847. 00:37:17 and get a response back in a few minutes.
848. 00:37:19 So what I try to do,
849. 00:37:21 and I know not everyone does this,
850. 00:37:24 probably most people don't,
851. 00:37:26 I know having been in IT support for a while now,
852. 00:37:31 that the better I ask my question
853. 00:37:33 and the more I frame what has happened
854. 00:37:36 that I have an issue with,
855. 00:37:37 the quicker they can get back to me.
856. 00:37:39 - Yes.
857. 00:37:40 - So my answer that I need can be received much, much faster
858. 00:37:45 if I take the time upfront to ask the questions correctly,
859. 00:37:48 but before we jumped,
860. 00:37:50 I just opened my email 'cause I wanted to know
861. 00:37:51 what was in my inbox right now
862. 00:37:53 so that we could talk about this.
863. 00:37:54 And I have a handful of things in there
864. 00:37:57 that I know right now are one-line questions.
865. 00:38:00 Like what you were talking about earlier is like,
866. 00:38:01 what's wrong with my monitor?
867. 00:38:02 Like, there's so many things.
868. 00:38:05 Like if you had taken the time to write me two paragraphs
869. 00:38:08 of explaining what you've done
870. 00:38:09 and what's gone on behind it,
871. 00:38:11 what's wrong with the script,
872. 00:38:12 how have you tried to install it?
873. 00:38:13 - And you could respond with a single sentence.
874. 00:38:16 - Correct.
875. 00:38:17 I could probably get back to you
876. 00:38:19 within a handful of hours based on my email practices
877. 00:38:22 and you could probably have an answer,
878. 00:38:23 but if it's gonna require me to do some testing
879. 00:38:26 and some exploring to figure out what's going on with it,
880. 00:38:29 there's not a good chance I'm gonna do anything with it.
881. 00:38:31 - Exactly, and nobody does that.
882. 00:38:34 - Correct, correct.
883. 00:38:36 - I could say on this podcast 'cause it's you and I
884. 00:38:39 that everybody does that 'cause I do the same thing.
885. 00:38:42 When I have a technical issue,
886. 00:38:44 this is the OS that I'm running.
887. 00:38:45 This is the app version that I'm using.
888. 00:38:48 Here's a video that shows exactly what I'm talking about
889. 00:38:51 and 99% of the time the response is like,
890. 00:38:54 "Wow, this is really helpful.
891. 00:38:55 Thank you, we have our team on this,
892. 00:38:57 we'll get back to you shortly."
893. 00:38:59 But nobody does that.
894. 00:39:00 It's, "Hey, why isn't this working?"
895. 00:39:02 I don't know.
896. 00:39:03 At that point, well, you can't fault people
897. 00:39:07 for that sort of request either though
898. 00:39:11 because they're completely overwhelmed
899. 00:39:13 and they have this question
900. 00:39:15 and if they took the time to craft three paragraphs,
901. 00:39:19 there would be 12 more dings
902. 00:39:21 that they would have to respond to
903. 00:39:23 and so they can't keep up, recognize that.
904. 00:39:25 That's why they're shooting off this quick question.
905. 00:39:27 But then they've just thrown the whole burden on your lap
906. 00:39:32 and even if you don't have an entire hour to craft
907. 00:39:37 the response right now, actually,
908. 00:39:39 sometimes it's even worse.
909. 00:39:40 If you do have an hour to craft the response,
910. 00:39:42 you could send that back,
911. 00:39:44 given the information that they shared you,
912. 00:39:45 "Oh, actually there's this other thing here."
913. 00:39:47 "Oh, well that changes everything
914. 00:39:48 and now you gotta do it again."
915. 00:39:50 So what ends up happening is you do that a couple times
916. 00:39:53 and you're like, "Okay, well, I'm not gonna spend
917. 00:39:54 that effort on the front at the front end anymore.
918. 00:39:57 I'll just dash out a quick response."
919. 00:39:59 Now you're playing email ping pong
920. 00:40:01 and you've got 12 more back and forths
921. 00:40:03 before you finally land on the specific issue.
922. 00:40:06 I absolutely hate this and so the best solution I've found
923. 00:40:12 is just not respond to email,
924. 00:40:13 which I can't like people can't do that.
925. 00:40:17 And I know it makes people angry.
926. 00:40:18 That's just, it's so frustrating to me.
927. 00:40:23 If you were to put a camera and watch my facial expressions
928. 00:40:28 as I deal with email, I probably start off like,
929. 00:40:31 "Oh, hey, happy Mike."
930. 00:40:32 And by the end I'm like, "Rrrr!"
931. 00:40:34 (laughing)
932. 00:40:36 - I would love to see that actually.
933. 00:40:38 - I guarantee that's what happens
934. 00:40:39 because it just, it's like fingernails
935. 00:40:44 on the chalkboard of my soul.
936. 00:40:46 It just, I cannot stand it.
937. 00:40:48 So I do whatever I can to spend as little time
938. 00:40:51 in there as possible.
939. 00:40:52 - Sure.
940. 00:40:53 I get it, I do.
941. 00:40:55 But you're absolutely right.
942. 00:40:57 Somebody's gonna have to spend time on it.
943. 00:40:59 And if you're the one asking the question,
944. 00:41:01 it should be you.
945. 00:41:03 Don't put it on the other person.
946. 00:41:05 Like that's my view on it.
947. 00:41:07 It can get things done much, much quicker.
948. 00:41:10 But at the same time,
949. 00:41:14 phone calls and in-persons,
950. 00:41:16 or in today's world video calls,
951. 00:41:18 are significantly better for that sort of thing.
952. 00:41:21 It may take, you know,
953. 00:41:23 a bit of a mess to set up technologically sometimes.
954. 00:41:27 But the broad scheme of things
955. 00:41:30 is it's done much, much faster.
956. 00:41:32 And more thoroughly, right?
957. 00:41:34 - In general, yes.
958. 00:41:36 Although I have talked to people who,
959. 00:41:39 with COVID and working from home,
960. 00:41:43 what they found is that their higher ups
961. 00:41:46 are scheduling these meetings all day, every day,
962. 00:41:49 because they wanna know what's,
963. 00:41:52 what their people are doing,
964. 00:41:53 what decisions they're making, you know, what direction.
965. 00:41:56 All the in-person stuff that used to happen at the office
966. 00:41:59 are trying to use video calls to replace that.
967. 00:42:03 The people who actually have to do the work, however,
968. 00:42:05 they're spending not an exaggeration,
969. 00:42:08 40 out of 40 hours per week in meetings,
970. 00:42:11 and then they're expected to go do all their regular work.
971. 00:42:14 So there's a disconnect there
972. 00:42:15 where the higher ups who are talking about the work,
973. 00:42:20 they don't make the connection between,
974. 00:42:23 oh, my people actually need the time to do the work,
975. 00:42:26 and they're at home, and their kids are at home,
976. 00:42:29 and they're doing school at home.
977. 00:42:31 And so the people who are actually trying to do the work,
978. 00:42:35 they're just completely stressed out
979. 00:42:36 because they have no time for anything.
980. 00:42:39 - I have a story about this,
981. 00:42:40 that will solidify what you're saying.
982. 00:42:43 So the job I took after I worked corporate
983. 00:42:47 was a virtual marketing company.
984. 00:42:49 And one of the big projects that I was the head of
985. 00:42:53 was to rebuild our internal system.
986. 00:42:57 I can't go into the details of what it is,
987. 00:42:58 it was very proprietary and such.
988. 00:43:00 So we had to rebuild our internal system.
989. 00:43:02 I had one other database person on staff with me,
990. 00:43:07 and between the two of us, we were gonna rebuild it.
991. 00:43:11 Now the idea was keep the team small
992. 00:43:13 so that we could move fast,
993. 00:43:15 so we could get this done very quickly.
994. 00:43:17 It's not a huge application,
995. 00:43:19 it wasn't gonna take a whole lot of time.
996. 00:43:21 However, the problem we ran into
997. 00:43:24 was that the board of directors in our higher ups
998. 00:43:29 wanted to have a lot of input into how it was built,
999. 00:43:34 like what the UI and stuff looked like.
1000. 00:43:37 And that's fine, but it's a virtual company.
1001. 00:43:41 So I was in meetings, usually every day,
1002. 00:43:46 talking with different directors at each time,
1003. 00:43:49 trying to get input from them, which is fine.
1004. 00:43:51 And then at the end of the week,
1005. 00:43:53 we would do a check-in to see how much work
1006. 00:43:55 had been done on it.
1007. 00:43:56 And it was rare that we made progress on it,
1008. 00:43:59 because between this database person and myself,
1009. 00:44:03 he was trying to figure out the data models
1010. 00:44:05 based on how we could share data with people,
1011. 00:44:08 with our clients.
1012. 00:44:10 Thus the directors were meeting with him all the time.
1013. 00:44:13 They were meeting with me all the time
1014. 00:44:14 on the front-end side of it,
1015. 00:44:15 and we weren't getting anywhere.
1016. 00:44:16 So they decided, and I told them,
1017. 00:44:19 we're in meetings all the time,
1018. 00:44:20 I don't actually have time to write code.
1019. 00:44:23 They decided to book a week,
1020. 00:44:25 the conference rooms at hotels.
1021. 00:44:27 They decided to book one of those
1022. 00:44:29 so that this database person and I could go to this room,
1023. 00:44:33 we'd have a week off from absolutely all meetings,
1024. 00:44:36 we weren't allowed to book anytime with anyone,
1025. 00:44:39 so that we could work on this
1026. 00:44:40 and make some solid progress on this tool.
1027. 00:44:45 Day one, we worked for two hours in the morning,
1028. 00:44:50 and then my phone rang.
1029. 00:44:51 (laughs)
1030. 00:44:53 And it was my direct boss wanting to know
1031. 00:44:57 if I would go look at a handful of emails
1032. 00:44:59 that had been sent from a couple of directors,
1033. 00:45:01 'cause they had some input on the specific pieces
1034. 00:45:03 we were building.
1035. 00:45:05 So they wanted me to respond to those.
1036. 00:45:07 Two and a half hours later, after I'd gotten through
1037. 00:45:09 all of those, I took a break from that as lunchtime,
1038. 00:45:12 so we went and grabbed lunch, came back,
1039. 00:45:14 had to run through, I didn't get anything done that week.
1040. 00:45:16 Those first two hours are what we got done,
1041. 00:45:19 and the rest of the week was still managing,
1042. 00:45:21 we weren't in meetings, we were managing phone calls
1043. 00:45:23 and emails all week.
1044. 00:45:25 So when we got done, like, here's the problem.
1045. 00:45:27 It was about a month later I left the company.
1046. 00:45:29 So, (laughs)
1047. 00:45:32 just a complete mess, it's exactly
1048. 00:45:33 what we're talking about here, right?
1049. 00:45:35 So this ends up creating a whole mess
1050. 00:45:38 unless you're able to separate from
1051. 00:45:41 all of these communication systems.
1052. 00:45:43 I'm sure tons of people are dealing with this today
1053. 00:45:45 because of all the virtual work that's out there.
1054. 00:45:47 But this is where maybe we should transition
1055. 00:45:50 into part two here because part two
1056. 00:45:51 kind of explains what to do instead of that.
1057. 00:45:55 And I think some of the principles there
1058. 00:45:57 would be extremely helpful to explain the alternative to this.
1059. 00:46:00 - Yes, agreed.
1060. 00:46:02 So chapter four is the attention capital principle.
1061. 00:46:05 That's probably the place to start.
1062. 00:46:07 And I do, real quickly, before we go in here,
1063. 00:46:10 I do feel that the whole point for the first section
1064. 00:46:14 is to just articulate this pain point
1065. 00:46:17 as much as humanly possible to motivate you to change.
1066. 00:46:20 My dad has us saying, when pain is sufficient,
1067. 00:46:22 change will come. (laughs)
1068. 00:46:24 100% true.
1069. 00:46:26 And so, Cal is kind of hoping that he's made you hurt enough
1070. 00:46:30 to try to make some changes.
1071. 00:46:31 - That he makes you do something.
1072. 00:46:33 - Yeah, in this next part.
