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.
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.
Election Day was Tuesday, and the results are still rolling in. We know who the President will be, and we know who will control the Senate. The House is still up for grabs, and two toss-up Senate seats are not yet called, as well as many other local races around the country.
And yet, 48 hours later, I’m seeing a lot of pieces offering explanations as to what happened and why.
So what happened?
The truth is, we don’t really know yet. Most of the data — not just votes, but the behind-the-scenes data that can inform why people voted the way they did — isn’t in. We might not know for a while why the results were what they were.
I understand the desire to rush to provide answers. It’s frustrating to have to wait to understand something that just happened.
But what often happens is that the wrong lessons pop-up in the few days after the election, and those stick around even when they’re later proven inaccurate. I’d rather wait — the data, however long it takes, will help us understand what’s really going on (and what might happen next).
This is one of those cases where the only right answer — in the short-term, at least — might be to say, “I don’t know yet.”
Twenty years ago or so, my family took a vacation to Costa Rica. We rented a car to drive to this park that we were going to visit.
We didn’t have iPhones or Google Maps or GPS. We’d never been to Costa Rica before.
What we did have, from the travel agent who helped us book the trip, was a printed-out set of instructions to get to the hotel. We were mostly traveling on two-lane roads to the park — not the kind of roads that have big signs pointing you where to go. So instead of the instructions you’d expect — “Travel 10 miles down Highway 1, take a left at Highway 17, continue on for 12 miles…” — what we got was a bit more abstract.
I remember the very first instruction vividly: We were told to drive about 15 minutes down the road and take a left at the big tree.
I was in the front seat, and my dad was driving. So as we drove, we kept an eye on the clock. 15 minutes seemed a bit unclear — did we think Costa Ricans drove faster than the speed limit or at a more average speed? (Were there speed limits?) And how big was this big tree? We drove down the road looking at each tree we spotted. Was this tree big enough? What about that one?
And eventually, some 20 or 25 minutes later, we came to a fork in the road. And there, dead ahead, was a very big tree.
We took the left.
I don’t remember how long it took to get to our destination. But I do remember being amazed that we got there at all, especially considering the directions we had. They weren’t what I was used to, but they were enough to get us there.
Point is: There are a lot of ways to get to where you want to go.
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That photo of green and red trees along the blue Costa Rican coastline was taken by Max Bender for Unsplash.
I was driving down with my son to pick up my wife at the airport. It’s an easy drive — 35 minutes, especially on a low-traffic day like a Sunday. There was no one on the road when we left home. We left two hours early so I could run a few errands beforehand. I was already thinking about activities to fill all the extra time we might have.
The drive was going fine — until it wasn’t. About two miles before the highway exited the canyon out into Salt Lake City, we hit a standstill. What we didn’t know was that an 18-wheeler had crashed, and the road was completely closed. It would take officials nearly eight hours to re-open the road.
I almost always check Google Maps before we leave, just to make sure there’s no traffic to be aware of. Had I done that today, it would’ve re-routed me to an alternate road. That trip to Salt Lake would’ve taken an extra 15 minutes.
I didn’t, though.
Instead, we got stuck in traffic for over an hour. Luckily, after a whole lot of waiting, police were able to route smaller vehicles like mine over a bridge and to an alternate route. We did make it to the airport for pick-up — it just took two hours for what should’ve been a 35-minute trip. Even more luckily: My son napped through most of the traffic.
Still, it was a reminder: No matter matter how many times you’ve done something before, you still should go through your routine. A five-second check of Google Maps would’ve saved me 90 minutes.
Next time, even if it’s the 1,000th time I’ve done something, I’ll still make sure to check.
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That’s the photo I took while stopped in the canyon on I-80 today. We saw a out of red lights for a very long time. I’m grateful we didn’t have to sit there for 8 hours — I’m not sure what we would’ve done!
Sometimes, when I’m on a road trip with the family, Google Maps will say that we’ve got two choices: We can stay on the highway and get to our destination in, say, 20 minutes, but things will be super slow due to an accident ahead; or we can get off the highway, driving at 25 or 35 miles per hour on a local road, and also get there in 20 minutes. The ETA doesn’t change — but with the local road, at least we’re not at a standstill.
When given that choice, my wife always chooses the local road. She always wants to be moving.
I was thinking about that recently while talking with a client. They were a little bit frustrated about the pace of progress with their work. They have a few big projects in the queue, but they need help from some colleagues to get those projects to the finish line, and that means a few more weeks (or months!) of work. They lamented the fact that they weren’t moving faster.
And I reminded them: There’s still stuff in their control that they can tackle sooner rather than later. Yes, those tasks might be a bit smaller, but getting them done would represent forward progress.
A baby step is still a step in the right direction.
Everyone wants to move fast, but sometimes, that’s not an option. So if you have the chance to take a step forward, no matter how big, take it.
