Speaker 1: Right now, I have two thousand and twenty six unread
Speaker 1: emails in my inbox. And you know what, I'm totally
Speaker 1: fine with that. We're talking about learning to live with
Speaker 1: and love your email. This is game plan. Hi. I'm
Speaker 1: Rebecca Greenfield and I'm Francesco Weedy, and this week we
Speaker 1: are talking about everyone's favorite thing to hate email mail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so everybody really hates on email. Emails the worst. I
Speaker 1: get so many of them, busy and important, but the
Speaker 1: o there's a lot of articles talking about how emails
Speaker 1: the cockroach of the Internet, and it's so distracting, and
Speaker 1: I mean I can see why. I mean, I just
Speaker 1: mentioned that I have over two thousand unread emails in
Speaker 1: my work email. Yeah, but you seem to be able
Speaker 1: to live with it. Yeah, I actually love email. My
Speaker 1: Gmail box is very different than my Bloomberg in box.
Speaker 1: My Gmail inbox has no one reading emails. Wow, that's impressive.
Speaker 1: I think I have several thousand unready. Feel like we're
Speaker 1: actually opposite because you have no one reads in your Bloomberg, right,
Speaker 1: I'm working on that for my boobs. Yeah. Well, my
Speaker 1: issue with email is that, um, I get so many
Speaker 1: emails that are not for me specifically, I'm just they're
Speaker 1: either spam emails, I'm copied on them along with ten
Speaker 1: other people, and I don't need to respond to them
Speaker 1: that it fills up my inbox so quickly that I
Speaker 1: miss important emails. So I've since I came back from
Speaker 1: maternity leave, I made a resolution to try and delete
Speaker 1: all of my unimportant emails every day. Well, so, I
Speaker 1: think this is one reason that email is so loved
Speaker 1: and hated and loved to be hated, is because it
Speaker 1: gives us so much anxiety, Like it takes a lot
Speaker 1: of brain space. So people feel the need to either
Speaker 1: be like an inbox zero person, right, so you can
Speaker 1: talk about or I'm not even going to think about
Speaker 1: all these emails in my inbox person. I guess I'm
Speaker 1: both of those people. Yeah, let's let's talk about in
Speaker 1: box zero. Do you want to explain what it is
Speaker 1: for people who don't know it's this way of life?
Speaker 1: Religious about it? Yeah? Where you have I'm not sure
Speaker 1: is that either no emails at all in your inbox
Speaker 1: or no unready emails. I think it's no unready emails,
Speaker 1: but maybe like a purist what, Yeah, I think there
Speaker 1: might be a purist version of it, where it's like
Speaker 1: no emails at all, and if there's an email that
Speaker 1: needs to be saved, it goes into a folder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I relate to this because if I have an
Speaker 1: unread email in my Gmail, it will not at me
Speaker 1: because it's telling me I need to do something right.
Speaker 1: I use it in that way, and I think that's
Speaker 1: how inbox zero people use it. But you have a misillian. Well,
Speaker 1: my feeling about inbox zero has changed a little bit.
Speaker 1: It used to be I used to think it was
Speaker 1: the biggest waste of time, and it was this kind
Speaker 1: of artificial sense of superiority or accomplishment that you got
Speaker 1: from deleting all these emails when actually you were investing
Speaker 1: all of this time and delete emails. And if you
Speaker 1: could just learn to be okay with having unread emails
Speaker 1: in your inbox, then your life would be exactly the
Speaker 1: same and you wouldn't have an empty emox. But then
Speaker 1: I wish I didn't have these pathologies that do Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think a lot of people do. And then
Speaker 1: I I still eventually I had to come to grips
Speaker 1: with the whole like missing an email from my boss
Speaker 1: because it was buried under like six hundred, you know,
Speaker 1: spam email from emails from PR people or notes from
Speaker 1: the facility staff on like the bathroom downstairs being closed.
Speaker 1: And so as soon as I started doing that, um, actually,
Speaker 1: it became a lot more like it to do list.
