Productivity Hack from Maggie Hsu of Zappos
How to manage the never ending influx of information by creating simple, yet effective systems.
Maggie Hsu is the Chief of Staff over at Zappos, the company that Amazon bought for $1.2 billion. Over the years, Zappos continues to make the news, for being one of the best in customer service. If you’re curious, you can read a ZenDesk case study on The Zappos Experience: Creating a Customer Service Culture, an HBR article by Tony Hsieh himself on How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers, and a Business Insider article that sums it all up perfectly in Check Out The Insane Lenghts Zappos Customer Service Reps Will Go To.
One might wonder, how does this culture of customer-first, reflect on the C-suite. As it turns out, it’s not only a culture that needs to be uphold by general staff members, but also by its executives — which includes Tony.
Maggie said that Tony will give up his email to a random stranger that he met on the street (in case you are wondering, it’s tony@zappos.com).
Translation: Tony’s inbox is probably one of the scariest place in Inbox World, with a constant & continuous stream of messages popping in every hour — or maybe even minutes!
Hack #1: Yesterbox
The first hack that Maggie shared (which helps Tony manages his time & inbox) is an email replying system called “Yesterbox”. In layman’s term, the idea of Yesterbox is that you are only going to respond to yesterday’s email today.
There are three main benefits that comes with this method of replying.
First, you are responding to every single email within a set time frame. This means that people are going to be trained that you won’t reply to them immediately.
Second, you are not constantly checking and looking through your inbox, thinking that there is something important that you must read and reply to immediately. This allows you to have more time to focus on what’s currently in front of you right now.
Third, you know where to start every single day. Tony dedicates and blocks off 2 hours of his day, every day to reply to emails. This allow him to process the information overload better. It allows him to prioritize which emails need to be replied first and requires a more thorough answer, and which emails require a more succinct response.
Hack #2: A public Evernote
Tony has a public Evernote that anyone can access. Literally anyone. It is a log of his emails, meetings, and to-do’s. This shows to people what he is currently prioritizing, and what he is currently obsessed about.
Sometimes, it is important to first know and understand what your current priorities are, before saying yes or no to a request. Once you know your priorities, that will serve as your compass. Once you know where you want to go, each decision point will either lead you closer or farther from where you want to be.
Hack #3: Ask for an additional step before granting access
A lot of people are interested in Zappos. A lot of people are interested to talk and make Tony Hsieh their acquaintance. Maggie said that most people say that they are interested, but once she asked them to do something, before granting access to Tony, a lot of them magically dropped out of thin air.
So, she would say, “I’m really glad that you are interested in what we are doing, can you please do this and get back to us”. She said that actually, only 10% of requester would take this extra step.
This reminded me of Randy Pausch, the author of The Last Lecture, who said that “The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”
Heard first at Inbox Awesome.
