Welcome to the Jill on Money Show. It's Sunday, August 21st, and we are airing the second part of an interview with Cal Newport. This was recorded earlier, so don't go too crazy if you think that maybe we're not talking about what's happening right this moment, but Cal is the author of a world without

email, reimagining work in an age of communication overload. Mark and I have found so much of

Cal's advice really helpful for us and just managing our own email, managing our own digital

lives, and he has been a great friend to the podcast. So here is the second

part of our interview with Cal Newport. Let's get into some of the ways that we can help people

who still exist in these organizations that they feel trapped by that email. So what can we do on the individual level to make our lives

a little bit better if we're in the confine of that prison? By the way, the bigger point here is that

this is actually not an antagonistic relationship sort of between management employees. The C-suite also

is starting to recognize that this is leaving a huge

amount of productivity on their table. So I think hope is coming. But in the near future, what you can

actually do, and here's what I've observed, you can start to do this process optimization

asymmetrically. That is, just focusing on what you control as an individual without announcing what you're doing,

without asking for permission, without annoying people with auto responders, you can just start

optimizing what you can in these processes and see a massive improvement in the poll of your inbox

on your mind.

So like this might mean, for example, here's like a report.

I collaborate with some people to produce every week. Like right now we kind of just rock and roll an email. You might send them a message and say, okay, yeah, here's what we're going to do. Here's I'm thinking, like I will have a draft of this report in our Dropbox by noon on Monday. Put any comments, just label them right there on the PDF, right? I'll pick it up Tuesday morning to take a look at it. I have this office hours Tuesday afternoon where I'm just always on Zoom and available by phone. So if there's like a problem, we really have to discuss, just grab me then and we can really get into it. And then my plan will be COB Tuesday. I'm going to place it in the folder where the production team grabs it, right? you've really created a process here that is avoided back and forth emails.

And remember, to place it in the folder where the production team grabs it, right? You've really created a process here that is avoided back and forth emails.

And remember, every back and forth email you have to send is going to generate a dozen checks.

That's why the change you made was so consequential because your producer might say,

yeah, it's simple.

Why not just send you by email?

...