Automation Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Wade, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Wade Foster
Yeah, thanks for having me, Pete. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into this conversation. I have used your tool Zapier before but, first, I want to hear the tale of you playing the saxophone—I, too, was a sax player in high school and marching band—at The Missouri Governor’s Mansion.

Wade Foster
Oh, goodness. So, I played saxophone for a long time. I started playing in 5th grade. And my instructor had a quartet that played at The Governor’s Mansion in Jeff City regularly at the time. And they had a member of the quartet who moved out of the state and so they needed a fourth member on pretty short notice. And, for whatever reason, in their infinite wisdom, they thought, “Let’s invite this 9th-grader to come play with us at The Governor’s Mansion.”

And so, they say, “Hey, Wade, come to our rehearsal, come to a trial run.” And I walked in and I’m probably, I don’t know, 4’7” and don’t even weigh 100 pounds, like sopping wet or anything like that, and they gave me a go, and they say, “Hey, try this out.” And, for whatever reason, I must not have done too bad because they said, “Why don’t you come play at The Governor’s Mansion.

I ended up getting to play over at The Governor’s Mansion quite a few times over the course of the next year. And then, eventually, a new governor came around, and he had different entertainment, I guess.

Pete Mockaitis
“No saxophones for me.”

Wade Foster
Yeah, and so we weren’t invited back after that. But it was a ton of fun as a 9th-grader. I loved it.

Pete Mockaitis
Did that shape your political views?

Wade Foster
You know what, it didn’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Liked one administration and not the other.

Wade Foster
Yeah, as 9th-grader, my views on, I guess, the political landscape were pretty rudimentary at the time. I was just like, “Let’s play saxophone. That sounds fun.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, sax is fun, and I would take a crack at a terrible segue of just as the saxophone has many buttons to push down so, too, can automation have a lot of different layers and buttons and approaches. So, that’s the topic du jour. And before we get into the nitty gritty of what to automate and how to automate, I’d love to get your overall kind of philosophy on automation. Like, why is it helpful? When is it not? Lay it on us.

Wade Foster
Yeah, I think automation is going to be one of the, sort of defining topics of the next decade or so. I think the way the mainstream press talks about it, it’s often pretty scary. They’re talking about how robots, especially in manufacturing—it’s a scary topic. But the way we see automation at Zapier, we see this across, we have, I don’t know, something around four million users now.

And most of the people doing automation tend to be knowledge workers. It tends to be white collar folks in professional jobs, they’re business owners, or maybe they’re entrepreneurs themselves, or many times they’re just a person in a job, whether it’s in marketing, or in sales, or a data analyst, or an engineer or a real estate agent, or a lawyer, or whatever, who’s sort of is using a suite of tools, maybe it’s some marketing software, or maybe it’s some sales software, or some customer support software.

And, oftentimes, they’re doing pretty manual stuff on a day-to-day basis. Maybe they’re downloading a list of leads out of Facebook or LinkedIn, and then uploading those into a CRM. Or maybe they’ve got a bunch of files that they’re pulling out and collecting from forms, and they’re making sure those get sent to the specific parties. But all of us kind of have stuff like that that we do on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis.

Maybe you’re a podcaster and you get transcripts manually delivered to you, and you’re trying to find ways to not do that stuff. And so, I think automation is a way that you can really take some of this mundane stuff that you’re doing every day, that you’re doing every week, and find a better way to do it, for really just not have to do that stuff anymore, and allow you to focus on the creative parts of your job, focus on the things that really deliver value, and leave the stuff that computers are good for to the computers.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Or just get home earlier.

Wade Foster
Yeah, that too.

Pete Mockaitis
“I don’t have to do that. Just get home now.”

Wade Foster
Yeah, see you tomorrow.

Pete Mockaitis
The work is done. Okay, so that’s cool. So, a real time-saver there. And so then, now automation sounds, in some ways, kind of big and spooky, not just because the robots are going to destroy and enslave the human race like Terminator, but also just because, “Oh, boy, do I need to know like scripts and APIs and codes and get developers involved,” like that just seems like too much for many of us.

And that’s one thing that’s nifty about Zapier, I’ve used it a little bit myself. So, why don’t you orient those who are not familiar? What does it do? How does it go?

Wade Foster
Yeah, so it used to be you did have to do that, you need developers and scripts and APIs, but with Zapier you don’t. We use a sort of simple metaphor called triggers and actions to help you set up automations. And so, a trigger is an event that might happen in any sort of software that you use. So, maybe it’s someone fills out a form that’s on your website; maybe you have a contact form, or a lead form, or any sort of form; maybe you’re collecting data for an RSVP for an event. When someone does that thing, that’s called a trigger, and then the action is, “What do you want Zapier to do for you when that happens?”

So, if you say like, contact form on a website, “Well, when someone fills out this contact form on the website, the action, I want them to log that person’s detail in my CRM so that I can make sure to follow up with them and communicate with them later.” So, at Zapier, we follow that simple trigger action logic, and it has a really simple UI to set some of this stuff up. And, in fact, a lot of the use cases are out-of-the-box where you don’t even have to understand what a trigger and action is. You can just turn that stuff on. And it helps you automate all sorts of different things that you might want to do around your job.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool. I was just thinking recently about Zapier. It’s very fortuitous, the timing, just because, in my huge listener survey—thank you so much, listeners, for spending that time there. Something came up associated with community, and that’s something I’m trying to figure out and build and, “How do I do that? Boy, is it even manageable with so many thousands of people and probably need to be paid to have fewer folks?”

But, anyway, as I’m going through the ins and outs, one thing that came up was listeners would love the opportunity to be able to chime in and share their questions associated with a guest as soon as they learn that a guest is going to be interviewed. And I thought Zapier is pretty cool in that I could say, “Hey, Calendly is what I use for booking,”—which is a really easy way to set appointments.

I could say, “Yo, Zapier, when I get a new booking for a podcast interview, I want you to share that information over in a Slack channel for the listener community to announce, like, ‘Hey, Wade Foster is being interviewed on this day. Here’s what he submitted.’” And then they could just have at it without me having to remember, “Ooh, shucks, I need to kind of find, and copy, and paste the booking info inside the community Slack channel so folks have the opportunity to chime in and say things.” So, what’s cool is that once you’re just aware that tools like this exist, you sort of start to see opportunities, and I think that’s pretty exciting.

Wade Foster
Totally. And I think that example you just shared is a great one because you sort of stumbled across a use case that helps you solve a very specific problem. And now, once you have that skill in your skillset, you can start to refine these things. You might say, “Hey, I’m glad that I’m getting all this feedback in Slack. But now when I go interview Wade, I have to go find that Slack channel or that Slack thread, and it’s buried because it was a couple weeks old. So, maybe I don’t want them to put it in a Slack thread, so maybe I’ll have the Zap setup when a Calendly then gets booked, I’ll have Zapier generate a form, and then I’ll post a link to the form in Slack so that, then, when I got to talk to Wade, I just pull up a spreadsheet that’s got a bunch of questions in it, and I have them all right in front of me, and it’s a little easier to find that stuff.”

Like, once you sort of get the hang of automation, you can start to go, “Well, I like this basic thing, but I could tweak it a little bit and get a little bit more out of it and customize it to the needs that I have.” And so, I think that’s when automation becomes really fun because you have that ability to let your creativity go wild on the problems that are unique to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I guess that’s sort of the thing, it’s like everyone is going to have their own unique things and it’s sort of hard to say, “This is the top thing you must automate.” But, nonetheless, someone will take a crack at it. Could you maybe share with us a story of someone who used Zapier or some other automation tools out there to receive just like tremendous time savings and career and life benefits in action?

Wade Foster
Yeah, I think one of the ones that I really loved is there was this company that started in Australia, and they run an on-demand lawnmowing service. And the way it worked…

Pete Mockaitis
I’d would like that.

