The Email Paradox: Inefficient Efficiency (Part 1)

SPEAKERS
Paul Harvey, Frank Butler

Frank Butler  00:00
Hey, busybodies, Frank and Paul here. Before we get into this episode, we just want to quickly address what we've done in this particular episode. Paul?

Paul Harvey  00:09
We decided that this particular show would work a little better as two shows, part one and part two. Partly because by the time we were done yakking, it was a little on the long side. And second, because while the topic stays the same email overload, it takes a bit of a turn right around the halfway point, where we shift from the day-to-day trials of communication overload into the longer term, more serious mental health implications. And we decided that's a pretty important topic that deserves its own show. So today, we present you part one of a two part email episode.

Frank Butler  00:47
So enjoy the show, folks. Hello busybodies. Welcome to another episode of the Busyness Paradox. I'm Frank Butler, here with my co-host, Paul Harvey.

Paul Harvey  01:14
Good day, Frank.

Frank Butler  01:15
So Paul, tell me what's on today's episode,

Paul Harvey  01:19
I'd like to talk about one of my favorite least favorite topics, which is email, email overload, and the paradox of email and efficiency. 

So if we kind of step back a little bit and think about efficiency, in the context of communication, efficient communication has as little friction as possible, lowest amount of cost and effort involved, there's really nothing more efficient for communication than email. And yet, I think a lot of people would argue, I am certainly one of them, that at some point, email hit a tipping point for a lot of us where it's not a gain for efficiency anymore, I would argue at least that for many, many of us, it's now a cause of inefficiency, possibly because it's so damn efficient. Because anyone can just fire off an email drop of a dime. It's quick, it's easy, it's efficient. 

Now responding to that email, things start to get a little bit more interesting. And you notice there's this whole kind of cottage industry that's popped up of ways to make your email more efficient, ironically, than it should in theory already be different apps, different web services that automatically will filter emails, automations, that will help you kind of speed up the response process of emails. And my argument is that these things do make us more efficient at communication, particularly through email. But in a way, that just compounds the larger problem. So we get more and more efficient at something that was already pretty efficient. And what I particularly noticed is that the more you become known as a fast and efficient email responder, the more emails you get, if you become the fastest way to get information, people will go to you for that information, instead of trying to look something up for themselves or figuring something out for themselves. Let's shoot an email off to Frank and he'll know what to do. And so you become ever more involved with emails. 

There was one point in time where I told my Dean, I said, if somebody came to monitor me at work for a week, say, just sat in the background took notes. But say this person had no idea what my job actually was, and was trying to guess, they would say, this guy is a professional email responder a few hours a week goes and stands in front of some students in the classroom for some reason and says some stuff. But then he gets back to his main job of responding to emails, the burnout from this is affecting more and more people. I myself, as you know, didn't respond to email for almost a year at one point, it just, it became such a psychological, I don't even know what you call it, a psychological barrier formed my mind that I just couldn't deal. And really, I'm only now kind of getting past that. So on a really, kind of deep psychological level, even a case can be made that email has become a destructive force for a lot of us.

Frank Butler  04:12
You know, I would say it's probably been compounded by the fact that we have so many different ways of quick communication, right? I mean, if you think about it, I'll fire off an email to you, but then also send you a text about something else, right. And it's like, holy crap. And so we're having to juggle these different mediums. You know, I've got WhatsApp installed, and I connect with my veterans in the veteran entrepreneurship program that way, or they'll message me through their, their message each other, you know, and I try to keep up with that. But then we also have the email chains going on or you know, and now there's different places for all of it. Typically, we don't just have one email account, right? You know, you've got your work email, fit your private email, you've got your iMessage or SMS messaging, you know, all this stuff. I think it's just it's all compounded, right? I mean, I remember when we first had Had email, you know, and that was back AOL days. And it wasn't so bad because you were using email and instant messenger. But there wasn't this, like critical mass of people using it yet. You know, we're still talking the infancy right? 

Paul Harvey  05:14
It was a niche communication medium.

