Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► Alright, you ready to do this thing? I am. Alright, let's get started.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Oh, shoot. Okay, now we really get started.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Perfect start. Destroying everything.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Hello Myke. Hey Gray, how you feeling?

00:00:11 ◼   ► I am jet-lagged. I am tired.

00:00:14 ◼   ► So I apologize to the listeners if I'm a little bit off my game today.

00:00:17 ◼   ► But I have recently flown from London to the United States to visit some family.

00:00:23 ◼   ► So I'm currently recording from a remote location in North Carolina

00:00:29 ◼   ► using some duplicate equipment that I had stashed here.

00:00:32 ◼   ► But yes, I have just recently changed many time zones

00:00:36 ◼   ► and am feeling a bit light-headed and off

00:00:39 ◼   ► in the way that I always do whenever I change time zones.

00:00:42 ◼   ► So yes, that's why I feel the need to apologize to listeners straight out of the gate.

00:00:46 ◼   ► This morning I booked some flights for a conference that I'm going to in October.

00:00:53 ◼   ► And I'm going to be there for four days.

00:00:55 ◼   ► And I looked at the kind of the times that I'm flying in the times that I'm coming home and realizing how horrible it's gonna be

00:01:00 ◼   ► Where is this conference?

00:01:03 ◼   ► Indianapolis

00:01:05 ◼   ► Indianapolis, okay, so the flight going there isn't too bad. I just have to stay awake until the evening

00:01:11 ◼   ► I leave at like 10 a.m

00:01:12 ◼   ► Here and it's a 12-hour flight and then I have to maybe do like another five or six hours a week

00:01:17 ◼   ► So I can live with that but the flight coming home like I arrived back in England at 6 a.m

00:01:22 ◼   ► And it's like, well I now know that I will be useless for four days afterwards.

00:01:26 ◼   ► Yes, I know those arriving early in London flights

00:01:30 ◼   ► and you just have to write off the next week.

00:01:34 ◼   ► I'm going to be a crazy zombie when I come back. Indianapolis I think is in one of those

00:01:38 ◼   ► funny middle time zones. I think it's not on the east coast.

00:01:42 ◼   ► It's central or mountain time. Yeah, one of those. We'll go with that.

00:01:46 ◼   ► Those two time zones everyone just forgets about. Everyone who lives on the coast that is.

00:01:50 ◼   ► But what makes this worse though,

00:01:52 ◼   ► well maybe better depending on how you look at it,

00:01:54 ◼   ► I'm also gonna be in Portland in September.

00:01:57 ◼   ► So like I'm thinking about that, I'm like right.

00:01:58 ◼   ► - Oh right, okay.

00:01:59 ◼   ► - Yeah like late September Portland,

00:02:01 ◼   ► I'm back for like maybe three weeks

00:02:03 ◼   ► and then going back out to the States again.

00:02:05 ◼   ► Like I may as well just shut down the business

00:02:08 ◼   ► in August and just write it all off.

00:02:10 ◼   ► - Yes, just relay will go off the air for two months,

00:02:15 ◼   ► September and October.

00:02:17 ◼   ► - I won't know where I am.

00:02:18 ◼   ► Jet lag is so much worse now that I'm self-employed because I can give into it.

00:02:25 ◼   ► When I used to work a job, right, I would, it was like, well, okay, I know you've only

00:02:30 ◼   ► slept for one hour, but it's 8am now, so you have to get up and go to work.

00:02:35 ◼   ► But now it's like, oh, I'll just sleep until 4pm, like whatever.

00:02:41 ◼   ► You lazy bum.

00:02:43 ◼   ► There's no one stopping me.

00:02:45 ◼   ► Like that was something that I had recently when I came back from the States and just

00:02:48 ◼   ► like one day I just fell asleep at two in the afternoon.

00:02:52 ◼   ► When I was intending to be working, it's just a disaster.

00:02:57 ◼   ► We talked last time about how I always think that I'm going to do those tutorial videos

00:03:02 ◼   ► for the video games that I play.

00:03:05 ◼   ► And when I take the flights back from London and I usually arrive early in the morning,

00:03:09 ◼   ► every time I think the same thing, which is, "Okay, I've arrived in the morning, I'm just

00:03:13 ◼   ► going to stay awake because that's the most reasonable thing to do. Sure I've been up

00:03:17 ◼   ► all night on an uncomfortable airplane, but if I can just stay up all day when I've arrived

00:03:23 ◼   ► at 6am, then I'll be right back into the swing of things tomorrow. And without fail, at some

00:03:28 ◼   ► point during the day, I slip into unconsciousness without even being aware of it, and then wake

00:03:35 ◼   ► up in the middle of the night wide awake in London. It just never fails that I, again,

00:03:39 ◼   ► I always overestimate myself, like "Oh, this time I really will stay awake!"

00:03:43 ◼   ► How often have we ever done this, brain? Oh, never! Never is how often we've done this

00:03:47 ◼   ► but this time it will be different. This time we really will stay awake.

00:03:51 ◼   ► So yes, I have always planned my going back around jet lag.

00:03:55 ◼   ► But this, we will talk about it more I think next time

00:03:59 ◼   ► but this whole trip of mine is, there are many more flights coming which I am not looking forward to

00:04:03 ◼   ► so this is just the beginning of many more flights and many more visits in America

00:04:07 ◼   ► So there will be much jet lag ahead.

00:04:11 ◼   ► - We'll talk about that.

00:04:12 ◼   ► Yeah, next week we're gonna talk a bit more

00:04:14 ◼   ► about travel in general, I think.

00:04:15 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:04:16 ◼   ► - So we had some follow up.

00:04:19 ◼   ► There was a surprising amount of follow up

00:04:21 ◼   ► related to Let's Play and video gaming.

00:04:25 ◼   ► I think there was more follow up about the Let's Play videos

00:04:28 ◼   ► than there was about the email section,

00:04:30 ◼   ► which was very surprising to me.

00:04:32 ◼   ► And it just shows that sometimes you really cannot

00:04:36 ◼   ► estimate what people want to hear or what they're interested in hearing about.

00:04:40 ◼   ► It's very interesting.

00:04:42 ◼   ► This is the lesson I have learned from the internet is

00:04:46 ◼   ► I am terrible at guessing what the things people are going to be interested

00:04:52 ◼   ► in are.

00:04:52 ◼   ► When I put up a video, very often people are discussing some part that I thought

00:04:57 ◼   ► was incidental but for whatever captures people's attention.

00:05:01 ◼   ► And when you have a big forum like on Reddit where you can see what people are

00:05:04 ◼   ► discussing

00:05:05 ◼   ► I'm just always aware that it is so often not whatever the ostensible main topic was,

00:05:13 ◼   ► it's something else that catches people's interest, whether it's videos or whether it's

00:05:17 ◼   ► podcasts.

00:05:18 ◼   ► And that's one of the reasons why I really do like to see the feedback, to see what are

00:05:22 ◼   ► people talking about.

00:05:23 ◼   ► And based on the last episode, we should have some kind of "let's play" segment of the show

00:05:29 ◼   ► every time, because that is what everybody wanted to talk about.

00:05:33 ◼   ► Even though I could not have made it any more clear in that episode that I know basically

00:05:37 ◼   ► nothing about Let's Plays.

00:05:40 ◼   ► Maybe if we ever do an experimental season of the show, we could just – me and you

00:05:45 ◼   ► could just do a Let's Play and just – because it seems to be – and then in theory we'd

00:05:49 ◼   ► probably have like a million listeners because it just seems that all anybody's excited

00:05:52 ◼   ► about.

00:05:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:05:54 ◼   ► Watch out for me, bye.

00:05:55 ◼   ► But if you're – we don't – yeah, we don't really have a lot of addressable follow-up,

00:05:59 ◼   ► but basically if –

00:06:00 ◼   ► Right.

00:06:01 ◼   ► Because again, we know nothing about this topic.

00:06:03 ◼   ► Literally nothing. But if you want to get some good video game suggestions you

00:06:08 ◼   ► should go to the thread for that episode and I'll put it in the

00:06:12 ◼   ► show notes again because there was lots of really interesting video games

00:06:15 ◼   ► brought up that people should play and there's probably I would be surprised if

00:06:19 ◼   ► there's not a couple of new things on your list to check out.

00:06:22 ◼   ► Yep, there definitely are.

00:06:24 ◼   ► So there was one really great comment and the comment was much longer than the part that I'm gonna read out and it was from

00:06:30 ◼   ► Danik Jericho. Danik was talking about about gaming and PewDiePie and the way

00:06:36 ◼   ► that people are perceived like celebrities and stuff like that and they

00:06:40 ◼   ► said and I really like this quote and I saw that you liked it as well. "People in

00:06:44 ◼   ► the public eye get paid the amounts that they do because we value what they

00:06:47 ◼   ► produce and you might take issue with the fact that society values a football

00:06:51 ◼   ► coach more than a laureate but the fact of the matter is there are more football

00:06:55 ◼   ► fans and science fans so it kind of makes sense and there are apparently

00:06:58 ◼   ► more gaming fans so PewDiePie gets to reap.

00:07:01 ◼   ► And I just thought that was really interesting because it is kind of just like, yeah, it

00:07:04 ◼   ► is weird that the guy who screams about video games makes millions of dollars a year, but

00:07:12 ◼   ► it's where the audience is and it's what people are interested in, so that's kind of where

00:07:16 ◼   ► the money is.

00:07:17 ◼   ► >> Yeah, it's a good point about the relative audience size because, yes, he's making millions

00:07:22 ◼   ► of dollars a year, but there are

00:07:24 ◼   ► hundreds of millions

00:07:26 ◼   ► of intense video game fans

00:07:28 ◼   ► worldwide.

00:07:30 ◼   ► I feel like it's um...

00:07:32 ◼   ► I mean, you are

00:07:34 ◼   ► you are much younger than me, Myke.

00:07:36 ◼   ► You might not have this

00:07:38 ◼   ► same feeling, but I am aware

00:07:40 ◼   ► that I think

00:07:42 ◼   ► the video game industry

00:07:44 ◼   ► has gone so much from

00:07:46 ◼   ► becoming, or from being

00:07:48 ◼   ► a kid

00:07:50 ◼   ► pastime to now being an acceptable part of mainstream culture and it's it is a

00:07:59 ◼   ► it is a powerful force to be reckoned with in the same way that the movie

00:08:04 ◼   ► industry is is a huge business that uses up lots of people's time and it's just

00:08:12 ◼   ► it's interesting I feel like to have seen that that change over my lifetime

00:08:17 ◼   ► Yeah, that now people like my age who grew up playing Nintendo or Super Nintendo

00:08:22 ◼   ► It's like well

00:08:22 ◼   ► We're now adults and we have money to spend and leisure time that we want to use and it's all

00:08:29 ◼   ► contributing to this enormous video game economy and that's I

00:08:32 ◼   ► Still sometimes catch myself feeling like video games are a marginal part of the culture

00:08:38 ◼   ► But they are long long past that now and that's that's partly why PewDiePie is an interesting

00:08:44 ◼   ► Intersection in that it feels like how can there be so many people watching him play video games and it's like oh, right

00:08:50 ◼   ► It's like asking how can there be so many people who watch movies like it's just a huge part of the world now

00:08:57 ◼   ► but but I think that I

00:08:59 ◼   ► Can still sometimes underestimate that because it was it was not like that when I was a kid there were no adults who played video

00:09:06 ◼   ► Games when I was a kid

00:09:08 ◼   ► No, I mean it's interesting

00:09:10 ◼   ► Hollywood is a great comparison because the base economics seem to match up.

