☕️ saturday mornings #8
☕️ saturday mornings #8
dancing slow, removing negatives & winning at email
Good morning all,
Happy Saturday.
Now that we’re into July, the summer and year are halfway over. I’m trying to remind myself to savor the warm weather and sunny days while they last.
For those of you that may be new, this newsletter covers cool things I’m exploring, actionable productivity tips, practical life advice, and high-quality insights from across the web, as well as a curated assortment of my favourite quotes, books, and articles that I think you’ll enjoy.
The aim then is to let readers (that’s you) save time, explore new ideas and then have the option to test some of them in your own life.
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Thanks for taking time out of your morning to spend with me. Let’s dive in.
Poem that stuck with me:
Slow Dance, David L. Weatherford
Slow Dance has been one of my favourite poems from this past year. It’s a quick and fairly easy read with evoking imagery. It’s stuck in my head as it contains a great message about appreciating the present moment and the time we have.
It ties into an idea I’ve been thinking a lot about, which is slowing down, enjoying the present moment and trying to resist always rushing to the next thing. And, as the Navy Seals say, “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”.
Tim Ferriss actually includes this entire poem in The Four Hour Workweek, mentioning it helped his friend overcome a habitual pattern of delaying happiness and pushing back leaving a job he despised. In this sense, it highlights the dangers of excessive “delayed gratification”.
If you feel stuck in the same train of thought it may be a helpful read for you.
Check out the written or audio version.
Personal finance tip I’m testing:
Purchase items that remove negatives
For starters, this is just an idea I’m experimenting with and have found helpful. It’s certainly isn’t a rule everyone needs to follow and leads to some financial Eutopia.
However, as someone that frequently sees things that I get excited about and want to purchase, I’ve worked to refine my decision-making process or “internal dialogue” when I’m considering buying a new item.
First, I try to follow one of the best rules to prevent impulse purchases and typically wait for around a week to see if the desire goes away a bit. But, if I still want the item, one of the useful questions in my buying decision process has become asking myself:
“Is this removing a negative in my life?”
Most of us buy items thinking that it will make us happy (at least, I don’t think people want to buy things that make them unhappy). But, as the question leads to, it’s fairly well studied that happiness is not really affected by adding positives to your life. This is especially true in a first world country like Canada, where most of us have all our needs met.
As such, gaining happiness from purchasing items is mostly accomplished by removing things that are strong negatives to your everyday life. However in contrast, many of us think the opposite and purchase items because we’re convinced they’ll make us cooler, fitter, smarter, more attractive, etc. when in reality that feeling wears off once we purchase that item.
A classic example is that purchasing a new iPhone is unlikely to have any material effect on your happiness, unless your previous phone was didn’t work properly (and was a clear negative in your life).
I used this question to avoid buying a watch. I had two watches that worked perfectly fine and telling the time (or looking stylish) wasn’t a pain point in my life.
To back test this for yourself, I’d encourage you to think back to some purchases that made you happy and those that didn’t add any happiness to your life, and question whether these purchases removed negatives or added positives.
This is not to say you should never purchase items that add positives. The rule has a lot of holes. For example, a trip to Europe with your best friends doesn’t necessarily remove a negative but could be one of the best experiences of your life. If you have a passion for golf or love collecting shoes, that’s something you should spend lavishly on without guilt.
This rule is simply intended to help one second guess whether an item will make them as happy over the long-term as they might have initially thought, and subsequently whether they really need it.
So next time you’re ready to purchase something, I’d encourage you to ask yourself if that item will remove a negative or you’re buying it to add a positive. It may be a helpful change of perspective.
Summer playlist I hope you love:
Tool I’m using to save time:
Changing how I interact with email
For many people, hyperactively checking email as you work and having a phone or computer ding throughout the day can be a massive drain on both time and attention.
A 2018 survey by Adobe of >1,000 office workers found they spent ~3.1 hours a day on work email, plus ~2.5 hours per weekday on personal email. That's an average of 5.6 hours of time each day just on email (or 56 days over the course of a year).
If you’re convinced your time is miles lower, I’d suggest tracking your email time for 1-2 days with a free online tool, such as Clockify.
Over the past few months, I’ve made three major changes with how I use email that have saved mental energy and freed up a ton of time to spend it doing things I love: (i) turning off notifications for email, (ii) deleting the email app off my phone, (iii) batching reading emails.
First, as someone that feels the urge to check any notification, as scary as it initially was, turning off email notifications was a breath of fresh air as my days no longer felt hijacked by continuous emails. Realistically, most people don’t need a response immediately. They can wait - most things aren’t that urgent. As the saying goes: “Don’t let others lack of preparation constitute for your emergency”. On the chance it really is urgent, they’ll likely call or text you.
I realized if I can choose, I don’t want to live my life feeling like I’m on other people’s beck and call. If you set a pattern of responding right away, people will expect it. But, if you set boundaries and make those clear to others, you won’t have the expectation of responding immediately, you’ll reduce stress and the feeling of guilt from answering late, and others will likely respect you more because of it.
This tip has also improved my productivity, due to something called attention residue. Researchers have found that when you switch between tasks, part of your attention stays on the previous task for 15-20 minutes. As such, checking email whenever I heard a ping actually took up ~20 minutes and really hurt my ability to do any kind of deep or thoughtful work.
Second, by deleting the email app and making it so that I had to log onto my computer to check email (much less convenient), I avoided reading emails first thing in the morning and in the evening. This provided some quiet time to read, exercise or engage with friends and family.
It also cut down the number of emails I send. On average, you can expect to receive ~1.6 emails back for every email you fire off. So, by being selective about when I really need to respond and when I don’t, it stopped the self-reinforcing email cycle and drastically reduced the total number of emails I received.
You may be thinking, “this is all well and good wise guy, but when am I supposed to check email?”. To answer this, I’ve found batching email to save a ton of time and boost focus. Batching email simply means designating 2-3 times throughout the day to check your email (for me it’s 9am and 4pm) and putting them in your calendar. This isn’t to say you’re forbidden to check email outside of those times. However, when you are doing something difficult and feel the nagging urge to flip over to email to give yourself a break, it provides a reminder that you have a set time to check email later and you’ll get to it. Worries aside. Additionally, because it lets you look at all the emails that have accumulated at once, it’s much quicker to delete a bunch you don’t need to read (that you might read if checked one by one), which also saves time.
Another helpful tip to avoid 20 emails back and forth when you’re trying to set up a meeting with several people and coordinate schedules is to create a free Doodle poll (in 30 seconds) that lets everyone select options for their availability.
There are also some more advanced tips such as using an email auto-responder, selecting times you want to receive email or using email analystics software that tracks a ton of data including your peak email volume time to allow you to select the optimal time to batch emails.
I know pulling back from email can be uncomfortable at first (it was for me) and involves reversing a lot of engrained habits.
As a small test, I’d encourage you to experiment with just one of these three ideas to see if it helps. I guarentee it’ll feel good once you begin to pull away a bit.
Time is our most valuable commodity, and I’d much rather not spend my time on email.
That’s all from me for today everyone. Hopefully you enjoyed this morning’s topics, and they provided some food for thought and interesting ideas to explore.
I’m experimenting with a shorter version of the newsletter, while still going into depth about topics. As such I’d love to hear from you about how you like the shorter format by doing a quick poll.
Thanks for reading. Have a wonderful weekend, all and stay beautiful.
Much love to you and yours,
Thomas