Speaker 1: Do you find yourself set up for a productive day
Speaker 1: only to be derailed by your emails? Checking and replying
Speaker 1: to emails always takes up more time than expected and
Speaker 1: can really bog us down and derail productivity. The problem
Speaker 1: of spending way too much time in my inbox has
Speaker 1: been bugging me for some time, so I was very
Speaker 1: excited to find out that Michael Bungay Stania has had
Speaker 1: similar problems and has been working on solutions. Michael is
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal best selling author of The Coaching Habit,
Speaker 1: which Brene Brown called a classic with over one point
Speaker 1: five million books sold. Michael was named the number one
Speaker 1: thought leader in coaching by Thinkers fifty and his insights
Speaker 1: have transformed how leaders all around the world work. He's
Speaker 1: clearly very busy and can't afford to waste time on emails,
Speaker 1: yet he still finds himself procrastinating with them. But he
Speaker 1: has a lot of strategies and tricks that we can
Speaker 1: all benefit from using. Welcome to How I Work, a
Speaker 1: show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. On today's Quick Win episode,
Speaker 1: we go back to an interview from the past and
Speaker 1: reveal a quick win. But this one was actually so
Speaker 1: special that we kept it out of the main episode
Speaker 1: so we could share it with you today. To start,
Speaker 1: I asked Michael about his experience being stuck in the
Speaker 1: email cycle and how he's working to break free from it.
Speaker 2: Like, I'm struggling a little bit to know how to
Speaker 2: break it, because I'm learning that, you know, for sure,
Speaker 2: one of the ways to break email addictions stop sending emails,
Speaker 2: because emails sent create emails that respond to it. But
Speaker 2: you know, I have too many email accounts, Like I
Speaker 2: have one for NBS dot Works, I have one for
Speaker 2: Boxer Crowns, a company I started. I have one a Gmail,
Speaker 2: one for personal. I have one for change Signal, a
Speaker 2: new project that I'm launching. So one is I've got
Speaker 2: too many email boxes anyway, But that's not the real problem.
Speaker 2: The real problem is I will go to answering email
Speaker 2: as a form of busyness. It's relatively easy. I can
Speaker 2: work hard at my screen and go tap tap, tap tap,
Speaker 2: and I can have small little hits of dopamine as
Speaker 2: I make progress, and I hit send on a bunch
Speaker 2: of things. But do I want to die and have
Speaker 2: on my grave. Michael managed his email quite well. At times,
Speaker 2: I'm like, that's that's not kind of aspirational for me,
Speaker 2: but I notice just how comforting it is. I just
Speaker 2: noticed that because I run my own organization and I'm
Speaker 2: the boss, in some ways, I can dream about email
Speaker 2: in a way that some people, Paul won't be able
Speaker 2: to dream about email. But what I know is that
Speaker 2: I am outstanding at hacking every system I set up
Speaker 2: to try and protect me from email. So you know,
Speaker 2: I have I think called Mailman, which means that the
Speaker 2: email only gets delivered three times a day. But I
Speaker 2: know how to hack that. So if I need to
Speaker 2: kind of get it, I can do that. I use Superhuman,
Speaker 2: which helps you get faster and email, and that's helpful
Speaker 2: as well, but I still spend a lot of time
Speaker 2: doing my email on Superhuman. So literally, just before this call,
Speaker 2: I was with Claudine is my assistant, and I'm like Claudine.
Speaker 2: But March is fairly open. The goal is by the
Speaker 2: end of March, I am not the first touch on
Speaker 2: any single email. Everything gets kind of worked through you first,
Speaker 2: and then I get what's left over. Now I don't
Speaker 2: know what that looks like, because I'm like, in Claudine,
Speaker 2: you need to set the rules on this, because if
Speaker 2: I set the rules, I break the rules and I'm
Speaker 2: a nightmare. So I've just asked the guy, so let's
Speaker 2: go away, and I have you draft to first go
Speaker 2: at this, which is what's the process, what's the system
Speaker 2: that will keep me out of email? What's the price
Speaker 2: I pay for breaking the rules? Because part of the
Speaker 2: challenge for me is because I'm the founder, there's no
Speaker 2: price for disobedience. Every guy's oh, Michael, he's just you know,
Speaker 2: he'll do whatever he wants. He's such a maverick, and
Speaker 2: I'm like, it's terrible. I need there to be a price.
