Email Extravaganza

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred and ninety four, which is first airing in late April of twenty twenty one. We are going to be talking all things email today. I know we've talked briefly about email in the past and our approaches to it and all that. But Sarah and I both recently read Cal Newport's new book A World Without Email. I reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal if anyone got a chance to see their review a couple of weeks ago, and Sarah also read it and had some thoughts on it. So we wanted to discuss how we approach emails. Some ideas that we've come up with over the years some thoughts from Cal's book as well. So, Sarah, how many emails do you have in your various inboxes right now? I have one hundred and sixty in my Gmail and one hundred and twenty seven in my work email. Right now as we are recording this, this is Thursday. So the day of the week has, as we will discuss, has some influence on how full my inboxes are likely to be on any given day. Oh and I look to see how many emails I got within like the last twenty four hour period, and it wasn't a super heavy email day. I don't think I got like sixty work emails and about actually a similar number of Gmail, half of which we're like spam and junk. Yeah, so that's why I say, I don't really know. I know, I get like it maybe like two hundred emails a day, but it's like a lot of it's spam and junk. You know that I somehow I try to avoid. But you know, you wind up on lists over time. It's not pure junk set. You've wound up on various lists that you wanted to read like a couple times, but then it keeps coming. And then so my Yahoo account is also out in the world in the public relations space that people get that list that in the past is like, oh well, this is a you know, journalist who covers X or whatever, and so people do email meself and occasional it's useful. So that's why I don't generally try to get myself off all these lists. But it does add up. So of the two hundred, maybe like twenty or twenty five or like a real interest, So I have to do a lot of deleting. I don't know. I don't archive stuff, so I probably have. I mean, I have definitely fifty sixty more thousand in my Yahoo, but I don't archive. It's just sitting there. That would be somebody else's archive. I have six hundred and seventeen unread ones, which to me means zero because I could probably go through and delete those six hundred and seventeen unread ones from the past somewhere, but I don't. It doesn't bother me, Sarah and I've discussed our differences of, you know, how we view these things, So the clutter doesn't bother me as much as I think it does, Sarah, because you do try to get to inbox sera, yes, but I'm like not fastidious about how I do it. So there are definitely So. I recently had Kelsey Wharton on Bestlaid Plans. She is a co host of the Girl Nextdoor podcast, and she talks a lot about organization and she has this like elaborate Gmail thing where she kind of manages her task via email and it sounds really really cool, but I don't actually do that. I just have like, I mean, the archive might as well be the delete button, except that I could like find it later. I mean, Gmail is very easy to do that. It's just xxxxx click the thing. I do prefer to do that versus your kind of more holistic like I kind of know what's in there because I guess it just gives me a sense that like at least I've scanned and I don't open everything. A lot of times stuff goes into the archives without ever being open, but it's like it's been processed, check it doesn't it filed anywhere. It just goes into a big bucket. Because as we'll talk about gmails search feature, it's pretty fantastic. I gotta say, like you really, you know, if you're like, oh, I want to remember, you know where we did gymnastics lessons in twenty sixteen, Like you can find that. It's amazing. Yeah, just type gymnastics and it'll come up. I mean, it's amazing. And I'm sure if I had fastidious folders that were like kids' activities, then I guess, I mean, I would still find it, but I get the same result. Folders is a waste of time. I mean, there's been research into this. It's a total waste of time. It actually takes you more time to find things via folders than it does to just search in any of the good email programs. Now, the search is better than you are going to come up with on your files. Now, I'm sure we're going to hear from somebody to be like, no, no, no, my filing system is perfect and I remember all my flys and folders and where it would have gone. But you are not average. Then let's put it that way. The timing studies have found that it is faster to do the search and it is to look back through folders to attempt to find things. So you clear it out on specific days of the week, then right, yeah, us, Well, and I'm not like again, I'm not like super super one hundred percent consistent about it. There's weeks that just get busy and it doesn't happen. So I don't know. Sometimes I feel like when I talk on this podcast, it sounds like I'm like, always stick to every ritual perfectly, and it's like, no, I describe my rituals because it's like the basic idea. But as I've said, I'm not a perfectionist, and so lots of times, maybe two weeks will go by. But I try weekly or bi weekly or whatever, usually on Fridays to get my work inbox to zero. And I do have one folder that I use for my work inbox. It basically funnel anything that I need to look back at later. I don't really use it to collect to do items. It's