Speaker 1: Like now I know if I have an email in
Speaker 1: there that something needs to be done about it. And
Speaker 1: most of the time it's just to delete it. But
Speaker 1: if it's if it's sitting there for longer than a
Speaker 1: few hours, that means like require some kind of action.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the fold. Yeah, although I'm not like that
Speaker 1: with Bloomberg. But but email is also so hada that
Speaker 1: some people have tried to get rid of it in
Speaker 1: their lives. There are offices that tell their internal staff
Speaker 1: they cannot use email to communicate. Wow, So what's the alternative?
Speaker 1: They use something like flack or hip chat or whatever
Speaker 1: social network that your company is on. And I think
Speaker 1: it does cut down on emails, and I think that's
Speaker 1: happening organically at a lot of companies. But I don't
Speaker 1: see how you can avoid email communication altogether if you
Speaker 1: have any sort of role where you communicate with people
Speaker 1: outside of your office. Right, and as we've talked about
Speaker 1: in other episodes, those alternatives can get cluttered up and
Speaker 1: start taking up your time to write. You can spend
Speaker 1: too much time sending and receiving messages on a chat platform.
Speaker 1: So yeah, on top of having all these notifications now
Speaker 1: from your chat app, it really doesn't get rid of
Speaker 1: email altogether in most offices. So I think instead of
Speaker 1: trying to get rid of something that is never going
Speaker 1: to go away, we need to embrace it and learn
Speaker 1: to live with it and maybe even if you're like me,
Speaker 1: one day you'll love it. And to tell us how
Speaker 1: to get to that point, our guest today a as
Speaker 1: a behavioral economist at Duke. His name is Dan Ari Yellie.
Speaker 1: He wrote a book called Payoff, the Hidden Logic that
Speaker 1: shapes our motivations, and he's going to teach us how
Speaker 1: to trick ourselves into loving email. Thanks for coming on
Speaker 1: my pleasure. So, Dan, you have an elaborate approach to email,
Speaker 1: and I would love to just start by talking about
Speaker 1: what happened when I emailed you to talk about coming
Speaker 1: on this show, um to give to give our listeners
Speaker 1: a sense of how much work and how much thought
Speaker 1: you've put into your own email strategy. So I want
Speaker 1: to do you want to tell people to sit down
Speaker 1: and kind of take a drink of something. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: you sit down and get comfortable. So I emailed you
Speaker 1: to see if you would be interested in coming on
Speaker 1: the show to talk to us. And what I got
Speaker 1: back was a long and very detailed automatic response, and
Speaker 1: it had a list of frequently asked questions that I
Speaker 1: assume was to head off the questions you get from
Speaker 1: a lot of people that can be answered really easily.
Speaker 1: And then it had another list of contacts that wait
Speaker 1: before before you did you? Did you look at any
Speaker 1: of the frequently asked questions? I didn't. I assumed it wasn't.
Speaker 1: I assumed none of my issues. So so here's what
Speaker 1: I recommended you do at some point to go back
Speaker 1: to those and look at the last two. The last
Speaker 1: two are a general positive response or a general negative response.
