Speaker 1: How many emails have you received in the last twenty
Speaker 1: four hours? Maybe fifty one hundred, five hundred. I mean
Speaker 1: chances are it was a lot, and your inbox was
Speaker 1: probably responsible for many interruptions in your day. But it
Speaker 1: doesn't have to be that way. Call Newport is the
Speaker 1: author of Deep Work and a World Without Email and
Speaker 1: a computer science professor at Georgetown University, and he has
Speaker 1: thought a lot about why email productivity hacks often not
Speaker 1: all that effective and instead why we need to attack
Speaker 1: the problem at the route. So, how can we get
Speaker 1: more deep work done without letting email take over our
Speaker 1: work date? And how can we find the bottlenecks in
Speaker 1: our organization's workflow? And how can meeting scheduling software free
Speaker 1: up time to focus. My name is doctor Amantha Imba.
Speaker 1: I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science
Speaker 1: consultancy Inventium. And this is how I work, a show
Speaker 1: about how to help you do your best work. On
Speaker 1: today's My Favorite Tip episode, we go back to an
Speaker 1: interview from the past and I pick out my favorite
Speaker 1: tip from that interview. In today's extract, I speak with
Speaker 1: cal about how we can change our workflow to dramatically
Speaker 1: reduce email in terms of low hanging fruit. Let's just
Speaker 1: imagine a typical professional services organization that's full of knowledge workers.
Speaker 1: Are there processes that you find tend to be low
Speaker 1: hanging fruit?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean there's a couple of things. One, meeting
Speaker 2: scheduling software has to be the standard. There cannot be
Speaker 2: meetings being scheduled with back and forth emails. Well what
Speaker 2: about Tuesday? No, Tuesday's not too good. What about Wednesday?
Speaker 2: I might be free in the afternoon. Is it a
Speaker 2: huge productivity sink? We don't realize it. But here's the issue.
Speaker 2: Setting up a meeting via email just back and forth
Speaker 2: might on average generate let's say six messages, right, So
Speaker 2: that's six times someone has to pay attention shift their
Speaker 2: context to that email inbox. But the thing about meeting
Speaker 2: scheduling is that it has to happen kind of quick, right,
Speaker 2: Like I don't want to spend a week to set
Speaker 2: up a meeting for you. That meeting might be in
Speaker 2: two days, right, So I have to check the inbox
Speaker 2: quite a bit for each of those messages so that
Speaker 2: I see it pretty soon after it comes. So now
Speaker 2: six messages might actually generate sixty inbox checks in just
Speaker 2: a couple of days, each one of those inbox checks,
Speaker 2: breaking your concentration and initiating a very cognitively expensive context shift.
Speaker 2: Just one meeting, therefore, can be a scheduling one meeting
Speaker 2: could be a pretty big cognitive disaster. Now multiply that
Speaker 2: over ten or fifteen meetings you're trying to set up.
Speaker 2: That simple thing alone can significantly reduce a team's ability
Speaker 2: to get things done. So everyone should use meeting scheduling software. Great,
Speaker 2: let's do it. You know where my link is, schedule it.
Speaker 2: One email meeting gets scheduled, So I think that's low
Speaker 2: hanging fruit. Office hours are also low hanging fruit to
Speaker 2: small questions. What about this? I don't understand this? Can
Speaker 2: we quickly figure out when we want to do that?
Speaker 2: Who's going to take on this? As much as you
Speaker 2: can divert as possible to just come to my next
Speaker 2: office hours. Just come to my next office hours. We
Speaker 2: will talk in real time then, not back and forth
Speaker 2: messaging that is applicable to almost any industry. So do
Speaker 2: those two things, meeting scheduling software and office hours that
Speaker 2: can handle eighty percent of small questions, discussions and clarifications.
Speaker 2: Those two things alone for almost any team will make
Speaker 2: a huge difference.
Speaker 1: With meeting scheduling software, What are you currently recommending that
Speaker 1: people check out?
Speaker 2: Well, there's a bunch of tools that are relatively equivalent
Speaker 2: right now. I've used a couple. I've used Acuity in
Speaker 2: the past. At the moment, I'm using Calendly. I like
Speaker 2: them both. I mean, maybe Calendly has a slightly slicker interface.
Speaker 2: I think Microsoft Suite has its own meeting scheduling link
Speaker 2: type software built into it. I mean I occasionally get
Speaker 2: links from people that are built out of the Microsoft
Speaker 2: Productivity Suite. People like x dot ai a lot. It's
Speaker 2: another meeting scheduling tool for group meetings. Doodles pretty good.
Speaker 2: I think that's kind of a default. The other tools
Speaker 2: are getting those, but they're all pretty equivalent. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's not a hard thing that you're doing here. You're
Speaker 2: just trying to avoid the back and forth, like to
Speaker 2: the point it's so important. Let's say you want to
Speaker 2: set up a meeting with someone and for whatever reason,
Speaker 2: because of their personality, you just know that no matter
Speaker 2: how much you social engineer it, if you send them
Speaker 2: a link, they're going to be upset because you're at
Speaker 2: a lower station to them to even go through that
Speaker 2: software and manually list out fifteen different times they can
Speaker 2: choose from. That may seem like WHOA, that's really inefficient.
Speaker 2: That's going to take me ten minutes to list out
Speaker 2: all these times when I could just shoot off a
Speaker 2: message that says how about Wednesday? But spending fifteen minutes
Speaker 2: to list a bunch of times in an email that
Speaker 2: that person can then just grab one that is worth
Speaker 2: it because fifteen minutes concentrated in the one task is
Speaker 2: way less of a cost than six messages you have
Speaker 2: to check your inbox ten times for each. So even
Speaker 2: if you're just literally manually doing implementing this by just
Speaker 2: listing out a bunch of time slaying someone choose it,
Speaker 2: it's still a win because that's how devastating these unscheduled
Speaker 2: messages are.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed that tip from Cal and if
Speaker 1: you're enjoying How I Work, maybe you might want to
Speaker 1: tell somebody else about it and spread the productivity love.
Speaker 1: You can simply click on the little share icon wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to this podcast and maybe share it with
Speaker 1: someone who's drowning in their inbox. How I Work is
Speaker 1: produced by Inventing and with production support from Dead Set Studios.
Speaker 1: And thank you to Martin Imba who does the audio
Speaker 1: mix for every episode and makes this all sound much
Speaker 1: better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.