1073. 00:46:35 So the attention capital principle,
1074. 00:46:38 this is the productivity of the knowledge sector
1075. 00:46:41 can be significantly increased if we identify workflows
1076. 00:46:44 that better optimize the human brain's ability
1077. 00:46:46 to sustainably add value to information.
1078. 00:46:50 The big story that he told from this section
1079. 00:46:54 is the Model T in Henry Ford.
1080. 00:46:58 And this was an interesting story
1081. 00:47:00 because you've probably heard aspects of this before,
1082. 00:47:04 but he adds a little bit more detail
1083. 00:47:06 in terms of the level of cost that was required
1084. 00:47:09 to make that assembly line really work.
1085. 00:47:14 And he addresses some complaints against it too,
1086. 00:47:19 where he's talking to somebody and he says,
1087. 00:47:23 "Well, that sounds miserable.
1088. 00:47:25 I wouldn't want to be a worker in that particular scenario."
1089. 00:47:29 'Cause you kind of get this picture of like,
1090. 00:47:31 well, the assembly line things are always moving
1091. 00:47:32 and they're just moving too fast.
1092. 00:47:34 And you have to kill yourself in order to keep up.
1093. 00:47:36 But that's not actually what happened here.
1094. 00:47:39 What happened was instead of taking all of the parts
1095. 00:47:44 and manually, you know, going and getting what you needed
1096. 00:47:47 and putting it together, that was like step one.
1097. 00:47:49 You have somebody who understands everything about the car
1098. 00:47:52 and they're going and getting what they need
1099. 00:47:53 and then putting it on the car.
1100. 00:47:54 Step two is we've got separate people
1101. 00:47:57 who are doing separate systems.
1102. 00:47:58 And so when this car is ready for this particular system,
1103. 00:48:00 that person comes over with their stuff
1104. 00:48:02 and they do the thing.
1105. 00:48:03 But step three is the car just moves
1106. 00:48:06 and when it's in front of you, you do your thing
1107. 00:48:08 and then it moves on to the next thing.
1108. 00:48:11 And they went from taking 12 and a half hours
1109. 00:48:16 to build a Model T to getting it down to 93 minutes,
1110. 00:48:22 which is really impressive.
1111. 00:48:24 You hear those stats and go,
1112. 00:48:25 "Oh, obviously I understand now why they incorporated
1113. 00:48:28 that assembly line."
1114. 00:48:30 But they didn't know they were going to be able to get to that.
1115. 00:48:33 And they had to build some really expensive systems
1116. 00:48:36 along the way in order for that to work.
1117. 00:48:39 And as he was telling that story,
1118. 00:48:42 I kind of half expected him to share a detail
1119. 00:48:45 of Henry Ford at one point being like,
1120. 00:48:47 "You know what?
1121. 00:48:48 I don't know if this is really going to work.
1122. 00:48:50 I think maybe we've sunk enough money into this project
1123. 00:48:52 and we should just go back to the way things work."
1124. 00:48:54 I've been involved in enough companies and organizations
1125. 00:48:58 that have thought that way.
1126. 00:49:01 You know, it's like, "Well, I'm not sure we're actually
1127. 00:49:03 riding the right horse here.
1128. 00:49:04 So let's go back and do what we know works."
1129. 00:49:08 - One of the things, and we haven't talked about this yet,
1130. 00:49:10 but one of the things I love about this second part specifically
1131. 00:49:15 is that all of the examples he uses to show,
1132. 00:49:19 I shouldn't say all,
1133. 00:49:20 a lot of the foundational stories that he uses
1134. 00:49:23 to set these up, to set up these principles
1135. 00:49:25 and explain how things work come from the 1800s
1136. 00:49:29 in the early 1900s.
1137. 00:49:31 Did you catch that?
1138. 00:49:31 - Yeah, very historical.
1139. 00:49:33 - Almost every single story has a deep history to it.
1140. 00:49:37 - Lots of Peter Drucker.
1141. 00:49:38 - Yep.
1142. 00:49:39 Lots of Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan.
1143. 00:49:41 Like there's a lot of that sort of thing here.
1144. 00:49:44 And he does use like some modern, you know,
1145. 00:49:48 2019 stories in this,
1146. 00:49:52 but he sets it all up with these 1890s,
1147. 00:49:55 1910s, like that's sort of time period,
1148. 00:49:59 which I think is fascinating
1149. 00:50:00 because it's kind of like saying,
1150. 00:50:02 "This is not new.
1151. 00:50:04 "This is just another repeat of history."
1152. 00:50:07 Thus the importance of maintaining and teaching history
1153. 00:50:10 as it truly happened.
1154. 00:50:11 So that is a thing that continues to be repeated
1155. 00:50:16 through this book.
1156. 00:50:17 I love that, I love it, it's cool.
1157. 00:50:19 - He mentioned Sam Carpenter in this chapter too,
1158. 00:50:23 which I really liked seeing that
1159. 00:50:26 because that work the system book
1160. 00:50:29 was very impactful for me when I read it.
1161. 00:50:31 Are you familiar with Sam Carpenter in the work the system?
1162. 00:50:34 - Yeah, I've not read work the system,
1163. 00:50:36 but I know of it and the concept behind it.
1164. 00:50:39 - So the TLDR with Sam Carpenter
1165. 00:50:43 is that he was managing a call center
1166. 00:50:48 and was at a point,
1167. 00:50:52 he gets into more detail in his specific book,
1168. 00:50:55 but he was at a point where he could not afford to make payroll
1169. 00:50:59 and it was coming up in a couple of days.
1170. 00:51:02 So he had this idea to systematize everything
1171. 00:51:07 in the company, create standard operating procedures
1172. 00:51:12 for everything.
1173. 00:51:13 And he was finally at that point
1174. 00:51:15 where he was desperate enough to try something new
1175. 00:51:19 and it worked the system, he talks about how
1176. 00:51:22 once he started doing that,
1177. 00:51:24 immediately everything got a lot better.
1178. 00:51:28 They became much more profitable,
1179. 00:51:30 they became much more productive, but even more so,
1180. 00:51:34 and this is the thing that gets lost, I think,
1181. 00:51:35 when you start talking about the assembly line
1182. 00:51:37 and work the system with Sam Carpenter,
1183. 00:51:40 it's easy to be critical because on the surface,
1184. 00:51:43 it looks like it's purely a focus on efficiency,
1185. 00:51:46 but having red work the system several times,
1186. 00:51:50 I also know that the people who work there love working there
1187. 00:51:53 and the quality of life for them is much less crazy
1188. 00:51:56 than it is for people who work at other call centers.
1189. 00:51:59 And I know people who have worked at other call centers
1190. 00:52:02 in other parts of the world and it's just,
1191. 00:52:05 like you get five minutes every couple of hours
1192. 00:52:08 and it's timed for your bathroom breaks,
1193. 00:52:10 like it's miserable, nobody wants to do that.
1194. 00:52:13 So yes, it's a hard industry and that maybe
1195. 00:52:16 taints your perspective going into that sort of story,
1196. 00:52:19 but that's not the only thing that we're focusing on
1197. 00:52:22 with this sort of stuff is efficiency.
1198. 00:52:24 So I do wanna make sure that people understand that
1199. 00:52:26 as we're talking about this and as Cal's talking about this,
1200. 00:52:29 'cause I feel like it's very easy to overlook that.
1201. 00:52:32 - Yeah, it's a good point, it really is.
1202. 00:52:35 But again, the principle here is that,
1203. 00:52:38 so the attention capital principle,
1204. 00:52:40 you can only put your attention in so many different places.
1205. 00:52:43 And namely, you can only put it in one place at a time.
1206. 00:52:47 And when you're switching that,
1207. 00:52:50 we've talked about this before.
1208. 00:52:52 This is, to me, this is one of the more obvious principles
1209. 00:52:57 in this, is like, just be aware that you can't
1210. 00:53:01 be doing email and other things at the same time.
1211. 00:53:03 And if you've got somebody who's in programming and such,
1212. 00:53:08 they're very likely going to be disrupted even more
1213. 00:53:12 if you have a single 20-minute meeting somewhere midday.
1214. 00:53:17 Like breaking up that attention and that focus
1215. 00:53:21 has pretty major detriments to it,
1216. 00:53:24 which he discusses, of course, in part one.
1217. 00:53:26 - Yes, exactly.
1218. 00:53:27 Also in this section, we discover
1219. 00:53:31 that Cal Newport works off of a Trello board.
1220. 00:53:34 - I did not know that. (laughs)
1221. 00:53:36 We will talk more about, in the next chapter here,
1222. 00:53:39 the process principle.
1223. 00:53:41 He tells the story at the beginning of this chapter
1224. 00:53:44 about Pullman Brass.
1225. 00:53:46 Pullman is interesting to me because it has ties
1226. 00:53:50 to my specific area.
1227. 00:53:53 I believe Appleton, Wisconsin was one of the first places
1228. 00:53:57 that they had the electric streetcars.
1229. 00:54:01 We have a restaurant down near the river
1230. 00:54:04 that's named after Pullman's.
1231. 00:54:06 The National Railroad Museum is in Green Bay,
1232. 00:54:09 about 30 miles away.
1233. 00:54:10 And they've got several of the original Pullman coaches
1234. 00:54:14 and all the stories behind the company and stuff.
1235. 00:54:17 But the story that he's telling about the brass,
1236. 00:54:20 that this was a division of Pullman,
1237. 00:54:22 where they made all of the brass pieces
1238. 00:54:24 that they needed to put together the cars.
1239. 00:54:27 And the process for requesting pieces
1240. 00:54:30 from the brass works was very inefficient.
1241. 00:54:35 People could just walk up and talk to anybody on the line
1242. 00:54:40 and that's often what they did
1243. 00:54:42 because that was only a way to get something
1244. 00:54:44 when you really needed it,
1245. 00:54:45 which that sounds a lot like an open office environment.
1246. 00:54:49 - It sounds great, very efficient.
1247. 00:54:51 - The point is that that compounds the problem, right?
1248. 00:54:53 You've got this process, you can't keep up.
1249. 00:54:55 And so people circumvent the process
1250. 00:54:57 in order to get what they need faster.
1251. 00:54:59 - Everybody has been in a situation
1252. 00:55:01 where they've experienced that.
1253. 00:55:02 - Yes.
1254. 00:55:04 - So their response to meeting the demand was actually
1255. 00:55:08 to make more complicated processes
1256. 00:55:11 and narrow the vectors that people could request things.
1257. 00:55:14 So you had to go through a single entry point
1258. 00:55:18 and you had to fill out these specific forms
1259. 00:55:20 and it took more work to request something
1260. 00:55:22 but because now they had a single point
1261. 00:55:25 where the requests are coming in
1262. 00:55:26 and they had a channel that they flowed through,
1263. 00:55:29 they were able to be much more efficient.
1264. 00:55:31 They were able to meet their demand
1265. 00:55:32 and they ended up turning a large profit
1266. 00:55:34 instead of being a large drain on the company itself.
1267. 00:55:39 So that's kind of the sets of stage for this whole chapter
1268. 00:55:43 of the work isn't changing,
1269. 00:55:46 the inputs aren't even necessarily changing
1270. 00:55:48 but the process needs to change,
1271. 00:55:50 which is a very interesting way to think about this.
1272. 00:55:53 He gets into this section here on like personal Kanban
1273. 00:55:57 and using boards and things like this.
1274. 00:56:00 I think this is brilliant.
1275. 00:56:02 I'd never thought of this as a replacement for email.
1276. 00:56:05 I know a lot of places where it cannot be
1277. 00:56:08 but I think it might be for me.
1278. 00:56:11 - Sure.
1279. 00:56:13 I thought it was interesting that,
1280. 00:56:16 you know, he gets into Trello
1281. 00:56:19 and has a couple examples of how,
1282. 00:56:22 well, namely one major example of a company
1283. 00:56:24 that uses Trello instead of email
1284. 00:56:26 to manage all of their projects and processes and such.
1285. 00:56:29 I thought it was interesting
1286. 00:56:30 that Basecamp didn't come up.