Speaker 1: So I asked people, if you just want me to say, yes,
Speaker 1: you're right, you're smart, and so on, click here and
Speaker 1: you get the YouTube with me agreeing with you. And
Speaker 1: if you want me to disagree with you, there's another
Speaker 1: link to another YouTube. Will I tell you it's a
Speaker 1: stupid idea and you should never do that. But but
Speaker 1: there's some there's some real answers there as well. I
Speaker 1: love that it's the most entertaining automatic email response I
Speaker 1: think I've ever received. But yeah, it assumes people read
Speaker 1: automatic email responses. Well I did. I mean, as soon
Speaker 1: as I saw it, I saw that there was enough
Speaker 1: there that I was probably going to have to do
Speaker 1: a little more work than just emailing you and forgetting
Speaker 1: about it. So I saw that if you had an
Speaker 1: interview request, for example, you should email your publicists. And
Speaker 1: I did that, and here we are. Can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about this, what led to you developing
Speaker 1: that response, and you know, like how you got there? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So first, well, you know, I do apologize because it's
Speaker 1: kind of an arrogant thing to do, right. People email
Speaker 1: each other and all of a sudden I say, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, I know you emailed me, but you know,
Speaker 1: here's the whole list of the emails and things I
Speaker 1: want you to do to email me. And there's some
Speaker 1: something very arrogant about it. And I've been holding off
Speaker 1: for a while trying not to do that. But um,
Speaker 1: the same thing is that I get about three hundred
Speaker 1: emails a day, and it's just very hard to to manage.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's there's like a level of personal stress,
Speaker 1: you know, waking up in the morning and seeing you know,
Speaker 1: handling some emails, just waiting. Sometimes I wake up and
Speaker 1: now early just to do email, and an hour later
Speaker 1: when I just finished, I have more email then when
Speaker 1: I started. So so, partially I think that when people
Speaker 1: send an email, we're not really good at conveying our intentions,
Speaker 1: like what exactly do you want? What? What? How? How
Speaker 1: you do it? What is this email about? You're asking
Speaker 1: a question? Do you want something? So, so emails are
Speaker 1: often long and hard to understand what people exactly know.
Speaker 1: I need to read the long email and say what
Speaker 1: what do they actually want from me at the end
Speaker 1: of this of this email? Um so so part of
Speaker 1: it is just the inability to to cope and the
Speaker 1: stress that comes with it. So so I had this
Speaker 1: outgoing message and then I try to direct people two
Speaker 1: different things. So first of all, I say, if you
Speaker 1: want to me to give a talk, my schedule is online.
Speaker 1: Um you can look every day of the year where
Speaker 1: I'm at and you can see by yourself if I'm
Speaker 1: busy or not. And then if you if you want
Speaker 1: to if you still want to write me after all
Speaker 1: of this, please go to this a website. And I
Speaker 1: got somebody to write me a program that is called
Speaker 1: short will. That's the term we gave it. And in
Speaker 1: that system, I asked people to write me, but by
Speaker 1: first answering a few questions. So I ask people to
Speaker 1: tell me what is this about? Is this a request
Speaker 1: for talking, interview advice, just to chat, exchange information the
Speaker 1: different options, and then they ask people tell me when
Speaker 1: they want an answer by do you want like for
Speaker 1: me to drop everything and answer immediately, end of the day,
Speaker 1: end of the week, end of the month, or no
Speaker 1: response necessary. And and then I say, okay, now tell
Speaker 1: me what the question is. And this has actually been
Speaker 1: incredibly useful. So let me ask you to kind of
Speaker 1: guess from all the people who write me through this system,
Speaker 1: what percentage of the emails do you think having the
Speaker 1: title drop everything and answer me immediately? I would think
Speaker 1: a very low percentage, or maybe it's a lot of people,
Speaker 1: because I don't know. I think I'm important and you
Speaker 1: are important, But but you know, what do you think
Speaker 1: is the percent give me numbers? I don't know. I
Speaker 1: would say maybe Becca, I have to go high now,
Speaker 1: so okay, so it's two percent, right, So so first
Speaker 1: of maybe two even maybe even two percent is too high.
Speaker 1: But but it is amazing, right when you give people
Speaker 1: a chance to stop and reflect and say, shoot the person.
Speaker 1: The moment you send somebody an email to somebody, it
Speaker 1: does beep, right, and they do, to some degree, even
Speaker 1: for a few seconds, stop everything and look at it's
Speaker 1: what you've asked them. And I give people, you know,
Speaker 1: the request to tell me like what's the time scale,
Speaker 1: and very very few people say drop everything and answer
Speaker 1: me now. And that's a wonderful thing because I have
Speaker 1: my my email set up so that if people say
Speaker 1: that my email pinks and I'm notified immediately. If it's not,
Speaker 1: it goes to a different inbox. What I love about
Speaker 1: that is that that figure is probably a lot lower
Speaker 1: than as the email receiver. That's you probably have a
Speaker 1: higher percentage of emails that you would personally think or
Speaker 1: drop everything and respond now emails. So if you are
Speaker 1: making the decision, you might think it's a higher percentage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and but you know so, so two percent of
Speaker 1: the people say please answer me very quickly, and I try.
