002: Eliminate Email with Cal Newport

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello, hello, welcome everybody. I am so, so overjoyed to be here today with one of my all time favorite podcast guests, Cal Newport. If you're listening, you probably know and love Cal's work already. I don't even need to tell you more about him, but if you haven't yet discovered the brilliant books and thinking that comes from this man, you must. Cal is an Associate professor of Computer Science at Georgetown and he writes about the impact of innovation on our culture. He has just released what he describes as in many ways his magnum opus on the topic of technology and the workplace. His latest book is called A World Without Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload and it builds on some of his previous books like Digital Minimalism and one that completely gave me vocabulary for the days I strive to have called Deep Work. Be sure to also check out his podcast wherever you listen to shows Deep Questions Cal, welcome to the show.

Janie. It is always a pleasure to talk with you.

Likewise, we joke that we always connect when one of us writes a book. Specifically you. You're more, you're more prolific than I am. So thanks for writing all these books.

Yeah, when I get lonely I write books. So excuse to talk to smart people. That's my strategy.

Well you should have seen me just about fall out of my chair because I browse what books are coming out with portfolio about every six months. And when I saw that you were putting your mind to this next book, this new one, A World Without Email, oh my gosh, I just started jumping with joy. And I already was counting down. It was months ago counting down to this conversation, so I can't wait to dive in. And let me start by saying you and I both describe email as a Sisyphean system, a never ending slog. And I'm just so glad. I just thought it was me that developed this allergy. Not only social media was like five years ago that that allergy happened, but email has been the greatest source of guilt in my professional life for at least 10 years, if not 15. And so I just will start us there. What led you to write this book and stake such a bold claim for A World Without Email?

You know, I started working on it almost immediately after the publication of Deep Work. So all the way back to 2016, I went through my notebooks to try to pinpoint timing when I first started seeing notes showing up about what if this was an idea, what if, what if this was even possible? And working on Deep Work had exposed me to the degree to which people almost universally were miserable about the way they were working. That this Sisyphean experience of there's nonstop communication, it's unstructured, it's ad hoc, it's always coming in through email or through new tools like Slack or through sms. I'm a little bit agnostic actually about the digital communication tool, but this underlying workflow of always stuff coming in, you can't keep up with it. Your workday is just driven by trying to respond to things coming in, allowing messages to nudge you forward, allowing messages to control what's on your plate, it really seemed to be making people miserable. Which is one of the reasons why I think Deep Work hit a chord. Because it was almost like a rallying cry of like, there's other types of work that could be important, but I had left untouched in that book. Why do we work this way? And is it possible to actually change the underlying way we work instead of just trying to carve out more time for deep work, trying to make sure that you get good at concentrating. Was there a deeper revolution possible? And at some point in 2016, the light bulb went off and I said, wait a second, I think not only is it possible that we could get away from this world in which we're just always Communicating, but. But it might be inevitable if we actually just step back and put a little bit of historical context to what's going on in the world of work right now. And to me, that was such an exciting idea and I've basically been thinking and writing about this topic since then.

You describe what work has become as the hyperactive hive mind and it is truly the antithesis to deep work. So it's interesting hearing. Of course, if you release a book on deep work and it kind of, it did, it spoke to what we were all craving, what we feel in our soul. Work could be like, should be like, or what it is like on our best days. And then you have the hyperactive hive mind. And what I find interesting, I mean, when I worked at Google, that was 2006-11, email was just getting going in full swing. Like Gmail was just, I won't say just it had been around, but what I saw a front row seat in a global organization started the, what I call the crush of the inbound. Like my friend and I had to work on Sunday afternoon just to work through our emails because we had so many meetings during the week, we couldn't get to our inbox. And then as a small business owner now I wonder what you think because these phenomenons, it's almost a tragedy of the commons in that any one email is not so bad. It's not the enemy. You know, people are really nice and kind and thoughtful most of the time. So we have a tragedy of the commons with email and then we also have that the more successful the you are, the more email you're going to get and it means that almost the more temptation to be reactive. And then if you combine that with this cocktail that I have of people pleasing and even worrying.

It'S a recipe for disaster. And it is truly, I think one of the things that most impedes deep work if you can't pry yourself out of that system. But the hyperactive hive mind is real and it's so strong. Did you reach a point in your own journey because you kind of have a hybrid career, you know, both as professor and, and thought leader, writer, how author, however you want to describe yourself on that realm of things. Did you reach a point where your email kind of sent you spinning or did you have you put principles and practices in place long ago to remove yourself from the hive mind?

