Ms. Ann Bezzerides: My name is Ann Mitsakos Bezzerides. Thanks for joining us for this episode, number 13. The goal of this podcast is to give you, Orthodox clergy and lay leaders, the knowledge, tools, and resources you need to be better stewards of your influence and have a greater impact on the organizations you lead. I’m here tonight with Dn. Michael Hyatt. How’re you doing, Dn. Michael?

Dn. Michael Hyatt: I’m doing great! Been looking forward to this episode, because this topic, I think, is so relevant to where most people are struggling.

Ms. Bezzerides: It really is. It’s top on my list, and sometimes I’m so overwhelmed I don’t even want to deal with this topic.

Dn. Michael: [Laughter] Well, I hope we can fix some of that tonight, because I don’t think that we have to be overwhelmed by communication, and we’re just going to talk about communication overload, but, yeah, I don’t think we have to be overloaded with it, but we’ve got to be strategic and thoughtful about how we use it if we’re going to stay on top of it, because for a lot of people, unfortunately, servicing their inboxes becomes almost an end in itself. You know, you can spend—as you well know, you can spend all day responding to email messages and still never catch up, because just as soon as you get to inbox zero, which is the holy grail, then you’re like: “Oh my gosh, I hope nobody writes me. Give me an hour at least of peace.” And so I’ve got some strategies I’m going to share that I think will be helpful here.

Ms. Bezzerides: I think that’ll be so helpful, and I will just say that’s exactly… You can get sort of in a spike when you think, “Okay, I’m going to take control of my inbox,” and just as exactly as you said, you’d spend all this time and get it all organized, and then all it takes is one thing to throw you off. We can’t check it as diligently for a couple days, and it’s back up at some ungodly quantity of emails you haven’t responded to, and then it feels overwhelming. So I think the idea of how to tackle communication overload— And I guess a question for you is: Why is it even important?

Dn. Michael: Well, I think it’s important because, if we’re in ministry—and hopefully the people that are watching this are ministry leaders, whether they’re priests in parishes or bishops over dioceses, or anybody else—there’s this desire—you probably got it in ministry—because you want serve people, and certainly communication is a part of that service, but it can also complicate your life, and it can get in the way of really serving people the way that we need to, because when you’re accessible to everyone and everybody can get to you, it’s very difficult to be proactive. You end up being in a responsive mode and not giving people the time and attention that they really deserve. So, yeah, it’s important that we tackle this because there’s other things, as it turns out, that we have to do in the parish and in our ministries that are not related to just servicing the inbox.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. Well, as we begin, please, post your questions in the comment section of YouTube or wherever you happen to be watching. We love your questions; we love the hard things that you’re dealing with, and Dn. Michael always so graciously answers, so bring on your hardest questions. Dn. Michael will be answering those questions live in the second half of our show. If you want to ask your question anonymously, you can text us at 615‐721‐2303.

So most leaders I know struggle with communication overload. Is this something—I can’t imagine you struggle with it, Dn. Michael. I think you must have so many strategies you don’t struggle any more, but—is it something you struggle with?

Dn. Michael: Yes, I have struggled and I continue to struggle, because no sooner do I feel like I’m on top of it and, kind of like we were talking about in the warm-up, putting your Slack channels… You know, just occasionally you’ve got to do spring cleaning or declare email bankruptcy and go back to ground level zero and start over. But back when I was in the big corporate world, when I was at Thomas Nelson Publishers as the CEO, I didn’t have just one executive assistant; I had two executive assistants. So I had one person whose total responsibility was managing my calendar, and it was complicated. I was traveling a lot—a lot of people to meet with, both outside the company, inside the company, so one person, that was a full-time job. Then I had a more traditional executive assistant who handled my correspondence and took meeting notes and all the typical things that an executive assistant might do.

Then when I launched this company in 2011, I thought, “First of all, I’m really tired of being in a big organization.” We had about 750 employees. And I thought, “I am so excited about just me, just being a solopreneur, and not having to manage anybody or worry about anybody,” but I quickly became overwhelmed, because I was having to do everything. I didn’t even know where the FedEx box was. I didn’t know a lot of the typical things—how to book travel. I hadn’t done that in years! So now all of a sudden I’m having to do that kind of stuff for myself.

I didn’t have anybody to respond or screen my email inbox or even my voicemails, so I had to do all that myself, and it finally got to the place where I said, “Okay, I’ve got to re-engineer this and retool it for myself.” Now, I did hire an executive assistant part-time, just a few hours a week initially, and then she got to the place where she was working more hours, but initially it was just me. And I was able to get on top of it and manage it, but the deluge of incoming messages today, whether it’s text messages, voicemail messages, inbox for email, Slack if you use that or Microsoft whatever they call their version of it—what is it called? Workspace? I can’t remember. But all those—Microsoft Teams; Facebook I think has Workspace. But there’s just all these inboxes, and it’s challenging. I find that people—

Funny story. My mom and dad just recently discovered they had a mouse infestation problem, and the mice were coming in through a hole in the heater vent for their heater, or for their dryer, in their pantry. They have the washer and dryer in the pantry. There was a hole in the hose, and so the mice were getting in there. Well, I kind of feel like that with inboxes. You just get it all settled and feel like you’re on top of it, and then, for whatever reason, people will send you messages that are urgent, like on Facebook or Twitter or some not-normal channel, but they respect a response just like they had emailed you personally. So it can be challenging.