Speaker 1: But the rest of them, they go into folded that
Speaker 1: says end of the day, end of the week, end
Speaker 1: of the month, and and I deal with those in time,
Speaker 1: and everybody gets to benefit. I don't get my I
Speaker 1: don't get my email. My work interrupted three hundred times
Speaker 1: a day, right for every usually for every email you get,
Speaker 1: you get a notification. This way, I get a notification
Speaker 1: only for the things that need immediately immediately response and
Speaker 1: then and not. The question is what percentage of the
Speaker 1: email you think have the title no response necessary, the
Speaker 1: classification no response necessary. I would think yeah, I would
Speaker 1: think that one. Because if you're forced to think about
Speaker 1: it and you realize there's no response necessary, maybe that's
Speaker 1: when you just back off and don't send the email
Speaker 1: at all. It's more about what my father. I don't
Speaker 1: think you're right in the white bother right. If somebody says,
Speaker 1: you know, thank you, I want you to know I
Speaker 1: read this book, I thought about this, or somebody says
Speaker 1: here is an article that I think you might be
Speaker 1: interested in reading. So we wrote this little program called Filter,
Speaker 1: and we asked people to check it out. And this
Speaker 1: program goes into email and basically takes forty of your
Speaker 1: of your last emails and say when would you want
Speaker 1: to see this email? And we did a couple of ways.
Speaker 1: The way that filter works is by the name of
Speaker 1: the person, right the email that comes from this person
Speaker 1: when you want to see it. But we also did
Speaker 1: it in another way through a different approach, and we
Speaker 1: sample four emails from people. We went to a company,
Speaker 1: a big, big tech company. For each person, we took
Speaker 1: fully of the emails they sent and forty of the
Speaker 1: emails that they received, and we said, for those emails,
Speaker 1: which one of those like? We went one by one
Speaker 1: and we said, for each one of those, is this
Speaker 1: email you wanted to know immediately when you got it,
Speaker 1: within the hour, two hour, four hour, the end of
Speaker 1: the day, end of the week, or never wanted to
Speaker 1: know about it? And we did it for both things
Speaker 1: that people send out and for the things that they received.
Speaker 1: And unsurprisingly, you know, people, things that people said out
Speaker 1: they think are more important than they think that they received. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's fine, but the percentage of things that people have
Speaker 1: said they wanted to never know about was was between
Speaker 1: fot and that's because we have so much email running
Speaker 1: around that you put you you add people just in
Speaker 1: case they might want to know one day you wanted
Speaker 1: to be in their archives. So if they want to
Speaker 1: to get it one day, they'll have it there. But
Speaker 1: you certainly don't want people to be disturbed in the
Speaker 1: middle of the work day to basically be notified that
Speaker 1: there are you know, the eighth person B. C. Seed
Speaker 1: on some email about a new procedure that is happening
Speaker 1: in the company. Right, you want to be able to
Speaker 1: say you sent it to them. You want to say,
Speaker 1: and then at some point they search for it. You
Speaker 1: want them to have access to it. The idea that
Speaker 1: this something needs to beep and interrupt somebody's day multiple times,
Speaker 1: it is kind of shocking. And you know we took
Speaker 1: We take lots of different types of communications and we
Speaker 1: call them email, like when things come to your house
Speaker 1: in the mail, at least you see regular envelopes and postcards,
Speaker 1: and you see junk mail, and you see catalogs, and
Speaker 1: they look very different and you know how to approach
Speaker 1: them differently. Right, You never start by opening the ones
Speaker 1: that are You start by the personal letters and the
Speaker 1: rest of them. You probably kind of know immediately that
Speaker 1: there's nothing in a hurry about this but an email.
