#41 – Principles of effective communication | Michael Mizrahi & Sam Corcos

We live in a world of constant notifications, constant alerts. Whether it’s social platforms, work platforms, even in-person conversations, we’re always surrounded by constant notifications of everything trying to hack and steal our attention. And the problem with that is that it takes away our ability to focus, to do deep work. In this episode Levels Co-Founder and CEO Sam Corcos and Head of Operations Mike Mizrahi sat down to talk about how we’re doing everything we can to get ahead of the problem and design communication systems that work for our team. They discussed:

• Why we gave up on the Slack firehose
• Why traditional communications lead to burnout
• Being intentional about synchronous vs async communication
• Exploring tools for different types of communication
• Combating the dopamine hits of synchronous communication

03:29 – Modern communication tools are designed to be addictive

The tools we use everyday are not designed for efficient communication but engagement and addiction.

A lot of the communication tools are inherently addictive and pathological. And even if I wanted to not do it I would still compulsively check. And I think that, when I think about the way that we want to build out our communication structure in the company and what tools we want to use to achieve that, I think that it probably makes sense for us to focus on building a culture where that isn’t the case, where we don’t create compulsive behavior with people and that the communication tools themselves are not the source of anxiety.

04:06 – Traditional communication tools often lead to burnout

Creating intentional rules around communication starts with team values and a willingness to challenge the status quo.

I think a lot of that has to do with us being a team that starts with values, and we’re pretty principled about most of the things that we take on. I think it’s particularly important in the async and remote-first world. It’s very easy to take all these tools at their face value of their product marketing websites. All the things that they say sounds like good things. They help your team get more connected, put everything in one place. But in using those tools we see that start to fall apart in different ways. A lot of companies just assume that that’s part of doing work and people bring that level of anxiety with them from past jobs, from past work environments. And I think there’s an interesting question there. In some cases that works and it does let people get through a lot quickly and stay on top of the fire hose, but at some point it fails, at some point it’s exhausting. People start to burn out, things get missed.

10:31 – Avoiding a culture of shoulder taps

Disrupting deep work leads to a loss of productivity and focus. Creating an environment with clear expectations for what and when to ask is critical.

In a culture where everything can be a quick question, it’s not only preventing folks from being distracted, it’s inhibiting their own ability to make decisions and move things forward. And that’s the part that worries me the most, is we could potentially create a culture where everything’s just a quick tap away and we’re not thinking deeply and just owning our own decisions.

10:50 – Not all text based communication is equally asynchronous

Just because a communication tool is text based, how you use it can determine it’s impact on your communication culture.

One of the things that I find myself thinking about as well is around the asymmetry in work that comes from these types of synchronous tools, where for example, if I were to text somebody on the team, if I was to text David and say, “Hey, David, I need you to do this thing.” It’s a quick text for my end. I only spent a few seconds on it but now David has to act on it immediately because it’s in text. And once you view a text it basically disappears, there’s no way to triage text messages. And so David now has to stop whatever it was he was doing. He has to write this down somewhere, figure out what I meant by that thing, and try to understand the context of whatever short comment I made and they’re highly disruptive. And I think one of the things that’s worth pointing out with a lot of these tools is that there are tools that are ostensibly asynchronous or that are ostensibly aligned with values, but as their practice they are not. A perfect example of this is text messaging. The statistic is that something like 90% of text messages are read within three seconds. That means that it is a synchronous tool. Technically it is in text form, so you could do it asynchronously, but that’s just not the reality.

12:28 – Using tools to wean the body off notification dopamine

Defining internal tools and SLA’s for communication can reduce disruption from people chasing their next dopamine hit.

Using a tool like Mailman or something that batches your messages so that no matter how many times you check it you’re not going to get that dopamine hit, it only comes in two or three times a day. And just showing everyone that asynchronicity and 24-hour response time is totally normal and reasonable, in the event that you need to communicate with somebody urgently, just give them a call. It’s okay to disrupt people if something needs a rapid response.

13:30 – Communication systems should be needs based

Designing communication systems to work for the expectations of all stakeholders should look different across an organization.

If you’re in a customer-facing role, yes, you need to be responsive to customers. If you’re a sales rep doing sales calls and having that kind of relationship management, it’s relevant. In our case, our priorities are set, we know what our big projects are. Ideas are going to come up but those aren’t necessarily time-sensitive. The only time-sensitive issues we really have are around probably outages, incidents, or anything of that nature, which are relatively rare. So to take a behavior every single day in the event that something urgent comes up is really a disservice to ourselves there.

15:18 – Setting clear expectations for response times

Not everything needs an instant response. Setting clear cultural expectations can help reduce stress and ensure everyone is on a level playing field.

One of our core values is to treat people like adults, but it’s also worth noting that the main reason why we set these norms is because they affect other people. If the norm is everything becomes synchronous and high-priority and high-anxiety, if it’s like that for enough people at the company, other people now have to get push notifications for every piece of communication and now everybody is in that same boat, just because it was maybe the preference of three or four people at the company. So setting those norms just to make it clear that it is not the expectation of real time collaboration on most things.

23:33 – Why we banned Slack

Slack is a firehose of information that makes it difficult to triage and create trackable action items.

There are so many things about email that are great, there are so many things about email that are not great. And especially using a tool like superhuman, it’s incredibly efficient to process a lot of information because of all the hotkeys. Everything can be triaged. The information is more than another forms. We use the firehose of Slack as like a good counter example of something that is banned because information is not quantized in any way. There’s no packet of information that you can respond to, it’s just like a fire hose of information. Whereas in email, each email itself is its own packet of information and so you can respond to each one individually and manage and process that information separately.

28:01 – Switching tools in search of a better way

The Levels team is actively exploring which combination of tools is the best fit for a team growing across multiple countries and timezones.