Wade Foster
Yeah, right? So, it’s kind of like Uber, right, you’ll hail a car to come pick you up. Well, this is you hail a person with a lawnmower to come mow your yard. And so, if you start to think about like, “What are the problems that you have to do to run a mowing service like that?” It’s like, well, you need a website, you need an order form, or a mobile app where people can say, “Hey, I want to book this thing.” And when they get booked, you need to be able to send an alert out to the people who have lawnmowers to say, “Hey, who wants to come do this thing?” And then you need to let the person who booked it know that you’ve got someone available.

Or you can just have a person just paying attention to the form and then doing all the matchmaking manually. Well, what this person did was said, “You know what, here’s how I’m going to set this up. When people request a lawnmower to come in, I’m going to have that get published automatically through Zapier into a spreadsheet. And in the spreadsheet, I’m going to have that trigger out a message via Twilio that goes out to our people who are currently marked as available to come mow the lawn. And then the first person that replies…”

Pete Mockaitis
Like a text message then?

Wade Foster
Yeah, a text message.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go. That’s so smart.

Wade Foster
That says, “Hey, someone wants their lawn mowed,” right? And then the first person to reply to it then gets assigned to it so it gets marked back into the spreadsheet to say, “Bob is going to come mow the lawn.” And then via another text message, it publishes back to the customer that says, “Hey, Bob is coming to mow your lawn.”

So, this thing that would’ve been like a pretty manual matchmaking service is now run by like a couple zaps behind the scenes. And so, as a result, the business spends most of its time just trying to find more people, more customers, and find more lawnmowers. They don’t have to worry about the matchmaking process themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
And what was so cool about that is if someone would say, I imagine—we recently had a chat about side hustles with Nick Loper—but if someone were starting out as like a side hustle, and to think, “Oh, my gosh, this is going to be so hard. I’ve got build a mobile app that has all of this connectivity with all this people.” And then, no, they just sort of hacked together like with Google Sheets and some other stuff and Zapier a means of getting the job done without the huge investment, Uber or Lyft or some stuff, just made into that.

Wade Foster
Totally, right? Those folks made hundreds of millions of dollars to build their stuff, and this person did it with a handful of apps, right?

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool. Well, so I’d love to hear then – so that’s a pretty cool use case – so let’s talk about those professionals you mentioned, the lawyer, the real estate agents, the knowledge worker, the engineer, some stuff that is super popular and effective and helpful to automate, like it shows up again and again and again, and the time savings can be substantial.

Wade Foster
Yeah, the thing that I see happen and over and over again is sort of managing requests and interactions and relationships with other people. So, you’re often seeing this in the form of customer relationships. A customer, or a lead, or a prospect fills out a form on a website, “And let’s make sure that they get logged in our CRM, or logged in our mailing list, or the sales rep gets a text message to say, ‘Hey, you should call this lead,’ or something like that.”

But, oftentimes, it can be internal employees. Think about like an HR function, they have a form setup that says, “Hey, who’s going to come to the holiday party? Like, fill out this form real quick so we know how much food to order and like what your dietary restrictions are and whatnot.” And then get logged in a spreadsheet and then text the person a response back or sends them an email to say, “Hey, we got your order and we’ve got you booked to get the chicken at the holiday party,” or whatever. And that all sort of happens automatically.

But there’s a lot of use cases around just managing and communicating with people, whether it’s customers, or employees, or fans, or your community, or things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And, I guess, the next stuff I was thinking about what you should not automate. And I guess what I’m thinking about, I think it was Ryan Deiss. And he was talking about when you automate outbound marketing messages too much, you have a real risk of embarrassing yourself and looking dumb. And I think that I’ve seen that with PR people reaching out to me, “Hey, Pete, we think so and so would be great for your podcast.” Like, “Yeah, I’ve already had them on my podcast.”

This happens to me multiple times a week. And that’s a whole conversation, like, “Isn’t that the first thing you did was figure out what shows this guy is getting booked on so you can have great recommendations for applicable shows?” But, whatever. We’re not here to throw publicists under the bus. I was talking about some of the risks or where is it unwise. I think that’s one zone is I think if you let automation run amok on sort of outbound messages.

Wade Foster
Yeah, non opt-in channels, like things like that. You obviously don’t want to go and buy an email list and then upload in this system and then bulk spam a bunch of people. That doesn’t feel good. But when you have a form that a customer filled out, and you’re sending them a confirmation email to say, “Hey, we got your request,” like people expect that. That feels normal.

So, I think those are pretty safe when you’re talking about direct customer communication. And then I think things around just making sure that that information gets logged in the right system so that you can track that stuff. Did you get a project spun up in your project management tool? Did you get them logged in Airtable or a spreadsheet so that you have that and know to follow up on those things? Kind of the back-office paperwork type stuff rather than the direct customer interaction but how to make sure that you’re properly managing the relationship. That kind of stuff is like a sweet spot for automation, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so there’s one sweet spot we’re talking about, the customer request and getting them processed and connected and moving to where they need to go. Any other kind of broad categories that show up a lot?

Wade Foster
The other big one we see a lot is things like, “How do you just collect all of the inputs for like a project?” Think of project management at work, or you’ve got a program that’s running, and you’re getting feedback in this plate, in something like Jira, you’re getting requests that come in from a customer via email, you’re getting a feature request that comes from your boss. You’re getting all these inputs from all these different directions.

And Zapier can help you consolidate a lot of that into one centralized system, whether it’s a spreadsheet, or Airtable, or CRM, or a project management tool that basically says, “All this information that’s coming at me from 10 different places, all of which is important, and I don’t want to go check 10 different places. I want to just see it in one list.” That’s a place where Zapier is just super helpful, Pete, for people who do project management and things like of this nature.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you. Well, so now I want to get even more precise. When it comes to Zapier, like what are the kind of absolute kind of most used zaps in terms of, “When I get an email about this, I want you to put it in Google Sheets like that”? So, in terms of when this program does this, trigger action, what combos are you seeing like have bazillions of, sort of installations or usages?

Wade Foster
Yeah, I think any sort of things like, “A customer paid me,” or, “Someone filled out my form on my website,” or, “Someone sent me an email,” that post a message into Slack sends you an alert, says, “Hey, this thing happened,” that’s really, really popular. Also, things like, “I got a lead through Facebook, a lead came in through Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Google, and I want to make sure a sales rep follows up on it instantly, so automatically route that into Salesforce or some other CRM,” things like that are really popular on Zapier.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I wanted this before, because I clicked around Zapier. So, now if you don’t have the thing that I want, can I find a developer to go make that for me?

Wade Foster
Yeah, so there’s a couple things you can do if we don’t have what you want. So, we have things like our inbound email action. So, if the app you have or working with that isn’t supported by Zapier, but it sends out email alerts, you can use that to have emails forwarded into Zapier. You can use things like RSS which, if it generates an RSS feed, we accept RSS.

If the service provides webhooks, which is kind of a more technical thing, but usually not that hard to learn even if you’re not a developer, you just point the webhook at Zapier, and say, “Zapier, accept this.” And if the service you’re working doesn’t have any of those things, you can go track down a developer or a Zapier expert. At zapier.com/experts, we have a whole list of experts that help with more complicated workflows, and say, “Hey, can you help me get Zapier to work with this tool, where I might need a developer to dig under the hood and play around with some codes and some APIs a little bit?” So, there’s a lot. So, that’s kind of the way that most folks approach it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool to hear because I have, at times, I visit Upwork.com and found some people to code some things for me.
Okay, so if folks are digging this and they say, “I want to get started,” I imagine you’d say, “Well, go to Zapier.com.” But what are some other tips or strategies you’d recommend for folks who want to start automating and offloading some of the stuff they’re doing all the time?

