1. Understand the Technology
- Email is an amazing Technology!
- Async-Mail
- Sync-Phone, Telegraph, Text, Chatapps,
- Email-Asynchronous with instant delivery–but this should not mean instant viewing
- Philosophy is wrong, not tactics
- Bad Solutions
- An article on just keeping emails in inbox misses the entire point. There are only two acceptable solutions and ignoring email is definitely one of them, but inbox zero is the better version of that.
- Inbox Zero
- Arrival Rate vs. Departure Rate
- Every inbox item costs you decision dollars
- We don't want to make decisions
- Too Much Email-No!!!!! Too Much Stuff
- I Just Check Once Per Day
- Vs. I set aside time to do Deep Work
- Analogous to I took Facebook off my phone…
2. Email Should Spark Joy
- Used to have combined work and home
- Never, ever do this!!!! Separate Work and Email
- Work Check Once, while at work or every day depending on your job
- Horrible human being would email on Friday afternoon with something horrible
3. Don't treat an async tech as sync
- Don't expect or encourage real-time use
- It is fine to reply right away, but dissuade the belief that you will consistently
- Pacing
4. Your Email Inbox cannot be your ToDo system
5. Just 1 Touch
- DoIt
- SystemIt
- DelegateIt
- SaveIt
- UnsubIt-goes back to brings joy, true joy–not dopamine hit
- FilterIt
- Trashit (actually archive)
- SpamIt
- Maybe-Bringit Back Services
6. Archive, Don't Delete
7. Search, Don't File
8. Inbox Elimination to Keep You Honest
- Too Many Inboxes
- Gmail Mailboxes
9. Cut out Back & Forth Steps
10. For Some Use cases, Are Slack/Basecamp/Teams the Solution?
Books to Read
- Essentialism–You need to prune down to what is important!!!
- Deep Work–Life Changing! We'll do a book club on this one ASAP
Now on to the Podcast…
Latest posts by Scott Weingart, MD FCCM (see all)
Excellent post !
NRN 😉 ! Wow !!! I love it, i am SO thrilled about this new podcast. What a great way to start. As usual, i love how you go deep and granular, first principles thinking at its best ! In all respect, i agree with 90% of everything, but i think you are missing a couple of crucial points. 1) Email is addictive Each response to an email is a burst of dopamine that tells us (me at least) : you are doing something awesome, keep up the good job !!! As a human being with a finite will, each… Read more »
1) Email is addictive Each response to an email is a burst of dopamine that tells us (me at least) : you are doing something awesome, keep up the good job !!! As a human being with a finite will, each email checking, will at some point, mean less deepwork. If you have culled your email, you actually are doing something awesome–that is my whole point. This comment came to me by email and it was super-rewarding to read. Deep work times should have you checking email NEVER. If you firewall your deep work time, then you are only checking… Read more »
Thanks you so much for taking the time for such a detailed answer ! i really appreciate it. I think you are just better than me at getting into the jedi mindset of deep work haha.. Deep work is so rewarding, but fighting the initial resistance is tough.. I find that email is SO convenient for my brain to avoid tough things and “feel like i’m working” I tried clickup as well, really solid platform, but we needed extensive reference storage as well. Monday.com is the best i found to cover everything. It’s pretty expensive, but they offer a significant… Read more »
Oh boy I am so happy about this series … can’t wait for the next episodes
I can’t even listen to it, unfortunately, because every couple minutes it turns to garble and stops streaming. Every other podcast works perfectly.
why don’t you contact us at emcrit.org/help and we can troubleshoot with you. there are no issues playing it on our end
–Rach
Would love a tl;dr on the apps you use on a daily basis, especially relating to email and scheduling.