Learning to Love (or at Least Live With) Email

so everybody really hates on email. Emails the worst. I get so many of them, busy and important, but the o there's a lot of articles talking about how emails the cockroach of the Internet, and it's so distracting, and I mean I can see why. I mean, I just mentioned that I have over two thousand unread emails in my work email. Yeah, but you seem to be able to live with it. Yeah, I actually love email. My Gmail box is very different than my Bloomberg in box.

My Gmail inbox has no one reading emails. Wow, that's impressive. I think I have several thousand unready. Feel like we're actually opposite because you have no one reads in your Bloomberg, right, I'm working on that for my boobs. Yeah. Well, my issue with email is that, um, I get so many emails that are not for me specifically, I'm just they're either spam emails, I'm copied on them along with ten other people, and I don't need to respond to them that it fills up my inbox so quickly that I

miss important emails. So I've since I came back from maternity leave, I made a resolution to try and delete all of my unimportant emails every day. Well, so, I think this is one reason that email is so loved and hated and loved to be hated, is because it gives us so much anxiety, Like it takes a lot of brain space. So people feel the need to either be like an inbox zero person, right, so you can talk about or I'm not even going to think about all these emails in my inbox person. I guess I'm

both of those people. Yeah, let's let's talk about in box zero. Do you want to explain what it is for people who don't know it's this way of life? Religious about it? Yeah? Where you have I'm not sure is that either no emails at all in your inbox or no unready emails. I think it's no unready emails, but maybe like a purist what, Yeah, I think there might be a purist version of it, where it's like no emails at all, and if there's an email that

needs to be saved, it goes into a folder. Yeah, and I relate to this because if I have an unread email in my Gmail, it will not at me because it's telling me I need to do something right. I use it in that way, and I think that's how inbox zero people use it. But you have a misillian. Well, my feeling about inbox zero has changed a little bit.

It used to be I used to think it was the biggest waste of time, and it was this kind of artificial sense of superiority or accomplishment that you got from deleting all these emails when actually you were investing all of this time and delete emails. And if you could just learn to be okay with having unread emails in your inbox, then your life would be exactly the same and you wouldn't have an empty emox. But then I wish I didn't have these pathologies that do Yeah,

and I think a lot of people do. And then I I still eventually I had to come to grips with the whole like missing an email from my boss because it was buried under like six hundred, you know, spam email from emails from PR people or notes from the facility staff on like the bathroom downstairs being closed. And so as soon as I started doing that, um, actually, it became a lot more like it to do list. Like now I know if I have an email in there that something needs to be done about it. And

most of the time it's just to delete it. But if it's if it's sitting there for longer than a few hours, that means like require some kind of action. Welcome to the fold. Yeah, although I'm not like that with Bloomberg. But but email is also so hada that some people have tried to get rid of it in their lives. There are offices that tell their internal staff they cannot use email to communicate. Wow, So what's the alternative? They use something like flack or hip chat or whatever

social network that your company is on. And I think it does cut down on emails, and I think that's happening organically at a lot of companies. But I don't see how you can avoid email communication altogether if you have any sort of role where you communicate with people outside of your office. Right, and as we've talked about in other episodes, those alternatives can get cluttered up and

start taking up your time to write. You can spend too much time sending and receiving messages on a chat platform. So yeah, on top of having all these notifications now from your chat app, it really doesn't get rid of email altogether in most offices. So I think instead of trying to get rid of something that is never going to go away, we need to embrace it and learn to live with it and maybe even if you're like me,

one day you'll love it. And to tell us how to get to that point, our guest today a as a behavioral economist at Duke. His name is Dan Ari Yellie. He wrote a book called Payoff, the Hidden Logic that shapes our motivations, and he's going to teach us how to trick ourselves into loving email. Thanks for coming on

my pleasure. So, Dan, you have an elaborate approach to email, and I would love to just start by talking about what happened when I emailed you to talk about coming on this show, um to give to give our listeners a sense of how much work and how much thought you've put into your own email strategy. So I want to do you want to tell people to sit down and kind of take a drink of something. Yeah, exactly,

you sit down and get comfortable. So I emailed you to see if you would be interested in coming on the show to talk to us. And what I got back was a long and very detailed automatic response, and it had a list of frequently asked questions that I assume was to head off the questions you get from a lot of people that can be answered really easily. And then it had another list of contacts that wait before before you did you? Did you look at any