Wade Foster
That’s a great question. I was talking to one of our experts, and he made this comment that automation is a mindset, it’s not a skill, which I thought was interesting. And the reason he said that was most people don’t even think about automation when they think about their to-do list on a given day. And so, he said, “One of the ways that I train people to get better at this is to start writing down what do you do every day, just write it down on a piece of paper. Or, when you write down your to-do list, don’t think, ‘How am I going to do this?’ Instead think, ‘How does this get done?’”

And shifting the way you think about your to-do list to not, “I have to do this,” to, “How does this get done?” starts to open your mind up to, “Well, perhaps I can delegate that thing to Zapier,” or, “Maybe I delegate something like this to an EA,” or, “Maybe I delegate this to a person that’s on my team.” But there’s other ways to get stuff done that don’t always involve you specifically, directly doing the task.

And I thought that such a smart way to help folks get into that automation mindset to step back and really understand where you’re spending time on stuff on a day-to-day basis, that maybe you don’t need to be spending that time on those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that is a cool mindset shift. Any other tools you’d recommend in terms of getting the job done? So, Zapier is handy and flexible and can do a lot. But things that either make automation happen or just keep work processes from being too boring or cumbersome.

Wade Foster
I think the other up-and-comer alongside Zapier that I see a lot is Airtable. So, Airtable is kind of like a souped-up spreadsheet database-type tool, and it’s kind hard to like describe it in a way that sounds really fun and interesting but, boy, do people love it. They start to get their hands on it, and they just find all sorts of interesting ways to do automation with Zapier and Airtable, and better manage a lot of projects and work that they’ve got coming in.

So, Airtable, similar to Zapier, we have a list of zaps all over the site that you can check out and use. Airtable also has their universe and a gallery that shows all the different ways you can use Airtable, which I think is a pretty fun place to go exploring.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, now, I’ll tell you this, I have heard Airtable mentioned here and there, but I don’t actually have any conception of what it is. I’m on Airtable.com right now.

Wade Foster
It’s like a spreadsheet but it’s like better. It’s hard to say because it’s one of those things that you just have to play with it. And as soon as you play with it for a little bit, you’re like, “Oh, I see why this is better.” But until you do, it’s one of those things that people will go, “Yeah, I guess, I use spreadsheets and I think spreadsheets are good.” So, I don’t know. You should have Howie come on your podcast and he can tell you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s intriguing. As I’m seeing right now, like there’s an Airtable, it looks like a spreadsheet, but they also have photos in there and notes in there. And those are kind of hard to do to stick a photo in an Excel or a Google Sheet.

Wade Foster
Totally. And you can put files in them. So, you can just like stuff more things in them, more like a database, like what you do with a database. But then you can visualize it in all sorts of ways. So, you can turn your spreadsheet into like a Kanban board, kind of like Trello would be, or you can do a bunch of pivot tables but in a way that you don’t have to know what a pivot table is. So, stuff like that.

Pete Mockaitis
I know deeply about pivot tables as a former strategy consultant.

Wade Foster
Oh, yes. Yes. But like most people don’t know what pivot tables are, and Airtable makes it easy to do it, and you wouldn’t even know you’re doing a pivot table. You’d just be like, “Oh, that’s a handy little thing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Wade, I hope you have not incepted me with this new desire which is going to result in 10 or 20 bucks a month departing my wallet continually. I’m a sucker. I love tools that help me do more, and I very easily justify their expenditure, like, “Well, this saves me just six minutes a month. It’s a bargain,” and maybe it is.

Wade Foster
Well, hopefully, with things like Zapier and Airtable, we’re doing more than six minutes a month. Hopefully, we’re digging into the hours and days a month buck territory.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. That’s just how I persuade myself, “Well, surely, more than six minutes, and that’s all we need to be based on these parameters.”

Wade Foster
Totally, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, Airtable is handy. Any other tools leap to mind?

Wade Foster
You know, Airtable is great. I think tools like Typeform or Wufoo are really popular these days for putting in forms.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, a new level of form.

Wade Foster
Yeah, Typeform is really slick. There’s another up-and-comer coming up called Coda that’s been pretty interesting. I’ve seen a lot of our people playing around with.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you spell Coda, C-O-D-A?

Wade Foster
Yes, C-O-D-A. So, it’s a document software. So, the cool thing about Coda is if you spell it backwards, it’s a doc.

Pete Mockaitis
Huh. Coda.io.

Wade Foster
Yeah, Coda.io. So, it’s like a Google Doc but similar to like how Airtable is like a spreadsheet, it’s so much more under the hood. And you can do all these like cool little macros, and like nifty things that make your doc more living and breathing, and auto updates based on other project software that you work with. So, it’s one of those ones that if you fashion yourself to be kind of on the cutting edge of new things. I’m seeing a lot of folks play around with Coda these days.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, while we’re talking about project management and stuff, do you have a point of view on monday.com versus Asana versus the others?

Wade Foster
You know, I don’t have a strong point of view. You see monday, you see Asana, you see Trello, then you see stuff more on the personal side like Todoist or maybe…

Pete Mockaitis
OmniFocus.

Wade Foster
Yeah, OmniFocus, there you go. Yeah, so stuff like that. Honestly, I think people work in different ways, so whatever works for you. Like, each of these tools have their own little design paradigms and ways that you approach this stuff. I think what’s more important is that you find habits that you can stick to. And if the software helps you stick to that habit, that’s probably the one you should do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and if the software gets in the way because you’re always tinkering and fiddling and formatting and customizing because your dorky little productivity sensibilities are firing off, and in a way that’s fun.

Wade Foster
Yeah, that’s a good time.

Pete Mockaitis
And if that makes work more thankfully enjoyable but I have, at times, saying, “Wait a minute. This is actually counterproductive work.”

Wade Foster
Yeah, it’s a bit of a form of procrastination, right.

Pete Mockaitis
Exactly. “I’ve got my formatting just perfect now. Oh, anybody know…?”

Wade Foster
Yeah, “What else can I do before I actually do the thing on my to-do list?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, hey, there’s one mistake not to make. Any other things you would flag in terms of a warning, or a common mistake, or failure when folks are trying to optimize and automate stuff?

Wade Foster
You know, I think one thing that’s really easy to get caught up with is the sort of hamster wheel of just working through your to-do list, like constantly just adding things to your to-do list, and continuing to trudge through them. I think the most sort of successful folks that I’ve worked with do this exercise. It’s not really an exercise, some of them don’t even know that they’re doing it. But they really have a clear grasp on what it is that they want to do, like what it is that they want to achieve over a longer period of time.

So, they might say, “In the next year, I want X,” or, “In the next five years, I want Y,” or, “In the next 10 years, I want to have Z.” And then they start to work backwards from that. And then when they look at their to-do list on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis, yeah, there’s some stuff that you just kind of got to do to make sure that the bills get paid and whatnot. But they continually remember, “What is it that I’m trying to achieve over the long haul?” And they make sure that every day, they’ve got some things on their to-do list that kind of pushes them forward on that rung.

And so that way, they’re not getting stuck in this hamster wheel where, after five years, they look up and go, “I’ve done a lot of work, I’ve checked a lot of to-do’s off over the last five years. I haven’t really done anything. I haven’t really achieved what mattered to me.” And so, I think doing that just mental exercise of, “What is it that I want? What do I want for myself? What do I want to contribute to humanity over the next year?” And really understand that is a very important step for optimizing your work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Wade, tell me, any final thoughts before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Wade Foster
Let’s do some favorite things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. How about a favorite quote?

Wade Foster
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study?

Wade Foster
Favorite study? I did a lot of math and science in school but, lately, I’ve been studying a bunch of like writing rhetoric tricks.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Tell me examples, please.

Wade Foster
So, I picked up this book, and every week I write a Friday update for the team, and it’s like it’s usually some stuff that’s on my mind to help them just better see the bigger picture. And the book has like, I don’t know, 50 different rhetoric tricks in it. And so, every week I write the update, and then I’ll go read one of the rhetoric tricks. And then I’ll go back through my update and find a way to use it as part of it.