Ms. Bezzerides: Well, I also find that I will be in the middle of doing something that I’m trying to focus on. To finish that I need to go look at an email. I go to find that email, and there are three new emails that catch my attention, and I forget what I’m looking for.

Dn. Michael: Yeah. We’ve got to get control of this, absolutely.

Ms. Bezzerides: So take us— You have some strategies. We’d love to hear about them.

Dn. Michael: I do. Basically what I want to give as a strategy for managing your communication that I think will make it easier and faster so that it’s not running your life, so that you can get back to the primary thing and keep the primary thing the primary thing. But I want to talk about how to limit your communication basically in seven key ways. So let me give you the first of these, which is this.

You’ve got to determine what your accessibility is going to be. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. Do you know, I used to think, when I first started my business—and again, I know that many of you who are watching are in ministry, so this may be a little bit of a different context for you, but when I started this business, I was a solopreneur. And everybody had equal access. This is back in the day, eleven years ago, and I was trying to build a platform and get my name out there and get speaking engagements and hopefully get a book deal and all these different things that I felt were necessary for my business to succeed. So I was very attentive to responding to every message that came in to me, and even blog comments. That was another inbox in the day; that’s not so much any more, thankfully, but back in the day that was a big deal.

So it suddenly dawned on me that I can’t give equal access to everybody. So if you think of it in kind of the most stark terms, I’ve got everything from my wife trying to contact me—I absolutely want to give her priority! She’s the most important person in my life; I want to make sure she can get to me when she needs to get to me. But then there’s some random person who’s calling me, wanting to refinance my mortgage. Those are two different things, and those two different people can’t have the same level of access. And there’s a whole range of access between those two extremes. So this is where, Ann, I think we’ve got to be thoughtful in terms of the access we’re going to allow other people to have.

I have a couple questions here, and this is how I think about access. First of all, who needs direct access to me? Who needs direct access to me? It starts by asking yourself the question: What’s the best and highest use of me? Because we don’t have unlimited time. You might look at the gospels and say, well, Jesus took everybody that came; you know, he dealt with everybody that came to him. Well, yes, but he was God, and he was also limited in his human nature, limited in the sense that he couldn’t be everywhere at once; he could only be one place at once. So, even when Mary and Martha made the request that their brother Lazarus was sick and he needed to hook it to their part of the country and try to heal them—and he didn’t get there for four days.

We all face human limitations, and our time is a human limitation. We have 168 hours a week. And if I just let everybody kind of lay claim to that time on my calendar to put a stake on that calendar spot, pretty soon I’m not going to be proactive; I’m probably not going to be doing the things that are high priority; and I’m not going to be doing the things that best serve Christ and his Church. So I’ve got to be thoughtful about that, so what’s the best and highest use of my time?

If you’re a priest, it’s probably liturgizing; it’s probably preparing your homily; it’s probably hearing confessions. There’s a whole host of things. But there’s probably not some other things that ought to be at the same priority. I get that: sometimes priests are like solopreneurs, too. They’re the only person there. But who fixes the plumbing when it breaks? Who recruits the volunteers for the Sunday school? All these different things, but what’s the best and highest use of you? Even if you have to do those things, it’s important to know this so that you don’t get side-tracked into all the minutia that tends to be a distraction and also just bleeds off your energy and your strength and so you can’t do the things that are the most important.

So as a leader, you’re going to likely have to be accessible. You want direct access certainly for your family. I’m a big proponent for the family; I’ve been married for 43 years. And I know that my marriage is the foundation of everything I do in terms of ministry. And I know that if that deteriorates, if it goes away—if Gail and I were to get a divorce or whatever—that would diminish the impact that I could have for Christ. And so it’s not that it’s instrumental, but it’s just that it’s that foundational and that important. So I certainly want my family, my kids, to have direct access to me.

Then direct reports. If you have direct reports, they ought to have direct access to you, but that doesn’t mean that everybody else has to have direct access. Key stakeholders. Your bishop, if you’re a priest, probably needs to have direct access to you. If you’re in a church that has multiple clergy, those clergy or the staff need to have direct access to you. Parish council members, maybe key donors, maybe the choir director—but you’ve got to think through this. How much access am I going to give them? Who’s going to have my cell phone number, and whom do I welcome to call me whenever they’ve got the need?

Everyone else can probably get their information they need from someone, either on your team or someone else in the parish. And I think— I get that sometimes we just don’t have the manpower, but sometimes we kind of like being at the epicenter of everything, because it’s gives us—and this is where we’ve got to be honest—gives us a sense of importance, because we feel like “I’m the glue that’s holding this thing together; I’m the person that’s making it all happen.” And sometimes we, if we’re honest—look in the mirror and be honest—we tend to hold on to these things too long. So we’ve got to think through what our access is going to look like, and I think stratify it.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. As I think about it and I think about some of the clergy who may not have even an assistant—a parish secretary or an assistant—and I think how hard that is, between funerals and all of the things that just come up urgently—I wonder if a first step would be doing just an audit of who reaches out to you, with what topics, every… in a two-week period. And then begin saying: of those, which are non-urgent, and how could you triage those? Because I do—I have a lot of compassion…

Dn. Michael: I do, too.

