I’m Dan Oshinsky, and I run Inbox Collective, an email consultancy. I'm here to share what I've learned about doing great work and building amazing teams.
A fun thing that’s happened twice in the last week:
I’ve been on a call and suggested a small tweak that a client make to their website — and right there, on the call, they go into their site and make the tweak.
No adding stuff to the roadmap, no meetings to discuss the changes. They heard the idea, liked it, implemented it, and then asked, “What’s next?”
When you’ve got the right idea, and you’ve got the time to make it work, you don’t need to wait. Just take care of it now.
I set a big goal for 2025 — something I’ve never set in the six years I’ve run my business.
My big goal isn’t around revenue.
It isn’t about growth.
It isn’t about launching new products.
My goal? I want to be able to ski or play golf 50 times in 2025.
To me, success isn’t about building the biggest, most profitable business. It’s about making something that brings in the revenue I need, has the impact I want, and gives me the time to do the things I love.
If I can run a business that does all three, then I must be doing something right.
Here’s to a lot more days on the mountain in 2025 — and on the links this summer.
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That’s me on the mountain at Deer Valley a few weeks ago. If you see a tall guy in a loud jacket skiing around Park City, it might be me!
I’ve found that it’s easier to do just about anything if you’ve got a little momentum behind you. It’s easier to get yourself to work out if you’ve done it the day before. It’s easier to make time to write if you’ve written the day before. I could go on, but you get the idea.
But it’s hard to build that repetition when you’ve got a child to take care of. I’m fascinated by the stories from people who say, for instance, that they wake up super early to squeeze in a workout before their kids get up. I love that idea, and I’m inspired by their work ethic — but I’ve found that my son has a funny habit:
If I try to get up early, he’ll somehow get up earlier.
I know that if I try to create new routines in the new year, they’ll get easily interrupted. So as I think about the year ahead, one thing I’m interested in is the idea of building good habits without building a corresponding routine. For instance: I want to do more writing, and I think I can make a few hours every week to write. But instead of trying to build a routine around it — i.e. every morning, after breakfast, I promise to spend an hour writing before checking my email and getting to other work tasks — my goal is to make space for the habit when I can. Maybe that means I have 15 minutes to write one day, and an hour the next, and no time the day after. That’s OK! The bigger thing is the intention — that I want to make writing a priority.
I don’t believe, at least at this moment in my life, that I can build a consistent routine around these habits the way that I could five or ten years ago. The question is: Can I still build the habit without the routine?
We’ll see how things go in the new year.
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That’s a lovely image, taken by Yusuf Evli for Unsplash, of a black Mercedes typewriter set against a brown desk, with a black lamp shining a light over it. It seems like a lovely place to write. (Mine is a windowless room in our basemen. Not quite as picturesque, but it gets the job done!)
Well, last week was one of those weeks where everything seemed to go wrong. My wife got strep. My son got hand, foot, and mouth disease and had to be held out of daycare. The heat broke in our house.
And the day we were set to send our son back to daycare, there was a pinkeye outbreak at his school.
It was just one of those weeks.
Sometime around Wednesday, I decided that I wasn’t going to get anything big done. I had some sizable projects that I was hoping to tackle — and it was very clear those weren’t going to happen. My only goal was to make it to the end of the week.
So I declared Parenting Bankruptcy. I cleared everything off my to-do list, and made it my only goal to get to Friday.
The hard part about parenting — at least for me, a dad with a toddler — is time management. (I’m betting that I will have a very different take on this in a decade!) When things are good, there’s a good balance between parenting and work. But when a few things go wrong, the balance gets entirely out of whack.
I’ve had tough weeks before, though I can’t recall one where I kicked all of my to-dos to the next week. This was my first time declaring Parenting Bankruptcy.
I’m sure I’ll do it again one day. This whole “being a dad” thing isn’t always easy; there will be more days and weeks like this.