The question that we’re really grappling with now is what are we missing and have we unintentionally effected some company culture pieces that we want to maintain or that require a questioning. And so things like a lot of the social chatter that used to happen, the water cooler chat. We’re remote team working across time zones, working asynchronously, everyone can check in when they’d like, but there was some element of social cohesion that I think at least some folks were getting from Slack. And the question is, can we recreate that in a different tool, but more importantly, do we need to recreate that or is there other ways for the team to connect? And that’s not something we have a clear answer to yet but it’s very much on our mind as we move forward with this experiment.

44:40 – How the future workforce will communicate

As new generations who have grown up with instant messaging apps as their default enter the workforce, we will likely see a need to deprogram their habits for more effective communication.

I wonder if there’s a generational shift coming our way as a younger generation of new grads come out of school and are used to just using messaging apps and not writing long form thoughts and emails. Those folks probably wouldn’t do exceptionally well in our culture but there is room for them to do that at other companies where everything is just Slack, everything is short form, and we’re seeing it as more and more people just are Slack natives. They’ve never worked without it.

Turning off that variable reward pathway that gets triggered from things like Slack and Twitter, and email can even do this. It does take some deprogramming. And I think that once people experience what work is like when you can have a flow state and you can focus and you’re not pulled in many different directions and just how much more you can get done and how much more satisfying it is than these ephemeral dopamine hits, I think that more people will adopt it.

Michael Mizrahi (00:02):

Okay, let’s try this again. I assume my audio is recording. I’ll see you when Sam comes in.

Sam Corcos (00:07):

I’m in.

Michael Mizrahi (00:08):

Hey, Sam. Do I sound decent?

Sam Corcos (00:11):

Are you Ben?

Michael Mizrahi (00:12):

I’m not Ben. I’m… Well, I’m Ben in here, yeah.

Sam Corcos (00:15):

Okay. Is Ben joining?

Michael Mizrahi (00:17):

He’s not.

Sam Corcos (00:18):

Oh, okay.

Michael Mizrahi (00:19):

Yeah.

Sam Corcos (00:19):

We’re just yellowing it. All right.

Michael Mizrahi (00:21):

Yeah. He thinks we can handle it alone. We’ll see.

Sam Corcos (00:24):

All right.

Ben Grynol (00:25):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health, and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Ben Grynol (00:45):

Communication and communication platforms. We live in this world of constant notifications, constant alerts. Whether it’s social platforms, work platforms, even in-person conversations, we’re always surrounded by constant notifications of everything trying to hack and steal our attention. And the problem with that is that it takes away our ability to focus, to do deep work. One could argue that it may be harder as a remote and asynchronous company to design for communication. You could also argue that it’s harder in-person because you don’t have the ability to control where and how conversations happen.

Ben Grynol (01:43):

So in-person, is there something to be said about synchronous time, serendipitous communication? Sure. But is there a way of ensuring that that communication is documented, publicly available, transparent for everybody to see and benefit from? It’s hard to say what the right approach is but one thing we know as a remote company, as a company that values asynchronous communication is that alerts are a distraction. And so we’re trying to get in front of everything that can happen as you grow a team, as you learn about how it’s best to communicate.

Ben Grynol (02:19):

And so, Sam Corcos, Co-Founder and CEO of Levels, sat down with Michael Mizrahi, Head of Operations. Lately, Miz, Michael Mizrahi, Miz, has been overseeing a lot of the communication and the communication platform exploration that we’ve done. We decided that, well, Slack was no longer a beneficial place for us to really have some of these conversations, so we started undertaking a new platform, Threads. We’re still experimenting with it, but it’s a lot better than trying to manage the inbox. Even if you’re using superhuman emails, they can still be hard to triage. Here’s, Sam.

Sam Corcos (03:02):

The thing that I’ve been thinking most about recently is communication tools just from the perspective of company values. And one of the books that we read, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, makes an interesting case around why work should not be the source of anxiety and why people should be able to set boundaries. And I’ve noticed that for myself, a lot of the communication tools are inherently addictive and pathological. And even if I wanted to not do it I would still compulsively check. And I think that, when I think about the way that we want to build out our communication structure in the company and what tools we want to use to achieve that, I think that it probably makes sense for us to focus on building a culture where that isn’t the case, where we don’t create compulsive behavior with people and that the communication tools themselves are not the source of anxiety.

Michael Mizrahi (04:06):

I think a lot of that has to do with us being a team that starts with values, and we’re pretty principled about most of the things that we take on. I think it’s particularly important in the async and remote-first world. It’s very easy to take all these tools at their face value of their product marketing websites. All the things that they say sounds like good things. They help your team get more connected, put everything in one place. But in using those tools we see that start to fall apart in different ways. A lot of companies just assume that that’s part of doing work and people bring that level of anxiety with them from past jobs, from past work environments.

Michael Mizrahi (04:46):

And I think there’s an interesting question there. In some cases that works and it does let people get through a lot quickly and stay on top of the fire hose, but at some point it fails, at some point it’s exhausting. People start to burn out, things get missed. And we were starting to see some of those symptoms, but I’m curious to hear from you. That desire to get it right early on, does that come from past experience of feeling pain with these kinds of things or is it mostly from our team starting to speak up about some of the symptoms of, “Ooh, this week’s an email week for me, I’m feeling behind.” Or, “I’m anxious that I’m missing something.” Because we’ve seen some of those comments come up recently as the team has grown.

Sam Corcos (05:26):

Yeah, it’s definitely the first one and the second one. I’ve personally experienced a lot of pain with this stuff. I think some of this has comes from my background as an engineer. I like deep focused work time and things that create context switching are incredibly expensive to my productivity and disruptions are incredibly negative in terms of my work output. And so certain tools like Slack is a good example of a… It’s a tool that acts like a slot machine, and I would feel this compulsive need to check it like I was an addict.

