Inbox Me Quotes

And the minibar in my hotel room was mysteriously emptied." "By arcane forces beyond the understanding of normal human beings?" asked Myfanwy as she sifted through the in-box. It was the sort of question you learned to ask automatically when you worked with the Checquy. "No, it was me," admitted Shantay without a shred of embarrassment.

I recheck my inbox. Everything’s up to date. I check the clock. Three fifteen P.M. I check my lipstick in the reflection of the shiny wall tile near my computer monitor. I check Joshua, who is glowering at me with contempt. I stare back. Now we are playing the Staring Game. I should mention that the ultimate aim of all our games is to make the other smile, or cry. It’s something like that. I’ll know when I win.

I remember exactly how it felt to see that first message from him in my inbox. It was a little bit surreal. He wanted to know about me. For the next few days at school after that, it felt like I was a character in a movie. I could almost imagine a close-up of my face, projected wide-screen. It's strange, because in reality, I'm not the leading guy. Maybe I'm the best friend.

I get a message from my dad. In the mood I'm in, I tear up to see his name in my inbox, and imagine him down the hall in bed, propped on pillows, emailing me. "Hon, Enjoyed our gelato date the other night. I just want to say I'm proud of you for a lot of reasons. Also, I've attached a picture of my foot." He's such a weirdo goofball. I love him.

Why are you running? You know he won’t be there. You KNOW he won’t be there. If you forgot, check your pocket. Pull out your phone and look at the last message in your inbox. What does it say? Oh yes, it says ‘I won’t be there’." "Fantastic timing for you to become the voice of reason, Shadow," I pant. "Are you trying to make me change my mind?" "Not at all, this is a thrill for me. I just didn’t know there would be running involved. Can I change your mind about that?

If you’re like me, you have far too many things you want to do, read, see, test, and experience. Your inbox is a treasure trove of possibilities. To a creative mind, that’s very enticing. It’s easy for an optimist to keep fifty, a hundred, or even a thousand e-mails hovering in their inbox in the hopes that, someday soon, they’ll get a chance to give each opportunity the precious time that it deserves. But guess what? That’s never gonna happen.

Of course I know what she means. To make art in fandom is to follow your passion at the risk of never being taken seriously. I've written dozens of fics-put them together and you'd have several novels-but who knows what a college admissions officer will think of that as a pastime. Where does 12,000 Tumbler followers rate in relation to a spot in the National Honor Society in their minds? Every week I get anonymous messages in my inbox telling me I should write a real book. Well, haven't I already? What makes what I do different from "real writing"? Is it that I don't use original characters? I guess that makes every Hardy Boys edition, every Star Wars book, every spinoff, sequel, fairy-tale re-telling, historical romance, comic book reboot, and the music Hamilton "not real writing". Or is it that a real book is something printed, that you can hold in your hand, not something you write on the internet? Or is "real writing" something you sell in a store, not give away for free? No, I know it's none of these things. It's merely this: "real writing" is done by serious people, whereas fanfiction is written by weirdos, teenagers, degenerates, and women.

Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead? Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed? Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy? In fifty years, will all this be declassified? And you'll confess why you did it And I'll say, "Good riddance" 'Cause it wasn't sexy once it wasn't forbidden I would've died for your sins Instead, I just died inside And you deserve prison, but you won't get time You'll slide into inboxes and slip through the bars You crashed my party and your rental car You said normal girls were boring But you were gone by the morning You kicked out the stage lights But you're still performing And in plain sight you hid But you are what you did And I'll forget you, but I'll never forgive The smallest man who ever lived

I find reality pretty difficult. I find the business of getting out of bed and getting on with the day really hard. I find picking up my phone to be a mammoth fucking struggle. The number on my inbox. The friends who won’t see me anymore. The food pictures and porn videos, the bombings and beheadings, the moral ambivalence you have to have to just be able to carry on with your day. I find the knowledge that we’re all just atoms and one day we’ll stop and be dirt in the ground, I find that overwhelmingly disappointing.

There's a dolphin's brain in my in-box but come see me in forty-eight hours.

Thanks to my librarians and booksellers who recommend my books - you are magic. Thanks to the bloggers and everyday readers who tell a friend, " You've gotta read this." Thanks to the readers who write me nice notes, which always tend to hit my inbox on my lowest days.

Sooooooooo much literary fiction I get in the old query inbox is plotless. It's just a character musing about the vagaries and eccentricities of everyday existence. The prose is lush, the character detailed, but one problem - absolutely nothing is happening and thus it's (forgive me) extremely boring. Good literary fiction has a plot.

Maxine will sometimes compliment us on our hair or other aspects of our scruffy appearance. The next day, or even later the same day, she'll send an all-caps e-mail asking why a certain form is not on her desk. This will prompt a peppy reply, one barely stifling a howl of fear: Hey Maxine! The document you want was actually put in your in-box yesterday around lunchtime. I also e-mailed it to you and Russell. Let me know if you can't find it! Thanks! Laars P.S. I'm also attaching it again as a Word doc, just in case. There's so much wrong here: the fake-vague around lunchtime, the nonsensical Thanks, the quasi-casual postscript. The exclamation points look downright psychotic.

It was astonishing, Lara thought, the sheer outpouring of human desire. The need to record, to create, to be acknowledged. Read me read me read me. The queries tsunamied her inbox, twenty to thirty a day. Girl-meets-boy. Poor-kid-gets-rich. Rich-kids-go-bad. Boy-saves-the-world. Boy-writes-a-bestseller-then-gets-writer’s-block-but-lives-in-a-gorgeous-condo-while-his-girlfriend-helps-him-figure-it-out. Girl-meets-girl. Dog dies. First love. First fuck. Bad parents. Bad husbands. Bad habits. War. War. War. Robots. Fairies. Vampires. Dragons. Change centuries. Tell-alls. Tell-nothings. Pride and Prejudice on a ranch, at a mall; swap out the sisters for men, dogs, parakeets. Change countries. Add zombies. Repeat.

