A selection of what showed up in replies this month. Lightly edited for length.
"How do you say no to your co-founder without it becoming a whole thing?"
Separate the no from the reasoning, and give the reasoning first. "Here's what I think happens if we do this, here's the cost I'm not willing to accept, so - no, not this quarter" lands very differently from a bare no followed by justification under pressure.
"What do you actually do about burnout on a five-person team, where there's no HR to escalate to?"
Name the workload out loud, in writing, before it becomes a feeling. Most burnout on small teams isn't about hours - it's about carrying a decision nobody else knows they're carrying. Surface the decision, and often the exhaustion follows it out.
"Best meeting you ever cancelled?"
A weekly "alignment sync" that had existed for so long nobody present could say what it was meant to align. We cancelled it for one month as an experiment. Nothing broke. It's been eight months.
Keep the questions coming - reply to any issue and I read every one, even the ones I don't have a good answer to yet.
A quick code note
A few readers asked what we use to track the weekly send checklist. It's genuinely this simple:
send-checklist:
- subject line reviewed aloud
- pricing or claims read verbatim by a second person
- links clicked, not just eyeballed
- schedule confirmed in local time, not UTC
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