There’s a ton of great tips and tricks packed into this read! Probably one of the most comprehensive essays I’ve read on the topic. One question: How much time do you devote to batch‑reading emails/messages per day? I agree that batch‑responding is much more efficient than pinging messages throughout the day, but I’m always concerned about being a bottleneck for work-related conversations. So I'm curious how you've approached this and how you didn't fall behind or out of the loop despite being harder to reach.
For email batch-reading, the amount of time really varies (can be 3+ hours depending on complexity; can also be 15m). Depending on the work situation and how much bottlenecking you're causing (and how much of an issue this genuinely creates), you might need to invert and just block out time when you *won't* respond to emails/messages, rather than time when you will. One interesting thing I've observed is that there is a barbell in response times across the best performers I've known: they either respond to everything with shocking immediacy (minutes), or they clearly batch communication and responses can take days/weeks (or never). I've gravitated towards batching over time, but I have a lot of control over my schedule and I heavily optimize for 'deep work.' If you want to move towards batching without bottlenecking, I'd communicate your intention and give people the right to bypass it at their discretion.
There’s a ton of great tips and tricks packed into this read! Probably one of the most comprehensive essays I’ve read on the topic. One question: How much time do you devote to batch‑reading emails/messages per day? I agree that batch‑responding is much more efficient than pinging messages throughout the day, but I’m always concerned about being a bottleneck for work-related conversations. So I'm curious how you've approached this and how you didn't fall behind or out of the loop despite being harder to reach.
For email batch-reading, the amount of time really varies (can be 3+ hours depending on complexity; can also be 15m). Depending on the work situation and how much bottlenecking you're causing (and how much of an issue this genuinely creates), you might need to invert and just block out time when you *won't* respond to emails/messages, rather than time when you will. One interesting thing I've observed is that there is a barbell in response times across the best performers I've known: they either respond to everything with shocking immediacy (minutes), or they clearly batch communication and responses can take days/weeks (or never). I've gravitated towards batching over time, but I have a lot of control over my schedule and I heavily optimize for 'deep work.' If you want to move towards batching without bottlenecking, I'd communicate your intention and give people the right to bypass it at their discretion.