more like and this is like soon ish reference material of things that are still going on, like okay, we're planning our orientation schedule and I need to and I keep that till like I don't know, fifty or less, like it's not a huge box, and then everything else just goes into archives and I get to zero. And that's actually important from a work perspective, because I'll get little things in there that like they don't at first glance don't look that important. But it's like, oh my gosh, if I don't like fill out this form for ex resident to you know, finish their Florida licensing credentials, and I don't do it by a certain date, like they're not going to start on time, and so I really find it important to get to zero there. And then my Gmail, I usually do it at some point over the weekend, and there's no there's no sorting whatsoever. It's either either an item goes into my planner to do or maybe sometimes like if it's a podcast question or something I kind of keep in a collection, it'll go in a specific place in Apple notes where I keep that, or it gets archived the end, and then I love to get it to to zero. Yeah, it is satisfying for whatever reason. Yeah. Well, I should add here that I currently have three email in boxes, so I have Yahoo, which is my main one that I sort of operate out of it. I know that's really old school. People are like, what really still? But I do because whatever, it's what I'm used to. My husband has a hotmail count, Like I should tell you how old we are right here. I have a Gmail account that's you know, el vander kamat Gmail, which I use because it's linked to my Chrome browser. So anything that needs see it opened and Chrome gets sent to that because then Yahoo's on Safari. I'm sure I could switch it up, but that's the way it's been right now, so there are certain programs that only open and Chrome versus Safari on my map. Anyway, it's also nice to have a backup because then if I want to archive something but I don't want it in my sort of workflow, then I send it over to Gmail to have a copy of it. I have a nerdy sad question, okay, which is do you use like the mail client on your Apple or not? No, I use my browsers. I'm sure I could, but I just don't. Haven't. It's just not how I have worked. And then I have another Gmail account that's linked to my website, which is Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. And so that's sort of a also a public email there, so if people come in through my website, that's where it will email to me. It's just out there as well, Like I mean, that's an email address. People might think to send me stuff, and so anything coming out of my newsletters or coming out of the website or all that will go there. I mean, I'm indifferent, like I have people emailing both, and because people might email me in any of the three, I do check them all. But I check the Yahoo one multiple times a day. I'll probably check the Gmail and the two Gmail accounts once a day or every other day, because those tend not to be quite as urgent. Fun fact about at least multiple gmails, you can forward them all to one if you ever wanted to. So, like we have a family one, which was a tip I think we got from a listener a long time ago. We have like a Sarah and Joshua unger that we I think Josh accesses it directly, but I actually forward a copy of that to my main inbox. So on the plus side, it means you can have multiple inboxes without having any check multiple inboxes like I never go in there to check. On the minus side, sometimes it makes responding really confusing because it'll funnel to your main inbox than when you respond, you don't realize that you're like using your own and I don't know. There are a little bit of complications that are added to that. But if you ever have considered getting like a family address, it's nice to know that you can actually just for that to your main Gmail inbox, at least in Gmail. I'm sure other email. Yeah, similar. Well, so we read this book called A World Without Email from Calendar a Port, which is quite quite a bold title, to have a world without email. I mean, Sarah, did you have any sort of like adult life without email? You? I mean we were sort of right on the dividing line of where email was something people always used. Yeah, I don't think I had adult life without email. Even in college there was email. So yeah, there was always email. There's always But I think, I mean, he admitted that the title was a little overreaching and if he had kind of named it, what the book was really about it was sort of like a world without the hyperactive hive mind mentality, which we can talk about what he means by that, which I actually think is a fantastic descriptor and I've been using it more and more in my everyday conversation. I think, as publisher describe this hyperactive, high hyperactive hide mind is the idea that in knowledge work we're going to get stuff done by just pining each other all day long whenever we need somebody for something, and that like basically like we're just going to somehow as a group move forward with various projects without any organized way of communicating means to each other other than like ad hoc continuous email and chat conversations, and like, honestly, to some extent, that's what I see happening. I mean, We'll be like trying to plan an event and it's like I'll get emails and then I'll even get like texts on my phone while I'm responding to the email, and it's just like, Okay, this could have been like let's have a fifteen minute face to face