I've constantly been doing battle with the hive mind. I'll get a configuration in place that works pretty well and then the context will change and then that will slip and then I'll have to change the configuration. And so I am constantly doing battle. But having a term for what I'm battling has made things a lot easier. Just like with the book Deep Work, just putting a label on that type of effort made a big difference. People are like, oh, it's not just work is work. There's different types of work. The same thing when it comes to this world that we live in right now of the constant communication, it's very confusing if you don't have the right vocabulary for exactly the reasons you talked about, which is an email in isolation or the protocols that run email when considered in isolation are imminently reasonable things. Using SMTP or POP3 as a way of digitally delivering asynchronous messages between universally addressed individuals makes a lot of sense. It is easier and better, without a doubt, to send an email versus having to leave a voice message on a voicemail machine and have someone type codes into their phone and hear that voicemail. It is definitively and inarguably easier and better to send a document to your lawyer with an email attachment as opposed to going to a fax machine. It's like trying to feed the thing through. So we have at one point, like, well, we have these underlying tools that make certain things easier, make things more convenient. I wouldn't want to use other technologies instead of. Yet at the same time, we're miserable. And so having this terminology say, okay, forget the tools. Tools aren't that interesting to me. Workflows are interesting to me. Like, what is the pattern by which you sort of identify, assign and review tasks within your organization? And the hyperactive hive mind is a workflow. And that really helped me when I made that distinction. It is a workflow that says the way work unfolds is through ad hoc unstructured communication that, like, as you need something, you just grab someone. You can go back and forth over email or Slack. You have a couple dozen different asynchronous conversations all unfolding at the same time. You basically take the way that you would naturally coordinate if you were sitting in a room with two other people and working on something. You just take that natural free flow back and forth and just scale it up to all of your business communication. And that is a workflow, Right? And that is a workflow that was made possible by email. Right? So it doesn't. You can't do this without really low friction, convenient tools like email or later things like Slack. But it's that workflow that is killer. And so once I had that Terminology. It made my own quest a lot better. I was like, oh, okay. The issue is not the tool. Is email good or bad? Or the question that. That I would always get, which I hate the most, is like, well, what if not email? What. What is the right tool like? Should we have. Is there right. Is there some better digital chat tool or something like. No, it's not. It's not the tool. Email is fine tool for asynchronously communicating with people. It is the workflow. And once I understood that, my whole journey and what I argue in the book is like, that's what you should be thinking about, what is our workflows. Because if you don't have that written down, if you're not thinking about it, if it's not explicit, you have probably just defaulted to the lowest common denominator, which is the convenience of the hyperactive hive mind, which is simple and cheap and flexible, but also makes people miserable.

Right. Oh, that's so powerful. And I read your book, but hearing you say it in this way, it does create an aha moment. Because you're right, it's not about. I feel a similar allergy is in the same family of allergy. Social media, email, Slack and text messages. I'm allergic to all of them in the same way. And it was only in this moment, how you put it, because there's a workflow, an invisible script operating beneath all of those things that says react, react to me. And I've always described it as death by a thousand cuts. And death's a little extreme, but it's like a workflow based on a thousand tiny reactions or cuts. And when you describe it, that's so powerful to just recognize.

What workflow a we're all kind of unconsciously subscribed to and then only by naming it. And that's so much of what I try to do with Pivot as well. And in this next new direction of naming things allows us to step outside of them and claim a new space. And I think that's why deep work is such a perfect compliment. Because what's the goal? It's not just a world without email for the sake of itself. It's for the sake of deep work.

Yeah. So if you, like, you have the term deep work, suddenly you realize we're doing zero hours of deep work. Oh, maybe that's not a good thing. Just like if you have the term hyperactive hive mind, you say, wow, our startup is deeply in the hyperactive hive mind. Now we have to confront that. Do we think that's the best decision or do we think it's worth putting in the effort to engineer some workflows that circumvent a lot of the issues of the hive mind. And there are a lot of issues that come with the hive mind. I mean, first there is the context switching issue. So, you know, in the book I pulled together for the first time all of the research on what happens to your brain when you have to keep switching back and forth between your primary task and monitoring and tending all of these simultaneous asynchronous conversations unfolding in your inbox and on Slack. The picture is not good. It really makes it difficult to think clearly. It's very draining and it makes people feel unhappy and anxious. So we're not meant to. We cannot parallel process in this way where we have to continually go back and monitor two dozen ongoing, open ended, socially related. There's people on the other end of these conversations, back and forth. It completely fries our brain. But also when you don't have a structured workflow beyond just figure it out on the fly with messaging, you get all sorts of interesting and often painful, unexpected consequences. Inequities, right? We're not tracking how much is on different people's plates, how much should be on this person's plate, Are they overloaded? Should they have this much work? It's all just informal. It's all just sort of informal and back and forth and obfuscated because what you have to do just exist lost among a thousand emails in your inbox. There's no central board where everyone can see Jenny has, you know, a ton on her plate or this or that. So we, we really overload people. People have way more work on their plate today than they would have 20 years ago. And I think that's a, it's a problem. It makes, it's very stressful. It makes it very hard to do work. Right. It leads to all these second shifts. As I mentioned, there's a lot of inequities in it because when you don't, you're not explicit about how you assign things. Well, who's going to get more. It's maybe the person who's more accessible, maybe the person who's nicer and least likely to say no, maybe the person you don't like, like the whole thing. There's so many negative consequences of the hyperactive hive mind workflow. And it's all just balanced against the positive, which is it's convenient and it's flexible. You only have to buy one tool, email. Everyone knows how to use It. It's very natural, just rock and roll. Like, it has that on the positive side, but it has all of these negatives on the other side. And once we have a name for it, you can just ask, okay, we definitely do the hyperactive hive mind here. Do we like that? Are we comfortable with that conclusion? Is that actually. Do we think that's the right workflow for us? And some people might say, yes, but by making the question explicit, I think a lot more people will say, I think we have to do some changes.

