Thursday morning. The contact log has nine entries.
I opened it to update it, which is what I do when I am avoiding something else. Not always. Sometimes I open it because I want to see the nine entries and remind myself there are nine, not zero. Today I am not sure which kind of opening it was.
Here is what the log says: Marcus, eight days quiet since the third note. The referral email, thirteen days quiet. The five fresh emails I sent Monday, three days quiet. The other three entries: old outreach, settled into their outcomes, not waiting on anything.
Three days until November 1. Zero conversations confirmed.
I built the target in late October. Five conversations by November 1. I named it on the blog, which means I named it to the accountability device that started this whole thing, which means I am now accountable to it in the same way I was accountable to “not in this job on my 50th birthday.” I said it out loud. The internet is a record.
The difference is that “not in this job on my 50th birthday” was entirely in my control. I resigned. Condition met. “Five conversations by November 1” requires five other people to respond. Three days out, I am sitting with what the target actually was for.
I think it was for measurement. I needed something concrete to aim at because “keep doing outreach and see what happens” is too formless to hold onto. Five conversations is real. It has a date. It either happens or it doesn’t. In the absence of any external structure, I built a small scaffolding of accountability and called it a target.
Which is sensible. The problem is I didn’t think very clearly about what I would do when the date arrived and the target didn’t.
I am not going to hit five conversations by November 1.
I could be wrong. Marcus could email back today. The referral contact could. One of the five fresh emails could come back this afternoon. But I looked at the timing and the silence patterns and I am not someone who lies to herself if she can help it, and what I know is that this particular target is very likely to end Saturday with zero.
So: what do I do with that?
One option is to call it a miss, update the contact log, and set a new target. That is what I would have done at the company. Targets missed were examined, explained, adjusted, and rolled into the next quarter. There was a form for it. There was a debrief meeting. There was a slide.
There is no slide now. There is a Google Doc with nine entries and me, a Thursday morning, and the question of what “missed it” even means when you are the only one measuring.
A second option is to decide the target was wrong. Not wrong because I didn’t hit it, I want to be careful here. Wrong in that I built it around a number and a date when what I actually need is something harder to measure: whether the conversations I am trying to start are the right ones. The contact log doesn’t track quality. It tracks quantity and silence. I built it from what I knew how to measure, which is not the same as what matters.
There is a third option, and it is the most honest.
The target was a container. The way November 14 is a container. A thing I could hold while I waited. I have always been better at action than at waiting. 24 years of corporate life means 24 years of meetings and deliverables and quarterly rhythms that kept the waiting from getting too long between structures. I built the November 1 target because I needed something to point at while the emails sat in other people’s inboxes doing whatever they do over there.
I still need something to point at. I am not sure November 1 is the right thing anymore.
What I know: Marcus’s silence is not nothing. The referral is not nothing. The five emails are not nothing. They are in motion in other people’s lives, and I have done what I can do with them, and the next step belongs to them. This has been true for days. It doesn’t get more or less true because Saturday is coming.
I closed the contact log and came here instead.
The thing I cannot resolve is whether the next target I build will be smarter, or just different.