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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us.
So today I'm delighted to welcome Charles Duhigg back to Before Breakfast.
Charles is the author of several bestselling books, including The Power of Habit and Super Communicators, which is newly out in paperback.
So Charles, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, really excited to have you back.
So if we have any new listeners who've joined us in the last year or so, maybe you could tell everybody just a little bit about yourself.
Absolutely.
I'm an author.
I wrote the book, The Power of Habit.
And also my most recent book is Super Communicators.
And I'm a writer at the New Yorker magazine previously with the New York Times, where I write about business and investigations and tech for the most part, and AI.
Absolutely.
So I know you have written about a ton of different topics, but I thought in our time here today we could focus a little bit on your most recent book with communication and, in particular, how better communication is can save us time, because that is a big thing for people who listen to this show.
So first, what tends to go wrong with communication that winds up being a major time suck?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a great question because oftentimes, when we're in a conversation and we want to actually communicate with the other person, and miscommunication is happening, which means they can't understand us, we can't understand them, the consequences are pretty dire, right.
They can go off and spend days working on a project without understanding that you actually asked for something different.
Or there can be these hurt feelings over this miscommunication.
And what's often happening there is that people are having different kinds of conversations without realizing it.
Right, what neuroscience tells us is that almost all discussions fall into one of three buckets.
There are these practical conversations where we're talking about plans and making choices together and solving problems.
But then there's emotional conversations where I tell you what I'm feeling and I don't want you to solve my feelings.
I want you to empathize.
I want you to relate to me.
And then finally, there's social conversations, which is about how you and I relate to each other and society and the identities that are important to us.
And all three of these different kinds of conversations are important.
And frankly, all three of them might happen during a long discussion or a big discussion.
But what researchers have found is, if we aren't having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, I cannot hear what you are trying to tell me and you cannot fully hear me.
And in fact, we'll feel disconnected from each other.
So if I'm telling you how like... Oh, go ahead.
No, I was just gonna say that's interesting because...
You know, when we're talking about how bad communication saves us time, I was going to say it would even just be the back and forth like having, you know, 10 different messages go back and forth of trying to figure something out.
But you're saying it's it's not even so much that is that people are having a different conversation.
Well, and oftentimes that back and forth.
In fact, one of the things that we know about productive conversations is that they tend to involve a lot of what's known as ping ponging right.
Like I'll say something and then you kind of pick up on it and you might interrupt me, and then I'll interrupt you.
And like, that means that we're both involved in the conversation.
We're really hearing each other.
It's not that the goal is to make conversations as brief as possible because, if you think about it, if the goal of a conversation is simply to impart information, then it shouldn't really be a conversation.
I should just tell you Laura, the weather today is this, and so therefore, you should wear a raincoat.
But I think what's important is that when we are in a conversation, we're actually trying to learn from each other.
We're trying to share our own perspective.
And to do that, we have to be able to hear the other person.
And that means we have to get aligned on what kind of conversation we're having.
So what are some best practices then for making sure that we are having an effective conversation?
Absolutely.
So the first and most important thing is to ask more questions.
One of the things that we know about consistent super communicators and we're all super communicators at one time or another, but consistent super communicators, people who can connect with almost anyone is that they tend to ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person.
And some of those questions don't even register as questions.
They're things like, oh, what'd you think about that?
Or what'd you say next?
Or what do you think about this?
They're invitations to a conversation.
But some of the questions are what are known as deep questions.
And a deep question is something that asks about our values or our beliefs or our experiences.
And that can sound a little intimidating, but it's as simple as if you meet someone who's a doctor, for instance.
Instead of asking them oh, what hospital do you work at?
You can ask them, oh, what made you decide to go to medical school?
Right, that second question.
That second question is actually an invitation for someone to tell me something about themselves.
That's real.
And that's how we tend to get aligned.
That's the best practice for getting aligned with the other person and making sure we're having the same kind of conversation at the same moment.
Yeah.
But so many of these conversations take place like back and forth over email.
