Maximizing Team Efficiency and Effectiveness: Strategies for Improving Communication, Time Management, and Performance with Nick Sonnenberg, Dr. Ned Hallowell, and Joe Polish - Genius Network Episode #187

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. 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. Not that meetings are bad, but people hate meetings. But they hate meetings just like they hate email. But they're not doing meetings 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.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com alright, 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 Hallowell, the top ADHD 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. Just wanted to let you know because he's sitting here with us. My book of course, which is what's in it for the question? It's an operating system. 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 then come up for error. So I'm involved with Nick for many years. He's an optimization and productivity expert. I mean there's. How would you describe what you do? What get leverage is your company. Leverage is the company. Getleverage.com is a website. 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 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. 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, all kinds of stuff. And we've helped and I'll get good for a period of time, but at this point, it seems like you helped my assistant, Eunice.

We just got EUNICE down from 200,000 to zero this afternoon.

So the question is, how is it in her inbox?

Yeah, she got zero right now. Wow. Yeah, it's the number one thing. 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, 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 what 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 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. I mean, you literally said that. So Describe, define what ADHD 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 once you learn some measure of control to put on the brakes to slow yourself down, then you do a lot better. 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 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 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 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. Right. First off, it's never ending. It's like it never stops.

Exactly.

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

And unless we create barriers of some kind, it overruns us. And it clearly. And that stimulation. I coined the term screen sucking 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 ChatGPT, right. The algorithms of all these different platforms like Instagram, Facebook, they're starting to get to know your deepest, darkest secrets so well that they can suck you in.

Right?

And it's hard to get off of that. So it's not just an email problem. It's.

Right.

Oh, no, there's social media, it's everything.

Text message, it's. There's a. 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 the 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, suffer 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 now as a way to solve kind of my add, because I could 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, I don't know but I just think that every idea I have, it's like potentially gonna win me a Nobel Prize. So it's like if I lose one of these things.

Well, it might though, don't. 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 onto 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 can be in the middle of a conversation and 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, David Atlen's helped you with some of this stuff before. He has a great quote which is you' Your brain's for having ideas, not holding ideas. And for me that's an underpinning concept with a lot of the stuff I come up with and extend onto teams. If I don't have a place to organize and dump things, I'm just a lunatic. Yeah.

Years ago I spent a day with David Allen. Probably right after Getting Things Done came out. We decided we were going to spend a day at my office in Tempe. And it was an office building I used to own that was probably about, about a 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 the marketing of the gtd.

What's gtd?

Getting Things Done, which is the name of his book. But then it became people. To this day it's a big thing. It's called gtd.

It's huge.

It's a methodology.

Yeah.

And it became 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 add in that you 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 went from PC to Mac just because I like the aesthetics. I lost the organization and I never gained it back. And we're talking now, 13 years later, right? And I was using a Mac when I went to a short sprint in college. So this is the late 80s, right. So one of the things I was like, okay, so the computer looks cooler. There's all kinds of neat things you can do. Everyone always say Mac is so much easier than PC. And in many ways it depends on what software you use and what you're using and 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 on 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 hate disorganization.

So you don't hate email. You love email. You love the instant.

I love tools that enable me not to.

You hate, overwhelm.

So that's kind of what we're here 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 guide 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 let's just talk about that one area. Even though there's a million different areas, if you, 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?

Well, 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. It's that 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, right? So that's kind of the biggest problem. But when we look at companies, they're taught to 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. 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, overwhelm and then the bigger one, you know, not achieving their goals. You know, they're not where they want to be. However well they're doing, they can be doing very well. Which in a sense that's a two edged sword. That's not altogether a bad. If you're not happy with where you want to be, that 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 that's nothing a systems approach will solve. 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 do until 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 just 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. That's difficult. And then the third way is you get more out of people and you make them more efficient. You reduce all the slippage that's happening.

Gotcha.

Okay.

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

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

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

Okay. In the space of a few hours.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, yeah, like she did additional work or did she do it with you? So we're talking about my assistant of 20.

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 being 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 start clicking buttons, let's talk about the theory 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. 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, you know, 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 fast as possible. So take your laundry. When you take your laundry out of the, 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 internal communications, your clients, project management, documenting 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 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 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 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 and your brain capacity. Every decision you make takes some computational power of your brain, 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, 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 email, like that's an extra x hundred decisions that Joe is having to think.

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

So you don't have to worry about deleting. 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. So the frame snooze.

I don't know how to do that.

So I'll show you that trick. That's a really important trick. So rad is the framework I talk about in the book Reply, Archive and 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. 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 this news 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 a.

Joy I get out of deleting things.

I know, me too, me too.

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 archive.

Like, so, for instance, I'll put an autoresponder on, but then the autoresponders fill up in my scent. Like, I want to delete all of the things that say 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.

Yeah. Where do you get that? From me.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

All right, so then you're gonna 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 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 add, we have a distorted sense of time. And in general, it's. They say something is due next Wednesday, not now, and it's gone. So it's why we.

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

Exactly. Then we have a way that's a wonderful way of preventing the damage that's done by our not now way of thinking.

All right, should we.

Is fur on, like, my Gmail thing is that I've never seen.

Yeah, come on this side. Come on this side and pull up a chair. And then we'll look through a couple of things.

Where are you at? Oh, this is easy. You're 12,000.

No, 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 in folders and stuff.

Right.

