097: Email Anxiety and Euphoria with Andy Mitchell

By December 16, 2016Podcasts

Andy Mitchell says: "It's not about emptying your inbox, it's about emptying your brain."

ActiveInbox founder Andy Mitchell shares insights gleaned from years of collaborating with the many diverse users of his email and task management software product.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why email won’t die for a while… and what to do in the meantime
  2. Why we experience euphoria at an empty inbox, and how to get there more often
  3. How to avoid the productivity death spiral triggered by working late

About Andy
Andy Mitchell is the founder of ActiveInbox for Gmail, an email tool and task manager combined into one. He maintains an ethos of ‘leaving more in the world than I take out of it.’ Day to day, he’s trying to ensure the team is all pulling in the same direction to craft the best product they can. Prior to ActiveInbox, he worked in a number of high-tech roles at LocallyCompared, ProductiveFirefox, Dakin Flathers, and MeeCard.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Andy Mitchell Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Andy, thanks so much for being here on the How to Be Awesome at Your Job Podcast.

Andy Mitchell 
Thanks Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
One of your major claims to fame is that you are the creator behind the ActiveInbox. Can you maybe just start us off with some orientation on the backstory there? What is this thing and what problem does it solve?

Andy Mitchell
At the very highest level, ActiveInbox is an email tool and a task manager combined into one. If you stop and think for a second here, the major frustration people have with email is that it’s chaotic, so actually treating emails like a flow of tasks or at least you inbox like a to-do list.

Certainly for some people, managers especially, it does make a lot of sense. On the flip side, you’ve got task management tools and if you’re of a certain character, then you can handle the fact that they’re something of a chore but for everyone else. They require constant maintenance just to even make them usable, you’re adding tasks to them and updating stuff, et cetera.

Most people just, to be honest, probably can’t be bothered but what you get when you combine the two of them is email that’s under control and a task manager that’s doing quite a lot of the work to keep itself up to date by the notifications that are coming into your inbox … because of course the inbox is often where all of the different tools and things in your life funnel notifications to you. It’s a nice stream to pick things from and update the task list from. That’s it at a functional level.

It came to be by complete accident. I can go into that if you want or we could stay more on the straight and narrow.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d like to hear maybe a little bit of the … I think of the infomercial moment like, “Ah. Are you tired of this problem?” What was going on in your life that made you think this is necessary?

Andy Mitchell
Do you want the absolute truth?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Andy Mitchell
This is not the most commercially monitored thing I’ve ever said. I was working on a different startup at the time, which is also, it was my own baby. This was back in 2006. We needed to be able to do customer support and being …

See, in England there’s a reputation amongst Northern people, that we don’t like to spend money. Being of a Northern persuasion, I thought, “Well, rather than Zendesk or their equivalent a hundred dollars a month to do customer support, why don’t I just build a little something up at the top of Gmail that adds essentially a ticketing system to my emails?” I’m already using Gmail for customer support. My biggest issue is I forget to reply to things. If I can take care of that, job done. My own little system. It will be free. Great.

I released this tiny little tool that I built for myself over a weekend, into the wild. Fast-forwarding through two or three years, the first startup I was involved in crashed and burned. The second startup that I was involved in that I got into on a rebound crashed and burned.

All the while, this tiny little tool that wasn’t supposed to be anything was getting written up in magazines. People were asking to donate money, which I said no too because it really seemed like too much of a headache at the time. Yeah. It took me far too many years Pete, to realize the thing I was trying to make work was a non-starter and the thing that I wasn’t trying to make work seemed to be what I should actually put myself behind. Yeah. Fast-forward 10 years and that’s where we’re at.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. Okay. You brought up a cool point about how some people have the it within them to update, maintain and rock a task management application independently of their email but you’re saying in your experience, these people are in the minority and I guess I would just love to get your take on that a little bit because some folks will have, yes, their inbox is a to-do list, or their calendar is a to-do list, or they have a separate to-do list.

I imagine you’ve put in a tremendous of thought about the pros and the cons of doing things one way or the other, so I would love to just put on the spot in here. What are some of those insights when it comes to these trade-off moves?

Andy Mitchell
We’ve always been quite proud that Active Inbox has been built as part of a community. Largely, because I just knew early on that I didn’t have the answers myself.