Frank Butler  05:16
Right, right. You know, my friends and I would be on Instant Messenger, you know, back in high school, like early high school when we couldn't drive and stuff like that, you know, and he'd still talk on the phone more, right? I remember, when my plan on my cell phone back then changed from you got 30 minutes a month to free nights and weekends? Oh, yeah. And that was a big deal. Right? You know, we weren't messaging that way. Either. There was a lot less communication going on, or not less communication, but less ways of communicating. Yes, good way of putting it. And I think that's maybe compounding the issue that we're seeing here. And to your point, one of the situations I've been dealing with is, I get really frustrated when my students don't respond back to an email that I've taken time to craft and send to them. They're asking me for assistance. Right? It's like, they don't send back a simple Thank you just acknowledged they received it. You know, I don't care if they action on it or not. I mean, I think they should action on what I send to them. But I think you and I both know that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. It's just you ask my advice. Here's my advice. Whether you follow it or not, that's up to you. But at least it's there. I've given it but you should at least acknowledge that you've received.

Paul Harvey  06:27
See now I actually reached a point where I preferred people did not do that interesting, because that meant one more email in the damn inbox. And you know, you click on it, and Okay, it's just a quick vacuum, then you move on to the next one. But still seeing that number in the little red circle, get bigger and bigger and bigger. Fill your phone buzz out more emails?

Frank Butler  06:47
Yeah, you know, for me, I think it was a closure kind of thing. It's like, okay, that's done. It's off my plate, right. So I felt like that was checking a box and saying, hey, I've done that. I've answered that person's issues. They've acknowledged it. So it doesn't feel like it's outstanding for me, but I can certainly see if you're backing up in your inbox, you're going, this is too much at this point, right? Yeah, I can see there's a relationship or eventually that you hit that tipping point where all sudden, you're like, this is too much, I can't deal with it.

Paul Harvey  07:13
And that's a good example of where efficiency becomes inefficient, the way you're talking about it. That's the way it should be done. You've sent somebody something they acknowledged receiving it, close the loop, all good. But if there's so much efficiency, that it's just so easy to send stuff back and forth, that you reach the point where you just can't handle another damn email efficiency has kind of come full circle, and bit me in the ass.

Frank Butler  07:37
Right. Well, you know, I know in your case, too, you were in a very unfortunate or unique situation, both unfortunate and unique, man. 

Paul Harvey  07:47
I'm glad you mentioned that, because I do think that's a relevant confounding factor, in my case, right. And maybe we'll get into it in some episode or something. But I was, unbeknownst to myself at the time going down a spiral of dual tick infections, and really losing my ability to communicate, especially through written formats. So yeah, that definitely aided and abetted my personal email the client, but that almost brought clarity to it. When I got to the point where I just couldn't communicate through written words anymore. I looked back at how much time I was spending on email on email. And Yep, I can't respond to emails anymore. They say, doctors and such would ask like, well, how many we talk in here? And I'd say, three to 500 a day, three to 500 responses, like actual actionable response things. They say, how did you ever do that? Well, I don't know. But the thing is, I used to be able to win now I can't, but I was able to, because of all these efficiency assistance that are out there. And this getting things done philosophy of productivity, which there's an interesting tie in between my gripes about email and this getting things done philosophy. I don't know if you're familiar with this guy, Merlin man, he was a software guy, an avowed Macintosh enthusiast.

Frank Butler  09:06
He's a good guy right there.

Paul Harvey  09:07
So we know he's solid. Yeah. So he read this famous book, getting things done by Dave Allen, and really became a champion of it, including this idea of Inbox Zero. He was, my understanding is he was the one who kind of coined that, and you would do seminars, and he had this blog and this whole kind of thing about how to attain Inbox Zero, like basically turning your emails into a production line operation, where you're just banging out responses and getting things done. He himself got so burned out on doing that, that he's now kind of changed sides in this thing to say this endless pursuit of efficiency is killing us because we're getting these efficiencies are in the administrative aspects of our job, not the real value added stuff, the innovation and the creative work. It's making the administrative stuff ever faster and more efficient. And in the end, we're just becoming robots. So Now he's completely on the other side of it saying, forget your email, don't even pay attention to your inbox. I kind of followed his path, I guess.

Frank Butler  10:07
Yeah, you know, I certainly not been up to the level of three to 500 emails in a day.

Paul Harvey  10:13
Remember I had, like, 1200 students at that time.

