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.
There’s a lot that’s frustrating about being human, but here’s one thing that’s annoyed me a lot lately: You’re not always at your best.
There are days you show up to do the work, and things feel a little off. It doesn’t matter what the work is — it could be a project, or a big piece of writing, or a day on the golf course. Some days, you show up and know you’re not quite right, even if things felt amazing the last time you showed up to do this work.
It’s hard to accept that your body feels a little different today, that your mind’s in a different place, that your energy’s different than usual. Maybe you know why, or maybe you don’t. But you know, because you know yourself:
Today will be less than perfect.
I like being at my best. I like how confident I feel when I know that I’m doing my best work.
But there’s something to be said for getting through those days when you’re at 70%, when it’s not all there. You make the most of what you can with what you have that day. You find a way.
Accept less-than-perfect for today. Better days will come.
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Naturally, that post was inspired by a morning on the golf course. The day before, I hit the ball so well and felt confident over every shot. The next day, it looked like I’d never hit a golf ball before. It happens.
Newsrooms sometimes hire me to produce an audit of their email strategy. They’ll give me logins to their email system and their analytics, and I’ll interview key staffers to understand what they’re doing and where there are opportunities to improve. Then I’ll turn my findings into a slide deck.
When I first produced these audits, the final deck was about 50 slides long. But as I did more of these, and started to identify other areas to cover during an audit, the decks started getting longer. 50 slides became 100, and then kept growing from there. My most recent audit checked in at 206 slides.
As a partner for these newsrooms, my job is always to overdeliver. I want to make sure I give them everything they’re looking to learn — and then some.
But last year, I noticed that when I’d present these longer decks, I wasn’t getting much feedback from the newsrooms. They weren’t asking questions about specific slides or tactics, which seemed odd, since they’d been so curious earlier in the process. What had changed? After I followed up with a few clients, I got my answer: I was overwhelming them with information.
So that became my new challenge: How could I overdeliver without overwhelming?
A few changes really helped. Up front, I started setting clearer expectations for what a client could expect from the audit. I told my teams: This is going to be a lot, and I don’t expect you to do every single thing in here. That freed up the teams to pick and choose what tasks to execute on based on my findings.
I also changed the structure of my presentations. Instead of one big audit reveal at the end, I started coming to my newsrooms with initial findings — a shorter presentation, about 45 minutes long, to talk through the most important topics, and to get feedback about things they wanted to see more of in the audit. That gave them a chance to start thinking through the big themes of the audit before the final deck was presented.
I changed the structure of the deck itself, adding a section at the start with a list of suggested tasks to prioritize. That helped teams understand which tasks were ones to work on right away, and which were ideas to put on the back burner.
I told newsrooms not to invite their entire team to the final audit presentation. Did the sales team really need to sit through 90 minutes of discussion about email deliverability or growth? No, not really. Instead, I started giving the audit presentation to a core group of stakeholders, and then set up smaller presentations to specific teams (sales, product, editorial) so they could focus on the findings most important to them.
And lastly, I started setting up monthly calls to check in with teams after the audit, to talk through their prioritization list, and to help remove any roadblocks in their way.
I’m still searching for other ways to overdeliver without overwhelming. The audit process isn’t perfect, and there are going to be ways to continue to make it even better.
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At top is a slide from an audit presentation to an Inbox Collective client.
If you launch lots of new products or features, several aren’t going to work. You’ll be excited about a big new newsletter launch, and you put it out into the world, and the audience just doesn’t like it. It happens!
The truth is: If you’re not failing, it means you’re probably not trying enough new tests.
When you fail, move on quickly. Don’t double down on your mistakes. Keep testing, keep trying. The more you try, the better the chance that you’ll eventually stumble into something that truly works.
I have a few dozen Inbox Collective clients that I’m working with right now. Some I talk to daily or weekly. Some I talk to once a month or once a quarter. And there are days when I’ll have five or six calls, often stacked back-to-back-to-back. When clients hop on that call, they expect me to be able to pick up exactly where we left off. They pay me too much to be disorganized or unprepared.
