What stands between us and meaningful work? Email!

It is killing our productivity and distracting us from the creative work we crave, yet we spend over a quarter of our work week on it. What is behind our addiction and what can we do about it?

Jocelyn Glei, author of the book, Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done, explains the science behind our addiction and offers strategies for prioritizing meaningful work. Jocelyn is the founding editor of 99U and editor of three productivity books, including the bestseller, Manage Your Day-to-Day.

In this interview, we talk about:  

The challenge of living in an age of distraction

Why it is easier to be busy than to focus on meaningful work

How, on average, we check email 11 times an hour and process 122 emails daily

How we spend over a quarter of work time on email

How the random rewards of email keep us addicted

How completion bias makes us strive for inbox zero

How designs like progress bars and percentages speak to our completion bias

How our negativity bias influences every email that we read

How empathy, emoticons, and punctuation can compensate for negativity bias

The fact that email goes awry because of a missing social feedback loop

How empathy goes a long way in overcoming email negativity bias

Email is great for asking but awful for declining

The difference between an email asker and an email guesser

What it means to do creative, meaningful work

Steps we can take to ensure meaningful work rules the day

The role momentum plays in doing meaningful work

Why we need to synchronize calendars with to-do lists

How scarcity of time and resources impacts capacity, mindset, and attitude

Tech setups to help us avoid frequent email checks

How the best way to fail at email is to rely on program defaults

Why the more we check our email, the less happy we are

How segmenting emails senders helps us decide which emails to ready by when

The fact that not all email messages are created equal

How quickly we respond to emails sets expectations

How to ensure your emails stand out

How productivity can be about what we choose not to do

Why we need to spend more time deciding than doing

Why it is about leaving a legacy

Episode Links

@jkglei

http://jkglei.com/

B. F. Skinner

Daniel Goleman and emotional intelligence

Mark McGuinness

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

Gloria Mark

Manage Your Day to Day

Clayton Christensen

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!