Yes. And maybe we can then be intentional and say, like, I'll do this sometimes. All right, today's email day. Or it's. And now I could say it's hyperactive hive mind day. I'm just gonna be in that mode. I can't do it very often, and I do find it very, very draining. But okay, this day is gonna be kind of that amount of catch up. Here's a question for you. So many years ago, you put up on your contact page, you said, I read every email, but I likely won't respond. Something along those lines, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And still up there. Yeah.

Okay. So did that work? Like, do you feel. Did you. Were you able to drop the guilt? Because as your books became bestsellers and I, you know, I've been lucky to know you for a long time and I'm so happy to see your name kind of really go mainstream. Maybe it hasn't hit, like, I like to say, known among nerds, you know, but it's like, were you able to drop the guilt of. As the inbound, like 10x itself, even good opportunities, interesting people. Were you able to resist the feeling that you needed to reply to all that?

Yes. Yeah. And. And, you know, I. I first instituted that filter back when I was primarily still doing student advice. And I. I had a. My rule was I wanted to answer every email because it was often. So the guilt was worse back then because often it was just emails from students who needed help. You know, I'm struggling with this test. I'm struggling with this. So because of the nature of the advice I was given, even before I was very well known at all as an author, it still got overwhelmed because I had. Was seen as a free source of advice. So I had the advantage of putting that filter in place pretty early in my career just because of the nature of the communication I had coming in. And that really helped once I got more well known. And I have to say, it has been fine. People, you might be concerned, like, well, aren't people going to think it's presumptuous. Aren't people going to get upset if you say basically I'm not going to answer your email? But they don't because what people appreciate is clarity. Clarity trumps responsiveness, I think in almost every situation. And so what I've really done, and this is sort of one of the core ideas about how we build a world without email is there's a particular process at play here, a process by which people get in touch with me either to tell me things or to ask me about opportunities or the semi interesting information. We had an implicit process before of just everyone can reach me through this email address and I just answer. And if I don't answer you, it's because I've made some choice, you're not important. That makes a lot of people upset. I replaced it with a much clearer process which is here's several different email addresses for several different purposes. I don't respond to these email addresses, but if you want to send me like an interesting article or link or thing I should know, send it to this address. That's a good way to get it to me. But I'm not going to respond to you. If you have these type of requests, send it to this person. If you see the type of request you have is not on here, hint hint, there's nowhere for you to send it. So don't. And people appreciate the clarity so they don't expect a response back and so they're not upset. And so I just replaced an implicit process that was much more ambiguous and open ended with one that was much more clear about. Here's how communication occurs in these contexts and people say great, now I get how that works. So yeah, maybe I'm bummed. I can't just get some answers to a question I have or some personal advice, but I don't actually expect to be able to. So I'm not upset at you about it. So just having that clarity, I don't feel guilt at all. I think it's really clear and people do not seem unhappy with it.

So two follow up questions. Do you ever respond like you know, when people send you the I love your interesting email address, do you ever. Do you ever randomly respond a sometimes to those I'm like wow, someone is reading or listening and they took the time to send me this thing and so I kind of let it linger in my inbox because I feel like I would want to respond in an ideal world. So do you ever respond randomly? Just curious. And then do you ever Have FOMO of like there's just not, not fomo. I don't think you or I are really the type to have too much intense fomo. But I mean, in terms of, are you worried you'll miss out on some kind of opportunity or anything by putting these filters in place?

Well, I don't, I do randomly respond, you know, because I do look through things and if, if I'm it, it really just depends on what's going on and how many other emails are in my inbox. And so, you know, some, some readers will get an instant response because I, I'm like clearing out. An inbox is just about empty. An email comes in, they're sending me an interesting link and I'm like, this is cool, thanks. And then sometimes I'm just feeling overwhelmed and I just archive the entire, you know, inbox. So I do randomly respond and, and I, I still enjoy that. I don't fear about, no, I don't fear about missing out. I mean, I think my hands are already full with things I know for sure are really important to me and really high value and make a big difference. And so I worry more about not giving enough time to those things. That's like, that's my main professional obsession is that not putting enough time on the things I know for sure are really valuable and really important. You know, working on a New Yorker article, working on a book, working on a proof as an academic. There's these things I really value and they give me really good return and I love doing them. And so I come from, from the mindset of I'm worried I'm not giving that enough time. Not that I don't need new opportunities. Like, I have enough, I have enough. I mean, I know it has, it has for sure. Probably this is why I'm probably known among nerds, maybe not known larger scale. I'm sure it slows down certain types of brand development or career growth, but it's just not a huge interest of mine. I mean, I'm interested in producing really interesting, impactful things that I, that I like working on. But I'll say the thing that saved me the most stress and annoyance and anxiety is not needing to answer messages that come in with a sort of open ended, ambiguous time commitment on your part. Just to answer like, you know, hey, would you be interested in coming to speak at this thing we're doing? Would you be, would you jump on a call? I mean, I got an email today from someone, they're like, yeah, we have a startup and it'd be cool to talk to you. So can you jump on the zoom with us on Monday and just like, talk to our team of five and just give us advice and walk through our product?

