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.
90% of my advice to clients is boils down to three words:
“Don’t overthink this.”
People get into their heads when it comes to tweaking their strategy or tactics. They get caught up thinking that there are a series of three-dimensional chess moves that will fix what’s wrong.
But usually, the fixes are simpler than that: Your positioning is unclear. You’re not targeting the right audience. You’re doing too many things at once.
My job is often to tell teams: You’re overthinking things! Let’s simplify and get back to the core of what you do well.
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That’s not the fanciest desk set up in the world, but it’d work just fine? Why? It’s so darn simple. Thanks to Unsplash for the photo.
I keep thinking about this line from poet Andrea Gibson in their book, “You Better Be Lightning”:
Regret is a time machine to the past Worry is a time machine to the future
I’m as guilty as any of having my head somewhere else. Sometimes that means thinking about mistakes I’ve made or things I could have done better. Sometimes that means spending too much time thinking about all the stuff I have to do in the weeks and months ahead.
Gibson’s lines are a reminder: Wherever your feet are, keep your head there. There’s work to do right here, right now. That’s where your mind needs to be, too.
I launched my consulting business in 2019, and in the years since, I’ve never sent out a cold email request to a potential client. My website mentions my consulting practice, but honestly, it’s a little bit hidden. Yes, I’ve got a newsletter and a welcome series, but I barely promote my consulting work at all. (I’ve had clients tell me they were on my list for months before realizing that they could hire me.)
And yet, I’m fully booked for the next six months.
So what’s the secret?
I just keep writing.
For the first few years, I shared what I was learning in Not a Newsletter, a public Google Doc I published. Later, I moved everything over to WordPress and started publishing every week.
But just through the act of publishing — at this point, hundreds of thousands of words about newsletters — I keep proving to my audience that I know what I’m talking about. (At least a little bit. I’m still learning new stuff about this space every month!)
If you’re in the services business and you’re not sharing what you learn — on your blog, in your newsletter, regularly via channels like LinkedIn — forget about those cold email strategies that promise to bring in new clients.
Just start writing.
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Speaking of longtime writing projects: I’ve been writing here on danoshinsky.com since 2008. That’s a screenshot of my website back in summer 2010 — I think dropping the tagline about my mom was probably a good move!
This interview with Jason Alexander, of “Seinfeld” fame, popped up in my feed the other day, and I think it’s worth watching in full. In it, he says:
I went to Boston University as a theater major, and because William Shatner was my muse, I wanted a dramatic career. I really thought I was going to play some of the great classical roles and be a dramatic actor. Sure, I hadn’t done much comedy. I’d done some musicals, so there was that, but I hadn’t done much comedy. And the summer second semester of my sophomore year, I had a professor named James Spruill at Boston. He was the only black member of the faculty. He was a guy who had come up in the ‘60s with street theater — theater is to change the minds of the masses, affect change. He brought me into his office for my my semester consultation, and he had this great basso kind of James Earl Jones voice, and he sat back, and he just kind of nodded his head and looked at me for a minute. He went, “I know that your heart and soul is Hamlet, and you would be a profound Hamlet. You will never play Hamlet, so you best get good at Falstaff.”
And he basically said, look, look in the mirror. You are 5’6’’. You are 20 to 25 pounds overweight, and you are losing your hair. You have a large performing persona. If you want a a commercially successful career, you’re going to be a comedian, and you’re not embracing it, you’re not looking at it, you’re not doing it.
Had he not said to me, “You ain’t Hamlet, man,” I would have finished that school and gone into the professional world thinking, ”Here’s Jason Alexander and the Iceman cometh. It’s what everybody is waiting for.”
And I would have been wrong.
It’s such a wonderful reminder: We all need someone in our lives who’ll be truly honest with us. Sometimes, we need that person to lift us up. Sometimes, we need them to keep on the right path. But all we need those voices we can trust, and if you find someone who can do that, you owe it to yourself to listen to them. They’ve got something worth hearing, even if it’s not what you want to hear at that moment.
My Missouri Tigers had a huge win this past week in men’s basketball, and I went back to watch the highlight package that the basketball team put together. Mizzou’s coach, Dennis Gates, has a bunch of different sayings he uses. (For instance, his eight core values for success: “Friendship, love, accountability, trust, discipline, unselfishness, enthusiasm, and toughness.”)
