Become Hard to Reach
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📖 LESSON SUMMARY
Most of us have more emails than we know what to do with. This steady flow of emails eats away at our mental bandwidth and attention—both of which could be put to better use if redirected toward deep work.
Having said that, there are several strategies you can put in place to deal with email and prevent it from crushing your focus. Here they are—along with recommended actionable insights for each strategy:
1. Make people work harder to get in touch with you.
- Require people to work for your email address. Avoid listing it publicly.
- Have people filter themselves by having different emails or separate contact forms for different questions.
2. Go the extra mile with your emails.
- Reduce the back-and-forth of emails with a more systematic approach.
- For example, when I receive a request for a meeting, I don’t just say “Sure!” I say, “Sure! I can do Monday from 1pm-3pm or Thursday from 12pm-2pm. If neither of those times work for you, give me a call at 555-555-5555 and we’ll figure out a time that works for both of us.”
- Predict what an exchange might look like and go the extra mile in your emails to close the loop on a conversation more quickly.
3. Don’t respond.
- Don’t respond to emails with any of the following qualities:
- It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response.
- It’s not a question or proposal that interests you.
- Nothing really good would happen if you did respond, and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.
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