ADHD Entrepreneur: Your Email Overwhelm Will Get Better the Moment You Watch This!

When people complain they hate email, they hate whatever the tool is, it's never the tool. They just don't know how to think about the tool and they don't know the purpose of the tool, not just how to use it, but more importantly when to use it. And the big part of my book is teaching the theory of how to think about the purpose of each of these tools. What problem does email solve vs text vs Slack vs Asana? Because people don't even know the purpose of it. They're using it like a Swiss army knife.

All right, so this is Joe Polish. We're sitting here at the Genius Network headquarters in one of the back rooms with a bunch of books. But there's three books that are really valuable and important for you to know. Dr. Edward Hollowell, the top ADDHD psychiatrist in the world, one of his 23 books, one of his newer books called ADHD 2.0. I've read the entire book. I've listened to it all on audio. It's amazing. I just wanted to let you know because he's sitting here with us, my book, of course, which is what's in it for them? The question to it's an operating system on you approach people with more give than take and it's for givers to be better boundaried around takers and how to develop really connected, authentic, aligned relationships. It's really how to win the right friends and influence the right people. And they come up for air. This is a galley version of this because the time we're doing this, it's coming out in about a month. Yep. And so I'm involved with Nick for many years. He's a optimization and productivity expert. I mean that's. How would you describe what you do? What get leverage is your company. Leverage is the company. Getleverage.com is a website.

Yeah.

And we're all going to talk about kind of what we do and how we do it. Then we're going to share with you one of many things that he can help with, which is how to get to Inbox zero and how to handle that. But what's this all about?

So Leverage is a training and consulting firm that helps businesses and teams get more efficient. And then when you think about all the different tools required to be a high performing productive team, there's Slack, there's Asana, there's email, there's all these tools. We help train people on best practices so that as an organization or as a whole, you can save up to a business day a week. And that book is the framework and employee manual that we train teams on. Great, great.

And here's what I think would be great. So I think all of us would identify as being at add adhd. Distractible. I'll let Ned in a moment define what that actually means. What I think would be cool about it is you have three people here who are very curious and have lots of ideas, and that means lots of communications, lots of curiosity, and I am completely a mess when it comes to email. I have never had a handle on email. I've read books on it.

I've hired consultants.

I mean, all kinds of stuff. And we've helped and I'll get good for a period of time. But at this point, you. It seems like you helped my assistant, Eunice.

We all got EUNICE down from 200,000 to zero this afternoon. So the question was in an Earn inbox. Yeah, she got zero right now. Wow. Yeah, it's the number one thing. Like, it's, it's, there's, there's all these new tools on the market. Asana, Slack Notion, all these things. Everyone uses email. It's the most misused tool. Everyone thinks they've got it. Well, a lot of people think they have a good system. And it's the one thing that's. I mean, I spent an hour with her and she read the book and then we sat down and played around with a few things and in an hour got her to zero. That probably will save her three to five hours a week.

Well, here's why. I have a hard time wrapping my head around, like in an hour you got her to zero. So she didn't obviously process these emails. She did. What did she do to get to that? And then what do you do with them all?

We'll talk about that. Okay.

So from now, here's, here's the thing, too. The people that I think in the business world, because anyone could probably benefit from this and just wants to organize email, but our world is mostly entrepreneurs, right?

Yeah.

And business owners. And they're utilizing email not because they're just sending messages to their friends. This is how they do business. It's one of the many ways that they communicate. And many of them are distractible and many of them, they're so quick that they don't set up systems. I remember, I don't know how many years ago this was. You even made this comment to me that systems cramp our style.

Yeah.

I mean, you literally said that. So describe. Define what ADDHD is, because you've actually come up with a New name for defining it, which is vast.

Vast. Yeah. No. Attention deficit disorder is a complete misnomer. I have the condition myself. Most entrepreneurs have it. We have an abundance of attention, not a deficit. Our challenge is to control it. You know, we've got this runaway brain, Ferrari brain with bicycle brakes. And so it's constantly running away with us. And, and once you learn some measure of control to put on the brakes, to slow yourself down, then you do a lot better. We, we are. So I call it variable attention stimulus trait vast. So we, you know, we're driven by curiosity, which is distractibility, depending upon how you're operating. And we're driven by a constant need for stimulation. What we can't tolerate is the absence of stimulation, that is boredom. And if we're in business, we're driven to take advantage of every opportunity. So every. The email represents a possible opportunity, so we don't want to miss any of them. You know, FOMO and fear of missing out. And those can be advantages or disadvantages depending upon how you use them. The problem with email is it presents, you know, there was a time when the mail came once or twice a day and we'd run to get the mail. Now it comes once or twice a second.