The more you talk to people, the more you realize that we’re all hugely idiosyncratic. We all have our own little ways of doing things. I think the takeaway aspect of that is we built or there’s a temptation with the toolmakers, of which I am one, to go, “Oh, wow. Email, that’s used by four billion people. Let’s try and get all of them, all with task management. Who wouldn’t benefit theoretically, from a task manager? Let’s get all of them.”

It’s the light that attracts the moth but the reality is, there are so many people that what we should be doing is building niche tools for a small number of them, niche tools that can be completely supported. I wouldn’t advocate ActiveInbox for absolutely everyone but for the people that it’s good for, it’s especially good.

I think where broad products, things like Google Inbox for example, they work really well for the majority of light email users, which makes perfect sense for Google, right? Because they want to sell to, or not sell but they want to be able to advertise to millions, ideally billions of people, but that’s no good if you’re a power user, who Google’s not interested in because you’re a minority. I think that’s it. I think that’s where we’re coming from, is it’s okay to build for a niche.

For us, that’s managers, executives and super power users but I completely concede that there’s characters and personality types where a standard task manager is fine because they’re the people who and I’m incredibly jealous of them, who just stay on top of things. They’re super organized. They produce lists. They finish lists. They do their weekly reviews but that’s not everyone. Yeah. That’s where my mindset is coming from.

Pete Mockaitis
That is interesting. I hear what you’re saying, is that if you’re in a position where your emails are largely to-do’s that need to just get a little bit of sorted and tagging and categorizing and due-dated, such that it, to bring it the rest of the way, to making a task manager that makes great sense. Whereas, other folks who have their emails are I guess, maybe more varied and they have plenty of tasks that are coming in from other sources, then it may not be hitting the bullseye for them.

Andy Mitchell
Yeah. I think that’s it. I think certainly in the last, oh I’m not sure, five years, maybe more, there’s been people have just been waiting for email to die, for the most part.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Andy Mitchell
People are just sick of it. For some people is the nature of their jobs and for them, if you told them email was dying, they absolutely would not agree. What we boiled that down to was if you’re in a position where you’re a mediator of some kind, between multiple teams…

Say You’re an Operations Director. You’re going to be liaising with a sales team, you’re going to be liaising with a product team, you’re going to be liaising with external vendors for the company and the product team might have bought themselves something like JIRA to use. The sales team might be using Sales Force. The outside vendor, you can only talk to them through email. The point being, when you’re straddling all these different teams, using different systems, email is the  only common denominator.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Andy Mitchell
Your inbox is the only hope you’ve got, so for those people, there is no way out of email. It’s what drives their daily workflow. Those are the power users that, I think, need this concept of blending tasks and emails into one. Other people of course, would probably think the idea is ridiculous and frankly if they never have to open an email or client again, they will be deliriously happy.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun and that’s a great way to call that out as the common denominator across all sorts of teams or groupings. It’s so funny. I even see it when some people just send me a calendar request, it’s like, “Hey, I don’t work for your organization. In fact, this isn’t quite going to work but almost,” click, click, download, double-click. “Ooh,” delete the duplicate. “Okay. Now I have it on my calendar. Thank you.” It really does resonate.

I’m guess I’m curious, that was an intriguing notion that email is dying, I’m curious to hear what will take it’s place and what are some best practices for dealing with email as it continues to exist?

Andy Mitchell
For starters, it’s a shame it’s dying, to be honest. It’s the only open system really … Open communication system, sorry, that really still exists. By open, I mean it’s not controlled by one company. For example, with Slack you can only talk to people who also are using Slack. Email is just like the friendliest guy at the bar. It’s talking to everyone, which is a metaphor and this [inaudible 00:10:24] bad. It’s also probably why it’s so bad. It means you have to talk to every drunk going, which explains your spam emails and everything else.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Andy Mitchell
Actually, I mentioned Slack because it did position itself as the email killer originally. Even still, Butterfield’s, the founder of Slack, has admitted that it’s going to take a decade at least, for email to finally whittle its way down. As for what will replace it, I …

There’s an idea in the startup world that you could just look at how any company uses the Excel spreadsheet and pick that particular use case and build a whole different product of it and you’d have a winning business. Email’s got the same quality because it’s used for everything. Just watch one little thing that people do, pick it out, do it better. I think … Yeah.