conversation about like what we're going to do with the event and like move on. And instead it's like ping ping, ping, ping ping all day long. And then oh, let's loop this person in. And now I've become in a supervisory so now I'm like getting like randomly c seed on stuff and it's like, oh, we're just gonna We're just gonna. I love the loop you like, what does that mean? Like do you want me to supervise this? Do you just want me to be aware of it. Do you want me to police this in some way or is it just for my information? And what does that even mean? Like, wow, I'm going on a tangent, but I there is something about the continuous conversations that are happening and sort of the expectation of very rapid response time both in email and through text and now through some clinical chat applications that add like another layer where hyperactive high of mind is what it feels like, like a bunch of bees buzzing around, kind of sort of moving in one direction, but in a very very inefficient manner. And so I really really like that descriptor, and that's what it means to me. Okay, yeah, So a world without email. He talks about the history of email and how technology sort of creates its own paths of how people use it. So it's not that somebody designed email in a certain it's just that whatever was the easiest way for it to be used winds up being how it is used, especially taking into account human nature. One of the stories in there is when IBM first introduced email and its headquarters, there was an attempt to figure out how much people would use it, right, So, as they were building the server capacity for people to send emails. They said, well, how much will people use it? Okay, well, let's add up like the voicemails, the memos. If anyone remembers the interoffice memo, it's in this grubby vanilla folder that's like Manila. Sorry not vanilla, but it's grubby. It's like everyone's touched it. The little threads are falling apart that you have to wrap around. You write the next person's name and cross out the one, and it's gross. It's discussing, and that's what people use. Email is definitely better anyway, So the voicemails, the inner office memos, the scribbled notes, they're like, okay, let's add that up. See what the amount of capacity is we need? Okay, So that's what they set the server for. They blow through it imediately because people realize, like, oh, I could just send an email instead of going to find this person and talking to them, and so what would have been a fifteen minute conversation, as Sarah was said, is now ten back and forth emails, which requires more capacity. People discovered that they could copy others, the dreaded cc as that came to be, and so he quotes cal quotes an IBM employees saying, basically, in one week there was gained and lost the entire prudential productivity gain of email, because all of a sudden you went from something that was definitely better than what came before, Like sending an email is so much more convenient in many cases than playing phone tag with somebody all day. It's so much more convenient than those horrible folders where you cross out the name and send the document then on to the next person. But people didn't use it necessarily rationally. They used it in a way that was creating this hyperactive hive mind where you go back and forth ten times instead of having one conversation, and you add other people because why not. There's no cost to it. It's frictionless communication at scale. And so it's a fascinating idea. So we have to take a quick break and when we get back, we're going to talk more about those Manilla folders. Okay, so you mentioned the Manila folders being terrible, but I think what you just said is such a good point, which is like maybe we needed a little friction, you know, Obviously not having friction drastically changed how we now use our attention and fragment our attention probably to our detriment. And one example that I have noticed in medicine is now that we have this chat feature, I will get pinged about things that I'm not sure somebody would have bothered to pick up the phone and tell me, because picking up the phone is harder and more stressful. And let's say a resident has to pick up the phone and tell me something about a patient, They're more likely to actually like do their homework first and like think about what they want to tell me and think about what I might ask, and be prepared for this phone call. But sending like a one liner text, Hey, this patient's blood sugar is you know one hundred and thirty seven. I just made that up. That is not real. Anything is a lot easier. And then often when I respond, like they haven't even thought about the next step because it was very stress free and easy to just tell me some piece of information. So that is how I am seeing the hyperactive hive mind even go one step further and to some extent alter clinical communications. And I've actually seen this happen much more recently, you know, this dawn of email. Obviously, as Laura said, like that was so long ago for us that we can barely imagine a world without email. But I can imagine a world without texted random clinical bits of info, because that's how it was like a year ago, a two months ago. And I am actually terrified thinking that I'm concerned about, like you know, the rest of my job, kind of going in the hyperactive hive mind direction. So I mean, I don't have an answer, and I think there are wonderful things about being able to reach anyone at any time, but there are very bad things