Are there ways to make sure that we are communicating more effectively in that medium?
There's a couple of things that we know about email in particular.
The first is that asking questions on email is actually even more powerful.
Right.
So if you just have two people saying this is what I think, this is what I think, that's not really going to work out.
But if somebody says look, I'm just wondering like, like you said, that this was really important to you.
Can you just give me a little bit of background on why it's important to you?
That's as easy to do in an email as it is at face to face.
But we do know that some of the things about email that are true are that, first of all, it tends to be there's a set of rules around email that we've all internalized, but sometimes we forget to remind ourselves of.
We know, for instance, that sarcasm does not work in email, right?
When I'm speaking to you, you can hear the sarcasm in my voice.
When I'm typing something, you don't know if I'm being serious or sarcastic.
We also know that politeness pays huge dividends when we're conversing online.
That simply saying please and thank you oftentimes and studies show this can bring down the temperature of a conversation significantly.
But equally, the thing about email is that it's asynchronous, right?
That's really one of the huge benefits of it is that it's immediate.
And when I hit send, you get it right away.
But also I can hit send tonight and you don't have to look at it until tomorrow morning.
Oh, last night, you know, I went home with my wife and we had this conversation.
Really, communication is about trying to over-communicate, or at least thinking about how we're communicating.
And it's not hard.
It doesn't take much time.
But the people who are the best communicators are the ones who just spend half a percent more thinking about what they're saying.
And what about in meetings, for instance?
I wonder if there's sort of norms around communication that can make meetings more effective and hopefully not drag on as long as many tend to do.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's actually a lot of research into how to communicate in meetings.
And the goal of all this communication in a meeting is to create what's known as psychological safety.
Psychological safety is the most important characteristic in bringing a team together, allowing them to feel like a cohesive unit, as opposed to just individuals operating next to each other.
And there's two things that researchers have found particularly help create psychological safety.
The first is what's known as equality in conversational turn-taking.
If you have dominated the conversation, you've spoken way more than anyone else.
That's not a great sign.
On the other hand, if you've spoken way less than everyone else, that might mean that you're not being invited or feel comfortable enough to voice your opinion.
And so for a leader of a meeting like that, what's really important is to draw people out.
Hey Susie, you know, you mentioned this thing last meeting and I haven't heard much from you.
Tell me what you think about this.
That's the first thing, equality and conversational turn-taking.
The second important tactic is what's known as ostentatious listening.
And it's particularly important that leaders do this that when I listen, I make it obvious to you that I am listening.
Hey, Jim, that's a really good point you brought up.
Let me repeat it back just to make sure I understand it.
Or hey, you know Frank, I remember earlier this meeting.
You said this and I'm wondering how it connects to this new idea.
What happens when a leader engages in ostentatious listening is that other people start to echo him or mirror him or copy him or her, almost unconsciously.
And so as a result, what you get is a room where people are talking up in roughly equal measure.
And that doesn't mean the same number of minutes or the same number of words, but roughly everyone has a chance to participate and that we are all showing that we are listening to each other, which means we are actually listening to each other.
That's going to work wonders.
Yeah.
Well, I love the phrase ostentatious listening.
I'm going to have to start using that one.
That's great to going above and beyond with the listening.
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back talking with more about ways that better communication can save us time.
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I live below a cult leader and I fear I've angered her.
Well, wait a minute, Sophia.
How do you know she's a cult leader?
Well Dakota, luckily it's.
I'm Not Afraid of a Scary Story Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so you'll find out soon.
This person writes My neighbor's been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals and now my ceiling is collapsing.
I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder.
I think they may be part of a cult.
Hold up, Sophia.
A real life cult?
And what is a dirt ritual?
No clue, but according to this person, contractors are tearing down the patio to find out what's going on with their ceiling, and her neighbors are not happy.
Well, she needs to report them ASAP.
She did, and now they've been confronting her in really creepy ways all the time.
So do we find out if this person survives their neighborhood cult or not?
To hear the explosive finale.
Listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
So I am here talking with Charles Duhigg about ways we can communicate better.
We've been talking about communication in email, communication in meetings.
I want to throw out one of the sort of most difficult ways to communicate the group text that you know.
I think many people have had the experience of things sort of going off the rails or even a simple thing of trying to get everyone together for lunch, or you know that many people are involved.
It goes many directions.
You want everyone to be heard, but sort of making a decision with five people is often very difficult.
I wonder if there are ways we can communicate effectively in those situations.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, let me ask you.
So when's the last time you were in a group text that you thought went well?
Well, I've had a few.
I've had a few.
You know, usually it's if you've gotten together recently and you're all sort of chatting about something that just happened.
You know you're rehashing what happened, sharing the inside jokes of what came out of that and laughing on it as sort of a way to send everyone off into the world.
Yeah.
And I think what's happening there is that, because you've been together recently, there's kind of an almost meta conversation happening in that group text right.
Remember when we were all together and Janie said this one thing like I'm going to make a joke about that, that'll harken back to it.
What we know is that one of the best things you can do for communication is engage in what's known as metacommunication, which is very simple and time efficient.
It's a matter of saying hey look my goal in this conversation.
I want to have a meeting with you, a sit down, and my goal is X.
That's a meta conversation.
I've told you what my goal is for this conversation.
I might ask you, what's your goal?
Like, what do you hope to get out of this discussion?
Oftentimes in group chats, we don't engage in meta conversation, right?
So somebody says, hey, you know, I'm wondering if we should go see that movie on Friday night.
And you don't know, are they proposing this?
Are they asking if you guys really wanna go?
Are they suggesting that we actually make a plan?
And so as a result, one person says like, oh yeah, that sounds good.
And another person says yeah, I can be there at 655 in the evening and I'll meet you guys exactly in front of the theater.
So what's happening there is that people are having different kinds of conversations, right?
Someone's making a general comment.
Someone's making a specific comment.
The other thing that happens in a group text and this is true group emails is that nobody feels the obligation to respond because it's a group that the message was sent to.
So for the sender, it feels very, very lonely that they send 20 of their best friends.
Hey, does anyone wanna go to the movies?
No one person responds.
They think that all of their friends hate them, But it's actually because when you're in a group, you don't feel any obligation to respond.
You assume that it's up to the group.
So the things that we can do that can make them better is just to be very explicit about why we are texting.
Hey, guys, I want to see if you'd like to go see the movie on Tuesday.
If so, then can you meet at the movie theater at 6.55?
Please respond to me either privately or over the group.
Okay, that's great, right?
Everyone knows exactly what they're supposed to do.
They know why you're having this conversation and they can easily opt out and say hey, I'm not interested.
But that's what often happens in group texts is that the meta conversation gets very muddled.
Well, so what I'm hearing you say here is that conversations in general need an intention, right?
I mean, we run our mouths all the time.
We have no idea why we are doing so.
But pausing to think about why I am having this conversation, either by email, by group text, by in person with another person, can go a long way.
Well, and it's actually a little bit deeper than that, which is that every conversation you have already has an intention, right?
You are opening your mouth for a reason.
Now, you might not be aware of what that reason is.
And that reason might be.
I want to make my friend laugh, or I want to find out how my spouse's day went, or I want them to understand that I'm angry.
There is an intention behind every time we open our mouth.
There's two questions.
Number one, do we know what our intention is?
Have we taken just half a second to say like, why am I having this conversation?
And number two, are we trying to communicate clearly what that intention is to the other person and ask them what their intention is?
If we do, the conversation is going to get much better.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I wonder if there's sort of a I mean, when we talk about that one with the group text.
You kind of wanted to get to a decision.
I mean, I've had a lot of experiences.
Some people kind of go back and forth, and I don't know if it's that they're trying to seek consensus.
They don't want to put something out there.
But if you're trying to schedule something or get together, I've had some people who are also like okay yes, we want to do lunch.
Let's do either this restaurant, this restaurant or this restaurant on Tuesday.
