Bookworm Transcripts

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I saw your video interview with Jeff Sheldon.

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That was pretty great.

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- That was a fun one.

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- You did a thing this week as we recorded on

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your life mission, which obviously is something

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I am very excited about.

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You've been on the homework podcast.

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I mean, you're all over the place.

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- It's kind of fun.

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And I'm trying to do a little more too.

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And actually before some of this,

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I did the automators thing too.

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So like there's a bunch of these

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that I'm kind of, yeah, pushing some stuff out.

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It's amazing what ADD meds will do.

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So.

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(laughing)

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So yeah, it's been fun.

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It's been a good one.

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Good couple of three weeks, I guess.

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- So I'm familiar with the automators podcast.

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That was great, even though I'm technically

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not an omni-focus user anymore.

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I have not had a chance to listen to the homework podcast.

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You wanna give a little plug for that one?

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- Yeah, so that one, the homework podcast is one that,

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I can't say I listen to religiously,

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but that is one that I used to,

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it's one of the very first podcasts I ever subscribed to,

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way back in the day.

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That was back when it was Dave,

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Kayla, and Aaron, Mankey, and T.

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- Me too, yep.

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- So that was one of the early, early podcasts and such

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that I was a part of.

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That was when it was a part of,

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what was five by five before it was five by five?

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What was it called?

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- Oh geez, I don't remember.

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- But it was a part of that network

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that became Dan Benjamin's five by five network

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when he renamed it and such.

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I can't remember what it was called though.

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So it was a part of that.

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So it was kind of a cool thing for me

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to be a part of that show,

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but we talked a lot about a number of things,

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like pen and paper systems, of course.

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Dave was fascinated that I'm still using an HPDA,

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Merlin Mann's index cards in the back pocket thing.

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So we got into that, but we talked a little bit

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about like notes structures.

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He asked about obsidian to a degree,

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goals and how you choose to set things up.

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Goals in the sense of like,

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how do you decide what tools to use?

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So it was kind of a cool, wide ranging conversation

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that went a whole bunch of different directions

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'cause you know, that's what I do.

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So the whole thing was, can they keep Joe on task?

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That was the goal.

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And I don't know that they succeeded.

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(laughs)

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It was fun though.

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- I have not formally met Dave's co-hosts that Harry Marks.

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- Harry Marks, yeah.

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- Yeah, but I think he does a great job

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on the podcast and I've known Dave for a while.

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He's good people.

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- Yeah, yeah.

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He's actually gonna be joining me on analog,

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Joe here before too long as well.

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So that'll be kind of fun.

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- Cool.

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Well, we've got a lot to talk about today.

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So maybe we should jump in here and hammer out this follow up

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which I only had two action items.

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- Yep.

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- And typical Mike fashion.

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I don't really have any way of reporting on these.

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(laughs)

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- They were don't share the outcomes

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and use and instead of but.

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I feel like that one I've made some progress with.

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I'm really hoping I don't embarrass myself

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and do that here on the podcast.

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Having said that, we will see how it goes.

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- Okay, here's hoping.

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- Here's hoping.

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Let's talk about email.

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- Okay, I'm game.

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- So this book is A World Without Email by Kael Newport.

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And this is his newest book.

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It actually is a record this.

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Came out about a week ago.

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- Yep.

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- So we cranked through this one in order to record this today

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because unfortunately we did not get sent advanced copies.

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Although if you are a New York Times bestselling author

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and would like to send us non-fiction books

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ahead of publication.

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- Non-fryllies.

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- Non-sci-fi.

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Non, like all these things.

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- We get those.

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- It's almost daily.

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You realize this.

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- It's almost daily, we get one of these.

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- Yep.

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(laughs)

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- Yeah, so, but this was a quick read.

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Kael Newport is a great writer.

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This will be an interesting conversation, I am sure,

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because the arc of Kael Newport's writing

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has kind of gone all over the place in terms of

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like being very much in line with Joe's way of thinking

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and very much in line with my way of thinking,

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this one may or may not converge, we will see.

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(laughs)

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It was interesting, he mentioned, I think it was near the end,

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that he actually was working on this book

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as soon as he finished the manuscript for Deepwork.

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So it was kind of being developed alongside that one,

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which you can totally see,

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but then also digital minimalism came out in between there.

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And then if you go back even further,

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he kind of started off as like,

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how to get good grades as a college student

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and so good they can't ignore you,

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which at some point we're gonna have to cover that book

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'cause that book is--

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- Right, it's really good.

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- You have to go back in time for that one, yeah.

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- Yeah, but yeah, all that to say,

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this is the latest Kael Newport book.

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It looks awesome, just talking about like the physical book,

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this thing on the spine, this is genius, I love this.

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I've had a couple people who have looked at this

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and said specifically like, wow, that looks really neat.

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(laughs)

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- Yeah.

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- So very well designed, which is not kind of

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what I was expecting from a Kael Newport academic

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college professor type book.

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But yeah, let's jump into the contents here.

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There's a couple different sections,

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there's an introduction, which is pretty short,

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and then really two parts with a couple chapters each.

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So I have all the chapters listed in the outline here.

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We'll see if we hit all of these.

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I kind of think the conversation will happen

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based on the parts.

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- Right.

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- Part one is the case against email.

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Part two is principles for a world without email.

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And then our brief conclusion at the end,

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which is really his just commentary

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of a cool speech that somebody gave.

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(laughs)

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- Yeah, yeah.

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- But anything you wanna add about the book in general

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before we jump into the specifics here?

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- Well, I will say that the joke, right,

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was Joe has bad email practices.

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And the hope was that by us doing this,

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Mike is hoping to solve my email problems, I think.

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(laughs)

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'Cause I don't have good practices with email

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according to the broader productivity world.

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I would tend to argue with a lot of people over that.

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So going into this, we've talked about before,

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like what are your expectations when you go into this?

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And sometimes what you expect can kind of

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set the framework, I guess, that you view the book through,

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kind of set the lens, I guess,

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that you're looking at the book from.

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And I will point out that before I started reading this,

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I was coming at it very, very skeptical,

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which is backwards from the way I've normally come at

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Cal Newport's books, because you've heard all the hype

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about deep work and then we read deep work.

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And we was like, oh, well, this is supposedly

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a really good book, so we were excited about it.

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Digital minimalism, I had kind of the same viewpoint.

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So good, they can't ignore you.

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It's another that's we've heard a lot about.

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We haven't read that one,

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but I would expect good things about it.

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This one, a world without email,

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being somebody who works with people all over the place,

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email is very central to that.

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So I came at this, like, okay,

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I'm looking out at this book from a side-eye view.

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(laughs)

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- Yeah.

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- Instead of just diving in head-first with it.

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So I just wanna point that out, that I had that.

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On the onset before we jumped into reading this.

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So that said, having gone through it,

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I'll share my views as we go, of course,

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but I just wanna lay that foundation before we start

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driving through all the content here.

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- Yeah, I completely understand that because that is

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the exact same approach I had when we did the previous book

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Thinking in Bets.

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- Oh, sure, yeah.

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- I went into it.

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This is not gonna be for me, and I was pleasantly surprised.

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- Right.

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- So we'll see if you get there by the end.

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- Yep.

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(laughs)

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- By the end.

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I also wanna clarify here at the beginning,

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because I feel like the book title maybe makes this seem

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as a tactical guide to spending less time in email.

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It's really not that.

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It's very Cal Newport-esque, and let's just blow up

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the system and figure out how to put it back together

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to accomplish the things that we want.

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And I understand that that is completely not doable

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for a large percentage of people who would read this.

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You're self-included.

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So while I review a little bit and say,

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oh, you got bad email habits, I do also understand

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that you're not the one making the decisions

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about how these conversations necessarily are taking place.

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- Right.

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- And that is also not to say that if you are in a position

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like Joe, where you do have to deal with email,

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just part of the deal, then there is still,

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I think things that you can take from this book.

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So it's not like a CEO level type read necessarily,

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but we'll get into the conversation here.

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Let's start with the introduction.

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He starts with a story about a person who started work

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with the government and then right after being hired

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to be the director of innovation and entrepreneurship,

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the whole network broke based on a cyber attack

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and they didn't bring it back up

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because they weren't sure exactly what was going on.

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So they just decided to burn it all to the ground

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and destroy everything in the office they had a chip in it,

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which is fascinating just in and of itself.

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I felt like that story could be unpacked

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and be 40 pages long and that would be really entertaining,

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but typical Cal style, he tells a brief part of that story

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and then moves on, but the big takeaway from that story

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is that there was no email for six weeks.

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In a position where they had relied on email

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and I feel this does a great job of setting the tone

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and maybe disarming an argument from somebody like you

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who would say, I can't do this

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because they were in a position

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where if you would ask them, they would have said,

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I can't do this and then they had to do this

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and surprise, surprise, they found that they actually

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started doing better on their job

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'cause they had more white space

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and they were disconnected from the email.

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So what was your impression,

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how did you react to this story in this introduction?

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- It made a lot of sense, right?

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So if your email system is down

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and I'll put another preface here,

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I've had this happen not to me on my entire email system,

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but I have had cases when I first took my IT director

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position at the church, their email structure

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that they were on had all sorts of crazy problems

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and it would regularly go down.

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So I knew the moment the email was busted

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because they would call me.

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It's like, yo, we have a problem.

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So like I've seen this happen

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and although my email at the time

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through the church, like that particular email address

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that I had was I barely got anything on it.

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So it was not a big deal to me.

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If you removed the two email addresses

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that I use regularly for all of my online stuff,

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that would be a different story.

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That would be very different.

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But a couple of things about this was that,

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okay, so the email structure went down, right?

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And she was forced to do things outside of email, right?

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So she's making phone calls, she's, you know,

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a lot of phone calls, doing a lot of in-person meetings

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and such.

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So she started doing a lot of those things in place of email.

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Totally on board with that.

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I totally get it.

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I don't know how many times I call people

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whenever emails are getting out of hand.

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So that is a thing I definitely would agree with.

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The trick is that she had an excuse for it.

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Like this is something he doesn't really talk about

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in that there was a reason,

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a very justified reason that she was off of email for,

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it was a long time.

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And that period, whenever she talked to people,

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why didn't you get back to my email?

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They shut my email server down.

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Like, that's a pretty solid excuse.

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So you have a justified reason.

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You couldn't do that on your own.

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Like you couldn't just run that experiment for yourself

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and say, I'm just not gonna use email at all for three months

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and then you're calling people and driving to people

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and doing all that.

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And they talk, why didn't you get back to my email?

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I just don't wanna use my email for three months.

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Yep, that's not gonna fly.

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So there's two sides of that coin.

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One, if forced, yes, you can be better at things

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and yes, you can get better at doing things without email.

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I think that's very solid.

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But if you don't have that forced upon you,

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you then have to use the rest of his book

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to understand how you can implement some of the benefits

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of what she was able to receive

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without the catastrophic server went down scenario.

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Yes, I agree with you.

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This reminded me this story

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because it took place in the government

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of the story of the army using Scrum

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during the Battle of the Bulge in that book

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when we covered it because they basically needed

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to find an alternative 'cause what they were doing

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wasn't working and then the minute that they got things

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under control, they went back to the old way of doing things.

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Right, right.

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Which is very typical, I think.

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They had to figure out a way to work without this

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and then when it became available,

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I'm sure they don't still not do email.

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But it's also interesting because I feel a lot of what

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Cal does with his latest books is try to paint a picture

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of a different world and he's not necessarily trying to say

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like these are the steps to get their typical

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productivity system style.

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But he's trying to inspire you like,

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hey, think about this because you probably never even considered

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what this would look like or that this was even a possibility.

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And so I feel like at this point, he's just trying to help you

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to think that this is more than just a pie in the sky,

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pipe dream, maybe there's aspects of this that you could apply.

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He also introduces in this section the idea of the hyperactive

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hive mind which comes up over and over and over again.

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So let's define this real quick.

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He says, the hyperactive hive mind is a workflow centered

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around ongoing conversations fueled by unstructured

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and unscheduled messages delivered through digital

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communication tools like email and instant messenger services.

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And I think everybody can kind of relate to that definition

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and has felt the pain of that in some way, shape or form.

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The other thing he says here is that the future of work

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is increasingly cognitive.

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This is a theme from deep work.

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I 100% agree with that.

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We have to therefore understand how our brains work.

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And he's basically saying in this whole book that email

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is not in alignment with that.

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So I do believe he is 100% correct when he says that

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a world without email is not only possible but inevitable.

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And people look at me like I've got a third eye

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in the middle of my forehead when I say that.

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But it just seems so obvious to me that this is not going

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to be the thing who knows how far down the road.

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It's probably not five years, it's probably not 10 years,

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maybe 20 years, 30 years, whatever, but email's not great.

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There's got to be a better way.

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And eventually we will collectively stumble on this

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and say, yes, this is better.

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The problem I think though is that we take this path

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of least resistance, especially with our communication.

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He talks about this later on in the book.

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And we were talking about this before we hit record.

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People will send a one minute message with a question

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and then it requires an hour long response.

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Like the guy who emailed me and he's like,

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"Hey, what do I have to do to get a response?"

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I just asked a simple question.

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About troubleshooting his monitor setup.

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Like I don't know.

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It could be this, this or this.

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And I finally did reply with three or four paragraphs

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and the whole time I'm doing it

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and I'm like, this is exactly what Cal was talking about.

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- Yes, this is why, and I haven't been as good about this,

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but for a long time, my email was,

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I had a lot of emails like what you're talking about.

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If you write scripts and you do things

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to help people automate their systems,

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you get stuff like that.

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Like this is what you're talking about too.

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Like you get these things, right?

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I don't know how many emails I have in my inbox right now

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of, "Hey Joe, can you get this script to do X, Y, and Z?"

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And like if it's somebody who texts me,

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like we know each other well enough

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that you have my phone number,

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generally I say yes to those because I know

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that it is something that that person cannot do

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and usually they're a little afraid to ask

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by that point they've taken like three weeks

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to conjure up the courage to say,

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"Joe, will you help me with this?"

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Like I know that.

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Yes, one of them's right here.

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So yes, I'm aware of that.

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Those I generally say yes to.

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The ones in my email,

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if it's people I don't know, no offense,

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but I get so many of them it's impossible

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for me to do that for everyone.

