Hello there, it's Amantha. I'm currently on a Christmas break, so I've handpicked a bunch of my favorite episodes from the last year to share with you. Okay, on with today's best of episode. I read a lot of books, but it's rare to read one that fundamentally changes the way you work. For me, that book was Deep Work by Cal Newport. I read it back in twenty seventeen, and in case you're not familiar with Cal, he's a computer science professor at Georgetown University and also a best
selling author. Deep Work completely changed the way I approached my work and made me infinitely more productive and happier at work too, So you could probably imagine that when I heard that Cal has just released his latest book, A World Without Email, to say I was excited to read it was an understatement. I immediately reached out to get Cal back on the show, and I'm so excited
to share this chat. If you're keen to dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend in your inbox, and to not just try to do this with standard productivity hacks like batch checking, then I think you're gonna love this chat with Cal. My name is Doctor Ramanatha Inbo. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work, a show
about how to help you do your best work. So, given it's been about two years since I first had Cal on the show, I was very keen to hear about new work rituals or habits or processes that he'd been implementing since we last spoke.
Well, I think one of the ideas that has clarified in my mind, It's one of the big ideas in the new book, is that when you're thinking about your work and knowledge work, you should really think about yourself as implementing a bunch of different separate processes the things you do regularly in knowledge work, and you want to think about how you implement these. And I've always thought
about process oriented workflows. But the big insight I've had working on the new book is one of the main things you want to optimize when you're thinking about these different work processes is reducing unscheduled messaging. So how much unscheduled messages do I have to receive to accomplish this process or that process? And so a lot of my new rituals. A lot of my new processes are seeing to this light of how do I reduce the number of unscheduled messages required to get this thing done or
to make progress on this regularly occurring obligation. And so you'll see things in my life now, like when it comes to doing publicity tour with like my US based publicist for my book tour, we created a system using a shared document where opportunities going to the document, questions of me are put in the document. I checked the document twice a week. I would come in and say, okay, I'll do this one. Here's when I can do it.
I signed up for this one, and we found a way for my US public see for example, just give one example among many of booking interviews without emailing back and forth. And so I think a lot of my new rituals in the last two years are really built around this idea of how do I reduce unscheduled messaging to get things done?
What did your US publicists think about that notion? Because that must be very novel for them.
Well, I mean the fact that we were publicizing a book about this certainly helps, right, So I could say, yeah, that's what it says in the book, But in general, what I find with more structured collaboration processes is that we often think what people really want is accessibility, but
it's not really true. What people want is clarity. And if there's not clarity about how a certain collaboration happens, then the default is people want just accessibility, because if they don't know or trust that you're going to answer something or keep track of something, or do something they ask you to do, then what they'll want in the in its stead is just okay, can you just answer my message right away because I have to keep track
of this till I hear back from you. Once there's something more structured in its place, people are just as happy. The main thing that you really want to avoid, or I found that people want to avoid, is just lack of clarity. If there's no clarity, then I just want you to answer right away, because otherwise I don't trust something it's going to get done. If there is clarity, Oh, it goes into this document. You checked the document twice
a week. Great, I get how that works. Good people tend to be pretty happy with it, and I think that's a there was a key understanding for me is that you're not taking something away from people by placing more structure about your interaction. You might actually be making that interaction much more positive for that person.
Now, in your new book, A World Without Email, which I was just saying before we hit record, I loved, I devoured it. I had such high expectations for it, and it still exceeded those expectations. So thank you for running such a brilliant book. But one of the things I appreciated is that you talk a lot about your own processes in the book, and I want to dig into some of those. So I want to start with how you designed your workflow in Trello for your role
as the director of graduate Studies. And I was wondering if if you could explain what that looks like exactly and how you went about that design process well.
And this was certainly a role that had the threat of generating lots and lots of unscheduled messaging. It's an administrative role where I was both responsive to students, right, so the grad students in our department would come to me, did questions about anything. We're talking about complex logistical issues, visa issues, grade issues, graduation requirement issues, steps required to make sure that they defend their dissertation properly the right
things or filing. All of these things fell under my purview. And then there was a lot of university facing back and forth, what is our budget for the grad program this year? What is happening with this particular student's tuition credits?
Right?
So it was a very complex logistical job that we sort of rotate through. So I came at it with the mindset it was a great case study. I came at it with the mindset that I lay out in that book, A World Without Email, which was break us down in the processes, what are the component things that make up this job that happened again and again and for each actually answer the question how do I want to implement it? And that's where I came up with
using some of these different tools. So Trello certainly played a big role. Everything that I was responsible for doing, everything I was waiting to hear back from someone on everything I needed to think about more and figure out what it meant. Went onto a Trello board. I had columns for different categories of these tasks. Some was not urgent but need to think about it. Some was Okay, it needs to be done really soon. A really key column on here was waiting to hear back from someone.
So if I had sent a note to someone, can you explain this to me? I need an answer to a question, I would be able to keep track of that. Okay, oh, here it is. I see that. That's something I'm waiting to hear back from people. What I'm working on this week. That trailer board became a repository of most of the obligations they went onto that board, and then a few times a week I would use that board, go at it, look at it, organize it, and figure out, Okay, what do I need to be working on in the next
few days. And so a lot of this was trying to get stuff immediately out of my inbox and into a system where I could see things all together. I could batch things, I could dispatch things in one big conversation, I could take things off my plate. It really gave me just a visual lay of the land of everything that was on my plate relevant to that role.
And so you're still in your inbox because I was curious, what role does email then play for you in your life? Because of these processes and workflows, that you've adopted.
