Today's episode is another my Favorite Tip episode, where I go back to interviews from the past and I dig out the thing that was my favorite tip, like the thing that I got out of the interview that really impacted or resonated with me. The extract that I have for you on today's show is from my chat with Jake Nap. This is the second time I've had Jake on the show. I loved our first interview so much that I was keen to check back in with him during COVID to see how he was going and how
the way he approacious work had changed. So if you haven't come across Jake before, Jake spent the last ten years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the design sprint, which is a method for building and testing a prototype in five days. He then went on and wrote a book about the process called Sprint, which was a New York Times bestseller, and he also wrote another book called Make Time, which I have referred to on
a few episodes previously. I personally loved Make Time, which is all about strategies to help make time for doing your most important work and really getting the most out of each day. So in this extract from my second chat with Jake, we talk about email and why email is so addictive and what Jake is doing to help win the battle against email. So on that note, let's head to Jake.
One of the one of the biggest struggles is email for sure. And you know they're if I, you know, if I try to like come up with the biggest struggles of the moment for me, in this moment of pandemic time, there they're like exaggerated versions of the struggles that I have all times. There are the struggles of like focus. I am not a naturally like focused person, and I have to I have to I have to have tools and methods and barriers to help me create
that that focus. That's been even more true. I've been even more distracted and and you know, emotionally bouncing around during this time. That challenge is is exaggerated. The challenges of you know, kind of like like like we talked about earlier, just having the sort of confidence or that sort of sense of like self worth or like this is the right thing to do. They can really put the wind in your sales when you have it. That's
that's always a challenge in it more so now. But email it's a funny one, right, Like it's very you know, tactical and like simple. Those other ones are like almost philosophical, and email just feels like awesome. But email is the for for many of us, certainly for me, it's like it is the place where a lot of like distraction and nebulousness lives, and like it's the heart of this this problem where I you know, if if you don't have clarity about what you what's most important to you.
If I don't have clarity about what's most important to me, and I don't have clarity of purpose about like what the thing is I should do and I'm certain I should do it, and I'm going to do it. Like if I don't have just blistering clarity about what that thing is, then I go into my email inbox and like there's a million things in there for me to do.
They all come with like a little like micro version of what you describe when somebody says like thank you for the you know, the talk or whatever, and that
like is so rewarding. Like every email has like a little piece of that, Like somebody asked me something and I can like do something for them in return, and like email, just it creates this like really these really like small rewards and these really small feelings of productivity that in the big picture, they come at this cost of like the big clarity about the bigger thing that I might be trying to do. Like it's it's very rare that the most important work I do happens in email.
Yet every day email is the easiest on ramp to a feeling of productivity, and yet it's like it's fool's gold, Like I get in there and if I can spend all day every day in email, and the weird thing about the pandemic is I'm getting way fewer emails than usual because, like I said, my work is really like totally you know, turned upside down because of events and in person stuff is canceled or postponed, so my email
volume is way way lower. And yet even still I could spend I could spend a full day every day in email, and I could, you know. It's it's actually like when I have less clarity about is this the right thing to do, or less confidence that I'm going to have thirty or sixty or one hundred and twenty minutes of uninterrupted time because like my son can't get on Zoom or like whatever, you know, first class like with with that, like that feeling of instability that comes
with the present moment. Even though there's less email, it's like more of a challenge to not succumb to it and just to be totally like you know, honest, even though it doesn't it doesn't make me look good as like this sort of you know, a marketer of a of a great time management tool. I've had to hire someone to help me with with the email stuff and to and to really kind of force me to stay out of it and stay out of my email and focus on the other projects that I want to do.
So how do you use that person then? Like what's their job? So to speak?
So I thought about this for a long time because you know, I do have a weird situation with email. John Saratski, my co author, has a good way of putting this because we both you know, we both worked in companies for a long time and then we both kind of quit our jobs sort of around the same time and went into this thing where where each of
us is like working on our own. So, as John puts it, like if you if you work in a company like some number of the emails in your inbox you don't really have to do anything about them because they're not to you, Like they're too a group of people, and if you don't comment on them, somebody else will will deal with it, or somebody you know, or it's
just kind of an fyi. But when you are self employed, like a lot of the emails, a much higher percentage of the emails in your inbox are like they're meant for you, and you're sort of supposed to do something with them. And and being in this situation like the with these these books, like it's great to be an author, and if people read your books, it's like it's so cool,
it's what you want and stuff. But I also really want if anybody emails me it has questions or comments about things, I really want to talk to them about it, you know, like that's so cool. And yet if I talk to them all the time, I won't do anything else, and there won't be any more books, you know, and there won't be any more there won't be any remote sprint guide, there won't be that other stuff won't happen.
And so to that required us like like like make time, we sort of wrote with it was we started writing while we were still working at Google Ventures. It's it's written with this context of like here's how you how we did this, like in our jobs at Google or in our you know, our jobs and these big companies, and we kind of have to like refigure out how
it works when you're a one person business. And so I thought about for a long as as I started to realize that the business side of you know, Jake Napp, Inc. Basically was was going to overwhelm my ability to do these sort of focused more maybe creative projects or just any kind of focused work because of the volume of things that needed to happen, I thought, well, I need to hire like a you know, an assistant of some kind.