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So what I've done historically is document the process,

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publish it on my blog,

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and when people ask I send them a link,

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it's like here, this is what you need.

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Go through this,

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or I find somebody else who's done it

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and send links to that and then just done.

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And 'cause I'm not gonna take the time

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to write the three, four, five paragraphs it takes

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to try to debug your system over email

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'cause that is just what we call a mess.

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That's the exact reason I wrote that post

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about my DSLR camera setup.

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Yes, yes.

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Because I get asked that question all the time.

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Yep.

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And now I have a place I can send people

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with links to all the gear that I use.

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And it is needlessly complicated.

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We were talking about this before we hit record.

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I actually have OBS running on my computer

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so that I can flip the display and send it to my iPad,

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which I have connected via Sidecar.

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And yes, I know Luna display is supposed to work.

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It doesn't and there are other things

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that should work and they don't.

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This is the solution for the M1 Mac

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because I set it up with my teleprompter

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and I wanna be able to look right into the camera

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when we have conversations like this.

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I feel like the resulting communication ends up being

00:19:18

a little bit better.

00:19:19

So yeah, I totally understand where you're coming with that.

00:19:23

But now that you've said this out loud,

00:19:24

people are gonna wanna know how you did it

00:19:27

and you're gonna get an email about it potentially.

00:19:29

So. - Link in the show notes.

00:19:31

(laughs)

00:19:33

Oh, that's just how this stuff goes.

00:19:35

- Yeah.

00:19:36

So let's jump into part one, the case against email.

00:19:40

And there are three chapters here.

00:19:43

Do you wanna tackle these individually?

00:19:46

I mean, there's only seven chapters in the entire book

00:19:48

or should we just talk about the whole case against email?

00:19:52

- Let's cover the whole case all in one shot.

00:19:56

'Cause basically email stinks.

00:20:00

All right, part two, let's move on.

00:20:02

(laughs)

00:20:04

- Well, there's three specific things

00:20:05

and that's why there's three chapters.

00:20:07

And I think these are very well defined.

00:20:11

For someone who maybe knows they resent the fact

00:20:15

that they have to spend a lot of time in email,

00:20:17

but they haven't really articulated exactly why

00:20:21

this is gonna resonate.

00:20:24

So chapter one is email reduces productivity.

00:20:27

That's kind of the one, Jan, I expected this from Cal.

00:20:30

Number two, email makes us miserable.

00:20:34

And that one kind of caught me off guard when I read that.

00:20:37

I'm like, oh, well, yes, I agree,

00:20:39

but that seems like a strong statement.

00:20:42

- Right, right.

00:20:44

- And then number three, email has a mind of its own.

00:20:46

So they feel very different.

00:20:49

This does not feel like your typical listicle style article

00:20:54

you would find on the web of three reasons why email is bad.

00:20:59

- Yes.

00:21:00

- And it feels more comprehensive to me.

00:21:03

So I don't know, where do you wanna start?

00:21:05

Email reduces productivity is probably

00:21:07

the logical place to start,

00:21:09

but it's also the place we've probably talked the most

00:21:12

about previously.

00:21:13

So should we just cover this real quick?

00:21:15

- There's a whole bunch here, right?

00:21:17

So I feel like the bulk of what we need to cover is part two.

00:21:20

So part one, the case against email,

00:21:24

it can kind of be summarized in that our use of a tool

00:21:29

that is supposed to make things better

00:21:32

is making things significantly worse.

00:21:36

It has a lot of unintended consequences.

00:21:41

Even though, if you look, 'cause there's all sorts

00:21:43

of stories here, right?

00:21:44

Some of which are about, some of the ones

00:21:47

that were most interesting to me is like the origin stories

00:21:50

to email, right?

00:21:51

How it came about, how they used it when it first came about.

00:21:55

One of the stories I think was most impactful

00:21:57

from a lot of this was that the IBM story,

00:22:01

where they hired a person to study how much communication

00:22:06

was happening in the office.

00:22:08

Because what they wanted to do is put in a mainframe

00:22:10

to be able to handle email, right?

00:22:13

That way they could figure out how much they needed

00:22:15

to spend in order to have a system that would actually

00:22:17

allow them to do the same amount of communication

00:22:20

once they brought the system in.

00:22:22

They're million dollar machines, like they're expensive.

00:22:26

So to do that meant that they wanted to be exactly sure

00:22:30

what they needed before they brought it

00:22:32

so they didn't spend too much.

00:22:34

They brought it in, they moved all of the stuff over,

00:22:37

they had calculated how many memos are sent,

00:22:39

how many voicemails are sent, how many people run up

00:22:41

and down the stairs, like they calculated all of this.

00:22:45

So they could figure out the exact number of messages

00:22:47

that are being sent on a daily basis.

00:22:49

Brought in a server that could handle that load

00:22:51

and it crashed in what, three days?

00:22:54

Because of the overload?

00:22:55

- Yes, 'cause they had five to six times as many messages.

00:22:59

- Right, and what they hadn't counted on,

00:23:02

there was one major piece that attributed to it,

00:23:05

the wonderful CC line where you can just copy people on,

00:23:09

I can send one message and send it to 15 people.

00:23:12

They realized that very quickly and thought,

00:23:14

huh, well, I'll just do that.

00:23:16

Well, on the server side, it's not one message, it's now 15.

00:23:20

So it becomes a bit bigger than they intended.

00:23:25

So then the whole thing comes down.

00:23:27

Basically, the point is that email is supposed

00:23:30

to help us communicate quickly, asynchronously,

00:23:35

but because it's so easy to do,

00:23:41

it comes with all of these other ramifications

00:23:44

like we're talking about here,

00:23:45

reducing productivity because of the time

00:23:47

and the fragmentedness of it.

00:23:49

It's making us miserable because we're spending so much time

00:23:52

on it, taking it home, not putting good boundaries around it,

00:23:55

has a mind of its own because the more you check things,

00:23:58

the more you send responses,

00:23:59

people realize you're available,

00:24:00

thus they'll send more at those times

00:24:02

and it just creates this big vicious cycle.

00:24:05

- Yeah, well, I do think there's a couple of things

00:24:07

we should unpack here.

00:24:08

Starting on page 19, where he directly addresses your concern,

00:24:13

he says, "Joebulic, no, many people acknowledge

00:24:19

that some jobs might benefit from significantly less interruption,

00:24:22

but not theirs."

00:24:23

- Yes, yes.

00:24:26

- And that is a quote pulled out of context kind of

00:24:29

because I think you would agree with just that quote

00:24:32

that your job would benefit from less interruption,

00:24:35

but the larger point he's making is like,

00:24:37

well, that would be great

00:24:39

and I'm sure some people can do this, but not me.

00:24:42

- I would put a caveat on that in that parts of my job need it.

00:24:47

- Sure.

00:24:50

- And a fair amount of my job doesn't.

00:24:52

And the people who work in the office with me know this

00:24:56

because there are times when I'm not anywhere near my email

00:24:59

and you can't get ahold of me.

00:25:00

So like that does happen.

00:25:02

So yes, I think email is very vital to some aspects,

00:25:07

but yes, I'll agree with him basically 100% on that.

00:25:13

- Yeah, 'cause that section, the header for that section

00:25:16

is email is not a job.

00:25:18

And that sounds a little bit controversial.

00:25:20

Well, what about customer support?

00:25:21

What about sales?

00:25:22

Those are the two that people always push back on me with

00:25:25

when I say email is not a job.

00:25:28

And I think what he is saying is that the job

00:25:31

is that you have to respond to people quickly.

00:25:34

And the default for many, many, many years has been,

00:25:38

email is the way to do this.

00:25:41

But I think it's important to disconnect those two,

00:25:43

even if you are not in a position of power

00:25:45

to shift the way that the communication happens,

00:25:48

recognize that email in and of itself

00:25:52

is not necessarily the job.

00:25:55

Maybe communication is the job.

00:25:56

And at that point, we can start to look for

00:25:59

maybe better ways to do that.

00:26:02

One of the stories that he told in that section

00:26:06

was George Marshall, the US five-star general,

00:26:08

which I thought was pretty great.

00:26:10

He frames this story as this is the guy

00:26:12

who was really responsible for winning World War II,

00:26:15

was it Dwight Eisenhower, the Eisenhower Matrix?

00:26:18

He's the one who gets a lot of credit

00:26:19

for the important versus urgent stuff.

00:26:21

But this is the guy who really implemented it.

00:26:23

(laughs)

00:26:25

'Cause he had a structure for every single interaction

00:26:28

that he had.

00:26:29

In fact, he's a five-star general, right?

00:26:31

So you-- - He was the very first

00:26:32

five-star general, I think, right?

00:26:34

- Could be that I don't know.

00:26:37

But basically, he's the one who said,

00:26:39

"Don't salute me when you come into my office

00:26:41

"in order to save time."

00:26:43

And then right away, you're supposed to begin your brief

00:26:47

and he will ask for recommendation

00:26:50

and then he will delegate the action.

00:26:51

That is the formula.

00:26:53

And I thought that was really interesting

00:26:56

that we talked earlier about there's government and policies

00:27:01

and we talked about Scrum, we talked about the six-week

00:27:03

email shutdown.

00:27:04

This is an example of somebody who is working

00:27:07

in government, but it's counterintuitive to that.

00:27:10

It's not falling into that trap or that formula

00:27:13

that we typically think of.

00:27:15

He's saying, "No, this is the way that we're going to do this."

00:27:18

And it feels very contradictory

00:27:20

to the standard protocol that people are supposed to follow.

00:27:25

So I found that really interesting.

00:27:27

The other thing I found really interesting in here,

00:27:29

which we could have probably a whole big conversation

00:27:32

about this, is he makes a statement that GTD rose

00:27:36

in popularity as email began to take off.

00:27:40

I kinda think he's right on with this

00:27:43

and I feel like he articulated something I have felt

00:27:48

about GTD that has bothered me for years

00:27:51

because I have not really implemented GTD for a long time.

00:27:56

Even though when I read that book the first time,

00:27:59

I was like, "Ah, this is great. I found the answer."

00:28:02

I had the same response that probably everybody else does.

00:28:04

And as I think about like,

00:28:05

why did that resonate with me back then?

00:28:07

It's because I was overwhelmed.

00:28:09

I had too many inputs and I was trying to become

00:28:12

just a little bit more efficient to squeeze out some time

00:28:14

for the things that were important to me.

00:28:16

And my working situation has changed to the point now

00:28:19

where I can be more intentional and be more focused.

00:28:22

And so now I think about GTD and that standard process.

00:28:25

And if it takes us in two minutes, just do it.

00:28:27

And I'm like, "No, I don't wanna do anything

00:28:31

that takes me less than two minutes to do."

00:28:33

'Cause it's probably not worth a while doing.

00:28:34

Like I would prefer to,

00:28:37

I'm gonna write this big article

00:28:38

and I'm gonna focus on that one article all day.

00:28:41

And I'm gonna write that article.

00:28:43

And there'd be different aspects of that.

00:28:45

You know, mind mapping the article,

00:28:47

maybe doing some keyword research,

00:28:49

actually writing the article,

00:28:50

getting the screenshots or images that are required for it.

00:28:54

Maybe even recording a video,

00:28:56

but I would lump that all under like that big task

00:28:59

and you could make the argument,

00:29:00

well, that should be a project.

00:29:01

You should break it down piece by piece.

00:29:03

But when you have the time and the space

00:29:05

to work on something in a deep way,

00:29:07

like that the question you're left with is why?

00:29:10

Because David Allen told me to,

00:29:11

because I'm constantly running back and forth

00:29:13

between different things,

00:29:14

because I'm constantly getting interrupted by email, maybe.

00:29:18

- I think one of the things that's interesting,

00:29:22

because I don't know that this is wrong, what are you saying?

00:29:26

Like GTD and email rising at the same time,

00:29:28

'cause they did come to full popularity

00:29:32

at about the same time.

00:29:34

And I wonder because, you know,

00:29:37

I've kept up with David Allen and his whole

00:29:39

getting things done culture and the stuff

00:29:42

he's continued to put out,

00:29:44

because I think a lot of what he says is solid.

00:29:47

And there's a thing that I've noticed,

00:29:50

there's like an undertone that he has been alluding to,

00:29:55

at least within the last couple of years

00:29:59

that I've noticed.

00:30:00

And that is that if your system can't handle

00:30:03

what you're throwing at it,

00:30:04

you need to back off what you're putting into it.

00:30:06

- Correct.

00:30:07

- And I kinda wish that was more of a core tenant

00:30:12

to what he pushes,

00:30:15

because a lot of what Cal Newport is saying here

00:30:18

has to do with eliminating inputs, right?

00:30:22

- It feels like a concession to me, honestly,

00:30:24

that statement,

00:30:25

because email has grown and grown and grown,

00:30:28

email is a mind of its own, right?

00:30:29

It's gonna evolve.

00:30:31

And if you look at any of the videos,

00:30:36

talks that he gives, whatever.

00:30:37

- David Allen or Cal.

00:30:39

- Sorry, David Allen.

00:30:40

- Okay.

00:30:41

- If you look at the people who are in the audience,

00:30:43

it's business guy,

00:30:45

- Right, right.

00:30:46

- Busy executive.

00:30:47

And those are the people who would also argue,

00:30:50

"Well, I can't break away from my email.

00:30:52

"There is no way that I can do that."

00:30:54

So Cal basically saying,

00:30:56

"Maybe there's a connection here."

00:30:58

And I think that kinda is.

00:31:00

He says a little bit more strongly.

00:31:01

He says email is responsible

00:31:03

for our frenetic pace of activity.

00:31:06

And he also says,

00:31:07

"And this I agree with GTD gave people a way

00:31:09

"to deal with an increase in volume."

00:31:11

But at some point,

00:31:13

efficiency is not the answer.

00:31:15

- Right, and I think that's some

00:31:17

of what I'm getting at here, right?

00:31:18

So I'm not saying GTD is the answer to everything here.

00:31:22

I'm just saying that GTD can help with,

00:31:27

'cause I still use that system to a degree.

00:31:30

Whenever I stop and look at what I'm doing,

00:31:33

it basically is that.

00:31:35

The difference is that the broader GTD community

00:31:40

generally thinks of GTD as a way

00:31:43

to handle the huge influx of things

00:31:46

that are inevitable, quote unquote,

00:31:49

to come into my inboxes, right?