So, this week, syllepsis was the thing that I was using as part my Friday update. So, I dropped a couple of syllepses, I don’t even know, like, some of these things I don’t even know the plural of it, into the update. And then I use it as a way just to teach the team some little writing tips and tricks throughout the week.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I always get it mixed up. Is syllepsis the one like, “Don’t ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”?

Wade Foster
Syllepsis is kind of like where you would use a single word to sort of…it’s used with two other parts of a sentence, but then that same word is understood differently in relationship to each other. So, for example, “They covered themselves with dust and glory,” That’s a quote from Mark Twain. Well, covered with dust and covered with glory, like that’s two different ways to be covered. You’re still using the same word covered, but dust is like a physical thing, and glory is like more abstract.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it feels awesome. It has a name and it’s used frequently in some of the word. Well, now, we’re all wondering what the name of this book.

Wade Foster
Oh, shoot, I have to find it. Let’s see, let me pull it up on my Kindle. So, the name of this book, I’m pulling it up here real quick, is The Elements of Eloquence is the name of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Wade Foster
It’s got a fancy title and everything.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s probably a name for that literary device right there.

Wade Foster
I’m sure there is. It’s “Elements of Eloquence,” it has some literation in there, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And who’s the author?

Wade Foster
So, the author for this book is Mark Forsyth.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, right on.

Wade Foster
Just some of my writing friends said, “You’ve got to check this out. It’ll help you be more persuasive. It’ll help you write cooler things.” And I was like, “I’d like to sound more persuasive. I’d like to write cooler things.” So, I picked it up and I’m having fun with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you. So, let’s see, there’s a book. How about a favorite tool?

Wade Foster
Can I say Zapier?

Pete Mockaitis
You can but give me another one as well.

Wade Foster
I’ll give you another one. So, one of the ones I’m really loving right now is this tool called Workona, which is a Chrome extension, that helps you manage all your tabs. So, if you’re like me, you might be a tab order, where you’ll have tens, maybe dozens of tabs open at the same time, but they’re all disorganized, and you can’t find the tab that you want.

Well, Workona helps you organize your tabs based on projects. So, for example, if you’re trying to plan a wedding, and you had a set of tabs for weddings, you could put that in one workspace. You had another set of tabs that was for meal planning. Maybe you’d put those in a different workspace. Then if you’ve got a set of tabs for this project you’re doing at work, that would go in a different workspace. So, as you switch back and forth between contexts, you can pop open those set of tabs all at once, rather than keeping all the tabs for all of those projects open at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Whoa! So, it’s kind of like I can bookmark a site, but that’ll take me to one site, but with Workona I can sort of save a collection of tabs.

Wade Foster
You’ve got it.

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds like when I need to get down to business and decide what goes in the podcast episode, get open up my Google Drive on my podcast files, and then open up my media schedule in a Google Sheet on another tab, and then open up my email with Superhuman on a third tab, and it could just save that for me.

Wade Foster
Totally, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s pretty cool.

Wade Foster
Yeah, and when you think about how you do work, at least how I do work, it’s often thematically the same. So, it’s like when I sit down to do this set of things, I always have these windows open up. But if I’m doing a different task, it’s a different set of windows. And so, I can save those workspaces and come back to them really quick, which is nice.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, cool. Workona, W-O-R-K-O-N-A.

Wade Foster
You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And how about a favorite habit?

Wade Foster
My favorite habit, honestly, this is my cornerstone habit, it’s my exercise habit. So, at 5:30, I’m usually heading to the gym to play racket ball or do some weightlifting, and everything feeds off of this habit. I exhaust myself at the end of the day, it takes my mind off of work. I come home and I’m able to eat dinner and get a good night’s sleep because I’m exhausted from working out hard. Then I wake up early in the morning, fresh and resilient for the next day’s things that I have to do. So, that exercise habit is really important for me.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share with your teams and those you collaborate with that really seems to connect and resonate with them?

Wade Foster
Our set of values that we have as a company are probably the things that resonate deeply. So, we have things like default to action, default to transparency, empathy no ego, growth through feedback, and, “Don’t be a robot, build a robot,” are a set of core values. These are things that we use in part of our hiring process. We use it as part of our performance reviews. And we even have like Reacji emojis inside of Slack to sort of illustrate when people are operating with the values in mind. And these things, it’s just become a part of our DNA, and it resonates with everyone that works at Zapier.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, “Don’t be a robot, build a robot,” is a great mantra even if you’re not building automation software. But, no, seriously, don’t do the same process hundreds of times over, find a means by which that could be automated. I heard someone say, “Hey, if your definition of automation can include other people who are not you, you know?” So, for example, if there is a job could be done by someone in a lower-cost nation, for example.

Wade Foster
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Or someone who has a lower cost of labor because they’re an intern or don’t have a college degree because it’s not necessary, then that could be handy too if you build a process that has a lot of sort of software automation as well as other people such that you’re bringing down the total time load and cost load to the organization and yourself to make it done. So, that follows up to that mindset shift of not, “How am I going to do this?” but rather, “How is this going to get done?”

Wade Foster
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
And by building a robot or the systems and processes.

Wade Foster
You bet.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s going to stick with me. Thank you.

Wade Foster
I know.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Wade Foster
Come check out Zapier.com. You can get in touch with me on Twitter, I’m pretty active there @wadefoster. And my email is not too hard to find, so if you’re really keen on getting in touch with me, email is always a good way too.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Wade Foster
I think just go get it. Go automate the stuff. Go find ways to work better. Why are you listening to us for? Go make it happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Wade, this has been a ton of fun. I wish you and Zapier tons of luck and keep on rocking.

Wade Foster
Yeah, thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Dianna, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Dianna Booher
Thank you, Pete. It’s great to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat once again. I think we’re going to get into some really important stuff. Your book is just a bullseye, I think, and for many professionals that they need to hear. But, first, I want to hear a little bit about you. You say you’re afraid of heights, yet you have 4 million frequent flyer miles in American Airlines. What’s the story here?

Dianna Booher
I don’t know. I’m going to blame it on my mom. You know, we blame everything on our parents. She used to tell me, when I was growing up, I was going to catch my shoelaces in the escalator, you know, “Jump off quickly. Quickly.” And I guess that’s where it came from, I don’t know, but I had been known to even walk over and ask total strangers if I could hold onto their shoulder or their elbow going down an escalator. I just step…

Pete Mockaitis
What do they tell you?

Dianna Booher
“Yes, yes.” At a trade show, would you believe, it was a competitor. She was standing at the top of an escalator about to go down, and I humbled myself to go over and say, “I am totally afraid to get on an escalator. Could I hold onto your arm?” And she just burst out to a hysterical laughter, and said, “Of course.” And it broke the ice, actually, it improved the relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s good. Was this a training competitor?

Dianna Booher
Yes, it was, a competitor of my training company. But I’ve even tried to get over it by going on tours, or climbing a mountain, doing something to go to this big lookout, and probably every country that I’ve visited, about 60 of them, and I would start off with my husband, you know, and this group and we’re going to go, and I would get to the first or second little stop, and just cling to the side of the mountain till I came back down. I just can’t do it. I just freeze.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, maybe someday.

Dianna Booher
Someday.

Pete Mockaitis
But, nonetheless, it hasn’t stopped you from flying, and building, and selling a training business, so congratulations on that as well. That’s cool. But you’re still in the game somewhat because you wrote a new book, Faster, Fewer, Better Emails. Very on topic, I think, for a lot of us. So, tell us, what’s the big idea here?

Dianna Booher
Well, basically, it’s about productivity and, of course, the writing skill because you want to be on message. But it increases productivity three ways. It gives strategies to reduce the volume that’s about to engulf everyone, it helps you write the necessary emails better so you get the action you want, and, really, the third way it increases your productivity is it helps you write faster because you’re thinking more clearly, and you say the right thing the first time and not have to do it over and over and over.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, that sounds great.