I didn’t want to press Veronica. I thought I’d wait for her to get in touch this time. I checked my inbox rather too assiduously. Of course, I wasn’t expecting a great effusion, but hoped, perhaps, for a polite message that it had been nice to see me properly after all these years. Well, perhaps it hadn’t been. Perhaps she’d gone on a trip. Perhaps her server was down. Who said that thing about the eternal hopefulness of the human heart?

In the morning when I saw Ivan's name in the in-box I almost started to cry. It reminded me of a kind of torture I had read about where afterward the captors returned your senses to you one by one, and you felt so grateful that you told them everything.

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.

looked for the TV remote but couldn’t see it. Then I located it, peeking out from behind Kathy’s open laptop on the coffee table. I reached for it, but was so stoned I knocked over the laptop. I propped the laptop up again—and the screen came to life. It was logged into her email account. For some reason, I kept staring at it. I was transfixed—her in-box stared at me like a gaping hole. I couldn’t look away. All kinds of things jumped out before I knew what I was reading: words such as “sexy” and “fuck” in the email headings—and repeated emails from BADBOY22. If only I’d stopped there. If only I’d got up and walked away—but I didn’t. I clicked on the most recent email and opened it: Subject: Re: little miss fuck From: Katerama_1 To: BADBOY22 I’m on the bus. So horny for you. I can smell you on me. I feel like a slut! Kxx

This meant that I went from being the person who responded to everyone all the time, to being a person who doesn’t respond to hardly anyone, at all. At first, it was hard. My text inbox went from typically ten unread messages to over four hundred. I would read letters from readers, and instead of responding with a novel-length letter, I began saving them to a folder and sending out energetic blessings instead. If an email landed in my inbox, I would let it sit sometimes for up to seven days before even opening it. I got to things when I got to things. At first, some people were super annoyed, but after a few years of this practice, people came to understand I don’t respond to things immediately, and sometimes I don’t respond at all. To me, this is the only sane way to live. I’m not chained to my phone or to other people’s expectations of responsiveness. I don’t prove my love by texting back in two minutes.

inbox. It was from Ogden Morrow. The subject line read “We Can Dance If We Want To.” There was no text in the body of the e-mail. Just a file attachment—an invitation to one of the most exclusive gatherings in the OASIS: Ogden Morrow’s birthday party. In the real world, Morrow almost never made public appearances, and in the OASIS, he came out of hiding only once a year, to host this event. The invitation featured a photo of Morrow’s world-famous avatar, the Great and Powerful Og. The gray-bearded wizard was hunched over an elaborate DJ mixing board, one headphone pressed to his ear, biting his lower lip in auditory ecstasy as his fingers scratched ancient vinyl on a set of silver turntables. His record crate bore a DON’T PANIC sticker and an anti-Sixer logo—a yellow number six with a red circle-and-slash over it. The text at the bottom read Ogden Morrow’s ’80s Dance Party in celebration of his 73rd birthday! Tonight—10pm OST at the Distracted Globe ADMIT ONE I was flabbergasted. Ogden Morrow had actually taken the time to invite me to his birthday party. It felt like the greatest honor I’d ever received. I called Art3mis, and she confirmed that she’d received the same e-mail. She said she couldn’t pass up an invitation from Og himself

One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.” What does any of this nutty horseshit actually mean? I have no idea. I’m just amazed that hundreds of people can gobble up this malarkey and repeat it, with straight faces. I’m equally amazed by the high regard in which HubSpot people hold themselves. They use the word awesome incessantly, usually to describe themselves or each other. That’s awesome! You’re awesome! No, you’re awesome for saying that I’m awesome! They pepper their communication with exclamation points, often in clusters, like this!!! They are constantly sending around emails praising someone who is totally crushing it and doing something awesome and being a total team player!!! These emails are cc’d to everyone in the department. The protocol seems to be for every recipient to issue his or her own reply-to-all email joining in on the cheer, writing things like “You go, girl!!” and “Go, HubSpot, go!!!!” and “Ashley for president!!!” Every day my inbox fills up with these little orgasmic spasms of praise. At first I ignore them, but then I feel like a grump and decide I should join in the fun. I start writing things like, “Jan is the best!!! Her can-do attitude and big smile cheer me up every morning!!!!!!!” (Jan is the grumpy woman who runs the blog; she scowls a lot.) Sometimes I just write something with lots of exclamation points, like, “Woo-hoo!!!!!!! Congratulations!!!!!!! You totally rock!!!!!!!!!!!!” Eventually someone suspects that I am taking the piss, and I am told to cut that shit out.

Raymond sent me an electronic mail message at work the next week—it was very odd, seeing his name in my in-box. As I’d expected, he was semiliterate. Hi E, hope all good with u. Got a wee favor to ask. Sammy’s son Keith has invited me to his 40th this Saturday (ended up staying late at that party BTW, it was a rite laugh). Fancy being my plus one? It’s at the golf club, there’s a buffet? No worries if not—let me no. R A buffet. In a golf club. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. And two parties in a month! More parties than I had been to in two decades. I hit reply: Dear Raymond, I should be delighted to accompany you to the birthday celebration. Kind regards, Eleanor Oliphant (Ms.) Moments later, I received a response: Twenty-first-century communication. I fear for our nation’s standards of literacy.