Name your thing, right.
There's some people who go very quickly to making it happen.
I wonder what we have going on there.
Is it good to do?
I mean, it does reduce back and forth if somebody takes that role.
I mean, it depends on what the like.
Let me ask you when somebody, which kind of conversation do you prefer?
Do you prefer one where someone says hey, we should all have lunch, and then you know, like A week and a half later people have chimed in and a month later you get together, which is totally fine.
Or do you prefer something where someone says we should have lunch?
Here's three dates for me to choose from at 12 o'clock and we're going to do it next week.
Which one do you prefer?
Oh, I love the second one because because it puts you in an easy place that you can say yes or no.
Right.
Yeah.
One more step.
And if it works for you, great.
If it doesn't, it doesn't.
But you don't have to continually come back to it and see what's going on and follow up and all that.
It's that we've gone from intention to reality and like. one small step.
And that doesn't mean that the first kind of conversation is a bad conversation, right?
There's sometimes, when we're just making jokes with our friends, where we don't want to be really efficient.
We don't want to be practical.
The whole goal of it is just to make each other laugh and to have something to go spend five minutes on in the middle of the workday.
But I think what's important there is to understand and recognize what you want out of a conversation.
If your goal is to go from hey, let's have lunch to a plan on when we're going to meet up in 12 hours, then you should be very explicit and say here's three dates and tell me which one works for you.
Or tell me that you can't join us.
But if your goal is just to kind of like reconnect with people and you don't really want to have a plan, and if you have lunch, it's okay.
But the point is that you asked to have lunch, then that's all right as well.
What's important is knowing in your own head what you're looking for.
And what studies tell us is that, if you just take literally two seconds and say why am I having this conversation?
You'll know immediately why you're having that conversation.
It doesn't take much time to figure out what your intent is.
What does take time is not knowing your intent and then moving around like a blind person in the dark.
I think the idea of mentioning having lunch but not really wanting to have lunch is a whole different set of social cues I have not really entirely figured out.
But that's a subject for an entirely different matter.
We're going to take a quick ad break, and then I will be back with more from Charles Duhigg.
We'll see you next time.
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The big take podcast from bloomberg news dives deep into one big global business story.
Every weekday, A shutdown means we don't get the data, but it also means for President Trump that there's no chance of bad news on the labor market.
What does a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich reveal about the economy?
Our breakfast foods are consistent consumer staples, and so they sort of become outsized indicators of inflation.
What's behind Elon Musk's trillion dollar payout?
There's a sort of concerted effort to message that Musk is coming back.
He's putting politics aside.
He's left the White House.
And what can the PCE tell you that the CPI can't?
CPI tries to measure out-of-pocket costs that consumers are paying for things, whereas the PCE index that the Fed targets is a little bit broader of a measure.
Listen to The Big Take from Bloomberg News every weekday afternoon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I live below a cult leader and I fear I've angered her.
Well, wait a minute, Sophia.
How do you know she's a cult leader?
Well Dakota, luckily it's.
I'm Not Afraid of a Scary Story Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so you'll find out soon.
This person writes...
My neighbor's been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals, and now my ceiling is collapsing.
I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder.
I think they may be part of a cult.
Hold up, Sophia.
A real life cult?
And what is a dirt ritual?
No clue.
But, according to this person, contractors are tearing down the patio to find out what's going on with their ceiling, and her neighbors are not happy.
Well, she needs to report them ASAP.
She did!
And now they've been confronting her in really creepy ways all the time.
So do we find out if this person survives their neighborhood cult or not?
To hear the explosive finale.
Listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, I am back talking with Charles Dewey, who is the author of the book Super Communicators, which is out last year and is out nearly in paperback.
So please go check that out.
So Charles, I'm curious about you.
Do you have any sort of norms around like email for yourself, like ways that you deal with email more effectively?
Any routines that help you?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
So when I send emails, I tend to use many more bullet points, right?
And the reason why is because what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to visually suggest to the person what my goal is right.