too, and nobody likes to think about them except they were in this book, which is why I really liked it. Some of my summer internships in college, you know, I was doing some reporting when most people were not on email, and so I was just like using my own email address basically like you know that I could use to send out, but you would call people, and the problem is you would call the same people because you had their phone numbers. You know, they would get to your phone call, right, So its email. Of course you could reach out to a broader, more diverse set of people, which is awesome, But of course because you can, there's a certain volume associated with email, which is one thing. When it comes from people you don't know, you can ignore that. But when it comes from people you do know, that's the problem. So the volume went way up from where people expected, and now people get hundreds of emails a day. You know, sometimes some of us can ignore it, other people can't. So people are checking their email every six minutes on average. I think that was a statistic from Cal's book that he said, you know, every six minutes, which, if you think about it, like you can't get anything else done during the work day if you are checking your inbox or slack messages every six minutes, and that he also argues that email makes us miserable because our brains are wired to have this kind of back and forth with our tribe members. So your close colleagues are the people you are fighting the masted on with, and because of that, you would never ignore them because they may find a masted on that's going to feed you in the event of the next famine, and so ignoring their email feels incredibly risky to your brain circuits that have evolved over the years to have these close alliances where you would never, you know, ignore a friend or family member. And they were asking to get your attention, and so people feel they can't not respond, and so that leads to being on every six minutes and feeling miserable when you try to get away from email because you're worried that you're missing something that is important to you. So, you know, I thought that was an interesting way of putting it. I mean, because I think he makes the argument that for a lot of internal communication, and here's what they it would be a world with less email, but it's the internal team communication that should not be done by email. So you've had a couple ideas, Sarah of like how you know in your workflow, for instance, it might work to do other things other than email. Yeah, and I think getting the cultural shift away from the expectation of twenty four to seven availability for everything is an important piece of that. Now I can imagine someone listening to my prior rant about getting the pay message and saying, well, that's terrible. You should want to have every detail about the pape. But the truth is you can't be pinged about every detail about everything of your job every minute, or you can't do your job. Like the brain is not able to deal with five different inputs every fifteen minutes on a different topic. So there has to be some official, organized way of corralling your work into ways that your brain can handle that, which might mean, you know, making sure that the clinical realm is separate from other things that you are trying to do by protecting that time, either by putting like an away message on your chat or just having kind of like Mora's that unless there's some sort of very time sensitive emergency that you know, these are the times that I'm on, and these are the times that I aren't and that I am not. And that's kind of what physician coverage systems are for within patient care, right. But then I think all of a sudden, at least in some institutions, when you introduce the idea of the chat, gets a little bit blurry because it's like, well, I'm just gonna, you know, ask them a quick question. But it's like that's such a slippery slope because you don't also want to give a patient kind of like half of your attention. You want to give it your patients all of your attention, but you can't do that while you're in the middle of something else. So I guess just making sure that it is thought through how people's time is divided and protected to some extent. And again when I say protected, I think people start to think, like, well, you don't get to go in your ivory tower and like sit around. But it's like, no, I just need to do my other part of my job, or I need to be seeing these outpatients, not these inpatients, and not trying to do everything at once. Now I think some things that might help with that. You know, Cal talks a lot about kind of the administrative details of his position, and actually he did like director of Graduate Studies, which to me is like very parallel because I'm a residency program director and I'm like, oh, like I have many of the same challenges and you can do more short organized meetings with groups of people where you get together and you know what day. I think having like knowing that every Friday is going to be a meeting is half the battle. Like it's not just the meeting itself, it's knowing that, like, you're gonna have access to this person every Friday, so you can save things up and not have to like ping them as ideas come to you, and being organized and planning is part of that. Like I actually use my planner. For example, when I know that I'm going to meet with one of my supervisors, I have like a list going on that date of like topics that have come up in the prior