You don’t need any more emails
But a meaningful perspective on how to navigate the new economy on your own terms could be helpful, amirite?
I consider my morning a win if I can avoid my inbox until lunch. I keep it locked with the Inbox When Ready Chrome extension except for a few hours in the afternoon and early evening. I also deleted the native email and Gmail apps from my iPhone over a year ago. And you’ll never find me chasing Inbox Zero, which is an addictive game, not a meaningful goal, according to Jocelyn K. Glei, author of Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done (Amen, sis!).
If you think about it, my aversion to email makes sense. I earn a living on the quality of my thoughts and my ability to quickly and creatively interpret them into new ideas and perspectives that help professional creators navigate the new economy. So any time spent reacting to an unrelenting stream of discrepant messages is time away from the creative work that delivers value to my life and the people I’ve chosen to serve.
Email, as I’ve learned the hard way, has a way of sucking up all the oxygen in your day. If you let it, email often morphs into a de facto to-do list, dictating your personal and professional priorities. And before you know it, the day’s escaped you without any sufficient progress to show for it.
In Unsubscribe, Joceyln looks at three reasons email can feel like an insidious force in our daily lives.
First, there’s the “variable reward schedule.” Email is a lot like social media in the sense that you feel compelled to keep checking your inbox because you never know when an important message will arrive. The dopamine hit you receive once a worthwhile email comes along is similar to the response to a like or share on Twitter or Instagram.
Then there’s the twinge (or tsunami!) of guilt you feel if you don’t respond to someone in what they perceive as a timely fashion. After all, someone’s taken the time to write and send the email — the social debt that comes with ignoring it is real.
And lastly, let’s talk about completion bias. Even though sending emails or pursuing inbox zero requires less focus and concentration than, say, recording a podcast episode or editing a podcast episode, it still gives us the illusion that we’re getting shit done. This makes us feel like bad bitches even if it’s the lowest-hanging fruit.
With this context, you’ll probably find it ironic to read the following six words: Email is my preferred marketing channel. Just as rich: This Should Help, the core product in my business, is — wait for it… — a newsletter.
I love email because it’s personal, direct and actionable. If someone gets an email from me, it’s because they’ve invited me into their inbox or one of their friends paid it forward. For all of its drawbacks (loss of focus, diminished performance, increased stress), email is still our primary means of digital communication — despite social media and mobile messaging getting all the shine.
You don’t need any more emails though.
But if you’re interested in designing an independent lifestyle from the value your work creates, then what’s probably missing is a meaningful perspective on the people, things and ideas that impact and influence how you make, brand, market and sell that work.
That’s why I created This Should Help. It’s why the unsung heroes of the creative class — women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community — are subscribing to it. And it’s the reason you will too (unless you need a special offer like 20-percent-off forever to inspire you?).
Four days a week, you’ll get This Should Help’s Daily Reader, which focuses your attention on the stories that enable you to have smart conversations and make empowered decisions. I report and write each Daily Reader myself and filter the topics through my editorial background, my experiences as a Black gay man from a liberal middle-class upbringing in a conservative southern state now living in New York City and my obsession with how creativity intersects business, technology, and pop culture.
This Should Help will require you to participate in dismantling oppressive systems like patriarchy, white supremacy and queerphobia that disempower us from working and living on our own terms. It’ll ask you to scrutinize the surveillance capitalists that profit from hijacking your attention and monetizing your behavioral data. It’ll insist that you reject the social convention that all creative work should be free so you can get paid an honorable income for the brilliance you bring to the world. And it’ll inspire you to build a sustainable creative business that prioritizes ownership over scale.
Because you’re the one you’ve been waiting for.