So I say like, hey, look, I wanted to talk about this new apartment that we're buying.
There's three things that I'd like to address with you.
Number one, number two, number three.
And what I'm saying explicitly is here are the three questions that I'm asking, right?
I'm not just sending you an email and hoping that you pull out the questions that are important to me.
I'm going to make it explicit.
The other thing is we have the saying in journalism, which is I didn't have enough time to write short.
Right.
And I think this gets at something kind of important, which is everyone who's written knows this feeling that when you're rushed and in a hurry, oftentimes you write longer more than when you're not in a hurry and you have the time and the luxury to figure out what you want to say and to write short.
And the same thing is true of sending emails or any other kind of communication.
Oftentimes we use an email to figure out what we mean to say through the process of writing the email.
And that's helpful because then we know what we want to get across.
We know what we want to ask.
We know what our intent is.
But if we've used an email to help us figure out what we want to say, it's worthwhile to reread that email and take out the fluff.
Because inevitably, the path of figuring out what I want to say involves a lot of side avenues that aren't that useful to me or useful to the other person.
So I think one of the things with written communications is that if we self edit, even just the lightest kind of self edit, that we know that that actually makes the communication much richer and actually more efficient for everyone involved.
All right, so we're gonna use bullet points.
We're gonna edit ourselves, right?
If you were figuring out what you were trying to say, you're gonna go back, take all that out, put in what you're actually going to say.
I'm curious about subject lines, because I think this is just.
I mean, it's only a few words and yet in and of itself, that can be whether the email gets opened.
It can be, you know, how quickly it gets responded to.
And yet most of us are not, you know, professional email marketers.
Like we have no idea how to title an email to get somebody to open it.
Well, I think that we should think of a subject line as marketing, right?
Sometimes we use the subject line as like, here's the summary of what I'm about to email you.
That's not what a subject line should be.
A subject line should be a little bit of marketing.
Hey, here's a funny joke for you.
Okay, now I know that if I open this- One weird trick, Charles, right?
It's one weird trick.
Yeah, the one weird trick.
And so I think the thing is that, obviously, We know what's interesting to us.
We know what's likely to cause us to open an email.
And if we just think about that for the other person that we're sending an email to, I think it'll work.
So when I send emails out to people I don't know, I often say from Charles Duhigg, the author of Super Communicators and the Power of Habit.
Because I think for some percentage of people, they are familiar with my work.
And so they think, oh, I got an email from Charles Dewey.
But for other people I might say you know from the New Yorker.
A quick question for you for an article I'm writing.
And for a certain type of person.
They're thinking oh, if they have a quick question for me, I might appear in this article.
And that's something that I enjoy.
I'm very aware of how a subject line is read by the recipient.
And in doing so, I'm using it as just a little bit of marketing.
Doesn't have to be over the top.
Doesn't have to be, you know, one trick that will cause you to lose weight.
But it should be something that entices you into this correspondence.
Yeah, I'm probably opening the one about the one weird trick.
I don't know.
I think we're all helpless when it comes to that subject line.
How about in terms of the rhythm of your days?
Are you the sort of person who's in and out of email a lot, or you'd have set times when you check it?
Oh, no, I'm in and out of email all day.
Now, I will say my ideal day and my actual days tend to differ quite a bit.
But one thing I do do is every night, before I go to bed, I just look at my calendar for the next day and I fill in blocks with the work that I want to do.
So, for instance, for today, it has this conversation with you.
And then on my calendar, it says for the next 45 minutes, answer emails.
And then I have another conversation.
And then for 45 minutes after that, I have something that says work on fact checking letters.
So basically what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to plan out my entire day.
Now that doesn't mean that I hit all of those exactly on the nose, but I know that today I have 45 minutes to deal with all the emails that I need to deal with.
And then I'm not going to have another chance to look at them until six or seven tonight.
And that's gonna help me prioritize what I actually look at.
So I think oftentimes starting is the hardest part, right?
Deciding to switch from one task to the next is challenging.
