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1 Step To Start Regaining Control Of Your Inbox

I spent a couple of hours today methodically unsubscribing from several years’ worth of newsletters, subscriptions, etc. It’s amazing how freeing it feels to see browser window after browser window saying, “Thank you, you will no longer receive these emails.”

I didn’t do this randomly, however!

Before beginning, I set out the objective criteria I would use: if I haven’t read an email from that list in over a year, I would unsubscribe. Period. I subscribe to many friends’ email lists. When considered one-by-one, I would never unsubscribe because it would feel like somehow weakening the bond between me and my friend. But make no mistake: there is no bond between me and my friend if I’m never reading their email. (And besides, if their email is mainly business, and we’re personal friends, a marketing email doesn’t keep me feeling a personal connection.) Using objective, pre-determined criteria let me make the decision quickly and cleanly.

And by the way–I kept the list of names of people whose unsubscribes felt personal. I’m going to call them, instead. On the phone. And establish a real connection, not the electronic fantasy of one.

Is The Marketplace of Ideas Turning Into a Swamp?

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We take it for granted that making things easier is always a good thing. I disagree. Sometimes it is, while sometimes it isn’t. Today, I’ve been contemplating the case where maybe it’s good to make things harder.

Technology has made it so that anyone can produce music or publish books. This is a very good thing, in that it means people driven by the desire to do those things can now do them far more economically. But there’s a downside to technology that enables: it drives the supply of those goods up, without necessarily driving demand up. More supply without more demand means prices will fall. In both arenas—neither of which have been famous for paying creators very much money—we’re seeing so much content being created that it’s hard for anyone to make a living anymore. The very few who manage to rise above the fray capture most of the money, and everyone else has to work as a waiter to get by.

In some abstract way, this may be good for the consumer by giving the consumer more choice (though the book The Paradox of Choice discusses about a dozen reasons why more choice is not necessarily good). But there’s now so much noise in the market that matching that consumer with the perfect author/musician is harder than ever. Unless the musician/author is one of the winners with a huge marketing budget, the consumers will never find them.

There may actually be benefits to markets that are somewhat harder to enter. Fewer players enter, but the ones who do can make enough money to make a living, and the number of entrants is low enough that consumers can at least have a decent shot at discovering the product that’s best for them.

Give Yourself Some Slack Time

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One of the most important things that I’ve learned is that you can only be up to 100% efficient –  you can’t get 25 hours of work done in a day.  How do you know when you’re at the point of diminishing returns?

We all want to believe we can add one more thing to our plate without it being a problem. But there’s only so much time in a day, and that tiny one-more-thing can be what tips the balance. Have you seen the last scene in the Meaning of Life by Monty Python? A huge man is eating a gigantic meal. At the end, he’s offered a tiny, wafer-thin mint. He eats it and explodes.

The two indicators I look at are my stress level and my slack space. If I have so much on my plate that I’m constantly thinking about the next thing and always rushing to get stuff done, that’s an indicator that my time is pretty much full. I’m at that point a lot at the moment, actually.

You can also consider whether you have enough slack time in your schedule. You need slack to handle unexpected work and personal things that crop up. If a single slipped schedule or car breakdown throws your whole life into chaos, you probably have too much on your plate and need to drop something.

Becoming more productive at what you currently do can, of course, free up some time. But even that isn’t a panacea. It takes time and effort to find alternate ways of doing your work, and then more time and effort to implement those. At some point, it takes more time and effort to improve your performance than the time and effort you actually save from improving. When you’ve reached that point, you’re doing as well as you can. If you’re still overloaded, it’s time to remove things from your plate so you once again have room to breathe, relax, and cope.

I’m still not convinced Inbox Zero is necessary

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My [intlink id=”inboxzero” type=”post”]previous Inbox Zero post[/intlink] has generated a lot of disagreement and controversy. I can’t say I didn’t expect it. I’m really torn. Part of me certainly agrees that if you work in a culture where everything of value happens via email and no one is willing to talk face-to-face or by phone, then email may be the only way you can work. But I just don’t believe that you have to be a victim of such a culture.

