I didn’t send out the last issue of Underneath the Numbers. It’s the first time I’ve “missed” sending it out.

Every email marketer, every course, every person who has ever advised me on this says the same thing: consistency is everything; the schedule is the game; never miss, no matter what. They’re not wrong, and I heard their voices all week as I was working on the draft. And yet, when the deadline to schedule the email to go out approached, and eventually passed, I didn’t pull the trigger.

This wasn’t writer’s block or laziness. (I had five different options I was working on.) It’s just that none of them held up when I got to the payoff.

I woke up Tuesday and no email had gone out. It was out on my morning run as I reflected on what held me back from sending something, and what I started to realize around mile two was that I had two rules in conflict with each other:

● Send an issue each week

● Only send something I feel is worthy of sending

Both are good rules, but it’s hard to honor both in a week when the writing just isn’t there. One had to win, and I had to decide which one, based upon my preferences and beliefs.

It would be easy to say I’m just making excuses, but skipping because the schedule was less important than the worthiness of the email was an intentional decision on my part. If I had skipped simply because I didn’t feel like it… well, that can be (bad) habit forming. After all, they both produce the same empty inbox, but they are not the same thing. In my opinion, the difference is whether I can say which rule I was intentionally serving. And that intentionality produces different emotions in how I feel and relate to the outcome.

What made the call possible wasn’t that one rule was better than the other. It was that I know what this newsletter is supposed to be. Once that part is clear, one of those rules is fundamental and the other one is a schedule.

Every owner has a rule they’ve inherited from someone credible. The daily team huddle that improves communication. The social media strategy that keeps you in people’s feeds. The hire made because you hit a revenue threshold. What makes them hard to break is that they’re right. Consistency is everything for a newsletter. The huddle does improve communication. That’s why we adopt them in the first place.

But most of the decisions that stall us aren’t between a good option and a bad one. They’re between two things that are both defensible, where one of them has to lose this particular week. Do I work this evening and ask my spouse to drive my kid to practice, or do I drive to practice and figure out the work another way? Neither one is wrong on its own merit. You can’t settle it by weighing the merits, because the merits are even.

What settles it is knowing what you’re aiming at. Without that, the loudest voice wins, and the loudest voice usually belongs to whoever handed you the rule, because their reasoning is finished and yours isn’t.

Then there’s what you carry out of the decision, which matters more than I used to think. I can drive to practice and still spend the whole evening feeling behind on the work I didn’t do. Same choice, same night, and I’ve managed to take the thing I decided was more important and turn it into something I resent. The deciding was never the only part.

I missed an issue. Nobody unsubscribed. Nobody wrote to ask where it was. I was more worried about missing it than anybody else was.

~ Nolan

PS - If this one made you think of someone, send it their way