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Ep. 267: Why Are You Tired?
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
How to Hack Email Context Shifting to Minimize Fatigue
To minimize the exhausting nature of email clearing, it is crucial to avoid excessive context switching. One effective strategy is to single thread your inbox by focusing on a specific cognitive context at a time. This involves creating a blank text file next to your inbox and summarizing every email within that context with quick one-sentence summaries. Once you have identified the relevant emails, you can forget about the rest and focus solely on generating ideas and answers related to that context. By doing this, the friction reduces as your neural circuitry becomes loaded with the specific relevant context, making it easier to come up with nuanced answers and solutions. Once you have addressed all the emails within that context, you can move on to the next context. For each context, create a new section in the text file and concentrate solely on that particular aspect. By single threading and focusing on one context at a time, you become more efficient, and even though you may end up answering the same total number of emails, the overall experience is significantly less exhausting. By hacking the context shifting and minimizing interruptions, you can greatly alleviate the fatigue caused by constantly checking your inbox.
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