How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

LIGHTENING THE LOAD
One last point. Many people say they hate meetings because there are just too
many in their schedule. Improving meetings helps, but they simply need fewer of
them. If that rings true to you, consider taking inspiration from Nayan, the bank
CFO we met in 
Chapter 12
. After taking a hard look at his schedule, he
discovered he was signed up for no fewer than forty-two regular, repeating
meetings. To slash the number of meetings he was attending, we applied some of
the concepts from 
Chapter 6
, on managing overload.
First, Nayan thought about what mattered most to him professionally for the

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coming year—what his big-picture intentions were. It quickly became clear that
many of his meetings were unconnected to those priorities; they were a legacy of
past commitments. For those meetings, he began to send out a series of “positive
nos,” to extricate himself gracefully. Then, for the remaining meetings that truly
did match his priorities, he asked himself whether attending passed the
“comparative advantage” test: Was he truly the only person who could
contribute? Or could someone more junior step in for him and do a reasonable
job? By attending only those meetings where he had a unique role to play, he not
only created opportunities for his younger colleagues to shine, but halved the
number of meetings he regularly attended. And got his life back.

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APPENDIX B
How to Be Good at Email
Professional email traffic accounts for 110 billion messages a day, and that
figure is growing steadily.
1
Email has great advantages: it’s faster than a
meeting, it’s more flexible than a phone call, and it conveys more formality than
instant messaging or SMS. But if you ask anyone what they think of email,
you’re likely to encounter at least one roll of the eyes. They’ll talk about feeling
overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it, for a start. Most of us have a backlog of
unanswered messages, many of them unread. And yet: we get annoyed when
others don’t respond to 
us
, or do so in what seems like an offhand manner.
Meanwhile, we use email for sensitive purposes that it was never designed to
handle. We spend ages drafting a tricky message even though we know we’d
easily find the right words if speaking face-to-face. As a result of all this,
surveys report, we’re typically spending at least a quarter of every day sending
and responding to messages, and we’re not happy about it.
2
So what does behavioral science tell us about ways to improve things? What’s
the best way to send messages that have the impact we want, and manage the
inflow so we end up with a happy inbox?