weeks that I know I want to speak with her about, so that I'm not sending her an email every week because I know that she gets probably nine thousand emails a day, and like, why would I want to do that to her when each of these emails would probably be a back and forth It would be so much faster in a person to person meeting. So I think doing that more and making sure meetings are very regular, predictable, and efficient that you're not just having them to have them, but you're like, okay, this is when this little group gets together. It can be fifteen minutes, it could be like brief, reef brief. I think the goal is actually to make them as as short as possible really so you can get on to the meet of actually doing your work, but kind of predictable get togethers. And the other idea I really liked from him is the office hours idea. And I think this can help if you're in a supervisory role where people are coming to you at hop like oh, you know this little thing, that little thing, and that's okay. You know, if they don't have a specific time they're supposed to do that, then of course they are going to do that anytime. And what's the easiest way to do it by pinging you with a text or a little staff message. But if instead you were, like on Fridays at three o'clock, I'm going to be on an open zoom meeting and any of you can like come in either as a group or one at a time and let me know what's going on, and I can like kind of create a to do list going forward. Then I'm hoping that that might kind of reduce some of the random pinging that goes on. So I am going to experiment personally with some of these things in my job. I haven't figured out exactly how to translate those to the clinical realm. I think in like in patient units, it's already done well to some extent. I mean, that's what rounds are. There are people getting together so that they're not randomly just getting anybody through the day as anything comes up, but they're saving it for around so that already does happen. So that's a great model but I think we have to be careful not to let new technologies tempt us to kind of stop using that model very well, I guess, because it's there for a reason. So yeah, he talks about a couple other tools for internal email reduction, such as using calendar scheduling software. I know a lot of people have that. You can book me or calendar apps that you know, here are my available times. Choose one that can solve about six back and forth emails. Sometimes if you're trying to set up a meeting. You can also use project management software. Talks about Trello or things like that. It's not so much that I mean you're you're using technology. I mean it's it's still something you can do virtually, but you are choosing which project to focus on, and then you are focusing on that project while you are in it, As opposed to email, which is randomly back and forth of lots of different projects. Right that you could be thinking about one thing and then new email comes back on another project, and so then you go to that, and then you go back and forth between them. So it just sort of flips the script on how you deal with messages on any given event. Because a project board, all the messages are going to be related to that project, so you can have the efficiency of focusing fully on that even though you're getting messages as opposed to getting messages on for different projects that you happen to be staffed on. If that's the case, and so that's definitely helpful for people who are in management if you're doing multiple projects like that. Certain things we can do personally. I always tell people like, even if you feel like you need to be on email a lot, and I get that, there are people who really do feel that they need to be on it pretty much constantly. There is a big difference between checking, say once every forty minutes. Like if you think of an hour bifurcated into forty minutes on something and then twenty minutes on email and messages, and then the next hour forty minutes on something and then twenty minutes on email and messages, nobody has to wait more than forty five minutes to get in touch with you in that world. And there are all sorts of reasons you might not be able to respond to something for forty five minutes. Right You could be on a very intense phone call with someone in a meeting, you could be driving somewhere. I mean, there's all sorts of reasons you would not be able to respond in forty five minutes. That does not feel like a huge ass, but the upside of having that forty minutes where you are not constantly pinging back and forth between things, allows you to do sort of deepish work. To use another Calen new Port phase, right that you can focus for forty five minutes on something, get a lot done in forty uninterrupted minutes if that's possible, and then deal with your messages after that. So bifurcating as much as possible is going to be better than going back and forth between them. You can also sort of limit yourself if you find your saying is this best as an email? If you find yourself writing a long email. I mean a lot of people don't read all the way through a long email because it just looks oppressive, so they're like, well, I got to deal with that later. If it's going to be more than a few sentences, you are probably best off calling the person if you know them. I mean, if it's somebody you don't know that you're responding to, or you know, we get questions from listeners that we sometimes respond longer than that. But if it's somebody you do