The Chaser

Adding one line that has never caused friction: asking whether the invoice was received and approved, specifically. Those are two separate events inside most companies and knowing which one has not happened tells you who to talk to.

The reframe in the first comment is the one that works: your contact is not ignoring you, they are not the person who pays. Emailing them harder is asking someone with no authority to feel worse.

Since I started asking for the accounts payable address in the first polite chase, forty-day invoices have basically stopped happening. Nobody is offended by it because it is an administrative question rather than an accusation.

A year of being fine and then silence is almost always a process change on their side, not a decision about you.

Budget the grinder like it is half the machine, budget water treatment like it is insurance, and get the electrical requirement in writing before you sign the lease.

Also worth knowing that hand sanitiser gets trapped under a band and is far harsher than soap. Two years of that during work and my wrist was a mess until somebody pointed it out.

None of the three, as stated. The version that has ever worked for me is publishing a decision with the reasoning attached: here is what I was choosing between, here is the data I had, here is what I picked and why, and later, here is whether I was wrong. A revenue chart with no decision behind it is a number, a changelog is a receipt, and narration is a diary. All three become interesting the moment they are attached to a choice someone else is also facing, because that is what makes a stranger stop and reply. At 45 minutes a week you can write exactly one of those a fortnight and it will outperform daily narration.

Agreed on predictability being the real product for IT buyers. I would still avoid per-user for an infrastructure tool where two admins manage a thousand nodes, because it prices the wrong thing entirely.

I did the version where you skip the list and it went exactly as you would expect. Big coordinated day, 900 visits, three directories, one moderately viral post, and zero signups, because the visitors had no context and no reason to care and I had no way to contact any of them again. The single change that would have fixed it was an email capture on the page from day one, so at least the 900 would have been reachable a second time.

Make sure the nib and feed are both fully submerged, not just the nib. The feed's job is to let air in while ink goes out, and if the breather hole is above the ink line you get exactly this.

It is a hobby purchase that makes better coffee, which is a perfectly good reason. Just do not put it in a spreadsheet and pretend it is an investment.

What would make this not worth doing is the best version of that question I have seen. It gives them a way to say a number without feeling like they have shown their hand.

It's the ink and the nib together: a dry-writing, high surface tension ink in a pen with a slightly tight tine gap. That ink is fine in a wetter pen and that pen is fine with a wetter ink, and the combination is what fails.

Three fixes in increasing order of commitment. Store it nib down for a night to confirm the diagnosis. Add one drop of water per 5ml of ink to drop the surface tension. Or gently widen the tine gap with brass shims, which I'd only do after the first two.

Also check the nib is fully seated. A nib pushed slightly out of alignment gives exactly this symptom with dry inks only.

Then dilute it slightly and you'll probably never think about it again. 10% water is unnoticeable in the colour and makes a real difference to start-up.

One Slack workspace each is the hidden tax nobody quotes for. I now charge a small onboarding fee partly to make people feel the cost of adding me to another tool.

I tracked this for a year in a spreadsheet because I did not believe my own feelings about it. My ceiling turned out to be three clients in active delivery plus two in maintenance, and the tell that I had gone over was not missed deadlines, it was that admin time per client roughly doubled - more status emails, more re-reading of old threads to remember where we were. The number of clients is a weak predictor; the number of open decisions I am holding is the real one.

Test before you commit next time. Buy one, write a page, then buy the three-pack. I have a shelf of expensive lessons.

Also worth knowing that the same brand can change paper supplier between print runs, so "this notebook was fine two years ago" isn't a guarantee.

In my experience there are exactly two delays that pay for themselves. One, you cannot take money safely or you would be shipping something that loses customer data, because those are the failures you cannot apologise your way out of. Two, something outside your control has a date attached, like an app store review or a partner announcement, and going early wastes it. Everything else, including onboarding roughness, edge cases at two percent, and logos, is a thing you fix in the first fortnight after launch with real users telling you which order to fix them in. Your billing edge case at one in fifty is a support email, not a delay.

I bought a large tin of a bargain oil once and used the last of it eight months later. Every batch from the back half of that tin spotted within a year and the batches from the first half never did. Same recipe, same water, same house. The oil was quietly oxidising in my cupboard the entire time and I was only smelling it once it was already in soap. Now I buy smaller and date the tin the day I open it.

Several, for your specific use. Four or five pages a day means the pen gets dropped, left uncapped on a desk for an hour, and forgotten in a bag over a weekend. That's a case for pens you aren't precious about, and multiple pens means you never stop mid-meeting to fill one.

But spend it as two, not four. Roughly 70-80 on two known-good workhorses in different nib widths, and keep the rest for ink, decent paper and a bulb syringe, because paper affects your daily experience more than the pen does. Buying four and finding you dislike the nib width on all four is the failure mode here.

The gold nib argument is real but it's about feel rather than performance, and you can't evaluate feel from a website.

Fair, and I'd agree if this were a journalling question. Meeting notes is a tools job, not a pleasure job, at least until you know what you like.

Try it on different paper before concluding anything. Toothy paper turns a slightly firm nib into sandpaper on upstrokes, and the same nib feels glassy on a coated sheet.