🤧 Dispatch from the sick bed

There are seven used paper napkins on my desk right now. At this point they qualify as production equipment, not just a way to deal with a runny nose.

I was on a flight to Estonia a couple of weeks ago, and apparently I picked up a flu with an unusually strong work ethic. An early flight out, a late one back, long layovers, and no day in between where I could lie down let it build a stronghold.

So it dragged for weeks, into this one, which is why the napkins.

For about a fortnight, every morning opened with the same question. What is the one thing I actually do today?

Two weeks of answering that told me a few things about my priority order.

This isn’t a solo consultant problem

A flu is a private problem. What it did to my working capacity is not, and you don’t need to be self-employed or ill to end up in the same position.

The same squeeze arrives in at least three ways.

• You go down. Flu, vacation, a family emergency. The most personal version.
• Someone leaves. You run short-handed from the resignation until the replacement is properly up to speed.
• The big annual campaign eats the quarter. Black Friday preparation for e-commerce, the signature client event for B2B. A large block of your capacity is now committed to one thing, sitting on top of daily operations.

All three ask the same question. When you can’t do everything, what do you protect?

Most teams answer that in the moment, under pressure, on instinct. I answered it for fourteen days running, so I have opinions now, and I’m fever-free enough to share them!

The list you need before the time comes

Here’s what held: client work, first, without a second’s hesitation. This newsletter. And everything I’d promised the people currently going through the Positioning Setup with me, which meant showing up live, on camera, on the days it was in the calendar.

What I cut: LinkedIn, almost entirely. The Threads and Bluesky experiments I’ve been running, too.

The line I drew, and this is my general mindset about this whole prioritization business: if it helps build or sustain an ongoing relationship with the audience, it stayed. If it was me reaching toward people who don’t know me yet, it went.

However, “she carried on and nobody could tell” would be a lie. People could tell. I paused a course live session for two minutes in the middle of a coughing fit. Some of the smaller things I’d promised clients are still not done. What genuinely had to move, moved. Everything adjacent to it slipped.

The priority list itself was no surprise. I’d have recited it to you on a healthy Monday in June. Enforcing it took everything I had.

A priority order is untested equipment until something makes you use it. Mine had sat there for years looking sensible. When I actually had to apply it, I kept arguing with a voice telling me I could probably manage one more thing, and that going quiet on LinkedIn would cost me something big.

If you run a team, that voice has a Slack handle and budget authority. Your CEO has already committed to the trade show. Your sales director shares your pipeline number and did not agree to a shift in plans. The order isn’t yours alone to set, which means knowing it is about a third of the job and holding it is the rest.

The part I didn’t have to think about

There’s a mechanical reason staying afloat was possible, and I want to be precise about it.

I did have a backlog, and it helped. A backlog of finished drafts also runs out in roughly two weeks, though, which I can now confirm experimentally.

What I had on my side was the system of decisions already made. What I stand for. Who I’m writing for. How I sound, and what I refuse to publish. None of it needed working out again at six in the evening with a fever, because it’s written down and my AI setup loads it before doing anything. The thin sliver of usable thinking I had went where a human was required: what to say this week, whether the argument holds, and where the draft is being a coward.

This is the same argument I made a few weeks ago about consistency being a plumbing problem, arriving from the other end. Decisions that live in one person’s head get made again every time. Decisions on a page get loaded, and a depleted version of you can work from them instead of re-arguing them from scratch.

So I think it’s important to take a moment and agree on the prioritization early:

• The order itself, ranked and written down. Which things get dropped first, second, third, settled in advance so the decision is already made on the day nobody has the energy to make it.
• Someone besides you who has agreed to it. For a team, your CMO or CEO nodding at the order before you need it. On your own, a clear commitment to what stays on the board. Either way, holding it later becomes a reminder rather than a negotiation.

***

For the sake of not overselling this: with a clear head, the edition you’re reading would be shorter, sharper, and a good deal funnier. But it got done, with an important idea I wanted to share, and it was the right thing to spend limited brain power on.

The worst possible day to discover your priority order is the day something forces you to use it. Pick an ordinary Tuesday instead. Write the order down, then tell it to whoever gets to overrule you, while nothing is on fire and that conversation still costs you nothing.

Order matters,

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

Claude Now Watermarks Everything It Writes. Here’s What It Means for Marketers | Ahrefs conclusion on Claude’s new invisible watermark (btw, if you need a simple explanation on what it actually is, here you go) is exactly my stance: what matters is whether the output is worse than the work you’d have done anyway. A strong idea, no matter how exactly it’s executed, matters.

How to turn your AI into a world-class designer | Design isn’t my field, which is exactly why I liked this. It shows how to get genuinely good design out of AI: seeding prompts with random strings to escape the model’s defaults, then running a separate critic model that scores screenshots until they clear 9/10.

Amazon’s Writing Culture Explained | I keep getting sent 30-page documents that would be sharper at six, and AI has made that worse. So it’s good to get a reminder about Amazon’s rules: sentences under 30 words, data instead of adjectives, no adverbs, and meetings that open with 20 minutes of everyone reading in silence. Bezos reckons a good memo takes a week.

👀 Two for fun

This tour of a very ordinary apartment | Scroll through and find out which unremarkable objects somebody once called a miracle. A useful reminder of what you stop noticing.

This origin story for the selfie | Robert Cornelius took the first one in 1839 with a camera made from a tin box and opera glasses, holding still for up to fifteen minutes. Trivia for the terminally online.

🐈 Weekly cat

A very hissy guy gets deactivated by a hug.