Yeah.

And we're still running to get the mail. And you know, there's something irresistible about an unopened message, you know, so we're opening more messages than we need to and we don't know what to do with them. They provide stimulation, but they clog up the Runway. And so we're operating in a place of perpetual traffic jam. It gives us the stimulation and we gratify our curiosity, but in every way it slows us down unless we have a system to manage it.

You just said something really interesting that I didn't even think about. I mean, it's kind of obvious now that I. You made the statement, but we used to run to get the mail, you know, when the mail was delivered. Well, the news used to come on at 10:00pm, you know, from. Even though there was 6:00pm news and that sort of stuff. And I used to deliver newspapers as a kid. Right. And you would deliver the news once a day and then people would go out and now they deliver the news every second.

First off, it's on every.

It's never ending.

Right.

It's like it never stops.

Exactly.

So we live in that sort of world now. So we are, we are just inundated with continual, never ending, non stop communication.

And unless we, unless we create barriers of some kind, it overruns us. And it clearly. And that stimulation. I coined the term screen sucking. Yeah. Because we become addicted. We aren't even aware of it. When someone says, I have more to do than time to do it, my first question is, how much time do you spend in front of a screen? And they're not even aware how much time they just give away to their screens because they're screen sucking. You say, I'll just check my email. An hour later, you're still sitting there, hardly just checking your email. You're surfing the net, you're responding to emails, you're sending emails you don't need to send. You know, so it's this big jumble that's fraught with brain candy that we can't resist, even though it's so counterproductive.

Well, we're living in an interesting time where you have more opportunity to be distracted than you've ever had before. We were talking about AI earlier today and chat GPT. Right. The algorithms of all these different platforms like Instagram, Facebook, they're starting to get to know your deepest, darkest secret so well that they can suck you in. Right. And it's hard to get off of that screen. So it's not just an email problem. It's.

Right.

Social media, it's everything. Text message, it's. There's a mil. It's too easy to get a hold of people and to grab their attention. And the algorithms are getting so good now to keep your attention that you need to put constraints and frameworks in place, otherwise you could get nothing done.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, so it. Again, it's everything about modern life, the good news and the bad news. The good news is you can do so much. The bad news is you can do so much. You know, and it's a, It's a matter of how you manage your. Your enthusiasms, really. And if you're not careful, those of us with add, we become victims of our enthusiasms. We have too much of a good thing and we don't know how to say no to every food item on the buffet bar. And we come back with our plate overloaded and we pig out and, you know, some of the consequences.

Well, I know, speaking for myself, I have ADD and I, I developed a lot of the content and frameworks and everything that we're training out as a way to solve. Kind of my add, because I couldn't be sitting and doing something, having a conversation, 20 ideas popped in my mind. And then the anxiety of losing one of those ideas, because for me, every idea I have is brilliant. Like, I just don't, I just think that every idea I have, it's like potentially going to win me a Nobel Prize. So if like I lose one of these things.

Well, it might though. Don't, don't, don't. So you never know.

So for me it's hard to, it would be hard sometimes to be present with people because I'm trying to latch on to these 20 ideas or you know, oh, I have to text Joe polish this thing or oh, this is an idea for this thing. And you could be in the middle of a conversation. You're like parallel processing like all these things happening. And so if you, I found like if you, if I don't have a strategy of how to get things out of my head so that I could get back to being present because otherwise there's just too much going on. It was very, very challenging and for me, and I know, you know, David Allen's helped you with some of this stuff before. He has a great quote which is your, your brains for having ideas, not holding ideas right. And for me that's an underpinning concept. With a lot of this stuff I, I come up with and, and extend onto teams and if I don't have a place to organize and dump things, I'm just a lunatic. Yeah.

You know, years ago, so I spent a day with David Allen probably right after Getting things done came out and he, we decided we're going to spend a day at my office in Tempe. And it was an office building I used to own that was probably about the seven minute drive from where we're at right now. And we spent half the day helping me with GTD stuff and getting things done. And then I spent half a day helping him with marketing of the gtd.

What's gtd?

