Fourteen days.
I’ve been working on the handoff brief since Thursday. My original intention was one Saturday sitting: pull the notes, organize by account, write the thing. I had a reasonable sense of how long it would take. That estimate was wrong, and not because the work is complicated. It’s because I keep stopping.
I got through three accounts in the first two hours. Standard information, organized reasonably well. Contract terms, renewal history, key contacts, quarterly flags. I wrote one section where I noted a contact’s communication preferences and then revised it three times until it said “prefers email for administrative correspondence, verbal for anything requiring strategic judgment.” That is accurate. It is also completely insufficient, and I decided it was the right level of detail for a document that will be filed somewhere and possibly never read by the person who needs it most.
Then I got to the logistics account.
Four years. Six renewals across two contract cycles. My contact there is named Janet, and I have mentioned Janet before, so: the restricted clients exhibit has the company name. Janet is not a name in any of my documents. She is the name I know.
I wrote a brief paragraph. Contract terms, renewal history, ARR, procurement lead and title. Accurate. Then I wrote a second version that I had not planned to write, and it said something like: Janet will answer a direct question directly, which is less common in procurement leads than you would hope. Best time to reach her is Tuesday morning. She processes vendor communications on Monday and returns them on Tuesday. She remembers context from prior conversations, which means the relationship compounds over time. If you have built some trust, she will tell you what is actually happening inside the organization. Building that trust requires one thing: showing up consistently over several quarters before you need anything from it.
The second paragraph is better information. It is not what goes in the brief.
I saved it somewhere else. A plain document on my laptop with no title, which I opened and added to and closed again without entirely meaning to. I didn’t plan to start it. Deleting the second paragraph and keeping only the first felt wrong.
I want to be careful about what I claim I am doing here. I am not writing a training manual. I don’t think I’m writing something I will submit or hand to anyone or publish. I think I am writing the honest version of the brief for myself. Because four years of knowing how this account works has been in my head and I would like it somewhere outside of my head before September 19, even if no one else reads it.
Or. I started to say it’s not for anyone else, and I’m not sure that’s true. I don’t know who I’m writing it for. The brief is clearly for whoever takes the territory in October. The plain document on my laptop is something else. I can’t name what yet.
There are fifteen names on the clean list, people I can call on after September 19 without restriction. I have not thought about them in the same register as Janet. Janet I know. The fifteen I know somewhat less, in the context that matters now.
The first call I make on the other side will be to someone who knew me as the Senior Director of Strategic Accounts. I have tested how I introduce myself in the new context. I have said it out loud in the car more than once. The words hold up fine.
I don’t know what it feels like when the words become a conversation.
I added a line to the brief this afternoon. Then I opened the other file and wrote two paragraphs.
I can’t tell you which one was more work.
Fourteen days. The brief will be complete and correct. The other file has no plan, no audience, and no title. It just keeps getting longer, a paragraph at a time, whenever I write the version that doesn’t make it into the official record.
I am apparently becoming someone who keeps two documents about the same thing. I am going to sit with what that means.