of the frequently asked questions? I didn't. I assumed it wasn't. I assumed none of my issues. So so here's what I recommended you do at some point to go back to those and look at the last two. The last two are a general positive response or a general negative response. So I asked people, if you just want me to say, yes, you're right, you're smart, and so on, click here and you get the YouTube with me agreeing with you. And if you want me to disagree with you, there's another

link to another YouTube. Will I tell you it's a stupid idea and you should never do that. But but there's some there's some real answers there as well. I love that it's the most entertaining automatic email response I think I've ever received. But yeah, it assumes people read automatic email responses. Well I did. I mean, as soon as I saw it, I saw that there was enough there that I was probably going to have to do a little more work than just emailing you and forgetting

about it. So I saw that if you had an interview request, for example, you should email your publicists. And I did that, and here we are. Can you talk a little bit about this, what led to you developing that response, and you know, like how you got there? Yeah? So first, well, you know, I do apologize because it's

kind of an arrogant thing to do, right. People email each other and all of a sudden I say, hey, you know, I know you emailed me, but you know, here's the whole list of the emails and things I want you to do to email me. And there's some something very arrogant about it. And I've been holding off for a while trying not to do that. But um, the same thing is that I get about three hundred emails a day, and it's just very hard to to manage.

And you know, there's there's like a level of personal stress, you know, waking up in the morning and seeing you know, handling some emails, just waiting. Sometimes I wake up and now early just to do email, and an hour later when I just finished, I have more email then when I started. So so, partially I think that when people send an email, we're not really good at conveying our intentions, like what exactly do you want? What? What? How? How you do it? What is this email about? You're asking

a question? Do you want something? So, so emails are often long and hard to understand what people exactly know. I need to read the long email and say what what do they actually want from me at the end of this of this email? Um so so part of it is just the inability to to cope and the stress that comes with it. So so I had this outgoing message and then I try to direct people two different things. So first of all, I say, if you want to me to give a talk, my schedule is online.

Um you can look every day of the year where I'm at and you can see by yourself if I'm busy or not. And then if you if you want to if you still want to write me after all of this, please go to this a website. And I got somebody to write me a program that is called short will. That's the term we gave it. And in that system, I asked people to write me, but by first answering a few questions. So I ask people to

tell me what is this about? Is this a request for talking, interview advice, just to chat, exchange information the different options, and then they ask people tell me when they want an answer by do you want like for me to drop everything and answer immediately, end of the day, end of the week, end of the month, or no response necessary. And and then I say, okay, now tell me what the question is. And this has actually been

incredibly useful. So let me ask you to kind of guess from all the people who write me through this system, what percentage of the emails do you think having the title drop everything and answer me immediately? I would think a very low percentage, or maybe it's a lot of people, because I don't know. I think I'm important and you are important, But but you know, what do you think

is the percent give me numbers? I don't know. I would say maybe Becca, I have to go high now, so okay, so it's two percent, right, So so first of maybe two even maybe even two percent is too high. But but it is amazing, right when you give people a chance to stop and reflect and say, shoot the person. The moment you send somebody an email to somebody, it does beep, right, and they do, to some degree, even for a few seconds, stop everything and look at it's

what you've asked them. And I give people, you know, the request to tell me like what's the time scale, and very very few people say drop everything and answer me now. And that's a wonderful thing because I have my my email set up so that if people say that my email pinks and I'm notified immediately. If it's not, it goes to a different inbox. What I love about that is that that figure is probably a lot lower

than as the email receiver. That's you probably have a higher percentage of emails that you would personally think or drop everything and respond now emails. So if you are making the decision, you might think it's a higher percentage. Yeah, and and but you know so, so two percent of the people say please answer me very quickly, and I try. But the rest of them, they go into folded that says end of the day, end of the week, end of the month, and and I deal with those in time,

and everybody gets to benefit. I don't get my I don't get my email. My work interrupted three hundred times a day, right for every usually for every email you get, you get a notification. This way, I get a notification only for the things that need immediately immediately response and then and not. The question is what percentage of the email you think have the title no response necessary, the classification no response necessary. I would think yeah, I would

think that one. Because if you're forced to think about it and you realize there's no response necessary, maybe that's when you just back off and don't send the email at all. It's more about what my father. I don't think you're right in the white bother right. If somebody says, you know, thank you, I want you to know I read this book, I thought about this, or somebody says here is an article that I think you might be interested in reading. So we wrote this little program called Filter,