Frank Butler  10:15
Yeah, that's huge. Yeah, yeah. But I get certainly the notion when you start having too many, that's almost when you need somebody who's just responsible for handling that aspect of it. Right, that seems like you know, what a CEO would deal with. And that's why they have an executive assistant whose job is to really manage those right, you know, to answer the ones that they deem as being not as important for the CEO to answer and then making sure that the ones that the CEO does need to answer get through to the CEO, right. So one of the things that I've done is, I've started to use smart mailboxes in my Apple Mail, for example. And that helps tremendously, because that means that I know which buckets are important. And I don't mean that like anything's less important, per se, but I certainly do have that triage thing going on where it's like, Okay, if it's going to one of my research, group folders, that's something that's related to a project that's open or under review, and resubmit or something along those lines. I have all my like, not spam, per se, but those groups you sign up for those newsletters, all those things, I have those going into a different folder,

Paul Harvey  11:18
I have a quasi-spam folder for that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Spam. But yeah,

Frank Butler  11:22
Right. In the rules I have set for that is basically they're, they're marked as red, right. So they don't even come in, I don't see a bubble for that. But I do have a folder that I can go to. So I you know, I've tried to be better about that, because I found that I would get at least irritated by the amount of, you know, email that I'd have to review. That's not that important. And then at the end of the day, I don't know about you, but like, I know, for us our school spams us to death with emails, you know, and, and I, so I have a folder actually named all the junk. And I have certain, just because it to me, a lot of it is I mean, I, to be quite honest, we get a lot of emails about, you know, math colloquium this week, and I'm like, Oh, yeah, cool, that does not pertain to me, I'm not that keen on it. So I deal with enough math, it is, you know, so I just have that, stuff like that, go to all the junk. And I'll go back and review it on occasion, you know, just to make sure I'm not missing anything, I do not have those marked as unread. But because they're in a different folder, they don't show up in my inbox read numbering. Right. So I think that helps tremendously.

Paul Harvey  12:30
It does. And we've actually talked about this before, I think this is a topic worth pursuing, in an episode, the organization kind of things that everyday people like us can do in terms of automating the routine aspects of our work with the caveat that, again, that involves making you perhaps too efficient. So if you've just got your email routine, lockdown, you become that super reliable, super-fast source of information. Eventually, your lockdown email routine gets overwhelmed from more and more people sending you stuff. So how do we know where to stop? When does the pursuit of efficiency bring us to that tipping point where we're just not able to do our jobs anymore? Because we've become professional email responders?

Frank Butler  13:13
Yeah, I think I think that's a great point. And I think it means that there does need to be some sort of triage thing, right? I think you have to be able to say, okay, emails from this individual are associated with these projects are important. So I'll have those obviously be the things that come up first, or what have you, you know what I mean. But even if you get more efficient with email, I think what's good about that means that you're able to spend more time in that person, right element and maybe, or working on other things that can benefit you or the organization. And I think, you know, if it's benefiting you, it probably benefits the organization, because you're developing skills. And I think that goes back to something we've talked about too, is just, the company should be more than happy for you to be developing your skill sets, and then figuring out ways of how they can apply that in house. I know one of the things we've talked about, it's sort of this internal, Uber for doing things, right, where I'm really good at something, but it's not really a core part of my job. But I'm also really good at my job, and I get things done. And instead of me just twiddling my thumbs and acting like I'm busy, you know, I use that time effectively, and I get, you know, rewards for that. Right? Whatever they the company deems is a way of maybe incentivizing people to contribute in other ways, right?

Paul Harvey  14:23
Yeah, it's good point. I was just thinking some people are good at this automation stuff, with emails and with other stuff, too. You know, back when I had my 1200 students, collating all these different spreadsheets with all these different bits of information for each student was this monstrous task. And one of my friends said, Yeah, give me a night with it. I'll code up some macros for you. And the next day it’s: click a button done, like, wow, that was nine hours of work in one click of a button, for him to put that together was, you know, it probably took him an hour, you know, for me that would have taken a week or two of figuring out the ins and outs of virtual basic and blah, blah, blah. So I think that is a good potential application for the organization of the workplace that we've been talking about it. 

But you know, it kind of brings to mind, another paradoxical phenomenon. Think about what we're what we're talking about here, structuring ways to become more efficient in our emails, or other aspects of work and seeking out help from other people to do that. And even sending lots of emails in the first place. A lot of this kind of looks a lot like people creating structure for themselves in a job where maybe there's just not enough structure. If you go back to the, you know, early 1900s, where nearly all work was done in a highly structured assembly line, or scientific management days, when efficiency meant watching people do their jobs and look for the smallest little things you could do, like put that pile of parts over there, so they don't have to turn around. And then we had this huge shift, Peter Drucker stuff in the mid 1900s, going along with the increase in what we now call knowledge workers, sometimes folks who are doing jobs that aren't just assembling things aren't just straight production.