Yeah, the thing that I worry about is unscheduled messages, not messages in general. I mean communication has to happen to do collaborative work. The thing that I villainize in my book is this notion of what I call the hyperactive high mind, where you work most things out. It's a common workflow where you work most things out with these unscheduled back and forth digital conversations. That's a real
productivity killer. It's what I'm trying to avoid because once you're using these ongoing, unstructured ad hoc back and forth digital conversations as the main way that you get things done, if you're doing more than a couple things, it means you have to constantly be tending these communications and inboxes because you're trying to keep up with lots of these ongoing asynchronous conversations. So I don't mind email as a tool.
What I do mind is the hyperactive hive mind. So everything I'm trying to do is to get away from having a sort of back and forth unscheduled conversation happening digitally.
Right.
Finding the broadcast information emails great. If someone wants to put something on my plate. I'm happy for it to come via email. If I need to set something up with someone, I'm happy to send that via email. But the thing to really avoid is just what do you think about this question? Mark?
All right?
When should we meet and let's go back and forth? What do do you know anything about what's going on over here with Bob? Can we get some sort of solutions that's sort of back and forth, asynchronous back and forth conversation. That is the real killer of productivity. So that's what I was always trying to minimize.
Yes, oh gosh, and I know I can relate to that. And it was so funny. As I was in the process of reading your book, I kind of read it over about a two or three day period. I was thinking about my inbox and there's a particular new product that I'm working on with a colleague, and I was just thinking, I think I've got about six or seven emails about different parts of that product that we're trying to develop sitting in my inbox, and it was doing
my head in and I was procrastinating on responding. So I'm like, I need to organize exactly what does she need me to do and how long will it all take? And the book really resonated with me because I think that there are just so many instances where that happens. So given that, like in a typical day, how often would you be in your inbox? Given email does play a role, but it's a much smaller role than people think that it should play in their lives.
Well, first I'll just note, you know, speaking to your situation, that would be a perfect example where the right thing to do here, or a much more effective thing to do there would be you have some sort of shared system where all of the information, question task and ideas around that product is all stored and everyone can see it, and then they highly structured as twice a week, twenty
minute conversation. That's on the books. It's real time. What are you working on, What happened to the thing you were doing? What do you need for me to get the next thing done? We're all on the same page. Good, We'll talk in two days, no emails, forty minutes of talking in a week, and you could be super productive. But going back to my life, well, first of all,
I don't have a inbox singular. I think I have something like six maybe seven different inboxes I'm not a big believer in just having a single catch all email addresses associated with your name. We have different roles, we have different types of work we work on. Not all of this should be, let's say, combined together, right in one inbox. I have many different types of inboxes for many different roles within my life as a writer and a computer scientist. How and when I check them depends
on the day, depends on the season, right. So I'll go some days where I'm just locked in working on something hard, no email gets checked. I have other days where, okay, I'm spending a lot of time in some of these inboxes catching up on various announcements or questions that have been sent in Those days will be pretty heavy email. It just depends on what's going on that day. But the key thing is I time block plan. I give every minute of my day a job. I don't go
through my day reactively. So when it is I'm going to check various email inboxes is figured out in advance. It's never a default activity. It's never something I fall back on to you say, Okay, what should I do next? I prefer to make those decisions much more intentionally.
Do you time block, like literally every chunk of time of your working day, let's say between nine to five.
Yeah, I mean so if you use something like my time block Planner product, it's literally a grid and there's different columns in the grid. You start in the first column, you mark off the hours, so all the hours of your workday are there and have boxes for them, right, and you draw boxes. You're blocking off every I'm in a meeting here for these thirty minutes, I'm working on this. For the next two hours, I'm working on this. You
really are planning. There is no gaps. Every minute of your day gets a plan, and if you fall off your plan, which happens, you move over to the next column, fix the plan for the time that remains. And then if you fall off that plan, you move over to the next column and you can fix your plan for the time that remains. But at any moment, the idea is that what you're doing with the time that remains in the day is something that you've given some thought to.
You're never in a time block planning approach. You're never reactive. You never let the incoming determine what you're going to work on that day, because that will one hundred percent hijack all your time away from the things that really matter.
And I'm imagining that you would time blocking your lunch or breaks as well.
Yep, yeah, here's why I'm going to take lunch. Here, We're gonna take a break. One of the reasons why people who time block get a bit of a productivity boost is that they time block their breaks. It's a subtle psychological thing. But if you don't plan when your breaks are going to come, then any moment is potentially a time you could take a break. So what happens is you are all throughout the day having to have this argument with your mind, should we take a break now,
should we jump on the email now? Should we look on social media now? And if there's no pre plan about when you're going to take those breaks, you're constantly having this argument. You're going to lose that argument more often than you win it, and you end up fragmenting your attention way more so. Even just knowing here's my checking email, here's why I'm just going to zone out
for thirty minutes and look on social media. Knowing when that is has the advantage of in the other time, you don't even have to have the debate.
Now you describe the personal caanban in your book, can you talk about how you use it in your own life.
