"It's just emails and text messages."
The Copywriter Column #208
There's a vibe I've come to recognize over the years — a weighty, frantic energy that settles in after staring at an Asana board too long.
My team and I slip into this rhythm unawares, shoulders gradually tensing as we mentally tally the cascade of looming deadlines: a dozen email campaigns needing copy by tomorrow, a landing page revision due end of day, and a dozen unread messages in Slack all communicating a perceived sense of “urgency.”
In these moments, I find myself whispering under my breath: "Remember, it's just emails and text messages. Nobody's going to die today."
The relief is almost physical – a release of breath I didn't realize I was holding.
I say this to my team often.
The thing is, we work in marketing, not an emergency room.
We craft words that attempt to persuade people to buy things they probably don't desperately need. We don't hold beating hearts in our hands or make split-second decisions that determine whether someone walks again. We push pixels and arrange letters in sequences designed to make people feel something about a product.
I get it, I understand the economics at play.
I know that a botched email campaign might mean missing quarterly targets. That a poorly constructed message might lead to lower conversions, which impacts revenue, which affects payroll.
The domino effect is real.
But so is perspective.
In our industry, we've developed a curious talent for manufacturing urgency. We've created elaborate systems of artificial deadlines and invented metrics that ping our phones at exactly the right time.
And some have convinced themselves that a 2% drop in conversion constitutes a crisis worthy of emergency meetings and last minute pivots.
But here's what I've learned over two decades in the workplace: the most effective marketers are the ones who understand the true weight of what they're doing.
They bring a certain lightness to their craft – not carelessness, but perspective.
They understand that creating space between themselves and the work allows them to see it more clearly, to infuse it with humanity rather than desperation.
(This is still something I struggle with, btw.)
But some of the best projects I've ever worked on came from teams that were having fun, not teams paralyzed by fear.
The most effective ideas emerged when the team felt liberated to experiment, not when they were chained to templates out of terror of missing KPIs.
This isn't an argument for mediocrity or a suggestion to care less. It's quite the opposite.
It's about caring more effectively. About understanding that stress narrows vision while calm expands it. About recognizing that "good enough" delivered on time consistently beats "perfect" delivered sporadically in spectacular fashion.
Next time you or your team is spiraling into crisis mode over a subject line or agonizing over the exact shade of blue in a call-to-action button, try reminding the room: "It's just emails and text messages."
The paradox of marketing is this: when we stop treating our work like life-or-death scenarios, we create work that actually connects with real human lives.
And maybe that's the secret ingredient that's been missing all along – not more urgency, but more humanity.
Now, back to those campaigns. They still need to be written.
But perhaps I can write them with the relaxed precision of someone who knows exactly what he’s doing: just trying to tell a good story, not saving lives.
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