00:09:14 ◼   ► There are the blockbusters which everybody plays, right? Like Call of Duty, for example.

00:09:19 ◼   ► There are middle of the road stuff that a bunch of people play, and then there's indie things that a very small fraction of the audience plays.

00:09:25 ◼   ► And they match with the movie industry really interestingly.

00:09:30 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think they also match in the way that unlike the world of literature, most games have to be multi-people projects.

00:09:39 ◼   ► You can't make a movie with just one person and the vast bulk of games except for the

00:09:45 ◼   ► smallest of small indie projects, like you have to have a team of people working on it.

00:09:49 ◼   ► So yes, I think that they are interestingly comparable industries in a bunch of ways.

00:09:53 ◼   ► I totally get why people get upset that it's like, you know, such and such person who's

00:10:00 ◼   ► doing a really important thing, trying to teach people or trying to help humanity doesn't

00:10:04 ◼   ► really make any money but it's kind of just like well what can you do?

00:10:09 ◼   ► There just isn't the amount of people out there to give that scientist the money that

00:10:14 ◼   ► PewDiePie gets because the audience just isn't there.

00:10:16 ◼   ► So it's like for as long as the public perception and for as long as the large people in the

00:10:20 ◼   ► world want to listen to what PewDiePie says then he deserves the money that's given to

00:10:24 ◼   ► him.

00:10:25 ◼   ► Yeah and I used to be one of these guys as well.

00:10:28 ◼   ► I remember a younger version of me would be really frustrated with situations like why

00:10:32 ◼   ► does the football team get so much funding and the library doesn't? And I think as I've

00:10:39 ◼   ► gotten older I've become more accepting of those situations and realizing, oh right of

00:10:43 ◼   ► course, that to a university or to a school, a football team is actually quite a valuable

00:10:50 ◼   ► public relations asset and it draws a lot of, like, it's not how valuable you think

00:10:58 ◼   ► It is how valuable it is to the wider audience of people who have vastly different preferences

00:11:05 ◼   ► than just you.

00:11:06 ◼   ► And so it's like, yes, I like books and I like the library, but a school or a university

00:11:12 ◼   ► isn't necessarily assigning funding based entirely on my preferences.

00:11:17 ◼   ► Or entirely on the super long-term value of what a kid might read in a library and then

00:11:25 ◼   ► what happens 50 years down the road.

00:11:26 ◼   ► Like the football team is an asset now in a very tangible way.

00:11:32 ◼   ► So yeah, I have relaxed about this but I used to get wound up over the exact same kind of things.

00:11:37 ◼   ► Why aren't scientists paid more and why are celebrities paid enormous amounts of money?

00:11:42 ◼   ► And I think I said last time, we might want the situation where scientists who I think unarguably contribute more to the long-term value of society than people who make movies.

00:11:55 ◼   ► make movies. You might want them to get paid more, but wanting that is a bit...

00:12:02 ◼   ► It's almost like fighting the laws of physics. I might want gravity to be stronger or weaker,

00:12:08 ◼   ► but it doesn't matter. I can rail against that all day and nothing is going to change that if you are looking at market forces.

00:12:18 ◼   ► It's very hard to move those things around.

00:12:20 ◼   ► So I wanted to address some more email stuff with you today.

00:12:23 ◼   ► We're doing this again? You are doing this again, I'm not finished. Great. You love it really, I know you love it.

00:12:29 ◼   ► I do not. Well, there is one thing that you seem to love which is receiving email because you instigated a new topic suggestions box which I'll come back to in a moment.

00:12:43 ◼   ► But for some reason then received via email every single suggestion that anybody sent you. What happened Gray?

00:12:49 ◼   ► So let's back up for a moment here.

00:12:53 ◼   ► We discussed last time how my email was not working very well for me.

00:12:57 ◼   ► And I made the point which I

00:13:01 ◼   ► I think for many of the things that I'm engaged in

00:13:05 ◼   ► I don't believe in the notion of just trying harder if something isn't

00:13:09 ◼   ► working. I believe very much in trying to change the system

00:13:13 ◼   ► so that you get more of the results that you want. And so I was thinking about

00:13:17 ◼   ► this because it, you know, we did that last episode because email had come to a kind of head as a problem for me

00:13:22 ◼   ► and I was thinking, okay, what can I do to try to systemically change some of this stuff?

00:13:27 ◼   ► And so, one of the things I thought was I get a lot of emails from people who are just

00:13:32 ◼   ► ultimately they're suggesting topics to me.

00:13:36 ◼   ► So I thought, okay, is there a way that I can pull this out of email

00:13:41 ◼   ► into a different format that is maybe easier for people to use

00:13:46 ◼   ► and also easier for me to receive.

00:13:49 ◼   ► And so I thought, "Oh, okay." I played around a little bit and I realized I could use

00:13:52 ◼   ► Google as an option where you can

00:13:55 ◼   ► set up forms that people can fill out, and then

00:13:58 ◼   ► it adds the information they have filled out into a

00:14:01 ◼   ► spreadsheet in Google Docs. So I thought, "Okay, great.

00:14:04 ◼   ► I'll set this up on my website and I'll just trial it out. I'll just see how this goes."

00:14:07 ◼   ► So on my website now, if you go to whatever it is,

00:14:10 ◼   ► the topic suggestions page, there's a link somewhere on the site.

00:14:13 ◼   ► There's a single line where it says "What would you like CGP Grey to make a video about?"

00:14:17 ◼   ► And just a little space for people to write something in, and they can hit submit, and then that goes into this spreadsheet for me.

00:14:23 ◼   ► And I was looking at the results as I was testing it out, and I thought "Oh, okay, this is actually way more useful to me."

00:14:30 ◼   ► Because I can look at this much more quickly because people don't feel the need to wrap their topic suggestion in a lot of paragraphs of other stuff.

00:14:40 ◼   ► Like I'm aware of emails that I get sometimes that are ultimately a topic suggestion.

00:14:44 ◼   ► There's a little bit of a warm-up, and then there's a little bit of a goodbye in that email.

00:14:48 ◼   ► Whereas here now it's like, "Okay, great. You've just written two or three words about what you want the thing to be."

00:14:53 ◼   ► So I can go through this much faster. I can look at it, and it's much more comprehensible much more quickly.

00:14:59 ◼   ► And I'm also not changing modes, like I mentioned last time with email.

00:15:03 ◼   ► It's like, I'm looking at this spreadsheet, and I'm looking at topic suggestions, and this is the thing that I'm doing.

00:15:08 ◼   ► I'm not receiving topic suggestions in between a whole bunch of other stuff.

00:15:12 ◼   ► So all of this was fine and dandy and I thought, "Oh great,

00:15:16 ◼   ► this is working just perfect." And I went away for a while and I came back a few hours

00:15:20 ◼   ► later and discovered that I had not realized that while I was sitting

00:15:24 ◼   ► there really chuffed with myself for how clever I was about this solution.

00:15:28 ◼   ► Look at me everyone, I'm lifehacked!

00:15:32 ◼   ► Yeah, don't say that, Myke. I came back and I opened my email

00:15:36 ◼   ► And I panicked for a moment because I opened my email and I saw the little unread badge zip up to something over a thousand messages.

00:15:43 ◼   ► And I thought, "What? What the heck is this? What happened?"

00:15:46 ◼   ► And I looked at my email inbox and sure enough, I didn't realize that the default setting was not only to add the topic suggestion to the spreadsheet, but also to email me the topics.

00:15:56 ◼   ► And so I had, yes, gotten over the course of a couple hours a thousand emails dumped into my email inbox.

00:16:02 ◼   ► All of which were just copies of what I had already been looking at in the spreadsheet and seeing how everything was going.

00:16:09 ◼   ► It was just like, "Oh, this is exactly the opposite of what I wanted."

00:16:13 ◼   ► Luckily, it was a relatively quick fix to take care of that.

00:16:16 ◼   ► To tell the suggestion box, "Please stop emailing me."

00:16:20 ◼   ► And also to clear all of those out in a systematic way because they were all very similar

00:16:25 ◼   ► learn it's easy to pull them apart but it was an unwelcome surprise and not what I was

00:16:33 ◼   ► expecting and I was very much worried about my email inbox.

00:16:37 ◼   ► Your heart got a little weaker that day.

00:16:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:16:40 ◼   ► I thought oh I'm making email better.

00:16:42 ◼   ► No you have made it worse.

00:16:44 ◼   ► Worse than you could ever imagine.

00:16:47 ◼   ► Yes.

00:16:48 ◼   ► But overall I am happy with this change I have instituted and it is definitely an improvement

00:16:53 ◼   ► so far.

00:16:54 ◼   ► This is a little piece of changing the system, not simply telling myself, "Oh, I'll go through emails even faster and harder than I ever have before."

00:17:05 ◼   ► So, I like the way this is working right now.

00:17:07 ◼   ► This spreadsheet is also a good thing you could give to someone, and be like, "Remove things that are duplicates, remove things that I'm just never going to touch, and then tell me what's good in here."

00:17:18 ◼   ► Oh yeah, there are many things that you can do with this, there are many things you can

00:17:21 ◼   ► do with it when it's now data in a format.

00:17:25 ◼   ► And so actually I was just looking through it to get a sense of what people were saying,

00:17:28 ◼   ► but you can also do something like, oh let me just run a word frequency analysis on this

00:17:33 ◼   ► to get a sense of overall what are the things that are people talking about.

00:17:38 ◼   ► There are just very many options for this now in a way that you couldn't do that easily

00:17:43 ◼   ► with email.

00:17:44 ◼   ► And alongside this you've also instituted a new contact CTP Grey page on your website

00:17:51 ◼   ► which has a little form on it which is clearly another way for you to try and make some sort

00:17:57 ◼   ► of change to email.

00:17:59 ◼   ► Yes exactly so I have also set up a form that people can fill out which is a real email

00:18:04 ◼   ► form now.

00:18:06 ◼   ► Someone can put in their name and they can put in their email address and write a little

00:18:08 ◼   ► message. And this does not go to me, this goes to my personal assistant who is then

00:18:15 ◼   ► filtering and dealing with these as they are coming in. And we're figuring out now, like,

00:18:21 ◼   ► you know, how does this work and what exactly the rules are going to be. But yes, this is

00:18:26 ◼   ► a way to take off some burden of contact from me and to try to have somebody else pull out

00:18:34 ◼   ► actionable stuff and summarize it for me.

00:18:37 ◼   ► So this is relatively new and we're just trying this out.

00:18:41 ◼   ► But you seemed a little bit insecure at the copyright. You tweeted that you were a little bit

00:18:46 ◼   ► not sure about this.

00:18:48 ◼   ► Yeah so

00:18:50 ◼   ► here's the part where it's just almost impossible

00:18:53 ◼   ► not to sound

00:18:56 ◼   ► like

00:18:57 ◼   ► a self-important douchebag.

00:18:59 ◼   ► Where

00:19:00 ◼   ► you're trying to do things that are

00:19:04 ◼   ► conflicting. I am attempting in one way to make it easier for people to reach me,

00:19:09 ◼   ► because this is the alternative to

00:19:12 ◼   ► "Your email has gone into an endless black hole that I will never look at." Right now, now,

00:19:17 ◼   ► so in this way, it's easier because yes, an actual person will look at your email, but at the same time

00:19:24 ◼   ► I'm trying to make something easier.

00:19:26 ◼   ► It is also, there's no way to get around the fact that I'm setting up a barrier as well.