Getting Things Done, which is David's book. But then it became people. To this day it's a big thing. It's called gtd. It's a methodology. Yeah. And it became, you know, a way to organize, manage. And back then we were using Office and the most organized I ever was on email was when, you know, there was no online Microsoft Office. It was all like software based, installed on the computer and there was a gtd, you know, add in that could have. And that was the most organized I'd ever been. But then when I switched to Mac because I like the aesthetics of Mac and this was going back to probably like 2010 when I finally had my whole company put onto. We, we went from PC to Mac just Because I like the aesthetics. I never, I lost the organization and I've never gained it back. And we're talking now, you know, man, it's been 13 years later, right? And so, and I was using a Mac when I went to a short, you know, Sprint in college, you know, so this is the late 80s, right? So one of the things I was like, okay, so the, the computer looks cooler. There's all kinds of neat things you can do. Everyone was always saying Mac is so much easier than PC. And in many ways it depends on what you, what software you use and what you're using, how you're using it. But for me, I totally lost my email organization. And right now I've never been able to get a handle it. So I tend to have a sense.

Of I hate email.

Well, do I really hate email? I love the things that email and text facilitate. But what I hate is overwhelm. I, I hate disorgancy, you know, hate email.

You love email. You love the instant, you know, love.

Tools that enable me, not that you hate overwhelm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

So that's kind of what we're going to talk about. Like, so if you're in this space of I don't know what, because again, come up for air, you know, the practical guy. To go from drowning in work that says in the back to freeing up an extra business day per week for everyone on your team. So lets us talk about that one area. Even though there's a million different areas. If you were to think about what are the things that entrepreneurs complain about an organization, if you had to pick a few, what would they be? And I'd love to ask you the same question. When entrepreneurs talk with you and their complaints are the biggest challenges.

What are they? I can answer in two ways. The biggest. First of all, when people complain, they hate email. They hate whatever the tool is. It's never the tool. Or they just don't know how to think about the tool and they don't know the purpose of the tool, not just how to use it, but more importantly, when to use it. And the big part of my book is teaching the theory of how to think about the purpose of each of these tools. What problem does email solve vs text vs slack vs a son of. Because people don't even know the purpose of it. They're using it like a Swiss army knife, right? So that's, that's kind of the biggest problem. But when we look at companies, they're taught to two quick. Two quick wins that every business on the face of the planet can do. One is teaching them how to use email properly and the other is meetings. Meetings are just the biggest. Not that meetings are bad, but people hate meetings. But they hate meetings just like they hate email. But they're not running, they're not doing meetings. Right, right. Meetings are too long, too many people disorganized, no agenda. So a meeting can be fantastic, but the way that they're being done right now is terrible. So I would say those are the two kind of common things across the board.

Okay, what about you? What are the complaints that entrepreneurs come to you looking for help for.

Oh, more to do than time to do it. I mean it's similar theme, the overwhelm and then the bigger one, you know, not achieving their goals. You know, they're not where they want to be. Yeah. However well they're doing, they can be doing very well. Which in a sense that's a two way sword. That's not altogether a bad thing. If you're not happy with where you want to be, it means you want to grow. If you're, if you're like my friend's father who died having had an illustrious career as a psychologist. He died unhappy because, and thinking he was a failure because he hadn't won the Nobel Prize. That's, you know, that's not a good. So. But I, that's nothing. A systems approach will solve that. But yeah, I mean I think what you guys have said, you know, overwhelm more to do than time to do it.

Well, actually just piggybacking off of that. Actually the number one thing is that they don't have enough capacity. I think that's the number one thing that I hear. And there's three ways to increase capacity. The first way that most people do, and I think there's probably a high correlation also with adhd. People using this strategy is they hire more people. It's the knee jerk reaction.

The first thing they do is work harder. Well, that's the first thing they do. That's what they know they're on the precipice of burnout.

That's the entrepreneur. But like in terms of like a team though, it's hard to get your team to, you know, that's the second thing that they, that they ask the team to do. But the first thing, a big first knee jerk reaction is thinking you need to hire more people. And that's the most expensive strategy for increasing capacity. You have to pay for recruiting, onboarding, training, pay a payroll, a salary, and every person you Add adds exponential complexity. So you start throwing more people into the mix and then it just becomes pure chaos. And then the second way is you tell people just to work harder. And teams apparently don't like to be told to work 100 hours a week. You know that that's difficult. And then the third way is you get more out of people and you make them more efficient and you reduce all the, the slippage that's happening.