1287. 00:56:33 You know, if he's gonna talk about tools,
1288. 00:56:35 Basecamp's the one that's been around for a long time
1289. 00:56:38 and is like specifically geared to help people
1290. 00:56:40 get off of email through the communication systems
1291. 00:56:45 that they have built into it
1292. 00:56:46 and has like an all-encompassing process
1293. 00:56:50 which is very similar to what he's talking about in Trello.
1294. 00:56:53 So I don't know, I thought that was interesting
1295. 00:56:54 but it might just be that,
1296. 00:56:57 'cause obviously Cal Newport has a computer background
1297. 00:57:00 to him, right?
1298. 00:57:01 And folks in that realm, no scrum, agile
1299. 00:57:06 and Kanban is part of that.
1300. 00:57:08 So I'm sure that has a pretty big,
1301. 00:57:11 what do I say, a bias put into it because of that?
1302. 00:57:14 So maybe.
1303. 00:57:16 - Yeah.
1304. 00:57:17 Well, Basecamp doesn't do Kanban
1305. 00:57:21 which seems weird to me.
1306. 00:57:24 That's one of the big reasons we switched away from it
1307. 00:57:27 at the sweet setup
1308. 00:57:29 because we wanted a Kanban workflow
1309. 00:57:31 so we hacked that together in Notion
1310. 00:57:34 and it does make things a lot easier
1311. 00:57:37 when dealing with like outside contributors
1312. 00:57:39 and managing an editorial calendar.
1313. 00:57:42 I feel like Basecamp should definitely add Kanban
1314. 00:57:45 because they have a lot of other features
1315. 00:57:47 that are designed to break the reliance
1316. 00:57:50 on the constant communication
1317. 00:57:51 and help you break away from talking about the work
1318. 00:57:54 and actually do the work
1319. 00:57:55 which is really what you were driving at there.
1320. 00:57:59 So that feels like very low hanging fruit
1321. 00:58:01 but I also think with Basecamp specifically,
1322. 00:58:03 it's just like any other project management tool,
1323. 00:58:05 you could use it in a very poor way
1324. 00:58:07 and be completely stressed out.
1325. 00:58:09 In fact, I've done that before using Basecamp specifically.
1326. 00:58:12 - Right.
1327. 00:58:13 - It was several years ago, V1 of Basecamp
1328. 00:58:17 but I felt that we were working on a development project
1329. 00:58:20 with the family software business
1330. 00:58:21 and the development team was on the other side of the world.
1331. 00:58:24 So they were working while we were sleeping,
1332. 00:58:26 we get up in the morning and all the stuff is there
1333. 00:58:29 and then you spend like all day responding to things
1334. 00:58:31 and then they take your input and they go
1335. 00:58:33 and they work on something and ship it
1336. 00:58:36 but that kind of worked out
1337. 00:58:39 because we were in different time zones
1338. 00:58:40 and we weren't able to communicate in real time
1339. 00:58:42 but the whole time out we were doing that,
1340. 00:58:45 I look back on it now and I kind of feel like,
1341. 00:58:47 well, if we had been in the same time zone
1342. 00:58:49 and worked directly, that would have been a disaster.
1343. 00:58:52 - Yes.
1344. 00:58:53 - So Basecamp, really, that's not what it was designed for.
1345. 00:58:56 You could have used any internet-based tool
1346. 00:58:59 and plugged it in there
1347. 00:59:00 and it would have accomplished the same goal.
1348. 00:59:03 Then had we been in the same time zone
1349. 00:59:05 and worked at the same hours,
1350. 00:59:07 Basecamp would have been a complete mess.
1351. 00:59:09 - Sure.
1352. 00:59:10 - I do think there's something to this using boards approach
1353. 00:59:15 and I don't know exactly what it is
1354. 00:59:18 and Cal didn't do a good enough job explaining it
1355. 00:59:21 that I can articulate it well
1356. 00:59:23 but I have always felt a little bit bad
1357. 00:59:26 about my use of task management systems.
1358. 00:59:30 I remember being on Learn Omni Focus with Tim Stringer
1359. 00:59:33 and doing my demo and people at the end
1360. 00:59:37 were making comments like,
1361. 00:59:39 wow, you really don't have much in there.
1362. 00:59:42 I was like, what?
1363. 00:59:43 I guess I should have more projects.
1364. 00:59:45 I guess I should have more tasks
1365. 00:59:46 and I felt bad that I didn't have thousands of tasks in there
1366. 00:59:50 and Cal Newport is basically like, no, you know what?
1367. 00:59:52 That's okay
1368. 00:59:54 because really what you need is a simple way
1369. 00:59:57 and boards are the way to do it
1370. 00:59:58 to manage the things that you're gonna do,
1371. 01:00:00 the things that you're working on
1372. 01:00:02 and the things that are done.
1373. 01:00:04 I am a hundred percent in
1374. 01:00:06 on trying to work completely with boards.
1375. 01:00:09 I've been kicking around different task management things
1376. 01:00:13 recently when I've been playing with Obsidian
1377. 01:00:16 and I mentioned to you that there's this really cool
1378. 01:00:18 to-do is plug in which will take your to-do is tasks
1379. 01:00:21 and you can embed them inside of a page.
1380. 01:00:23 And I think I like that
1381. 01:00:25 because I can embed tasks for a specific project
1382. 01:00:28 inside of Obsidian.
1383. 01:00:29 I get to them get to them that way
1384. 01:00:31 if I really need to see everything
1385. 01:00:33 that's associated with a particular project.
1386. 01:00:35 But to-do is also supports boards
1387. 01:00:39 and the one project I have in there at the moment
1388. 01:00:41 is the project for writing the next version of my book
1389. 01:00:45 and it is set up as a board inside of to-doist.
1390. 01:00:49 And I love that approach.
1391. 01:00:51 It's working really, really well.
1392. 01:00:53 And so I think I'm gonna try to do that same sort of thing
1393. 01:00:57 with all of my tasks and not feel bad
1394. 01:01:00 about not having a bunch of different boards.
1395. 01:01:02 He does talk about the best practices
1396. 01:01:04 for individual task boards
1397. 01:01:06 and having more than one board that you're using.
1398. 01:01:09 So I don't know exactly what this is gonna look like
1399. 01:01:12 but this is an action item for me
1400. 01:01:14 is to use Kanban boards for my personal task management.
1401. 01:01:19 And that makes things simpler
1402. 01:01:20 because I've already got the stuff I'm doing for TSS.
1403. 01:01:23 That's inside a notion.
1404. 01:01:24 So I'm not gonna try to track that
1405. 01:01:26 inside of a personal task management too.
1406. 01:01:28 That's just a different board in a different place.
1407. 01:01:30 And when I'm in work mode, I can look at that board.
1408. 01:01:32 And when I'm working on the book, I can look at that board.
1409. 01:01:36 I think this is going to be the thing
1410. 01:01:39 that really works for me.
1411. 01:01:41 And I'm gonna use it, I'm still gonna use my fancy notebook.
1412. 01:01:45 Still write out like these are the tasks I'm gonna do today.
1413. 01:01:48 But in terms of like managing the projects,
1414. 01:01:50 I don't need more information than this is the stuff
1415. 01:01:53 that's yet to be done.
1416. 01:01:54 This is the stuff that's in progress.
1417. 01:01:55 And this is the stuff that I've actually shipped.
1418. 01:01:57 - I think you mentioned the fewer things
1419. 01:02:00 that you have in your system.
1420. 01:02:02 And I think over time I've had the move
1421. 01:02:05 to fewer and fewer things in task management.
1422. 01:02:08 I think the bullet journal kind of forces that to a degree
1423. 01:02:11 just because you're not gonna write things
1424. 01:02:13 at that level.
1425. 01:02:16 This is one of the things I think GTD has done us a disservice in.
1426. 01:02:20 Because one of the things that David Allen pushes
1427. 01:02:25 is you define your project, right?
1428. 01:02:28 And then you define the individual steps.
1429. 01:02:30 Like the definitions he has for a project versus a task.
1430. 01:02:33 Like if a project has more than two steps,
1431. 01:02:36 more than one step, it's a project, right?
1432. 01:02:38 So that could mean buy light bulb, install light bulb.
1433. 01:02:43 That would be two tasks in the system.
1434. 01:02:46 My system has buy light bulbs.
1435. 01:02:48 - And that's it.
1436. 01:02:50 - Like that's all it is.
1437. 01:02:51 - Yes, exactly.
1438. 01:02:53 That's been a huge point of friction for me too.
1439. 01:02:55 And I never understood why.
1440. 01:02:57 - Yeah.
1441. 01:02:58 And this is what I've moved more and more towards
1442. 01:03:00 is to use David Allen's definition.
1443. 01:03:04 A lot of times I have a list of projects for the day
1444. 01:03:08 to use his definitions again, right?
1445. 01:03:09 But if I were to break that down
1446. 01:03:12 in the way that he intends or recommends,
1447. 01:03:14 that list would be at least 10 times as long
1448. 01:03:17 as what it actually is.
1449. 01:03:18 And I don't find the value in breaking it down that far.
1450. 01:03:22 Like the return on that isn't there, I don't think.
1451. 01:03:25 To a degree for some people, I can see how it is.
1452. 01:03:28 But to me, it's just extra work.
1453. 01:03:32 And if I can just bust out writing seven or eight things
1454. 01:03:35 down on my list of the things I have to get done today.
1455. 01:03:38 Like I know that breaks the whole three in my T thing,
1456. 01:03:40 but if I've got seven, eight,
1457. 01:03:42 I've had days where I've got 18 things on that list.
1458. 01:03:44 I got them all done,
1459. 01:03:46 but technically those are all projects.
1460. 01:03:49 And the overhead involved with managing it the way
1461. 01:03:52 that GTD recommends, it does two things.
1462. 01:03:55 It makes that system very big and unwieldy.
1463. 01:03:56 And you have to use something like to do
1464. 01:03:58 with your OmniFocus, just to keep track of it all.
1465. 01:04:01 - Yeah.
1466. 01:04:02 - And the overhead involved with putting it into that system
1467. 01:04:06 and then managing it is quite high.
1468. 01:04:09 Thus you have so many people,
1469. 01:04:11 I remember you're talking about Learn OmniFocus.
1470. 01:04:14 Whenever I've done, I don't know how many sessions
1471. 01:04:17 I've done there now.
1472. 01:04:18 But one of them that I did there,
1473. 01:04:20 there was a gentleman that had questions.
1474. 01:04:21 He's like, how do you decide what to do next?
1475. 01:04:24 And he said that he had his dashboard set up.
1476. 01:04:27 If you follow me, you know, like the historical dashboard
1477. 01:04:29 that I've set up,
1478. 01:04:30 automatically would put a list together for the day,
1479. 01:04:32 which is cool concept, mess and philosophy.
1480. 01:04:36 And it was something he had done,
1481. 01:04:39 but he was getting two to 300 things
1482. 01:04:41 on that dashboard list in a day.
1483. 01:04:43 He's like, I just don't know how to choose what to work on.
1484. 01:04:46 - Exactly.
1485. 01:04:47 - And it's like, dude, like you've gone to two things,
1486. 01:04:52 like you've broken it down way too far.
1487. 01:04:54 And then you've made too many things,
1488. 01:05:00 the most important thing for that day.
1489. 01:05:02 So between those two, you got a mess on your hands.
1490. 01:05:06 You're gonna have to either scale it back
1491. 01:05:08 as far as what you're putting into it.
1492. 01:05:09 So you're only looking at 10 things instead of 300.
1493. 01:05:12 But also say no to things.
1494. 01:05:15 Like that's part of the trick.
1495. 01:05:17 And I think that's some of what we're getting at
1496. 01:05:18 with the dangers of that.
1497. 01:05:20 Now, again, I'm hesitant because I know GTD has some benefits,
1498. 01:05:24 but it does have some of these potential downfalls.
1499. 01:05:27 - Yes, so with GTD, something like a meeting,
1500. 01:05:31 which I would not put as a MIT,
1501. 01:05:35 but let's just for the sake of argument,
1502. 01:05:36 say that there is a meeting,
1503. 01:05:38 there's actually at least three tasks
1504. 01:05:41 with each one of those meetings that you have.