00:31:53

So Facebook and social media can be a bank of inboxes.

00:31:57

Email, of course, is a big inbox.

00:31:59

There are a lot of these things

00:32:01

to use some of David Allen's terminology inboxes, right?

00:32:05

But I think what Cal is telling us is

00:32:08

that you wouldn't need something like GTD

00:32:12

if you didn't allow all these huge influxes of inputs

00:32:17

to hit you in the face.

00:32:18

Like it wouldn't be that necessary.

00:32:20

So although I think GT could be a good thing,

00:32:25

I think the reason it took off is a bad thing.

00:32:31

Exactly.

00:32:32

The problem that it's solving intentionally or unintentionally,

00:32:36

I don't think is as altruistic as it first appears

00:32:40

when you come to it.

00:32:41

Right, yeah.

00:32:42

Because it's kind of a symptom, not disease solution.

00:32:47

That's kind of the revelation I got from thinking about GTD

00:32:52

prior to this.

00:32:54

I've kind of been brewing on this for a while,

00:32:57

but I didn't have a good way to articulate

00:33:00

the tension and the friction that I felt about it

00:33:04

until I read this book.

00:33:06

And then when he made the connection

00:33:08

between email being a driver of the frenetic pace of activity

00:33:12

and GTD being a way to deal with the frenetic pace of activity,

00:33:16

I was like, aha, that makes total sense.

00:33:19

And it's not just email, it's Slack,

00:33:22

it's a bunch of other things,

00:33:24

but that hyperactive hive mind,

00:33:26

that's the thing that he keeps coming back to,

00:33:29

hyperactive hive mind doesn't resonate as much

00:33:32

as a world without email.

00:33:34

That's why he does a title.

00:33:36

But ultimately that is what he is addressing here.

00:33:40

The tools you use for this may change,

00:33:43

and in fact, in chapter three,

00:33:44

kind of talks about the three drivers

00:33:46

of the hive mind at the office,

00:33:47

the hidden cost of a synchrony,

00:33:50

the cycle of responsiveness

00:33:51

and the caveman at the computer screen.

00:33:53

The hidden cost of a synchrony,

00:33:55

this has a couple different aspects.

00:34:00

It's easier to just throw out an email

00:34:04

that it is to pick up the phone and call someone

00:34:05

or set up a meeting and actually talk to them.

00:34:08

That's good in some senses, bad in other senses.

00:34:11

We already talked about how you can ask a question

00:34:13

and it doesn't take you very long

00:34:15

but then the person responding has to spend an hour crafting

00:34:18

and response.

00:34:19

And I feel like the asynchronous piece,

00:34:21

what it allows you to do is completely disconnect

00:34:24

from the true cost of the interaction

00:34:26

because you're not there watching the other person

00:34:29

and waiting for them to respond,

00:34:31

even though you probably are just hitting refresh

00:34:33

on your computer every couple of minutes

00:34:36

or every time you get a ding going and looking

00:34:38

and seeing if the answer that you need is there.

00:34:41

But we need to recognize the true cost of the interaction

00:34:46

and if that's all we did,

00:34:48

regardless of whether we use email or not,

00:34:51

communication would be a lot more effective.

00:34:53

But asynchronous email specifically makes it easy

00:34:57

to gloss over and not recognize those true costs.

00:35:00

- This plays into, we've talked about digital minimalism

00:35:04

and some of the books we've talked about,

00:35:06

the science behind social media

00:35:11

and the notification system, the like system

00:35:15

that comes with that, right?

00:35:16

So what they do in a lot of those cases

00:35:19

is split up the time

00:35:23

so that you don't know when a notification is coming.

00:35:26

Like if you don't know when something's coming,

00:35:29

you'll have a tendency to spend more time on it

00:35:31

and check that thing, that app, that system more often.

00:35:36

Email is exactly that.

00:35:38

Like this is by accident built to be addictive.

00:35:43

That is the addiction cycle, right?

00:35:48

So, or one of, there's a bunch of those actually.

00:35:51

So it's one of those.

00:35:53

So you have to be very careful

00:35:55

and it's easy to fall into some of that trap, I think,

00:36:00

just because of the nature of the beast here

00:36:04

that we're talking about.

00:36:05

So I don't think anyone's gonna argue with us

00:36:09

that email has some downsides.

00:36:13

A lot of the science and stuff that he shares here is like,

00:36:17

you had me at the beginning of the first chapter,

00:36:20

like we got three chapters of this.

00:36:22

I'm with you, like I get it, it kills productivity

00:36:27

'cause you're checking it all the time.

00:36:28

I really don't like dealing with it.

00:36:31

Like they're saying in the chat,

00:36:32

if you get a really small question in your email,

00:36:35

it's easy to have to deal with the big long response

00:36:38

'cause if I don't take the time to craft something,

00:36:41

like my question well, that person responding to it

00:36:45

has to put a whole lot of work into doing this.

00:36:48

Even like the support structures

00:36:50

for apps and systems and services, right?

00:36:53

Like how many of these,

00:36:54

you see like the little chat box in the bottom right.

00:36:56

You see that where you go to the system

00:36:59

and it's got the little thing in the bottom right.

00:37:01

And if you have a support question,

00:37:02

you can just tick that, ask a question

00:37:05

and somebody gets back to you within a few minutes

00:37:07

and it's like, okay, think about the mass number of people

00:37:11

and the structure that's gotta be in place

00:37:13

so that someone can get that from anyone anytime a day

00:37:17

and get a response back in a few minutes.

00:37:19

So what I try to do,

00:37:21

and I know not everyone does this,

00:37:24

probably most people don't,

00:37:26

I know having been in IT support for a while now,

00:37:31

that the better I ask my question

00:37:33

and the more I frame what has happened

00:37:36

that I have an issue with,

00:37:37

the quicker they can get back to me.

00:37:39

- Yes.

00:37:40

- So my answer that I need can be received much, much faster

00:37:45

if I take the time upfront to ask the questions correctly,

00:37:48

but before we jumped,

00:37:50

I just opened my email 'cause I wanted to know

00:37:51

what was in my inbox right now

00:37:53

so that we could talk about this.

00:37:54

And I have a handful of things in there

00:37:57

that I know right now are one-line questions.

00:38:00

Like what you were talking about earlier is like,

00:38:01

what's wrong with my monitor?

00:38:02

Like, there's so many things.

00:38:05

Like if you had taken the time to write me two paragraphs

00:38:08

of explaining what you've done

00:38:09

and what's gone on behind it,

00:38:11

what's wrong with the script,

00:38:12

how have you tried to install it?

00:38:13

- And you could respond with a single sentence.

00:38:16

- Correct.

00:38:17

I could probably get back to you

00:38:19

within a handful of hours based on my email practices

00:38:22

and you could probably have an answer,

00:38:23

but if it's gonna require me to do some testing

00:38:26

and some exploring to figure out what's going on with it,

00:38:29

there's not a good chance I'm gonna do anything with it.

00:38:31

- Exactly, and nobody does that.

00:38:34

- Correct, correct.

00:38:36

- I could say on this podcast 'cause it's you and I

00:38:39

that everybody does that 'cause I do the same thing.

00:38:42

When I have a technical issue,

00:38:44

this is the OS that I'm running.

00:38:45

This is the app version that I'm using.

00:38:48

Here's a video that shows exactly what I'm talking about

00:38:51

and 99% of the time the response is like,

00:38:54

"Wow, this is really helpful.

00:38:55

Thank you, we have our team on this,

00:38:57

we'll get back to you shortly."

00:38:59

But nobody does that.

00:39:00

It's, "Hey, why isn't this working?"

00:39:02

I don't know.

00:39:03

At that point, well, you can't fault people

00:39:07

for that sort of request either though

00:39:11

because they're completely overwhelmed

00:39:13

and they have this question

00:39:15

and if they took the time to craft three paragraphs,

00:39:19

there would be 12 more dings

00:39:21

that they would have to respond to

00:39:23

and so they can't keep up, recognize that.

00:39:25

That's why they're shooting off this quick question.

00:39:27

But then they've just thrown the whole burden on your lap

00:39:32

and even if you don't have an entire hour to craft

00:39:37

the response right now, actually,

00:39:39

sometimes it's even worse.

00:39:40

If you do have an hour to craft the response,

00:39:42

you could send that back,

00:39:44

given the information that they shared you,

00:39:45

"Oh, actually there's this other thing here."

00:39:47

"Oh, well that changes everything

00:39:48

and now you gotta do it again."

00:39:50

So what ends up happening is you do that a couple times

00:39:53

and you're like, "Okay, well, I'm not gonna spend

00:39:54

that effort on the front at the front end anymore.

00:39:57

I'll just dash out a quick response."

00:39:59

Now you're playing email ping pong

00:40:01

and you've got 12 more back and forths

00:40:03

before you finally land on the specific issue.

00:40:06

I absolutely hate this and so the best solution I've found

00:40:12

is just not respond to email,

00:40:13

which I can't like people can't do that.

00:40:17

And I know it makes people angry.

00:40:18

That's just, it's so frustrating to me.

00:40:23

If you were to put a camera and watch my facial expressions

00:40:28

as I deal with email, I probably start off like,

00:40:31

"Oh, hey, happy Mike."

00:40:32

And by the end I'm like, "Rrrr!"

00:40:34

(laughing)

00:40:36

- I would love to see that actually.

00:40:38

- I guarantee that's what happens

00:40:39

because it just, it's like fingernails

00:40:44

on the chalkboard of my soul.

00:40:46

It just, I cannot stand it.

00:40:48

So I do whatever I can to spend as little time

00:40:51

in there as possible.

00:40:52

- Sure.

00:40:53

I get it, I do.

00:40:55

But you're absolutely right.

00:40:57

Somebody's gonna have to spend time on it.

00:40:59

And if you're the one asking the question,

00:41:01

it should be you.

00:41:03

Don't put it on the other person.

00:41:05

Like that's my view on it.

00:41:07

It can get things done much, much quicker.

00:41:10

But at the same time,

00:41:14

phone calls and in-persons,

00:41:16

or in today's world video calls,

00:41:18

are significantly better for that sort of thing.

00:41:21

It may take, you know,

00:41:23

a bit of a mess to set up technologically sometimes.

00:41:27

But the broad scheme of things

00:41:30

is it's done much, much faster.

00:41:32

And more thoroughly, right?

00:41:34

- In general, yes.

00:41:36

Although I have talked to people who,

00:41:39

with COVID and working from home,

00:41:43

what they found is that their higher ups

00:41:46

are scheduling these meetings all day, every day,

00:41:49

because they wanna know what's,

00:41:52

what their people are doing,

00:41:53

what decisions they're making, you know, what direction.

00:41:56

All the in-person stuff that used to happen at the office

00:41:59

are trying to use video calls to replace that.

00:42:03

The people who actually have to do the work, however,

00:42:05

they're spending not an exaggeration,

00:42:08

40 out of 40 hours per week in meetings,

00:42:11

and then they're expected to go do all their regular work.

00:42:14

So there's a disconnect there

00:42:15

where the higher ups who are talking about the work,

00:42:20

they don't make the connection between,

00:42:23

oh, my people actually need the time to do the work,

00:42:26

and they're at home, and their kids are at home,

00:42:29

and they're doing school at home.

00:42:31

And so the people who are actually trying to do the work,

00:42:35

they're just completely stressed out

00:42:36

because they have no time for anything.

00:42:39

- I have a story about this,

00:42:40

that will solidify what you're saying.

00:42:43

So the job I took after I worked corporate

00:42:47

was a virtual marketing company.

00:42:49

And one of the big projects that I was the head of

00:42:53

was to rebuild our internal system.

00:42:57

I can't go into the details of what it is,

00:42:58

it was very proprietary and such.

00:43:00

So we had to rebuild our internal system.

00:43:02

I had one other database person on staff with me,

00:43:07

and between the two of us, we were gonna rebuild it.

00:43:11

Now the idea was keep the team small

00:43:13

so that we could move fast,

00:43:15

so we could get this done very quickly.

00:43:17

It's not a huge application,

00:43:19

it wasn't gonna take a whole lot of time.

00:43:21

However, the problem we ran into

00:43:24

was that the board of directors in our higher ups

00:43:29

wanted to have a lot of input into how it was built,

00:43:34

like what the UI and stuff looked like.

00:43:37

And that's fine, but it's a virtual company.

00:43:41

So I was in meetings, usually every day,

00:43:46

talking with different directors at each time,

00:43:49

trying to get input from them, which is fine.

00:43:51

And then at the end of the week,

00:43:53

we would do a check-in to see how much work

00:43:55

had been done on it.

00:43:56

And it was rare that we made progress on it,

00:43:59

because between this database person and myself,

00:44:03

he was trying to figure out the data models

00:44:05

based on how we could share data with people,

00:44:08

with our clients.

00:44:10

Thus the directors were meeting with him all the time.

00:44:13

They were meeting with me all the time

00:44:14

on the front-end side of it,

00:44:15

and we weren't getting anywhere.

00:44:16

So they decided, and I told them,

00:44:19

we're in meetings all the time,

00:44:20

I don't actually have time to write code.

00:44:23

They decided to book a week,

00:44:25

the conference rooms at hotels.

00:44:27

They decided to book one of those

00:44:29

so that this database person and I could go to this room,

00:44:33

we'd have a week off from absolutely all meetings,

00:44:36

we weren't allowed to book anytime with anyone,

00:44:39

so that we could work on this

00:44:40

and make some solid progress on this tool.

00:44:45

Day one, we worked for two hours in the morning,

00:44:50

and then my phone rang.

00:44:51

(laughs)

00:44:53

And it was my direct boss wanting to know

00:44:57

if I would go look at a handful of emails

00:44:59

that had been sent from a couple of directors,

00:45:01

'cause they had some input on the specific pieces

00:45:03

we were building.

00:45:05

So they wanted me to respond to those.

00:45:07

Two and a half hours later, after I'd gotten through

00:45:09

all of those, I took a break from that as lunchtime,

00:45:12

so we went and grabbed lunch, came back,

00:45:14

had to run through, I didn't get anything done that week.

