Oh, hi friends!
I was sitting here and staring into space thinking, “What am I forgetting to do today?”
Oh right, the daily newsletter. Wow.
Writing the newsletter turns my creative brain boil down to a simmer (in a good way) so here I am, showing up late but showing up regardless.
And perhaps it’s a reminder to you, too.
It’s not too late in the day to do one of the things you meant to do.
“His giving is governed by a simple rule: the five-minute favor. ‘You should be willing to do something that will take you five minutes or less for anybody.’”
As an Adam Grant superfan, it was only a matter of time before I read one of his first books, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success. (Amazon, Bookshop, I got it from the New York Public Library)
Lots of illuminating advice — definitely recommend reading it — but right now I like the takeaway of the “five-minute favor.”
Write the review, send the email, answer the question, respond to the comment, make the introduction. Expect nothing in return. It creates a growing web of reputation, connection, and possibility.
When You Want an Email to Disappear But Pop Back Up Later
I recently replied to an email thread from February and the person I emailed was impressed that I remembered — in my last email I had said, “I’ll get back in touch closer to when my book is coming out.” Then I did!
But I only remembered because I brought the email back up to my inbox using the Gmail extension Boomerang. Think of it like a follow-up reminder from your past self.
It’s helpful to sweep things out of sight but have them return when you need them. (I also use this for digital theater tickets or flight information, and set them to boomerang back to my inbox the night of the show or the day I travel!)
(I love when I recommend these things and it always sounds like ad copy — sidenote: remember when I did a program at Droga5 and almost became a Peggy Olson copywriter five years ago?? — but actually it’s just me being really excited by something useful!! Wait maybe that is the key to effective advertising. Create something useful — and tell people why you care about it.)
My next level use of Boomerang is that I now *write the email I'm going to send* then schedule it to arrive in my inbox on the date I said I'd send them a reminder. It's because I used to just boomerang the email, but found the friction of having to remember what it was, what I wanted to say to them, etc, to be too much.
So now I hit reply, take their email out of the "To" line and replace it with my own, write whatever it was I want to write to them in six months time or whatever, and in the subject line write "This is a potential client who might pay you to do something fun!" or whatever it is to entice myself, then schedule it for the day I want to email them.
On the day, I can just dig out their last email, hit reply, copy/paste the new text (doing Shift+Command+V to take the formatting off, because: gmail) , then send it off! Present Me is always grateful to Past Me for her mental, emotional and physical labour!