May I have your attention for just a moment?
Whether you’re reading my words for the first time or continue to welcome me into your inbox month after month, I want to thank you for the brief grant of the most scarce resource you’ve got: your attention.
I struggle to reclaim my own attention from those who are fighting to capture it. We all do. And I’m someone who has been writing a (mostly) monthly email for the better part of 7 years.
This means I have a tricky balance to navigate: the balance between providing something useful to people who care about what I have to say… versus becoming just another nuisance we all face in life.
Any of these sound familiar?
You buy an exciting new skincare product, maybe because it kept popping up in your Instagram feed. Now the company emails you every day, maybe more than once.
You get four texts and an email reminder about your upcoming trip to the dentist. Plus a request for a Google review after your appointment is over.
You pick up your phone to respond to a text message from a friend, only to put it back down again 15 minutes later without having responded at all. Maybe you don’t even remember why you picked it up.
The number of inputs we’re receiving in a day, across the number of ways we receive those inputs, continues to grow with no end in sight.
Janel Comeau put it best: “hey sorry I missed your text, I am processing a non-stop 24/7 onslaught of information with a brain designed to eat berries in a cave”
The marketing experts have a fix. They’ll tell you it takes performative, algorithm-chasing content that provides little actual value to an audience. Louder. Flashier. More.
For me? Absolutely not.
Occasional, long-form emails seem quaint. A relic of decades past. Still I persist.
For the most part, I’m just happy to be writing occasionally and hearing even more occasionally from someone if it resonates. Each time I send out an email, I get a couple of “Yours is consistently the only newsletter I read every time…” type comments, and it feels great!
I’m also faced with the reality that I run a referral-based business. My ongoing success depends on people remembering who I am and what I do, so they can call on me when they have a need. I sent a message recently about a mentor coaching program I’m starting in January.
I received a trickling of initial interest, and still need to fill the seats. Should I email again? Same message or different? How often? Do I risk alienating the rest of my audience that doesn’t care about mentor coaching, to the point that they unsubscribe or start ignoring my messages? Do I send a WUPFH?
I honestly don’t know. If you’ve got an opinion on this, I’d love to hear it.
In the meantime, I’m going to keep erring on the side of less. And thank you, as always, for reading.
P.S. Since you’ve now heard me agonize about it: the mentor coaching details are here. Forwarding this to a coach you know would be a kindness.