But I also have to remind myself: There will be even days and weeks where things are great, where my son is an absolute joy, and where I’m so grateful that I’m a dad.
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That’s a photo of my son reading at this little table in our living room, in a far quieter and less hectic moment than the one we went through last week.
One little thing that’s worked for me when it comes to New Year’s Resolutions: Starting just a little bit early.
I used to do the thing that everyone does: I picked a resolution or two at the end of the year, started in January, and completely quit on it by the end of the month.
But what I discovered works a little better for me is if I start now — not in January.
Let’s say the resolution is to work out more in the new year. (In this case, this is something I genuinely want to do next year!) I know that if I try to go from 0 to 60 in January, it probably won’t stick. I need a little time to warm up to the new habit.
So instead, I’ll start now — in December. I’ll put a few workout classes on my calendar. I’ll make sure to make time during the month to use that stationary bike. And by January, I’ll already have started to slowly build that habit.
Once you’ve gotten the ball rolling, it’s so much easier to keep it moving when January comes around.
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That is 100% not me on an exercise bike, but it is a lovely black-and-white photo of someone biking from Josh Nuttall for Unsplash.
I’m 37 years old, and I know that it’s okay to say goodbye to something you love.
We made a big move this spring, moving from New York to Park City, Utah. Those last few months in New York were bittersweet — we were marking an end to a wonderful era in our life. I’d lived in New York for a dozen years, and Sally for even longer. When we met, we were in our 20s. We grew into adulthood in the city, got married, made amazing friendships, started new careers, traveled. And then we had Ben, and we swapped out weeknight concerts and dinners for naptimes and singalongs. So much in our life changed when Ben arrived, but for the better, and New York was still a constant in our lives.
We recognized, sometime over the winter, that it was time for us to move. Sally was working most weekends, and I was often solo with Ben — and that’s on top of running my business and trying to have a life outside of parenting and work. I remember a Saturday when I had to hire a babysitter for a few hours so I could photocopy some tax forms. (Nothing like a weekend afternoon at FedExOffice!) We were making it work, but it wasn’t really working for us.
So we said our goodbyes and headed west to be closer to family. In a way, leaving New York gave us permission to move fully into this new era as parents. We’re filling our weeks with new things, new memories. We’re taking Ben on hikes and to swim classes at the local pool. We’re going on weekend adventures to new places. We’re discovering new favorite restaurants. We’re getting snow tires for the car and getting skis waxed for ski season. We’re making new friends, and we’re watching Ben grow up in real time. It feels like he’s transformed into a real person ever since we arrived in Utah — he’s walking and talking and is so fun to spend time with. It’s exciting to be in this moment and live in a place where everything is new.
Do I miss New York? Absolutely. I miss the people and the energy and the bagels (especially the bagels). But there are nights when Sally and I will sit on our back patio, watching the sun go down behind the mountains while we eat dinner and unwind from the day.
It feels right. It feels like we’re at the start of something exciting.
It feels like home.
Over the past year, there are certain things I’ve come to believe hold true. I know that my beliefs will continue to change. I know that I will change.
But here, at 37, is what I believe:
“It goes so fast” is the most annoying parenting advice. It’s also annoyingly correct.
There are days when I can be on a literal stage, sharing my expertise with hundreds of people, and just a few hours later, I’m negotiating with a tiny human who does not care about my expertise and does not want to listen to me as I beg him to stop throwing spaghetti across the room. Being a parent is humbling.
Also humbling: Asking another parent in the daycare drop-off line what they do for work and being told, “I’m an Olympian.”
Parenting a toddler means it will become entirely normal that, several times a day, you’ll stick your entire nose into another human’s butt and tell your spouse, “No, I don’t think he pooped.”
Whoever said “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” was never a working parent whose daycare only operated from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and who had to cram eight hours of work into a six-hour window. I don’t know if parenting is hard, but the time-management part of it certainly is.
