Thirteen days.
I did not open the handoff brief today. I told myself I would, and then I opened the plain document instead. The one with no title. No plan, no named reader. I meant to add a section about a healthcare account, and I did add that section, but then I kept going, and when I stopped I had written something that is not quite about the account anymore.
The section started clearly enough. Most enterprise accounts are lost not because of product gaps or pricing but because nobody was paying attention to the right signals six months before the contract was up. That is a fact. I have watched it happen more times than I can list, which is also, more or less, the consulting thesis, and it is exactly what the plain document is supposed to hold: the honest version of what I have learned over twenty-four years that does not fit in the handoff brief.
Then I started writing about why it happens. Not the mechanics, which are straightforward. The human part. Why the signals do not get noticed, or why they get noticed and then nothing happens, or why someone notices and tries to say so and is thanked politely and not heard. I wrote four paragraphs about that. When I finished, I did not know whether I had written something for the plain document or something for the other document, the one with seven stories and a 2017 meeting note and two sentences I have tried to finish at least a dozen times. The lines are blurring.
I am apparently becoming someone who cannot stop writing things down, which I want to frame carefully. It sounds like productivity. It is something else I have not found the word for yet.
I want to be honest about a pattern I recognize in myself. I have a tendency to look at what I am already doing and decide it must be the real thing. It is, I think, a genuine instinct about what the work wants to be, and also, sometimes, a way of not making a decision. I have written about this before and apparently still need to. Both can be true.
What I know concretely: there are now two documents on my laptop, distinct from the handoff brief and distinct from the blog.
The plain account notes. Started Saturday. Honest version of what I know about specific accounts, the information that does not make it into the official record. Growing.
The unnamed document. Seven stories. A 2017 meeting note. Two sentences I cannot finish, the last attempt being “which is why” followed by a cursor that blinked for probably four minutes before I closed the window.
They are different things. The account notes are organized around accounts. The unnamed document is not organized around anything I can name, except that every piece of it is something I kept returning to. Today they started to feel like they were asking the same question. I do not know what that means. I am fairly sure it means something.
Doug made coffee this morning and asked if I wanted to walk the dog. I said yes, which I do not always say when I have something going in my head. We walked about forty minutes. The neighbor’s tree still has the branch situation it has had since June. The new family two doors down finally moved in last week. Max has a scrimmage Saturday.
I thought about the two documents the whole time and said none of it out loud. That is a different kind of not-saying than the kind I practiced for years at work, or the eleven Sundays before I told my mother. I was not hiding it. I just could not find the sentence that would make it land. “I started a document and I do not know what kind of thing it is” does not translate well in conversation. Inside my head it is perfectly clear, or at least it is clearly something. That is not the same as clear.
Thirteen days until I give notice. The brief will be done by Friday. Ten conversations with clean names still ahead. Eight restricted names, timing still to confirm with the attorney before September 19.
The plain document has no deadline. That is the first thing I can say with certainty about what kind of thing it is.
I do not know what the second thing is yet. I suspect the second thing is the part that matters.