And where are the commands archive, delete and defer?

Here. So let's go to your inbox. Okay. So on another. I'll sit down.

I don't understand what's happening with 30. There must be a set of 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 be automatically moving it.

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

Oh, yeah, same later. He's got 81, 000 here. 69.

Okay.

It's automatically archiving ones.

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 saved by.

So where are the. These commands? Delete archive.

Yeah, so for today, that's just. Let's just focus on this, 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 all as a default.

So when, if there's like me, Eunice and Ned in an 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 advance so that you can go from one email to the next and deal with it really quickly.

What does Auto advance mean?

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

Sure.

All right. Do you need this or no?

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

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

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

Alright, 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.

Yeah.

All right, so now you can hit the letter E to archive because we've enabled the keyboard shortcuts and what that Auto advance does, you see, it just took them 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 is Auto events?

It's in the.

It's in the.

It was in the. It was that setting here in the advanced that we. 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. E is a shortcut for Our classified.

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 gonna read it on Sunday. So now that just magically left your inbox and will come back to the top on Sunday.

Yeah.

Make sense. Yeah. All right.

Same thing.

All right, so just use it to Sunday.

Last. Just pick Sunday.

Right.

Okay. This is the same thing.

There's a clock.

Okay. Okay. This is bullets from today. So I.

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, like, this is crap. Right. You could just archive. Right. All right. Anything here you need to do?

Yeah, those. Yeah, I'm gonna look at those.

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. 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 gonna delete. It's one less decision. You're. There's no risk. So if you search for Ben Hoodie, you're gonna 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. It's not procrastination. You have control over it.

Yeah.

Whereas with us, with our adders, it's 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 gonna 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. But be realistic with yourself, too, because what you don't want is when you're unrealistic and you start snoozing it to tomorrow, 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 I'll do that this weekend. This one. I'll go this weekend.

Yeah, the one next to it. 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 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 any new 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 as 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 fucking 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 date, it's just like you got a thousand things and it's like, oh, my God. And then you're spending half the day.

Yeah, like what I do there, I just click this.

You could click und.

This is so good.

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

What. What I did.

I was watching what you did.

That's a tas. Oh, I added it.

Yeah. Don't worry about. Do you use TAs? No. Why just snooze. Because I use asana for you. What I would recommend is try to block, you know, what is Dan Sullivan called? Buffer days? Or try to block free. Oh, you don't want. This is. This isn't a fun free day thing. Yeah, yeah. But 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 decided with. With Eunice. So Mondays and Thursdays are going to be my buffer days. Tuesdays and Wednesdays will be when 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 stuff, I could put some stuff, but I'm not scheduling stuff. So I told her, from now on, everything. Now we're gonna play with that. We may alter. We may Change it a bit. But I decided that the last couple days that I'm gonna do, all the main things that are work related that are most important are gonna be Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Monday is going to be a prep day, Thursday is gonna 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 decision.

Well, let's say this though. 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 should probably do it Saturday.

On Saturday.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right, so are we done here, guys?

So the last thing.

Okay, you almost. Because the ADD's like get the hell out of the house here.

Right, exactly, exactly.

So then the very last thing that, 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.

So then I 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.

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. 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 everything that's older than I think I selected from two years back. Right. Or from a year back. Let's see, what search criteria did I do? So 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 forget about it.

That I don't want to do. Yet until I have, by the way, I want to do that, but I want to actually sit up.

So I, at least it might be start five years ago. Like everything's 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 the 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 in, 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 flat. 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 dilemma for people watching this. So they, they got a little bit of a Sneak peek into, you 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 were talking about this a couple weeks ago that self esteem is domain dependent. You know, you, you have more self esteem in certain environments, in certain domain. Right. And, and so when I'm good in a particular area and it could. Where I'm skilled, like tech that I do understand or I've gotten 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 trick is 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 video. So if you feel like, oh, you're totally disabled or you suck here. It's just simply because I'm not. I don't have literacy.

You haven't learned this.

Right, 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 this is the purpose of your book.

Yeah. I mean, 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've only read part of it.

Right.

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 live.

Spending like a nice romantic time with. On vacation. You can just read.

Yeah. Just read your book for the whole time.

It's a very romantic book.

You know, Now I'm going to shoot myself, come up for air. I'm never coming up.

I would say the quickest thing that people can do is understanding the purpose of email and try to separate out personal communication in 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. So I recommend solving one problem at a time for people. People start hearing about slack and Monday and Asana and all these things and then, you know, the add kicks in and 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 Hallowell, author of ADHD 2.0. How do people find you Hollowell center or what's the website?

Drhollowell.com Dr. Dr. Noperiodhollow.com okay.

Getleverage.com getleverage.com and come up4air.com okay.

Yeah. And so Come up for Air is his new book. I mean, I'd say on the topic of all this we're talking about, if you want to learn this, obviously read his book or get Leverage is the company Get Leverage My book. You can get at what's in it for them dot com. Or if you're too cheap to buy one of my books, just go to joe'sfreebook.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 upsell 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 scalp. I used to have long hair in a ponytail. Yeah. Back in the day, you know, when I was young and things were, you know.

Thank you guys.

All right, thanks.

All right, peace out. Good luck with everything. Don't miss another episode of Genius Network. Subscribe today@gieniusnetwork.com subscribe. If you'd like access to the show notes or resources, please visit geniusnetwork.com 187.