It’s July 2. I checked the inbox at 7:08, because I am apparently not breaking that habit, and found the same categories of nothing that have been there for seventeen days and nine days respectively. I have stopped telling myself it doesn’t mean anything and started just noting that it means exactly as much as it means, which is: I still don’t know.
This morning I sat in a product alignment meeting. I am not on the product team. I have been listed as a key stakeholder on this particular recurring for two and a half years, which is the company’s way of saying you have customer relationships we might occasionally want to extract information from, without giving you a seat at the table where the information goes. The format is: I have context, I give the context, someone types something I cannot see, the meeting moves on.
Today I gave context about a customer concern I have been watching for six weeks. The product manager nodded, typed something, moved to the next item. That is the correct outcome for a key stakeholder. I went off mute, said what I had to say, went back on mute.
Somewhere in that sequence, I caught myself doing something I have been doing for months without naming it: I was filing the moment away. Not for the meeting, not for my quarterly review notes. For tonight.
That is what sixty-eight days of writing has done. I think. Actually, I’m not sure “writing” covers all of what this is. Sixty-eight days of keeping some kind of account.
I started this because I needed a commitment device, which I said on day one and meant, and which is still true. But somewhere around day forty, the blog also became the thing I am writing toward when I’m not writing. I move through meetings now with something like a second part of my brain running in the background, noting things I know I will have to account for later. I notice the shape of a conversation while it’s still happening. I hear a phrase and think: I will need to be more precise about that.
I do not think this is entirely healthy as a way to be present in a meeting. I also have not been able to stop doing it, which tells me something about where my attention actually is.
The question I cannot answer is whether the writing taught me to notice, or whether I was already becoming someone who noticed things she used to explain away, and the blog is just where it goes now. Those are different processes. The first means the blog made me more observant. The second means something shifted first and the blog is the outlet, not the cause.
I suspect the second. But “I was already paying attention, I just needed a place to put it” is a flattering interpretation of my own process. I have gotten careful, in the last sixty-eight days, about flattering interpretations.
I have been in product alignment meetings, in some form, for twenty-four years. I have given the key stakeholder context, watched it get nodded at, gone back on mute. This is not new. What is new is that I walked out of this morning’s meeting with a sentence I wanted to write down, and it had nothing to do with the product.
I wrote it down. It’s not in this post. It’s in the other document, the one with eight stories that I keep returning to and still won’t name. The sentence didn’t fit any of the eight. I put it at the bottom anyway.
At some point, filing things away has to give way to doing something with them. The blog is a record, and records are useful. The document is something else that I have not yet fully understood. The watching is useful up to a point, and I cannot tell exactly where that point is.
Seventeen days. Nine days. One document without a name and a sentence at the bottom that I cannot place.
I am paying attention. I am not yet sure what I am paying attention for.