School's almost out and the cabin list is on the fridge. Every year the board game debate starts. There's a hard limit on what fits in the truck and everyone has opinions. The negotiation is real. One thing that's already locked in: the new hockey-themed Yakety Pack deck we've been building. Small box, works anywhere, and the boys have been asking about it since we finished the prototype. Everything else is still being argued.

The Monday number I look at first isn't shipments out. It's how Friday's receiving closed. Here's the actual practice. Every PO that closed last week gets one of two marks: clean, or closed-with-questions. Quantity mismatches, damaged cartons, SKUs that didn't match the packing list, anything that made someone stop and ask. The ratio is the number. A clean week means this week starts at full speed. A messy week means Monday starts with fires that look like picking problems but aren't. Most ops problems are last week's inputs wearing this week's costume. If you run your own warehouse, track that ratio for a month. It predicts your week better than your order forecast does.

End of May. Two moments on the work side that mattered. Henry & Sons shipments started going out clean. CanShip added UniUni and ShipWizmo to the carrier mix, which sounds small until you've spent a quarter trying to bolt one on yourself. Two more months of build-in-public posting taught me what hits and what doesn't on here. Posts about the moments out-perform posts about the framework, every time.

Last Sunday of May. The grass finally got tall enough to hide the road hockey balls we lost in March. Going to mow it after coffee. The detail I remember from a week tends to be inversely proportional to how busy it was. The slow weeks come back in pictures.

The founder advice I keep coming back to is from operators who've been at it long enough to have weathered a downturn. Current-success advice tends to be calibrated to whatever tailwind is happening at the moment. The advice from operators who've scaled and then had to figure out how to scale again is calibrated to the actual variance. Most of what I'm hearing today from people two years in is probably right for a 2026 market. The decade-in voices are right for whatever market is coming after. The second group is harder to find on social. Worth the work.

Last weekend in May. Hockey wraps end of June. Lacrosse runs until July. We get five or six weeks of summer before tryouts start and the cycle picks back up. Unless I end up renting summer ice for the boys and their friends, which is also a thing. Same on the work side. May used to feel like a quieter month and now it's the runway into summer planning.

The Parent Power-Up expansion was the deck the kids didn't know we were building. Same format, flipped roles. Kids draw the prompts, parents answer. The first pull at our house had one of my boys asking me what I'd been most embarrassed about at his age. That was the bridge we hadn't realized was missing. Building things that work in both directions is harder. Worth it.

Friday notebook review. Started doing this in January. The pattern that keeps showing up: what I thought would matter on Wednesday usually didn't, what came in mid-week often did. The Monday plan was never wrong, the week just kept teaching.

Inventory accuracy at BTS is where we're spending most of our planning time right now. The 3PL space talks about it like it's a solved problem. The difference between a 95% accuracy SLA and a 99% one is bigger than it sounds at brand-volume scale. We're not at 99 yet. The path there is what we're working on this quarter.

The number worth tracking that almost nobody does. Same-day fulfillment percentage broken out by what time the order came in. The daily aggregate hides the operational tell. Morning orders and afternoon orders are two different stories. The afternoon number is usually where you'd find the bottleneck.

🇨🇦 Canadian DTC is small enough that a "good month" can be couple thousand orders, not tens of thousands. The math doesn't transfer down from US playbooks. The brands I see scaling here are not trying to be a smaller US brand. They're solving for actual Canadian wants and needs.

Memorial Day in the US. Regular Monday up here. Half my inbox is dark today. Doesn't change anything about how the week works on my end. Does mean less noise to push through this morning, which is the closest thing to a planning day Monday ever gets. Going to use it for the Tuesday brief instead of triaging email.

One of my boys drew three cards in a row from the YPC deck last night that all hit the same nerve. We talk about gaming a lot in the house. We don't actually talk about it the way the cards push you to. That second layer is the part you can't shortcut with screen-time rules.

Sunday morning, kids still asleep, coffee number two. Used to spend Sundays trying to get ahead of Monday. Doesn't work, never did. The week is going to do what it's going to do regardless. The Sundays I remember are the ones where I just let it be Sunday. Tomorrow the house wakes up.

Half the founder advice I read is about how to be busier. The good half is about how to be less busy without being less effective. Haven't fully figured it out, but the move that helped most this year was treating Friday afternoon as a hard stop. Saturday morning is the cushion.

Lacrosse tournament this weekend. Two or three games in a day, short breaks in between, no real practice time. The teams that win these aren't always the most skilled. They're the ones whose coaches taught them how to reset between games. Same shape on the work side. The reset is the muscle, not the original plan.

The Yakety Pack core deck reviews still hover around 4.6 stars after about 6 months on the market. The thing reviewers keep coming back to in the longer write-ups isn't the cards themselves. It's the moment the kid picks one up unprompted. That's the part we keep designing for.

Friday check. What did I think the week would be on Monday, and what did it actually become? Been doing this every Friday for a while now. The gap is almost always bigger than I expect. The Friday review is the planning. The Monday plan is just the starting point.

Drove Carter to a 6am practice this morning. Came home, opened the calendar, three meetings had moved overnight. The kids' schedule trained me for the work schedule. Both are moving targets. You plan for the move, not the version you wrote down.

🇨🇦 Most ad-driven Canadian brands miss this on cross-border. Buyers count brokerage and duties as part of the shipping cost. Even when the line item says zero. If your checkout shows free shipping but the carrier hits the customer with a brokerage fee on delivery, you didn't make shipping free. You made it surprise-priced.