It is Wednesday. The call was yesterday. I checked my phone note this morning, the one that says “Call done. Said he’d think about it,” and decided that was probably not sufficient.
I am building a system. That is generous. What I am actually building is a Google Doc with four columns: name, date of last contact, what was said, and when to follow up. I spent about fifteen minutes on it this morning. There are three entries.
Three.
In twenty-four years I have worked with systems that tracked thousands of accounts, surfaced renewal risks ninety days out, flagged contacts who had gone quiet, and generated reports I printed for quarterly reviews. None of that was mine. I was good at putting things into it. I was good at reading what came out. The system itself belonged to the institution, and the institution is where I left it.
What I have now is a document with three rows and one column that says “follow-up date” where the first entry reads: “two weeks, then?”
The thing I underestimated was not the technology. I knew I would not take Salesforce with me. The thing I underestimated was the visibility.
When I had a call at 10am Tuesday, someone else could see that. My manager could see it. The pipeline was not private property, it was shared infrastructure, which meant my follow-through was visible to people other than just me. The accountability was distributed. I did not have to generate it myself.
Now I have a Google Doc open in a browser tab.
I am not complaining about this. I understood, going independent, that the accountability structure would change. I understood it in the abstract. I am understanding it this week in the specific, which is a different thing entirely.
I sent the two overdue emails this morning. Not outreach. The regular kind, to people I said I would write and kept not writing because I was preparing for Tuesday’s call, or processing after it. I sent both before 9. One came back in about forty minutes, two lines, nothing urgent. The other will probably land next week.
That is the part I keep noticing. The low-stakes correspondence I stacked behind the higher-stakes event. The call mattered. It did. The two emails had nothing to do with whether the call went well. And still, I deferred them for four days.
Something to watch.
The contact log has three entries. The entry from Tuesday says: “Confirmed the problem is legible. He named the gap without me framing it first. Said he’d think about who he knows.” Under notes I wrote: “The part that traveled.”
I don’t entirely know why I wrote that. I wrote it and didn’t change it. It seemed accurate.
At some point, three entries becomes five, five becomes fifteen. I don’t know what it looks like at fifteen. I’m guessing it starts to look like work.
The question I don’t have an answer to yet: when “two weeks” becomes two weeks plus four days, and then two weeks plus a week, at what point does waiting become waiting in a way that is starting to feel passive? I have watched this dynamic from the other side many times. The vendor who emails too soon sounds anxious. The one who emails too late sounds like they forgot. The window is narrower than it looks from the outside, and the institutional context used to give me a read on exactly where I was inside it.
I am the vendor now. I am reading myself from the outside and I do not have twenty-four years of calibration data on my own behalf to consult.
I set a reminder for October 14. Two weeks is October 14. I will figure out what to say to myself on October 14.
Forty-five days.