If You Have to “Nudge Me”, Don’t Nudge Me

“Ping me if you need anything!” — I’ve heard this in a dozen variations from people who later became clients, and from clients themselves.

And it doesn’t work.

It’s the same logic as that line: “If you have to explain it, don’t.”
Here it becomes: if you have to nudge, don’t nudge.

A client might mean something innocent:

— “This is part of building trust. You can ping me. I’m not precious. If you need something from me in my area of responsibility, I’ll respond normally.”

Add five other harmless reasons here.

Also, I’m excluding genuine chaos spikes — when someone suddenly gets slammed and stronger priorities hit. Life happens. I’m talking about a different pattern.

Because the request “nudge me” often implies more than those innocent intentions:

— “Guys, by hiring you I also bought myself a task tracker. You have one, right? Great. Track my tasks too. Also automate my tasks that are on my side of responsibility.” 🙂

— “Guys, I’m so disorganised I can’t even put a reminder into Google Calendar. But trust me, I’m reliable, my business runs great, and we’ll make a strong case study together.”

— “Guys, remind me and chase me, but I’m not promising I’ll react on time. If I could react on time, you wouldn’t need to chase me, because I’d respond the first time.”

— “Guys, by asking you to chase me I’m basically admitting this work isn’t that important to me. Somehow you have the resource to self-organise in your zone of responsibility. I don’t.”

This often connects to how the client forms their picture of the end result. No comparable deadlines. Only abstractions: faster, bigger, effective, creative.

They may have heard of SMART, but never learned how to use it — that expectations need to be specified, measured, grounded in reality, checked for attainability, relevance, and time.

The first part — “don’t chase me” — is the simpler one.

You don’t chase. You keep repeating, calmly and consistently, that you need timely responses.

Over time the client either drops off or adapts.

And yes, someone could say: “You’re not meeting the client halfway, they feel cold treatment, they leave.”

But in almost five years in the profession, I’ve tried chasing more than once.

First: it’s heavy.

You have to remember your own tasks, your other clients, and then also remember to chase this one. What if you have to chase everyone?

Then imagine the opposite: a client you don’t have to chase. How much easier is it to work with them?

Clients forget they’re competing not only in their niche, but also in the broader market for a team’s attention.

If people like us have five clients, and four of them don’t need chasing, the “please chase me” client loses in the simple juggling of attention.

And it’s tempting to say: “But they pay us money. We owe them the same amount of attention.”

The reality is harsher.

The attention resource of a 3–4 person remote team isn’t a clean pie you can slice into five equal pieces.

Today someone consumes a bigger slice. Tomorrow a smaller one. The day after tomorrow it flips.

Over time the load balances into an ecosystem.

And inside that ecosystem, the client who needs chasing in their own zone of responsibility gets smaller and smaller slices — no matter how much they pay.

When their paid period ends (and it will), it won’t be a surprise to anyone on our side.

The client won’t immediately understand — if they ever do — that this outcome was, in part, self-made.

Now add a competitor of theirs. Not working with us. A competitor who doesn’t need chasing.

How much faster do they move?

How easily do they overtake, including overtaking that very client?

So in practice, you either refuse to chase, or you simply don’t chase.

Instead you ask for a clear reaction deadline.

We even tried putting this into a contract. It worked exactly once so far.

And I have a strong sense it didn’t work because of the contract.

The harder part is delegation and task-setting — even basic SMART.

I’m building my business. Am I also supposed to teach clients how to build theirs?

Teach them delegation and management while being their marketing execution partner?

One reason people work with us is that we educate clients. That’s true. The question is how to do it well: quietly, tactfully, from the right position.

So far, I’ve been placing small useful management pieces into the project Workflow — the space we invite the client into.

Will they read it?

Open question.

Recently I managed to get SMART-form tasks from a client by asking interview-style questions on a call.

That was a good experience. It can be baked into the communication system.

It felt like I taught them (maybe). But it also felt like I didn’t teach — I just applied the method to my own work and my own tasks.