00:19:32 ◼   ► Like it's not going directly to me, it's going to another person who may then pass it on to me or may respond to you directly.

00:19:40 ◼   ► And so yes, trying to figure out how to write the copy on this page of

00:19:45 ◼   ► being honest about what this is. No, you're not sending me an email directly. It's going to my assistant.

00:19:52 ◼   ► But without sounding like "Oh, I'm so important. I can't read your email, but please send me emails anyway because it's just great."

00:19:59 ◼   ► I think there is simply no way to accomplish that task.

00:20:04 ◼   ► Completely impossible.

00:20:05 ◼   ► Because there's no humble way to say, "I can't read your email, it has to go to an assistant first."

00:20:14 ◼   ► There's just no way you can word that where it sounds like a normal human.

00:20:21 ◼   ► Yeah, it is just impossible.

00:20:24 ◼   ► It's just impossible.

00:20:25 ◼   ► And so I tried to make it like a little bit funny and also just tried to make it as short as humanly possible

00:20:31 ◼   ► because yes, there's no good way to do this.

00:20:34 ◼   ► But yeah, so it is up there, it's an option for people to send me emails.

00:20:38 ◼   ► I have noticed something interesting so far about these two different forms

00:20:43 ◼   ► which has changed already the way email has come in.

00:20:46 ◼   ► Because for the moment I'm monitoring these things and seeing, okay, how do each of them...

00:20:49 ◼   ► How are they used, you know, how is this going to work as a system?

00:20:53 ◼   ► And people have definitely been using them and way less email has come directly to me.

00:21:01 ◼   ► But interestingly, the number of topic suggestions is enormous.

00:21:06 ◼   ► It's way more contact than I ever got from people sending me contact suggestions directly.

00:21:11 ◼   ► So I looked at this just yesterday and there were thousands and thousands of topic suggestions on that spreadsheet.

00:21:17 ◼   ► And interestingly, the emails to me have vastly dropped down and way fewer people are using that contact form to send an email.

00:21:30 ◼   ► So I'm just aware of this and thinking "I wonder what's happening? Is somebody thinking 'Oh, let me send an email' and then they're coming up to that form and then deciding whatever they were going to send probably isn't going to make it through my personal assistant and just not bothering?"

00:21:45 ◼   ► instead of trying to guess what my email address is and contact me directly

00:21:50 ◼   ► they're just looking on the site and going "oh there is a way"

00:21:52 ◼   ► "oh, I just won't do it"

00:21:54 ◼   ► It's interesting and I don't know what is the reason for

00:21:59 ◼   ► email through that form being quite low

00:22:02 ◼   ► and then the topic suggestions are just enormous

00:22:05 ◼   ► it's an interesting difference that I would not have predicted when I set this up

00:22:09 ◼   ► I think I would have

00:22:11 ◼   ► Oh yeah?

00:22:12 ◼   ► Yeah, because with the topic suggestions, you're doing two things.

00:22:16 ◼   ► You're pointing to it, right?

00:22:18 ◼   ► And you're tweeting about it and stuff like that.

00:22:20 ◼   ► You're pointing to the fact that you would like topic suggestions.

00:22:23 ◼   ► And you're also changing a policy in which you are now willing to accept them.

00:22:29 ◼   ► Because I think people that may be familiar with your work or listen to stuff that you

00:22:32 ◼   ► do know that if they email you a topic suggestion, you'd probably not see it, right?

00:22:39 ◼   ► But now they're like, "Whoa, you've opened the floodgates and you're requesting them."

00:22:44 ◼   ► So I may as well, Joe Smith, send you that topic suggestion because now you're asking

00:22:50 ◼   ► for them, or you haven't before.

00:22:52 ◼   ► So it's like when you make a change like that and then highlight it, I can see why people

00:22:56 ◼   ► would send through more.

00:22:58 ◼   ► And also the email thing makes sense to me as well because I would bet a lot of the email

00:23:02 ◼   ► that you got was personal.

00:23:04 ◼   ► people were addressing you personally to tell you something about you but now they know

00:23:10 ◼   ► that it's not going to you.

00:23:14 ◼   ► A lot of the personality in it, like the connection, will have gone.

00:23:19 ◼   ► And I don't think that necessarily people will see that and go "oh no I hate Grey" but

00:23:23 ◼   ► just so more like "oh well if it's going to go to somebody else I'm not going to write

00:23:27 ◼   ► it in the way that I would write it so maybe I just won't write it."

00:23:31 ◼   ► Hmm, that's interesting.

00:23:33 ◼   ► I think you might be right.

00:23:34 ◼   ► I think you might be right, Myke.

00:23:35 ◼   ► And also, people that want to do business with you or whatever, or ask you to do something,

00:23:40 ◼   ► now have a self-qualifier of, well, it has to pass a third party to think that this might

00:23:46 ◼   ► actually be worth Grey's while, so let me think about this a little bit more.

00:23:50 ◼   ► Now that you say it, it sounds possibly obvious, but yeah, I would not have predicted this

00:23:54 ◼   ► in the beginning.

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00:25:41 ◼   ► [BEEP]

00:25:41 ◼   ► So I have some more stuff around email.

00:25:45 ◼   ► Some of it is centered around things that I didn't get to talk to you about last week that I wanted to,

00:25:50 ◼   ► and some is based on feedback that we received.

00:25:53 ◼   ► One of the questions that we received a bunch was people wanted to know the total number of how many emails are in your inbox.

00:26:01 ◼   ► So this would be, I would think, the very top level, all inbox, every email account that you have, every smart folder, every filter, everything.

00:26:11 ◼   ► What is that number that sits at the very top?

00:26:14 ◼   ► So people want to know how behind I am, basically. That's what people want to know.

00:26:20 ◼   ► I think people just want to hear an astronomical number.

00:26:23 ◼   ► Yeah, people just want something huge.

00:26:25 ◼   ► Like 75,000.

00:26:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:26:28 ◼   ► So I only have a rough estimate

00:26:34 ◼   ► because I didn't count it up last time we were talking.

00:26:39 ◼   ► But I know that the number of emails

00:26:43 ◼   ► that I had to deal with in some way,

00:26:45 ◼   ► so yes, across all accounts

00:26:48 ◼   ► and across all levels of my sorting.

00:26:51 ◼   ► Flagged emails, waiting for all of the rest of this stuff.

00:26:54 ◼   ► That number was somewhere above 1000 and below 2000.

00:26:59 ◼   ► I can't narrow it down more specifically than that,

00:27:01 ◼   ► but when we spoke last time, that's where we were.

00:27:05 ◼   ► - So whilst that isn't, it's a very large number, right?

00:27:09 ◼   ► That is a very, very large number.

00:27:11 ◼   ► It's not like 15,000 or whatever.

00:27:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.

00:27:14 ◼   ► - But I think, and correct me

00:27:16 ◼   ► if I'm making an incorrect assumption.

00:27:18 ◼   ► I think that the problem is isn't the number,

00:27:21 ◼   ► it's the fact that that number probably never really changes.

00:27:24 ◼   ► Like it's always a thousand,

00:27:26 ◼   ► because as much email comes in as you can remove.

00:27:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean that number was,

00:27:34 ◼   ► or that number had been increasing over,

00:27:37 ◼   ► say the last six months.

00:27:39 ◼   ► And I think listening to me talking last time

00:27:41 ◼   ► on the episode, the one thing that I did not get across

00:27:44 ◼   ► very well was one of the big reasons this was also occurring was me just spending less

00:27:51 ◼   ► time on email and so that's why I was spending less time clearing it out and so that was

00:27:58 ◼   ► also causing this backlog effect to occur.

00:28:02 ◼   ► I was doing much less frequently a thing that I used to do more often which was say dedicate

00:28:08 ◼   ► an entire day or two in a row to just clear out email and to get it down to nothing.

00:28:14 ◼   ► I used to do that much more frequently and I was doing that much less frequently because

00:28:18 ◼   ► I was trying to say like, "Is that the best way to spend my time? Is that what people

00:28:26 ◼   ► want me to do?" And yes, there are problems in email, there are things that need to be

00:28:33 ◼   ► solved, but all problems and benefits are relative.

00:28:37 ◼   ► And so I was spending more time on making things and less time

00:28:41 ◼   ► on email. And that's partly why the

00:28:45 ◼   ► backflow was increasing. But I wanted to bring it up as a topic

00:28:49 ◼   ► because obviously at a certain point it

00:28:53 ◼   ► gets on your mind. Like email was now on my mind as this little burden

00:28:57 ◼   ► that was always there in the background. And so that's kind of

00:29:01 ◼   ► why I was wanting to talk about it is because I can feel this as a problem now, not because

00:29:06 ◼   ► of anything that's like in the email, but all of the emails in aggregate together are

00:29:12 ◼   ► like a psychological burden, even if none of them in particular is a huge deal-breaking

00:29:19 ◼   ► problem, which is why I can dedicate less time to them. Like none of them stop the business,

00:29:25 ◼   ► but all of them together are just a psychological burden. So that's where I was last time we

00:29:28 ◼   ► spoke.

00:29:30 ◼   ► So where are you of email now?

00:29:32 ◼   ► As of this morning, I am happy to report that I have zero emails in my inbox.

00:29:40 ◼   ► Whoa, okay.

00:29:42 ◼   ► Because it turns out if you make a podcast where you embarrassingly talk about how far

00:29:51 ◼   ► behind on email you are, you have basically shamed yourself into having to actually clear

00:29:58 ◼   ► all of this out.

00:30:00 ◼   ► I just couldn't deal with it being there anymore.

00:30:04 ◼   ► And the fact that I'm traveling happens to have made this an excellent time to do this,

00:30:11 ◼   ► because all of my normal routines are thrown off kilter anyway.

00:30:17 ◼   ► So on the airplanes, and I've been working here in North Carolina a little bit, I was

00:30:25 ◼   ► filled with a vengeance to get this back down, at least to just be able to slap the bottom

00:30:33 ◼   ► of the empty floor for a split second before it starts filling back up again.

00:30:38 ◼   ► That was the goal, because I was also thinking about, if I want to try to change the way

00:30:44 ◼   ► this works systematically, it's very hard to do that while still having a big backlog

00:30:51 ◼   ► of stuff.

00:30:53 ◼   ► It's easier to sit down and say, "Okay, I'm actually going to spend a serious amount of

00:30:58 ◼   ► time dealing with this and then trying to build a new system from the ground up."

00:31:05 ◼   ► And that's easier to do if I'm just focused on email.

00:31:09 ◼   ► So I haven't been writing scripts, I haven't been doing other stuff related to the business,

00:31:14 ◼   ► I have basically dedicated my time to clearing out all of that stuff.

00:31:20 ◼   ► Yes, just a couple hours before we started recording I reached the bottom, so I'm quite

00:31:26 ◼   ► relieved about that.

00:31:27 ◼   ► That's amazing.

00:31:29 ◼   ► Like really, that is awesome that you did that.

00:31:33 ◼   ► It's not amazing, it's just a matter of time.

00:31:35 ◼   ► But you know, this is, because here's the thing going through all of this, it makes,

00:31:41 ◼   ► it was just again of realising with email, yes, none of these are big problems but they're

00:31:45 ◼   ► They're all just little problems spread across a huge variety of domains.

00:31:50 ◼   ► Personal life and business life and all of these things.

00:31:53 ◼   ► There's just a whole bunch of stuff to deal with in all of these different context switches.

00:31:58 ◼   ► It just takes a lot of time.