Speaker 1: We treat everything is if we're in a hurry, right,
Speaker 1: And Gmail has made an attempt to try its hand
Speaker 1: at sorting these emails into the most important and less important,
Speaker 1: right they have. But but here's the thing. There's a
Speaker 1: huge difference between important and urgent. And this is no
Speaker 1: disrespect to my mother, but but everything my mother rights
Speaker 1: me is important. Nothing has yet been urgent. And and
Speaker 1: I think that what what we need to do is
Speaker 1: we need to think both about importance and urgency. You're
Speaker 1: you're a behavioral economist. Are you using behavioral economics when
Speaker 1: developing these apps and websites and theories? Yeah? So partially
Speaker 1: you know this question about how do we frame things? Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's let's start from the beginning. One thing is,
Speaker 1: I am actually acutely aware of the cost of distraction. Right.
Speaker 1: Somebody doesn't know the research might say, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: my phone BIPs, nothing happens. But the reality is if
Speaker 1: your phone bibs or your computer bibs, something big happens.
Speaker 1: You're just not aware how big it is. So there
Speaker 1: was one study in which they took undergrads and they
Speaker 1: got them to solve math problems in the computer, and
Speaker 1: they paid them by how many math problems they were solving, right,
Speaker 1: so they were highly motivated to solve these math problems
Speaker 1: as quickly as possible. And they asked them to put
Speaker 1: their phone on the side and not to touch their
Speaker 1: phone for the time that they were solving these problems,
Speaker 1: and unbeknown to them, from time to time they would
Speaker 1: text them, and from time to time they would call them.
Speaker 1: And what they saw was the incredible reduction in people's
Speaker 1: ability to solve these problems, not only when the phone
Speaker 1: was being called or vibrating because of texts, but it
Speaker 1: lasted for a few minutes after that. So when when
Speaker 1: we have a notification on that something is happening, we think, oh,
Speaker 1: it's just that notification, But in ten seconds we're back
Speaker 1: to it. Now we're not really back to it. So
Speaker 1: I I have an agenda of fighting notifications, so I'm
Speaker 1: aware of of the cost of distraction that I'm trying
Speaker 1: to minimize it. That I think is number one. The
Speaker 1: second thing is this idea of thinking about urgency rather
Speaker 1: than importance. And you know, I wish I could ask
Speaker 1: people how how important is your email? Could I live
Speaker 1: without it? But but that that's aside understanding that the
Speaker 1: real issue is urgent, seeing what is the time frame
Speaker 1: of how to deal with this? And that email create
Speaker 1: a tremendous burden when you have a big to do
Speaker 1: list and you are burndened by the fact that you
Speaker 1: have a big to do list and it just sits
Speaker 1: there on your mind and weighs on you. And I
Speaker 1: have a big one, and we all have actually big ones,
Speaker 1: often in the form of email that just sits there
Speaker 1: and wait for us to respond to it. So I'm
Speaker 1: doing as much as I can to think about what
Speaker 1: are those kind of cognitive challenges that we've created for us,
Speaker 1: how much stress are they creating? And what can we
Speaker 1: do to fight them? So let me ask you on
Speaker 1: that urgency topic. Has have you ever been stung by
Speaker 1: your by putting your phone to sleep? Because I think
Speaker 1: that's a big worry that people have that they'll miss
Speaker 1: something urgent. Yeah, I have. But but you know, this
Speaker 1: question of you know, what are you willing to lose
Speaker 1: for what gain? Is a question of do you appreciate
Speaker 1: the gain and the losses? Right? So what happens I
Speaker 1: think that we all see the losses like a missed
Speaker 1: call and you say, my goodness, I would have gone
Speaker 1: to this other building that that happened to me. I
Speaker 1: went to the wrong place for a meeting, and from
Speaker 1: time to time I missed something. Yeah, there is a cost,
Speaker 1: but the question is what's the benefit. And if you
Speaker 1: think that the benefit is very small, you say not
Speaker 1: worth it. But if you realize how big the benefit
Speaker 1: is of not having it, then you would be willing
Speaker 1: to take some cost for it. That's such an economist viewpoint.
Speaker 1: Just think of cost benefit analysis. You have to you
Speaker 1: have to write. So here's another principle that we find
Speaker 1: is that there are things in life that are more
Speaker 1: visible and there are things in life that are less visible.