work with a lot, those are probably, you know, best replaced with a phone call or a short end person meeting. Same thing if you find yourself really carefully weighing your words, because that's a sign that you're trying to convey a point that's going to be hard to convey an email. There's also been some research into that people can't distinguish sarcasm. They think anything email is angrier than it actually is. It's perceived more negatively because you don't have the person's smiling face as they are delivering whatever thing it is, or the eye contact and the subtle facial cues or even vocal cues that you might get on the phone. You don't have those in the written word, and so the written word automatically comes across as more negative. So if it's in any way a tough email, pick up the phone or get together with the person in person. No, those are wise words. And I think if you are somebody who tends to leave your email client open while you're doing other things, the first step should be thinking about what Laura just said and be like can I open that for fifteen minutes at the end of every hour, because you may think you have the wherewithal to stay focused on your task while things are coming in, but because of that whole human nature mastered on the situation, you don't. I mean, maybe you do, but most people don't, and so making that a continuous stream of inputs is really going to be very stressful at best and detrimental at worse to getting your job done. One other sort of broader topic that came up in a world without email was the idea of how technology has been made it easy for many of us to do our own administrative work, but we may have gone a little bit too far, and the idea of doing our own administrative work. So, you know, in the past, like an executive had an assistant who was charged with setting up meetings, or you know, having the travel department do all the travel stuff or filling out forms or anything along those lines. And now, of course, you can do many of those things quite easily yourself. I mean, obviously you can go book a flight pretty easily, you can schedule your own meetings very easily. But because of that, you wind up spending a lot of time on doing those things, and you know, it's probably not going to recreate a world where there it's an assistant for everybody, but having some more administrative support might be wise in certain places, or even just navigating processes so that they don't treat employees, especially skilled, highly trained employees attention. As part of the Tragedy of the Commons, so Cal mentioned the idea of an attention ombudsman, the idea being that each department is not going to be allowed to send their own email newsletter to all internal employees. Like if you have stuff people need to know, it goes on one newsletter, then everybody gets that one newsletter and you look at that as opposed to seventeen from different apartments, departments, or you know, if there are forms that need to be filled out, like each department creates it in a way that works for them, and then they send it out and people are trying to figure it out. Well, an attention ombudsman would make sure that, well, does this need to happen? What if we ask for it in a little bit more intuitive format and then you guys on the back end put it in the format that is required for your particular technology, but that you don't treat everyone's time and attention as limitless because it isn't. And when people are checking their email every six minutes, like nothing gets done except if it gets done at nights and weekends, and that leads to burnout. Yes, well, I think that's most of what we had to say. I think, right, fun email, I think so. I mean there's that like kind of agel don't check email in the morning. I think there is something to that. I try not to check my work email in the morning unless there's something specific I was following up on or like I am doing work in the morning, which does happen sometimes. And when I say morning, I mean like five am, so not often but sometimes. But I'm only going to it if I'm strategically going to it. I'm not going to it just to like see what happened overnight, because then you're going to be sucked in and it's too late. Your day belongs to whatever is there. Yeah. I see this all the time on timelogs, and I love that phrase. The never check email in the morning from Julie Morgan Stern, one of our past podcast guests, as well another a great productivity author that you guys should check out if you haven't listened to that episode. But the problem is people have this idea of like, Okay, I'm going to clear the decks and then I'm going to get into my real work for the day. But what tends to happen is if you start with email, then you're dealing with whatever is hot in there and you have to take care of it, and then your first meeting. Let's say your first meeting's at ten, you might only do email before ten thirty, and then you have your meeting and then suddenly it's lunch and you still haven't gotten to whatever the important work is that the task you set yourself for the day, and then early afternoon people have this energy slump and you're attempting to do your tough work at the time, and you would have had your energy slump. Whereas if you said, Okay, planning my day, I know I have this tough task I need to tackle. I'm starting my day at nine if that's when your workday starts, and I'm going to just do that until ten fifteen, then take a quick glance at my email and go to my ten thirty meeting