Randy Dean, MBA: The E-mail Sanity Expert(R) A Very Brief 2 Minute Demo Highlights Reel

Let me tell you what it is. It's that little sound that your Outlook makes or your email server makes when a new message comes in. And for some people, it's like Pavlovian, right? They hear that little bubbling and they'll be working on something. Bubbling. What's going on? Where was I? What?

Let's go into my inbox. Jealous? That's real, by the way. Almost every workday I get my inbox all the way to zero. But what I want to do right now is show you how, why people read their emails over and over again. Here's what they do. It's very common. They open up a new email, they read it a little bit. You know what, I don't really have time for this one right now, so you know what I'm gonna do? And I'm gonna come up here and mark it unread. How many of you used to mark unread? Or wait, wait, wait, no, not only am I gonna mark it unread, I'm gonna come over here and turn on the little flaggy. How many of you use the Unreads and Flags, Outlook users? Wait a minute, we got some Gmail people out here.

You know what? I can't get all this done in just a 4-hour block. So I want everybody to watch this very closely. Watch this very closely. Are you ready? Who just saw me procrastinate? See it? Want to see it again? All right. Quite a few. As a matter of fact, I remember when the single biggest distraction there was was the television. Who remembers when the TV— and there was all these things in like late '70s, '80s, people are watching more television than they're even working their full-time job. You remember there used to be stories about that? And I'm old enough to remember when I was the remote control. Anybody remember those days? Yeah, I hated those UHF channels. Remember? Yeah, what I think it's led into is this thing right here called the squirrel syndrome. Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. And by the way, do you know how freaking hard it is to get that picture right there? Yeah, I took that picture.

I'm like, I look forward to hopefully working with you soon.