00:45:16

Those first two hours are what we got done,

00:45:19

and the rest of the week was still managing,

00:45:21

we weren't in meetings, we were managing phone calls

00:45:23

and emails all week.

00:45:25

So when we got done, like, here's the problem.

00:45:27

It was about a month later I left the company.

00:45:29

So, (laughs)

00:45:32

just a complete mess, it's exactly

00:45:33

what we're talking about here, right?

00:45:35

So this ends up creating a whole mess

00:45:38

unless you're able to separate from

00:45:41

all of these communication systems.

00:45:43

I'm sure tons of people are dealing with this today

00:45:45

because of all the virtual work that's out there.

00:45:47

But this is where maybe we should transition

00:45:50

into part two here because part two

00:45:51

kind of explains what to do instead of that.

00:45:55

And I think some of the principles there

00:45:57

would be extremely helpful to explain the alternative to this.

00:46:00

- Yes, agreed.

00:46:02

So chapter four is the attention capital principle.

00:46:05

That's probably the place to start.

00:46:07

And I do, real quickly, before we go in here,

00:46:10

I do feel that the whole point for the first section

00:46:14

is to just articulate this pain point

00:46:17

as much as humanly possible to motivate you to change.

00:46:20

My dad has us saying, when pain is sufficient,

00:46:22

change will come. (laughs)

00:46:24

100% true.

00:46:26

And so, Cal is kind of hoping that he's made you hurt enough

00:46:30

to try to make some changes.

00:46:31

- That he makes you do something.

00:46:33

- Yeah, in this next part.

00:46:35

So the attention capital principle,

00:46:38

this is the productivity of the knowledge sector

00:46:41

can be significantly increased if we identify workflows

00:46:44

that better optimize the human brain's ability

00:46:46

to sustainably add value to information.

00:46:50

The big story that he told from this section

00:46:54

is the Model T in Henry Ford.

00:46:58

And this was an interesting story

00:47:00

because you've probably heard aspects of this before,

00:47:04

but he adds a little bit more detail

00:47:06

in terms of the level of cost that was required

00:47:09

to make that assembly line really work.

00:47:14

And he addresses some complaints against it too,

00:47:19

where he's talking to somebody and he says,

00:47:23

"Well, that sounds miserable.

00:47:25

I wouldn't want to be a worker in that particular scenario."

00:47:29

'Cause you kind of get this picture of like,

00:47:31

well, the assembly line things are always moving

00:47:32

and they're just moving too fast.

00:47:34

And you have to kill yourself in order to keep up.

00:47:36

But that's not actually what happened here.

00:47:39

What happened was instead of taking all of the parts

00:47:44

and manually, you know, going and getting what you needed

00:47:47

and putting it together, that was like step one.

00:47:49

You have somebody who understands everything about the car

00:47:52

and they're going and getting what they need

00:47:53

and then putting it on the car.

00:47:54

Step two is we've got separate people

00:47:57

who are doing separate systems.

00:47:58

And so when this car is ready for this particular system,

00:48:00

that person comes over with their stuff

00:48:02

and they do the thing.

00:48:03

But step three is the car just moves

00:48:06

and when it's in front of you, you do your thing

00:48:08

and then it moves on to the next thing.

00:48:11

And they went from taking 12 and a half hours

00:48:16

to build a Model T to getting it down to 93 minutes,

00:48:22

which is really impressive.

00:48:24

You hear those stats and go,

00:48:25

"Oh, obviously I understand now why they incorporated

00:48:28

that assembly line."

00:48:30

But they didn't know they were going to be able to get to that.

00:48:33

And they had to build some really expensive systems

00:48:36

along the way in order for that to work.

00:48:39

And as he was telling that story,

00:48:42

I kind of half expected him to share a detail

00:48:45

of Henry Ford at one point being like,

00:48:47

"You know what?

00:48:48

I don't know if this is really going to work.

00:48:50

I think maybe we've sunk enough money into this project

00:48:52

and we should just go back to the way things work."

00:48:54

I've been involved in enough companies and organizations

00:48:58

that have thought that way.

00:49:01

You know, it's like, "Well, I'm not sure we're actually

00:49:03

riding the right horse here.

00:49:04

So let's go back and do what we know works."

00:49:08

- One of the things, and we haven't talked about this yet,

00:49:10

but one of the things I love about this second part specifically

00:49:15

is that all of the examples he uses to show,

00:49:19

I shouldn't say all,

00:49:20

a lot of the foundational stories that he uses

00:49:23

to set these up, to set up these principles

00:49:25

and explain how things work come from the 1800s

00:49:29

in the early 1900s.

00:49:31

Did you catch that?

00:49:31

- Yeah, very historical.

00:49:33

- Almost every single story has a deep history to it.

00:49:37

- Lots of Peter Drucker.

00:49:38

- Yep.

00:49:39

Lots of Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan.

00:49:41

Like there's a lot of that sort of thing here.

00:49:44

And he does use like some modern, you know,

00:49:48

2019 stories in this,

00:49:52

but he sets it all up with these 1890s,

00:49:55

1910s, like that's sort of time period,

00:49:59

which I think is fascinating

00:50:00

because it's kind of like saying,

00:50:02

"This is not new.

00:50:04

"This is just another repeat of history."

00:50:07

Thus the importance of maintaining and teaching history

00:50:10

as it truly happened.

00:50:11

So that is a thing that continues to be repeated

00:50:16

through this book.

00:50:17

I love that, I love it, it's cool.

00:50:19

- He mentioned Sam Carpenter in this chapter too,

00:50:23

which I really liked seeing that

00:50:26

because that work the system book

00:50:29

was very impactful for me when I read it.

00:50:31

Are you familiar with Sam Carpenter in the work the system?

00:50:34

- Yeah, I've not read work the system,

00:50:36

but I know of it and the concept behind it.

00:50:39

- So the TLDR with Sam Carpenter

00:50:43

is that he was managing a call center

00:50:48

and was at a point,

00:50:52

he gets into more detail in his specific book,

00:50:55

but he was at a point where he could not afford to make payroll

00:50:59

and it was coming up in a couple of days.

00:51:02

So he had this idea to systematize everything

00:51:07

in the company, create standard operating procedures

00:51:12

for everything.

00:51:13

And he was finally at that point

00:51:15

where he was desperate enough to try something new

00:51:19

and it worked the system, he talks about how

00:51:22

once he started doing that,

00:51:24

immediately everything got a lot better.

00:51:28

They became much more profitable,

00:51:30

they became much more productive, but even more so,

00:51:34

and this is the thing that gets lost, I think,

00:51:35

when you start talking about the assembly line

00:51:37

and work the system with Sam Carpenter,

00:51:40

it's easy to be critical because on the surface,

00:51:43

it looks like it's purely a focus on efficiency,

00:51:46

but having red work the system several times,

00:51:50

I also know that the people who work there love working there

00:51:53

and the quality of life for them is much less crazy

00:51:56

than it is for people who work at other call centers.

00:51:59

And I know people who have worked at other call centers

00:52:02

in other parts of the world and it's just,

00:52:05

like you get five minutes every couple of hours

00:52:08

and it's timed for your bathroom breaks,

00:52:10

like it's miserable, nobody wants to do that.

00:52:13

So yes, it's a hard industry and that maybe

00:52:16

taints your perspective going into that sort of story,

00:52:19

but that's not the only thing that we're focusing on

00:52:22

with this sort of stuff is efficiency.

00:52:24

So I do wanna make sure that people understand that

00:52:26

as we're talking about this and as Cal's talking about this,

00:52:29

'cause I feel like it's very easy to overlook that.

00:52:32

- Yeah, it's a good point, it really is.

00:52:35

But again, the principle here is that,

00:52:38

so the attention capital principle,

00:52:40

you can only put your attention in so many different places.

00:52:43

And namely, you can only put it in one place at a time.

00:52:47

And when you're switching that,

00:52:50

we've talked about this before.

00:52:52

This is, to me, this is one of the more obvious principles

00:52:57

in this, is like, just be aware that you can't

00:53:01

be doing email and other things at the same time.

00:53:03

And if you've got somebody who's in programming and such,

00:53:08

they're very likely going to be disrupted even more

00:53:12

if you have a single 20-minute meeting somewhere midday.

00:53:17

Like breaking up that attention and that focus

00:53:21

has pretty major detriments to it,

00:53:24

which he discusses, of course, in part one.

00:53:26

- Yes, exactly.

00:53:27

Also in this section, we discover

00:53:31

that Cal Newport works off of a Trello board.

00:53:34

- I did not know that. (laughs)

00:53:36

We will talk more about, in the next chapter here,

00:53:39

the process principle.

00:53:41

He tells the story at the beginning of this chapter

00:53:44

about Pullman Brass.

00:53:46

Pullman is interesting to me because it has ties

00:53:50

to my specific area.

00:53:53

I believe Appleton, Wisconsin was one of the first places

00:53:57

that they had the electric streetcars.

00:54:01

We have a restaurant down near the river

00:54:04

that's named after Pullman's.

00:54:06

The National Railroad Museum is in Green Bay,

00:54:09

about 30 miles away.

00:54:10

And they've got several of the original Pullman coaches

00:54:14

and all the stories behind the company and stuff.

00:54:17

But the story that he's telling about the brass,

00:54:20

that this was a division of Pullman,

00:54:22

where they made all of the brass pieces

00:54:24

that they needed to put together the cars.

00:54:27

And the process for requesting pieces

00:54:30

from the brass works was very inefficient.

00:54:35

People could just walk up and talk to anybody on the line

00:54:40

and that's often what they did

00:54:42

because that was only a way to get something

00:54:44

when you really needed it,

00:54:45

which that sounds a lot like an open office environment.

00:54:49

- It sounds great, very efficient.

00:54:51

- The point is that that compounds the problem, right?

00:54:53

You've got this process, you can't keep up.

00:54:55

And so people circumvent the process

00:54:57

in order to get what they need faster.

00:54:59

- Everybody has been in a situation

00:55:01

where they've experienced that.

00:55:02

- Yes.

00:55:04

- So their response to meeting the demand was actually

00:55:08

to make more complicated processes

00:55:11

and narrow the vectors that people could request things.

00:55:14

So you had to go through a single entry point

00:55:18

and you had to fill out these specific forms

00:55:20

and it took more work to request something

00:55:22

but because now they had a single point

00:55:25

where the requests are coming in

00:55:26

and they had a channel that they flowed through,

00:55:29

they were able to be much more efficient.

00:55:31

They were able to meet their demand

00:55:32

and they ended up turning a large profit

00:55:34

instead of being a large drain on the company itself.

00:55:39

So that's kind of the sets of stage for this whole chapter

00:55:43

of the work isn't changing,

00:55:46

the inputs aren't even necessarily changing

00:55:48

but the process needs to change,

00:55:50

which is a very interesting way to think about this.

00:55:53

He gets into this section here on like personal Kanban

00:55:57

and using boards and things like this.

00:56:00

I think this is brilliant.

00:56:02

I'd never thought of this as a replacement for email.

00:56:05

I know a lot of places where it cannot be

00:56:08

but I think it might be for me.

00:56:11

- Sure.

00:56:13

I thought it was interesting that,

00:56:16

you know, he gets into Trello

00:56:19

and has a couple examples of how,

00:56:22

well, namely one major example of a company

00:56:24

that uses Trello instead of email

00:56:26

to manage all of their projects and processes and such.

00:56:29

I thought it was interesting

00:56:30

that Basecamp didn't come up.

00:56:33

You know, if he's gonna talk about tools,

00:56:35

Basecamp's the one that's been around for a long time

00:56:38

and is like specifically geared to help people

00:56:40

get off of email through the communication systems

00:56:45

that they have built into it

00:56:46

and has like an all-encompassing process

00:56:50

which is very similar to what he's talking about in Trello.

00:56:53

So I don't know, I thought that was interesting

00:56:54

but it might just be that,

00:56:57

'cause obviously Cal Newport has a computer background

00:57:00

to him, right?

00:57:01

And folks in that realm, no scrum, agile

00:57:06

and Kanban is part of that.

00:57:08

So I'm sure that has a pretty big,

00:57:11

what do I say, a bias put into it because of that?

00:57:14

So maybe.

00:57:16

- Yeah.

00:57:17

Well, Basecamp doesn't do Kanban

00:57:21

which seems weird to me.

00:57:24

That's one of the big reasons we switched away from it

00:57:27

at the sweet setup

00:57:29

because we wanted a Kanban workflow

00:57:31

so we hacked that together in Notion

00:57:34

and it does make things a lot easier

00:57:37

when dealing with like outside contributors

00:57:39

and managing an editorial calendar.

00:57:42

I feel like Basecamp should definitely add Kanban

00:57:45

because they have a lot of other features

00:57:47

that are designed to break the reliance

00:57:50

on the constant communication

00:57:51

and help you break away from talking about the work

00:57:54

and actually do the work

00:57:55

which is really what you were driving at there.

00:57:59

So that feels like very low hanging fruit

00:58:01

but I also think with Basecamp specifically,

00:58:03

it's just like any other project management tool,

00:58:05

you could use it in a very poor way

00:58:07

and be completely stressed out.

00:58:09

In fact, I've done that before using Basecamp specifically.

00:58:12

- Right.

00:58:13

- It was several years ago, V1 of Basecamp

00:58:17

but I felt that we were working on a development project

00:58:20

with the family software business

00:58:21

and the development team was on the other side of the world.

00:58:24

So they were working while we were sleeping,

00:58:26

we get up in the morning and all the stuff is there

00:58:29

and then you spend like all day responding to things

00:58:31

and then they take your input and they go

00:58:33

and they work on something and ship it

00:58:36

but that kind of worked out

00:58:39

because we were in different time zones

00:58:40

and we weren't able to communicate in real time

00:58:42

but the whole time out we were doing that,

00:58:45

I look back on it now and I kind of feel like,

00:58:47

well, if we had been in the same time zone

00:58:49

and worked directly, that would have been a disaster.

00:58:52

- Yes.

00:58:53

- So Basecamp, really, that's not what it was designed for.

00:58:56

You could have used any internet-based tool

00:58:59

and plugged it in there

00:59:00

and it would have accomplished the same goal.

00:59:03

Then had we been in the same time zone

00:59:05

and worked at the same hours,

00:59:07

Basecamp would have been a complete mess.

00:59:09

- Sure.