Sam Corcos (06:02):

In fact, it’s interesting I was talking with one of our newer hires, Chris Jones, where in his previous job he mentioned to me that you used to have 10 different Slack windows open and he was constantly checking email. And he described his job as like playing whack-a-mole with communications all day. But that’s just so opposite of the way that we operate. He’d been using our tools the way that we built them and the way that we use them. And after about two weeks he said, “At first it was really weird and uncomfortable.” And by the end of two weeks he said he felt like he had just gone through rehab and he had rid himself of an addiction and that it was a totally different way of operating that was so much lower stress. And I see myself doing that as well.

Sam Corcos (06:48):

Another conversation with Tom who runs partnerships, he knows that he doesn’t need to check email all the time and be super responsive, but in conversations I’ve had with him he says he still feels like he has to. And not from a company culture perspective, but it’s this dopamine rush of checking for new things, new information, and getting a fast response to it.

Sam Corcos (07:14):

But I think that entropy tends towards that synchronicity. And when you set that as a norm, not even necessarily an explicit expectation, when it becomes the norm of people respond to things very quickly. Miz, you can probably speak more specifically to some of the issues we have with Slack specifically as a tool, where we tell people it is an asynchronous tool, don’t get notifications, but people still do because it feels good. And somebody posts something on a Slack channel and then 20 people respond to it within an hour because everyone’s checking it all the time.

Sam Corcos (07:51):

And then the decision gets made very quickly, even though it really didn’t need to and some of the people who should have been involved in that weren’t involved in that decision because they were using the tool correctly. So now those people are forced to use it as if it is a synchronous tool, and so now everyone is using it synchronously and everyone is getting push notifications and now you have all this anxiety that everyone else has to deal with. That’s really where it comes from, is for myself personally having experienced all of these disruptions and just wanting to build a culture where deep focus work time and low anxiety is the norm.

Michael Mizrahi (08:25):

Yeah. There’s a few things in there to unpack. And I guess the place that I’ll start with is the comment about Tom feeling the need to check email, to get the dopamine hit, to see what might be in there. And unfortunately that’s just true of all of our apps and services today, whether in the workplace or not. The refresh of Twitter or the refresh of Instagram or the news website is the exact same behavior. And obviously we can’t change everyone’s habits and people might not want you to change those habits for themselves, but we can try to build a culture internally by starting with our principles there. And there’s two parts to it. There’s one which is we want to minimize distractions that people can do deep work and focus and not get sidetracked by tracking wings and funny gifts and all these things that are going on throughout the day.

Michael Mizrahi (09:14):

The other thing that I’ve noticed that I’ve seen create issues that we don’t really talk about because it’s one level deeper, it’s that in the ops context, in any, even I think this extends to engineering, in a world where every answer is a few keyboard taps away and you can tap into the hive mind, so to speak, that everyone’s a part of and ask any question, it builds behaviors that end up being a detriment to the team. Those are the kinds of things where you don’t look for the documentation and when you get the answer you don’t then go back and document it again. And so it creates this world where people can think short spurts of thoughts or have quick questions. Everything is “quick question,” XYZ, without thinking through whether or not they are actually the decision maker there, whether or not they should make the call on what that answer should be given the information they have.

Michael Mizrahi (10:04):

And sometimes that is the case. I think empowering people to say, “You don’t have to check points every single step along the way. We trust you to make some decisions.” If you’re handling a tricky support contact on the support team, for example, yes it’s nice to have input in cases that are particularly tricky but you also learn and grow when you push yourself to just make assumptions, make jumps, and move the context forward in a way that you just have to trust yourself and believe in yourself a little bit.

Michael Mizrahi (10:30):

And so in a culture where everything can be a quick question, it’s not only preventing folks from being distracted, it’s inhibiting their own ability to make decisions and move things forward. And that’s the part that worries me the most, is we could potentially create a culture where everything’s just a quick tap away and we’re not thinking deeply and just owning our own decisions.

Sam Corcos (10:50):

One of the things that I find myself thinking about as well is around the asymmetry in work that comes from these types of synchronous tools, where for example, if I were to text somebody on the team, if I was to text David and say, “Hey, David, I need you to do this thing.” It’s a quick text for my end. I only spent a few seconds on it but now David has to act on it immediately because it’s in text. And once you view a text it basically disappears, there’s no way to triage text messages. And so David now has to stop whatever it was he was doing. He has to write this down somewhere, figure out what I meant by that thing, and try to understand the context of whatever short comment I made and they’re highly disruptive.

Sam Corcos (11:38):

And I think one of the things that’s worth pointing out with a lot of these tools is that there are tools that are ostensibly asynchronous or that are ostensibly aligned with values, but as their practice they are not. A perfect example of this is text messaging. The statistic is that something like 90% of text messages are read within three seconds. That means that it is a synchronous tool. Technically it is in text form, so you could do it asynchronously, but that’s just not the reality. And so this is actually is related to the conversation I had with Tom related to email, is that he knows he doesn’t need to check it but he checks it all the time, he treats email like a synchronous tool.

Sam Corcos (12:21):

And I don’t think he actually wants to, it’s just the behavior that is embedded in the use of the tool. And so using a tool like Mailman or something that batches your messages so that no matter how many times you check it you’re not going to get that dopamine hit, it only comes in two or three times a day. And just showing everyone that asynchronicity and 24-hour response time is totally normal and reasonable, in the event that you need to communicate with somebody urgently, just give them a call. It’s okay to disrupt people if something needs a rapid response.

Michael Mizrahi (12:53):

That pickup the phone and just give them a call sounds so simple and yet so uncommon in the work environment where we’ve moved everything online and we’re messaging and emailing and throwing things back and forth and comments that it is okay to just hash through things by picking up the phone and calling someone, and knowing you’re being disruptive in that case is part of the equation. But I think the pushback that I’ve heard often, depending on what kinds of roles folks are in, is that email is the lifeblood of the job. If I miss an email in the morning, then I’m behind on some big development.