Email is not just paper mail put online. People use it quite differently. Email is fundamentally different from prior forms of communication in that it comes at virtually no cost to the sender. The size of your inbox is not under your control. It is under the control of those who want to send you stuff. Back when written letters required effort, addressing, stamps, and delays, people did not use them to pass off work, delegate things they could do more easily themselves, and so on.

By removing all barriers to sending, email has made all of us recipients of whatever drivel anyone wants to send. Given the slowness of the medium (even very fast typists can’t type nearly as fast as they can talk) and the poor use of it by most senders, my observation is that it fails to make us more productive in many cases; time spent working towards Inbox Zero increases our activity and feelings of accomplishment while actually reducing measurable results. (The exception to this is when email is used to communicate reference information, shared documents, etc.)

A Couple Of Tips That Help

Am I advocating ignoring messages in your inbox? I guess not. But I am advocating adding back barriers to having people send you email in the first place. Don’t respond immediately. Ask people to come talk in person if they have anything of substance to discuss.  Use short, almost  useless answers (or don’t answer!) for messages that should never have been sent in the first place.

Sorting your inbox by subject or sender can also help you quickly identify the messages you want to respond to, and keep your brain on one topic long enough to make some progress, but it’s only a partial solution, since you are still at the mercy of other people’s subject lines and time-wasting messages. (And besides, Gmail won’t let you sort by sender, only by it’s idea of what a conversation is.)

Challenge Me With Data

Want to challenge me? Log your email for a week. Write down (or put in a spreadsheet) each message that hits your inbox, whether it really required your attention or not, and what job outcome would have been affected had you ignored it. Also note how much total time you spent on email. Then give me a call and we’ll examine the log message by message, and decide how useful your email is. Cries of “I just HAVE to do it all” won’t convince me, but data will. (And though I’m willing to change my mind, I’m going to bet that no one reading this is actually willing to do the experiment for fear of having data that contradicts the justification for their email addiction.)

But saying “I need to process all my email every day” does not regain the time you’re wasting on email, nor does it make you more productive, nor does it change the fact  that email buffets your attention and uses up brain power that then can’t be used for anything else. (See the book “The Power of Full Engagement” for a discussion of how our attention and willpower is limited, and gets used up by activities that require thought, regardless of whether those are the “right” activities or not.)  Email is a communication tool, nothing more. Like any tool, its use should be measured in how much more work it helps you do.

Email is Still an Incredible Time Suck

The fact remains that an hour of email triage a day is six work-weeks a year. That’s an awful lot of time to devote to email unless you can make a convincing case that a month and a half’s worth of your results wouldn’t have been possible without doing it over email.

Personally,  I like saving my brainpower for the things I care about. Not everyone has the same priorities. But as I get older and find I have less energy to spend on trivia, email stands out as the number one drain of my energy that’s high on dopamine punch, but low on measurable results.

Peek behind the curtain: Who actually benefits from your ‘extended warranty’?

I bought a printer recently. The store clerk offered to sell me the 3-year warranty, which cost 1/3 as much as the entire printer. I confess, the very idea astounded me.

Apparently, I’m supposed to believe that the printer can’t be expected to last 3 entire years without breaking. In which case, why am I willing to pay hundreds of dollars for it? Shouldn’t I have enough faith in the manufacturer that I don’t have to buy a separate service contract? In fact, shouldn’t the manufacturer itself have enough faith in its own product that I should be confident it will continue to work?

Warranties are the measure of how much a manufacturer believes their product is shoddy.

It’s that simple. If a manufacturer truly built well and believed it, they would offer an extended warranty for free. In fact, when the warranty is invoked, the manufacturer could use that as a chance to investigate and discover how to make their product better.

But these days, it’s become standard practice for companies to make huge amounts of money selling extended warranties. The good news is that they wouldn’t get sold if they weren’t profitable for the companies, which implies that most of the time, the products under warranty don’t need to be replaced. The bad news is that it may be more profitable to offer relatively shoddy products and sell the extended warranty than to manufacture good products to begin with.

