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I think that random rewards are particularly appealing when you re aimless, right?
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When you don t really know what you would rather be doing.
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You re not clear on where you re headed.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with Jocelyn Gley, author of a book called Unsubscribe.
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Yes, it s a book about email.
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No, you shouldn t turn this off immediately just yet.
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I had the exact same thought when I originally saw the title of the book.
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But this thing, I read the whole thing.
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It s a quick read and it was awesome.
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I ve been using email for 20 years and there were still plenty of things that I learned in terms of the productivity and the triage and the way that I handle it.
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We re going to talk about why email is a random reward system and why it s so effective at distracting us.
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Why checking email feels so productive when you re actually not doing anything useful, aka email martyrdom.
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and why email acts like some weird form of kryptonite when it comes to social interactions, the negativity bias coming to bite us in the butt.
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There s a lot here that we discuss, a lot of practicals in this episode, so enjoy this episode with Jocelyn Gley and definitely check out the book, which of course we will link in the show notes as well.
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And by the way, if you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the AOC toolbox.
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That s where we discuss things like reading body language and having charismatic nonverbal communication, negotiation techniques, networking, influence strategies, the science of attraction, mentorship, persuasion tactics, and everything else that we teach here at the Art of Charm.
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Check that out at theartofcharm.com.
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Also at theartofcharm.com slash podcast, you can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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All right, here s Jocelyn Gley.
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Jocelyn, thanks for coming on the show, and this took a long time, and I wish this was a joke, but the reason it took us such a long time to schedule the interview is because a lot of the emails were buried in my inbox, which is just a sweet irony that this show is about email and productivity.
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At first, I have to admit, I thought this was kind of a silly book idea.
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I mean, after all,
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who doesn t know that email needs to be structured in a certain way, our habits of email need to be optimized, et cetera, and then I kind of like did that whole, but look in the mirror, physician heal thyself thing, checked my own inbox, the thing s a disaster, a mitigated in some ways disaster, not the unmitigated that most people s is, but most incoming email was way too long, or it was unclear, or it had some other issue, and I noticed all this stuff after I read the book.
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It s kind of like everything s fine, and then you read a book about email,
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And you go, crap, I ve got so much work to do.
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And for a productivity type of nerd like myself, I thought, of course I have this on lock.
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And yet here we are.
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Yeah, well, that s why I wanted to write the book.
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I think that
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You know, the main motivation was most of us spend about 30% of our work week on email.
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And most of that 30%, I think, is spent largely inefficiently.
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So I wanted to really call attention to what I think seems like a small topic, but it s something that takes up an inordinate amount of our time and ask people to look at a little bit more thoughtfully, really.
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Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense to do that, and I like the psychology in the book about why email is this sort of perfectly addictive reward system.
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Can you outline that for us?
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I thought this was fascinating.
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Yeah, I mean, I think essentially your email operates more or less like a slot machine.
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So, you know, if you think about playing a slot machine, most of the time, you know, you pull the lever, similarly checking your email, and you kind of lose, right?
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So, you know, if you re going through your inbox, a lot of times you, you know, you pull the lever, check your email, you get, you know, an email from an angry customer, or you get an email from your boss asking you to do something, maybe you don t really feel
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But every once in a while, you get something great.
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As I did a couple of weeks ago, you get an email from a long-lost childhood friend who found your book in a bookstore and wants to reconnect, or you get an invitation to speak at a conference that s really flattering.
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And so it s those random rewards that are really mixed in with all that junk and all that drudgery that make that cycle so addictive because you re constantly on edge and it really activates a primal seeking mechanism.
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in our brains.
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And so why does it actually feel productive then?
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Because at some logical level, right, I m sitting here with my email controlling me, I m not focused on the outgoing, I m trying to achieve inbox zero, why would I think that that s a good use of my time?
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Because at some level I still do feel like I m being productive when I m checking my email.
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Absolutely.
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Yeah.
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And that s the result of basically something that s called completion bias.
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Well, that makes the human brain predisposed to want to focus on short, easy to complete tasks because we essentially like getting that little hit of completion.
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We complete a task when our brain recognizes that task is complete, it releases dopamine and it makes us feel good.
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And so it makes us want to repeat those behaviors, you know, again,
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And again, but that does make us sort of predisposed to those quick, easy to finish tasks, right?
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And we like to see that progress.
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We like to feel that sense of completion.
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And when you think about that in the context of your inbox, of course, you know, inbox zero is sort of that ultimate completion.
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But even as you, you know, move through kind of ticking through or ticking off those unread messages, you re almost getting these little mini hits of completion.
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And so that,
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cycle of, you know, this quick, every email is like a quick, easy to finish task.
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That s extremely addictive for us.
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Yeah, I feel the pull on this myself.
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I mean, have you looked at brain science and have you seen, have they even done this where people are answering email and they re like getting a little hit of dopamine and it s firing these little receptors off in our brain?
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I haven t seen one, unfortunately, where people s brains are actually hooked up to something while they re checking their email.
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That would actually be quite remarkable.
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But, you know, the sort of completion bias concept that we were just talking about is fairly recent research.
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And I think it s pretty easy to, you know, kind of clearly map that onto email, as well as other things that we use, you know, like social media, you know, where you have those notifications that you
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You want to constantly tick off or you think about progress bars that get you to track the status of a download or wanting to make your LinkedIn profile 100% complete.
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We re sort of constantly having this completion bias almost used against us by different technology companies.
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Got it, okay.
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And I think that a lot of this is designed by accident.
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I think now with social media, they re engineering us like crazy, but when email was first designed, it was just, hey, this is convenient, you re gonna get like three of these a day, max, and it s just an easy way to communicate.
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Yeah, no, I think with email, I mean, one thing that s interesting about it is it really is one of the last great unowned technologies, right?
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No one owns it.
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I mean, certain, you know, companies maybe are Gmail or, you know, finding ways to present ads around it, but essentially no one person owns the technology of email.
