It is Saturday morning. I have been awake for twenty minutes and I have already opened the contact log.
I noticed this. Three days old, three entries, nothing in it that wasn’t there when I built it Wednesday morning. I read the rows anyway. Then I closed the laptop and made coffee and came back.
I think I am doing to the contact log what I spent twenty-four years watching people do to their inboxes.
I have been thinking about October 14. I said in this space yesterday that I would figure out what to say to myself when the reminder fires. Eleven days. I have not yet produced anything.
That is not fair. I am thinking about it constantly. In the shower, walking the dog, the window between five and six a.m. when I wake up before the alarm and lie there. I am doing something. What I have not done is write anything down. So either the thinking hasn’t finished, or I am using it as a reason to not yet write, and I cannot tell which from inside it.
There is a thing I know about vendor follow-up from twenty-four years on the account side of B2B software contracts. The window after an initial positive conversation is narrower than it appears from outside the meeting room. Email too soon and you seem anxious: the call is still warm and you are already asking for the next step. Wait too long and the contact has moved on to other concerns, and your name lands in the same category as things they meant to get back to.
The right window, in my experience: ten to fourteen days. Brief note, warm tone, one concrete next step.
I know this material well. One side of it. The account-side version. The calibration I built over two decades was built from inside the room, not from sending emails into it.
What I do not know is how to apply this when I am both sides of the transaction. Both sides, or all three. I am the account team that said “two weeks,” the vendor who has to send the note, and the follow-up system that is supposed to tell me when two weeks is up. That is a lot of roles for one Google Doc and a reminder I set myself.
I keep telling myself I know what to do. I know what to do from one side of the table. That turns out to matter.
This morning I walked the dog. Zoe asked if I was going. Max asked about bagels. We did not have bagels. These are the people I live with.
I spent most of the walk thinking about what to actually say in the follow-up note. Something brief. Something that sounds like I am not counting the days, which is technically inaccurate, but a note that communicates counting would be wrong. Something that opens a conversation without suggesting I am running low on patience, which I am not: I set the date myself, I have precisely the patience I chose to have.
But also: something true.
I still don’t know what “something true” looks like from the vendor side. I know what I would have told the vendor to write. I’m learning that knowing the advice and being able to take it are two different skills that I developed separately, and I only brought one of them with me.
Eleven days. I’m thinking. At some point the thinking becomes the note.