00:59:10

- I do think there's something to this using boards approach

00:59:15

and I don't know exactly what it is

00:59:18

and Cal didn't do a good enough job explaining it

00:59:21

that I can articulate it well

00:59:23

but I have always felt a little bit bad

00:59:26

about my use of task management systems.

00:59:30

I remember being on Learn Omni Focus with Tim Stringer

00:59:33

and doing my demo and people at the end

00:59:37

were making comments like,

00:59:39

wow, you really don't have much in there.

00:59:42

I was like, what?

00:59:43

I guess I should have more projects.

00:59:45

I guess I should have more tasks

00:59:46

and I felt bad that I didn't have thousands of tasks in there

00:59:50

and Cal Newport is basically like, no, you know what?

00:59:52

That's okay

00:59:54

because really what you need is a simple way

00:59:57

and boards are the way to do it

00:59:58

to manage the things that you're gonna do,

01:00:00

the things that you're working on

01:00:02

and the things that are done.

01:00:04

I am a hundred percent in

01:00:06

on trying to work completely with boards.

01:00:09

I've been kicking around different task management things

01:00:13

recently when I've been playing with Obsidian

01:00:16

and I mentioned to you that there's this really cool

01:00:18

to-do is plug in which will take your to-do is tasks

01:00:21

and you can embed them inside of a page.

01:00:23

And I think I like that

01:00:25

because I can embed tasks for a specific project

01:00:28

inside of Obsidian.

01:00:29

I get to them get to them that way

01:00:31

if I really need to see everything

01:00:33

that's associated with a particular project.

01:00:35

But to-do is also supports boards

01:00:39

and the one project I have in there at the moment

01:00:41

is the project for writing the next version of my book

01:00:45

and it is set up as a board inside of to-doist.

01:00:49

And I love that approach.

01:00:51

It's working really, really well.

01:00:53

And so I think I'm gonna try to do that same sort of thing

01:00:57

with all of my tasks and not feel bad

01:01:00

about not having a bunch of different boards.

01:01:02

He does talk about the best practices

01:01:04

for individual task boards

01:01:06

and having more than one board that you're using.

01:01:09

So I don't know exactly what this is gonna look like

01:01:12

but this is an action item for me

01:01:14

is to use Kanban boards for my personal task management.

01:01:19

And that makes things simpler

01:01:20

because I've already got the stuff I'm doing for TSS.

01:01:23

That's inside a notion.

01:01:24

So I'm not gonna try to track that

01:01:26

inside of a personal task management too.

01:01:28

That's just a different board in a different place.

01:01:30

And when I'm in work mode, I can look at that board.

01:01:32

And when I'm working on the book, I can look at that board.

01:01:36

I think this is going to be the thing

01:01:39

that really works for me.

01:01:41

And I'm gonna use it, I'm still gonna use my fancy notebook.

01:01:45

Still write out like these are the tasks I'm gonna do today.

01:01:48

But in terms of like managing the projects,

01:01:50

I don't need more information than this is the stuff

01:01:53

that's yet to be done.

01:01:54

This is the stuff that's in progress.

01:01:55

And this is the stuff that I've actually shipped.

01:01:57

- I think you mentioned the fewer things

01:02:00

that you have in your system.

01:02:02

And I think over time I've had the move

01:02:05

to fewer and fewer things in task management.

01:02:08

I think the bullet journal kind of forces that to a degree

01:02:11

just because you're not gonna write things

01:02:13

at that level.

01:02:16

This is one of the things I think GTD has done us a disservice in.

01:02:20

Because one of the things that David Allen pushes

01:02:25

is you define your project, right?

01:02:28

And then you define the individual steps.

01:02:30

Like the definitions he has for a project versus a task.

01:02:33

Like if a project has more than two steps,

01:02:36

more than one step, it's a project, right?

01:02:38

So that could mean buy light bulb, install light bulb.

01:02:43

That would be two tasks in the system.

01:02:46

My system has buy light bulbs.

01:02:48

- And that's it.

01:02:50

- Like that's all it is.

01:02:51

- Yes, exactly.

01:02:53

That's been a huge point of friction for me too.

01:02:55

And I never understood why.

01:02:57

- Yeah.

01:02:58

And this is what I've moved more and more towards

01:03:00

is to use David Allen's definition.

01:03:04

A lot of times I have a list of projects for the day

01:03:08

to use his definitions again, right?

01:03:09

But if I were to break that down

01:03:12

in the way that he intends or recommends,

01:03:14

that list would be at least 10 times as long

01:03:17

as what it actually is.

01:03:18

And I don't find the value in breaking it down that far.

01:03:22

Like the return on that isn't there, I don't think.

01:03:25

To a degree for some people, I can see how it is.

01:03:28

But to me, it's just extra work.

01:03:32

And if I can just bust out writing seven or eight things

01:03:35

down on my list of the things I have to get done today.

01:03:38

Like I know that breaks the whole three in my T thing,

01:03:40

but if I've got seven, eight,

01:03:42

I've had days where I've got 18 things on that list.

01:03:44

I got them all done,

01:03:46

but technically those are all projects.

01:03:49

And the overhead involved with managing it the way

01:03:52

that GTD recommends, it does two things.

01:03:55

It makes that system very big and unwieldy.

01:03:56

And you have to use something like to do

01:03:58

with your OmniFocus, just to keep track of it all.

01:04:01

- Yeah.

01:04:02

- And the overhead involved with putting it into that system

01:04:06

and then managing it is quite high.

01:04:09

Thus you have so many people,

01:04:11

I remember you're talking about Learn OmniFocus.

01:04:14

Whenever I've done, I don't know how many sessions

01:04:17

I've done there now.

01:04:18

But one of them that I did there,

01:04:20

there was a gentleman that had questions.

01:04:21

He's like, how do you decide what to do next?

01:04:24

And he said that he had his dashboard set up.

01:04:27

If you follow me, you know, like the historical dashboard

01:04:29

that I've set up,

01:04:30

automatically would put a list together for the day,

01:04:32

which is cool concept, mess and philosophy.

01:04:36

And it was something he had done,

01:04:39

but he was getting two to 300 things

01:04:41

on that dashboard list in a day.

01:04:43

He's like, I just don't know how to choose what to work on.

01:04:46

- Exactly.

01:04:47

- And it's like, dude, like you've gone to two things,

01:04:52

like you've broken it down way too far.

01:04:54

And then you've made too many things,

01:05:00

the most important thing for that day.

01:05:02

So between those two, you got a mess on your hands.

01:05:06

You're gonna have to either scale it back

01:05:08

as far as what you're putting into it.

01:05:09

So you're only looking at 10 things instead of 300.

01:05:12

But also say no to things.

01:05:15

Like that's part of the trick.

01:05:17

And I think that's some of what we're getting at

01:05:18

with the dangers of that.

01:05:20

Now, again, I'm hesitant because I know GTD has some benefits,

01:05:24

but it does have some of these potential downfalls.

01:05:27

- Yes, so with GTD, something like a meeting,

01:05:31

which I would not put as a MIT,

01:05:35

but let's just for the sake of argument,

01:05:36

say that there is a meeting,

01:05:38

there's actually at least three tasks

01:05:41

with each one of those meetings that you have.

01:05:44

There's prep for the meeting,

01:05:45

which is gonna take longer than two minutes.

01:05:47

There's a participant in the meeting,

01:05:50

which who knows how long that's gonna take.

01:05:53

And then the processing of the meeting notes

01:05:57

and creating the tasks associated with it.

01:06:00

Even if you aren't doing any of those tasks in the moment,

01:06:03

each one of those things is gonna take longer

01:06:05

than two minutes and must be identified

01:06:07

as something you need to do for a single meeting,

01:06:10

which maybe is only 30 minutes long.

01:06:13

But can now imagine you're in back-to-back meetings

01:06:16

all day in our intervals.

01:06:18

So you've got eight of these.

01:06:19

That's insane.

01:06:22

- Yes, it's a lot.

01:06:24

- Now, regarding the MITs,

01:06:26

I have been jotting down five of them in my notebook,

01:06:29

but I am not including meetings in those for the most part.

01:06:34

When we record a podcast, I will include that.

01:06:37

But that is one of the things I think is genius

01:06:39

about these analog cards.

01:06:42

There's 10 spaces on here,

01:06:44

but if you look at the website,

01:06:45

Jeff actually shows like meetings on that list.

01:06:50

So I think the number, you mentioned seven to eight,

01:06:53

I don't think you're too far off there.

01:06:55

I just think we need to rethink

01:06:57

how the things that we are actually doing

01:07:01

and recognize that a meeting is actually a task.

01:07:04

It is going to use up some time

01:07:05

and you're going to have less other time

01:07:08

to do other things.

01:07:09

So don't feel bad about the number,

01:07:11

but recognizing this is the number I can get done

01:07:14

in a day is very important.

01:07:17

'Cause as long as you don't have that,

01:07:19

you will continue to throw these things on your list

01:07:22

like processing these meeting notes

01:07:23

because GTD, I can't do this in two minutes

01:07:26

and at the end of the day,

01:07:28

you've got another eight hours of work.

01:07:30

Just follow up from the meetings

01:07:32

before you do your actual work.

01:07:33

And then you'd get to, by the way,

01:07:35

go to bed exhausted,

01:07:36

wake up tired and do it all tomorrow.

01:07:38

- We need to keep moving,

01:07:40

but yes, you're absolutely right.

01:07:42

So the moral of the story is,

01:07:45

we don't manage this stuff well.

01:07:47

We're dumb when it comes to all this stuff.

01:07:50

So we need to get better at it.

01:07:52

Thus, he brings us to chapter six, which is...

01:07:56

- The protocol principle.

01:07:58

- Which I think is interesting.

01:07:59

- This is all about doing things the right way.

01:08:02

So protocol principle is actually designing rules

01:08:05

that optimize when and how coordination occurs

01:08:08

in the workplace is a pain in the short term,

01:08:11

but it can result in significantly more productive operation

01:08:14

in the long term.

01:08:16

This is, if I were to summarize this,

01:08:19

defining the rules of engagement

01:08:21

for how communication happens at work.

01:08:26

And he has a couple different tactics for how to do that.

01:08:30

The big one that he advocates for,

01:08:33

and he even kind of pokes holes in his theory

01:08:36

that this is a good solution.

01:08:37

He mentioned he presented this a while ago

01:08:39

and since then he's realized it's really not that great

01:08:42

as a comprehensive solution,

01:08:43

but it can still be useful.

01:08:45

Is this whole concept of office hours?

01:08:47

They can't replace email for timely interactions,

01:08:50

but I have seen this in effect

01:08:53

where you define this is the time to get questions answered.

01:08:58

And if you have a question before then

01:09:00

you wait until that time.

01:09:02

And magically people who wait get their answers answered

01:09:06

and they're okay with it,

01:09:07

even though initially they're like,

01:09:08

well, I probably will have something super urgent

01:09:11

that I'll need an answer for.

01:09:13

In reality, even if these office hours are only once a week,

01:09:16

like a weekly team meeting,

01:09:18

once you get used to doing things this way,

01:09:20

it's a lot less hectic and everybody is usually okay with it.

01:09:23

- Yeah, I think chapter five and chapter six,

01:09:25

so the process principle and then the protocol principle.

01:09:29

When I read those in my head,

01:09:30

it's like, how is he gonna break those apart?

01:09:31

It'll seem very, very similar to me.

01:09:34

So just to clarify some of that,

01:09:37

the process principle is kind of the way

01:09:39

that things move through your system.

01:09:40

- Yep. - Right?

01:09:41

So this is the process, the steps

01:09:44

that something works through.

01:09:46

Once it hits me, this is the step that goes next.

01:09:49

And then it goes to the next one.

01:09:51

And then it goes on to the next one.

01:09:53

Like that's the process, think of it as a workflow.

01:09:55

And that's where the Kanban thing can come in, right?

01:10:00

The protocol principle is kind of like the rules of engagement.

01:10:04

- Yep. - And probably the clearest way

01:10:07

to think of that is like it's the rules

01:10:08

and the requirements to get it into that process

01:10:13

that we just created the chapter prior.

01:10:16

Like that's, I mean, there's some pieces that talk about

01:10:19

as it moves and such, but generally it's how things come into it.

01:10:22

Think of the brass process that you were talking about earlier.

01:10:27

They ended up creating a form that then had to go to somebody

01:10:29

and then they approved or like it created this whole friction point.

01:10:34

This is similar to what I do at our church actually.

01:10:36

We have a whole like room request process.

01:10:40

If you want to request a room for a class or a meeting in some form,

01:10:43

you have to fill out this form

01:10:44

and hand deliver it to our receptionist.

01:10:49

And people have repeatedly asked,

01:10:52

do you have just a place online?

01:10:53

I could do this.

01:10:54

Is there a way we could just get,

01:10:55

can you just email me the form?

01:10:56

Like people ask this all the time.

01:10:59

And I'm the IT guy, right?

01:11:00

So I would be the one that sets that up

01:11:02

and I repeatedly tell them the moment you do that,

01:11:05

you will get at least double the number of requests.

01:11:08

We're already in a weird spot.

01:11:10

- Probably five to six times based on the IBM example.

01:11:13

- Yes.

01:11:14

- So I'm the naysayer on this one.

01:11:17

It's like, I'm not doing that because

01:11:19

you're gonna get a whole bunch more

01:11:22

and it's gonna be unsolicited

01:11:24

and you won't get to ask questions

01:11:26

and it's gonna make a mess.

01:11:28

So we've never done it.

01:11:29

I've had this on a repeated conversation for about three years,

01:11:34

but we have a very strict protocol, right?

01:11:36

You have to show up, you have to collect the form,

01:11:40

you have to fill it out and hand it back to us.

01:11:42

And then it has a whole process it goes through

01:11:44

to get it to the right people,

01:11:45

depending on what you've put on that piece of paper.

01:11:48

But it creates the friction point, right?

01:11:51

(laughs)

01:11:52

- Yeah, well, friction isn't necessarily,

01:11:54

like there's the real principle at work here

01:11:57

is that there are costs to everything.

01:12:00

So friction and cost, that's a form of a cost,

01:12:03

but it's not the only one that we need to consider.