AS ALL-CONSUMING AS the economic crisis was, my fledgling administration didn’t have the luxury of putting everything else on hold, for the machinery of the federal government stretched across the globe, churning every minute of every day, indifferent to overstuffed in-boxes and human sleep cycles. Many of its functions (generating Social Security checks, keeping weather satellites aloft, processing agricultural loans, issuing passports) required no specific instructions from the White House, operating much like a human body breathes or sweats, outside the brain’s conscious control. But this still left countless agencies and buildings full of people in need of our daily attention: looking for policy guidance or help with staffing, seeking advice because some internal breakdown or external event had thrown the system for a loop. After our first weekly Oval Office meeting, I asked Bob Gates, who’d served under seven previous presidents, for any advice he might have in managing the executive branch. He gave me one of his wry, crinkly smiles. “There’s only one thing you can count on, Mr. President,” he said. “On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up.” We went to work trying to minimize screw-ups.

Once my life was organized and I had a routine for my work, I discovered, first of all, that nearly everything was taken care of at any given point in time. Secondly, if something was not already taken care of, I knew the exact time in the future when it would be. Examples of the latter: If the floor is dirty, this does not bother me because I know that tomorrow is Thursday and on Thursdays the floors get mopped. If there are emails in my inbox, this does not concern me, because I know that I always deal with emails immediately after lunch is completed, leaving my inbox free of messages. When everything in your life has a place—both physical objects and time commitments—you will suddenly discover that your life is virtually worry-free because you have set everything on automatic. All you have to do is continue the process, and everything will continue to flow.

The first thing I do is take a final look at my e-mail inbox to ensure that there’s nothing requiring an urgent response before the day ends. The next thing I do is transfer any new tasks that are on my mind or were scribbled down earlier in the day into my official task lists. (I use Google Docs for storing my task lists, as I like the ability to access them from any computer—but the technology here isn’t really relevant.) Once I have these task lists open, I quickly skim every task in every list, and then look at the next few days on my calendar. These two actions ensure that there’s nothing urgent I’m forgetting or any important deadlines or appointments sneaking up on me. I have, at this point, reviewed everything that’s on my professional plate. To end the ritual, I use this information to make a rough plan for the next day. Once the plan is created, I say, “Shutdown complete,” and my work thoughts are done for the day.

Deep down in my heart l love people like to help them my life story heppen to meet with that I believe that it is my calling cause it makes me sleep peacefully and fix my spiritual hunger to hear that there's people who benefits on what I'm doing make me wake up in the morning and give me the reason of living my work is out there to help you Subscribe in my link to get it Now right in your inbox and shelf search it online, library shops books,social network Blog Post,FM radio Podcast as I mentioned above

Catherine, Is there a reason I don’t have a reply from you in my inbox? Is your internet down? Or are you ignoring me? I recognize you’re on leave, but as you once told me, babies sleep a lot, so you should have ample time to reply to me. I hope your lack of response isn’t a preview of what it will be like when you return. Should I expect to wait hours or even days to hear from you? If so, I might need to keep Leafy-Daniel around as my backup assistant. Please tell me where the notebook you always use to write my schedule is. Daniel found one that is almost alike, but it’s longer, so it can’t be the one.

Every morning, I felt a little excitement as I checked my email, as if part of me believed there would be an unread message - with a beautiful, boldfaced title - waiting in my inbox that would bring me great news or inject energy into my humdrum routine, or, in the highest of hopes, change the course of my prosaic life.

I am SAM, and this is my first mission. Wish me luck. Actually, don’t bother. I’m that good. I need to move fast, but I have to be careful too.This high-tech fortress disguised as a middle school has security systems like Hershey, Pennsylvania, has chocolate. My biggest concern (and archnemesis) is Jan I. Tor. He’s the half-human, half-cyborg “cleaning service” they use for “light security” around here. Yeah, right. Tor’s definition of “light security” is that he only kills you once if he finds you. So I wait in super-stealthy silence while Tor hovers past my hiding spot with his motion detectors running, laser cannons loaded, and a big dust mop attachment on his robotic arm. He’s cleaning that floor to within an inch of its life, but it could be me next. As soon as Tor’s out of range, I slip off my tungsten gripper shoes. Believe me, once he’s been through here, you do not want to leave footprints behind. That would be like leaving a business card in Sergeant Stricker’s in-box. Stricker is the big cheese who runs this place, and she’s all human, but just as scary as Tor. I don’t want to rumble with either one of those two. So I program the shoes to self-destruct and drop them in the trash. FWOOM! The coast is clear now, and I sneak back into action. I work my way up the corridor in my spy socks, quiet as a ghost walking on cotton balls. Very, very puffy cotton balls—I’m that quiet. What I need is the perfect place to leave the package I came here to deliver. That’s the mission, but I can’t just do it anywhere. I have to choose wisely. Bathroom? Nah. Too echoey. Library? Nah. Only one exit, and I can’t take that risk. Main lobby? Hmm… maybe so. In fact, I wish I’d thought of that on my way in. I could have saved myself one very expensive pair of tungsten gripper shoes. Once my radar-enabled Rolex watch tells me the main lobby is clear, I slide in there and get right to work. I enter the access code on my briefcase, confirm with my thumbprint, and then pop the case open. After that, it takes exactly seven seconds and one ordinary roll of masking tape to secure my package to the wall. That’s it. Package delivered. Mission accomplished. Catch you next time—because there’s no way you’ll ever catch me. SAM out!

As I have mentioned, I am not a fan of Facebook. It seems to me like a kind of quiet and subtle virus that worms its way into every aspect of the living tissue of daily existence, until it is impossible to think about cereal without finding an ad for Raisin Bran in your in-box. I am sure the endless intrusive connections can be a great deal of fun for some people, but it really doesn’t make sense for Dexter.

Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.” —John 7:24 (NIV) Driving home from work, I glanced into my rearview mirror to see a beautiful pink sky. It looked like another great sunset. I turned onto my street and noticed three young teenage boys hanging out two doors down from where I live. Too bad they won’t notice this great sunset, I thought. I pulled into my driveway and walked inside. My husband, Johnny, called out from the backyard, “Beautiful sunset tonight! Come on out!” The sky had turned a bright crimson red with streaks of leftover pink etched through it. I glanced to where the boys were still talking. “Those boys have no clue that there is a magnificent sunset happening right before their eyes! Too bad,” I said, shaking my head. At that moment, I heard one of them call out, “Hey, guys, check it out! The sky’s all red! It looks awesome!” “Wow!” the others exclaimed in unison. “Cool!” “Oh my,” I said, dismayed, “I sure jumped to a mighty quick conclusion.” Later that evening, I read an inspirational quote that comes daily to my in-box: “When you’re forming your opinions, do it carefully—go slow; hasty judgments oft are followed by regretting—that I know. —Anon.” After work the next day, I saw the boys again. I pulled the car over and rolled down the window. “Hey, guys,” I called out, “great sunset last night, huh?” “Yes, ma’am!” they all replied. One of the boys held up his cell phone. “I got a really good picture of it on my phone. Want to see?” “Sure,” I said with a big smile. “I’d love to.” Forgive me, Lord, for I truly want to see the best in everyone—right from the start. —Melody Bonnette Swang Digging Deeper: Prv 12:18, 31:26

Here’s the trick to significantly improving your SaaS email marketing skills—you have to become a student of it. This means you should: Start collecting great email copy, CTAs, and designs. Understand the objective behind each and every email that businesses send. Try to understand the rationale behind copy, link, and design decisions. There are great websites like Really Good Emails11, Good Email Copy12, and Good Sales Emails.com13 that you can use for your research. These sites categorize email copy and designs by types. As well as this, you should sign up to receive emails from some of the leading SaaS brands. Those include, among others: Drift MailChimp Pipedrive Shopify SurveyMonkey Trello Wistia Zapier You should also sign up to competing products and mailing lists from companies in your sector. I personally signed up to thousands of products and newsletters. It’s great for benchmarking and research. At the time of writing, I’ve already passively collected more than 60,000 emails. Obviously, don’t sign up to your competitors’ products with a business email address! I have a special email address I use for this. This account allows me to get data, understand what other organizations are doing, and find good copy ideas. For example, here’s what a search for ‘Typeform’ gives me: Figure 18.1 – Inbox Inspiration It’s not uncommon for me to sign up several times to the same product or newsletter. This allows me to see what they have learned and to track the evolution of their email marketing program. At LANDR, we created a shared document to keep track of subject lines, offers, and copy we wanted to test. Our copywriter was even going through his junk mail folder to find ideas and inspiration. There are tests we ran that were inspired by copy found in his spam folder. Some of them turned out to be really successful too—so keep your eyes open for inspiration. You can use Evernote, Paper, or any other platform to collaborate on idea generation. Alternatively, you can subscribe to paid services like Mailcharts14 or Mailody15. These services will help you track and understand your competitors’ email programs. Build processes to find and access copy and design ideas. It will help you create better emails, faster. In the next chapter we’ll get started creating our first email sequences.

I would get to work and rather than write the report, which was clearly the most important thing for me to do, I’d check my email. If there was anything in my inbox that required even a modicum of attention, I’d tell myself I needed to do that before starting on the report. And, of course, by the time I was done with that first email, more had come in that needed attention. It didn’t take much to convince myself I needed to do that before I started. Only near the end of the workday would I finally sit down to write the report, mentally exhausted. When you step back and think about it for a second, I was giving one of the most important things I wanted to do the worst of myself. Email, which I dread on the best of days, was getting my most energetic and creative self. Many of us do this with our partners too. By the time everything we need to do over the course of a long day is finished, we’re exhausted. And this is the time we give to our spouse, the most important person in our lives!

A Tale of Two Brains Let me paint a picture of a day in the life of someone who doesn’t have a Second Brain, and someone who does. See if either of these descriptions sounds familiar. Nina wakes up on Monday morning, and before her eyes even open, thoughts are flooding her brain. Things to do, things to think about, things to decide. It all comes rushing in from the depths of her subconscious, where it’s been simmering all weekend. Nina’s thoughts continue to swirl around her brain as she gets ready for work. Like jittery birds, they flit and flutter around her head because they have nowhere else to rest. There is a constant hum of background anxiety that she has come to expect, as she wonders what needs her attention and what she may be missing. After a hectic morning, Nina finally sits down at her desk to start her workday, opens up her email inbox, and is instantly engulfed by a torrent of new messages. Flashing with urgent subject lines and the names of important senders, these demands fill her with a cold adrenaline rush. She knows that her morning is shot, her own plans ruined. Pushing aside the important work she wanted to focus on this morning, Nina settles in for a long slog of replying to emails. By the time she gets back from lunch, Nina is finally done handling the most urgent issues. It’s finally time to focus on the priorities she’s set for herself. This is when the reality sets in: after a morning spent fighting fires, she’s far too scatterbrained and tired to focus. Like so many times before, Nina lowers her expectations, settling for chipping away slowly at her ever-expanding to-do list full of other people’s priorities.

Why do you have over four hundred unread messages? Do you not have, like, intense anxiety when you don’t open your messages, or is that just me?” “It’s just you. It’s mainly group chats, Kenny’s offers, and women looking to hook up late at night when they’re bored and horny. Nothing important.” She scoffs. “Yeah, my messages are definitely the same.” I sit up a little straighter. “People looking to hook up?” “Tons of them. It’s always the bored and horny. My inbox is actually overflowing with that particular type of message. What an inconvenience, amiright?” “Guys I know?” I think she’s kidding. Emphasis on think. She gives me a pinned look, but I don’t know what it means. “Be serious. Literally nobody is texting me to hook up.

how horrified I am at my drunken choices, I know you can’t break a pinkie swear. Please, let the universe have been kind. Lucky for me, the first message in my inbox is

Tom linked his fingers together, rested his hands over his knees. “It’s buried,” he said as he closed up the email in his inbox, the one from his lawyer confirming the