Ms. Bezzerides: We’ve just been in a season of COVID where the funerals, I mean… Sometimes two funerals a day for some of these clergy, and those are urgent. Or somebody’s sick and on their few last breaths in the hospital. So I don’t know if you have any more thoughts around that. But I also do wonder, Dn. Michael, as you’re talking, if we do have clergy and others listening—do tell us your real challenge, either in the comments or on the anonymous phone line so we can really dig into them and have Dn. Michael help with this, because it’s so important.

Dn. Michael: You know, Ann, I think that one of the objections I often hear from people—and I get this from doctors, from therapists, from people that are in the people business—they’ll say, “Well, I just don’t have control over all of my time, because I have to be reactive. I’ve got patients calling, or customers calling” or whatever. And just because you can’t control all your time doesn’t mean you can’t control some of it. So you can’t just throw up your hands and give up and be reactive because you can’t control 100% of it.

I own my own business, and I don’t have 100% control of my time. But I want to make sure that I’m a faithful steward over the part of it that I do have discretion over, and I want to get smarter about managing the parts of it that I sometimes think I don’t have control over—because I do have discretion on: Do I call certain meetings? And in those meetings, can they be done in half the time? Or are some of those meetings, could they be handled in another way that didn’t require everybody to go out at night and meet together? Yeah, I understand that getting together’s a really important thing, but I just think we have to kind of question everything for the sake of our sanity.

Here’s another part of this direct access thing: How should we communicate to all the people that we’re not going to give direct access? Because part of it could be—and there’s really at least three responses here—one is you might refer them out. There may actually be somebody in your parish that’s better able to handle it than you are. We had a parishioner, for example, that was looking for a job and suddenly found himself unemployed. He asked our priest—this is so interesting! He asked our priest to coach him on putting together his resume. My priest wisely said, “I don’t know anything about that,” and he referred him to me. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about that either! [Laughter] So I had to refer him out to somebody else. But you don’t have to do everything well; sometimes a referral is the best thing that you can do. Send them to somebody else that will solve their problem or answer their question, but it doesn’t always have to be you.

Sometimes you just need to decline; you just have to decide that you can’t participate in that, as much as you’d like to, if you’re going to be faithful to your existing commitments. Sometimes you have to say no. We’re going to do a whole little thing on that; that’s one of my ways to limit, in your communication strategy. So I’m going to talk about how to say no, because that’s critically important. So declining invitations, declining offers, declining things that look really interesting—it has to happen if we’re to maintain our sanity, because the opportunities will always, always eclipse our capacity, especially if you’re good at what you do and you’re successful with what you do.

Another thing, too, is there are some requests, frankly, that can just be ignored. I’ll just give an example—and I’m not talking about being rude or unkind, but I probably get three emails a day from people who want to redesign my website; they’re just web designers that are just looking for work, and they’re sending me an email and just cold calling, basically. Do I need to respond to those? No! I’m not going to, because I don’t have the time, and I’m sure they understand, and I have no relationship. Just because somebody sends you an email—this is really important to understand—it does not create a reciprocal obligation on your part to respond. I mean, think about that. Just because somebody sends you an email or makes a phone call to you—and I get, like everybody, spam phone call messages, too—I don’t have to return a call from everybody who’s trying to sell me something or trying to promote something. Not necessary. I don’t have the time. That’s all I would do, if that’s what I was going to do.

So that’s the first way, is basically determine your accessibility, and it does take some thought. And I love your idea about taking inventory. What a great place to start.

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah, and I think even knowing when you can ignore would be helpful, doing the audit to say… Because certainly I can think in a parish context you could get yourself in a lot of hot trouble if you ignore the wrong emails! [Laughter]

Dn. Michael: Definitely, that’s true in business, too. That’s half the challenge right there. But there are some other options, too, on accessibility, like if you continue to get repeated phone calls from the same organization trying to sell you stuff and they’re unsolicited—block them! Block them, or drag their message, if they’re sending you emails—I use a service called SaneBox, and I’m going to talk about that in a little bit, but I just drag it into the trash file, and I never hear from them again. Or unsubscribe; you could do that, too.

Ms. Bezzerides: My husband just doesn’t answer phone calls that he doesn’t know the number of. Ever.

Dn. Michael: Me neither. I’ll get into more of that in a second, because that’s its own thing. All right, you want to go way two?

Ms. Bezzerides: Let’s go to way two.

Dn. Michael: Okay. Way number two: master the positive “no.” Now, I have to say, Ann, that I am a recovering people pleaser, and it is really hard for me to say no. I want to be helpful, but I’ve only got 168 hours a week. Now, I used to be afraid to say no to people, because I thought—and it’s hard to admit this—that they wouldn’t like me.