Gotcha. Okay.

No, that, that makes sense. So to go to the systems thing, let's. Why don't you walk me through my messy email and show me how to fix it, at least his starting point. And so for people that are watching this, I'd like them to be able to walk.

Could we interrupt and just tell them what you did this afternoon? So we're talking about real riff. You took someone's email that had 280,000 entries.

Two, I think she had 198,000 and we got it down to zero.

Okay. In, in the space of a few hours.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, yeah, like she did additional work or did, did she do it with you? 7. We're talking about my assistant of 27 years.

So.

So she was great. She read the book. She was highlighting the book and stuff. So she started implementing it. She got it down to like from like 198 to like 80,000 or something. On her own. On her own.

Okay.

Just following the book and then I showed her a few extra tricks and that was like another hour or so.

Okay.

It would have been faster, but sometimes when you're having to deal with so many, like you're dependent on Google servers, be able to process it fast enough.

I want to watch you do this with Joe, but just for my own ignorance, other than deleting them, how do you get rid of them?

Well, I didn't delete any.

So what happens to them?

So before we, we, before we start clicking buttons, let's talk about the theory of, of some of this stuff because I think the concepts are the most important because we're going to look at Gmail, but I want this to be helpful if you use Outlook or whatever. Okay, so there's a few underpinning concepts. I'll start overall with efficiency and then we'll go into the what is email? And how to think about email. The underpinning concept with all this stuff and it relates in particular with email is the name of the game isn't transferring information as fast as possible. And I think in the context of adhd, this is an interesting point. To talk about because I think the ADHD brain wants to move quickly and get things, play hot potato, just get it off your plate as fast as possible. Because you're processing so many things and it's hard to take pause and put things where it belongs because you're moving so fast. But for me to really be a high performing team, the name of the game isn't to transfer stuff as fast as possible, but to optimize to retrieve stuff as as fast as possible. So to take your laundry, when you take your laundry out of the dryer, you don't just throw it all in one drawer, you separate your socks in one drawer, your underwear in a drawer, your T shirts. Not because it's the fastest way to be done with your laundry, you do it because tomorrow when you have to put an outfit together, it's faster to retrieve what you're looking for. So the first mindset shift that is tough for entrepreneurs, tough for people with adhd, is sometimes you have to take pause and take an extra second to put it in the right bucket. Because when you want to find that thing in a month or you want your team to find it in a week, they save. Instead of taking, you know, two seconds, you don't want it to be taking 20 minutes, right? So you want to avoid all those things. So that's the first thing we want a system to optimize for retrieval. And then the second thing, what's the purpose of email? So email is an external communications tool. Most people are making the mistake of using it to communicate with your team, your, your internal communications, your clients, project management, documenting, you know, SOPs and putting them into folders. So for me, and what I talk about in the book is the use case of email is for an external communication tool and all these other use cases, there's other tools built for purpose for that. So those are a couple, two things, simple to wrap your head around. And then the next thing, there's a few common mistakes that we see with email. The first is people have way too many folders, right? And back to kind of principle one. The name of the game is to retrieve information as fast as possible. So let's just think about some of the folders and I haven't looked at your email yet, so I have no idea. I'm just talking in general. In general, people have too many folders and it would be useless to have a folder called Nick Sonnenberg, right? Because you could go in the search bar and type Nick Sonnenberg and retrieve all those emails far Faster by typing my name in the search than by having to go and find a folder. And all the wasted time clicking on an email and dragging into a folder. So then you have thousands of folders every think about the cost of that. Every email that you drag into a folder, say it takes you two seconds. This might get like nitpicky, but say it takes two seconds. But that happens 60 times a day. That's two minutes of waste a day. That's 10 minutes a week, that's 40 minutes a month.

Right.

What's that in your eight out, eight hours in a year. And then if you have 10 team members doing that too, that's 80 hours of lost productivity just from dragging something an extra two seconds. So there's little things like this that you have to be mindful of. Sometimes just saving that second or two adds up to a significant amount of time. So no folders if it's easily searchable. I don't believe in deleting anything. There's so much cloud storage now. Just archive. And again, back to your distraction, your brain capacity. Every decision you make takes some computational power of your brain. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

I'm not the MD here, but that's.