Frank Butler  16:08
Yeah, coding, right, these kind of coding jobs or r&d type jobs, there's not a lot of structure, right, right, sort of you got to do what the outcome of the project is, right. So you've got this kind of,

Paul Harvey  16:18
Yeah, and you trust the knowledge worker to know more or less how to, you know, within reason how to arrive at that. So there's this big shift away from having supervisors really micromanaging their employees, saying that you You're the expert in this area, we'll assume that you're able to figure out the best way to do your job, and to varying degrees of what you do. Think about how drastic that was a change in a really short amount of time, from early 1900s. And what it meant to be a manager was one thing. And then by late 50s 60s 70s, it was something completely different. Now a manager or someone who monitors employees from afar, and kind of gives them 

Frank Butler  16:59
I was gonna say, manages, you know, email. Manages email. 

Paul Harvey  17:02
Manages email! Used to manage people, now they manage emails. And I like autonomy as much as the next guy, and it's a good development. But I wonder how much of what we're seeing here is the result of certain jobs having too much autonomy, not enough structure to the point where people have to create their own structure. And one way of doing that is by shooting emails all over the place. How should I do this? What should I do next? You know, in the old days, you would have a boss who just you just asked that boss. Now it's like, Huh, who out there? Do I know who could answer this question, shoot off an email.

Frank Butler  17:31
That's actually interesting, because I know like, we can talk about networking and stuff like that, too, like how you develop networks, and how you have these central nodes and networks. And you know, each person brings something to the table. So if you're like an information getter, right, you could be a central point where people reach out to you frequently, because you know who to go to, to get help in that. And I'm wondering, if that doesn't apply more in this context. Now, with email and the ease of communication, let's go. So certain people are probably getting more emails than others even right, if you're one of those people who just knows where everything is, you know, I think about kind of when I was working in Germany, a lot of the our subsidiaries, they would reach out to me first, because I would be able to connect them to the right person in Germany, for example. And so I would get a lot of communication that way. But then I started thinking about my job tonight, I did a lot of just managing projects, right? So I'd be emailing a bunch of different people about things and just tracking it versus, you know, necessarily doing a lot of hands on stuff anymore, right? I mean, I would be doing some hands on stuff, but certainly a lot less than when I was just working quality control and trying to figure out how to go through a testing program and those kinds of things and very different, right, just very different being the central contact point. For a lot of people, that's where they came to, but it was facilitated by the notion that we had email because especially when you're dealing with 12 different languages, it just made it easy for them to write English, right, because they, you know, either it could translate or whatever. So it was a form of communication, that was probably a little easier for them to be clearer with, or at least, if anything, give me the opportunity to be able to decipher their English if it was less clear. And, you know, we would get to a point of understanding quickly some cases. 

But you know, to your point, there was a lot more information exchanged a lot more emails, but I'm just I'm wondering if there's like, not sort of components that apply to that. Obviously, in your case, you had a bunch of students being sort of a central communication point for a lot of context. You know, those people probably deal with a lot more inflows and outflows of communication, management, obviously, I think probably a lot more so too, because they're trying to just manage, and I'm wondering if you're not correct, and saying we probably need to think about the structure of management jobs. And that that actually makes me think about that Harvard Business Review that just came out by I think is podany is his name. He's the Dean of Apple University. It was on the way that Apple actually does things right. It was on that sort of how that the management managed in essence, and You know, their leadership and how they use their time was very interesting, because they were saying that, you know, you got to be an expert in something. And so their management, we're all kind of developing this expertise. And they are experts in their areas, but at the same time, because they are taking on more areas of responsibility, they have to learn to delegate more to write, they have to learn about stuff, and they still have a lot of learning they do, which I think is important, right? Because as you become a manager, you become a generalist, right? You go from developing expertise, it's not that you want to lose that expertise, but much more so that you have to learn more about different things, which actually enhances I think, in a lot of ways, your expertise compared to lower level, right, because if you coming in, and I'll just use this as a quick kind of example, if you're a Java programmer, and you come in and you're programming Java, and people who are in it, industry, don't blast me on this, I'm just throwing it out there. As an example, if you start with Java, and you came in, you're really just become super proficient with Java, you start moving up, and you become part of this program team. And not only you're having to lead over Java, but now you also have to include other programming languages underneath like Python. Okay, so now you have to learn how Python works. And I think you know, because you have a foundational base of Java, and a great understanding of how that works. You have that foundational knowledge of how computers think, in a sense, right? How they process information, maybe you're becoming less of an expert in Java, but now you're creating a broad set of expertise. So you can work with a lot of people, because now you understand probably a different level of how the computer works. You know, there's different expertise that goes through each of those steps. Yeah, you're an expert in Bluetooth. You're an expert in Bluetooth technology, but you're not necessarily an expert in the software side, you might be on the hardware side, and vice versa, you know, so