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So it certainly wasn t designed with this idea of
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of these behavioral rewards in mind.
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I think that s certainly happenstance, but I think part of that even makes us maybe a little bit less conscious of the fact that that is what s happening.
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So we re sort of blind to how addictive it is in a way.
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Why then can t we just shut it off?
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I mean, at least me personally, why do I feel like I owe everyone who emails me a response and I feel guilty at some level if I can t give one?
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Well, there s this thing sort of called the rule of reciprocity, which is a sort of natural human tendency that makes us want to, you know, reciprocate like actions with like actions.
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So essentially, if you, you know, took the time to write me an email, there s almost a sort of basic human instinct of reciprocity that makes me feel like I should respond to that email.
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One of the pieces of research that I cite in the book that I thought was particularly interesting was this study that was done back in the 70s by the scientist Philip Kuntz that was kind of testing the rule of reciprocity.
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And this was, you know, pre-internet.
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So he looked up about 600 people in the phone book and he sent them holiday greeting cards.
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And they either had like a picture of his family in a note or it was just a handwritten note.
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And he had never met any of these people before.
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And it turned out he got, I think, over 200 replies to those greeting cards from people who were complete strangers.
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And then some of those people went on to send him holiday cards year after year, you know, for 10 or 15 years after the experiment happened.
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And so I think that s a really interesting study that just emphasizes, you know, the kind of basic
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human instinct to reciprocate when someone sort of takes the time to send you a letter or to send you an email.
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And back in that kind of pre-digital age, maybe that was manageable.
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But now we have these inboxes that have kind of infinite capacity.
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And so the rule of reciprocity becomes sort of problematic.
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Sure, and Robert Cialdini, Dr. Robert Cialdini has talked about this a lot in his work as well, Law of Reciprocity, and this is kind of a common influence and persuasion thing that people rely on all the time, but why on that same token do we then get such satisfaction from attaining inbox zero, even if we know, okay, look, Law of Reciprocity aside, it s freaking meaningless.
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What does Google say?
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Nothing to read here, try Google News, I mean,
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unsatisfying and anticlimactic.
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cognitive capacity as you sort of continue to think about them in the background and want to finish them.
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And I think that in some ways our inbox functions in that manner, but, you know, kind of full time almost as a sort of background, sort of attentional pull that it s exhibiting on us.
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Right, and we can see this in your work, you research some employees, and it s kind of disturbing to see average people are checking their email is 74 times a day, spending over a quarter of their total workday on the task of reading and responding to email, so we re just kind of like rats getting that little cocaine buzz from the little dispenser in the side of the cage.
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Completely.
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And right before we jumped on the phone, I read a new piece from Harvard Business Review that was recapping a study that was done recently that was saying that, you know, sort of average managers or supervisors were spending about half a day a week on answering emails that were essentially unnecessary.
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you know, that were maybe misdirected to them or that, you know, maybe didn t really require their expertise to answer.
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So it s kind of, you know, just indicative of the massive amount of time that we re spending on email and not necessarily doing tasks that have very much meaning.
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Sure.
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Yeah.
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And it becomes super unscalable when we re dealing with hundreds or thousands of times that, I mean, how many pieces of misdirected postal mail did we get in our lives probably?
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before email existed.
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And I mean, I was a kid, so I got less than anyone, probably enough to count on one hand.
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But I think most adults probably got the occasional handful of junk mail, maybe every day that was easy enough to sort through.
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Now it s times 100, especially if you run a business and you re looking at that online.
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One thing I ve noticed that a lot of young people do especially is using their email as some kind of to-do list.
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And I found myself a few years ago just getting sucked into this.
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And I see a lot of people who are so successful that they should know better still using their email inbox as this kind of to-do list.
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And I think it s a terrible idea.
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And you mentioned this in your work as well.
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How do we get around that?
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Well, I mean, I think everyone has to come to their own solutions about how they want to manage email and how much work they want to put into doing things like creating a folder structure or getting particularly organized.
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I personally think that keeping a to-do list within your inbox is an incredibly bad idea.
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But I think that if that s the way you want to work or predispose to work, I think it s actually okay.
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But then there are certain email applications and types of things that you can use that can actually help you organize it in a better way.
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But I do think it s extremely important to, I guess, segment your email around this idea of understanding what messages you respond to, what messages you sent that are
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you know, pending follow up, right, that are essentially a task that you ve asked someone to do that is awaiting a response before it s actually complete.
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And then, you know, kind of also sorting through those emails that you might want for research purposes later and kind of figuring out like an incredibly simple folder structure just for that type of thing that could be as simple as pending reply, pending response, archive type of thing.
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I think that
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Particularly when we talk about folder structures for email, I was actually just reading Tim Harford s new book, Messy, which you ve probably taken a look at.
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And he talks about how there have been studies done, people who had really complex folder structures with email, it was actually incredibly unproductive for them.
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It s actually simply much better to simply have like a very few set of kind of broad strokes folders that you can quickly sort things into and move on.
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Because anytime you try to get more ambitious than that, you re kind of trying to anticipate more complexity than you can really account for with your folders.
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Sure, because it s really easy and you know who you are out there sorting your emails into 16 different folders.
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Now every email that you see, you re like, does this go into my follow-up folder or is this about an event with my friends?
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Is this a friend or is this a business contact?
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I don t know.
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I went to John s wedding so I guess he s a friend and then it s just like, what am I still doing looking at this effing email?
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And I think, for me, getting my to-dos out of email was mandatory, and crafting a to-do list beforehand and having email alone as a to-do, and then if something comes in that becomes a to-do, it gets put on a to-do list, not done in the moment, not focused on at that particular point in time, I m just doing triage.
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And then, additionally, the to-do list
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but also has to get scheduled into the calendar.
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So I don t have 27 to-dos that get done at some nebulous point in the future.
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I have, oh, I need to spend an hour setting up this backdrop in my studio.
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That gets blocked off.