Absolutely not.

Stuff like this. And to not have to respond just because it's clear, like, look, I don't. If there's a speaking request, like Beacon Agency, talk to them. And if there's a publicity thing, there's like a publicist, you talk to them. And I'm not going to. I can't respond to other things. That clarity has saved me so much stress and anxiety because that's the thing that really gets to you, is the things that come in and you're like, I have to say no to this person. And then they're going to kind of push back and be like, yeah, but I would really like to make this work. And can't we just. They always used a phrase like, jump on a call. Can we just jump on a call or grab a coffee? I can't tell you the relief of seeing that and knowing you don't have to answer. And again, I don't think it's something that upsets people because it's really clear. It's like, look, I don't have time to do those things. I'm not going to respond to those things. And it's often worded now as like, well, it's a long shot. We know you probably won't see it. I don't think people are offended when I don't answer. And I do have a rule. I do answer if it's students. So when student groups, especially at my own school, I'll always, of course, talk to my own students. And, you know, even if I can't come do their student event, I'll talk to them because I appreciate students having that, having that energy and drive. But that has been the biggest. I notice that every day to be able to just click archive on a request, you're like.

I don't really want to do that. I don't really have time, and I don't want to have to explain why. And not not having to answer those, I think has been one of the biggest stress relievers of my professional career.

Amazing. And you describe so many great things in there, which is having. When you're clear on the projects that you really care about, you don't need more opportunities, you're actually pretty clear that in most cases, it is going to be a no. And then I did the same thing as you. I stopped even being the person that responds to incoming speaking requests. I don't get on the phone anymore to just explore something. I'm just not at that point. And that's a huge relief as well. Just to be clear. No, I don't do exploratory phone calls like that. And what you said about having these different roles or these different filters, I remember many years ago. Well, okay, two thoughts. Well, you'll get your choice. Fork in the road. You can choose your own adventure. Ten years ago someone told me how would Oprah handle email? Like I needed to think at that level or even Tim Ferriss we were talking about four hour workweek before we hit record and that thinking at that someone who had that level of inbound and so we could either speak to that. I also remember many years ago someone told me you need to treat email like a task. And I think this is kind of what you're saying with the workflow is that we need to step out of this workflow of complete ad hoc 247 reactiveness and instead treat email as a discrete, as a tool or, or fit it into a different workflow altogether where it has a discrete start and end and it's intentional when we are going to do it. Like in your case, you're even traffic directing so many emails don't even. You're not the one responsible for them. I'm curious how you, when you cal. Actually do go into your inbox, like how do you treat email as a task or as its own? Like fitting into a different workflow than the ad hoc hyperactive hive mind. And if you want to speak to, you know, thinking about, even if your, if your book was to like go even more mainstream, do you think that your current workflow would still hold? Do you feel like you've kind of cracked the case or like you said, it just changes as the context changes. So I know there's a lot in there. Pick wherever you want to go.