But if we can make that decision in advance, if we tell ourselves, when we're in what's known as a cool period, when the work isn't right in front of us, that tomorrow at nine o'clock, when I'm in a hot mindset, instead of going and doing something pointless, I'm going to spend 45 minutes on email, but that's it.
It makes it easier.
I love the idea of scheduling the exact amount of time you are going to spend on email as well.
I think for many people, it becomes, I mean, it's like tidying the house.
I mean, you can fill any amount of time that you choose to give them.
Absolutely.
And the more you answer emails, the more emails you get.
Right.
It's it's I think that oftentimes people use their email inbox as a to do list.
And that's exactly the wrong way to use it, because what you're doing is you're letting other people put items on your to do list that you might not want to do.
What's important is to take control of that.
So I don't have inbox zero.
I don't have a certain number of emails in my inbox that I care whether it's above or below that number.
I just glance at it at least once a day to see if there's anything pressing that needs to be dealt with right now.
And if the answer is no, then I'll wait until I have more time.
I think the most important thing is to forgive yourself for email.
You should feel no guilt over not returning an email.
Just because somebody has emailed you does not imply an obligation on your part to reply or return that email, unless it's something you want to do.
All right.
Well, that's tough love, but we'll try to keep that in mind.
So Charles, since you've been our guest on the show before, I always ask people something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome.
Well, so it's a great question.
So we just moved from one house to another house.
And one of the things that's been driving me crazy is that there's been boxes all over.
And having like this visual clutter in my eyesight has been really hard.
And so what I did is yesterday I just spent a bunch of time picking up boxes and putting them into basically this side room that we're not using.
Now, this is not particularly efficient.
I'm gonna have to take those boxes back out of that room.
I'm gonna have to unpack them.
Not only that, but in that room it's very hard to get organized because there's a whole bunch of boxes in there.
But what I recognize is that I'm more efficient and more productive when I have sort of a clean, simple visual field around me.
And taking the time to create the environment that makes you most productive is oftentimes one of the most productive things you can do.
Oh, I love it.
Well, it's kind of like putting the emails in a folder that you don't want to see at this point.
Maybe you'll deal with them later, but at least you don't have to look at them.
I have a folder like that.
I have a folder called AA To Do.
And what happens is if an email has been sitting in my inbox and like I don't want to deal with it and it's been there for a long time and it's stressful just to see it, I put it in that folder and the key is I never open that folder.
It's gone.
It's like the stuff that was put in the donation box and you wait for a while.
And then if you don't open it in six months, it's out.
And I don't have to feel guilty that I deleted it.
In fact, I still have it.
Someday, who knows, 100 years from now, I might actually open that folder.
But the point is that Right now, I've decided I don't need to and that there's no point in having it on my consciousness.
Absolutely.
We love getting rid of clutter.
So what are you looking forward to right now?
One of the things I'm looking forward to is I'm looking forward to hearing from people about how they communicate better.
You know, one of the things that's been such a delight is that after writing this book, I get emails from people saying I haven't talked to my brother and you know, four years.
And then I read this book and it gave me a way to go and have this conversation.
Or I've been meaning to ask for a raise for the last six months and I didn't know how to do it.
And then I read your book and it gave me a step-by-step guide on how to have that kind of conversation.
And so, if anyone listening, if you've had a great conversation, I would love to hear from you and to hear how it went and why you think it went so well and what you learned from it.
Awesome.
Well, be sure to reach out to Charles.
And so I should ask you, how can people find you?
Yeah, absolutely.
They can find me online.
I'm at charlesduhigg.com, which is D-U-H-I-G-G.
Or I have a Substack newsletter called The Science of Better.
And if you just Google Science of Better or my name, or even Power of Habit or Super Communicators, it will certainly come up.
And I'd love to hear from you and love to have you as a subscriber.
Awesome.
Well, be sure to check that out.
So Charles, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you to everyone for listening.
If you have feedback about this or any other episode, you can always reach me at laura, at lauravandercamcom.
And in the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
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