1505. 01:05:44 There's prep for the meeting,
1506. 01:05:45 which is gonna take longer than two minutes.
1507. 01:05:47 There's a participant in the meeting,
1508. 01:05:50 which who knows how long that's gonna take.
1509. 01:05:53 And then the processing of the meeting notes
1510. 01:05:57 and creating the tasks associated with it.
1511. 01:06:00 Even if you aren't doing any of those tasks in the moment,
1512. 01:06:03 each one of those things is gonna take longer
1513. 01:06:05 than two minutes and must be identified
1514. 01:06:07 as something you need to do for a single meeting,
1515. 01:06:10 which maybe is only 30 minutes long.
1516. 01:06:13 But can now imagine you're in back-to-back meetings
1517. 01:06:16 all day in our intervals.
1518. 01:06:18 So you've got eight of these.
1519. 01:06:19 That's insane.
1520. 01:06:22 - Yes, it's a lot.
1521. 01:06:24 - Now, regarding the MITs,
1522. 01:06:26 I have been jotting down five of them in my notebook,
1523. 01:06:29 but I am not including meetings in those for the most part.
1524. 01:06:34 When we record a podcast, I will include that.
1525. 01:06:37 But that is one of the things I think is genius
1526. 01:06:39 about these analog cards.
1527. 01:06:42 There's 10 spaces on here,
1528. 01:06:44 but if you look at the website,
1529. 01:06:45 Jeff actually shows like meetings on that list.
1530. 01:06:50 So I think the number, you mentioned seven to eight,
1531. 01:06:53 I don't think you're too far off there.
1532. 01:06:55 I just think we need to rethink
1533. 01:06:57 how the things that we are actually doing
1534. 01:07:01 and recognize that a meeting is actually a task.
1535. 01:07:04 It is going to use up some time
1536. 01:07:05 and you're going to have less other time
1537. 01:07:08 to do other things.
1538. 01:07:09 So don't feel bad about the number,
1539. 01:07:11 but recognizing this is the number I can get done
1540. 01:07:14 in a day is very important.
1541. 01:07:17 'Cause as long as you don't have that,
1542. 01:07:19 you will continue to throw these things on your list
1543. 01:07:22 like processing these meeting notes
1544. 01:07:23 because GTD, I can't do this in two minutes
1545. 01:07:26 and at the end of the day,
1546. 01:07:28 you've got another eight hours of work.
1547. 01:07:30 Just follow up from the meetings
1548. 01:07:32 before you do your actual work.
1549. 01:07:33 And then you'd get to, by the way,
1550. 01:07:35 go to bed exhausted,
1551. 01:07:36 wake up tired and do it all tomorrow.
1552. 01:07:38 - We need to keep moving,
1553. 01:07:40 but yes, you're absolutely right.
1554. 01:07:42 So the moral of the story is,
1555. 01:07:45 we don't manage this stuff well.
1556. 01:07:47 We're dumb when it comes to all this stuff.
1557. 01:07:50 So we need to get better at it.
1558. 01:07:52 Thus, he brings us to chapter six, which is...
1559. 01:07:56 - The protocol principle.
1560. 01:07:58 - Which I think is interesting.
1561. 01:07:59 - This is all about doing things the right way.
1562. 01:08:02 So protocol principle is actually designing rules
1563. 01:08:05 that optimize when and how coordination occurs
1564. 01:08:08 in the workplace is a pain in the short term,
1565. 01:08:11 but it can result in significantly more productive operation
1566. 01:08:14 in the long term.
1567. 01:08:16 This is, if I were to summarize this,
1568. 01:08:19 defining the rules of engagement
1569. 01:08:21 for how communication happens at work.
1570. 01:08:26 And he has a couple different tactics for how to do that.
1571. 01:08:30 The big one that he advocates for,
1572. 01:08:33 and he even kind of pokes holes in his theory
1573. 01:08:36 that this is a good solution.
1574. 01:08:37 He mentioned he presented this a while ago
1575. 01:08:39 and since then he's realized it's really not that great
1576. 01:08:42 as a comprehensive solution,
1577. 01:08:43 but it can still be useful.
1578. 01:08:45 Is this whole concept of office hours?
1579. 01:08:47 They can't replace email for timely interactions,
1580. 01:08:50 but I have seen this in effect
1581. 01:08:53 where you define this is the time to get questions answered.
1582. 01:08:58 And if you have a question before then
1583. 01:09:00 you wait until that time.
1584. 01:09:02 And magically people who wait get their answers answered
1585. 01:09:06 and they're okay with it,
1586. 01:09:07 even though initially they're like,
1587. 01:09:08 well, I probably will have something super urgent
1588. 01:09:11 that I'll need an answer for.
1589. 01:09:13 In reality, even if these office hours are only once a week,
1590. 01:09:16 like a weekly team meeting,
1591. 01:09:18 once you get used to doing things this way,
1592. 01:09:20 it's a lot less hectic and everybody is usually okay with it.
1593. 01:09:23 - Yeah, I think chapter five and chapter six,
1594. 01:09:25 so the process principle and then the protocol principle.
1595. 01:09:29 When I read those in my head,
1596. 01:09:30 it's like, how is he gonna break those apart?
1597. 01:09:31 It'll seem very, very similar to me.
1598. 01:09:34 So just to clarify some of that,
1599. 01:09:37 the process principle is kind of the way
1600. 01:09:39 that things move through your system.
1601. 01:09:40 - Yep. - Right?
1602. 01:09:41 So this is the process, the steps
1603. 01:09:44 that something works through.
1604. 01:09:46 Once it hits me, this is the step that goes next.
1605. 01:09:49 And then it goes to the next one.
1606. 01:09:51 And then it goes on to the next one.
1607. 01:09:53 Like that's the process, think of it as a workflow.
1608. 01:09:55 And that's where the Kanban thing can come in, right?
1609. 01:10:00 The protocol principle is kind of like the rules of engagement.
1610. 01:10:04 - Yep. - And probably the clearest way
1611. 01:10:07 to think of that is like it's the rules
1612. 01:10:08 and the requirements to get it into that process
1613. 01:10:13 that we just created the chapter prior.
1614. 01:10:16 Like that's, I mean, there's some pieces that talk about
1615. 01:10:19 as it moves and such, but generally it's how things come into it.
1616. 01:10:22 Think of the brass process that you were talking about earlier.
1617. 01:10:27 They ended up creating a form that then had to go to somebody
1618. 01:10:29 and then they approved or like it created this whole friction point.
1619. 01:10:34 This is similar to what I do at our church actually.
1620. 01:10:36 We have a whole like room request process.
1621. 01:10:40 If you want to request a room for a class or a meeting in some form,
1622. 01:10:43 you have to fill out this form
1623. 01:10:44 and hand deliver it to our receptionist.
1624. 01:10:49 And people have repeatedly asked,
1625. 01:10:52 do you have just a place online?
1626. 01:10:53 I could do this.
1627. 01:10:54 Is there a way we could just get,
1628. 01:10:55 can you just email me the form?
1629. 01:10:56 Like people ask this all the time.
1630. 01:10:59 And I'm the IT guy, right?
1631. 01:11:00 So I would be the one that sets that up
1632. 01:11:02 and I repeatedly tell them the moment you do that,
1633. 01:11:05 you will get at least double the number of requests.
1634. 01:11:08 We're already in a weird spot.
1635. 01:11:10 - Probably five to six times based on the IBM example.
1636. 01:11:13 - Yes.
1637. 01:11:14 - So I'm the naysayer on this one.
1638. 01:11:17 It's like, I'm not doing that because
1639. 01:11:19 you're gonna get a whole bunch more
1640. 01:11:22 and it's gonna be unsolicited
1641. 01:11:24 and you won't get to ask questions
1642. 01:11:26 and it's gonna make a mess.
1643. 01:11:28 So we've never done it.
1644. 01:11:29 I've had this on a repeated conversation for about three years,
1645. 01:11:34 but we have a very strict protocol, right?
1646. 01:11:36 You have to show up, you have to collect the form,
1647. 01:11:40 you have to fill it out and hand it back to us.
1648. 01:11:42 And then it has a whole process it goes through
1649. 01:11:44 to get it to the right people,
1650. 01:11:45 depending on what you've put on that piece of paper.
1651. 01:11:48 But it creates the friction point, right?
1652. 01:11:51 (laughs)
1653. 01:11:52 - Yeah, well, friction isn't necessarily,
1654. 01:11:54 like there's the real principle at work here
1655. 01:11:57 is that there are costs to everything.
1656. 01:12:00 So friction and cost, that's a form of a cost,
1657. 01:12:03 but it's not the only one that we need to consider.
1658. 01:12:06 That's what he's talking about in this chapter,
1659. 01:12:07 is that there could be non-monetary costs
1660. 01:12:10 like cognitive cycles
1661. 01:12:11 and other costs is inconvenience,
1662. 01:12:14 but that's outweighed by the,
1663. 01:12:18 improving the signal to noise ratio,
1664. 01:12:19 the requests that come in are truly legitimate requests.
1665. 01:12:23 And this gets back to a concept called information theory,
1666. 01:12:26 which he summarizes at the beginning.
1667. 01:12:28 This part was hard for me to get through
1668. 01:12:31 and really understand this is Cal speaking
1669. 01:12:35 as a college professor and me having to struggle
1670. 01:12:38 a little bit to process this.
1671. 01:12:40 But I think it's important.
1672. 01:12:41 So the information theory, basic idea here,
1673. 01:12:45 if I were to try to summarize this,
1674. 01:12:47 is that the protocols,
1675. 01:12:50 that take into account the structure
1676. 01:12:51 of the information being communicated
1677. 01:12:53 can perform much better than a simply naive approach.
1678. 01:12:56 And the naive approach is,
1679. 01:12:57 well, it's just make this more efficient,
1680. 01:12:58 throw it on the web, anybody can fill this out
1681. 01:13:01 because that's easier for me.
1682. 01:13:02 But they don't consider the whole chain
1683. 01:13:05 that things have to go through.
1684. 01:13:08 And he's addresses a couple specific things
1685. 01:13:10 in terms of protocol here with like meeting scheduling.
1686. 01:13:14 He says, standard meeting scheduling protocol equals
1687. 01:13:18 energy minimizing email ping pong.
1688. 01:13:21 I completely agree with that.
1689. 01:13:24 I have been, I'm still a guilty of this occasionally,
1690. 01:13:28 but I shy away from this from whenever I can.
1691. 01:13:31 He advocates that you consider using a scheduler.
1692. 01:13:34 That is the simple solution.
1693. 01:13:37 It's a little bit tricky because you have to shift
1694. 01:13:40 people's expectations, but that's the common thread
1695. 01:13:43 between anything that he says in this entire book.
1696. 01:13:47 The criticism of the schedulers is that they're cold
1697. 01:13:50 and impersonal and I'm a friend who wants to meet you
1698. 01:13:53 for coffee, why are you sending me through this cold,
1699. 01:13:55 emotionless system, you know?
1700. 01:14:00 But from a work perspective, I think it's maybe
1701. 01:14:04 a little bit easier to get everybody on board
1702. 01:14:06 with like, okay, so these are the real costs
1703. 01:14:09 when someone wants to schedule a meeting.
1704. 01:14:11 And here's a different way of doing it,
1705. 01:14:13 which there are trade-offs, but ultimately the cost
1706. 01:14:16 of this is going to be less.
1707. 01:14:17 So how about we try this?
1708. 01:14:19 That's ultimately the conversation that needs to happen.
1709. 01:14:21 And that's not a new idea in this book, by the way.
1710. 01:14:24 He talks about this in Deep Work 2.
1711. 01:14:25 One of the things that resonated from me from that book
1712. 01:14:28 was a story of the woman who was always having to respond
1713. 01:14:33 to something that her boss wanted and she kept track
1714. 01:14:37 of all the different times that she was interrupted.
1715. 01:14:39 And then she scheduled a meeting and she said,
1716. 01:14:41 well, what do you pay me to do here?
1717. 01:14:43 What is it?
1718. 01:14:45 What would you say it is exactly that I do here?
1719. 01:14:47 And they defined together, like,
1720. 01:14:51 this is the thing that's most valuable.
