This is optimal living daily episode 900, email 0, imagining your life without email by Cal Newport of Cal Newport dot com, and I'm a very on personal narrator, Justin Molick, reading to you from some amazing blogs and books to help you optimize your life. It is episode 900. Yesterday, I thought of an idea to play my bloopers at the end. This may or may not be entertaining for you, who knows, but might as well do something a little different for this milestone, right?
Hopefully you didn't think that I do this all in one perfect read if you thought that. Maybe don't listen to the bloopers and pretend I'm just that good. Anyway, you can hear the bloopers if you stick around to the end. For now, it's here from Cal Newport on email as we optimize your life.
Email 0, imagining your life without email by Cal Newport of Cal Newport dot com. Lightmen lives lightly. At first glance, Alan Lightman is the poster boy for a fast-paced turbocharged lifestyle. He's currently an adjunct professor of humanities, creative writing, and physics at MIT, where among other feats, he introduced the Institute's first undergraduate writing requirement and founded a science writing graduate program.
Professor Lightman is perhaps best known for his writing, including the best-selling book Einstein's Dreams. His essays on science and life have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and basically every other impressive literary publication on the planet. When you read Professor Lightman's biography, it's hard not to imagine the prototypical gung-ho celebrity intellectual glued to his blackberry, making moves, and ping-pongy messages with movers and shakers well into the night. One can only guess how many messages clog his inbox, 10,000?
That's chump-change for the average busy professor. A better guess might be closer to 50,000. But then you look a little closer at his official website and notice a curious note, quote, I do not use email, but you can reach me at my MIT office, address, telephone, unquote. If anyone can make an argument that he had to have email, it would be on Lightman.
Think about it. You can communicate constantly with students and his colleagues. He also has to zip around manuscripts and magazine articles. And what about keeping in touch with all of his high-power friends and fans?
Imagine all the cool opportunities that he's missing by shutting off the electronic spigot. But here's the thing. He's busier than you and me, yet he's doing just fine without email. It doesn't stop him from accomplishing his professional goals or living an interesting life.
With his in mind, I implore you to shut the door, pull the blinds, and ask yourself softly the following question. What would happen if you lived life without email? A powerful thought experiment. I've been obsessed recently by this insidious little thought experiment.
Over time, I've come to believe that for a significant cross-section of society, life without email would not only be possible, but would also reduce stress and not really cause any serious impact on their daily life or professional productivity. First, however, let's note who this probably doesn't apply to. People with bosses. As has been often discussed, email is asymmetrical.
It's easier to send emails than to receive them. Bosses want their lives to be easier at your expense. There you go. You have to answer email.
But what about the entrepreneurs or academics or writers or freelance consultants among you? Though your knee-jerk reaction might be, that's impossible. My clients or colleagues or students or editors would never abide an email free me. On closer examination, your situation just might be more flexible than you first believed.
Problems and solutions. Let's extend the thought experiment by facing our worst fears. What would become a problem if you were to lose email? How might we fix it?
Number one, lose touch with friends. This one's easy. Email is a poor way to keep up with close friends. Many people, myself included, tend to have a call rotation that keeps us up to date with everyone worth pinging.
Number two, my clients demand access. Yes, but this doesn't have to mean email access. Back in the good old days when I ran my own.com, we made good use of a regular phone checking schedule and a sophisticated extra net that gave our clients the ability to check in on daily progress. At the time, this was crucial because I was attending high school and was a varsity athlete with daily practice, which meant that I was literally away from email from 7 a.m.
to 5 p.m. most weekdays. They adapted. Number three, email is the best way to send files.
Register a files at yourname.com email address. Give this to people that need to send you a file. You can check it when you know a specific file is being sent. Of course, never actually respond to any emails sent to this address.
Number four, too many people won't go through the hassle of calling me, but they would have sent an email while be missing out on this communication. Good, this filter's communication down to the truly important. Number five, my business requires me to handle a constant stream of requests and queries from customers or students. Build a custom website form that allows your customers or students to specify the type of request, a description of the request, and a list of actions if any they require from you.
If you want an example of such a form in action, check out the contact pages deployed by some of the more popular productivity blocks, for example, 43 folders. If they insist that email is the best way to contact them, build it into your system, the ability to do one way email. That is, to send a message from the control panel of your request submission system to an email address and have the reply to address be set to something fake. You can automatically append a standard signature of the form, quote, please not reply to this email.
If you require further information, you can end quote. If you need to process a huge quantity of such requests, consider a professional grade ticket system of the type used by system administrators. Number six, I'll be left out of discussions driven by messages that are CC to multiple people. Very good, these are time wasters.