Speaker 1: So you know, email is very visible, and the real
Speaker 1: work you want to do is less visible. Think about
Speaker 1: like something like writing a book. Right, And you don't
Speaker 1: have on your calendar every day two hours dedicated to
Speaker 1: writing a book. It's just something you you want to do,
Speaker 1: and slowly you can. You work, and you work, and
Speaker 1: you work, but but email comes. And now the question
Speaker 1: is which one takes priority, the book or email. Email
Speaker 1: is here and it shows up. And there's a beautiful
Speaker 1: term called structural procrastination, the feeling that we make progress
Speaker 1: even though the only thing we're doing is making to
Speaker 1: do list and crossing them off, or you know, deleting
Speaker 1: email that nobody should have sent us from the beginning.
Speaker 1: But it gives us the sense of progress. Who is
Speaker 1: writing a book doesn't give you the same feeling of
Speaker 1: progress because maybe you work the whole day to try
Speaker 1: and explain some topic and at the end of the
Speaker 1: day decide you didn't do a good job and you
Speaker 1: have to start again tomorrow. I feel like like we
Speaker 1: don't get the same sense of progress. We get a
Speaker 1: sense of progress from all of these emails and to
Speaker 1: do list and things like that, but it's not the
Speaker 1: real progress. I mean, how many people are going to
Speaker 1: die happy knowing that they you know, they got to
Speaker 1: invoke zero seven twenty one days during their lives. This
Speaker 1: is just not the stuff that makes long happiness. But
Speaker 1: because it is present and immediate and beeps and somebody
Speaker 1: is waiting, it actually takes precedent over the things that
Speaker 1: are important to us. We let other people determine our
Speaker 1: priorities rather than us controlling them. Taking this approach, the
Speaker 1: behavioral economist approach, means kind of trying to affect other
Speaker 1: people's behavior. You know, it also means so I think
Speaker 1: it's the first thing it means is it means to
Speaker 1: understand the real costs and benefits and understand that our
Speaker 1: psychology is not mechanical, and something like a notification or
Speaker 1: something like it to do list can can miss direct us,
Speaker 1: and something like it to do list can switch our
Speaker 1: priority lists and so on. Then the second thing is
Speaker 1: to try different things, right, just experiment, just try to
Speaker 1: figure out what works and doesn't work. And then in
Speaker 1: this particular case, it also meant, you know, even though
Speaker 1: it's arrogant and um, you know, not a nice thing
Speaker 1: to do, let's let's put as on the people who
Speaker 1: are writing me because I can't find another solution. I
Speaker 1: wish I did. But but you know this, this other
Speaker 1: thing that is happening with this email response is it
Speaker 1: gives me permission to respond more slowly. Right, so, so
Speaker 1: we have this idea of we expect things very very quickly,
Speaker 1: but but the moment you have a notification, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you say, hey, you know, it's it's okay
Speaker 1: not to respond so quickly, and we're trying and approach.
Speaker 1: This is just in design stages, but you know, lots
Speaker 1: of times you you call somebody and they're driving. When
Speaker 1: you text somebody and driving and you don't know. And
Speaker 1: one of the things we're trying to do is for
Speaker 1: your phone to respond automatically when you're driving, say thanks
Speaker 1: for the call, Dan can enter now he's driving, or
Speaker 1: thanks for the text, Dan can't respond now he's driving.
Speaker 1: And that would basically clear the feeling that you have
Speaker 1: to respond quickly. Plus it would make it so that
Speaker 1: if you do respond quickly, people would say, hey, are
Speaker 1: you driving and texting at the same time. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: could make the roads a lot safer if people really
Speaker 1: used it. But but we do have. You know, the
Speaker 1: the natural way of discussion is you ask a question
Speaker 1: and you respond. You don't wait three hours. So so
Speaker 1: we have a tendency a desire to respond quickly, and
Speaker 1: and and this email buffer kind of gives me permission
Speaker 1: to say, no, I can I can focus for the
Speaker 1: next few hours, and and it could be Okay, well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on and talking to
Speaker 1: us about email Okay, bye. I want to go back
Speaker 1: to this idea that Dan brought up about structured procrastination.
