I’m not going to endorse this idea, but I will say it’s kinda clever. This company, in an attempt to get you to actually read what they want you to, sends you $0.02 over PayPal. PayPal formats the message pretty large so it stands out.
They are a pitching company and getting clever with pitches makes it seem like they’ll be pretty good at the job.
It can’t remain effective forever though, so for actual advice, I’d stick with honest, well-written, authentic emails.
Also, sorry PodPitch.com, I get at least a couple of pitches for “put this person on your podcast” every week and, I don’t know if they are from you, but they suck. I’ve never once bit on one, and in fact, is such a turnoff I’d be hesitant to ever have someone on who has pitched in this way. Because it’s a lie. They tend to start with stuff like “we just listened to your [recent episode here] and it was good!” — which is fake pandering and makes me feel like you are a dishonest person. They pitch above, which is probably a recycled generic message they use, at least feels in the realm of honest.
Just so I can be sure I’ve mentioned it on my blog That Is About Email: The case of the 500-mile email is a funny little anecdote of a bug and the characters around it.
I’m a super long time Gmail user and I honestly appreciate what a good product it’s been. Looking at that screenshot, it doesn’t even feel wildly different than that today, which is pretty wild in web apps land.
I’m still on Mimestream over here, continuing to surprise myself that I like this sort of UI. It forces me to think about the challenges of building an app on top of someone else’s API though. For instance, “snoozing” only works for local Mimestream clients, because apparently Google doesn’t offer a proper API for snoozing it at that level. So when looking at my email on my phone (Gmail app) or another computer, I’ll see emails I snoozed in Mimestream on only my laptop for example.
… a lot of people simply don’t reply to emails/messages these days any more. I get that emails can be exhausting at times, but really, I am answering any email I get. Sometimes late, but I answer.
The reason for this is that I always try to imagine myself. Not getting an answer leaves you with questions like “Did the message arrive or did it end up in spam?”, “Did I say something wrong and upset her/him?”.
There’s no law that you have to, but if you’re shooting for success of any kind, just not answering is almost never going to be part of the path there.
I can remember specific no-reply emails I’ve sent and and thought, oh well, wouldn’t wanna work with them on anything. It’s similar to dating: if that’s how they treat people, it’s probably a dodged bullet.
For at least the last fifteen years I’ve kept an inbox close to zero. Currently I’m sitting at the supposedly magical number.
I like it that way.
But sometimes a few emails also start to linger. I like to think of them as festering.
I’m not clear on what action to take, not clear on the steps required, and tend to stare at the emails dozens of times until I come to some resolution.
Who will be reading this email? What do they want of me? What do I want of them? Who are they? What do they know about me? What do they know about the topics of which I am writing? How can I read the room, so to speak?
Say the person who you’re writing an email to is holding a metaphorical knife. A knife that severs your job. Severs your ability to provide for yourself and family. And you know nothing about this person. They are entirely anonymous and the best you can tell they know nothing about you, your job, the circumstances, or anything at all that would help you craft this email.
Could you write this email? Could you write it well?
Email has been in the news a bit lately, in just this context. Like:
It’s not entirely cut and dry. Most of us, I’d wager, are in favor of efficiency. Particularly in government, where we want processes to work cleanly for us. And we want our tax money to feel like it’s being used well.
So some sort of way to measure and improve that efficiency seems more than fair.
And what about an efficient way to measure that efficiency? Also good? Perhaps an email just asking people what they are doing is smart. Seems like a pretty easy task. If you can’t do that, maybe it really is a sign you aren’t particularly effective in your job.
But I’m not sure that’s fair.
Email, like any other form of communication, requires this empathy on both sides.
This isn’t a surprise to those federal workers. Apparently this is the second of such requests recently. When your job is at risk, you know about it. They are biting their fingernails already.
An anonymous person holding a knife at you is asking these questions. Not your boss, not your boss’ boss, no someone who is clued in from anywhere near the organization.