00:32:01 ◼   ► That's all it is.

00:32:04 ◼   ► It's not hard.

00:32:05 ◼   ► It's not like coal mining where it's difficult work all day long.

00:32:09 ◼   ► It's just time consuming.

00:32:12 ◼   ► This is where I feel conflicted about it. Like I mentioned before, okay, so I feel better because I've relieved this mental email burden from myself.

00:32:21 ◼   ► But, like, is this really what the people who support my work want me doing with my time? No. They want me writing scripts. They want me making more videos.

00:32:31 ◼   ► And this is the part of being self-employed and dealing with all this stuff that I just don't like.

00:32:36 ◼   ► I hate spending time on this administrative stuff, but it does need to be done at some point, even if it's just because it's on your mind, not because it's necessarily a problem in and of itself.

00:32:48 ◼   ► But I'm very much aware, like the most valuable work that I can do, the stuff that people like the best, is not me just replying to emails.

00:32:57 ◼   ► It's me making podcasts and making videos.

00:33:00 ◼   ► But anyway, that is done, and now I am attempting to figure out how to build a new system that will manage,

00:33:08 ◼   ► that will last in the longer run.

00:33:11 ◼   ► And so that's why the topic suggestion thing and filtering more emails to my personal assistant

00:33:16 ◼   ► are the first two pieces of this bright new future with email.

00:33:22 ◼   ► So, I mean, ideally, now, it's like trying to architect a system in which you then don't

00:33:29 ◼   ► have to do what you just did again.

00:33:32 ◼   ► That's exactly right.

00:33:34 ◼   ► And also now I can have a better sense of...

00:33:37 ◼   ► What's happening?

00:33:38 ◼   ► Yeah, like, how many...

00:33:39 ◼   ► Like what's the...

00:33:40 ◼   ► I can have a much better sense of, okay, what is the minimum amount of time that I need

00:33:45 ◼   ► to dedicate to this to keep it at a steady state where I can get it to empty on a, you

00:33:52 ◼   ► know, every other week basis or whatever it is.

00:33:54 ◼   ► Now I have a much better sense going forward of what that's going to be because I'm working

00:33:58 ◼   ► with a much more reasonable system.

00:34:00 ◼   ► So that's what I'm trying here.

00:34:02 ◼   ► I guess my pro tip here is if you're very behind on email, start a podcast and tell

00:34:08 ◼   ► the whole world about how behind on email you are.

00:34:10 ◼   ► That's the takeaway from this.

00:34:14 ◼   ► That's a really good takeaway.

00:34:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:34:17 ◼   ► Put yourself in a situation where you're really embarrassed and yeah, there you go.

00:34:22 ◼   ► So I maintain what I said earlier that this helps you whether you like to admit it or

00:34:28 ◼   ► not.

00:34:29 ◼   ► And it was help, it was unwelcome help because it was embarrassment but it was help nonetheless.

00:34:34 ◼   ► Yes, but nonetheless I'm at the bottom of my email now.

00:34:38 ◼   ► Have you ever heard of the term and/or considered email bankruptcy?

00:34:41 ◼   ► Yes, I have.

00:34:43 ◼   ► I've come across this, and I am philosophically opposed to email bankruptcy.

00:34:51 ◼   ► For listeners who may be unaware, I think maybe the best way to describe email bankruptcy is

00:34:59 ◼   ► it's just like bankruptcy in real life. You're so far in debt with, in this case not money, but emails that need to be replied to

00:35:08 ◼   ► that the only way forward is to just say

00:35:12 ◼   ► "I am dumping all of this and starting afresh"

00:35:17 ◼   ► "My email debt is being absolved by me declaring bankruptcy and we're just going to move forward"

00:35:25 ◼   ► and anything that's important will reappear at some point in the future

00:35:29 ◼   ► I know that if I did that, I would feel way worse about it

00:35:35 ◼   ► Because I would also feel like I hadn't really solved the problem, and I would feel like what I've done is swept a bunch of problems under the rug.

00:35:44 ◼   ► That then there's like an uncertainty of "Did I sweep something away that I really needed to see that wouldn't have resurfaced at an appropriate time scale?"

00:35:56 ◼   ► I'm not saying that email bankruptcy is never acceptable, but it is not something that I would be comfortable dealing with.

00:36:08 ◼   ► I would much rather do what I've done, which is take a bunch of time and say I'm doing nothing else except email and get to the bottom of all of it and then feel like I have a genuine fresh start.

00:36:20 ◼   ► The email bankruptcy feels a bit like stealing a fresh start in a somewhat illegitimate way

00:36:27 ◼   ► to me.

00:36:28 ◼   ► That's a bit of how it feels.

00:36:29 ◼   ► I can see why people do it, but I can see why you wouldn't do it.

00:36:35 ◼   ► So I think the reason that I thought of this as well was like you were in a – well, at

00:36:40 ◼   ► least you seemed to be in a situation in which the email that was in your inbox was never

00:36:44 ◼   ► going to get answered.

00:36:45 ◼   ► It was just going to continue to build, right?

00:36:47 ◼   ► So in that world, if that was what was going to occur, email bankruptcy makes sense because

00:36:54 ◼   ► you're never going to get to those emails anyway, so stop giving yourself the anxiety

00:36:58 ◼   ► of seeing that number.

00:37:01 ◼   ► That's I think where the idea comes from for many people.

00:37:04 ◼   ► But the reason that I can see that you've taken the route that you've taken and done

00:37:07 ◼   ► what you've done is it doesn't gel with you because it's like, well, it's only just going

00:37:12 ◼   ► happen again because all I'm doing is taking a temporary measure.

00:37:17 ◼   ► There is absolutely zero reason why my email inbox would not get back to a thousand if

00:37:24 ◼   ► all I'm doing is just every six months deleting everything.

00:37:28 ◼   ► Because there's no new system.

00:37:31 ◼   ► It's the exact same system but now you're just starting from zero again.

00:37:35 ◼   ► I don't know where this comes from originally but there's a little saying that your daily

00:37:39 ◼   ► is perfectly designed to get exactly the results that you're getting

00:37:43 ◼   ► and if you think, you know, it's almost a definitional statement

00:37:49 ◼   ► but yes, it's like, oh, if you are in a situation where you are getting more emails than you are responding to

00:37:55 ◼   ► however you deal with email, that is your system and it is producing those results

00:38:00 ◼   ► like it is perfectly designed to produce those results

00:38:03 ◼   ► And so, yes, declaring email bankruptcy is just going to get you the exact same thing later down the road.

00:38:09 ◼   ► I don't like the idea of just sweeping away these problems without actually facing them.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Of just saying, "I'm just going to push it all away and hope it's fine. Hope I hear from people again when I need to on an appropriate time scale."

00:38:26 ◼   ► And I mean that does mean that I have replied to in the past few days some emails that were just embarrassingly late.

00:38:34 ◼   ► And that's a bit uncomfortable to do, but I still think I feel better about replying to something embarrassingly late

00:38:41 ◼   ► than I feel about just sweeping it under the rug and not replying to it if it is something that still needs a reply.

00:38:48 ◼   ► Do you think that email has an expiration date?

00:38:51 ◼   ► Here's a question for you, Myke.

00:38:53 ◼   ► Did you ever find that when you're working with large groups of people that there are

00:38:56 ◼   ► definitely problems that just, if you wait long enough, they do go away on their own.

00:39:03 ◼   ► There are problems that just kind of like, "Well, if I don't handle this, it'll just

00:39:07 ◼   ► get fixed by somebody else or it will just become irrelevant."

00:39:10 ◼   ► Do you know what I'm talking about?

00:39:11 ◼   ► Great, you have uncovered my top tip for working in a corporate environment.

00:39:16 ◼   ► Oh, yes?

00:39:19 ◼   ► As part of my job, I did a few different things.

00:39:23 ◼   ► So my old life, the most recent job that I had, I worked in a bank doing marketing.

00:39:30 ◼   ► And I mentioned this last time, email marketing was part of my job.

00:39:33 ◼   ► I did DM marketing, so that's direct mail, so this is the stuff that you receive through

00:39:39 ◼   ► the letterbox.

00:39:41 ◼   ► And also email marketing as well.

00:39:43 ◼   ► So we would email our...

00:39:44 ◼   ► It was all existing customer stuff, so we would send emails to people promoting our

00:39:47 ◼   ► products and that kind of thing. That was one of my jobs. One of my other roles was

00:39:52 ◼   ► also a bit of like admin and systems processing for a different part of the

00:39:57 ◼   ► business. I had a really weird job in that I did this creative part of

00:40:02 ◼   ► marketing but then also managing this like other marketing department. It was

00:40:06 ◼   ► kind of strange but it was a job that I did. I would get sent emails for things

00:40:12 ◼   ► that nobody knew how to do so they sent it to me because they expected that I

00:40:17 ◼   ► was the person that would have to do it, you know? Like nobody else knows how to

00:40:21 ◼   ► do this, it has to get done, so let's just send it to the guy that it's going to

00:40:24 ◼   ► affect the most if it doesn't get done. Right. So they would send it to me. Now a lot

00:40:29 ◼   ► of those things I would read them and be like, "I don't know how to do this, I don't

00:40:33 ◼   ► want to have to learn, so what I'm gonna do is delete this email and if it comes

00:40:39 ◼   ► back in a few weeks then maybe I'll look at it." But if it doesn't come back it was

00:40:44 ◼   ► never that important in the first place.

00:40:45 ◼   ► And that saved me so much time

00:40:48 ◼   ► because I would just delete things

00:40:50 ◼   ► and then if people say like, why didn't you do this?

00:40:51 ◼   ► I'd just be like, I haven't gotten around to it yet.

00:40:53 ◼   ► Like that was always my answer,

00:40:54 ◼   ► which is like, or I haven't seen this.

00:40:56 ◼   ► And then I would deal with it.

00:40:59 ◼   ► But more often than not,

00:41:00 ◼   ► these things would just never come back

00:41:02 ◼   ► because the executive who asked for it

00:41:05 ◼   ► moved on and didn't care anymore.

00:41:06 ◼   ► 'Cause all of these things

00:41:09 ◼   ► in these big corporate environments

00:41:10 ◼   ► I just stemmed by somebody in the management team

00:41:14 ◼   ► asked a question and now everybody thinks

00:41:18 ◼   ► there needs to be an answer to this question

00:41:20 ◼   ► when really they were just asking the question.

00:41:22 ◼   ► So yeah, I very, very frequently would do this

00:41:27 ◼   ► and or if there was an email in my inbox

00:41:30 ◼   ► or in a folder or something that I believed needed

00:41:34 ◼   ► to be dealt with and it was already like three

00:41:36 ◼   ► or four weeks past the time that it was sent

00:41:38 ◼   ► and I had no chaser email, gone, just gone.

00:41:42 ◼   ► So people used to say to me,

00:41:45 ◼   ► how do you get all the work done that you do

00:41:47 ◼   ► and also leave at 5 p.m.?

00:41:49 ◼   ► I was the only person in my team

00:41:51 ◼   ► that came in at nine and left at five.

00:41:52 ◼   ► And they're like, how do you stay on top of things?

00:41:54 ◼   ► And it was basically because I don't allow myself

00:41:57 ◼   ► to get bogged down in things that I think are dumb.

00:42:00 ◼   ► That was how I survived my old job.

00:42:05 ◼   ► Just deleting a bunch of stuff basically.

00:42:08 ◼   ► So part of your system was first contact to Myke

00:42:11 ◼   ► always had to happen twice or it didn't count.