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It takes up an hour on Tuesday, and then that way I don t have a bunch of stuff to do and a full Tuesday full of work, which means that none of the to-dos get done, which means that they stack up into a giant book that I could publish that would be even longer than yours, right?
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Because full of uncrossed, unchecked to-dos.
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So we see this inbox zero thing becoming essentially this meaningless game of whack-a-mole, not a meaningful goal, and also email, in a way, has designed itself to become a psychological addiction, right?
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We see progress bars, and even in my Gmail, I see like, oh, 17 unread.
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I just have to not look at it.
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because otherwise it s like, oh crap, I was at zero, now I have 10, maybe I should start attacking these.
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But of course with the email, activity breeds activity.
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If I reply to yours and you happen to be looking at yours, now you send one back and by the time I m 10 emails later, you ve already got your response, I ve got to respond to that.
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Now I m in instant messenger conversations with 87 people.
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And that s the black hole that you can get sucked into.
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I think meaningful work, and you ve made this point as well, meaningful work doesn t have a progress bar, doesn t have the small quick wins a lot of the time, so it becomes less appealing.
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A lot of books and apps and things like that, they don t have, if you re coding them, I mean, or writing them, they don t have an easy to track completion.
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And I think we run the risk of falling down this very slippery slope.
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Yeah, one of the things that I talk about in the book, I don t just want to point out sort of the problems of why email is so addictive, but talk about, you know, what are some of the solutions so we can kind of drag our focus away from email and spend some more time, as you say, focused on more meaningful work.
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And, you know, very simply in terms of tracking your to-dos and thinking about how you want to counteract some of those addictions that email offers.
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you know, even engaging in a simple practice like making tomorrow s to-do list the night before.
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I think when you wake up with a very clear sense of what you want to accomplish in the day, with a very clear sense of what your priorities are, it becomes much easier to resist those random rewards.
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I think that random rewards are particularly appealing when you re aimless, right?
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When you don t really know what you would
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rather be doing.
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You re not clear on where you re headed.
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So I think that even tiny acts like that are important.
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But additionally, I really recommend that people try to figure out different ways to make progress visible in the work that is meaningful to them.
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Again, to counteract that sort of feeling of progress that you get from email.
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So for me, I m a writer.
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So
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meaningful progress can be tracked in words per day.
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So I have a calendar that sits by my desk in which I note down how many words I ve written every day, as well as other kind of meaningful milestones in terms of projects I want to move forward on.
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If you were a designer, it could be
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kind of printing out different iterations of web designs that you ve done and putting them up on the wall or, you know, having iterations of different prototypes out on a desk in a studio.
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But I think thinking about ways that we can acknowledge that progress that we re making in the work that s meaningful allows us to gain some momentum around things other than email as well.
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Right, this makes sense.
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We re not gonna get rid of the psychological trigger in our brain that says, well, I need small, quick wins every day to feel this way.
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So we have to sort of transpose those small, quick wins, those dopamine hits onto bigger projects somehow if we wanna make those work, right?
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It s like if you can t stop playing video games, I understand that they re designed to be addictive, but what can you do to gamify something that actually matters and moves the needle in your life?
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Absolutely.
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And I think one of the things that s happened is that technology tends to hide that progress from us.
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When we re working on a computer, you re working in a Photoshop, you re working in Illustrator, InDesign, you re not making prototypes by hand.
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So you re not having these kind of visible indicators of the progress.
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that you re making.
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You re writing a draft in Word and then you re erasing it and rewriting it and erasing it and rewriting it.
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And so I think technology actually takes away the tools that we use to do some of our most creative work actually hide some of that progress for us.
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So we kind of have to go that extra mile to
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you know, again, kind of bring it back out and make it visible, whether it s by printing things out, or it could even be, you know, I m sure you re familiar with the work of Teresa Amabile, who wrote the book, The Progress Principle, you know, and studied hundreds of workers over a long period of time.
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And those people were
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simply journaling on a daily basis for, you know, about five minutes a day about, you know, kind of their small wins, you know, little steps that they had made towards their goals at work.
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And she found that that was an extremely, you know, sustainable form of motivation and that those people were more productive and more engaged at work.
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So even I think tiny things can make us, you know, start to recognize our progress.
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This is a really interesting way to use our own psychology against us, which I m a huge fan of doing because I feel like it s the only way I can get anything done in sort of any sort of predictable way.
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And that s one reason why I think that podcasting and broadcasting is so appealing because you re in it, you do it, you release it.
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I have these tiny little packaged products
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several times per week rather than, oh, I ve gotta at some point release this book or this feature film or this giant sort of all-encompassing opus that I just, it would be very challenging for somebody like me to wrap my head around.
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Another email phenomenon that I think, man, this is just like the story of my life.
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I almost wanted to subtitle this section of the book in my brain, Why I Piss Off People Every Single Day in My Inbox,
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And the negativity bias that we experience, there s the lack of social feedback with email, does in everybody from me and my dad to people I do business with all the time, salespeople, this is a new firm handshake, essentially, or lack thereof.
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Yeah, the negativity bias was a really kind of revelatory thing when I learned about it a few years ago.
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I think Daniel Goleman, who s essentially the sort of father of the idea of emotional intelligence, discovered it.
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And it is essentially that, you know, this idea that between the writing of the email and the receiving of the email, every message gets downgraded a few positivity notches.
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If I write an email to you and I feel positive about it, by the time you receive it, you feel neutral.
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And if I feel neutral about it when I write it, you probably are going to feel negatively about it when you receive it.
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And obviously, to your point, you know, if I feel negatively about it when I write it, then you re probably going to be really, really upset when you receive it.
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SPEAKER_00
And the reason that is, is the lack of social feedback.
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SPEAKER_00
So, you know, most of the time we re talking right now, someone can hear my voice, hear my tone.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, often you re talking to someone face-to-face, you can see their gestures, you can see their facial expressions, and all of that immediate social feedback kind of
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shades how you perceive their intentions, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
But of course in email, all of that social feedback is absent.