01:12:06

That's what he's talking about in this chapter,

01:12:07

is that there could be non-monetary costs

01:12:10

like cognitive cycles

01:12:11

and other costs is inconvenience,

01:12:14

but that's outweighed by the,

01:12:18

improving the signal to noise ratio,

01:12:19

the requests that come in are truly legitimate requests.

01:12:23

And this gets back to a concept called information theory,

01:12:26

which he summarizes at the beginning.

01:12:28

This part was hard for me to get through

01:12:31

and really understand this is Cal speaking

01:12:35

as a college professor and me having to struggle

01:12:38

a little bit to process this.

01:12:40

But I think it's important.

01:12:41

So the information theory, basic idea here,

01:12:45

if I were to try to summarize this,

01:12:47

is that the protocols,

01:12:50

that take into account the structure

01:12:51

of the information being communicated

01:12:53

can perform much better than a simply naive approach.

01:12:56

And the naive approach is,

01:12:57

well, it's just make this more efficient,

01:12:58

throw it on the web, anybody can fill this out

01:13:01

because that's easier for me.

01:13:02

But they don't consider the whole chain

01:13:05

that things have to go through.

01:13:08

And he's addresses a couple specific things

01:13:10

in terms of protocol here with like meeting scheduling.

01:13:14

He says, standard meeting scheduling protocol equals

01:13:18

energy minimizing email ping pong.

01:13:21

I completely agree with that.

01:13:24

I have been, I'm still a guilty of this occasionally,

01:13:28

but I shy away from this from whenever I can.

01:13:31

He advocates that you consider using a scheduler.

01:13:34

That is the simple solution.

01:13:37

It's a little bit tricky because you have to shift

01:13:40

people's expectations, but that's the common thread

01:13:43

between anything that he says in this entire book.

01:13:47

The criticism of the schedulers is that they're cold

01:13:50

and impersonal and I'm a friend who wants to meet you

01:13:53

for coffee, why are you sending me through this cold,

01:13:55

emotionless system, you know?

01:14:00

But from a work perspective, I think it's maybe

01:14:04

a little bit easier to get everybody on board

01:14:06

with like, okay, so these are the real costs

01:14:09

when someone wants to schedule a meeting.

01:14:11

And here's a different way of doing it,

01:14:13

which there are trade-offs, but ultimately the cost

01:14:16

of this is going to be less.

01:14:17

So how about we try this?

01:14:19

That's ultimately the conversation that needs to happen.

01:14:21

And that's not a new idea in this book, by the way.

01:14:24

He talks about this in Deep Work 2.

01:14:25

One of the things that resonated from me from that book

01:14:28

was a story of the woman who was always having to respond

01:14:33

to something that her boss wanted and she kept track

01:14:37

of all the different times that she was interrupted.

01:14:39

And then she scheduled a meeting and she said,

01:14:41

well, what do you pay me to do here?

01:14:43

What is it?

01:14:45

What would you say it is exactly that I do here?

01:14:47

And they defined together, like,

01:14:51

this is the thing that's most valuable.

01:14:52

And then she says, well, okay, I don't have any time

01:14:55

to do that because I'm doing all this stuff for you.

01:14:57

And then he's like, oh, okay, I guess I got

01:14:59

a quid interrupting you.

01:15:00

And how about these hours, at least we can set aside

01:15:04

for you not to be interrupted and do that sort of thing.

01:15:07

And that's the type of conversation that nobody wants

01:15:09

to have with their boss.

01:15:10

Right, right.

01:15:11

But it's ultimately the only way to incorporate

01:15:15

any of this sort of change if you're not the CEO

01:15:17

calling the shots.

01:15:18

Yeah, 'cause you're forced to have a hard conversation

01:15:22

up the ladder, right?

01:15:23

Which is--

01:15:24

Not everybody loves conflict like I do.

01:15:26

It's true, it's true.

01:15:28

It's like, Mike, if you bring something up

01:15:30

that's gonna contradict something he thinks,

01:15:33

he's all on board and he gets fired up and he's ready for it.

01:15:36

That's not normal.

01:15:38

I don't know if people are aware of that, but--

01:15:40

(laughs)

01:15:41

So yes, you have to put boundaries around it, right?

01:15:45

That's a lot of what this can be boiled down into.

01:15:49

I don't know, like, I have a handful of action items

01:15:52

that I'll get to when we get to that point,

01:15:55

but this is just an interesting,

01:15:58

like, set some rules of engagement, right?

01:16:02

For how to put things into your process.

01:16:07

Yes, so one of the rules they talk about,

01:16:09

we kind of hit on this already,

01:16:10

keep the email short because the sender typically

01:16:13

is gonna be the one who sends the one minute message

01:16:16

with a couple of questions and then the recipient is the one

01:16:19

who has to spend hours responding.

01:16:20

Yes.

01:16:21

Another one that they talked about here, though,

01:16:23

which I thought was pretty brilliant,

01:16:25

is to disconnect email from an individual.

01:16:29

So that means that if I am doing support,

01:16:33

people do not email Mike@company.com.

01:16:38

They email support@company.com.

01:16:43

So what this does is it lets the sender think

01:16:47

that they're still communicating via email,

01:16:51

but it allows the recipient to use a ticket-based system,

01:16:54

something like help scout or zendesk,

01:16:58

something like that, where a bunch of people

01:17:00

can work on things together and they can put things

01:17:04

in the right places and people can respond to tickets

01:17:07

much more efficiently, much more effectively.

01:17:09

And the person who asked the question via email

01:17:12

has no idea that they're not receiving an email

01:17:16

from a specific person anymore.

01:17:19

And this is the kind of thing

01:17:20

that we should be looking for when we're trying

01:17:23

to change the way that we do email, in my opinion.

01:17:27

We're not gonna get everybody to agree right now,

01:17:31

hey, let's just not use email anymore.

01:17:34

That's not gonna happen.

01:17:36

But there are ways for you maybe to not use email

01:17:39

as much anymore.

01:17:41

This isn't, in my opinion, and maybe there's some gray area

01:17:44

here, but in my opinion, this isn't like pulling a fast one

01:17:47

on someone.

01:17:49

This is not tricking them because you're doing something else.

01:17:54

This is actually a better solution for everybody involved,

01:17:59

because the person who's making the request

01:18:02

doesn't want you to question all of their systems.

01:18:04

They just want an answer to their thing.

01:18:06

So they don't really care how you get that answer to them

01:18:11

and you don't really care about what they're gonna do next.

01:18:16

You just want to get it off your plate as quickly

01:18:18

as possible.

01:18:20

Ultimately, I think we do need to get to the point.

01:18:23

We do need to have the difficult conversations

01:18:26

for people that we receive these types of requests from often

01:18:29

and say, hey, is there a better way to do this?

01:18:32

But if you can just get the thing done,

01:18:36

I mean, that's what David Allen would say to do, right?

01:18:39

- Right, right.

01:18:41

But I mean, if you start putting this whole thing together,

01:18:43

and I know we've got one more principle here to cover,

01:18:45

but if you start putting it all together,

01:18:48

you need to be careful with how you set up your process

01:18:52

so that it is being mindful of the attention capital

01:18:57

that you have, right?

01:19:00

So that's-- - Yes, true.

01:19:01

- You gotta kind of tie those two together

01:19:03

because the process is designed to move things forward

01:19:08

without fragmenting your workload.

01:19:13

And then you have this protocol that you put in place

01:19:17

for how things should be done,

01:19:20

like how that process should work.

01:19:22

But then that brings us to chapter seven,

01:19:24

which is the specialization principle,

01:19:27

which is effectively a principle that tells you,

01:19:30

focus on the things you should be doing,

01:19:33

focus on the things you're good at.

01:19:35

- Yep.

01:19:35

- Don't let things get into your process

01:19:37

that you shouldn't be doing, like, don't be dumb.

01:19:41

(laughs)

01:19:42

- Don't say yes to everything.

01:19:43

- Which is an argument that we've heard

01:19:46

over and over and over again,

01:19:47

so people maybe hear that and they're like,

01:19:49

"Well, I don't need to hear this again.

01:19:51

I don't think you've heard it this way."

01:19:54

The story that he tells at the beginning of this chapter

01:19:57

is the perfect story at this point in the book

01:20:02

because it's kind of self-deprecating on Cal.

01:20:05

He talks about how his grandfather was a professor

01:20:08

and his grandfather wrote a bunch of books.

01:20:11

He ended up with a chair in religious studies

01:20:13

and a role as a provost at a large theological seminary.

01:20:17

And he's kind of poking fun at himself as like,

01:20:20

"Well, I'm the one with the computer.

01:20:22

I'm the one with the technology.

01:20:24

I should be running circles around my grandpa."

01:20:27

He's like, "I'm not there."

01:20:29

- Yes.

01:20:30

- So the point here is that the technology

01:20:34

doesn't necessarily make us more productive.

01:20:37

And the real point he's making as it pertains to this chapter

01:20:40

is that computers specifically cause us not to specialize.

01:20:45

And that I think I 100% agree with.

01:20:48

It's easy to say, "Well, I can just take care of this."

01:20:53

And I have fallen into this trap myself

01:20:56

over and over and over and over and over again.

01:20:58

It's one of the reasons that the few times

01:21:00

I've tried to work with a VA, it has never worked out

01:21:04

'cause I know intellectually I should spend up to 30 times

01:21:08

as long as this thing takes

01:21:10

in order to delegate this so someone else can do it.

01:21:13

But I get annoyed the minute it takes me

01:21:16

even slightly longer than I could have finished it myself.

01:21:20

So this chapter, what it did for me is it helped me realize

01:21:24

that there is a lot of value in specialization.

01:21:27

And I am not committing to try to use a VA again,

01:21:31

but I am committing as an action item

01:21:34

to make a list of things that I can delegate.

01:21:37

I think that's kind of like the first step.

01:21:39

So kind of an anti-mic action item with this one,

01:21:41

very specific, very measurable.

01:21:45

By next time, will I have a list of things

01:21:47

that I can delegate?

01:21:48

And then from that point, I can figure out,

01:21:51

if I do wanna delegate this thing,

01:21:53

what are the steps that I must do

01:21:55

in order to make this delegate a bowl,

01:21:57

but that's not what I'm saying for this specific one.

01:22:00

I just wanna list the things

01:22:02

that I could potentially offload.

01:22:04

- Overlay Emily Wattnick's book,

01:22:07

How to Be Everything on Top of This.

01:22:09

- Yeah.

01:22:10

(laughs)

01:22:11

- That's a thing that crossed my mind.

01:22:13

He's, okay, computers make it possible

01:22:16

to do tons of things, right?

01:22:18

Think about how many different content creators, you and I,

01:22:22

video work, editing, now we're doing streaming,

01:22:25

we do audio work, we do writing, we do publishing,

01:22:28

we do all sorts of different things.

01:22:31

Finances and such, like there's a ton of this stuff

01:22:34

that's very wide ranging that we do.

01:22:37

Emily Wattnick's book was about how to do that essentially,

01:22:41

like how do you keep yourself engaged

01:22:44

when you have a bunch of different things,

01:22:46

like in making sure that you do have that,

01:22:49

but anyway, how do you do everything versus Cal Newport's?

01:22:54

You gotta focus on the things that you're good at,

01:22:57

like pick what you're gonna do,

01:23:00

don't try to do all of this different stuff, right?

01:23:02

So, I don't know, I just, I thought it was an interesting

01:23:06

way to say it in that computers make it possible,

01:23:10

they make a lot of things accessible to us, right?

01:23:13

Which is awesome, but at the same time,

01:23:17

it's similar to this broader email conversation,

01:23:20

in that yes, email does have some theoretical benefits, right?

01:23:25

But the way we actually use it turns out to be not so great.

01:23:30

Computers in general can have that same argument

01:23:33

in that they make a lot of things possible,

01:23:36

but that doesn't mean it's something you should or should do.

01:23:40

You know, this is the, what's the name for it?

01:23:44

I can't think of it, but if there's one small good thing

01:23:48

out of a tool or a product, we'll tend to say,

01:23:50

oh yeah, I'll accept that because it makes it possible

01:23:52

for me to connect with people across the world.

01:23:55

Yes, Facebook may allow you to do that,

01:23:57

but there's whole baggage of things

01:23:59

that are gonna come with it.

01:24:00

Email's the same way, the computer in general is the same way.

01:24:04

Cal Newport's push is to don't just default

01:24:07

to do all the things, don't just default to take it

01:24:11

if there's one small piece of good in it.

01:24:13

Ask the question, does it benefit overall,

01:24:17

and then bring it in if it is a yes?

01:24:21

I think maybe there's a difference between

01:24:25

being a multi-potentialite and doing a bunch of busy work.

01:24:30

I think that's really what Cal's getting at

01:24:32

in this specific section, 'cause he talks about

01:24:35

on page 233, that busyness is controllable.

01:24:38

If you decide to be visibly busy,

01:24:39

you know you can certainly achieve this goal.

01:24:43

And that's the distinction for me.

01:24:46

I don't know if that's exactly what he's saying,

01:24:48

but with a multi-potentialite,

01:24:50

I view that as like, I'm a podcaster, I'm a writer,

01:24:54

I'm a video creator, but all of those have a common thread

01:24:58

that tie them together, that make them valuable things

01:25:02

to be doing, maybe it's content creator,

01:25:05

though I don't really like that specific term.

01:25:07

And I feel like with multi-potentialite

01:25:09

and Emily Wopnick's book, it's kind of,

01:25:11

you're doing all these things,

01:25:12

and there is that common thread between them,

01:25:14

and Cal Newport is basically saying, yeah,

01:25:16

go ahead and identify the things that are important,

01:25:17

but the things that aren't important,

01:25:19

and he's making the case email, hyperactive,

01:25:21

hive mind type stuff,

01:25:23

that's the thing that you should be looking to delegate.

01:25:26

For example, the scheduling of the meetings

01:25:29

that we're talking about in the last chapter,

01:25:32

that's a kind of thing that you could outsource.

01:25:34

He talks about designing or outsourcing email,

01:25:37

outsourcing design, outsourcing social media,

01:25:40

which there are people who your multi-potentialite bent

01:25:43

could be that I am a designer.

01:25:47

I like the design process,

01:25:50

and that's part of what makes my brand my brand.

01:25:53

So for me personally, I kind of feel like

01:25:54

the sketchnote stuff is kind of part of that.