and we asked people to check it out. And this program goes into email and basically takes forty of your of your last emails and say when would you want to see this email? And we did a couple of ways. The way that filter works is by the name of the person, right the email that comes from this person when you want to see it. But we also did it in another way through a different approach, and we sample four emails from people. We went to a company,

a big, big tech company. For each person, we took fully of the emails they sent and forty of the emails that they received, and we said, for those emails, which one of those like? We went one by one and we said, for each one of those, is this email you wanted to know immediately when you got it, within the hour, two hour, four hour, the end of the day, end of the week, or never wanted to know about it? And we did it for both things that people send out and for the things that they received.

And unsurprisingly, you know, people, things that people said out they think are more important than they think that they received. Okay, that's fine, but the percentage of things that people have said they wanted to never know about was was between fot and that's because we have so much email running around that you put you you add people just in case they might want to know one day you wanted to be in their archives. So if they want to

to get it one day, they'll have it there. But you certainly don't want people to be disturbed in the middle of the work day to basically be notified that there are you know, the eighth person B. C. Seed on some email about a new procedure that is happening in the company. Right, you want to be able to say you sent it to them. You want to say, and then at some point they search for it. You

want them to have access to it. The idea that this something needs to beep and interrupt somebody's day multiple times, it is kind of shocking. And you know we took We take lots of different types of communications and we call them email, like when things come to your house in the mail, at least you see regular envelopes and postcards, and you see junk mail, and you see catalogs, and they look very different and you know how to approach

them differently. Right, You never start by opening the ones that are You start by the personal letters and the rest of them. You probably kind of know immediately that there's nothing in a hurry about this but an email. We treat everything is if we're in a hurry, right, And Gmail has made an attempt to try its hand at sorting these emails into the most important and less important, right they have. But but here's the thing. There's a

huge difference between important and urgent. And this is no disrespect to my mother, but but everything my mother rights me is important. Nothing has yet been urgent. And and I think that what what we need to do is we need to think both about importance and urgency. You're you're a behavioral economist. Are you using behavioral economics when developing these apps and websites and theories? Yeah? So partially you know this question about how do we frame things? Okay,

so let's let's start from the beginning. One thing is, I am actually acutely aware of the cost of distraction. Right. Somebody doesn't know the research might say, oh, you know, my phone BIPs, nothing happens. But the reality is if your phone bibs or your computer bibs, something big happens.

You're just not aware how big it is. So there was one study in which they took undergrads and they got them to solve math problems in the computer, and they paid them by how many math problems they were solving, right, so they were highly motivated to solve these math problems

as quickly as possible. And they asked them to put their phone on the side and not to touch their phone for the time that they were solving these problems, and unbeknown to them, from time to time they would text them, and from time to time they would call them. And what they saw was the incredible reduction in people's ability to solve these problems, not only when the phone was being called or vibrating because of texts, but it

lasted for a few minutes after that. So when when we have a notification on that something is happening, we think, oh, it's just that notification, But in ten seconds we're back to it. Now we're not really back to it. So I I have an agenda of fighting notifications, so I'm aware of of the cost of distraction that I'm trying to minimize it. That I think is number one. The second thing is this idea of thinking about urgency rather than importance. And you know, I wish I could ask

people how how important is your email? Could I live without it? But but that that's aside understanding that the real issue is urgent, seeing what is the time frame of how to deal with this? And that email create a tremendous burden when you have a big to do list and you are burndened by the fact that you have a big to do list and it just sits there on your mind and weighs on you. And I have a big one, and we all have actually big ones, often in the form of email that just sits there

and wait for us to respond to it. So I'm doing as much as I can to think about what are those kind of cognitive challenges that we've created for us, how much stress are they creating? And what can we do to fight them? So let me ask you on that urgency topic. Has have you ever been stung by your by putting your phone to sleep? Because I think that's a big worry that people have that they'll miss

something urgent. Yeah, I have. But but you know, this question of you know, what are you willing to lose for what gain? Is a question of do you appreciate the gain and the losses? Right? So what happens I think that we all see the losses like a missed call and you say, my goodness, I would have gone to this other building that that happened to me. I went to the wrong place for a meeting, and from time to time I missed something. Yeah, there is a cost,

but the question is what's the benefit. And if you think that the benefit is very small, you say not worth it. But if you realize how big the benefit is of not having it, then you would be willing to take some cost for it. That's such an economist viewpoint. Just think of cost benefit analysis. You have to you have to write. So here's another principle that we find is that there are things in life that are more visible and there are things in life that are less visible.