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah

Dn. Michael: And I don’t like disappointing people. I don’t like the thought of missing out on opportunities. I just had a friend that was in town from Florida, and he’s trying to hook me up with somebody that started a new business here in Franklin, Tennessee, where I live. And I’m like: I don’t need another relationship; I can’t manage the ones I have. I’ve got so many… So to just be randomly introduced to somebody else—I know he was trying to be helpful and all that, but I had to say no.

So I want to tell you about a concept I learned from Harvard professor William Ury, and it’s called the power of a positive no. Have you heard this before?

Ms. Bezzerides: I’ve heard it; it’s fabulous.

Dn. Michael: So here’s the idea, that it’s possible to say no with grace. It’s possible to say no in a way that people will respect—they won’t hate you, I promise, but they’ll respect you.

So here I’m going to give you the framework, and then I’m going to give you an example. You begin with the yes; you begin with a positive affirmation of the person making the request. Unfortunately, when we get a lot of these requests in our inbox, a lot of the times we just kind of let them languish in our inbox, and then the person has to send us another message, and then we get a little irritated, and so either we ignore them, which is frustrating to them, or we respond in anger because they continue to bug us about it. So I just try to respond immediately, and start with the affirmation of the person making the request. I’ll give you an example here in just a minute, but that’s where it’s got to start.

They’re not doing anything wrong by asking. They don’t have the full context; they don’t realize, like if you’re a parish priest, that when somebody asks you for something—what they don’t see is that that’s like the 156th request you’ve had this week. They don’t see that! They’re just one person with a need, and they’re making the request, and you’ve got to affirm them in that. So that’s the first part of the framework.

Second thing is you’ve got to deliver an unambiguous no—and it can be kind! But here’s what doesn’t work when someone makes a request: When you say [Sigh], “Man, I’m just swamped right now! Could you check back in two weeks?” Because here’s what’s going to happen—we all know this—that’s a boomerang waiting to happen, because now you’ve got to deal with it in two weeks, and it’s going to be the same thing you’ve just gone through. Are you going to be less busy in two weeks? Maybe—probably not, so you may as well deal with it on the front end and be unambiguous about it.

So decline. It’s yes, no, and then yes. But don’t just leave them with something negative: that’s when you’ve got to go to the third part, which is to reaffirm and maybe you can direct them to somebody else or to a helpful resource that will meet their need, and it’s all good. So let me give you an example. This still happens to me to this day, because I still spend so much time in the book publishing world, I still get— Were you going to say something?

Ms. Bezzerides: Well, I was just going to say: How about I ask you right now?

Dn. Michael: Okay!

Ms. Bezzerides: Dn. Michael, we have a lenten retreat coming up, and I can’t think of a better speaker than you to come lead this retreat. I would love you to do it. There’s nobody better. We have a whole team waiting to listen to you, and you’re the only guy who could do it as well as we need right now.

Dn. Michael: [Laughter] Okay, so here—I’m going to follow the structure; then I’m going to deconstruct what I said. Ann! Thank you so much for thinking of me! I’m really honored. Thanks for your kind words; thank you for thinking of me. This sounds like an amazing thing. I love lenten retreats; we’ve had them at our church, and it’s always been a positive experience for the people in our church. But, unfortunately, due to my other commitments, I’m afraid I’m going to have to say no. But I do have a couple other speakers in mind that might be helpful to you, and if you’re interested, I’d be happy to give you those names, and you could check with them, but all the best on your retreat. It sounds like an amazing thing.

Ms. Bezzerides: Thank you for so kindly answering, but I won’t take no for an— [Laughter] No, just kidding!

Dn. Michael: No way! [Laughter] No. Yeah, so I started by affirming you in making the request. So the goal there is for you to—I don’t want to shame you; I don’t want you to feel guilty for making the request. I want you to feel affirmed, because I truly am honored that you would make that request. But then I gave you an unambiguous no, so I didn’t say, “It’s just… I’m packed out for this Lent. I mean, we’re already in the pre-lenten period. I don’t see how I could do it. Check with me maybe later this fall and I’ll see if I could do it next year.” I didn’t do that; I just cut it off. But then I ended by affirming and trying to be helpful by giving you a couple suggestions, if you want them, of speakers that could maybe do it.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s awesome. I do think that end piece, for those of us who are people pleasers or creative thinkers—that giving them something… You’re giving them something, which feels good when you’re saying no.

Dn. Michael: Yes. I can tell you this—and this is honest-to-God truth—I’ve never had anybody come back to me and scold me or be upset with me. Almost everybody—because I have this saved as an email template: more about that later—so I’ve got that framework… But usually the response I get from people when I say no is: Man, I knew it was a long shot, but thank you so much. I really just appreciate you getting back to me. Maybe we can get together later on something. So it’s always a positive thing for everybody, and they go on to the next thing.

What people can’t handle is when you don’t respond. That drives people crazy.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. Okay, so way one is determine your accessibility. Way two is master the positive “no.” Tell us way three.

Dn. Michael: Okay, way number three: Communicate asynchronously. So there’s two different kind of communication. There’s synchronous, and there’s asynchronous. Synchronous communication is when you’re communicating in real time. You text me, I respond immediately: we have a whole conversation on text; we’re communicating in real time. So that’s synchronously. What we’re doing right now is synchronous communication.