afterwards. That would have been so much more productive. You would have gotten through that task probably in that hour in fifteen minutes, as opposed to leaving it for two pm when you want a nap and it's going to take two and a half hours because you keep getting distracted. Because that's the way our brains work. So we can should we do Love of the Week or question? First? I forget what order we do, and we do these you know, well, our love of the weeks we're sort of email related or email related, and I already kind of gave mine away, but I'll just reiterate that I think search via Gmail in particular is genius and amazing and a technological wonder that they should get some credit for, which I'm sure they have profited nicely. Yes, good job. Yeah, well, I mean Yeahoo's is good too. I'll put that out there. I can almost always find what I need to through, Yes, just keywords of like oh, you know, who was that person who was in this field that I talked to maybe three years ago? Like put in two twenty seventeen gardening, and it comes up right like it's just wonderful. And your brain is not nearly not as efficient as mentioned by the fact that I'm like, huh gardening maybe twenty seventeen exactly. I was going to put a shout out to a couple email newsletters that I actually read. I got put on the Hexios Future Email because a friend of mine from college is the author of it, and I enjoy reading it. It is great, you know, a couple of brief ideas on future and scientific trends. So people might want to look into the Axios news letters. I think many of them are free, so go for it. In terms of politics, I am all over the map. I like to read iconoclastic people, and in this world of like substack and paid news split or subscriptions, there are really you can find just one kind of interesting voice and follow that person. So you know, I read Jonah Goldberg's stuff. He was at National Review for many years and then sort of moved on to The Dispatch, which is a kind of right of center, but very sort of center right. Like anyway, I won't go into the people know about the splits within the right wing of different sides. Anyway, this is a very center right the Dispatch. Their newsletters are pretty good. I also read Matt Iglesias. I think that's how you say his name he's been in the news lately because of his deal with Substack, but he just always has very different ways of looking at topics that aren't very straightforward left of center, even though that's what he kind of would put himself as. So I've enjoyed that reality of what email can bring to us. And i'd put a shout out here that both Sarah and I have email newsletters, so you can subscribe to those and get our musings from time to time in case your Tuesday musings from us and Mondays from Sarah on best Plaid Plans and our blogs are not enough for you. We have more, and neither of us are super frequent, so you'll just get a little little taste every a few weeks, not like daily or anything crazy. Yeah, and they're free, and they're free exactly all right. So our question this week comes from a listener who is staring down a major licensing exam, and I know that many of our listeners have these and different things. They accounting physicians have to get their board certification every certain number of years, so you have this major licensing exam requires a lot of studying. You could put any amount of time into it, but as a parent, you probably don't have infinite amount of time, so she had suggestions, how do you make time for studying? So, Sarah, I am curious with your board certification. When that comes up for renewal, what do you do? Haha? Well, actually, okay, So my first board certification that I ever had to study for with a child was my pediatric Endegrin boards in twenty thirteen, and I did have a toddler, and so I'll talk a little bit about that. But Pediatrics has actually changed their structures, so I don't think I'm ever going to have to take an exam again, which is pretty amazing. They changed it to like an online programmer. You have to read articles and answer questions and it's probably more time but in some ways less stressful. And the idea is that you know, you take these exams and you pass them, but like, how much do you really learn from them? Versus these are more designed to facilitate lifelong learning and be a little bit less stressful. So I haven't entered my first cycle yet. I think it starts like next year because I'm about ten years out from my initial exam. But I'll let you know. But no, I don't I don't have to take a test that I know of, and I'm happy about that. But I do actually pretty vividly remember studying for my boards when I had Annabel, and I had to just be really really I was good at making study schedules, of course for my med school days. That's like the you know, any pre med or med student is going to be like a study schedule master. But I had to be more realistic, Like it stopped being like can I get the highest possible score, and it started being like I need to do decently enough to know that I'm going to pass on, Like what's a reasonable amount of hours to spend studying? And I kind of did the same thing, but in a lighter version that I had for my the prior hurdles that I had to pass, where I would block off a certain number of quiz questions that I wanted to get done over like a kind of a six week period. And I also requested some time off of my clinical service during fellowship, which is pretty common, like you can use vacation time or whatever if you want a