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Leitura de 11 min

From Explicit to Implicit: When Our Mental Energy is Wasted

Summary

In this episode of Developer Tea, host Jonathan Cottrell explores the concept of shifting systems from explicit to implicit to conserve mental energy. He argues that many daily tasks consume unnecessary cognitive resources that could be better allocated by making certain processes more automatic.

Cottrell first tackles email management, describing how constant email checking acts like a slot machine—offering occasional rewards but mostly wasting time. He recommends treating email like a scheduled meeting, limiting notifications, and setting specific times to engage with your inbox to reduce its cognitive drain.

He then addresses meeting inefficiency, noting that recurring meetings often lack structured agendas. Cottrell suggests creating predefined meeting types with standard agendas, which serve as prototypes. This upfront investment in system design saves repeated effort and ensures important topics are consistently covered.

By implementing these two systems—email scheduling and meeting templates—listeners can reduce the explicit mental energy spent on routine tasks. This allows developers to redirect their focus toward more valuable, creative work, ultimately enhancing productivity and career satisfaction.

Recommendations

Tools

  • Blue Medora BindPlane — Sponsored tool for monitoring integration, seamlessly streaming metrics and logs from over 150 technologies into platforms like Google Stackdriver, New Relic, Azure Monitor, Wavefront, and Datadog.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to shifting systems from implicit to explicit — Jonathan Cottrell introduces the episode’s theme: moving systems from explicit to implicit to save mental energy. He explains that while previous episodes focused on making implicit systems explicit, this episode explores the opposite—identifying tasks that unnecessarily consume cognitive resources.
  • 00:01:45 — Email as a wasteful explicit system — Cottrell identifies email as a primary example of an explicit system that wastes energy. He describes how constant checking creates addictive, slot machine-like behavior. Most emails provide little value, yet we spend significant time managing inboxes due to self-imposed or external expectations.
  • 00:04:26 — Tactical recommendation for email management — The host recommends scheduling email like a calendar event to reduce its cognitive load. He advises limiting notifications, especially on phones, and encourages managers to set policies that don’t require constant email availability. This approach reclaims time spent on low-value inbox management.
  • 00:06:35 — Recurring meetings as another energy drain — Cottrell shifts focus to meetings, noting that recurring meetings often lack structured agendas. He observes that people frequently rebuild similar agendas each week, wasting mental energy. The solution is to recognize meeting patterns and create standardized templates.
  • 00:07:50 — Creating meeting types and predefined agendas — The host suggests establishing meeting types with predetermined agendas, similar to filling out a form. This ensures important topics are systematically included and leverages our pattern recognition skills. While some companies do this for client meetings, one-on-ones often lack such structure.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2019-09-28T12:30:00Z
  • Duration: 00:10:21

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] In the last couple of episodes of Developer Tea, we’ve been talking about taking some

[00:00:08] of the implicit systems that our brain tries to give us as a favor and moving them to be

[00:00:14] more explicit, asking our brains to do a little bit more work.

[00:00:18] And the idea being that some of these implicit systems we don’t really want to shortcut on.

[00:00:25] In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the other direction.

[00:00:28] Sometimes we do spend the extra energy that we don’t necessarily need to spend,

[00:00:36] some things that we can offload to our more implicit systems.

[00:00:41] My name is Jonathan Cottrell, and you’re listening to Developer Tea.

[00:00:44] And my goal on the show is to help driven developers like you

[00:00:46] find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers.

[00:00:52] So what kinds of systems do we often treat as explicit

[00:00:57] that we could use to make a difference?

[00:00:58] And how can we support ourselves?

[00:01:05] Because so much of the implicit things that we do, our brains kind of automatically did for us.

[00:01:11] So how can we trigger that automatic process?

[00:01:15] Well, interestingly, we can’t necessarily trigger the automatic process.

[00:01:19] Our brain does that optimization for us, and sometimes it’s wrong and sometimes it’s right.

[00:01:24] But we can build systems.

[00:01:28] And systems can help nudge things more towards implicit.

[00:01:33] So in today’s episode, I want to give you two systems

[00:01:36] that I believe you can make more implicit and find some value out of.

[00:01:42] The first one is really straightforward.

[00:01:45] It’s email.

[00:01:46] Email takes a lot of our time, and it takes a lot of effort to manage.

[00:01:51] That is, if you treat it like most people treat it.

[00:01:55] Email is an always-on mechanism.

[00:01:58] It’s a way to manage your email.

[00:01:58] It’s a way to manage your email.

[00:01:58] It’s a way to manage your email.

[00:01:58] It’s something that we check multiple times per day, sometimes multiple times per hour.

[00:02:04] And we also have a set of expectations around how quickly we should react or respond to a given email.

[00:02:12] Sometimes these expectations are set out by our company, our employer.

[00:02:18] Sometimes those expectations are set out by some kind of service-level agreement, for example.

[00:02:24] But most of the time, we have a lot of flexibility.

[00:02:28] But most of the time, we have a lot of flexibility in how we respond and when we respond to emails.

[00:02:33] And perhaps more importantly, we have the opportunity to set our own reading time.

[00:02:42] When do you consume your emails?

[00:02:44] This is a question that I want you to ponder, to consider.

[00:02:48] Do you consume your emails constantly?

[00:02:52] Do you check your email right when you wake up or before you go to bed?

[00:02:56] Are there times where…

[00:02:58] Do you check your email multiple times, perhaps, without any new emails coming in?

[00:03:05] If you’re like most people who work in some kind of technical field, the answer to all of these is probably yes, or often.