00:42:14 ◼   ► - Pretty much, if it was a--

00:42:14 ◼   ► - That's the way that sounds.

00:42:16 ◼   ► - If it was a thing that was like,

00:42:17 ◼   ► no one knows how to do this, can you do this?

00:42:20 ◼   ► And you can pretty much assume

00:42:21 ◼   ► that it got deleted initially.

00:42:23 ◼   ► I don't do that anymore

00:42:25 ◼   ► because every deleted email like that affects my business.

00:42:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, well that's what I was gonna say

00:42:32 ◼   ► is that we are now in very different situations.

00:42:34 ◼   ► But I was sitting here, I'm trying to remember what it was,

00:42:37 ◼   ► but at some point in my teaching career I had a similar realization of

00:42:41 ◼   ► a lot of these requests I can just ignore

00:42:45 ◼   ► and I'll never hear about them ever again. Now that's not so much

00:42:49 ◼   ► the case because people are contacting us directly

00:42:53 ◼   ► because of a thing that we do, but in groups there seems to be this thing where

00:42:57 ◼   ► you just get many more requests where

00:43:01 ◼   ► it's clear that something popped into somebody's mind for a mere minute

00:43:05 ◼   ► long enough to write you an email, and then they almost don't care about it the instant they're done writing the email.

00:43:11 ◼   ► And you learn to recognize those kinds of requests.

00:43:16 ◼   ► The only thing that's coming to my mind was, a thing that I never did, but received a bunch of requests for was,

00:43:24 ◼   ► I'd get emails about how I was supposed to contact a parent about something related to their child.

00:43:31 ◼   ► And it wasn't the parent reaching out to me, it was an administrator telling me that I should reach out to a parent about X.

00:43:41 ◼   ► And I always thought, "Well, the parent hasn't approached me. I don't really know how much they care about this topic.

00:43:47 ◼   ► This just seems like something an administrator wants me to do, and so I'll just never do this unless I hear about it again."

00:43:54 ◼   ► about it again. And in my entire career teaching, I never once called a parent, even though

00:44:02 ◼   ► I received many requests from administrators to call parents. And I never heard about it,

00:44:08 ◼   ► ever. I honestly think this was one of those things where it just popped into somebody's

00:44:11 ◼   ► head. "Oh, you know, you should call Susie's mom about whatever." I'm like, "Okay." You

00:44:16 ◼   ► know, didn't do that. It never happened, never mattered. And I could have been spending an

00:44:21 ◼   ► hour on the phone, you know, several times a week calling to parents to talk about their precious darling and why they aren't performing perfectly in every possible way.

00:44:31 ◼   ► So yeah, I wish I could remember more, but that's the one that's clearly jumping into my head. Like, if I just ignore this, it goes away. And clearly nobody cares.

00:44:38 ◼   ► Not the parent, not the student, not the administrator. It's just an email that has appeared because these things do.

00:44:46 ◼   ► Mine would be a lot of like, um, this item of literature is out of stock. The last time

00:44:55 ◼   ► it was ordered was six years ago. The company that makes this item doesn't exist anymore.

00:45:02 ◼   ► We need more of them. And I'll be like, "Nope! I'm not doing it! 'Cause that sounds horrible!"

00:45:08 ◼   ► Yes. Oh, actually, I do have a follow-up question for you. Something from last show. That, uh,

00:45:15 ◼   ► You mentioned offhandedly that part of your job was to send emails to millions of people,

00:45:20 ◼   ► and we never followed up on this.

00:45:22 ◼   ► Tell me about this.

00:45:23 ◼   ► That was it, like the marketing stuff.

00:45:26 ◼   ► Like I would be in charge of creating marketing campaigns that were sent out to the millions

00:45:32 ◼   ► and millions of people in the customer base.

00:45:34 ◼   ► So that's what you were doing, you were sending those emails that I don't read from my bank

00:45:40 ◼   ► about something being updated or some special promotion.

00:45:43 ◼   ► That was you.

00:45:44 ◼   ► think that it literally was me? I didn't know it was you at the time but it

00:45:49 ◼   ► literally was you. It was me. So you know that first email? Maybe that wasn't the

00:45:53 ◼   ► first email that you got from me because you were getting stuff that I was bugging

00:45:58 ◼   ► you with. The most frequent question that came through after last week's episode

00:46:04 ◼   ► was about having like segmenting email accounts basically so having secret

00:46:11 ◼   ► email addresses for family and friends using aliases, so like saying that, I don't know,

00:46:17 ◼   ► CGP plus spam at grey.com or that kind of thing, right, using little aliases or just

00:46:24 ◼   ► having multiple email accounts to deal with certain things so you could more easily filter

00:46:29 ◼   ► stuff and just more easily get what you wanted. Do you have a system in place like this? Do

00:46:34 ◼   ► you do anything like this?

00:46:36 ◼   ► I have seen a lot of advice on email about doing this exact kind of thing.

00:46:41 ◼   ► Have multiple email addresses for different kinds of contact that you are going to receive.

00:46:48 ◼   ► And in my experience, this just doesn't work.

00:46:52 ◼   ► It doesn't work because ultimately I have to open up the email client on whatever device I'm using.

00:46:59 ◼   ► So I'm opening up mail on my Mac.

00:47:03 ◼   ► And even if I've segmented different emails,

00:47:06 ◼   ► or I have one email address for my family,

00:47:08 ◼   ► and I have one email address for business,

00:47:10 ◼   ► and I have one email address as a public contact form,

00:47:12 ◼   ► it's all going to the same program that I open at the same time anyway.

00:47:17 ◼   ► So it's... you can't help but see everything that is there.

00:47:22 ◼   ► When I have occasionally tried to do that,

00:47:25 ◼   ► have different email addresses,

00:47:26 ◼   ► I've always just found that it seems like it is mentally more work

00:47:30 ◼   ► than simply having it all in the same place.

00:47:32 ◼   ► And I do have dozens of email addresses that I think I've collected over the years.

00:47:38 ◼   ► And all of them are doing this crazy forwarding chain, where as I have created new ones and eventually abandoned them, I set them to forward to what is the more current email address.

00:47:49 ◼   ► So it all filters back to the same place now.

00:47:52 ◼   ► But I think people who've known me for a very long time, if they send me one of my older... send me a message to one of my older email addresses,

00:47:59 ◼   ► It probably goes through three or four email addresses that all each say, "Oh, forward to this one now. Oh, forward to this one now."

00:48:05 ◼   ► Before it ends up at what is my current email address. So I don't know, I guess the way to put it is it feels more...

00:48:12 ◼   ► It feels more honest and it feels more easy to manage to just have it all end up in one account.

00:48:20 ◼   ► And then to try and use

00:48:22 ◼   ► smart filters or rules on that one account.

00:48:28 ◼   ► That just feels way more straightforward than trying to manage a bunch of accounts and then also

00:48:34 ◼   ► Manage rules maybe on those or smart filters. It just doesn't it seems like duplicates

00:48:40 ◼   ► It seems like duplicate work and plus I know people who have

00:48:43 ◼   ► Secret contact email addresses that you're supposed to use

00:48:47 ◼   ► To get in touch with them

00:48:49 ◼   ► But then this also becomes a problem of now you have a secret to keep or now you have to remember

00:48:54 ◼   ► Which email address you're supposed to use to get in touch with that person

00:48:58 ◼   ► It also puts a burden of effort on everyone else who is contacting you in some way.

00:49:04 ◼   ► So it's almost like a security through obscurity measure to have secret email addresses.

00:49:13 ◼   ► Well, they're eventually going to be not secret, they're eventually going to spread out, and then you just have to do the whole thing over again.

00:49:20 ◼   ► So that's why I'm much more focused on trying to have a system that just works for all of my email.

00:49:26 ◼   ► And I don't find segmenting that stuff works very well.

00:49:31 ◼   ► But I mean I know you have a few email addresses. Do you segment it?

00:49:36 ◼   ► Like do you find this useful to do or do you have it all go to one place as well?

00:49:39 ◼   ► It all goes to one place.

00:49:40 ◼   ► So you do the same as me then?

00:49:42 ◼   ► Yeah, although I don't really yet have many filters in place.

00:49:46 ◼   ► The only filters I have is for stuff to go immediately to archive, which tends to be

00:49:52 ◼   ► notifications of things.

00:49:54 ◼   ► So like for example, I want them there in case I need to search for them, but I don't

00:49:59 ◼   ► ever want to see them.

00:50:00 ◼   ► Exactly, exactly.

00:50:01 ◼   ► Yeah, I have a ton of stuff that does that as well.

00:50:03 ◼   ► So like my thing is, my reason that I don't have this, and I can totally see why it works

00:50:08 ◼   ► for some people, but my main problem with email is the psychological burden it places

00:50:14 ◼   ► on me, right?

00:50:15 ◼   ► seeing the number. This doesn't fix that because I would still be adding all of those email

00:50:20 ◼   ► accounts to the same email app.

00:50:24 ◼   ► So I'm always going to see, even if I just go into one inbox, I'm still going to see

00:50:28 ◼   ► that number on the big inbox, which is exactly the same as the problem that I have now. And

00:50:34 ◼   ► then you could start getting really crazy with it, being like, "Right, so I use mail.app

00:50:38 ◼   ► for this email account, and that's just never going to work for me." Because then it's like,

00:50:43 ◼   ► well now I have to have six email apps open and it's just a nightmare.

00:50:48 ◼   ► I can totally see why some people do it.

00:50:50 ◼   ► You are perfectly right that the only way this is practical is if you are also willing to use multiple email applications.

00:50:56 ◼   ► And that is a bridge that I am simply not willing to cross.

00:51:00 ◼   ► As it is, I use two things for email and that's already more than I really want to.

00:51:06 ◼   ► And the only reason that I use two is because on iOS I have drafts set up as a kind of faux email account that allows me to send a message to someone without having to open up and look at my own email account.

00:51:20 ◼   ► And I do the same thing on the Mac with Airmail, it's called, which I have set up as an outgoing only email account so I don't have to open up, like look at all the stuff that has come into me if I just want to send an email to someone.

00:51:34 ◼   ► That's as close as I'm willing to get to actually using multiple email accounts, or multiple email apps

00:51:40 ◼   ► And really that's just like using 1.1 email apps

00:51:43 ◼   ► So yes, I'm not willing to have multiple ones

00:51:46 ◼   ► And that's the only way I think that having multiple email addresses is helpful in a segmenting way

00:51:52 ◼   ► In the same way that Slack is segmented for our communication

00:51:57 ◼   ► You need to have a whole other app and just rather deal with email all in one place in a consistent way

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00:54:24 ◼   ► I think we briefly touched on this in a previous episode that you tend to use mail.app for

00:54:31 ◼   ► your iOS and OS X majority of email processing stuff, right?

00:54:37 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, essentially all of it.

00:54:40 ◼   ► Is that purely because of utility or is it you're just stuck, like you know how to use

00:54:45 ◼   ► it, you're stuck in its ways kind of thing?

00:54:46 ◼   ► you've used it forever. I am in the minority here of I, for the most part, like the way

00:54:52 ◼   ► that it looks. Like I've tried to use Gmail stuff and personally I find it hideous. I

00:54:59 ◼   ► know that there are people who are all in on using Gmail for email and I don't like

00:55:04 ◼   ► using their web interface. I have no- it just- it does not work with the way I think about

00:55:11 ◼   ► email for whatever reason and I also just think it is ugly. Whereas I like the fact

00:55:15 ◼   ► that mail is relatively clean.