01:25:57

Could I delegate the production of a sketchnote file?

01:26:00

Yes, I could, and that would free up more time for me,

01:26:03

but that's kind of my thing.

01:26:05

That's part of the important stuff.

01:26:07

And so I'm not gonna delegate that.

01:26:10

I think that's anyways how I would separate those

01:26:13

in my head, but maybe I'm wrong with that.

01:26:17

No, I think you're right.

01:26:18

I think that makes sense.

01:26:19

I was mostly thinking about like Emily was trying to show us

01:26:22

how to do a whole bunch of different types of things

01:26:25

at the same time, versus cows push to find the thing.

01:26:30

Sure, okay.

01:26:31

It wouldn't even be the thing.

01:26:32

Just find what is your specialty,

01:26:37

and that could be a handful of things,

01:26:39

and focus on those, as opposed to trying to do

01:26:42

so many things at one time.

01:26:44

So to me, it just felt like it was two different

01:26:46

ways of coming at it.

01:26:48

So, yep, for what it's worth.

01:26:50

Makes sense.

01:26:51

I'm glad you brought that up though,

01:26:53

because on the surface they seem like very contradictory.

01:26:55

I think they're actually pretty complimentary though.

01:26:58

Basic idea is that you've got only so much attention,

01:27:01

only so much time, and you've gotta spend it

01:27:04

on the right things, and you've gotta identify

01:27:07

what those right things are.

01:27:08

And maybe it's not clearly defined as like this one thing

01:27:11

that I do over and over and over again, like Cal, maybe would,

01:27:14

or at least that's the impression you get

01:27:15

from reading Cal stuff.

01:27:16

And Emily's like, no, do this, that, that, that, that, you know,

01:27:19

and connect the dots in your own weird way

01:27:21

inside of your brain.

01:27:22

Right.

01:27:23

But ultimately, you know, budget your attention,

01:27:26

whatever you don't budget ends up being wasted,

01:27:30

whether that's money, whether that's time,

01:27:32

whether that's attention.

01:27:33

So just considering that there is a bunch of stuff

01:27:35

that you probably just do because, oh, this is part

01:27:37

of the process, and the big thing for me is thinking about,

01:27:41

well, maybe that doesn't need to be part of your process.

01:27:44

Maybe you can't get away from scheduling the meetings,

01:27:46

maybe you can't get away from dealing with email,

01:27:48

but maybe you can change the way that you do

01:27:51

some of these things.

01:27:53

- Yeah, just to put this whole thing together,

01:27:55

'cause we've kind of been talking around things

01:27:56

that aren't email here, even though like,

01:27:59

that's his main driver here in the book.

01:28:02

But you've got these four pieces, right?

01:28:05

The attention capital principle,

01:28:07

this is all for how to build a world without email.

01:28:10

Attention capital principle, the process principle,

01:28:12

the protocol principle, and the specialization principle.

01:28:15

And yes, the book is about a world without email.

01:28:19

But if you notice, like when we talked about these,

01:28:22

yes, email's kind of an undertone,

01:28:24

but it's not like point blank,

01:28:26

this is what we're talking about.

01:28:27

He's not explaining how to manage email folders.

01:28:29

He's not talking about how to move conversations

01:28:32

that happen on email elsewhere explicitly.

01:28:35

He's not saying that.

01:28:37

He's just talking about the knowledge work that we do.

01:28:41

There are better ways to communicate about that work

01:28:45

through these four principles of managing your attention,

01:28:48

building the process, for managing that knowledge work,

01:28:51

the protocol for creating what that knowledge work is,

01:28:54

and then choosing what of the knowledge work

01:28:57

you're gonna do with the specialization.

01:28:58

So it's not necessarily, like this is the part where,

01:29:02

and I know we're coming up here on this conclusion and such,

01:29:05

but this is the part where I was a little bit taken off guard

01:29:10

here because when we started this, remember what I said,

01:29:15

I was very skeptical about this because email is

01:29:20

kind of this fundamental piece in a lot of what I do,

01:29:25

but some of what is in this one, in this particular book,

01:29:30

involves the work outside of email

01:29:33

and how to manage it outside of email,

01:29:35

as opposed to defaulting to a communication tool

01:29:39

that's asynchronous that comes with a bunch of flaws,

01:29:42

finding other systems that could do the same thing.

01:29:46

So it is kind of fascinating when you start thinking about it

01:29:49

that way because it's at least caused me to start thinking

01:29:52

through how do I get work, how do I get what that is

01:29:57

that I need to do and how do I design,

01:30:01

how things come into that process, what is the process,

01:30:05

how do I manage that whole thing?

01:30:08

So it's at least prompted those thought processes.

01:30:11

So I think it's just been like, yes, email is the conversation

01:30:14

point and the potential problem here,

01:30:16

but the broader principles for getting off of it

01:30:21

could be pretty wide ranging and not necessarily just email.

01:30:25

It could be getting you off a slack.

01:30:26

It could be getting you off of forums online.

01:30:30

It could get you off of all sorts of stuff,

01:30:32

but it's how do you manage the work that you've been assigned?

01:30:36

And recognizing that email is not as innocuous

01:30:41

as it seems at first, kind of transitioning

01:30:47

to the conclusion here, but he makes a statement

01:30:50

that email isn't additive, it's ecological

01:30:52

and it changes everything.

01:30:54

So the typical approach with email is it's just this one

01:30:59

message, it's this thing in isolation and his real argument

01:31:03

is that no, it's the hyperactive hive mind

01:31:05

that comes along with it and all of these other costs

01:31:09

that are really hard to measure,

01:31:12

but that's the thing we really gotta be taking

01:31:15

into the equation when we decide is this the right tool

01:31:18

to be using in this particular thing?

01:31:20

And this is also where he talks about Neil Postman

01:31:22

and how every advantage a new technology offers

01:31:25

is always a corresponding disadvantage.

01:31:28

And if you came into this book just blindly doing email

01:31:34

because I gotta do it, it is what it is

01:31:37

and you're kind of not to the point maybe even where I was

01:31:42

where I hate this with a fiery passion

01:31:45

with the intensity of a thousand sons,

01:31:47

but you don't really even think about it.

01:31:51

I feel like this book is very eye opening,

01:31:55

but even for someone like me,

01:31:58

it's a call to action for looking for alternatives

01:32:03

because I admit that while email isn't a big part of my job,

01:32:07

it is something that I just default to while I gotta do this.

01:32:12

And it takes as long as it takes

01:32:13

and I've been able to minimize that as much as I can.

01:32:16

So I, and part of that is like I'm setting my own rules

01:32:21

and I take some people off with that.

01:32:23

Like you could make the argument in terms of Cal's focused

01:32:26

email journey, I'm farther along than a lot of other people,

01:32:30

but even with that I find myself

01:32:33

having to take a hard look in the mirror and say,

01:32:36

you know what?

01:32:37

Like I never even thought about this, that and the other thing

01:32:40

and why am I still doing this?

01:32:41

- There's a point in this last chapter in this conclusion

01:32:47

that I thought was kind of interesting

01:32:51

in that when Henry Ford was building cars,

01:32:56

everybody had a process for how that was supposed to work,

01:33:00

right? - Yep.

01:33:01

- And we've talked about what that is.

01:33:03

When he came to the assembly line process,

01:33:07

it completely changed the car making industry and process.

01:33:12

And so much of what people had been trying to do

01:33:17

previous to that assembly line was find ways

01:33:20

to build cars quicker by making it easier to manufacture

01:33:25

the parts that went into it, by making it easier

01:33:28

to get things to and from that car as it sat on the shop floor,

01:33:33

which is why Henry Ford's process of moving the car

01:33:36

was such a big fundamental change.

01:33:40

With email, we haven't had that moment yet

01:33:43

where there's the big fundamental change

01:33:46

that brings it into its full glory in that

01:33:50

all email has done so far has taken

01:33:56

normal office practices and made them move faster.

01:34:01

Even though it hasn't changed what those practices are

01:34:05

or the fundamental of how the business operates, right?

01:34:09

All it has done is move the memo process quicker

01:34:12

into more people so it's propagated it even further.

01:34:16

So it hasn't actually had its big fundamental shift

01:34:20

to bring it into a place where it has its full benefit.

01:34:24

So this is some of what he's calling for, I guess,

01:34:28

in that if you can use these systems,

01:34:30

because even to look at the processes

01:34:32

and such that he's talking about,

01:34:34

he's even talking about things getting into the process

01:34:36

by sending an email, that's what he's referencing in that.

01:34:40

So he's still saying, like email is a thing

01:34:43

that is used for these cases.

01:34:45

So yes, he can see a world without email,

01:34:49

but in the interim, trying to get better at using it

01:34:53

is a big thing as well.

01:34:55

- And this is the hard part because there are companies,

01:34:59

like Basecamp we mentioned earlier,

01:35:00

with their hey email, which are redefining

01:35:05

some of the rules around email.

01:35:07

There is no inbox in hey, there's just stuff that comes in,

01:35:12

there's no concept of like these are the messages

01:35:15

that I have to clear through in order to get to inbox zero.

01:35:18

I mean, that just completely breaks if you use hey,

01:35:21

but that means that hey is something separate.

01:35:24

It's not iMap, it's not pop three,

01:35:27

and that means that you have to use specifically

01:35:30

hey's client, which the nerd in me is like,

01:35:34

no, use the standard, but as long as you continue

01:35:37

to use a standard, you're stuck with the standard.

01:35:39

So it requires companies like Basecamp

01:35:42

trying new things like hey,

01:35:44

there's gonna be this point though,

01:35:46

where things are super stressful in the meantime,

01:35:49

because you're gonna have a bunch of different things

01:35:50

all over the place.

01:35:51

Gmail is kind of like that, it's sort of iMap,

01:35:54

but not quite.

01:35:55

And so whenever there's a new version of macOS mail,

01:35:59

Gmail changes something and it breaks.

01:36:02

It seems like the first version, it never works.

01:36:05

And then they have to make a change,

01:36:06

and then eventually it does.

01:36:08

And the more different options there are out there,

01:36:12

the more different standards or protocols

01:36:14

that people are using, it is gonna get worse before

01:36:18

it gets better, but I do completely agree

01:36:20

that there is going to be a point.

01:36:23

You're right, we're not there yet.

01:36:25

And I don't know how far in the future it is,

01:36:26

but there will be a point when we think about the way

01:36:29

that we deal with email right now,

01:36:31

and we're like, wow, how archaic was that?

01:36:33

- Right, right, for sure.

01:36:35

All right, action items.

01:36:39

- I actually have two, I'm going to attempt

01:36:44

to use Kanban boards for things that I am going to get done.

01:36:49

And I am also going to make my list of things to delegate.

01:36:54

So what that looks like for next time,

01:36:57

I think is that the Kanban boards

01:36:59

will probably be inside of todoist,

01:37:01

but I'm not 100% sure about that yet.

01:37:05

There are certain things about todoist

01:37:06

that bug me like the different priority levels.

01:37:08

There's only one priority, knock it off todoist,

01:37:11

but maybe I can figure out a different way to use those.

01:37:14

And the list is simple,

01:37:15

so I'll just have a list of things

01:37:16

that hopefully I can delegate.

01:37:20

- There you go.

01:37:21

I have two, one of them you might laugh at me for,

01:37:26

but one of them, the one you won't laugh at me about,

01:37:30

is creating protocols for how tickets and such come to me,

01:37:35

like how support comes to me in my day job.

01:37:39

I do fully control that system.

01:37:41

So how people go about bringing things to me

01:37:45

and how people get things into that process

01:37:48

and defining that process.

01:37:50

Right now, it's just, you have an issue,

01:37:52

I'm gonna go fix it right now.

01:37:54

That's a lot of how I do things,

01:37:56

even if it doesn't need done right now.

01:37:57

A lot of times I will do that

01:37:59

just so I don't have to try to keep it in any system whatsoever.

01:38:02

So I've built in a lot of ability

01:38:04

to have distractions in the day.

01:38:05

Like I have a lot of time available for that

01:38:08

and it's just planned on that.

01:38:10

So I just use it for those things.

01:38:12

But I don't have clear processes for the things

01:38:17

that aren't able to be done immediately and tracking those.

01:38:21

I do have an assistant that works under me at the moment.

01:38:24

So trying to manage things between the two of us

01:38:27

gets to be a little bit messy at the moment.

01:38:28

So using some of what KAL is recommending here

01:38:31

with the process and protocol pieces specifically,

01:38:33

that's some of what I wanna try to do at our church.

01:38:37

So that's one.

01:38:38

The second is, so I do still have email on my phone.

01:38:43

Right?

01:38:46

This is the thing that people tell you all the time,

01:38:47

get email off your phone.

01:38:48

I can't do that because so many of the systems

01:38:52

that I use on a daily basis send like the codes to get into it

01:38:56

and they send it via email.

01:38:57

But I'm trying to get into it from my phone

01:39:00

because I'm moving around so many different places

01:39:03

that it's impossible for me to constantly get back

01:39:05

to my computer to get that code, type it in and such.

01:39:08

It's just a pain.

01:39:10

Maybe that would be a good thing,

01:39:13

but I don't find that it's easy for me to get email

01:39:16

off of my phone because of that.

01:39:18

So I had a thought on how to maybe subvert this

01:39:24

in that I could potentially create a series shortcut.

01:39:29

This might be crazy.

01:39:31

This is why I'm putting so many caveats on it.

01:39:33

I think I can create a series shortcut

01:39:36

that replaces the email icons on my phone.

01:39:41

And I could tap that, it would check the time and day.

01:39:47

And if it's outside of working hours,

01:39:49

it just gives me an alert.

01:39:50

If it's inside working hours,

01:39:52

it could take me to the email app

01:39:53

that I originally wanted to go to.

01:39:56

- Interesting.

01:39:57

- I don't know if this is a good idea or a bad idea.

01:39:59

It's one that I had a couple days ago

01:40:01

as I was reading this and thought,

01:40:03

that would be helpful because I don't feel

01:40:05

like I can get this off because of the need

01:40:07

for the security aspect.

01:40:09

So maybe I can just kind of subvert it

01:40:13

in that I can leave it that way.

01:40:14

I'm not deleting it and reinstalling it every single day

01:40:16

every time I've got to have that

01:40:17

because that's just a pain.