Well, yeah, I mean in terms of my own habits, I, I mean I'd have to look at my, my inbox, but virtually, I mean I have four different email addresses and something like seven or eight inboxes. So I do not have a single undifferentiated email address just associated with my name used for all purposes. I really segregate communication into channels based on communication type. So it's possible for me to engage one type of communication channel when appropriate and another when that's appropriate. So I think that's a key thing. So there's not a notion of just I'm in my Inbox or not? It might be I'm in my Georgetown collaborator research inbox. Why? Because I'm working on a paper right now and this is my time to sort of check in. I'm doing a block of computer science stuff. Or now I'm in my sort of writer's inbox where I communicate with people I know within the world of writing, like my agents, my editors, and these type of things. And because I'm working on writing right now and I have an admin block on my time block calendar, and now that's part of, like doing admin for that writing role. So I'll say that, but then I'll say more generally. Let me get in a little bit here to part two of the book where we get in the weeds a little bit on geeking out setups and configurations just to set the stage. Part one of the book is called the Case Against Email. And that's when I argue like, here's what the hyperactive hive mind is, here's why it's terrible. And then I make this big argument that it's arbitrary, that no one ever really decided it was a good idea. It just sort of emerged as a natural reaction to these tools showing up. And I really get into that. Which just sets the stage for we should have absolutely no trepidation in looking at it critically and looking at other ways of doing work. Because just because everyone's doing it doesn't mean it's a good idea. And so it's kind of the case against email. Then part two is the principles of a world without email. So how do you get past? How do you design an approach to work that is not dependent on the hyperactive hive mind? And one of the things that's really critical here is thinking about email. A lot of email tips or strategies are what they're actually implicitly doing is assuming the hyperactive hive mind is the underlying workflow and it's just trying to tame it. Right? So etiquette on how you respond to emails. When you check your inbox, like batching your inbox versus not batch your inbox, keep notifications open. That's about just trying to make do with the workflow that you're using. And what I really push for in that second part is like, let's get down to the actual underlying workflows themselves and see what's better. And, you know, this is the way I think about work, and it's the way I recommend other people thinking about work is move beyond just how often you check your inbox or this or that and say, what are these messages coming in? What processes are they implicitly connected to? So if I'm getting a lot of requests, for example, like we were talking about a lot of requests for like speaking and jumping on calls. Let's give that a name. This is the, like, the incoming request process. As someone who writes and does podcasts, there's lots of, like, businesses and people who want to talk and share opportunities. And all right, now that I've given a name to that process, I can really think it through. Like, do I want that process in my working life? Where is it valuable? Where is it not? Okay, how do I design then my rules about it that is going to maximize my, the value I get while minimizing the negative impacts. And now it opens up lots of creative things like, well, I certainly shouldn't just have these coming inbound over like just a general purpose email address. And I'm just thinking out loud, but maybe what I really want is like a special email address for those. And I do one call every Friday so that I'm exposed to randomness. And I kind of explained it, like, whatever. You know, I'm saying, like, you come up with a process or you might say, like, I do. Like, I don't want to be involved with that at all right now. So I just say, I don't do those. You look at other emails like, well, a lot of these emails are like, use me as an example. Like, I'm talking back and forth with someone on the publicity team at Portfolio a lot. Because, you know, there's podcasts to be scheduled. But wait a second, that's a process. Let's identify it and name it. Right now it's generating a lot of back and forth ad hoc, unstructured emails. But what's really the best way to do this? And like, in that particular case, we came up with a system that involves a shared document. And Lillian puts things in the shared document. And then I come in a couple times a week and I can schedule things and put notes or answer questions. And there's essentially, you go from 50 emails a week to one like, okay, I've updated the document. It's like, okay, I put in my notes, right? That's an example. So you go through what's creating all these messages. You identify all the different processes going on in your working life implicitly that are generating these messages. And then for each of these, you say, what's the right way to do this process? And in general, the things you're trying to Optimize. What I argue in the book is when you're trying to optimize a process within your work life as a knowledge worker, you typically want to minimize context switching. So you want to find a way to achieve that process these goals without you having to constantly switch your context, like, let's say, keep checking back in on ongoing conversations and inboxes. And two, you want to avoid a sense of overload or ambiguity. So it's like, what's the right way to handle this process? Where I feel like it's under control and there's not just tons of stuff out there that I'm missing or I'm not, I'm behind on, or like, what's the way to structure this process? And if you go through with this mindset through each of your processes, and then you end up with a lot less emails or emails of a type that are much easier to deal with. And so that'll be like the underlying foundation to my solution. Discussion here is that you go to fix the underlying processes to generate emails. Because if you stay just at the level of once all these emails are here, what do I do with them? You're not getting to the core of the problem. You're taking Advil. You're taking Advil for the hurt knee instead of actually getting the knee healed.

And that's when it becomes Sisyphean is like never ending because you're only responding at the surface level. This is so good. I love hearing your process for this and how your mind works. And specifically, what are these messages coming in and what processes are they implicitly connected to? And that's what I realized. The days I feel better about email, I actually put my operator hat on in that way you just described where I'm saying, my job in this moment is not email responder. My job is what are the processes? What do I need to design? What do I design so that the next 10 of this type or 20 of this type is actually handled in a systematic way. And I think that's what. When we're at the bottom of the email pile looking up, you know, or a bottom of email Everest looking up, it could be hard to do that. Exactly what you just said of like taking a step back and thinking through those processes, I just love the way you described that whole workflow.

And I. And I think you said the right thing there. Your job is not email responder. Your. Your email responding is serving an underlying job. And there are other ways you could probably service that same underlying job. So, you know, if you're have a book going into production, and you're getting. Drowning all these emails coming back and forth from the production team and your editors or this or that. Your job is not to answer emails from your publisher. Your job is to get your book prepared for publication. And then once you recognize that in this example, you can say, oh, okay, maybe I want a better process for servicing this job. And what we really need to do is have a call every single Monday for the next six weeks, and everything up since the last Monday gets summarized in a shared doc that I can see. And we go through it, and it takes 20 minutes. We make all the decisions, and then now we don't have to do emails back in it. And you can tell I'm pulling this from my personal.

I love it.

The underlying job in that example is I need to get this book into production, not I need to answer emails. And so I think that point you made is the key one, is that there are. This is what we. We don't name the hyperactive hive mind. It's hard to understand there's alternatives, but once you name a particular workflow, you can say, is that the best workflow for this job, for this process? And if it's not like, there's other ones, and let's think about them, and it's hard, and it's hard to get right. And I'll say the other thing that happens when you go through this process and if you run your own business or you're like a solopreneur, I mean, I'm saying you should literally list these things out. I mean, you need to have these. It's a master document. Here are the processes, here's the things, all the different things I do, all of my different roles, all my different jobs, whatever you want to call them. And here is how I handle each of these things, including how I communicate about it, how information comes in and out, how I organize the work for each of these things. When you do that, it also often makes clear, my God, I have way too many of these. And now you're like, okay, wait a second, I could probably get rid of this one and this one and this one and this one, because I'd rather spend much more time on this one, which is more important. Like, I'd rather make my podcast a lot better, but I'm doing this and this and this, and I'm trying to build out these processes, and it's very hard. And what if I just got rid of them? You can't get rid of something until You've named it. So that's the other benefit that ends up reducing email of this approach is once you're naming your processes and optimizing them. Often the right optimization for a given process, especially for entrepreneurs, is, is get rid of this altogether.

