Most nonfiction authors are easy to reach. They include an e-mail address on their author websites along with an open invitation to send them any request or suggestion that comes to mind. Many even encourage this feedback as a necessary commitment to the elusive but much-touted importance of “community building” among their readers. But here’s the thing: I don’t buy it.
If you visit the contact page on my author website, there’s no general-purpose e-mail address. Instead, I list different individuals you can contact for specific purposes: my literary agent for rights requests, for example, or my speaking agent for speaking requests. If you want to reach me, I offer only a special-purpose e-mail address that comes with conditions and a lowered expectation that I’ll respond:
If you have an offer, opportunity, or introduction that might make my life more interesting, e-mail me at interesting [at] calnewport.com. For the reasons stated above, I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests.
I call this approach a sender filter, as I’m asking my correspondents to filter themselves before attempting to contact me. This filter has significantly reduced the time I spend in my inbox. Before I began using a sender filter, I had a standard general-purpose e-mail address listed on my website. Not surprisingly, I used to receive a large volume of long e-mails asking for advice on specific (and often quite complicated) student or career questions. I like to help individuals, but these requests became overwhelming—they didn’t take the senders long to craft but they would require a lot of explanation and writing on my part to respond. My sender filter has eliminated most such communication, and in doing so, has drastically reduced the number of messages I encounter in my writing inbox. As for my own interest in helping my readers, I now redirect this energy toward settings I carefully choose to maximize impact. Instead of allowing any student in the world to send me a question, for example, I now work closely with a small number of student groups where I’m quite accessible and can offer more substantial and effective mentoring.
Another benefit of a sender filter is that it resets expectations. The most crucial line in my description is the following: “I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests.” This seems minor, but it makes a substantial difference in how my correspondents think about their messages to me. The default social convention surrounding e-mail is that unless you’re famous, if someone sends you something, you owe him or her a response. For most, therefore, an inbox full of messages generates a major sense of obligation.
By instead resetting your correspondents’ expectations to the reality that you’ll probably not respond, the experience is transformed. The inbox is now a collection of opportunities that you can glance at when you have the free time—seeking out those that make sense for you to engage. But the pile of unread messages no longer generates a sense of obligation. You could, if you wanted to, ignore them all, and nothing bad would happen. Psychologically, this can be freeing.
I worried when I first began using a sender filter that it would seem pretentious—as if my time was more valuable than that of my readers—and that it would upset people. But this fear wasn’t realized. Most people easily accept the idea that you have a right to control your own incoming communication, as they would like to enjoy this same right. More important, people appreciate clarity. Most are okay to not receive a response if they don’t expect one (in general, those with a minor public presence, such as authors, overestimate how much people really care about their replies to their messages).
In some cases, this expectation reset might even earn you more credit when you do respond. For example, an editor of an online publication once sent me a guest post opportunity with the assumption, set by my filter, that I would likely not respond. When I did, it proved a happy surprise. Here’s her summary of the interaction:
So, when I emailed Cal to ask if he wanted to contribute to [the publication], my expectations were set. He didn’t have anything on his [sender filter] about wanting to guest blog, so there wouldn’t have been any hard feelings if I’d never heard a peep. Then, when he did respond, I was thrilled.
My particular sender filter is just one example of this general strategy. Consider consultant Clay Herbert, who is an expert in running crowd-funding campaigns for technology start-ups: a specialty that attracts a lot of correspondents hoping to glean some helpful advice. As a Forbes.com article on sender filters reports, “At some point, the number of people reaching out exceeded [Herbert’s] capacity, so he created filters that put the onus on the person asking for help.”
Though he started from a similar motivation as me, Herbert’s filters ended up taking a different form. To contact him, you must first consult an FAQ to make sure your question has not already been answered (which was the case for a lot of the messages Herbert was processing before his filters were in place). If you make it through this FAQ sieve, he then asks you to fill out a survey that allows him to further screen for connections that seem particularly relevant to his expertise. For those who make it past this step, Herbert enforces a small fee you must pay before communicating with him. This fee is not about making extra money, but is instead about selecting for individuals who are serious about receiving and acting on advice. Herbert’s filters still enable him to help people and encounter interesting opportunities. But at the same time, they have reduced his incoming communication to a level he can easily handle.
To give another example, consider Antonio Centeno, who runs the popular Real Man Style blog. Centeno’s sender filter lays out a two-step process. If you have a question, he diverts you to a public location to post it. Centeno thinks it’s wasteful to answer the same questions again and again in private one-on-one conversations. If you make it past this step, he then makes you commit to, by clicking check boxes, the following three promises:
I am not asking Antonio a style question I could find searching Google for 10 minutes.
I am not SPAMMING Antonio with a cut-and-pasting generic request to promote my unrelated business.
I will do a good deed for some random stranger if Antonio responds within 23 hours.
The message box in which you can type your message doesn’t appear on the contact page until after you’ve clicked the box by all three promises.
To summarize, the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are underdeveloped. The notion that all messages, regardless of purpose or sender, arrive in the same undifferentiated inbox, and that there’s an expectation that every message deserves a (timely) response, is absurdly unproductive. The sender filter is a small but useful step toward a better state of affairs, and is an idea whose time has come—at least for the increasing number of entrepreneurs and freelancers who both receive a lot of incoming communication and have the ability to dictate their accessibility. (I’d also love to see similar rules become ubiquitous for intra-office communication in large organizations, but for the reasons argued in Chapter 2, we’re probably a long way from that reality.) If you’re in a position to do so, consider sender filters as a way of reclaiming some control over your time and attention.
Tip #2: Do More Work When You Send or Reply to E-mails
Consider the following standard e-mails:
E-mail #1: “It was great to meet you last week. I’d love to follow up on some of those issues we discussed. Do you want to grab coffee?”
E-mail #2: “We should get back to the research problem we discussed during my last visit. Remind me where we are with that?”
E-mail #3: “I took a stab at that article we discussed. It’s attached. Thoughts?”