You’ve seen this play a lot. You saw it with Craig’s List as well. Airbnb has grown to be an insanely huge company by basically taking one of the bits of Airbnb that Craig’s List did okay and perfected it. I think this is what will kill email. It will be a death by a thousand cuts.

Pete Mockaitis
Hmm. That’s an interesting theory and it’s intriguing because on the one hand studies come out showing that companies are getting more and more and more emails in total and per day but your prediction is that this will hit its summit, its peak level of in-decline as superior innovations and solutions that take subsequent slices out of what email can do for people?

Andy Mitchell
Yes, with a caveat that every future soothsayer of some kind has been wrong. It’s not hard to find a way to do things better than email for specific cases. Again, this openness, I honestly don’t know how that’s going to get replaced and for that reason and that reason only, email might be the thing that survives for the next 50 years. Who knows? It’s not so bad as long as people keep trying to innovate around it and then yeah, I’m fine with that. I think all is good.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Andy Mitchell
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
When you’re the individual person who’s giving and receiving email after email, day after day, what have you discovered are some best practices or pro tips for doing that well and hitting inbox zero more often?

Andy Mitchell
This ties to something that’s been bugging me a bit at a much higher level and it’s going to take just 30 seconds to stick it.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Yeah.

Andy Mitchell
We’re living, I think it’s the same in the US as it is in the UK, we’re calling it austerity, the idea that as nations, we’ve lived too freely and we need to pay back our debts now. Everyone, corporations are using this to get employees to work hard or get into it longer. Job security is down and say, “No. Oh, if you want to keep that job, you better do the extra hours. You better do the extra work.” We’re all just feeling the pressure a little bit.

I think that … I can’t remember the stat I saw, I think it was in the Washington Post, something like 25% of our day is spent in email. It strikes me like it’s a rich scene, like something of an old fashioned gold mine somewhere, for actually managing to recuperate some time back.

I think if you try and decide, “Okay. How … You know, all of these different tools I can use for email, which one should I go for?” Anything that can save you time, including [inaudible 00:14:16], if it reduces your stress as a form of time saving. That’s the best thing you can hope for. That’s what you should optimize for. To be concrete about that …

Forgive me because I am going to be at risk of talking about Active Inbox because obviously, we did try to make it to do these kind of things, so it’s top of mind. The one thing I’m really against is snoozing, which is slightly controversial because obviously, it has taken the world by storm. Undeniably, all modern mail apps now snooze but we tried it years ago. We tried it in 2012 or something and never got past beta with it.

We tested with a few hundred people and what we saw was that people were snooze hunting. They’d throw it a day forward, two days forward and then it would come back into their inbox. Then they’d snooze it again but in the meantime, they’re also snoozing other things. They’re creating this tidal wave of email ahead of them, where they keep throwing it back out and it keeps coming back but more of it’s coming back and it just never quite gets done. Everyone was doing this. Maybe, the culture’s changed and people have got better at snoozing but I think, if you ask of my own experiences, I still do it if I use an app that can snooze.

It feels like a solution. It’s almost like having a beer. It feels great for a minute but then you pay the price down the line. What we advocate is a today list, which as a concept is incredibly simple. We say, “Look, if something has to be done today or in the future, actually say what day you’re going to do it and then have your today list always in front of you, but away from your inbox.”

You can just focus on that without the distraction of all of the stuff that’s coming in and starts pulling at the edges of your brain to, “Pay attention to me. Pay attention to me.” Nope. I’m just going to focus on the today list. We’re going to go for it and we’re going to try and empty it out. Again, rather than growing, like snoozing does, it just keeps shrinking. I think in terms of keeping people calm and stress free, that’s really, really important.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Merlin Mann who’s the chap that coined inbox zero as a term. I can’t quite do his quote justice but he sums it up beautifully when he says, “All those emails that are in your inbox, they’re not things to be done. They’re little weights on your brain holding you down and achieving an empty inbox, that’s not emptying your emails. That’s clearing your brain.”

I think that that’s so important because more and more we live in this interruption culture where emails are coming in and we might be doing creative work but suddenly we got and check. We see what that email is or we worry about what we’ve missed in our inboxes and it’s always just eating away at the back of our brains . Again, it’s stopping us creating whatever meaningful things that we like to actually invest ourselves into. It’s reducing us as people. Yeah. I think that … What does that actually mean in terms of practical advice? Find a tool that means you just don’t have to think about your email.