Speaker 1: We've talked about this before on the show, and I
Speaker 1: agree that it's a thing and definitely a problem when
Speaker 1: you do something that's busy work and convince yourself that
Speaker 1: it's real work. And that is my big complaint about
Speaker 1: in Buck zero in a way, Oh yeah, exactly, that
Speaker 1: was your whole main first problem with it. But I
Speaker 1: want to push back on this a little bit and
Speaker 1: say that sometimes email is a part of my job.
Speaker 1: I think communication is a part of our jobs and
Speaker 1: an important part of our jobs. Like we don't a
Speaker 1: lot of us, at least in my job and a
Speaker 1: lot of other people's jobs. We don't just work in
Speaker 1: these vacuums like communicating the skill it's part. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't like this idea that, like all email, it's
Speaker 1: a waste of time, right, we dismiss email as this
Speaker 1: distraction from our work, But for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: email is our work. It's part of our job, so
Speaker 1: getting Yeah, as you say, communication is a skill. And
Speaker 1: I think we often hear of these apps or movements
Speaker 1: to not have email from people whose jobs are more solitary,
Speaker 1: like engineers, for example, who aren't known for their communication skills.
Speaker 1: And I think that it's not the reality for some
Speaker 1: of us, like me, whose job is super communication based Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you don't always have a job where you have
Speaker 1: like a tangible product, you know, I mean you your journalists,
Speaker 1: so you can say I wrote this article, that's what
Speaker 1: I did today, or that's what I did this week.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of people whose job descriptions
Speaker 1: are a little bit more nebulous, or they coordinate projects,
Speaker 1: and email is kind of the way that they show
Speaker 1: their work. Yeah, which I guess is why it does
Speaker 1: kind of get out of control because it'll it'll be
Speaker 1: like I am doing this thing, c C. Everyone. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have definitely worked in places where you get a
Speaker 1: lot of unnecessary updates on projects with bullet points from
Speaker 1: people that just show you so that they know how
Speaker 1: to format emails. Well, that's let's all to say that
Speaker 1: emails not going away. And I love it and I
Speaker 1: want you all to to I don't love it yet,
Speaker 1: but I think I can handle it all right. And
Speaker 1: now it's time for half big takes, happy fake takes
Speaker 1: before we get to our own half pig takes, we
Speaker 1: had a listener right in and remember you can call
Speaker 1: into our hotline at two on two six zero one
Speaker 1: six six and leave your own half baked take. So
Speaker 1: our listener Emma wrote in saying in meetings, women should
Speaker 1: not take notes. Even though I feel more comfortable taking
Speaker 1: notes because it's the best way I can remember what
Speaker 1: we discussed, I end up becoming the de facto secretary
Speaker 1: of the meeting, so now I'm spending more time focusing
Speaker 1: on remembering the meeting and not taking notes. I have
Speaker 1: no idea if this is going to work or not,
Speaker 1: but hey, that's why you call it a half baked take.
Speaker 1: I liked this because she's so right. She's so right,
Speaker 1: but also not even the gender thing. When I take
Speaker 1: notes and meetings, I mean, you should look at my
Speaker 1: notepad and you've seen it. First of all, it's eligible,
Speaker 1: but also it's mostly me doodling my name over and over,
Speaker 1: Like what are we Are we really going to look
Speaker 1: back at those notes? I think notes can be useful,
Speaker 1: and I'm with her on being a little bit at
Speaker 1: sea about like what if I don't If I don't
Speaker 1: take notes, how well I know what's going on? But
Speaker 1: there is Like I was at a meeting recently with
Speaker 1: a few men and a few woman in the person
Speaker 1: who usually takes notes in the meeting wasn't there, and
Speaker 1: the man leading the meeting was like, well, somebody ought
Speaker 1: to take notes, and I just sat there frozen and
Speaker 1: I was hoping none of the women in the room
Speaker 1: were given and eventually one of them did it. Just
Speaker 1: there's something wrong with taking notes if it works for you,
Speaker 1: But being the note taker, I don't know. It just
Speaker 1: feels kind of like a demotion and a meeting. Sometimes
Speaker 1: maybe it'll make people pay better attention. Anyway, maybe everyone
Speaker 1: should take notes. Another half pick that I just made
Speaker 1: her half bay take a two third take wait, three fours. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to mad. What is your half piked
Speaker 1: idea this week? Francesca? Okay, this one might blow your mind,
Speaker 1: so be prepared. I have the perfect response to a
Speaker 1: passive aggressive comment of any kind, and it will just
Speaker 1: it will stun your passive aggressive opponent into silence or confusion.