1721. 01:14:52 And then she says, well, okay, I don't have any time
1722. 01:14:55 to do that because I'm doing all this stuff for you.
1723. 01:14:57 And then he's like, oh, okay, I guess I got
1724. 01:14:59 a quid interrupting you.
1725. 01:15:00 And how about these hours, at least we can set aside
1726. 01:15:04 for you not to be interrupted and do that sort of thing.
1727. 01:15:07 And that's the type of conversation that nobody wants
1728. 01:15:09 to have with their boss.
1729. 01:15:10 Right, right.
1730. 01:15:11 But it's ultimately the only way to incorporate
1731. 01:15:15 any of this sort of change if you're not the CEO
1732. 01:15:17 calling the shots.
1733. 01:15:18 Yeah, 'cause you're forced to have a hard conversation
1734. 01:15:22 up the ladder, right?
1735. 01:15:23 Which is--
1736. 01:15:24 Not everybody loves conflict like I do.
1737. 01:15:26 It's true, it's true.
1738. 01:15:28 It's like, Mike, if you bring something up
1739. 01:15:30 that's gonna contradict something he thinks,
1740. 01:15:33 he's all on board and he gets fired up and he's ready for it.
1741. 01:15:36 That's not normal.
1742. 01:15:38 I don't know if people are aware of that, but--
1743. 01:15:40 (laughs)
1744. 01:15:41 So yes, you have to put boundaries around it, right?
1745. 01:15:45 That's a lot of what this can be boiled down into.
1746. 01:15:49 I don't know, like, I have a handful of action items
1747. 01:15:52 that I'll get to when we get to that point,
1748. 01:15:55 but this is just an interesting,
1749. 01:15:58 like, set some rules of engagement, right?
1750. 01:16:02 For how to put things into your process.
1751. 01:16:07 Yes, so one of the rules they talk about,
1752. 01:16:09 we kind of hit on this already,
1753. 01:16:10 keep the email short because the sender typically
1754. 01:16:13 is gonna be the one who sends the one minute message
1755. 01:16:16 with a couple of questions and then the recipient is the one
1756. 01:16:19 who has to spend hours responding.
1757. 01:16:20 Yes.
1758. 01:16:21 Another one that they talked about here, though,
1759. 01:16:23 which I thought was pretty brilliant,
1760. 01:16:25 is to disconnect email from an individual.
1761. 01:16:29 So that means that if I am doing support,
1762. 01:16:33 people do not email Mike@company.com.
1763. 01:16:38 They email support@company.com.
1764. 01:16:43 So what this does is it lets the sender think
1765. 01:16:47 that they're still communicating via email,
1766. 01:16:51 but it allows the recipient to use a ticket-based system,
1767. 01:16:54 something like help scout or zendesk,
1768. 01:16:58 something like that, where a bunch of people
1769. 01:17:00 can work on things together and they can put things
1770. 01:17:04 in the right places and people can respond to tickets
1771. 01:17:07 much more efficiently, much more effectively.
1772. 01:17:09 And the person who asked the question via email
1773. 01:17:12 has no idea that they're not receiving an email
1774. 01:17:16 from a specific person anymore.
1775. 01:17:19 And this is the kind of thing
1776. 01:17:20 that we should be looking for when we're trying
1777. 01:17:23 to change the way that we do email, in my opinion.
1778. 01:17:27 We're not gonna get everybody to agree right now,
1779. 01:17:31 hey, let's just not use email anymore.
1780. 01:17:34 That's not gonna happen.
1781. 01:17:36 But there are ways for you maybe to not use email
1782. 01:17:39 as much anymore.
1783. 01:17:41 This isn't, in my opinion, and maybe there's some gray area
1784. 01:17:44 here, but in my opinion, this isn't like pulling a fast one
1785. 01:17:47 on someone.
1786. 01:17:49 This is not tricking them because you're doing something else.
1787. 01:17:54 This is actually a better solution for everybody involved,
1788. 01:17:59 because the person who's making the request
1789. 01:18:02 doesn't want you to question all of their systems.
1790. 01:18:04 They just want an answer to their thing.
1791. 01:18:06 So they don't really care how you get that answer to them
1792. 01:18:11 and you don't really care about what they're gonna do next.
1793. 01:18:16 You just want to get it off your plate as quickly
1794. 01:18:18 as possible.
1795. 01:18:20 Ultimately, I think we do need to get to the point.
1796. 01:18:23 We do need to have the difficult conversations
1797. 01:18:26 for people that we receive these types of requests from often
1798. 01:18:29 and say, hey, is there a better way to do this?
1799. 01:18:32 But if you can just get the thing done,
1800. 01:18:36 I mean, that's what David Allen would say to do, right?
1801. 01:18:39 - Right, right.
1802. 01:18:41 But I mean, if you start putting this whole thing together,
1803. 01:18:43 and I know we've got one more principle here to cover,
1804. 01:18:45 but if you start putting it all together,
1805. 01:18:48 you need to be careful with how you set up your process
1806. 01:18:52 so that it is being mindful of the attention capital
1807. 01:18:57 that you have, right?
1808. 01:19:00 So that's-- - Yes, true.
1809. 01:19:01 - You gotta kind of tie those two together
1810. 01:19:03 because the process is designed to move things forward
1811. 01:19:08 without fragmenting your workload.
1812. 01:19:13 And then you have this protocol that you put in place
1813. 01:19:17 for how things should be done,
1814. 01:19:20 like how that process should work.
1815. 01:19:22 But then that brings us to chapter seven,
1816. 01:19:24 which is the specialization principle,
1817. 01:19:27 which is effectively a principle that tells you,
1818. 01:19:30 focus on the things you should be doing,
1819. 01:19:33 focus on the things you're good at.
1820. 01:19:35 - Yep.
1821. 01:19:35 - Don't let things get into your process
1822. 01:19:37 that you shouldn't be doing, like, don't be dumb.
1823. 01:19:41 (laughs)
1824. 01:19:42 - Don't say yes to everything.
1825. 01:19:43 - Which is an argument that we've heard
1826. 01:19:46 over and over and over again,
1827. 01:19:47 so people maybe hear that and they're like,
1828. 01:19:49 "Well, I don't need to hear this again.
1829. 01:19:51 I don't think you've heard it this way."
1830. 01:19:54 The story that he tells at the beginning of this chapter
1831. 01:19:57 is the perfect story at this point in the book
1832. 01:20:02 because it's kind of self-deprecating on Cal.
1833. 01:20:05 He talks about how his grandfather was a professor
1834. 01:20:08 and his grandfather wrote a bunch of books.
1835. 01:20:11 He ended up with a chair in religious studies
1836. 01:20:13 and a role as a provost at a large theological seminary.
1837. 01:20:17 And he's kind of poking fun at himself as like,
1838. 01:20:20 "Well, I'm the one with the computer.
1839. 01:20:22 I'm the one with the technology.
1840. 01:20:24 I should be running circles around my grandpa."
1841. 01:20:27 He's like, "I'm not there."
1842. 01:20:29 - Yes.
1843. 01:20:30 - So the point here is that the technology
1844. 01:20:34 doesn't necessarily make us more productive.
1845. 01:20:37 And the real point he's making as it pertains to this chapter
1846. 01:20:40 is that computers specifically cause us not to specialize.
1847. 01:20:45 And that I think I 100% agree with.
1848. 01:20:48 It's easy to say, "Well, I can just take care of this."
1849. 01:20:53 And I have fallen into this trap myself
1850. 01:20:56 over and over and over and over and over again.
1851. 01:20:58 It's one of the reasons that the few times
1852. 01:21:00 I've tried to work with a VA, it has never worked out
1853. 01:21:04 'cause I know intellectually I should spend up to 30 times
1854. 01:21:08 as long as this thing takes
1855. 01:21:10 in order to delegate this so someone else can do it.
1856. 01:21:13 But I get annoyed the minute it takes me
1857. 01:21:16 even slightly longer than I could have finished it myself.
1858. 01:21:20 So this chapter, what it did for me is it helped me realize
1859. 01:21:24 that there is a lot of value in specialization.
1860. 01:21:27 And I am not committing to try to use a VA again,
1861. 01:21:31 but I am committing as an action item
1862. 01:21:34 to make a list of things that I can delegate.
1863. 01:21:37 I think that's kind of like the first step.
1864. 01:21:39 So kind of an anti-mic action item with this one,
1865. 01:21:41 very specific, very measurable.
1866. 01:21:45 By next time, will I have a list of things
1867. 01:21:47 that I can delegate?
1868. 01:21:48 And then from that point, I can figure out,
1869. 01:21:51 if I do wanna delegate this thing,
1870. 01:21:53 what are the steps that I must do
1871. 01:21:55 in order to make this delegate a bowl,
1872. 01:21:57 but that's not what I'm saying for this specific one.
1873. 01:22:00 I just wanna list the things
1874. 01:22:02 that I could potentially offload.
1875. 01:22:04 - Overlay Emily Wattnick's book,
1876. 01:22:07 How to Be Everything on Top of This.
1877. 01:22:09 - Yeah.
1878. 01:22:10 (laughs)
1879. 01:22:11 - That's a thing that crossed my mind.
1880. 01:22:13 He's, okay, computers make it possible
1881. 01:22:16 to do tons of things, right?
1882. 01:22:18 Think about how many different content creators, you and I,
1883. 01:22:22 video work, editing, now we're doing streaming,
1884. 01:22:25 we do audio work, we do writing, we do publishing,
1885. 01:22:28 we do all sorts of different things.
1886. 01:22:31 Finances and such, like there's a ton of this stuff
1887. 01:22:34 that's very wide ranging that we do.
1888. 01:22:37 Emily Wattnick's book was about how to do that essentially,
1889. 01:22:41 like how do you keep yourself engaged
1890. 01:22:44 when you have a bunch of different things,
1891. 01:22:46 like in making sure that you do have that,
1892. 01:22:49 but anyway, how do you do everything versus Cal Newport's?
1893. 01:22:54 You gotta focus on the things that you're good at,
1894. 01:22:57 like pick what you're gonna do,
1895. 01:23:00 don't try to do all of this different stuff, right?
1896. 01:23:02 So, I don't know, I just, I thought it was an interesting
1897. 01:23:06 way to say it in that computers make it possible,
1898. 01:23:10 they make a lot of things accessible to us, right?
1899. 01:23:13 Which is awesome, but at the same time,
1900. 01:23:17 it's similar to this broader email conversation,
1901. 01:23:20 in that yes, email does have some theoretical benefits, right?
1902. 01:23:25 But the way we actually use it turns out to be not so great.
1903. 01:23:30 Computers in general can have that same argument
1904. 01:23:33 in that they make a lot of things possible,
1905. 01:23:36 but that doesn't mean it's something you should or should do.
1906. 01:23:40 You know, this is the, what's the name for it?
1907. 01:23:44 I can't think of it, but if there's one small good thing
1908. 01:23:48 out of a tool or a product, we'll tend to say,
1909. 01:23:50 oh yeah, I'll accept that because it makes it possible
1910. 01:23:52 for me to connect with people across the world.
1911. 01:23:55 Yes, Facebook may allow you to do that,
1912. 01:23:57 but there's whole baggage of things
1913. 01:23:59 that are gonna come with it.
1914. 01:24:00 Email's the same way, the computer in general is the same way.
1915. 01:24:04 Cal Newport's push is to don't just default
1916. 01:24:07 to do all the things, don't just default to take it
1917. 01:24:11 if there's one small piece of good in it.
1918. 01:24:13 Ask the question, does it benefit overall,
1919. 01:24:17 and then bring it in if it is a yes?
1920. 01:24:21 I think maybe there's a difference between
1921. 01:24:25 being a multi-potentialite and doing a bunch of busy work.
1922. 01:24:30 I think that's really what Cal's getting at
1923. 01:24:32 in this specific section, 'cause he talks about
1924. 01:24:35 on page 233, that busyness is controllable.
1925. 01:24:38 If you decide to be visibly busy,
1926. 01:24:39 you know you can certainly achieve this goal.
1927. 01:24:43 And that's the distinction for me.