If someone wants to put something on your plate, they have to take the time to get in touch with you by phone or in person and explain clearly what is needed. If they need to check in on an ongoing project, the same holds, phone or in person. The result, less ambiguous, more focus. Number seven, in general, I'm gonna miss out on some communication.
That's fine, we don't need to communicate as much as we do now. Number eight, the editors or agents or clients I need to contact are only available on email. Not true, people, relators and answer the phone, you just don't wanna make the effort. And number nine, regardless of what you say, I can think hard and come up with some work or clients or opportunity that would be impossible without email.
I'm sure such things exist, don't do those things. The benefits, the benefits that arise in the start experiment are twofold. Number one, less. And number two, more focus.
You still accomplish the important stuff, but also free yourself from all the small or annoying or unnecessary or worst of all, ambiguous requests that eat up so much of our day. Perhaps even more profound. Imagine the focus you could achieve if there was no inbox to check. Instead, you just worked until you finished what you needed to, then shut down the computer and got down to the business of living life.
The implication. I don't know what to make of this thought experiment. Should we really turn back the clock on such a powerful innovation? Would we really want to?
I don't know. But Professor Leimen's example does make one thing clear, regardless of how you personally feel, the email zero lifestyle is possible. If you live in your inbox, it's a choice you're making, a choice you could reverse. For the students among you, this is something to keep in mind as you plan your ideal life after college.
You've just listened to the post titled Email Zero, Imagine Your Life Without Email by Cal Newport of Cal Newport dot com. So I don't think I'll ever eliminate email completely. I do find value in different emails. Some I agree could be done using some other system or method of communication, but I also do like a lot of the emails I receive.
If it's adding value to your life or actually saving you time compared to a different form of communication, then it's definitely worth it. But I do like the points you brought up, something to think about. And that's 900 episodes, holy moly. I didn't have anything special planned for today originally, but I did think of a random idea of playing my bloopers at the end of this episode as a weird celebration for episode 900.
So why not? I have that coming right up in like 20 seconds, but I need to do something a little more special for episode 1000, no clue what that'll be, but it'll be here in no time. So I better start thinking. So leave it there for today, enjoy my bloopers, or skip them if they're irritating, or if they ruin how you thought I made these episodes.
I hope you're a great week, and I'll see you in tomorrow's show, where you're off to my life. Oh, wait, my first glance, Alan Light, Alan Allen, at first glance, at first glance, at first glance, glance Alan, at first glance, Alan Lightman. Why's that so hard to say? At first glance, now I'm saying glance, weird.
He's currently an adjunct professor of humanities, creative writing, and physics at MIT, where among other feats, he introduced the Institute's first undergraduate writing requirement, Jesus, as long sentence. When you read Professor Lightman's biography, it's hard not to imagine the prototypical, prototypical, prototypical, yes, that's the word. When you read Professor Lightman's biography, it's hard not to imagine the prototypical, gung-ho, celebrity intellectual, glued to his blackberry, making moves, and ping-pong-y messages with movers and shakers well into the night. I did not understand that sentence.
A better guess might be closer to 50,000. But here's the thing, he's busier than you and me, yet he's doing just fine without email. It hasn't stopped him from accomplishing his professional, professional. Over time, I've come to believe that for a significant cross-section of society, life without email would not only be possible, but would also reduce stress and not really cause any serious impact on their daily life as a long sentence.
Though your knee-jerk reaction might be, that's impossible, my clients or colleagues or students or editors would never be able to, nope. Though your knee-jerk reaction might be, that's impossible, my clients, colleagues or students or editors would never abide an email-free me. That is weird sentence. This one's easy, email is poor way, email is a poor way.
Number two, my clients demand access. Yes, bus, bus. Yes, but this doesn't have to mean that's a bad reading. Number three, email is the best way to send files.
Register a files at yourname.com email address. Oh, a files at yourname.com email address. If you want an example of such a form and action, check out the contact pages deployed by some of the more popular productivity blogs. That is to send a message from the control panel of your request-immissioned system.
Shh, shh, shh, shh, shh. If you need to process a huge quantity of such requests, consider a professional-grade ticket system of the type used by system administrators, system administrators, administrators. Number nine, regardless of what you say, I can think, nope. But Professor Lightman's example does make one thing clear.
Regardless of how you personally feel, the email zero lifestyle, your email zero lifestyle. But Professor Lightman's example does, but Professor Lightman's example does make one thing clear. Regardless, but Professor Lightman's example does make one thing clear, regardless of how you professionally feel. That's not right.
There's also coconut, berry, key lime, and more, including, but I also do like a lot of emails, I have a person, and a person, and a person, and a narrator, Justin Malik, reading to you from, reading to you from a firm? Hahaha.