An often overlooked point. Whatever decision, even if you decide to delete it or ignore it, even to ignore it, yeah. That takes a certain number of calories, a certain number of molecules of neurotransmitter.

And if you're getting volume like Joe's getting an email and you're having to make an extra decision times number of emails, like that's an extra x hundred decisions that Joe is having to think.

He ends up making draconian solutions like I'm not checking emails on Tuesdays or people I'm shutting down. You know, that's not ideal either. You know, so.

So you don't have to worry about deleting. They, they give you so much storage. Just erase that as a decision that frees up all this brain space and you just archive stuff that you don't need to deal with in your email. Every email platform there's an inbox and then you have your all mail. So all mail is inbox plus the archive. Right. So when we talk about inbox zero, we're talking about it's like a to do list your inbox. Anything that you don't need to deal with now is out of your inbox and can be archived. Or there's another way. There's another thing that I'll get to in a second, but that's pretty much it. If you can wrap your head around that, then I'll just show you a few settings and tricks. But there's three things you can do with any email. You reply, you archive or you defer to the frame. For me, snooze.

I don't know how to do that.

So I'll show you that trick. That's a really important trick. So red is the framework I talk about in the book. Reply, archive and defer.

Defer.

So defer is extremely valuable. So say you have driving directions to a conference that's in a month from now. What do you do with that email? You don't want to forget about it, right? So you don't want to start like marking it red or unread or all these things. It's not relevant now. You need that in a month from now.

Here's my big question as I see where you're going. If I learn how to defer it, which I don't even know how to do.

Yeah.

How do I find it when I need it?

So when you defer it, it bounces back to the top of your inbox on the date that you've deferred it to. And what's cool is it bounces back to the top the sooner of the date that you defer it to or if there's an update. So let's just think of all the examples that this is useful. Say you're replying to a potential genius network member that is thinking about joining and you write an email. Or Eunice does, right? Well, maybe if they don't reply to you in a week, you want to do a follow up, right? So you could write the email, snooze it for a week and you're guaranteed that if there's no update, it'll bounce back to the top of your inbox. If there is an update on day four, it deactivates the snooze and it's at the top of your inbox on day four. So you either deal with the email right now, there's nothing left to do, archive it, or I'm not going to deal with it now, I'm going to deal with it for whatever reason in the future. Another reason might be, and this is getting back into psychology, but maybe you theme your days, maybe Fridays are your admin days and you don't take calls on a Friday and you just push all your crap to a Friday, right? So some people do that, some people have different themed days, so you might want to snooze things onto the days that you want to deal with them. Yeah, it's kind of like there's joy.

I get out of deleting things.

I know, me too. Me too. Yeah.

Just get the same joy. Learn to get the joy out of.

Archive so we'll never see you again anyway.

Yeah, yeah.

Learn to get the joy out of it.

Like. So, for instance, I'll put an autoresponder on, but then the autoresponders fill up in my set and like, I want to delete all of the things the autoresponder just so they're not intermixed. Because if I type in Nick Sonnenberg, it'll also pull up the autoresponder.

Yeah.

Typically, I'm not a huge fan of the autoresponder strategy. Yeah, yeah. But you know, Dean Jackson's got a. I like some of. He has some really elegant frameworks. Right.

He has.

He always talks about it's now or not now.

Dad, where do you get that from the.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

All right, so then you're going to love this stuff. So it's the same with email. It's either now, which means it's in your inbox, or it's not now and it's in your archive, or you've snoozed it and it's as simple as that. Your. Your. Your inbox is your now. Most people don't distinguish now and not now, so their inbox is just a cluster of everything.

Well, define now and not now. Like they go do. I mean it's obviously.

Yeah, yeah. It's just in, in. In ADD we have a distorted sense of time and in general it's. They say something is due next Wednesday, not now and is go. So it's why we.

Well, so then you can snooze it to Wednesday and then it's.

Well, exactly. Then we. Then we. Then we. Then we have a way that's a. That's a wonderful prevent. Way of preventing the damage that's done by our not now way of thinking.

Yeah. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait end. Till the. The end of this video or you can Simply go to joefreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

All right. Should we.

Is yer on like my Gmail thing is that I never.

Yeah, come on this side, dad, come on this side. Yeah, Pull up the chair. And then we'll. We'll look through a couple of things.

Where are you at? Oh, this is easy here. 12,000.

Oh, no, no, no. But when we go down here, how.

