Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly, I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an anonymized question that I answered in Ditcherville, which is my group coaching community, and it's about organizing your ideas or how I organize my ideas for a daily mailing list. And then I talk about some other sort of tips and tricks around email, especially daily emails. So I hope you enjoy it. Here we go. The question is, I started emailing daily this week. Hooray! So far it's been a lot of fun. I have a ton of ideas and jot them down in all sorts of places, but I feel like it quickly gets disorganized. How do you manage all of your drafts, ideas, brainstorms? I'm eager to learn some of your best practices in daily emailing. Can you please share some general tips or words of wisdom on this? Okay, so a couple of, not random, but a couple of thoughts about daily emails, but specifically first, how do I keep the ideas organized? For me, it's really important to capture an idea the instant I have it, because if I get distracted by my phone or the kids or the dog or anything, it's gone. And the feeling of knowing I had an idea that I thought was interesting and then I lost it, it's the worst feeling. So as soon as I have the idea, I hold it in mind and I launch Gmail on whatever device I'm near, and I just hit compose and I type the idea into the empty message window. So I just basically create an email. I type up enough of the idea to remind myself, it usually doesn't take too much, but it could be like bullet points or it could be not even me starting to write it, but me just saying the idea is to, I don't know, something about my car being a 2018 and the lady at the gym that asked me about it. Remind myself of the situation where I had the idea and the general premise of it. I might just have kind of the punchline of the idea. Sometimes I'll say something like, you know, come up with a way to incorporate Yogi Berra style humor into a why conversation. It could just anything to remind me of the idea. And then I just close the window. I don't even send it to myself or anything. The reason I picked Gmail for this is because it instantly syncs across all my devices. I can grab anything. I could be on somebody else's computer, like the kid's computer or my wife's laptop or an iPad or my Android phone. It doesn't matter. It launches really quickly. It's really easy to hit the compose button and immediately start typing or even hit the microphone and just talk the idea in there. And usually the transcription will be accurate enough for me to understand what I was talking about. So my drafts folder has something like 800 draft emails in there. I'll never get through them all. I don't organize them in any way. I just if I don't have an idea for a particular email or I have an idea and I can't get to it immediately, I'll just jump into the drafts folder, read through them until one of them sparks me. I'm just like, oh, that'd be a fun one. And I can kind of like instantly picture the whole email. And I just like I get excited and I just type it up. The other thing I do is when people send in questions in response to messages, I will usually reply to get the permission to share it. Or it might it might not be a specific question that I want to share. It's just a general question that a lot of people have sent in. And I'll tag that with a tag that I just use. You could use any tag. I use list fodder. And so I have those two folders. I've got my drafts folder where I've got my own ideas. And then I've got list fodder where it's prompts from readers about questions that they would like to have answered. Those usually take a little bit longer to write. So depending when I sit down to write, if I have more time or if I have more time, I'll probably go into the list fodder folder. If I have less time, I'll probably go into the drafts folder and I'll just scroll through until I find one that excites me that I can write in the amount of time that I have. So, OK, any other ideas about daily emailing? One thing is every time you sit down to write, if you're doing daily, I think it's important or certainly useful or at least rational or logical to try and keep the email to one specific point. Not like three points. If you've got three points to make, make it three emails. Keep it as short as possible while still delivering value. So sometimes that is 500 words. Sometimes it's three sentences. You just want to make your point, get in and get out as quickly as possible. What else? My goal, personal goal for each email is to make the person glad they read it. So the longer it is, the harder it is to make the person glad they read it because they had a smaller time investment. It cost them less to read it.

less time reading it. So, the barrier for positive ROI is much lower. It can be hard to write a short email that's useful at all, but if you are shooting for always delivering positive ROI with each message, you'll find yourself automatically editing them down from long, long, long, you know, sort of brain dumps into like, well, what's the key point here? Maybe I can just pull that out and make the point without all the supporting arguments, and maybe I'll save the supporting argument for a follow-up. So, you don't have to answer like every question in the world in each message because you know you're going to have another one tomorrow. So, yeah, I guess now I'm going into this idea of open loops where I can do an email that's maybe a little bit inscrutable or a sort of Zen cone-like, you know, paradox or something, and then see if that resonates with people and they have a bunch of questions, and then I answer the questions the next day or over the course of the next couple of days. It doesn't have to be everything about a particular topic. It can't be everything about a particular topic. So, just make a point, and then if there are a lot of questions, answer the questions the next day or over the course of the next few days. What else? It was just, this is on my mind. It's not a big deal, but we were just talking about it in Slack. I don't use the person's first name in the messages. First of all, I don't like having extra fields on the signup form. I think the fewer moving parts, the better. So, it's just the email address. That's the only thing I need to get in touch with you, just your email address. But the bigger reason why I don't, you know, say, hi, Jeff, is because I want the emails to feel like they're coming from a close friend, and close friends don't do that in their emails. Like, I don't get an email from my brother, Matt. It's like, hi, Jonathan. He just immediately just starts writing. It's like two sentences, and he gets to the point. There's not a lot of throat clearing at the beginning. I know this goes against conventional wisdom, that you should personalize the email for the people, and, you know, whatever. I don't do it. And when I get emails from people that say, hi, Jonathan, it automatically, I feel that arm's length, that distance, that we're not close. If they were close, they wouldn't be using my name like that. I mean, it might be like, yo, Jay, or something like that, but they're just not going to do that in a casual, personal email. And that's the feel I want. I want it to feel like it's coming from a personal friend, a close, personal friend. Anything else? So, you know, folks, if you have more questions about daily emails, I am literally right now putting together a daily emailing course. It's going to be called Email 365. So, if you have any questions that you have or fears that you have about doing a daily email list, if you're thinking about doing that, absolutely hit me up in Slack. All of that will make it into the course. I would love to get all of your hopes, dreams, worries, and fears about daily emailing, if that's something you're interested in. Cool. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call. C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.