Asynchronous, not-synchronous, would be communication like you send me an email—like I got a very important email from somebody on our board at St. Vlad’s on Friday afternoon, but I’d already shut down everything for the day. I just saw it and said, “Well, I’ll just respond on Monday,” because I don’t typically deal with email over the weekend. That’s asynchronously. So I’m responding now not in real time, but at a time that’s convenient for me.

So here’s what that might look like. It means that you’re not sitting in front of your computer all day, interacting with people as the messages come into your inbox. That will make you crazy, unproductive, distracted; you’ll not get anything else done. So instead, what I encourage people to do—and this’ll work for priests; it’ll work for bishops; it works for all my clients; we teach it in our Full Focus system—and that is: begin your day with a workday start-up ritual, and there may be a series of things that you do to start off your workday. You know, you hit the office: What are you going to do? Or you leave the office at the end of the day, then you have a workday shut-down ritual. Those are the only two times that I’m checking my inboxes: starting up and shutting down.

Ms. Bezzerides: Wow.

Dn. Michael: Now here’s what’s cool about that. It’s on my time, so I’m not bothered by it all day long. I can do the deep work that I need to do, that I’m required to do, to serve the people that God has called me to serve, and I’m not just living in my inbox. Now, if somebody really needs me and if they have access to me, they can text me or they can call me, and if it’s somebody on my list of the people that I’m going to talk to instantly—like if my bishop called, I would pick up. If I was in the middle of something else, I wouldn’t. Everything else goes to voicemail.

Now, one little hack with voicemail that you can do, or phone messages, because there’s a lot of people that call you just to call you and they don’t know that you’ve got anything else going on, and honestly they don’t need to hear from you immediately, they just need to talk to you at some point—this is where one of the most underappreciated free services out there is Google Voice. Now here’s why I like it. Google Voice will give you a phone number for free that you can give out just like it’s your normal phone number, but the beautiful thing is—first of all, you can pick up your phone; it’ll ring on your phone if you want it to—I have all that turned off; it never rings on my phone. This is [what] I give to people who are not in the direct access line. If I order pizza or if I meet somebody for the first time and we don’t really have a relationship: I’m going to give them the Google Voice number. When they call, it’s going to automatically go to voicemail—and here’s the cool part. Google will transcribe it, email me the transcription, and then I can process it asynchronously at my normal time, my workday start-up or my workday shut-down. So that fits it into my schedule, not where I have to constantly be living at the mercy of my inboxes. Does that make sense?

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah, that’s fabulous. Wow.

Dn. Michael: It’s a cool service. There was another one I saw that you have to pay for, but Google Voice, I’ve been using it for years. Not for four years, but a lot of years, and it really works great.

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah. For those of us who are not in the habit of only morning and evening email inbox-checking, do you have any suggestions for how to manage that transition?

Dn. Michael: Yeah, I would— First of all, you know you don’t have to have your email running all the time. Definitely turn off notifications. You cannot have notifications on. You can’t constantly have your attention shifting between this thing that—let’s say you’re working on your homily; you’re a parish preacher working on your homily. You’ve got to get that ready; you’ve allotted two hours to prepare. And all of a sudden somebody calls; now you’re interrupted. You know there’s a phenomenon of—and I’m trying to look at my notes here to find out what this is called—attention—do you remember this, the name of this?

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah… It was a great word…

Dn. Michael: I’ve got it here somewhere.

Ms. Bezzerides: I’ll see if I can find it.

Dn. Michael: I can certainly talk about the idea, because I wrote about it in my book, Free to Focus.

Ms. Bezzerides: Attention residue.

Dn. Michael: That’s it!  Attention residue. Thank you. Thank you. It takes a village. Here’s the idea. Whenever you get interrupted—let’s say you’re in the middle of deep work; you get interrupted, whether it’s a phone message or a text message or whatever it is. Even though that may last 30 seconds, on average, the research shows it takes 25 minutes to get back on task back to what you were doing before, because it disrupts your attention. Now, you go all day through that? I mean, you’re just bouncing from one thing to the next. Multi-tasking is a myth; you cannot multi-task. You can time-slice, but you can’t multi-task. You truly can’t do more than one thing at a time. And if you try, it’ll make you anxious, make you crazy, and you will not be productive. So give up on the attempt to multi-task—that’s an important concept as well.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. Okay. Way one, determine your accessibility; way two, master the positive no; way three, communicate asynchronously. Way four, automate your inboxes. What’s way five?

Dn. Michael: Did we do automate your inboxes? I don’t think we did.

Ms. Bezzerides: Oh my gosh, we didn’t! Sorry! We were just talking about inboxes, so I was thinking we did.

Dn. Michael: That’s all right. I get the message:you’re trying to speed me along. That’s okay. [Laughter] Now, there’s a lot of ways that you can automate your inbox. Never do something yourself that you can automate. For example—I mean, we all know this example, and probably a lot of us that are on this session tonight do this—but why write out checks for your regular occurring bills when you can set up autopay and never have to worry about it again? Bills just get paid, and you only have to pay the stuff that’s not recurring.