Paul Harvey  21:47
I think...I think that's an important distinction there that I hadn't thought of. So kind of specialist versus generalist, you become more of a generalist as a manager. And I think that's part of what is happening. People who are not managers are kind of being I say, forced into but informally required to be generalists themselves, because you're taking in information from unpredictable places. And simply by virtue of trying to respond to those people, you learn more stuff, and that can be a good thing. But the distinction is, you know, is it actually helping you to learn all those things at that point in your career? Or is it taking your focus away from what you're actually supposed to be doing? Like your example of working in Germany, being that central communication point, a hub in the spoke of people make sense? If correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that was actually part of your job. That was just something that organically occurred

Frank Butler  22:40
Probably was because I was over international sales and partnerships. And so technically, it did apply. But people would reach out to me beyond just simply sales type things, you know, like, they would want to know other information, or, you know, what have you. So there was some overlap, but because my expertise was technically in managing our relationships with those outside of our company, but also working within our company to help expand our sales, to our customers, and so on, you know, especially as we acquired new subsidiaries, and such, you know, I think that just sort of naturally then became part of my job, too, is anything else, it's like, Okay, he's gonna at least know, because he's in headquarters, you know, and connected to everybody. And

Paul Harvey  23:22
I think the point still holds it. And so, you were in something of a kind of managerial function there. And so, you were doing a managerial sort of thing when you are connecting all those people to each other? Hmm. Yeah, this is kind of an important distinction that, you know, a manager doing those things is they're doing their job when they do those things. Someone who's not in a management position, who's doing those things is being distracted away from their job.

Frank Butler  23:49
Right. Right.

Paul Harvey  23:51
One of the stories I like to tell: I realized that I was losing the email battle when like, 90% of the emails I would write, or apologies to people for, you know, falling behind on a deadline, because I was answering their emails. [laughs] Yeah, it's like, it just became this downward spiral like that.

Frank Butler  24:07
But wasn't that already normal? Weren't we? You and I both kind of always a little bit. Not I don't think procrastination is the right word. I just think kind of pressure cookers. We like to work more under the deadline pressures. Yeah. So while we're, I think we're kind of Type A-ish, in a sense, we're really tight be in a lot of other ways, right? Because I think in this profession, you have to be type A, in some ways, you have to be yeah. But then I think in other ways, you can really be a lot more laid back. And I know for me, I deadlines, man that they're my favorite thing, because it's like, that's when I start really getting to focus, right, because I feel like I got all this time otherwise, and

Paul Harvey  24:44
I wish it wasn't that way, but [laughs]

Frank Butler  24:46
I'm wondering that compounded that. Because, yeah, you know, it's like, there is a point where you start stressing out, and that's sort of what happened to me too, is that all sudden, like you have all these things going on, and you're like, I just don't I no longer have the time and then you just Do nothing right? Like all of a sudden you let it all go, in a sense, because you've actually I, this is sort of what triggered my anxiety problems was this very, I just kept doing more work. I didn't create any balance, and I didn't have, I just kept saying yes to everything I think is what was problematic. And while it was great, because I was getting a lot of rewards for all that, right, because I was publishing a lot at that time. You know, I was teaching a lot of overload because we had this new online program. So I mean, it was like making, you know, better money. And, you know, it was exciting. And, you know, the people at work were coming to me, because they're like, hey, you're doing this stuff in, you're killing it. We do this too. And you're like, yeah, yeah, sure. You know, it's like, Hey, you know, and, and then next thing, you know, you're like, it a full stop. Right? nothing gets done, and you just you just seize up? Yep. And then that's, that's, I think, the trouble with being that. And so it's, there's probably a lot of different things that have to be done. I mean, even I think even if you were to get better organized with how you handle things and become more efficient, let's say in emails and what have you, I don't think that solves the larger issue that you're dealing with in that context, too. Right. I think just the email happens to be, or messages, in general tend to be the sort of catalysts are another variable in the, the breakdown, I guess, there's other, you know, I think that you had also taken out personal life aspects too, right. So, you know, you're dealing with that stuff, you throw in, you know, somebody has a family then too, and they've got kids to worry about, you know, I think these just all and you've got your work pressures, and so he's

Paul Harvey  26:35
Only got so much energy,

Frank Butler  26:37
Right, your identities overlap too much, then you can't separate them as well anymore, and just it all collapsed. Now, of course, I think that's on the extreme end, you know, and I think you can even be said, if you don't have kids, it can happen to or a significant other. I mean, that's what happened in my context, I didn't, I didn't have a significant other, and the I just kept doing more and more and more, and was just chasing the reward. And that might be part of the problem. There's no external. So there is no balance, right? There was no balance, you know, just chasing those rewards. And that's damaging, right? in its own sense.

