I've started giving myself a commute again.

Two or three mornings a week. Up early, coffee in hand, twenty minutes along the seafront before I go anywhere near the laptop.

That was this week. God's country. Sunderland coast!

Here's the thing though. When we all stopped commuting, everyone agreed it was the single best part of working from home. An hour back. No traffic, no train, no crazy person on the tube talking crap. I said it too.

But the commute was doing a job none of us gave it credit for.

That bookmark before and after a day way most valuable than I thought.

Now most people wake up, and the first thing that touches your brain is someone else's message. A Slack, an email, a missed call from a prospect. Your day gets set by whoever contacted you first.

That's reaction mode. And reaction mode is a close cousin of the survival mode I wrote about last week.

Because when you start the day responding, you never stop responding. You're on the back foot at 7am and you're still there at 4.

The walk doesn't make me productive. Let's be honest, nothing measurable happens on it. But I arrive at my desk having already decided what today is about, instead of finding out from my inbox.

That's the whole thing. Twenty minutes of deciding, rather than being told.

You don't need a seafront. You need ten minutes where you can't do anything about anything.

I’d strongly recommend it to anyone.

What I Listened To Last Week

Lara Acosta on The James Smith Show. The episode's called The Problem With LinkedIn.

It's a good listen and a fair bit of it is critical, which I liked. It's not a hype piece about posting every day and watching the money roll in.

But it did make me reflect on what LinkedIn has actually given me, and the honest answer is a hell of a lot.

Without posting on LinkedIn, I'm not sure I'd have co-written Problem Prospecting?!

I probably wouldn't have started my own business.

And I definitely wouldn't have started a YouTube channel.

None of those were the plan. I started posting to generate a bit of pipeline. Everything else arrived as a bonus.

That's the part people miss when they're judging it on leads in month one. The leads are just a piece of the pie.

You just have to start. And stick at it for longer than five minutes.

This Week's Framework: Voicenote, Then Three

Talking about LinkedIn. Here’s a LinkedIn messaging tip that feels wrong but works too well not to use.

Step one. Send a voicenote first. Thirty seconds, their name, why you're reaching out, the problems you solve for people like them and a simple CTA. Almost nobody does this, which is precisely why it lands.

Step two. Leave it a few days. Doesn't matter how many really.

Step three. Then send three messages in a row, together, in one go.

That last one makes people wince. It shouldn't. Three short messages arriving together reads like a human who's just thought of something. One long paragraph reads like a template.

Reply rates on this are the best I've had.

In The Business This Week

Four inbound leads. From LinkedIn. People who came to me.

I've done outbound my entire career. Every deal I've ever closed started with me interrupting someone's day. So there's a small, daft part of me that finds inbound almost disingenuous, like I haven't earned it.

Not a big enough part to turn them down, obviously.

And I still do outbound. I'll always do outbound. Why would you want one when you can have both?

But here's what connects it to the walk, and to last week.

Inbound doesn't just give you leads. It gives you the thing I keep coming back to: room. Four conversations that started themselves means I'm not desperately needing a deal to land. I can ask a proper question. I can tell someone they're not a fit and mean it.

Headspace in the morning. Pipeline that isn't entirely dependent on me interrupting strangers. Same result. You stop selling from need.

Everything good in this job seems to come from that.

Thanks for reading.

See you on the next one.

Stu