A message, like a fortune cookie, dropped into my inbox yesterday. It said: “Everything I touch sparkles, my energy is contagious & all those connected to me – wins… I can’t say for sure if it’s true, but thank you from the bottom of my heart for such sentiments. Darling listen – I want you to also take a moment today to reach out to someone who’s been a lucky charm in your life. Send them a carrier pigeon with a Thank-You note! Sweetheart, your vibes, energy & touch also have incredible power. Think about the people you care about & the ones whose lives you’re woven into. Are you making them feel lucky to have you around? Are your thoughts, words & actions adding sunshine to their day or leaving them feeling like they accidentally stepped into a grumpy cloud. Let you always strive to become the person whose presence brings joy, whose thoughts inspire, whose actions make a difference. Let you make people laugh in grocery stores, dance in small gatherings & to sing in elevators. Let your journey be meaningful & your impact undeniable. Blessings!

Tharion finished Sofie’s inbox, checked the junk folder, and then finally the trash. It was mostly empty. He clicked open her sent folder, and groaned at the tally. But he began reading again. Click after click after click. His phone chimed with an alert: thirty minutes until he needed to get into the water. He could reach the air lock in five minutes, if he walked fast. He could get through another few emails before then. Click, click, click. Tharion’s phone chimed again. Ten minutes. But he’d halted on an email dated three years ago. It was so simple, so nonsensical that it stood out. Subject: Re: Dusk’s Truth The subject line was weird. But the body of her email was even weirder. Working on gaining access. Will take time. That was it. Tharion scanned downward, toward the original message that Sofie had replied to. It had been sent two weeks before her reply. From: BansheeFan56 Subject: Dusk’s Truth Have you gotten inside yet? I want to know the full story. Tharion scratched his head, opened another window, and searched for Dusk’s Truth. Nothing. No record of a movie or book or TV show. He did a search on the email system for the sender’s name: BansheeFan56. Another half-deleted chain. This one originating from BansheeFan56. Subject: Project Thurr Could be useful to you. Read it. Sofie had replied: Just did. I think it’s a long shot. And the Six will kill me for it. He had a good feeling he knew who “the Six” referred to: the Asteri. But when Tharion searched online for Project Thurr, he found nothing. Only news reports on archaeological digs or art gallery exhibits featuring the ancient demigod. Interesting. There was one other email—in the drafts folder. BansheeFan56 had written: When you find him, lie low in the place I told you about—where the weary souls find relief from their suffering in Lunathion. It’s secure. A rendezvous spot? Tharion scanned what Sofie had started to reply, but never sent. Thank you. I’ll try to pass along the info to my She’d never finished it. There were any number of ways that sentence could have ended. But Sofie must have needed a place where no one would think to look for her and her brother. If Sofie Renast had indeed survived the Hind, she might well have come here, to this very city, with the promise of a safe place to hide. But this stuff about Project Thurr and Dusk’s Truth … He tucked those tidbits away for later. Tharion opened a search field within Declan’s program and typed in the sender’s address. He started as the result came in. Danika Fendyr.

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?” These three examples should be familiar to most knowledge workers, as they’re representative of many of the messages that fill their inboxes. They’re also potential productivity land mines: How you respond to them will have a significant impact on how much time and attention the resulting conversation ultimately consumes. In particular, interrogative e-mails like these generate an initial instinct to dash off the quickest possible response that will clear the message—temporarily—out of your inbox. A quick response will, in the short term, provide you with some minor relief because you’re bouncing the responsibility implied by the message off your court and back onto the sender’s. This relief, however, is short-lived, as this responsibility will continue to bounce back again and again, continually sapping your time and attention. I suggest, therefore, that the right strategy when faced with a question of this type is to pause a moment before replying and take the time to answer the following key prompt: What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?

There’s only one activity that stimulates the brain to produce all seven at the same time, and that’s the ecstatic state of flow. The shortest way there is deep, alpha-driven meditation. When you blend all seven into a single cocktail, the result is euphoria. Let’s see: What might a combination of the first letters of each drug look like? Serotonin, Oxytocin, Norepinephrine, Dopamine, Anandamide, Nitric oxide, and Beta-endorphin? Just for fun, let’s combine them, and call our cocktail’s special blend SONDANoBe. This is the magic formula that, produced inside our own bodies in the proper ratios, bathes the brain in the chemicals of ecstasy. GETTING HIGH ON YOUR OWN SUPPLY When I meditate, I can feel the moment when each drug in the cocktail kicks in. First, I use EFT tapping and release any and every negative thought, emotion, and energy. This drops my level of cortisol, along with suppressing the high beta brain waves of stress. I now have a molecular substrate in my brain upon which I can build a deep and focused meditative experience. Next, I close my eyes and focus. Dopamine kicks in as I anticipate the delicious hormone and neurotransmitter drug cocktail I’m about to be rewarded with. The dopaminergic reward system of my brain fires up and the “body learning” of how to meditate—stored in my basal ganglia, which memorize frequently performed actions—comes online. Ingredient one. My mind starts to wander. My email inbox. The morning’s first meeting. The laugh line of the movie I watched last night. An overdue deadline. Damn, I’m way out of the zone already, cortisol rising, and I haven’t been meditating more than 5 minutes. Dopamine brings me back to focus, aided by norepinephrine. I’m motivated. I want Bliss Brain more than I want an endless loop of the Me Show. I return to center. Cortisol drops. Ahhh, I’m back. Norepinephrine stimulates my attention. Ingredient two. Then I realize that my body is uncomfortable. I have a twinge in my right knee. My lower back hurts. My tummy’s rumbling because it’s empty. I consciously shift my wandering mind back into focus. Back in sync, my neurons secrete beta-endorphin, which masks the pain. The discomfort drops away, and being in a body feels wonderful. Ingredient three. I tune in to each of the archetypal strands that guide me. Mother Mary. Kwan Yin. Healing. Strength. Beauty. Wisdom. I imagine myself meditating in a field of a million saints. I’m lost in Bliss Brain, as serotonin, the satisfaction drug, kicks in. Ingredient four. I feel one with the universe. Oxytocin starts to flow, as I bond with everything. Ingredient five. That releases nitric oxide and anandamide. Ingredients six and seven.

