When should you write an email and when should you schedule a meeting

Writing isn’t good for everything. I’m a writer. I know.


We have so many different forms of communication now: not just email, phone, text, and in person. Those may be the 4 basic ones, but that doesn’t include all the other chat messages on every app everywhere. I communicate with my friends in my writers group through text, email, and the Meetup chat, as well as several google docs that I recently set up that allow for commenting. 


I work with clients through email, phone, text, and LinkedIn messages, as well as my online course platform which has its own email, chat, discussion threads and other functions. 


Even my friends communicate with me through phone, email, text messages, and voice messages on regular text and Whatsapp, so there’s a million different methods for them to get in touch with me. Oh, and I forget Instagram both forwarding things and messaging (and Facebook, etc). 


Once upon a time, your choices were to send a letter or talk to them in person. Sometimes I long for those times when communication was simpler because it was so hard. 


Now it’s too easy. 

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How to introduce yourself (it's different in writing than when face-to-face)

Why do we state our name right away? Most people don’t remember it. Their brains don’t know whether your name is important until they know whether they like you or care about what you have to say. 


But we state our name because the person we are talking to needs to know what to call us–the body standing in front of them. Our names are how we humans distinguish one body from another body. It’s a weird concept. 


Even though the standard is to say our name first when introducing ourselves in person, most people don’t remember it. They’ll remember something we said or talked about. They might go, “Oh, I met this really cool person who had the same opinion as me on returning shopping carts at the grocery store!” And the next time they see you, they’ll get your name and remember it because–shopping carts!


Your name is a label for your body. And since the body is present in in-person intros, we want the name.


Introductions in writing are different. 

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