Speaker 1: It is thank you. Do you want to do? You
Speaker 1: want to try an example? Okay, so say something passive
Speaker 1: aggressive to me. I don't even know I needed I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know. Oh. Um, just be like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's so great that you don't really feel the need
Speaker 1: to advance too quickly in your job. Oh it's so
Speaker 1: great that you don't feel the need to advance too
Speaker 1: quickly in your job. Oh my god, thank you, it's
Speaker 1: pretty good, aren't you? Just like disarmed? And because the
Speaker 1: thing is is your instinct is to respond to passive
Speaker 1: aggressive comments by saying something that shows that you know
Speaker 1: that they're being passive aggressive and you're going to be
Speaker 1: kind of snotty too, and then you say something passive aggresive,
Speaker 1: and then it just goes back and forth. But if
Speaker 1: you say thank you, it's just not the response that
Speaker 1: they were looking for. And it also it frees you
Speaker 1: from having to ever feel affected by what they say,
Speaker 1: because you can just pretend everything is a compliment. Try it, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna try it. I'll let you know how it goes.
Speaker 1: I'm not sold, but I'm not not sold. I just
Speaker 1: don't know if I understand. Thank you anyway, what's your
Speaker 1: half bag? Take mine? Is that people are putting their
Speaker 1: grocery store baskets away improperly. Oh I worry I might
Speaker 1: be doing this. Tell me what I'm doing wrong. So
Speaker 1: I use a basket when I go to the grocery store,
Speaker 1: and usually not getting that many things like a carry basket,
Speaker 1: And so you go to the register to check out.
Speaker 1: You put your things on the belt, and then you
Speaker 1: put your basket at the front of the register to
Speaker 1: stack it up, and often people will put it so
Speaker 1: that the handles criss cross on top of each other,
Speaker 1: making it impossible for me to stack mine inside that basket.
Speaker 1: And it's wrong and rude and really annoying. So then
Speaker 1: I have to take an extra second to fix the
Speaker 1: error so I can stack mine in right when they
Speaker 1: could have just taken a split second to do it
Speaker 1: on there before exactly. And I get it. That's one
Speaker 1: second is a little annoying, it really is. It's it's
Speaker 1: the feeling I get when I make my bed in
Speaker 1: the morning. I don't want to do it. This will
Speaker 1: take one second, and I do it and then everything
Speaker 1: is in order. And it's also just this fundamental thing
Speaker 1: of remembering like we're all living in a society together.
Speaker 1: Let's just not be jerks. I love that. Alright, this
Speaker 1: has been half big Takes. Hath Thicke takes. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening to another episode of Game Plan. You can find
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at rs Greenfield and I'm at Francesca today.
Speaker 1: You can tweet your Hathnike takes at us at at
Speaker 1: game Plan, or you can call into our very cool hotline.
Speaker 1: It's two on two six seven zero one six six.
Speaker 1: If you like this episode, please rate, review us on iTunes,
Speaker 1: and subscribe. And while you're looking at Bloomberg podcasts, why
Speaker 1: don't you check out material World, a podcast about all
Speaker 1: the things that we buy. This week's episode is all
Speaker 1: about tequila. This show was produced by Liz Smith and
Speaker 1: Magnus Hendrickson. The Head of podcast is Alec McCabe and
Speaker 1: we will see you next week later. H oh, that
Speaker 1: is for another podcast episode. You know how I feel
Speaker 1: about that.