What if your federal job doesn’t involve being in front of a computer much at all and you missed it?
What if you’re amazing at your job but you aren’t particularly good at writing?
What if you’ve recently broken both of your arms and are on leave or are doing something else constructive at work aside from computer work?
What if you did a lot at work but it’s really niche and complicated and requires nuance and context to understand, so explaining in 5 bullet points will sound like gibberish?
Jobs tend to be pretty niche. Ask a random federal worker exactly what their day to day job is it’s probably not “chop carrots and bread chicken filets” it’s probably more like “I work for the VA doing project management on the computer system for processing claims. Part of it is in legacy MUMPs and it needs to stay that way as we don’t have the budget or staff to re-write it, but it does need to continue working so that claims are processed for our nations vets. There was a bug with leap years that resulting in the wrong date on some forms. That’s one of 45 things I’ve worked on this year.”
So it requires empathy on the side of the (guy holding knife) that is reading these emails (lol). And it requires empathy on the side of the threatened employee writing these emails. They need to take a wild guess at who is doing that reading and evaluating the emails and write toward them, which will be mistargeted at best.
Again all this isn’t entirely cut and dry. I do think it’s a reasonable ask for employees to be accountable and productive. I also think it’s reasonable to question the methods for determining this.
Perhaps the most time I personally spend on email is staring at lingering emails. I bet I average about 5 of them at any given time. Emails that are just sitting there and I know they need some kind of action or response, I just can’t get it done for whatever reason. Maybe I don’t know what to say yet. Maybe I just can’t spend the time right now on what it needs.
It’s not all bad. Maybe letting it sit there and having my brain re-visit it periodically is what it needs for the right answer to be come to. But then there comes a point where I just can’t look at it anymore. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t anymore. Maybe I start to resent it or something. There definitely is a breaking point though, where I literally think “Done. This needs to be gone.”
At that point, I either force myself to deal with it or move what needs to be done somewhere else, like a TODO list. In rare cases I just delete it.
This of course makes me wonder if I should constantly be clearing out the inbox before I start to resent emails, inbox zero style. But I’ve had that thought many times and have never moved on it. Again, like I said, I think forcing my brain to revisit the email many times over and over is what it takes to deal with it.
If it’s sincere, heck yes. Directly reaching out to someone to tell them something or ask them something without it being overly self-serving is wonderful. It’s human. It’s fun. Email is just one way to do it, but it’s a good one because it’s fast, free, and you do it from your comfiest chair.
People screw up email. BCC is confusing. People can feel overwhelmed by email. Email isn’t as evolved and friendly as some more modern forms of digital communication.
I’m slightly surprised Terence Eden is opposed to email in general (for the reasons above, to name a few). I’ve read his blog a long time and seems to generally favor long-standing reliable tech. But hey, it’s not like I don’t see the warts.
Perhaps we’re on the cusp of obliterating email? Will the youth of today see sending an email as ridiculously old-fashioned as a paper telegram or a landline?
There are, I’ll admit, some advantages to email. The most prominent being that the receiver can permanently store a copy. Notwithstanding inept attempts to recall an email (which often highlights its sensitivity) an email delivered is an email stored. That is undoubtedly useful for the recipient.
But it is hard to escape the conclusion that email is an analogue process in a digital world.
Replace it with what? is my main pushback every time this comes up. How does my cable internet company get in touch with me? What do I tell someone I met at a conference how to get in touch with me? How can I provide a general generic way to communicate with me? What can be the root-level authentication method for other services for me?
I don’t want to give people my phone number, it’s too personal, too immediate, too abrupt. I don’t want to tell them to join a Discord group that I happen to also be in, that’s signing them up for a world of communication they may have no desire to have. I’m not giving them my address to send a letter, too dangerous, too slow. We need a very generic, very global, very interoperable communication system and we literally have it.
It’s not that hard and it’s not that bad. I think people can come to actually like it.