And I started to talk to people who had crossed that threshold of when they decided I need to hire an assistant and how they decided to do that, And it took me a long time to figure out that what worked for them probably wouldn't work for me because for people who cross that threshold running a business with other people, the needs that they have are different from
my needs. So it's the main thing I need help with is I need help with kind of a system for dealing with a community of people who who I want to interact with and I want to you know, talk to and stuff. But I can't let it become everything I do. And I need a system for dealing with the things that come to me that are like you know, business or you know, people want me to come do a keynote or teach a boot camp or something. And I need a system for I need coaching, honestly,
for the creative work. And it's hard to admit when you have written a book is supposed to be like an advice book about you know, attention management and time. It's hard to admit that you need help with that very thing. But it's in a new arena for me and I and I when I finally admitted it, and I went to a friend who I had worked with at like Google, and she's she's brilliant. It's great coach, and she's able in just a few hours. You know,
she's not sort of a full time assistant. She used to be a few hours of kind of coaching and looking at my inbox and saying, look, here's how you need to organize it, and saying, like, if people you know in your email like you need to put an out of office responder and I need here's what needs to say. And that's been huge. That's been that's been really huge, and in my sort of peculiar situation, has been exactly what I needed.
And has that helped you stay out of your inbox more like almost to help resist that temptation?
It does. Yeah, it's It was a really big deal to me. I got an email, so I was like emailing a friend who's a writer, and I got he had this out of office you know, auto responder that said I'm out of email until May. Like this was in maybe February or something. I got this email from him and I was like, wow, what that's so cool?
And it said it said I'm off, I'm out of email till May, working on a writing project and if it's urgent, text me or send an email to and he has an assistant and he works with email the assistant And I emailed it to my friend who's coaching me, and I was like, what do you think we should do? What do you think about this? And she's like you need to do that, Like you're not going to I wanted to write it after by May actually have my book and she's like, that's what you need to do,
otherwise it's not going to happen. And I was like, well, maybe I could do it for you know, a week or two weeks. I could say I was offline. She's like, come on, like you need to do the whole thing. So that was really hard to take that step to write that auto responder, you know, and this is probably a tactic I should add to the new tactics. To write that auto responder was tough, but once I did it, it was very freeing to like the first few hours, you know, to know that emails were coming in and
people were getting that that bounced back to them. I was like, oh god, what are people going to say? But people were like fine with it, like nobody. I mean, this is a common challenge that we see again and again as you talk to people about make time, which is like we had we all have this expectation that other people are like much more keenly interested in our response time and much more judgmental of us than they
actually are. And and if we the really that judgment comes from side ourselves, like that mean for me, that's one hundred percent true. The expectation is actually generated by me that I'm this kind of person who gets back to you and out of respect for you.
I want to get back.
Yeah, right, and like there's a there's god getting past that and realizing where the actual boundary was, what's the actual response time that different things need. And granted, it helps a ton to have a friend looking in on your inbox, but that's something I think. I don't know what the right arrangement is, but I have this notion that a lot of people, even without you know, an assistant, a lot of people could benefit from this notion of a friend who will look in on your inbox, or
a friend who can be the designated contact person. If so that you can have an out of office thing that says, if it's urgent, contact this person and they'll know how to get in touch with me. And if that, you know, maybe you can maybe you can have like an agreement that you do it for each other or something.
But that's really powerful, like to give people a way to escalate if they need it, and then say, normally my rule is going to be And for me it's been like I'm not going to check, I'm going to there's a category of email I'm not going to check except for every like few weeks, like it might be two to three weeks before I look at those. And there's one category I'm going to check every day if it's like from certain people who I know have urgent emails.
I have, like you know, like two VIP sort of people, and then there's going to be one kind that I check once a week and deal with like business kinds of emails, and other than that, I have to promise myself I'm not on email. And it's still hard, but that makes it doable. And that, man, I'm telling you, Amantha, that unlocks for me, like the ability to get in to do something that's really hard, and like the sci fi writing fiction, there's no I'm you know, nobody's probably
ever going to read this book. I don't know if it's any good, but it's fun to do because it's so hard and it's also awful to do. It's also like miserable at the time, but I am doing it because it's so hard and it I can't I could not have a chance of doing that hard thing if I couldn't create that that boundary. And because it's so hard to maintain on this one, the confidence that the
work matters. I've needed that extra boost, you know, whereas when writing like Sprint or make Time, there was more of a signal that people are people would want this, you know. The publisher said that, well, we'll publish the book. When you're writing fiction, it's different and I've needed more to get through it.
Yeah, and I just want to I want to read out your auto respondent because I've just found it here in front of me, and it says HI, between shelter in place with the kids at home and stealing heads down time for a writing project, I'm slow as heck on email right now. If you need something of any kind of timeline, please email you're assistant or text me. So it's really simple and to the point, and I love that. I love your thoughts on email. That is
it for today's show. If you want to listen to the full episode, I link to that in the show notes, so you might want to check that out. And if you are enjoying how I work, I would be so deeply grateful if you just take five seconds out of your date to leave a review in Apple podcasts. It might be a star rating or a few words, and by doing so, it helps other people find the show and it also brings a huge smile to my face. So thank you to the hundreds of people that have
left reviews. It is so deeply appreciated. So that is it for today's show and I will see you next time.