Last January I sat down with a stack of index cards and tried to write the name of every person who had shaped my work over the past decade. Not collaborators in the formal sense — just people whose ideas, offhand remarks, or quiet encouragement changed the direction of something I was building.
The exercise broke something open. I realized that for years I had been storing these relationships inside software designed to move people through stages. The language alone should have been a warning. Nobody wants to be a "lead."
The Notebook Method
So I started a different practice. Every Friday morning, I open a plain notebook and write down three people I spoke with that week: what surprised me, what they care about, and one detail worth carrying forward.