Additional Focus Zooms, and a Word on Email

"Do You Want to Be Known For Your Writing, or For Your Swift Email Responses?"

Apr 17, 2023

Check out my first post here to read more about the namesake of this newsletter and make a copy of the input/output tracking sheet if you so desire.

The subhead of this email comes from one of my favorite pieces about email and priorities, written by Melissa Febos:

“Do You Want to Be Known For Your Writing, or For Your Swift Email Responses?”

In it, she breaks down how she used to respond to emails (frantically, with a focus on being a good girl and giving people what they want), and what changed:

A handful of years ago, I had a revelation. This was back in the time when I worked very hard to answer all the emails in my email inbox. When I lived in fear of the disappointment of other people. When quelling the impatience of strangers was of higher priority than my own artmaking or sanity. Maybe you live in such a time of your own right now.

“Quelling the impatience of strangers…” YES

She discusses an interaction with a famous male author who was an unreliable emailer, though he did eventually give a great reading at her event—he just didn’t sacrifice any of his priorities to respond immediately, because her priorities were not his. Her takeaway:

The goal cannot be to answer everything, even eventually. If you set very high expectations, the only place to go is down, into disappointment. What if you become a big deal and start receiving an outrageous number of emails? Are you going to write exclusively emails?

Last week, I put up an away message on my email because I needed to focus on larger picture concerns for a work in progress. Whenever I do this (and I’ve been doing it consistently since 2018), I get a few responses:

People saying, “hell yeah! Wish I could do that!”
People saying something snarky like, “must be nice!”
People saying something about how getting the autoresponder made them feel like, “this is annoying.”

None of those responses are my problem. It’s always very clear that they are are much more related to that person’s own issues they’re struggling with (feeling a lack of control around their own time and work, feeling overburdened, feeling stuck, feeling frustrated) than it is about me. I have empathy for them.

What I really like about Febos’ piece is that it puts such a clear point on the fact that we only have so much time, and demanding excellence of ourselves in one sphere (for her in the piece, writing) means we simply will not be excellent in others (emailing, texting, responding to DM’s, we were not put on this earth to be answering machines!). I’m going to include a long quote because it’s so resonant:

Listen to me: Being good is a terrible handicap to making good work. Stop it right now. Just pick a few secondary categories, like good friend, or good at karaoke. Be careful, however of categories that take into account the wants and needs of other humans. I find opportunities to prove myself alluring. I spent a long time trying to maintain relationships with people who wanted more than I was capable of giving. The truth is, I do need to cancel plans regularly. I need to disappear for a few days or even months to attend to my writing. Friends or lovers who resent this, who interpret it as a personal rejection, are often angry with me. And feeling at a deficit makes me want to work harder to make it up to them. In recent years, I’ve learned the relief of letting go of this debt. It is possible to do so with love. Being a good friend doesn’t mean adhering to your friend’s ideal of a good friend. It means devising your own ideal, and then applying it to friends who share that ideal. This application requires a working knowledge of “boundaries.”

Finally, she takes on the idea of switching from “no” to “yes.” When I first read this, I was mind blown, though it’s so simple. In order to say yes to the things of highest priority to you, you must say no to things that are high priority to others. This, I think is why some people get upset at away messages—they understand that whatever they want is not a priority to the person they’re reaching out to, and that makes them feel all sorts of ways:

Get comfortable with no. This requires shifting your relationship to no. You are not saying no to an event where you might make an important connection, you are saying yes to your work. You are saying yes to the sleep you need to make good work. You are saying yes to the real relationships you already have and need to nourish and enjoy so that you can be strong enough to withstand the very hard parts of writing and living. You are not saying no to an opportunity; you are saying yes to the revolution. You are not saying no to that person who might be disappointed in you, you are saying yes to a life in which you are not in bondage to the fear of other people’s disappointment.

The book 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman is also excellent for gaining this perspective. It was marketed as a productivity book, but it’s really more philosophical to me, about how we all have limited time by nature of being human beings who will die (4000 weeks is the average human lifespan) and by choosing to do some things, you are necessarily choosing NOT to do other things. That knowledge should spur you to make more ruthless choices, not less. The main takeaway of the book is that you CANNOT DO IT ALL, and you will be miserable if you try.

So if you get an auto-response from someone’s personal email controlling their own time and it unleashes a flood of feelings in you, ask yourself: why? What do you feel is lacking in terms of control in your own life? I’m not trying to be facile: I know people have caretaking commitments, limits due to disability and physical and mental conditions, insane bosses who take masochistic pleasure in being unpredictable time eaters (ask me how I know that...). But I also firmly believe that most people can take small steps toward carving out time away from other people’s demands.

Personally, I used to pride myself on my emailing—I would respond to everything as fast as possible in great depth. It made me feel professional and in control during a time period where I felt out of my depth. Not surprisingly, during that time I also had the lowest output of my own personal writing in my career.

Now, I answer less, more slowly, use away messages much more, and have written things I couldn’t have dreamed of completing in that 2015-2018 period. Do I have fewer acquaintances and happy strangers who usually never even responded with a “thanks” to that email I worked so hard to get out so quickly?

Yup, and good riddance.

I highly recommend Febos’ entire piece—I have it bookmarked and reread it quite a few times a year. Since she wrote it in 2017, she’s won a National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Girlhood and became a full professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Not a bad show of how setting boundaries and priorities can supercharge your career, huh?

The piece ends with this great line:

Feel free to write to me if you need to be reminded of this, but do not expect a speedy response, or any response at all.

FOCUS ZOOMS:

These went so well last week I’m going to run two more:

Wednesday, April 19, 3-5pm EST (link here)
Friday, April 21, 2-5pm EST (yes, three hours! link here)

How to join: Just come into the Zoom at any point during those two sessions, put in the chat what you're working on, and feel free to either leave your camera on for accountability, or turn it off for privacy. All mics will be off except at the very beginning, when we'll say hi. Please don’t come in and then mess around on your phone on camera! Respect the focus zone.

OUTPUT: If you want to try a little prompt on this topic, I just had a very fun writing session where I went through 10 different variations of my character’s out-of-office message. I think this can be a good way to get a sense of a character’s priorities, sense of humor, sense of fear (what do they worry will happen if someone can’t get a hold of them? What are they trying to control?) and many other things.

It’s a short format that can be used in long work, or even became an entire humor piece itself, like this piece from my buddy, the excellent writer, Irving Ruan: “Existential Out of Office Replies.” Give it a shot!

Do you ever use an auto-responder on your personal email? Why or why not?

Input/Output

Discussion about this post