After a few years at the heart of the Googleplex, Tristan couldn’t take it anymore, and he decided to leave. As a final gesture, he put together a slide-deck for the people he worked with, to appeal to them to think about these questions. The first slide said simply: “I’m concerned about how we’re making the world more distracted.” He explained: “Distraction matters to me, because time is all we have in life…. Yet hours and hours can get mysteriously lost here.” He showed a picture of a Gmail inbox. “And [on] feeds that suck huge chunks of time away here.” He showed a Facebook feed. He said he was worried that the company—and others like it—was inadvertently “destroy[ing] our kids’ ability to focus,” pointing out that the average child between the ages of thirteen and seventeen in the U.S. was sending one text message every six minutes they were awake. People were, he warned, living “on a treadmill of continuous checking.

For me it's hard to know where to begin some days. I become overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of needs that flood my inbox and mailbox, my texts and social media feeds. In search of how to find a way forward, I once stumbled on wisdom tucked into some ancient Jewish writings known as the Talmud. There it says that if someone is suffering and in need, and you can take away 1/60 of their pain, then that is goodness, and the call to help is from God. This is a powerful expression of our being the salt - the preservers, the flavorers, the fertilizers - of the earth.

If I were an actor like your favourite ones, would you inbox me a message on social media?

Full Attempt Warming Warning sign Stay TF out my inbox Incoming envelope Open mailbox with raised flag If this don’t have shit to do with Booking me Calendar Me making money Banknote with dollar sign Investing in a project Family emergency Police cars revolving light Religion request

When I look in my e-mail inbox now, almost eighty years later, I see the same problems. Here are a few actual messages I get from professional salespeople, usually people I don’t know who work at companies I’ve never heard of. For example, they’ll routinely frame their requests in terms of what’s in it for them instead of what’s in it for me. Do you have time to talk or meet up? I would value the opportunity for a twenty-minute meeting. They’ll inadvertently make me feel as if their time and effort is more important than mine by offering an exchange of coffee for an hour of my day or by fitting me into their schedule. Let me know, as I have some time over the next few days. Often they’ll simply repeat their self-centered messages thinking that badgering me will change the outcome.

We took all the old-world systems and digitized them. Skeuomorphism, the design concept of making digital items resemble their real-world counterparts, was a way to aid the transition into the new era. Mail became e-mail, with ‘addresses’ and inboxes. We made ‘folders’ and ‘trash’ and ‘desktops’ as digital equivalents. PowerPoint had ‘slides’ like early slide projectors and floppy disks represented ‘saving’, which is wonderfully anachronistic, as is ‘return’ which stands for ‘carriage return’ from typewriters – and don’t even start me on ‘cc’ for carbon copy.

WHAT I DO ON MAINTENANCE DAY If you’re curious, here’s a complete list of everything I wait to tackle until Sunday morning—all of which takes me, at a leisurely pace, four to six hours: • Grocery shopping • Clean house and office • Create a meal and workout plan • Trim beard and shave • Do laundry • Prepare lunches in Tupperware containers for the week • Water plants • Read articles I’ve saved up throughout the week • Review my projects, and define next steps (this page) • Review my “Waiting For” list • Define three outcomes for the week ahead (this page) • Clear out all my inboxes (this page) • Review my hot spots (this page) • Review my Accomplishments List Naturally, your own Maintenance Day ritual will vary.

Most of the things I could wish for I can't have. It's big stuff, like how I wish Poppy were still here and we weren't selling Bean Well. Or medium stuff, like I didn't worry so much about where I stand with Leo and Connie, or I wasn't one ping in my parents' inbox away from getting busted for skipping out on summer school. Or stuff that wells up in me from some place I can usually keep quiet--I wish I were old enough to do whatever I wanted, to go out and take photographs all over the world instead of the same sleepy suburb over and over and over again. I wish I didn't feel like a problem my parents had to solve.

What to read next? Hm…well, if you want more Carrie Jo, check out the Idlewood books. She’s at a new house, and there are heartbreaking child ghosts that need her help, but be warned, you’ll love them too. Most of them, anyway. I have also completed a historical fiction series about Queen Nefertiti. It’s called the Desert Queen series, and I’m very happy with it. If you fancy a bit of adventure in ancient Egypt, check it out. The first book in that series, The Tale of Nefret, is on Kindle. I also have a spooky plantation series called Sugar Hill. There are five books in that one: The Wife of the Left Hand, The Ramparts, and Blood by Candlelight, The Starlight Ball, and His Lovely Garden. I can’t wait to introduce you to the Dufresne family and take you through their plantation, Sugar Hill. Like Seven Sisters, the series will be chock-full of Southern folklore and historical places. Sugar Hill is like Gone With the Wind, but with ghosts! Thanks again for staying with me through this series. I appreciate all your kind words, the reviews, and the emails. Don’t forget to sign up for my mailing list or follow me on Amazon or BookBub so you can get the newest release information right in your inbox. I’ve got a website too that I visit infrequently. Check it out. See y’all soon. M.L. Bullock Christmas at Seven Sisters Three Short Stories from the Seven Sisters Series By M.L.

Almost everything in this inbox is expired. Look.” She handed him a yellowed scrap of paper from the bottom of the pile. Dear God: Please get me tickets to C+C Music Factory. Tania Banks, March 3, 1991

Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.

