The Tyranny of the Single Opt-In Intro
A sure sign that a situation has gotten out of hand is when you need to create a scripted response to it.
I was driven to that point a few years ago when I received one single opt-in introduction email too many. My employer at the time had posted a rare set of job openings and I’d been inundated with dozens of that age-old request to “learn more about my experience.” Ordinarily, these wouldn’t have been such irritants. But the deluge coincided with a stressful period in my life — my own taxing job hunt, an impending move, looking after an elderly parent — and my inbox was increasingly the site of repeated demands for time and energy I didn’t have to give. But while a cold email from a stranger is easy enough to ignore, most of this outreach came from people I knew cavalierly connecting me to people I didn’t without asking my permission first. The terms single opt-in intro and double opt-in intro hadn’t yet entered my vocabulary, but even though I didn’t have a name for them, I knew these connections were disrespectful incursions into not just my inbox and calendar, but my mental and emotional space. My heart rate would spike every time I got one of these, someone essentially volunteering one of my most precious commodities — my time — without my consent. Luckily, Google had just introduced one of Gmail’s greatest features, the canned response. I spent forty-five minutes one…