When I’m on my call, I’ve got a notebook where I jot down notes and ideas. I find that I stay more focused if I can write things down on paper instead of trying to type up notes as we go.
And at the end of the day, I go through my notebook and type up the notes in a Google Doc designated for every client. If they’re not a client, I create a new Doc for them — often, I’ll find that a casual conversation might lead to something a few months down the road, and having those notes is a hugely valuable tool. I’ll document everything — the date, who was on the call, updates from the team, ideas we discussed, and next steps.
What it means is that over time, I’ve fully documented everything I’ve talked about and done with that client. Some teams have been with me since 2019, and I can’t always remember what we might have tried three years ago. In those cases, it’s great to be able to open up their Google Doc and search for a phrase to figure out if we might have tackled a particular issue already.
If you’re holding regular meetings with a variety of stakeholders, you might want to try the running notes system, too. Set up a doc for every team or individual you meet with, and document your notes from the day. That way, when you need to find notes from a conversation, you’re not searching in your desk for that one notepad that might have your notes, or searching through your inbox hoping to find an email that mentions the topic. You’ll have a document of exactly what you discussed, and when.
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That’s my notebook and a running notes Google Doc, both for WBUR, a client that’s worked with me for nearly three years. At this point, my Doc for them is 44 pages and more than 9,000 words long.
I’m a pretty good skier on a sunny day. When the light is good on the mountain and I can clearly see the next few turns, I ski with a lot of confidence.
But it’s another thing to ski on a wintry day, when the clouds and the mountain seem to merge into one. When the light is flat, seeing the path ahead gets tricky. On those days, I find myself struggling to maintain control — it feels a little like skiing through fog. A bad turn or two and I lose confidence quickly.
So on those days, I try to adopt a mantra: Trust your turns. I’ve been skiing since I was a kid, and I can get down just about anything. (It won’t always be pretty! But I’ll get down.) And when I tell myself, “Trust your turns,” I’m saying: You know the motion — trust your ability to string turns together, even in low light. Ski just like you would on a blue-sky day.
We all want to be able to clearly see the path ahead. But we can’t always see the next turn — or whatever’s around the next corner. And in times of uncertainty, we can’t just stop and wait for things to clear up. Trust the work you’ve already put in, and the processes you have in place.
Trust your turns, and keep going.
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That’s a photo I took on a sunny day at Breckenridge in 2021.
Understanding that you’ll never have all the answers. The only way forward is to have an open mind and keep asking questions.
Whatever you’re working on, remember this: Curious people make the best teammates. Find people who are always curious, and you’ll build a team that builds a great strategy in the long run.
A year ago, I realized that clients were asking me, over and over again, for examples of certain things:
Dan, do you have any examples of great pop-ups to convert readers from our website to our newsletter?
Have you seen any good examples of promotions on Instagram?
Do you have any examples you can share of amazing welcome emails?
So I started compiling examples into a big Google Drive file, and shared it with clients. But then I made another choice: I added a weekly note to my calendar to keep adding to the Drive. I created a folder on my laptop where I could store examples that I’d noticed over the course of the week, and then, every Friday, I’d upload them to Drive.
Sometimes I only have an example or two to upload on Friday, and sometimes, I’ll have dozens. But over the course of a year, I’ve uploaded hundreds of examples that I can refer clients to. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this one project has changed the way I work with clients. It’s one thing for me to be tell them about the concept, but it’s another to be able to show them a handful of great examples from their peers.
And had I decided to, say, update the file every month or every quarter, I’m not sure I would’ve stuck with it. (It took a lot of work to upload that first, giant batch of examples!) Instead, by focusing on a small, weekly habit, it feels so much more manageable — and the long-term result has been so much more than I ever could’ve expected.
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That’s a screenshot of the pop-ups folder. There are now more than 30 examples of pop-ups I love that I can share with clients.
But the truth is: I’m still not very good at saying “no.”
It’s hard to turn down work — especially when it involves projects I’m excited about. It’s hard to turn down revenue for the business. It’s hard to say “no” to people I’d love to work with.
I know that saying “no” is often the right move for me. But it’s still hard to do.