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SPEAKER_00
And one of the things that Goldman noticed was that we still would write the emails as if it were present.
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SPEAKER_00
Thus, you know, we wouldn t really try to account for that lack of tone or that lack of, you know, facial expression with the message that we were sending.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that all kind of adds up to, you know, the negativity bias and has caused, you know, sort of innumerable flame wars over the years in terms of email.
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SPEAKER_00
you know, my kind of takeaway from that was that I think we need to be a bit more enthusiastic and a bit more encouraging, and certainly try to add a bit more sort of color and tone to our messages than maybe we re sort of naturally predisposed to.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, this makes a lot of sense to me as well, because not only are we writing email, and we might be just kind of engaging this logical portion of our brain where we re like, look, I need this thing to get done, but we re also looking at other people s emotional filters, and we teach this a lot at our AOC boot camps, our live programs, and things like that.
2
SPEAKER_02
These emotional filters are, even if I write, hi, Jocelyn, really looking forward to seeing the draft, even something like that, right?
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SPEAKER_02
Absent tone would be like, hi, Jocelyn, looking forward to seeing the draft.
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SPEAKER_02
If you re in a bad mood or you re feeling negative about your own work at that point, you might be like, oh, of course you re looking forward to seeing the draft.
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SPEAKER_02
You just want to see me stumble, Jordan, you son of a bitch.
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That kind of thing, that emotional filter could be in place.
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And since we have a negativity bias, you re probably not reading it as, Jordan just can t wait to see how great my draft is.
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SPEAKER_02
I m so excited to send it to him.
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There s going to be that downgrade in addition to whatever kind of day you re having.
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If you just spilled your coffee on your hand as that email came in,
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well, I m in for it now, right?
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SPEAKER_02
You re gonna hit reply, you can t fire that reply off fast enough.
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SPEAKER_02
And so, we really do have to kind of, would you say we have to sort of overdo it, overcompensate?
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, do we just put a dozen smiley faces in the email?
2
SPEAKER_02
What do we do here?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I am in favor of, you know, exclamation points and emoticons if you feel like that s in keeping with your personality.
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SPEAKER_00
And also if you feel like it s in keeping with the person who you re communicating with.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, that really depends on what the relationship is, who you are, who that person is.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I think you can t just say, you know, bottom line, you know, use exclamation points, don t use them, use emoticons, don t use them.
2
SPEAKER_00
But I was looking at some data, you know, sort of email company Boomerang did, and they looked at about, I think they crunched, you know, about 40 million emails and looked at what emails people were more likely to respond to and what the qualities of those emails were.
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SPEAKER_00
Two of the things that they noticed was that one, people were more likely to respond to emails that had positive language in it, but it wasn t like overly positive.
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SPEAKER_00
So you don t want to overdo it, but you know, you want to be upbeat, you want to be encouraging without being, you know, obnoxious, I think sort of common sense.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the other thing they noticed was that emails that had more of a subjective voice tended to be more likely to get a response as well.
2
SPEAKER_02
What does that mean for us non-English majors over here?
2
SPEAKER_00
Basically, you know, that we re expressing an opinion or expressing some, you know, I think kind of personality is the way to read it.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I think a lot of us have this idea that good emailing, professional emailing is about just sort of like communicating the information, you know, and not going too overboard with emotion or not going too overboard with
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SPEAKER_00
expressing personality, but they actually found that positivity and kind of that personal perspective was actually a good thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think it makes sense, right?
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SPEAKER_00
If people are spending 30% of their work week on email, those emails in which like someone actually is, you know,
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expressing their personality in some way that s engaging, you are going to probably want to be more likely to engage with that email than, you know, the person is sort of just like shouting at you like a computer or something, you know?
2
SPEAKER_02
Right, sure.
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SPEAKER_02
But here s the counter-argument.
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SPEAKER_02
You actually address this really well in your book, but my initial counter-argument, apparently I was not alone in this.
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SPEAKER_02
Ain t nobody got time to be all polite in emails.
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SPEAKER_02
Come on, aren t I being efficient just by laying it out there, this is what I want to do, get it done.
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SPEAKER_02
Why should I sit here and try to figure out how to make sure everybody feels good about my 300 emails a day if I m running a big company here?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think it s a completely fair question.
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SPEAKER_00
I think it s one of those things where it s sort of like a stitch in time saves nine.
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Essentially, if you want someone to respond to your emails, you want them to do that thing that you are asking them to do, you need to have them on your side.
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You need to have them feel like they re supported.
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You need to have them be
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motivated, you know, you need to have them feeling like they re going to be making progress if they re doing this thing that you are asking them to do.
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And I think, you know,
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So if you are kind of taking those things into account at the outset and understanding a little bit of that psychology behind how you re going to get people on your side and how you re going to get people to engage with your emails, I think it is worth taking that time upfront because that s going to save you those one or two or three follow up emails on the back end.
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It s going to save you that blow up where they misinterpret what you re saying.
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And all of a sudden, you re having a 12 thread back and forth.
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Or you have to go to their office and confront them face to face because they misunderstood something that you said and got upset.
3
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So all of these things, I think, are ways in which doing it right and being a little bit more empathic and a bit more careful about your emails up front really is a lot more efficient on the back end.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right, so basically, getting this handled, using that empathy, figuring out efficient ways to communicate that also involve other people not having an adverse reaction to our communication, that set of skills makes us more efficient in the long run because we re not dealing with, well, you know, Jordan told me to do this, but he said it in a side way, so I m gonna back burner this just to show him that I m not gonna be pushed around.
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SPEAKER_00
We have all done this, right?
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We ve all gotten an email from somebody where we re like, well,
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SPEAKER_00
You know, Joss, go shove it, I don t like the way you said that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And meanwhile, you had no intention of being rude, you just were on the subway, or whatever.