So I have one of these taskboards for each of the different roles in my life. So when I was a director of graduate studies, that was one board. I have one board for writing. I have another board for my computer science research, and I have another board for I call it like professor. It's class related things and university administration related things, right, so I sort of separate
those from research. So for each of those roles, I have a board where I keep track of all the things that I need to be doing and their status. And youre look, well, I can load it up. I have it right here, so let me load it up on my computer. Depending on the board, I have different columns, but I'm looking right now. For example, on my writer board, I have a column called two process. So sometimes you're like, Okay, here's something I need to work on, but I can't
even right now figure out what that means. Right, Like I need to figure out a book launch campaign, Like we need to get started on the book launch campaign, and I don't even know what that means other than we need to do this soon. So the two process means here's things that need to be thought through and
figured out like what activities they actually relate to. Then I have two different I call them back burner columns, So these are things that they're not urgent, but the things I want to do at some point probably, And I have a couple of these different columns are just kind of categorizing by whether it's related to book writing or whether it's related to sort of more my book
business activities. I have a waiting to hear back column, So to me, it's a huge mental relief to know that if I am waiting to hear back from someone about something, that it's written down somewhere, I don't have to keep track of that in my head. Then I have a column for this week, so I'll move cards over to this week when I do my weekly plan. Okay, these are the things that I want to actually get
done this week. I look at these boards detail at the beginning of each week, I move things over to the column for what I want to execute this week, and then each day, as I make my plan, I look at these boards, but really focus in on the this week column and say, okay, which of these things am I going to try to fit in today? And so I have a board like this for all my different roles.
In your book, you talk about a column in your board that is called to discuss. Can you talk a bit more about the two discuss columns? I found that quite interesting.
Oh, that was critical for my director of Graduate Study set up because there was a couple people in that role that I had to talk two weekly. So there's my department chair and there's lots of issues that the department chair is the right person to talk to in that role. And then also there's a program administrator, the graduate program administrator with whom I worked, and so we would meet a couple times a week usually, and so
it was sort of a two man job. And what I had with this to Discuss column is I realized I could save a ton of communication if every time I had something I need to ask my department chair or ask my program administrator instead of just shooting off an email in that moment, which in the moment would
give me a little bit of relief. But every one of those is a new unscheduled message that's out there and a new unscheduled response that's going to come back, and perhaps even a long back and forth chain of unscheduled messages, which I learned doing the research for my book is Productivity Poison. I would put it under the two discussed column, and I actually had one for each
of those two different people. Then whenever I had my next meeting with them, I'd be like, Okay, hold on, I got a lot of things to go through here, and the bam bam bam, bam bam, go through all the things in that list, and we just resolve them so quick because there's a real time back and forth. Bam bam, bam, bam bam. Probably saved many dozens of unscheduled emails per week by just waiting until I got
to those next meetings. So that was a great That was a great productivity saver for that particular role.
Would you ever come across things that you're like, no, that this is an urgent thing to discuss, or do you think that people may be listening going well, when I fire off an email to someone, I need a response now, do you think that maybe just overestimating what is urgent and what is not actually that urgent.
I mean, often when people think they need a response now. It's because they don't want to keep track of it. They say, Okay, I want a response now because I don't know if you're going to answer or not, and I can't. I'm not organized enough to keep track of Like have I heard back from cal about this? So I just I'm going to send you this email and just get a response right away so I can take this off the things I need to worry about. That's
usually why people need immediate responses. It's a function of disorganization, not an actual function of urgency. Structure solves this problem. Base Camp, for example, Jason Freed's company, their subject matter experts have office hours. If you have a question for me, wait till my office hours, come to my office hours, ask me in my office hours. They worried that people
want it. Put up with the delay. I mean some of these people only did office hours once a week, so you could have up to seven days you had to wait before you could ask someone a question. There are very few complaints because it turned out urgency was It's not really a big issue here. It's just clarity. So if they know, oh, this is how I ask questions on Monday mornings, I go there and ask you this question. Okay, so I'll just have to wait till Monday and then I'll ask you.
Let me.
People are fine. So again I come back to this a lot clarity trump successibility. We need an urgent response, typically not because this actually needs a response right now, but because I don't want to keep track of it.
I do love that idea of applying the academic idea of office hours to a company, and I loved what base Camp for doing. Now I want to talk about outsourcing, because you do write a bit about that in the book What have you outsourced in your own work life?
I mean outsourcing. It's difficult, right, There's two different responses to a common problem. The common problem here is that the average knowledge worker does too much. And not only they do too much, but we've created this productivity paradox where modern technology made a lot of logistical or administrative tasks just easy enough that anyone could do them, and so we just put them on the plate, not of support staff, but just of the people who are also
doing the frontline work. Right because when you have email, now you don't need someone to type thing. Do you have a work process or you don't need a typeis you you know, we we've moved things onto the plate of the frontline worker. So now the frontline worker has way too much work and way too administrative work probably on their plate to actually get a good return from the brain power. So this is a real issue. It's it's the it's called the diminishment of intellectual specializations, a
technical term net net. It probably makes us less profitable. Right, Yeah, you save money by not having support staff, but you lose money because you have to hire more expensive frontline workers to get the same amount of work done. You end up usually worse off. So how can we deal with this problem? If let's say you're a solopreneur or a freelancer, so you don't you know, you don't have support staff and a company that you can you can put work
off to. Well, there's there's two responses here. One is to outsource things, right, this has to be done, but let me it is paying someone else to do this is going to be net net better because I can produce more valuable things. But the other option is to just minimize the amount of things on your plate in the first place. And so, I mean I heard someone
say once I kind of like this idea. Once you get to the level where you think you need a personal assistant, your right response should be I need to do less, not I need to hire a personal assistant. So in my life I've I've felt a tension between
those two things. I've gone through periods where I've had assistant types handling more, and I've gone through periods where I've just tried to minimize take things off my plate, and usually taking things off my plate just not doing them, bypassing those opportunities, not doing this particular type of work that often work better now. The one exception is that there's certain things, especially in my business life as opposed to my CS life, that are technical and need to
be done. And for technical things, I do have people you know that are better at me. There's I have a web person on retainer so that the three dozen small issues involving my various websites and technology that comes up each week, I can just send those immediately to that person that's really worth the money. I have some similar people who helped me with my podcast that's really worth you know, that's really worth the money. So I really evolve on this up and down, depending on how
busy I am. But that's the key tension I feel. Should I do less or do I need help?