Many do we have here? So, yeah, you have 446,000.

446,000 emails.

But that's in your. That's in your archive. Right. Or folders or stuff. Right.

And where are the commands archive, delete, and defer?

So let's go to your inbox.

Okay.

So on another. I'll sit down.

I understand what's happening with 30, there must be a setting that's unread.

So you got 3,600.

Oh, but I got way more than in your inbox.

But then you've moved stuff out of inbox into these other.

It must automatically move it.

Yeah, you got like, sane. You got all.

Oh, yeah. Button. Got E1069. Okay. It's automatically archiving one.

Well, it's. It's automatically moving them to these, not archiving. It's automatically moving to some other folder out of your inbox.

Yeah, because I got same.

Yeah, yeah.

So where are the. These commands? Delete, archive.

Yeah.

So for today, that's just. Let's just focus on this.

Okay.

Right. And teach you the tools how to get your inbox to zero. And then one by one, like, I would sit with you and let's just start removing this stuff once you learn the tools of how to do this. So first let's look at a few settings and just make sure that your settings are good. All right, so I would do reply all as a default. You got that enabled.

What do you mean? Reply also default.

So when. When. If there's, like, me, Eunice and Ned and email and like, you're replying, it'll default to all instead of by one. That's the most common. It's the most common response. Enable Auto Advanced so that you can go from one email to the next and deal with it really quickly. It's enabled.

What does Auto advance mean?

So when you're in an email before, do you mind if I click into me?

Sure.

All right. Do you need this or no?

Yeah. All right, well, let's see if I respond to it.

So now I put the reply all button. Yeah. Okay.

So, Danny, I'll say, call Nick. Call Nick. He's in town.

All right, so you're done. There's nothing left to do. If he doesn't reply to you, do you want to be notified in a week or if.

No.

All right, so now you can hit the letter E to archive because we've enabled the keyboard shortcuts and what that Auto Advanced does, you see, it just took him straight to the next one. Without that, it would have taken them back here and then you have to manually click into the next one.

So where's auto events? It's in the. It's in the.

It was in. It was that setting here in the Advanced that we.

Oh, okay.

It's here. So again, it's sometimes these, like, little things that you just have to do. Yeah, Right. So now, like, look at this one. You probably don't need to do anything here. Right.

No, that. That's just an automatic same box.

So hit E. The E is a shortcut for our left.

That's an issue. All right, that I'll read later.

All right, later today. But you're doing a genius network event, so probably, what, Sunday you'll read it.

Sure.

All right, so then you could click on this clock and realistically, you're going to read it on Sunday. So now that just magically left your inbox and will come back to the top on Sunday. Yeah, makes sense.

Yeah.

All right.

Same thing.

All right. Just use it to Sunday.

Massive. Just pick Sunday. Right. Okay. This is a insane thing.

Empty clock.

Okay.

Okay. This is a bullish from today.

So are you gonna read it today?

Well, it's. I have to. Yeah. I mean.

All right, so then just go back to your. Yeah, the inbox. So anything that you're going to deal with today, leave in the inbox, but then all these other things that you're not going to do, you either just get rid of it and archive it. So anything here that you know you like. This is crap. Right. You could just archive. Right. All right. Anything here you need to do.

Yeah, those. Yeah, I'm going to look at those.

All right, so what you just archived. Just to be clear, we didn't delete anything. It's all here in your all mail. Because your all mail is your inbox, your archive, it's everything. So you don't have to have that anxiety like, oh, my God, I made a mistake. I deleted this important thing. Because you're never going to delete. It's one less decision. There's no risk. So if you search for Ben Hoodie, you're going to see all the stuff that you just archived from Ben. Makes sense. So you're basically just building a now and a not now. That's all that you're doing. Right.

But you have good. It's not procrastination. You have control over it. Yeah, I think with us, with our adders, this procrastination.

Well, you know, you have to be also realistic with yourself, right? Like you're at a genius network event right now. You're gonna have a. You're have dinner with Ned. You've got all day tomorrow. You gotta pack like realistically, like these nice to read articles you probably aren't gonna get to till Sunday. So like be realistic with yourself too. Because what you don't want is when you're unrealistic and you start snoozing it to tomorrow, right. And then it's just this like rolling snooze. That's annoying too. So you have to be realistic.

So if I go this weekend, it always pops up at 8am, right. So that this weekend. This one. I'll go this weekend.

