Chasing inbox zero | Ep. 82

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:09)

All right. Ready? What's up, Lifers, and welcome to the Daily Standup.

And I lost my line again.

[Dillon] (0:10 - 0:13)

Where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas.

[Rob] (0:13 - 0:14)

All right, all right, cool.

[Dillon] (0:14 - 0:15)

Hold on one second.

[Rob] (0:16 - 0:39)

Ready? Yeah. What's up, Lifers, and welcome to the Daily Standup, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day, as fresh as Fruzy.

I'm your host for the day. Rob Zambito, and I've got my co-hosts here. JP, do you want to say hello?

[JP] (0:40 - 0:48)

Can you smell what Lifetime Value is cooking? Welcome to the Daily Standup, y'all.

[Rob] (0:49 - 0:51)

And we've got Dillon here. Do you want to say hi, Dillon?

[Dillon] (0:52 - 1:07)

Thank you, JP, for saving it. You threw in a defunct frozen yogurt brand and didn't call out Lifetime Value.

I was ready to fight you, but JP fixed it. Hi.

[Rob] (1:07 - 1:15)

I can referee that fight. I can referee that fight any day.

Like I said, the shirt is blue and white, not black and white.

[JP] (1:15 - 1:17)

We have fun. We have fun here. We have fun here.

[Rob] (1:18 - 2:13)

So, today we've got an interesting topic that I have had some passionate conversations on this week. Is inbox zero a goal to strive for in customer success? We've had varying opinions so far.

We've got people who say, absolutely, inbox zero is the perfection of productivity. If you miss things in customer success, you're very prone to fall behind. We've got other people who say, that's a completely unrealistic standard.

That is not a standard that correlates with the things that actually matter in customer success. Frankly, in a world where everyone's telling us to do more with less, this is the fat we've got to trim off of our plates. We've got to make sure that we're not holding wild standards of inbox zero when we've got to play the triage game.

Let's take it to JP. JP, what do you think?

[Dillon] (2:13 - 2:24)

Before you start, JP, I just want to ask a clarifying question. What is inbox zero? You literally can't have anything in your inbox?

[Rob] (2:25 - 2:25)

So, yeah.

[Dillon] (2:26 - 2:31)

You can tell I don't practice it.

[Rob] (2:32 - 3:16)

The basic definition is nothing left unread at the end of each day in your inbox. It was I think it came out of the book Getting Things Done by a guy named David Allen. I think it came out as an extension of those circles.

I'm trying to remember the name of the person who popularized the term, but basically the idea is you shouldn't have anything unread in your inbox at the end of every day, not every week, every single day. Your entire inbox should be clear. There are people who take that a step further and they're like, you should archive everything that you don't have anything actionable on.

It comes out of this spirit of productivity, right? The four-hour workweek crowd might subscribe to this. They might not, but I think it's really the people who think that this is the key.

[JP] (3:16 - 3:20)

Four-hour workweek? So, we went from four days to four hours?

[Rob] (3:21 - 3:22)

Four-hour workweek, yeah. It's a book by Tim Ferriss.

[JP] (3:22 - 3:24)

Which is unrealistic ass?

[Rob] (3:24 - 3:30)

Okay. It's a crazy unrealistic ass. Yeah.

Okay.

[JP] (3:30 - 5:51)

I'm just going to, first of all, say I think that both of these thoughts are right. They both sound correct to me that it can be unrealistic, but that it also can be good. I think it really is contextual.

This is a newer thing for me in a situation where there's no CSP and you are really trying to find ways to stay on top of things, especially if you're in scaled or digital CS, one of those things where it becomes more unrealistic because of the volume of the emails that you're getting, then to me, it just naturally seems to make more sense. Maybe there are ways where it wouldn't, as opposed to if you're dealing maybe with more commercial enterprise, fewer accounts, then maybe it isn't as important. Again, your mileage may vary.

I'll say that my thoughts are what Dillon actually said was really important because you can get your inbox to zero or the variation I've heard is 25, which is really just how many you have, one page of Google. I think if you just have inbox zero, in other words, no unreads, that doesn't mean that you've necessarily answered all those emails. The point is, yes, you want to get to inbox zero or inbox 25 or basically have a manageable inbox, but the purpose is really to make sure nothing goes unanswered, unchecked.

I think that along with that skill is really prioritization. I think also, Rob, what you called out as a daily practice, I think that this is where things could get more unrealistic. If it's a weekly practice, maybe it's a little bit more feasible depending on where you work.

If it's a daily practice, who knows, but maybe that daily practice is what keeps it from being a chunk of time. I can see different sides of it. I'm going to just end by saying, I think that without a CSP, for me, it can be pretty good.

[Rob] (5:51 - 5:54)

Tell me more about why the CSP can solve that for you.

[JP] (5:55 - 6:46)

If you have a CSP, typically you have some sort of customer journey that's already mapped out in it that's connected to your customers. If there is something that's unanswered, it's typically going to have a function where it's going to notify you that you have not responded to this email. I think that it can still get missed depending on there's a misconnection somehow, but it's going to let you know, hey, you haven't responded to this.

I know because I previously used a CSP and it was really good for that. It would let you know, oh, hey, you haven't sent an email to this person in a while. I saw it wasn't perfect all the time, but I did see that in action.

I think that to me, that's why because the CSP will help to keep you on top of your inbox naturally.