For us, with Active Inbox, you can say, “Okay, this email here, I’m going to do it tomorrow. This email here is probably this project but get it out 0f my inbox.” It’s just  a way of saying, “Everything that’s important has been seen, is being tracked and I will do it, so I don’t need to worry about it.” Ah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Andy Mitchell
Yeah. The only other little thing is again, is another feature that we pioneered. With Gmail especially, email has it’s conversation views where you get maybe 20 emails or 20 messages within a conversation and that’s a mass of information.

If you came back to an email in two days time, you don’t want to reread something that you’ve already read, so we encourage you to summarize all of the actionable things that you want to do with an email when you first read it, into sub tasks. Those sit just next to the email. Next time you come back, you don’t have to reread anything and go, “Oh, okay. There’s one, two, three things for me to do, cool. I’ll just crack on with it.” Yeah. Those off the top of my head, those are the best time savers I think we’ve seen.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s cool. For each sub task, I can tag that to a project and a context and a due date?

Andy Mitchell
It’s there attached to the emails and the emails themselves can be attached to a project. Then, when you’re looking at a project view, you can see the emails and you can see the first sub task on the email. It’s all very scan-able when it’s in a list.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm. That’s cool. You made a fun noise. I want to follow-up on a noise that you made, as opposed to a comment that you made, when you said, “You’ve processed all of the emails and you don’t have to think about it and there’s settle and you go, “Ah.” The “Ah” I want to hear a bit more about.

What are the true benefits in the experience of you and I’m sure all of the users that you’ve interviewed and chatted with, associated with having that kind of command clarity control of, “Hey, I’ve been through the muck of all the inputs. I’ve processed it all and they’re in their places.” What does that really mean or do for you, practically speaking, as a human being and a professional?

Andy Mitchell
It would be very easy for me to just say stress is bad. Stress stops you being creative. It releases cortisol. It makes our body go into fight or flight response. We become really flitty in how we think. The action like you’re sitting down and doing 30 minutes of work becomes really difficult. Actually, some people really generally do thrive best from stress, but I suspect there’s different types of stress.

There’s stress of a deadline, which can help focus you and then there’s stress of a million little things that are spread all over the place that you have to worry about and your brain just can’t handle that volume of stuff really. That’s the stress that is just … Because each of those items is so small, you don’t really worry about any individual one of them. It feels more like an anxiety.

It’s like, I know there are these things. I can’t think of anything specific but I know there are these things and it just sits there, just weighing on your heart and on your chest. I think that silly noise I made, that “Ah ,” that’s the feeling of that pressure coming off your chest, of knowing that there’s not those millions of little things possibly out there. It’s knowing that there are tens of things that are out there that are under control. That’s the difference. Then you can get on with doing with whatever it is that’s actually important to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. That’s exactly how I feel. When my inbox is getting a little out of control at about 200+. It’s just like there’s this uncertainty like, “I may have overlooked something important and someone could be disgusted with me right now because I have failed to answer a basic question,” and they’re like, “Aren’t I paying this guy a lot of money? Who is this joker?”

Andy Mitchell
Exactly. That’s the other thing of course. It’s not just tasks like it is in a task manager. It’s communication, which has all manner of social connotations  and we’re deeply, deeply social animals. The idea of letting down a tribe’s mate, that in itself is so powerful and so full of fear, that again, it’s going to impact us. Yeah. I hadn’t really thought about that before but yeah, that social aspect does make a huge difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I guess before we shift gears into some of your favorite things, I’d like to just maybe do a catchall. Any other key systems, or practices, or pro tips you recommend for doing less while achieving more?

Andy Mitchell
I worry about sounding glib when we talk about this but often the simplest answers are the most effective. I’m going to stand up as if I was at some sort-of AA meeting. I used to be a workaholic.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Andy Mitchell
Looking back, I don’t actually think I achieved particularly more in the long hours as I did in the short. There’s some famous quote, I can’t quite bring it to mind, of the task span to fill whatever time you give them.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Parkinson’s Law. Yeah.