Yeah, the one next to it. So. So this is the theory and like basically what we're doing right now is you have a sink that's broken and there's water pouring all over the place on the floor. And instead of mopping faster, we're trying to plug the leak on. On the pipe, right? So we're trying to teach you the tools, how to think about it, how to snooze, how to do all these settings so that, so email that comes in in the future, you're not having to mop more. So once, once we teach you and you're comfortable with this is a tool and you're realistic, you know, you don't want to put like a hundred things on a Saturday and then you're overwhelmed. You're just yourself on Saturday. So that's another thing again, like psychologically people have to be realistic. Whether it's email, whether it's asana. So many people put the same due date and then on that day it's just like you got a thousand things and it's like oh my God. And then you're spending half the day.

Like oh, what happened? What I do there? I just CL thing.

You could click undo.

This is so good.

Now you're that. I hope that wasn't a really expensive.

What do we do? Add to tasks? Oh, I added the.

Yeah, don't worry about. Yeah, why Just news. Cuz I use a sauna for you. What I would recommend is try to block, you know what is Dan Sullivan called buffer days or try to block. Oh, you don't want this.

This isn't. This isn't a funnel. Three days, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah. But I guess this is like buffer Day activity, like once or twice a month, maybe block your calendar, don't do any calls and this is like your snooze.

Here's what I've called you decided with with units. So Mondays and Thursdays are going to be my buffer days. Tuesdays and Wednesdays will be what I do interviews. These are my focus days. And then Friday, Saturday and Sundays are going to be free days and I'm going to give myself the option of like on a Friday if I need to do something I could put stuff, but I'm not scheduling stuff. So I told her from now on, everything, now we're going to play with that. We may alter it, we may change it a bit. But I, I decided that the last couple days that I'm going to do all the main things that are work related that are most important are going to be Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Monday is going to be a prep day, Thursday is going to be a wrap up and then it'll give me three days over the weekend to actually have more of a life.

Great. Well, I would pick a day, pick X days a month or pick a day of the week. That's your default snooze day when you don't know that's what. That way also you're not having to make decisions.

Well, let's say this zone. So I'm getting ready to go on vacation but I really would like to pick this because if I choose it then they're able to send these things out. I don't want to do it after I get back from vacation. And I have one day, Saturday. So I do it Saturday.

On Saturday.

All right, so are we done here guys?

So the last thing you want was.

Because the add is like get the hell out of the house here.

Right, all right, exactly. So then the very last thing that we do. So now you have the tools to, you know, deal with anything new. But you've still got this old stuff that we got. You got this parasite in you that we got to get out.

Right.

So then what?

Love your images, they're perfect.

So if you go to, if you go here to your filter and you say just search like within a year of. Let's just go back, make sure you.

Don'T make them all go away before I know what you're doing because then I'll freak out.

No, I know. All right, so let's just see what pulls up here. So these are all very old emails.

Yeah, many that have things that I still need to deal with.

Right. Like you probably have Millions of dollars sitting in your inbox, which is having been processed, of course.

Right, yeah.

So. So, yeah, I'm not sure about how.

To make a bunch of money.

So what I would do is I'd click this, click on this. And then now, now everything that's older than I think, I selected two. From two years back. Right. From a year back. Let's see, what search criteria did I do? So you. You select a time period that you're comfortable archiving, and then you select all and you hit the archive button and that's a reset. So it might be some people. We recommend 30 days. Anything older than 30 days, just move it to your archive and figure.

Yeah.

Then I don't want to do yet until I have. Well, by the way, I want to do that, but I want to actually cine. At least it might be.

Start five years ago. Like, everything more than five years old. Archive. Right. And, you know, but you'll have to block time to catch up a little bit with things. And then over time, like Eunice, like, eventually we got it down to everything older than 30 days.

Yeah.

Archive. It's all searchable. We didn't delete a single thing. Right. So she could type anyone's name and she'll see the email that was archived.

When do you leave?

Tomorrow night.

Okay, so let's do this. And for purposes of this being a useful video for everyone that's watching this so clearly, like, my hesitancy to start pushing buttons or whatever say, let's do that, is anxiety. And the anxiety is fear of missing out. Right. So there's a bit of FOMO here, but not fomo, like, oh, I'm excited about. I want this, but it's more like the obligation of not getting back to someone.

I'm interested in psychology, actually, of the missing out. Because actually, you're probably missing out on more by not letting go. Right?

