You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
Like any other tool, e-mail is what you make it . It’s an incredible tool of productivity, collaboration and knowledge-sharing for me. That’s not to say I haven’t struggled with it like everybody else. But one thing I realized is that if you want to reduce the amount of e-mail in your in-box, it’s actually very simple: you need to send fewer e-mails. I know it’s kind of a self-evident truth. Because every time you send an e-mail, what’s going to happen? It’s going to trigger a response, and then you’re going to have to respond to that response, and then they’re going to add some people on the “cc” line, and then those people are going to respond. You have to respond to those people, and someone’s going to misinterpret something. That’s going to start a telephone game, and then you’re going to have to clarify that stuff. Then you have someone in a time zone who didn’t get the clarification, so you’re going to have to clarify that clarification.