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 is so much we need to accomplish. It can feel overwhelming at times to look at the to-do list and see what still needs to be done. The tasks ahead can feel endless.
But the work doesn’t happen all once. Change happens incrementally. You point yourself in the right direction and slowly start moving there, step by step. It’s only through persistence and time that you’re able to move things forward.
The most important thing is to keep making progress. You won’t always go as fast as you want, and you won’t always get where you’re going as quickly as you want. Even when you reach that destination, you may find that things have shifted — there may be new goals and new milestones ahead. Good.
Keep pushing forward.
Keep trying to make things a little better every single day.
I turn 33 today. A year ago, I was just thinking about leaving The New Yorker. I didn’t know that in the year ahead, I’d get to work with clients across the country and across the world. I didn’t know how much this business would grow. (I’m not sure I even realized that I was building a business!) I didn’t know that I’d have the chance to give talks to teams on four continents. I didn’t realize how familiar I’d get with Zoom. I didn’t know I’d get to spend so much with Sally in such wonderful places: Rio, Salt Lake, Surf City. I didn’t know how much I would learn.
I don’t know what 33 will bring. This year’s been unexpected, eye-opening, and full of opportunity. I hope I get to do it all again, and more, in the year ahead.
Something I’ve noticed in my conversations this month: Lots of organizations are trying to craft a long-term plan.
It’s how we’re used to thinking about the future. You’ll sit down with your team and say: Here’s what we’re going to achieve this quarter. Here are our goals for the year ahead.
But no one knows what will happen next. We’re all making this up as we go along — so trying to craft long-term plans is a little foolish. You’re making a plan for a future that may not exist.
It’s hard to do, but if you can, focus more on the immediate future. For instance, I’ve been telling teams with newsletters: Right now, your daily email is focused on the crisis in your community — deaths, illnesses, the situation at hospitals. But next week, it might need to shift, as the crisis goes from a medical one to an economic one. In a few months, if the virus comes back in your community, you might need to pivot again. My best advice: Be willing to adjust the products on a week-to-week basis to make sure you’re serving your readers as best you can at that moment.
It’s hard for us to shift to a short-term mindset. It’s not our default position. But the organizations that think about today, tomorrow, and this week are the ones that will move nimbly and build things that truly help their audience when it’s needed most — now.
In the past 24 hours, I stumbled upon two very similar quotes from two very different people.
The first: I was reading a New York Times essay by Christoph Niemann about a trip to Eastern Europe, and he quoted former Estonian President Lennart Meri, who in 1992, just a year after his country was granted independence from Russia, famously said: “Our situation is shit, but this is the fertilizer for our future.”
The second: J.B. Smoove of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” went on a podcast recently to talk about his comedy career, and he said, “I like to plant seeds. I’m a seed planter. Whether that tree grows a week, a month, a year, five years, ten years from now, at some point, it’s going to grow. It’s just a matter of how fast it’s gonna grow.”
None of us really knows what things will look like a few weeks or a months down the road. We don’t know if we’re headed for a recession, a depression, a global change in the way we do business — or if this all just a blip.
But what I do know is that this is a moment for us to plant seeds. In the next few weeks, I’m going to launch a few small projects — some on my own, some with partners in the news space — to try to be helpful. I’m not focused on driving revenue with these projects. The goal is just to help, in the way I can be helpful, at a time of need.
Long term, my hope is that the help I give and the relationships I build now will lead to interesting things down the road — whenever and whatever that might be.
As the former President of Estonia and a guy on HBO both wisely noted: Now’s the moment to plant the seeds for whatever’s next.
When I interviewed a candidate at BuzzFeed for a role on the newsletter team, I always asked the same first question: Do you subscribe to any of our newsletters?
These were candidates who’d applied specifically for a job on the newsletter team. They’d submitted resumes and cover letters for the role. We’d read through them, picked the candidates we’d liked, and set up a quick phone screener — 20 minutes on the phone to ask a few questions. Each candidate had a few days to prepare for that interview.
And yet: Probably forty percent of the candidates I interviewed immediately said “no” to my simple question: Do you subscribe to any of our newsletters?
I was always astonished by that. How could so many people know absolutely nothing about the types of work we’d done? Signing up for a newsletter was remarkably easy, and free. And yet two out of every five candidates failed to do even that.
In all the interviews I did, I can’t recall a single candidate who answered “no” and got a second interview.
I tell that story now because I’m reading “In the Land of Men,” a memoir by Adrienne Miller about her time working at GQ and Esquire. In it, she tells the story of her first day of work, walking through the office with GQ editor David Granger:
“As Granger and I spoke, it became apparent that I did have one thing going for me: I was able to talk about past issues of GQ. Later, he said that I got the job because I was the one person he’d interviewed who’d actually even bothered to open the magazine.”
“ ‘Never underestimate how unprepared most people are,’ he would later observe, correctly.”
The bar to clear in a first interview is pretty low: Show up on time, have a few questions ready to ask, and make sure you’re knowledgeable about the place you’re interviewing at. That minimum effort won’t get you the job — but it might be enough to get you to the second round of interviews.