1928. 01:24:46 I don't know if that's exactly what he's saying,
1929. 01:24:48 but with a multi-potentialite,
1930. 01:24:50 I view that as like, I'm a podcaster, I'm a writer,
1931. 01:24:54 I'm a video creator, but all of those have a common thread
1932. 01:24:58 that tie them together, that make them valuable things
1933. 01:25:02 to be doing, maybe it's content creator,
1934. 01:25:05 though I don't really like that specific term.
1935. 01:25:07 And I feel like with multi-potentialite
1936. 01:25:09 and Emily Wopnick's book, it's kind of,
1937. 01:25:11 you're doing all these things,
1938. 01:25:12 and there is that common thread between them,
1939. 01:25:14 and Cal Newport is basically saying, yeah,
1940. 01:25:16 go ahead and identify the things that are important,
1941. 01:25:17 but the things that aren't important,
1942. 01:25:19 and he's making the case email, hyperactive,
1943. 01:25:21 hive mind type stuff,
1944. 01:25:23 that's the thing that you should be looking to delegate.
1945. 01:25:26 For example, the scheduling of the meetings
1946. 01:25:29 that we're talking about in the last chapter,
1947. 01:25:32 that's a kind of thing that you could outsource.
1948. 01:25:34 He talks about designing or outsourcing email,
1949. 01:25:37 outsourcing design, outsourcing social media,
1950. 01:25:40 which there are people who your multi-potentialite bent
1951. 01:25:43 could be that I am a designer.
1952. 01:25:47 I like the design process,
1953. 01:25:50 and that's part of what makes my brand my brand.
1954. 01:25:53 So for me personally, I kind of feel like
1955. 01:25:54 the sketchnote stuff is kind of part of that.
1956. 01:25:57 Could I delegate the production of a sketchnote file?
1957. 01:26:00 Yes, I could, and that would free up more time for me,
1958. 01:26:03 but that's kind of my thing.
1959. 01:26:05 That's part of the important stuff.
1960. 01:26:07 And so I'm not gonna delegate that.
1961. 01:26:10 I think that's anyways how I would separate those
1962. 01:26:13 in my head, but maybe I'm wrong with that.
1963. 01:26:17 No, I think you're right.
1964. 01:26:18 I think that makes sense.
1965. 01:26:19 I was mostly thinking about like Emily was trying to show us
1966. 01:26:22 how to do a whole bunch of different types of things
1967. 01:26:25 at the same time, versus cows push to find the thing.
1968. 01:26:30 Sure, okay.
1969. 01:26:31 It wouldn't even be the thing.
1970. 01:26:32 Just find what is your specialty,
1971. 01:26:37 and that could be a handful of things,
1972. 01:26:39 and focus on those, as opposed to trying to do
1973. 01:26:42 so many things at one time.
1974. 01:26:44 So to me, it just felt like it was two different
1975. 01:26:46 ways of coming at it.
1976. 01:26:48 So, yep, for what it's worth.
1977. 01:26:50 Makes sense.
1978. 01:26:51 I'm glad you brought that up though,
1979. 01:26:53 because on the surface they seem like very contradictory.
1980. 01:26:55 I think they're actually pretty complimentary though.
1981. 01:26:58 Basic idea is that you've got only so much attention,
1982. 01:27:01 only so much time, and you've gotta spend it
1983. 01:27:04 on the right things, and you've gotta identify
1984. 01:27:07 what those right things are.
1985. 01:27:08 And maybe it's not clearly defined as like this one thing
1986. 01:27:11 that I do over and over and over again, like Cal, maybe would,
1987. 01:27:14 or at least that's the impression you get
1988. 01:27:15 from reading Cal stuff.
1989. 01:27:16 And Emily's like, no, do this, that, that, that, that, you know,
1990. 01:27:19 and connect the dots in your own weird way
1991. 01:27:21 inside of your brain.
1992. 01:27:22 Right.
1993. 01:27:23 But ultimately, you know, budget your attention,
1994. 01:27:26 whatever you don't budget ends up being wasted,
1995. 01:27:30 whether that's money, whether that's time,
1996. 01:27:32 whether that's attention.
1997. 01:27:33 So just considering that there is a bunch of stuff
1998. 01:27:35 that you probably just do because, oh, this is part
1999. 01:27:37 of the process, and the big thing for me is thinking about,
2000. 01:27:41 well, maybe that doesn't need to be part of your process.
2001. 01:27:44 Maybe you can't get away from scheduling the meetings,
2002. 01:27:46 maybe you can't get away from dealing with email,
2003. 01:27:48 but maybe you can change the way that you do
2004. 01:27:51 some of these things.
2005. 01:27:53 - Yeah, just to put this whole thing together,
2006. 01:27:55 'cause we've kind of been talking around things
2007. 01:27:56 that aren't email here, even though like,
2008. 01:27:59 that's his main driver here in the book.
2009. 01:28:02 But you've got these four pieces, right?
2010. 01:28:05 The attention capital principle,
2011. 01:28:07 this is all for how to build a world without email.
2012. 01:28:10 Attention capital principle, the process principle,
2013. 01:28:12 the protocol principle, and the specialization principle.
2014. 01:28:15 And yes, the book is about a world without email.
2015. 01:28:19 But if you notice, like when we talked about these,
2016. 01:28:22 yes, email's kind of an undertone,
2017. 01:28:24 but it's not like point blank,
2018. 01:28:26 this is what we're talking about.
2019. 01:28:27 He's not explaining how to manage email folders.
2020. 01:28:29 He's not talking about how to move conversations
2021. 01:28:32 that happen on email elsewhere explicitly.
2022. 01:28:35 He's not saying that.
2023. 01:28:37 He's just talking about the knowledge work that we do.
2024. 01:28:41 There are better ways to communicate about that work
2025. 01:28:45 through these four principles of managing your attention,
2026. 01:28:48 building the process, for managing that knowledge work,
2027. 01:28:51 the protocol for creating what that knowledge work is,
2028. 01:28:54 and then choosing what of the knowledge work
2029. 01:28:57 you're gonna do with the specialization.
2030. 01:28:58 So it's not necessarily, like this is the part where,
2031. 01:29:02 and I know we're coming up here on this conclusion and such,
2032. 01:29:05 but this is the part where I was a little bit taken off guard
2033. 01:29:10 here because when we started this, remember what I said,
2034. 01:29:15 I was very skeptical about this because email is
2035. 01:29:20 kind of this fundamental piece in a lot of what I do,
2036. 01:29:25 but some of what is in this one, in this particular book,
2037. 01:29:30 involves the work outside of email
2038. 01:29:33 and how to manage it outside of email,
2039. 01:29:35 as opposed to defaulting to a communication tool
2040. 01:29:39 that's asynchronous that comes with a bunch of flaws,
2041. 01:29:42 finding other systems that could do the same thing.
2042. 01:29:46 So it is kind of fascinating when you start thinking about it
2043. 01:29:49 that way because it's at least caused me to start thinking
2044. 01:29:52 through how do I get work, how do I get what that is
2045. 01:29:57 that I need to do and how do I design,
2046. 01:30:01 how things come into that process, what is the process,
2047. 01:30:05 how do I manage that whole thing?
2048. 01:30:08 So it's at least prompted those thought processes.
2049. 01:30:11 So I think it's just been like, yes, email is the conversation
2050. 01:30:14 point and the potential problem here,
2051. 01:30:16 but the broader principles for getting off of it
2052. 01:30:21 could be pretty wide ranging and not necessarily just email.
2053. 01:30:25 It could be getting you off a slack.
2054. 01:30:26 It could be getting you off of forums online.
2055. 01:30:30 It could get you off of all sorts of stuff,
2056. 01:30:32 but it's how do you manage the work that you've been assigned?
2057. 01:30:36 And recognizing that email is not as innocuous
2058. 01:30:41 as it seems at first, kind of transitioning
2059. 01:30:47 to the conclusion here, but he makes a statement
2060. 01:30:50 that email isn't additive, it's ecological
2061. 01:30:52 and it changes everything.
2062. 01:30:54 So the typical approach with email is it's just this one
2063. 01:30:59 message, it's this thing in isolation and his real argument
2064. 01:31:03 is that no, it's the hyperactive hive mind
2065. 01:31:05 that comes along with it and all of these other costs
2066. 01:31:09 that are really hard to measure,
2067. 01:31:12 but that's the thing we really gotta be taking
2068. 01:31:15 into the equation when we decide is this the right tool
2069. 01:31:18 to be using in this particular thing?
2070. 01:31:20 And this is also where he talks about Neil Postman
2071. 01:31:22 and how every advantage a new technology offers
2072. 01:31:25 is always a corresponding disadvantage.
2073. 01:31:28 And if you came into this book just blindly doing email
2074. 01:31:34 because I gotta do it, it is what it is
2075. 01:31:37 and you're kind of not to the point maybe even where I was
2076. 01:31:42 where I hate this with a fiery passion
2077. 01:31:45 with the intensity of a thousand sons,
2078. 01:31:47 but you don't really even think about it.
2079. 01:31:51 I feel like this book is very eye opening,
2080. 01:31:55 but even for someone like me,
2081. 01:31:58 it's a call to action for looking for alternatives
2082. 01:32:03 because I admit that while email isn't a big part of my job,
2083. 01:32:07 it is something that I just default to while I gotta do this.
2084. 01:32:12 And it takes as long as it takes
2085. 01:32:13 and I've been able to minimize that as much as I can.
2086. 01:32:16 So I, and part of that is like I'm setting my own rules
2087. 01:32:21 and I take some people off with that.
2088. 01:32:23 Like you could make the argument in terms of Cal's focused
2089. 01:32:26 email journey, I'm farther along than a lot of other people,
2090. 01:32:30 but even with that I find myself
2091. 01:32:33 having to take a hard look in the mirror and say,
2092. 01:32:36 you know what?
2093. 01:32:37 Like I never even thought about this, that and the other thing
2094. 01:32:40 and why am I still doing this?
2095. 01:32:41 - There's a point in this last chapter in this conclusion
2096. 01:32:47 that I thought was kind of interesting
2097. 01:32:51 in that when Henry Ford was building cars,
2098. 01:32:56 everybody had a process for how that was supposed to work,
2099. 01:33:00 right? - Yep.
2100. 01:33:01 - And we've talked about what that is.
2101. 01:33:03 When he came to the assembly line process,
2102. 01:33:07 it completely changed the car making industry and process.
2103. 01:33:12 And so much of what people had been trying to do
2104. 01:33:17 previous to that assembly line was find ways
2105. 01:33:20 to build cars quicker by making it easier to manufacture
2106. 01:33:25 the parts that went into it, by making it easier
2107. 01:33:28 to get things to and from that car as it sat on the shop floor,
2108. 01:33:33 which is why Henry Ford's process of moving the car
2109. 01:33:36 was such a big fundamental change.
2110. 01:33:40 With email, we haven't had that moment yet
2111. 01:33:43 where there's the big fundamental change
2112. 01:33:46 that brings it into its full glory in that
2113. 01:33:50 all email has done so far has taken
2114. 01:33:56 normal office practices and made them move faster.
2115. 01:34:01 Even though it hasn't changed what those practices are
2116. 01:34:05 or the fundamental of how the business operates, right?
2117. 01:34:09 All it has done is move the memo process quicker
2118. 01:34:12 into more people so it's propagated it even further.
2119. 01:34:16 So it hasn't actually had its big fundamental shift
2120. 01:34:20 to bring it into a place where it has its full benefit.
2121. 01:34:24 So this is some of what he's calling for, I guess,
2122. 01:34:28 in that if you can use these systems,
2123. 01:34:30 because even to look at the processes
2124. 01:34:32 and such that he's talking about,
2125. 01:34:34 he's even talking about things getting into the process
2126. 01:34:36 by sending an email, that's what he's referencing in that.
2127. 01:34:40 So he's still saying, like email is a thing
2128. 01:34:43 that is used for these cases.
2129. 01:34:45 So yes, he can see a world without email,
2130. 01:34:49 but in the interim, trying to get better at using it
2131. 01:34:53 is a big thing as well.
2132. 01:34:55 - And this is the hard part because there are companies,
2133. 01:34:59 like Basecamp we mentioned earlier,
2134. 01:35:00 with their hey email, which are redefining
2135. 01:35:05 some of the rules around email.
