Thank You Emails

I have a love-hate relationship with writing and receiving thank-you emails. You know those emails... where the only text in the body is some version of "thank you".

These messages add one more email to process in an already full inbox.
Do you delete the email or reply with a "you're welcome"? This just adds to the clutter.

Do you archive the email? What do you do with an archive of thank you emails? No one is browsing their Outlook application in their free time!

When I receive a thank-you email, I read it and delete it. Thank-you emails do not get archived away in my inbox. They get processed, which is reading, then deleted. Not because I hate those emails -- I do not, but because the intention is conveyed as soon as I have read the words thank and you.

And if you have sent me a thank-you email, I appreciate you doing that. You are very welcome.

But here is why I send them...

The infinitely cluttered mess of social media platforms makes it very easy for one to acknowledge another without having to type words. Typing words makes people read words and adds further clutter to an already full message notification bar. In social media, you can hit the little like button, heart icon, favorite icon or whatever your app allows. No need to write a comment. Acknowledgement done.

Traditional email does not allow any such button other than a mark-as-read notification which are tacky to say the least. So I tend to reply with a "thank you", but I also add something like "perfect, that helped me". This shows that not only did the sender send me what I requested, but their help was meaningful to my project.

These few extra words in addition to the "thank you" really emphasize the value of the work that was done. A simple "thank you" is just saying,"you checked the box you obedient little widget".

Of course, you should be using a team messaging tool like Slack or Campfire. These reduce emails sent between team members. These also increases your ability to collaborate with people and not just send them instructions via email.

Timely

My cubicle is in a moderately high traffic area of my office. My previous years at corporate America taught me to always "act busy", "don't let the screen saver show up on your monitor", etc.

My current place of employment is not petty like this. I feel comfortable pushing away from the desk, leaning slightly back on my chair, and thinking. I intentionally let my mind wander for a few minutes till I have a moment of clarity on the problem I am working on. Then I am back against the desk typing away furiously.

I feel fortunate and grateful to have the time and space to simply ponder. Pondering is slow, often aimless. Pondering does not guarantee a solution to the problem. But I can't think of finding a creative solution to a problem without it. Without pondering, I am simply typing away towards a direction with no pause to check the quality of its trajectory.

I find interractions in today's fast-web world encouraging high-volume consumption now over quality interractions in a timely manner. Jack Cheng tackled this very topic in his 2012 article The Slow Web.

Replying to messages now has almost entirely replaced making plans to have a conversation over coffee later.

Replying to emails now is encouraged over taking time to really find the answer and produce it in a complete and succinct manner.

More meetings win while collaborations lose.

No one is going to write on their grave stones, "Answered hundreds of emails daily."

Elucidate

Do you listen to podcasts?

Podcasts are a rich media that brilliant producers create. Shows are beautifully crafted and are super engaging. I subscribe to a dozen podcasts and listen to them daily.

Think DVR for your best radio shows downloaded to your phone seamlessly...we live in wonderful times!

My good friend and musical genius, Goliath Flores started a podcast. He is combining his love for story telling along with his love for sound-design and soundtrack creation.

I have been listening to his first episode this afternoon and it is simply brilliant. He tells a familiar story but with details that have gripped me into the narrative. The soundtrack helps build emotion but largely stays out of the way, like any good soundtrack should.

Subscribe to his podcast, Elucidate on iTunes, Stitcher, Overcast or where ever you get your podcasts.
Download, listen, tip on his website.

You will thank me.

Hustle

Good artists hustle. They stretch their limits of imagination. They welcome discomfort. The others are busy drawing more sea-shells and palm trees.

Good musicians work two jobs so they can play their own music at gigs. Gigs are tough. Gigs need you to hustle. The others are pretty happy with their status quo in their coffee-house style playing covers.

A monk hustles. Zen is tough. "Don't-know mind" does not come easy. Meditation is really hard. They put in the time and the effort where others give up and quit.

Hugh MacLeod hustled when everyone told him it was worthless to do so.

"If your plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain." -- Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody

Hustle is a good marker of people I want to be around. These people say "What if" when they can say, "Will do." They are not happy with good. They seek better. Not more, but better. And they want to find better themselves.

Casey Neistat says this in his own way in the video below.

Committee

Chilli's puts a touch screen device on every table.

• You can pay for your meal with it, saving the server a valuable 5 minutes per table
• It shows you ads continuously that you can not turn off. Billboard on your table anyone?
• It also plays video, typicaly cartoons, in full volume no less just in case a phone or tablet is unavailable to be stuffed in your childs face
• This is in addition to the two TVs playing something or the other in constant view from any table
• And the pop music that is being piped in through the dining room speakers

A committee came up with this dining experience. I am sure of it.