No, I'm not. Maybe that's not the right word. It's not missing out. It's just like, I pride myself. And even if I have to renegotiate timelines, I don't like dropping the balls. Now that not dropping the ball has me hold on to a lot of stuff that I don't even have the capacity. So I understand that sort of thing. And yes, I believe the opportunity cost is greater than what I perceive or even think the opportunity is by holding on to stuff. Because when you're. When you're too full, your body can't digest it. And so, you know, it's like that whole line of you know, because I took a one year sabbatical not last year but the year before. You know that the whole thing I went into it is entrepreneurs that are too tightly scheduled cannot transform themselves. So if you're too tightly, you know, filled up, it's very hard to be fluid. It's hard to be. It's like a really tight muscle. You can't. You're kind of tied up. So. And your whole thing come up for air. I mean the whole thing like you know.

And I've been there too. Like I've way overly scheduled especially right now with book launch. So I totally get the, the dilemma.

For people watching this so they, they got a little bit of a sneak peek know just what. What I'm. What I'm dealing with. But I think most entrepreneurs have whatever version of that and I'm. I have a friend, Annie Lala, she's a love coach and I write about her in my book and she, she has this. We're talking about this a couple weeks ago that self esteem is domain dependent. You know you, you have more self esteem in certain environments and certain domain. Right.

Absolutely.

And, and so when I'm good in a particular area and it could where I'm skilled like tech that I do understand. Right. I'm skilled at. I feel really good. This is a domain where I don't. I feel kind of like pathetic. Right. Because I've just never been really good at the emails.

Don't turn that into self esteem. That, that you got to separate competence from self esteem.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well the reason I brought it up is right now the best way I could think about it is I'm saying this so for the. So if you feel like oh you're totally disabled or you suck here. It's as simple because I'm not. I don't have illiteracy.

You haven't learned this.

Right.

Exactly.

Right.

Exactly.

So my, my some. The way I want to wrap this up is like what's the next step? Like what. So from this standpoint of learning it clearly you're. This is the perfect book. Yeah.

I mean that, that's a really easy next step.

Yeah. Read the book and practice. You got to practice.

Yeah. We go step by step. What you have to do.

But because I've not read your whole book yet, I want to read part of it. Right.

Once you, once you finish it, you'll be at zero.

Well and I'm gonna, I'm gonna actually that's another thing I have to have to read this dude's book because in like two weeks he's a guest on like this I love marketing which is my podcast. We're gonna do an I love marketing.

Why spending like a nice romantic time with Sheree on vacation.

You can just read.

Yeah.

Just read you for the whole.

It's a very romantic book, you know.

Now I'm gonna shoot myself, come up for air. I've never come down.

Quickest thing that people can do is understanding the purpose of email and try to separate out personal communication and text and external communication in Gmail. And if you do already have tools like Slack and teams, try to just use that with your team. If you don't. One thing that we've seen be a disaster and overwhelming for people is when they try to do too many things at once.

Right.

So I recommend solving one problem at a time for people. People start hearing about Slack and Monday and Asana, all these things and then you know the add kicks in and you're before you know it you've got 10 new accounts on things no one knows how to use these tools like get solve email, save three to five hours a week and then you have some breathing room and use that three to five hours for the next thing that you have to do.

Gotcha. This is Dr. Edward Hollowell, author of ADHD 2.0. How do people find you Doc Hollowell.

Center or what's the website drhlowell.com with Dr. Dr. No period hallowell.com okay.

Getleverage.com getleverage.com and come up for air.com okay.

Yeah. And so come up for air is this new book. I mean I'd say on the topic of all this we're talking about, if you all learn this obviously read his book or get leverage is the company get leveraged calm my book you can get it. What's in it for them.com or if you're too cheap to buy one of my books just go to joe's free book.com and you can get Life gives to the giver which you can download for free and if you want a physical copy you can pay for shipping and handling. And we will not put you into some like massive pitch up cell funnel because we just give away good stuff because life does give to the giver. And I hope that we gave enough in this video for you to feel more confidence and more capable and at least maybe have a different perspective of the add mind. And you were entertained by watching these guys touch my so smooth gal by you sound long hair to ponytail yeah, back in the day, you know, when I was young and things were. You.

Thank you, guys.

All right, thanks.

All right, peace out. Good luck with everything. Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

Go ahead. You're over here.

Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.