So here’s some different ways that you can automate your inboxes. First you could forward certain email messages to other people, like I get a lot of receipts that are sent to me. I don’t need those receipts; there’s nothing I’m going to do with those receipts! But my bookkeeper needs those. Those need to be accounted for in our financial statements, and if you’re a parish priest and you’re running a ministry, you’re going to get those receipts, too, and maybe if you’re in a really small ministry you’re going to have to do it yourself—but it might be better just to set up an email rule and forward that to somebody else, so that it automatically happens; you never think about it. And by the way if you use Google Mail—I sound like I’m a Google evangelist; I’m really not!—but Google Mail has amazing email filters, and I’ve probably got 15 of them, where certain messages that come in get forwarded automatically to somebody on my team, because I’m not the person to deal with it.

You can also either forward or drag newsletters to a folder for reading later. Very rarely when I get a newsletter do have time to read it at that moment, but sometimes later in the day I may just sit down and take 30 minutes and go through it. A couple more things that are interesting: if you use EverNote as kind of your junk drawer for all things digital, if you use EverNote they give you an email address that will send stuff directly into EverNote. You can use that when you subscribe to a newsletter, and all your messages, all those newsletters will go automatically to EverNote; they’ll never hit your email inbox. That’s pretty cool, too.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s fabulous.

Dn. Michael: So here’s another one. There’s a service called SaneBox; look it up. It costs a little bit; I can’t remember what it costs, but there’s a monthly fee. But it allows you to train your inbox so that once you train it—like if I got a message from you, if I wanted to, I could create a folder inside of SaneBox which would show up in my list of folders, and every time I got a message from Ann Bezzerides, it would go into my “important” folder. And it would always happen, because SaneBox is smart like that; it uses artificial intelligence, and it would know anything that comes from your address is going to go to my “important” folder.

Conversely, if you get messages—this happens to all of us—where you can’t figure out how to unsubscribe—they don’t put an “unsubscribe” button—you can drag it into what they call “Sane Blackhole,” which means you’ll never see it again. It just disappears from that point forward. So SaneBox is a great tool.

And I explained how I use Google Voice. I like almost never—unless it’s my mom calling—I never answer my phone. Or one of my kids—if they call or certainly Gail calls; if somebody in my family calls—but other than that, I just let it go to voicemail, and I’m going to return the call when it’s convenient for me.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. Okay, so we are going to determine our accessibility; we’re going to master the power of the positive no; we’re going to communicate asynchronously; automate our inboxes—what is the next way that we can master communication?

Dn. Michael: It’s this: use templates. Why keep reinventing the wheel? If you ever write a message, and you think to yourself, “You know, this is the third time I’ve written the same message,” create an email template. Ann, I realized this back when I was in the corporate world; I realized that I was answering a lot of the same email messages over and over again. I’d have people that would say, “Could you review this book proposal?” or “Would you consider serving on our non-profit board?” or “Would you consider making a charitable donation to our ministry?” whatever it is. So I came up with a list of about 50 different requests, and I said, “Hm. What if I built a template library, and every time—I don’t have the time to just do this all at once and come up with all these 50 templates, but next time I get that request, I’m just going to take a little bit of extra time and write that message to that person in a way that’s really thoughtful and thorough and that I’m proud of and then—get this—I save it as an email signature. I know we all use email signatures to put repetitive information like our contact information. You can use it for a lot more than that, though. You can actually use it in order to save these email templates.

If you use an email program like Spark, which I highly recommend—Spark is fantastic; it has templates built right in. You’ll notice when I sent you the show notes for our podcast, pretty much it’s always the same? It’s because I’m using a template.

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah, that’s great.

Dn. Michael: So, yeah, I’ve got a bank of those that I use repetitively. So if you’re a parish priest, and one of the emails that you get on a frequent basis, or a text message or maybe a phone call, is: “Okay, could you give me the directions to your church?” Get that down one time, save it as an email template, and just—bam!—it takes you five seconds. And even if it’s a template, you can warm it up on the front end, like all those “declines,” when I have to say no to somebody, I don’t want to go through the angst of trying to come up with it every time, and feeling bad about myself and should I say yes or no—no, you just pull down a template, put some personalization on the front of it, maybe some on the end. But it helps me respond quickly, effectively, and at a similar high level of quality every time.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s fabulous. Can you think of any times when you would guard against using a template?

Dn. Michael: Well, you certainly never want it to look like a template, and you don’t want people to feel like you’re blowing them off, but if you’re trying to respond thoughtfully to a one-off request, or somebody asks your opinion on something, if you were to send me—maybe you wrote a paper, and you say, “Hey, could you just take a look at this and see if I’ve missed anything?” I don’t have a template for that. That’s going to take original work.

But here’s the cool thing. Let’s just say 80% of your correspondence could be handled with a template. Well, then, now you can give the bulk of your time, energy, and creativity to the 20% you can’t automate with a template. That’s the value.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. Cool! Okay, so way five is to use templates. Tell us about way six.