This was the trap. I always used to write down the types of emails that came in. But what you're saying is really important, which is list your roles, your job roles of how you're showing up and even your example of okay, collaborating on a paper at Georgetown vs writer self launching a book. And.

This is, it's so similar to this aha moment that I had a couple months ago.

Oh.

That led me to make some major cuts because I wrote down all the different revenue streams in my business and I wrote down the new things I wanted to create that would require deep work. Cause that's what I love to create. A book, a new book and a new podcast. And when I saw it written on this piece of paper, I was like, this is insane. I'm basically running 10 businesses and trying to add two new ones. This is insane. Things have to go and never before even now I'm going to take us homework. But listing the roles before you even list the processes and traffic direct what types of messages are coming in. It's the role because this is your bumper sticker gal of this conversation or at least one of so many. Your job is not email responder. Email response is serving an underlying job.

Yeah. And then once you see them, you say these are the jobs I want to keep. Then you can ask the key question of okay, how do I want information flow to work for this job and be willing to to make trade offs like okay, the optimal balance for this particular role. It's important to me. But I'm going to come at it in a way where maybe I am reducing my opportunities, reducing my revenue stream, but by doing so, it allows me to put in place an information flow that significantly minimizes how much it taxes my cognitive resources versus what would be required to, let's say maximize opportunities or maximize speaking fees. Like I might take a lot of things off the table and just. And by doing so make my life much simpler. But it's worth it, right? You know, in other words, like now you can start doing these trade offs where by you're not just optimizing like how do I make the most money out of this role or how do I optimize the opportunities. Now you can optimize things like the trade off between its benefits and the impact on my Cognitive resources that I have to share among other things or about other parts of my life. I mean, this was like the famous story in, you know, Tim Ferriss for our Workweek, where he really tightened up his processes for how his clients could renew and send in orders, because it was a huge taxing thing to handle. Every possible order and every possible contingency was really stressing him out. And some of his clients were really abusive. And he says, this is how it works. Now, you can tell this is an older book because the solution involved the fax machine, but I was basically, you send them in on this fax machine. It has to be in an order form. It has to be this many days before the order is due. I don't want you to bother me, otherwise you certainly cannot curse at me or abuse me. And he lost a couple clients, and the rest said, sure. And the footprint of fulfilling orders in his life was minimized like 99%. So this is an example of sometimes trading off a little bit of one benefit can give you massive benefits in return. But again, until you have the stuff written down, until you're looking at it, until you're saying, what footprint does this have on my cognitive resources? How does information come in and out of it? Is this just people email me what goes on here? Until you actually see it written down, you can't answer those questions. But once you answer those questions, you gain so much control, so much control over your information landscape, among other things. And so it makes a big difference.

So many gems. I love how you phrase that. What footprint does this have on my cognitive resources? And just there's another piece of language for us, that there's a footprint, that there's the downstream effect to either having a process or not having it, or having a certain way things are done or letting it be kind of sloppy, that there's a footprint that follows. And so I think helping us just ask that question is so important. What footprint does this have and is it worth it? Because the thing is, this is why your book is so crucial, and I love the way you've set it up, because I do think that you make the case so well in the first half and you start providing a path forward in the second, that part of the footprint, at least for me, I could say when I don't get clear on these things, that's when the underlying guilt, stress, tension occurs. And that's a footprint, too. You know, it is a choice not to make choices about these things. And the other thing that maybe you could just speak briefly to part of the tragedy of the commons that I think of with hyperactive hive mind is when things feel time sensitive and they're not. So my friend Julie calls it true urgency versus false urgency. But, like, in what world does an email come in on a Monday? And you and I cal like, we're not rocket scientists. If anyone's going to be, it's going to be you between the two of us. But, like, we're not brain surgeons. Nothing that we're doing, in at least our context of knowledge work it. Most likely it can wait within a given week for the proper container or however we fit it into our underlying workflow. But I think that when you're in the hyperactive hive mind, it feels like there's some kind of expectation. Like a text message feels. Feels like you should. I mean, I don't do this. Anyone who knows me knows that I always have 100 unread at any given time. But it just. It's like breaking a real norm not to respond same day. And yet, for me, I just had to make the choice. There's no way. There's just no way. How do you think about time sensitivity and the false perception we have there?