01:40:19

So I thought about trying to do something along those lines.

01:40:22

I don't know if that's a good idea or not,

01:40:23

but it would be better than what I have now,

01:40:26

that much I know.

01:40:27

- So it would be better.

01:40:29

- Sounds a little bit like a complicated compromise, but.

01:40:33

- That might be good.

01:40:35

I don't know.

01:40:36

It's kind of like setting a protocol

01:40:37

for checking your email.

01:40:38

I don't know.

01:40:39

(laughs)

01:40:40

- Yeah.

01:40:41

Who knows?

01:40:42

Maybe I just wait until later in the day

01:40:43

to check that stuff and do an email run once a day.

01:40:46

I don't know what that is.

01:40:48

I may not actually build it,

01:40:49

but it's an idea that I'm trying to explore at the moment.

01:40:51

- All right, cool.

01:40:53

I'm anxious to see if that goes anywhere.

01:40:55

(laughs)

01:40:57

We'll talk next time about how much of a failure it is.

01:41:00

- It's over my head for sure.

01:41:02

All right, style and rating.

01:41:04

- Let's do it.

01:41:05

- Okay, so this is a very Cal Newport book.

01:41:10

I really like his style.

01:41:13

There are occasional places where he's so smart,

01:41:18

it's hard to keep up with him.

01:41:20

I mentioned like this story on the information theory,

01:41:26

and I'm sure in the world he runs in,

01:41:28

like that's an elementary principle,

01:41:30

but first time I'd ever heard about it,

01:41:32

I have no frame of reference,

01:41:35

and he's trying to condense it down into a very brief thing,

01:41:38

which for the most part, his story is that works really well.

01:41:41

He get the main point,

01:41:42

but with this one, it felt like I really had to dig

01:41:45

to understand what the heck he was talking about.

01:41:48

So there are a few points in this book

01:41:53

where it is not going to be an easy read,

01:41:57

but for the most part, I feel like it is an easy read.

01:42:01

It's very engaging, his thoughts are very well put together,

01:42:06

and he's very articulate.

01:42:09

There's not a whole lot of like one liners,

01:42:11

like quote type things,

01:42:13

I called out a couple of them

01:42:14

as we were recording here today,

01:42:17

but for the most part,

01:42:18

it's just a very solidly written book

01:42:22

with a lot of entertaining stories

01:42:25

that very much support the point

01:42:27

that he's trying to make.

01:42:28

Feels kind of like Ryan Holiday in that sense.

01:42:33

I do think there is a chance

01:42:35

that if you pick up this book

01:42:36

just because it's Cal Newport,

01:42:38

and you are a little bit skeptical,

01:42:40

like Joe was at the beginning that you absolutely hate this.

01:42:43

I mean, just to hear what you have to say.

01:42:46

I really liked it.

01:42:47

I feel like he makes a very compelling argument

01:42:49

for a world without email, hence the title.

01:42:52

I do think it's broader than just email.

01:42:55

He talks about the hyperactive hive mind.

01:42:57

I don't know how many times he uses that term,

01:42:59

but it's a lot.

01:43:00

That's really what he's driving at.

01:43:01

- That's a ton.

01:43:02

- I don't think this is like a change the world type book,

01:43:08

but I also think it has the potential to be.

01:43:10

We could look back in 10 years from now

01:43:12

and be like, this is the one that really kind of shifted

01:43:18

discussion around email as a productivity tool.

01:43:22

I think we kind of have that approach

01:43:24

when we think about deep work, at least you and I do.

01:43:27

Maybe not everybody else who has read it

01:43:29

based on your specific work situation,

01:43:32

but I think people like us, knowledge workers,

01:43:35

we could look at that and be like,

01:43:36

"Yeah, that significantly changed my life for the better

01:43:39

"and totally impacted the way that I get my work done

01:43:43

"or at least part of my work done."

01:43:45

So that being said, I think it's difficult to rate it

01:43:50

in terms of future impact that it may have

01:43:52

versus impact that it has right now.

01:43:56

I'm gonna put it at 4.5 because I feel like on the low end

01:44:01

assuming that this is just Cal's manifesto

01:44:05

and everybody completely ignores this

01:44:07

and we deal with email for the next 100 years,

01:44:09

it's still a really good book.

01:44:11

There's still a lot of great principles in here.

01:44:12

There's still a lot of things that you can do

01:44:15

that can make email a little bit less of an annoyance

01:44:18

right now, that would be the 4.0 side.

01:44:21

The 5.0 would be if he's 100% hitting this

01:44:24

and we look back at this and be like,

01:44:26

"Yeah, he was the first guy that really said,

01:44:29

"email's not tenable," and he gets credited

01:44:32

with the whole big push away from email

01:44:34

as a communication medium.

01:44:36

I have no idea if and when that happens.

01:44:40

So I feel putting it in the middle is probably

01:44:42

the fair thing to do at 4.5 because even if he's wrong,

01:44:47

he's not wrong in the large sense

01:44:51

with everything that he says here.

01:44:52

There's still a lot of stuff that you can apply right now

01:44:55

but he does kind of make his moonshot at the end

01:44:59

of like, "Hey, this is coming."

01:45:01

Kind of feels like so he can point back to it

01:45:05

if that happens and be like, "See, see, I said that.

01:45:07

"I said that there."

01:45:08

- I told you. - Yep.

01:45:10

And I don't think that that's a non-zero chance

01:45:13

that there has a non-zero chance of happening.

01:45:15

So.

01:45:16

- Yeah, I think this book is one that's,

01:45:19

it's a headier book than his other ones, right?

01:45:23

I feel like as time goes on,

01:45:25

he's thought about this a lot more

01:45:27

and I also think that he spent a lot of time on this book,

01:45:31

potentially more than he has on his other ones

01:45:33

and you can tell that in the word smithing

01:45:36

that's done in this one

01:45:39

'cause there are some sentences that I'm like,

01:45:41

okay, I gotta stop and reread that one.

01:45:44

'Cause like, what is he getting at?

01:45:45

What did he just say?

01:45:46

Like, there were a number of those in this one.

01:45:49

I don't remember having that experience with his other books,

01:45:53

namely, Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.

01:45:55

So I think this is one that's designed

01:45:58

to be more long-term.

01:46:01

Like this is one that you're like,

01:46:02

it's set up to be one that you read

01:46:05

and then process over time.

01:46:06

- Sure.

01:46:07

- That's kind of my gut feeling that.

01:46:09

The problem with that is that he has a handful of references

01:46:14

to very specific tools.

01:46:16

- Yeah.

01:46:17

- We talked about this with getting things done.

01:46:19

Like, we're in the very, very first edition

01:46:23

of Getting Things Done,

01:46:24

there were a lot of references to specific tools

01:46:26

and apps and such.

01:46:27

And when the rewrite, they pulled all that out

01:46:31

and I think for the better on that one.

01:46:34

But Cal Newport does call out specific apps and tools

01:46:37

and my concern was,

01:46:39

why happens if Trello shutters its doors here next month?

01:46:42

- Yep.

01:46:42

- Then what?

01:46:43

- That's true.

01:46:44

- He's got a book that just came out

01:46:45

that's no longer available.

01:46:48

Like it just doesn't, so it was weird to me

01:46:50

because it felt like this is a very evergreen,

01:46:53

long-term, written book.

01:46:56

And yet he has some very time-specific pieces in it.

01:47:00

So I'm sure he thought through that, but it seems weird.

01:47:04

- The Trello example is genius, by the way,

01:47:07

because they were acquired by Atlassian, I believe,

01:47:10

which makes Jira, they could tomorrow decide

01:47:14

this free thing that people are using

01:47:16

is no longer in our best business interest

01:47:18

and try to force everybody over to Jira.

01:47:20

- Correct, yeah.

01:47:21

And that's a very real possibility.

01:47:24

Having worked with Atlassian's stuff in the past,

01:47:26

like that would not surprise me at all

01:47:29

if we saw that announcement this afternoon.

01:47:31

So, I don't know.

01:47:33

I mean, that's a concern I have with the book itself,

01:47:37

but I think that's probably a bit of a minor one.

01:47:39

We talked earlier about my skepticism coming into this.

01:47:44

I was pleasantly surprised to see him cover

01:47:47

broader things than just email.

01:47:50

I thought we were going to be talking about just email,

01:47:52

but this involved Slack and all the chat systems

01:47:56

and he involves a lot of that in it as well.

01:47:59

And then terms this hyperactive hive mind thing

01:48:04

and helps us understand that that's actually

01:48:07

what we're fighting against.

01:48:08

I'm all on board with that.

01:48:10

I'm not saying that email is in a rosy state for me at all.

01:48:15

I'm definitely going to be trying to change up

01:48:17

how I do things with email.

01:48:19

I'm not sure what that looks like,

01:48:20

but it's something I'm trying to figure out that process.

01:48:23

Like I talked about earlier.

01:48:24

So, as far as like how to rate this

01:48:28

and how to like rec,

01:48:31

I mean, obviously this is one I'm going to recommend to people.

01:48:34

Again, it's a bit headier.

01:48:35

So I'm going to be doing this with people

01:48:37

that I think can handle a little bit more difficult of a book.

01:48:41

Like this isn't one that's as easy to read,

01:48:43

I think as like digital minimalism.

01:48:45

That one was just, you could cruise through that thing

01:48:48

very easily.

01:48:49

This one you kind of had to,

01:48:50

at least for me, I had to take a little more time with it

01:48:53

just because it was so dense and it was so heady and such.

01:48:58

So, that is a thing to keep in mind.

01:49:02

I will be recommending it to a number of folks.

01:49:04

I think you nailed it with the rating.

01:49:05

I think it should be 4.5

01:49:07

in that it doesn't feel like,

01:49:11

you know, part of this might be because the title

01:49:15

is a little bit off in my mind.

01:49:18

I think the title of the book is maybe to get sales

01:49:22

somewhat, which is a little bit of a hit,

01:49:25

I think to Cal Newport.

01:49:26

I mean, he's got it named, I think probably correctly

01:49:31

as far as what people want from him,

01:49:35

but because he covers so much more than email

01:49:39

and like look at the four principles, right?

01:49:41

The attention capital process, protocol specialization,

01:49:45

all of the things in there are about

01:49:46

how to manage knowledge work.

01:49:47

It doesn't have anything to do with,

01:49:50

I shouldn't say anything.

01:49:51

It doesn't have a focus on email.

01:49:54

So this is why I was trying to summarize,

01:49:57

this is how it applies to email.

01:49:58

So that's a thing, right?

01:50:01

So I don't know, it's just something about it

01:50:04

doesn't quite click for me to get it all the way to the 5.5.0

01:50:08

and maybe I'll change my mind and this will be

01:50:10

like how to read a book and I'll continually think about this

01:50:12

all the time and constantly in which I had rated it 5,

01:50:15

in which case episode 200 I'll change it.

01:50:17

So at this point in time, I'm gonna put it at 4.5

01:50:20

'cause I feel like that's about right, given all of this.

01:50:24

- Cool, let's put this one on the shelf.

01:50:29

What are we covering next, Joe?

01:50:32

- It'll be fun, "The Art of Whitty Bantar" by Patrick King.

01:50:37

You and I do enough voice work and enough video work now

01:50:41

that I feel like it would be good.

01:50:43

The subtitle on this is "Be Clever, Quick and Magnetic."

01:50:46

- Awesome.

01:50:47

- I'm looking forward to this one.

01:50:48

I'm excited about it.

01:50:50

It might be a train wreck, but it'll be fun.

01:50:52

- All right, after that, I wish Otter was here

01:50:56

because I'm gonna pick one of his books.

01:50:58

We're gonna do, think again, "The Power of Knowing

01:51:01

What You Don't Know" by Adam Grant.

01:51:04

I think this came up, this was in your analog Joe stream,

01:51:07

right, that this came up?

01:51:09

- It was on one of the Twitch streams I think.

01:51:10

- I remember being in the room for that one

01:51:13

and when we started talking about that,

01:51:15

it was like, this sounds like my kind of book.

01:51:18

So.

01:51:20

- Yeah.

01:51:21

- We'll do that one next.

01:51:22

You got any gap books?

01:51:23

- I finished up reading "Purple Cow" by Seth Godin,

01:51:26

but other than that, I haven't done anything

01:51:28

in between since then.

01:51:29

You?

01:51:30

- I did not get my gap book finished,

01:51:33

which is "The Roadless Stupid" by Keith Cunningham,

01:51:35

but I am not going to only partially read this one this time.

01:51:39

I'm gonna pick it again and get through this one.

01:51:42

- Okay.

01:51:43

- All right, well, that's it for this episode then.

01:51:46

I wanna say before we go, thank you to all of the

01:51:50

Bookworm Club Premium members for supporting the show.

01:51:53

Thank you to the people who are attending live.

01:51:57

This always makes the recording a lot of fun,

01:51:59

but huge thanks to the people who are willing

01:52:01

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01:52:05

If you want to go to club.bookworm.fm/membership,

01:52:10

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01:52:12

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01:52:14

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01:52:17

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01:52:19

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01:52:22

for all of the books that we read

01:52:24

when I get done with those.

01:52:25

I upload them to the club.

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There's a few new ones I added last week.

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I fell a bit behind, but it should be up to date now.

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So you get all that stuff and the place to go

01:52:34

if you wanna do that again is club.bookworm.fm/membership.

01:52:39

- One other thing to point out

01:52:41

because Mike just did this as well.

01:52:42

You can still get T-shirts and sweatshirts

01:52:44

and apparently onesies for babies.

01:52:46

- That's true.

01:52:47

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And Mike finally wore out his bookworm sweatshirt

01:52:53

and had to order a new one.

01:52:54

But if you're interested in that,

01:52:55

just go to Bookworm.fm.

01:52:56

There's a link in the menu there

01:52:58

for picking up merchandise if that's of interest to you.

01:53:03

So again, thank you to all of you who have joined us live

01:53:06

and those of you who continue to support the show.

01:53:10

We couldn't do it without you.

01:53:11

So thank you so much for doing that.

01:53:14

And if you're one of the folks reading along with us

01:53:18

as we go through these books,

01:53:20

pick up The Art of Whitty Bantar by Patrick King.

01:53:22

We'll read that and cover it in a couple of weeks.