What's an example of something that you did take off your place?
Okay, so yeah, okay, these are yeah, good question. So like with my podcast, for example, I simplified the production to the point where there's I didn't need, for example, a producer or a production company that I had to work with the sort of get the files edited and put together. I said, I'd rather just create a simpler format for my podcast where I could just record it and edit on the fly and it's ready to go.
Right.
So now I do have someone that does the ads for the podcast, though, because that's really annoying. You have to actually deal with advertisers. You actually have to talk to people, You actually have to sign contracts and so there I'll happily hire someone. But I didn't have a producer. I took that out even though that's the standard thing to do, and it wasn't a money issue, it was a complexity issue. Now you have another person you're dealing with, you have to get things to them in advance, You
have to explain things. There's more overhead working back and forth, and so as an examp where I simplified something so I wouldn't have to worry about that. There's many different types of opportunities to come my way that I just blanket don't do. I don't consult, I don't do advice calls. I do very limited speaking because again there's a lot of overhead involved with that. Now I could hire people to help me with that overhead, but I'd rather just
not have the overhead in the first place. I had someone who was helping me emails that had their own email address, an assistant that could communicate on my behalf. But I found it simpler to actually just close up the incoming channel, so less emails came through and there's
just less for me to answer. So, you know, this type of thing shows up pretty often actually in my work life, where I actually try to constrain things or simplify things as opposed to hire someone to handle something complex.
Do you still use a virtual assistant like you write about in the book.
No, I don't work with her anymore. Yeah, I just I Instead I simplified things. I simplify things even further so there's less emails to deal with, and then I ended up with more subject matter experts. So you know, I have my web person who can do a lot of my internet stuff, and that took a lot off
my plate. And I had my publicist at the publisher really could handle a lot of the publicity related things, so I didn't really need the assistant to help with that, and projects that I was using her for I just stopped doing. So I was taking that original piece of advice, Hey, when you need an assistant, maybe you need to do less. I took that to heart and it's been okay, it's worked pretty well.
I want to know what your process was for actually writing the book. What were some of the workflows that you had to actually create this book when you were doing the researching and the actual writing it.
Yeah, it's an interesting question. People often ask me about my writings, and one of the reasons why it's a little bit hard for me to answer is just I've always been writing books. I mean my entire adult life. I signed my first book deal right after I turn twenty one. There's really no period in my life where I'm not writing books at the same time as whatever else is going on. Right, So it's almost like asking
a fish about water. I'm just very used to this idea that one of the things that I'm always scheduling time for week in and week out is reading, thinking, writing, you know, and if I'm not actively working on a book manuscript, I'm writing articles for magazines, I'm writing longer essays. So I just am always putting aside a non trivial amount of time to work on my book. Now, the
particular systems I use, it's really not that complicated. When I read books, I mark them up physically with a pencil, so it's really easy to go back. I have a particular format I use, really easy to go back and find notes. I use online note taking systems typically, ever, note I've experimented with a few others that actually capture
my various research I'm doing for a book. And then at some point when I'm ready to write, I go chapter by chapter and I pull in the sources I think irrelevant, I look through my notes, I go for a bunch of thinking thinking walks, and I just start writing. So the tech behind my workflow is relatively straightforward, But the scheduling is just something I'm so used to now I'd be very uncomfortable, you know, if I wasn't putting aside regular time. It's just always in my mind, when
can I get time to write? When can I get time to think? And I'm always fighting for that.
Do you tend to do your writing at similar times during the day or is it literally just when you can find time.
I'm all over the place in my book deep Work, I call it the journalistic method of deep work. I'm just used to looking for good opportunities to write. Oh my wife's taking the kids to this thing. Great, that's a period I can write. I don't I don't have any meetings this morning. Let me write in the morning. Oh here's a clear afternoon. Why don't I go to the coffee shop and write. It's something I'm always looking
for good writing times, and I'll schedule times too. Of course, at the beginning of the week, I'll try to set aside my writing times, but I always have an eye for that. I'm alway looking out for what would be good times. I tend to write in the morning. That tends to be my mess time. Writing is the one thing I will do on the weekend. I don't do normal work on the weekends. I'm a nine to five guy. But the one exception is book writing. I will do book writing on a weekend morning because I find it
quiet and a good time to concentrate. So I do have those preferences. It's typically in the morning, but I'll do many different locations and it can be quite flexible.
I remember when I last had you on the show, imagery that stuck with me was around the different rituals that you had for different types of deep work. And I remember you describing your writing with the custom made kind of library desk that you have in your house. Is that something that you still do different rituals for different types of deep work.
Yeah. And I temporarily lost access to that library table that I had custom built because of the COVID pandemic. We converted my study into homeschool into a classroom for the kids because our kids' school is closed for basically a year. So I then leased, which i'm talking to you from now. I lease some office space in town, and I had a moving company. We took all my books that because I used my books and my library, I mean I use them all the time. I use
it like a real library. I had all my books shipped. I mean it's three blocks from my house, but we had to have a moving van come and I brought all my books to this this new office space I leased and I set we set up a library here and brought in some new tables, so I have some tables that are they're not as nice as my custom built table. And brought in my rug and a reading a leather reading chair. And so I created a new headquarter because I think ritual is important and having environment
is important. Ritual is important. We should respect intense cognitive work is something that we should take very seriously, be willing to dedicate money, dedicate time, dedicate overhead to supporting these type of efforts.