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And it went off, you didn t put the extra winky face in there, so it ruined my whole day, and now I m taking it out on you.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right, so it s an interesting sort of setup, and it s a little counterintuitive, and for me, this made all the difference in the world, making sure that I was managing sort of exactly the same thing I would do in a regular conversation, where I wouldn t say something in a certain way
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and then disregard that person s reaction, I would take that into consideration and I would make sure that I understood the way they were feeling about something that they were told or delegated to, but we just don t do that in email, in part because we don t have nonverbal communication, so we have to make it up on the back end and be a little bit more verbose.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, certainly you have to make it up on the back end.
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And I think a lot of the reason it happens with email too is we tend to be multitasking with email.
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So, you know, we re maybe not giving email or quite frankly, that person, that conversation that we re having with that person 100% of our attention.
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SPEAKER_01
I think it happens again when sometimes we choose to use email or sort of don t ever think about the option of not using email as well, which is something that obviously has to be considered, you know, certain conversations,
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certain types of work are not great for email.
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You know, brainstorming is not good for email.
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Contentious conversations are not good for email.
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Debating complex details is not good for email.
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SPEAKER_01
So I think sometimes, you know, you also have to kind of use your emotional intelligence to say, you know what, like I m going to call them at this moment, or I m going to walk over to their desk again to
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SPEAKER_01
understand that email is not going to be the ideal medium in some instances, and certainly is not going to be the most efficient medium in some instances.
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SPEAKER_01
We ve all done that thing where it turns into like a 20 thread email, and you could have had a one minute conversation and everything would have been great.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I think we also have to be a bit less kind of lazy about constantly defaulting to email as well.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, I agree with that as well.
3
SPEAKER_00
One of the exercises that I got from your book, which has given me tons of comfort and relief when I m thinking about this reciprocity, because in a digital world, as you mentioned, reciprocity is a losing game.
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SPEAKER_00
We do tend to default to email.
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We do want to complete it.
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We do have that completion bias.
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I started to keep a stack of printer paper on my desk.
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I don t even know if this fits my printer.
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I ve had it for a million years.
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I got it from the garage.
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But if I visualize emails printed out and stacked up as those boxes of printer paper, I would never expect myself to reply to all of those letters.
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But if I see inbox unread 350, I m just like, well, I got to get into this.
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I got to do this.
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But if I look at one third of that stacked up on my desk, it s just like, well, for God s sake, I m never going to.
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be expected to tackle that in short order if ever.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think you re right, I think it s sort of taking a step back and instead of reflexively diving into email for certain types of discussions or any discussion at all, we have to sort of make it a little bit more tangible and or figure out another way to attack the problem because otherwise we re just exacerbating the inbox issue.
3
SPEAKER_00
You had some really interesting dichotomy here in the book, askers versus guessers.
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SPEAKER_00
Can you take us through this?
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I d never heard this before and I thought it was brilliant.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so this is a concept.
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It s sort of like a cultural theory.
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It s not like a scientifically based concept.
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But for me, it really helped me learn how to become a lot better at saying no in email and just saying no in general.
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And so the idea kind of works like this.
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Essentially,
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it s that everyone is raised in either an ask culture or a guess culture.
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And so if you re raised in an ask culture, you re sort of taught to believe that it s totally fine to ask anyone for anything that you want.
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But the understanding is that they can always decline and that s fine.
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If you re raised in a guess culture, you re taught that you should only ask for something if you re
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extremely sure that they re probably going to say yes.
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And so you learn to become very attentive to sort of the subtle signs and signals that indicate if someone is going to be receptive to your proposal.
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Now what happens is the problem kind of comes when askers
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confront guessers.
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And so what happens is, right, and we all get these sort of inquiries, right?
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Like it s a friend of yours, you know, emails you and they re like, hey, can I stay at your studio apartment for a week?
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Or, you know, will you photograph my wedding for free?
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Or, you know, something like that.
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And you re kind of like, oh my God, how could they expect me to say yes to that?
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Like, it seems very brazen and presumptuous.
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And the reason some of those clashes happen is because if you are a guesser kind of confronting an asker,
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you assume that the asker expects you to say yes, you assume that they think in the way that you think, you think they would only ask if they were really expecting you to say yes.
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But the problem is the askers are just testing the water, right?
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SPEAKER_01
They don t really care if you say no, they re just kind of putting it out there and you know, sort of like, what the hell?
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SPEAKER_01
Okay, let s try it, you know.
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SPEAKER_01
But so when you get those confrontations between askers and guessers, you get this kind of really uncomfortable
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tension where if you kind of feel like you fit into that guess or model, you tend to feel very, you know, sort of put upon or, you know, kind of go into a huff.
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SPEAKER_00
How dare you ask me this?
3
SPEAKER_00
How dare you?
3
SPEAKER_01
Exactly, right?
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Like, how do you think I have time for this?
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Or, you know, why would you assume that?
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And, you know, this unfolds in life, but certainly on email very frequently where you get one of those asks from someone
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SPEAKER_01
You know, you re feeling sort of offended by it.
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And all of a sudden, you go into the spiral of like, why do they think I have time for this?
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SPEAKER_01
And you had some tasks that you were doing that you were focused on.
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SPEAKER_01
All of a sudden, you ve been kind of sucked into this web of like thinking about this and getting offended by this inquiry, rather than just kind of understanding that person was just kind of throwing it out there.
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SPEAKER_01
And you know, it s no big deal if you say no.
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SPEAKER_01
And what I took away from that distinction, because obviously, as I described this, right, I m probably identifying more with this kind of guesser modality.
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SPEAKER_01
What I took away from it is approaching your email, experimenting with the idea of what would happen if you actually assume that people didn t necessarily expect you to say yes, that saying no was equally fine.
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SPEAKER_01
So you kind of level the playing field between the possibility of saying yes and the possibility of saying no.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that allows you to kind of take a more relaxed perspective, consider the opportunity, you know, in a calm manner and then just say yes or say no as it relates to, you know, whatever your other priorities are, but without kind of going into this sort of like huff and feeling very offended about it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think there s a lot of self-awareness involved in that, and of course, being able to make the distinction between askers versus guessers in your head has been useful for me in recent days as well to avoid, like you said, the trademark huff.