Either way, manufacturers, don’t offer me a warranty, please. I’ll simply take it as an indication that you do such a poor job you’re not willing to stand behind your own handiwork.

Do we create our institutions to stifle creativity?

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My friend Michael posted on Facebook: I’m feeling sad today, because I’m already one of those people who works his butt off and doesn’t do much of anything to be creative, innovative or out-reaching. How did I stray from the ideals so quickly?

My response: I think most of our institutions are designed (or have evolved) precisely into places where creativity and innovation are squashed. It isn’t deliberate in the sense of some evil dictator trying to keep us down, but it *is* deliberate in the sense that we create institutions to be stable. That means, to do the same thing day in and day out. We scope the jobs, workload, and responsibilities around just enough to get things done the way they’re currently done. When was the last time a job description included, “Four hours a week to be spent day-dreaming, engaging in creative flights of fancy, and redesigning how things work?” (Well ok, Google has a similar policy, but who else?)

What do you think?

Inbox Zero and the Critical Mistake That Saps Productivity

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Everyone loves the concept of “Inbox Zero.” The idea is easy: make it a priority to empty your email inbox every day. It feels great. I agree that it feels great. One member of the Get-it-Done Guy community said it’s how he knows he has control over his email.

I respectfully disagree that inbox zero means you have control over your email. You don’t control the content, the order, or the volume of email that arrives. Inbox Zero is basically a reactive strategy—it says that your inbox is so high priority that you should attend to everything in it every day. Since you don’t control the content, that means shifting your brain through several topics just to scan your inbox in a single session. The order you have to think about those topics is determined by the order messages arrive, not by the importance or relevance of the topic to you. Brains don’t do well with rapid, random context switching. You’re using up brainpower just in the process of triaging the whole inbox. This isn’t just a philosophical issues. In “The Power of Full Engagement” by Tony Schwartz cites research that we only have a certain amount of mental capacity between each sleep cycle. Your brain doesn’t care what you use it on. You can use it up triaging your inbox just as easily as you can use it actually doing good, high-quality work. When I’ve paid close attention, I’ve noticed that email saps my actual productivity.

The amount of your email is determined by others, and the amount of time it takes to scan your inbox is proportional to the amount of email they send. Unless you’re in a completely reactive job and the only people who email you are people whose agenda aligns with yours, taking your time to sort through their email can waste a lot of time. I get about 100 emails a day. If I spent as much as 30 seconds on each one, that would take up the equivalent of a month and a half a year. There’s simply no way that’s a productive use of time in aggregate.

I believe that an empty inbox just means you’ve ceded control of your thinking and priorities to everyone who emails you. They control the volume, order, and substance of your attention for the time you’re processing your email. It *feels good* to have an empty inbox, but it also feels good to gorge on Oreo ice cream cake. That doesn’t mean that Oreo ice cream cake is good for you, only that it feels good. Inbox Zero has the extra sugary bonus that since *some* email is an essential part of our job, it’s easy to believe (with no evidence at all) that therefore it’s useful to spend some time on *all* email.

Rather than striving for inbox zero, I advocate learning to identify the truly relevant emails very, very quickly, with an absolute minimum of cognitive load or context switching.

Hint: consider the concept of semantic priming. When you consider a topic (or even just a word), your brain unconsciously brings to mind associated concepts. I’m assuming that this is part of what happens to drain the mental energy that email drains. How would you use semantic priming to your benefit while processing your inbox?

Hint #2: Consider that humans find it easier to choose between 2 things than 3, and that the framing of a choice–e.g. the choice to read/respond to an email versus to ignore it–will dramatically change the amount of mental energy needed to process that email.

Hint #3: Consider the behavior of people who send mail. Contrast their pre-email behavior (stamps, envelopes, etc.) and post-email. What was different? Why? What implications does this have for responding to senders?

The Power of Science to Solve Today’s Complex Problems

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They’re narrowing the streets in my neighborhood, and everyone is up in arms. People are freaked out, saying that narrowing from sort-of-1.5-lanes to 1 lane+bike lane is going to cause huge traffic snarls.

On the face of it, this sounds reasonable. After all, won’t fewer lanes mean less space for traffic, so traffic must go slower?