Dn. Michael: Okay, number six: respond less. What do I mean by that? We all get in these email chains where somebody sends you a thank-you, and then you feel the need perhaps to respond to them and say, “You’re welcome!” And all that just back-and-forth clutters up everything, and it also encourages people to respond on the other end more. Let’s say that somebody sends out a message, but it’s not really to me; I’m copied for my information. Great: I’m going to look at the information; I’m not going to respond, because that’s only going to invite somebody to keep playing tennis with me and keep sending another message.

So just respond less, and ask yourself the question: Does this really warrant a response? Because if it doesn’t, I save myself time, and I keep from cluttering up a colleague’s inbox as well. So if it’s just a point of information, you could thank them if you wanted to, but I just don’t do that. If somebody sends me the information I need, great. I’m grateful, but I’m not going to respond unless they’ve asked me to confirm receipt or something like that. Pretty simple.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. Yeah, hard, though! Hard, but great. All right, so take us to way seven.

Dn. Michael: Okay, way seven; number seven. This is the final one, and it’s this: set expectations. Set expectations. You know, this is where we’ve got to be careful, Ann, because we can set people’s expectations implicitly or explicitly. Implicitly we set them by the way we respond. So let’s say we’ve had a full night’s sleep, we’re feeling energetic, we ate our Wheaties, we’re all excited about today, and so we’re on it, man. And somebody sends us a text message or an email message, and we respond immediately. What we don’t often see is that we’re training them on what they can expect from us. And we kind of paint ourselves into a corner if we’re not careful. I don’t like setting that expectation. I have a lot of times people will send me emails over the weekend; I don’t respond over the weekend, typically. I do to you because we’re doing this show together, but I don’t typically respond over the weekend. And the reason I don’t is because I don’t want to create the expectation that I’m always accessible and always on.

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah, that’s great. And actually speaking of Google tricks, you are able to schedule send, so you can actually, from your inbox, if you need to… I have to clock through some emails on a weekend, and I can schedule send for sending Monday morning.

Dn. Michael: See, the beautiful thing about that is it’s respectful of the other people, too. In our company, we really discourage after-hour communication, because we’re trying to help people get what we call the double win, where they’re winning at work but succeeding at life. We don’t want them spending their after-hour time, time that rightfully belongs to their family or time for self-care or whatever else—so we just don’t like to communicate in those off-work hours, but— And we use Slack; I’ve shared that before. But inside Slack you can schedule when it happens, too. So if it’s after-hours, and I decide I need to get it off my mind and I need somebody to get this message, I’ll just schedule it for nine o’clock on Monday morning so I can forget about it, but they can get it at a time that’s convenient for them that’s not going to interrupt their workflow.

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah, that’s great; I think it is. The challenges in ministry are that people’s lives often, they’re going through big struggles that don’t time themselves conveniently.

Dn. Michael: Yes.

Ms. Bezzerides: And that is a big challenge, including life and death, and all sorts of things in between.

Dn. Michael: Ann, I think that’s the case, too, where I think if you’re a pastor, you can set people’s expectations and also give them a pass so that if there is an emergency, they know how to get in contact with you. But I find people to be amazingly understanding of this, and it may require you, in the announcements after Liturgy one week, to just say, “Hey, I just want to share with you my philosophy of communication and response so that you know what to expect, because my heart is that I want to serve all of you, and I want to make sure that the people who need me have access to me, and that my whole life is devoted to serving you. So here’s what we’re going to do. If you send an email, my goal is to respond within 24 hours, same day if possible; some days it’s not possible. But if it’s not urgent, I just want to ask you to be patient. I will get to you, but I’m not going to respond to you synchronously when I get it. Now, if you have an emergency, what I’d like you to do”—and you could create anything you want here.

You could say, “Text me”; you could say, “Call the church office and speak with my assistant, Bill, and if it’s an emergency and he can’t help you, he will forward it to me. So my goal is always to serve you, but if everything’s an emergency and if everything’s at the same level, then I’m really not going to serve everybody very well. So we’ve just got this communication strategy so that you get what you need, but I’m not constantly at the beck and call of my inbox.”

Ms. Bezzerides: I love that. As I think about it, my instinct would be probably running that by the parish council first.

Dn. Michael: Yeah!

Ms. Bezzerides: Do a dry run. Set it with the parish council, let them know that—first of all, see how they react. You definitely want them buying in and supporting you when you announce it to the whole parish.

Dn. Michael: Totally, and you might want to classify certain things, like: “If you’re having an issue with this, then call this person”—maybe there’s two or three people. “And our goal is to get you the best help we can get you, as fast as we can get it for you, but here’s kind of the protocol.” And I totally agree with that; that’s just good cascading information. Make sure—probably run it by your spouse first; see if that makes sense. Maybe you’ve got a little inner circle that’s not even the parish council, but it’s a few parish council members; get some response and get it to the parish council. Because you never want to surprise anybody in a larger audience, and you don’t want the parish council going, “Well, that’s the first I’ve heard of that! No, I don’t agree with that!” That’s a recipe for disaster.

What you want to have happen is have them all cued up so that when you share it publicly, they’re like, “Yep. He shared that with us last week. Totally makes sense. We’re all for it.”

