TLDR: Minimize the mental energy others need to spend when interacting with you.
You get a WhatsApp notification. You see the name. Before you even read the message, you already feel something — excited or anxious. That feeling has nothing to do with the message. It’s built from every past interaction with that person.
Try to be the person whose name makes others excited.
Exciting messages usually have a few things in common, but the main thing is: it is easy to process, easy to understand, and easy to act on.
You’re making others use Mental Energy (will refer to as mana) each time you interact with them. You should try to decrease it as much as possible.
You can use this concept everywhere. Others reviewing your ideas, designs, PRs, polls…
Think of the below questions asked to you.
❌ Tell me about your life → Requires 100 mana to answer
❌ Tell me about the fitness aspect of your life → Requires 50 mana
✅ Tell me about the exercise you did today → Requires 10 mana
✅ Did you go running today? → Requires 1 mana (yes/no question)
Yes/no questions are the easiest to answer. People love them. Broad questions are harder to answer.
A cheap question opens the door for an expensive one. Once you ask someone a yes/no question, you activate a conversation and give them the first easy win.
❌ Why did you not go running today? → Requires 10 mana
✅ Did you go running today? Why? → First question requires 1 mana, second one requires 5 mana
As a designer, use this skill to pay attention to mana spent by users and do designs accordingly.
As a colleague, use this skill to decrease the mana spent by your colleagues.
Getting a review should be done elegantly.
❌ If you send a 10-page document and ask for review → People will hate you
✅ If you send a 10-page document and ask them to read section 1 and then give feedback on section 7 → That’s better
✅ If you send just the screenshots of those sections with a link to whole thing → They’ll love you
❌ If you send 200 lines of code change and ask “can you review the database changes” → They’ll hate you
✅ If you send 200 lines of code change and tag them in the 10 lines of code “can you review these lines” → That’s better
✅ If you create a separate PR with only the 10 lines of code “can you review this PR” → They’ll love you
❌ “Want to hang out sometime?” → They have to figure out when, where, what, and even whether to take it seriously
✅ “Want to do something this Saturday?” → Better, but they still have to figure out what and when
✅ “Want to grab coffee Saturday at 2pm at Nero?” → One decision: yes or no
Check out communication for more principles.
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