00:55:18 ◼   ► Like there's, and this is why I especially like doing mail

00:55:21 ◼   ► on my iPad or on the iPhone, is like okay,

00:55:24 ◼   ► it's very clean, like you're just looking at the message,

00:55:27 ◼   ► there's not a whole bunch of stuff all over the place,

00:55:29 ◼   ► and you're just looking at one at a time.

00:55:31 ◼   ► I really like that.

00:55:32 ◼   ► Whereas Gmail has just always felt really,

00:55:34 ◼   ► really messy to me.

00:55:35 ◼   ► So that's why I use these, I actually do like them.

00:55:39 ◼   ► I feel like I'm the only person who likes mail.

00:55:41 ◼   ► They're obviously the things that frustrate me about it.

00:55:44 ◼   ► Although on my Mac I definitely love, there's a plugin for Mail which is called MailActon

00:55:51 ◼   ► which I would be very sad if it didn't work anymore.

00:55:53 ◼   ► But it does allow me to assign just some keystrokes that will automatically do things to a message.

00:55:59 ◼   ► So I have it set up so that if I press CTRL+A while I'm looking at a message, it will archive

00:56:06 ◼   ► that message but it'll also make sure to clear any flags that are on that message and to

00:56:11 ◼   ► make sure that the message is unread because sometimes I'll actually archive something

00:56:17 ◼   ► so quickly that it doesn't pass the like three second timer of "yes this is an unread message"

00:56:23 ◼   ► so I just want to make sure that like if something loads and I immediately go like "nope boom"

00:56:28 ◼   ► in the archive I don't want the archive to be cluttered up with random messages that

00:56:32 ◼   ► are still marked as unread. So that is a handy little thing that I use.

00:56:36 ◼   ► The fastest archiver in the West.

00:56:38 ◼   ► Yeah exactly.

00:56:40 ◼   ► It doesn't even have the time to recognize it's been read.

00:56:44 ◼   ► But yes, that's a male acton.

00:56:47 ◼   ► Big fan of that.

00:56:48 ◼   ► I quite like that on the Mac.

00:56:50 ◼   ► So you said you don't like Gmail.

00:56:53 ◼   ► Do you use Gmail for your web email hosting?

00:56:56 ◼   ► Or do you use something completely different?

00:56:59 ◼   ► I used Gmail for years and then I want to say it was maybe six months or a year ago

00:57:07 ◼   ► now.

00:57:08 ◼   ► relative times. But somewhere in that boundary I had what was a disastrous problem with Gmail

00:57:18 ◼   ► and Mail talking to each other. Which Apple and Gmail have never really played well together,

00:57:24 ◼   ► there have always been minor problems.

00:57:26 ◼   ► I remember this.

00:57:27 ◼   ► Yes.

00:57:28 ◼   ► Yeah, there was an update to OS X that basically meant they couldn't, you just couldn't use

00:57:33 ◼   ► Gmail and Mail anymore. That was why a lot of people don't use Mail, that's why I stopped

00:57:37 ◼   ► using mail was because I couldn't get my email anymore so it was like well I'm

00:57:42 ◼   ► just gonna go elsewhere. Yeah if you're using mail I can't wholeheartedly

00:57:47 ◼   ► recommend using Gmail with it but it wasn't I didn't run into that problem

00:57:52 ◼   ► where you couldn't access it I ran into a problem where and my feeling is I don't

00:57:58 ◼   ► care whose fault this is I don't care if it was Apple's fault I don't care if it

00:58:00 ◼   ► was Gmail's fault I just ran into this problem where I don't even know how to

00:58:05 ◼   ► describe it, but basically I had a big number of flagged messages in my Gmail system that

00:58:12 ◼   ► I needed to reply to, and at some point all of those flags got lost. And the way Gmail

00:58:19 ◼   ► works is that you just have all of the messages in one giant archive, and it kind of smart

00:58:26 ◼   ► pulls out the ones that are flagged so you can just see them. The flagged ones aren't

00:58:30 ◼   ► in an actual separate folder that you can just go and look.

00:58:34 ◼   ► And so if you lose the flags, those messages are just lost

00:58:39 ◼   ► among the tens and tens of thousands of emails that are in your whole archive.

00:58:43 ◼   ► You're never going to find them again. And so I had a big chunk of flag

00:58:48 ◼   ► messages to reply to,

00:58:49 ◼   ► I lost all those flags, and that was my

00:58:53 ◼   ► "You know what, the way Gmail works with its funny, it is IMAP but it isn't really

00:58:57 ◼   ► IMAP." I'm like, "I'm done with this.

00:58:59 ◼   ► I want to have a system where it's folders and I know that I'm putting messages in those folders and they're just there.

00:59:07 ◼   ► I don't want any of this fancy Gmail stuff that I don't even use anyway.

00:59:11 ◼   ► So I switched over and I'm now using Fastmail as the backend to my actual email.

00:59:18 ◼   ► That is what is happening behind the scenes.

00:59:21 ◼   ► I pay Fastmail now to provide the service which is just a standard IMAP client.

00:59:27 ◼   ► that's what I'm currently using.

00:59:28 ◼   ► And I'm very, very happy with it.

00:59:30 ◼   ► I'm very happy with it.

00:59:32 ◼   ► - When we started Relay, we started off with Fast Mail.

00:59:36 ◼   ► But we, for some reason, something went awry

00:59:42 ◼   ► and we somehow ended up getting a ton of spam.

00:59:47 ◼   ► And it was somehow not passing through

00:59:52 ◼   ► the spam filters very well.

00:59:53 ◼   ► Something went wrong somewhere.

00:59:56 ◼   ► But what was happening was people then started to email me

00:59:59 ◼   ► like potential sponsors, which was very early in the company

01:00:03 ◼   ► and the emails were bouncing.

01:00:04 ◼   ► And I basically said to Steven,

01:00:07 ◼   ► "We need to change this right now."

01:00:11 ◼   ► Like this needs to be fixed,

01:00:13 ◼   ► I will not allow this to happen again

01:00:15 ◼   ► and then we moved to Gmail and we have Google Apps for us.

01:00:19 ◼   ► And that also allowed me to,

01:00:21 ◼   ► because I wanted to be able to try

01:00:23 ◼   ► all of the fancy email apps that integrate with Gmail, like Mailbox.

01:00:27 ◼   ► Right, of course.

01:00:28 ◼   ► And I couldn't use those if I was using a third-party IMAP provider or something like

01:00:34 ◼   ► that.

01:00:35 ◼   ► So we use Google Apps and I use Mailbox as my email app of choice.

01:00:40 ◼   ► I'm just going to say for anybody who does use Fastmail, I ran into the same thing straight

01:00:44 ◼   ► away of, "Boy, I seem to be getting a lot of spam and this is weird."

01:00:48 ◼   ► Fastmail has some very bizarre default settings for how it handles spam.

01:00:54 ◼   ► And I almost want to reach out to the people at Fastmail and go like,

01:00:58 ◼   ► "You know if you change the defaults for the way you handle this it'd be much better?"

01:01:01 ◼   ► But there is a way in the settings if you do use Fastmail to tell it,

01:01:06 ◼   ► "Here, Fastmail. Look at my archive of messages."

01:01:12 ◼   ► And those messages, learn them as not spam.

01:01:15 ◼   ► And for some reason I don't know why it does that.

01:01:17 ◼   ► It's just trying to evaluate spam in the abstract against the whole internet, I guess.

01:01:24 ◼   ► Whereas it's not like Gmail does by default, looking at your messages and trying to learn, "Okay, what kind of messages are sent to this person?"

01:01:33 ◼   ► So if you sign up with FastMail, make sure to go into the settings and tell it, like, "Yes, please look at my archive of messages and learn what is and is not spam to me."

01:01:43 ◼   ► And ever since I did that, I haven't had any problems.

01:01:46 ◼   ► But yes, the default setup is a bit weird.

01:01:50 ◼   ► You do get a lot of spam.

01:01:51 ◼   ► So I think they need to work on that.

01:01:54 ◼   ► But otherwise, I'm quite happy with it.

01:01:57 ◼   ► - On your phone and on your iPad,

01:01:59 ◼   ► I assume you obviously use Mail.app,

01:02:01 ◼   ► but then you also mentioned having drafts

01:02:04 ◼   ► as like this send-only email account.

01:02:07 ◼   ► How did this come to be?

01:02:09 ◼   ► - I just know I wanted to solve that problem of

01:02:11 ◼   ► I have thought of a thing

01:02:12 ◼   ► and I want to send a message to somebody,

01:02:15 ◼   ► but I don't want to open up my email and get distracted by things that are in there.

01:02:21 ◼   ► I realize, oh, if I set up a separate email address, which is basically my email address .mobile, right?

01:02:32 ◼   ► That I can send messages from there, but then the .mobile address, its rule is to forward everything to my real address.

01:02:43 ◼   ► So if I send somebody an email from my .mobile one, they can reply to it and it will go to

01:02:50 ◼   ► my real email address.

01:02:52 ◼   ► It won't go back to the mobile one.

01:02:54 ◼   ► So that way, the mobile email address is always clear.

01:02:59 ◼   ► There's nothing that's in there because it sends outgoing messages and it redirects everything

01:03:06 ◼   ► that is coming in.

01:03:08 ◼   ► So I just find that very useful for, "Oh great, I want to send a message and I don't want

01:03:12 ◼   ► to get distracted by all of my email.

01:03:14 ◼   ► Do you have this configured in any different way on your iPad?

01:03:17 ◼   ► Your iPad definitely seems to be for you like a dream email device, right?

01:03:23 ◼   ► It's the one that I use the most.

01:03:24 ◼   ► I wouldn't say that it's a dream email device because all email is ultimately a nightmare.

01:03:34 ◼   ► But I find that it is the one where it is the least stressful way to deal with email.

01:03:41 ◼   ► That's the way I would describe it. It's the cleanest and it's the simplest way of dealing with email.

01:03:46 ◼   ► But it is not always the most convenient because sometimes in emails you'll need to attach something

01:03:51 ◼   ► or I'll need to look something up, and then on the iPad that can become kind of a pain in the butt.

01:03:55 ◼   ► But all things being equal I would rather do email on my iPad.

01:03:58 ◼   ► Have you ever tried anything like Google inbox or mailbox?

01:04:02 ◼   ► Basically something that can categorize email on your behalf.

01:04:06 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

01:04:07 ◼   ► Have you ever tried any of these services?

01:04:09 ◼   ► Because I have so many email addresses, many of them are Gmail addresses.

01:04:14 ◼   ► And so yes, I have tried playing around with all of the various plugs into Gmail different services.

01:04:21 ◼   ► And I think those things are a lot like to-do apps.

01:04:27 ◼   ► If you look on the App Store, there are a bazillion different to-do apps.

01:04:32 ◼   ► And you have to find a to-do app that just fits with your mind very well, and there are just--people think about their to-dos in very different ways, where one app is good for someone and it's just a terrible fit for somebody else.

01:04:51 ◼   ► I think a lot of these Gmail apps like Inbox or like Mailbox, if they happen to line up with the way you think about email, then they're amazing.

01:05:01 ◼   ► But if they don't fit the shape of your mind, then they are terrible.

01:05:06 ◼   ► And so some of the features in Mailbox about, you can press a button and say, "Oh, like boomerang this back to me in a week. I don't want to see this now, but make it look as though this message just got sent to me anew in a week."

01:05:17 ◼   ► Something about that just does not fit my mind at all.