I need to say this, too: I wouldn’t trade anything for the time I get with my son.
When they’re babysitting, let the grandparents do their thing. Don’t supervise or intervene. And don’t ask later what they did while you were gone. (You won’t approve of it anyway.) If your child is alive and happy when you pick them up, the grandparents did their job.
Heck, most days, I don’t even need the “happy” part. If my son still has the same number of fingers and teeth as when I dropped him off, that’s good enough for me.
A sign that my business is growing the way I want is that I’m saying “no” more than I’m saying “yes.”
A good day is a day where I spend more time doing than worrying.
You don’t always have all the answers, but keep an eye out for the people willing to work hard to find them. Those are the people you should be working with.
I’m sure there will be a day when it becomes totally normal to see a moose walking down my street, but today is not that day.
No matter what you’ve been told, there is never a good reason to order food at the Margaritaville in Times Square.
There are plenty of days when things feel hectic and hurried. But I know that in a decade or more, I’ll look back on these days and think: Things were so easy then!
I try to remind myself to say thank you more often. I’ll say it for the little things: When Ben has a good night of sleep, when Sally does something small and kind to help, when a friend checks in to see how things are going. It always feels good to feel grateful.
And finally: I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, or next year, or four years from now. But I’m hopeful about the future, about the idea that we can make something better than we have today. I remind myself to aim not for perfection, but progress. Maybe it’s foolish, and maybe it’s naïve, but I still want to make things a little better — for Sally, for Ben, for all of us.
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Moving to the mountains meant that our holiday card was taken in a literal field in front of a literal mountain. The very talented photographer Lexi Rae took that photo.
During the pandemic, when we were living on the coast in North Carolina, I started going to the beach every single day. The weather wasn’t always great, but every day that it was safe to go in the ocean, even when the water was cold, I went in. Sometimes, it was just for a minute or two. But I had this realization that there might not be another time in my life that I lived minutes from the beach, and I didn’t want to miss a single day. I didn’t want to let that moment pass me by.
We’ve since gone from the beach to the mountains. There is snow in my driveway right now, and the ski slopes will open this weekend. So here’s my pledge:
I don’t know if Park City is a place where we’ll spend two years or 20. But I live five minutes from the base of the mountain, and I know that’s probably not going to be something I can say forever. I intend to make the most of it.
And any time I’m making a choice that takes me away from getting outside and doing something in the mountains — particularly on those half-day Fridays or a weekend — I need to remind myself: Make this most of this, Dan. Who knows how long it lasts.
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That photo of the gondola passing over snowy mountains and trees — I’m pretty sure it’s the Red Pine Gondola, over at the Canyons — comes via Mollie Moran and Unsplash.
I tried a little experiment in my newsletter today. At the top of the email, I wrote:
I’ve found LinkedIn to be a useful channel for meeting new folks and discovering interesting newsletter content, and I’d love if you connected with me there. But if you do, will you also attach a note to your connection request? I accept pretty much every request as long as they add a note…
I got about 20 requests on LinkedIn today. Of them, seven had a note attached.
I find that to be amazing. I don’t personally know most of the people making these requests — I hadn’t met one in person, to my knowledge, and in many cases, I hadn’t even received a previous email from them! Why would I connect with someone who I don’t even casually know?
I think part of this is how LinkedIn is set up. It’s really easy to send a connection request without adding a note. (In fact, I did that this evening — I clicked the button to connect but it didn’t pop up with the ability to send a message.) I’m also a little bummed — if I knew that these folks were definitely readers, I’d happily connect with them.
I know some people on LinkedIn hate all the notes because they feel obligated to reply to each one. (I usually reply with a “thanks, and thanks for reading!” Takes two seconds to do so.) But the little bit extra goes a long way — at least in my book.
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That’s the basic LinkedIn request form: “How do you know this person?” The screenshot is from Barry Schwartz and is re-used here thanks to a Creative Commons license.