Michael Mizrahi (13:26):

And I think it’s important to carve that out for the industries in which it’s relevant. But if you’re in a customer-facing role, yes, you need to be responsive to customers. If you’re a sales rep doing sales calls and having that kind of relationship management, it’s relevant. In our case, our priorities are set, we know what our big projects are. Ideas are going to come up but those aren’t necessarily time-sensitive. The only time-sensitive issues we really have are around probably outages, incidents, or anything of that nature, which are relatively rare. So to take a behavior every single day in the event that something urgent comes up is really a disservice to ourselves there.

Sam Corcos (14:03):

Totally. And I think this is when I did some philosophizing on principles of effective communication. One of the things that just became very clear to me is that most of the problems related to communication inside a company come from blurring lines between different types of communication. Blurring the line between social communication and work communication, where, if something comes up and you want to be a part of it. Most social things can be done asynchronously and when you start to get these notifications and people start talking about social things, it starts to overwhelm all of the things that you need to pay attention to and then you lose sight of a lot of the work things that you need to do, similarly, blurring the lines between synchronous and asynchronous.

Sam Corcos (14:50):

When things start trending towards synchronicity it increases the perceived urgency of every task to the point where everything is on fire and everything feels urgent and then you just get overwhelmed and you can’t get any real work done. It’s suddenly something that I’ve personally experienced, just this escalation of priority. And it’s one of the reasons why I think setting norms around these things and really using tools to enforce some of these norms it’s done.

Sam Corcos (15:18):

One of our core values is to treat people like adults, but it’s also worth noting that the main reason why we set these norms is because they affect other people. If the norm is everything becomes synchronous and high-priority and high-anxiety, if it’s like that for enough people at the company, other people now have to get push notifications for every piece of communication and now everybody is in that same boat, just because it was maybe the preference of three or four people at the company. So setting those norms just to make it clear that it is not the expectation of real time collaboration on most things. And, Miz, you and I did an exploration-

Michael Mizrahi (15:56):

Yeah.

Sam Corcos (15:56):

I think we have a loom internally where I was going through all of my communication and trying to find things that were time-sensitive. And we went through everything that I sent out and everything that I took in for an entire day, and I don’t think there was a single thing that was actually time-sensitive.

Michael Mizrahi (16:12):

Yeah. I guess, catching folks up who’re listening. We have an exploration dock as well where we took all of the tools that we use at the company, Slack, email, voice calls over the phone or Zoom, Notion, and then GitHub, G Docs, Threads, and we put all of those on a bunch of axis, basically measuring three things or calibrating them against three things, depth, speed, and importance. We explicitly called out how each of these tools should be used and explored the pros and cons of each of the tools in their own right.

Michael Mizrahi (16:42):

But, yeah, we set those standards explicitly so that folks know, hey, email is intentionally a shallow tool, don’t use it for deep thought or deep collaboration. It’s intentionally async and so we’re not going to go back and forth in email and if we are, we’re probably in the wrong place. And on the importance side of things, this should be used for FYIs, for regular communications, or for time-sensitive or urgent, which have their own definitions of what the turnaround times are.

Michael Mizrahi (17:08):

And so for each of our tools we defined across those three areas. And I think without defining those explicitly, that’s where you get into a dangerous territory of, you’re assuming that you have to judge each communication based on its content to understand whether it’s important, whether it needs to be dealt with quickly. And I think something that you’ve done and that you’ve mentioned before is you often send emails to different team members or in the past these were emails… We’ve since switched tools a little bit, with ideas or spreads of thought that you want someone to look into but it’s not urgent.

Michael Mizrahi (17:39):

And so in other companies, I think Haney has this example where he started, he got some emails from the CEO and all of a sudden it felt like he had to drop everything to respond to those. You’ve been really intentional about calling out, hey, I’m going to send you ideas but they are not a priority. You can get back to me in a month if that’s when you get to this one. Spreading that across the whole teams that folks know, okay, if I get a communication in this channel, here’s how I can batch it and here’s the expectations of me with the rest of the team to handle this well.

Michael Mizrahi (18:07):

Something that I think we got into a little bit of warm water with, and I think this is true of a lot of communication tools, is that they can become single-player games. You mentioned earlier you have this engineering mindset, you like doing deep-focused work in time blocks that are defined. And so let’s use the email example. If you decide that Tuesday afternoon from 3:00 to 5:00 is email time, you clearing your inbox and being great at your email means that you’ll probably send, let’s say, 20 to 30 outbound emails during that window. You hit inbox zero and now that burden of work is transferred on to other people who then have to play the ping pong and prioritize and triage and respond.

Michael Mizrahi (18:47):

And so you get into this world where everyone’s playing for their own inbox, but the result is everyone has more emails as a result and it’s not a good place to be. I think we’ve touched some of that. And that’s some of the symptoms that made us realize we might need to change course and switch channels to a more effective tool for what we’re trying to achieve.

Sam Corcos (19:07):

I think I was talking to Josh about this where email was causing him a lot of anxiety. And a lot of it was from when I would tell him about my batch processing times. It’s like, all right, I got three hours of email today and Josh is now terrified that he’s going to get into his email inbox with 50 new emails or things he needs to do. And I think the main reason why it has historically caused anxiety is that it’s not actually the volume of emails, it’s about the ambiguity. It’s that there might be 50 emails and maybe three of them are time-sensitive and urgent, but the only way to know that is to go through every single one of them right now. So now all of them are time-sensitive and urgent.

Sam Corcos (19:51):

And some of them might be one minute of work and some of them might be 10 hours of work. The challenge comes from, it’s the ambiguity that causes these problems. When you get a stack of emails that are all and prioritized, uncategorized, you have to treat all of them like they are maximally time-sensitive and urgent but the reality is that most of them are not going to be.