2136. 01:35:07 There is no inbox in hey, there's just stuff that comes in,
2137. 01:35:12 there's no concept of like these are the messages
2138. 01:35:15 that I have to clear through in order to get to inbox zero.
2139. 01:35:18 I mean, that just completely breaks if you use hey,
2140. 01:35:21 but that means that hey is something separate.
2141. 01:35:24 It's not iMap, it's not pop three,
2142. 01:35:27 and that means that you have to use specifically
2143. 01:35:30 hey's client, which the nerd in me is like,
2144. 01:35:34 no, use the standard, but as long as you continue
2145. 01:35:37 to use a standard, you're stuck with the standard.
2146. 01:35:39 So it requires companies like Basecamp
2147. 01:35:42 trying new things like hey,
2148. 01:35:44 there's gonna be this point though,
2149. 01:35:46 where things are super stressful in the meantime,
2150. 01:35:49 because you're gonna have a bunch of different things
2151. 01:35:50 all over the place.
2152. 01:35:51 Gmail is kind of like that, it's sort of iMap,
2153. 01:35:54 but not quite.
2154. 01:35:55 And so whenever there's a new version of macOS mail,
2155. 01:35:59 Gmail changes something and it breaks.
2156. 01:36:02 It seems like the first version, it never works.
2157. 01:36:05 And then they have to make a change,
2158. 01:36:06 and then eventually it does.
2159. 01:36:08 And the more different options there are out there,
2160. 01:36:12 the more different standards or protocols
2161. 01:36:14 that people are using, it is gonna get worse before
2162. 01:36:18 it gets better, but I do completely agree
2163. 01:36:20 that there is going to be a point.
2164. 01:36:23 You're right, we're not there yet.
2165. 01:36:25 And I don't know how far in the future it is,
2166. 01:36:26 but there will be a point when we think about the way
2167. 01:36:29 that we deal with email right now,
2168. 01:36:31 and we're like, wow, how archaic was that?
2169. 01:36:33 - Right, right, for sure.
2170. 01:36:35 All right, action items.
2171. 01:36:39 - I actually have two, I'm going to attempt
2172. 01:36:44 to use Kanban boards for things that I am going to get done.
2173. 01:36:49 And I am also going to make my list of things to delegate.
2174. 01:36:54 So what that looks like for next time,
2175. 01:36:57 I think is that the Kanban boards
2176. 01:36:59 will probably be inside of todoist,
2177. 01:37:01 but I'm not 100% sure about that yet.
2178. 01:37:05 There are certain things about todoist
2179. 01:37:06 that bug me like the different priority levels.
2180. 01:37:08 There's only one priority, knock it off todoist,
2181. 01:37:11 but maybe I can figure out a different way to use those.
2182. 01:37:14 And the list is simple,
2183. 01:37:15 so I'll just have a list of things
2184. 01:37:16 that hopefully I can delegate.
2185. 01:37:20 - There you go.
2186. 01:37:21 I have two, one of them you might laugh at me for,
2187. 01:37:26 but one of them, the one you won't laugh at me about,
2188. 01:37:30 is creating protocols for how tickets and such come to me,
2189. 01:37:35 like how support comes to me in my day job.
2190. 01:37:39 I do fully control that system.
2191. 01:37:41 So how people go about bringing things to me
2192. 01:37:45 and how people get things into that process
2193. 01:37:48 and defining that process.
2194. 01:37:50 Right now, it's just, you have an issue,
2195. 01:37:52 I'm gonna go fix it right now.
2196. 01:37:54 That's a lot of how I do things,
2197. 01:37:56 even if it doesn't need done right now.
2198. 01:37:57 A lot of times I will do that
2199. 01:37:59 just so I don't have to try to keep it in any system whatsoever.
2200. 01:38:02 So I've built in a lot of ability
2201. 01:38:04 to have distractions in the day.
2202. 01:38:05 Like I have a lot of time available for that
2203. 01:38:08 and it's just planned on that.
2204. 01:38:10 So I just use it for those things.
2205. 01:38:12 But I don't have clear processes for the things
2206. 01:38:17 that aren't able to be done immediately and tracking those.
2207. 01:38:21 I do have an assistant that works under me at the moment.
2208. 01:38:24 So trying to manage things between the two of us
2209. 01:38:27 gets to be a little bit messy at the moment.
2210. 01:38:28 So using some of what KAL is recommending here
2211. 01:38:31 with the process and protocol pieces specifically,
2212. 01:38:33 that's some of what I wanna try to do at our church.
2213. 01:38:37 So that's one.
2214. 01:38:38 The second is, so I do still have email on my phone.
2215. 01:38:43 Right?
2216. 01:38:46 This is the thing that people tell you all the time,
2217. 01:38:47 get email off your phone.
2218. 01:38:48 I can't do that because so many of the systems
2219. 01:38:52 that I use on a daily basis send like the codes to get into it
2220. 01:38:56 and they send it via email.
2221. 01:38:57 But I'm trying to get into it from my phone
2222. 01:39:00 because I'm moving around so many different places
2223. 01:39:03 that it's impossible for me to constantly get back
2224. 01:39:05 to my computer to get that code, type it in and such.
2225. 01:39:08 It's just a pain.
2226. 01:39:10 Maybe that would be a good thing,
2227. 01:39:13 but I don't find that it's easy for me to get email
2228. 01:39:16 off of my phone because of that.
2229. 01:39:18 So I had a thought on how to maybe subvert this
2230. 01:39:24 in that I could potentially create a series shortcut.
2231. 01:39:29 This might be crazy.
2232. 01:39:31 This is why I'm putting so many caveats on it.
2233. 01:39:33 I think I can create a series shortcut
2234. 01:39:36 that replaces the email icons on my phone.
2235. 01:39:41 And I could tap that, it would check the time and day.
2236. 01:39:47 And if it's outside of working hours,
2237. 01:39:49 it just gives me an alert.
2238. 01:39:50 If it's inside working hours,
2239. 01:39:52 it could take me to the email app
2240. 01:39:53 that I originally wanted to go to.
2241. 01:39:56 - Interesting.
2242. 01:39:57 - I don't know if this is a good idea or a bad idea.
2243. 01:39:59 It's one that I had a couple days ago
2244. 01:40:01 as I was reading this and thought,
2245. 01:40:03 that would be helpful because I don't feel
2246. 01:40:05 like I can get this off because of the need
2247. 01:40:07 for the security aspect.
2248. 01:40:09 So maybe I can just kind of subvert it
2249. 01:40:13 in that I can leave it that way.
2250. 01:40:14 I'm not deleting it and reinstalling it every single day
2251. 01:40:16 every time I've got to have that
2252. 01:40:17 because that's just a pain.
2253. 01:40:19 So I thought about trying to do something along those lines.
2254. 01:40:22 I don't know if that's a good idea or not,
2255. 01:40:23 but it would be better than what I have now,
2256. 01:40:26 that much I know.
2257. 01:40:27 - So it would be better.
2258. 01:40:29 - Sounds a little bit like a complicated compromise, but.
2259. 01:40:33 - That might be good.
2260. 01:40:35 I don't know.
2261. 01:40:36 It's kind of like setting a protocol
2262. 01:40:37 for checking your email.
2263. 01:40:38 I don't know.
2264. 01:40:39 (laughs)
2265. 01:40:40 - Yeah.
2266. 01:40:41 Who knows?
2267. 01:40:42 Maybe I just wait until later in the day
2268. 01:40:43 to check that stuff and do an email run once a day.
2269. 01:40:46 I don't know what that is.
2270. 01:40:48 I may not actually build it,
2271. 01:40:49 but it's an idea that I'm trying to explore at the moment.
2272. 01:40:51 - All right, cool.
2273. 01:40:53 I'm anxious to see if that goes anywhere.
2274. 01:40:55 (laughs)
2275. 01:40:57 We'll talk next time about how much of a failure it is.
2276. 01:41:00 - It's over my head for sure.
2277. 01:41:02 All right, style and rating.
2278. 01:41:04 - Let's do it.
2279. 01:41:05 - Okay, so this is a very Cal Newport book.
2280. 01:41:10 I really like his style.
2281. 01:41:13 There are occasional places where he's so smart,
2282. 01:41:18 it's hard to keep up with him.
2283. 01:41:20 I mentioned like this story on the information theory,
2284. 01:41:26 and I'm sure in the world he runs in,
2285. 01:41:28 like that's an elementary principle,
2286. 01:41:30 but first time I'd ever heard about it,
2287. 01:41:32 I have no frame of reference,
2288. 01:41:35 and he's trying to condense it down into a very brief thing,
2289. 01:41:38 which for the most part, his story is that works really well.
2290. 01:41:41 He get the main point,
2291. 01:41:42 but with this one, it felt like I really had to dig
2292. 01:41:45 to understand what the heck he was talking about.
2293. 01:41:48 So there are a few points in this book
2294. 01:41:53 where it is not going to be an easy read,
2295. 01:41:57 but for the most part, I feel like it is an easy read.
2296. 01:42:01 It's very engaging, his thoughts are very well put together,
2297. 01:42:06 and he's very articulate.
2298. 01:42:09 There's not a whole lot of like one liners,
2299. 01:42:11 like quote type things,
2300. 01:42:13 I called out a couple of them
2301. 01:42:14 as we were recording here today,
2302. 01:42:17 but for the most part,
2303. 01:42:18 it's just a very solidly written book
2304. 01:42:22 with a lot of entertaining stories
2305. 01:42:25 that very much support the point
2306. 01:42:27 that he's trying to make.
2307. 01:42:28 Feels kind of like Ryan Holiday in that sense.
2308. 01:42:33 I do think there is a chance
2309. 01:42:35 that if you pick up this book
2310. 01:42:36 just because it's Cal Newport,
2311. 01:42:38 and you are a little bit skeptical,
2312. 01:42:40 like Joe was at the beginning that you absolutely hate this.
2313. 01:42:43 I mean, just to hear what you have to say.
2314. 01:42:46 I really liked it.
2315. 01:42:47 I feel like he makes a very compelling argument
2316. 01:42:49 for a world without email, hence the title.
2317. 01:42:52 I do think it's broader than just email.
2318. 01:42:55 He talks about the hyperactive hive mind.
2319. 01:42:57 I don't know how many times he uses that term,
2320. 01:42:59 but it's a lot.
2321. 01:43:00 That's really what he's driving at.
2322. 01:43:01 - That's a ton.
2323. 01:43:02 - I don't think this is like a change the world type book,
2324. 01:43:08 but I also think it has the potential to be.
2325. 01:43:10 We could look back in 10 years from now
2326. 01:43:12 and be like, this is the one that really kind of shifted
2327. 01:43:18 discussion around email as a productivity tool.
2328. 01:43:22 I think we kind of have that approach
2329. 01:43:24 when we think about deep work, at least you and I do.
2330. 01:43:27 Maybe not everybody else who has read it
2331. 01:43:29 based on your specific work situation,
2332. 01:43:32 but I think people like us, knowledge workers,
2333. 01:43:35 we could look at that and be like,
2334. 01:43:36 "Yeah, that significantly changed my life for the better
2335. 01:43:39 "and totally impacted the way that I get my work done
2336. 01:43:43 "or at least part of my work done."
2337. 01:43:45 So that being said, I think it's difficult to rate it
2338. 01:43:50 in terms of future impact that it may have
2339. 01:43:52 versus impact that it has right now.
2340. 01:43:56 I'm gonna put it at 4.5 because I feel like on the low end
2341. 01:44:01 assuming that this is just Cal's manifesto
2342. 01:44:05 and everybody completely ignores this
2343. 01:44:07 and we deal with email for the next 100 years,
2344. 01:44:09 it's still a really good book.
2345. 01:44:11 There's still a lot of great principles in here.
2346. 01:44:12 There's still a lot of things that you can do
2347. 01:44:15 that can make email a little bit less of an annoyance
2348. 01:44:18 right now, that would be the 4.0 side.