Paul Harvey  27:08
It is. And, you know, you mentioned something a minute ago about, you know, yeah, you could spend more time being more organized, and, and do all this stuff. But you know, think about what we are, you and I are college professors, like we're not paid to be organized, you know, we're paid to be the opposite of organized.

Frank Butler  27:24
Creative, we’re in a creative field.

Paul Harvey  27:26
Yeah, you want to think of things that haven't been thought of before and test them and teach about them. And none of those things are compatible with developing a foolproof email response machine. It's unfortunate that we even have to have this conversation. And I don't think we would have been having this conversation 20 years ago, not 25 years ago, before everyone had email.

Frank Butler  27:44
No, I bet. You know, I think there's other things that we would be dealing with 25 years ago, in this case, right? I mean, think about just how much technology's changed how we do things, you know, we write a paper, now we send it back and forth to our co-authors, once we get to a point, we submit it online, you know, we're not having to go and print out three versions of it, and then package it up and mail it and have to deal with all these other things. You know, I think there's different layers of challenges.

Paul Harvey  28:06
But look, what's happened there. Now, we're all expected to publish three times as much because it doesn't take, it doesn't take weeks to [laughs]

Frank Butler  28:12
Well, that's true. Not only are we expected to publish more, but because there's so much more volume going because it's more efficient, more efficient, the tools have gotten better as more volume that's unique to obviously academia, but it's not necessarily. There's not necessarily aspects of that that's not happening in corporate either or death or nonprofits where you know, the expectations because things have changed. Now, you're expected to do more, I mean, again, not necessarily bad, but it does change the notion of how do we have to think about the work function to but then you have to throw in on top of that, hey, you know, you got to answer emails that you didn't have to do before you just answer the phone every once in a while, or, you know, your boss checks in on you face to face. And there's some comfort when your manager comes in face to face,

Paul Harvey  28:55
I think you've touched on something, 
Frank Butler  28:57
I touched on a lot of weird stuff [laughs] 

Paul Harvey  29:00
Well, one thing in particular, that I was paying attention to the kind of paradoxical nature of efficiency. And again, like you said, it's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think in some ways, we're kind of selling ourselves a false bill of goods, when it comes to becoming more efficient, like, oh, look how much faster I can do this. That means more time for me. Now, it means more time for you to do more stuff, and not necessarily value-added stuff. But back to our namesake and the whole idea of being busy all the time, when the important part of your job gets faster and faster. Sometimes we end up filling in the void, not with relaxation, or creative thinking or whatever, exercise or something, but with busywork.

Frank Butler  29:37
Yeah, it's pretty interesting to think about that notion of technology can make us efficient, but then it also means that we're trying to, you know, either by your management's perspective or your own, I need to be doing more, right, that that notion of I have to be busier

Paul Harvey  29:51
Right. Whether it's an impression management thing, or if it's actually semi legitimate, like, there is more work that needs to be done. We're under under-staffed, whatever.

Frank Butler  30:01
Or just internal, intrinsic, right, intrinsic, I just have to be doing something. You know, some people just have to be doing something, right. So there's different levels, right impression management's, not you feeling like you have to do it. But intrinsically you feel like you have to do it.

Paul Harvey  30:16
Yeah, that's a reasonable thing, especially if you're at your job, you know, you're kind of in that mode, like, Alright, I want to be productive. I already finished my work for the week because everything's so efficient. Now what? Oh, yeah. And like you said, I wish someone asked you, would you mind helping with this? Yes, I'd love to. Next thing you know, you're wildly overextended, sleeping four hours a night developing like alcohol problem or something, which, personally, I think that's where a lot of modern alcoholism comes from, is this feeling of like, always being stretched thin, always having something else that needs to be done? And I think it's a way to for a lot of people to kind of turn that off for a few hours. 

We'll pause this discussion on that uplifting note. Please join us next week for part two of this episode. And thank you as always for listening. 

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