Duly Noted — Issue No. 1
I have started a newsletter.
This is, I am aware, not a radical act. People start newsletters the way they start diets — with conviction, a subject line, and the quiet understanding that most of them will not survive past February. The internet is full of newsletters that published four issues, paused “for the summer,” and were never heard from again. Their authors are fine. Nobody noticed.
I mention this not to lower your expectations but to establish them at a level we can both sustain. This newsletter will arrive every two weeks. It will be about work — specifically, the parts of work that nobody writes LinkedIn posts about because they are not inspirational enough to go viral and not catastrophic enough to warrant a thread.
The middle parts. The Tuesday-at-2pm parts. The parts where you are not thriving or struggling but simply continuing, with competence, in a role you understand reasonably well.
I have spent fifteen years thinking about these parts. I have built a consultancy around them. I wrote a book — Meeting Expectations: A Field Guide to the Annual Performance Review — that is entirely about the professional skill of receiving a rating you already expected and leaving the room without incident. It has chapters on nodding. I am not being flippant. Nodding, done well, is a strategic act.
But that is the book. This is the newsletter. And the newsletter is for something slightly different.
The book is a manual. It covers a specific event — the annual review — and gives you a methodology for surviving it. Duly Noted is for everything around the event. The weeks before the review when your manager starts making more eye contact than usual. The development goals you set in November and forgot by January, which is correct because that is what development goals are for. The slow, unremarkable Tuesday afternoons that constitute approximately 94% of your professional life and receive approximately 0% of the career advice published on this platform.
I am interested in those Tuesdays.
Not because they are secretly meaningful. They are not secretly anything. They are Tuesdays. But they are where the actual texture of a career lives — in the small decisions about what to respond to and what to leave until tomorrow, what to volunteer for and what to let pass, when to speak in a meeting and when to nod thoughtfully and write something in your notebook that may or may not be words.
These are skills. They do not have certifications. They are not taught in any programme I have encountered, and I have encountered several programmes, most of which had workbooks. But they are real, and they are learnable, and the people who are good at them tend to leave the office at a reasonable hour.
This newsletter will cover them.
What you can expect, specifically: one essay every two weeks on a topic related to professional maintenance, career sustainability, or the organisational dynamics that govern your working life in ways you may not have named yet. Occasionally I will reference clients — names changed, situations composited, identifying details removed to a degree that would satisfy a moderately cautious lawyer. Occasionally I will reference the book, because I wrote it and it is relevant. I will not do this often enough to be annoying, or at least that is the intention. You will let me know if I fail.
I will not tell you to network more. I will not suggest that your side project is your real calling. I will not use the word “intentional” as though it were a personality trait. If at any point I begin sounding like a keynote speaker at a regional sales conference, you have my permission to unsubscribe and my respect for doing so.
What I will do is write clearly about things that are true, in a way that is occasionally useful and reliably short.
That is the newsletter. You are now reading it. This has been noted.