That depends. If all drivers simply stayed in their lanes, never made turns, and drove at constant speeds, yes. But they’ve been doing a *lot* of experimenting in Boston with alternative configurations. They’ve compared the results and found that sometimes narrower streets with curb cut-outs and bike lanes result in all kinds of unexpected benefits.

It’s long been known that widening a street won’t necessarily ease congestion because people simply drive more, until the congestion reaches prior levels. “Archie, it’s such a nice day, let’s go drive down the nice, new freeway.”

This is called science. We measure what happens, we compare and contrast, and we learn the world doesn’t always work the way we think it will.

If science always matched up to our intuition, we would have invented high technology 10,000 years ago. We couldn’t have technology until a relatively small number of people invented the scientific method and were willing to believe it’s results over what their intuition said. Intuitively, a 10-pound ball falls faster than a 1-pound ball, the Earth is flat, and the sun rises and sets. Science, however, shows that the balls fall at the same speed (acceleration, actually), the Earth is round, and it spins, rather than the sun moving.

Next time you find yourself getting defensive over some scientific study, stop. That’s a good thing; it means that maybe you can revise your beliefs to reflect reality. Read the study, consider with an open mind, and find out.

Science gave us ziplock bags. Who knows what might be next?

Safely Using Social Media In Your Professional Life

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Q: Hi Stever (and GIDG fans), I’m dreading creating separate professional twitter/facebook accounts because I don’t want to come up with another name (other than my own) and start building my network all over again. But I’m afraid I’ll bore my friends (who aren’t in my profession) if I start posting more career-related comments, and the overlap of friends/colleagues seems so inefficient to me. Is there any appropriate way to combine personal & professional social networks?

A: This is really hard, especially because businesspeople who want to see your personal life may realize you have two profiles and request access to the other one. (An employer would never ask to walk through your apartment before hiring you, but they’ll happily ask to see your Facebook profile.)

I would create a LinkedIn profile as my professional profile, and only give that one to colleagues. If they want access to my Facebook profile, I would politely explain that I keep that only for my non-work life and prefer not to mix the two.

If they object or complain, that’s valuable information that you’re working for (or about to work for) a company that does not respect your privacy and your boundaries. For me, that would be a huge red flag. Do you really want to spend your entire career with a company worrying about revealing your private life?

No matter what you decide, however, it’s still hard to control the information. If your “real” profile shares friends with a business colleague, they may see your private updates on the mutual friend’s wall, in their comments, etc., even though they can’t view your profile directly.

This is one of the interesting issues with social media: in the real world, humans can present themselves differently to different people and in different situations. Social media as we’ve implemented it makes that much, much more difficult. On one hand, it means we see each other, warts and all. On the other hand, I’ve met very few people who are accepting enough to forgive others’ perceived faults, which means displaying our warts could have bad social consequences. (Unless they’re shaped like four-leaf clovers. Those warts are universally admired and envied.)

Switching Mental Modes

Ever since my first management job, I’ve been confronted with a very unpleasant truth about myself: I don’t switch modes well. As a project manager, I was also doing some of the individual contributor work on the project. It was a disaster for me. When I was being Manager Boy, I would lose my place in the work I was doing and often fall behind. When I was being Individual Contributor Boy, I would lose my perspective and get totally engrossed in the project. Priorities would slip, relationships would fray, and things would fall apart.

I found that switching contexts like that is very hard for me. I can perform well as a manager. I can perform well as a worker. But I can’t switch between them or keep them both in my brain at once. I’m just not built that way.

Different roles require different kinds of thinking. Take a good look at yourself and decide: (1) are you good at all the kinds of thinking you’re being asked to do, (2) are you good at switching between the kinds of thinking you’re being asked to do, and (3) are you actually turning in the quality you know you’re capable of?

Arrange your life so you’re spending your time working in your strengths, or in areas that you want to become strengths. If you aren’t great at switching, at any given moment, try to limit your responsibilities to related tasks that minimize your need to change thought styles. Team up with people whose skills complement yours, to take care of the rest. In the long run, you’ll be happier and more productive.