Dianna Booher
So, basically, that’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so maybe let’s talk about the why for a second. So, I know I don’t like having a ton of emails hanging out of my inbox. It feels kind of uncomfortable, just a low-level anxiety exists in my psyche when I’ve got it. And I know, listeners, I owe you some messages but you’re not forgotten. It will happen. That’s like two babies.

Dianna Booher
I think most people feel stressed about their email, or at least that’s what a report, you know, when we did our major survey, which is sort of the basis of all the strategies that we give in the book. Well, we surveyed people for more than 30 different organizations across all industries. And we found people are really, really stressed out by their email and not only at work but when they go home, they’re logging back in afterhours and on the weekends to just keep up with it, to start off even again the next Monday.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, so could you maybe give us the lay of the land then? You got the survey, some research, some study. Can we get some numbers on kind of what sort of time are we talking about and what kind of time could be saved if we were doing it faster, fewer, better?

Dianna Booher
Well, two to three hours a day, and that’s conservative, according to the research, and we found that 42% of the respondents spend three or more hours a day doing email.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Dianna Booher
And that’s just astounding to me because for many people that’s not their core job. We’re not talking about people whose job it is to sit there like customer service agent maybe whose job it is all day to sit there and respond to email. But maybe their core job is doing an engineering project, or arriving a feasibility study, or doing an engineering report. But that’s just on top of their regular job.

In fact, a story that one CEO was talking about, he was talking to a reporter, actually this story was passed on to me, but the reporter was asking about the volume of email. And he said, “Well, I have a project here that would probably take me an hour and a half to finish, but because I get so much email in here, it’s probably going to take me the rest of the afternoon to do it.” And that was at 1:30 in the afternoon.

So, Pete, the idea is that people just can’t get to their real work because of keeping their email up, staying through the inbox, going through it all the time. And we just found out a lot of things with the email that I was really surprised to know, and that comment from that CEO. It reminds me 55% of our respondents said that they check their email at least every hour.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Dianna Booher
In other words, they just leave it open, and they’re continually checking their email rather than focusing on their core work, and checking it two or three times a day, which is what I recommend in the book. You check it when you come in the morning, maybe check it after lunch and before you go home so you can respond to things that people are waiting on. And it’s either waiting for them before they go home or the next morning. But some people just, as things pop into their box, they handle it so they’re continually disrupted and distracted from what they’re doing.

Another thing that was surprising to me, since you’re asking about surprising things, 31%, in other words, one out of three people said that they spent more than 20 minutes every day just searching for information because they’re disorganized. And so, when they need to send an email or type something, they don’t file documents, they don’t title them consistently so they’re looking for things. They just kind of haphazardly put this here, put that there. So, when somebody says, “Can you send me the numbers on this? Or, can you send me data for that?” they’re searching. And some people said they spend up to an hour a day just searching for things. That’s where the disorganization really cost them a lot of time.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, if I guess some would say, “Well, hey, email is sort of part of life.” Just how much savings of time are you seeing when you implement some of these best practices?

Dianna Booher
Well, we have not asked per se different organizations to give us savings. Now, we have on our writing programs. So, when we’re teaching writing programs, before I sold my training organization last year, we surveyed every three years, and we ask organizations to report how much time they saved in writing time. And the average participant, or in the average organization came back to us and said they saved upward of 35% on their writing time, and also, we had to measure reading time.

Now, this was self-report, and we would say, “All right,” when they started, before they went through our program, we would say, “How much time do you spend writing normally? And then how much time have you reduced it?” Not just the next day, well, they remembered all the techniques we gave them. But we would ask organizations, not us, but the organization, their HR department, their training department, go back and ask them three months later, “How much would you say you’ve estimated reducing your writing time?” And the average would be upward of 35%. So, that’s a tremendous savings in just their thinking process.

And then also in reading time, we asked them to do the same thing for their executives’ perspective, you know, all the documents that are coming to them, and basically their job is reading, you know, decide, approve, buy this, consider, have a meeting on that. But all of that is coming to them in written form before they take those actions. And if they can cut the length of documents going to them, then obviously, and particularly if they’re copying six people or 42 people, then they’re saving a lot of reading time. So, it’s another way to measure.

But we’ve also had a client who actually literally, literally measured paperwork, because a lot of people don’t want to keep their screen time so they’ll print out, believe it or not in this day and age, they’ll print out a lot of emails and take it with them on the airplane to read, or take it with them in a briefcase, take it with them on the road while somebody else is driving, if they have a lot of commute time on the train, etc.

And so, this one client literally measured paperwork, how much paperwork did they have before they started this program, and then how much six months later less trash. And that’s an engineering company as you can imagine that would do that. And so, that’s another metric, so reading time and just thinking time and preparation time. So, there’s a lot of ways to measure that we let organizations themselves measure the effect.

And, of course, the results and if their salespeople are measuring the closing rate. If they can’t close a proposal, but after they learned to write better and they have a better closing rate on their emails and proposals where they’re dealing with their clients, that’s a measure as well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so much good stuff. All right. Well, I’m sold. Hey, 35% on two to three hours a day, one HR a day, that’s huge. What could you do with that? Wow. So, let’s get into each of it. So, when it comes to, say, first of all, I just got a boatload of emails. How do we tackle that?

Dianna Booher
Well, there are several strategies to cut paperwork and just to reduce the volume. Let me give you one of the pieces before you understand how these strategies play out. When we ask people, “What are the kinds of emails that you get that are just totally unnecessary?” They said, let me check here, “Thirty-two percent of the emails that we get are totally either redundant or irrelevant.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Dianna Booher
And when they defined what they meant, it either doesn’t apply to them. In other words, they’re on somebody’s distribution list and it’s long outlived its usefulness, they don’t need to be on that list anymore. So, people, they put together a list for this project or this certain kind of monthly report, and then they no longer need to get it, but people, rather than cleaning their distribution list, they’re just still sending it over and over so that just clutters their box.

Or, they have no interest in it. They never were interested in getting this information. So, every morning when you come in, and you look at your email, a third of it you don’t need or it’s redundant. Six people have sent you the same thing. So, just cleaning your distribution list and deleting and unsubscribing, rather than just deleting. If for all eternity you don’t need this, then unsubscribe, don’t just delete it. Of course, it takes a little bit longer to take three steps to un-delete, and the safe unsubscribe always asks you, “Why do you want to un-delete? Is this the right email? Why do not want it? Did you not sign up, etc.?” That’ll take you three clicks rather than delete which takes you one click, but then you’re out of it for good. You don’t keep getting it every Tuesday morning, etc.

But here are the kind of strategies that I’m talking about in the book. In fact, the first chapter gives 12 of these. But, throughout, you’ll come up with about 30 or 40, throughout the whole book. But let me talk about some of those that are the most troublesome that clogs up your email. And that is using your email box for a to-do list.

A lot of people open up their email, and they think, “Oh, I need to do something, but I can’t do it right now. I need to finish so and so,” or, “I need to collect this information but I don’t have it.” And rather than schedule that task, pull that over, put it on a calendar, or make a physical note of it if they need to do that, they just leave it open in their email box, and then they open the next thing, “Oh, I need to call so and so. Well, I don’t want to forget that,” and they just leave it in their email box.

And so, pretty soon they’ve got 15 open emails and they keep having to read through those. Then the next day, they don’t remember, “What was that? What was that detail? When was that due?” And they have to read through those. Oh, every time they come across it, they have to keep reading through it and reading through it to remember. So, it clutters up their box, it creates re-reading. So, when they come across something like that, they need to act on it. They need to either move it, file it, make another note of when they’re going to do it, move it over on their calendar, and just get it out of the inbox. It is not your to-do list.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if there’s a to-do item, it doesn’t belong in the inbox but it should be not forgotten and placed elsewhere. So, do you just have like a separate folder or a label called To-Do or what is it called?