So you know, email is very visible, and the real work you want to do is less visible. Think about like something like writing a book. Right, And you don't have on your calendar every day two hours dedicated to writing a book. It's just something you you want to do, and slowly you can. You work, and you work, and you work, but but email comes. And now the question is which one takes priority, the book or email. Email

is here and it shows up. And there's a beautiful term called structural procrastination, the feeling that we make progress even though the only thing we're doing is making to do list and crossing them off, or you know, deleting email that nobody should have sent us from the beginning.

But it gives us the sense of progress. Who is writing a book doesn't give you the same feeling of progress because maybe you work the whole day to try and explain some topic and at the end of the day decide you didn't do a good job and you have to start again tomorrow. I feel like like we don't get the same sense of progress. We get a sense of progress from all of these emails and to do list and things like that, but it's not the

real progress. I mean, how many people are going to die happy knowing that they you know, they got to invoke zero seven twenty one days during their lives. This is just not the stuff that makes long happiness. But because it is present and immediate and beeps and somebody is waiting, it actually takes precedent over the things that are important to us. We let other people determine our

priorities rather than us controlling them. Taking this approach, the behavioral economist approach, means kind of trying to affect other people's behavior. You know, it also means so I think it's the first thing it means is it means to understand the real costs and benefits and understand that our psychology is not mechanical, and something like a notification or something like it to do list can can miss direct us, and something like it to do list can switch our

priority lists and so on. Then the second thing is to try different things, right, just experiment, just try to figure out what works and doesn't work. And then in this particular case, it also meant, you know, even though it's arrogant and um, you know, not a nice thing to do, let's let's put as on the people who are writing me because I can't find another solution. I wish I did. But but you know this, this other thing that is happening with this email response is it

gives me permission to respond more slowly. Right, so, so we have this idea of we expect things very very quickly, but but the moment you have a notification, all of a sudden you say, hey, you know, it's it's okay not to respond so quickly, and we're trying and approach. This is just in design stages, but you know, lots of times you you call somebody and they're driving. When

you text somebody and driving and you don't know. And one of the things we're trying to do is for your phone to respond automatically when you're driving, say thanks for the call, Dan can enter now he's driving, or thanks for the text, Dan can't respond now he's driving. And that would basically clear the feeling that you have to respond quickly. Plus it would make it so that if you do respond quickly, people would say, hey, are

you driving and texting at the same time. Yeah, that could make the roads a lot safer if people really used it. But but we do have. You know, the the natural way of discussion is you ask a question and you respond. You don't wait three hours. So so we have a tendency a desire to respond quickly, and and and this email buffer kind of gives me permission to say, no, I can I can focus for the next few hours, and and it could be Okay, well, thank you so much for coming on and talking to

us about email Okay, bye. I want to go back to this idea that Dan brought up about structured procrastination. We've talked about this before on the show, and I agree that it's a thing and definitely a problem when you do something that's busy work and convince yourself that it's real work. And that is my big complaint about in Buck zero in a way, Oh yeah, exactly, that

was your whole main first problem with it. But I want to push back on this a little bit and say that sometimes email is a part of my job. I think communication is a part of our jobs and an important part of our jobs. Like we don't a lot of us, at least in my job and a lot of other people's jobs. We don't just work in these vacuums like communicating the skill it's part. I don't know.

I don't like this idea that, like all email, it's a waste of time, right, we dismiss email as this distraction from our work, But for a lot of people, email is our work. It's part of our job, so getting Yeah, as you say, communication is a skill. And I think we often hear of these apps or movements to not have email from people whose jobs are more solitary, like engineers, for example, who aren't known for their communication skills.