01:05:22 ◼   ► And Inbox on the other end of that I feel like Inbox is trying to do too many things automatically.

01:05:29 ◼   ► And I just don't like that as well.

01:05:31 ◼   ► But for the right people, the impression that I get is those different services are just amazing if it matches up with your mind.

01:05:39 ◼   ► In the same way that if you find a to-do manager that matches with your mind, you feel like, "Oh thank god, this is exactly what I'm looking for."

01:05:46 ◼   ► So that's kind of my thought on those things.

01:05:50 ◼   ► I'm not really very comfortable with an app that tries to make decisions on my behalf.

01:05:59 ◼   ► That's how I feel with inboxes.

01:06:00 ◼   ► It's like it's doing too much, like it's categorizing things and moving things around and putting

01:06:06 ◼   ► things in this hidden folder.

01:06:08 ◼   ► I don't really like that, but I am like the exact opposite in you in that my favorite

01:06:13 ◼   ► feature of mailbox is the idea that I can take an email and say show me this

01:06:17 ◼   ► in a week. And that's because I really hate to see email in my inbox.

01:06:23 ◼   ► I like to be able to clear it because it makes my mind feel a bit clearer

01:06:28 ◼   ► when I go to my email app that there's not like a hundred things in there.

01:06:32 ◼   ► And there's some things where it's just like well there is something in here

01:06:35 ◼   ► that I need to do. Like this person says you know email me about this in July.

01:06:39 ◼   ► Well, I can then just set a thing which just says on July 1st, bring this email

01:06:45 ◼   ► back. And that really works for me. And also as I could just a way of like, just

01:06:51 ◼   ► get rid of this today, because I'm not gonna deal with this today. I don't want

01:06:55 ◼   ► to keep seeing it today. Show me it later and I'll deal with it later. And I quite

01:06:59 ◼   ► like that. That works quite nicely for me. And that is an element of which, you

01:07:03 ◼   ► know, a lot of people really, really don't like of using your emails like a task

01:07:06 ◼   ► list but quite frequently my email inbox is a task list and I also...

01:07:12 ◼   ► Yeah there's no way around that.

01:07:14 ◼   ► Yeah so I whilst I use OmniFocus like to try and navigate my to-do's and things

01:07:21 ◼   ► like that there is still stuff in my email inbox which are tasks that need to

01:07:25 ◼   ► be completed so sometimes it's just easier for me to just be like okay I

01:07:29 ◼   ► will treat this as a task I will come back to it later. Like mailbox does have

01:07:33 ◼   ► more stuff like allowing you to create lists and things like that with the email.

01:07:37 ◼   ► I'm like, "Nope, not doing that." But I also quite like the fact that you can

01:07:41 ◼   ► reorder email as well. So you can just bring that one down, bring that

01:07:45 ◼   ► one up, and that works quite nicely for me. So I like Mailbox for that.

01:07:49 ◼   ► I always feel like email is its own separate universe

01:07:53 ◼   ► when it comes to all kinds of problems that are related to

01:07:57 ◼   ► getting things done and organizing your life and task management.

01:08:01 ◼   ► I've just always felt like email is a completely separate thing from that that needs to be dealt with in its own way.

01:08:10 ◼   ► And so, I've discussed before, I've used a broadly getting things done kind of system, but I've always ended up partially recreating that within email.

01:08:20 ◼   ► Because it's just so self-contained and also so big that when you mention like, "Oh, send this email back to me in a month."

01:08:29 ◼   ► My version of doing that is I have a folder called "Waiting For"

01:08:33 ◼   ► that any of those "Oh I need to reply to this but not in any immediate timeframe"

01:08:39 ◼   ► I put those messages in there and then I just have a list of them

01:08:43 ◼   ► because it's too much overhead to then go into my regular task management program and say

01:08:49 ◼   ► "Oh create a task to reply to this"

01:08:51 ◼   ► because then in the future me is then going to need to search for that email

01:08:55 ◼   ► You need some way to manage all of this stuff.

01:08:57 ◼   ► It's just such a big thing.

01:09:00 ◼   ► But yeah, so my version of that is just have a folder

01:09:03 ◼   ► and I prefer to see all of those things there.

01:09:05 ◼   ► Whereas with something like Mailbox,

01:09:08 ◼   ► I always have this feeling of,

01:09:10 ◼   ► well, how many emails have I boomeranged to myself?

01:09:12 ◼   ► When are they gonna come back?

01:09:13 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:09:14 ◼   ► - You can see it.

01:09:15 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, do they have a list?

01:09:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's a little button you just press.

01:09:18 ◼   ► The way that their app is navigated,

01:09:20 ◼   ► they have three buttons along the very top.

01:09:23 ◼   ► They have a clock, an email of an intray, and then a tick.

01:09:26 ◼   ► And then the clock is the snoozed email.

01:09:29 ◼   ► Then the one in the middle, the intray, is your inbox.

01:09:31 ◼   ► And then they have the little tick, which is the stuff that you've archived.

01:09:34 ◼   ► Hmm. Interesting. Interesting. I missed that. That's better.

01:09:37 ◼   ► My issue with what you're doing is, like, how do you know

01:09:42 ◼   ► when any of those emails need to be actioned on?

01:09:45 ◼   ► They just sit in this little list.

01:09:47 ◼   ► And it's like you'd have to go into the mall to find out

01:09:51 ◼   ► when you're supposed to work on them.

01:09:52 ◼   ► Yeah, that is definitely the problem.

01:09:56 ◼   ► And so I do have a note to review that every once in a while.

01:10:00 ◼   ► But the way of mailbox boomeranging something back to you is much more precise.

01:10:05 ◼   ► Presuming that you check your email frequently. You check it every day.

01:10:09 ◼   ► Which was definitely not the situation that I was in.

01:10:12 ◼   ► But yeah, so this is what I mean. It's like we're doing similar things in slightly different ways.

01:10:17 ◼   ► And that's why it just... if the app fits your mind, it's great.

01:10:21 ◼   ► great. I'm not against those things but I just haven't found one that fits my mind.

01:10:27 ◼   ► And that's why it's so difficult to suggest to somebody to use a different email app.

01:10:33 ◼   ► Because if it just doesn't gel with your way of thinking then it's never going to.

01:10:39 ◼   ► Potentially we have reached the end of talking about email.

01:10:42 ◼   ► Oh thank god I was just about to ask, please let this be over. We must be done talking

01:10:47 ◼   ► about email.

01:10:48 ◼   ► I think we're done. I'm not going to say we're done forever, but we're at least done for

01:10:53 ◼   ► now.

01:10:54 ◼   ► We're done forever.

01:10:55 ◼   ► We're done for now. So I wanted, we were talking about your iPad a moment ago. And I noticed

01:11:03 ◼   ► that on Twitter you were talking about some of the new iOS 9 features, so I assume you've

01:11:09 ◼   ► installed the public beta on your iPad?

01:11:12 ◼   ► Yes, we discussed on one of the earlier episodes that I was going to wait for the public beta

01:11:17 ◼   ► and it came out, I don't know, what was it, a week ago? Two weeks ago now?

01:11:19 ◼   ► Yeah, something like that.

01:11:21 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. And I immediately installed it on my iPad because I wanted to check things out

01:11:26 ◼   ► and I'm really liking it so far. I'm really liking it. It definitely feels like this is

01:11:31 ◼   ► the iPad-focused iOS update. And since I'm a very heavy iPad user, I am pretty happy

01:11:38 ◼   ► with that.

01:11:39 ◼   ► Have you installed it on all of your iPads?

01:11:44 ◼   ► No, Myke. I have not installed it on all of my iPads.

01:11:47 ◼   ► Okay, so the thing is, right, about that question is I know that it sounds like I am poking

01:11:52 ◼   ► fun at you and there is a very small element to that, but I'm surprised to hear that you

01:11:56 ◼   ► haven't done it because now, like, they are not the same.

01:12:01 ◼   ► Like your iPads now have different functionality.

01:12:06 ◼   ► Well partly, I put it on my iPad Air 2 and that is because I wanted to be able to test

01:12:12 ◼   ► the features that are most interesting to me which is to be able to do the app side

01:12:15 ◼   ► by side.

01:12:16 ◼   ► I only have one iPad Air 2 then.

01:12:18 ◼   ► Yes, I only have one iPad Air 2.

01:12:20 ◼   ► Look, guy, you can't, like, you know, talk about me as being the crazy one here.

01:12:25 ◼   ► It's impossible for me to know, because you have so many of them.

01:12:29 ◼   ► I only have one of each kind that I have. I don't have multiples of the same kind.

01:12:34 ◼   ► That is the bridge too far.

01:12:36 ◼   ► But yeah, so I just have the one iPad Air 2. I installed the public beta on that.

01:12:41 ◼   ► And I also knew that this was a good time to do it because I was going to be traveling shortly

01:12:46 ◼   ► and I only bring one iPad with me when I travel, Myke.

01:12:49 ◼   ► So I was going to bring the iPad Air 2.

01:12:52 ◼   ► And so I thought, "Oh, this is a good time because then I won't be switching back and forth between devices

01:12:57 ◼   ► and get frustrated with things and I can just try it out."

01:13:01 ◼   ► So that's what I have been doing. That's my situation.

01:13:04 ◼   ► Does that answer what you wanted to know about which iPads?

01:13:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so.

01:13:07 ◼   ► Yeah, you good with that?

01:13:08 ◼   ► Although I am surprised that you don't have one in the case and one in your carry-on in

01:13:12 ◼   ► case something gets lost, but...

01:13:14 ◼   ► Oh no, I haven't just made you do that, have I?

01:13:18 ◼   ► No, no, I haven't.

01:13:20 ◼   ► No I haven't done that.

01:13:21 ◼   ► I haven't done that.

01:13:24 ◼   ► The redundancy too far.

01:13:26 ◼   ► So the app, like the multitasking features, like being able to have two apps open at a

01:13:33 ◼   ► time, I assume that you're probably getting some use out of this because you use a few

01:13:37 ◼   ► of Apple's official apps, right? Because at the moment, as we are where we are today,

01:13:43 ◼   ► the only apps that this works with are Apple's inbuilt applications, where later on third

01:13:48 ◼   ► parties will be able to integrate this functionality and you'll be able to use like OmniFocus and

01:13:53 ◼   ► Fantastical side-by-side for example.

01:13:55 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the third party ones using it.

01:13:59 ◼   ► Yep.

01:14:00 ◼   ► And I wanted to play with it because it's just different handling something than thinking

01:14:05 ◼   ► about it in a conceptual way, to be able to play with it in person and say, "Oh, okay,

01:14:11 ◼   ► this is how it feels when you snap two apps together.

01:14:13 ◼   ► This is what the size looks like right in front of my face."

01:14:16 ◼   ► You get a much better sense of it than watching Craig Federighi do a demo of it, and then

01:14:20 ◼   ► you think, "Ooh, I wonder how…"

01:14:21 ◼   ► It's also useful to understand the limitations of how it really works.

01:14:26 ◼   ► When you see a demo, it's very easy for your brain to fill in a lot of details that

01:14:31 ◼   ► And then you later on realize like, "Oh, it doesn't quite work like that."

01:14:35 ◼   ► Or, "Oh, I made this assumption." So I wanted to play with it just to get a much clearer

01:14:39 ◼   ► sense sooner about how potentially useful it can be.