Dianna Booher
Yes, yes, you can have it separate. There are several ways to handle it. If you’re using Microsoft Office 365, you literally could pull that email over on a date to handle it. Let’s say you’re waiting for information to go in that email. Before you can respond, you’re going to get some data next Wednesday on it, then you can literally pull it over to next Thursday because you’re getting the information on Wednesday, and now you can respond on Thursday. You just literally drag it over on that pane.

Or you can make a note. Let’s say you have a paper calendar where you have a list of to-dos. You just make a note, “Respond to Jack about so and so,” and then file that document with that client if it’s merged with your CRM system, your customer management system. Just file it. Or, if you want to, you can have a folder that says “To-Dos” and just pull it in that folder, and then check that folder every morning for what you’re going to do, or schedule it on a certain day. Any number of ways. The point is don’t leave it in your inbox because you just keep having to re-read it and think, “What was this supposed to do? What were the details of that? What was the deadline of that, etc.?”
Pete Mockaitis
I dig it.

Dianna Booher
Yeah. And another thing that clutters up and disrupts people and distracts them from their core work that I was talking about is what I call piling on or hanging on. And what I mean by piling on, let’s say a manager, or just anybody, is working on a project, and they’ve written a document, and they want some feedback, or they’re just sending it out for input. And they send it out, and say, “I’m getting ready to forward this up to chain to such and such. Is everybody okay with it? Or do you have anything to add?”

Well, if you read it, instead of everybody hitting Reply All, and saying, “It’s fine. It looks fine to me. Okay. I don’t have anything to add,” and cluttering up 27 boxes with meaningless comments that all say the same thing, don’t do that, don’t use that Reply All. And not only are you at fault if you’re doing that kind of reply, but also the person who sent that out is creating the clutter too. What you really should do is if you want input, you want feedback, is to say something like, “I’ve put together such and such report that I’m getting ready to mail to Joe Schmo on this date. After you review it, if you have any comments or changes, please reply to me individually. Otherwise, no actions taken. If you see no changes, please no action is necessary.”

And then that takes care of it. You don’t expect any reaction. You don’t need 27 people to hit your inbox with meaningless comments, basically, all saying, “It’s okay. I don’t have any changes.” So, you see how people, they create sometimes their own clutter. You should just ask for an exception, “If you have an exception, email me back. If you have a change, email me back. But if you’re fine with this, no action is necessary.” So, it’s not only the person who’s doing the cluttering by hitting Reply All, but it’s the person who’s asking for the feedback, they’re not asking sometimes in the best way possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. It’s nice and clear. So, you put that out there. Lovely. How else do we slim that inbox?

Dianna Booher
Well, I think what I call piling on is similar to that but a little different. And I think people do it for relationship building but after a while it’s just clutter. Somebody is out sick, say, for example, and they send an email, and say, “I’m not coming in today. I’ve got the flu,” and all of a sudden they get 14 emails back, “Oh, sorry, you’re sick. Sorry, you’re sick. See you tomorrow, buddy. Take it easy. No problem. We don’t want the germs,” you know. All of a sudden you got 17 emails again that interrupt everybody else’s work.

Occasionally, if some over-the-top odd, unusual circumstance, then, okay, that might be necessary. And, occasionally, you do that kind of thing to build camaraderie. But when you do that routinely with just meaningless responses, it’s distraction, distraction, distraction, distraction.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And you could show your support with an individual reply, you know, without involving everybody.

Dianna Booher
Yes, right. Right. Another issue that’s a problem or a thing that people need to think about is just using email for things that email was never designed for. When we first got into big email in a big way back in the ‘90s, people used email for everything because basically that was our only communication connection system, and so we used it to schedule things, we used it to invite people places, we used it for project management, we used it to collaborate with teams. It was just the all-purpose tool.

But that’s not the case anymore. There are all kinds of more appropriate software packages for specific tools. For example, Pete, when you schedule interviews, you use, what is it? Calendly that you use.

Pete Mockaitis
Calendly, yeah.

Dianna Booher
If you’re doing project management, there’s Basecamp, there’s Asana, there’s Workzone, there’s Slack, there’s all kind of project management tools and communication tools so that all of your comments as a group working on a project can move over to that area and be together without cluttering up your email. Whatever tool that’s more appropriate, take it off your email so that it’s done efficiently.

If you’re using Microsoft 365, and you’re trying to setup a meeting with three people, I mean, you’ve seen people go back and forth on their email, like, “But we really need to get together to discuss this. Are you up at the end of the week?” And somebody else replies back, “I can’t do it at the end of the week. I’m going to be out for a couple of days. We’re closing our new house. How about early next week?” Of course, he emails back, “Well, I’m going to be traveling Tuesday. How about Wednesday after 4:00?” “No, I can’t.” And they get six emails going back and forth trying to set a time when, on Microsoft, they could just say, “Cortana, find an open place on our calendars and schedule the meeting,” and it’s done.

So, my principle here, use appropriate software to do tasks that email was never appropriate, it’s just not the appropriate tool now. Maybe in the ‘90s it was. It’s no longer the appropriate tool. So, email is used only for correspondence.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Lovely. Well, so, now I want to dig into a little bit of the composition side of things. You’ve got a framework, which I want to hit in a moment. But, first, I’d love to get just, you mentioned that you saw some cool results with regard to sales folks having better close rates, or I imagine also opening things up with a cold email and starting a conversation. What are some of your tips for just, generally speaking, writing emails that get responses maybe when you’re reaching out to someone for the first time?

Dianna Booher
Well, several things here. You always want to be specific. The reason a lot of people don’t get action on their emails is they’re just not specific about the action. They write to inform but they don’t persuade. Now, I’m not talking about hard sales. I’m just talking about that need to ask for an action. It’s amazing how many people who are in sales who don’t really ask for the next step, “So, can we meet with you to give you a trial run through this? Can we setup a tour? Can we do such and such?” They have to be very specific about time and date, a task.

The greeting needs to be tailored. You get a lot of emails that you know have gone to the whirls, so to speak. They send it to their entire database because it doesn’t use your name and there’s nothing in there that is specific to you, and there’s no indication that they know anything about you or remember anything about you from a previous conversation. So, there needs to be some tie to what you said previously.

I think it’s also important, in the subject line, that that subject line is not mysterious. I know if you are writing ads on TV, if you’re doing something for the Super Bowl, okay, you’ve got to be clever and cute and whatever, but that’s not email. Email, I call them sublines, S-U-B, and that stands for they need to be specific, they need to be useful, and they need to be brief. So, if you can take the S-U-B, specific, useful, and brief because…

Pete Mockaitis
Otherwise, you’re an S-O-B. I couldn’t resist it. You probably heard that dozens of times.

Dianna Booher
No, no. Quit pranking there, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you bet.

Dianna Booher
But people prioritize by their subject lines. When they’re busy and they’re on their phone, and they’re sitting at the gym waiting on their…sitting at the soccer field waiting on their child to finish the sports workout or whatever, and they’re going through 42 emails, and they’re trying to decide, “Read now, read later, or wait till I get home. Wait till I get back to the office in the morning,” etc. They’ve got to decide and prioritize.

And so, you’ve got to tell them immediately, and some of them actually just read the subject line and decide to delete and make the decision whether, “I’m going to open or send it to somebody else.” So, they need to be able to tell exactly what it is and see what’s in it for them. So, if you could put the action that you want in the subject line, that’s much better.

A lot of times, people just use a topic in their subject line. And what’s far better is to use a headline. Can you imagine reading the newspaper tonight and seeing something like, “Congress. Veto. Terrorist Attack. Weather?” You don’t. You see something like, “Terrorist attack kills 52 people in Malaysia,” or Sri Lanka, or whatever. Or you see, “Trump vetoes X, Y, Z legislation.” Or, “Congress passes X, Y, Z bill.” You see a message, and that’s what you’re…

Pete Mockaitis
this weekend.

