Email is Gambling & It Always Comes Down to Code

Human beings love to gamble. I was blown away when I saw the research from WeChat Pay that discovered that users preferred an unpredictable cash-back reward over a predictable one even when the expected (average) return on an unpredictable reward was lower than that of the predictable one. Our brains release dopamine when outcomes are different from those expected. It's why jokes that "pull the rug" feel so pleasant to listen to. If you need further proof then look to the psychologist B. F. Skinner who replicated this effect... in pigeons.

Nir Eyal (a Write of Passage Alum) has written a brilliant book, Indistractable. This book is much closer to therapy than I was expecting but has made me significantly more productive.

One of the sections that struck a chord was how close checking your email is to gambling. It is an unpredictable reward... Good news... Bad news... Important information... Cat memes... The unpredictability keeps us pecking... and pecking... and pecking.

When we receive an email another human impulse kicks in. Our desire for reciprocity. How many of us have felt the nagging compulsion to reply to a clearly automated marketing email.

"Chris, I'm not sure you're receiving these emails, can you let me know?"

Despite knowing, for certain, that this email is merely a Hubspot workflow actions being triggered by my previous non-response I feel a deep compulsion to reply. It's why they send the emails.

An article published in the Harvard business review discovered that 25% of emails should never have been sent. And then we reply to those emails. And then we receive replies. And the pecking continues.

I do not want to denigrate the very serious condition of gambling addiction, but understanding that a lot of our office habits are responses to chemical reactions in our brains is a powerful first step towards dismounting the pigeon merry-go-round.

It Always Comes Down to Code

Low and no-code solutions (like their alcohol equivalents) have exploded over the last ten years. The value proposition of achieving Gandalf level efficiencies and automation without having to put in the time to learn how computers work is tempting. Zapier is great. Airtable is great. They are (mostly) all great.

But if you look closely at the feature development of those products at some point, either in infancy or middle aged, they will introduce a "run code" module. This will allow you to run custom code in Python or Javascript in order to achieve specific aims.

So my usual advice to kids still remains true today. If you learn one skill outside of academia, learn to code. The way it will teach you to break down a problem and its practical applications in the real world are as valuable today as they ever were. Perhaps more so because a lot of the back end wrangling can now be handled by a "No-Code" solution allowing you to make use of your skills where they have the highest leverage.

Of course, AI might make all this redundant... but I'm still yet to be convinced.