Right now, I’m reading “Eat a Peach,” the memoir from chef David Chang, and he talks often about the pressure of working as a chef — one whose success opened up all sorts of exciting new opportunities for him: Opening new restaurants, writing books, even TV. He writes that at times, he felt like he needed to hit rock bottom before he would be willing to change the way he worked.
“The paradox for the workaholic,” he writes, “is that rock bottom is the top of whatever profession they’re in.”
That line’s stuck with me the past few days. I’m not a celebrity chef, but I’ve been lucky to have had some success — and to have gotten a little publicity — the past few years. I’ve gotten all sorts of interesting new opportunities as my business has grown.
And I’m starting to understand what Chang might have experienced himself. I love to do this work, and if I could say “yes” to every potential client, I would.
But that’s not an option.
So I need to keep getting better at saying “no.” I need to do it for my family, for my friends, for my business, for my industry — and for myself. Saying “no” is what I need to do make sure I’m prepared to say “yes” to the right opportunities going forward.
A former BuzzFeed colleague of mine just left a job there for a new role, and we had lunch the other day. She asked me if she should know anything about working at a new job — a real job, where there isn’t a test kitchen and where staff writers don’t wear JNCO jeans as a fashion experiment.
“They’re going to think you have magic beans,” I told her.
She looked at me funny. (And I don’t blame her.) I went on.
“When you leave BuzzFeed for a new company, they’re going to unusually curious about what you’ve learned at BuzzFeed. They might think you know some sort of deep secret of the internet — that someone on the BuzzFeed team, on your first day, gave you the cheat code to unlock all that internet traffic that BuzzFeed gets every day. And they’ll be a little disappointed when they find out that there isn’t a secret to BuzzFeed at all.”
I paused for a second.
“There wasn’t any big secret to BuzzFeed — just a set of lessons that helped us build a platform that readers loved. Remember those lessons: Test out weird ideas. Be willing to look stupid, and be willing to move on when things don’t work. When you get the chance, hire smart, curious people who listen to one another. Make sure you have the tools you need to test out your ideas. Make sure you know what you’re measuring when you do the work.”
She nodded along.
“Just show up and do the work every day,” I reminded her. “I’ll take your work ethic and the lessons you learned from BuzzFeed over a bag of magic beans any day.”
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That’s a photo of a giant LOL sign that hung at the entrance to the BuzzFeed office on 21st Street in New York.
I’m on vacation this week, out west visiting my family. I’m doing the stuff you do out here: Spending time at the pool, reading, taking afternoon naps, firing up the grill.
But I’m also working, pretty much every weekday morning, for a few hours.
This isn’t supposed to be some sort of treatise on the importance of hustle, some #nodaysoff mission statement. I’m a unique case: I’m in my 30s, I don’t have kids, and I run a one-person business — one I’ve built to serve a lot of small clients (instead of a few big ones). What I’ve done in the past is the traditional vacation: Shut down the laptop, turn on the out-of-office reply, and then return a week or two later to dive back in.
But with Inbox Collective, I’ve discovered that if I shut down everything for a week or two, here’s what happens:
1.) I return to a million unanswered emails (since there’s no one else clients can redirect their questions to).
2.) The week before vacation and the week after vacation are absolutely stacked with meetings, as clients try to squeeze in time before I leave.
The last time I took a week off, I spend the entire week stressed out about how much work I had the next week. I seemed miserable the entire trip.
So I’m making adjustments. On recent trips, I’ve tried to carve out a little time in the morning — about 2-3 hours — to reply to emails and take calls. I’ve blocked off every afternoon for myself, and I’ve turned on my out-of-office reply so people know I’m not going to write back right away. And it’s working: My inbox is manageable, my schedule when I return from vacation is fairly normal, and once the clock hits about 11 a.m., I shut down the laptop and head out do to something fun.
It seems a little odd to still do some work on my time off. But if this is what I need to do to make sure I actually enjoy the time off — to work 10-15 hours a week, even on vacation — then it’s a trade-off I’m willing to make.
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That’s a photo of me, on one of my afternoons off, on the golf course. A beautiful day, but a pretty terrible lie for that particular shot.