[Rob] (6:47 - 7:20)

The interesting observation I have there is I just got off a call where this came up. What a CSP is doing is helping you be proactive by taking your proactive tasks and making you reactive to those tasks, which is interesting because now you're just responding to the tasks. Now you have not only your inbox to handle, you've got your tasks to handle.

Some people might say, that's just more places to manage my stuff. Obviously, as we all know, if we've used a CSP before, it helps prioritize between the tasks. Dillon, I want your thoughts though.

Do you? I do.

[Dillon] (7:22 - 7:24)

I hate this idea. I hate this idea.

[JP] (7:24 - 7:26)

Oh, big surprise.

[Dillon] (7:26 - 9:07)

So stupid because what it does is it creates this snappy, punchy idea, and then it vaults it up onto a pedestal and makes those who don't do it feel guilt and feel shame as though they are lesser, as though they don't have the virtue that people who have zero inbox have. It loses so much of JP, you said the magic word that we talk about so often, context around who the cares if I don't have any unread emails, if I'm still not getting my done. What it's really trying to say is, are you getting the done that you have to get done?

There's a lot of other ways we can go about it. I think we get that, but these pithy ideas or super marketable ideas, I think it just creates so much anxiety. Am I not doing it right?

If I don't have 25 or zero emails in my inbox at the end of the day, and for that reason, I just don't like it. It's super conditional, super contextual. We're creating this lofty expectation and then applying it to everybody when this is a thing that should be applied where you deem it necessary as an individual.

[JP] (9:08 - 9:30)

Dillon, to be fair, isn't that the worst of it though? That's the absolute worst of it. That is the extreme.

In other words, you're perfect. You're getting inbox zero all the time, but what about as a practice? What about as a mindset?

It's not about just running like nothing. You're just not doing your job.

[Dillon] (9:30 - 9:54)

You know why it's better? You know why people love it? Because the real answer is be organized and prioritized.

That's super ambiguous and not flashy. It leaves so much room to be interpreted by the individual or even the organization. Inbox zero sounds like a frigging military term.

It sounds like an operation by the Navy SEALs.

[Rob] (9:54 - 10:05)

Take a step further what it means to be prioritized. What it means to be prioritized in our roles means often stopping churn, expanding accounts, depending on your role.

[Dillon] (10:05 - 10:14)

And your role might be different, sure, but that's often what the director— You want to make sure I read my marketing, the emails I get from a CSP that's trying to sell me something every single day.

[Rob] (10:15 - 11:55)

That's where I'm like, but it doesn't make any sense. That's why I'm a proud convert on this topic because I used to be diehard inbox zero up until maybe a year and a half ago, until the point where it became completely unrealistic. And it was like when I really went all in on my business and I was like, it's just not realistic for me to manage a business and prioritize this thing.

It used to take me like a half hour at the end of every day just to clean up my inbox. And the number of years of my life that I've lost to this unrealistic standard, and this transition was hard for me, right? It was hard for me to relinquish the standard that I had.

And I had to think like, where does this come from? And it comes from my time actually managing support teams, where on our support teams, yeah, it made sense. We wanted to clear all the new tickets every day.

But I also reconciled myself with the fact that, and this is the conversation I had earlier this week, I was talking to a support rep. She's a solo support rep at a company that I'm working with. And I was like, look, if you got a thousand emails in a day, we would have no problem calling that what it is, which is completely unrealistic, that standard.

Maybe, just maybe, we're already past the point of what's realistic. And we're playing a stupid game that we've made up. We can change this game.

We can change the game from being one of get the inbox to zero to being one of let me actively decide I am not going to get my inbox to zero. I'm going to play the triage game. And I'm going to master my KPIs around churn or whatever else, while deliberately ignoring certain things that are not a priority for today.

And that is a much more difficult, but a much more engaging and thought provoking game to play.

[Dillon] (11:56 - 12:31)

So let's, let's end it with this question, this sort of like thought experiment for everybody out there. Imagine you are in seat, you're a CSM, or you're even a manager, but you have a boss you have to answer to. You have a one on one with your boss at the end of the day.

And you cancel it and say, I'm sorry, I got to work on my inbox. I got to make sure I don't have any emails unread before the end of the day. And this meeting's in my way.

And because that's an expectation, I've got to go and do that. Everybody knows that would not fly. Inbox zero is the matrix.

[JP] (12:32 - 12:39)

But that's taking it at its surface value to for sure that that means that you put that as the priority.

[Dillon] (12:39 - 13:00)

But the problem is, if I have to interpret the saying, and I'm interpreting it back to what I said, which is be organized and prioritize. And the just the activity through which I do it is reaching inbox zero. Well, then like, I don't need that.

That statement becomes a smokescreen. Yeah, it becomes the matrix. Yeah.

[JP] (13:01 - 13:15)

People be intelligent about your language and what things mean. Don't take things literally or at the surface or to the extreme. Yeah, especially now to get to what things means.

Hey, that's all our time for today, folks.

[Rob] (13:15 - 13:32)

Yeah, look at a time like now where burnout is at an all time high, and we're like do more with less. And we're hearing that left and right. Like, now's the time to rethink some of the standards that we're bringing to our workplaces.

So that's all our time for today. So until next time, take it easy lifers. See ya.

[Speaker 4] (13:35 - 14:06)

You've been listening to the daily stand up by lifetime value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetime value media.com.

Find us on YouTube at lifetime value and find us on the socials at lifetime value media. Until next time.