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah, that’s great. I also—it just occurred to me now to give a shout-out to all the parish assistants, administrators, and secretaries. We have a few of our young CrossRoad alum who are in this role, and they’re realizing that they are the first line of contact for a lot of people at a lot of parishes, and deal with… It’s a holy role, actually, to be the first person a lot of people call and say, “My loved one just passed away. Will you tell Father?” It’s pretty amazing that they do that triage work on behalf of all of us.

Dn. Michael: It’s so good. And I have my assistant—I’m not a parish priest, so it’s different for sure, but you know Jim, my assistant, has been working with me now for six or seven years, and the great thing about it is he knows when somebody calls and it’s urgent and he needs to get to me right away and I need to take care of it. But there’s a lot of times when there’s something that he’s fully equipped to answer, or get for them. It may be a piece of information, it may be—whatever it is they need, they don’t have to wait on me to get back to them. So our goal is: How could we more responsive, not less responsive? But it doesn’t always require me being sort of at the apex of all this.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. Okay, we want to get to any listener questions you may have, but first let me summarize what I heard you say. So if we’re suffering from communication overload, we need to reevaluate our communication strategy. You shared seven ways that we can limit our communication. Number one, determine your accessibility; number two, master the positive no; number three, communicate asynchronously; number four, automate your inboxes; number five, use templates; number six, respond less; and number seven, set expectations. Okay, with that, let’s take some questions. Again, if you have a question or even a comment, just post it in the comment section below.

Dn. Michael: I’m kind of scrolling through and it doesn’t look like—I’m not seeing any.

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah. Any to our other line there?

Dn. Michael: Nope, I’m checking that, too.

Ms. Bezzerides: Okay.

Dn. Michael: Well, good. I mean, good that—

Ms. Bezzerides: I guess that’s good. You’ve answered everybody’s questions! [Laughter] If you were—for the most overwhelmed, where should we start? Where would you recommend someone start?

Dn. Michael: You know, it’s a little bit like that old metaphor where people say, “We’re so busy finding the alligators, we don’t have time to drain the swamp”? And sometimes you have to drain the swamp. Sometimes you just kind of have to stop and say, “Look, I’ve got to think through this and come up with a better strategy, because this is getting out of control.” I really believe in the principle of what gets scheduled gets done. So I would just schedule a time, when you say, “I’m going to take an hour, or I’m going to take two hours to think about this, and I really want to come away with a communication strategy.”

I’ll tell you another thing I’ve done with some clients. I’ve looked at people’s email inboxes where they’ve had 1,000; 5,000; 10,000 messages, hundreds of unread messages, and they’re like, “Well, I just— I can’t get through all this. What do I do?” What I would recommend is some form of what I would call email bankruptcy, where you just say, “Look, I’m going to completely reset. I’m not going to be ashamed.” But what I do is when I process an email, I always drag that to the archive, because I want to know it’s dealt with—it’s not going to sit there in my inbox and haunt me. I’m going to drag it to the archive, because that lets me know that I’ve dealt with it. So if you’re declaring email bankruptcy, what I would do is I would mark all those messages in your inbox “read,” and then I would drag them to your archive. If it’s something—you might do a quick scan over the last two weeks to see if there’s really anything urgent—but here’s the thing: if it’s super urgent, people will probably email you again.

But here’s the thing, like real bankruptcy, you can’t declare it very often and get away with it. So if you’re going to do email bankruptcy, but don’t do it unless you have a new communication strategy so that you’re going to deal with the email as they come in so that you don’t ever get in arrears again. But it’s a wonderful strategy for sort of resetting the table, resetting everything and just kind of starting over.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. Okay, we are out of time! This is all the time we have for this week and this episode, and we so appreciate everyone joining us tonight. We’ll be back here again, God willing, next week, at the same time. We plan to discuss…. Dn. Michael?

Dn. Michael: You know, I didn’t look… Hang on one second and I will find it. I will find the exact thing that we’re going to discuss. [Laughter] I should have put that in the show notes, but I didn’t. But I can tell you. I’ve actually already set it up. Okay, so what we’re going to be talking about is remote communication, so something that some of us didn’t really have any experience with until two years ago when the pandemic hit, and now we’ve all gotten kind of good at it, or we certainly have to do it. So we’re going to talk about remote communication and how to make it better.

Ms. Bezzerides: Awesome. Thank you. Well, as we wrap up, any final thoughts for all of us?

Dn. Michael: No, I think just that you don’t have to be suffering from overload. It happens. It happens to all of us. It happens to me still to this day occasionally. And there’s just those times when you’ve got to reset everything. You’ve got to go back and say, “Okay, in this season, given my current level of responsibility, what makes sense?” And if you’re in a parish and it’s growing or a ministry that’s growing, just because something worked five years ago doesn’t mean it’s going to work today. So it’s important to retool it occasionally, and there are better and better tools that are available. The technology that’s available today can really help us with this, because thankfully there are people out there that are solving these problems with all the complexity. So, yeah: be encouraged. You can get on top of it.

Ms. Bezzerides: Awesome! Thank you so much, Dn. Michael! Thank you to all of our listeners for joining us, and we’ll see you next week!

Dn. Michael: See you then!