Speaker 2: So it's like, what is it? Is it? Like, Michael,
Speaker 2: you have to donate five hundred dollars every time you
Speaker 2: answer an email before it's been assigned to you, Like
Speaker 2: that would be a high incentive not to do email
Speaker 2: if it's costing me five hundred dollars a pop. Because
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, I like it, but I don't like
Speaker 2: it that much. So we need to have a think
Speaker 2: about consequences for me misbehaving. So there's me confessing that
Speaker 2: are my struggles with email you're up against that as well.
Speaker 2: What lessons are you learning? What's your best current wid
Speaker 2: and how to manage email?
Speaker 1: I mean a really simple one. I also use Superhuman.
Speaker 1: Is that I just don't open Superhuman. If Superhuman is
Speaker 1: not open on my computer, it's kind of a hassle
Speaker 1: to wait the five seconds for the software to reboot
Speaker 1: and open itself and load all the emails. And that
Speaker 1: is enough of a barrier to go. Do I really
Speaker 1: need to be in my inbox? I think where I
Speaker 1: come unstuck is when I need to find something in
Speaker 1: my inbox or when I need to send something. Let's
Speaker 1: just say I had a task to do that was
Speaker 1: maybe a deep sprint in the morning that was put
Speaker 1: together a proposal for a client, and then I want
Speaker 1: closure on that task, which involves sending the email, and
Speaker 1: to do that. I used to have a little plug
Speaker 1: into Chrome when I was on the Google ecosystem, but
Speaker 1: I haven't found an equivalent now that we're on the
Speaker 1: Microsoft ecosystem and Superhuman does have a plug in you,
Speaker 1: It's like it's all or nothing. You open your inbox
Speaker 1: or you keep it closed. Whereas there used to be
Speaker 1: this great Chrome plug in. I can't remember what it
Speaker 1: was called, which is not very helpful. But you hit
Speaker 1: a button, it would open a compose email window and
Speaker 1: then you could send the window without getting into your
Speaker 1: inbox and that saved me a lot of inbox time.
Speaker 1: So that's where I come unstuck. Where the deep work
Speaker 1: thing that I'm working on or need to finish, I
Speaker 1: need to open up Superhuman and that's a problem that
Speaker 1: I need to solve for right now.
Speaker 2: I mean, the challenges is like more efficient for me
Speaker 2: makes less efficient for somebody else. Like I could draft
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of things in Google say or something
Speaker 2: like that, and go Ake Claudine, I've drafted the emails,
Speaker 2: can you now paste them into the email and send
Speaker 2: them on my behalf? And that would save me from
Speaker 2: getting into inbox stuff, but would also mean Claudina is
Speaker 2: now doing stuff which just doesn't feel particularly rewarding for her.
Speaker 2: Oh great, I get to cut and paste Michael's emails
Speaker 2: into an email thing. So anyway, I'll be delighted to
Speaker 2: see what she comes up with in terms of trying
Speaker 2: to save me from myself.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. I feel like that's maybe a hack that
Speaker 1: I can try because Jem and I will typically communicate
Speaker 1: on Microsoft teams Chat, and I'm not addicted to that
Speaker 1: at all. I could go for days without checking that.
Speaker 1: I have to remind myself to be in teams Chat.
Speaker 1: But also it's a good way to not be in
Speaker 1: my inbox but communicate with Jem. And so maybe that's
Speaker 1: the thing. Maybe I just I pace the email there
Speaker 1: because for Jem it would take her two minutes out
Speaker 1: of her day. And I might try that. I might
Speaker 1: try that clauding.
Speaker 2: And I do. There's a bunch of emails that I
Speaker 2: have not yet figured out how to access, and I'm
Speaker 2: trying not to hack that system. So when we have
Speaker 2: our meetings, we meet for an hour start an end
Speaker 2: of the week. She'll walk me through a bunch of
Speaker 2: inquiries or emails that have come in for me, and
Speaker 2: I'll go respond like this, and she'll make some notes
Speaker 2: and then she'll send those emails off and I don't
Speaker 2: get to see them. That works really well. So maybe
Speaker 2: there is a precedent which is like, actually, I'll just
Speaker 2: give you notes and you can compose the email on
Speaker 2: my behalf.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this little quick win with Michael.
Speaker 1: If you would like to listen to my full interview
Speaker 1: with him. You can find a link to that in
Speaker 1: the show notes. If you like today's show, make sure
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Speaker 1: when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on
Speaker 1: the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the
Speaker 1: Cooler Nation.