When a committee works well, you get a Toyota Camry that lasts thirty years, five hundred thousand miles, all on the strength of timely oil changes. No personality, but the damned thing refuses to die.

When a committee works poorly, you find yourself with an attrocity of a touch screen device on your dinner table. With sound. And ads. Ditto on the personality. All with below-average food conjured up by the same committee.

In a world full of pocket internet devices, the best gift you can give someone is your attention.

Unless you are at a Chilli's.

Pride

In the backgrop of the Orlando Tragedy, our little community 30 minutes west of Orlando is witnessing something beautiful.

We are all mourning the tragedy that struck so close to home. While political candidates are using this as an opportunity to further their agenda, be it vanilla or rancid, the helpers are working their collective butts off in support of the LGBTQ community.

My wife has set up free support groups twice a month till there is need for anyone recoiling from the attack at Pulse. Gay bars are a safe place for gay people where they can spend time without judgement. This idea of a safe place was shattered and gay people need to heal.

To promote the free support group to the community that needs it the most, we set up a photo booth at the local Pride event this morning. We set up props and people came in by the hundreds. Couples, teenagers, proud mothers, fathers, and grand parents, babies, puppies... everyone was out with a message of love.

Moreover, my wife and I were embraced fully by the LGBTQ community as allies.

There was no discrimination on our more traditional man-woman union: "Oh, you are not gay... we will find some other booth at the vendor to visit"

There was no judgement: "sexuality is fluid, so how can you two be sure that you want a man-woman relationship?"

There was no conditional acceptance: "we love you even though we don't understand your straight lifestyle"

There was only love.

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The illustration is free to use if you like. You may rightclick on the image and save to your computer. You could also get it on imgur. No copyright on this one.

Home

I stumbled upon a homeless person's camp today.

A small brown puppy with a green collar was sitting on a sidewalk. I noticed it during my drive to the office from lunch. I pulled over immediately and walked over to where the puppy was. I fully intended to rescue it. The puppy ran into the woods barking as I approached it. I noticed that the path into the woods was well worn, so I walked in.

There were a couple of tents in a clearing a few feet into the woods. The puppy was next to the far tent. The puppy was not agressive. It stayed next to the tent. Barking.

I heard no person there. The camp did not look like much, just a few old tents and some assorted things. It looked shabby.

Home is typically a feeling that transcends the traditional four-wall house. Sometimest the idea of home is associated with a neighborhood, sometimes with a person, sometimes with particular pieces of furniture.

Sometimes home is a shabby tent in a clearing in the woods with a brown puppy protecting it.

Tuna

My first time eating tuna was in the form of a boiled mess scopped from a sandwich assembly line and plopped into my 6 inch roll. This was back in 2004. It was my first year in the US. I never had tuna before that meal. And I never had tuna since.

That boiled scoopable tuna spoiled tuna for me for many years. I have opted for a meatball sub since then for the next twelve years and counting.

I will at times dig up a poor impression that I have been hiding away for a while and see if I can change my mind about it. Life is too short to dismiss something or someone forever. Forever is a long time. I turned my nose at tuna when I passed by it at the grocery store for twelve long years. Clearly I don't dig up those poor impressions often enough!

I cooked myself a tuna steak tonight with my dinner. I opted to cook the tuna blackened with copius amounts of cajun seasoning. The flavor in my memory had to go.

And it did!! Tuna steak was fantastic! I am glad I picked it up at the grocery store.

Small victories like this one make me want to revisit and reevaluate some of the other ideas that I have dismissed in the past. This is the kind of positive reinforcement that can be an effective life-hack of sorts.

Go ahead, try the tuna!

Illustrations

I really like it when I see blog posts that have an accompanying image. It adds a nice personality to the post. Just that little bit extra splash of color and visuals for the imagination to the reader. Images also foreshadow part of or the whole message of the post. Like a little teaser.

I started drawing in Biology class. Our assignments and tests were prose-style questions and we had to draw the accompanying illustration of the topic we were answering. I used to be pretty good at those drawings.

Then came engineering drawings -- isometric and orthographic projections, plan and elevation views of complex machinery -- and I really liked those. We used a mini-drafter, A3 paper and a 0.5mm mechanical pencil. I was good at it.

All these illustrations and drawing requirements vanished once I got a J.O.B. I do CAD layouts with my projects, but those are not tricky. And none require the use of a pen and a paper. It is all mouse clicks, snap to grids and so on.

So I am going to give this drawing thing a shot again. I drew the watercolor pallete thats in the header image. I drew it on my iPad mini using the Pencil and Paper app by Fifty Three. I am really bad at it... I know.

My ambitious plan is to write a blog post in the evening as time permits. Then find something to draw about it. My skills are severely limited, so I have to be creative before I even pick up the stylus.

It will be fun!

P.S. I am going back and adding images to older posts.