Andy Mitchell
Is that what it is? Parkinson’s Law. Say, one of the biggest changes I ever got was to actually start making sure each of my evenings was filled with either a social commitment or a hobby, something that would force me to leave the office at 6:00 or 7:00 pm in the evening. If you just stop and think about the opposite of that, if you stay into the evening, you’re not going to be doing your best work, so you’re slowing down anyway.

You start to panic more so maybe you stay even later but then you can’t get sleep. Now you’re starting to really cost yourself because if you go straight from the office  to bed, you can be sat in bed for an hour or two just staring at the ceiling, thinking about all of the things that are in that.

Sleep is, as a knock on effect, an incredibly important thing. Without a great night’s sleep, the first likely to go, I think, if my memory serves me, is creativity, so you start working more stupidly in terms of you still work hard but now you’re just on the treadmill just doing work, work, work. Whereas, a creative person might go, “Yeah, You know what? Rather than doing all of that kind-of peace work over there, if I just do this one thing, I stop all of it.” That’s what you lose when you’re sleep deprived.

Going back all along that chain of events, finding a way to get yourself out of the office and ideally, to do something physical so you get the endorphin rush that completely just seems to flush the brain of worry and academic anguish. Yeah. You’re clear when you get sleep when you need to and you’re good to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh. That’s quite a clear crystallization of the anti-productive, work too hard death spiral.

Andy Mitchell
Yeah. It’s so easy to fall into Pete. That’s the thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Andy Mitchell 
Anyway…

Pete Mockaitis
Really –

Andy Mitchell
I’m sure you get that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes and you’ve made those connections so clear in terms of leads to less sleep, leads to less creativity, leads to more work, so… Yeah. I’ve been in places where I’m on a nice upward cycle and then I’m on a downward cycle and I think just having that language and identification can be helpful to shift gears quickly and slap some sense into yourself.

Andy Mitchell
That’s very interesting to me right now, which is the idea of upward cycles and downward cycles. Have you read a book called ‘The Winner Effect’?

Pete Mockaitis
No, but it sounds right up my alley.

Andy Mitchell
It’s a really cheesy title. It’s one of those things, I’d put a brown bag over it if I was reading on the train but despite that, it’s just chalk to block with Science. A lot of the stuff in there is mind-blowing. One of the things that they talk about is the physiological changes that come with success and as an inverse, comes with failure.

When you have success, you’re body’s capacity for testosterone production increases. It’s not only that your testosterone levels increase and stay high but it means in future, you can produce it faster and you can produce more of it. The opposite happens when you lose. What it means is, there’s a link between testosterone and confidence and doing well in many, many situations. Our body’s, it has this very physiological feedback loop where small successes lead to big successes and … Yeah.

In terms of assistance use-wise, finding us ways to have little wins, especially if you’ve been going through a bad patch for too many days where things aren’t going right. You can reset it, find something where you can succeed and do it. The example that gets used in the book is Mike Tyson. When Tyson came out of prison in, I don’t know I was too young at the time but ’91, ’92, Don King found a way for him to fight some real softies in the ring. Tyson beat them easily, confidence improves. All the physiological changes were there as well. By the time he faced the world champ six months later, he entered that ring absolutely on top of his game.

It’s that kind of … It’s not a waste of time to do small things you know you can succeed at. Yeah. The only other caveat I would add to that, that again is in the book and it’s fascinating and do stop me if this is not useful, but it’s that all of this stuff happens in context, so the environment really matters. We get good in certain environments but that ability doesn’t necessarily translate, so you might be useful to winning at the office but it’s not going to make you successful in the sports field, for example.

The really enlightening research they pointed to was … During the Vietnam War, a lot of the US soldiers, one in five, were getting addicted to heroin-

Pete Mockaitis
Wow.

Andy Mitchell
But when they were coming back to the states, suddenly they were dying of overdoses. Whereas, before they had not. What they later proves with dubious ethics with rats, was that if you got a rat addicted to heroin in a blue cage and then moved the rat to a green cage but kept the dosage a high as it had been before in the blue cage, the rat was statistically more likely to die of an overdose.

It’s hugely counterintuitive, the idea that we think of drug addiction certainly as you either have it or you don’t and you’re habituated or you aren’t but no, apparently not. Something as simple as the color of your cage can make a huge difference to how your body responds.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fascinating. Wow.

Andy Mitchell
My apologies if I went too far off there.

