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The pattern hiding behind my best emails
When I first started sending weekly emails, some of those emails took me hours to write.
Not exaggerating. Four to six hours. For one single email.
I'd sit there hemming and hawing over what to write. Start something. Stop it. Start something else. Stop that too. By the time I hit publish I was dreading having to do it all again the next week. I remember thinking, there’s gotta be a better way than this.
So I started paying attention to which of my emails actually worked, and more importantly, which ones felt the best to write.
And after a while, I noticed many of them followed a similar pattern.
Not necessarily similar topics or stories, but just the general shape underneath them.
So I started leaning into that pattern on purpose. I’d dutifully write inside it again and again. And as I started doing that, every time my girlfriend asked me how my daily email went that day, I’d enthusiastically reply, “I think I wrote my best one yet!”
Now she just says, “You always say that…”
And these days I can bang out a genuinely good email in about 15 minutes. Some days I’ll take 30, or even 40 if I’m feeling like it. But honestly, half the time in 15 minutes it’s done.
Which is good.
And since it’s an email. That’s better than good.
So I ended up creating a process for the whole thing and calling it the SOLO method.
And the reason it works so well is because it leans into the exact way that humans have been communicating with each other for millions of years. And once you see how it works, you won’t be able to unsee it. And once you start writing inside it, sitting down to turn your ideas into emails stops feeling like work, and starts feeling like one of the more pleasurable parts of your day.
At least that’s how it went for me.
Anyway, if you want to see the system I use to write 99% of my emails, go here:
Talk soon,
Kevin Hood