Michael Mizrahi (20:13):

I’ll add a gripe on here because I love griping on emails, specifically. The other thing is that it’s not just thread to thread that you have to sort through for relative priority, it’s also within each thread. A message thread that was not a priority when it started in one of the earlier messages might now be a priority based on how the replies evolved. And the only way for me to know that is to read the entire thread and oftentimes context-switch back to where I was the first time I processed it to now reprocess it and have that whole cognitive load again, to understand where is at and whether or not an action is required. There are tests that explicitly need action that aren’t identified and so there’s a lot of work for each specific recipient to determine if that’s the case. And so that was another pain point that we felt there.

Sam Corcos (21:00):

Yeah, totally. And like you triage something and then it gets untriaged against your will because somebody responded to it. And now that thread it’s back in your inbox, you forgot what needed to be done. It’s one of the reasons why I really liked using Threads. They have a different primitive more than just read, unread, done or scheduled, it’s the follow-up. And you can have a specific action item that you need to take and that’s somewhere that’s categorized elsewhere. And so if people comment on this thread, it’s still triaged, you still know you need to take an action and so you don’t lose track of a lot of these things.

Michael Mizrahi (21:35):

Yeah. Zooming out a little bit, for some context, it’s now mid-August 2021 and we’ve been talking about this idea around internal communication, effective communication principles, exploration of our tools. For some time now, and we’ve been on the search for a tool that would align with the kind of work communication that we want to have, and it’s been a tough search, nothing quite nailed what we were looking for until recently we came across Threads. And so we have a bold experiment running where we said to the company, our team of 30 now, that we’re going to cut off use of Slack and internal email for all internal communications and we’re going to put everything in Threads. We’ve checked out the tool, we think that the tool aligns with our interests. It works the way that we want to work and we’re going to go all in and give this a try.

Michael Mizrahi (22:21):

This is a pretty tricky thing to do in a lot of companies. There’s a big switching cost to changing the way people work and it impacts groups differently. A lot of the problems that we’ve been talking about with email that are specific to folks, maybe on the business and the operations side or legal might look very different to an engineer or a product team member where they might not feel the same pain around email and they might work fairly collaborative in Slack. So we had to meet folks where they were at and see if this tool could fix those issues for us. And so, yeah, how do you think it’s going so far based on these first three weeks?

Sam Corcos (22:57):

Yeah. I think that there are a lot of things that I like about it. I’ve been in touch with their CEO to talk about some of the things that are deal breakers. Probably the biggest deal breaker for me is around hotkeys and triage. One of the primitives that they currently use is around read and unread, which is like text messages, which is why people don’t like processing information on texts. Because once you look at it and then you look away, you forget who sent it to you, what it said, and it just gets lost and being able to schedule things for the future is really a really important feature.

Sam Corcos (23:33):

There are so many things about email that are great, there are so many things about email that are not great. And especially using a tool like superhuman, it’s incredibly efficient to process a lot of information because of all the hotkeys. Everything can be triaged. The information is more than another forms. We use the firehose of Slack as like a good counter example of something that is banned because information is not quantized in any way. There’s no packet of information that you can respond to, it’s just like a fire hose of information. Whereas in email, each email itself is its own packet of information and so you can respond to each one individually and manage and process that information separately.

Sam Corcos (24:16):

It does have the problem that we mentioned before, which is, you can process one email. It might contain multiple things that need to happen and then you can triage it somehow and then it gets untreated judged and then you lose context on that, but that’s a different set of problems. The biggest problem with email is that it is a closed silo versus an open silo. And I think a lot of this is cultural, just the type of culture that we’re building with the degree of transparency and communication that we have. Having open silos, it’s okay to have information silos. I wouldn’t even say it’s okay, it is expected and necessary to have information silos. Because once you get to a certain number of people, remember that head count scales linearly, and the edges between those nodes, so the communication pathways between everyone on the team scales polynomially, so there will necessarily need to be silos of information where not all information makes it to every person.

Sam Corcos (25:13):

The difference is whether those are open or closed. In a closed silo like email, only the people who’ve received the initial communication are able to see what the information was and there’s no way to show people that except to maybe there’s no discoverability at the very least. You can forward to somebody, you can add them during the course of a conversation, but it’s very much a closed silo with no discoverability. An open silo is more like Reddit, it’s a forum, where the information is all available and people can find it and people can engage with it but the goal is not to have no silos, is to make sure that your silos are open rather than closed.

Michael Mizrahi (25:49):

And I think importantly, the information and email doesn’t live on beyond the conversation itself. And so it can’t be referenced, it’s not discoverable by future hires. Some might argue, well, you can pull up the Google Groups UI and do a quick search on a specific group if you’re using Groups correctly but I think in practice that that doesn’t quite work out that way. What Threads does effectively here, and credit where it’s due, the idea comes from Slack, having channels that are organized by team or project or even on the social side by affinity group or interest, is that each specific functional area has a forum dedicated to it. And communications can exist in that forum or the equivalent subreddit, so to speak, between two people but it’s still happening in the operation space. So anyone can go into double-click on the operations team. They’re not getting every single update that happens there but they can go pull information if they’d like it.

Michael Mizrahi (26:42):

And I think that creates a culture of transparency and awareness. It also makes us double-click and question some of our assumptions on sending one person a specific email or a question when that could be exposed to the team because information might be relevant to someone else and we just don’t know that upfront. And so organizing by forum has that nice side effect there. The other thing is that it allows for triage. Now I can go to an inbox that might have 10 new messages in it but I can skim by which forums those are ran and prioritize based on specific projects that are moving quickly or direct messages if that’s the case. And so those two elements really help quite a bit.

Sam Corcos (27:19):

Yeah, the categorization is helpful because this gets to the same, going back to the example where Josh would get this pile of 50 emails and feel some anxiety around it. Is that part of it is the categorization that helps with it where if he knows that his top priority is something in say operations or some specific feature in Slack, you have a channel dedicated to that and he can just pay attention to that one channel to make sure that at a minimum is paying attention to that. And the downside of email is, again, the only way to know if you’re getting the proper information on a specific project is to get notified for every single thing and to process all of them in real time, and so that’s a huge problem.