Was it easy to, I guess, shift that ritual into a new physical location. Was there anything that you did, aside from physically get all your stuff into that new location to help get into flow more easily in those first few sessions.
No, it's been hard. I think it's definitely hard because rituals really important, and so that study I was very used to working in. The Other thing I was used to doing is I did a lot of work at coffee shop. There's a coffee shop near my house, and I would go. I do a lot of my writing there and it was another ritual. I would do morning writing, and I would occasionally do like a happy hour session of writing too, where you know, maybe you'd have a
beer or something and you're doing more brainstorming. And they obviously all their seating was closed for the pandemic too, So I lost my study and I lost my coffee shop. So it wasn't Yeah, it wasn't easy to try to shift shift to a new location to try to build new habits here. The one thing I could still doing was my walking ritual. So I do a lot of thinking walking in my town, and that I could still
do and think, thank goodness I could. And I started doing a little bit more work outside as well, even when it's cold. I introduced that as a new ritual. I'd go for a walk and you would sometimes find me, and you know, it'd be cold outside and people be in jackets, and I'd be at the park with my lap you know, write a New Yorker piece or something like that. So I added some more rituals once I lost those old places to help jump start that creative impulse.
Hey, there, it's nearly time for a little ad to break. But can I ask a favor of you. If you are enjoying how I work and you're not one of the several hundred people that has kindly left a review for the show, I would be so incredibly grateful if you could do so. It's a great way of letting other people find out about how I work, and for me, it's also really lovely hearing listener feedback. It really does
bring a smile to my face every time. And up next after the break cal we'll be talking about how you can dramatically reduce the amount of unscheduled communication at your organization now in a world without email. You talk about delineating between support versus specialist roles within knowledge workers' work life, and I was wondering what does that look like for you in terms of how you're petitioning your time or days around those two roles.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's two different types of work and knowledge work. There's before I referred to it as frontline work, but you can think of as specialist work. That's the actual application of value to information, the thing that actually creates the value for the company, the ad copy, the computer code, the new business strategies, right, the things that you're selling or the things on which you're receiving funding. And then there's all the support work that goes into
keeping the lights on. You know, the timesheets need to be filed, the taxes need to be submitted, the bills need to be paid. Right, so there's two different types of work. There has been, as I called it before, this diminishment of intellectual specialization, where I believe misapplied the
productivity potential of new technology. So as we went through the personal computer revolution and the office network revolution and the smartphone revolution, we got all of these quote unquote productivity enhancing technology, so ways of implementing certain support activities faster and more flexibly and quicker than before. We have these computers. A word processor, for example, is much more
efficient than a typewriter. Right, we misapplied this revolution. In my opinion, what we should have done is use this revolution to make it cheaper to deploy a support staff, because now support staff could do their work faster, they can do it more efficiently. Maybe you don't need as many support staff to support the same amount of specialist. What we did instead is we fired the support staff and so now the specialists can also do the support work.
Net I think that made things worse. Right, It so diminishes the unbroken time required to actually produce the things to create the frontline value for the organizations that you end up having to hire a lot more of the frontline workers to get the same amount of work done, and it costs more. Like that added salary is more than what you saved by firing the support staff. So I think we need to go back towards more specialization.
And this is just a general trend in economics that in general, specialization, as long as you can have efficient, efficient information flow between the specialist units, is almost always more economically productive than trying to be more general purpose. There's actually a whole field of economists called transaction theory that gets into this notion when thinking about factories and production, but it applies to really any type of work. So broadly,
I think we need more intellectual specialization. People should be doing less, We should separate support work more from frontline specialist work. Each of those things should be much more focused where people can really do what they do really well. If you're a support specialist, you should be doing that
really well and be really well compensated for that. And with new technologies, you can probably support a lot of people, and if you're a frontline specialist, you should be doing much less, but doing those things at a higher level of accountability and be well compensated for it. I think that is probably the most economically productive way of doing things. Unfortunately,
almost no organization does that right now. So the best I can do is in the business I can control, I try to minimize the amount of support work that's just necessary. So that goes back what we were talking about before about simplifying. And in my Georgetown work, I really think of myself as it's different roles. It's like I have two part time jobs. I'm a professor and I am an assistant to a professor, and I treat those as two separate jobs. I mean, in a perfect role,
there would be an actual assistant. I have to play both roles, but I really want to separate them, all right. I have my part time job. I'm doing professor stuff, and when I'm doing that, that's what I'm doing unbroken concentration. Let's go, let's produce research, let's teach classes. And when I'm doing assistant work is like, okay, let's do this.
Now we're doing emails and forums and trying to optimize processes and get rid of unscheduled messages, and I really treat those almost like two different part time jobs.
Is there an argument for you asking the university to just provide an assistant like the what's the logic in going, Okay, now I'm going to play the assistant role of a professor as opposed to getting one.