A friend is starting a brand new job on Monday, after more than a decade in his previous role. We were chatting the other day, and I was asking him: What’s it going to be like starting a new job like this? How are you going to approach it?
His reply was incredibly smart:
I’ve got a lot of big ideas for the job, he told me. But my job isn’t to tear everything down and start fresh. I want to figure out how to take what they’re already doing and make it better. So the first couple of weeks, my job is simple: I need to ask a lot of questions, listen to the team around me, and then try to figure out how to get others to buy into the vision that I have for the job.
I love everything about that reply:
1.) He’s putting listening first.
2.) He’s trying to build a team with a shared vision.
3.) He’s thinking about incremental changes as a way to build respect and drive the organization in the right direction.
Big changes don’t happen overnight — direction is more important than speed. But if you listen, if you get others to buy in, and if you work to make positive changes — even small ones — you can make a difference in the long run.
I’m just a few months into working remotely as I grow Inbox Collective. There’s a lot I like about it. For one: I’m writing this from Utah, where I’ve been working for the past 10 days. It’s been fun getting to work in a new place (and then getting the chance to ski when I can).
But something I’ve learned about remote work: Your office is wherever you are. If you’re on a plane and there’s decent WiFi, that can be your office. If you’re on a chairlift checking your email, that’s your office. If it’s midnight, and you’re at home, on the couch, laptop open, well, that’s your office.
When you’re remote, it’s easy for the work to follow you around all day. I wake up, walk over to my desk, and often start my day by 7 a.m. But if I’m not careful, it can be 10 p.m., and I’m still there, working hard. And I’ve learned quickly that that’s not a recipe for success. If I try to work long hours every day, including weekends, I’l burn out.
So I’m trying a few things this year that are a little different to make sure I keep that balance between work and play. Here’s one: I’m pushing myself to make 90 minutes every day, in the middle of the day, for a pause. I can go to the gym, take a walk, step out for lunch, or get coffee with a friend — but I have step away from the desk for a little bit.
Here’s another: I’m going to set a time to shut down work at the end of the day. (It’ll be around 7:30-8 p.m.) I’m thinking of this as the “pencils down!” request your teacher probably gave you in high school at the end of a test. There’s always going to be more work, and I can’t just work all day. I’ve got a lot on my plate — consulting work through Inbox Collective, work on Not a Newsletter, and speaking gigs. I know I have to find time to pause.
We’ll see how this goes in 2020. I’m hoping that creating this time for breaks gives me the time to focus on the other things happening in my life — and hopefully, gives me the energy to come back and tackle bigger work projects in the long run, too.
I love this post from Daniel Zarick, a former product manager at Twilio, about the strategy at his old company. The focus was always on starting quickly and figuring things out as you go. Or as they put it: “Draw the owl.”
Start figuring it out. Put some of the pieces together. When you truly get stuck, ask for pointed advice. Stuff like “What sort of salary should I be asking for at my experience for this type of job?” and “Do you think X marketing strategy is good for this type of product?”
Nobody else can lay out all the steps for you, because nobody else has been you or is in your situation.
You’ve heard the expression, “Less is more.” I don’t believe that to be true.
I think less is enough.
I believe that, yes, you should sketch out those big plans. You should think about the best-case scenario. You should lay out the roadmap — the work you want to do in six months, in twelve months, and beyond.
But you should also be willing to start soon. Remember: Direction is more important than speed. The goals you want to achieve are ambitious, and they’re going to take time. You’re not going to be able to move as fast as you want to go.
But you can start. It won’t be everything you want, but take the first step anyway. Start moving in the right direction.
Less isn’t everything you want — but it’s enough to start.
When you become a boss or a manager, you have to learn how to deal with meeting creep — that phenomenon when meetings take over your calendar, with barely enough time to take a breath between them. You’ve got check-ins and calls and workshops and presentations. Every hour between 9 and 5 is booked.
And the question becomes: When do you actually do the work?
There are a few strategies I’ve tried over the years that have helped lessen the burden of meetings on my calendar:
1) Make your meetings better — Make sure everyone has an agenda for the meeting up front. When the meeting starts, recap the topics that need to be discussed, and see if anyone has anything else they need to discuss. Close the meeting with clear next steps. And by all means, try to finish on time!
2) Turn some meetings into drop-bys or emails — There are a number of meetings that could be solved by taking 5-10 minutes to drop by a coworker’s desk to talk things out. And there are far too many meetings that could have been a quick question solved over email. Know when you need to call a meeting (to build consensus, to decide on next steps as a team, to check in with a team member, etc.) and when you can save time.
3) Make time on your calendar for actual work — That might mean blocking out 90 minutes a few times a week on your calendar to sit down and do real work. It’s tough to get anything done when you’re only getting five minutes between meetings to try to take on a project. If your day’s overrun with meetings, block some time off so that others can’t take over your entire calendar.
Another idea: Save certain types of meetings — 1-on-1s, for instance — for certain days of the week. So many employees take days off on Mondays and Fridays throughout the year — meaning that any Monday/Friday check-ins end up getting frequently rescheduled — that maybe you want to move all of your 1-on-1s for mid-week, and save Monday and Friday for full work days.