Michael Mizrahi (27:59):

Yeah. I think the question that we’re really grappling with now is what are we missing and have we unintentionally effected some company culture pieces that we want to maintain or that require a questioning. And so things like a lot of the social chatter that used to happen, the water cooler chat. We’re remote team working across time zones, working asynchronously, everyone can check in when they’d like, but there was some element of social cohesion that I think at least some folks were getting from Slack. And the question is, can we recreate that in a different tool, but more importantly, do we need to recreate that or is there other ways for the team to connect? And that’s not something we have a clear answer to yet but it’s very much on our mind as we move forward with this experiment.

Sam Corcos (28:42):

Specifically related to that, one of the things that is, I definitely don’t have an answer for this, but one of the engineers that I talked to when I was asking you for feedback on this said that what they would like to have is if we’re switching to Threads and we’re switching social to discord or something that is unaffiliated with the company, that they would like to have a forum for synchronous chat with team members. And I’m not actually convinced that we ever want to have that. I think synchronous chat is actually the source of a lot of these problems. I don’t know for sure that this is where I’ve been leaning recently, synchronous chat like instant messenger or Slack in this case, it is extremely intrusive for most people. Most people treat it like a synchronous tool but it is a synchronous tool that pretends to be asynchronous.

Sam Corcos (29:33):

And so it has all the expectations of a synchronous tool, but it doesn’t have the same, call it, emotional cost of where you don’t feel like you’re intruding on somebody when you send them a message. It’s, we’re talking about calling somebody, a lot of people don’t want to do it because it feels so disruptive where I’m intruding on their time by calling them right now. The reality is you’re doing the same thing when you send them a Slack message or you send them something via text or some other forum. It just doesn’t have the same emotional cost on the person sending it. I don’t have complete thoughts on it but that’s definitely where I’ve been leaning recently.

Michael Mizrahi (30:11):

Yeah. I think part of the problem of sending a Slack message or some other real-time messages and different from being a call is that if you miss the call you know that the person has something to tell you, but you don’t necessarily know what it is. Oftentimes when you see a Slack, you then think about it and decide whether or not you want to reply now. And whether or not you do, that topic is now on your mind and so you’re just adding it. It’s not an unorganized to-do list and you get stuck with it in that way.

Michael Mizrahi (30:37):

What we’ve heard a lot of engineers say, and I’m curious for your take from the software engineering angle, is that chat’s necessary for these messages that you want to put out there that you don’t really know who the audience is, it’s not defined, and there’s not necessarily a clear ask but it’s something that you want to post to the group in order to get input, to be on block, to keep moving on what you’re working on. So there’s hypothetically, or at least from what we’re hearing, a use case or a need there. But I think if you rewind 10 years, Slack is what? Probably less than, I think early 2010s, is when Slack came out. Before that we were in, I don’t know, HipChat, there was Campfire. There’s been other IRC style tools. There’s been IRC itself.

Michael Mizrahi (31:20):

But software engineering has existed before real time chat messages did in a work environment. And so it was possible to write great software before these tools came about and the question I think is, how is it being handled in the past and are we just stuck in our current state of everything’s direct messaging, everything is as easy and quick? Do we work slowly that way anymore? Is it the landline attached to the wall? Is that the equivalent of, to compare to cell phones today, the way the world is communicated has fundamentally changed. The question is, does the work environment change with it or does it look different because this way isn’t necessarily working out great.

Sam Corcos (31:56):

I thought about that one before, the question of getting a short piece of information to get unblocked for something. There’s actually a perfect example of this at work already in the software world, which is Stack Overflow. And Stack Overflow is a forum. It’s not Slack, it’s not real-time. It’s also searchable. Most engineers in their early days spend much of their time to searching Stack Overflow and copy pasting things. And it has tremendous value. If Stack Overflow was a Slack firehose it would be completely unusable.

Sam Corcos (32:28):

But Stack Overflow is also asynchronous. So if you’re currently blocked and you really need an answer you’re just stuck. I think that a potential solution for this is asking the question directly, maybe to a manager. I think managers have the understanding that if somebody on their team is stuck that their job is to unblock people on their team. If there’s something that is truly blocking in as much as they can’t really do anything else until this problem is solved, probably the first step would be ask the manager or the engineering lead if there’s a solution to this problem, and if not, then potentially expanding it out to the larger group.

Sam Corcos (33:10):

It’s not unreasonable to interrupt people. Interrupting people, it’s not something that has to be avoided at all costs, it should just be done intentionally, as opposed to, the thing that I really want to avoid more than anything else is just inertia and entropy of just allowing these things to happen. When everyone knows in advance we don’t want to this type of culture, but we just want to let it happen because of a lack of attention. Every decision has trade offs and I think just knowing what those are is really the answer.

Sam Corcos (33:41):

There are negative consequences to being long form asynchronous primarily for your mode of communication. Which is, some decisions will take longer to make, it will require more thoughts. Whereas if it was all done synchronously in a meeting and everyone was together and you have all 10 people in the decision making process in a room, sure, you might be able to come to a decision faster but it’s also very expensive and very disruptive to the company and that same decision in a remote environment might take five days because people were only getting these messages two or three times a day, it’s all being batched, but maybe that decision didn’t have to be made in one day. And maybe the net effect of this is that the decision that is made is better and it’s a lower anxiety on the people involved, and in general, the thought process would have been better because it’s more long form and less anxiety-inducing.