Well, they won't. So I wrote a whole article about this a couple of years ago for a public the Chronicle of Higher Education, which is, you know, an industry publication, And I wrote an article that was titled is email making Professor Stupid? And I really got into this argument about we place way too much administrative work on professor's plates and it's unchecked. But the issue is it's kind of an unresolvable problem. It's a very difficult problem. Universities
would say they don't have the resources. I don't think that's true. I think well supported professors could produce much more and be much more effective for the university than non supported professors. I also think probably a large fraction of the work that falls on professor's plates and universities as not necessary. It's just in a university environment, it's really more of like a federation. You have all of these different units. It's kind of way more democratic than
a company. Right, there's not a CEO over university with a profit motive that can come in and make big changes. It's very more democratic at universities, and every unit has their own objectives and for every unit, getting some of your time and attention makes their life easier. And so you just have a bunch of these independent units, all trying to do their job as well as possible, all of them wanting more of your time and attention. Hey, if you could just figure out this complex form, it
makes our life easier. So professor, figure out this complex for me. All right, we need this information professor to do our COI filings this year, and it's a pain for us to try to put this in the right format. So we're going to give you a very complicated online intranet portal you have to figure out and aren't going to understand, because it'd make our life easier if you
could do that better. Everyone is just trying to pull from everyone's time and attention with no one looking down at the whole thing saying, oh, our profits are down this quarter leave our programmers alone. Like you know, if you're in a different type of company, it's a different type of feel. So I actually think it's a real problem in universities. I think we have significantly significantly diminished the cognitive freedom and capacities of the professors, which is
kind of counterproductive. But as I learned after I published that article, it's not easily fixed.
Us thinking about your university, Georgetown, has anyone at Georgetown reached out to you and said, cal can you help us fix the problem here at this university.
I had lunch with the dean after that article, so I think they're sympathetic. It's hard, though, right, I mean, it is a hard problem. If I had a university that I wanted to really increase the reputation of, this would be my advice. Make this thing a citadel of concentration. If you come here as a professor, you were going to think and you were going to teach, and that is it. You don't even need an email address, like, we will take care of that for you. We're going
to give you an office. It's esthetically pleasing, like it's going to be Cambridge in the nineteen twenties, there's going to be a fire going in the fireplace, and you'll have brandy in the evening, and the whole thing will be set around you producing the best thoughts you can with your brain. You would put some of the best talent in the country to a school like that, right,
That's what I would do. It's very hard to go back and do that retroactively once you have your huge university with fifty different units that each have your own constituencies. I mean, famously, one of the hardest things at universities is that once something comes into existence, it's very hard to get rid of it. It just becomes a permanent
part of the university landscape. And I see every one of these units from an attention capital perspective as a different sink for attention capital, because every one of these units is going to need some attention capital from other
people in the university to survive. And so it's like you have so much In a different metaphor, you have so only so much petroleum, you know, for your motorized army, And as you add more and more units, they each see a little bit more petroleum, Like you're eventually going to run out right, and your frontline units aren't going to have much gas left to do their movement right. There's only so much concentration, attention capital to go around,
but it's very hard to go backwards. But that's my model. I think the citadel of concentration model is one that more schools should follow. I think they'd really be punching above their weight class if they did so.
For organizations that exist already, should we be thinking about making workflow changes gradually to reduce what we're relying on email for or do we do it all at once? What's the ideal way to approach this.
What I think organizations should do is focus first at the team level. So I think that's the appropriate scope at which to make these type of changes. If you're in a large organization and you try to do workflow engineering at the organization level, it's difficult. You're not flexible enough, one size fits all solutions aren't going to work, and you really run the risk of falling into bureaucracy territory.
And bureaucracy territory can be just as bad, where you feel like there's these arbitrary roles that you had little say in and in the end are causing more harmed and goods, So you really want to avoid that. So I think the team, which a term I use loosely, but most organizations have some notion of a team that's the right level, so a group of people who consistently
work together on consistent outcomes. The right thing to do right away is say, the hyperactive high mind workflow is what we're trying to get away from, where we just figure things out back and forth messages. And the other thing to do right away is like, let's list out all the different things this team does. I call them processes, you call them what you want, but here are the
things we repeatedly do. Our long term goal will then be processed by process to figure out how to implement it without the high mind, without so many unscheduled messages. It may then take a long time to get through all those processes. Start with the low hanging fruit. You're
going to have to go back and tweak things. That could be a long term process to get through all the different processes, and momentum will build as you get better and better at it, so that could take a while, but your goal up front should become pretty clear in terms.
Of loe hanging free let's just imagine a typical professional services organization that's full of knowledge workers. Are there processes that you find it tend to be lie hanging for it?
Yeah? I mean there's a couple of things. One, meeting scheduling software has to be the standard. There cannot be meetings being scheduled with back and forth emails. Well what about Tuesday? No Tuesdays not too good? What about Wednesday? I might be free in the afternoon. Is it a huge productivity sync? We don't realize it. But here's the issue.
Setting up a meeting via email just back and forth might on average generate let's say six messages, right, So that's six times someone has to pay attention shift their context to that email inbox. But the thing about meeting scheduling is that has to happen kind of quick, right, Like I don't want to spend a week to set up a meeting for you. That meeting might be in two days, Right, So I have to check the inbox quite a bit each of those messages so that I
see it pretty soon after it comes. So now six messages might actually generate sixty inbox checks in just a couple of days. Each one of those inbox checks, breaking your concentration and initiating a very cognitively expensive context shift. Just one meeting, therefore, can be a scheduling one meeting could be a pretty big cognitive disaster. Now multiply that over ten or fifteen meetings you're trying to set up. That simple thing alone can significantly reduce a team's ability
to get things done. So everyone should use meeting scheduling software. Great, let's do it. You know where my link is, schedule it. One email meeting gets scheduled, So I think that's low hanging fruit. Office hours are also low hanging fruit. Any sort of small questions, what about this? I don't understand this? Can we quickly figure out when we want to do that? Who's going to take on this? As much as you can divert as possible to just come to my next
office hours. Just come to my next office hours. We will talk in real time then, not back and forth messaging. That is applicable to almost an industry. So do those two things, meeting scheduling software and office hours that can handle eighty percent of small questions, discussions and clarifications. Those two things alone, for almost any team, will make a huge difference with.
