“What kind of life am I living that I am 4 days behind on email......”
The neglected message was not a customer emergency or a broken server. It was a thread about naming a Volkswagen van.
My contribution was Axl.
Maybe the van looked like an Axl. Maybe I had been listening to too much Guns N' Roses. I also announced that Axl would be the name of my first son, which felt like a perfectly reasonable thing to add to a vehicle-naming discussion.
The email backlog was the more honest part.
I normally answered quickly. Messages were how I kept projects moving and stayed connected across all the travel. Watching them pile up was a reliable sign that I had taken on more than the week could hold.
I was starting a new Director role at Shutterstock. Ops Dojo had just become an actual company. The previous job had ended badly enough to make a clean transition impossible. School had been put aside. Normal life kept arriving anyway.
Four days does not sound like much now. At the time, email was where plans, work, friendships, and half the internet lived. Falling four days behind meant resurfacing into several different versions of your own life.
Each thread assumed it was the only thread.
There was infrastructure Chris. New-job Chris. Side-company Chris. Friend-who-should-probably-answer Chris.
The van thread was a tiny break from all of it. No strategy. No organizational problem. No financial model. Just a silly name and an unnecessary declaration about a hypothetical child.
I answered late.
Axl was still a good name.