Easy To Slip By…

My emails come in thick and furious, every day except Friday.

I try to reply in a timely fashion, but…benefit coming up, website redesign, kids gone beserk…you name it, it’s coming at us from all directions.

Which makes it even more important to stop, once every week or two, and go through to catch all you’ve missed.

Especially the thank yous.
It’s so easy to focus on the balls that will get dropped, essential projects that are stuck, meetings needing to get scheduled, all that muck.
But what about the simple courtesies that make life pleasant – and work life even more so?

The secret is…it’s also easy to catch up.
To send a “So sorry this is belated, but I’ve been thinking about how great it was when you…” email that is delightedly received, no matter what the timing.
To send a “Yes I’d love to get together when you’re in town, I was just wondering how you were…” message that reminds someone they haven’t fallen off your radar screen.

To slip in, as it were, a touch…of that human connection that makes our days just a little bit more enjoyable to get through.

I tend to do these sweeps over my email stream early in the morning, so that people get these messages before they’re too tired to see them amidst the barrage of all their email accumulation.


Well, I have to come clean.


I don’t do this sweep at that time of day for a strategic reason relating to the emails’ reception – I do it because that’s when I have the time to focus on this level of detail.


But it helps to start my day off sweet – as well as, hopefully, the day of the recipients.

The Day After

I have a new theory – that you can judge the success of a board meeting by the flurry of emails the day after.

It’s the holy grail – that our board members will be talking and listening to each other, not sitting passively by as staff drones on.

But it’s when that active inquiry spills over to their own time – personal time, work time – that you get board members thinking about the organization in the shower.

Owning its successes, its challenges, its path.

We had two board meetings in the past week where the emails just flew afterwards. More ideas people had to express, more questions to raise, more excitement to share.

That’s when you know it’s working.