Meeting scheduling software. What are you currently recommending that people check out?
Well, there's a bunch of tools that are relatively equivalent right now. I've used a couple. I've used Acuity in the past. At the moment, I'm using Calendly. I like them both. I mean, maybe Calendly has a slightly slicker interface. I think Microsoft Suite has its own meeting scheduling link type software built into it. I mean I occasionally get links from people that are built out of the Microsoft Productivity Suite. People like x dot Ai a lot. It's
another meeting scheduling tool for group meetings. Doodles pretty good. I think that's kind of a default. The other tools are getting those, but they're all pretty equivalent. I mean, it's not a hard thing that you're doing here. You're just trying to avoid the back and forth to the
point it's so important. Let's say you want to set up a meeting with someone and for whatever reason, because of their personality, you just know that, no matter how how much you social engineer it, if you send them a link, they're going to be upset because you're at a lower station to them to even go through that software and manually list out fifteen different times they can choose from. That may seem like, WHOA, that's really inefficient.
That's going to take me ten minutes to list out all these times when I could just shoot off a message that says how about Wednesday. But spending fifteen minutes to list a bunch of times in an email that that person can then just grab one that is worth it because fifteen minutes concentrated in the one task is way less of a cost than six messages you have
to check your inbox ten times for each. So even if you're just literally manually doing implementing the software by just listing out a bunch of times laying someone choose it, it's still a win, because that's how devastating these unscheduled messages are.
Now. In the book, you talk about thinking about workflows and processes with customers and suppliers and potentially just looking internal first rather than trying to change things with people outside the organization. But let's just say we're starting at the team level and there are a lot of processes that involve customers or suppliers. Should we be trying to change these? Because I know in your book, you give
examples of how you've avoided doing that. But then it was interesting hearing you talk about how you're working with your publicist for the book, and you know they are an external partner. I guess, so what's your view on that?
So when you're doing individual work, and this might be what you're referencing, So you can always start by trying to just optimize your processes from a personal perspective, given just what I can control, how can I minimize unscheduled messages? And I advise in the book if you're doing that, which you should do because, by the way, even if you can't control anyone else in your team, just thinking that way for your own processes makes a big difference.
Don't advertise it, right, So that was the argument, don't advertise what you're doing, because it's just going to make people upset, you know, apologize once they're actually upset. Don't give them a reason upset about something they didn't realize they should be upset about. When you're working as a team on these processes, then of course that's not an issue because everyone has buy in when it comes to clients.
I do think you need to engineer these protocols. I do think you need to move away from unscheduled messaging, and you do need to tell them what you're doing, but maybe just be careful about how you advertise it. Never advertise these new protocols from the perspective of making your life easier. It always has to come from the perspective of making the relationship better, being more structured, being more responsive, being able to better serve the client right,
And I do think that's very important to build. In specific, we should be very clear about how we interact with each of our clients, how they send questions, how we give them updates. Clients love this. It is much more important to clients that they have clarity about how they interact with you than it is that they have constant accessibility. I mean, it is the point that we talked about earlier.
Ability is something that people demand only when there's nothing else to assuage their fears that something's going to be lost. So with clients, I think you do need to do that work.
In the book, you talk about the thirty X rule, which I loved. Can you describe this.
It's a standard idea from outsourcing, thinking that you know if you're going to do something more than thirty times. I think this is a year I have that right, then it's worth automating or outsourcing.
Right.
So if it's something if you're gonna do with that much times in the overhead of figuring out how to outsource or automate, it is probably worth it. We probably don't have to be that specific, but I think the general idea there is a useful heuristic. If something's going to happen repeatedly, then it's really worse thinking through what's our process for this. You know, if something is just happening one time, then let's not spend too much time trying to figure out the optimal way to get this
thing done. If it's never going to happen again, it's a sort of you know, there's some business emergency and we have to go, you know, figure out how to solve some issue that's unlikely to come up again. Then it's less important that we figure out the optimal way to do that. But if this happens every month, let's figure out our rules, all right. This information goes into a shared doc. We have the shared meeting on the calendar.
That's when it's worth the overhead of trying to put in place a better process.
Now, when I finished reading A World Without Email, I immediately ironically cringe as I say this. I emailed my CEO my organization, Inventium, and I said, Mish, you have to read this book and we have to apply it. And so with that in mind, where a management consultancy, we specialize in innovation and productivity, where should we start. We are a ten person team, but then we work in smaller teams on different projects. Where do we start?
Cal Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, I would say, don't cringe about sending the email. The semi provocative title aside, the book is really about how to get past the hyperactive high mind workflow. I'm happy for email to be around. I don't want to leave voicemails. I don't want to fax things, So I'm happy. I'm happy that email is here. What I don't want is to hyper active high mind. I don't want to work everything out with back and
forth messaging. So there's nothing wrong with that's actually a good use of email. I am sending you some information. You should look at this. Here's something we should discuss next time we meet. I think you might like this that's a perfect use for email. The wrong use for email would be thoughts, question mark, you know, at the end of that message, and then you and your CEO trying to figure this out with back and forth messages. That would be that would be a worse be a
worst use of email. So where should you start list out the processes? What are the things as a management consultancy that we do again and again and again. These are the core things we have to do to make money and keep the business running. Okay, Now, for each of these, we can go one by one and we don't have to do this all at once. We can start with the low hanging fruit. How do we actually
want to implement these processes? If we don't have an existing answer to that question, the default answer is probably the hyperactive hive mind. It's just we just get this done by messaging each other. How do we actually want to do it? And everyone should have buy in everyone involved in this process, Like, Okay, here it is, let's write it down somewhere. Here's how we're going to try to implement this. We'll check back in two weeks. And here there's our escape hat. So if like something bad
happens and the process isn't working. Here's what we do. You call me on my cell. Here's to fall back routine, and you try it, and you evolve it, and you do this process by process every time, trying to minimize unscheduled messages. That's the metric. Right In the industrial sector, the metric was how do we minimize the man hours required to produce the car. In the brain work sector, the metric for these processes is how do we minimize the number of unscheduled messages that have to be received
and replied to an order to get this done. That is our equivalent of assembly line speed. And you just go process by process, write down what you're doing, try it, adjust, get something you like, move on to the next. And it's simple. And it's hard, because hey, it's hard to get these things right. And sometimes the answer is maybe we shouldn't do this process, you know, because it's really there's no way to do this without lots of interruptions.
