My Favourite Tip: Emily Oster - Why you should send emails to your kids

If you’re a bit of a productivity buff, you probably have some clever hacks for reducing time spent reading or sending emails. Maybe you use Superhuman, like I do, or maybe you’re a big proponent of Inbox Zero. 

Either way, you’re probably not looking for, say, a How I Work episode that suggests you spend more time on email! But this is different… 

The goal of true productivity, after all, is to get more meaningful work done in less time. So, what if using some work tools at home could enable you to make more intelligent decisions in less time? 

That’s exactly what Emily Oster, her partner, and sometimes even her kids do when they send each other emails. Expectations are usually clearer in writing than in spoken conversation, you can choose exactly when you want to respond to or think about a particular issue, and of course - the dinner table is out of the question when it comes to certain conversations about the kids!

Learn how an economist uses what she’s learned at work to make life easier and more productive at home. 

Connect with Emily on Twitter or Instagram. And pick up her latest book, The Family Firm.

You can find the full interview here: Economist Emily Oster on how to make better decisions at work and in life

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CREDITS

Produced by Inventium

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: Martin Imber

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you're a bit of a productivity buff, you probably
have some clever hacks for reducing time spent reading or
sending emails. Maybe you use Superhuman like I do, or
maybe you're a big proponent of inbox zero. Either way,
you're probably not looking for So how I work episode

(00:22):
that suggests you spend more time on email? But this
is different. The goal of true productivity, after all, is
to get more meaningful work done in less time. So
what if using some work tools at home could enable
you to make more intelligent decisions in less time. That's

(00:43):
exactly what Brown University economics professor Emily Oster and her
partner and sometimes even her kids do when they send
emails to each other. So how can using email in
your personal life actually help strengthen relationships and lead to
better decisions. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an

(01:09):
organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy invent Him.
And this is how I work, a show about how
to help you do your best work. On today is
my Favorite Tip episode. We go back to an interview
from the past, and I pick out my favorite tip
from the interview. In today's show, I speak with Emily
Osta about why she sends fairly regular emails to all

(01:33):
members of her family. Now, I've heard that when you're
talking about like different matters relating to your kids, you
will do quite a bit of email discussion with your husband.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Is that right? That is right? Yeah, we do a
lot of our interaction over email. I love a good email.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Can you tell me why you decide to do that
via email than some other communication channel, like face to
face at the dinner table.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Well, first of all, the kids are at the dinner
channeling about that. But I yeah, so I think that
that we try pretty hard to do to do much
of this interaction over email. And I think part of
you know, or over some like to get even more extreme,
like in an Assana task or over something like that.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
And I think that the reason is that that you
can be much more direct and concrete and understanding is
just much clearer when it is written down and it
sets expectations in a way that everybody can see, like
can see what is written, can see what we agreed on,
can sort of like see all of the information together.

(02:39):
It's also an efficient way to be able to go
back and back and forth between sort of learning something
and asking questions and learning more. So give you an example,
there was like a period of time when one of
my kids had a tick on them, like there's like
a bug and tick on them, and there's like a
question about there's a concern about mime disease where I live,

(03:02):
which is a thing that you can get if you
have a tick bite. And we had to have a
discussion about whether we wanted to like pre treat him
with antibiotics for this. And that is a place where
like having the interaction the about that question over email
is very productive because I can say here are the facts.
He can say, well, here's the question that I still have.

(03:22):
And rather than him saying over the breakfast table, here's
the question I still have and me being like, okay,
let me try to remember, like look at that later
and then get back to you about it. I can
just see the email, put it aside when I have time,
come back to it, send it back to him. And
it's sort of like so sometimes I say, like, your
computer doesn't get tired of remembering things even though you do,

(03:43):
and so you've got to like give your computer a
little mental load.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
Is there anything else that you do like because of
your background that helps you like in work or life
that other people would go, oh, that's really quirky.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
See, we have a lot of these same kinds of
interactions with our kids where we will sort of interact
over email with them. And the other day so I
noticed that they were emailing each other, and you know,
there's like six and ten, it's like my son opened
up his computer and he was like emailing with he
like emailed like, I hope you have a good evening.

(04:18):
I mean, I don't even know where they come up
with this, where they come up with this stuff, but
but I think we do, you know, sort of lean
into the idea that had kind of everybody in the
in the household can engage in this kind of slightly
structured decision making.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
That is it for today's show. I hope you enjoyed
my chat with Emily. And if you're looking for more
tips to improve the way that you work, I write
a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that
I have discovered that helped me work better, ranging from
interesting research findings three to gadgets that I'm loving. You
can sign up for that at Howiwork dot co. That's

(04:55):
how I Work dot C. How I Work is produced
by Inventi with production support from Dead Set Studios. And
thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix
for every episode and makes everything sound so much better
than it would have otherwise. See you next time.