2349. 01:44:21 The 5.0 would be if he's 100% hitting this
2350. 01:44:24 and we look back at this and be like,
2351. 01:44:26 "Yeah, he was the first guy that really said,
2352. 01:44:29 "email's not tenable," and he gets credited
2353. 01:44:32 with the whole big push away from email
2354. 01:44:34 as a communication medium.
2355. 01:44:36 I have no idea if and when that happens.
2356. 01:44:40 So I feel putting it in the middle is probably
2357. 01:44:42 the fair thing to do at 4.5 because even if he's wrong,
2358. 01:44:47 he's not wrong in the large sense
2359. 01:44:51 with everything that he says here.
2360. 01:44:52 There's still a lot of stuff that you can apply right now
2361. 01:44:55 but he does kind of make his moonshot at the end
2362. 01:44:59 of like, "Hey, this is coming."
2363. 01:45:01 Kind of feels like so he can point back to it
2364. 01:45:05 if that happens and be like, "See, see, I said that.
2365. 01:45:07 "I said that there."
2366. 01:45:08 - I told you. - Yep.
2367. 01:45:10 And I don't think that that's a non-zero chance
2368. 01:45:13 that there has a non-zero chance of happening.
2369. 01:45:15 So.
2370. 01:45:16 - Yeah, I think this book is one that's,
2371. 01:45:19 it's a headier book than his other ones, right?
2372. 01:45:23 I feel like as time goes on,
2373. 01:45:25 he's thought about this a lot more
2374. 01:45:27 and I also think that he spent a lot of time on this book,
2375. 01:45:31 potentially more than he has on his other ones
2376. 01:45:33 and you can tell that in the word smithing
2377. 01:45:36 that's done in this one
2378. 01:45:39 'cause there are some sentences that I'm like,
2379. 01:45:41 okay, I gotta stop and reread that one.
2380. 01:45:44 'Cause like, what is he getting at?
2381. 01:45:45 What did he just say?
2382. 01:45:46 Like, there were a number of those in this one.
2383. 01:45:49 I don't remember having that experience with his other books,
2384. 01:45:53 namely, Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.
2385. 01:45:55 So I think this is one that's designed
2386. 01:45:58 to be more long-term.
2387. 01:46:01 Like this is one that you're like,
2388. 01:46:02 it's set up to be one that you read
2389. 01:46:05 and then process over time.
2390. 01:46:06 - Sure.
2391. 01:46:07 - That's kind of my gut feeling that.
2392. 01:46:09 The problem with that is that he has a handful of references
2393. 01:46:14 to very specific tools.
2394. 01:46:16 - Yeah.
2395. 01:46:17 - We talked about this with getting things done.
2396. 01:46:19 Like, we're in the very, very first edition
2397. 01:46:23 of Getting Things Done,
2398. 01:46:24 there were a lot of references to specific tools
2399. 01:46:26 and apps and such.
2400. 01:46:27 And when the rewrite, they pulled all that out
2401. 01:46:31 and I think for the better on that one.
2402. 01:46:34 But Cal Newport does call out specific apps and tools
2403. 01:46:37 and my concern was,
2404. 01:46:39 why happens if Trello shutters its doors here next month?
2405. 01:46:42 - Yep.
2406. 01:46:42 - Then what?
2407. 01:46:43 - That's true.
2408. 01:46:44 - He's got a book that just came out
2409. 01:46:45 that's no longer available.
2410. 01:46:48 Like it just doesn't, so it was weird to me
2411. 01:46:50 because it felt like this is a very evergreen,
2412. 01:46:53 long-term, written book.
2413. 01:46:56 And yet he has some very time-specific pieces in it.
2414. 01:47:00 So I'm sure he thought through that, but it seems weird.
2415. 01:47:04 - The Trello example is genius, by the way,
2416. 01:47:07 because they were acquired by Atlassian, I believe,
2417. 01:47:10 which makes Jira, they could tomorrow decide
2418. 01:47:14 this free thing that people are using
2419. 01:47:16 is no longer in our best business interest
2420. 01:47:18 and try to force everybody over to Jira.
2421. 01:47:20 - Correct, yeah.
2422. 01:47:21 And that's a very real possibility.
2423. 01:47:24 Having worked with Atlassian's stuff in the past,
2424. 01:47:26 like that would not surprise me at all
2425. 01:47:29 if we saw that announcement this afternoon.
2426. 01:47:31 So, I don't know.
2427. 01:47:33 I mean, that's a concern I have with the book itself,
2428. 01:47:37 but I think that's probably a bit of a minor one.
2429. 01:47:39 We talked earlier about my skepticism coming into this.
2430. 01:47:44 I was pleasantly surprised to see him cover
2431. 01:47:47 broader things than just email.
2432. 01:47:50 I thought we were going to be talking about just email,
2433. 01:47:52 but this involved Slack and all the chat systems
2434. 01:47:56 and he involves a lot of that in it as well.
2435. 01:47:59 And then terms this hyperactive hive mind thing
2436. 01:48:04 and helps us understand that that's actually
2437. 01:48:07 what we're fighting against.
2438. 01:48:08 I'm all on board with that.
2439. 01:48:10 I'm not saying that email is in a rosy state for me at all.
2440. 01:48:15 I'm definitely going to be trying to change up
2441. 01:48:17 how I do things with email.
2442. 01:48:19 I'm not sure what that looks like,
2443. 01:48:20 but it's something I'm trying to figure out that process.
2444. 01:48:23 Like I talked about earlier.
2445. 01:48:24 So, as far as like how to rate this
2446. 01:48:28 and how to like rec,
2447. 01:48:31 I mean, obviously this is one I'm going to recommend to people.
2448. 01:48:34 Again, it's a bit headier.
2449. 01:48:35 So I'm going to be doing this with people
2450. 01:48:37 that I think can handle a little bit more difficult of a book.
2451. 01:48:41 Like this isn't one that's as easy to read,
2452. 01:48:43 I think as like digital minimalism.
2453. 01:48:45 That one was just, you could cruise through that thing
2454. 01:48:48 very easily.
2455. 01:48:49 This one you kind of had to,
2456. 01:48:50 at least for me, I had to take a little more time with it
2457. 01:48:53 just because it was so dense and it was so heady and such.
2458. 01:48:58 So, that is a thing to keep in mind.
2459. 01:49:02 I will be recommending it to a number of folks.
2460. 01:49:04 I think you nailed it with the rating.
2461. 01:49:05 I think it should be 4.5
2462. 01:49:07 in that it doesn't feel like,
2463. 01:49:11 you know, part of this might be because the title
2464. 01:49:15 is a little bit off in my mind.
2465. 01:49:18 I think the title of the book is maybe to get sales
2466. 01:49:22 somewhat, which is a little bit of a hit,
2467. 01:49:25 I think to Cal Newport.
2468. 01:49:26 I mean, he's got it named, I think probably correctly
2469. 01:49:31 as far as what people want from him,
2470. 01:49:35 but because he covers so much more than email
2471. 01:49:39 and like look at the four principles, right?
2472. 01:49:41 The attention capital process, protocol specialization,
2473. 01:49:45 all of the things in there are about
2474. 01:49:46 how to manage knowledge work.
2475. 01:49:47 It doesn't have anything to do with,
2476. 01:49:50 I shouldn't say anything.
2477. 01:49:51 It doesn't have a focus on email.
2478. 01:49:54 So this is why I was trying to summarize,
2479. 01:49:57 this is how it applies to email.
2480. 01:49:58 So that's a thing, right?
2481. 01:50:01 So I don't know, it's just something about it
2482. 01:50:04 doesn't quite click for me to get it all the way to the 5.5.0
2483. 01:50:08 and maybe I'll change my mind and this will be
2484. 01:50:10 like how to read a book and I'll continually think about this
2485. 01:50:12 all the time and constantly in which I had rated it 5,
2486. 01:50:15 in which case episode 200 I'll change it.
2487. 01:50:17 So at this point in time, I'm gonna put it at 4.5
2488. 01:50:20 'cause I feel like that's about right, given all of this.
2489. 01:50:24 - Cool, let's put this one on the shelf.
2490. 01:50:29 What are we covering next, Joe?
2491. 01:50:32 - It'll be fun, "The Art of Whitty Bantar" by Patrick King.
2492. 01:50:37 You and I do enough voice work and enough video work now
2493. 01:50:41 that I feel like it would be good.
2494. 01:50:43 The subtitle on this is "Be Clever, Quick and Magnetic."
2495. 01:50:46 - Awesome.
2496. 01:50:47 - I'm looking forward to this one.
2497. 01:50:48 I'm excited about it.
2498. 01:50:50 It might be a train wreck, but it'll be fun.
2499. 01:50:52 - All right, after that, I wish Otter was here
2500. 01:50:56 because I'm gonna pick one of his books.
2501. 01:50:58 We're gonna do, think again, "The Power of Knowing
2502. 01:51:01 What You Don't Know" by Adam Grant.
2503. 01:51:04 I think this came up, this was in your analog Joe stream,
2504. 01:51:07 right, that this came up?
2505. 01:51:09 - It was on one of the Twitch streams I think.
2506. 01:51:10 - I remember being in the room for that one
2507. 01:51:13 and when we started talking about that,
2508. 01:51:15 it was like, this sounds like my kind of book.
2509. 01:51:18 So.
2510. 01:51:20 - Yeah.
2511. 01:51:21 - We'll do that one next.
2512. 01:51:22 You got any gap books?
2513. 01:51:23 - I finished up reading "Purple Cow" by Seth Godin,
2514. 01:51:26 but other than that, I haven't done anything
2515. 01:51:28 in between since then.
2516. 01:51:29 You?
2517. 01:51:30 - I did not get my gap book finished,
2518. 01:51:33 which is "The Roadless Stupid" by Keith Cunningham,
2519. 01:51:35 but I am not going to only partially read this one this time.
2520. 01:51:39 I'm gonna pick it again and get through this one.
2521. 01:51:42 - Okay.
2522. 01:51:43 - All right, well, that's it for this episode then.
2523. 01:51:46 I wanna say before we go, thank you to all of the
2524. 01:51:50 Bookworm Club Premium members for supporting the show.
2525. 01:51:53 Thank you to the people who are attending live.
2526. 01:51:57 This always makes the recording a lot of fun,
2527. 01:51:59 but huge thanks to the people who are willing
2528. 01:52:01 to pay a couple bucks a month to help us keep the lights on.
2529. 01:52:05 If you want to go to club.bookworm.fm/membership,
2530. 01:52:10 you can sign up to support the show
2531. 01:52:12 and you get a few bonuses with that,
2532. 01:52:14 like a wallpaper that I designed,
2533. 01:52:17 some gap book episodes that Joe had recorded
2534. 01:52:19 and links to all of the MyNODE files
2535. 01:52:22 for all of the books that we read
2536. 01:52:24 when I get done with those.
2537. 01:52:25 I upload them to the club.
2538. 01:52:26 There's a few new ones I added last week.
2539. 01:52:28 I fell a bit behind, but it should be up to date now.
2540. 01:52:31 So you get all that stuff and the place to go
2541. 01:52:34 if you wanna do that again is club.bookworm.fm/membership.
2542. 01:52:39 - One other thing to point out
2543. 01:52:41 because Mike just did this as well.
2544. 01:52:42 You can still get T-shirts and sweatshirts
2545. 01:52:44 and apparently onesies for babies.
2546. 01:52:46 - That's true.
2547. 01:52:47 - With the Bookworm logo on them.
2548. 01:52:48 And Mike finally wore out his bookworm sweatshirt
2549. 01:52:53 and had to order a new one.
2550. 01:52:54 But if you're interested in that,
2551. 01:52:55 just go to Bookworm.fm.
2552. 01:52:56 There's a link in the menu there
2553. 01:52:58 for picking up merchandise if that's of interest to you.
2554. 01:53:03 So again, thank you to all of you who have joined us live
2555. 01:53:06 and those of you who continue to support the show.
2556. 01:53:10 We couldn't do it without you.
2557. 01:53:11 So thank you so much for doing that.
2558. 01:53:14 And if you're one of the folks reading along with us
2559. 01:53:18 as we go through these books,
2560. 01:53:20 pick up The Art of Whitty Bantar by Patrick King.
2561. 01:53:22 We'll read that and cover it in a couple of weeks.