Michael Mizrahi (34:32):

I don’t know if it’s a cultural change as much as it is a headwinds that we’re up against, which is, I think the way work is done in a lot of tech companies today is primarily communication. There’s the sense of like LARPing your job from Slack specifically, but oftentimes what I’ve noticed in people onboarding is that one of the first questions that we’ve gotten is, hey, can I get access to Slack a little bit early so I can catch up and tap into what’s going on? But something that I think people notice within their first few weeks, you mentioned Chris Jones’s comments about playing whack-a-mole and I think we’ve seen this from some other folks, is that when your time is clear and you’re not just keeping up with the constant firehose of comms, you then have to think about what work you need to do and how you actually move forward the priorities that you’ve defined earlier on in some other strategy doc or when you took the role.

Michael Mizrahi (35:25):

And so for everyone, I think having open time that’s not constantly filled with distractions makes you think about how you can prioritize your time and work effectively on the products that you’ve got. And so there are, I think, jobs in tech where you can join and just be in the Slack and it looks like you’re doing your job because you’re just visible and communicative, and setting intentionally our cultures that we’re not fighting against… Well, we are fighting against that headwind but setting our culture so that folks know that it’s a little bit different here and we want to prioritize and focus the work itself is one of the underlying things that we’ll achieve if we get this right.

Sam Corcos (36:00):

Yeah. And it has been super interesting. I added something on this in our investor update, just asking if anybody feels like they have a good solution for internal comms. And it’s one of those interesting things where I got a lot of responses back from teams that are much larger than ours and companies that have scaled and are much further along from a lot of different founders and investors. And what was interesting is the universal sentiment was, well, when you figure it out let us know because we’re struggling with this too. And I was surprised to hear that because communications is a fundamental piece of basically every company and it seems like very few people feel they have a handle on it.

Michael Mizrahi (36:44):

Yeah. There’s just so many ways to do knowledge work, it’s such an open end that we just leave it up to each individual person to figure out how they prioritize tasks, how they communicate. And so you have all these different styles mixing together with no standard operating procedure of here’s how you do work in this kind of environment, which you might have obviously in a factory floor or some mechanical job. I think engineering probably has way more structure than this knowledge work that’s open-ended. There is no standard of work. The standard today is you know how to use G Suite and you know how to use Slack, and those are your tools and how about it? Project prioritization, stand-ups, documentation.

Michael Mizrahi (37:25):

Every single company does those entirely differently and they’re all recreating the wheel for their own needs and purposes. Which, there should be room for experimentation. There’s obviously not one way to build a company or one way to run a company, but we are all recreating it and I think if you don’t pause and look intentionally at what kind of culture you want to build, you just end up with the amalgam of whatever folks you’ve hired from companies. Whatever cultures they bring to the table, you end up with some combo of that which isn’t really intentional.

Sam Corcos (37:54):

I think it was something that, Haney, our Editorial Director brought up in a previous conversation that something we should really consider, it’s not telling people what to do but it is reasonable to set default behavior. And when we think about tools like Slack, people come in with defaults already. And it’s actually, it’s not crazy to help people reprogram into what our norms are and just setting those as maybe… I think you and I have talked about having people strictly follow a set of guidelines for the first month of we’re going to have everyone use Mailman to batch their emails and only get emails three times a day and not on weekends and after the first month you can do whatever you want.

Sam Corcos (38:39):

But that’s the norm and that’s the default, setting things where communication notifications, in terms of push notifications are turned off and just making sure that people follow that for a month, just to make sure that everyone understands that that’s the norm and the default but they can change it later on. Otherwise, you’re basically just inheriting whatever culture other companies have developed and a lot of them are developed in a way that was not as intentional as ours.

Michael Mizrahi (39:05):

There’s no reason why that shouldn’t or couldn’t be part of onboarding. I mean, we’ve had pieces of it but at some larger companies there’s eng boot bootcamp where you learn to stack, understand the different programs and learn how engineering is done at X company. We could potentially do something very similar, which is, here’s how we communicate and you’re going to go through a training on this so that you get it and we feel confident that we’re maintaining our own culture here.

Sam Corcos (39:30):

Yeah, definitely. One of the things that is also useful… We haven’t done this explicitly but I know that we’ve talked about doing this sometime, probably by the end of this month as we’re rolling things out for communication is setting more explicit expectations, or in the engineering world they call them SLAs, around communication. If you are in leadership, we expect you to be an inbox-zero person and we expect you to hit inbox zero at least once a week or maybe three times a week.

Sam Corcos (40:03):

But just being more explicit around that, because I do think that communication, email in particular, but communication broadly is something that’s usually, it usually takes second fiddle to whatever seems most important right now. When people fill up their calendars with meetings and with work products, they usually leave out email or any form of communication. But the reality is that most people in leadership spent many hours per day on email and communication and they don’t budget that into their calendar. And so I think just being more intentional and explicit about the role that communication plays, it’s something that we can do to better set expectations for people.

Michael Mizrahi (40:42):

Yeah. And there’s one level deeper there, especially as it relates to leadership or to management, it’s setting the expectation that your job as a leader is to make decisions and communicate them. And so your job is not to coast along happily and there’s never going to be any problems, your job is specifically to solve the problems that come up. And I think oftentimes taking that mindset changes and shifts people’s perspective and lens on what they’re doing every single day. There’s the communication element of it, which is, expectations around how often you should be hitting these marks so that you’re unblocking people and moving things forward, but there’s also an assumption that this is part of the job. Your job is communication because you are a connector of ideas and of people and of projects, and in order to do a great job at that you have to hit these SLAs and communicate in this kind of way and make decisions that move things forward and make the calls.

Sam Corcos (41:33):

Yeah. And one of the other things that became just really obvious to me related to leadership and email, specifically, is that email is definitely an inadequate tool for internal communications. However, it is also never going away. It is the primary mechanism by which people communicate with external parties. It would be nice if there was a way that hybridized some of the tools like Slack or Threads that also worked with email, but I won’t speculate as to the possibility for that. It would be like having an external party in a channel that’s communicating to them by email but to us we don’t really see any difference in the communication.