week where you just cram, and if you have kids, that might not be the most glamorous option, but it's actually pretty effective because they can be in daycare during the day and you can spend some solid hours really prepping for a test. So I am not above the idea that you could take time off from your kind of regular workday stuff to really just do test prep. Everybody's testing skills and strategies may vary. I tend to be a pretty good test taker, so I didn't stress too much. But I think part of that is putting in the work, creating an actual schedule, and being realistic about the time that you have. Like I think back to when I pre kids, and I literally would study for like nine hours a day for days. We sort of had that time built into our med school curriculum. I couldn't do that after I had anabell, but I could still do like two hours like three or four times a week, and knowing I had X amount of questions and X amount of topics I needed to get through. So it was like, You're going to do these specific things, not the like, oh, I'm going to study in this vague sense, but like, I'm going to do this block, this block fifty questions of those fifty questions this week, and when am I going to do that? I think as a parent, you just you figure out where to put it in, You plan it, and you get it done, and maybe you take off some work with childcare to get some extra done. Yeah. I would also say that this deserves to be a family priority. That if you are going through the licensing process for a career, either at the initial part of it or too continue working in this career, that is something that the rest of the family has a you know, needs to be on board with and to treat it as a priority and something that can consume your time for a while. It won't be forever, but it does require some extra time. I mean. The reason I'm saying this is because I read an absolutely horrifying study I don't know if it's a year or two ago, about the percent of surgeons who passed Sarah, You're gonna have to tell me which part of the exam it was. But when you are like grilled by other people in the field. Yeah, So that's the oral board, the oral Josh had to do that twice, once for general surgery and once for vascular. We don't have that in pediatrics. So the oral boards. The pass rates for men were unaffected by whether they were married or had kids. The pass rates for women were horrible for mothers, and I think that that is just I mean, it's sad because you have a lot of really well trained, good surgeons who are hitting this roadblock, and I think you may be to try again, but it's still like what a waste and what it is is that you know, I'm not sure because if you're being grilled by people in the field, then there's also the element of like what do people think a surgeon looks like? And it might be that men don't pass women, But there's also a question of how much you prepare for it, and if your time is constrained in some ways, then it may be harder to make the time for it. So make it a family priority. We can't solve the larger societal issues, but you can decide that within the context of your family, you will not feel guilty about asking for the time to do it. Carve out a schedule. Maybe it's that your partner takes the kids in the morning and you can work from six am to the start of your work day. You know, if that's three hours six am to nine am, or is your study time and you're going to do it three days a week for the two months leading up to the exam. Right, that would be something that might work. You could also decide that you are going to do every Saturday morning from nine to noon, or if you know you have a lot of kids' sports on Saturday mornings, maybe it's that you are going to get two to five on Saturdays and make a backup spot, like if it doesn't happen on Saturday, it's going to happen on Sunday, and that is just how the family is going to deal with it for the next few months until you get through that. I'm sorry this is a long winded thing, but I actually think this is a really important thing, and it's something that does keep women from advancing in fields is when it doesn't become a family priority for them to leap through these hoops. And by the way, if at least in the medical field, many of these exams cost two thousand dollars, So if you fail, you're out two thousand dollars, and you can get a lot of childcare for two thousand dollars if you actually think of it. By the hours, so it is an investment in yourself, not just in the career, but in the exam itself. Many people will work somewhere and they may cover it, but they're not going to cover it if you fail or cover it multiple times. One other thing I would say, though, is be sure you know what's on the exam, Like you don't want to waste your time, and so there may not be you know, open source realities of what is on there, but you can talk to people who've been through it. Make sure that one of your first steps of preparing for it is to talk to say five colleagues friends who have taken these exams and what they felt was important to know, and make sure that you're studying with that in mind, rather than just shooting blind and trying to spend as many hours as possible. Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've talked a lot. It has been a long episode on email, although I think some of that's are splicing the other. But we will be back next week with more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura Vandercam dot com This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.