But watching the movie, I heard one line I’d never heard before.
Gates: Communication has to be excellent, OK? It has to be excellent. It don’t have to be perfect, it has to be what?
Team: Excellent!
I’ve written a lot — like, somanydifferentthings — about perfection. But I love the idea of reframing the concept. For most of us, the goal shouldn’t be around perfection. The goal should be to put in the work, to enjoy doing the work, and to try to do something great.
Aim for perfection and you’ll usually fall short. Aim for excellence and you have a chance to do excellent work along the way.
A funny thing about being a parent, especially a parent of a young child in daycare, is that your entire schedule can change in a moment.
One phone call from daycare — “Hey, your son has a runny nose and a weird cough, so I think you need to pick him up” — and suddenly, there goes your week. Calls get canceled, work gets postponed. That big project you wanted to do today? It’s definitely not happening today anymore! (And maybe not next week, either.)
All of this has made me weirdly grateful for the days when things go right. There are days when things actually work out, where the work gets done and your child comes home completely healthy. Those are great days, even if this winter, it feels like there are far fewer of them than before.
Still: The mindset shift is important. I used to get mad when the work didn’t get done. Now I know it’s part of being a parent — and it’s my job to adjust how I work, adjust what I work on, and adjust my mindset. I’m a dad and a business owner. This is just how things work now, and that’s part of what I signed up for.
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That’s a photo of my son carrying a reusable bag upstairs. Why? Who knows, but parenting means a lot of unexpected moments — like my son deciding that a bag is far more fun to play with than the toys we got him.
Back in 2021, I got the chance to speak at Email Summit DK, Denmark’s largest email conference. (It’s also one of the biggest email conferences in all of Europe.) I loved the event — the warmth of the attendees, the incredible venue, the little touches.
And this week, I got to go back and stand on that stage again — this time in front of 600 people.
And as I closed my talk, I told the attendees this: It’s not lost on me what a gift it is for all of us to get together, for a day like this. We have so many things competing for our time; it’s so easy to stay glued to our desks. So to see everyone, in one place, sharing and learning and eager to grow — that is an incredible thing, and I’m grateful to be a small part of it.
I’m lucky to get the chance to give talks like this. Each and every one still feels special. I’m grateful, as ever, for the opportunity.
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That’s a photo of me on stage in Odense, Denmark, at Email Summit 2025.
I had this moment yesterday where I wanted to skip ahead.
I sometimes get jealous of the parents who have a few kids who are already in elementary school. They’ve gotten through the toddler years where kids get sick every 20 minutes. (My son has RSV right now; so does everyone in his class.) They’ve gotten through sleepless nights and potty training. They can take their kids on big vacations and really do fun stuff with them.
Plus, they don’t need as much attention every day — so I could reclaim a bit of that time to get stuff done at work.
And then I thought about it some more and remembered: I don’t want to skip ahead. I don’t want to miss these moments. I hate that Ben is sick, but there are also wonderful moments these days, too. Yesterday, he climbed into my lap and gave me a huge hug — in a few years, he’ll be too big for that! (At this pace, he might be too big for that by July.) Those moments won’t last forever.
So I’m writing this to remind myself: I don’t want to hit fast-forward. I want to be here, right now, in the moments that will never happen again — big smiles and new foods and new experiences and colds and restless nights and all of that. This is part of the journey; I want to make the space to really be here for it.
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That’s a photo of Ben wearing my sunglasses around the supermarket. When I talk about not skipping ahead, I’m talking about moments like that — he’s such a silly little guy!
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.
I ask myself this a few times a quarter when projects start to pile up: I’ve got a lots of things to tackle. Where should I start?
And the truth is: You can start anywhere — as long as you start.
I know I can find myself paralyzed by all those choices. Instead of getting stuff done, I end up worrying about all the stuff I have to get done. (And then I find myself with a lot less time to actually do the things I need to do!)
Don’t worry about finding the perfect starting place. The end result is far more important than where you start.
Start somewhere, and go from there.
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That’s a photo of an American Airlines jet taking off, with pink flowers blurred in the foreground and the moon behind. It was taken by Sachin Amjhad for Unsplash.