[00:03:13] These are very common behaviors around email, and unfortunately, they’re also not very productive.

[00:03:20] They’re not very valuable.

[00:03:21] As it turns out, email can be addictive.

[00:03:25] Because with email, we often get…

[00:03:29] News.

[00:03:29] We get information.

[00:03:30] Sometimes really valuable information.

[00:03:33] Information that we appreciate, that we’re excited about.

[00:03:36] But most of the time, we don’t get really much out of email at all.

[00:03:42] And so, in many ways, we have adapted to email as a sort of slot machine.

[00:03:48] Most of the time, we don’t win, but the few times that we have won is enough.

[00:03:52] It’s enough to keep us coming back and still pulling down that lever.

[00:03:57] The problem is that…

[00:03:58] With slot machines, well, the house is rigged to win.

[00:04:03] In other words, they’re going to cost you more in the long run than you can actually make.

[00:04:09] It’s the only way that slot machines would be viable.

[00:04:12] But when we treat email as a slot machine, really, nobody wins.

[00:04:17] This is problematic because it takes away our incredibly valuable resource of time.

[00:04:23] So, my tactical recommendation here is…

[00:04:26] To view your email as something…

[00:04:28] That you can put on a calendar.

[00:04:30] Like any other event.

[00:04:32] Imagine having a meeting with your inbox.

[00:04:35] I highly recommend that you try to limit the number of notifications that you receive on your phone in general.

[00:04:42] But certainly limit the notifications that you receive from emails.

[00:04:46] If you are a manager, or if you somehow kind of direct the policy of a given company,

[00:04:54] I encourage you to tell your employees that their email…

[00:04:58] Is not something that has to always be on.

[00:05:01] Much of the wasted energy that we spend in a given day is just managing our inboxes.

[00:05:09] We’re going to take a quick break and talk about today’s sponsor, Blue Medora.

[00:05:12] And then we’re going to come back and talk about another system that we can move from explicit to implicit.

[00:05:19] Today’s episode is sponsored by Blue Medora.

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[00:06:31] Thanks again to Blue Medora for sponsoring today’s episode of Developer Tea.

[00:06:35] I want to talk about another explicit system that we can make implicit…

[00:06:40] And hopefully come out with a better use of our energy.

[00:06:45] And the way we’re going to talk about this is…

[00:06:47] Looking at your average week.

[00:06:49] Open up your calendar.

[00:06:50] And take a look at the meetings that you have.

[00:06:53] How many of these meetings are basically the same meetings you had…

[00:06:57] Last week.

[00:06:58] Or the week before.

[00:07:00] How many of them are recurring?

[00:07:02] Very often…

[00:07:03] The meetings that we have are either recurring…

[00:07:06] Or they have some similar format to a previous meeting.

[00:07:10] Yet we often labor over what agenda we should have.

[00:07:16] Instead of spending energy rebuilding the same agendas over and over…

[00:07:22] I encourage you to have a basic way of establishing meeting types.

[00:07:28] Imagine these are kind of like prototypes.

[00:07:31] And by default, you’re going to use these various meeting types…

[00:07:35] And only spend energy establishing a new kind of agenda…

[00:07:41] If it’s necessary to depart from those meeting types.

[00:07:46] For every meeting type, have a predetermined agenda.

[00:07:50] Make it so that you can fill out a form almost.

[00:07:53] And that will fill out your agenda for that meeting type.

[00:07:58] This accomplishes two goals.

[00:08:00] The first goal it accomplishes is…

[00:08:02] It makes a lot of the important things that you care about…

[00:08:07] A systematically included option.

[00:08:11] In other words, if you have certain values…

[00:08:14] Either you personally or your company…

[00:08:17] You can improve your adherence to those values…

[00:08:21] By having them automatically included in that agenda.

[00:08:26] This helps you…

[00:08:28] To avoid problems with simply having to remember…

[00:08:31] To do a particular exercise, for example, in a given meeting.

[00:08:35] Because we are excellent pattern recognizers…

[00:08:39] When we rely on meeting types…

[00:08:42] We also have the opportunity to recognize previous patterns…

[00:08:46] From meetings that were like this one.

[00:08:49] This helps us to be a little bit more efficient in a given meeting…

[00:08:53] And hopefully adapt that meeting to become better and better.

[00:08:58] Over time.

[00:08:59] This gives us a better baseline to start from…

[00:09:02] And ultimately improves our communication with each other in our meetings.

[00:09:07] Meetings end up wasting a lot of time…

[00:09:10] If we just set them without thinking about it…

[00:09:12] Without adding that extra bit of energy up front.

[00:09:16] But the interesting thing here is that…

[00:09:18] By adding this energy initially…

[00:09:21] By creating these meeting types…

[00:09:23] And setting up these prototypes of agendas…

[00:09:26] We don’t have to do it again.

[00:09:28] This reduces the amount of energy that we spend doing it over and over.

[00:09:33] Now this may seem obvious to you…

[00:09:35] You may already have this practice in your company…

[00:09:37] But I encourage you to look at all of those meetings.

[00:09:41] Most people have only certain meetings.

[00:09:44] For example, client meetings that have a specific type.

[00:09:48] And their one-on-ones may not have any agenda at all.

[00:09:53] Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Developer Tea.

[00:09:56] Thank you again to…

[00:09:58] Today’s sponsor, Blue Medora.

[00:09:59] Once again, head over to bluemedora.com slash tea.

[00:10:02] That’s bluemedora.com slash t-e-a to get started.

[00:10:07] Thank you so much for listening.

[00:10:08] And until next time…

[00:10:10] Enjoy your tea.

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