Dianna Booher
Yeah, your subject line needs to say something not just introduce a topic. And that’s important.

Pete Mockaitis
You can say this with slide headlines too as opposed to just like report, data, survey. It’s like, “Well, tell me what I’m supposed to take away from this survey, otherwise we might all just draw our own interpretations,” which, if that was what you were going for, that’s okay. But usually it’s not. Usually, you’re trying to tell a story.

Dianna Booher
Right. I was coaching, I coached six executives last week, I was coaching them on executive…they’re already executives but I was coaching them to polish their executive presence and when they actually do a presentation to the board of directors. And we went through the entire slide decks. And, by far, most of them just had a topic as their slide. And I was saying, “Well, what’s the walkaway here? You’re talking about your revenue. But what about your revenue? Are you talking about your goals or are you saying you’re not going to meet your goals, you are going to meet your goals, your goals are falling short of what your budget, or your revenue, or your profitability? Is it that you’re not going to meet your profitability goals for the next quarter? What is the point about that?”

And they, finally, got it. And then once they understood, “We’re going for a headline here, if they could just read this and didn’t see anything on that slide, or they didn’t read anything in that email, could they walk away with a point?” And then they got it. And that’s key in email.

Another thing, too, that keeps people from even seeing your email is the habit, and it’s kind of a recent trend, of putting favorite quotes in the signature block, and putting images in the signature block. It wasn’t a big deal until about five years ago, or maybe it was about eight or 10 years ago, people started putting an image for their signature. Instead of typing it, they started writing, actually doing cursive, so to speak, and scanned it in, and they scan in their like, “Joan Smith,” and then they put that image there, and they’ll put their favorite quote, or they might put a banner, or their company logo.

Those are the kind of things that spam filters catch and keep things from being delivered. So, in the last three or four years, people have learned that, and they stopped doing that. But it’s really the spam filters are getting much more savvy about stripping those out and saying, “This is spam.” Being careful to not send those through from the outside. So, be careful about doing that, and use fewer images that will get clogged or get screened out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. All right. So, that’s some handy stuff in terms of getting the response. And so, now, let’s talk about the process you utilize to craft emails quickly and effectively.

Dianna Booher
Okay. Well, the book which talks about writing faster, fewer and better, there’s two parts to that. I don’t mean faster in the sense that you’re really going to type faster, or that you’re going to zap it all faster, there’s a faster way to get your email through technologically. What I mean by that is faster thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Dianna Booher
If you do it better, and you think better, you will do it in a more complete fashion from the very beginning, and that will result in getting the action done the first time. Instead of having to write seven emails to correct the problem or to handle a situation, you’ll write one email that takes care of the whole situation.

And so, that’s what I mean about, overall, faster. Overall, the whole situation will be taken care of faster. And so, the thinking process, really, is to analyze your audience right up front. Do you have one reader or do you have multiple readers? Who should you really copy? A lot of people, if you think about this, Pete, a lot of people, they have a situation that they need to communicate about, they write the email, and then they think, “Okay, who should get a copy here?” That’s a totally wrong approach, because your email should be tailored according to, just like that slideshow we were talking about a minute ago. The email should be tailored according to who you’re writing to.

So, the first step is, “Who am I writing to? And then, what is their bottom-line message of interest?” If they could just read one sentence, what would that one sentence be? And why do they want to know this? What’s their interest about this situation? And then you ask yourself, “How are they going to use this information? I mean, are they going to actually do the action or are they just going to approve something? Are they just going to forward this email to somebody else, and somebody else is actually going to implement it? And if so, then I need to copy so and so because they need to actually implement it. Or maybe I should put the bulk of this information in an attachment for a reference so somebody can just print it off because they’re the doer, but the person I’m writing to is just the decision-maker on it. They’re just going to approve it, and then they can forward it to somebody else to actually implement this a month later.”

So, you see all those questions matter even in the format of what you’re sending. And then you ask yourself, “Okay, what do they already know about it?” Don’t tell people what they already know. And think about this, Pete, how many times do you get an email that starts off, “As you already know,” or, “As we discussed a couple of weeks ago,” and they spend a paragraph telling you what you already know.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Dianna Booher
Or, “As we discussed in the meeting last week, blah, blah, blah.” And you think, “Yeah, I was in the meeting. Why are you wasting my time rehashing what we decided last week?” That’s a waste of time. So, think about that and then think the last question, and maybe the most important, is you ask yourself, “Okay, how are they going to react when I tell them this? When I give this one sentence overview message, are they going to be skeptical?” If so, that means you’ve got to add the why details to build credibility. “Are they going to be angry? Is somebody going to lose face? Are you creating extra work for them? Is this going to cost a lot more than they thought?”

There’s some typical negative reactions they might have. And that thinking dictates the details you’re going to put in. if you think there’s no negative reactions here, you may not include some of those details. So, that thinking, the answer those questions right up front, immediately tells you what details to include, and what you should omit, what’s just going to clutter it up. And then once you do that thinking, you’re home free, basically. You just arrange it in the MADE format.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, the MADE format is the message, the action, the details, and the evidence.

Dianna Booher
Yes. And that’s what I spend a whole chapter on because that is what will revolutionize 95% of what you write. Literally, I’ve been stuck for three decades, I’ve been teaching writing, so I’ve literally read thousands and thousands, and probably hundreds of thousands of emails so I can say it with confidence. In all different industries, all different types of documents, 95% of what we write in the business world can be structured that way. And that is an overview message of one or two sentences, maybe three if it’s a really long document.

And then, so what action next? Based on that message, what do you want the reader to do? It could be a recommendation, big picture recommendation, or it could be a follow-up action. You might be saying, “So, based on that message, here’s the action I’m taking, or here’s the action I want from you, the reader.” And once you get that message and action, then you circle back and then you elaborate on the details.

Now, if they’re just brief details, like a word or a phrase or who or when or what, those brief little details, it could be answered in a word or phrase, or probably already going to be part of your message and part of your action. But if you need to elaborate, that’s the key phrase. If you need to elaborate on the details, then that elaboration comes in this details section. Generally, it’s the how and they why. Most often you can make this, and elaborate, “And here’s why I’m saying what I’m saying. And here’s how to take the action.”

And then the E, evidence, if you have any kind of attachment you want to send along, like, “Here’s a copy of the spreadsheet that I’m referring to, where I’ve done a calculation,” or, “Here’s the copy of the contract that I’m saying I don’t agree with this clause that we’re going to dispute in court,” or whatever, or, “Here’s a map of the layout of this building that I’m saying we need to renovate this particular wing,” or something like that, then you attach it.

But if you use that structure, you just start thinking like that. And then emails are so easy to write when you just think, “Okay, what’s my message, what’s my action? Okay, now, what needs to be elaborated on?” And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you send out an email.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I really like that. And I think so often, it’s like I start writing an email, it’s like, “Wait a minute. What am I really going for here?” And then I like to rewrite it, and then maybe rewrite it again. Whereas, you could just sort of take a moment. So, it sounds like you might even sort of jot some notes on a tablet or some scratch pad somewhere as you’re doing this. Or how do you think about that?

Dianna Booher
Yeah, a lot of times people can. Once they start thinking like this, and they practice this, they can do the M-A-D-E in their head, you know, while they’re getting dressed in the morning, while they’re driving down the freeway, while they’re sitting on the subway, while they’re eating breakfast, and think, “Okay, in a sense, what’s my message? If I just picked up the phone and thought for a minute, and it’s about to cut off, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I got to get on the point of…’ It’s like turn off your cellphone, turn off your cellphone, I’ve got 30 seconds, what would I say?’” And you can figure out that part in your head.