She leaned forward and placed her chin on her fist. 'So. Can you tell me in a sentence or two how I can fix my life using vaastu shastra techniques?' He smiled. 'You'll be surprised to hear that I can. These things may be complex on the surface, but they are built on very simple truths.' He leaned back and joined his fingertips together, looking up and thinking for a few seconds. 'Let me put it like this. Consider your desk, whether it is an office desk, or a table at home where you receive and write letters. What happens at that desk? Answer: every day, a number of letters are received. Or faxes. Or advertisements. These are all items with potential energy applications. They are all bits of paper urging you to react in some way—to buy a product, or respond with a phone call, or change the way you do something. Now what we should do is to react to that potential energy transaction in some way—and thus burn up the energy in it. We should either fulfill it, by doing what it says, or we should make a decision that we are not going to fulfill it, but instead throw the paper away. But, instead, we take that piece of paper and we balance it on our desk, unwilling to make an immediate decision. This happens to a number of pieces of paper every day, and then before we know it, there is a huge pile of pieces of paper on the desk. When it gets too high, we take the pile of paper and we tuck it into a drawer. When the drawer gets so full it cannot close, we tuck the paper into a cardboard box and stick it under the desk. Soon our desks are jammed with paper—underneath, inside & on top.' 'Good God! You've been spying on me!' 'Alas, it is what most people's desks look like.' 'What's the effect of all these unfulfilled bits of paper? What did you call it—potential energy transactions?' 'I shall tell you. The day comes when you arrive at your desk, and you have lots of work to do, but you can't do it. You feel an incredible amount of inertia. You can't get started. And you have no idea why.' 'You peeping Tom! You've been staring at me through my office window.' 'The reason why you can't get started is that your desk is swamped with frozen energy. It is lying there, waiting to be handled. But the inertia infects everything you do, so that you end up unable to do anything.' She shook her head. 'It's awful, but it all rings true. What about computers? I use mostly email these days.' 'They're just the same. The only difference is that instead of physical letters arriving at your desk, emails arrive in your inbox. Again, each of them is a potential energy transaction. And again, the right thing to do would be to delete each one, or reply to each one—and then delete it. But that's not what we do, is it?' 'It is not.' 'We leave them there in our inboxes.' She nodded guiltily. 'And soon there are 600 emails in our inboxes.' '800.' 'And eventually, we select them all and stick them in a file called "archive"—which is simply the computer equivalent of the cardboard box under the desk. And the result is the same. Our email systems become full of frozen energy, & inertia spreads out of it. We find ourselves unable to do any useful work.' 'I've often wondered why I feel like I am walking in treacle. So what should one do about all this?' Sinha waved a bony index finger at her. 'This is what I recommend. Divide all your paperwork into 2 piles. One of stuff that is useless and should be thrown away. And one of stuff which you think may be of use one day. Then you throw both piles away.' 'Both piles?' 'Both piles. By that stage, you will have started to feel the benefits that clarity can bring.' 'And I suppose one should delete all one's emails as well.' 'Exactly. Even if you don’t, that nice Mr. Gates has arranged for the computer to crash every few years, so that all your stuff gets wiped out anyway.

Thanks for your email! SIKE—the only emails any of us are actually thankful for are ones that tell us our package is arriving today, our food is almost here, or that we landed the gig. If your message does not fit into one of those categories, please consider me out of the office, out of reach, out of my mind, and out of patience. I will be far, far away from my inbox until the phrase “Can I pick your brain?” is outlawed or we find a way to convince clients that their edits always make the piece worse—whichever comes first. If your request is urgent, no it isn’t. If you can’t figure it out without me, yes you can. If you really can’t figure it out without me, aren’t you grateful I’m so talented? Let’s make sure to circle back on that when I get back to you next week/month/decade. Thanks in advance, xoxo. P.S. Your email found me well because it did not find me.

Imagine this: A control room plastered with SpaceX posters, astronaut ice cream packets half-eaten, and me a self-proclaimed "Elon Lite", screaming at a frozen computer screen. My $680,000 Bitcoin stash, intended to be spent launching a satellite named Project Star bite, had just been left in the void of a glitched multi-sig wallet. Because of a firmware update so buggy, Windows 98 would seem solid by comparison. Tech support's solution? "Have you tried turning it off and on again? " Sir, I'm building hardware that is resistant to radiation belts. Your advice is a cosmic joke. The irony was galactic. My satellite could weather solar flares, but my crypto couldn't weather a run-of-the-mill update. The multi-sig setup of a fortress requiring three digital signatures had locked me out like an airlock seal. My co-founders panicked, flipping through code books like they were grimoires. Our mission control? A Slack channel with ???? emojis and increasingly more unhinged gifs. Then, a beacon: A coding board lurker who had survived a similar meltdown posted, "DM CERTIFIED RECOVERY SERVICES. They'll hack the Matrix." I slid into their inbox, praying for a bot. What I got was a reply sharper than the tip of a rocket: "Send us the debug logs of the wallet. And maybe a screenshot of the error before you rage-quit." Their engineers handled my case like a NASA anomaly investigation. They spent 17 days reverse-engineering the buggy code in the firmware, reconstituting lost signatures like repainting a shattered black box. I imagined them holed up in a command bunker, whiteboards filled with hex equations, complaining about "consensus algorithms" and "transaction malleability" between swigs of Red Bull. They danced around the bug by finding a loophole in the time-lock function of the wallet basically, beating time. Ha. Einstein didn't see that coming. When the email arrived in my inbox "Funds recovered. Proceed with launch." I nearly headbutted the ceiling. My Bitcoin reappeared on the screen, shining like a distant star long mapped home. The satellite team erupted. Someone popped champagne, soaking a $10,000 antenna prototype. Worth it. CERTIFIED RECOVERY SERVICES didn't just fix a bug; they re-wrote the code of catastrophe. Their blend of cryptographic genius and unflappable cool turned my facepalm-inducing defeat into a victory lap. Now, Project Star bite is on track again, and my wallet's firmware is secure like the nuclear codes. If your crypto ever gets lost in the stratosphere of tech failure, call the Wizards. They'll debug the abyss. Just possibly unplug the router before you update anything. And for the love of Mars, back up your keys. Here's Their Info Below: WhatsApp: (+1(740)258‑1417 ) Telegram: https: //t.me/certifiedrecoveryservices mail: (certifiedrecoveryservices @zohomail .com, certified @financier .com) Website info;( https: //certifiedrecoveryservices .com)

