The Broken Promise Audit Fourteen search strings, twenty minutes, and every promise you made and never closed Peter O'Donoghue

Open Read this first

You've already sold work you never delivered. It's sitting in your Sent folder.

14 search strings. 20 minutes. Every promise you made and never closed, with the name, the date, and the exact sentence you used.

Read this bit, then start. Time to first result: under ten minutes.

This is not a productivity system and there is nothing to install. It is one pass through your own Sent folder, using search strings you'd never think to type, to find the things you said you'd do and didn't.

Every one of them is a reason to make contact that isn't a pitch. You're not selling. You're finishing something you started. That is the easiest conversation in professional services to restart, and almost nobody restarts it, because nobody can remember where they left off.

Open The problem

You have never made a cold call in your life and you don't intend to start. Your work comes from people who already know you.

So here's the uncomfortable arithmetic. Over the last twelve months you said, in writing, to real people:

"I'll introduce you to Sarah at Acme." "Let me send you that framework." "Ping me in July and we'll pick it up." "Once things settle down, let's talk properly."

Some of those you closed. Most of them you meant at the time, and then a client deadline landed, and the thread went quiet, and eleven months went past.

This is not a discipline problem. You didn't forget because you're disorganised. You forgot because no human being holds two hundred relationships' worth of commitments in working memory for a year. The information was never lost. It was just never surfaced back to you at a moment when you could act on it.

That's what this audit does, by hand, once.

Open The audit

Step 1: Open your Sent folder and set a window

Gmail. Every string below already contains in:sent newer_than:1y: sent mail only, last twelve months only.

Outlook / Microsoft 365. Open the Sent Items folder first, then search the phrase in quotes. Add sent:>=01/09/2025 (or your own start date) to bound it. Outlook searches the folder you're standing in, so the folder matters more than the operator.

Superhuman / Missive / HEY. All pass Gmail syntax through. Paste as-is.

Step 2: Run the 14 strings

Run them in order. Don't read the emails yet. Just log the hits. Reading kills momentum, and step 3 is for reading.

Braces are Gmail's OR: {"a" "b"} finds either phrase.

#	What you're hunting	Paste this
1	The introduction you promised	in:sent newer_than:1y {"I'll introduce" "I will introduce" "happy to introduce" "let me introduce"}
2	The connection you offered	in:sent newer_than:1y {"I'll connect you" "put you in touch" "make an intro"}

Open What you'll notice by the end

One. You'll find more than you expected. Everyone does. That's not a character flaw, it's a memory problem with no owner.

Two. The best rows are the oldest ones. A promise reopened after three weeks is politeness. A promise reopened after eleven months, quoted back word for word, is startling, because it proves you were actually listening, and nobody else in their inbox was.

Three. You only found your half.

That last one is the real finding. This audit reads what you said. It cannot see what they said: the budget they mentioned in passing last October, the hire they were waiting on, the "call me after the reorg" buried in a transcript you never reopened. Their promises to you are worth more than yours to them, and there is no search string for a sentence someone said out loud on a call fourteen months ago.

That's the ceiling on doing this by hand. Run it once a quarter and it keeps working. It will not keep going on its own, and it only ever sees one side of the relationship.

Open What to do next

You've just done manually, for one folder, what Nynch does continuously across your email, calendar, meetings and LinkedIn, on both sides of every relationship. Every promise you made, every promise they made, every date either of you named, surfaced back to you in the week it matters instead of the year after.

→ Talk to the founder. Bring the list you just built. We'll run the same question against your real data, live, and show you the half this audit couldn't see.

30 minutes. On your real data. Not generic slides.

Book the 30 minutes →

Not ready for a call? Reply with the single best thing you found. I read them all, and I'll tell you what I'd send.

Nynch, the AI CRM for consultants and fractionals who win high-value deals based on relationships.