If you’ve got a scratch pad, write it down. You don’t have to even write out complete sentences. Just say, “Here’s the phrase for the message. Action. I want them to setup a meeting. Detail. I need to explain why this fine is going to happen, how much it’s going to cost, and how to setup the three steps to do so and so.” And that’s a scratch sheet of paper, that’s your outline. And then when you get to the computer, you’re ready to just turn it into sentences, and it goes very, very quickly. But you can do that thinking anywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, I’m wondering, so how do you think about the headline, the subject versus the message?

Dianna Booher
The subject is last. See, a lot of times people fill in the subject line first, but you can’t summarize if you don’t know what your message is. So, always write it first, and then go back and put in your subject line. Your subject line is like the Reader’s Digest condensed version of your message.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that is an even shorter version of the one- to three-sentence message.

Dianna Booher
Right. It’s a summary version of your message and your action.

Pete Mockaitis
House on fire. Insurance payment $5,000.

Dianna Booher
Yeah. Or, “Just hired new VPs; starts next Monday.” That becomes a summary of the longer message of your first sentence which would be, “Our executive senior vice president just hired a junior vice president Mr. So-and-so who’s coming to us from XYZ Corporation. He’ll be starting next Monday, and his key responsibilities will be blah, blah, blah.” That would be the full message, but your subject line might be, “Just hired a new executive vice president; starts next Monday.”

Pete Mockaitis
And the action is, “You need to invite him to the luau. Make the necessary welcome here and acquire a Hawaiian shirt.”

Dianna Booher
Right. And be sure to shake his hands and ask for a raise right up front.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Cool. Well, any other thoughts? So, you do your thinking up front, and then you put that out there with the MADE format, and then you do the subject last. Any thoughts for doing some of the editing in terms of, “Okay, I’ve written a bunch of words on my screen.”

Dianna Booher
Just do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Just do the editing.

Dianna Booher
Do the editing. A lot of people just, when they get through the thinking, they do the one draft and they hit “send”, and send it out, and that’s not a good idea because you’re going to have missing words, you’re going to have an awkward sentence, you’re going to have a grammatical error. So, take the minute to go back and re-read it.

It’s best, if it’s a really important email, to let it cool off, particularly if it happens to be bad news or a sensitive topic. Let it cool off overnight if you can. If you can’t, a couple of hours helps. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back just after a couple of hours, just go to lunch and come back and read it, and think, “Oh, no, I’m so glad I let that sit here. I see two missing words here.” You just can’t see things. You read what you think you wrote. The message is still in your mind. So, always let it cool off if at all possible.

Now, if it’s just a two-sentence email to the guy next door, and you don’t care about a missing word, or an awkward sentence, then, okay, sometimes you just have to do something immediately. But if it’s important, yes, cool off is really important. Now, if you can’t do that optimally, you could read it aloud if the tone is important. Read something aloud to yourself and you can catch errors. If you think, “People are going to think I’m crazy, I’m talking to myself,” pick up the phone and hold it like you’re talking to somebody, or you’ve got your Bluetooth plugged in and you’re just talking out loud, and people won’t think you’re crazy. They’ll think you’re talking to your spouse on the phone. And it’ll sound funny to your ear. If it sounds awkward, it’s stilted or something, your ear will catch it, and you can improve it.

If the sentence sounds too long when you start to read it, it will feel awkward to you, and you’ll think, “Whoa, I lost my breath. I couldn’t get to the end of the sentence.” It’ll help you go back and think, “I need to cut that sentence in two, it’s too long. I ran out of breath, ran out of steam, ran out of energy.” If that, still, you think, “Well, you know, I think I’ve got some hot words in here, and I’m not sure. It could be offensive. It could be a little blunt,” then have a colleague read it.

Don’t read it to them because you add the inflection, and you can change. It could be really blunt on page, but you’re softening it with your tone. So, just hand it to them and say, “Read that and tell me what you think about the tone.” And so, when they pick it up, they can be a more objective reader for you on sensitive matters.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. Thank you. Well, tell me, any sort of key software, plugins, add-on, services, tools that make this better, or help with the email struggle?

Dianna Booher
Well, I mentioned things for software to do other things other than email, like Calendly, Slack, Workzone, Smartsheets. Those are the kind of things that you want to look into, just think, “Do I have other things that are not correspondence-related?” Those are what’s helpful to you. ShortKeys. If you find yourself writing the same messages over and over, maybe like a bio, like when I respond to reporters frequently, they want your credentials or your bio, so you have that on ShortKeys, you can just hit two keys or a code, and the whole paragraph goes in.

If you have a certain product or a certain service that you provide, then you hit ShortKeys and the whole paragraph goes in. What you don’t want to do is to write those over and over, because even if you know with your brain what you’re saying, it’s too easy to incorporate an error, to leave out a word just because of familiarity to create a typo, so it’s good to make sure it’s error-free to begin with, and just plug it in with ShortKeys.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention about email before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Dianna Booher
I think that you just don’t want to create distractions for yourself. Many people create their own distractions with email because they keep it open and they use it for to-dos, and don’t ask things in the right way. And so, they write six or seven emails to accomplish what the first one should’ve accomplished.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dianna Booher
I like the quote by Martin Luther who said, “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” Now, for me, of course, that’s been inspiring because I’ve been a writer all my life, but for others I think you’d do the same thing for your own reputation when you write a good email because that has staying power. It establishes your credibility on any subject.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Dianna Booher
I always like to read the major studies that IBM does, that McKinsey does, PricewaterhouseCoopers, all of the Gallup. I like surveys because I like to keep my finger on the pulse. And, of course, they’re very revealing, our study, with the University of Northern Colorado, their social research lab when we did this major study for Faster, Fewer, Better Emails. That was very revealing. So, whatever study that you put faith in, look at the trends from that.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, over time.

Dianna Booher
Pardon me?

Pete Mockaitis
You mean like over time.

Dianna Booher
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it came out this year, then next year, then the following year.

Dianna Booher
Yes, yes, and how they change.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Dianna Booher
Traveling Mercies. I like Anne Lamott. Basically, anything she writes. I really like her. A lot of people haven’t discovered her writing, but she’s an excellent writer. She has a book called Bird by Bird which is on writing. But Traveling Mercies is more my favorite.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something you use to help you be awesome at your job?

Dianna Booher
I like snipping tool. It’s just so easy, I keep it right at the bottom of my taskbar. I find I use that all of the time. It’s just so useful for adding something, screen capture, to send in an email, to show people exactly what you’re talking about. So simple and yet so useful for so many tasks.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s called snipping?

Dianna Booher
It’s called snipping tool, that’s the name of it. Snipping tools. The icon is like a pair of scissors and, literally, you can cut anything on your screen, and then attach it to an email and send it. You can email it, you can paste it into an email, you can capture the screen and send it as an attachment. It’s like the simplest miracle you can imagine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite habit, something that you do that makes you awesome at your job?

Dianna Booher
This is weird, I know, because most people like to procrastinate. But I like to move all of my deadlines for any kind of task, I move them forward in case of emergency. Somebody tells me I have to have something done by May 31st. I will move it up at least two weeks because I don’t want to be caught in case of an emergency. If there’s a major illness, if there’s a death in the family, I just don’t want to be stressed out, and I don’t want to miss a deadline. So, whatever deadline somebody gives me, if it’s just a few hours or days or weeks, I’m going to move it forward. That’s just a habit I’ve had all my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. And is there a particular nugget you share that seems to connect and resonate with listeners and audience members?

Dianna Booher
Yes, this sentence. I have quoted and collected the most quote collections online more than any other. It’s been out there for a while, and people just keep repeating it and quoting it. It’s, “If you can’t write your message in a sentence, you can’t say it in an hour.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful. Well, Dianna, this has been a ton of fun. I wish you tons of luck with “Faster, Fewer, Better Emails,” and your other adventures. And just keep doing the good work.

Dianna Booher
Thank you, Pete. It’s been great to be with you.