It's one of the things that makes the hyperactive hive mind so immiserating. I mean, I have this whole chapter called email makes us miserable where I get into the science of this. This. But there is something uniquely ill suited to our brain about the hyperactive hive mind workflow. And what you're talking about is one of these big pieces. So, I mean, I get into the research in the book about how our brains evolved primarily during the paleolithic, and we are incredibly sensitive to pairwise relationship maintenance because this was very crucial for tribal survival. If we're talking about 100,000 years ago. Right. So you really had to care about maintaining the right relationships, maintaining positive, good relationships with the individual members of your tribe. The theory calls this dyadic connections. But, you know, okay, I have to really tin these relationships. My survival depends on it. So we have this instinct that we take communication with other individuals very seriously. Email completely messes with that instinct. I mean, obviously, there is no email in the deep history context in which these instincts evolved. And so no matter how much your prefrontal cortex tells you we have norms in our company. And, man, I heard that term norms so much from C suite executives when I was promoting deep work. They're all convinced that this is an aside. They were also convinced that the email was so close to being a productivity nirvana. If they could just adjust the norms. We're like three norm shifts away from email being great. But no matter how much a prefrontal cortex tells us we have a clear norm in this company, that there is not an expectation to answer this email within 24 hours. We've written it down, we all chant it every morning, we engraved it in stone and we put it above our desk. There's a deeper part of your mind that sees those messages piling up in your inbox and says, a member of my tribe is tapping me on my shoulder. I'm ignoring them. This means I might starve when the famine comes. And it makes us very anxious, right? And I go into some studies in the books where you can actually see this play out. There's a very clever, if not mean, study where they brought people in and for whatever they told them. The experiment was about something where they needed to monitor them, right? So they got all these monitors on them so the subjects, they could monitor the subject's stress response. And unrelated, the subjects didn't realize this, but for half of the participants, they arranged to call their phone while they were in the experiment. And what they had done ahead of time is said, hey, your phone, and I'm sorry about this, your phone is putting off interference and.

It'S messing with our equipment. So we're going to just move the phone away from the equipment a little bit. And they only used iPhones because the iPhone had a silent. You can turn it on to non silent mode with your finger. So the researchers would turn it off silent mode. They put it across the room and they would call it and they'd be monitoring their stress reaction. And this is a clear cut place where.

They know it's okay in their prefrontal cortex if they don't answer the phone. They had put their own phone on silence, right? So it's almost a surprise that they're hearing it. So, like they had completely planned for the next hour while I'm doing this experiment. I'm not going to take calls. I don't expect to take calls. I've turned off my phone. It's just for one hour. I'm in the middle of an experiment and still just hearing your phone ring and not being able to answer it or hearing the text message notification sent the anxiety reaction off the charts. That's the Paleolithic, right? And so that's one of the ways.

Maybe my family member is in an emergency because if the ringer was off and the call still came through, like maybe there's a true Emergency, Right.

There could be a true emergency. But even if you see like. So this is what happens with like work email. You're like, I know I don't have to, like, logically, I don't have to answer these messages. Right. It's fine. We have norms. No one's going to yell at me. No one expects me to answer these messages. But there's a deeper part of you that says you can't ignore people. That's like a big deal. Because our survival. I mean, I talk about these studies. They've been doing them in extant hunter gatherer tribes. You can look at it where, like, the people who are worse at connections starve more. We really worry about it. So anyways, just to have like a piling of. The piling of messages that you can't get to is a uniquely immiserating type of phenomenon.

Well, I'm glad. Thank you for sharing that study and that research and because at least there, at least we can name that as well. To name that, you know, you've kind of given permission that, hey, there's a very primal tribal part of your brain and your physiology that is.

That is going to be stressed about that. I don't know how we overcome that. Well, we do. Because of all the things you've shared on this show.

You get away from the hive mind. You get away from the hive mind.

It's better.

The hive mind creates the overflow. Without the hive mind, you don't have the overflow.

That's true. And when you're clear on your roles and then you're clear on, like, it's true that when I have a really big, deep work project that I care about, I kind of. The other stuff does fall away. So I think it's also always coming. Coming back to re clarifying what are my priorities, what is most important to me, kind of. I know we're both fans of Greg McCown and essentialism. I loved your conversation with him for his show and yes. So thank you for sharing that. And we get to give ourselves a little bit of relief. Like, there's nothing wrong with any one of us if we're feeling overwhelmed by this. It's baked into the system and our physiology.

And I really believe for most people, especially people who have a lot of autonomy, like you run your own company, like a lot of your listeners, if you really go through and reject a hive mind, identify your processes, get rid of the ones you don't want, optimize how you deal with information for the ones you do want. The role of the email inbox in your life can absolutely be reduced to what it was in 1995. You know, it can absolutely be reduced to like once a day or maybe twice a day. I go in and there's like a few things and some of them are just informational, like, okay, here's that file I needed and it takes 30 minutes. And I mean, I profile companies, small teams in this book where this is their reality. Their inbox is something they check maybe once a day. If they forget, it's not a big deal. It's just not central to how they work. I just think that is, that is possible for like 95% of probably your listeners right now. They could get there. That is possible.

I agree. I, I go days without checking a single email because I don't trust myself. I'll get anxious. As soon as I see any one email, I'll. I know my anxiety will pile up until I start answering them. So yeah, I'll go days where I don't even check it. And I still can work with my team exactly as you describe in the book. And I think that's an interesting adventure for listeners is see if you can go whatever your current time interval is, whether it's half a day, an hour, there's a statistic Cal shares in the book, it's every six minutes people check their email, but double it, triple it, you know, see if you can go one day without looking at the inbox. And so for me, it's like, I got that far, but now I gotta do what you've done so well, Cal, which is those being clear about the expectations and what people can expect.