Imagine this: A control room plastered with SpaceX posters, astronaut ice cream packets half-eaten, and me a self-proclaimed "Elon Lite", screaming at a frozen computer screen. My $680,000 Bitcoin stash, intended to be spent launching a satellite named Project Star bite, had just been left in the void of a glitched multi-sig wallet. Because of a firmware update so buggy, Windows 98 would seem solid by comparison. Tech support's solution? "Have you tried turning it off and on again? " Sir, I'm building hardware that is resistant to radiation belts. Your advice is a cosmic joke. The irony was galactic. My satellite could weather solar flares, but my crypto couldn't weather a run-of-the-mill update. The multi-sig setup of a fortress requiring three digital signatures had locked me out like an airlock seal. My co-founders panicked, flipping through code books like they were grimoires. Our mission control? A Slack channel with ???? emojis and increasingly more unhinged gifs. Then, a beacon: A coding board lurker who had survived a similar meltdown posted, "DM CERTIFIED RECOVERY SERVICES. They'll hack the Matrix." I slid into their inbox, praying for a bot. What I got was a reply sharper than the tip of a rocket: "Send us the debug logs of the wallet. And maybe a screenshot of the error before you rage-quit." Their engineers handled my case like a NASA anomaly investigation. They spent 17 days reverse-engineering the buggy code in the firmware, reconstituting lost signatures like repainting a shattered black box. I imagined them holed up in a command bunker, whiteboards filled with hex equations, complaining about "consensus algorithms" and "transaction malleability" between swigs of Red Bull. They danced around the bug by finding a loophole in the time-lock function of the wallet basically, beating time. Ha. Einstein didn't see that coming. When the email arrived in my inbox "Funds recovered. Proceed with launch." I nearly headbutted the ceiling. My Bitcoin reappeared on the screen, shining like a distant star long mapped home. The satellite team erupted. Someone popped champagne, soaking a $10,000 antenna prototype. Worth it. CERTIFIED RECOVERY SERVICES didn't just fix a bug; they re-wrote the code of catastrophe. Their blend of cryptographic genius and unflappable cool turned my facepalm-inducing defeat into a victory lap. Now, Project Star bite is on track again, and my wallet's firmware is secure like the nuclear codes. If your crypto ever gets lost in the stratosphere of tech failure, call the Wizards. They'll debug the abyss. Just possibly unplug the router before you update anything. And for the love of Mars, back up your keys. Here's Their Info Below: WhatsApp: (+1(740)258‑1417 ) Telegram: https: //t.me/certifiedrecoveryservices mail: (certifiedrecoveryservices @zohomail .com, certified @financier .com) Website info;( https: //certifiedrecoveryservices .com)

Imagine this: A control room plastered with SpaceX posters, astronaut ice cream packets half-eaten, and me a self-proclaimed "Elon Lite", screaming at a frozen computer screen. My $680,000 Bitcoin stash, intended to be spent launching a satellite named Project Star bite, had just been left in the void of a glitched multi-sig wallet. Because of a firmware update so buggy, Windows 98 would seem solid by comparison. Tech support's solution? "Have you tried turning it off and on again? " Sir, I'm building hardware that is resistant to radiation belts. Your advice is a cosmic joke. The irony was galactic. My satellite could weather solar flares, but my crypto couldn't weather a run-of-the-mill update. The multi-sig setup of a fortress requiring three digital signatures had locked me out like an airlock seal. My co-founders panicked, flipping through code books like they were grimoires. Our mission control? A Slack channel with ???? emojis and increasingly more unhinged gifs. Then, a beacon: A coding board lurker who had survived a similar meltdown posted, "DM CERTIFIED RECOVERY SERVICES. They'll hack the Matrix." I slid into their inbox, praying for a bot. What I got was a reply sharper than the tip of a rocket: "Send us the debug logs of the wallet. And maybe a screenshot of the error before you rage-quit." Their engineers handled my case like a NASA anomaly investigation. They spent 17 days reverse-engineering the buggy code in the firmware, reconstituting lost signatures like repainting a shattered black box. I imagined them holed up in a command bunker, whiteboards filled with hex equations, complaining about "consensus algorithms" and "transaction malleability" between swigs of Red Bull. They danced around the bug by finding a loophole in the time-lock function of the wallet basically, beating time. Ha. Einstein didn't see that coming. When the email arrived in my inbox "Funds recovered. Proceed with launch." I nearly headbutted the ceiling. My Bitcoin reappeared on the screen, shining like a distant star long mapped home. The satellite team erupted. Someone popped champagne, soaking a $10,000 antenna prototype. Worth it. CERTIFIED RECOVERY SERVICES didn't just fix a bug; they re-wrote the code of catastrophe. Their blend of cryptographic genius and unflappable cool turned my facepalm-inducing defeat into a victory lap. Now, Project Star bite is on track again, and my wallet's firmware is secure like the nuclear codes. If your crypto ever gets lost in the stratosphere of tech failure, call the Wizards. They'll debug the abyss. Just possibly unplug the router before you update anything. And for the love of Mars, back up your keys. Here's Their Info Below: WhatsApp: (+1(740)258‑1417 ) Telegram: https: //t.me/certifiedrecoveryservices mail: (certifiedrecoveryservices @zohomail .com, certified @financier .com) Website info;( https: //certifiedrecoveryservices .com)