01:14:43 ◼   ► And my answer is very. Although because I use a lot

01:14:47 ◼   ► of third-party apps, what I can actually do with it right now

01:14:51 ◼   ► is quite limited. But the few times something has come up, I've thought,

01:14:55 ◼   ► "Oh, this is just great." So if I'm, say, looking at something on

01:14:59 ◼   ► on a webpage, but I'm also busy instant messaging with someone, man is it a relief to just have

01:15:05 ◼   ► both of those on the screen instead of having to constantly flip back and forth to reply

01:15:10 ◼   ► to the person.

01:15:11 ◼   ► I can just have the ongoing conversation and keep doing what I'm doing.

01:15:15 ◼   ► That is great even just with the built-in apps, so I'm a huge fan of that.

01:15:21 ◼   ► But by far and away, my favorite feature is that the Alt+Tab switcher is on the iPad.

01:15:33 ◼   ► This is just glorious to me.

01:15:37 ◼   ► Ever since I connected a keyboard to an iPad for the first time, I just constantly hit

01:15:44 ◼   ► Alt+Tab to switch between things, and it does nothing.

01:15:47 ◼   ► always been infuriating that it's not there on the iPad.

01:15:50 ◼   ► And this works now and I feel like, "Oh God,

01:15:53 ◼   ► such relief!" Because

01:15:56 ◼   ► I'm a very, very heavy keyboard user. I try to use

01:15:59 ◼   ► a mouse, you know, the least amount possible.

01:16:02 ◼   ► And so yes, on my regular computer I'm always just

01:16:05 ◼   ► Alt+Tabbing between stuff. I never use the mouse to switch

01:16:08 ◼   ► applications. And so I am hugely

01:16:11 ◼   ► happy that it's on the iPad. I would

01:16:14 ◼   ► upgrade to iOS 9 immediately and they could charge 20 bucks for that upgrade if it only

01:16:20 ◼   ► had the Alt Tab Switcher.

01:16:21 ◼   ► I'd be like, "Yes!

01:16:22 ◼   ► Tim Cook, take my money!

01:16:24 ◼   ► 20 bucks just for the Alt Tab Switcher, nothing else?

01:16:26 ◼   ► Great!

01:16:27 ◼   ► This is the best iOS update ever!"

01:16:29 ◼   ► So that, and the Alt Tabbing and having apps side by side, I think that they're definitely,

01:16:38 ◼   ► like you mentioned before, it makes things feel faster on the iPad, like going from app

01:16:43 ◼   ► to app to app to app.

01:16:46 ◼   ► And one of the things I've noticed as well, and I wonder if you've noticed this, you know

01:16:50 ◼   ► when you would click to go, like you click a link and it would open another application,

01:16:54 ◼   ► and it would do that thing where it was like the app went away and like span around and

01:16:58 ◼   ► here comes the next one.

01:17:00 ◼   ► They have now replaced this with just the app slides in from the side and it makes...

01:17:04 ◼   ► I love that.

01:17:06 ◼   ► It makes it feel so much faster.

01:17:08 ◼   ► And I just want to point out before we carry on, this is how it works on Android, that

01:17:12 ◼   ► is the animation before people mentioned that.

01:17:14 ◼   ► And also the fact that there is this persistent back button

01:17:17 ◼   ► now is also a thing that's in Android.

01:17:20 ◼   ► So they are good things that have come from Android to iOS.

01:17:24 ◼   ► But it definitely helps 'cause it doesn't feel like,

01:17:27 ◼   ► let me just wait for you, iPad, for a moment

01:17:30 ◼   ► while you spin some apps around.

01:17:32 ◼   ► Especially with some of the things that we both use

01:17:35 ◼   ► like Launch Center Pro which are basically there

01:17:37 ◼   ► to open up other applications sometimes.

01:17:40 ◼   ► You feel like you're waiting for weeks whilst apps are spinning round and round and round.

01:17:45 ◼   ► This is a case where I bet that the slide-over thing, it might not actually be any faster

01:17:52 ◼   ► or just insignificantly faster than the swap-around application, but it just feels so much faster

01:18:00 ◼   ► than watching them go like, "Oh, here.

01:18:02 ◼   ► Whoop!

01:18:03 ◼   ► The one in the front goes to the back and the one in the back comes to the front."

01:18:06 ◼   ► Maybe it's a tenth of a second or two tenths of a second actually faster, but something

01:18:10 ◼   ► about that animation just feels so much faster.

01:18:16 ◼   ► It's just a good user interface design, and if they took that from Android, great!

01:18:21 ◼   ► That is really nice.

01:18:23 ◼   ► It is much, much improved.

01:18:24 ◼   ► And as I also agree that the labeled back button at the top is very nice, so when you

01:18:29 ◼   ► go into a different app at the top left of the screen it'll say, "Click to return to

01:18:34 ◼   ► Safari if Safari is where you were last. That is also very nice. It definitely feels like

01:18:40 ◼   ► moving around and switching between applications is vastly, vastly improved.

01:18:46 ◼   ► Have you tried the picture-in-picture video at all?

01:18:52 ◼   ► I just played around with it, but no, I haven't done that. Mainly because I don't tend to

01:18:56 ◼   ► watch video very much on my iPad. So I haven't had a chance to really play with that in person.

01:19:02 ◼   ► I just wanted to see that it worked.

01:19:04 ◼   ► And I was showing it off to my wife,

01:19:06 ◼   ► and then her opinion was,

01:19:08 ◼   ► "Oh, this is the greatest thing ever,

01:19:09 ◼   ► "this moving around video, picture-in-picture thing."

01:19:11 ◼   ► But I haven't used it much myself.

01:19:13 ◼   ► - I love it.

01:19:15 ◼   ► I really, really love it, yeah.

01:19:17 ◼   ► - But you can only use it with the videos app now, right?

01:19:20 ◼   ► Or is there any?

01:19:20 ◼   ► - And Safari.

01:19:21 ◼   ► - Oh, okay, hmm, interesting.

01:19:23 ◼   ► - So it's just, it's fantastic.

01:19:25 ◼   ► So I can be, there might be like,

01:19:27 ◼   ► say like there's like a YouTube video or something

01:19:29 ◼   ► that I want to watch, but I'm not like,

01:19:31 ◼   ► I don't need to be super engrossed in it.

01:19:34 ◼   ► Like a Let's Play.

01:19:36 ◼   ► - Right.

01:19:38 ◼   ► - And--

01:19:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, something long that you want in the background

01:19:40 ◼   ► that is also primarily audio content.

01:19:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, or that just doesn't require a ton of attention,

01:19:47 ◼   ► or maybe, and so then I can have that video playing

01:19:50 ◼   ► and be reading Twitter at the same time,

01:19:53 ◼   ► and it's like, that is great.

01:19:54 ◼   ► Or one other thing that I've been able to do

01:19:57 ◼   ► is to be able to take notes on a video,

01:20:00 ◼   ► which I do a lot for research and stuff.

01:20:03 ◼   ► And it's like, this is just fantastic for that.

01:20:07 ◼   ► Because it still enables you to have the focus

01:20:12 ◼   ► that an iPad gives you,

01:20:13 ◼   ► because you can only see the video on the one application.

01:20:16 ◼   ► And so it still allows me anyway

01:20:19 ◼   ► to feel like I'm really focused on it,

01:20:21 ◼   ► rather than using it on my laptop,

01:20:23 ◼   ► which is like buzzing and binging

01:20:25 ◼   ► and throwing things all over the place.

01:20:27 ◼   ► So I really, really like that feature.

01:20:29 ◼   ► And then I guess the last one that I think is good for you, I love it too, is the transit stuff. The transit maps.

01:20:37 ◼   ► Yeah, because I haven't been in London, I haven't had a chance to use this directly. But I did look at it and I thought, "Oh wow, it's nice to see that for the major train stations they have the exact entrances and exits labeled."

01:20:49 ◼   ► That makes a huge difference because I mean some of the stations...

01:20:53 ◼   ► Like you go to Kings Cross, St. Pancras in London.

01:20:57 ◼   ► I mean that's just like a massive two train stations

01:21:01 ◼   ► interconnected with each other. Big, big problem.

01:21:04 ◼   ► When a map would show it as a single dot it was just a lie.

01:21:09 ◼   ► If you were going to that single dot you might be

01:21:13 ◼   ► 40 minutes away from wherever you're trying to go.

01:21:16 ◼   ► a thousand minutes away from wherever you're trying to go.

01:21:19 ◼   ► So I think that's a really big deal and it's...

01:21:23 ◼   ► I was just looking at the train stations that I know well and thinking "yes, like

01:21:26 ◼   ► they got this exactly right" and some of the tricky

01:21:29 ◼   ► little details about, you know, where entrances are, where you

01:21:33 ◼   ► can walk, it looks like they have it really pat down. I'd be

01:21:35 ◼   ► curious to know where they pulled that data from,

01:21:38 ◼   ► but it looks very useful, especially for anybody getting around in a

01:21:41 ◼   ► city that they're not familiar with. I genuinely think that that data comes

01:21:46 ◼   ► from humans.

01:21:47 ◼   ► Yeah, it has to, it has to.

01:21:50 ◼   ► It's very limited.

01:21:51 ◼   ► The transit maps are only in a handful of cities, except in China where it's in every

01:21:56 ◼   ► single one of them, because apparently they have all this data.

01:22:00 ◼   ► It's really easy to do transit mapping in China because they have one company that manages

01:22:06 ◼   ► all of the data, unlike some other cities in the world where you have to get it from

01:22:10 ◼   ► a couple of different sources.

01:22:11 ◼   ► I think that a lot of this entrance and exit stuff, to me, feels like it only could be human collected,

01:22:19 ◼   ► because otherwise Google would use it. Like if it just came from Transport for London,

01:22:23 ◼   ► like one of the companies that holds this data and licenses the timing and things like that of trains,

01:22:28 ◼   ► if they had this data, then other people would have bought it and would be using it.

01:22:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. Apple might have just paid people to do it.

01:22:36 ◼   ► But this is something where I'm like, I use Google Maps and I really like Google Maps

01:22:40 ◼   ► because Apple Maps can be kind of wonky for me in certain scenarios.

01:22:45 ◼   ► But I'm looking at it now and I'm like, well I'm probably at least in the meantime going

01:22:48 ◼   ► to switch to Apple Maps.

01:22:50 ◼   ► Because I use it sometimes when I want directions on my watch because the integration with the

01:22:55 ◼   ► watch is really good.

01:22:56 ◼   ► But now I'm like, that transit stuff, that is fantastic.

01:23:01 ◼   ► I really, really like their transit maps.

01:23:03 ◼   ► So I only have iOS 9 on my iPad right now, I don't have it on my phone, but I'm thinking

01:23:11 ◼   ► that that would be something that I would use a lot when I put it on my phone.

01:23:16 ◼   ► Yeah I was not going to install the public beta on my phone, especially while traveling.

01:23:20 ◼   ► The phone is too vital, I'm definitely not going to do that.

01:23:25 ◼   ► But on the iPad it was fun to do and fun to play around with.

01:23:29 ◼   ► So big thumbs up from me for the iOS 9 beta so far.

01:23:33 ◼   ► I'm really liking it. IMS9 is grey approved. Yes. Alright, we're gonna cut the show here I think. We are indeed sir.

01:23:39 ◼   ► Right because we're not gonna do questions. No. Because you and I are actually going to record

01:23:46 ◼   ► tomorrow and do a whole bunch of questions because of the traveling that I am doing so

01:23:52 ◼   ► In listener time they will hear us in a week, but I am going to hear you in less than 24 hours

01:24:00 ◼   ► I'm so excited.

01:24:01 ◼   ► It is a thing that is happening.