Well, I was gonna say just to ratchet down to the next level of geekdom is really briefly the kind of three principles I keep in mind for doing that type of engineer. So there's like this process principle, like I'm talking about identify processes and you want to optimize. And I talk about this protocol principle, which is where it really gets into this notion that having protocols for certain types of interactions, you do often protocols that are maybe have a little bit more overhead and they're a little bit more pain to set up at first, can over time give you huge savings by over time cutting down the back of ad hoc communication. So you start thinking about protocols. And then my final principle, specialization, which is in many contexts doing fewer things but doing them better is really the right, that's really the right mix for sort of maximizing the return you get on your attention capital, as I call it. So Having this mindset of specializing more, I do less things, I do those things, I do those things better. Those are the type of principles I have in mind that form together to get you to that goal. Which is the goal of course is if you go a couple days without checking your email and it doesn't really matter because there's not that much there, that's where I want people to get. And there's definitely people who have gotten there. Where it's not just that you're. I'm avoiding seeing it because it's stressful. It's like I'm avoiding looking at it because there's not much in there. Like it's just not a huge part. It's fine. Like, of course this is how, you know, I told my accountant, like, yes, send me the. Send me your invoice over email. It's great. I don't want you to mail it to me. Sure. But it's not, oh, there's 35 conversations I'm tending and 17 open ended requests that I have to somehow say no to. Like you. You get rid of that. And email is like, oh, this is like a very convenient physical mailbox.

I love it. Thank you. As soon as I hear you say to just geek out even further, I'm already excited. So where. How could we have even closed this conversation without these three principles? These are so good. Tell me if I get them right. Identify, processes, protocol principle and then specialization.

Yeah, yeah. Think about things in terms of processes. Be willing to have extra overhead and pain sort of in a process because if it reduces your average amount of communication. And I get super geeky here. I pull from Claude Shannon and information theory. I really get into information theory. Like at the core of information theory is this idea that you set up these complex codes that really take into account the actual structure of the information and they're a pain to set up. But then the average amount of bits required to communicate is greatly reduced and all of the digital communication revolution is built on that idea. So like we can take that idea when it comes to our, our work communication and then specialization is that doing less but doing better is almost always the right balance. Especially if you're running your own company and you have this limited trough, I call it attention capital. In the book you have this limited amount of attention capital. You can't get more. Right. If it's just you or just you and your team that this is what you have. And so it's not a matter of would it be valuable to do this? I get some Value from doing this. Do I make some opportunities for getting this? Like, no, you have this much att. How do you get the best possible return? Almost always the answer is doing less.

It's so well said. And especially if you're a business owner and you want to work with your mind, it's like the specialization is so crucial because otherwise we won't be harnessing our best work and the unique gifts that each of us has will be spread thin all over the place and totally fried.

Yeah, that's absolutely it. Yeah.

Oh, and I wanted to tell you, on protocol principle, you might like the way that Tara McMullen put it on her podcast, what Works. She said, what can I create today in terms of process? What can I create today that will free my time tomorrow? Isn't that nice? Nicely said.

Yeah, I love it.

So it's like always just thinking, okay, what process can I create today that will free my time into the future?

Yeah. Not just tomorrow, but for the next hundreds of days. That's where you get the return.

Yes. Yeah, exactly. Okay, Kal, the last question is, if you could give listeners permission, like, if you could write them a permission slip for one thing, what would it be?

All right. If I give permission for one thing, it would be electronic communication does not have to be. That does not have to be a super important part of your work life. That you can have a work life in which you do not spend much time at all sending messages back and forth. And it feels heretical just because we got so used to it. But I'm trying to get permission to believe that it's really kind of arbitrary and no one decided that's a good way to work, and it's terrible, and I think we're all going to move past it at some point. So you have permission to get out in front of that curve and say, my job is not answering emails. My job is not answering Slack. My job is not keeping up on text messaging. It's producing stuff that's too good to be ignored and using as the foundation of a generally deep life. I want to give people permission to do that. To say, I am willing to try and construct something completely different than the way everyone around me is working.

And the crowd goes wild. I love it. I have a huge smile on my face. That was so beautifully said. I need to give that back to you so you can have this for your. For some kind of quote card. That was brilliant, gal. Thank you so much. I love it. You have permission not to be just pinging messages back and forth all day and to get out in front of this curve because it's an arbitrary, hyperactive hive mind. Nobody set it up intentionally. You make that case so brilliantly in your new book and so we can do things differently. And I love your permission to believe that this is possible. That's so good. Thank you so, so much. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

So. Well, hard to stay in touch. And I don't use social media and I'm.

You're not.

Yeah.

If they want to immerse themselves in your your world of goodies.

Yes. Well, so the two places are. If you want to. You know, I write a weekly article and I've been doing that since 2007, so you can read those or subscribe to get those sent via email@calnewport.com you can also learn about my books there. And if you want to hear me opining on these topics in your ear each week, my podcast is called Deep Questions.

It is great and if you subscribe to his newsletter, you can submit questions for said show. I told Cal before I hit record he was my friend hiking with me during a week's vacation in the summer when he first launched. It was so fun. And be sure if you have not yet already grabbed your copy of A World Without Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload Cal, thank you for this new book. Thank you for all the work that you do. Like the amount of permission and attention capital that you've helped me and everyone I know free up is completely priceless. Thank you so, so much.

Well Jenny, I appreciate it. And you know, as always, I always have a great time talking with you.

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