How many emails have you received in the last twenty four hours? Maybe fifty one hundred, five hundred. I mean chances are it was a lot, and your inbox was probably responsible for many interruptions in your day. But it doesn't have to be that way. Call Newport is the author of Deep Work and a World Without Email and a computer science professor at Georgetown University, and he has thought a lot about why email productivity hacks often not all that effective and instead why we need to attack
the problem at the route. So, how can we get more deep work done without letting email take over our work date? And how can we find the bottlenecks in our organization's workflow? And how can meeting scheduling software free up time to focus. My name is doctor Amantha Imba. 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. On today's My Favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from that interview. In today's extract, I speak with cal about how we can change our workflow to dramatically reduce email in terms of low hanging fruit. Let's just imagine a typical professional services organization that's full of knowledge workers. Are there processes that you find tend to be low hanging fruit?
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, Tuesday's not too good. What about Wednesday? I might be free in the afternoon. Is it a huge productivity sink? 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 it 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 for 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 to 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 any 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, like 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 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 this by just listing out a bunch of time slaying someone choose it, it's still a win because that's how devastating these unscheduled messages are.
I hope you enjoyed that tip from Cal and if you're enjoying How I Work, maybe you might want to tell somebody else about it and spread the productivity love. You can simply click on the little share icon wherever you listen to this podcast and maybe share it with someone who's drowning in their inbox. How I Work is produced by Inventing and with production support from Dead Set Studios. And thank you to Martin Imba who does the audio mix for every episode and makes this all sound much
better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.