3
SPEAKER_00
Also being able to sort of triage my email, which I do every morning, and I wanna discuss that as well, because I know that that was one of the things in the book that you mentioned not to do.
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SPEAKER_00
asking whether or not email serves my goals, deciding what is important, deciding who is important.
3
SPEAKER_00
The book is loaded with strategies and very clear, concise how-tos on those issues as well.
3
SPEAKER_00
I wanted to sort of skip ahead and say, look, a lot of people say don t check your email in the morning.
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SPEAKER_00
You re one of those people.
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SPEAKER_00
I check and triage my email every morning.
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Why should I not do this?
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Or why should people in general not do this?
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SPEAKER_00
And then I ll try to stake my claim, make my point on that issue.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, the reason that I recommend people don t do it is because sort of whole purpose of the book, in my opinion, is not just to get control of your email, but to get control of your email with the goal of spending less time on email so that you can spend more time on work that you find.
3
SPEAKER_01
to be more meaningful.
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SPEAKER_01
So I recommend that people try to start their day, if they can, with about, you know, 45 to 90 minutes of work focused on, you know, whatever that sort of meaningful, deep work is for you, you know, so for me, it s writing for someone else, you know, could be working on your business model, you know, could be painting, whatever that is,
3
SPEAKER_01
for you.
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SPEAKER_01
Or it could be just working on, you know, a really important talk that you want to give at your place of work, something like that, whatever feels like deep creative work for you.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the reason that I recommend that is I think, you know, essentially email is sort of this Pandora s box, right, of, you know, emotions and possible flame wars, and, you know, requests and tasks.
3
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, you don t really know what you re getting into when you open
4
SPEAKER_01
it up.
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SPEAKER_01
So I think that anything that you can do to kind of start the day off, truly focused on the stuff that really matters to you, then no matter what s in your inbox, once you open it up, what fires you have to put out, what other emergency requests you get, you re still going to at least feel like you got a certain amount of good work done during the day.
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SPEAKER_01
That s kind of the first reason.
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But actually, the second reason, I think I don t really
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SPEAKER_01
actually talk too much about in the book is just thinking about kind of the basic circadian rhythms of, you know, the way that our bodies work and when we have our energy peaks and when we have our energy dips and different people have slightly different rhythms, but more or less, most people are at their peak energy around between 9am and 12pm.
4
SPEAKER_01
and are experiencing an energy dip between about 2 and 4 p.m.
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The way that most of us go through our day is sort of the exact opposite of if you wanted to align with those energies, right?
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SPEAKER_01
A lot of us go into work, we open up that email, maybe we spend about 9 a.m.
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to 11 a.m.
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powering through that email.
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Who knows what updates?
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asks and fires you read about in that email, those take you off in some direction.
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SPEAKER_01
And then, you know, often it s maybe 3, 4pm until you re able to turn your attention to the work that actually really matters to you.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so part of the reason that I ask people to endeavor to do that meaningful work just for 45, 60, 90 minutes in the morning is to try to sort of flip that script so you can do that work when it s really going to align with when you re at your kind of peak cognitive energy, essentially.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I check my email in the morning, but I will agree with everything that you said.
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SPEAKER_00
In part, it s very hard for me not to get sucked into things.
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SPEAKER_00
However, I also have a very good triage system where something urgent that s logistical goes to my assistant, something that s just a misdirected fan mail that s supposed to go to another inbox, I just forward it or I leave it, mark it as read.
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SPEAKER_00
Very rarely is there anything
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actual emergencies in there, but I don t allow myself to get sucked into that wormhole.
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SPEAKER_00
However, it took years of practice, and had I known this strategy about not checking it in the morning a long time ago, I probably would have built around it.
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SPEAKER_00
So if you want to change your habits and you can do that, then do so.
4
SPEAKER_00
For me, it s just been sort of like,
4
SPEAKER_00
It s almost like going to the gym and doing squats or something.
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SPEAKER_00
I m so used to doing it in this way that I m strong in my ability to be able to resist that.
4
SPEAKER_00
However, there are definitely better ways.
4
SPEAKER_00
But let me flip this script on you here.
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We re all used to this email martyrdom type stuff.
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SPEAKER_00
What about Slack?
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SPEAKER_00
What about our chats that we have, our Jabber account that we have, our internal IM thing from our employer?
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SPEAKER_00
What about these internal conversations?
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SPEAKER_00
Do you keep that off until the afternoon as well?
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, slack is a whole can of worms, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
That could be your next book, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t think I want to take on how to manage Slack.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t know if it s possible to manage Slack.
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SPEAKER_01
When I was looking at some of the research around email and obviously all the stuff we re talking about, about addiction and random rewards and all of these things pertain, you know, as much to Slack and other, you know, forms of social media as they do to email.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I certainly think if you can devote a certain amount of time to working on a key project of, you know, deep focus in the morning without turning on Slack, certainly do that.
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SPEAKER_01
One of the other things that I found when I was doing some of the research for the book and around what helps people with email was looking at a study that was essentially found that the more clear your primary work screen was, the more clear your mind was, the more clear your focus is.
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SPEAKER_01
Obviously,
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Part of that means for email and for Slack, not having those things on your primary work screen.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I think, again, if you can find ways... A lot of people have Slack or email on a second monitor, and I think that s okay.
4
SPEAKER_01
But if you can also maybe just limit those things, keep them off your primary screen, and maybe not even have them on a second monitor, but only check email or only check Slack on your phone or only do those things on an iPad.
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SPEAKER_01
So you re literally keeping it in a
4
SPEAKER_01
a separate physical and cognitive workspace so that when you do have to shift modes and look at that Slack window or look at your email, when you shift back to that primary work screen, whatever your task is that you want to be top of mind, it is there and is very clear and still is very focused.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think that s a good practical way of thinking about working with some of these tools that
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SPEAKER_01
Quite frankly, if you have a job and you have to use Slack at your job, you have to use it.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can t just decline.