Pete Mockaitis
No. I’m going to chew on that for a while. Thank you. Now I’d love to hear about, perhaps a favorite quote.

Andy Mitchell
Once I realized that really we’re all basically victims of a cultural changes, that as humans we were capable of believing that we could be collectively rewarded or individually rewarded. I thought, “You know, actually it’s okay to be kind to yourself. The Cohen quote that I’m going to go for and forgive me because I can’t sing this: “Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.” The idea that imperfection isn’t necessarily a problem, it could in fact be the path to who you are or who you could be. Yeah. There we go.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. That’s cool and fun. Now, could you share with us a favorite habit, something that you’ve done as a personal practice that’s been helpful?

Andy Mitchell
Yeah. It’s that Seinfeld-esque, do one thing a day. Again, it comes back to, often if you don’t challenge yourself to do as much as possible, you can’t get yourself off the grindstone. It could be that doing one creative thing is ten times as valuable as doing ten small ones.

The problem with the small ones is they feel like work, so you feel like you are succeeding. Whereas, doing one thing can feel quite lazy, but … Yeah. If you can somehow manage to adopt a true understanding of the value of what you’re doing, then … Yeah. Just finding one important thing to do every day is my personal habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Would you say, is there a key thing that you share, in terms of if you’re speaking or working with your teams, that really seems to resonate and to get people nodding their heads and agreeing with your brilliance?

Andy Mitchell
Rarely. Brilliance and my pontifications rarely go hand in hand. It’s never going to get a team nodding it’s heads but there is a really powerful notion in … Have you come across a book called The Happiness Hypothesis?

It’s the Psychologist who wrote it and the principle of the book … By the way, it’s a brilliant, brilliant book. He took 10 ideas from antiquity, so the teachings of Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus and tested them against cutting-edge modern psychology, brain scanning, all the modern science we have and basically summed up at the end of every chapter, good advice from antiquity, bad advice from antiquity, so from that sense, it’s fascinating.

The analogy that I found worked best is, you know the book Thinking Fast and Slow.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Andy Mitchell
Loads of people have read it. The idea of … They talk very dryly. There’s a system one and there’s a system two, where system one is a, I might get this the wrong way around, but system one is our subconscious, super fast, responsible for making most of our decisions, happens without us in any way being able to control it. Then, there’s system two that’s this super, slow-witted but very thoughtful. That’s our conscious thought, where we decide to do something.

Generally speaking, our subconscious is in control. A lot of our behaviors day to day are happening without us really thinking about it. It turns out that if you just slightly change the way you think about it, suddenly this becomes a powerful idea. The way the book talks about it is the elephant and the rider, where the elephant is our subconscious.

That’s the thing that’s making all of the rapid decisions in our world and it’s just bounding along, charging for the jungle, smashing through everything in it’s path and the rider’s sat on top basically holding on for dear life. The rider’s our conscious decision making bit and it’s trying to persuade the elephant to go the way it wants it to but really, it doesn’t have that much influence.

Like an oil tanker trying to turn, the rider can gently, in time, slightly move the course of the elephant. I think that for anyone, this does effect teams quite a lot, anyone who is maybe having problems with emotional response in a team, getting angry about things that they should be more objective about, for example.

If you can start to actually understand how your subconscious behaves, then your conscious can start to control it, but it’s only if you find a way to actually understand your weaknesses or how you operate deep down, the elephant, that the rider has any chance of changing it’s direction and if one of those two parts aren’t open to change, change can’t happen. It’s like a deadlock. You need both of them to be responsive.

Pete Mockaitis
Hmm. Perfect. Thank you. What would you say, it would be the best place for folks to contact you or learn more about what you’re up to?

Andy Mitchell
To be honest, ActiveInbox has a forum and that’s where I mostly hang out. Obviously, that’s limited. We’re just talking about the product mostly but talking about products was basically talking about people’s problems with email and actually have they live their day. Everything’s fair game. If you want to have a chat, just put it on there.

Pete Mockaitis
Andy thanks so much. It’s been a real treat. I wish you and Active Inbox, tons of luck in what you’re doing here.

Andy Mitchell
Oh, thanks Pete. Genuinely, it’s been lovely to chat to you and it’s rare we get to think so broadly about things. This has been really nice.

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