And I think that it's not the reality for some of us, like me, whose job is super communication based Yeah, and you don't always have a job where you have like a tangible product, you know, I mean you your journalists, so you can say I wrote this article, that's what I did today, or that's what I did this week. But there are a lot of people whose job descriptions are a little bit more nebulous, or they coordinate projects, and email is kind of the way that they show

their work. Yeah, which I guess is why it does kind of get out of control because it'll it'll be like I am doing this thing, c C. Everyone. Yeah. I have definitely worked in places where you get a lot of unnecessary updates on projects with bullet points from people that just show you so that they know how to format emails. Well, that's let's all to say that emails not going away. And I love it and I want you all to to I don't love it yet,

but I think I can handle it all right. And now it's time for half big takes, happy fake takes before we get to our own half pig takes, we had a listener right in and remember you can call into our hotline at two on two six zero one six six and leave your own half baked take. So our listener Emma wrote in saying in meetings, women should

not take notes. Even though I feel more comfortable taking notes because it's the best way I can remember what we discussed, I end up becoming the de facto secretary of the meeting, so now I'm spending more time focusing on remembering the meeting and not taking notes. I have no idea if this is going to work or not, but hey, that's why you call it a half baked take. I liked this because she's so right. She's so right,

but also not even the gender thing. When I take notes and meetings, I mean, you should look at my notepad and you've seen it. First of all, it's eligible, but also it's mostly me doodling my name over and over, Like what are we Are we really going to look back at those notes? I think notes can be useful, and I'm with her on being a little bit at sea about like what if I don't If I don't

take notes, how well I know what's going on? But there is Like I was at a meeting recently with a few men and a few woman in the person who usually takes notes in the meeting wasn't there, and the man leading the meeting was like, well, somebody ought to take notes, and I just sat there frozen and I was hoping none of the women in the room were given and eventually one of them did it. Just there's something wrong with taking notes if it works for you,

But being the note taker, I don't know. It just feels kind of like a demotion and a meeting. Sometimes maybe it'll make people pay better attention. Anyway, maybe everyone should take notes. Another half pick that I just made her half bay take a two third take wait, three fours. Sorry, I'm not going to mad. What is your half piked idea this week? Francesca? Okay, this one might blow your mind,

so be prepared. I have the perfect response to a passive aggressive comment of any kind, and it will just it will stun your passive aggressive opponent into silence or confusion. It is thank you. Do you want to do? You want to try an example? Okay, so say something passive aggressive to me. I don't even know I needed I don't I don't know. Oh. Um, just be like, oh, it's so great that you don't really feel the need

to advance too quickly in your job. Oh it's so great that you don't feel the need to advance too quickly in your job. Oh my god, thank you, it's pretty good, aren't you? Just like disarmed? And because the thing is is your instinct is to respond to passive aggressive comments by saying something that shows that you know that they're being passive aggressive and you're going to be kind of snotty too, and then you say something passive aggresive,

and then it just goes back and forth. But if you say thank you, it's just not the response that they were looking for. And it also it frees you from having to ever feel affected by what they say, because you can just pretend everything is a compliment. Try it, Okay, I'm gonna try it. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm not sold, but I'm not not sold. I just don't know if I understand. Thank you anyway, what's your half bag? Take mine? Is that people are putting their

grocery store baskets away improperly. Oh I worry I might be doing this. Tell me what I'm doing wrong. So I use a basket when I go to the grocery store, and usually not getting that many things like a carry basket, And so you go to the register to check out.

You put your things on the belt, and then you put your basket at the front of the register to stack it up, and often people will put it so that the handles criss cross on top of each other, making it impossible for me to stack mine inside that basket. And it's wrong and rude and really annoying. So then I have to take an extra second to fix the error so I can stack mine in right when they could have just taken a split second to do it on there before exactly. And I get it. That's one

second is a little annoying, it really is. It's it's the feeling I get when I make my bed in the morning. I don't want to do it. This will take one second, and I do it and then everything is in order. And it's also just this fundamental thing of remembering like we're all living in a society together. Let's just not be jerks. I love that. Alright, this has been half big Takes. Hath Thicke takes. Thanks for

listening to another episode of Game Plan. You can find me on Twitter at rs Greenfield and I'm at Francesca today. You can tweet your Hathnike takes at us at at game Plan, or you can call into our very cool hotline. It's two on two six seven zero one six six. If you like this episode, please rate, review us on iTunes, and subscribe. And while you're looking at Bloomberg podcasts, why don't you check out material World, a podcast about all the things that we buy. This week's episode is all

about tequila. This show was produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson. The Head of podcast is Alec McCabe and we will see you next week later. H oh, that is for another podcast episode. You know how I feel about that.