It's not that valuable to us. I'd rather lose this classic client than have to constantly be on beck and call. So it's not always easy, but the approach is pretty straightforward.
I read in your book. But you're not a fan of auto responders on email, and I've had one for a while. And one of the reasons why I have one now is that we gosh nearly a year ago, we implemented a four day week at Inventium, and my auto responder tells people that I'm generally not available on Fridays. But you're not a fan of auto responders, So I'm wondering if you can explain why you're not and if you would recommend that maybe I'd just switched that off after this interview.
I would look, if someone complains, you can explain it to them. But I think you'll have zero to one person complain in the next six months, you know what I mean. I think when it's about am I away, am I here, am I whatever, it's best just to have your systems and just execute, and you know, if someone gets upset, you can explain to them what's going on. But I don't think it's necessary to preemptively explain to people how you're implementing your system or when you're going
to be awound or when you're going to be away. Now, I think that the fact that we use these auto responders and being away one day a week is a very mild case. One of my readers sent me a much more extreme case recently where someone had to set up an auto responder because their power went out or something for an hour and it was like, okay, I might not have my email back for an hour. When you see that, he's like, Okay, you were completely captured by the hive mind.
Right.
That's like going to the car factory and they're building the cars with the lights out to try to save money on electricity, and they produce one car a day and they're missing a wheel, right, Like it's crazy, right, you know that you are working in a terrible way. You're you're you're you're optimizing in the moment convenience over actually producing things. That's valuable. Right, But even in your case, it's not crazy to have an auto responder. Stuff's not standard.
But I usually just say just go for it, right. I mean, when most people are sending an email, they're just happy that it's off their plate and they're not sitting there, you know what I mean, And they're not unless it's you know, again, one of these situations where it's a client and they don't trust you and they need a response right away. But in that case, you have a bigger problem. You know you need to solve that. You need to solve that problem of we need a
more structured way of dealing with things. But I bet you and you should test this. Take off that auto responder and say, I'm ready to apologize fully to anyone who says, why did you not answer my Friday email on Friday? And I bet you'll have almost no one who ever says that to you.
I'm going to switch it off immediately after this interview. Now, I want to know what your next book, what you're thinking about for your next book, because I remember when we spoke last time you were thinking about and I think the title did not change your World Without Email? So what are you thinking for your next book?
You know, I'm not sure yet. The thing about A World Without Email is that I started it right after deep work, So in twenty sixteen I started working on this book. It was the natural follow up. A lot of the early interviews in the book were done in twenty sixteen, and then I put the book on hold the Right Digital Minimalism, which I published in twenty nineteen because that topic seemed to really, really timely and then
I came back to finish a world without email. So when we last talked, there was no doubt what I was working on, because I had been working on that book for years by the time we talked this time around. I'm not quite sure yet. So I have some ideas. I'm not sure exactly which direction I'm going to go. Typically, the year that I publish a book, I start working on the next so that I can distract myself, because once a book is out of my hands, I don't
like that because I can't control it anymore. So I like to have something else to occupy me. But this year, we had the pandemic, and I put a lot of my that same part of my brain. I put a lot of that intention into starting a podcast, and so I think that that distracted me enough that I didn't start a new book yet. So I'm open to ideas. Actually, so you let me let me know, let me know if I have a couple, but let me know if you have a great idea, because I'm still a free agent right now.
I will. And look, my final question for you is how can people connect with you? Presumably not over email, but how can people connect with you? And get the hands on a copy of A World Without Email.
Well, I'm not super easy to get in touch with, but I'm not that hard to find out about. I guess that's something. So A World Without Email you can find any of the places that you buy books if you want to get I write this equally essay I've been doing since two thousand and seven. You can find it at calnwport dot com so you can sign up for my email newsletter and I write about these topics every week and a big audience that listens to it there.
I also have a podcast called Deep Questions, and I answer it's questions from my readers, and it's about all these type of topics. So if if you like this type of information, you might enjoy that podcast as well.
Excellent. I will link to all that in the show notes. Cal It's just been an absolute highlight for me. Having you back on your work has just influenced me to no end in my working life. So thank you for your time today and just for everything that you are putting out into the world.
Well, no, I appreciate it, and you know, I don't always get a chance to really geek out about the specifics of my systems and how I think about organizing work because for a lot of people, you know, their eyes glass over. So I like being among my tribe, that is, the fellow productivity geeks out there, So it's always a pleasure.
Thanks so much, Cal Hello there. That is eat for today's show. If you enjoyed today's episode, why not share it with someone else that you think would benefit and maybe get some useful tips to improve the way that they work. How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support from dead Set Studios. And thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix for every show and makes everything sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.