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SPEAKER_01
So I think thinking about how we can work smarter with those things is worthwhile, certainly.
4
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of working smarter, the book is loaded with practicals and I wanna blow through a few of these towards the tail end of the show here.
4
SPEAKER_00
Batching your email versus just nibbling.
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I know a lot of people, Jen, my girlfriend, wife, assistant, she loves to just look at her phone and check email.
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SPEAKER_00
It drives both of us insane, me sort of transitively through her, but I stop doing this.
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SPEAKER_00
I batch my email.
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SPEAKER_00
I will look at it in the morning, I will look at it in the evening, and I will look at it if I m gonna handle a bunch of it.
4
SPEAKER_00
in a certain three to four hour block, and I don t wanna touch it after that, because otherwise I can t focus on reading for the show, recording the show.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, imagine if I was checking my friggin  email right now.
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SPEAKER_00
It would be a disaster, but I used to do stuff like that.
4
SPEAKER_00
I used to be in my inbox while having a chat, and man, those shows sucked.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you can just imagine.
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SPEAKER_00
We ve gotta batch that stuff.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s just one of those non-negotiable things, I think.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, if I had any one tip for people about dealing with their email, it would be shifting from processing it reactively, which basically means monitoring it constantly through notifications and so forth, to batching, which means you pick two or three or even four specific times a day, focus 110% on your email, and then ignore it the rest of the time.
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And that s not just my opinion, it s backed by research that s shown that people who approach their email in a batched manner tend to be more productive, less stressed, and happier.
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And so I think that s a huge shift.
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SPEAKER_01
But some people, you know, would say, Oh, I can t do that.
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SPEAKER_01
You know, I have to be away, my boss is gonna freak out if I don t, you know, respond to his or her emails within 15 minutes.
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SPEAKER_01
I think still, even if you know, you can t afford to say check your email only three times a day,
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SPEAKER_01
You could take a sort of Pomodoro technique approach to batch processing.
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SPEAKER_01
So you re going to say, okay, I m going to sprint for 25 minutes of focus, and then I can spend 5 or 10 minutes on my email.
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SPEAKER_01
And then I ll do another 25-minute sprint for focus.
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The important thing is
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The most important aspect of batching is that you re not multitasking.
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You know, you re focused 100% on your email, and then you re focused 100% on something else.
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Some of the research that I cover in the book around multitasking, what it looks like when people are constantly multitasking with email, one of the sort of most horrifying stats was that it had the equivalent of lowering your IQ about 10 points.
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So essentially the equivalent of like smoking pot at work the entire day or something like that.
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With email, multitasking literally makes you sort of dumber, slower, and more stressed out at work.
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And that s why shifting to that batched approach is so important.
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Yeah, I couldn t agree more.
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I mean, the idea that you would monitor your inbox all day, for me, I used to do that.
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I mean, most people used to do that.
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I still find myself slipping back into that habit here and there.
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I ve had to do a lot of things like deleting email off of my phone or moving the app to six folders nested deep somewhere in the back screen because I have to
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only be able to send email from my phone when it s urgent or when I have a minute, not just like, well, I m waiting in this line for coffee, what s in my inbox, right?
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That stuff becomes destructive and damaging.
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The other tip that I loved was, and that I ve implemented in full here, advancing or closing conversations ASAP.
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So what we see a lot is people saying, hey, do you wanna do lunch?
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Sure, what works for you?
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I don t know, how about Friday?
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Well, okay, Friday doesn t work for me.
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Well, then how about next week?
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Well, okay, what day?
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Well, maybe on, and then you just, the 87 emails later, you re getting a burger next Thursday, and it s ridiculous.
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What took me a while was starting to think like a chess player, essentially, and I know jack about chess, so forgive the analogy if it s clumsy here, but basically,
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Hey, Jordan, you wanna have lunch?
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Sure, how about next Friday at 1 p.m.?
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Here s a list of three different places.
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If you can t do 1 p.m., how about 3 p.m.
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on another day, and here s another day if that doesn t work, and here s another location, and if you re gonna be in another part of town, let me know, and then I delegate all that to Jen, who handles it for me, and if you don t have an assistant, that s fine, but you should at least do as much thinking and anticipating of what those responses will be, and throw them all into one message.
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That way, they can pick an option.
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Otherwise, you got a 30-thread lunch plan, and it s just insane.
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Yeah, and I think that gets back to this idea of busy people, when they re dealing with email, you want to say yes or you want to say no and you want to move on.
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You don t want to have a long debate.
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You don t want to have a long discussion.
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So I recommend, as you said, always trying to close the conversation and never pass the buck.
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So every time you re asking someone to make a decision, whether it s to have a lunch meeting
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or take the next move on a project, try to give them all of the information that they need to make the decision, say yes, say no, get back to you immediately and just close the thread.
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And that means, you know, even something as simple as, you know, every time you propose a question to your boss or anyone else also proposing a solution so that it s very simple for someone to read the message, you know, and just kind of say yes, say no, or give a quick response.
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And I think we
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really have to save ourselves time and we want to save other people s time and just keep things as efficient as possible.
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We have to always be thinking about how we can close the conversation, thinking about how we can always make it easy to say yes.
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Yeah, there s so many practicals in the book.
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I wish we had time to go through all of the rest here.
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I m just gonna buzz through a few of these and we can say a few words on these.
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I love the idea of asking whether or not an email aligns with your core goals.
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This was something I struggled with for a long time.
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Every email was a new opportunity to grow out of charm.
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Hey, do you want to speak at this thing?
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Do you want to write a blog post?
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Do you want to come on my show?
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Do you want to do this other thing?
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Do you want to, can you do this speech for my class?
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I mean, it was just a million different things.
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And so I decided to only focus on my core goals a few years ago.
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So when I decided I wanted to get really good at speaking for 18 months, I just said yes to pretty much every speaking gig.