Sam Corcos (42:14):

The reality is that a lot of things happen by email and you’re never going to move away from it. You’re not going to be able to convince a Fortune 50 company to stop using email and to switch over to whatever communication tool you’re using, if it’s Slack or if it’s Threads or something similar. So no matter what we decide on, no matter how communications evolve, people in leadership always need to be good at email.

Michael Mizrahi (42:38):

It is the operating system of the world today. But I will say that there is something interesting going on with Slack given how broadly adopted it is now. They’re pretty heavily pushing this cross-company Slack channel integration, I don’t know what the official product feature name is. But I will say in our Slack we have at least three or four companies hooked up to share channels, one of them being Truepill which is our pharmacy partner and fulfillment partner. We have Stripe. We’re working through an engineering integration and we spin up a Levels-Stripe channel where Stripe engineers are in there and Levels engineers are in there. They’re already in Slack within their own companies and so now we can just do cross-company that is replacing a lot of the emails. I think we also have one with one of our marketing agencies.

Michael Mizrahi (43:22):

All of these are actually, interestingly enough, making it harder for us to completely turn off Slack because that is our communication channel to a lot of these other companies that are at least tech-forward and using these kinds of tools. And so there is something interesting happening there where Slack is displacing some of that email communication. The question is if that’s the right way to handle it, my biggest concern where email actually does better in those cases is that you can hold some accountability and track down the thread and drive a result, whereas in Slack it’s very easy to post a message to the partner and it doesn’t get replied to and it gets pushed out of the way. And so-

Sam Corcos (43:58):

Yap.

Michael Mizrahi (43:58):

There’s much to it-

Sam Corcos (43:59):

Yeah. It’s funny because I’ve… Yeah, I’ve been in circumstances where the vendor or third party that I worked with asked to be put on a Slack channel and I said, “Can we just do this by email because if we do it on Slack I’m not going to be able to keep track of anything that you’re doing because it’s just going to be a firehose? And if you ask me a question I’m not going to have Slack open anyway so I’m probably going to miss that and if you need to get ahold of me you have my phone number. And almost never do people actually need to get a hold of you in real time. I think a lot of these things are, there may be less than 5% edge cases and the vast majority of communication can be handled asynchronously in a really positive and low anxiety way.

Michael Mizrahi (44:40):

I wonder if there’s a generational shift coming our way as a younger generation of new grads come out of school and are used to just using messaging apps and not writing long form thoughts and emails. Those folks probably wouldn’t do exceptionally well in our culture but there is room for them to do that at other companies where everything is just Slack, everything is short form, and we’re seeing it as more and more people just are Slack natives. They’ve never worked without it.

Sam Corcos (45:05):

Yeah. I think that they would do fine in our culture but it would take probably several weeks of deprogramming.

Michael Mizrahi (45:11):

That’s right.

Sam Corcos (45:12):

Turning off that variable reward pathway that gets triggered from things like Slack and Twitter, and email can even do this. It does take some deprogramming. And I think that once people experience what work is like when you can have a flow state and you can focus and you’re not pulled in many different directions and just how much more you can get done and how much more satisfying it is than these ephemeral dopamine hits, I think that more people will adopt it.

Sam Corcos (45:43):

One of the mighty conversations that I’ve been having with Threads is that there are many things that I like about the tool. There’s a lot of philosophical alignment that I feel that I haven’t felt with other tools that I’ve used, but they blend a lot of these things with synchronous and asynchronous. They still get push notifications for when somebody you’ve used a post that you made and you get that dopamine hit and it makes me feel like I need to be paying attention to this. You get notifications for things. They prioritize new information over actions that need to be taken, even though actions are much more important.

Sam Corcos (46:18):

I have a conversation with them, I think as early as next week to talk about some of these things, but I do think that finding the tool that is really just aligned with our values as a company of we are remote, we are asynchronous, and we really mean that, and we do not believe that workplace communication should be the source of anxiety in your life.

Michael Mizrahi (46:39):

Or the dopamine hit because it feels so good when someone gives an emoji response to one of your threads and-

Sam Corcos (46:44):

Totally.

Michael Mizrahi (46:45):

… you get that sparkle effect animation. But, yeah, it’s just, there’s no value there and it doesn’t improve our workout plan, it just distracts us and creates feedback loops that aren’t necessary when you have a tool that’s built to get us out of that.

Sam Corcos (46:59):

Yeah. And nobody is immune to this. I have website blockers and I have all kinds of stuff to try to prevent me from getting distracted. The things that I have on block are Slack and Twitter. And I was mentioned in a Twitter post from First Round on the article that came out about time management. And as much as I wanted to not constantly check Twitter, I felt this like overwhelming pull to check the slot machine probably every 10 minutes for the entire day.

Sam Corcos (47:30):

I’m not immune to this, even though some people think that I might be. I had to block everything, I had to stay away from my computer. I had to turn it off of my phone and I still felt this overwhelming urge to keep checking things. The further away we can get from that in terms of our work tools, I don’t want our work tools to be things that create addictive behavior in people that work here. I think that’s just something we need to avoid.

Michael Mizrahi (47:56):

We’ve got enough of that in today’s culture, with today’s tools, and then, yeah, I think the distinction here is it’s not necessarily for work and it’s not going to help us achieve our mission any faster, and in fact, probably only inhibits us here.

Sam Corcos (48:08):

We’re going to have to cut this part out. I don’t know if you hear that?

Michael Mizrahi (48:21):

Yeah, I did, though.

Sam Corcos (48:22):

The door. I hope it’s-

Michael Mizrahi (48:26):

Hey, it’s not the phone.

Sam Corcos (48:27):

Yeah. That’s right. All right. We’re at the 20 minute mark. I’ll make a note.

Michael Mizrahi (48:31):

Yap, I got it as well.

Sam Corcos (48:33):

Well, we’ll splice this in however Ben decides makes sense.