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I don t care if it was at the YMCA or at Apple, I would say yes.
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right and then when it was we were testing blog posts I reached out to a bunch of people they reached out to me and I said yes now though if someone says hey will you come and speak at the small business chamber of commerce there s no pay but we ll give you a ham sandwich in exchange for your four hour trek to the city I have to say no to that because it doesn t align with any of my goals if somebody wants to have me
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on their particular program, there s a certain set of criteria which I don t make public because it s really easy to fabricate that criteria, I usually have to say no.
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And that has been a complete game changer because otherwise you get this crazy FOMO about, oh I shouldn t have said no to that, what if it s a big deal, I always want to grow my business so maybe I should have gone to that speaking thing.
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And that s how you end up with 16 hour work days.
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Yeah, I think it s incredibly important.
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One thing I talk a lot about in the book is to be really incredibly clear about what your meaningful work goals are.
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And then you have the tools that you need to align your emails with that.
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I think a lot of us spend a lot of time thinking, Oh, I wish I d spent less time on email.
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You know, I d much rather be doing something else.
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But we often don t take the time out to get really pretty laser focused on what we would rather be doing.
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do we want to achieve?
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Is this the year of public speaking?
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Is this the year of advancing your blog writing abilities?
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Making those decisions and deciding to only say yes or to only say no to the things that really align with that.
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We get mixed messages quite frequently about saying no and saying yes.
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I was thinking about this recently.
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We re either told to constantly say yes to every opportunity or we re told we should be saying no to every opportunity.
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I think it really has to do more with just where you are in your career, where you are with your success.
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You know, when you re young, saying yes to most opportunities is probably a good idea.
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But as you get more success, as you get more clear on where you want to be going, then you have to start saying no more.
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So I think it s really a function of where you are in your career as well.
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Absolutely, and this book is loaded with practicals.
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Again, asking for clarity, making sure that the email that you send actually makes sense and is not just some sort of nebulous thing that you dangle out there.
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I delete those now because I just don t have time to say, I m not sure what you re asking me here.
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I got 300 other people asking me stuff, it gets deleted.
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So if you re not sure if you re being clear and you re not getting a good response, chances are you might need to sharpen up those emails and you give advice on how to do that.
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commanding attention, certain red flags like, hey, I just want to pick your brain, those kind of red flag phrases are listed elsewhere in the book, not asking questions, proposing solutions to make sure that people can just say yes or no, making your emails really easy to respond to, making your emails scannable, which is a concept I hadn t thought about, but that turns out I use all the time.
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Is this bulleted or is it a wall of text?
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Is there a subject line that gets my attention?
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Do they preview this on their mobile phone?
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I look at emails sometimes on my phone, and if I see Atlas Shrugged on my screen, that s just gonna get read later or never.
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You gotta make sure, preview the email on your mobile.
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If it doesn t fit on one screen, it s too damn long.
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Acknowledging their workload.
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I wanna wrap with this because I thought this was really interesting, little psychological trigger here.
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Why is it so important to acknowledge people s workload when you email them?
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Well, I think as touched on earlier, we live in this world where everyone is busy and everyone s attention is overtaxed, right?
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And so I think to just acknowledge that you understand that person is, you know, a busy, overloaded, overtaxed individual, you know, it offers some, I guess, you know, essentially like empathy is sort of perspective taking and understanding communicates your understanding that your email
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sits somewhere on a continuum of many, many different things that they have to do.
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And I think that makes them a bit more receptive to you and a bit more likely to respond to your email because they understand that you have some humility, but also kind of understand what they re working with.
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You know, you re not just some kind of person who s kind of like, hey, like pushing your way into their inbox, like pay attention to me, you know, you understand that they do have other things going on in their life.
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Right, I ll never forget I got a one-star review in iTunes from somebody who reviewed the show with one star because they asked for relationship advice and a whole 48 hours later I had not written him back and that was just unacceptable and it s that kind of stuff whenever anybody who s busy sees any kind of reaction like that or sort of sense of entitlement for your time
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I know from speaking with other people, I talked about this with Ryan Holiday as well, who you probably know, that is just an instant blacklist.
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I just will never look at anyone s email from that again because there s zero ROI on that.
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And again, lots of practicals in the book, including scripts and cheat sheets for things like crafting a signature.
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composing an out-of-office message, which is, there s ways to do it, ways to not do it, curbing unproductive threads and brainstorming, getting off annoying email threads, following up with people after meetings, reaching out to influencers, writing proper thank you emails, lots of stuff on there that was really, really useful, even for somebody who s been using email since the 90s like me, so I highly recommend it.
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Jocelyn, thank you for coming on.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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This book was packed with practicals.
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I mean, we barely got through 20%, so if this stuff is ringing a bell for you, definitely check out the book Unsubscribe.
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That ll be linked in the show notes as well.
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Great big thank you to Jocelyn.
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Again, the book is called Unsubscribe, and that is one of the many myriad tactics you can use to, of course, improve your inbox and your email workflow and your productivity and your sanity.
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for that matter, and if you enjoyed this, don t forget to thank Jocelyn on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well.
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I m also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm, and remember, if you re looking for those show notes, they re on the website, or if you re listening on your phone, you can tap the screen, and they should pop up, unless you re using some super janky podcast player, but they should show up right there on your phone screen.
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Boot camps are live program details at theartofcharm.com.
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This is our live program.
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The AOC team is your coach during the week that you re here.
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Remember, we re sold out a few months in advance, so if you re thinking about it a little bit, get in touch with us ASAP to get some info from us so you can plan ahead.
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And don t forget about the Art of Charm Challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge.
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Or if you re here in the States, you can text the word charmed.
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to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to the number 33444.
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The challenge is about improving your networking and connection skills, inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
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We ll also email you our Fundamentals Toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show.
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I also do regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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It s all designed to make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed in the U.S.
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to 33444.
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For the full show notes for this and all previous episodes, head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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Of course, this episode of AOC was produced by Jason DeFilippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogarty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.